a failure

… il avait tué la marionette. – Paul Valery

Sometimes LI bears a striking image to a fly dying at the base of a window. The fly keeps bumping against that congealed air that 350 million years of evolution had never warned him against. The fly’s experience of the world, which is, as is well known, a place divided into 360 spaces, each space radiating a certain glow, and the edge of each space grading into the edge of the next space save when the edges parted to make a passage just exactly equal in width to the width of a fly’s body, seems, for magical reasons, no longer to work. In addition, something seems to be happening in the back behind the eyes, the load, as the fly would name it, that it always carries about and that sometimes gets sexually excited. Something seems to be squeezing the load. Normally, a pressure like this would prompt the fly to escape, but lately the 360 spaces seem to be liquefying to such a degree that they no longer scatter to the fly’s wingbeats. This is not good news. And, as the fly falls over, there flashes through its mind, absurdly, the first line of an old joke: “waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”

So – this is the sitch with LI vis a vis our attempt to get together a nice post on De Quincey and the disconnected giant. This is the new modernist giant, the giganticism that consists of unexpected and unlimited multiplication.

But before I get to De Quincey and Baudelaire – maybe next post – I will tell you a dream.

Actually, although this dream happened to me, I don’t really remember it happening to me. It happened to me when I was a child. I was lying in bed, and – as I often did when I was a child – I was rocking from side to side. Rocking from side to side was how I got to sleep. But on this occasion, I was in bed abnormally early, because I was sick. I was feverish. And – according to my parents – I started screaming. So my parents came into my room to see what was wrong, and I said that my hands had grown so big and so heavy that I could no longer hold them up. This dream is something I heard later from my parents, who thought it was funny. Not that they were cruel about it, but later, after I was over my fever, we all laughed at my panicked idea that my hands were these enormous, separate entities. And, if I make an effort, I can still communicate a bit with that faint speck of myself so long ago. I can see – or at least sense – the enormity of those white, moist, wildly growing hands.

divine entrapment

LI was pleased as a parrot with our Wings of Desire post, but it seems to have fallen flatter than an illmade pancake on the ears of our readers – alas! Getting all that dough in the auditory canal – that’s fucked up!

And yet, such is our hardness in vice that we are going to continue a thought we started in that post – a thought that extends back to our reading of Michelet’s La Sorciere last summer.

When Michelet writes about the importance, to the witch, of doing things backward to undo the powers that be that rule over the world, he is, of course, thinking of the Lord’s Prayer. As we pointed out, reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards was a perfect symbol of what Marxists call the negation of the negation. It also bore a relation to the unconscious poetry that runs through Marx’s own texts, where things that are upside down have to be reversed to stand right side up. But that inversion isn’t done by laying rough hands on the reader and shaking him – the reader has to see something that is impossible to see, which is: how he sees. In the path to seeing the things of this world in their real order, the reader has to go through a demonic moment.

Well, in the W.o.D. post, we pointed out the system of espionage lightly concealed by the cosmology of angels and Satans. And the clustering together of all the little fathers, pharaoh to Stalin, around God, the supreme fiction of a society that needs to turn the innocent. That needs a quota of the damned. Up to an including the kids in Miami that the FBI has dropped into a dark hole, forever, after encouraging their fantasy of blowing up the Sears building - or at least having something exciting happen in a life of unremitting economic boredom and terror - i.e, life on a unskilled worker's earnings in America.

Turning the innocent – entrapment of one sort or another – has evolved a whole discourse. It is called temptation. When you say the Lord’s prayer backwards, in a sense, you can hear for the first time that craven plea not to be led into temptation – and you can ask, who are we pleading with here?

As a matter of fact, St. Augustine (my friend and foil Paul C. should perk up his ears, here) had decided ideas about this. In a letter to Constantius, St. Augustine considers a passage in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonicans in which he seems to imply that “only the devil tempts us, and God tempts no one – as in effect Saint John says literally. However, it is said elsewhere, the Lord your God tempts you; and it is necessary that the words of the Scripture which appear contrary be accorded one with the other. And how can they be? By the diverse signification of the word temptation: for temptation is an other thing which comes to seduce us and makes us fall from that which comes just to test us. In the first sense, it is from nobody else than the Devil; but in the second sense, God tempts us some times. Voila, the difficulty resolved.”

That resolution echoes down the centuries and in every cop show you want to watch: is it genuine evil, or government authorized non-evil evil?

In a famous commentary on the Psalms, St. Augustine has more to say about the phenomenology of temptation. We will end with this quote, and pick up this theme in another post:

Now these three kinds of vice, namely, the pleasure of the flesh, and pride, and curiosity, include all sins. And they appear to me to be enumerated by the Apostle John, when he says, "Love not the world; for all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life." 1 John 2:15-16 For through the eyes especially prevails curiosity. To what the rest indeed belong is clear. And that temptation of the Lord Man was threefold: by food, that is, by the lust of the flesh, where it is suggested, "command these stones that they be made bread:" Matthew 4:3 by vain boasting, where, when stationed on a mountain, all the kingdoms of this earth are shown Him, and promised if He would worship: Matthew 4:8-9 by curiosity, where, from the pinnacle of the temple, He is advised to cast Himself down, for the sake of trying whether He would be borne up by Angels. Matthew 4:6 And accordingly after that the enemy could prevail with Him by none of these temptations, this is said of him, "When the devil had ended all his temptation.

o for a foe!

LI doesn’t really know what to do today. The amount of ridiculousness in the press over the last five days is truly gratifying, but it is also a blog it yourself situation. We have, in the bizarre Washington Post, an op ed piece flogging Jeb Bush on Sunday, followed by a I was only joking interview with the author on Monday, followed by today’s rather priceless piece by one of those Cheney scion who, in the spirit of smaller government and peculation for all, was shoehorned into a position for which she was magnificently unfit in the state department, where she got out the crayons out of her crayonbox – the reds and the blues and that hard color, verf- vermillion - and made a whole two pages of remarks just like Daddy! That the Washington Post editorial page not only supports the war with bloodsoaked teeth bared, but aims to reproduce certain aspects of it (namely, giving berths to the academically challenged sons and daughters of rightwing honchos) is sweet in very sick, sick way.

And then, before you can turn around, Christopher Hitchens has two, count em two reviews up, one on a book by Mark Steyn, the other on a book by Nick Cohen. To batter the remnant of Hitchens that now does the writing is beyond even LI’s sadism. It should be noted, though, that Cohen is trying to resurrect an old trope from the first round of pro-war propaganda – the sleight of hand substitution trick. You take a term that can be logically described in two ways, and you substitute an invidious description to describe a person’s belief. I march against the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq will hurt Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein is a fascist. Thus, I march in support of fascism.

That type of invective is the equivalent of going about in soiled intellectual diapers. It convinces nobody. It is logically threadbare. It is, in other words, shit and sophistry… but more just shit. I support the war in Iraq, the war in Iraq brought a Taliban like group to power in Basra, I am a supporter of Islamofascism. See how easy it is to play this game? Leggos for the lobotomized. This is, believe it or not, the sum total of Nick Cohen’s four years of writing about Iraq. He actually thinks he is making a “critique”, God save the saints. Of the Left, no less and no doubt, he’s all about the Left, the Left and he are splitsville, he’d had the Left over to dinner and they didn’t bring even a bottle of wine and they stink and also, also, the Islamophilia on some of them, why liberals and lefties are going on and on, nowadays, quoting the Q’ran and shit. This raises the bellylaugh quotient, of course. We especially like it when you throw in a few Hitchens reviews, bespattered with the term, “comrade.” I would say: you can’t make this shit up. But somebody obviously does.

However, as our far flung correspondent T. has told us – enough! basta!

We long for a worthy adversary.

PS – well, I guess LI should say something.

After the State of the Union address, the natural place to go is the Washington Post, and their excellent political reporter, Dan Balz, under the headline: A President Beleaguered But Unbowed

We totally agree with this assessment:

“Caligula’s response last night was a speech that was very much in keeping with the style of leadership he has demonstrated repeatedly in office. If he was humbler in tone and rhetorically generous to his Democratic opponents in calling for cooperation, he was anything but defensive.

There was an underlying message in the speech. The main plea was to make his horse the speaker of the House, a chord struck earlier in the day by spokesman Tony Snow. Although roughly two in three Americans disagree that Mr. Ed, as President Caligula calls him, should be House Speaker, and members of Congress are preparing nonbinding resolutions declaring their opposition, Caligula asked for time to show that the strategy can succeed.

He recalled that the country was largely united at the time he announced both his sister’s divinity and his own divine right to couple with her in 2003 and acknowledged the divisions that have emerged since. But he argued that whatever motivated members of Congress at the time of the declaration of divinity, there was a consensus that the United States must have a young, nubile couple of very, very rich people in charge of this great country. And young people, as the President steadfastly maintained, come with complicated sexual urges.
…
Caligula's final message last night was perhaps the most robust domestic agenda of his presidency, a way of saying to those who are ready to write him off that he still has the power of the bully pulpit to inject ideas into the national debate and force others to react to them: from the purging of the Senate, the assassination of his tutor, to the announcement that his divinity is greater than Jupiter’s, it was a message that said he should not be regarded as a lame duck.”

LI, as ever, urges readers to send money to the PAC of Mrs. Nero, who is really, really getting on top of the Mr. Ed issue. "We don't want Mr. Ed not to be a god," she said today, "but we are firm in saying that maybe Mr. Ed is not the first choice for House Speaker unless we can find the synergy to go forward to make me, and other middle class Americans, comfortable with this choice."

Mrs. Nero - a leader, a doer, a conversationalist with America!

the politics of angels

I saw by night, and behold a man riding upon a red horse, and
he stood among the myrtle trees that were in the bottom; and
behind him were there red horses, speckled, and white.

001:009 Then said I, O my lord, what are these? And the angel that
talked with me said unto me, I will shew thee what these be.

And the man that stood among the myrtle trees answered and
said, These are they whom the LORD hath sent to walk to and
fro through the earth.

001:011 And they answered the angel of the LORD that stood among the
myrtle trees, and said, We have walked to and fro through the
earth, and, behold, all the earth sitteth still, and is at
rest. – Zechariah

Well, to cap my return to my past – plunged into it as I was by Bob Solomon’s death, and the pretty marvelous ceremony to commemorate his life Saturday – I sat down and watched an old 80s movie that was particularly important to me back in the days before the Wall fell: Wings of Desire. By coincidence, the woman who played the trapeze artist, Marion, (Solveig Dommartin) died a few weeks ago of a heart attack. My generation is not going to go out raving in the street a la some Ginsberg poem, but prematurely wearing out their hearts like they were so many rainsoaked grocery bags – thus saith the industrial fats upon which we have steadily gorged, plus of course the coke and heroin and – let’s admit it – the occasional speedball.

Anyway, I did rain down tears for that time, and for some still marvelous parts of the movie – not so much the plot but simply seeing Berlin.

However, I know more about the politics of Satan and the angels now than I did in those dim days. I know the politics – and I know this from having looked it up after reading Mailer’s new novel, for which I penned a commendatory review in yesterday’s Austin Statesman (much better, my review, I must say, than the thing produced by Janet Maslin for the NYT last week – and as for Lee Siegel, well, I just can’t read Lee Siegel). Zechariah is generally considered a post exilic book, and the notion of these walkers abroad has roots, according to some scholars, in the Persian and Egyptian spy systems. In effect, both kingdoms had stumbled upon the idea that lightbulbs its way into the head of every Behemoth since – let’s spy on the population. Even better, let’s turn certain people. Let’s just do it, pour encourager les autres. Turning people. From the Pharaohs to the FBI and the DEA, this practice has a history that bears a double aspect: on the one side, politics, and on the other side, demonology.

While Satan already plays the role of a sort of egger on in Job, the importance of Zechariah is that Satan, for the first time, resolves himself clearly into the role by which we know and love him best: the adversary.

“And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.

And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan;
even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not is not
this a brand plucked out of the fire?”

Whose fire is it, o Lord? – for isn't this the template of the millions of conversations over the millenia that have unfolded behind the iron curtain - by which of course I mean the curtain between the powerful and the dispossessed? Here we are eavesdropping - the prophets are such snoops of the divine, counterspies in the house of Daddy Love - on the tyrant and head of his secret police, president and advisor, sheriff and jailhouse bird. It was how Stalin handled Mandelstam and Pasternak. All brands are, virtually, in the fire, and the fire is the nation. The Joshua that is the case before us tonight is, of course, a high government exec – a high priest. Those are the ones. The system rewards those who damn their brothers by allowing them to climb up to another niche, but the system will, and this is the justice of it, award even those who damn the ones who have damned their quota. Credit systems or politics, computers or the old fashioned way of entrapping your prey in a bar on the Tex Mex border with the offer of some good shit which both of you can cut and make beaucoup bucks - it is all the same, ever ancient, ever the poem, from Jerusalem to Juarez. When Satan accuses Joshua, the machinery that is set in motion is not too much different from the finger that was put by some Satan on Mandelstam, and Mandelstam had survived so far only through the protection of the secret police chief, Ezhov, through Ezhov’s wife.

LI's definition of utopia: a society in which there is no system wide incentive to damn another. That's it. On that day, hell will truly be purged from our lives.

In Wings of Desire, of course, the angels are Rilke’s angels, supposedly purged of that sinister etymological connection with the men on the red horses. They spy, but only as the eye spies – joy and function merged. There is, however, a missed opportunity here – everyone has felt that the sentimentality at the center of Wings of Desire is discrediting, however beautiful the movie is in its collection of modernist tropes. And of course, this city in which the angels spy like hippies is a city of much more professional spies. Pynchon saw so much further - he knew that hippies made the best narcs. The humint that flows through Wenders angels must be woven, in the center, into a world of accusation, where Satan stands on the right hand and resists – since his bureaucratic role is, of course, to play the resistor. How can one condemn to eternal fire those who are guilty of nothing and not be guilty oneself? Even God needs some savior - or rather, scape goat - to carry off his sins or give him, at least, official deniability – hence Satan. Satan, the prince of deniability.

And no one saw the carney go, no one saw the carney go…

bogosities of the press: Israel and Iran

LI went to the memorial service for our friend Bob yesterday. As in life, so in death – Bob was always a catalyst for things to happen to yours truly, and the service was no different. One of my best buds of yore, from whom I’d parted in considerable anger over issues that have long been swallowed up by the steady creep of geological time was there, and we went out and had several reconciling drinks. This has actually put a lot of joy in my heart (the lines from the childhood hymns come back!).

Not so much, though, that I don’t have heart left for the stamp of varied and sundry indignations left by the varied and sundry stupidities of the press.

Exhibit no. 1, yesterday, was the astonishing Deborah Lipstadt op ed piece about ex President Carter’s rather mild plea for the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank and the end of the governance mess there and in the Gaza. About which Lipstadt had only to say that Carter has not genuflected with enough fervor to the holocaust, and thus is an anti-semite – but, being a just person in all things, Lipstadt was willing to concede that perhaps he is just an unconscious bigot. Lipstadt, you see, embraces the larger view.

This is almost spookily stupid – especially as you can tell that Lipstadt’s (non) argument is pretty close to the orthodoxy among the muscular liberal-neo con set that so rule the roost in the WAPO op ed pages, and probably does reflect the central bias of the policy set in D.C.

The Eichmann made me do it excuse for the West Bank land grab wouldn’t convince a first grader. Lipstadt, a historian, would do well to read a book of history – any book of history – about Israel’s post 67 West Bank policy.

However, I am not going to grapple with a piece that serves, really, only that old and hoary function of injecting a vague hint of anti-semitism into any criticism of Israel. Rather, I’d like to spotlight one of the mythemes in the piece, since it now travels about in the Press like as a convenient warmongering piece of DNA, a little transpone, bringing us visibly nearer to war with Iran. In the past, LI has vigorously downplayed the idea that the U.S. is going to war with Iran, and we find the fervent belief that Bush is always a week away from it among leftwingers – who have been saying we are a week away from attacking Iran since 2004 – extremely puzzling. Both the left and the right often participate in a shared illusion of American hyper-powerdom, but reality has always put strict limits to the extent and exercise of American power. It is exercised best when America has implanted, in a given country, an endogenous pro-consular class. But usually, America avoids the direct violence route.

Still, in the final instance, we are being run by an essentially criminal collective, which is obviously thinking of winding up its pathetic run by attacking Iran. If the wishes of the executive were obeyed as direct orders – the Fuhrer-prinzip that Cheney has tried to instill in the government over the last six years – than we would be attacking Iran. In lieu of that, the warmongering sockpuppets do try to inject, in any mention of Iran, the idea that the country is on the verge of attacking Israel. And one of the ways they do this is to infinitely fold spindle and mutilate a quote of President Ahmadinejad – in Lipstadt’s piece, that comes out as: “When an Ahmadinejad or Hamas threatens to destroy Israel, Jews have historical precedent to believe them.” I’m not even going into the facile identity between Israel and Jews, here, - an identity that is unrealistic and, in fact, symbolic of the kind of nationalism many of the greatest figures of Jewish culture in the 19th and 20th century fought against like mad – or the idea that the threat to a state, Israel, is of the same order and nature as the threat to the Jewish inhabitants of various countries in Europe. This is to spiral down into Ron Rosenbaum style madness. No, what concerns me is simply that quote. Not whether the quote has been mistranslated – I don’t know enough about Farsi to give you a donkey’s fart worth of wisdom on that issue. What isn’t undisputed is that Ahmadinejad is citing Khomeini. Now, if we are truly to take the quote as a military threat against Israel, then surely it was a military threat when Khomeini uttered it too. Logically, then, Israel should have received it as a threat from Khomeini and acted accordingly.

But if you look back at the 80s, you will notice right away that the quote wasn’t pulled out to justify some attack on Iran by Israel – rather it was ignored as the rightwing government in Israel helped arm Iran and support a closer relationship between the U.S. and Iran. Far from viewing themselves as partisans in the Polish woods, at that time, the Israeli government viewed themselves as maneuvering an alliance against Iraq. They viewed themselves, quite sensibly, as a state.

An article in the summer, 2005 issue of Iranian studies by Trita Parsi, “Israel-Iranian Relations Assessed: Strategic Competition from the Power Cycle Perspective,”
sums up the real history of the relationship between Iran and Israel quite well:

Iran’s foreign policy is believed to have lost much of its ideological zeal after the death of Khomeini. One often cited exception to this general pattern is Iran’s relations with Israel. Tehran’s posture on Israel and the Middle East peace process is often explained as a remnant of its revolutionary and ideological past and contradictory to Iran’s national interest. However, this analysis neglects crucial systemic changes that occurred in the Middle East after 1991, as well as
Israel’s willingness to improve relations with Iran at the height of Iran’s revolutionary fervor in the 1980s and the Islamic regime’s refusal to allow ideological considerations to stand in its way to purchase arms from Israel. Furthermore, it reduces Israel’s role in the equation to that of a non-actor whose destiny is limited to mere reactions to Iran’s ideological designs.

Parsi hauls up a lot of inconvenient, old news from the memory hole:

The two Israeli leaders that in the early 1990s initiated a very aggressive Iran policy pursued a diametrically opposite policy only a few years earlier. In 1987, Yitzhak Rabin argued that Iran remained an ally geo-politically.40 Shimon Peres, who sought a “broader strategic relationship with Iran,” urged President Reagan to seek a dialogue with Tehran.

It is an axiom of punditry that, in pursuing the usual quest to kill people on a large scale, one needs to forget that those same people, years earlier, were allies in another quest to kill another set of people on a large scale. For the Lipstadt’s of the world, of course, being pro-Iranian in 1987 was resisting the Nazis, and being for war against Iran in 2006 is still resisting the Nazis. We evermore resist the Nazis.

Well, enough of the various bogosities of this subject, and onto another piece of news about the Bush administration which is – in obedience to the law of news governing the way the press has reported the Global war on Terror – 3 years late.

“An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp.

The U.S. State Department was open to the offer, which came in an unsigned letter sent shortly after the American invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told BBC's Newsnight in a program broadcast Wednesday night. But, Wilkerson said, Cheney vetoed the deal.”

As faithful readers will remember – well, not really, but as this faithful writer remembers – LI’s position before the invasion was that the U.S. could and should aim at having Saddam Hussein overthrown in Iraq. It could do this by a., establishing détente with Iran, Hussein’s number one enemy, and b., showering Northern Iraq, separated from Hussein’s Iraq for 5 years, with aid. Sanctions were stupid and killing so long as they were instituted in the framework of the double sanctions on both nations. The neo-cons were right to decry the sanction system as it was under Clinton, but wrong to promote the belligerent approach – and wrong to think that the U.S. policy should be aimed at maintaining American hegemony in the Middle East when the conditions for that hegemony had so dramatically changed in the post Cold War era.

Obviously, LI’s idea was not only rational, but possible. Its rejection has led to the current debacle. Neither party is willing to de-structure the root cause of that debacle – American superpowerdom.

Let the empire turn up its little heels and die is our advice.

emancipation

LCC has links to articles about Representative Barbara Lee’s bill to open a truth commission about the facts surrounding the political claustration of Aristide, which is further explained here. As it happens, LI is writing a review of Madison Smartt Bell’s biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture (who was, like Aristide, kidnapped by a hegemonic power with malign intents towards Haiti). We are great fans of Bell’s three volume trilogy about the great slave revolt of Saint-Domingue, which is still mostly a blank in the American eye. In the biography, Bell translates and prints the first Emancipation Proclamation in the New World – this one composed by the leaders of the slaves themselves. It was sent as a letter to S-D’s General Assembly in July 1792, signed by Biassou, Jean-Francois, and Belair – and not, significantly, not by Toussant a Breda, as he was known at this time.

Toussaint very probably had read the Prince, and in any case, he had an appreciation amounting to genius of the uses of invisibility – a way of merging into the very air of the kalfou, the crossroads. The uninitiated, unaware of the paths down which they were walking, usually had already passed through him before they realized their mistake. To be underestimated was power. Thus, at this time Toussaint may well have claimed to different persons he did not know how to read or write. There is a story that Toussaint was once confronted about reading a book by a white manager – of the class of petits blancs – and beaten. That man latter was killed by Toussaint.

So Toussaint might well have had a hand in the composing and sending of that letter. Surprisingly, the letter isn’t well known outside of Haiti. Here’s two paragraphs:

For too long, Gentlemen, by way of abuses which one can never too strongly accuse to have taken place because our lack of understanding and our ignorance – for a very long time, I say, we have been victims of greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourselves – yes, men – over whom you have no other right except that you are stronger and more barbaric than we; you’ve engaged in slave traffic, you have sold men for horses, and even that is the least of your shortcomings in the eyes of humanity; our lives depend on your caprice, and when it’s a question of amusing yourselves it falls on a man like us who most often is guilty of no other crime than that he is under your orders.

We are black, it is true, but tell us, Gentlemen, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man? Certainly you will not be able to make us see where that exists, if it is not in your imagination – always ready to form new phantasms so long as they are to your advantage. Yes, Gentlemen, we are free like you, and it is only by your avarice and our ignorance that anyone is still held in slavery up to this day, and we can neither see nor find the right which you pretend to have over us, not anything that could prove it to us, set down on the earth like you, all being children of the same father created in the same image. We are your equals, then, by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colors within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black nor an advantage to be white….

Bob Solomon, r.i.p.

A friend of mine died last week. I have an obit up in the Austin Chronicle.

I don't know whether I want Bob to rest in peace - he was never the retirement type, and I don't like the idea of death to be of the life depicted in About Schmidt. No, I hope death brings a more complex release, Bob. EWG.