some notes for saturday

It is a point that is not often enough stressed that one of Marx and Engels co-editors on their newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, was a man named Ernst Dronke whose major claim to fame was as a chronicler of low-life and Polizei Geschichte. Marx’s well known affection for Balzac, whose police stories were one of great unifying threads in the Comedie Humaine, was matched in his real life, the period of his greatest political activity, by his own involvement in decrying the police tactics and the laws concerning certain “little things” – such as the laws against gathering wood for fuel in private forests passed by the Rheinische Landstag, against which Marx pointed his lance as early as 1842.

Without my expecting or planning it, it seems that the tree from the Chuangtze haunts the Human Limit.

I’ve been pondering in my off hours the way in which commodities – say in dead wood in the underbrush – not only get up and lead a secret life in the world of Capital, but, in so doing, evoke the organization of the police and the attempt to follow and control the most private of routines – for instance, the one that connects the cells in your brains to the distilled spirits in your stomach – which is, one might say, the political side of the secret life of commodities….

…

There’s been a recent controversy about happiness and militant dysphoria over at Ads Without Products to which I contributed my predictable pence. I liked it that the argument fingered the tropes I would have predicted in just the way I would have predicted, with everything centered around the inability to imagine that there could be any ideal but happiness, and at the same time leaving that massive signifier as blank as the eyes of any idol, any dug up statue, from any long sunk dynasty. One must infer the vision…
…

But to get back to the world of little things, especially the little things that get you drunk… or that in some way interfere with the state’s desire for the paradigm consciousness (which at that time was a nice cleared Lockean blank slate – land for the tilling, a property, and not common land debauched by vile liquids). Jessica Warner’s Craze is not only the history of that brief time in which gin was drunk in killing quantities, but of the attempt, by the state, to stop it. This involved using informers – not to betray a dissident religious or political sect, but to betray a consumer choice. While the state’s fight against smuggling had long used informers, I am going to tentatively claim that the act of 1736 which made it a crime to sell gin without an expensive license, intentionally available to few, introduced something new: a much more concentrated use of informers to control ordinary life. Here, indeed, was a contradiction in proto-capitalism: the elite – like Walpole – who depended on the money flowing in from the tax on spirits and the support of the great brewers were also confronted with a popular movement that lay outside of religion, politics, or ideology. Not of course that the movement didn’t develop an ad hoc ideology in its defense, one that caught hold of the theme of liberty. The gin acts, which go up to the 1750s, provoked riots. And they marked, Warner claims, a brief but telling victory of the urban obscure – artisans, maids, construction workers, etc – over the police powers of the establishment. She does not connect this with a revolt that happened later on, in America, sparked by, among other things, two of the little things, sugar and tea. However, as within, so without – the magic warrant for our inverted universal history seems to hold, here.

I am become death

There is a beautiful passage in Logique du sens – a book that tugs at me as I think about intoxicants and the Mordspiel. And not only intoxicants – the little things that loom large for Schloezer move eerily between addiction and normality. In the biography of Thomas Beddoes, the radical doctor friend of Coleridge and Humphrey Davy, we read these thoughts from the great man, circa 1800:

“The use of salt as a condiment to meagre diet as to potatoes only he condemns upon the authority of Dr Darwin as injurious. He considers it as having a great share in inducing glandular relaxation and tending to the production of scrophula. Could opium he enquires be used as a substitute in minute quantities? He hesitates in recommending it for fear of its leading to the adoption of bad habits. It is probable however, he adds, that some seasoning for poor food which did not increase the production of sensorial power and at the same time promote the expenditure of this power might be found. Between the oriental spices and the garlick of the French there is great choice. An obstacle to the introduction of that seasoning which may have the best title to supplant salt may be apprehended in the prejudices and habits of the people but is this a reason why we should not immediately set about to ascertain which that best seasoning is? It cannot be adopted before it is known The seeds of benefit to the human race have generally been sown for ages before any fruit became ripe for gathering.”


The meager diet of the poor and how to create the necessary illusion that it stretched to fit the exigencies of the rulers – that is the question.

Not only for the rulers, but for the universal historian. For whom I interpose my translation of the 15th series, of singularities, from Deleuze:

“The two moments of sense, impassibility and genesis, neutrality and productivity, are not such that one could pass for the appearance of the other. The neutrality, the impassibility of the event, its indifference to the determinations of interior and exterior, of individual and collective, of the particular and the general, etc. are very much a constant without which the event would not possess an eternal truth and wouldn’t be distinguishable from its temporal effectuations. If the battle is not one example of an event among others, but the event in its essence, this is without doubt because it is effectuated in many ways at the same time, and that each participant can grasp it on a level of a different effectuation in its variable present: hence for the comparisons that have become classic between Stendhal, Hugo, Tolstoy such that they “see” the battle and make their heroes see it. But it is principally because the battle “flies above” [survole] its proper field, neutral by relation to all its temporal effectuations, neutral and impassible by relation to the winners and the defeated, by relation to the cowards and the braves, and even more terrible because of all of that, never present, always already to come and already passed, only being able to be grasped by the will that it inspires itself to the anonymous, the will that must be called “indifference” in a soldier wounded mortally, keeping himself there where the event is, and thus participating in its terrible impassibility. Where is the battle? It is on this account that the soldier sees himself flee when he flees, and leap when he leaps, determined to consider each temporal effectuation from the very eternal height of the event incarnate in it and, alas, in his proper flesh. Still, it taks a long conquest for the soldier to arrive at this moment beyond courage and cowardliness to that of the pure grasp of the event by a “voluntary intuition”, that is to say, by the will that makes him the event, distinct from all the other empirical intuitions that correspond to these effectuations.”

To fly above – survoler – doesn’t this sound like dissociation? It is common, in the lumbering reports of the sexologist and the tendentious anecdotes of the psychologist, to encounter the trope of the out of body experience during sex. Women, for instance, who feel the braces of the body slide away and, loosened, float above the couple on the bed in their embraces. Is this vision from the ceiling a vision of the event? What else could it be, in Deleuze’s terms. Above the bed or the battlefield, soldier or lover, it is at this high point that the neurotic, the traumatized, and the universal historian meet and – to the latter’s respectable horror – join. One might call this the moment of perverted solitude – for solitude will not be downed or drowned in the mingling of bodies. Funny that Deleuze does’t mention either the Iliad or the Bhagavad-gita at this point. Oppenheimer, watching the atom bomb bloom in the New Mexico desert, recalled, famously: “A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line form the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says: Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” [In Atomic Fragments: a daughter’s questions, 235]

little things and the deathgame

World history, Ludwig Schlözer wrote in 1787, was synonymous with the history of “Erfindung” – a word that can mean either discovery or invention.
“Everything that makes for a noble progress or regress among mankind, every new important idea, every new kind of behavior, pregnant with consequences, which the rulers, priests, fashion or accident enduringly bring among a mass of men should be called by us, out of a lack of a more appropriate word, invention.” [67 Weltgeschichte]

Invention or discovery – this, Schlözer thought, was the secret hero of history. Not the discoverer, necessarily: “The inventors (alphzai) themselves are mostly unknown. Often they don’t deserve to be eternalized: than not seldom, simply accident lead a weak head to a discovery, that only later generations learned to use.”

It was also the secret of Europe’s dominance. For small Europe was the ground zero of discovery. Europe, not coincidentally, defined discovery – the verb preeminently described the European act or gaze. America, to use the most obvious instance, may have been seen by millions of its children, and yet it was only when it was seen by Europeans that it was discovered. Thus, like the meat in a nutshell, crack open the word discovery and you find universal history itself before you.

It is a curiously non-heroic heroic history. Schlözer, one of Germany’s truly Enlightened intellectuals, was ruthlessly mocking of an older, heroic history that placed kings merely because they were kings at the center of historical action.

“It goes back to the decadent taste for the deathgames (Mordspielen) of old and new man-murderers, named heros! Lets not rejoice any longer in the smoking war histories of conquerors (Eroberer), that is, over the passionate story of these evil doers who have lead nations by the nose! But for the present believe that the still musing of a genius and the soft virtue of a wise man has brought about greater revolutions than the storms of the greatest bloodthirsty tyrant; and that many happier sorites have ornamented the world more than the fists of millions of warriors have desolated it.”

Given this shift in the emphasis on what history – world history – is about, it isn’t surprising that Schlözer wants us to see the “little things” as the great ones: “… the discovery of fire and of glass, carefully recounted, and the advent of smallpox, of brandy, of potatoes in our part of the world, shouldn’t be left unremarked, and so one shouldn’t be ashamed to take more notice of the exchange of wool for linen in our clothing than to seriously and purposefully deal with the dynasties of Tze, Leang, and Tschin.”

Schlözer’s separation of the ‘little things that one shouldn’t be ashamed of noticing’ and the deathgames of the tyrants would not, of course, survive the scrutiny of a master of world history like Marx. He would notice that deathgames are ingrained in those little things, and those little things are engrained in the deathgames. We kidnap Africans to raise sugar cane to make rum to intoxicate the sailors who kidnap Africans. This circle of biota, human bodies, taste buds, brain cells, and money can be named circulation, lightly lifting up the name given by Harvey to the movement of blood in the body. Looked at, as Fielding did (whose Enquiry uses the word circulation to discuss London “life”), one sees that a creation story that separates the liquids and the solids won’t do. In a sense, the Fielding of the Journal to London, being eased of the deathgame at play in his body by being drained of his built up liquids, is an emblem of the monster-London he depicts in the Enquiry, where the solids – the solid division of the classes, recognized in the law statutes he cites that go back to Richard I – are melting under the “torrent” of currency, and the liquids – the circulation of traffic in the street – are solidifying under the ambush of robbers.

Time- in qualudes and red wine

Time is waiting in the wings

While it may seem that the history of the happiness culture and the history of policing are on two entirely different trajectories, they really aren’t. When the bond between the governors and the governed becomes that of a project of collective happiness – even and especially in the form of a government that permits the pursuit of individual happiness – then Nemesis, the gaze in which the happiness of some is exactly the cause of the unhappiness of others, is going to be at its crack work. That is, even as the edifice of collective happiness is built, the cracks in the edifice give rise to surveillance and order. And this order is embodied in the policeman. The eighteenth century brought about both the outlines of the modern paradigm of happiness and the project of substituting a government hired and supported police force for the old order of private justice, an old order that made do with private thief catchers, private ransoms for goods stolen, and enforcement of norms by ad hoc crowds, charivaris and the like.

Jessica Warner uses Fielding’s ‘Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers’ as a sort of boundary marker that indicates the end of the almost fifty year long moral panic about gin. Much of Fielding’s language – about the dangers of idleness and drunkenness among what he calls the lower sort – has by this time achieved a canonical status in the battle between the reformers and a political establishment that was quite comfortable with using the tax revenues from gin to fight its battles. As Fielding complains that gin is debauching the child in its mother’s womb, making him unfit for soldiering latter on, the soldiers were literally being paid out of the proceeds from taxing gin.

The question of idleness is still a hot one in the history of the industry revolution. The old Marxist claim was that the industrial revolution sucked the time, and thus the life, out of the worker. In the 60s, the group around E.P. Thompson claimed that the increase in working time through the eighteenth century was to be judged in terms of the intesification of labor A 1998 paper by Hans Joachim Voth, Time and Work in 18th century London, surveys the standard positions, the most interesting one being as follows:

“The importance of holy days in England before and during the Industrial Revolution has been a matter of discussion for some time. Herman Freudenberger and Gaylord Cummins added another aspect to the issue of labor intensification when they argued that the observance of holy days was sharply reduced during the eighteenth century.5 The basis of their contention is a list of holy days contained in a handbook published by J. Millan in 1749.6 He gives 46 fixed days on which work at the Exchequer and other government offices ceased. Later, during the second half of the century, the observance of these holy days is said to have vanished slowly. Consequently, Freudenberger and Cummins argue, annual labor input possibly in- creased from less than 3,000 to more than 4,000 hours per adult male between 1750 and 1 800.”

Others have expressed their doubt about all this:

“N.F.R. Crafts, commenting on the substantial body of literature that suggests an increase in the number of working hours per year observed that "[m]easurement of this supposition has never been adequately accomplished.'"'11 Joel Mokyr concurs: 12 "We simply do not know with any precision how many hours were worked in Britain before the Industrial Revolution, in either agricultural or non-agricultural occupations."

Voth, however, thinks he has found a clever way to accomplish this measurement, at least in London. He took 7,650 cases found in the "Proceedings of the Sessions of the Peace, and Oyer and Terminer for the City of London and County of Middlesex" and analyzed the testimonies of witnesses about their time use.

“Crimes are committed on all days of the week, during all seasons of the year. All hours of the day are present in the sample. We can thus replicate a method for measuring time-use that modem-day sociologists favor: random-hour recall."9 In modem surveys, individuals participating in the study are asked to provide a thorough description of their activities for a randomly chosen hour of an earlier day. Very much the same occurs in front of a court when witnesses are asked to testify. Witnesses very often not only mention their occupation and sex (and, in a substantially lower number of cases, age and address), but also report what they were doing at the time of the crime, at the time when they last saw the victim, or when they observed the perpetrator trying to escape.”

From his sample, Voth has concluded that, as Freudenberger and Cummins claim, there was a crash of holidays and offdays in the last fifty years of the 18th century. In particular, Monday, which was a day often taken off by working men, gradually became a regular work day. Plus, of course, the holiday schedule was radically shortened. Voth concludes that the working year rose from approximately 2,763 hours in 1760 to 3,501 in 1800. Voth believes this solves a puzzle: how is it that wages fell during this time, but consumption rose? In fact, as in our own time, the rise in consumption and lifestyle was coupled with the rise in working hours. In the U.S., it is estimated that the average median household puts in 350 more hours per year now than it did in 1970. Hours haven’t risen for the male worker, but the female in the household is now much more likely to work – hence the rise. And the further rise in consumption even as wages for the male worker stagnate.

this beatitude comes in terror - replay

This April post should really, I think, be on the margin of these Fielding posts. And I don't think it got enough attention at the time. So I'm pasting it here, a sort of onlooker text.


"It would be impossible to film this. It would be impossible that is to score the film to a proper time. There is the rhythm of time given by the historian, with its units – “the age”, for instance – of varying duration in which the content somehow determines the boundaries of the unit, and there is the real time, which opens up, upon being represented, to an audience who must trade their own real time for it, and there is slow mo and fastforward, which operate on the object of representation, the film, to create a difference in the content that picks up things unseen in real time.

This is a site and an occurrence. The site is London in the eighteenth century – a time cue. Three things happen. One, William Hogarth publishes The Four Stages of Cruelty in 1751. It is another of Hogarth’s series of etchings, this one depicting Tom Nero’s inevitable ascent into murder. The first of the etchings depicts acts of cruelty to animals. The Tate has a succinct description of the etching: “The worst abuse is being inflicted by Nero, who pushes an arrow into the anus of a terrified dog being restrained by two other boys. Another youth is distressed by what Nero is doing and attempts to stop him by offering a tart. To the left of Nero, a boy draws a hanged man on the wall and points at him, underlining the inevitable: that Nero’s behaviour will deteriorate further and cost him his life.” Lichtenberg will write about these etchings. So will Kant, in his most extended consideration of animals as the Analoga of humans in the lectures on moral philosophy, where he writes, for instance, that “when, for example, a dog has long served his master truly, so that is the analogon of service [Verdienstes]; for this reason I must reward it and sustain the dog until the end, when it can no longer serve.”



Two, in 1745 or thereabouts, in Princess Street, Emmanuel Swedenborg has his first vision. This post is about that vision… But wait…

Third event, if we want to call these things events: John Long publishes his book, John Long’s Voyages and Travels in the Years 1768-1788 in 1791, and in one paragraph, he quietly introduces a new word into the English language:

“One part of the religious superstition of the savages consists in each of them having his totem, or favorite spirit, which he believes watches over him. This totem, they conceive, assumes the shape of some beast or other, and therefore they never kill, hunt or eat the animal whose form they think this totem bears.”

Explaining this savage belief, Long delves into civilized history:

‘This idea of destiny, or, if I may be allowed the phrase, “totemism”, however strange, is not confined to the savages; many instances might be adduced from history to prove how strong these impressions have been on minds above the vulgar and unlearned. For instance one in the history of the private life of Louis XV, translated by Justamond; among some particulars of the life of the famous Samuel Bernard, the Jew banker of the court of France, he says that he was superstitious as the people of his nation are, and had a black hen to which he thought his destiny was attached; he had the greatest care taken on her, and the loss of this fowl was, in fact, the period of his own existence, in January, 1739.” (112)

Long himself was assigned a totem, the Beaver. It was tattooed on his body.

So, let us turn to Swedenborg. Two totemic quotes, incised in this non-space, to begin with:

It often happened to me subsequently, he said, to have the eyes of my spirit open, to see in full daylight what happens in the other world, and to converse with angels and spirits like I speeka with men.
- Jacques Matter, 79

This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or absence,- a getting out of their bodies to think. All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints,- a beatitude, but without any sign of joy; earnest, solitary, even sad; "the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to the alone"; Muesiz, the closing of the eyes,- whence our word, Mystic. The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. – Emerson, Swedenborg, the mystic

Swedenborg was the son of a bishop, an expert on metals (just as Newton worked at the Royal English mint , Swedenborg was apparently called in by the Swedish treasury to work on the silver purity of the coins), and a general polymath. Long after his death, his posthumous papers on the brain were published. Together with the Animal Kingdom, a book he published in the 1740s, these, according to Charles Gross, in his history of the neuroscience of vision, show that somehow, Swedenborg made certain deductions about the division of labor of the brain that were amazingly prescient. He not only suggested the existence of neurons, but made a number of pronouncements that were confirmed only much later:

Swedenborg’s view of the circulation of the cerebrospinal fluid was not surpassed until the work of Magendie, a 100 [sic] years later. He was the first to implicate the colliculi in vision, and in fact the only one until Flourens in the nineteenth century. He suggested that a function of the corpus callosum wasw for “the hemispheres to intercommunicate with each other.” He proposed that a function fo the corpus striatum was to take over motor control from the cortex when a movement became a familiar habit or “second Nature.”


This is all the more remarkable in that Swedenborg seems not to have dissected or at least experimented himself. It has been speculated that he observed Pourfour du Petit’s experiments on dogs in Paris. But there is no hard evidence for this. (128-129)

What we do know is this. Swedenborg, at some point in the 1740s, traveled to London. Being a wealthy and famous savant, honored in Sweden with a seat in the Parliament, his travels were always apparently punctuated with visits to other savants and important people. This is what he told a director of the bank of Sweden. He had come back to his lodgings for the night. He ate with a great appetite that evening. Then, he experienced a disconcerting thing. His apartment seemed to fill with fog. The floor seemed suddenly covered with reptiles. “I was all the more taken by the fact that the obscurity kept getting thicker. However, soon it thinned out, and I saw, distinctly, a man sitting in one of the corners of the apartment at the center of a lively and radiant light. The reptiles had disappeared with the shadows. I was alone, and you can imagine my horror when I heard him, the man, in the kind of tone that would inspire terror, pronounce these words: Don’t eat so much. At these words, my view was clouded again. Little by little it came back, and I saw myself alone in my apartment.” (63)

Now, it is easy to understand the terror. If this happens to me tonight, I will be a raving lunatic tomorrow. But why the words, don’t eat so much?

It is a very strange way to enter into the numerous heavens and hells that surround us, and through which Swedenborg was able to communicate, like some kind of code going through the corpus callosum.

It wasn’t until the next day, when the man reappeared again, that he explained that he was god, and that Swedenborg was his man for writing down the proverbs of heaven and hell.

“Don’t eat so much.” The sentence seems to come out of Gogol, or Kafka. That it is in the highest degree banal, and in the highest degree terrifying – that it seems to attach to no symbolic system (though Matter does try to find one), is what makes it so uncanny; this is the tyrant’s banality, which the courtier endlessly interprets. It is like the story about Potemkin with which Benjamin introduces his essay on Kafka. In that story, Potemkin is in one of his depressed states, confined to his room, and won’t sign any paperwork. The council, meeting in an antechamber to his room, is in an uproar, when a lesser functionary, Shuvalkin, tells them he will easily set things right. He takes the papers and boldly goes into Potemkin’s room, sees the great man sitting in the half darkness, biting his nails in a threadworn sleeping outfit, and presents the papers to him for signature:

“Shuvalkin stepped up to the writing desk, dipped a pen in ink, and without saying a word pressed it into Potemkin’s hand while putting one of the documents on his knees. Potemkin gave the intruder a vacant stare; then, as though in his sleep, he started to sign – first one paper, then a second, finally all of them. When the last signature had been affixed, Shuvalkin took the papers under his arm and left the room without further ado, just as he had entered it. Waving the papers triumphantly, he stepped into the anteroom. The councilors of state rushed toward him and tore the documents out of his hands. Breathlessly they bent over them. No one spoke a word; the whole group seemed paralyzed. Again, Shuvalkin came closer and solicitously asked why the gentlemen seemed so upset. At that point he noticed the signatures. One document after the other was signed Shuvalkin… Shuvalkin… Shuvalkin.” (795)


The devil is in the banal, and the devil may be the Lord. Such is the rule of ambiguity in the great cosmic tyrannies. Indeed, Swedenborg’s journeys through heaven and hell have that same mix of the celestial and the utterly banal, from what I have read of them. The law of analogies is unfolded without any more to do than Swedenborg took in unfolding the laws of the brain. One wonders whether, in fact, after all, perhaps Swedenborg’s analogies were all travels in the brain… the brain… the brain…

But to our donkey business. As is well known, Swedenborg believed that we are all doubled – our images exist in another realm, and their images are us. He could converse with those images. But there is a twist to his belief. There are three heavens, but every heaven corresponds to a part of the human body. And every part of the human body is a society of angels. We know what part of the body this society is by its position in regard to other societies of angels. In a sense, this is a vast fractal, the body composed of self-resembling bodies, and so on to infinity. The substance of these bodies seem to be a sort of entelechy of affection, and affection connects man, beast and plant. What distinguishes man and beast and beast and animal in this scheme is not reason, but degrees of affection, with man being closer to the center – God – and plants being further out.

Although this retains the traditional hierarchy, it retains it in a much different way than Kant. In fact, it is similar to Mary Douglas’ notion of how meals gain their meaning – “ The smallest, meanest meal metonymically figures the structure of the grandest, and each unit of the grand meal figures again the whole meal – or the meanest meal. The perspective created by these repetitive analogies invests the individual meal with additional meanings. Here we have the principle we were seeking, the intensifier of meaning, the selection principle. A meal stays in the category of a meal only insofar as it carries this structure which allows the part to recall the whole. “ (1972, 67)"

the waters of life and of death

In his sad last book, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Henry Fielding begins his account proper by sketching out the measures he took, while suffering from the ills brought on by the miasmas of London, his course of life, his workload, and his forced encounter with numerous stinking criminals, beggars, whores and the whole lot, to rid London of a gang of murderers and robbers. Having succeeded in the year 1753 in actually suppressing murder for a whole season in London (a city by this time of around 650,000 people), he then retired from his magistrates position to devote himself to restoring his health. For, as he writes, “I was now, in the opinion of all men, dying of a complication of disorders.” These included gout and dropsy.

“After having stood the terrible six weeks which succeeded last Christmas, and put a lucky end, if they had known their own interests, to such numbers of aged and infirm valetudinarians, who might have gasped through two or three mild winters more, I returned to town in February, in a condition less despaired of by myself than by any of my friends. I now became the patient of Dr. Ward, who wished I had taken his advice earlier. By his advice I was tapped, and fourteen quarts of water drawn from my belly. The sudden relaxation which this caused, added to my enervate, emaciated habit of body, so weakened me that within two days I was thought to be falling into the agonies of death.”

Fielding’s body is dragged across the pages of his journal like some hideous object, of which he – a magistrate - is the victim, much as a criminal might be the victim of some instrument of torture. When he finally does decide, for the sake of his health, to seek the warmth of Lisbon, Fielding has to be taken on a litter to the dock, and then, sitted in a sedan chair, hoisted aboard the boat. At which point, sitting in his cabin, he makes the following reflection:

This latter fatigue [of the journey] was, perhaps, somewhat heightened by an indignation which I could not prevent arising in my mind. I think, upon my entrance into the boat, I presented a spectacle of the highest horror. The total loss of limbs was apparent to all who saw me, and my face contained marks of a most diseased state, if not of death itself. Indeed, so ghastly was my countenance, that timorous women with child had abstained from my house, for fear of the ill consequences of looking at me. In this condition I ran the gauntlope (so I think I may justly call it)
through rows of sailors and watermen, few of whom failed of paying their compliments to me by all manner of insults and jests on my misery. No man who knew me will think I conceived any personal resentment at this behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of men which I have often contemplated with concern, and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts. It may be said that this barbarous custom is peculiar to the English, and of them only to the lowest degree; that it is an excrescence of an uncontrolled licentiousness mistaken for liberty, and never shows itself in men who are polished and refined in such manner as human nature requires to produce that perfection of which it is susceptible, and to purge away that malevolence of disposition of which, at our birth, we partake in common with the savage creation. This may be said, and this is all that can be said; and it is, I am afraid, but little satisfactory to account for the inhumanity of those who, while they boast of being made after God's own image, seem to bear in their minds a resemblance of the vilest species of brutes; or rather, indeed, of our idea of devils; for I don't know that any brutes can be taxed with such malevolence.”

This passage (which I consider extremely wonderful and frightening) could stand as a totem, as something to think with, as one reads Fielding’s Enquiry into the Late increase in Robbers. That Enquiry is all about a distemper in the constitution of England – and Fielding means, by that, something like a social body, on the lines of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Fielding, in the above passage, goes from himself, body and face, as a horror not to be gawked at (which is in contrast to the horrors that were gawked at – the hanged at Tyburn, for instance) to those who insulted him, the sailors, men of low degree, to the notion that, as with the dropsy, our original constitution needs purging, a taking off of those liquors of original sin in which we swim, to a moment of satiric ascension not unlike Swift’s in Gulliver’s travels, in which God’s own image is conjoined the vilest of brutes. The most celebrated effect of Fielding’s Enquiry, according to Jessica Warner in her book Craze: Gin and Debauchery in the Age of Reason, was to supply ammunition for the last Gin Reform act. The correlate for the waters of death, the anti-baptism that exchanges God’s image for that of a yahoo, was precisely gin – which, as Warner points out, was the first serious drug craze in the West.

I'll stop here for today, with a quote from the Enquiry:

"..for the intoxicating Draught itself disqualifies them from using honest Means to acquire it at the same that it removes all Sense of Fear and Shame, and emboldens them to commit wicked and desperate Enterprize Many Instances of this I see daily; Wretches often brought before me charged with Theft and Robbery, whom I am forced to confine before they are in a Condition to be examined; and when they have afterwards become sober, I have plainly perceived from the State of the Case, that the Gin alone was the Cause of the Transgression and have been sometimes sorry that I was obliged commit them to Prison.”

Fielding is on deck

My ass festival post may have been more enigmatic than I quite wanted it to be. Sometimes, I want the haze of connotation to rise up from my prose – there’s no reason to live without a little mist. But I don’t want the mist to eat up the prose.

Anyway, this is a busy week for me, but I am going to write my next post about a rarely read text of Henry Fielding’s, An Enquiry into the causes of the late Increase in Robbers. We will see if I can do this.