A sense for traces

I'm going to try to tear my appalled attention away from Haiti, and begin a new thread about Goethe's Faust, book II. As Thomas Mann wrote in his essay, Goethe and Tolstoi, Goethe was a man of the 18th century whose Spuersinn - sense of traces - foresaw the 19th: "the whole social-economic development of the 19th century, the industrialization of the old cultural and agricultural lands, the domination of the machine, the rise of organized labor, the class conflicts, democracy, socialism, Americanism even, along with the sum total of intellectual and educational consequences that organically come out of these changes.” In Mann's Doktor Faustus the narrator, Zeitblum, remarks that it wasn't until the end of World War I that the ancien regime - a way of thinking stretching back to the 14th century - finally collapsed. In this respect, the "Spursinne" for what I'd call the advent of the artificial paradise has to be put in relation to the fact that, for the great mass of people even in the 'advanced' countries like France and Germany, it touched them only at the edges.

To return, for a moment, to the scenes that we can't get out of our head of Haiti - the place that created the sugar and rum wealth of France and, by extension, Europe, the land that received, like a giant maw, hundreds of thousands of black bodies and swallowed them in the 18th century, ate them up, chewed up 500,000 - to see the earthquake knock down the artificial paradise is to see how it adheres to our skin and bones, how we only move within it, even those of us who are on the edge of it, and how, destroyed, it destroys us.

I can't stand it

This is the time
this is the time
This is the time
because there is no time

The NYT hosted a 'debate' today about what "we" should do about Haiti, in which a bunch of Americans exchanged airy views about impossible changes that should be magically implemented in the near future, or a decade from now, etc.

In actuality, the future is fucking now, and what we should be asking is why, if we have ability, as any half assed surfer of the net has, to pinpoint hundreds of situations in Port Au Prince, and we have the equipment - why we aren't taking advantage of that. Why is there not a heavy helicopter traffic over the skies of Port au Prince? Why is it that the incredibly simple tools that are needed aren't being distributed, as the Newspaper gathers tres tres interesting opinions about Haiti's economic future?

From Le Monde:
On the corner of Capois and Cameau streets, the moder bank Unibank building is half collapsed. With naked hands, a group of twenty youths are extracting great blocks of concrete at the base of the edifice.

"There are two persons alive," cries one of them. With the aid of a long plastic tube, the improvisatory rescuers begin to exchange some words with the survivors who ask for water. At the end of two hours of effort, two men are taken out. The first, an employee of the bank, 26, is unharmed; the other can barely stand.

Au coin des rues Capois et Cameau, l'immeuble moderne de la banque Unibank est à moitié effondré. A mains nues, un groupe d'une vingtaine de jeunes dégagent de gros blocs de béton à la base de l'édifice.

" Il y a deux personnes en vie ", s'écrie l'un d'eux. A l'aide d'un long tuyau en plastique, les sauveteurs improvisés parviennent à échanger quelques mots avec les survivants qui demandent de l'eau. Au bout de deux heures d'efforts, deux hommes sont dégagés. Le premier, un employé de la banque, âgé de 26 ans, est indemne, l'autre, un agent de sécurité a du mal à se relever.

These twenty guys seem to have understood more in their lifetimes than the whole of the NYT editorial office if given the power of infinite recycling through time by the compassionate Buddha. I can't stand it.

I, a scrawny nothing in Austin, merely by scanning blogs, facebook, twitter, can find a hundred, two hundred descriptions of what is happening, and where, in Port au Prince. I know exactly who has set up a rescue station in Jacmal. So where the fuck is the U.S. rescue mission? Do they have nobody fucking doing the same thing? Boom, we have a rescue center in Jacmal already, they need tents, medical tents, fly them the fuck in. Information is pouring out into the air, and being absolutely ignored by the powers that be. USE YOUR INFORMATION!

vertigo 2

The more I ponder it, the more I consider Veronique Nahoum-Grappe’s essay on dizziness one of the great essays – like Caillois’ essay on the praying mantis, or Ginzberrg’s on Making It Strange. It is bizarre that this 1993 essay hasn’t been translated into English. Perhaps I ought to ring up October Magazine and tell them that I’ll do it for them.

I’ve already advanced through the first section of the essay. It is remarkable that Nahoum-Grappe’s coordinates, in this and the essays that group around it – her essay on beauty, her essays on nteoxication – are so close to those in Aristotle’s Poetics, where, as I remarked, we have a fourfold space, with the vertical axis being the high and the low, and the horizontal axis described by the ugly and the beautiful.

These poles are both preserved and violated in laughter – that is, as it relates to the absolute comic. For Nahoum-Grappe, the relationship between high and low, in terms of dizziness, is the relationship between the highest moment of suspense and the plunge. The moment of suspense traverses a number of behaviors – just think, for instance, of sexual arousal. Why should it be the case that being aroused – being hard, being wet – is so often accompanied by a distinct light feeling in the stomach? Is so often enfolded in drinking? Is so often merely the breadth of a slip away from dizziness, a disorder in the thoughts – a disorder that is classically present in 18th century novels, where women, under the influence of seduction, are always described, or describe themselves, as thinking in a confused fashion. Order, here, the moral order, certainly preserves the Aristotelian grid that separates the high from the low. There is, I’d suggest, a certain coordination between the plunge that is the parameter of suspense and a certain movement between ugliness and beauty.

Nahoum-Grappe’s method is to take the phrases that are ordinarily overlooked from diverse … routines, and see that they have a functional seriousness:

“It is rare that a French attempted suicide explains himself like this: I am a more than50 year old male, a transient agricultural worker and excessive consumer of alcohol” – which we may extract from the too happy appropriations of statistical data. Insteaad, there will be phrases like – “everything seemed pointless,” “everything was going wrong”, “nothing worked”, “why live?” which risk being heard prior to the silence preceding the fatal act: phrases which have in common the vertiginous closure of time (never again, always) and space (the world is just a but of shit”). The addicted toxicomaniac who tries to give an account of his ‘relapse’, the excessive drinker who closes his eyes and accelerates his speed taking a hairpin curve in the night. Or even the lover shutting the door in an access of chagrin, ordinary heroes in the field of social suffering, will thus have recourse to these vertiginious closures. ..

This ‘nothing more is possible’ consists, on the plane of an invisible topic, to put oneself above an emptiness: a functional sociology will tend to evacuate that manner of seeing as a subjective point of view of the social actor, whereas the poet will make it a song and the psychologist will dig out its implications. But here, that attitude of ‘suspended above everything is taken as an objective segment of signification, as an effective intellectual posture, as a kind of belief making an effect on behaviors. It is rendered possible by a corporal competence: that of the vertiginous perception.”

Here, then, we come back to mimetism – vide the discussion regarding Baudelaire’s irony – not by way of Aristotelian mimesis, but by way of Caillois’ praying mantis.

HAITI

What can I say today? Today has crushed a lot of small bones. Give to the Haitian relief fund of your choice.

signifyin comedy, or the tale of a melon

André Gill was one of the great caricaturists under Louis Napoleon. He begins his posthumous autobiography, Twenty Years in Paris, thusly: “One beautiful morning in the month of August, 1868, my best friend, he who shares all my pains and joys, and – to put it all in a word – also my underclothes, stopped, at the corner of Rue Vavin, in ecstasy before a melon.”

That Gill begins by describing himself as his ‘best friend” is perhaps a little less funny than eerie, considering that this autobiography was written, apparently, in Charenton, the madhouse where Gill had been committed – and where he died. The melon story is funny, however. Gill buys that wondrous melon, and then decides to he must draw it. Gill, by this time, had already gotten into trouble with Louis Napoleon’s censors for his drawing of Rocambole, the gentleman thief – a drawing that looked oddly and coincidinkily enough like Louis Napoleon. The censors had closed down Gill’s outlet, La Lune. But surely nobody could find a drawing of a melon subversive…

Except perhaps those who remembered a certain spate of drawings depicting pears. Under Louis Philippe, caricaturists had captured a certain pearness to Louis’ face – and, under a censorship that had eliminated Louis Philippe from the repertoire, had contented themselves with drawing the pear itself. This wondrous multiplication of pears put the censors in a ridiculous position – they faced, here, that French ‘gaiety’, or Baudelaire’s significative comic. And yet, what is a pear? A pear is the apotheosis of the banal. The reality of Louis Phillipe’s face, its soul, so to speak, was a pear.

Gill – and surely the censors – remembered the pear.

So L’Eclipse published the drawing of the melon. It was a drawing of the melon split open. The split made the melon like a puppet face, one with a big slash for a mouth. The censor originally passed it, but when the melon was published, the state, in its infinite wisdom, decided to get out from under the ridiculousness that haunted Louis Philippe’s censors by accused the paper not of a political crime, but of obscenity.

The state bureaucracy, that product of the highest rationality, is also – as Gogol knew well – always on the edge of a dream. Or rather a nightmare. And by that logic, censoring the melon as a caricature of the head of state would be worse than allowing the caricature of the head of state, since the main and important thing was not to connect Louis Napoleon’s court with a melon. As Gill said, this was pretty stiff on the part of the authorities:

‘As the scribble [croquis] didn’t represent anyone, it was easy to apply the intention to to anybody, and each for himself made the reference for his “bete noir”. “

And Gill references one of the names that were thrown out: Delesvau, the president of the sixth chamber. Famous for currying to the court by making a series of ‘wicked arrests”.

Gill had the happy thought of procuring another melon, that he took to court with him, with the intent to prove that there was nothing obscene about a melon. The judge, however, merely looked at the drawing of the melon, and looked sadly at the defendant, and dismissed the case.

Such is the power of ridiculousness in a falling regime.

A harlot high and low

Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, a French ethnologist who studies intoxication – among other things – begins her essay, The ungovernable gratuitousness: dizziness behaviors, with a story:

“Among the numerous favelas of Rio de Janeiro, those urbanized zones where the material precariousness is only equaled by the sociological stigmatization, the favela Rocihne is better platted than the others, situated on the elevated flank of a hill and overlooking certain rich sections of town. The poor can thus see the rich from up above, which brings about laughter and jokes on their part, but also all across the town, according to Esther Barberosa, a brazillian sociologist. To see from [d’en haut] up high those who see you from a height [de haut] is not an indifferent fact, in spite of the derisory gratuitousness of such a revenge. From the moment that the base of the ladder occupies an elevated position, the metaphor of the reversed world, in an illusory way, but nevertheless physical, as on a roller coaster, can incite social laughter.”

Well, as anybody who knows LI can plainly tell, this beginning, and the very subject of this essay, wins my heart straightaway. Evidently Nahoum-Grappe is not afraid of the insights of Caillois and Bataille – nor of the derisory gratuitousness that, in spite of everything, is the invisible order that we all obey.

The ‘behaviors of dizziness’ are rarely the subject of investigation in themselves. A commentor on my last post, Roger Mexico, mentioned the fact the Paul de Man analyzed the same passage in Baudelaire’ Essence of Laughter as I did, and came to another conclusion about the dizziness induced by the fairy’s wand: that this was the dizziness of irony. De Man is on good textual ground, as we know that irony was a much developed romantic trope, a sort of countervailing power against Sturm und Drang sentiment – and Baudelaire definitely mentions Germany as the home of the absolute comic.

But I want to pull that vertigo in another direction, since we are lifted a little too far, in de Man’s interpretation, from Satan, fairies, and Punch and Judy – not to mention Harlequin. And even in Germany, there is something more to say – or rather there are other texts to point at. For instance, one can look at Marx’s forties texts, among other young Hegelians, and see a certain delight in recoding Hegel by turning him upside down. Inversion – Verkehrung – after all, is a sort of encounter of logic and pantomime.

“We are interested here in the cause of the most candid of these laughs, to wit, the pure infantile fact of being up high, above, looking over a space defined as a possible unity. The important point is this position of the body truly imagined, in this particular topic, and one can replace the words ‘truly’ with the word ‘physically’, or even consciously, for the ‘truth’ about what happens up high lodges in the kinaesthetic sensation.”


We all know this scene. The baby is held aloft. The baby is taken firmly, but not so that the grip pinches, up, up from the cradle, the crib, up up past the breast, the face, up up high. The baby is held above her Mother’s head. Her Father’s head. Up above the adult head, who gazes up at this business, all smiles, too, for the baby, that tiny instance of a human, that human second hand that has clocked merely the first second in human time, and who, if things go right, will perform an incredible feat over the next couple of years – of growing four, five times its weight, and will keep on going - is now higher than the adults who have already been there, once, a fact that they deduce more than remember.

And so must I have been held up. Surely.

And now – well, here’s what happened last year, what typically happened. I went to a friend’s place in Mexico City. This friend had moved into a rather swank apartment, near the presidential palace as a matter of fact. The kind of place with its own private elevator. Up, up we went, and then we got off at the twelfth floor – I believe. Some incredible height about the street. And here was a very large window to advertise that fact. And here was a balcony. With a table. Where I had a drink with my friend. And we chatted.

But in my mind, I was not wholly chatting with my friend. I was also holding myself in my chair, because it seemed to me that if I didn’t hold myself in my chair, I would get up, I would jump, I would leap over the incredibly fragile looking bit of a half wall that enclosed the patio, and I would drop down down down to splatter on the road. I knew that some mysterious force was operating on me, and what I felt like was, I felt like lying down. This is my response to being up over the city street, in a sky scraper. Indeed, the long, beautiful window with the long, beautiful view struck me, from the moment I first set foot in the apartment, as a monster. My enemy.

Yet, though I am afraid of heights, I like to creep slowly towards precipices.

This, of course, is a minor macula in the mental life of a minor man. But it has made me acutely aware of high and low. And is it simply a coincidence that I, in life as well, chose the low, and attack the high? Choose poverty, and bark at wealth? Choose low life through which to light my candle of high culture and wend my way through a labyrinth of gutters, to what end I can’t even tell you?

High and low, high and low. I pick at those cardinal points compulsively, and have done so my whole life. Mouth and anus, food and shit, words and dirt – oh the Swedenborgian light that shines out my disgruntled but ever faithful asshole, my Sancho on this long journey!

Well, for those of us who know the signs, it is not surprising that, in this context, Nahoum-Grappe quotes from the work of a young man in the 1930s, in the grasp of the interior experience:

“I don’t know if I stopped, in the middle of the street, masking my delirium under an umbrella. Perhaps I jumped (this is without doubt an illusion): I was convulsively illuminated, I laughed, I imagine, in running.”

Why, our anthropologist wants to know, did Bataille leap – and why do we leap for joy? Even if he didn’t.

“Between the leap and vertigo [vertige – dizziness], there is a double affinity. “It is when I faint [defaille] that I jump”, Bataille tells us, tying the leap to the one who feels himself fall in the bouncing up of an excessive joy. But the jump is also the resume of the vertiginous experience, be it under the form of little leaps or under that of a supreme élan, in an emptiness. Between what pushes towards the height and the threat of a fall is situated the suspence, that infinitesimal but decisive tension, the precise place of vertiginous kinaesthesia.”


Well, I’ll stop here. The rest – well, the rest is the leap in this post, and must be taken as the kind of claims that rush through your head when you are falling…

Because I have meant this theme, this thread, this slo mo conceptual tantrum, to indicate something that can’t be true – that use follows delirium – and yet that also seems to be true when we base ourselves in the world of these psychoactive products. That the artificial paradise wasn’t just poured out, so much concrete and asphalt, over the bones of the peasants, but the peasants had an afterlife, to the surprise of the builders, atop that concrete and asphalt. That it is no accident that the Morrdspiel of the small commodities is still in our ear, entangled with all the larger Mordspiels. That it is the décor we can’t do without, and that is, of course, killing us. That, as a French sociologists, Cauzenave, once pointed out, our machines – as they go faster – are machines to produce vertigo. That we have turned transportation itself into a psychoactive drug. That joy riding is the secret sharer of the traffic jam. That the happiness culture strains and groans to contain a system that is larger than it. That we have replaced Nemesis with what we think are our highly controlled and rational experiments with ilinx. That I suspect we haven’t. I suspect. I.

second tableau

Second tableau: Baudelaire, after presenting the laughter in relation to the Fall of man, goes on to divide it, as a form of art, into two kinds: the significatively comic and the absolutely comic. The ghost of Madame de Stael’s distinction between humor and gaiety knocks at the window here – and following de Stael, Baudelaire relates his two different types of comedy to different national types, with the English and Germans being the masters of absolute comedy, or the grotesque, and the French being inclined to the significatively comic – the gaiety, as de Stael would say, of a society in which conversation is cultivated. “The absolutely comic is much nearer nature, presents itself under one genus, and is the kind of thing that wants to be grasped by intuition. There is only one verification of the grotesque, it is laughter, and the laugh submits to it; in the face of the significative comic, it isn’t forbidden to laugh after it is done – this doesn’t argue against its value; it is a question of the rapidity of the analysis.”

Given this distinction and these geographical coordinates, Baudelaire chooses to discuss, under the German grotesque, Hoffman – and under the British grotesque, a pantomime he observed in Paris. It seems to have been a sort of live punch and judy show, except in this one, punch avoids the guillotine, not the hangman.

Which leads us to this utterly astonishing passage. It concerns the prologue of the pantomime:

“The principle persons of the play, Pierrot, Cassandre, Harlequinn, Colombine, Leandre, are in front of the public, very gentle and tranquil. They are almost reasonable and don’t differ all that much from the brave members of the audience. The miraculous breath that will make them move so extraordinarily has not yet been blown on their brains. Some japes of Pierrot only give a pale image of what he will soon be doing. The rivalry of Harlequin and Leandre has just been declared. A fairy gets interested in Halequin: she is the eternal protector of mortals who are in love and poor. She promises him her protection, and to show him what this means then and there, she waves, with a mysterious and authoritative gesture, her wand in the air.

As soon as she stirs that stick, dizziness makes its entrance, dizziness circulates in the air. One breathes in the dizziness; it is dizziness that fills the lungs and renews the blood in the ventricle.

What is dizziness? It is the absolutely comic: it sweeps up every being. Leandre, Pierrot, Cassandre all make extraordinary gestures, which clearly show that they feel introduced by main force into a totally new existence. They don’t look irritated – they are old troopers of great disasters and the tumultuous destiny that awaits them, like someone who spits in his hands and rubs them together before doing some remarkable act. They mill about with their upraised arms, resembling windmills tortured by a storm. This, doubtlessly, loosens their joints, which they will certainly need later. All this operates under the accompaniment of great bursts of laughter, full of a vast contentment; then they jump one over the other, and, their agility and aptitude duly noted, there follows a blinding bouquet of kicks, punches and slaps that make an artillery’s racket and light; but all of this without any anger. All of their gestures, their cries, their facial expressions say: the fairy wills it, destiny precipitates us, I will not worry: Go! Run! Leap! And thus they leap out into the fantastic work, which, properly speaking, only then begins, that is, on the frontier of the miraculous.”

This must be read in French for the full affect – I translate in the same spirit of submission that the pantomime figures play their tricks, as the fairy wills it.