THE "MUSE" OF DADA

“I’m a woman. I’ve let go of the controls. The question about the „why“ and the „whence” .

I’m only confessing the “how”.

How was it?“

 - The brand

She lived, in the last year of her life, in a room above a gas station/grocery store, in Magliaso, Tessin, in Switzerland. It was 1948. Count the dead: Hugo. Eric. Else, Ernst’s wife. Kurt, in England. The gypsies, the bohos and drunks from Munich, the cabaret singers who supplemented their incomes with tricks on the side – like she did. Cities: Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden.

When she died, she was buried in the same cemetery as Hugo. There were some announcements in the Swiss papers. She was not utterly forgotten, ever. One paper commented that the price of her burial service was paid late: a collection was made among friends.

She was hewed out of the same raw sensitivity to the violence in half-capitalist/half ancien regime world that went into the great female characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, which she would have read in German translations in the Piper edition. Novels that were not “reflexions” of society, but much more suggestive, more intrusive than that: guides to excess, to marginality, to the polar opposite of bourgeois decency.  Dostoevsky was an event. Hamsun was an event. In Gide’s essay on Dostoevsky, he presents the credo:

I recently read an interview with M. Henry Bordeaux, who used a phrase that somewhat astonished me: : « First you have to try to know yourself,” he said. The interviewer must have not understood – Certainly a literatus who seeks himself [qui se cherche] runs a great risk: that of finding himself. After this, he will only write cold books, conforming to himself, all resolved. If he knows his lines, his limits, it is in order not to cross over them. He no longer has any fear of being insincere ; he is afraid of being inconsequent. The true artist remains half unconscious of himself, when he produces. He does not really know who he is. »

« He does not really know who he is”. The radical disjunction between who one is, from every social and political perspective, and who one is, from the subjective point of view, creates the space of a certain impossibility to settle on an identity. This space was populated by both artists and con artists, by cabaret singers and prostitutes, by pimps and poets, by agents and counter-agents, by revolutionaries and provacateurs. She was a familiar of this circle, which she found everywhere – even in Switzerland – in the 1910s and 20s. The underground, bohemia, the party, the cult, psychoanalysis or the avant-garde, these are names for overlapping domains.

The domains, of course, had a reach outside the circles in which she travelled. The Dostoevsky who discovered the Underground, for Gide, Hesse, Hugo Ball, etc., was at the same time the Dostoevsky who inspired the proto-Nazi antisemites that would latter fill the role of Nazi ideologues: Brasol, the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes of a Writer, would also translate and distribute Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the US, finding a patron in Henry Ford, and a receptive audience in Wilson’s State department and the Department of War.  

Alienation, like a hit of acid, is an unpredictable trip.

 In Der Brandmal, she wrote a novel that took its impetus from her own adventures; but her narrator was nevertheless a double, or perhaps the anima, of the narrator of Hamson’s Hunger, with the same mental obstruction lying in the path of any normal course of getting by, a certain refusal to shrink back from the brink of death – death by starvation. Hunger was a keynote. She was not born to bourgeois parents, professionals, she did not go to university, she did not recognize, even, the attraction of the stability of the bourgeois household. Her father, a sailor, was remade into a Sindbad or an Odysseus in her mind – but she was well aware that she was creating a symbol for her own use out of the old man.

Prison [Gefaengnis] and Der Brandmal are a set. The woman who is imprisoned in Prison, who is unjustly imprisoned, who is shaken by the experience so as to see everything in a new light, is connected to the woman who, in Munich, was ripped off by a client – and who consequently took from the client what they had agreed upon. It was for the latter – recompense for her, theft to the court – that she was imprisoned.

Of course, we can trace her in the texts of men, who often reveal their seedy sides in their notebooks, these exploitative fighters against exploitation. Eric Muehsam, for instance, an anarchist, who was later arrested after the Reichstag fire, and murdered “by an SS commando in the night of July 9-10, 1934” in the Oranienburg concentration camp, knew her and claimed she “seduced him” so that they had “coitus” when he was infected with gonnorhea. They were friends, they both worked freelance for Simpliccimus, and she probably charged him for the “coitus”.

Eric Muehsam: The poor girl gets way too little sleep. And since she is very willing, she never gets any rest.“  https://www.xn--mhsam-tagebuch-gsb.de/tb/diaries.php#h5_r190

 By this time she had a daughter. And she was living, as always, hand to mouth, even as she was building up a reputation as a cabaret singer and dancing. She was working at an artist’s bar, Kathi’s, until 3 in the morning, and taking painting classes. To be a cabaret singer you had to put in long hours: it wasn’t a matter of one song, it wasn’t Liza Minelli in Kabaret, it was work.

Later came Hugo, later came her entrance into history, opening the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The dances, the masks, the free-floating signifiers.

No Muse ever worked so hard.

ars poetica

 

The poem feels its erasures

As the old soldier feels his old wounds

Which make his dreams what they are.

 

And the household what it was

And the child the man

Who puts his raging alky Dad in the nursing home and done.

 

I am the eraser, I am the whiteout

In the nerveways I jump

And jack. Mostly jack.

 

“Similar tactics in other verticals”

A man once said to me

And then said, “all fixed. Should be right as rain.”

- Karen Chamisso

The fascitude ahead of us

We have the useful phrase virtue signaling to describe a certain hollow but scolding tone implying the speaker's woke state. We need a phrase for what Barnier is doing in France. We see it all the time - a politician almost literally begs the financial markets to help him out by raising interest rates or showing "chaos" in the market, etc. We have the phrase capital flight - which is short for taxing rich people and giving workers more benefits - but this an appeal to capital flight if the on display legislation - lowering taxes on the wealthy, tearing up the social insurance program, cutting medical and education expenditure, etc. - isn't voted through tout de suite. I suppose we could call it money signalling. Sometimes it works - in the UK, every step downhill has been accompanied by VSP saying this or that austerity measure must be put through or there won't be pudding. It always turns out that pudding is only for plutocrats. In any case, France still remembers that the social insurance system - retirement, health, education - was only put in place by violent struggle, and that memory remains in the street, though it is trampled under nightly by rightwing tv. Macron, drunk on non-power, laughed about Barnier's threats - France is a rich country, he said, which is so true that it vitiates his entire economic policy thus far.

So, the censure is happening today. Key question is: has Barnier kissed Le Pen's ass enough that the big Fascist will rescue her fine boy? The funny thing is that the RN is running on a leftward economic policy - keeping the social insurance network strong. Which shows that they actually know why they have been winning. The immigrant bigotry is one thing, but if their voters feel that the RN is taking away their healthcare and their retirement, they will go back to the Left.

The neolib consensus is breaking up in the fascitude that was always the next step. God help us.

Donne and the women

 

In 1980, Sarah Wintle, in the London Review of Books, wrote:  “Any close criticism of Donne’s poetry has, it seems inevitably, to be an account of oppositions in action.” The phrase sweeps up the critical dictum under which Donne has been read at least since Johnson’s phrase about the yoking together of opposites, and Eliots reflection on the  discordia concors.

There is a lot to be said for Donne’s attraction to opposites – black and white, East and West, constant and inconstant, etc. And one of the things to be said is that such opposites, resting on essence terms, are vulnerable to the inverting of those essences – an inversion that remains within the essentialist camp in order to create the paradoxes that Donne’s mind played with.  Donne’s paradoxes are never advances towards relativism, because he needed the essences to make sense of the paradoxes he could make out of them.

I am a great fan of Donne’s prose. Flannery O’Connor said she read Henry James to tone up her own prose; I use Donne, sometimes, for the same reason, although the sermons can become a bit too plummy as one wades through the intricate (and I often think bogus) philology and etymology to get to the redemptive point. Which, I think in the greatest of paradoxes, is also the generative point, redemption being another mask of creation.  Donne’s earlier prose, the Devotions, the Biathanatos, the paradoxes, are not meant as trials of hermeneutical weightlifting in the service of the King, but are to an extent ludic exercises – although of course the devotions and the Christian pamphlets have a more serious purpose. They are essays, but tend towards deforming or parodying the essayist’s usual intent. To my mind the Paradoxes, which were in vogue in the Renaissance, should be included in the pre-history of prose poetry: they are a poetry of pure opposition, of opposites as being, in that space between rhetoric and ideation,  themselves poetic tropes.

What you can do with such play, in early 17^th century England, is to make the essences approved of in common and scholastic life dance to it.

I would not defend the value of all the paradoxes, but, unlike Helen Peters, who condemns certain of the paradoxes – most notably the defence of the inconstancy of women – to the shadow realm of the Dubia, although the evidence for making the judgment that Donne didn’t write it seems pretty shallow to me. I just don’t think Helen Peters liked it.

Donne often took on the role of railer against women and as a railer, he permitted himself the rhetoric of extremism that Christianity as he conceived it permitted him. Yet, in Donne’s afterlife in the twentieth century, one notices that it is the company of women, academics and poets, that have not only gathered his works together with extraordinary scholarship, but who as well are the great arguers for his poetry. The last biography of Donne, by Katherine Rundell, is the heir of the work of Helen Gardner, Evelyn Simpson, and Helen Peters, among others. In particular, certain Catholic writers, such as Dorothy Sayers, have made a cult of Donne.

Perhaps it is the way in which Donne seems so dashing. To dash is to break out, to draw a line through, to thow away, and it is also, since the 18^th century, about making a brilliant show. Both means seem to mark Donne’s persona – and no matter how often, in a classroom, one is assured that the poem’s I is not identical with the biographical person, the mental superposition of one over the other happens, and happens as part of the poetic process. The moreso in Donne, who sent his poems privately, and never collected them himself.

The Defence of Woman’s Inconstancy is the longest of the paradoxes, and seems the most thought out, as a piece of prose. It launches itself with the same kind of gymnastic tonguework as many of the love poems:

“For every thing as it is one better than another, ſo is it fuller of change; The Heavens themſelves continually turne, the Starres move, the Moone changeth; Fire whirleth, Ayre flyeth, Water ebbs and flowes, the face of the Earth altereth her lookes, time ſtayes not; the Colour that is moſt light, will take moſt dyes: so in Men, they that have the moſt reaſon are the moſt alterable in their deſignes, and the darkeſt or moſt ignorant, do ſeldomeſt change; therefore Women changing more than Men, have alſo more Reaſon. They cannot be immutable like ſtockes, like ſtones, like the Earths dull Center; Gold that lyeth ſtill, ruſteth; Water, corrupteth; Aire that moveth not, poyſoneth; then why should that which is the perfection of other things, be imputed to Women as greateſt imperfection?”

The brilliance of this requires a convention that still dominates the discussion of gender: a type, which is woman, and a type, which is man, pieces upon a chessboard. The token never runs away with the type, never ruins it. Rather, in this game, we only drive to logical paradox the attributes of the type. But what a glorious length of the universe is trailed behind the attributes of the type – the air, the stars, water, color, the inventory of the world. As in Donne’s poetry, where love becomes not just a matter of the attraction of the poet to the woman he loves, but rather a microcosm of the macrocosm, a proof and reflection of the largest order, the All. Even if Donne’s poet casts an evil eye, a certain violence:

But O, self traitor, I do bring

The spider love, which transubstantiates all

And can convert manna to gall;

Transubstantiation is a powerful word in this place – and the spider love that inhabits the speaker has an anti-Christ’s cast. The spider, the flea, worms, all the little and somewhat disgusting beasts are always at Donne’s beck and call, which is part of the dash of the poetry and the poetic persona. Here there is no sparing of the excremental side of life, blood and piss and shit. In the 1920s, when Donne became faddish, there was a larger sense of the excremental side of life among the cultivated – who’d splashed through four years of it at the front.

One of the great things about Donne is that he has never been wholly accepted as canonical. The excremental life, the imbalance as it might be seen by those who require balance to block out crouched man, taking a dump – that is the other side of the dashing persona. In this respect, Donne could be considered in the terms Orwell uses about Ulysses:

“The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper. He dared – for it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique – to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America which was under everybody’s nose.” The “America” under everybody’s nose – one feels a link to Donne’s numerous uses of America to speak of bodies, discoveries, intimate space. Most famously in his account of getting naked with his lover:

 

O my America, my new-found-land,

 

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,

 

My mine of precious stones, my empery,

 

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

james joyce, Mr. Claud Sykes, and dissimulation

 

Mr. Claud Sykes wanders into James Joyce’s life, according to Richard Elman, in 1917 in Zurich, when he applied for a role in a movie that Joyce was supposedly making with a crook named Jules Martin. Martin’s idea was to set up a movie company, borrow money for expenses and such, and in some vague manner abscond with the cash.

Mr. Claud Sykes remained in Joyce’s life as a friend, and the typist of Ulysses, for some time.

Ellmann interviewed Sykes in the fifties. He conveys what Sykes told him. He doesn’t doubt the story that Sykes and his actress wife had somehow, in the midst of WWI, washed up in Zuric. In a bit of luck for Joyce, were hard up enough to do typing for the miserable fees he was able to pay them.

And it may well have unfolded like this.

Yet, there is another side to Claud Sykes.

Alan Burton of Brunel University has written an interesting essay on the anti-communist thrillers of the thirties, and narrows the scope to the anonymous writer, Vigilant, who wrote a number of such thrillers as well as the non-fiction book, Secrets of Modern Spying. According to book publishing records, Vigiland was  Claud Sykes. And Claud Sykes seems to have known, from experience, a few of the secrets of modern spying. For what other reason could he, really, have been in Zurich in 1917?

“An obvious suggestion is that, as an accomplished German speaker, he was in some way serving British Intelligence, perhaps one his roles being to keep an eye on the wayward Irishman Joyce who was suspect in some quarters. One is immediately put in mind of the writer Somerset Maugham who had been recruited to the wartime British Secret Service and based around French-speaking Lake Geneva only 280km distant. It could be that Sykes was yet another of those British writers of spy fiction who had served in intelligence. Maugham, of course, was a celebrated case in point, publishing the classic Ashenden in 1928, a set of stories based on his espionage activities in neutral Switzerland.”

The Sykes who was given 10 francs here and ten francs there to type chapters in Ulysses is the same Sykes who, apparently, was the son of a fairly well to do father and the grandchild of a millionaire. Peter Fishback, whose interests are in the Royal Irish Fusiliers and in James Joyce (an interesting overlap!) has written a much denser post about British intelligence in Switzerland during WWI and Sykes profile. He includes the review of Sykes Secrets of Modern Spying that appeared, in 1930, in the Illustrated London News, which featured this bit:

“In a chapter entitled "Humours of Spying," "Vigilant" shows that even Intelligence has its lighter side. One of the stories, which tells how the Germans continued to send money to a spy after he had been shot, money which English counter-spies used to buy a motor-car (they called it by the dead man's name), is a very grim joke. But nothing could be more diverting than the fate of the unfinished manuscript of James Joyce's novel, “Ulysses." This masterpiece of modern fiction was sent to the Censor, who thought it so obscure and baffling be could not believe it was a novel and despatched it to Room 40, the department in Scotland Yard where codes are deciphered. After much fruitless study, in which their best decoders failed to elicit the book's meaning, the officials decided that perhaps it was a novel after all. A man of letters was summoned, who pronounced that it "bore some faint resemblance to literature." Thus vouched for, the manuscript was set free.”

Joyce, like any writer, was always on the lookout, one might even say vigilant, for any mention of himself in the press. So he might have read this. Joyce and his wife, Fishback sez, visited Sykes and his wife in 1929. He had already received a copy of Sykes’ first “mystery”, The Nine Pointed Star – so I imagine that Secrets of Modern Spying came his way.  It must have given him some ideas – especially as there is no accounting for how the chapters of Ulysses were rerouted to the British intelligence boys in “Room 40”. As well, of course, was information about the burglaring of the Austrian consulate in Zurich. Joyce no doubt knew this consulate, from having been in contact with Austrian officials when he was in Trieste. Stories of burglary and misrouted letters certainly floated into  Finnegans Wake.

Joyce scholars have used Sykes mainly as the source of Joyce’s knowledge of the theory that Shakespeare was really the Duke of Rutland – a theory Sykes got from a book by a German named Bleibtreu, which Sykes loaned to Joyce and Joyce, in a moment of grace, gave back. Ah, loaning – a word that hangs around Joyce, a man who was continually waiting for funds and continually in need of a loan. The theory about Shakespeare ends up in Ulysses, in the section where Stephen Dedalus, a much loaned to man himself,  spins out his theory of Hamlet.

As well, Sykes and Joyce put on Oscar Wilde’s play,  The Importance of Being Earnest. Both the Shakespeare story and the Earnest story are about people who are not who they claim to be – who dissimulate. And of course Oscar Wilde was a famous and tragic dissimulator in his own life. In Syke’s case, as a British agent soaking up information for his higher ups, he really was not who he claimed to be, or at least he claimed to be not all of what he was, doubling merrily between typing on a French typewriter an Irishman’s English to reporting on any suspect Germanness among the bohemians in Zurich, one supposes. Joyce would be a suspect type in many ways, since he made up songs mocking the war and claimed himself to be a pacifist, or at least against blowing holes in the bodies of strangers with rifles and such. If Joyce read Secrets of Modern Spying in 1929 or 1930, surely this must have struck him with a certain suggestiveness.

In Joyce, suggestiveness was sucked into the great work, sooner or later. Notes were taken, conversations overheard, information gets shifted and refracted among voices that are sometimes in the ambilocative, the neither here nor there, and that are sometimes the voice of public or pubic opinion in the great scenes in FW.   

Mr. Sykes is in there somewhere.

2.

 

Joyce  loved the mix of high and low, of Thomas Acquinas and Paul de Kock. I imagine, I fantasize that Joyce, reading Sykes on counterspies, on invisible inks (and their failures) and rerouted letters, might have thought about the whole rich Catholic literature on dissimulation. That literature which touches on casuistry, on the black legend of the Jesuits. Wasn’t Stephan Dedalus called a Jesuit by Buck Mulligan in Ulysses? The subtle mind, subverting certainty, exploiting ambiguity for the sack of the good, or the church, or Art.

In the Ways of Lying: dissimulation, persecution and conformity in Early Modern Europe, Perez Zagorin traces a certain scar in Catholicism, a certain opposition, a blind argument, back to Augustine and Jerome.

In particular, their controversy circled around a passage in Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, 2:11-14. In this passage, Paul explains why he rebuked Peter in Antioch. Peter, who had ceased to observe the dietary laws, pretended, in the company of Jewish Christians in Antioch, to have remained an observer. He withdrew from the Gentiles, he dissembled – or so Paul claimed: “If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?”

Jerome had a rather extraordinary interpretation of this passage: he took it as an instance of Paul’s own dissimulation.  “According to Jerome, Paul’s rebuke to Peter was merely feigned, having been pre-arranged between two apostles for the benefit of both Catholic and Jewish converts.”

The theatricality of this episode, the conspiracy of it. Christianity here becomes strategy, and strategy becomes sacred. Jerome supports his interpretation by pointing to instances in the Acts where Paul also asked Gentiles to live as Jews – asking a convert to be circumcised, for instance.

Augustine, reading Jerome, couldn’t believe his eyes. He not only wrote to Jerome, asking him if he was serious, but he published his own interpretation. Jerome, that translator, was not a systematic thinker, or at least not on Augustine’s level. Augustine wrote that it was extremely dangerous “to admit that anything in the sacred books should be a lie… If once we admit in that supreme authority even one helpful lie, nothing will be left of these books.

Jerome is not known for being a liberal thinker. He was very rigid, so to speak, on the subject of female virginity. But here, here, perhaps he did think as a translator.  He, after all, translated the Bible into Latin. From the translator’s point of view, dissimulation could be much like translation. The language of the original text is, as it were, hidden under the language of the translated text. The translation is a sort of lie, a dissimulation, a silent ascent to what it does not say.

Translation as a sort of invisible ink.

Now, I have no proof that Joyce ever made these connections. Yet in the Shem the Penman sections of Finnegans Wake, there is surely some attraction to pennings and inks and dissimulations going on, some eavesdropping and counterspying. In Sykeness and in health, by the hand that holds the crayon.

Ah, dissimulation – I must write about this again.

Dialectic of the Enlightenment: a drive by

 

Enlightenment does not begin with the question, “what is the truth?” It begins with a consideration of the interplay between two questions:

a. what is the truth?
b. and: what do we want the truth to be?

To understand Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, it is crucially important to keep this in mind.


The ‘excursus’ entitled “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality” forged a conjunction between Sade and Kant that, while unheard of when the Dialectic was published in 1947, has become a standard trope in cultural studies. Partly it owes this fame to its shock value. While A and H diagnosed the fascist politics of shock, they were not immune to its allure. This is confusing for those who believe that distance and distinction is the hallmark of the relationship between criticism and its object. A and H, however, question the cost of maintaining that distance – a cost that is paid in granting to the object the seriousness of the untouchable. For A and H, the satyr play is part of the whole cycle – parody, mockery, quotation, and other forms of secret sharing can not only not be excluded from the philosopher’s repertoire, but gauge the philosopher’s willingness to confront the history of his categories.

So, in this chapter we have a seemingly puzzling reading of Kant. If we remember the interplay between the questions we began with – and if we don’t, peremptorily, treat them as opposites – we have a Leitfaden – a guiding thread – to what A and H are doing here.

Kant, for A and H, is the most systematically intelligent Enlightenment philosopher, which is why they take the critical philosophy to be a sort of canon of Enlightenment. For Kant, the scientific use of understanding – the posing of the question, what is true, without regard with what we want to be true – finds a systematic object: what Newton called “the system of the world.’ And what is the system of the world? Cause and effect, as far as the eye can see. Yet there is a problem. Insofar as the object of understanding is a total and materially determined system, the understanding itself, if part of this system, is itself determined. But insofar as the true is different from what we want to be true – insofar as that is the boast of the Enlightenment – we seem to be denying the understanding that freedom among alternatives that would make for a disinterested choice. If understanding does not have the freedom to choose its version of its object, the truth value of that object becomes suspect. Perhaps the understanding has been hypnotized, perhaps its trust in cause and effect is not understood but simply vouched for, perhaps perhaps. Such is the systematic place of freedom in Kant’s metaphysical project’ such is the problem of freedom. Notice what we require here: a primary instance of freedom to found a deterministic system. For Kant, this instance of freedom does find an embodiment in the “I” – but an I that has sacrificed all its object-hood. The transcendental I, as Kant says, is an accompanying “x” – a variable. In terms of Kant’s system, the transcendental I is coherent with the ethical instance of freedom, which also requires a sacrifice of object-hood. A and H point to this sacrifice, and point to the fact that it is elided – that its mediate nature, to use Hegelian terminology, remains hidden. The ethic of freedom demands, in fact, all of the personal characteristics of the I, for those characteristics hopelessly cling to object-hood. But can it be the case that the ethical demands that the I give away all its personal and embodied characteristics in order to be free, and thus subject to categorical imperatives? Sade’s answer is that, of course, the animal is the animal, and never more so than when eating, fucking, and dying. We are driven to do so, and we have developed delusions about what we want to be true in order to cover our tracks. What we want and what is true, in Sade as well as in Kant, are sorted into two different orders. But if Sade is right about our real wants and what they say to us, those orders are logically false – there’s only one order, of animal man.

So, in both the metaphysical and ethical realms, whether the imperative is to fuck or to not lie, we establish what is true only by such a total sacrifice of what we want to be true that we expel want itself – desire – from the system of human knowledge and morality.

To put it in terms of the Freudian return of the repressed – when human desire is expelled from the social, it returns as inhuman desire.

At which point we might ask: isn’t this a little facile? There are those who feel that Adorno and the whole of Critical theory relies on a sort of scam. On the one hand, Kant is a philosopher, and we use his corpus of works to talk about “Kant.” On the other hand, he seems to be one of the emanations of history, a sort of representative in some unarticulated Phenomenology of the Spirit. How, one might ask, is Kant ‘representative’ of the society of Enlightenment – which includes Ben Franklin and his neighbor and the members of Parliament and all of these figures. Can we do intellectual history by sampling without having some justification for our samples?

Conservatism from the margins

Conservative parties have long dominated the political scene in the top OECD countries, and dominate policy choices even when so called “social democratic” or progressive parties are elected. That degree of domination has not, so far, been matched with an intellectual history of the movement that does not merely move from head to head: from, say, St. Thomas Aquinas to Edmund Burke. I  am too much the left-bot, the Marx reader, to think that this is satisfactory. I take the conservative claim to monopolize or articulate “common sense” as a clue to understanding how the conservative effect emerged in the modern world. I’d maintain that the effect has two sources: one, rooted in the establishment – the alliance of landowners and Capital  – adopted a  strategy well summed up by the Prince in The Leopard with the famous phrase, “everything must change so that everything stays the same”. But Burke, I think, is an emblem of another kind of conservatism:  a conservatism from the margins. This kind of relationship is drawn to the organic notion of the social, identifying the organic with a form of lifestyle that is in the crosshairs of liberalism. The  marginal conservatives derive from various nostalgic pictures of an original society: the Catholic population of Ireland, the Bretons  in the French revolution, the Austrians (among others) in the Austro-Hungarian empire, etc. Their effect is to produce a double vision of conservatism as not only the natural ideology of the ruling class, but also, paradoxically, as the victims of the liberal order. This victimhood is systematically undervalued, if seen at all, by the liberal order – by those who generally have succeeded in Capitalism’s circulation sphere, per Marx – the emblematic winners in the world of non-productive labor.

Whose conspiracy theory?

 Happy is the country where conspiracy theory is a mere fantasy to amuse teenagers.

You could not write a history of Guatemala, Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, etc. without including a heavy dose of conspiracy, mainly conspiracies hatched by a nation’s far right class and the United States intelligence services. Reading American liberals bemoan “Russia’s” interference in the elections in the U.S., citizens in these among other nations must think: payback’s a bitch.

Russia is, in fact, ruled by the direct result of the U.S. interfering majorly to re-elect Yeltsin in 1996. For the Clinton administration, it was a no-brainer – they were never going to allow the democratic election of a Communist president.

Payback’s a bitch, even if in the case of Trump, the Russian interference, if there was such, was in no way as decisive as, say, the American interference in the foreclosure of the administration of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, or even in Italy in the election of the first Christian government in 1948. One can draw a pretty straight line from the U.S. interference in 1948 to the triumph of the fascists under Meloni in 2022. Meloni is James Jesus Angleton's secret love child - if anybody is.
This is a history of “stopping communism” that was not only supported by the Cold War liberal community, but was planned by its most illustrious members, who staffed the intelligence agencies, the state department, and the Pentagon. When illustrious members of the American liberal community today dismiss conspiracy as a non-starter to explain political events – a bone to chew on for the rubes out there, but not sophisticates! – they are trying to bury the entire history of American foreign policy for the last eighty years. Which means they have no tools to understand how blowback can happen to even the most super of the super-powers.
I am less fascinated by conspiracy, myself – except as a very nifty narrative strategy – as I am in what Alan A. Block, in his book about corruption in the Bahamas, Masters of Paradise, calls “the serious crime community.” Block, in his preface, traces the discussion of the junction of Under and Upperworlds to Edwin M. Sutherland’s coinage of the term “white collar criminal” in 1939. It is a term that, as Block points out, has its uses:
“By bringing the “ ‘upper-world’ ” crimes of business and government into a field of study that traditionally focused on the crimes of the poor and the underprivileged “ ‘underworld,’ ” Sutherland creatively enlarged the breadth of his discipline.”
Block, however, sees the term as insufficiently sociological – undermined by its individualistic presuppositions:
“My quarrel with the term lies in its imprecision when differentiating white-collar crime and criminals from organized crime …”
Block means organized crime by people who exist in a community that they influence by going over the line from licit to illicit activity. In the case of Bahama, much of the history of the de-colonization of the Bahamas was interlocked with the corruption of the government in order to allow the islands to host vast money laundering and gambling operations.
Block’s book was published in 1998, but it does have a certain relevance today. The serious criminals that ran Bahaman casinos and produced corporate fronts like Resorts International, which came out of a crooked, Meyer Lansky connected company named Mary Carter Paint Company. After Resorts International, in conjunction with various grifters and outliers of the Mafia, had debauched the Bahamas, they turned their eyes to Vegas and to Atlantic City. Anyone who has seen Casino knows some part of the Vegas story. In Atlantic City, Resorts had trouble with the vast overruns involved in building the Taj Mahal casino; now, this was a Resorts special. Overruns were really operations for draining money from investors and putting it into the pocket of some core of gangsters, but in New Jersey the corporation really seemed to be drowning – so it was taken over in a bid by Donald Trump. Trump’s final destination – not D.C., but Mar-a-Lago – is an extension of the Bahamas story.
Block’s book is straight up sociology of crooked businesses in the Bahama setting. So he does not go into another, shadow side of the story very much, which is that the CIA used Bahama banks, too, as depots of laundered money that they could put to use, originally, in trying to overthrow Castro. Douglas Valentine, who examines the CIA in terms of organized crime (which is a surprisingly tight fit) presents some of the story of Florida. One remembers that Richard Nixon (who was a bit like Donald Trump with less libido and more brain) had a sort of home away from home in Coral Gables, staying with his best friend Bebe Rebozo, who had a hand in various shady banks in the Bahamas. In fact, CREEP, Nixon’s reelection committee, probably used shell banks to distribute money, which led to Watergate as much as anything else.
The Bahamas have played, I would say, a miniature, a tiny, a small small small role in the Big Books about American Foreign Policy, written from a perspective that excludes, a priori, the very idea that the American intelligence community and the community of serious criminals overlap.
Perhaps this is a mistake.

Thinking non-neurotically about the party system

I am so old that I remember the election of 2004. Remember, Kerry crushed by the man who presided over the 9/11 moment of absolute incompetence and rode it to a second term? Remember the Dems acting like toothless old guys afraid of the Boss, and shaping the election completely to Bush’s specs?

At the time, I was struck by the free rider paradox that seemed, to me, to explain the election. That is, a certain part of the American populace, when freed by a quasi-delusional sense of their economic security, will vote for their most libidinous prejudices. Because they believe such a vote has no cost.
I am not as sure about that argument in the 2024 election. To my mind, the terms are a bit different, what with Biden presiding over the biggest spike in inflation since the seventies and thinking, or his people thinking, that they could nudge it away and massage the “vibes”.
But that is the election. The current discussion about the party. And myself, I’m turning back to the Bush moment to revisit what I thought then and think now is the real issue: the difference between a movement and a party.
Between the thirties and the eighties, the left in the U.S. did a very interesting thing: it invented a number of movements. From labor movements in the 30s to the Gay rights movements in the seventies, these movements originated political change. They had a galvanizing effect on the Democratic party. In 1900, there was nothing particularly progressive about the Democratic party, that collection of urban party machines depending on ethnic politics and white people in the South, but in 1960, there was. However, the party itself didn’t originate progressive politics – it rather responded to an exterior pressure. Anybody who looks at how, say, the Kennedys dealt with the civil rights movement sees this. The gun was in the hand of the movements.
On the philosophical plane, the sixties philosophers who broadcast a distaste for representation (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, etc.) were, in some manner, reflecting the revolt against the party as a political unit. This was obviously inflected by the Communist party in France, that black hole of the French intellect since the liberation in 1944. But in the U.S., the same thing was happening on a less philosophical, more pragmatic plane. The Black Panther/Civil Rights duo, for instance, destroyed the remnants of Democratic party machines in Chicago, Detroit, and Newark. In general, the perspective at the time was that the party exists as a vehicle for the movement; that the relationship between party and movement is purely tactical. The party never represents the movement. It never represents anything but itself. It is a vehicle. You don't ask your car where it wants you to go. You simply drive it, or fix it, or junk it.
The counter-attack came in the eighties. Movements were relabeled ‘special interests” by party intelligentsia. The New Republic played its one historic card during this era by actually generating writers and a vocabulary to crush movement politics, and to reverse the power relationship between movements and party. However, what was really important was the absorption of movements into various D.C. centered institutions. and the dispersion of movement figures into various institutions, academic and political. In the eighties, the Democratic party came to monopolize opposition in America, with fatal results for the Opposition.
What this means, to LI, is that it is a mug’s game to beat up on the Democrats. The party is structurally in contradiction with itself – its leadership is from a different social niche – overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy – than its membership. That niche has used its position to discipline the membership – to crush the possibility of movement politics – and the answer to that is not to fight back by “saving” the party, but simply establishing a non-fetishistic relationship with it.
My story of parties comes from a lefty perspective, and has one gaping hole: the relation of parties to the right. Here, there’s an interesting parallel with the brief period when the Dems seemed, even to progressives, to be the next step up from movements. The Republican party in 2004, and now, and perhaps since Reagan, doesn’t have this movement problem: because the Republican party resembles a movement. The extra-party element – corporations and businesses and religious organizations – have a firm independent existence outside of the party. Thus, they can ignore that directive niche that occasionally tries to impose the same kind of discipline on movements as the Dem leadership does. The Lincoln project that calls out the far right part of the GOP for its lack of respectability simply get stomped. Whereas every Dem leader longs to display his racism in a sister soulja moment, to send the message that white rule is still at the heart of the Dem party.
So – who cares? The Dems leadership will never be young urbans like AOC, but always old deadheads like Biden. Use the Dems in some things, don’t use them in others, and never expect that they will protect your interests. Skip em, fuck em, and work on the movement rather than the party level, is the macro conclusion. The problem of course being that the old movement architecture has long been gutted, even as the new mediasphere actually allows it to grow again. In my view of things, it is more important for Trans peeps to win on Netflix than in the Dem party – a party that still honors rapey old Bill Clinton. And of course has never ever honored Jimmy Carter, who called the show in Israel apartheid decades ago.
The Dems are reverting to type right now. Centrist losers.

keys to our present predicament, my friend, ally, mother, father, lover ...

 

Among my keys for understanding our curious epistemological existential situation, I like those I can find in William James’ most out of there book, Essays in Radical Empiricism. The “radical” in the book is about expanding the timid empiricists notion of experience, which is still slotted into the subject and there pitched against an experienced object, to something more like the whole of what possibly is. Experience is the field, be it of quanta or the big bang. It is the material of the possible.

James first disposes of consciousness in the first chapter – a breathtaking demolition job – and set to work in the second chapter to build up this world of pure experience.

In James’ terms, one of  the great problems for philosophers (and lovers and voters and drivers of cars in traffic jams and thieves and cops) is this:

“My experiences and your experiences are “with each other in  various external ways, but mine pass into mine and yours pass into yours in a way in which your and mine never pass into one another” (in this prose I can hear the sounds of James’ great pupil, Gertrude Stein, who gets the tune, here).

To understand this routing problem – and in James, the method of the route, of going from one place to another, is always the metaphysical mother – James considers, in the tradition, the problem of knowing itself. James is a triadic man (just as Decartes is an either/or warrior, and Deleuze is a fourfold riddler), and he puts his problem like this: “Either the knower and the known are:

1.       The self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are

2.       Two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or,

3.       The known is possible experience either of that subject or another, to which said conjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged. “

The solution now stands out to me like a star, a malevolent star, casting its light on what, to my old eyes, looks like the world transformed by media: the word as entirely the product of the mediate. The world as fandom – always knowing all about, but never ‘knowing’. In the sense of know in the phrase “I know him” or “She knows me”. My acquaintance, my friend, my mother, my father, my sibling, my lover. Where the tacit dimension of the self is included in the mix.

James makes his first move in explaining type one by invoking the kind of knowledge he calls “knowledge of”.

Knowledge of is research knowledge. Or search knowledge. That browsers respond to whatever one puts in the box with “searches” seems to have become, or even was from the beginning, a sort of social instinct, an unquestioned us of the term that presupposes a certain intentional looking or journey. The intention in the journey is to find, to fill in, some implicative object, some correct answer on the fill in the choices test. The search, in Jamesian speak, reproduces the perceptive act. We see, we touch, we hear, we browse.

What this world does without is … the dream of transcendental union, the “immediate touch of one by the other.” James imagines his adversary dismayed that we have moved among “mere intermediaries” and have left no room, have squeezed out, the transcendental glory of “apprehension”, ‘ in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as by lighting…” That image! James is, indeed, proposing a deflating, a de-sublimating image of the world as a compound of “mere intermediaries” – all ands, to what purpose we do not know, and as we get used to it, do not care. A world of only connect, no matter what the connection conveys.

I can imagine James’ adversary saying, producing that old cliché like the canniest poetry, that the map is not the territory. Routes are not the whole. But in fact that map and the territory are linked the way the shovel and the hole dug in the ground are linked, parts of an experience that extends beyond them. Maps change the territory, they reconfigure the territory. The charts that led Columbus to the New World, the chart which leads the ships through the supposedly eternal currents and predictable winds,  led to the decimation of the natives, the chopping down of the forests, the slave ships extracting human beings flavivirus and plasmodium falciparum from one continent to another, the extraction of oil and coal and the subsequent warming of the atmosphere and the oceans and the surprisingly quick shifts in the currents that Columbus encountered. It all happens in the blink of a geological eye. The map is not a description of the territory, but a symptom of the change that the territory will undergo, and us with it.

Keys. If they are keys.

Puritanism and flirting: American women rock the world

 

It became a commonplace in the American culture of the 20s to decry “puritanism”.

Twenties culture was heavily influenced by Mencken, who played a role similar to Emerson’s (a writer he despised) in the 1840s and 1850s – he somehow became the impresario of American culture. The anti-puritan note came from Mencken. Puritanism was associated with democracy, socialism, progressivism, and all the things that Mencken found laughable.

In the Smart Set essays of 1913-15, collected by S.T. Joshi, Mencken made his most extensive attack on the products of puritanism. In considering what makes the American different, Mencken bumps into puritanism:

“That further explanation is to be found, I believe, in the continued survival of a dominating taint of Puritanism in the American character—a survival no less real and corrupting because many of its outward evidences have been concealed by time. Since the very dawn of his separate history, the American has been ruled by what may be called a moral conception of life. He has thought of all things as either right or wrong, and of the greater number of them, perhaps, as wrong. He has ever tended, apparently irresistibly, to reduce all questions of politics, of industrial organization, of art, of education, and even of fashion and social etiquette, to questions of ethics. Every one of his great political movements has been a moral movement; in almost every line of his literature there is what Nietzsche used to call moralic acid; he never thinks of great men and common men, of valuable men and useless men, but only of good men and bad men. And to this moral way of thinking he adds a moral way of acting. That is to say, he feels that he is bound to make an active war upon whatever is bad, that his silence is equivalent to his consent, that he will be held personally responsible, by a sharp-eyed, long-nosed God, for all the deviltry that goes on around him. The result, on the one hand, is a ceaseless buzzing and slobbering over moral issues, many of them wholly artificial and ridiculous, and on the other hand, an incessant snouting into private conduct, in the hope of bringing new issues to light. In brief, the result is Puritanism.”

This is both Mencken at his best and Mencken at his worst. We recognize our American cultural politics here – from puritanism to political correctness. But we also notice elements that are treated as given – right and wrong, bad and good – that point to something Mencken always lacked: any sense of dialectic. He could see that the American was, as he put it, a mongrel, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the basics on which he was brought up in urban America: hence, the racism, the mistaken idea that traits are immutable, the misconceived Darwinism.  This, too, is recognizable today. We see it all around us and label it “fascism”, when it precedes fascism in the Mussolini sense and was “American common sense” among the movers, shakers and thinkers, from the halls of Harvard to the pages of the Baltimore Sun.

In 1915, as Mencken was creating his vision of American cultural politics, Freud published an essay, Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod – Contemporary observations about war and death, to give an awkward translation. In this essay about the pleasure principle gone mad, so to speak, there is a throwaway observation around which has grown a little subliterature, It occurs in a passage in which Freud is talking about the way death, the fact of death

Our stance with relation to death has a strong effect on our life. Life is impoverished, it loses interest, when the highest stake in the game of life – life itself – cannot be wagered. It becomes as shallow, as without substance, as an American flirt, with which it is presupposed that nothing will come of it in distinction from a continental love affair, with which both partners must continually remain aware of the serious consequences.”

This is quite the comparison.

I see Mencken as primarily operating as a misogynist. A sexist, by cliché and convention, sees a woman as an object – a misogynist sees a woman as an enemy. The identification of women with puritanism was one of the presupposed syntheses in the modernist struggle against puritanism. In that struggle, I think, there is a long misinterpretation of the uniqueness of American female culture, of what that creole, mongrel crisscrossing was all about. Freud, I think, was also writing here as a misogynist, but with a vision of that crisscross culture that helps us understand both the misogyny and the sexism.

That women’s place in the great national division of emotional labor was to come at the world ethically was a programmatic truth for Mencken; in this, he was reflecting a long and even trans-Atlantic tradition. His own contribution was to given this a name, puritanism, and a carnivalesque role: the joykiller. Freud, though, saw something else – saw the joy in the realm of flirting that posed a true threat to the mandarin thinker, to the thinker’s prestige in general. For without the thinker, what is life worth? By succedaneum (for the thinker is usually elsewhere when the battle is waged), the thinker thinks about life and death issues and thus puts into the balance his own life.

I myself have played the role, here, of seeing through Mencken and Freud; that’s a bit of impudence on my part. I read both Mencken and Freud with pleasure, with my hat off, in admiration. But I think they cast up screens that make it hard to see one of the truly unique contributions of American culture to world culture, which was a very different form of women’s culture that was neither the joykiller nor the serious thinker’s muse. From Daisy Miller to Josephine Baker, there was a different set of co-ordinates, a different orientation that made the “flirt” possible.

 

 

 

Robert Burns and the NOTORIOUS B.I.G.

 

There is too little notice given to the similarities between Robert Burns and The Notorious B.I.G.

So I thought I’d contribute to the literature.


Burns is, for one thing, a big cocksman, and proud of it – although the most recent biographer of Burns, Robert Crawford, whose book came out at the same time as the biopic of Biggie’s life,  Notorious, is too apologetic about it to look at it. Burns had perhaps six, seven bastards by various women, which on the one hand is a great curse on the women, and not excusable even back then – contraception was by no means unknown in the highlands. On the other hand, lets not pretend that in the cauld cauld age of patriarchy, there was an infinite difference in the treatment the married woman and the single mother could expect, or that the children who'd been routed into this world through the good and proper channel of a Calvinistic blind poke on the marriage bed were infinitely a different matter. Burns raised some of the children - or his poor wife Jean did – and some were raised by girlfriends who got married themselves.

Jean Armour, Robert Louis Stevenson thought, informed by some rumor, never loved Robert. This is probably not so. She definitely bore with him, and definitely lay with him right willingly. She had three of his children before they got married, and he did miss his “sweet armload” even when he was cavorting with a higher class of people. Most biographers have stumbled and been quite horrified about a letter he wrote to his friend Ainslie about her on the eve of her giving birth to twins – before he married her:

'Jean I found banished like a martyr — forlorn, destitute and friendless; all for the good old cause: I have reconciled her to her fate: I have reconciled her to her mother: I have taken her a room: I have taken her to my arms: I have given her a mahogany bed: I have given her a guinea; and I have f---d her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But — as I always am on every occasion — I have been prudent and cautious to an astounding degree; I swore her, privately and solemnly, never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl, and I took the opportunity of some dry horse litter and gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones. Oh, what a peacemaker is a guid, weel-willy pintle ! It is the mediator, the guarantee, the umpire, the bond of union, the solemn league and covenant, the plenipotentiary, the Aaron's rod, the Jacob's staff, the prophet Elisha's pot of oil, the Ahasuerus' Sceptre, the sword of mercy, the philosopher's stone, the Horn of Plenty, and Tree of Life between Man and Woman. »

Myself, I don’t take this as the literal truth of the matter. That Burns could get it up for two big fucks while Jean, nine months pregnant, was being electrified by his thundering scalade – I sense a joke, here. It wasn’t, however, a joke that Burnsians have appreciated – in Victorian times, this letter was heavily edited, and now, in our politically correct times, my biographer opines that maybe Jean was in pain from the application of the Aaron’s rod.

Burns was a great believer in fucking, and recommended it as the remedy against war in his political poems, as in:

“Some cry Constitution
Some cry Revolution
And Politics kick up a Row:
But Prince and Republic
Agree on the subject
No treason is in a good mowe”

(mowe is the Scots for fuck.)
–
Burns, in fact, was a lot more happy about cunt – or cunthappy - than Biggie, who was much more sentimental and responsible in many ways:

What do you do
When your bitch is untrue?


This wasn’t such a problem for Burns, who had a looser sense indeed about untrue and not. My biographer claims that there is some evidence of Burns corresponding with Mary Wollstonecraft – I do wonder, if this is true, what could have been in those letters? But unlike a cocksman like, say, Henry Miller, Burns loved to look through the eyes of the very women he ‘seduced’. As Raymond Bentman has pointed out in his edition of the Collected Poems, no male eighteenth century poet, and perhaps no other comparable English poet, wrote as many poems in the female voice. His poem, Wha’ll mow me now? Is about the predicament he left many in – for instance, Jenny Clow in Edinburgh, who he seemed to have fucked primarily because she was the maid of an upper class woman he was obsessed with (Burns always fucked maids and peasants of his own class, and was always falling in love with upper class women). In this case, the woman is a prostitute:

Wha’’ll mow me now, my joe
An wha’ll mow me now
A sodger with his bandeleers
Has banged my belly fu’.

Now I maun stole the scornfu’ sneer
O mony a saucy quine
When, curse upon her godly face!
Her cunt’s as merry’s mine.

Biggie, too, mixes sex and class:

“The rap slayer the hooker layer
Muthafucka say your prayers
(Hail Mary full of grace)
Smack the bitch in her face
Take her Gucci bag and the North Face off her back
Jab her if she act
Funny wit the money
Oh you got me mistakin honey
I don't wanna rape ya
I just want the paper”

It is an old story, now, among the tracers of music, that the Scots song mixed in the south with African song, especially Fon and Yoruba songs. There were similar clan systems, similar raiding cultures, similar codes of honor and ecstasy. That some of Robert Burns has made its stealthy way into Biggie Smalls music should be no surprise. Burns was, as well, Walt Whitman’s model – a poet of the people, a literal ploughman poet, with little Latin, no Greek – but an early training in the schools that his father, a tenant farmer, could send him to. Like Biggie, Robert Burns early on found flash his way out of a society he felt was too small for him. This is Robert Louis Stevenson’s shrewd appraisal:

“Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete character--a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy of notice; in his own phrase "panting after distinction," and in his brother's "cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were richer or of more consequence than himself:" with all this, he was emphatically of the artist nature. Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, "and his plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner round his shoulders." Ten years later, when a married man, the father of a family, a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great Highland broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake. This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter; and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention and remark.”

Just as Biggie was by no means conventionally handsome, neither was Burns – every observer says he was too “dark” to be handsome. No milk white skin enveloped our poet, and his seductions had to be conducted by boldness and a gifted, supremely gifted tongue. Nelly Miller, who was a Mauchline neighbor, recalled that he “na to ca a bonie man: dark and strong; but uncommon invitin’ in his speech – uncommon! Ye could na hae cracket wi him for ae minute, but ya wad hae studen four or five.”

Even more than his flash, though, what disturbed the Victorians was his politics. The letter that he sent Ainslie about fucking Jean was repressed by Burnsians – the poem, The Liberty Tree, was disavowed as something that certainly couldn’t be by the author of Auld Lang Syne! With its cracking verse:

King Loui’ thought to cut it down
When it was unco sma’, man
For this the watchman cracked his crown
Cut off his head and a man.

Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, who drew back from the excesses of the French Revolution, Burns, who knew men were hanged for theft and women were transported for prostitution (a trade that he had some kindness for, except when it came to Marie Antoinette), was not disturbed by the murder of the royalty. “What is there in delivering a perjured blockhead and an unprincipled prostitute to the hands of the hangman.” Given the fact that it was awful easy, in 1793, for a man to get thrown into the hulks for Burns’ sentiments, he was pretty open about what he thought. But by 1793 he had seven kids and debts and was working as a cop – the equivalent, I suppose, of working as a Drug Enforcement agent. He was an exciseman, policing the district of Dumfries and capturing smugglers. This was a job that he had serious doubts about – after all, Burns’ favorite literary character was Satan in Paradise Lost. To keep himself in his job, he wrote the occasional servile poem of loyalty – but in all of them he would put in sly jabs at the King.

Biggie’s songs about drugs have the outlaw flavor of Burns’ own sentiments about politics. Supposedly, from the proceeds of one of his snatches, Burns bought some cannons and had them shipped to the French revolutionaries in 1792 – a pretty outrageous gesture.

Alas, Youtube does not contain any recording of Burns’ voice, for he died decades before Edison discovered that needle, wax and groove combination.  But you can here Biggie singing this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QW-V8O6f-U


“When I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell
Cause Im a piece of shit, it aint hard to fuckin tell
It dont make sense, goin to heaven wit the goodie-goodies
Dressed in white, I like black tims and black hoodies
God will probably have me on some real strict shit
No sleepin all day, no gettin my dick licked
Hangin with the goodie-goodies loungin in paradise
Fuck that shit, I wanna tote guns and shoot dice
All my life I been considered as the worst
Lyin to my mother, even stealin out her purse
Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion
I know my mother wished she got a fuckin abortion
She dont even love me like she did when I was younger
Suckin on her chest just to stop my fuckin hunger
I wonder if I died, would tears come to her eyes?
Forgive me for my disrespect, forgive me for my lies”

On sleep related erections

 

It is funny how much of the continent of human biology can be overlooked.

Here’s an example. Men, even brain damaged men, have erections during REM sleep. Women have engorged clitorises and vaginal lubrication during REM sleep. But as Peter Martin puts it in his book on sleep science, Counting Sheep, this fact about our sleep life was not noted by scientists for a “disgracefully long time.” Martin claims that the first observation in a scientific journal about this was published in German in 1941 in an article by Ohlmeyer, Brilmayer and Huelstrung, entitled, banally, Periodische Vorgaenger im Schlaf, Periodic Processes in Sleep.  OB and H did not know, I should say, that the tumescence was connected to REM sleep because REM sleep was only discriminated in 1953. Indeed, the continent of sleep, from the scientific point of view, was not really mapped until the late twentieth century. Interestingly, just as the American continents were discovered and explored by Europeans who were fundamentally contemptuous and murderous of and in regard to the indigenous inhabitants, sleep has mostly been investigated under the aegis that we need to figure out how to do with less of it. After all, work work work is what we should be doing until we drop. Along of course with buy buy buy and fun fun fun.

My own utopia would be one designed to fit our real biologies, so that the people who want 9 hours of sleep – in one form or another – would get nine hours of sleep. In the dysutopia we live in, children soon learn that they must go to be early so they can get up early, since early is when they have to absorb large portions of the corpus of all things to learn. Even your average dog knows this is the wrong way to go about things.

How could the arousal of our members have escaped scientific notice until then? Or even folkloric notice? In Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,   A. R. Ekirch cites a part of Pepys diary:
“Leering husbands, spouses suspected, committed adultery without once leaving their sides. Such visions Pepys cherished all the more dearly during the height of London's Great Plague in 1665. After dreaming of a liaison with Lady Castlemaine ("the best that ever was dreamed"-"all the dalliance I desired with her"), he reflected: "What a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves ... we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this." "Then," he added, "We should not need to be so fearful of death as we are this plague-time. So suspicious of his visions was Pepys's wife that she took to feeling his penis whi'le he slept for signs of an erection.”
I have my doubts that that suspicion of Pepys’ wet dreams was the sole motive for Pepys’ long suffering wife, but she surely came upon the thing itself, if not asleep herself, while Pepys was REMing. In Sleep Related Erections Throughout the Ages, Mels F. van Driel contends that our history is distorted. However, van Driel has a very expansive sense of evidence. Plato, for instance, is quoted as saying “in males the nature of the genital organs is disobedient and self willed, like a creature that is deaf to reason”, not exactly conclusive grounds for the assertion that SREs – sleep related erections – were studied or known to the Athenians. Much of the article has to do with the knowledge of erectile dysfunction, and erections during sleep, not the invariability of erections and vaginal arousal during sleep – a much different thing.
Neurologists have traced the control of male and female SRE to the same part of the brain that controls yawning: the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus where, like the officials in Kafka’s Castle, the neural bureaucrats are continually dealing with stimulus and output as the paper piles up on their desks and they themselves fall asleep or wonder about how they got there and where they are going, pushing buttons all day, the frontal lobe, now that is where its at, those neurons have it so easy, where is the secretary and who is the boss and are they all going to see God someday – to give you some idea of what is going on in there.
Myself, I am interested in the fact that “sleep-related” seems to grammatically subordinate sleep to sex. But what if the direction of subordination is the other way, and sex, that waking pleasure, is really a form of sleep? And all of us are simply vehicles for the Great Sleep – or to quote Schopenhauer: 'It is Maya, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller from afar takes to be water; or the stray piece of rope he takes for a snake'.
All those stray pieces of rope, all the sleepers in bed, or outside of bed, joined in the universal hypothalamus, sleeper cells all of us, reproducing to expand the kingdom of sleep, not that we  know it – this is at least as plausible as any waking explanation of universal ends.