demography and poetry

On July 4, 1793, a group of children coming from the faubourg Saint-Antoine shelter for foundlings paraded before the national convention in order to thank the deputies for the recent law that promised the principle of rights of succession to natural children. “You have shown yourself fathers in rendering to them the rights that they lost in being born in a manner one has always regarded as illegitimate,” declared the teacher of the children. “You did more: you have returned them to the social body… You have established the base of government upon equality.” In a few words, in its fashion, the Convention gave body to its promise. The astonishing and controversial law of 12 brumaire Year II (2 November 1793) accorded to illegitimate children, when they were recognized by their parents, rights of succession equal to those of legitimate children. The same law implicitly suppressed the customary right which permitted single mothers or their progeniture to petition for action in recognition of paternity in order to obtain a food pension.” - Susan Desan, What is a father? Illegitimacy and paternity of the Civil Code of Year II, Annales, 57:4 935.

So far, LI’s discussion of the issue of free love seems to follow the plot lines of various nests of gentle folks. In particular, the romantic movement in Germany as well as in England seems, when one examines it, an astonishingly close knit affair, with almost all participants being at one to two degrees separation from each other. It is this closeness which makes the history of German literature during its classical period seem so very much like a People magazine article about marriages and divorces among today’s young stars. It is a “small world” network. And yet, of course, it is operating in a much larger world – that Georg Forster ends up dying in Revolutionary Paris, writing his fascinating defenses of the French Revolution as a sort of embodiment, on the social plane, of physical laws (nobody at the time was more fascinated by the transfer of the term revolution from physics to society), connects, by one degree of separation, a generation of South Sea exploration, Tahiti, Captain Cook, and the extreme limit of the older form of imperialism to the new order with startling abruptness – it is by their degrees of separation that the poetry of social history is made by its unconscious agents.

In order to breath, however, LI has to periodically refocus. We’ve chosen free love as an ideology in the making, and love and suicide as two expressions of it, in order to bring us close to the conflicts that went into the birth and development of the culture of happiness. Of course, the participants did not think of themselves as particularly contesting happiness. Only in retrospect does one see how they diverged – as though separated by magic, magnetic fingers – from the bourgeois main. But that main itself was certainly involved in the wreck of the ancien regime – or one might say that it came through the fire as a new creature entirely. No salamander – but something more like a phoenix.

Desan rightly points out the conjunction of a seemingly progressive reform coupled with the collateral casualty suffered by a traditional usage – a “superstition”, if you will. Desan found that the implementation of the law, in fact, was rare – she used the Calvados department as her data base – and its terms confusing. LI suspects that the law is not only to be associated with the Terror, but to the strange rise, towards the end of the 18th century, in illegitimate births, coupled with the ‘dechristianization” of death that Paul Veyne has pointed out – orienting points that hint at a largescale collapse of beliefs across Europe.

Things fall apart.

- Edvard Munch, Death of Marat



According to no less an authority than Josiah Royce, to understand the philosophy of Schelling, one must understand Caroline Michaelis, his wife. In 1792, when she joined Therese Huber’s household, she was still Caroline Boehmer, recently widowed. Already August Wilhelm Schlegel was obsessed with her – and already she felt herself puzzingly superior to him, an intuition she was never to overcome. Later, after the occupation by the French and the counter-occupation by the forces of reaction, later, after Therese had fled to Strassbourg (which is when, apparently, she wrote Georg that she was leaving him for Hubner), after Georg left for Paris and received the condemnation of almost the entire German intelligentsia (poor mistaken Forster, Wilhelm Humboldt signed), and that after Therese might have written Caroline a letter giving her a green light for Caroline’s own affair with Georg, after the pregnancy with the unknown father, probably a French office, after being released from Mainz and exiled from her native town of Gottingen as a danger to morals and public order, she would be ‘rescued’ by Schlegel and cozened, cozening herself, into an loveless marriage, which broke up on the rocks when she finally met the man she did love, the young philosopher, Schelling. Caroline, it seems, spread her own version of what happened between Therese and Georg.

This pattern of split ups, rumor, and leftist politics is going to fasten to free love from the revolutionary period onward. The great charge against free love is its fissility – just as the great charge made against bourgeois love, from the standpoint of free love, is its creeping dissolution of the amorous impulse, which decays in the acids of repetition and over-familiarity. They fuck you up, your Mom and Dad. Love loses its courage, that side of its character that is a perpetual test. The family withdraws into its comforts, loses its curiosity and generosity, becomes fasco-tropic. Or as Shelley puts it later in the Notes on Queen Mab:

“Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution. Law pretends even to govern the indisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary affections of our nature. Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve.

How long then ought the sexual connection to last? what law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgement should that law be considered which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits of the object.
The state of society in which we exist is a mixture of feudal savageness and imperfect civilization. The narrow and unenlightened morality of the Christian religion is an aggravation of these evils. It is not even until lately that mankind have admitted that happiness is the sole end of the science of ethics, as of all other sciences; and that the fanatical idea of mortifying the flesh for the love of God has been discarded. I have heard, indeed, an ignorant collegian adduce, in favour of Christianity, it's hostility to every worldly feeling!*
But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and and disunions; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits.”

If we spread the deck of cards, circa 1793 to 1893, what houses do we see? The Forsters, the Shelley-Owens, the Herzens. Oda Krohg-Hans Jaeger. The Przybyszewskas. Blok-Bely.

...
Love generates two overlapping and yet contradictory semiotic fields. In one field, love is the essence of liberty. “Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty” wrote Shelley – variations of the same phrase are doubtlessly to be found in the letters of the whole generation of romantic writers. All other choices are determined, more or less, by need. Love, though, is the very angel of free will, bursting forth from the casements of the heart in one spontaneous moment, sword upraised. Love in this field, then, is the opposite of need, and those things which bear the mark of need, either physical or social, are either ignored or subsumed in the presence of true love. Both sex and money fall under this law. If we confine ourselves to this field, we could say that free love aligns itself in perfect opposition to the old libertinism, the old eighteenth century materialism. That free love demands the free giving and taking of sexual delight by no means affects this anti-sensual and anti-social turn. In the eighteen century, the sexual arrangements of the great aristocrats gradually flowed into the great bourgeois households and opinions, but they brought forth romantic love, as the enemy of that calculation, of that agreeableness – and beyond that, the antithesis of libertinism, free love.

On the other hand, another semiotic field folds over the one of liberty. “Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness”, Shelley also wrote. The old story is that love does not come out from the heart as the central identifying act – it has, instead, an exterior power all its own, and imposes itself. If this is freedom, it is a freedom that gravitates to metaphors of captivity. If in this field, the beloved isn’t necessary the way satisfying a sexual appetite is necessary, this is because the beloved exists in a space beyond physical necessity. This second field plays around the edges of the first one, and out of the interference between the two there gradually emerges images not of the angel of sex, but of the vampire, the femme fatale.

a humble suggestion for a whole new model of Value at Risk

- Alfred Kubin

Sunday’s article by Joe Nocera about the rise and apparent fall of Values at Risk models, which were used by banks, hedgefunds, ponzi schemes and assorted big and little fish, as well as their captive regulators, to justify mad and bad leverage, has caused a lot of commenting on the financial blogs – Yves Smith, hat treasure, provided, as usual, the hectoring chorus, with that radiant skepticism which always sets apart the Wall Street dissident from the usual greed jughead, seeing in Nocera’s simplifications that cool anaesthesia of conventional wisdom which, at the moment, is the way the financial press has been self-medicating itself. It is a story that will no doubt stretch on for years – the story of how everything will return to what it used to be after a few knobs are pushed, a few wires are connected.

The model talk is, to an extent, disingenuous, dancing around the question of whether we would really want a financial system that sucks up such appreciable amounts of capital for the purpose of making a very few people very rich. The financial system is, at best, built upon rents – in itself, it adds little to the prospects of humankind. And, of course, when it swells into a force similar to that which has poisoned our culture and way of life since the early nineties, no small benefit it adds will balance the barbarization that it produces, the insect like calculation it introduces into every crevice and hole of our lives. Teaching the insects to enjoy the insecticide is, of course, an old rule in elite governance, but there are limits!

However, instead of a model that takes transforms non-linear processes into a pleasingly single number, good to use over the whole portfolio of security instruments, LI would suggest that Wall Street look to literature for a better model. Most notably, Balzac’s story of the Peau de Chagrin. Chagrin is usually translated as Wild ass – The Wild Ass’s skin is George Saintsbury’s translation. It is a story ripped from today’s headlines, so to speak. Raphael, the protagonist, is a young man who has lived so largely that he is now bankrupt. One day, thinking about suicide, he goes into an antiquary’s shop and finds a skin, upon which is printed, in Sanskrit, the following message:

“Possessing me thou shalt possess all things, but they life is mine, for God has so willed it. Wish, and they wishes shall be fulfilled; but measure they desires, according to the life that is in thee. This is thy life, with each wish I must shrink, even as they own days. Wilt thou have me? Take me. God Will hearken unto thee. So be it.”

Which means, basically, that every wish shrinks the talisman, and every diminishment of the talisman diminishes the number of days left to the wisher. The wishes, the shrinkage, and death will all combine in one moment. The antiquary, of course, tries to warn Raphael from his own exotic experience (“Yes, I have seen the whole world. I have learned all the languages, lived after every manner. I have lent a Chinaman money, taking his father’s corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab’s tent on the security of his bare word, signed contracts in every capital in Europe, and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams”), but of course Raphael is not to be moved by the cautiousness of an earlier generation.

Well, the U.S. economy has been one enormous Peau de chagrin. And last autumn we decided to re-write the contract, wish back the wishes. It is as if one of the wishes could be to make the talisman grow back again. But this is the limit of the contract. One can’t contract to enjoy the wishes and then wish that the conditions be changed. They go together. The rule of talismans are impervious to the chiseling of logicmongers and traders. We watch the traders hang on, though, hang on and on to their precious skins. One more wish. Bring back the effortless profits! The bonuses! Seize the money from somewhere! Bring on the dancing, captive economists, let them predict good times!

"Quite so," said the man of science. "I understand. The remains of any
substance primarily organic are naturally subject to a process of
decay. It is quite easy to understand, and its progress depends upon
atmospherical conditions. Even metals contract and expand appreciably,
for engineers have remarked somewhat considerable interstices between
great blocks of stone originally clamped together with iron bars. The
field of science is boundless, but human life is very short, so that
we do not claim to be acquainted with all the phenomena of nature."

"Pardon the question that I am about to ask you, sir," Raphael began,
half embarrassed, "but are you quite sure that this piece of skin is
subject to the ordinary laws of zoology, and that it can be
stretched?"

"Certainly----oh, bother!----" muttered M. Lavrille, trying to stretch
the talisman. "But if you, sir, will go to see Planchette," he added,
"the celebrated professor of mechanics, he will certainly discover
some method of acting upon this skin, of softening and expanding it."

the revolution of ugly men

Events in Mainz in 1792 (continuing the thread broken off before I went to mexico)

In 1792, Georg Forster had ended up in Mainz, a city in Hesse. The region had become a conflict zone between the French revolutionary armies and the various armies of the coalition formed under the terms of the Brunswick manifesto, to rescue the ancien regime, i.e. the house of Bourbon.

Forster was overworked as the head of the archive and library. At the beginning of 1792, he had not taken a public political stance, although in private letters he expressed a clear sympathy for the Jacobins. He was hiding from his wife Therese the exact extent of his indebtedness, which was crushing – Georg Forster was never a prudent man when it came to cash.

Therese seems to have been emotionally and intellectually of the left. Geiger, her biographer, in 1909, found this so scandalous that he tried to mitigate it by claiming that Therese was Forster’s ‘pupil’. It was far more likely she was his comrade. This marriage and its failure has attracted a host of commentators who have puzzled themselves over the fact that Therese left Georg for another man, and yet the two seemed to rely on each other even after the separation. The solution – that their sexual incompatibility did not hinder their affinity with each other on the basic level of friendship – seems too shocking to propose – especially for those who want to tell a story of betrayal. But Therese seems to have cared for Georg, although she didn’t love him.

The man she did love was Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, a Prussian official and intimate of Schiller. Therese met Huber through Forster, in 1788. In 1790, Huber was living with the married couple. Therese was moving in a direction taken by her mother – who lived with her lover in the house of her husband:

We stood in a doubtful relationship one to another for 1 ½ years. In the beginning I pushed him away, everything now came together, he wanted to forget [his relationship to his fiancé, Dorothea Stock], and a miserable doctor pulled him away from the border of the grave. The noble, humane Forster saw a lot in the young man, drew him nearer, I became used to him, he saw me for a year and went through all the gradation of feeling, my unhappiness strengthened my love for him – although I though of none – finally circumstances offered a hand. I don’t know in which moment, before we could guess ourselves, he had exposed to me his relationship with that girl. I pondered the thing and found decisively the result: he must confess to her that he didn’t love her any more, that time had changed his feeling, that he had no more rights upon her heart. … “ As Therese says, it took 2 ½ years for Huber to come to this point.

Some biographers have said that Therese Huber used her status, when Forster was dead, to suppress much of the information about what was happening in Mainz in 1792.

If the scene was not loaded for an explosion yet – a disaffected couple, sickly children, an overworked world famous intellectual, the French revolutionary army in the area, the wife’s lover in the house – into this scene came Caroline Michaelis.
Why Therese would invite her school friend Caroline, lately widowed, to stay with the household in Mainz is a puzzle. Or perhaps it isn’t – perhaps Therese, out of fairness, wanted Georg to have a lover too. Although Georg was not sexually faithful, apparently he had sex in the approved way, with lower class girls.

Caroline was of course as strong willed as Therese. Caroline’s letters from Mainz give another account of the Forster-Huber household. It is a sign of how narrowly the circles intersect that he chief correspondent was Meyer, the writer who had been Therese’s admirer – who “took” her virginity from her, according to Therese in an ambiguous reference. Surely Caroline knew about that. Even before she went to Mainz,she had written to Meyer: “I have never depended on her friendship – among women, there can be none.”

Soon Caroline is writing in a more sympathetic way about Georg. In particular, she writes a letter linking the ugly men of the revolution – Mirabeau, ostensibly – with her own “beauteous” figure. Strikingly, Caroline “reads” herself into her situation – which has forever been the subject of speculation – with Georg by reading Mirabeau’s famous at the time letters to his lover, Sophie, of which she writes to Luise, her correspondent, that she should read them, except that she imagines Luisa won’t have time, and won’t read in bed, being more inclined to sleep, and is too “good” for a “ugly monster” [hassliche Bosewicht] as the extraordinary Mirabeau was, who had virtues and talents enough to supply a thousand normal people, and too much true intelligence to seriously be a monster, as one can conclude out of particular features. He may have been ugly, he says that often enough in the letters – but he loved Sophie, for women certainly don’t love the beauty of men – and yet the ugly man imposes himself through his exterior on the unruly masses…”

We remember, of course, the striking ugliness of Georg Forster. And that, too, of Chamfort. A revolution of ugly men.

from the other shore

My friend R., M.’s husband, is skeptical of my book. Unfortunately, at one point I described my project as “against happiness” – which is true in a complicated sense. Still, R. quotes that back at me – he has a good ear for the ridiculous things I say. And that phrase certainly goes against R.’s New Left politics.

On New Years Eve, we were all in Malinalco. Chepe has a country house there. I’d previously been down there in 2005. It is a compound of three houses – one is Chepe and Tania’s house, one is a guest house, and one is the house that Tania’s mother lives in. It is a perfect place for long, wordy afternoons, as though cut from a Tom Stoppard play. We all drink, smoke and snack, waiting for dinner, which will be the trout M. bought from the market about half a mile away. The kids throw each other into the cold swimming pool behind Tania’s mother’s house – we can hear them shriek. Friends and relatives show up, say hi, disappear.

M., in the hammock, complains to me that the beginning of the Sorrows of Werther, which she is thinking of teaching to her students this semester on my recommendation, is too lachrymose. Why did I suggest it? I make a few suggestions as to what is historically important in Werther. R. interjects that Werther is not new – that the treatment of love ending in suicide is prefigured in the medieval romance literature, as Denis de Rougemont shows. And he says, Werther is a jerk.

M. says she isn’t going to teach her class that her husband thinks Werther is a jerk. Who cares if R. thinks Werther is a jerk?

Tatiana draws up a chair. She enjoys the fuss R., M. and I are making. She doesn’t say much, but smokes and watches. I reply that there is something different happening in Werther than, say, in the Arthurian romances. One has to have a sense for how history enters the system of the passions. That, I say, has to do with the synthesis between a sentiment, a situation, and a sanction – I reference Durkheim and Ogien. It is in the forging of these syntheses, in the interstices, that we can make a history of the passions possible. So, in particular, we should take the household demographic situation of Europe in the 18th century, which is much different than in the eleventh century, and use it as a reference for understanding how certain syntheses produce sentiments. In particular, with the love-choice marriage, the question arises whether love is the kind of thing described by a longer synthesis, or whether shorter, intense syntheses are at its base.

But R. is not convinced by this, and insists that Werther nevertheless represents an old, Christian thematic of coupling love with death. And that, he says, is a reiteration of an old familiar nihilism, which buffers all the old institutions. What he demands, he says, by way of Marx, Nietzsche and Deleuze, is not my syntheses, which all fall under the notion of the negation of the negation, but an affirmation of an affirmation – love affirmed as it is, in life. We have to get past the clutter of guilt and shame that have been built around the life processes.

My problem with this, I say, is that it is the wrong way to start the investigation. Our material should first be seen as it is, as it is performed, materialized in performance. Whether I reject the coupling of life and death or not, as a social phenomena, the thematic exists. I’m more interested in how to account for it so that I can see how it changes.

I don’t disagree with you from the view of the historian, R. says.

At this point, a couple appears in the yard, coming from Tania’s mother’s house. Hola, everybody says. I say, we are talking about love and happiness. Tatiana laughs.

ps - my review of Patrick Tyler's history of U.S. foreign relations with the Middle East since Eisenhower was published today here.

revolts - intestinal and otherwise

I flew in from Mexico on New Year’s Day. And around six o’clock that night, a little bug crept out from my intestinal fauna and launched a popular revolt against my oons and being by forcing me to vomit copiously every forty five minutes. Alas, copiously does not describe how much my stomach can contain – I’ve never been one of nature’s trencherman. Rather, I have the delicate stomach of a 14 year old schoolgirl considering ballet as a career.

So I went to sleep for 24 hours, waking up now and then to swallow sugared water.

Apparently my organism has recovered. My mind hasn’t fully recovered, however – I have a notebook stuffed with comments I was going to post, here, but an almost insurmountable sloth stands in the way of that ever happening.

So, as a form of light entertainment, here are some comments on the unconsciously hilarious NYT article about Egypt that appeared this morning, under Steve Erlanger’s by-line. One of my wilder predictions for this New Year is that Egypt, which resembles Iran under the Shah, without the oil money, will undergo a revolution. This is simply an intuition – as the Israelis slaughter more and more Gaza Palestinians on the principle, apparently, that nobody can stop them, my intuition tells me that Egypt, heavily dependent on handouts from Saudi Arabia and the U.S., will be on the receiving end of the real collateral damage. Erlanger’s clueless analysis, which could easily have been written by a man locked in the bowels of the Heritage Foundation instead of a man supposedly walking the streets of Cairo, has all the earmarks of a report from a protectorate that is going down.

“CAIRO — Egypt is the crucial, if reluctant, intermediary between Israel and Hamas, which is no great friend of this moderate secular state. Still, a sustained Israeli ground operation in neighboring Gaza would sharply increase public pressure on President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to do more to help the Palestinians there.

Few criticize Mr. Mubarak himself, and there are widespread feelings here that the radical group Hamas provoked the current crisis. Yet there is unhappiness with the government’s relative silence about Israel’s bombing campaign and its Palestinian victims, and with the apparent lack of diplomatic pressure from Cairo on Israel and the United States to stop the fighting.”

This is lovely reporting. The “widespread feeling”, the mushmouthed “unhappiness with the government’s relative silence…” – truly, this is the kind of reporting you get when your introductions all come from the American embassy. “Few criticize Mr. Mubarak himself” – what can one say? Perhaps Mr. Erlanger might have sought an intro to the jails, to find out what happens to those disaffected few who don’t share the ‘widespread’ feeling among Egypt’s cocktail set. This kind of reporting shares the willful blindness of CIA reports coming out of Iran in 1978 – a little bazaari discontent, nothing that a little sulfur and flint can’t take care of.

Since Egypt is an authoritarian society in which there is nothing like a ‘democracy’ – our favorite word, covering a multitude of American sins in the Middle East, the thing and cause we are always ardently supporting but somehow, through an evil voodoo, end up not supporting at all, and in fact crushing in any of its manifestations – the NYT has to reach around to find kindly, soothing words – an alka seltzer rhetoric shake. Thus the talk of a “moderate secular state”., which is another way of saying, apparently, “a dictatorship by an eighty year old man”.

Most enjoyable is the contrast Erlanger draws between the complicatedness of things and, uh, reality:

“Given the continuing Israeli occupation of much of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, deep divisions among Palestinians and a Gaza controlled by Hamas, the Egyptian government “must make difficult choices,” he said.
“Egypt is working for peace while trying to work realistically with the situation in Gaza, where a radical group took over the territories next to Sinai, a sensitive subject for Egypt,” Mr. Said continued. “So Egypt is trying to support Palestinian humanitarian needs, but not allow a radical group to control the situation, dominate the Palestinian issue or affect Egyptian internal politics.”

But such complications are not easy for most Egyptians to grasp, especially when they see the constant repetition of images of Israeli bombs and dead Palestinians on Al Jazeera.”

Erlanger’s article has to bridge so many complications that it finally lapses into incoherence, as ‘widespread support’ for Mubarak is reduced, in the last paragraph, into an impotent unpopularity:

Ms. Malky, the editor at Daily News Egypt, said that the government is making it clear it wants Hamas to fail. “They’re afraid of the internal situation,” she said. “They don’t want a successful Islamic or Muslim Brotherhood experiment on their own border.

But she warned that unpopularity should not be confused with weakness. “The perception of the government in the feelings of the masses is deteriorating,” she said. “But their power and ability to contain whatever dissent may come out has not been shaken in the least.”

Yes, this is a riskier prediction than those I pronounced at the beginning of last year – it was easy to see that the U.S. economy was going down, while what do I know about Egypt? Yet the combination here of a worldwide recession, the indifference of the Egyptian elite to the murder of Palestinians, and the contrast between the external impotence of the state and its internal omnipotence in crushing dissent are precisely the factors that lead to revolution. Countering which is the eternal inertia of things. Usually, it is better to bet on inertia – it almost always comes in first. But Gaza doesn’t seem to be ending…

sex and the city

I lost my reading glasses in the surf of Playa de la Cuesta, and came back to Mexico City to deal with the duality this introduces into my life. My real glasses are good for the middle distance and beyond, but they take a dim view of print, or the handling of small objects. So I can walk down the street with confidence, but put me in a bookstore and, peering through my glasses, I see all the print as black blotches, as though it had melted and run in the rain of my myopia. My simple solution was to find some reading glasses, but this proved harder than I imagined. In the U.S., you go into a drug store or a supermarket and there they are, the ancient mariner´s friends, on a rack. In Mexico City, this seems not to be the case. So I gave up, but today, wandering lonely as a cloud down a street in the Centro, I spotted reading glasses. I tried some on, attracting, inevitably, a salesperson who hovered around me, and to whom I had to explain, in a parody of baby Spanish that seems, on every outing, to get more and more incomprehensible to the people at whom I am aiming it, that I had lost my reading glasses and had no prescription. So he showed me some, and I bought a pair for 40 pesos that have turned out to be less than useful. However, as I was paying, I looked around the shop and realized it was a sex shop. Mexico is always surprising me. Perhaps the owners decided that the old story, that jerking off causes blindness, might be true, and provided the glasses as a service to old and faithful clients.