dangerous tears

 One of the most cited witticisms of Oscar Wilde concerned the climactic sentimental scene in the Old Curiosity Shop when Little Nell dies.  Wilde said that  “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing”. The remark  became a sort of benchmark for the change from Victorian to modernist attitudes towards the presentation of sentiment.  Dickens readers in 1850, of course, felt differently about Little Nell.  There’s a famous story that a crowd in New York awaited the ship carrying the last bit of the serialisation of the Old Curiosity Shop demanding the fate of little Nell, and when they heard she died, they burst into mass tears.

However, at some point in the 70s or 80s, I think, the tide began to run against Wilde’s attitude.  Little Nell again came into her own as the modernist anti-sentimentality itself became suspect, was uncovered as a sort of masculinist gesture meant to impose a bogus stoicism that made  a great show of covering wounds to the ego in silence in order to have us all bow to those wounds.   And so Little Nell, that abused child, who begins Dickens’  novel by repulsing the repulsive Quilp, who lusts after her, changed into a very trendy figure. 

The politics of tears go back a long way in a certain “western” tradition. According to Darja Erker, a classics scholar, women’s tears in ancient Rome aroused peculiar fears. The repression of women’s emotional lives in public was part of the repression of women’s political role in the republic. However, the ritual of mourning was an exception to this regime of censure. Here, tears fell in public.  

When the family “admits” or recognizes (agnoscere) the death of one of its members, it becomes impure, and is provisionally separated from the rest of society. During the  feriae denicales, time stops for the members of the family, who are polluted by the death. After the period of marginalisation, the family reintegrates into the life of the civitas due to the banquet celebrated by the tomb.  (lautum novemdiale) The marked characteristics of the funeral ritual are displacements, or inversions of normal behavior, symbolic of the period of marginality.

The participants in the funeral ritual don’t wear their normal clothes, they neglect their hygene and reverse the practices governing eating together. These rituals express a temporal alteration of social values. In regard to this,  John Scheid borrows the words of Servius for characterizing the funeral service as a ritual of inversion: contraria facere. Similarly, when the time of the annual feast of the dead  (Parentalia) came around, magistrates marked the presence of a pollution incompatible with their public functions in not wearing their insignia.

Tears preside over the world of inversion.  And this has always had a frightening potential. Perhaps it is for this reason that modern scholars make much more of the carnivalesque, where laughter reigns, than the world of mourning, with its own characteristic revolt against hierarchy. It is the case in America that the tears of a man are celebrated, in the political sphere, while the tears of a woman are mocked.   

Myself, I grew up in a period, the seventies, when public crying was briefly, and in some social sets, non-taboo.  Also, I’m a crybaby. Thus, I knew last night, when we were heading towards the Arc Cinema to see Moonlight (at last!) that I’d probably leak like a faucet.  And I did.  I was redfaced and gasping by the end.  Typical for me. I always embarrass myself  this way.

Through the scrim of tears, I did notice the influence of Douglas Sirk, the… the Leonardo da Vinci of the weepy, the Picasso, the Newton and Einstein. Especially in the final scene between Chiron and his mother I felt some breeze from the beating wings of Imitation of Life,  one of my favorite films, and Sirk’s masterpiece.

Chelsea Clinton, in a much mocked interview with the NYT (in their By the Book series) said “I avoid most fiction in which children are harmed or seriously threatened in any way.” I understand her impulse.  But her criteria would ban all fairy tales, definitely all Hans Christian Anderson, much of Dickens, and much literature since, including most  YA literature. I’m reading Sandra Newman’s apocalyptic sci fi novel, Ice Cream Star, right now, and the toll on children in the plot is heavy. In Moonlight, the threat to Chiron as a child drives the entire movie. I wonder if the gesture of avoidance, here, is tied to old, old taboos about tears in public – a censoring of the atrocities that are a normal part of function of the everyday machine- you know the one, the thing that produces streets, cars, tv, the paycheck, and the death of the holocene. 

Ode to melatonin

 Certain subjects fill me with a wild and passionate interest, even if I have no specialist insight into them. One is laterality – the literature of the left/right dichotomy is, to my mind, full of the kind of insight that one could spend a lifetime meditating upon. A genuine classic in this field, Chris McManus’s Right Hand, Left Hand, is the modern equivalent of the Anatomy of Melancholy – it starts off, unashamedly, galloping in all directions, and yet by the end, you have a strong sense of the wierdness of Left and Right in nature and culture. The other subject which always interests me is sleep. The anti-sleep bias that arose in the Enlightenment – the curtailment of our freedom to sleep, which parallels the development of industrial society, the curious yoking together of knowledge and waking – makes sleep a troubled locus in our badman times. In my opinion, Freudian theory is resisted as much because of its emphasis on sleep as for its emphasis on sex. Anti-Freudians commonly dismiss dreams as junk, without ever pondering the fact that scientists might be biased against a human situation that rules out science. The dreaming scientist, while he or she dreams, is no scientist, but, like the rest of us, an argonaut, traveling under strange compulsions. Hence the pretence that sleep is a sort of annex or footnote to humanity. Jonathan Cray’s recent book about the current “war” aganst sleep, 24/7, contains some alarming information about the US Military’s effort to create a force of soldiers who never sleep. DARPA, the agency that was involved in studying forest fire scenarios in Vietnam – burn down the jungle and win the war! – is studying the chemical processes in the brains of certain migrating birds that let these birds go for days without sleeping. Isn’t that precious?

Which brings us to the best long read in this weekend’s NYT, Richard Freedman’s exploration of sleep, depression, mania, melatonin and the reason traveling East from, say, California to France exposes the traveler to mania, while traveling from France to California makes you more vulnerable to depression. In between, Freedman plays variations on the theme of Jet Lag, and why it is important to exercise more when you have a midlife crisis. 

In my opinion, the circadian rhythm produces a basic unconscious effect that comes through more clearly in Magic Mountain than in The Interpretation of Dreams – although the latter conditions the former, obviously. All those patients laying out on their balconies, sun-curing, and all the time slipping away. I am one of those people who somehow let massive blocks of time get away from me. For instance, I can’t believe that we will soon be returning to live in France from Santa Monica. We have been here almost four years, and I can believe it when I look at Adam – but otherwise, everything seems so recent to me. I have a Jet Lag soul, perhaps. I do nothing very quickly, and that is why I am so poor on tasks like driving the getaway car for revolutionary bank robbers and such (kidding, mr. FBI man! You know I love ya!). I’m not a quick draw.
And I love melatonin. It has to be in my top five bodily secretions. If that is what it is.

A poem

Reading the review of Elizabeth Bishop's latest biography made me pretty ... sad for her, if that is the emotion. Indignant. The cruelties that can fill out a life are astonishing. And here's a poem about it, which I'll call the Abusers, even though 'abuse' strikes me as an abstract, euphemizing term for something as material as chewing.

We know them now – some knew them then –
Their hands so smooth, their zippers open
Bishop’s Uncle George, Woolf’s step brother Gerald, 
In the dirty labyrinth of home, biography traces these
Stravrogins, hangmen of the kid
Whose limp body dangles under a lifetime’s lid

Better, you say, that a rock were tied around their necks?
But it never was. Wrecks produce wrecks
While they smiled, serving dinner, above heaped plates
Like some impenetrable masculine fate
They stuck their knives into the shepherd pie
Thinking themselves the boys that made the little girl cry.

a voter strategy that worked until it didnt

I've long had a theory that the GOP and the neolib Dems benefit from the fact that GOP voters, for the most part, can get their moral rocks off voting against the gov. in the confidence that what they will receive is a bit of a tax break - and continued service from the Gov, since the opposition Dems will see to that. Thus, Social Security and Medicare are safe. That was not a bad strategy for GOP voters - and Trump seemed to reaffirm it when he promised the continued service from the Gov. Now the shit is coming down, and the Dems are finally weak enough that the GOP can do what it wants without any check or balance. In consequence, you can superimpose, over those maps showing the Red counties - which were in rural or exurban areas of the country - another map, showing where the burden of cuts are going to fall. Guess what? The bleeding will start with them. The strategy doesn't work if there is too much GOP-ery - then the moral stance agin the Guvmint becomes a practical sink or swim deal.

When I use the word strategy, here, I should make it clear that it is a strategy the way natural selection is a strategy - it is not the intention of the voters individually, but the environing pattern they react to and shape as a group,

So why didn't the Dems pick on this in 2016? a recent Vox article about HRC's ads, to which a major portion of campaign funds were allotted, tells the sad tale. HRC ran on a platform that was full of incredibly popular programs. She could have trounced Trump in every policy category. But her campaign team thought they were on the Apprentice set, and didn't go with icky policy stuff. Cause who really cares if you can afford childcare or healthcare? This is still echoed in the pundit chamber with remarks about how dumb your average American is. Cause we are all for democracy, we who went to the Ivies, but come on! Those dummies always need our nudgin'.

the voice stage

From the beginning of the human race until around 1880, no human being ever heard his or her voice. Socrates didn’t, Sappho didn’t, Jesus Christ didn’t, and Abraham Lincoln didn’t. Jenny Lind, it is said, made a wax cylinder for Edison, so she might have gotten a scratching inkling of what she sounded like in the 1880s, long after her singing prime. 

In a strong sense, what this means is that the voice had no mirror. One of the great wonders of modern life is that one was invented.
It is hard to imagine ourself back to the millenia of being, essentially, like actors in a silent movie, at least to ourselves. Yet long before there were phonographs, there were sayings about hearing one’s own voice. We do have a strong sense of our voice, we seem to hear it. But when we record it, it seems a wilder thing, not the thing we recognize. There is, it turns out, a delicate interface between inhabiting a thing heard and having the sound itself confront us in its full materiality, uninhabited by us. Nowhere else is the so called "user illusion' - the illusion that we are in control of the thing we use when we are actually following its preprogrammed design - so actual.

The era initiated by Edison did not, of course, make the voice mirror universal. It took some time for audio technology to get there. When I was a kid, cheap tape recorders were available with which one could tape oneself, but it was, at best, an entertainment that was outside of the daily routine. I think one of the great moments in the history of human voice was the invention and distribution of answering machines. Although several devices to record telephone calls existed in postwar America, they were either expensive or discouraged by At and T, which wanted to monopolize the market with its own high priced technology. Attachments to record were actually just gussied up tape recorders, the older kind of tape recorders. What changed was the advent of recorders with magnetic tapes and integrated circuits that made recording incoming calls less cumbersome. An advertisement (in a 1977 Popular Mechanics) for a Ford Code-A-Phone 1977 shows a machine that would be easily recognized by the children of the seventies: a sleek silver rectangular box on which you could record a message just by holding down an inviting plastic red button, and which allowed you to easily erase messages and record over them. In addition, you could call yourself, press a code, and have the machine play back your messages over the phone. Magic! I remember my parents getting a similar box. So the first widespread consciousness of one’s own voice in America was the voice saying: this is X Smith, or this is the household of X Smith, leave a message at the beep. I remember my Dad making such a, when you think about it, referentially complex message. What kind of token was it? It had the qualities of the written, and yet, it was part of no system of linguistic representation – it was neither phonetic nor ideogramatic. It was, at best, an echo – echo writing. It was the thing itself, except that it wasn’t.
There’s really no metaphor for this, no comparable historical situation. This was something new in the psychological construction that we had always had around our voice. No echo ever prepared us for this.
My Dad never puzzled about the philosophical problems the telephone recorder posed. In fact, if this was a blow to human narcissism (different from Freud’s three moments: Copernicus, Darwin and Freud), its effect was muted. Especially with my old man, as far as I could tell.

The function of the voice in the psyche, as Freud conceived it, was crucial to the formation of the conscience. It was the parental voice that was, in a sense, recorded by the infant’s answering machine – making the conscience something foreign to the ego, something injected into the ego. This was the root, Freud felt, of the paranoid symptom of feeling observed: “the patient complains of the fact that all his thoughts are known, and their behaviors are watched and spied on. They are informed about this rule through voices that characteristically speak to them in the third person ('Now she's thinking of that again', 'now he's going out').

However, I don’t remember Freud speaking of our reaction to our own voice. Although by this time the gramophone had become a common bourgeois household object, access to record one’s own voice was pretty much restricted to entertainers and celebrities. Although perhaps one underestimates the place of recording the voice began to play in the imagination of modern culture.

In a fascinating essay entitled ‘Primal Sound’, Rilke recorded a memory of his school years that happened about the time the first gramophone was produced. The physics teacher in his class made a primitive instrument that used waxed paper, a cylinder of cardboard, and a bristle from a comb to show how sound waves could be captured in a material and replayed.

“At that time, and years afterwards I supposed that the evidence of this independent sound, taken from us and preserved in an outside material, would remain a sensation I’d never forget.”

Yet, as Rilke goes on to say, the moment of shock that the sound came out of this primitive record did not remain with him as the sense of this primal scene (Rilke describes it precisely as a primal scene, the infant beginning of something that would grow endlessly larger) . It was absorbed in the moral economy of everyday routine, so to speak. Instead, his mind fixed on the grooves themselves: “It wasn’t … the sound out of the funnel that remained uppermost in my memory, as it happened, but instead the marks carved into the platter which remained peculiarly present to me.”

In the rest of the essay, Rilke’s thought takes a sort of paranoid turn – if we remain with Freud – and instead of the peculiarity of his own voice, it is the peculiar idea that sound is frozen into substances everywhere – in as much as things are grooved. What if we found a way to “play”, for instance, the grooves in a skull? Perhaps even these grooves – in particular, the coronal suture – represent some primal sound – the scratching of God’s own finger on us, mere platters.

We all tunnel forward in our manias. Mine, here, is that this obvious turning away from the shock of hearing – even if so faintly as to be an intimation – his own voice is the negation around which Rilke has created his essay.

As far back as I can remember, I haven’t liked to hear the sound of my own voice – even as I loved recording messages in other voices I’d imitate. Although I am just the kind of person the phrase “loves to hear himself talk” was made for, I love to hear it in that shadowy place inside the voice, surfing the glottal instance that is not at all petrified in an outer material substrate. The voice, separated from me, recorded, become a thing, has always seemed to me a peculiar, shaming weakness.
I thought about all of this when, a couple of days ago, I played a quicktime film that Adam’s teachers made. Each student made a picture of a jellyfish; then each sat before the teacher, with her phone camera, and explained it. Adam came about sixth or seventh. I thought he was wonderful.
Adam didn’t. He said he didn’t like his voice. 

Because this is not the first time that Adam has heard his voice, his remark made me wonder if something happens – some voice stage new to our natural history, something that is separate from Lacan’s mirror stage – that gives us a sense of the self that is at once exposed and that we would like to avoid.
The bad conscience of the voice brings us back to questions of the dialect, and of imperial power. Hmm, where am I going with this?

dialect and defeat

I’ve been reading two books that are mainy written in dialect, or at least non-standard English. One is Their Eyes were watching God, Zora Hurston’s most famous novel, where the  black Southern dialect alternates with an authorial voice written in standard English. Hurston had a folklorist’s expertise in dialect. She wrote the novel in Haiti, and must surely have been thinking about how Haitian creole had separated itself out from French to the extent that it was a separate language. Hurston was right proud of her rendering of black speech, and criticized Richard Wright for what she believed were amateur mistakes in trying to convey its sound and power.

The other book, Ice Cream Star, by Sandra Newman, is about a future in which the US is populated largely by tribes of teens, who all face a disease that eliminates them when they enter their young twenties. The teens are black – although the plot in the book begins with an encounter with a “Roo”, a white man who is presumably Russian. The entire book is dipped in the language that Newman makes up for her narrator, Ice Cream Star.

Wright accused Hurston of making a minstrel show of a novel. I wonder if he was responding to the way the two levels of English operate, with standard English becoming the median of understanding and  explanation – producing the usual distance that the authorial voice mediates between the actions and the characters and their passions and the reader. The traditional hierarchy between low passion and high reason, of course, stands behind this. But, as a particular instance of that structure, there is also, in the play of phonetic spellings, a sort of global implication of a kind of illiteracy in the characters, as if they were misspelling their own words. Given the American penchant to use black speech against the speaker, to lower the status of the speakers, it is easy to see where Wright is coming from.  But as Hurston is writing from Haiti, where the idea of using creole against the chains of orthodox french was certainly in the air, there’s another perspective on the dialect business, a claim and proclaim program.

There is a long history of dialect as a literal, or rather, oral declaration of independence. Walter Scott did the same thing with Scots. The jungle of apostrophe marks that accompany these forays against the metropole are the equivalent of the dust  tossed up by some vast marching army of Goths, on a pillaging expedition to Rome.    

In Scott’s novels, the tie to the extinguishing of a culture, as the Gaelic highlands culture was extinguished in Scotland, is the loser’s wound that throbs beneath the whole edifice.  Scott’s dialect characters are tied to their political and economic station.  Here, from Old Mortality, is the  kind of thing that occurs frequently in Scott:

"Your leddyship never ca'd me sic a word as that before. Ohon! that I

suld live to be ca'd sae," she continued, bursting into tears, "and me a

born servant o' the house o' Tillietudlem! I am sure they belie baith

Cuddie and me sair, if they said he wadna fight ower the boots in blude

for your leddyship and Miss Edith, and the auld Tower--ay suld he, and I

would rather see him buried beneath it, than he suld gie way--but thir

ridings and wappenschawings, my leddy, I hae nae broo o' them ava. I can

find nae warrant for them whatsoever.”

And here is the kind of thing that occurs in Hurston – a snippet of dialogue between Janie and Tea Cake:

“Ah know it and dat’s what puts de shamery on me. You’se jus’ dis gusted wid me. Yo’ face jus’ left here and went off some where else. Naw, you ain’t mad wid me. Ah be glad if you was, ’cause then Ah might do some thin’ tuh please yuh. But lak it is—”

“Mah likes and dis likes ought not tuh make no dif fer­ence wid you, Tea Cake. Dat’s fuh yo’ lady friend. Ah’m jus’ uh some time friend uh yourn.”

               The image of a Vandal army attacking Rome brings up, of course, the barbarian/civilized opposition that has long formed a certain mainstream approach to dialect. Indeed, language follows conquest, with its attendant justifications all centering around some essential fault of the conquered. Rome, however, was founded by barbarians in the strictest sense – Trojans who were defeated by the Greeks. Underneath the victorious power, it is easy to find a level of subjection and defeat. The Scots tribes, whose defeat becomes Walter Scott’s theme, moved out – they populated much of the Southeast U.S. that Hurston knew. And they put their stamp of victory on the slaveholding society that raided at large other tribal societies.

               I’m going on to Newman’s book tomorrow.   

how bad was the Democratic response to Trump? Very very very bad

I've been thinking about this today, a little obsessively. And I've come to the conclusion that the dead heads in the Democratic establishment in DC are innumerate in a serious way.
Most of them are old white people, like Schumer and Pelosi. So perhaps this explains their bias.
I'm sure they think featuring an old white guy surrounded by a diner full of other older white people is a sure, a non-risky way of confronting Trump.
Actually, though, I'd argue that it is the riskiest bet they can make.
Given the fact that, at least since 1980, older white people vote Republican by between 10 percent to 20 percent more than they vote Democratic, what does it mean to pitch your entire response to them?

Your choices are: Ds want either less of them to vote, to convince them to vote D., or finally, you outflank them.

The first option is absolute. You absolutely want to discourage them. It is thus not identical with the third option, which is that you dilute their voting power by increasing the numbers in other sectors - blacks, hispanics, millenials - so that the older vote is proportionately diminished.
Given the trend lines with older whites, the most risky strategy is to try to convert them. Firstly, because it is statistically unlikely it will make a difference, and secondly, because it screws up your third option. It will bring more old white people out to vote. In 2016, there were a lot of reports that the Clinton campaign's idea to appeal to moderate Rs actually motivated a lot of Rs to go to the polls - and vote Trump.
So the DNC and the DC Dems chose the most risky option to play against Trump. But they will all assure themselves that they are playing it safe. This is how lost they are.