My syphilis

The suicide note is an enlightenment genre. Werther, before he died, burnt many of his papers, and sent others to his friend Wilhelm, who – completing the exchange of friendship – then published all the notes and letters as “The Sorrows of Young Werther”. But, of course, as a man of fashion – so fashionable, in fact, that he is concerned with that the clothes he wears into the grave represent his look – Werther was not going to lose the occasion to write a last letter. And so he writes it to his “dearest one” – Charlotte.

As I’ve pointed out, love and suicide in the Sorrows of Young Werther overlap, in a way – they both are imagined in terms of circles, and those circles in turn are the forms in which something is distributed to elements that are substitutable – variable places, in fact. However, Werther’s suicide itself is told in terms not of a circle, but of a line. Werther sends his servant to borrow the pistols from Albert, Lotte’s husband, who is in a foul mood – and we do remember that among the first things Werther says in his early letters was that he could not abide a foul mood. Albert is suffering from problems at work and from Lotte’s relationship with Werther. And of course by this point he knows that Werther is a drinker who talks about suicide a lot. So what does he do? He loans the pistols. And who gives the pistols to the servant? Albert tells Lotte to take the pistols down from where they are hanging, on the wall. So the pistols pass through Lotte’s hands. She even wipes the dust from one of them. She, too, knows that Werther has talked about suicide. And she has reproached him for drinking. But she gives the pistols to the servant without saying anything to Albert. In a sense, the scene in which Lotte gives the pistols to the servant is a scene of judgment: Werther has finally been thrown outside of the circle, into which he entered knowing that Albert existed as Lotte’s fiancé.

The suicide note left by Werther is, then, a letter from a man who has been excluded, and who is about to take that exclusion and embody it in a bullet to the head. In it, he alludes to the first night he met Lotte, and the scene in which, after the counting game broke up, the two of them watched the storm out of a window and communed with each other over some verses from Klopstock. In this, Werther’s suicide note is not of the usual type:

“I step to the window, my dearest one. And look and look through the stormy clouds flying overhead at the individual stars of eternal heaven. No, you will not fall. The eternal holds you in its heart, and me.”

Studies of the suicide note first started appearing in the nineteenth century. But the modern study of the suicide note took a giant leap forward in the twentieth century, when Edwin Schneidman found files of them in the Los Angeles police department archives in 1944. Schneidman and his associate, Farberow, published a paper on the notes in 1957, using a “control” – simulations of a suicide note. The Schneidman Farberow method even has its own acronym in suicidology – the SSN (Simulated Suicide Note).

“A simulated suicide note (SSN) is a communication written by someone who is not suicidal but who has been instructed to write a note as if they were. These notes are matched according to demographic variables and compared with genuine suicide notes. Any differences that emerge are attributed to differences in suicidality and characteristics that discriminate between these two groups are warranted in any explanation of suicide.” [Understanding Suicidal Behaviour, O’Connor, 81]

Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther – LJW – could be considered an SSN. Although as has been noted, literature – that social stain which seeps through everything! – has contaminated the genuine suicide note from the beginning.

Schneidman wrote that his ideas about the suicide note have changed. At first he thought that it would do for him what dreams did for Freud – provide him with the royal road to the heart of the suicide consciousness. But over the course of time, he has moderated this view. What the simulated suicide notes brought out was the length of the genuine note, the fact that the genuine note is more often dated, and that it has more factual statements in it.

Schneidman was interested in what he called “risk writing” – that is, the relationship between writing and suicidal ‘mentation’ – and wrote a study of the "suicidal logic" of the Italian writer, Cesare Pavese, who committed suicide. Schneidman quotes a remark made by Pavese about his early fascination with suicide – which he first attempted at the age of 19 – as his “syphilis.” Interestingly, he had, according to Schneidman, some very highly wrought sexual relationships with women – he often felt inadequate (oh, this language! How dick and pussy are processed through the mill!) because he was impotent, or prematurely ejaculated. Pavese noted in his diary: “A man, unless he is a eunuch, can always achieve ejaculation with any woman… and a man who ejaculates too soon had better never been born. It is a failing that makes suicide worthwhile.” (August 3, 1937) That is not a pleasant thought to carry about in one’s head – besides, of course, being entirely ludicrous. But – as Kafka intuited – the higher judgments, the judgment that condemns you to death, is ludicrous in the extreme.

Schneidman is very good about this. He quotes Von Domarus and Arieti, who wrote that the patients they dealt with – schizophrenics – often mutilated logic by shifting the deductive focus in sentences from the subject to the predicate. The subject of the premises is how we understand the workings of the standard syllogism: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. But in schizo-logic, the focus shifts to the predicate. “An example: Certain Indians are swift; stags are swift; therefore, certain Indians are stags…. Another example. The Virgin Mary was a virgin; I am a virgin; therefore, I am the Virgin Mary.” Schneidman finds this kind of thinking showing up in Pavese’s diary. He uses the word catalogical – “because it destroys the logician” for this kind of thing.

“An example:

You must confess you have thought and written many banalities in your little diary these past months. I agree but is there anything more commonplace than death? A lover’s reasoning: If I were dead, she would go on living, laughing, trying her luck. But she has thrown me over and still does all those things. Therefore, I am as dead. (February 25, 1938)

The argument embedded in this paragraph contains a blatant logical error – and gets Pavese into deep trouble. He reasons himself into hopelessness: Therefore I am as {good as) dead (and might as well be really dead). It makes as much logical sense as his saying that he is Switzerland or the Virgin Mary. One has to watch carefully how one uses the word ‘therefore’..

Pavese’s catalogical reasoning style – I call this pattern of thinking catalogical because it destroys the logician – linked suffering with death, death with suicide, and therefore the presence of suffering the (the necessity of) suicide. … From clinical experience we know that committing suicide is often reduced to the need to do something – anything – to stop the flow of unbearable mental anguish.” [Schneidman, Suicide as Psychache 124-125]

To do something – this is doing without any subject. And – by catalogical inference – suicide operates here as the essence of the dread possibility that lurks at the bottom of this infinite freedom to do something else. It is symbolic of the dark side of the world of abstract labor, a world in which all connections are inessential.

The Bullet we missed

The NYT has a piece on ex Senator Phil “I love a billionaire” Gramm, whose career in the Senate is an epic of corrupt practices and a vile ideology, which all resulted in the economy we know and love today. They even, as a sidenote, print the emails that the ever irrepressible Enron people were sending each other as Gramm was passing the Enron provision in the bill barring the regulators of commodity futures from even thinking about derivatives – a provision that allowed Enron to spiral into a gigantic fraud whose clawmarks can still be spotted in California. How Beautiful! And they print his remarks on the wonders and charms of subprime mortgages, which, in the grand forgettery of the rightwing spin machine, have been tossed aside for insane fantasies about Barney Frank. Gramm is the man who was within a whisker of being the secretary of the treasury.

LI has long considered Gramm among the vilest of the vile. Here’s what we wrote in 2001:

Friday, January 04, 2002
Dope

Some further comments on Senator Torricelli's Houdini like escape from prosecution seem called for.
The question on the mind of the spectator must be: why would the Repugs go along on this deal? After all, damn Senator T with the black spot and Senator Lott will once more be the majority leader, talked to, even, by tv reporters and such.

Well, let's speculate a little bit, children. When one of D.C.'s pirates is caught with his hand in the till, very often a delicate situation arises. Because so many other pirates on the ship have been quietly amassing as much loot as their natural greed allows them. It is a tradition that goes back to the Roman senate. So if Senator T.'s skin is graciously unflayed, one looks around for who else could be outrageously vulnerable to charges of pilfering. And the eye alights on a certain Texas senator, Phil Gramm. Phil and his wonderful and rich wife, Wendy, have made quite a killing in the past decade from their association with Enron corporation, of blessed memory. There's a Public Citizen release that counts the ways Enron loved the Gramms, and the Gramms loved Enron. Consider that Wendy, high spirited free marketer that she is, was appointed by Bushie the elder to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This is a sad sack commission ostensibly armed to police the derivatives market -- but armed like a boyscout with a peashooter facing down the Nazi Wehrmacht. Even so, you never know when some nasty regulation will actually enforce transparency on futures or options trading, the biz Enron was massively in. So our heroine, Wendy, came to Enron's rescue by exempting trading in futures contracts by Enron, in 1993. It was one of her last acts as a truly altruistic public personality, because she then resigned her chairmanship and, five weeks later, took on an entrepeneurial role on the Enron board of directors. Now, reader, you are thinking that this is merely a coincidence; and besides, boards of directors are notoriously composed of crash test dummies, rubberstamping the decisions of the CEO. But our dear Wendy also served on the Enron Audit committee (this part of her story should be scored to that all time popular hit, "Three blind mice'). So double hitting for that innovator in spot prices in power for you and me, she made off with around a million five. Hey, I'm sure that Phil was uninfluenced by that chunk of change, but you know how a loving, christian couple, in the depth of the night, abed, sometimes talks about the meaning of it all, and our redeemer's beautiful life story, and wouldn't it be nice if some properly motivated senator snuck a provision onto some bill de-regulating the power commodity markets. Probably these sweet whispers were in vain, given Phil adamantine integrity, but maybe something, well, unconscious kicked in, cause golly, Phil did muscle in the bill Enron wanted. For good Laissez Faire reasons, no doubt.

Yes, the money rolls in, but Phil's ambitions no longer play out on the national level, and his mind has turned to contemplating the blank verse of The Prelude or something -- those sweet retirement thoughts. But still, with Enron falling apart this year with a speed and desperation much like that of the East German government in 1989, the Gramms probably also had some heart to hearts about those pesky laws constraining politicians from accepting bribes in too public and outrageous a fashion -- laws which, as we all know, are stronger in the spirit than the letter, but still... Maybe it is time to fold your tent and creep home, with the couple millions of Enron bucks under your belt or in your portfolio to watch over you in the golden years. This will no doubt be used by invidious nabobs of negativism to explain why Phil gave a press conference on September 2 announcing his retirement from the Senate, even though he had amassed a 4 million dollar reelection warchest.

Warms your heart, doesn't it, reader? And so maybe Senator T gets traded for Senator G. in the game. We are not of course suggesting anything so cynical went down in D.C. in reality. In reality, all Senatorial transactions are motivated by the unwavering patriotism of the members of that hallowed chamber. All Limited Inc is doing is, well, muddying the waters. Spewing negativism. Speculating, as is our wont, in an idle and destructive manner.


Here’s what we wrote in 2002:

Monday, October 07, 2002
Remora

Isn't this sweet? Outgoing senator Phil Gramm -- that's what all the news releases say -- is set to join UBS Warburg:



ABC News announces it in the easy tones that embody the flow of senatorial personage to business personage and back:

"Senator Phil Gramm will soon become vice chairman of UBS Warburg, the investment banking arm of Switzerland's biggest bank, UBS Warburg said on Monday.Gramm, who will take up the private sector post when his Senate term ends later this year, follows a well trodden path of key legislators who join top Wall Street firms. Gramm has been in Congress for 24 years, and co-authored far reaching legislation in 1999 that repealed a prohibition on companies offering banking, brokerage and insurance operations under one roof."

Curiously, nobody connects a few dots. So Limited Inc will take up the pencil. How about this?

1. Wendy Gramm serves on the board of Enron. Preceding this nice little sinecure, she sits on the Commodities and Futures Commission and gives Enron a nice little waiver to embark upon its energy trading business without any pesky federal regulation. After eight years and about 600 thousand dollars, Wendy, on the Accounting committee of the Enron board no less, is shocked, shocked to learn that the company has been looted as thoroughly as the Russian looted Berlin, circa 1945.

2. But as that looting is drawing near its close, certain high up personages in Enron have not wholly given up the idea that, in the last moment, they can lick the spoons. Greg Whalley, among this seedy crew, is operating, supposedly, as Enron's President. It is his decision to reach in the piggy bank and award compensatory amounts up to a million dollars a piece for the people who are sitting at Enron's energy trading desk -- which, you'll remember, was made possible by Wendy Gramm's fortuitous waiver. He justifies these awards by going on about necessary personel, and the need to keep them from jumping ship. Of course, he doesn't allude to the vulgar fact that the energy trading desk has been losing money hand over fist. Or that the compensation comes directly out of the hide of the older workers in the gas pipes division -- yokels all.

"A top Enron executive wrongfully allowed employees who stayed with the company to cash deferred-compensation claims worth at least $32 million, while denying similar payments to former employees, legal experts say. And the experts said one-time Enron Chief Operating Officer Greg Whalley may well be personally liable for the payments distributed in October and November. A lawyer for Whalley recently told the Chronicle that his client had allowed dozens of company executives to cash out their deferred-compensation plans because they were still "providing value" to Enron. But retirees and other ex-employees who sought to cash out at the same time, or earlier, did not get approval."

3. Well, what is a hardworking president to do? Got to keep the energy section going until you can sell it, and yourself with it, to some lucky company. And guess who that company is, sweethearts? Why it is UBS Warburg: here's the announcement, dated February of this year, in Computerworld.

"A wholly owned subsidiary of London-based UBS Warburg, which is itself the investment banking subsidiary of Swiss bank UBS AG, the re-formed energy exchange has acquired Enron's gas and power trading IT infrastructure, its intellectual property and 625 of its former employees (see story).

"When the sale was finalized [Feb. 8], those people became UBSWenergy employees," said company spokeswoman Jennifer Walker. Most notable in the group is former Enron President and Chief Operating Officer Greg Whalley, who rose to that position in August after former Enron President Jeff Skillings left unexpectedly."

4. And so now Senator Gramm, the honorable Senator Gramm, who seems to have slipped through this awful mess that must have, just must have been caused by government regulation (ask the guys who write the editorials for the Wall Street Journal) with his wonderful wife Wendy by his side, unbowed by her experience and comforted, perhaps, by that half a mil she earned for two weeks work a year, is headed, by coincidence, for the refuge of the high end final Enron looters. Quelle coincidence! Not that we are accusing anybody of striking a deal, especially not good old dirty fingered, corrupt, cheating, lying, stealing, black hearted, selfish, conniving, worthless Phil Gramm -- as we like to call him, jokingly, in Texas. We simply think that it is, indeed, a small world after all, and one in which Phil simply keeps running into people he's helped out, and who want to help him out in turn.

The Modern way to commit Suicide

“In 1718, at Chateau-Gontier, a young pregnant girl having poisoned herself, the cadaver, from the time of the beginning of the trial, was exhumed and imprisoned in a jail”. Then it was dragged, head down, through the streets of the village, hung by its feet, and at last “placed on a bonfire and reduced to ashes.” I don’t know of another case where the penalty of burning was applied. The sentence of Chateau-Gontier specified that the ashes would be thrown to the wind and the child would be, before this, extracted from the cadaver to be buried with the stillborns.

The is even examples of condemnation in cases of suicide attempts. In 1777, the Journal of Paris told the story of a man who, having tried to hang himself, was condemned to the galleys for life and was only acquitted on appeal. Voltaire, in the Philosophical Dictionary, speaks of a man who, having “made several light cuts on himself with a knife, like the charlatans, in order to obtain some recompense”, was condemned to be hung by a decree of Parliament.”

Bayet, Le Suicide et le morale, 632.

LI has been reading Georges Minois’ History of Suicide with mixed feelings. Minois is very good at gathering together sources. But his comments are very flatheaded. I’m using it mostly to poke around in the references. But the information in the Minois book does pose some puzzles if you are interested in suicide as the manifestation of something deeper going on in a culture. For instance, Minois uses the work of Guy Barreau on suicides in Brittany during the 18th century. Barreau maintains that the records show that women account for five times more suicides than men. That is truly unusual – men almost always outnumber women as suicides, usually by a considerable amount. Another striking statistical fact comes via a survey of suicides in England between 1541 and 1799. Children under 14 account for the highest percentage of suicides, an amazing 30 percent. Minois’ notion is that, at least in the eighteenth century, this might reflect the truly horrendous conditions of apprentices and working children. Even in the list of Breton suicides, many of them are young, and are described like this:

29 November 1769. A young girl of fifteen, Francoise Royer, drowned herself at Fougeres. She had for some tie been abused by her mother, who sent her out to beg, gave her hardly enough to eat, threw her out into the street in the middle of the night calling her a whore, and beat her with a stick. The mother showed no sorrow at her daughter’s death: It’s the devil who broke her neck, but she’s over seven, she isn’t under my care anymore… There she is, the great she-devil, she was looking for trouble and she found it… She’s a wretch, she told me so. It’s the evil spirit that whipped her.”

Blake’s Little Black boy among the snow/crying weep weep in notes of woe came from the very heart of the people.
…
It is suicide and love that unweave the net woven by reason and sympathy. The net in which we are caught.

…

Look at how Durkheim sorts his suicides. One sees, in the categories, glimmers of Tocqueville, particularly the analysis of American society. This is the egoist suicide:

“The more the groups to which he belongs are enfeebled, the less he depends on them, the more, in consequence, he stands on his own two feet in order not to recognize other rules of behavior than those which are founded on his own private interest. If, thus, one agrees to call egoism this state where the individual I affirms itself with excess in the face of the social I and at the expense of the latter, we can give the name egoi8st to the particular type of suicide that results from unlimited individuation.” Book ii, 69

Contrasted to Altruistic suicide:

“Thus, in all these cases [of warriors and widows sacrificing themselves], if a man kills himself it is not because he has seized that right for himself, but, which is very different, because he has a duty to do it. If he fails this obligation, he is punished by dishonor, and also, most often, by religious chastisements.” [77]

In Durkheim’s quadrivium of suicides (anomy, egoism, altruism, fatalism), it is obvious that the modern suicides fall under the anomy and egoism side, and the pre-moderns under the altruism and fatalism side. Yet, his statistics irritatingly refuse to give us a neat pattern, in which the modern simply succeeds the premodern. Instead, it lurks within the modern structures. Its dread name is woman – for women, in Durkheim’s statistics, stubbornly refuse to commit suicide for reasons of anomy and egotism, and commit suicide, after being all too integrated into the social, for reasons of altruism and fatalism. To explain this, Durkheim even has to allude to biology – not a very Durkheimian gesture. Women must have more primitive brains then men. That must be it.

However, Durkheim did not have good stats on suicide attempts. I wonder what he would have made of them? Esquirol was one of the first to distinguish suicides from suicide attempters, and estimated the suicide attempters as forty percent of the suicide total. In actuality, or at least in contemporary actuality, there are about three times as many attempters as successful suicides, and the majority of attempters are women.

Durkheim’s quadrivium of suicides is suggestive in another way, too – it ties into the imperial perspective. For the altruistic/fatalistic suicides are primitive, and when we find them, we can be sure the society is unhealthily laggard. From the suttee to the kamikaze pilot to the suicide bomber, this perspective still holds. The other/enemy still horrifies by being so imprisoned in the chains of feudalism, from which we have long ago liberated ourselves. Meanwhile, in the shadows cast by this structure, the altruistic/fatalistic type lurks. Every SAC bomber crew in the Cold War was expected, if the call came, to attack even knowing that the chance of survival was minimal – close to what the truck bomber might expect. Yet we never called this our suicide squadron. In fact, during the Cold War, it was often recognized, as a metaphor, that the missile policies of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were thinly disguised suicide threats. It was, in fact, writ large, the cutter’s fantasy, the bulemic’s fantasy.

…
One other note. According to Minois, the suicide letter was a mainly eighteenth century invention. Of course, this is partly due to the spread of literacy. But, Minois thinks, it is also due to the spread of secularization – more and more, the afterlife was not thought of in terms of heaven and hell. It was a vaguely pleasant place where one met one’s loved ones again (the idea that there was no giving or taking of wives and husband in the Kingdom of God – that radically anti-family idea from the radically anti-family Jesus – had long bit the dust), but just in case, one wanted to get in a word or two posthumously.

August 12, 1771 (2)

After the conversation between Albert and Werther takes a turn towards considering whether suicide could be excusable or not, Werther takes a recent case of a girl – a Mädchen – who had recently drowned herself in the nearby river. Remembering that Werther’s falling in love was ritualized in three circles, it is surprising and interesting that Werther describes the girl’s falling in love in terms of circles, too.

“ I reminded him of a girl who, some time before, had been discovered dead in the water, and repeated to him her history: a good young creature, who had grown up in the narrow circle of domestic affairs and definite weekly tasks; and in addition, who knew no prospect of satisfaction than, for instance, on Sundays, to stroll around in the city dressed up in her piecework finery with similar girls, perhaps stopping to dance once at all the festivals…”

The first circle – which should remind us of the first circle in which Werther saw Charlotte for the first time, surrounded by her brothers and sisters.

But then things change. She gets bored until a “man arrives to whom an unknown feeling irresistibly draws her, on whom she now throws all her hopes and forgets about the world around her (rings um sich), hears nothing, sees nothing, feels nothing but him.” The second circle of love – unlike Werther’s love for Charlotte, a love that the girl can more easily enact – is a rather frightening circle. Already, it discloses the structure of suicide, in that the world around her is forgotten. The circle, that form in which distribution and substitution are the elements, takes on a form in which the substituted elements disappear, and the distribution of affection has no resource to draw from except that of the girl’s naked self.

Here is how the story ends: with the girl “sticking her arms out to embrace all her wishes – and her lover abandons her. Petrified, without sense, she stands before an abyss. Everything is darkness around her, no prospect, comfort, sensation: he has left her, in whom alone she feels her existence. She doesn’t see the broad world, which lies at her feet, nor the many, who could supply her loss [den Verlust ersetzen koennten], she feels alone, abandoned by all the world.”

… and blindly pressed upon by the narrowness of the horrible pain in her heart, she throws herself in, in order to drown all her pain in an all encompassing [rings umfangenden] death.” [70, 71]

Death is the fourth circle, so to speak, after the world, in which the many exist who could supply her loss – the many who emerge, with infinite lightness, in Cosi fan tutte to show that substitution is freedom – and who here exist as a sort of mockery, the abandoned who abandon her.

Why a circle and not, for instance, a line? Because a line would negate the game with its infinity. In the line, there would be no vantage point outside it to tell who stayed and who left. The circle has both closure and infinity – and, most importantly, from within the circle, one can survey the work of substitution.

August 12, 1771

... But before I can go further, I need to go back to the very important conversation between Werther and Albert on August 12 – a day that changes the entire tone of the novel.

On August 12, Werther records an important conversation with Albert. Albert is Charlotte’s betrothed. In fact, Werther has been making Albert his doppelganger. They both love Charlotte, and – while Werther has said nothing about this to Albert – one can guess that Albert has guessed. I won’t dwell on how much this situation reminds me of certain adulterous passages from my own past – because that would be tedious and embarrassing. Suffice it to say that I found Werther’s behavior here almost unbearably familiar.

So, on August 12th, Albert and Werther have a conversation. The starting point is Albert’s pocket pistols, which Werther wants to borrow. This leads to a discussion of the etiquette of pistols – once, Albert’s servant was cleaning the pistols and showing off to tease another servant, a likely girl, and accidentally shot her. Since then, Albert has made sure that the pistols aren’t loaded.

Werther’s immediate commentary on this story is not only gorgeous, but gives us in a very brief space the aesthetic credo of modernism.

“ My dear, what after all is foresight? Nothing can ever really teach us about danger. Really – “ Now you know [you being Werther’s silent friend, to whom he is writing this letter] that I have the warmest feelings for the man, up to his ‘really’. Because isn’t it self-evident, that every general rule suffers some exceptions? But the man will insist so much on being in the right! That when he believes to have said something hurried, general, half true - - so he begins to limit, to modify, to hem and haw endlessly, until there is nothing left of the thing at all. And on this occasion he plunged deeper into the text – I finally stopped listening to him, fell to moping, and with an irritable gesture I pressed the mouth of the pistol over my right eye, on the forehead. What are you doing!? as he grabbed the pistol away from me. It isn’t loaded, I said. Even so, he said impatiently. I can’t imagine how a man could be so foolish as to shoot himself. The simple thought goes against my grain.

You people, I cried out, in order to speak about a thing, have to say the same thing: that is foolish, that is clever, that is good, that it is bad! And what does all that amount to? Have you thereby plumbed the inner relationships of an action? Do you know with certainty how the causes develop, why they happen, why they have to happen? If you only had, then you wouldn’t be so quick with your judgments.

You will have to concede, said Albert, that certain actions remain vicious, whatever the grounds from which they spring.

I shrugged my shoulders and conceded it…”

Stop here for a second. It is August 12, 1771. And in this passage, a revolution has happened. You can look around the 18th century where you will, but nothing like this conversation, this attitude, that shrug, that outcry – not even in Rousseau. Nobody had written this kind of thing before. That is, since Shakespeare and Montaigne. Sure, you will find bawdy in the 18th century, you will find glimpses of Rabelais, and there was always Cyrano, and there was the conversations in Gullivers Travels in the fourth book – but all of that remained under the stamp of classical forms. This, this is new, this is Satanic – to use the word as Michelet used it, talking about how the saying of the Lord’s prayer backwards was a decisive blow against the totality and the total oppression of the Church. August 12, 1771. That bold idea – to profane the sacred not by denial, but by reversal, by inversion – that forms a domain of revolt that emerges in this conversation as clearly as the fact that Albert’s gun isn’t loaded – that is, it is fraught with obsession. It all comes together here – the pistol, Werther’s moment of bitter absent mindedness, the irritable gesture, Albert’s irrefutable reasonableness – out of this comes Kleist’s end, and the fever dreams of Stepan Verkhovensky and the girl that Stavrogin might have raped, and who certainly hung herself, Munch painted this, Godard filmed this, the Sex Pistols sung this – and a million exegetes have tried to sweep it into one ideology or another, God help us. It is central to, and hidden by, the turn in happiness culture – that moment in which, after the liberation from the old feudal structure of the passions, from the old superstitions, from the old fears of pleasure, from the old primitive cosmos of pain and pleasure doled out by a mastertroping deity, the imagination turns to look at its creation and is struck … with the horror of it all. For it all ends up in Albert’s voice, in his reasonableness, in his being just the kind of man who will make Charlotte the best of husbands.

And I too will take the energy of this, and I will flatten it out, I will seek the larger view, the gross generalization, I will put this in some machine or other. See if I don’t.

To be continued next post…

substitutes and suicide

Durkheim’s book on suicide has generated a long history of controversy regarding its statistics, Durkheim’s attack on Tarde’s imitation model of suicide, his interpretation of the data according to sex, etc. Using Bertillion’s statistics, Durkheim was able to overthrow some myths – that, for instance, the English were prone to the English malady – it turned out that they had less of a rate of suicide than the Germans – or that married men were more prone to suicide than bachelors. The latter was a very deft statistical routine, since the misconception – statistically – rested on including, in the set of bachelors, boys below the marriageable age. When adjusted for men over eighteen, it turned out that married men were significantly less likely to kill themselves than bachelors, although the ratio was closer for married men in their twenties. As for women, well, women are less likely to kill themselves period – a fact born out since Durkheim. What Durkheim did not have the statistics on then is suicide attempts – and that, it turns out, is startling, since women are much more likely to attempt suicide.

Durkheim’s famous quadrangle of suicide categories, which he discerned beneath the statistics, classified suicides by two binaries: egoist vs. altruist, and anomie vs. fatalism. These divisions in turn rested on Durkheim’s perception of one large social fact – the degree of social integration.

There are a number of attacks on Durkheim’s thesis as vague, or Durkheim’s numbers as wrong. Jack Douglas, an early symbolic interactionist, for instance, disputed the numbers since, in Douglas’ view, suicide is undercounted, and disputed the anomie thesis, since in his view Durkheim was not giving enough weight to the social situation of the suicide case. He was mashing them all together. Other’s have attempted to revive Tarde’s notion of the imitation suicide – and indeed, there are indications that this happens. However, nobody really thinks that imitation is at the center of suicide, at least as Tarde conceived it.

The statistics on suicide and suicide attempts points to a rather fascinating social phenomenon, presaged in folk beliefs about suicide. According to Irina Pappano’s Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia, there was a Slavic folk belief in the wandering dead, the zalozhnye pokoiniki,, who “are not fully dead: disembodied, they continue to serve the terms of their earthly existence. Anthropologists connect such beliefs, which are common to many cultures, to the mythological view of death as a transition between two worlds. Suicides are forever suspended in the liminal realm, belonging neither to the world of the dead nor to the world of the living.” (54) This belief may be more modern, more contemporary, than we are willing to admit. The “to be or not to be’ is defied by the attempted suicide. That it seems to be a category of its own, apart from suicide, is indicated by the fact that some 85 percent of attempters don’t, in fact, succeed in killing themselves – they die of other ‘natural’ causes. Thus, “not to be” is made a more ambiguous thing, a suspended thing, a metaphor. Death is drawn into the order of life to play many roles: intensifier, cleanser, transcender, etc. I am not certain what to make of this, given Durkheim’s categories.

I want to apply some of Durkheim’s theory of suicide to The Sorrows of the Young Werther – in particular, to the part played by the circles I have drawn your attention to in the last post. That is, the way Werther’s falling in love seems to be mediated by three circles, having two elements: the distribution of something – bread, dancers, numbers/slaps – and the substitution relation. Now, I have long been nosing around the idea of substitution without fully explaining it, and some may have smelt the Marxist mouse in the house. My concern with substitution and love is a timid attempt to forge a link with one of the great social inventions of the proto-capitalist era, abstract labor – to wit, the notion that laborers in the industrial system are infinitely substitutable. The blacksmith becomes a car mechanic who becomes a worker on a computer assembly line, all under the benign gaze of the economist who sees in this the triumph of the freed up labor system. It doesn’t matter what you do, it matters that you make money. Dissolving the traditional slavery of the apprentice, the artificial barriers erected by the guild, we free up the laborer to be, in essence, an adventurer in the realm of substitution. The jack of all trades, the Casanova of skills, or, less prettily, the reserve army of the unemployed – it all results from and confirms a certain view of the tie between subject and his or her routines.

It isn’t that I want to push for a perfect similarity of substitution as it functions in the economic and erotic domain. However, that substitution in both is both a liberation and a threat seems indisputable. More disputeable, but a thesis I’m going to support anyway, is that the precarious balance between liberation and threat was felt throughout the social body in the 18th century, constituting the vibe of the dying order. And thus it is that I am interested in the substitutions in The sorrows of young Werther and Cosi fan Tutti.

But before I can go further, I need to go back to the very important conversation between Werther and Albert on August 12 – a day that changes the entire tone of the novel.

Zona Komiks!

“People are grieving,” said Ms. Goldsmith, a semiretired psychotherapist who counsels fellow residents of the Gleneagles Country Club, a gated community here. “There was a death. Their money died.”

The zona is proving to be quite the beast. Even LI, in whose head wheels of fire turn, and who could stick out his hand anytime to Jonah, Isaiah or Jeremiah and say, cousin, is surprised by the claws on this thing. Our own, perhaps naïve thought was that all the money in the world wasn’t going to help – that in fact, sooner or later, about 65 trillion dollars in derivatives would be nullified. A haircut! Think of the surprise lines drawn around a cartoon character whose been stunned by some sudden news – think of those surprise lines as a trillion each. Nothing, right? But lo and behold, looks like this magic money got comingled with real money. Magic money is, of course, the chief concern of all right thinking people, which is why AIG gets a nice little 30 billion dollar snack yesterday, and today the Bushies are for vetoing any aid to GM. GM evokes a lot of anger from the GOP crowd, because they realize that GM hired thousands and thousands of Union workers – the horror! Not like those wondrous AIG people, people you can recognize, people you might want to have a drink with, or go pussy-hunting with after a long hot day fleecing the rubes – in contrast with those greedhead workers, always trying to get health insurance and pensions. Imagine! It makes a person sick, it really does. Howwegonnastaycompetitive, as the economists always say. After they explain that trade deficits are nuthintoworryabout. That might seem contradictory, until you realize that the world in which innovative financial instruments lead to utopia is in a different column than laborflexibilitycreativedestructioncompetitiveadvantage and other words of that ilk, assuring us that maximizing inequality, stabilizing incomes and invest invest invest is the best thing in the whole world, though it does sometimes lead to crackup, the end of the atmosphere, endless war, and the stupidest sitting with riding crops poised on top of your neck and you watch your life turn into a senseless and pointless debttrap.

But, though it might break the bank and your heart, still, the zona has its charming side. It is funny! Surely this is the funniest depression ever. LI is serious – the best thing I’ve read about the ‘bubble’ so far is this fantastic article by Michael Lewis, of Liar Poker fame, in Portfolio. I read it last night, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

Recently, I read a buncha comments in various blogs mourning the passing of Michael Crichton. Those remarks puzzled me, because all of them would announce that Crichton was a lousy writer who seems to have been addictive. But why? And the plots that he apparently worked out seem, well, to have been either done before and better – Jurassic park, meet the lost world – or not worth doing. Contrast this with fi fiction – or faction, which is what Michael Lewis does. For one thing, he can write – he is definitely not clunky. He has the prose style of the Moviegoer - unsurprisingly, coming from Walker Percy's town. And for another thing, the characters he writes about, who inhabit Wall Street, are monsters ten times scarier than a band of people with star influenza, or who, I don’t know, conspire to trick the world into thinking global warming is a fact. But they are also, as supreme egotists with no culture, extremely funny. The things Lewis' characters do to ruin companies, the lives of individuals, and anybody who gets in their orbit merely to make the next million bucks have just that horror movie note of the unstoppable evil force. At the same time, it is wildly funny. The way they package instruments they don’t understand and sell them to each other is funny. The way they got America, where it is morning and Reagan is the sun, on the hook, the one that is dragging us under. This is what comedy is about. What’s not to love about these characters? Plus, they are real.

The hero of Lewis’ piece is a hedge funder named Steve Eisman. Eisman, like a Michael Crichton character, is set down in the midst of suspicious and whacky doings - Wall Street, 2003. As in Jurassic Park, there seemed to be something genetically suspicious going on – animals were getting bigger and bigger on resources that were lean enough to support merely a crop of mice. In what, to me, is the key to the whole fascinatin mystery, Eisman and his crew at FrontPoint, his fund, learn this:

At the end of 2004, Eisman, Moses, and Daniel shared a sense that unhealthy things were going on in the U.S. housing market: Lots of firms were lending money to people who shouldn’t have been borrowing it. They thought Alan Greenspan’s decision after the internet bust to lower interest rates to 1 percent was a travesty that would lead to some terrible day of reckoning. Neither of these insights was entirely original. Ivy Zelman, at the time the housing-market analyst at Credit Suisse, had seen the bubble forming very early on. There’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” Zelman says. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren’t real buyers. They were speculators.” Zelman alienated clients with her pessimism, but she couldn’t pretend everything was good. “It wasn’t that hard in hindsight to see it,” she says. “It was very hard to know when it would stop.” Zelman spoke occasionally with Eisman and always left these conversations feeling better about her views and worse about the world. “You needed the occasional assurance that you weren’t nuts,” she says. She wasn’t nuts. The world was.

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But he’d spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. “What most people don’t realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity world,” he says. “The equity world is like a fucking zit compared with the bond market.” He shorted companies that originated subprime loans, like New Century and Indy Mac, and companies that built the houses bought with the loans, such as Toll Brothers. Smart as these trades proved to be, they weren’t entirely satisfying. These companies paid high dividends, and their shares were often expensive to borrow; selling them short was a costly proposition.”

What is the meaning of the shift from 3 to 1 to 4 to 1? Well, we will hear, we are hearing, our ears are deaf with hearing, that we brought this on ourselves, us selfish pigs, overspending, never saving, bad bad bad people. Of course, this is a pile of shit. What this means is that housing prices were going up while the benefits of increased productivity went solely to the investor class. In actuality, people, selfish greedy pigpeople, were operating under the rational assumption that they were going to make more money as time went along. That is because they had four decades of experience in which, as time went along, they made more money: the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. What was different under the Great Fly’s years? They hit a wall. The wealth was spread among the wealthiest, while the little people – greedy fucks! – finally got shut out. After all, as suave economists like those who write for Freakonomics point out, the poor are really the lucky duckies – look at how prices for plastic tat from China have plunged! Why, Walmart is proof positive that the hillbillies are engrossing the benefits of free trade, free markets, and our wonderful health care system! While the rich (sob!) have to be content with taking the profits from the system for themselves. This makes the Freakonomic guys emotional, it really does.

Anyway, to get back to our pump and dump saga, Lewis shows Eisman and associates going to various new housing developments, talking to dealers in CDOs, and getting a feel for the New World. It is pod people time.

For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls held by Moody’s but not allowed to ask questions. The people at Moody’s were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007. By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. “But we’re sitting there,” Daniel recalls, “and he says to us, like he actually means it, ‘I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.’ And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, ‘What did you just say?’ as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as they left the meeting, “you’re delusional.”

I’d continue this story, but I’d rather just whet your appetite for it. Go and read the terrific Portfolio piece. Have a laugh! Then figure out how you are going to eat for the next coupla years.