The metaphysics of the lost and found department

 

Why does Dante’s Divine Comedy start with the poet being lost in the middle of a forest?

Or rather, the way is lost:  ché la diritta via era smarrita.

To ask this question, one must ponder the difference between the meaning of loss in “being lost” and the meaning of loss in “the way was lost”. The second lost might imply the first – but the implication skips over the material condition of ways. Roads, objects that are not alive – these cannot be lost in the same way Dante was lost. The way never loses the way. The loss, here, is purely human.

The scholastics like to puzzle over such paradoxes as: can God make a boulder too heavy for him to lift? As far as I know, they did not puzzle over a simpler paradox: can God get lost. It would seem to me, at least, that all the higher creatures can get lost. Not only humans: dogs, birds, giraffes, etc., all things with “territories” can get lost. Fish probably can get lost – surely dolphins can get lost.  Yet God, in the Judeo-Christian sense, seemingly can’t get lost. Nor can the Greek gods get lost.

As a silly old man, I find myself pondering the philological-philosophical frolic of lost-ness – of losing, of being lost, of things that are lost – quite a lot. Even as a silly young man, I found the word “loser” to contain a world. There was something about “being a loser” in America that I found, on the one hand, distressing, and on the other hand, perversely inviting. For certainly, since I was kneehigh to a three volume set of Capital, I’ve been pretty suspicious of winners. There is something about winning, and especially about being born to win, born to winners, that distorts the character. Well, one could say the same about losing, of course. After I was kneehigh – after I expanded my mental lineaments within the unwilled expansion of all my other lineaments – I came across Nietzsche, took to heart the lesson about resentment, and lost – as much as it was possible to lose – my prejudice against happy winners. Although of course neither I nor Nietzsche could shed the slave morality simply by taking thought. It was more a matter of imagining a state I would never really reach.

There is nothing more metaphysical than a lost and found department. I always smile at the phrase.  Another question for God: if he or she or they are never lost, how could they be found? All problems which stem from the idea of a God with self-consciousness. A god without self-consciousness is such a harsh thing that I rather hope there is no such a thing, but a God with self-consciousness poses a lot of questions about divinity.

In 1893, there were a number of stories about the lost and found department at the Chicago Exposition – the fair that inspired Henry Adams’s chapter on the Dynamo, and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. The Scientific American wrote about the array of objects lost and wondered if there was some statistical significance to the great number of umbrellas. The Chicago Tribune wrote about the man who was put in charge of it, Edward Hood. Hood set it up on a scientific basis, creating a record-keeping system On June 19, 1893, the Tribune reported that there were 550 unclaimed items in the department already, and then gave forth with a few Horatio Alger-esque stories about valuable jewelry lost by wealthy women and returned by humble working men to the department.

“People visiting the Fair seem prone to forgetfulness. Mr. Hood is of the opinion that the glories of the Exposition are so overpowering that little things like umbrellas, canes, and wraps are forgotten in the contemplation of novel sights.”

To be overwhelmed is a condition which, at least in my experience, is conducive to getting lost or losing something. As I grow older, I become more like Beckett’s beggar every day, continually checking my pockets for keys, wallet, phone, etc. There Paris police prefecture has long operated a service of objets trouvés. A city, like an elementary school, is full of people rushing about with loads of things on them. Our packs. A dream: to go out naked, unpacked, unencumbered. But the dream always leads to embarrassment. As pack animals, we like and need our packs. The dream of being naked, nakedness itself, and being lost are connected by many unconscious capillaries.

Alex Purves, in Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative, considers such stories of being lost as Homer’s Odyssey and the Anabasis of Xenophon. Dante in the woods could be a reincarnation of Odysseus, who, as Purves acutely notes, is not only a sea captain who has lost his way home through most of the poem, but who also carries a fate predicted by Tiresias in Hades:  

[Tiresias] bid me to go to many cities of men

Holding in my hands a well-fitted oar,

Until I should ccome upon a people who do not know of the sea,

Who do not eat food that has been mixed with salt,

And who know  nothing of peruple-cheeked ships,

Or of well fitted oars, which are the wings of ships.

But he told this cear sign to me that I will not hide from you.

Whenever some other traveler coming across me in the road

Should say that I carry a winnowing shovel upon my gleaming

Shoulder,

Then he told me to fix the well-fitted oar in the earth,

And to carry out auspicious sacrifices to lord Poseidon

A ram and a bull and a boar who mounts sows,

Then to return home, and to accomplish holy hecatombs

To the Immortal gods who hold Olympus

All of them in order. Death will come to me from the sea…

Purves notes that being lost in spatial terms  is one thing, but being lost so that the very signs and conventions one holds are also lost is to be lost indeed. It is only from within that state of extreme loss that Odysseus can make his peace with Poseidon, his old enemy. In a sense, Poseidon as the god of the sea commands loss, or lostness, as his domain.

Purves quotes an essay by architectural critic Mark Wigley: being lost is defined by an “indeterminate sense of immersion, in which the body cannot separate itself from the space it inhabits.” This is Edward Hood’s Chicago Fair observation about the items in his lost and found department all over again. The sense of being overwhelmed is, of course, a moment in Kant’s construction of the sublime. With the addition of something like a divine instance: one’s consciousness of that grandeur – in the flash of which, human intellectual superiority, or the superiority of reason itself, is redeemed.

Lost, losing, things lost and people lost and people gone and myself gone all the way into this concept I can’t really sum up: these moments of failure I shore against the overwhelming madness of American success. Sooner or later, I’ll take up an oar and hoist it on my shoulder and walk some road alone.

Stop in the Name of Love: some reflections

 

“Let not mercy and truth forsake thee; bind them about they neck; write them upon the table of thine heart.”

So we are advised in Proverbs. Good advice. Although I don’t know if I have bound mercy and truth about my neck in all instances. As for the table of my heart, well, upon that table there are certain songs.

Why these songs and not others? I don’t know. I don’t know why certain songs make me perpetually happy and at the same time, by a negation that is not a negation, also make me perpetually blue.

It is a mystery.

For instance, take the Supremes “Stop in the name of Love.” Is life worth living without “Stop in the Name of Love"? Apparently it is, or at least the generations that lived and made love and died before February 8, 1965, the day the song dropped, did not know that they were missing something essential to their salvation, and may have died in their ignorance perfectly content with whatever they experienced – building pyramids or cathedrals or inventing the lightbulb and so forth. But those who have lived past this date have no such excuse: to not love Stop in the Name of Love is to be a pore lone critter, embittered and marooned in the midst of life. A poor excuse for a biological similitude to a human being, a misfit under the music of the spheres.

2.

Of course, the song comes with several pluses. For instance, the Supremes in all their gowned beauty, debuting it in 1965, included, from the very beginning, the dance that is its signature. They sway, they smile, they come to the chorus and arms out, hands up, the eternal gesture of the traffic cop on a Detroit crossroads, but a cop that accompanies the gesture with a sensuous movement of the hips that turns this stop into Cupid’s own arrest. It is not possible, it is not humanly possible, to ever hear the song and see that dance and not want to make that same gesture, dance that same dance, when the song comes on. And if the Elohim have poured out their blessings on your life so that you have been to a disco or club or dancehall and heard this song and poured out with your date or friend or partner or some stranger and hit the floor, you have thrust out your hand to stop, in the name of love, your errant lover.

3.

But to me, the Supreme happiness is not simply the irresistible Motown arrangement, which is, like everything Motown was doing in 1965, the best thing you ever heard – nor is it the choral response of (think it over) that Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard sing back to Diana Ross’s lyrics (although that is, when you see clips of the song being performed, an amazing and complete work of art in itself) – no, the best thing is that moment, a moment that transcends time, space, and my ability to pile exaggeration on exaggeration, that moment when the doublet ending the stanza is: “after I’ve been good to you/after I’ve been sweet to you”.

It is the way Diana Ross sings sweet. She makes of that word, in the beat of turning it on her tongue, into a sound encompassing all honey, all sex, all delight – and she does this by uplifting, by the slightest of note changes, the “sw-“ in sweet. And yet, and here is the miracle that makes one even belief that the word becomes flesh – it is also the saddest of inscriptions on the tombstone of this relationship to a cheating man. That is sweetness the man has turned his back upon. It is the sweetness of Paradise. He has become an outlaw of love. He can never go back to that Paradise. That sweetness as passed, in a lightning flash.

And all of this is blindingly clear by the time the repeat line is sounded for the first time. Already we know that Stop in the name of love is a command that is bound not to be obeyed.

So, in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, “Stop in the name of Love” not only justifies our existence but also explains why justification is never enough. Justification is hollow. Paradise is closed.

Which is why the same double verse in the next stanza, in the repetition of  “after I’ve been sweet to you”, the sweetness has lost some of its savor. The “sw-“ here does not aim at transcendence. It is a resigned sweetness.

Man’s fall is all there. The loss in that note, which we barely register, is infinitesimal and infinite. It is the mystery that makes this song ever-listenable. Bound around my neck with mercy and truth.

Du Bellay meets Hank Williams Sr. in the Coliseum

I like it when a critic pulls some philological razzle dazzle out of his pocket and makes me see a poem I think I know in a whole new light. David Wilbern, in an essay on a poem by Robert Duncan (Murther: the hypocrite and the poet) does this with a famous bit from Baudelaire:

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,

— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

It is of course the ending two lines of Baudelaire’s To the Reader, which begins the Flowers of Evil. Wilbern begins his essay by asking a good question: what is the literary critic for? And he pulls out of this poem the word that catches the eye – hypocrite – to answer, provisionally (and how could it be other than provisionally?) his question.

“Yes, I know this reader (c’est moi meme) and my question is, what sort of literary critic does he make? In answer, I’ve derived what I might call the art of hypocriticism. That is the practice of getting a poem under my skin, like a hypodermic injection which magically transforms me into a likeness of the poet: a monstre délicat, a double who lies somewhere between a perfect clone and Mr. Hyde. I become a temporary semblable, or facsimile: “making like” the poem as I read it, re-presenting its words in my own style, pretending that my voice resembles, reassembles, the voice of the poem. As I read the poets written words in my own speech, and feel the poet’s recorded emotions through my own feelings, I become a reader simulating the other: that is, a hypocrite. Yet not solely a usurper of dissembler. The Greek hypokrites was an actor, but more specifically he was an answerer, that other reciprocal voice which created a dialogue…”

Of course, we find such mimetism suspect. This is a game of pretend, and like pretend, it takes us back to the human basis, which is the play ground. Every child discovers, at some point, that answering and mocking are closely associated. Use, for instance, the words that are said to you: say them back. Do this often enough and you will definitely upset the first speaker. Say them back with a comic intonation, or an insulting one. Or, you can just infinitely respond with a non-response. Why is good. Just repeat why to every sentence. This, too, can create a “magical” irritation in the first speaker.

What I am saying here is that the philological dozens played with hypokrites opens a field; it does not provide one particular routine, so that we can say, this is what the literary critic does.

Myself, I often play the translator. And here the hypodermic injection of the poem does not operate as a magic cause, but a very specific linguistic one. A matching, in as much as one can match, of poem to its (dis)semblable, the poem in another language.

So it is with the poem that begins Du Bellay’s Regrets. It must be said that Du Bellay, being a Renaissance poet, lived a long time before Hank Williams, Sr., who was a country balladeer. However, it is not a stretch to think that the Renaissance had its own honky tonk style. Or – it is a stretch but what the hay. After all, a Renaissance poet like Du Bellay thought nothing of boosting his stylings and themes from Horace or Ovid. One of Du Bellay’s modern commentators, M.A. Screech (a last name like something in a Nabokovian fever dream) notices that, like Horace, Du Bellay dares to introduce a “style raboteaux” in his ars poetica: a prickly style, a hickory bark style. Run your hand over it and you are bound to get scratched.

And one could say the same thing about the cheap scotch thrills of M. Williams ballads. His bucket, as is well known, has a hole in it. And through that hole I’ll drop this translation.

I don’t want to be digging in the bosom of nature

I don’t want to be mulling the spiritus mundi

I don’t want to be measuring the abyss under me

Nor, for pretty buildings, exhale some heavenly rapture.

I don’t want to paint with the finest paint my canveses

Nor from high arguments draw out my verse

But from some poky instance take its accidents diverse,

Good or bad, to be writing of my advances.

I’ll put a tear in my lines if I’ve got reason to cry

I’ll laugh with em too, and whisper my why

As if they were taking dictation from my heart.

So: I don’t want a lota curlers and cosmetics

And be making up heroes and heroics.

This will be more a journal where I’ll spill my part.

Okay. Honky-tonk up to a point. And here’s Du Bellay’s poem, for purists.

Je ne veux point fouiller au sein de la nature,

Je ne veux point cercher l’esprit de l’univers,

Je ne veux point sonder les abysmes couvers,

N’y dessigner du ciel la belle architecture.

Je ne peins mes tableaux de si riche peinture,

Et si hauts argumens ne recerche à mes vers :

Mais suivant de ce lieu les accidens divers,

Soit de bien, soit de mal, j’escris à l’adventure.

Je me plains à mes vers, si j’ay quelque regret,

Je me ris avec eux, je leur di mon secret,

Comme estans de mon cœur les plus seurs secretaires.

Aussi ne veux-je tant les peigner et friser,

Et de plus braves noms ne les veux desguiser,

Que de papiers journaux, ou bien de commentaires.

Notes on haunting and being haunted

 In the world of epiphenomena, the haunt is king.

This sentence, believe it or not, forced itself upon me at 6:45 a.m this morning, as I was arising from bed to go empty my bladder. An old man in a dull month, or a dull man with an old prostate – one of those moments.

Well, yesterday I had to finish up some editing work, and in the evening we were scheduled to go to La Rotunde and chow down, but in between times I was thinking about haunting. In particular, haunted houses. Houses in which what happened in the house forms the nucleus of the story.

Haunted houses have been mocked in the cultures that claim to be children of the Roman Empire since Lucian of Samosata was a pup. In fact, Lucian’s dialogue, Philopseudès, or The lover of lies, is one of the great documents of the Hellenic enlightenment, written maybe a decade before Tertullian, in another part of the Empire, began vigorously damning peeps like Lucian. Renan compared Lucian to Voltaire – and Voltaire also compared Lucian to Voltaire. The lover of lies is a dialogue that contains a dialogue, a conversation between philosophers, so called, at gathered around the sick bed of an evidently wealthy man named Eucratès. They commence to talking about miracle cures, phantoms, and other such business, to the disgust of Tykhiadès, who takes the view, sometimes taken by Voltaire and lesser philosophes as well, that superstition is just stupidity. How can anybody be so dumb as to believe in ghosts haunting houses?

This kind of one dimensional positivism is still around. And it has its fragment of veracity: if we believe in something we call “cause”, much of these superstition visions seem to call for explanations rooted in local causes – like fear of the dark – rather than in cosmological causes – like an afterlife from which these phantoms come.

Our anthropological liberalism, too, searches for causes, but not in the stupidity of the credulous, but in cultural practices that we study while withholding our own cultural biases – an epoche that is either tolerant or patronizing.

Haunting, of course, as hauntology and all the rest of it, became a modish object of reflection after the fall of the wall. Helped along by Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, the idea of something haunting something else - the way Communism haunted Europe, or the way Hamlet’s dad haunted Hamlet – became a model for thinking about our own neo-liberal ghostliness.

Myself, as a citizen of Paris, think about haunting as a matter of urban history. And certainly Paris is a haunted and hunted city – we walk past old torture chambers and the ghosts of faits divers, here, as we go to Carrefour and get the meat and veggies and wine.

Paris has always been a central place for occultists, sex magic theorists, Gurdjeffians, far right white magic dudes, clairvoyants, and situationists. Yet, in the Paris media, the ghosts and haunted houses are usually somewhere else. There’s a whole mythology of Britain as a ghost-haunted place, and Brittany too. Whereas if such beliefs creep into Saint-Germain, they are intellectualized – its all surrealists and serious searchers in the Kabbalah.

In Southern France, “folk beliefs” are everywhere. Recently there’s been an excellent scandal in a village near Montpellier. The mayor of Agde, Gille D’ettore, felt that he needed a connection on high. He needed God. Or some spirit. So he searched around to contact the big OTHER, and had the misfortune to contact a corrupt clairevoyant, Sophia Martinez. Here’s the story in brief from the Midi Libre:

“Medium and healer, she is alleged to have used a stratagem with the Mayor of Agde and numerous other interlocutors: in using a masculine and raw voice on the telephone, she made them think she was in contact with a supernatural being from the Beyond. This voice incited them to take good care of the voyante, including materially.

Suddenly, she was able to pay, by means of Gilles D’ettore, for a veranda, a jacuzzi, a sumptuous wedding, airplane tickets for herself and her friends, etc.”

Such little things the beyond wants from us! D’ettore was not the only seeker after advise – some real estate broker is suing Martinez because he gave her ten thousand euros to speak to his late mother, which he did on the telephone – although the voice at the other end might, just might have been Martinez’s own.

If corruption there must be, I’m rather happy that it went into making sure a clairevoyante from Agde could soak in a jacuzzi after expending enormous spiritual energy connecting with the beyond. I get it.

Stupid apocalyspo time: and the winner is the Italian fascist! Applause applause!

 For those who think we are living in normal times, I present, as countering evidence, the Atlantic Council. This money suck (it gets a million from the British government) consists of cast-offs from the great anti-communist crusade. The lounge lizards of the Tory party, and others of that sort. So, it makes sense, as we go through the stupid Apocalypse, that the Atlantic Council would give its Global Citizen award to their fave fascist, Giorgia Meloni, and that she would have Elon Musk as her besty at the ceremony, forking over the trophy. Lina Wertmuller was right in the Seven Beauties: Fascism won't be understood if you don't see it as comedy. A comedy drenched in blood. The blood drenching is, of course, all around us. So, in honor of the Meloni award, this song from the beginning of Seven Beauties. One of the greatest openings of a movie ever. They should def played it before Meloni came on stage. Oh yeah! For those who want to look up the words to Quelli che, here they are.

The ones who say follow me to success/ but kill me if I fail, so to speak/ oh yeah

The ones who say, you know what I mean/oh yeah

one year: October 7, 2024

 The commemoration of the Hamas attack on October 7 has been an exhibition of hollow and disgraceful rhetoric, which probes neither the causes and circumstances of the murder of 1,189 Israelis nor the bloody and criminal consequences. The government of Israel is, astonishingly, unchanged. The murder of more than 40,000 Gazans with weapons supplied by the U.S. is unmentioned. The false image of Jewish unity - when it is Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace who have been most prominent in protesting the massacre - is tossed out there as the prevarication of the day. The expansion of the war, via terror tactics, in Lebanon (it is casually mentioned that 2,000 people in Lebanon have already died, but you can bet their will be no anniversary in the news for their deaths) is treated as an understandable gesture, a little irrational, but nothing to withhold bomb shipments over. Discussion here is a hollow mockery. This October 7, 2024, those murdered Israelis are being used in the most unholy way to justify war crimes committed by the very government that utterly failed them. We've seen this before - of course. On 9/11, the US government showed its complete incompetence by failing to stop a much signalled attack staged by a buncha college dropouts and rednecks from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, then seized on its failure to fail on a much larger scale.

An event that taught the powers that be absolutely nothing.
How should the NYT, Le Monde, etc., have commemorated the murdered souls of the victims of October 7? By shutting up. By publishing column inch by column inch a blacked out text. By an act of shame - for the news medias in the West have systematically overlooked the fascist tendencies, the irredentism, the corruption, of a government who has put a statement of clear apartheid in the Israeli constitution.
Hamas murdered those people. Israel's government was the silent accessory. And the murdered tens of thousands of Gazans will weight like a nightmare on the state of Israel for decades to come. But lets all forget that with fake mourning.
It is a heartbreaking one year. And it is getting worse.

The ethnostate on the downward path: Israel

 The Netanyahu government seems determined to make Israel a major power or destroy it. It is a crazy ambition. And a logical one. Every ethnostate goes irredentist - following an almost Freudian arc - where the Id goes, the ego follows. In this case, the ID is majorly armed, and doesn't hesitate to drop a two thousand pound bomb on the capital of a neighboring state. The ethnostate is best tamed internally, by the development of a theoretically egalitarian, non-ethnic or religious constitution. This has not happened in Israel. Will it? this is where the West's abetting of Israel has damaged not only thousands of murdered Gazans, not only hundred of murdered Lebanese, but, as well, Israel's future chances of survival. Israel had its moment of peace with its neighbors, and could have used that moment to seriously return to the 1967 borders that were internationally recognized - but it has used it, instead, to abet a class of furious nationalists, who think nothing of stealing and killing Palestinians due to a mystical "right". Meanwhile, the Israeli right's alliance with evangelicals is paying off, for the latter. This is the show they've paid for: the Armaggedon of the conversion of the Jews.

Maybe making your allies the people who want to fundamentally eliminate you is not such a great idea.

Is laughter allowed in utopia?

 

I’m a sentimental mook. When a writer dies, I often read something of theirs as a form of commemoration – a remembering together with the dead person, whose memory is, as far as we known, no more. A remembering together with those who have read this person, the invisible community of writer and reader.
So I thought: time to read Archaeologies of the Future. The book that is generally considered a turning point in … in the general consideration, the career, of Fredric Jameson as writer and critic. The turn to science fiction.
Jameson’s approach is through the utopian. My approach to science fiction is through the more marginal science fiction texts, like Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Benjamin Labatut’s When we cease to Understand the World and The Maniac. In Calvino’s case, the Utopian is derived, I think from Nietzsche – specifically, the Nietzsche of The Gay Science, the first book of which opens with the harshest summary of the “truth” of the science of man – that the individual is nothing, the species all – which is a reprise of a certain nineteenth century interpretation of Darwin – and then runs with that dictum like it was a Marx brothers routine. Nietzsche deals with a dialectic that every person must, once in their lives, stumble upon: the amazing difference between one’s non-importance, one’s absolute nullity in the universe, and one’s importance to one thing in that universe: oneself. Dialectic, or comedy routine? This is Nietzsche standup in that first mini-essay, which asks whether there is a future for laughter, a utopian future for laughter, even, against the utopian impulse. Laughter, here, is not an argument – it is a tabooed event, that which, in the absolute, as it is conceived by the moralist, cannot be allowed to have a future, or even a present:
“That drive, which rules in the most superior and most common people alike, the drive of preserving the species, breaks out from time to time as reason and the passion of the mind; it then  goes about in a glorious entourage of reasons  will, with every violence, make us forget that it is fundamentally drive, instinct, foolishness, groundlessness. Life must be loved, then! Man must care for his neightbor, then. And we will call them musts and thens, even in the future! Thereby that which is necessary and forever and happens by itself, from now on will appear as directed towards a goal, and will illuminate men as reason and the last commandment – for this is what the ethical teachers represent, as the teachers of the goal of existence. And thus they invent a second and other existence and elevate by means of their new mechanics this old common existence, unhinge it from its common hinges.  Yes – and the teacher will absolutely not permit us to laugh about existence, or even, and also, about ourselves – nor about him; for him, One is always One, something first and last and enormous, for him there is no type, no sum, no nothings.”
Benjamin Labutet’s When we cease to understand the world was published a decade after Jameson’s book. Some might hesitate to call it science fiction – rather, it is fiction about real scientists. But I think it is in the vein that goes back to Swift’s Island of Laputa, and really to Aristophanes cloud cuckoo land, and is part of the Jameson’s plat, his vision of science fiction. While Calvino’s plunges into the science as a sort of Dada project, with Nietzschian references. For instance, this, from the story, The Meteorites:
“According to the most recent theories, the Earth was originally a tiny, cold body which later increased in size through the incorporation of meteorites and meteor dust.
At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean – old Qfwfq said – since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different, there’s the atmosphere; you look at the sky and say: ‘Oh, how clear it is, how pure!’ But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder white as mothballs, which deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round.”
 

flood

 The destruction of the old world, said the preachers after the New World was discovered, was accomplished and marked by the Flood – the universal flood. Jonathan Edwards even hazarded the interpretation that man, before the flood, subsisted only on herbs of the field. Only after the flood did God allow a further ferocity:

“For we have no account of anything else that should be the occasion of man’s slaying beasts, except to offer them in sacrifice, till after the flood. Men were not wont to eat the flesh of beasts as their common food till after the flood. The first food of man before the fall, was the fruit of the trees of paradise; and after the fall, his food was the produce of the field: Gen. iii. 18. “And thou shalt eat the herb of the field.” The first grant that he had to eat flesh, as his common food, was after the flood: Gen. ix. 3. “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

Edwards world was one in which the great woods, and their inhabitants, was not so far away, and was as unexplored as, well, a flood.

Wilderness and flood, these are the signs and portents in the New World, or at least for the creoles inhabiting that Atlantic Oceanward huddle of real estate, the thirteen colonies.

Forests burn. Rivers flood. Against these sempiternal truths of natural history the United States, that knitting together of real estate deals, has always pitted itself. Pitting, fighting, constructing, damming, roadraging, planting – every moving thing that liveth and that was in our path had to get out of the way.

In one of those great early essays, Holy Water, Joan Didion wrote: “Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is.”

Didion later revisits and downbeats the American triumphalism of her essays about California in Where I was from. This account includes experiences in Sacramento, a town that was often flooded when Didion was a kid.

This is from the infinitely wiser book, Where I was from:

By 1979 , when the State of California published

William L . Kahrl's The California Water Atlas, there were 980 miles

of levee, 438 miles of canal . There were fifty miles of collecting

canals and seepage ditches. There were three drainage pumping

plants, five low-water check dams, thirty-one bridges , ninetyone

gauging stations, and eight automatic shortwave water-stage

transmitters. There were seven weirs opening onto seven bypasses

covering 101,000 acres. There were not only the big headwater

dams, Shasta on the Sacramento and Folsom on the American

and Oroville on the Feather, but all their predecessors and collateral

dams, their afterbays and fore bays and diversions: Thermalito

and Lake Almanor and Frenchman Lake and Little Grass Valley

on the Feather, New Bullard 's Bar and Engle bright and Jackson

Meadows and Lake Spaulding on the Yuba, Camp Far West and

Rollins and Lower Bear on the Bear, Nimbus and Slab Creek

and L. L. Anderson on the American , Box Canyon and Keswick

on the Sacramento. The cost of controlling or rearranging the

Sacramento, which is to say the "reclamation" of the Sacramento

Valley, was largely borne, like the cost of controlling or rearranging many other inconvenient features of California life, by the federal government."

I never had that opportunity, or terror, of facing a flood. The town I lived in, Clarkston, within the Atlanta metro area, was subject to downpour and thunderstorm, and excitingly enough, sometimes the storm gutter running along our southern boundary line would fill up with churning water, which it would take into the mouth of a great corrugated metal pipe, but that is as far as flooding went.

That was one image of flooding, liliputian flooding. But if I find the image of the flood peculiarly terrifying, I owe this terror of my childhood to a book I read about the Johnstown flood when I was eleven. The description of the sudden destruction of that town, the awful mauling of the casualties of the flood, the way people noticed a rise in the water in the street and thought nothing of it, and the way it was presaging the wall of water to come all fed my nightmares for months. In terms of book-caused terrors, it was right up there with Hersey’s Hiroshima.

I have shed that childhood panic, but I am still vastly interested in water, and too much water. There are two books on water in America that, in my opinion, are indispensable – that is, if you don’t know them, your American history knowledge is deficient. One is Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, which is directly in line with Didion’s Holy Water, although giving the Devil’s version – Ambrose Bierce’s devil, the truthteller. The other is John Barry’s Rising Tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

Usually a subtitle like that is so much guff. It is pretty easy to find midrange events in the newspapers of the past and show how they changed, in some little way, America. But Barry traces the flood, state power, and race in this book about one of the largest American disasters so that by the end you see why the Republican party lost its hold on Northern black voters, how that party, under its conservative wing represented by Herbert Hoover, became and remained a real federalist force about infrastructure (there’s some justice in naming that huge dam the Hoover Dam), and how the great black migration to the North went the opposite way of the Mississippi flood after 1927.

Barry’s book is, among other things, a corrective to the measures which, in apartheid and even post apartheid America, are used to measure loss. Officially, the 1927 flood took 1,000 lives. This is because black lives were, of course, undercounted. Not counted at all in many cases.

In 1927, the crucial moment in the great flood of the Delta was the collapse of the levee at Mounds Landing. Here’s Barry:

“The crevasse was immense. Giant billows rose to the tops of tall trees, crushing them, while the force of the current gouged out the earth. Quickly the crevasse widened, until a wall of water three-quarters of a mile across and more than 100 feet high—later its depth was estimated at as much as 130 feet—raged onto the Delta. (Weeks later, engineer Frank Hall sounded the still-open break: “We had a lead line one hundred feet long, and we could find no bottom.”) The water’s force gouged a 100-foot-deep channel half a mile wide for a mile inland.

It was an immense amount of water. The crevasse at Mounds Landing poured out 468,000 second-feet onto the Delta, triple the volume of a flooding Colorado, more than double a flooding Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper Mississippi ever carried, including in 1993. The crevasse was pouring out such volume that in 10 days it could cover nearly 1 million acres with water 10 feet deep. And the river would be pumping water through the crevasse for months.”

Looking at the pictures and videos of the floods that followed and succeeded Hurricane Helene, thinking of people I know in Atlanta and Western North Carolina, I am in shock. Shock here in Paris. I am reminded of these flood scenes, the iconography both biblical and geopolitical. I’m reminded that we all think too little of water. We live in a very populated, very administered, very constructed world - and that world is uniquely vulnerable to the leak under the levee, the storm that hits land 300 miles South of us, events high in the stratosphere that only the satelittes and angels spy on.

Forests burn, rivers flood.

Voices from my dead

 

Yesterday I was boiling water for oatmeal. As I poured a cup of oatmeal flakes into the bubbling pot, a voice from nowhere, a voice from my dead, appeared: it will stick to your ribs. The cartoon bubble works so well to iconograph the thought process – a liquid like bubble, a soap bubble, inside which move words or some mentalese equivalent.

So it was like that, a cartoon bubble, and it came out of my past, maybe sixty years ago, at a table in Clarkston Georgia where my Dad, now dead, said it, or my Mom, now dead, said it. It was poured into my ear, the ear that was picking up a version of the world: stick to your ribs.

Probably my Dad. It sounded like the old man.

Of course, even as a child I did not think that oatmeal literally stuck to your ribs, but the crossing of the evident, gluelike stickiness of oatmeal and the idea of ribs, something I could feel if I put my hands to my sides and squeezed my torso, somehow seemed brilliant. Everything is, eventually, a question of stickiness. Or at least breakfast is: the jam, the butter, the honey, the eggs.

And here I was far far away from that home, listening to my dead wake up for a moment, and hand me that phrase again.

Though I’ve been washed in the blood of the multitudinous wars that have erased the thought of the traditional afterlife from the hivemind, like anybody else, I also have a sense of the afterlife. Not a plan or a map. Not a place. But, like a cartoon bubble, a certain definite floating as weird as the way neural discharges become a breakfast table in the long ago and a phrase: stick to your ribs.  These things are well below the superficial level of reality in which things are “proved”.

negation of the negation

 Ah, the bits that are thrown away by writers in passing! Here I am, for some reason reading an essay collection by Mary McCarthy – yes, I’m one of that phantom audience who reads old essay collections - and in a review of Simone de Beauvoir’s account of her American tour, I come upon this bit of diamond fit for a sceptre that was, as it were, thrown away in a bit of meat for the periodical grinder:

“On an American leafing through the pages of an old library copy, the book has a strange effect. It is as though an inhabitant of Lilliput or Brobdingnag, coming upon a copy of Gulliver's Travels, sat down to read, in a foreign tongue, of his own local customs codified by an observer of a different species: everything is at once familiar and distorted. The landmarks are there, and some of the institutions and personages—Eighth Avenue, Broadway, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, Harvard, Yale, Vassar, literary celebrities concealed under initials; here are the drugstores and the cafeterias and the busses and the traffic lights —and yet it is all wrong, schematized, rationalized, like a scale model under glass.”

This is, first of all, a great idea for a short story, say by Borges. Or by Philip Dick. Second of all, I think it exactly hits the sentiments of those whose lives are taken up, stolen as material, by the writer. At the moment there is a silly lawsuit going on between Scarlett Johanssen and some French novelist who used her name and certain biographic facts for the protagonist of one of his novels. Surely Johanssen – if she has read the book, instead of simply listening to a précis presented by one of her handlers – has had that feeling of déjà jamais vu – which is when something happens that you are sure has happened before, but not like it is happening now. McCarthy was right to choose Swift’s book, since its play on perspectives is so thorough that one never thinks of the Lilliputians reading it, or the Brobdignaians getting out their microscopes to trace its print. Reversal does not, in this world, trump reversal – the negation of the negation does not bring us back to equilibrium. This is what consciousness is like.actions:

terrorism of the approved kind

 Curious that not one "Western" government has condemned Israel's acts of terror - if only out of self interest. Moving into the world of exploding phones, computers, etc. is not going to be good for the civilian populations of the West. But lets all flush ourselves down the toilet for Netanyahu

Impersonality and identity

 

Proust’s idea for a contre-Sainte Beuve criticism was part of a larger movement, within modernism, to escape from the criticism of the portrait, or the biography, and to approach the linguistic object with a certain formalism.

Paul Valery, in 1937, wrote an essay with a very old fashioned, Saint-Beuvian title: Villon and Verlaine. But the first thing he wants to establish is his formalist cred, in rather Nietzschian terms:

« Even in the most favorable cases, it is not in being humans that gives authors their value and endurance, it is in what they have that is a little more than human [Même dans les cas les plus favorables, ce n’est pas ce en quoi les auteurs sont hommes qui leur donne valeur et durée, c’est ce en quoi ils sont un peu plus qu’hommes.] And if I say that biographical curiosity can be harmful, it is because it too often procures an occasion, pretext or means to not confront the precise and organic study of poetry.”

In my time, the whole formalist-modernist apparatus of impersonality has been overthrown by an identity ethos. One used to learn that, precisely, we approach the poem as the thing in itself, or at least the classroom thing in itself. Yet, that was always a game based on a fundamentally contradictory position, for we learned the poem as Shelley’s poem, or Eliot’s – X’s. To attach a name to a poem or novel or essay was already to organize the work, behind the classroom’s back, according to a historic fact, namely, the fact of the author. If, for instance, we attributed The Wasteland to Dostoevsky, we would, frankly, not understand it at all. Biography can be thrown out the window, but it creeps back in through the keyhole.

Hence it is that Valery honors the Contre Saint-Beuve principle in the breach. Somehow, it is necessary, to read Villon, to know something of the life of Villon. In fact, Marcel Schwob, who did a lot of research on the historical facts around Villon, was one of Valery’s friends. In fact, Schwob was an inveterate portrait maker, even though he was not centered, as Sainte Beuve was, on the, as it were, royal family of French writers, the classics – he was more interested in the crazies, the marginals – in this, taking his cues from Nerval, who, crazy himself, insisted on the Illuminés who preceded him.

Villon is a liminal case. He is a royal, in as much as French poetry can’t really be understood, historically, without him. But he was a user of argot, a thief, swindler and perhaps a murderer. And not the good kind of murderer who, under orders as a soldier, butchers for the state. Eventually, it seems, Villon was hung.

On the other hand, Villon’s biography – which Valery sees in parallel with Verlaine, a man who also knew jail and bedbugs – does point to the more than human in the human life. By a certain paradox, what the identity ethos liquidates is the particular, the all too human and the more than human in the poet.

I love this bit about Verlaine. Valery, whose master was Mallarme and certainly not Rimbaud, still pays hommage:

“Verlaine !… How many times I saw him pass by my door, furious, laughing, swearing, striking the ground with his great sickman’s cane – or that of a threatening vagabond! How could one ever imagine that this beaten tramp, sometimes so brutal looking, sordid in word, at the same time anxiety making and inspiring compassion, was however the author of poetic music of the most delicate kind, verbal melodies that are some of the most touching and novel in our language? All the possible vices respected, perhaps seeded, or developed in him that power of suave invention, that expression of sweetness, of fervour, of tender welcome that noone gave like him, for nobody else knew how to dissimulate it like him or could forge the like power of consummate artistry, breaking with all the subtleties of the most skilled poets, in works that appear easy, with a naïve tone, almost childlike.”

This is how I think of the great pop musician-songwriters: the children of Villon and Verlaine.