Buckley, r.i.p

The only American conservative I have any regard for just died – William Buckley.

It is a long regard, going back to my teen years. Not that Buckley has been a force on the right since the eighties. He was as alien to the Bush right as he was to the liberalism of the Great Society era. The right's utter intellectual collapse must have pained him - he always believed that the alliance between rich drones and highly stupid people was redeemed by tone. He had wit and literacy. You can search high and low for that in the National Review of the past decade, but you'll search in vain. The last controversial utterance from the old man was that Iraq was a big fuck up, which was greeted with the embarrassed silence the heirs reserve for the batty grandpa, peeing in his recliner.

And so is extinguished the last dying claim of conservatism to truth, beauty or logic. I'm not sure if I should quote Yeats, at this point - or Pope's the Dunciad.

scribble scribble scribble, mr. gathman

It might still not seem clear why LI’s relentless pursuit of the triumph of happiness should have lead us to talk about social animals. As our friend Alan said a couple of weeks ago, our posts about happiness fail to represent any principle of order. We leap around like the jester Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn, stripes painted across our ass, now going here, now there.

Now, primo, partly the problem is due to the flightiness of LI’s mind. Partly it is due to the fact that we are doing this as an historien du Dimanche. No license or position outside the text assuages the readers doubts about the catholicity of our choice of topics. In essence, LI is claiming that there is a topical hole, here, however much the successors of Lucien Febvre have claimed to make the sensibilities the object of historical study. And so we beat about in that hole, looking for themes.

Segundo, topics are generated by actual enchainments within social facts. It is, for instance, a social fact that the early modern era treated the passions as thought they were properties of a certain ‘animality’ in the human makeup. This trope goes back a long way in folk psychology and the writing of the scholars. You find it cropping up among the philosophers of the enlightenment – Kant’s the royal example, with his strong notion that the passions are at once something not quite human and all too human. The sensual interest is an animal interest. The non-sensual interest is – freedom. Fit for men, those creatures who can disburden themselves of the soiled rags of their animal impulses.

Finally, tercero, if we see changes in the way animals are conceptualized in the nineteenth century, our instinct – which is that of a solid ‘birds flock together’ man – is that probably, we’ll see changes in the way emotions and feelings are conceptualized that will mirror their former concept kin. And if the opposite of the sensual interest is freedom and freedom is the political legitimator par excellence – and if, in a pantomime that reverses such talk, freedom in the economic sphere is to let your sensual interest dictate without impediment – well, this too has to have an impact on the way society becomes the object for a host of sciences.

…
These notes I shore against the book to come. Onward, then, to Hofmannsthal’s The Letter.

And this bird you'll never chaaaaiiiinnnnnn!

What can one say about Alabama? LI spent his molting years in an Atlanta suburb, learning to appreciate poetry, masturbation, and a correctly set up tennis serve – the usual adolescence. The old man worked, for a while, as a consultant on big HVAC jobs throughout the Southeast, so he was often posted to Birmingham. I have a vague memory of going with him to the town, which, back then, was a ironman’s heaven, a coaldust place, with a big statue of Vulcan on one of the many city hills. It was Orc city back then.

Georgians consider ourselves at least semi-civilized, and sniff a great deal at the whole idea of Bama. That’s where the wild west really begins – sullen cotton farmers settling sinister black rivers. Of course, that isn’t true – Alabama isn’t the analphabetic, rickets plagued place of my childhood mythology. For instance, there’s Tuskegee University, which was a steady light in the Dixie darkness for decades. Mencken wasn’t kidding when he claimed that the South of his time – 1917 – was the Sahara of the Bozart:

“Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac.”

Mencken goes on to fling the kitchen sink at Dixie, and then the chairs, the curtains, the lamps, and anything else that he can get his hands on. And he was still short of the astonishing thing about the South, which is not that there are a lot of ignorant people there, but that no place on earth is one’s ignorance more aggressively adored – there is, in Southern tradition, a love for stupidity for its own sake that can only truly be appreciated by those who’ve lived down among the peckerwoods and swapped fleas with em. And if there is one state in which that love is condensed and made into an essence, it is Alabama. There’s a reason George Wallace came from Alabama. There’s a reason Lynyrd Skinner wrote that the “Governor was true.”

Which is why Alabama has turned out to be, much to my surprise, a precursor state in the Bush era. The stupidity-lite of the Bushies, their promotion of ignorance for ignorance sake, has very southern roots. Even Alabama roots. Stealing the election of 2000 in Florida did not begin with Election 2000 in Florida – it began with the Dixie wide attempt, through the nineties, to disenfranchise black males through mass jailing and the use of punitive laws that keep ex felons from voting. It is an old Dixie trick. Alabama, of course, led the way.

However, as we know in these good old states, an astonishing, public crime committed on the black population will rouse not a whimper of protest from the liberal media,. They are, after all, busy encouraging free trade and such. What has happened in Alabama lately even beats the old records – namely, the railroading of the one popular Democratic figure in the state, Don Siegelman, by Karl Rove, a man with deep, greasy roots in Alabama.

Harper’s blogger Scott Horton has tracked this primitive process, which bears comparison with the way Central Asian former Soviet Republics deal with the opposition, with astonishment. And little encouragement from the mainstream media. Finally, though, 60 minutes ran a segment about it. And – it was censored in Alabama! The tv stations in the Peckerwood Kazakhistan are apparently controlled by the usual bevy of corporate criminals, aka friends of the Bushes, and they just suffered an inexplicable outage when the 60 minutes film was a-rollin’. Fancy that!

I’ve wondered when Horton’s reporting was going to get some traction. I’m hoping the time has come. We’ll see.

Ugolino

This is the account in the Florentine Chronicle

“In that time the Count Ugolino being lord of Pisa, for the bad treatment that he used towards them, the people rose up in anger, coming with force and great uproar to the Archbishop Ruggiero Ubaldini, crying out: “Death! Death!” They took him and threw him in prison with two of his sons and two grandchildren, making them die of hunger in prison…Then Guido, Count of Montefeltro, commanded that Count Ugolino and his sons and two grandchildren never more be given food to eat, and thus they died wretchedly of hunger all five. These were the Count Ugolino and Uguccione, Brigata, Anselmuccio and Guelfo, and it was found that the one had eaten the flesh of the other, and finally the last rites were denied to them and all five in one morning were dragged dead from prison. This Count Ugolino was a man of such cruelty that he made the people of Pisa die of famine while at the same time having great abundance of grain, to such an extent that it cost seven pounds to buy a measure of grain in Pisa; then finally he himself died of hunger with all his family.”

Count Ugolino has had a famous afterlife. Dante came across him in the ninth – the lowest – circle of hell. His head was fixed to the top of another head – one that he chewed, as a dog chews a bone.

Dante interrupts him to ask his tale, and the head lifts itself from its bloody gnawwork to give his name and the name of the head he chews upon – Archbishop Ruggieri –

“That I, trusting in him, was put in prison/
through his evil machinations, where I died,/
this much I surely do not have to tell you.

What you could not have known, however, is/
the inhuman circumstances of my death.
Now listen, then decide if he has wronged me!

Ugolino’s story, in Dante’s version, is not as much about Ugolino’s stored up grain as it is about the deeper hunger – a hunger for something bloodier than grain – in the barely sublimated hunt of politics. Shelley translated this part of the story:

Now had the loophole of that dungeon, still
Which bears the name of Famine's Tower from me,
And where 'tis fit that many another will

Be doomed to linger in captivity,
Shown through its narrow opening in my cell _5
'Moon after moon slow waning', when a sleep,

'That of the future burst the veil, in dream
Visited me. It was a slumber deep
And evil; for I saw, or I did seem'

To see, 'that' tyrant Lord his revels keep
The leader of the cruel hunt to them,
Chasing the wolf and wolf-cubs up the steep

Ascent, that from 'the Pisan is the screen'
Of 'Lucca'; with him Gualandi came,
Sismondi, and Lanfranchi, 'bloodhounds lean, _15

Trained to the sport and eager for the game
Wide ranging in his front;' but soon were seen
Though by so short a course, with 'spirits tame,'

The father and 'his whelps' to flag at once,
And then the sharp fangs gored their bosoms deep. _20
Ere morn I roused myself, and heard my sons,

For they were with me, moaning in their sleep,
And begging bread. Ah, for those darling ones!
Right cruel art thou, if thou dost not weep

(Notice that these images of lean dogs were used by Shelley in his political poetry – especially in the Masque of Anarchy, where ‘seven bloodhounds” follow Castlereagh.

“All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.”)

Ugolino’s suffering is, then, first of a public thing, revealed in a dream, and then shrinking in an instant to himself and his children, who die like this:

They wept aloud, and little Anselm mine,
Said--'twas my youngest, dearest little one,--
"What ails thee, father? Why look so at thine?"

In all that day, and all the following night,
I wept not, nor replied; but when to shine
Upon the world, not us, came forth the light

Of the new sun, and thwart my prison thrown
Gleamed through its narrow chink, a doleful sight,
'Three faces, each the reflex of my own,

Were imaged by its faint and ghastly ray;'
Then I, of either hand unto the bone,
Gnawed, in my agony; and thinking they

Twas done from sudden pangs, in their excess,
All of a sudden raise themselves, and say,
"Father! our woes, so great, were yet the less

Would you but eat of us,--twas 'you who clad
Our bodies in these weeds of wretchedness;
Despoil them'."

…

The fourth day dawned, and when the new sun shone,
Outstretched himself before me as it rose
My Gaddo, saying, "Help, father! hast thou none

For thine own child--is there no help from thee?"
He died--there at my feet--and one by one,
I saw them fall, plainly as you see me.

Between the fifth and sixth day, ere twas dawn,
I found 'myself blind-groping o'er the three.'
Three days I called them after they were gone.

Famine of grief can get the mastery.”

It is at this famous and controversial line that Shelley breaks off. Borges, in The False Problem of Ugolino, claims that the earliest commenters took Ugolino to be saying that fasting did more than grief to kill Ugolino, and not confessing to having despoiled the flesh of his dead children. Borges backs up to consider the way Ugolino represents his children as offering their father their flesh:

“I suspect that this utterance must cause a growing discomfort in its admirers. De Sanctis … ponders the unexpected conjunction of heterogeneous images; D’Ovidio concedes that “this gallant and epigrammatic expression of a filial impulse is almost beyond criticism.” For my part, I consider this one of the few false notes in the Commedia. I consider it less worthy of Dante than of Malvezzi’s pen or Gracian’s veneration. Dante, I tell myself, could not have helped but feel its falseness, which is certainly aggravated by the almost choral way in which all four children simultaneously tender the famished feast. Someone might suggest that what we are faced with here is a lie, made up after the fact by Ugolino to justify (or insinuate) his crime.”

But Borges does not make the leap one might expect from his notion that Ugolino is lying – or is being made to lie. The two notions, of course, imply very different forces - on the one hand, the implication is that Ugolino did commit the crime of cannibalism, and on the other, the implication is that he is being falsely implicated as hinting that he committed the crime of cannibalism. Borges believes that Dante’s choice, here, is to arouse our suspicion without sating it with a definite answer. Borges takes this as a lesson in the form of art, as opposed to the substance of life:

“In real time, in history, whenever a man is confronted with several alternatives, he choses one and eliminates and loses the others. Such is not the case in the ambiguous time of art, which is similar to that of hope and oblivion. In that time, Hamlet is sane and is mad. In the darkness of his Tower of Hunger, Ugolino devours and does not devour the beloved corpses, and this undulating imprecision, this uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is made.”

LI can travel with Borges so far on this argument, but we are much less sure that the strange matter of art is so different from the common matter of life. For it is part of life that we remember, and tell what we remember. And it is part of memory that we edit. We inexorably edit. Our lives aren’t lived in hard focus or in close up – they continually turn out to be softfocused, full of distracted pans, and the alternatives chosen are often, it seems, chosen unconsciously, or made up as the alternatives of the moment afterwards, after sloth, routine, and the contingencies of success or failure impel us to recarve the past. I don’t know if Borges had read about Schroedinger when he wrote this essay – if not, he stumbled on a Schroedinger-like situation without benefit of physics.

Oops. LI really meant to direct this post back to the predator – prey relationship discussed in the Queneau post. And we’ve gone completely astray. Sorry.

I'm alive, he cried

I think it must be: starve a fever. At least, that is the course I’ve taken in the last few days. LI has been down with the flu. We’ve been living in a world of biomorphic distortions and inexplicable lapses of time, much like the narrator of Le Très-Haut. We’ve crammed ourselves with Tylonals, sudafeds, and cough suppressants – the latter of which still does not bar the dog from our door. The dog that is making that godawful din, growling, whining and barking, which shoots out of our mouth and rattle our bones. Possessed by a demon dog and condemned to walk the reaches of the night.

Yesterday we had to finish a review. It couldn’t be put off any longer. Such agony! Usually reviewing a novel combines putting together a flow sheet with a few remarks from our distinguished panel of judges. But instead of bright and spritely flow, every sentence we wrote seemed a peculiar and malicious bog, in which we would sink up to our chin. And then, by mainforce, we’d go forward by another sentence, and so on. The funny thing is that the review, which in the end was pretty bare and barren, is probably just the thing our editor is looking for – we are always being edited back to a paint by numbers, thumb up or thumb down format, there. Sadly, people actually expect reviews to be thumb up or thumb down affairs, when the faithful reviewer could truly care less about whether a review is positive or negative. No, the real reviewer has a wholly surgical objective: to peel back the skin and muscle from the heart cavity and reach in and touch the beating, quivering center of the book. That is reviewer’s coup. Which is why the question I am most often asked about my reviews is – but did you like the book?

…
Well, I have answered a few questions this week. One question is: how much food does a man have to consume in a day? And the answer is: a can of tomato soup every two days is sufficient. However, I have this creeping feeling that my fast is about to break.


And here comes sickness...

the oligarchy

For those among you who love (as much as LI loves!) xrays of the oligarchy, I strongly advise John Cassidy’s article in the March Portfolio.

---Your freedom is garbage!
---It is the freedom of the majority!

the mathematical theory of the struggle for life

"If sharks were people,” the small daughter of his landlady asked Mr. K., would they then be nicer to the small fish?” – Brecht, Wenn die Haifische Menschen wären

Continuing LI’s notes on the predator/prey relationship – we discovered, through one of Machery’s essays, that a famous essay by Volterra had caught Raymond Queneau’s eye, and was mentioned in his 1943 essay, The place of mathematics in the classification of the sciences, which begins like this: “In its relations with mathemtics, every science passes through the following four phases (four as of now, perhaps five tomorrow)” – which elegantly combines the academic and the Groucho Marxian. Queneau briefly surveys the sciences, claims that physics has gone through three of his stages, already, and then writes: “This is the ideal stage for the scientists of the late nineteenth century. The other sciences reamin far behind in this regard. Only very limited subjects are treated by this method: in biology, the theory of the fight for life; in sociology, econometrics. These two examples furthermore show that there is no incompatibility between the analytic method and the life sciences. The delay is in part explained by the fact that such an application apparently offers no problem to be resolved from the mathematical point of view, and so no potential for discovery; mathematicians thus soon lost interest in these theoretical fields, which offered no grist for their mill. if the theory of the fight for life was developed by Volterra, it’s because it ultimately led to integro-differential equations worthy of interest.”

The explanation from mathematical banality might not quite have been the whole story, or at least LI can’t see it. But it is a nice story, nonetheless. The essay arose out of a project Queneau was working on in July 1942 (terrible months to encounter the struggle for life): Brouillon projet d’une atteinte a une science absolue de l’histoire, (sketch for a project for an attempt at an absolute science of history) of which Voltarra’s Lecons sur la theorie methematique de la lutte pour la vie was going to be one of the main sources, and Vico, Bruck, William Flinders Petrie, Spengler, “authors who believed they could discern rhythms or cycles in history” would be the other.” In the Model History in which Queneau jotted down these reminiscences, he also wrote: “if there had never been any wars or revolutions, there would never have been any history; there wouldn’t be any matter for history; history would be without an object… happy people have no history. History is the science of the misery of mankind.”

Most people have heard of the Volterra-Lotka equations, which show how predator-prey relations should oscillate around an ideal equilibrium over time, all other conditions being equal, and how that oscillation takes on four states. Queneau’s idea that, perhaps, these predator-prey states are strung out over human history is startling.