Encyclopedia of the second hand: Bar

     There is a bar somewhere.  You are sitting in it. You are at the bar proper, the counter which runs two thirds of the length of the front room.  In the back room there are two pool tables and two pinball machines.  Boys with baseball caps on and most of them with the bills backwards  hang around there, either actually shooting pool or the bulk of them waiting themselves to play and in the meantime talking among themselves and not really attending to the science going on on the tables, knowing that nobody there tonight has anything to teach them, all of them mediocre bar players, making their shots regularly and flubbing up easily and generally not taking the whole thing too seriously.  The bar is about three, three and a half feet high, high enough that you, sitting on a stool in front of it,  can rest your shoes on the rail that runs along the bottom of it, and continue to remain a natural interval away from the drink before you. The natural interval is not precisely quantifiable, but it is more a matter of  golden mean, the instinctive proportioning of the body you find in Greek sculpture. Discus throwers, god of thieves, limbs carried just a certain measure away from the matter of the body. When you used to go out with Jan to the bar you worked at, one time you worked in that dangerous environment, drug of your predilection all around you, Jackie’s in New Orleans, she used to sit uncomfortably close to her glass of beer, or whatever she was drinking.  Jan is the shortest lover you ever had, she must have been five three. You are six foot one, and you consider that bars were made for a person of about your height.  She’d wear short skirts and she’d perch on the stool awkwardly, her pale legs separate, swinging in slightly, knocking knees, swinging out, her heels planted on one of the stool’s rungs.  You'd drink with Jan mostly at booths, tables, you'd both like sitting in the shadow of each other's intimacy, which comes out to between one and two feet, depending on whether you all were alone, whether you were leaning towards her, one foot, half a foot, three inches, your arms on the table, her arms on the table. If the table was wide enough it was awkward to lean across and graze on her lips, you’d have to raise yourself slightly in your chair. She’d talk, letting fall from her lips words that were as sweet as golden plums, and you’d try to catch them, not only the words but the very notes and stops of breathing, the intonations, as if broken down by your effort into the elements of pulse you would be able to hear the very origin of speech, here, the forming, material moment of the body’s utterance, Jan in the dawning moment, genesis of Jan - later of course you play back certain scenes, love’s product, the info received and given, all that talk, and having distance on it and with distance an under the surface disgust for the words and the energy and the youth and the nearness, you edit to keep from confronting what you know you actually did get, or what you wanted, the person who would want that, but here in this bar you have to admit, that is how you were, that hungry. So. But all of this was sometimes difficult if a jukebox were playing loudly  or the bar was noisy. Jackie’s was fine, at least on weekdays or nights, because you both were pretty sure nobody Bob knew was going to darken the door. However, risk was definitely a part of this relationship. Risk, which is why you also remember hotel bars with Jan, quiet dark spots. The Windsor, the La Rouchfoucauld.  Where Bob’s parents could have come upon you. You’d listen, watching her ripe lips, trying to catch what she’d look like in twenty years.  Fixating on the way her mouth would pull on her small, stubborn chin.  The chin bobs up and down.  Catching a fleeting vision of her mother’s face when she frowns, pulling her lower jaw in. Jan s frown is absolute  rejection, and you at the time kept mistaking the absolute for her with your absolute, which was consistent and stubborn while hers was ephemeral, what counted for her was format. That every rejection be absolute, every preference be passionate, that was Jan’s consistency. You were always adopting her passions as your own, and she was always forgetting them, you saying but you said last time and Jan going I don’t care what I said last time.  So you listen, you look. It was sometimes a rather terrible vision for you, as if her mother had been, magically, oracularly, projected in front of you, the way her face would suddenly reflect another face, an adult face older than her face.  You were twenty‑five. You couldn’t  imagine age, sexually speaking,  except in terms of panic. Jan was four years older than you, of course Julia also being three years older than you made you think a thing was going on here. Sitting across from each other if you were sitting with nobody else, with another person there usually sitting besides her.  With somebody else you were not lovers, although sometimes you would lean your leg against her leg, let that illicit warmth be there. Jan, after all, is Robert’s wife.  You’d been to their wedding.  You like drinking and thinking about past lovers. Not that you want to do anything foolish, like go out and call them up.  Oh, sometimes you get a little happy with quarters in a phone booth in a bar.  You might call up Julia, why not call up Julia? No, you sit down again, you’ ll wait. Maybe call up your assistant, Mary Rose, she’s in Albuquerque today, right?  You have her number in your wallet. But no, not Jan, Jan doesn't want to hear from you.  Sometimes Jan drank dumb things, like daiquiris. What the hell, you'd even, at first, in the throes of love, take a sip her drink, although there was the immediate recoil, your mouth curling, you can take the latent sweetness of scotch and soda but not the jammy, adolescent sweetness of daiquiris or the gooey disguises of vodka in some lactescent, chocolaty thing only Jan would think it was a good thing to order, usually it was the name, something clever, it struck you as a sort of regression, why drink like that, but then Jan's habits of ingesting whatever were always under the sign of infancy and its various melodramas, take her anorexia or whatever it was, at twenty‑nine perhaps it is a whole new illness, watching her take a jar of mayonnaise out of the refrigerator and polish it off, spooning it down, you had to turn your head. You begin getting nostalgic for past lovers, and then you remember why they are definitely not here with you today, good thing, you hunch a little over your drink, you hunch a little inwardly over this thought, although on the other hand what you did to Jan, you have to admit, you were as Jan said a fink, the word trembling up as if it were the worst word in her arsenal, lips pursed as if one of the golden plums she so habitually let fall from her lips were thrust back by your hand a little roughly into her mouth, and it was sour, what frightened dignity, come on Jan, you’d even said, bastard, son of a bitch, not fink, grow up, I can t stand changing your diapers. You were drunk ‑ or were you drunk?  What was Jan expecting, you were going to say divorce Bob, no way, you weren't going to marry her yourself, there might even be a law against it, cousins getting married, although that isn’t ...  The counter is of some dark wood, or at least it is stained so that it looks dark. It looks mahogany, it has that Edwardian, purplish tone, it resonates, faintly, a mustachioed association with the good old days, barber shop quartets of high imperialism, the genteel aspirations of the regnum middle class. Now of course there are bars that are constructed out of lighter woods, or even of cane.  There are bars you’ve been in in Texas and New Mexico where the bar consists of  sheets of unvarnished plywood tacked together to skirt around a wobbly rectangular frame.  There are bars to which the owners have tacked sheets of copper, or silverish material, or leather. There are bars painted bright, gay colors. But your mind’s eye dwells on mahogany, when you enter a lounge in which is interred  a dark heavy mahogany counter like an enormous stye in the eye of sobriety,  your whole body relaxes.  Especially around the back of your neck, your shoulders, it is as if a heavy burden slipped from you, some papoose of serious purposes. You are home. Home free. The top of the counter must have a certain sheen and smoothness, although sometimes it is a good sign that it is spotted with the impress of innumerable mugs of beer, the crawl of some alcoholic ringworm, because there is a myth about bars, which is that ideally the bartender can draw a mug of beer, sit it there, and slide it down to whoever wants it.  You’ ve never really seen this outside of advertisements and movies and the once when at Jackie’s’s  when one of the waiters, Dirk or something, bet  you you couldn’t and  Rory, the kitchen manager, after the bar closed, tried to do it, with much hilarity, smashing of glass, and  suds. New Orleans times are on your mind tonight, which moves from Jan to Rory.  That isn’t  why you had that fight, you are focusing now, it was because of Bella, always Bella.  You are sitting on your watchtower, your eyrie, your lighthouse purchase, your peak, your Andean solitude, top of the world ‑ your stool, in short. Now of course bars come equipped with all manner of furniture: leather sofas and loveseats, overstuffed padded cane backed chairs, heavy fake oak chairs enfolding you in a funny  Daddy's embrace of arms and splats, but you prefer stools, the ideal thing to sit on while poisoning the beast at your heels, this body. You drink, and slowly you can feel that part of yourself which is pure dog poisoned, oh so slowly, come here pooch and down the throat you pour your pale yellow liquid. You like the bogus stoicism of being so uncompromisingly individuated, the barstools lined up in a saccadic movement one two three around the bar, the being thrust back upon the rugged discipline of the spine, balanced, as if upon a bike, as if sitting at a bar were some kind of talent, with that same air of balance, that play with balance, a phenomenology of drinking as a play with dizziness, with orientation, with being the upright quadruped, who invented that you'd like to know, fire was secondary damage, Adam on all fours, ah, that was paradise, maybe that is obscurely symboled in the upright snake, but we are a long way from Eden here as you can tell by the occasional guy who slips off his stool, drunk, you've seen this, you've done this, even, although not often, you have to defend yourself, you seem to have seen this or done this in this very bar, if only you knew...  You lean forward, you cradle your beer, or your scotch, or whatever. When you worked at Jackie’s, it was like you were suddenly in the mirror, looking out instead of in, you scurried along the catwalk pouring drinks, adding ice, mixing, stirring, adding a cherry here, whipped cream there That would be on Fridays, madness night, only time the yuppies would usually venture out this far on Plum Street. Normally you had cops, regulars, some blue collar types, the artsy. There was enough alcohol within reach to poison a considerable number, but you were not so into thinking about these issues.  Rory and you would break and smoke a joint in the parking lot, and you would return to your duties with renewed distance, distance is the very infrastructure of balance, write that down, you have a pen in your pocket, you grab a napkin, and though you ended every night pretty intoxicated, you got there accidentally, mostly, as if you'd been lead by friends of brief acquaintance from party to party until, ultimately, you found yourself at some orgy of strange faces. A girl would stand you a drink, you’d pour yourself a beer after a rush, or during one, people would say hey, pour yourself a beer, on me, you'd do the same, people come in of whom you know just that they come in and you are giving out beers.  And so by little intervals you would get a little addled, nothing that the bike ride  home wouldn’t cure.  What was it, three nights a week? Summer, New Orleans, the heavy heat of the swamp, why the piddling scion of French aristocracy decided to settle a marsh is anybody's guess, LaSalle had to be the craziest motherfucker of them all, good thing they murdered him. God, you were young.  Intensely working, even with Bella wrapping her vulva around your neck, to quote a line. There was a yeasty smell behind the bar.  The floor, there,  was overlaid with a lattice of small, closely spaced wooden rungs interconnected by two small cords which ran through holes drilled at either extremity of the rung. Under that, a rubber mat. When you closed the place, you would take up the wooden thing, folding it like a rope ladder and then you d take up the rubber mat, and you'd go out to the back parking lot and shake them out and spread them and take up a hose and wash them down.  Hot summer nights. Sometimes you’d see rats out by the dumpster back there. Disgusting work. You lean over the bar a little and you look at the floor of the catwalk of this bar and there is just the rubber mat, no wooden thing here. If only you knew where you were.  The bartender sees you, comes over, want another drink, and you are I used to tend bar in New Orleans, like you are some old pro, you are tempted at this point to disclaim, but your tone has already been set, the exact shade of the bullshit you are going to be doling out, and this guy, wearing a striped shirt, the uniform shirt from some team he plays on, is I been to New Orleans, great fucking town. You look past him, yeah, you see yourself in the mirror, yeah, when did you go, always there is a mirror, and always that curious way they put shelves in front of it, so the mirror has to look at you around things, as if you and the mirror are playing some childish game.  The mirror winks, planning to go down there and really do Mardi Gras, like live it, it is always in midwink, as if all the mirrors in all the bars have something of confidential import to whisper to you, some in joke, something about you, as if you were well known beyond the tain, one Mardi Gras I was there, I got so fucking soused, your eyes shift from that bland face idling above you, a pony tail of brown silky hair, an ear ring, his looks disconcertingly resembling a star in a porno flick you recently rented, same greedy hooked face, hey can I have a beer down here, to the row of bottles, check you later, you have a brief image of the young lady he was slamming into, fuck me in the ass, her mouth in greedy, meaty, nasty twist, looking back,  ah the bottles, all those colors, ambers, greens, whites, deft cool shapes, silver bottles, the clear ones with the rather exotic liquids, bottles from foreign companies with exotic names, squat bottles, bottles with netting over them, bottles with elaborate seals you have to break to uncap them, no other bottles are so interesting, so much like glowing little worlds, or actually no, more like satellites, one thinks of the moons of the planets, or asteroids, when you were a kid you loved that there were asteroids, these islands just floating around which nobody made a big deal of, exotic.  The bottles, you wonder does anybody order for instance that silver one? In this bar beer is obviously the mother planet, whereas that cognac on the shelf that the bartender would have to reach for with his arm all the way out, that is the asteroid. Maybe you will get it, what is it, probably it is that twenty dollar a glass shit but who cares, tonight you are celebrating something. No, what is there to celebrate?  You can't exactly remember.  You came in here to celebrate something cynically, something you saw in the paper, oh, that story about the man who lost his bank a billion dollars, that was it, you were all wound up by that story, a man at an outpost bank, some branch in Asia everybody'd forgotten, hell, a Conradian figure, some Lord Jim of the Islands except now the islands have teletypes, are plugged into computer systems, still you like to think he was out there on his first assignment, and he bets the bank on movements in the Tokyo exchange, nobody notices, just blips, yes, each blip worth a million, a hundred million dollars, who is going to do the radar on that back in the home country, boy is there to make like fucking loans to the Negros to get like fucking oxen and here he is instead just using the bank like it was a car he could go joyriding around in yes, here is to the fall of capitalism,  you liked the erosion you sensed in that small but telling overthrow of fortunes, a glimpse of the Lucretian universe with its own version of freedom and fall, the inexplicable swerve of the atom, rumors in the machine, ineradicable delinquency, seeing the story in the paper you once again touched the event, your own name for that privy maim of what just misses, that wound in the world’s body, illuminated you came in here to celebrate anarchy, soon you are telling the guy next to you all about it, did you see that in the paper, buying him a beer, turns out he’s from Michigan, great, you are talking to him and aware, vaguely, that you have a small problem, a little blackout problem.  Where are you exactly, well you can ease into that with him, no, you are saying, that is where you are wrong, my friend, communism is about the opposite of anarchy, your hand on his wrist,  it is more like another story, although Lenin had some good ideas in the beginning, he is sure, comrade, what about your fucking Soviet Union, that went down with a crash,  you are the state was supposed to wither away, Lenin had some good ideas at the beginning my friend, your hand back to your glass, swirling the liquid there, thing about Lenin is he was really in two revolutions, one was in this dream state in his head, some advanced capitalist society, and the other was the feudal Russia he was stuck with, like a thin man dreaming in a fat man's body, and the disastrous result of putting a dream in power is that it becomes a nightmare. Take Trotsky, you are about to say, but you take a drink instead, as the guy is if they gave everybody the same amount of things, the next day somebody would have more and somebody would have less. Where am I, that would be the startling thing to just pop in. Olive skin.  Pouchy, with a tie, white shirt, his coat unbuttoned.  Ink black, thick beard.  You are trying to focus on where that argument with Jan took place, it seems like it was at a bar, too. Was it even... You scoot your stool out with a sudden thrust of your back and butt, both  hands on the edge of the bar, the four legs scraping on the tile floor, you hop down, sorry, you interrupt him, I've got to make a call, and now you are down at the jukebox, leaning over it, surveying all the little labels under the curve of the glass, the neon light shining up into your face, a chalky white light that emphasizes the dark of the nostrils, the shadowy fringe of eyelash, the songs are mostly country and western and you select an old tune, Ghost riders in the Sky, leaning there you have a moment of looking at yourself and choreographing yourself, your posture, the light, the pleated, tan khakis you are wearing, your awareness of a single woman, blond, in the booth near you, smoking a cigarette. You come into a bar, you push open the heavy wooden door with the sign just inside saying no one under eighteen admitted or the glass door tinted a dark murky blue or green or - if it is a glass door to a  tittie bar - with the paper silhouette of a well endowed woman, the va-va-va-voom curves,  taped to the inside of  the door - and you have a moment in which you attract the loose attention of the boozers at the bar. It is an almost spatial element,  unbound, labile, and spastic, they turn and their eyes, in one measuring stare, are on you. You come into a bar and you immediately are analyzed into your elements of hat, hair length ( and whether it is on your face), sex, and movement, and you are either approved for the place you have entered or you are made to feel that you are out of your frame of reference.  Supposedly sharks are so attuned to the water they swim in that the merest disturbance in the current of it, a wounded flurry in it, an awkwardness scanned from off the displacement of water usual to the healthy stroke,  determines them on direction and speed and desirability of attack. Sometimes this is the case in bars, regulars and drunks having that blurred sense of territory.  There is attention there waiting to lock onto an object, whether that obsession come out as amour fou or visceral, sudden hatred. Alcohol, of course, is the spirit that mediates here between perception and object - which leads to compositions of forces that sobriety would never imagine.  To you, this is one of the great attractions of bars - bars are theater, and entering a new bar is like going through a screen test. You can star for a night in a bar. You can bomb.  The Ghost Riders song makes it click in your head and suddenly you know the name of the bar.  You walk past the booth with the woman and you glance at her and she glances at you. Smile.  You go down the aisle between the booths and the tables.  Johnny O’s. Now you stand at the phone, between Damas to your right and Caballeros to the left, and you fumble in your wallet, looking through the bills in the bill section, three twenties, good, and you spread out bits of paper on the metal shelf beneath the phone, receipts from ATM machines, grocery and liquor stores, bits of unaccountable paper, a napkin with dis. infra. scribbled on it, what the hell, you wad it up and throw it on the floor. On the back of one of the receipts you find the number and you drop the quarter in the phone, dial, and at the other end there is an answer, a female voice, her.  Bright little, tight little Mary Rose.  You dance a step.  Bright little, tight little Rose Marie.  She asks you, after a while, if you’ve been drinking, and you say what do you think and why don’t you meet me.  After a while she says yes, and then you try to explain where Johnny O’s is, and you do a superb job for a man who five minutes ago didn’t know if he were in Santa Fe or New York City. You go on for a bit about the guy who lost his company a billion dollars, you exaggerate.  You claim that he was a high school drop out, you claim that it was a summer job, part time, you laugh, you are I’m not making this up, let’s celebrate, for God’s sake finally something to celebrate. She hangs up.  You hang up, you are laughing, happy, suddenly it seems like a clever idea to celebrate this moment of anarchy, Mary Rose is joining you and she’s a sweet child, sweet nymph, you picked her out when you gave your talk at the university down here, somehow you counted as a New Mexico artist although you yourself point out there should be a residency requirement on that, you’ve only been a summer New Mexican, okay, actually Willet had gotten you that gig, who was teaching photography down there, married and living in that house, his wife a little uneasy around you, Willet must have told her stories about the Austin days, expecting you to pull out your pecker any minute and pee in the fireplace like some Jackson Pollack figure reanimated and let loose in the landscape, but seriously you went on you have been influenced, shaken, really, by the geography blah blah blah, and afterwards, just as you hoped, she came up to talk to you about the summer position you had mentioned. You hang up, but meaning to simply put the receiver on the hook you somehow instead hit yourself with it.  Smart on the nose, bang.  You must have been about to slam the receiver down, too, you were excited, you were overexcited, you get like this, you’ve been doing a lot of astonishingly clumsy things lately, tripping over uneven places in sidewalks, spilling things, spitting when you talk, forgetting to zip your fly, you think maybe you have a brain tumor, something, maybe you’ve always been this clumsy and you just never noticed it before.  No, you’ve always considered yourself a graceful person, leaning on the glass of the juke box just a moment ago you distinctly caught yourself in a moment of pure aura, the blond woman saw it too. Age, sure you are aging, what are you ten years older than Mary Rose, probably, but what with fluoride in the water,  vitamins every day like a religion, the gym, weeks sometimes where your drinking slows down to a thin trickle, thirty three isn’t that bad, it isn’t like fifty three, how old was Dad when he died? Although  in his case, since he himself foreshortened his lifespan... Lately you’ve been feeling like hell, but that is because you are on an absurd schedule, you never seem to get to bed until two and automatically you wake up in a sweat at six. At six o’clock it is all over for you, you feel the burden of being the upside down man, you have been through the mirror and come back to the terror of this unconsciously inversed world, you are a sick man, you are a spiteful man, ridden by ghosts and a ghost yourself indeed, a spiritual cobweb,  lacking  that fundamental grain of reality, if you are in your house in Glorieta in particular,  if Julia isn’t there.  You did slug yourself incredibly hard, though. You hit yourself so hard that you are in through the Caballeros door before you can think, you are bent over, pain, a lot of pain here, your hand cupped over your nose.  You remove your hand and look at it, my God, it is blood.  Your are bleeding, a nosebleed, you are dripping blood on your shirt, your pants, shit, it is a deluge, coming out of your nose, you wince, you couldn’t have broken your nose.  In the mirror you are a mess, you lean over the sink, clogged with a brown towel slimy and slick with the water that saturates it  over the drain cover in the bottom there, you touch it and it is cold, and you try one faucet and then the other, and the other works, good.  Water, you splash water on your face, you straighten up, you lean back, your nose still stings but it isn’t, you are sure, broken.  At this point you start laughing, great, what if the damn thing was, you’d tell her Jule, I did try to stop drinking so much I beat myself up in a bar one night.  You take a towel from the roller, you press the rough texture of it against your nostrils, tamping them, you straighten up and take a good survey of yourself in the bathroom mirror.  You could splash water all over your shirt, or maybe go out and ask the bartender for salt, salt gets out stains. It was in Houston that you had that fight with Jan, it was at your friend Willet’s opening, you’d gotten the invite and you persuaded Jan to come with you since Robert was going to spend the weekend in some hospital in New Iberia. He made a thousand dollars a day, he said, just being on call there, he’d stay in a hotel and smoke reefer and swim in the pool - the only requirement was that he be near a phone.  Like all of Robert’s deals, it sounded fishy, he said he never got a call, or hardly ever.  Some Louisiana or Federal regulation requiring a certain number of  physicians to be on call, he was filling up the quota. So you got Jan to tell Robert she was going shopping in Houston, stay in a hotel, go to some nice stores, go to the opera, and you were hitching with her because of this opening.  Robert would look at you and you would look away, you wondered what the hell he suspected, you assumed that he had to suspect, Jan getting home deep into three a.m., you’d let her go at your door, a kiss, you’d watch her going down the outside stairs, her worried glance back to you  at the turning, then disappearing, the click of her heels on the metal stairs down, you'd wait until the sound suddenly fell dead as she stepped off onto the banquette, she looked to you as you released her like a woman who had just been fucked, she must have smelled of you, you like to think that you have a claiming odor, that no woman can lie under you and not be enveloped in the territory of your scent. You concentrate on getting the bloody traces off your face and drying yourself. Once, in a bar on Maple Street, you got into a fight.  Once, in a bar in Monterry  Mexico, you watched a sweaty, fat woman in a crowded dance hall break a beer bottle and go after a guy with the jagged neck.  You were with a friend, you were leaning on the bar, you'd said you'd wanted to see some whorehouses and so your friend obliged, and this cavernous venue was the last stop of the night. Your friend said it was a real people's place and your friend was that kind of leftist, of which there are touchingly few left, who said people as if he were talking about God's standard of justice embodied on earth - but your friend's parents income kept him at a comfortable distance from authenticity, as you were unkind enough to notice, and this distance came out in his sexual preference, which was for blondes.  So you'd been to whorehouses where the model of beauty was definitely not La Passionara, it was more like Madonna, you'd come into this place and you were frankly in a funk. The standards in this place, as far as you could tell, were all do it yourself. And then this woman, wearing very little, and that at almost the uttermost point of restraint, as if her immense and monumental blubber were about to cast aside the vestments of discredited modesty, in this case a little skirt with a flower print and something that looked like a vinyl vest, pitched with fierce rotundity and a mean and, to your untrained eye, rather skillful thrusting motion of broken glass, into her dancing partner, who jumped away from her and fell over a chair and lay in a heap, like a discombobulated scarecrow.  In that bar on Plum Street you'd been with who? Taking a final glance in the mirror, you had to admit that it looked like you'd been brawling. You'd explain it all to Mary Rose, maybe she would find it funny, you'd explain it all so it sounded funny. As long as it didn't sound drunk. You weren't drunk, though.  It was brain cancer, it must be, so you walk out of the bathroom and make your way back to your stool the same way you came.  You pass by the blond.  Smile. She pretends not to notice. Maybe she can’t see who it is, because the hour has come for dimming the lights.  At least this makes it less noticeable that you are bloody. You get back to your place at the bar. Your friend is gone, and the bartender, looking your way, frowns.  There is another man back there with him, a tall bearded fat man, and your pony tailed friend, looking rather epicene compared to this guy, says something to him.  The bar is getting crowded.  That Maple Street bar was a favorite of Tulane frat boys, and you had been there with Bragg, who was playing up his gay side. He was dancing with you, nothing that intimate, there really wasn’t any place to dance, he’d simply dropped a few quarters in the juke box and in the little bit of space before it he was swaying. You were vaguely swaying, it wasn’t full court dancing, you weren’t really paying attention to the patterns of his movement and following them or making variations upon them,  you all could easily have gone down to the Quarter and danced in any number of gay bars, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. There were bars in the Quarter where it wasn’t a big deal to suck off your partner on the dance floor. But for reasons you cannot now reconstruct you ended up in hostile territory committing just the kind of ambiguous act that would infuriate half the crowd at that bar, which is of course why Bragg was doing it.  The burly, tall bartender comes down and stands in front of you.  That is about all for you, he goes, I think you better go home now.  You look at him dumbly, what, you are I’m not drunk, I’m waiting for somebody.  The man has practiced the inexorable tone, he is sorry, we need you to pay up, what did you do to your shirt, you are nothing, an accident, I’m sick, I have brain cancer.  The man doesn’t think you are funny, something is wrong with your delivery, and then you get stuck on demanding another drink, you keep asking for it, he is I don’t want to come around the bar but I am going to.  In the noise of the bar there is a pocket of silence around you two. People are looking. We don’t want you coming back to this bar. You slam your glass down on the bar and the man has your wrist in his grip, like in a second,  he lifts your arm and slams it down on the bar, you are first of all paying for your fucking drinks and if you made a mess somewhere, I am personally going to mop up your shit with your face, you understand? I was giving you a chance, you wrench your arm free, I am paying, you say, I don’t want any trouble, you are trembling, where is your wallet? You are usually I’m funnier than this, the burly bartender is looking at this couple who are seated a few stools from you, what is it some cordon sanitaire around the poor drunk? You are I’m an artist, you have turned to the couple, an audience, you heard this guy threaten me, I’m going to call my lawyer, I know people in this town, I’m not going to be treated like dog shit, you throw down a twenty, I want change.  The burly guy is you owe ten more, man.  The other twenty.  That time with Jan, you were with a bunch of people, old friends from Austin, from the art school, it was a reunion.  Jan didn’t know most of them, Bragg, Mark, but the main thing bugging her was that Julia came.  It was that night, first time in a year you’d seen Julia.  First extended separation from her since you were seventeen, and you and she were all over each other in a corner.  Jan got tearful and ridiculous, and you got embarrassed for her.  If you only had the balls like that fat woman in Monterrey.  Take your glass, smash it against the edge of the bar.  You’d be at a disadvantage, the burly guy has a large reach and you’d have to make your move across the bar, off balance, your body in a movement that would naturally carry it out of its center of gravity.  The move would only work if it had a lot of force in it. The guy steps back, he’s out of your range, and then he goes for the baseball bat. You aren’t going to get your head split open for nothing. You make your way out of the bar, pushing back against the crowd of people that are suddenly in the bar, between you and the doorway, out the window you can see that aching lingering evening light, it is going to be a long summer evening,  and these people make way before you, you feel yourself collecting looks as you pass, any minute somebody is going to snicker, laugh in your face. Around the bar you can imagine the wisecracks, the quips, the ritual of servility, the customers that saw it trying to get the bartender’s comments, the laugh at your expense, you hate them all briefly not even because in this case it is you who are the victim but because these are the bystanders de toujours, the people who lived outside of concentration camps for five years and then claimed that they had no idea, well isn’t your expulsion from this bar a symptom of fascism, yes, on the micro level, you look at all these greedy, pretty, plump faces, the panicked narcissism that has emptied out every eye tonight and you know in your gut that they will automatically, predictably take the side of power whenever it is a question of a crisis, they just will. Not one of them has the balls to get kicked out of a bar,  you have  worked up your head of steam at last, you are standing in the doorway of this place. One thing you can say for yourself, at least you don’t have that complex, you’ve never had it, you don’t find the stupid application of mechanical force erotic, but those cretins do, they all bare their little bottoms when the man tells them to, oh, it is disgusting, especially for an upside down man.  No one ever sympathizes with the guy who is kicked out of a bar. You pace up and down, trying to think about what to do.  You now have that humiliation in you like a sharp object and you have to either let it go, the Buddhist thing to do, or you have to get revenge. If you let this go, you let everything go: Julia, Dad’s death, your choked art like all of Rousseau’s abandoned babies, politics, memory, your debts, old hatreds, worse old loves, pity, humanity, the lineaments of your common movements and the body of your desires, lines of fate in your hand and elsewhere, the one ball that sags more than the other, birds, the trip to Mexico, hope, your Jeep, the marvel of driving drunk late at night under the inverted cup of the night sky, what’s going to happen with Julia, what’s going to happen, how you are going to get home tonight, Ruth Parquin, credit cards, resistance, rock n roll, every book in your head, every scrap in your studio, parties, anything you have to do or any person you have to meet tomorrow, Mom’s present craziness, Dita and Brian’s money problems, Jan’s hard middle age, the grip of cold selfishness on your heart like someone’s soft white hand squeezing an exhausted tube, Dad’s death, death death... You start hopping up and down, a big red rose of anger is blooming inside you, fantastic, you feel its huge, thick petals stirring, swelling, a vegetable splendor in your chest, maybe it is a heart attack. Mary Rose.  She is supposed to meet you, you have to stay around here.  You are hopping up and down on the sidewalk and a couple tries to get by you and enter the bar, so you stand in front of the guy, you are you all don’t want to go into this bar, this bar... discriminates! A man and a woman. The woman giggles, the man (in bermuda shorts and baseball cap) says get out of the way, man. The SS of bermuda shorts and baseball caps. You move, for some reason you say I’m a black man. Now you have it.  You start hopping up and down, marching in front of the window, the door, you are at the top of your voice Two Four Six Eight, Johnny O’s discriminates.  A little demonstration, you notice people looking out the window at you. You look down at yourself, you do look a sight.  Your shirt is spotted with blood, there are red spots on your pants, Christ, you should have asked the bartender for salt before you left, the least you can do is give me some salt.  You laugh, one two three four, what is it we’re fighting for? You scare a few people away, at least they looked like they were heading toward the place until they saw you like Tom o’ Bedlam hopping around, chanting.  Two people enter despite your pleas. You actually kneel on the sidewalk, please, massa, please don’t enter that place of shame, that abattoir, that drinking parlor where dey puts de strychnine in de beer! You are starting to feel better, next person who comes in or out you will kneel at their feet, this is your best revenge idea ever.  Except killing that bartender. No, you have decided the buddhist line is correct, and you hope at the end of this demonstration you will feel able to let go. Then you will bless the place.  Mary Rose. Mary Rose is coming, and you will have to explain to her. Tom o’ Bedlam is good, in a way all the fools in all the King Lears have been turned out in our streets nowadays, although there is a slight income differential between you and any one of that crew of jesters.  You will explain so much.  Someone to explain so much to. The first thing you have to point out is your evident sobriety, my God. The next person asks what Johnny O’s did.  You are this bar discriminates against drunks. Then the burly man appears, he comes out of the door, what the fuck do you think you are doing? You are I am demonstrating. Look, he says, if you don’t stop this I am getting the cops. Get the cops, man. You are down on your knees, don’t go into this house of misrule! Two girls.  One of them laughs, which is a good sign, the burly man has moved out on the sidewalk, you are still down on your knees.  The thing is to go limp, please don’t hurt me, please, you scream. The girls have gone on down the sidewalk and they have stopped at a certain distance to watch this.  The man is trying to pick you up, which is a mistake on his part because you are limp, so he looks like an utter fool, he can’t catch hold of you, he pounds you once on the back. Dangerous warmth above you, you can feel inside him the restraints breaking down, locks giving way.  Stop it, you scream, stop, alright, man. You feel you and he are poised, here, for something bright, brief and fierce.  You could go further, oh just a little bit further, a needle’s span further, and something would happen. A flaw in the civil order, a man beating another man in an access of that hysterical passion that must be put down, what need for these sweaty brawls? Reptile versus reptile. Creepy twins of disorder, two heavy breathing old farts. Your hand has got caught under your knee and is being scraped on the concrete of the sidewalk. A car has stopped by the curb, you are thinking about rolling a bit both to dislodge your hand and so that you can end up at the feet of this person as though you were some wildcat temperance preacher, on fire with the unpronounceable word of God a permanent drunk on your tongue, clothed for a sign in bloody khakis and a ruined oxford shirt,  you look up, and getting out of the car - oh fire, fire, fire! - dressed in a white miniskirt with white go go boots and a white halter, an expression of indignation distorting the clear, tan skin of her beautifully high cheeked  face (directed, as you can immediately see, at your persecutor and not at you) and thus endearing herself to you forever,  is Mary Rose.

from encyclopedia of the second hand

I wrote a series of chapters to a novel in the 90s. It centered around an artist - Longstreet in some versions, Laff in others - and the things he remembers. The chapters, then, are grouped as entries, and not chronologically. I have finally decided that I probably won't finish this. So I think I'll put them up on my blog, occassionally, to please the few punters who come here.
Here's Kickball

‑    Those inflatable rubber balls, the rubber feeling very thin over the hollow, air filled core.  Although when the ball hits you, it stings.  It can sting.  The surface of these balls, the rubber rind, is always dented.  Not smooth, but always a little pitted.  Pebbly.  You never saw this type of ball outside of school unless someone stole one.  And then everybody would know that this person stole this ball, because it was so distinctive, so it wasn't a great thing to steal, in terms of other great things you could steal, like magazines from stores or the little knicknacks, batteries and disposable razors and such, that they always have hanging up at the checkout counter, or (like your friend Eric's sister, Brenda, did) a necklace from someone you were babysitting for.  Of course, Eric's sister wasn't prudent in committing the last mentioned bit of larceny, because it didn't take a genius to connect  Brenda babysitting last night with the necklace no longer glittering whereever it had been glittering this morning. The lack of necklace loomed large enough that the next day it was restored to Mrs. Phillips by Mr. Klimke, and Eric's sister got punished as she was always getting punished, by being grounded, and as always she glided out of her bedroom window like a little sorority cat burglar when her boyfriend Bobby drove up before the house in his big black Oldsmobile. Which Eric saw, of course, but even though he didn't like his sister he still didn't tell about. That is to his folks. To us he told about it. He always did tell us. Eric's sister never cultivated prudence, which was why, on the back of the Thrift Village there on Shallowcross road you could read that Brenda sucks donkey dicks (a dismissable slander) and that Brenda suck Bobby (grammatically doubtful, but accepted as gospel truth by the Gladstone seventh grade).

     Kickball was the eminent ball of the playground. There was the softball, the basketball, the football, the baseball, and the program was that as we got older these would be our balls, and we would be sorted out according to what ball we were around most. (Oh, you forgot the bowling ball. But that was church. The Sunday School class, organised for a rainy Saturday excursion to the bowling alley and you watching the movie must have been made in the fifties, say, that guy looks funny, he looks like my Uncle, yeah my uncle always wears his undershirt and not a shirt over it and the movie voiceover telling Longstreet to take his steps up to the line like in the diagram step a and dot dot dot step b ahead of it and the arm back hey though these finger holes are too small and the after swing ‑ perfecto, man, but the ball I don't think the ball is right see it keeps curving like you know that means they must of unbalanced it by putting more weight on the right, man, and that isn't fair). But up until the sixth grade we were all sort of under the sign of the kickball. Liberte, egalite and fraternite, translated into elementary school terms, meant kickball. If Engels had been around we might have reminded him of that stage of primitive communism when everything is pretty groovy and even the girls get to play on the kickball teams, and then later on he might posit an Asiatic feudal stage in balldom, when the huge project was sorting out the bats and finding the things like petrified pillows for bases and then setting up our configurations and all of this division of labor tending to establish a definite tyranny and caste system, with the outfield getting to play the pariah parts. Any clumsy jerk could be stationed out there, and a lot of times they doubled or tripled up, so there are three right fielders at a time, two left fielders, and so on. 

‑    I should try to be more conscientious of the limits of my world, or at least put in markers here, little surveyor's clues, even if the real limits are by their essence such that the slave to them cannot see them.  The real limits are invisible and function invisibly, the real limits are self‑suppressing, the real limit is not the wall I touch but the interface between touch and wall. I  am talking about the Gladstone Elementary School playground as if it were representative of all elementary school playgrounds, at least of a certain era, but I have to say my sample is limited. The only other playground I had any familiarity with is the Dallastown, Pennsylvania Elementary School playground. The Earlys moved to Gladstone, a suburb of Atlanta, when Street was nine, and Mom was happy about that cause she didn't like living up North so much and so she really got on Dad when he got the opportunity to come down here, Dad was doing a little of this and a little of that and had ended up there in Pennsylvania working on a newspaper for, Street was surprised to learn twenty years later talking to Dad on his porch and Dad reminiscing about that time, Dad making six thousand a year. And it was only four thousand more, the ad agency in Atlanta, but Mom kept pointing out it was a ground floor opportunity, look, honey, this article says  Atlanta is the new New York, it is like the place to be. Honey. Like it was the opportunity of a lifetime.  We could live near Grammy Shillowford. It is important to note that Longstreet had, by that time, incorporated playground in my paradigm of how to be ‑ yes, it was that stark, in those stark terms, that I thought, since I was a melancholic child ‑ and so my memories of kickball, which don't go back to Dallastown, where we played rather chaotic and un‑ball‑organized games, plug into my playground and classroom routine.

‑   In Dallastown you were beaten up on the playground. No, that is an exaggeration ‑ you were never physically beaten up, but you were the object of a certain amount of bullying. The bullying made an impression. For instance, there was this tyke Amazon who would come after you with her coat. She'd swing her coat so that the zipper would hit you. Of course, the zipper didn't hit you very often because you ran away. Now why she came after you with the coat in the first place, that has to do with the reasons children find the targets they do, and that has to do with miseries that are accumulated from elsewhere. From one's relationship to Mom and Dad ‑ standard answer. From the air, from God, the curses of angels or mad toothfairies, who knows, but the important thing is that children, with their back‑to‑the‑primates program of selecting out the weak, are going to find your weak spot.

     Now, here is the thing: by the time you got to Gladstone you were not tormented, or not particularly, and certainly not by children of your own age.  The reason for this is that you were a quick student, you liked to read, you impressed your teachers, and that gave you a certain amount of power, a power base, and it taught you how to use powerful allies to establish yourself.  Not that you told, you didn't have to tell. It was that you could have told and didn't, actually, that made the difference. It is easy to caricature what I am talking about here, we have the vocabularies we inherited from childhood, we  know about sneaks, queers, snitches, bookworms, bullies, but if I turn my back on that sad gallery and really think about it what impresses me is the diplomacy involved in classroom and playground survival, the ability to pick the right moments for remaining loyal and the right and legal moments for jettisoning one's allies, ah, the terrible beauty of Realpolitik in Kinderwelt, ah, the friends who turned out to be mistakes, or somehow became mistakes, not that at first they were mistakes but it was like the effect of some terrible hidden gene, you would be gone a summer from them and you'd come back and there your friend would be, a mistake, a pud, a sucker, coloring the very air around him with unhealthy vulnerability.

‑   So in Atlanta you have a system down, you have a power model that you have discovered, you are very quick to establish yourself.  By the fifth grade you have established yourself on the playground.  All of our models are so crude, it goes along with picking my nose or my butt and not worrying about it, it goes along with poking a straw in my nostril, it goes along with the thing Eric can do with  his eye by putting his finger on the lid right at the corner and pulling it and like pulling his eye right up so that you only see the runny white of the eye, gross, this all goes along with the rawness of the assertions and surrenders on the playground. You have got to where you are in the middle of the kids who are selected for Jackson's team. Jackson Whittemore is the biggest kid in fifth grade and his team usually wins, so you are comfortable, this is the middle management level which a lot of these kids will go into, it starts from here.

‑    The kickballs come out of a closet.  The janitor's closet.  The doors of all the classrooms are wooden doors, easy doors to open, but the special doors in the school, the door to the office, the door to the bathroom, and the doors to the storerooms, they are all heavy metal doors. The janitor unlocks it selecting one key from a great clanking mass of them, which is attached by a chain to his belt.  The janitor, the main janitor of the Gladstone Elementary School is an old black man (which means around fifty, to Street the thick, tufted gray hair signifies extreme age, and he has no eye for the damage and endurence of black skin, his measurements are all in white skin) who at some later date ‑ when Street is already in High School ‑ has to leave the school because he is caught trying to show a little girl pictures of naked women.  God knows what is involved in such a complexly suggestive gesture. A teacher will get Grady to unlock the door and he'll be attended by volunteers.  Maybe the teacher will go with Grady herself, but most of the time the teachers' point of view is that playground time means going to the teacher's lounge and taking a drag on a cigarette. So without Miss Petty or Beston or Muldive we would get nine balls, and sometimes they would be deflated and they are neat when they are like that because you can crevice the surface in this way or that way, and if you knock a dent in the ball and then knock another one in it the dents you form will interfere with each other, and that is endlessly fascinating for about two minutes.  The other interesting thing about hitting the ball to obtain these dents is that it makes an interesting thump, and the other interesting thing about it is that when the ball is pumped up the dents will pop out, and that is good to watch. The ball looks like it is alive when this is happening, a strange seal or something, like it is eating, or at least the way things eat in cartoons where a lot of times what is eaten is swallowed whole, gulp, and it just stays the same inside, in fact if the thing eaten is the smart thing, like the Roadrunner, then it just lights a match and the thing eating it, like the Coyote, has to spit it out.

     Okay, the balls come out of the storage closet and suddenly they are all over the playground.  Little impish red balls, around which coalesce groups of boys and girls and teachers, the ones who aren't smoking in the lounge, which it must be that they switch on and off.  Boys and girls, though: this is a teacher's words.  I write this, I veer, I am in another perspective with the touch of a word.  Kids.  We were kids, I was a kid. We were big kids and little ones, we were girls only in a special tone (geerl. You're a geeerl ‑ a special taunt among the boys) and we were boys only in pathetic moments when we were licking the ass of some especially chosen adult, like going home with some story of malfeasance to a parent (he was a big boy ‑ he was a bigger boy ‑ phrases to evoke sympathy and, one hoped, rage ‑ maybe Daddy will go over there and beat up Mr. Whittemore!).  We could all easily be pretty pathetic lackies, childhood being a wonderful discipline for later acts of supererogatory servility

‑     But normally we werent lackies ‑ we were, as I have tried to point out, diplomats, secretaries of state on delicate missions in perilous international situations.

‑   Shift a little, Street, shift the focus.  Because I want this to be clear ‑ to actually describe the world of kickballs involves a lot of subtle stuff, it involves the whole metaphysics of description and depiction, that stitching between art and life. 

‑    My dream is to describe myself into existence.    

‑   There is always a word, but not simply a word: a charm. An open sesame, a one if by land and two if by sea.  The lock is unlocked, the stone is lifted, the agents meet in the park at twelve and exchange briefcases. Yes, not simply a word, because its synonyms won't do, the place that it holds is uniquely its own, its function is to transform the situation, to make visible the threshhold between absense and appearance.  Like a stage mindreader, your challenge is to pick out a few  experiences from the nattering psychic throng, all those unnamed lifes, all those random vibes. Except here, in the palace of memory, those lifes are one life: your own.  Your own, splintered into a thousand aspect

‑    There is another kickball game which comes later, comes in high school.  It is called smear the queer, although like all these names there are official and unofficial titles and I'm pretty sure Coach Sick, who had a hard enough time saying sperm when the time came for him to say sperm when we got our sex education class from him, I'm pretty sure he didn't go around saying smear the queer, he probably said something more World War II like, like bombardment. Anyway, the game was played inside, in a room that had one wall open so you could lean out and look down on the gym floor and the girls and their little uniforms down there.  I should explain that you are in a school district where they have compressed Junior High and High School, because other people I talk to, they say ninth grade was Junior High.  Well, not for Street.  Now, the girls were inside for the same reason we were:  it was raining.  But you didn't have much of a chance to look down like that, because smear the queer was a hyperbusy game.  It was simple;  two teams, lined up each before a wall, faceing each other.  You could run out a certain distance, to a line running across the floor. You hurl a kickball right before the line.  If it hit some boy, that boy was out.  The tempo of the game was different from the kickball games you played at Gladstone .  Those earlier games were sort of slow fusion jazz, a lot of riffs of inactivity ‑ retrieving the ball, watching the pitcher pitch it, the exchange between catcher and pitcher, neither of whom was better than anybody else at catching the ball, since to catch the ball you had to have a developed sense of speed and the curves that the ball would take and we were all a little primitive about that. Most of the time when the kicker did hit it the ball was foul, and somebody had to go retrieve it, and even when he did kick it and it was legal it usually didn't have to involve you.  Mostly you could confine your involvement to yelling, maybe a little sympathetic movement towards the part of the field where something was going on. But in smear the queer, Coach Sick kept tossing in kickballs, and since there wasn't any set time for anybody to throw a ball balls were constantly in the air, so you could be dodging one and be hit by another.

‑    What do you think is going to happen? Do you think this is going to end with some more profound knowledge about the meaning of kickball?  Do you think, yes you do think, that if you do it right, if you reach the magic moment of greatest specificity, the sound one day of the ball crunching on the sandy mixture they laid on top of the playground that you had to dig down a foot through before you reached clay, the ball bounding towards you segment by segment larger but not so that you had time to mark the stages of its fascinating trajectory, the ball actually heading in your direction and the screams and yells suddenly receding like the soundtrack going out, something screwed up  with the friggin projector as Mr. Dupley in exasperation and shadow said one day, the ball almost in your hands and you squatting down in the catcher's squat for it, if you get this in the crosshairs, see it, know that posture and the waiting and how suddenly you don't want to be here, it will be like a kickball will drop out of the story, memory's relic take physical form, Lazarus as kickball come back from the dead come to tell you all I will tell you all.

ukraine, russia and crimea

I’ve noticed with some amusement that the hawks have come out about Russia and the Ukraine. Timothy Snyder at the NYRB is practically foaming at the mouth, warning that if Crimea is annexed it will mean the end of the “European order”. Similarly, David Remnick and his reporters at the New Yorker are pulling out propaganda tricks that were old in 1991, when they were used to propell the US into the defense of tiny, embattled, and surely democratic (or semi-democratic or completely feudal) Kuwait.

Myself, I think Putin’s annexation ploy is probably a feint that will allow him to get what he wants anyway by “compromising” and making Crimea totally autonomous. But even if Crimea is annexed, there is little Europe or the US can do about it.

However, there is a certain lesson, here – a lesson that we are forced to swallow every four or five years. The lesson is that America’s gung ho gang of interventionists always cause immense and long range trouble. For instance, the Putin who Remnick spits on is, what? The product of Boris Yeltsin. And as those who have memories longer than your average tv anchorman, Boris Yeltsin’s second term was the result of a massive and unprecedented use of private funds and government power, and was influenced by the same American government/NGO nexis that has traditionally gone around making a sham of elections in various “strategic” countries.

Remnick’s comments on the 1996 elections are, in this context, extremely relevant. First he quotes from Adam Michnik: “Today, Russia stands before a dramatic dilemma to which no one yet has given a reasonable answer. What is better: to disrupt the rules of democracy and chase out the totalitarian parties while they are sufficiently weak, or to respect the democratic order and open these parties to the road to power?” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/06/17/1996_06_17_005_TNY_CARDS_000373659 This is the kind of orotund stuff that is the cat’s meow to American pundits. Kissinger said it much better about overthrowing Allende:  "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due  to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

In the event, though, Michnick’s dilemma was solved by a judicious use of power that Remnick compared to what John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Rutherford Hayes did – to which we can add George W. Bush, then not on the horizon. So the state media saturates the zone with pro-Yeltsin news and fake photo ops.

It was a classic operation, and it even involved a photo-op war – the war in Chechnya. The war had a strange effect on Chechens – they seem to multiply right before the election and vote in overwhelming numbers for your friend and mine, Boris Yeltsin, putting him over the top. A winner!

In fact, Time Magazine was so proud that they impertinently put out an issue, Yanks to the Rescue, in 1996, detailing  just how the Americans had rejiggered the Yeltsin campaign. Of course, they avoided talking about the really dirty stuff, but the model was created that would elect Putin in 2000, and thereafter the Russians could take over the reins in running dirty elections.

However, butter does not melt in the mouth of yesteryear’s interveners, always straining at the bit to visit some new disaster upon the world, and spitting on those who oppose them as the friends of totalitarianism and the murderers of Mickey Mouse.

I resent that latter charge. My son loves his Mickey Mouse, and I wouldn’t hurt a hair on that Mouse’s head.

But the official mediasphere, for too too long, has had its run of DC’s toys. One of the effects of the Bush-Obama deal, which solidified the plutocracy on the top of the American economy and has allowed the bottom 80 percent to slip decorously into the shit, is that it is hard to get that 80 percent all excited about our national interests in Crimea.

Just as with Georgia, Putin is playing for low stakes, and the US will lose and give John McCain an ulcer. To say this isn’t to celebrate Putin, a true butcher and an heir to an illegitimate and corrupt system.  It is to look at the real effect of the 90s fun filled shock therapy, mafioso ologarcho takeover of industries, and the skewing of the very beginning of Russian democracy by the farce put on in 1996. The let’s do it again crowd should not be listened to.

betrayal

It is an interesting affair – the affair one has with certain authors, those you read compulsively, and then can’t read. Can’t. Favorite authors. When I was a kid in high school, for instance, I read all the Kurt Vonnegut I could find in great satisfying gulps. God Bless you mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, Sirens of Titan, etc., etc. I thought that this was how to write. I imitated him.

And then one day I couldn ‘t read him.

This moment of turning away – what is it but a betrayal? As with a love affair, it is a moment of heavy psychodrama, with  a whole lot of projection going on. That projection is covered, at least in my case, by a critical language, which finds the fault in Vonnegut and the burden of betrayal is unconsciously shifted to him.  It is the author’s betrayal, not my own! He led me on. He took advantage of my teen naivete! And it isn’t even that the critical language is false, the negativity misplaced – but there is a fundamental bad faith behind it all.

Anton Chekhov, in a letter to a friend written in 1891, gave an elegant description of this moment of betrayal. In his case, the writer was  Tolstoy:

“Perhaps because of my no longer smoking, the Tolstoyan morality has stopped stirring me, and in the depths of my soul I feel badly disposed toward it, which is, of course, unjust. Peasant blood flows in my veins, and you cannot astound me with the virtues of the peasantry. From childhood I have believed in progress and cannot help believing, as the differerence between the time when I got whipped and the time when the whippings ceased was terrific. … But the Tolstoyan philosophy had a pwerful effect on me, governed my life for a period of six or seven years; it was not the basic premises, of which I had been previously aware, but the Tolstoyan manner of expression, its good sense and probably a sort of hypnotic quality. Now something within me protests: prudence and justice tell me there is more love in natural phenomena than in chastity and abstinence from meat. War is evil and the court system is evil, but it does not therefore follow that I have to walk around in straw slippers and sleep on a stove besides a workman and his wife, etc. This howevver is not the crux of the matter, not the “pro and contra”; it is that somehow or other Tolstoy has already passed out of my life, is no longer in my heart: he has gone away saying, behold, your house is left unto you desolate. I have freed myself from lodging his ideas in my brain.”

Tolstoy is, of course, a much larger mass than Vonnegut, but Chekhov’s outburst applies to all the betrayals: first comes the rationalization, which indeed contains a spiritual truth, a truth of authenticity; then comes the desacralization, an energy that goes beyond mere argument; and then comes a more accurate description of what it means to be in love with a writer and then fall out of love.

The authenticity of the experience is rooted in Chekhov’s claim to be of peasant blood, and more vividly, to know the experience of the whip growing up – although this is not the serfowner’s knout, but papa’s belt, apparently. Then comes a sort of mockery of the Tolstoyan agenda, which is easy to cook up – the idea of sleeping with the working man and his wife on the stove is a comic image. Then comes the real reason, and here, it isn’t progress or rationality that dominates, but possession and exorcism.

This corresponds to my experience exactly. The hypnotism affected by a writer, a writer one falls in love with, is an act of possession. It could even be an act of angelic possession. But Chekhov, the Chekhov who claims his peasant blood here, wrote in another letter that he had tried to drain the slave from his blood to the last drop, and this purge counts for beloved writers too.

These thoughts were crystallized by a Hudson Review essay onDavid Foster Wallace’s conservatism. The author, James Santel, guides his essayinto port using three facts about Wallace – that he voted for Reagan in 1980,that he voted for Ross Perot in 1992, and that he wrote a shamefullyhagiographic article about John McCain in 2000. Santel ignores DFW’s campaigning for Kerry in 2004 and the interview he gave to the WSJ in 2008, where he says:

“ You write that John McCain, in 2000, had become "the great populist hope of American politics." What parallels do you see between McCain in 2000 and Barack Obama in 2008?

Mr. Wallace: There are some similarities; the ability to attract new voters, Independents; the ability to raise serious money in a grassroots way via the Web. But there are also lots of differences, many too obvious to need pointing out. Obama is an orator, for one thing;a rhetorician of the old school. To me, that seems more classically populist than McCain, who's not a good speechmaker and whose great strengths are Q&As and small-group press confabs. But there's a bigger [reason]. The truth -;as I see it -is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it's very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.”

However, I think Santel has a point about Wallace, even if the point keeps shuffling away from him. It isn’t that Wallace is conservative because he thinks “the individual is alone”. What lefty would disagree? And what lefty wouldn’t say that “alone” is an attitude that emerges in the social whole. It is a social construct, which does not mean it is somehow not real, but that it gains its entire value as such a construct. Santel I think confuses methodological individualism with existential individualism. But I think that Wallace did too. From the Ayn Rand fan-dom of his teenage years through the entire body of his non-fiction, and to a certain extent his fiction, he lacked that sense of the contemporary – of the historic moment, and the forces engaged within it – that a novelist like Mann, or Bellow, or Updike – to name some other conservative novelists – had.

It has been a while since I read Wallace like I used to in the nineties and 00s. I’ve never even considered reading Pale King. I do remember thinking Interviews with Hideous Men was a huge comedown from Infinite Jest. But I also remember thinking that  the essays – on the AVA awards, on a LA talk radio jock, on whatever – were genius.

Recently, though, picking up A Supposedly Fun thing I’ll Never do Again (ah, that supposedly!) I found myself reacting allergically to the whole of it. The wisecracks, the footnotes, the mix of hesitation and arrogance, of erudition and self-mockery – it seemed so wrong.

Was it wrong? One of my great reading experiences was lounging in my high bed in New Haven and, as the snow fell endlessly outside the window on Mansfield Street, reading hundreds of pages of Infinite Jest at a stretch. It seemed then that finally the novel had come back, after a long sleep in the eighties – with few exceptions. The novel as I loved it – the paranoid codex. Gravity’s Rainbow, J.R., Lookout Cartridge – these were my household spirits.

Now, of course, I think back to things like the schtick with Joelle Van Dyne, the PGOAT (prettiest girl of all time) and wonder whether this was a tell – a crack in the Golden Bowl, a mark of an essential falseness. Rather like Vonnegut’s catch phrases.

However, I know that this is all about betraying DFW, and the reason that I want to betray him isn’t entirely clear to me. The truths of disaffection obscure the truths of infatuation – that is how betrayal is.

Who knows, though. Maybe I should go back and read The Sirens of Titan.

a slogan for the new revolution

One of the most durable of the Western – or perhaps I should say Axial – metaphors associates waking with enlightenment, with spiritual vision, and sleeping with everydayness, with existential blindness – sleeping through life.

Like  many of these Axial metaphors, in the capitalist world, there is a certain literalism that takes over and, while destroying the material basis for these metaphors, continues to use them as though our value system were unchanged. In this, it is like what has happened to youth. There are complicated demographic reasons that the material basis of youth (what it connoted, socially) started changing in the seventeenth century. Partly this was due to the end of the family house – in much of Western Europe, sons ceased to live in the family house when they got married, but started their own, a business that required capital that was usually unavailable  to an eighteen or twenty year old, thus opening up a period of suspense, of being neither in nor out of the family, and creating the protoform of youth. But this transformation still did not change so much the Axial value set on youth, always in reference to Age. It signified the time of rebirth, of freshness, of adventure. Only in the late nineteenth and twentieth century did youth become a mandate – an actual goal in life. Since life is biologically about aging, the imperative of youth – which has resulted in advice about “staying young” given to codgers who are fingering the shroud, so to speak, or posted up on corkboard in old folks homes – destroyed the culture of age, with its ideal of wisdom. The realisation of that ideal was, of course, rare – you are old, Father William – but it has now been put on the kind of reservation the west always uses to manage  aborigines.

Sleeping, too, has been swept into the anti-biological regime of late capitalism. A metaphor for the enemy of enlightenment, it is now targeted for liquidation by the plutocracy and, in an ironic twist, its absense causes enlightenment to become an impossible dream, a relic. To sleep is to escape from the 24/7 world, to refuse – by the most basic of refusals that the consciousness can make – the function of producer and consumer. Jonathan Crary, in 24/7, recounts a research project being funded by the military that is seeking to unlock the biochemical secrets of the white crowned sparrow, which doesn’t sleep during its fall migration. “The aim is to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep and to function productively and efficiently. The initial objective, quite simply, is the creation of the sleepless soldier, and the white-corwned sparrow study project is only one small part of a braoder military effort to achieve at least limited mastery over human sleep.”

The old revivalist and revolutionary cry – wake up people! – is now in the hands of the worst. Strike a blow against the Empire, and oversleep tomorrow.

what the newsman gives us

“The least sophisticated reader, whenever he takes an old book in his hands, knows in advance that he is entering a world where even the most familiar words will not mean quite what they do today. This is the unsophisticated

reader’s historical intuition.” – Lidiia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose

The least sophisticated reader has all the advantages against today’s sophisticated news reporter. The news can be described as that discourse that does its best to eliminate the reader’s historical intuition. Some news items really make this clear. Take, for example, this platitudinizing item in the New Yorker today, which begins on a note of unconscious propaganda that it sustains to the last sentence: “On Saturday, Mexican authorities arrested Joaquín (El Chapo)Guzmán Loera, who was the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, acriminal organization responsible for violence and drug trafficking."  This seemingly bland announcement ends by associating El Chapo’s “organization” – of which he is supposedly the leader – with violence and drug trafficking – thus distinguishing him from the unnamed Mexican authorities. This is very sweet. Another way of this release could be written is: Mexican authorities, who have been complicit in the violence and drug trafficking associated with so called cartels, arrested the man who they helped escape from prison the last time they arrested him.” In fact, a glance at Anabel Hernandez’s Narcoland, which has an exhaustive chapter about Guzman, his previous arrest, his first confession (which named the people in power he was paying off), and the threat he received from “Mexican authorities” to change it (which he did), and what it means to be a “leader” of a cartel, would actually help the unsophisticated reader to know what is going on – what these words like “criminal” and “violence” really mean.

But that of course is not the point of this little news item.  Its point is to operate as both an establishment mouthpiece, destroying any alternative reading of this event, and to keep the system of selling drugs, putting dirty money into the system (that money, after all, has been truly vital to parts of the American economy – what would Miami be without it?) and police and military arrests going. It benefits everyone except that majority of people.

“Arresting Guzmán was an inarguably worthwhile goal, but there is concern about how much his absence will affect the organization’s operation. “There are a couple of senior guys in the Sinaloa cartel—one called El Mayo and another one called El Azul—who are still functioning,” Finnegan says.”

Yes, one wouldn’t want to call the goal into question. One wouldn’t even want to think that an argument could be made that the goal, that all the goals in this context, are dirty and worthless, from the, well, human point of view. What we need is the elite point of view here, the only point of view that counts, that has “worth” – and from this point of view, guys “function”. We get a nice, faux insider sense from knowing these guys are called El Mayo and El Azul. And faux insiderdom is what the newsman can give us, in exchange for destroying our historic intuition.

It is, inarguably, a shitty exchange. 

the moraliste and the ethicist

Here’s a couple of sentences from Cioran’s Thinking against Oneself: “Assaulted by the malediction attached to actions, the violent man only forces his nature, only goes beyond himself, in order to return furious, as an aggressor, trailed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for his having instigated  them. No work fails to turn against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action.”

This is the voice of a moraliste. A moraliste is an expert in generalizations that are rooted in his exacerbated sense of the world as a place where he tests himself, and fails – taking each failure as a mark left by the world on his hide, and worth studying for that reason. The ethicist, on the other hand, is an expert in generalizations that are, ideally, not suppose to make contact with his personality at all. From the ethicist’s point of view, the moraliste is carelessly and unforgiveably unconcerned with the truth of his generalizations, and is thus an untrustworthy and perverse guide to conduct. For the moraliste, the ethicist derives truths from cases that are so thin and so abstract, so lacking human meat and gusto, as to be caricatures. There is no investigative surprise in such work: it has the quality of fables composed by a bureaucracy.

The moraliste’s problem with the truth is that a too close adherence to it – which presumes success in its pursuit and capture – creates mere sententiousness; while a too intense sensitivity to the failure to discover the truth leads to unending paradox. Both sentiousness and a too facile way with paradox lead to tedium – primarily, in the life of the moraliste himself. Cioran, who began his literary career as a partisan of fascism and an admirer of Hitler and apparently changed his mind in 1940, when he managed to migrate from Romania to France, was the violent man whose work turned against him. And in the work he did after that repentence, the work for which he is known, the work in French, the tension is always between the feeling that fascism gave him – which he identified with youth and energy – and the feeling that the repentence gave him – which he identified with old age and nihilism. Thus, his life and work was an endless political cold turkey. The leveling impulse, as he saw it, of the ethicist who dismisses exhilaration and elevates the rules, enraged him, for that way lead to the crippling of high spirits and the impulses, generous or horrible, of life; and at the same time he had visible proof that the only social order he could really live in either had to cage hatred, violence, bigotry, and hysteria or collapse.    

Barthes and the paragraph

To read Barthes properly, one must be equipped with a pen and a piece of paper, a notebook, have them at hand, cite and dissect. There’s a reason for this besides the difficult theoretical terms and arguments in the text – that reason being that the texts tend to be disconnected in subtle ways, and one needs to have some record to chart the gaps. We know that his method of composition was to write on index cards and arrange them – which he did not only in his study of Michelet, but, according to his colleagues, also in his other work, throughout his life. Thus, Barthes’ text offer not the forward flow of a text that moves over a notebook, or over the loose pages of a typewriter, but instead in short bursts. Barthes once wrote an essay entitle Flaubert and the phrase. It seems natural to associate Flaubert with phrases, since he made so much of them. A similar essay could be written about Barthes and the paragraph.
The paragraph is eminently prosaic. Poetry – save for prose poems – does not settle into a paragraph. The poem must ultimately remain in touch with the vatic, the riddle, the omen – and the paragraph is antithetic to these presumptions and devices.
And yet – it isn’t precisely correct to speak of the product of these cards as paragraphs. Barthes entitle his perhaps most popular work Fragments of a lover’s discourse, and surely there is something to that ‘fragments’. The fragment is closer to the poetic line, it possesses a certain rawness that is groomed out of the properly constructed paragraph. The fragment extrudes its unity, which becomes the number that marks it from the outside – think of Wittgenstein – or the date, or some other indexical sign. It is as if here the paragraph is either too exhausted or too indignant to do its job – to pull itself together and express its topic organically. The topic thus becomes a sort of title or caption outside of it, names the fragment rather than being the interior connector that keeps it together.

walking, magic, moral failure

Magical realism is, as a term, a real drag. That is, in as much as it is applied to a certain kind of Latin American literature. However, the implied integration of the fantastic into the ordinary does work when you are describing your baby learning how to walk. Because this happens in plain old secular time in which you bump into things, you need a shave, the third drink makes you drunk, and dreamtime, in which you are being chased by robbers again, there is a flood coming, it turns out your dead relatives aren’t dead, etc. Such are the lacunae in the chronicle that I don’t remember when Adam developed his crawl, which was not your traditional four on the floor ambulation, with both legs providing the body motion, but the three wheeler model, viz, tucking one leg up and extending the other leg behind him. It was surprisingly speedy, due to his ability to pivot with that tucked up leg. We worried, though. Was there some reason he seemed to be nursing that front leg? Somehow, though, I recognized this crawl. That’s because it resembles something I do when I am in the position (which I very rarely am) of having to crawl across a roof four stories over the ground. I once spent a summer working at an apartment complex, and occassionally I was ordered to clean out the gutters, so I would mount up to the roof on a long ladder and making it down the peak to the side, where of course the abyss called to me. Or hissed. In any case, I would not walk to the edge in a crouch, as a man does, but would crouch crawl there, and tucking one leg up under my chest, I’d lean out tentatively with my little spade and dig into the leafs and sticks and crap clogging the gutters, tossing it down to the ground. After a while, of course, the ground didn’t seem that far down, but I still kept my tripod-al attitude. And here is Adam, whose instinct is to take the same stance. A meaningless coincidence, but parenthood is all about the semiotics of meaningless coincidences.

Anyway, for a while, now, he has been rising up to clutch at the wall, or the chair, or the table, or the sofa, unsteadily tottering there; and every day he had been doing more and more moving on his pins this way. Two weeks ago, he even launched out and made a few brave steps, a balletic leap that always ended in him either falling back to the floor or sliding back to it. We said, he’s going to walk any day now.

We thought we were expecting this.

But this Monday, we come back from an expedition and there is our sitter, and she says we’ve been walking! And there is Adam. He no longer walks like the newborn foal, but like the gazelle! Or if not the gazelle, not in fact at all like the gazelle, then like Charlie Chaplin, wobbling a bit but able to cross the entire room. If Adam had sprouted wings and was flying around the room, it wouldn’t have astonished me more. It was a moment of gestalt – the whole thing of walking like that, I just hadn’t quite thought it through.

I’m sure I will forget this eventually. I once thought that having a baby would teach me to see the baby in adults – I’d look at the balding, badly shaven man with the gut and I’d see the bald headed toddler he was, somehow. I’d have this magic insight. In fact, however, I only see the badly shaven man with the gut. It is a great disappointment – I was sure that I would become morally exalted and exude compassion like a super-Buddha. And I am sure that Adam’s walk, in two or three months, will just seem normal to me. The experience will melt in my hand.

So I will put this down instead, and hope that it does not become a dead letter to my imagination.   

paperwork

When, in the 1950s, the American military surveyed the incidence of plane accidents and accidents involving all the surrounding equipment necessary to get a bomber or a missile in the air, they came to an alarming conclusion: over ten years time, the chance of some accident setting off a hydrogen bomb was one in five. These are terrible odds. As with all military problems, this one was turned over to various war intellectuals at Rand. One of them, Fred Iklé, completed a secret report that zeroed in on the real problem here: once the accident happened, people might get mad at the Pentagon. In order to ward off the terrible notion that the Public would lose faith in the generals, Iklé spelled out several responses. The responses simply gave voice to what any old-timer could have told the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it was put into print by Iklé. The first and most important thing was to appoint a board of inquiry – not in order to get to the heart of what happened, of course. That way lies suicide! No, what was great about boards of inquiry was they filled the all important function of “temporizing”. After all, wiping out thousands of people arouses unsightly passion, which needs to be channeled and mitigated – and what better way to do it than to fasten upon the incident and draw out the investigation of it until the headlines had moved on.

I found Iklé’s memo in Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, which is a history of nuclear near misses. But it made me think of another book, a wonderful book, about paperwork: Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: Powers and failures of paperwork. This book I’ve been urging upon my friends, partly because it gives us a novel perspective on power, and partly because it is wonderfully written, with an exact balance of microhistories and big names –  for instance, the story of a bureaucrat in the…, L, who, legend has it, made spitballs out of the orders passed down to his department to arrest and execute various people during the Terror, precedes Kafka’s presentation of  Tocqueville, whose  sense of the real accomplishment of the French Revolution was that it introduce a new administrative mechanism into the art of government, viz., bureaucracy, and in so doing changed everything. Tocqueville, by the way, deplores the lack of paperwork in America in his Big D. in America (as I sorta freely translate it), a theme that I never noticed before reading The Demon of Writing.

Kafka does not set out to praise paperwork – but, in spite of his title, he does seek to understand it, rather than simply demonizing it. Myself, I find many of his microhistories leading us back to Iklé’s rule: temporize. This, I think, is one of the a very important functions fullfilled by paperwork. Yet whether this is an accident of other functions, or a real function, is a question that traverses Kafka’s book, which is informed with a psychoanalytic sense of the unconscious. Some will groan, of course, at the idea of anything being informed by a psychoanalytic sense of the unconscious, since the times are against the psychoanalytic. Myself, I am convinced that, on the contrary, the relapse into analysing all human events solely in terms of consciousness is naïve and fundamentally wrong, a sign of these woeful times. But to get back to what I was saying before I became enamored with saying something else… I am a little bemused by the lack of analysis of this temporizing function. For surely here we are approaching neurosis not just as a condition, but as an instrument. The neurosis afflicting power becomes, through the daily exercise of power, a means of afflicting the powerless.

Of course, it isn’t that simple. Kafka’s insight into what he argues is the beginning of a qualitative change in paperwork – which he locates in the French Revolution, lining up with Tocqueville to this extent – is that paperwork arises out of a liberatory impulse. The revolutionaries sought a form of government in which the governors could be held responsible for what they did. In order to achieve this goal, what they do must be transparent. That transparency is the meeting notes, memo, slip, report, form. There’s a scene in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, one of La Carré’s Smiley novels, where a spy discovers that a crucial record of phone calls on a certain night has been excised from the book in which all phone calls are noted at HQ, an absence – a purloined letter – that operates as the key clue in the development of the plot.  Transparency and responsibility are ruined when the records are messed with or missing.

What happens, however, when an administration pursues the goal of transparency is that records generate records, memos memos. This unintended consequence soon becomes an exploitable resource – it provides both an excuse for the bureaucrat and a means of temporizing that robs the client of his or her time. Indeed, the time is felt as something stolen. At the same time, the client can do nothing about the robbery – the client is robbed for his or her own sake.

In other words, the bureaucratic text, paperwork, presents itself as a text wholly without pleasure, the negation of Barthes’ pleasure of the text.

However, we should be suspicious of an activity that reproduces itself through the absense of pleasure. We should wonder if, indeed, pleasure has simply gone into hiding, or metamorphosed itself, as in one of those legends of gods coming to earth in the guise of mortals.   Kafka has an eye on the rage, the blind anger, that can be provoked in the citizen who waits for the paperwork to be done, who begs for the proper forms, who is always being scolded for failing to assemble them properly. But as to the correlate of that rage, the circumlocutory pleasure of the bureaucrat – that is a story still to be told.

routines (part of a larger essay)

1.

Imagine a culture without routines. Is this possible? The routine for eating, cooking, harvesting, hunting, traveling, not to mention curing, excreting, making love – don’t these practical matters have to become routines?

But as we press the question, the concept of the routine seems to become more indistinct.

Imagine a culture without rituals, then. The late nineteenth century anthropologists became obsessed with rituals – rituals and art, rituals and magic, rituals and taboo. The rituals of savages – the people without the law, the non-Western Europeans – and their survivals among the civilized savages of the European zones, among whom are the scientists themselves, the middle class, the peasants and workers - were intensely studied, taxonomized, and generalized. Basing their claims on the huge data base that was presented in The Golden Bough, the anthropologists claimed that there was no culture without ritual. Without, as Jane Ellen Harrison was fond of pointing out, dromenon, the ancient Greek term for “thing done” – connected philologically and socially to drama. Ritual for the ancient Greeks became drama, was Harrison’s claim.

But routines… I will leave undecided, here, at the start, whether there are cultures without some base of routines, some transmitted program for doing things.  

But what we do know is that the word “routine” did not exist in early modern England up until the late seventeenth century.

“Behold, I am now become a grammarian, I, who never learn’t tongue but by way of rote, and that yet know not what either Adjective, Conjunctive or Ablative meaneth.” This is John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s essay, Des Destries – On Steeds, Florio called it. Behind the phrase “by way of rote”, Montaigne uses a single French word – “routine.” Rote, an etymologically related word, was  in the English vocabulary of the early 17^th century. It appears in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Nights Dream, when Titania says to the fairies, instructing them on their roles:

“First, rehearse your song by rote

To each word a warbling note.”

Shakespeare, however, never uses the word routine. Nor does Bacon. In France, Montaigne uses it twice in his essays, and his friend, Amyot, uses it a couple of times in his translation of Plutarch’s collected works.  A particularly interesting instance is in the translation of the essay, “That Virtue can be Taught”, in which Plutarch, at one point, takes up the opposite view and shows how absurd it would be that there are schools and precepts and masters for other things – ‘pueriles choses’ – but for the “great and perfect there is only a routine, or only chance meeting a case of adventure.”

Routine, in Montaigne and Amyot, already carries  an ambiguity in its soul. On the one hand, it points to cognitivizing a procedure – doing a routine is knowing how to proceed with a practice. On the other hand, this knowledge, to be a routine, undergoes a sort of baptism in the world of instincts. It becomes inert, habitual, and takes on a slightly negative coloration in contrast to the knowing associated with the higher intellect. In the soul’s division of labor, as laid out by the theologians – influenced by Aristotle – and the doctors – influenced by Galen – routine engages, so to speak, the lesser self, the vegatative soul, the inner dark that is wholly immersed in heartbeat, breathing, animal warmth – hardly skills at all, although they need to be practiced, repeated, and in fact repeated correctly – the heart otherwise suddenly seizes up, we choke, we freeze. The tongue may paddle, but it is no natural grammarian. 

It is more than fifty years later  that the word “routine” finally does cross the channel and make its appearance in English. It first appears in a  translation by John Evelyn of a book written by Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une Bibliotheque. Naudé was relatively young when the first edition of this book was published in 1627; by 1644, when the second edition was published, he’d garnered a large reputation as a librarian – or more than that, a builder of libraries. In 1644  Evelyn was visiting France, and perhaps this is where he picked up a copy of the book. Evelyn, calling his translation an ‘interpretation’, titled it Instructions for the Erecting of a Library. When it came out in 1661, Evelyn  recorded in his diary that he was disappointed that it was “miserably false printed” – and later, in a letter to the man it is dedicated to, Lord Clarendon, Evelyn suggests a new program – new routines – for printing books. But the diary is otherwise not forthcoming about when or where Evelyn began his translation, or why. In the diary that Evelyn kept for 1644, there is not mention of Naudé’s Advis. The  entries are crammed with highly detailed descriptions of the  gardens, architecture and painting Evelyn discovered in France: more than the traveler’s notes, these lists have a certain sensu-round feeling, the child in the midst of his toys. He also visited scholars and controversialists. When, finally, Evelyn returned home from the continent, his England was gone, or at least in hibernation, for the Puritans and Parliament had won, and King Charles I was dead. Evelyn bided his loyalist time until the Protector died, and then threw himself into public affairs under Charles II, becoming  one of the leading members of the Royal society, an advisor on rebuilding London after the great fire, an advocate of forestry, and an influential gardner – his books on gardening helped create the English style. He was the kind of man known, at the time, as a virtuoso: a man of many talents and interests, for whom knowledge was literally a venture. It is easy to see what might have attracted such a man to ‘Naudaeus’’s book.

Like Evelyn, Naudé was a man of the modern spirit – a reader of Galileo and Machiavelli, a collector, a spirited opponent of mystification – be it of the Rosicrucians or of the witchhunters. Naudé, however, belonged to an earlier generation. Born in 1600, he has been classed in the twentieth century with the group of  ‘erudite libertines’  who flourished in the first half of the 17^th century in France, only to be frozen out by the authoritarian King Louis XIV. These were the esprits forts to whom Pascal addresses various of his Pensees. It was  a group that was more attracted by Pierre Gassendi’s materialism – which Gassendi  embraces by way of Epicurus - than Descartes’ reclamation of St. Augustine’s cogito; who sympathized, sometimes covertly, with the great freethinking nobles, many of whom ended up aligning themselves with the Fronde, the disastrous aristocratic rebellion of 1648 against Naudé’s patron, Cardinal Mazarin ; and whose deepest beliefs were, perhaps, less structured by the Christian ideal of redemption than a mixture of the Stoic resignation and the  Epicurian cosmology which  seemed somehow to match their circumstances, political and existential. The Epicurian universe was almost absolutely material, composed of atoms streaming ceaselessly across the void, obeying geometric laws – except for the mysterious emergence of random fluctuations among them. That fluctuation – the clinamen – was the basis of free will. It was a picture that beautifully accomodated order and disorder, the sovereign and the aristocrat, rule and whim, the rules of art and style. Against the ascetic ideal of baroque piety, the erudite libertines posited a moral code based on volupté. The career of volupté is instructive: in the seventeenth century, it was not yet simply  a matter of sexual hedonism. It was not yet defined by the air of excuse floating over  all those softcore eighteenth century novellas – the memoirs of a flea, the confessions of a sofa. Rather, it was about embracing nature.  The code of volupté was a way of living that found its supposed master in Epicurus and the new learning; in the chain of sememes of those texts that were dedicated to it, if volupté appears, soon nature will appear also.  Nature is new, it is modern, it is something that doesn’t yet have a full meaning. It isn’t quite God, but it is adverted to as though it “taught”, as though it were a guide to living.  In the reference to nature there is the promise of a program, of a way of casting off the ideology of sacrifice. Certainly, it leads the esprit fort to a negation – the negation of those things that are against nature, or supernatural.  Saint-Beuve, in a very sympathetic ‘portrait’ of Naudé (one in which he even elevates him into the link between Montaigne and Bayle) quotes Naudé’s  friend, the doctor Gui Pantin, whose description of Naude’s spiritual attitude could be extended to any number of “honnetes hommes” in this period: «As long as I knew him, he seemed to me to be extremely indifferent in his choice of religion and to have learned this at Rome, where he stayed a dozen good years; and I even remember hearing him say that he had, in the past, a teacher, a professor of rhetoric at the college of Navarre, named M. Belurgey, a native of Flavigny in Bourgogne, who he highly valued… Thus, this professor of rhetoric vaunted himself notoriously to be of the religion of Lucretius, of Pliny, and of the great men of antiquity; for his unique article of faith, he often alleged the line of a certain chorus in Seneca’s Troade.” Lucretius, Pliny, Seneca. Amyot, Montaigne. The names conjure up a connection in the mind, and it is out of this mix that routine takes its first flavor.

 Naudé recognized, perhaps, in Seneca a man of his own sorrows, even if those sorrows, in Naude’s case, were cocooned by a position of privilege that he had carefully carved out for himself, at least by the time of the second edition of his book: thus, the instructions for erecting a library are charged with a program that runs underneath the lists of the names of books. In the erudite libertines one can trace the embryo of the program of the Enlightenment  that was articulated by the philosophes in the 18^th century, but even so, the seventeenth century esprit fort was an enlightenment that fully accepts,understands, and codifies – through a combination of cynicism and deep frivolity - its own defeat by, on the one hand, the credulity of the populace, and on the other, by the interests of established power.  Which is one way of understanding Saint-Breuve’s marvelous summing up of the world of these baroque free spirits: atrocité içi, mauvais gout là.

Naudé worked as a librarian for a number of seventeenth century eminences – Cardinal  da Bagno, for whom he went to Italy, where he spent eleven years and immersed himself in the Renaissance writers, Cardinal Mazarin, and Queen Christina of Sweden. Perhaps Evelyn had heard of  Naudé’s circle of ‘free thinkers” at Gentilly, outside of Paris.  Naudé was in Paris in 1644, having accepted an offer from Cardinal Richelieu to be his official librarian - which, by the time he got back to France, was transferred to Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu having died in the meantime. Probably, too, Evelyn was familiar with another book  Naudé wrote in his youth: a History of Magick By Way ofApology, For all the Wise Men Who Have Unjustly Been Reputed Magicians, from the Creation, to the Present Age, which was ‘englished’ by John Davies in 1657. The wise men of the title are for the most part the authors of the books that Naudé discusses in his Advis. Both building a library and defending the reputation of the sages were part of Naudé’s program to “deniaiser les esprits” – to destupify minds – by edging in, as it were, into the field of cultural politics, without exposing too much of oneself to the awful coercive power of the church or the state.  This was and is a tricky task – requiring both the broad view of the learned and the guarded rhetoric of the courtier.

Here, then, is the context – early modern – scholarly/political – enlightened/disenchanted - out of which the word leaps into Evelyn’s translation. It is not a passage that stands out for any other reason in the world of English prose. It is easy to imagine this lexical firstling appearing around this time in some other text.  Evelyn’s sentence reads: “What we may discern, one must be carefuyl to take with him divers theorems and praecautions, which may with more facility be reduced to practice as opportunity happens, by those who have the routine and are vers’d in books, and who judge all things fairly and without passion.” [23] Evelyn, while transposing Naudé’s word, “routine”, is still not comfortable enough to leave it alone. In the French, it is simply “ceux qui ont une grande routine des livres” – the “and vers’d in” is Evelyn’s gloss.  The “great routine of books” is, for Naudé, a tacit knowledge, a compound of experience, taste and perception, that allows the librarian to successfully decide on the questions of quality versus quantity, the ancients versus the moderns, and even the heretical versus the orthodox – for in Naudé’s opinion, a library is the one social space where virtue and vice, orthodoxy and heresy, the new learning and the old, not only can but, if the library is to be great, must coexist. The book shelf is where one can discretely build Rabelais’ utopia, the abby of  Thélème, with its motto – do what you will. The link between utopia and its survival in 1644 is routine, a “great routine”.

2.

But this is not enough. We can’t stop here. There is, as well, a larger etymological context to consider. For the word takes us, by way of the word “route”, back into Latin, where the root term from which routine arises is “rota”, or wheel. And from rota we can go back to the Sanskrit, “ratha”, chariot. Routine is thus connected with the great family of  rotational words. The wheel, of course, provided a central affordance space for technology in Europe and America (the gear, the mill, the turbine) well up until the age of electrification, when it was replaced in the collective imagination by the switch – connecting routine to a very powerful family of concepts and images.

Such philological reasoning has long been dismissed as a voyage to Cratylia, a relapse into word magic. I don’t want to defend the Cratylian position – that is to say, I don’t think the earlier meanings of the roots of words give us the secret meaning of the word - but I do want to rethink the sense of etymological reasoning, outlining a position that is, perhaps, neo-Cratylian. Etymologies stand rather like totem poles – positivistic totem poles – at the entrance to words in the dictionary. The great tribe of philologists built them. Here, we are given  a series of words that precedes,as their evolutionary development, a specific word that is now current. One notices that each of the older words is accorded a naively unambiguous meaning, as though each word in its time was tied unambiguously to a certain definition.  How else could etymology  be done? And yet, at the same time, etymology suggests that there are forces that work on words, forces that change words, change pronunciations, displace meanings into other conceptual fields, records of semiotic smears and blurs, metaphoric offerings that not only work outside the dictionary, but fret against the differential structure, the individuated lexemes that it so patiently records. As Jane Harrison puts it, “feeling ahead for distinctions is characteristic

of all languages”. In this respect, the etymological totem pole operates less positivistically, and more totemically. The way words are essentially linked leads us to a history  that is open to occult forces and anthropological understandings. One of the first Western descriptions of a totem pole, by Captain George Dixon in 1787, describes “… figures that might be taken for a species of hieroglyphics, fishes and other animals, heads of men and various whimsical designs, mingled and confounded in order to compose a subject.” Indeed, the totem combines these objects, animals, designs in complicated ritualistic ways to map a certain power, released by ritual. That power divides and compounds. Taking each etymological “stage” in this totemic way, one can think of the totem pole of meanings and deviations that towers in the background over “routine” as itself a current  force, a repressed figure that continually returns, operating invisibly, compulsively, linking “routine” with metaphors and examples that keep turning up throughout its history, as though imprinted on the word’s wheel of fate.   

We should remark, as well, that here, as so often, ancient technologies crop up at the deepest level of the word – which one sees happen so often with key words.  The road in “routine”,  the stamp or incision in “character”, the chain in “addiction”. How many great families of words congregate around primitive tools?  The wheel, of course, exists as a specific discovery during a specific epoch among specific cultures. It never finds a place among, for instance, Mesoamerican cultures. But in the Meditteranean, Northern Europe and whereever the Europeans colonized, it became an essential metaphor for a whole vision of things. To turn a wheel is eventually to come to the point where one started. And yet that point only returns after it has gone through a predictable cycle of variations in its cardinal location. As those variations are gone through (as the wheel turns – and the turn itself is buried as a metaphor in the very language that I am using to explore the metaphor of the wheel), the wheel moves forward. The motion of the wheel, given these two structural elements, became the privileged metaphor and symbol for both fortune and nemesis – figures that are so closely connected that there has been a long transfer of symbols and identities between them. In the history of economics, for instance, these qualities of the wheel – fortune’s wheel – are at the center of it. Fortune was used, in the Renaissance, in places where we would now say “market” – and one of fortune’s symbols, the balance, is constantly evoked beneath the concept of “equilibrium”, which neo-classical economists, at least, consider to be the very basis of intelligibility for economic analysis. Even when, in the nineteenth century, the positivists sought to break out of  the cyclical view of history, the wheel still became a privileged reference for progress – for forward motion. The nineteenth century historians thought that they buried Nemesis, but Nemesis survived, Nemesis colonized progress, an event that Walter Benjamin wrestles with in his theses on history.

Within this matrix of connotations, at the crossroads of these philological intersigns, sits “routine”, a term that  carries a certain semantic and semiotic weight into sociology and art.