big and small

Our Mercury, therefore, is the same which contains in itself all the perfections, force and virtues of the Sun, which also runs though all the streets and houses of all the planets, and in its own rebirth has acquired the force of things above and things below; to the marriage of which it is to be compared, as is clear from the whiteness and the redness combined in it. – Paracelsus

And the world being spontaneously produced and being also self-adherent, is allied to matter; which, according to a secret signification, is denominated a stone and a rock, on account of its sluggish and repercussive nature with respect to form: the ancients, at the same time, asserting that matter is infinite through its privation of form. Since, however, it is continually flowing, and is of itself destitute of the supervening investments of form, through which it participates of morphe, and becomes visible, the flowing waters, darkness, or, as the poet says, obscurity of the cavern, were considered by the ancients as apt symbols of what the world contains, on account of the matter w9ith which it is connected. – Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs, translated by the ever strange Thomas Taylor.

There is an old hermetic slogan, one that is referenced by every alchemist: as above, so below. LI’s notion of politics begins with the opposite view: as above is not as below. Instead of drawing a heavy dividing line between the public and private, we draw it between the big and the small, viewing those two sphere not as degrees on one continuum, but as opposing and asymmetrical spheres. Yet, there is a power – or a power relationship – that ‘runs though all the streets and houses of all the planets.’

Mr. Death, please don't take Bat Boy!

Fuck! There goes my last hope for American journalism

It came out of nowhere. People worry about Murdoch taking over the WSJ when a much more prestigous paper was, unbeknownst to us all, threatened by catastrophe. Only the true insiders could draw on stories like this one, by top flight journalist Chuck Lee:


"After opening a popular Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, Chuck Lee discovered that eating large amounts of hot mustard enabled him to foretell the future. Chuck has consented to share his remarkable predictions in a weekly column.

2008 BUCHAREST, Romania — Vampires realize that the blood of tuna fish suits their macabre nutritional requirements as effectively as human blood. The undead begin lurking near the shores of the Black Sea, sucking fish dry and discreetly throwing their bodies into the water.

2009 BUCHAREST, Romania — An unexpected side effect of the new vampiric diet occurs when the discarded fish themselves return to life as vampires. The fishing industry comes to an abrupt halt while authorities try to capture and kill the thousands of bloodthirsty ‘nosferatuna.’"

Other papers are afraid to tell the truth. WWN did it every week. No favoritism. I can only think that aliens have penetrated this society and succeeded in shutting down the one paper that was warning us of their menacing approach.

islamo-penguinism

Johann Hari, having retracted his old support for invading Iraq, gained some absolution from LI. But his recent review of Nick Cohen’s lachrymose new book, I was a Red Diaper Baby and I poop in Your Face… uh, oh, wait a minute, that’s not the title, let me google it, it is "On the Pleasure of Sticking My Thumb Up My Ass", sorry about the mixup – he gives a fourfold analysis of the pro-war Left view, circa 2002-2003 that makes the old anti-warrior in LI want to cry. The very first pillar, which Hari still evidently believes, is the idea that Islamism is fascist. Fuck. Again, the only proof presented for this is a slender book by Paul Berman. Here’s Hari’s account:

“Islamism. The pro-war left argued that Islamism (as opposed to Islam) is a variant on an old enemy of the left - fascism. Paul Berman, in his book 'Terror and Liberalism', carefully teased out the intellectual origins of Islamic fundamentalism, looking primarily as Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of al Qaeda. It was not hard to find the links: Qutb was explicitly and openly influenced by European fascism. Not was this a merely intellectual influence: when his ideas eventually became a state-ideology - in Taliban Afghanistan - it looked hideously familiar to historians of fascism, with its fanatical Jew-hatred, homophobia, misogyny, the banning of all dissent (and even of music), and the supression of all liberal freedoms. Jihadists even inherited the most eccentric lacunae of fascist conspiracy-thought: on 9th March 2004, a meeting of Freemasons in an Istanbul restaurant was blown up by Islamist suicide-murderers.

Ah, the minimisers of Islamism said, but these are the poor, the wretched of the earth! In fact, the pro-war left pointed out, Islamists activists are overwhelimgly wealthy - Bin Laden is the son of a billionaire - and they are oppressing the real wretched of the earth, not least women. Besides, to refuse to see that people living in poor or oppressive countries can become fascists is to fall for what Bertrand Russell called "The Fallacy of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed."”

Actually, this is such entire rubbish that one is hesitant to ever read Hari about the Middle East ever again, no matter what his repentance. The opponents of the fascist paradigm did not say that Islamism arose from the cries of the oppressed, but, quite differently, that Islamism arose as a confluence of interests between the ruling ideology of Saudi Arabia, one that existed in the Arabian peninsula a hundred years before Sayyid Qutb, and American anti-communism. It is a simple story, one that was rehearsed time and time around the globe. Searching for anti-communists meant, to the U.S., destroying ‘neutralists’ – or at least leaning against them heavily – which thus made the U.S. a natural ally of Pakistan against India – and maintaining the flow of oil that underwrote the thirty glorious years from 1945-1975. The idea that fascism had a salience here, or that it was the state formation into which Islamism fell, badly distorts history and fascism. The one salient characteristic of fascism is the cult of the leader. The one salient characteristic of Islamism is not the cult of the leader – it is the re-unification of theological and state power, on the Wahabi model. If one wanted to crusade against this, there is one place and one place only where it has emanated from: Saudi Arabia. Not Iraq. Not even al qaeda. However, Saudi Arabia just happens to be a keystone state, without which the West would be plunged into an economic downturn that no leader in the West wants to contemplate. End of story.

That Hari thinks banning music is echt fascist shows that he has little or no idea of fascism.

On the other hand, there are proto-fascistic states in the Middle East, set up to maximize the state’s hold over businesses, legitimated by a cult of the leader. One is Iraq. One is Syria. One is Egypt. Even here, however, fascism is a pretty poor model – except in the case of Iraq. In Syria, for instance, the leadership, belonging to a minority sect, can’t really play the ethnic cleansing card that is one of the pillars of fascism. In Egypt, the leadership model after Nassar was badly dented, and one could as well talk of a kind of monarchy. In Iraq, on the other hand, there was a cult of a leader, the persecution of ethnic groups, a reliance on the military and an aggressiveness that does approach fascism. Unfortunately, this is the reverse of Islamism. The evidences that are given for some symbiosis are pitiful – Saddam’s concessions to and play upon the newfound fervor for Islam was a way of navigating the dictator’s dilemma, and was certainly not generated from above. While there is every evidence Osama bin Laden is a genuine believer in a Wahabist state, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Saddam is, and the Baathists left in Iraq form the strongest opposition to the idea of Iraq becoming an Islamic republic – it is, rather, America’s ally there that has pulled that one off.

It is sad that four years into the war, Hari still has not learned basic, basic facts about Middle Eastern history, and shows an astonishing inability to grasp what fascism means besides that it means the rule of meanies and evildoers. Why not have done with it and say that Osama is really the Penguin in Batman and call Islamism Penguinism?

girls who want boys who dig girls like they're boys...

In his book “Sex collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers and Compilers of Erotica”, Geoff Nicholson makes a very sensible remark about that monument to Victorian encyclopedism, My Secret Life: that in some ways, the most entertaining part of that eleven volume chronicle of fucking is the index:

You might, for instance, look up Spending and find the following citations:

my first
in voluntary
on writing paper
on a silk dress
on silk stockings
against a looking glass
against a door
in a woman’s hand
copiously
baudy ejaculations when
is the most ecstatic moment of life
happiness of dying whilst

And so on.…

LI, last week, proposed that the pre-history of the money shot in visual and written pornography hasn’t, really, been written, even as IT has been busy finding traces of its invisible ink in pornography of the twenties and thirties, the evanescent signature of the ill paid Stakhanovite dick, moonlighting the extra night, the bleary dawn, scurrying home to catch a little rest. Our perhaps crooked opinion is that it is the sheer accident of filmic form, the imposition of a narrative structure on a sequence of images to give them some kind of spurious spectatorial order, which elevated spending into its present uneasy prominence. It was not in response to some voyeuristic mandate, but – like so many narrative solutions to technical problems – was actually a double solution in the double register of pornographer and viewer, with a different sense and context in each register This, of course, begs many questions about narratives themselves. Most notably, are we going to just give it up and allow that tiresome notion of a narrative imposing itself on some wild tabula rasa of images to subtend an argument without taking a proper Derridean potshot at it?

Our readers, we hope, don’t think LI is capable of that level of stupidity. However, we simply want to leave a mark here, a sort of editorial mark, against simple dualism and move on to …

Art history!

Last week we mentioned the dilettanti club, which was ostensibly founded to foster a feeling for antiquity – or at least that antiquity that the proper English gentleman would come upon in the Grand Tour of Italy. The interest in antiquity, however, was not, at this point, a mild and scholarly pursuit. It was the meeting place for a number of radical currents in English – and in European – life: the idea of non-European civilizations as actual civilizations, for instance, which comes out in William Jones’ work; the idea that Christianity suppressed the ‘healthy life’ of paganism, which has alchemical and deist roots; the development of the modern Epicurean ideal of volupte, which gradually embougeoised into the pain-pleasure calculus (with the dire consequence, from LI’s point of view, of giving rise to Happiness Triumphant, which currently bestrides the world like the Goddess Dullness in the Dunciad:

Whate’er the talents or howe’er designed
We hang one jingling padlock on the mind.

ah, private enterprise, how sweet the sound

And the state… was on the other side
We can beat them… for ever and ever – David Bowie
Not – LI

As we have tried to make abundantly abundantly clear on this blog, we consider the terms in which politics is ‘seriously’ discussed in the U.S. to be laughable. We especially find laughable that there is some primal difference between public entities like the South Dakota Department of Education and private entities like Exxon. There is not now, there has not been, and there never will be a primal difference of that kind. To consider how that clown show called libertarianism bases itself on this fallacious fault line makes the observer of the American scene almost despair. Just as cultures have their special cuisines, they have their special stupidities. This is the Ur American one. You can talk until you are blue in the face, but the next thing you know, someone will be dreaming of how we can all set up a magic kingdom in which the state is shrunk like a pair of panties gone through the hot cycle while the private domain blossoms and grows and is full of hippety hop nursery animals.

Well, in this kingdom of the blind, you don’t even have to be one eyed to be king – you simply have to blink every once in a while.

The press, gaudily touting itself as the fourth arm of the government, at least presents an accidental truth. Indeed, the press operates, mostly, as a lubricating agent to ensure the smooth expropriation of a nation’s wealth into the pockets of those who deserve it least and who, entrenched behind that vast architecture of legalized crime called the financial market, gain the most. I suppose in this system, the surprise is that one gets any honest reporting, rather than the opposite. Still, we were amused that the NYT, fresh from its awestruck coverage of the scholarly depths and breadth of the CEO set, had the audacity to publish a sort of crib sheet from the Exxon PR department by Jad Mouawad entitled,

“Gas Prices Rise on Refineries’ Record Failures.”

Whenever the oil companies are ringing up record profits while prices soar, the newspapers are put in a bind: how can one create an explanation to disguise the simple and truthful one that oil companies enjoy excess wealth, have spent tons bribing generations of congressmen to ensure that they will enjoy excess wealth, and have no scruple about picking the average autodriver’s pocket to put that money in the hands of Exxonish upper management types? Newspapers can be awfully creative, but Jad Mouawad makes an unprecedented move in this article by in effect, simply saying na na na na na.

Some critics of the industry have theorized on Internet blogs that the squeeze on gasoline and other refined products points to a deliberate effort among oil companies to bolster profits by keeping supplies tight. But experts point out that the companies have little incentive right now to hold back on fuel supplies.

“Every refinery would like to run as much crude as possible but they simply can’t,” said David Greely, senior energy economist at Goldman Sachs, who in a recent report compared the drop in domestic refining with an “invisible hurricane.” “These are more complex systems. There are more chances for things to go wrong. And when things go wrong, they tend to back up the system.”

Notice, of course, that Mouawad not only quotes a Goldman Sachs guy against those unnamed internet bloggers (as opposed to the bongo drumming bloggers), but that he is so certain that the incentives that the internet bloggers don’t understand exist that, uh, he doesn’t tell us what they are. They just are. I mean can't you trust a guy who says that the refiners want to produce more gasoline? If you can't take him at his word, well, feelings get hurt. This is what those barbaric internet bloggers don't understand, but Jad understands so well. Surely, during the interview, David Greely started crying big buttery tears, just like the Walrus, and our friend Jad, just like the carpenter, lent him his big checked handkerchief. Salt tears mingled, no doubt, with a lunchy Terrine De Foies De Volaille appetizer. I hope those internet bloggers are truly ashamed of themselves. Really! Ruining an appetizer like that. The internet blogger argument is so mean, and cruel, that Jad and his buddy aren't even going to honor it by giving a counter argument. In this way, those internet bloggers are proven decisively wrong.

The article is so riven with baloney, lies, half truths and half wittedness that we just get tired thinking about it. Still, for some facts about the oil industry go to this blog, (an Internet blog! my god!) which takes out a pocket knife and picks the article to pieces pretty quickly.

Jack Kupransky makes a pretty obvious point. First, he quotes the NYT:
As a whole, refining disruptions have been considerably higher than in previous years: they averaged 1.5 million barrels a day in the first quarter, compared with 700,000 to 900,000 barrels a day from 2001 to 2005. In the days after the hurricanes, refiners were forced to briefly halt as many as five million barrels of production.
Then, unlike the gods and heros that inhabit Goldman Sacks, he actually does some simple arithmetic:
To anybody who knows nothing about the business, a shortfall of "1.5 million barrels a day" in refining capacity might sound like a really big deal, except for the fact that available inventory levels of retail gasoline (as reported weekly by the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) having been running consistently above 200 million barrels for this entire period, way more than enough to cover even a 1.5 million barrel a day shortfall. If inventories weren't able to cover the shortfall, we would see inventories declining dramatically over time. Yes, inventories are 4.5% below a year ago (but only by a mere 9.5 million barrels), but that further proves that refinery shortfalls are not causing inventories to be drawn down in a dramatic way. Multiply 1.5 million per day by 90 days and you get 135 million barrels. The EIA data proves that gasoline inventories have not been depleted by 135 million barrels. In other words, the loss of production due to outages did not result in a shortfall of available gasoline. In other words, there was no supply shortage.”

So, why did the NYT chose to publish this laughable piece of pro oil company propaganda? The shoe drops at the end of the article, with a nice instance of quote marks to make us realize that only internet bloggers and real yahoos would ever question OIL:

“But with a third summer of high gasoline prices, lawmakers are debating legislation they claim would punish oil companies for exploiting the tight supply situation and engaging in “price gouging.” At the same time, they are pressing refiners to produce more fuel.”

Price gouging. My god, how twentieth century, along with usury laws and the like. Those fucking legislators should know better, and – in fact – they do. They will make noise. They will do nothing. The machine, the public/private machine, will work smoothly. Ain’t that sweet – sweet as sweet crude!

the hearsties

The prizes for journalism are not, perhaps, as well known outside of journalism circles as within. There is, for instance, the Pulitzer “cockroach” award, given for the columnist who has done the most to promote exterminationism and war crimes – and though most people thought Christopher Hitchens had the lock on it again this year, that award went to the ever egregious Fred Hiatt. And there is the Hearst award for Bootlicking, which goes to the journalist who has displayed the most valiant brownnosing in the areas of celebrity interview, sports, business, and political reporting. The Hearstie is prized by the writers of Teen People and the business journalists from Forbes, two pools that have traditionally dominated, but this year, I see a strong showing by the New York Times. Harriet Rubin, for instance, turned in a stunning performance yesterday in the business section.

An article entitled “C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success” had a certain magnificent abasement, a certain saucy extra lick to the ever delicious brown pucker of many of our wisest titans of industry, that it sent a responsive shudder through through the media world. It was said that Louis XIV’s tutor would agree with the prince’s anwswers even before Louis spoke them – prudent man. Today’s journalist takes the same route, which is the safest with the obviously great, world class figures they have the honor and the privilege to actually address. Wasn't it the NYT's political correspondent who spoke, in 2003, of how scary it was to ask the President - a man, and yet really, so much more than a mere man! - questions in press conferences. One had to come up with questions in a trembling voice, like, do you rate yourself, as a leader, as slightly better or much better than FDR and Churchill? Could you give us the secret of your brilliant decision-making? etc. Things like that. Things that our fourth branch can be proud of.

The subject of Rubin’s piece is of that our CEOs are not only Einsteins, are not only the genetically perfected group of mortals that sit atop the most perfect meritocracy in this most perfect of meritocratic worlds, but that they are also readers. Reading has apparently just been discovered – the woman who writes the Harry Potter books invented it – and it has been discovered, moreover, to be good. It is good to read! And so we get stories like this:

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.

Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private. Few Nike colleagues, for example, ever saw the personal library of the founder, Phil Knight, a room behind his formal office. To enter, one had to remove one’s shoes and bow: the ceilings were low, the space intimate, the degree of reverence demanded for these volumes on Asian history, art and poetry greater than any the self-effacing Mr. Knight, who is no longer chief executive, demanded for himself.

The Knight collection remains in the Nike headquarters. “Of course the library still exists,” Mr. Knight said in an interview. “I’m always learning.”

Or like this:

“If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: “Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors,” suggests David Leach, chief executive of the American Medical Association’s accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.”

And then, of course, that vignette that helps us, outside the golden circle, sympathize with these titans, these brains, these possessors of the biggest cocks ever to rape the planet Earth. This one is touching on every dimension:

Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power. The empire-loving Elizabeth I surrounded herself with the Roman historians, many of whom she translated, and kept one book under lock and key in her bedroom, in a French translation she alone of her court could read: Machiavelli’s treatise on how to overthrow republics, “The Prince.” Churchill retreated to his library to heal his wounds after being voted out of power in 1945 — and after reading for six years came back to power.
“Over the years, the philanthropist and junk-bond king Michael R. Milken has collected biographies, plays, novels and papers on Galileo, the renegade who was jailed in his time but redeemed by history.”

Ruben might have bowed to that silly journalistic rule about including all the highlights of a career in her description of the philanthropist and junk-bond king by adding ‘jailbird’ to that list of glittering titles – but the comparison of Milken and Galileo is, well, almost a masterpiece. The probing tongue has discovered, here, a piece of hardened excrement beyond price, and swallows it down with an insouciance that would make Louis XIV’s tutor shiver all over. One is reminded of that great scene in Gravity’s Rainbow of the encounter between Brigadier Pudding and Katje:

‘Now her intestines whine softly, and she fells shit begin to slide down and out. He kneels with his arms up holding the rich cape. A dark turd appears out of the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white buttocks. He spreads his knees, awkwardly, until he can feel the leather of her boots. He leans forward to surround the hot turd with his lips, sucking on it tenderly, licking along its lower side..”

One does hope that Ms. Rubin got the proper antibiotic shots after her own performance with Milkin, et al. This is truly an article to cherish.

search me with this salt

- Lot's wife, Anselm Kiefer


But the storehouse, and the very life of memory, is the history of time; and a special charge have we, all along the Scriptures, to call upon men to look to that. For all our wisdom consisteing either in experience or memory – experience of our own, or memory of others, our days are so short that our experience can be but slender… - Lancelot Andrewes

In his great, skewed sermon on Lot’s Wife, preached before Queen Elizabeth, Lancelot Andrewes remarks there are only seven instances, in the Vulgate, when we are called upon to remember something – a memento is laid down, as he puts it:


“Seven several times we are called upon to do it: a. Memento dierum antiquorum, saith Moses. 2. Recordamini prioris Seculi – Esay. 3. State super vias antiques-Jermy. Investiga patrum memoriam-Job. 5. Exemplum sumite Prophetas-James. 6. Rememoramini dies priscos-Paul. 7. Remember Lot’s wife- Christ here; that is, to lay our actions to those we find there, and of like doings to look for like ends. So read stories past, as we make not ourselves matter for story to come.”

Of course, it isn’t hard to pick out an odd discrepancy here in the chain of taboos – for if Lot’s wife was cursed for looking back, what is Christ doing but asking us to look back to that act? In a sense, the reason to remember the story within the memento seems to contradict the command of the memento. Except: what is that command?

Which brings us closer to the fate of Lot’s wife and her pitiful story. LI is a great fan of this story.

It is the more pitiful in that the story ends with Lot’s wife appearing as a sort of footnote to the whole adventure. One is reminded of that great Brueghel painting - the subject of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" - of the fall of Icarus – the boy’s legs waving just above the encroaching waves, and the placid and roundabout ignorance of the event as life goes on: the herdsmen, the sailors, the laborers.

Briefly, this is what Genesis has to say:

Lot dwells in Sodom, with his wife, two daughters, and his sons in law. The Lord sends angels into the city to check it out – he is doing a survey, and if the angels can find a just man in the place, the Lord will spare it. But the Sodomites throng before Lot’s door, demanding to have sex with those angels. Lot offers his daughters in their place, but the Sodomites won’t have it. The angels then tell Lot to go, but:

“019:016 And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and
upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two
daughters; the LORD being merciful unto him: and they brought
him forth, and set him without the city.

And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad,
that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee,
neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain,
lest thou be consumed.

019:018 And Lot said
unto them, Oh, not so, my LORD:

019:019 Behold now, thy servant hath found grace in thy sight, and
thou hast magnified thy mercy, which thou hast shewed unto me
in saving my life; and I cannot escape to the mountain, lest
some evil take me, and I die:
019:020 Behold now, this city is near to flee unto, and it is a little
one: Oh, let me escape thither, (is it not a little one?) and
my soul shall live.

019:021 And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning
this thing also,
that I will not overthrow this city, for the
which thou hast spoken.

019:022 Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do anything till thou
be come thither. Therefore the name of the city was called
Zoar.

019:023 The sun was risen
upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.

019:024 Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone
and fire from the LORD out of heaven;

019:025 And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the
inhabitants of the
cities, and that which grew upon the
ground.

019:026 But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a
pillar of salt.”

When Christ lays his memento on Lot’s wife, commanding us to remember her, he doesn't give her a name. Unlike Abram’s wife or Joseph's, we aren't given her first name in the story. As she figures, a diminuendo, at the end of the great destruction of the city, that diminuendo is made tinier still by the absence of a name, as though by degrees we were getting down to granules of her, flakes, a mere seasoning. By looking back and becoming a pillar of salt, she became one of the two great Western myths about looking back – the other being Orpheus’ backward glance at Eurydice as the two were coming out of the underworld. In Orpheus’ case, too, the taboo was that he could not look back. And in Orpheus’ case – just as in the case of the memento laid on Lot’s wife – the original taboo did not effect the chain of glances backwards to the moment of violation. The poem - the story - escapes the rule. Such a limit to the taboo implies that memory and the gaze backward are on two different planes…

But LI is not as concerned with this as with the career of Lot’s wife. Lancelot Andrewes’ sermon is constructed around the orthodox version of the story – Lot’s wife is an instance of faintheartedness. In one sense, of course, she links up with Eve, another woman who disobeys the Lord’s word. But in another sense, Lot’s wife has put up with everything. She left Ur, the wicked city, with Lot. She wandered with Lot for years. She put up with Lot offering to protect the angels of the Lord at the price of giving the men of Sodom her daughters. So her great sin was quailing at the last moment. It was frailty of the will.

“Looking back might proceed of divers causes, so might this of hers, but that Christ's application directs us. The verse before saith, 'Somewhat in the house;' something left behind affected her, of which He giveth us warning. She grew weary of trouble, and of shifting so often. From Ur to Haran; thence to Canaan; thence to Egypt; thence to Canaan again; then to Sodom, and now to Zoar; and that, in her old days, when she would fainest have been at rest. Therefore, in this wearisome conceit of new trouble now to begin, and withal remembering the convenient seat she had in Sodom, she even desired to die by her flesh-pots, and to be buried in 'the graves of lusts;' wished them at Zoar that would, and herself at Sodom again, desiring rather to end her life [67/68] with ease in that stately city, than to remove, and be safe perhaps, and perhaps not in the desolate mountains. And this was the sin of restlessness of soul, which affected her eyes and knees, and was the cause of all the former. When men weary of a good cause which long they have holden, for a little ease or wealth, or I wot not what other secular respect fall away in the end; so losing the praise and fruit of their former perseverance, and relapsing into the danger and destruction from which they had so near escaped.
Behold, these were the sins of Lot's wife, a wavering of mind, slow steps, the convulsion of her neck: all these caused her weariness and fear of new trouble--she preferred Sodom's ease before Zoar's safety, 'Remember Lot's wife.”

In a great phrase, Andrewes later says that we are searched with her salt. This vivid picture of Lot’s wife is, in fact, why I am in absolute agreement with Kurt Vonnegut, who dedicated Slaughterhouse Five to her:

“Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because
it was so human.

So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.”

Oddly enough, Vonnegut’s interpretation imputes to Lot’s wife feelings that are not often interpreted to her in the afterlife of her story. A more common interpretation is that Lot’s wife was drawn by the sensation of the destruction. That the taboo was a taboo on enjoying violence. Just as in the story in Plato, where Leontius was so drawn and at the same time repulsed by the bodies that lay on the execution field outside of Athens that he rushed to one and addressed his eyes, saying, there, ye wretches, take your fill of the fine spectacle. Myself, though, my instinct is that Andrewes notion of a certain sloth, a certain nostalgia, a certain weariness, a desire to, at last, to “die by her flesh-pots, and to be buried in 'the graves of lusts’” rather than continue on this unending quest with her husband, in the service of a dangerous god, in the hands of an inhuman justice, can be combined with Vonnegut’s notion of a certain instinctive human compassion to give us a sense of the meaning of remembering Lot’s wife. To LI’s mind, Lot’s wife is the genius of our reactionary instincts. It is where we are reactionary – politically, socially, emotionally.

Although Lot’s wife is a strong figure, the only figure in the New Testament, as Andrewes points out, who has a memento laid on her by Christ, she is not the subject of a lot of poetry. But Anna Akhmatova wrote one poem for her. Here it is:

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,

over a black mountain, in his giant track,

while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:

"It's not too late, you can still look back



at the red towers of your native Sodom,

the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,

at the empty windows set in the tall house

where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."



A single glance: a sudden dart of pain

stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .

Her body flaked into transparent salt,

and her swift legs rooted to the ground.



Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem

too insignificant for our concern?

Yet in my heart I never will deny her,

who suffered death because she chose to turn.

All of which brings us back to that death sentence. If one reading of the punishment - that Lot's wife is punished for feasting her eyes on a scene of destruction - is wrong, what, then, are we to make of this taboo? In LI's opinion, we here strike upon an odd topic: the embarrassment of power. Yes, the catastrophic crimes committed by the powerful need some cover, some secrecy, so that they do not arouse such indignation in subject populations that Jehovah will be strung from a lamppost. But it isn't the case that power is simply and completely structured by rationality. Perhaps - LI hypothesizes, don't hold me to this in court! - perhaps Jehovah is embarrassed. Perhaps the reactive feelings that turn Lot's wife's head - reactive feelings that, remember, have caused Lot himself to linger and complain - are not unknown to the Lord of Hosts, or the Fuhrer, or the POTUS, or the infinite bureaucratic systems with their infinite lists that make possible the slaughter of cattle and people in equal measure, with more wastage per pound on the homo sapiens. Joseph K., you will remember, is hidden in the tavern to spy upon one of the Castle's minor officials, but a great demonic power in the village itself. There is a shame in power, in its exercise, its structure, that must be revenged upon its victims. An embarrassment even where power is most rampant and insolent.