the rude French waiter

The rude French waiter is as much of an enduring stereotype as the American cowboy and the English aristocrat. However, in the age of neo-liberalism, rudeness in the service industry is being replaced by the service with a smile ethos. In 1981, when I first came to France, the rude waiter was everywhere. But now, in 2018, in Paris, this species is a definite minority.

This, you might think, is one of the more pleasant effects of globalization. From a French perspective, it might be thought of as "Americanization". Yet the rude waiter phenomenon was not confined to France. Just look at the famous breakfast scene in Five Easy Pieces (1970). The waitress, in this scene, makes no effort to please the customer - an attitude that no longer holds sway even at Waffle House.

Arlie Hochschild, in the 80s, shrewdly saw what was happening and coined the term emotional labor. Or I think it was her. In any case, the wind blew from the U.S., and all over the world you seem much more service with a smile - and as a customer, at least, you probably don't think of the smile as work. But of course, it is. It is consistent with that little extra, that surplus value, that Capital requires.

What is interesting is that in France, this ethos finds its place within a larger French ethos of manners.

In America, instead of manners, we substitute an ersatz intimacy. In the client-service person situation, the client might ignore what would be required in France - the pro forma hello, or good morning, etc. But the client and the service person might overflow with too much information. I remember once getting a hotel room in Houston with A., and how appalled she was that the woman at the desk gave us not only our key, but an update on her wisdom tooth situation.

Manners in France, by contrast, are explicitly oriented towards keeping the intimate and the public apart. This can be confusing for Americans. Take, for instance, the institution of tutoyer. Americans really don't distinguish between you as a familiar term and you as a formal one. When you start speaking French, as an American, this is as confusing, at the beginning, as a sitck shift is if you have always driven an automatic. You are going to be in for some bumps and grinding noises. Myself, I mostly remember to vousvoyer, but in the press of the moment I become inappropriately informal, still.

i find "rudeness" a fascinating topic, because it does seem to mark a certain semiotic-seismic fault line between ways of performing the interaction between strangers - and even familiars. I was raised to be "nice", which is a different thing from not being "rude". But this distinction is not something I would be able to articulate in the American (white, suburban) context alone - it needs to be contrasted in order to be seen.

However, one must continually remember that national characters - our stereotypes - are historically constituted, and historically change. And that, y'all, is what I have to say about that.

mussolini laughs

"The ones who don't enjoy themselves

Even when they laugh

oh yeah

In 1939, the advertising campaign for Ninotchka consisted of the phrase: “Garbo laughs”. The gag was not an in-joke: even the lowest form of film goer knew that Greta Garbo was supposed to be classy and solemn, an actress for the superior, MGM parts.

It is interesting to think about another advertising campaign, which had come about in 1934-5, and could have been called: Mussolini laughs. In the twenties, Mussolini’s government made a conscious effort to distance fascism from laughter. Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, in an essay entitled Rire sans eclat – laughing discretely.

The fascist regime was officially serious. They were serious down to the small details. For instance, a memo was sent to the newspapers in 1936 that, after some deliberation, it was decreed that the schedule for theaters would henceforth be anno teatrale instead of anno comico – comico being a word that meant not only comedy, but also theater in general. And Mussolini was very conscious of his photo-geny: while he laughed in private, at things like Laurel and Hardy films, his public presence was unsmiling, and often, scowling. The scowl, though, had been so bandied about by caricaturists outside of Italy that the campaign to show that Mussolini smiles was devised as a counter-blow. It was also part of the campaign to show that Italy was back as a European power. The war in Ethiopia was accompanied by the campaign to show a jovial, or more jovial, Mussolini. Then, according always to Matard-Bonucci, World War 2 returned Mussolini to his official sourpuss image.

During the interwar period, that is, the 20s and 30s, there was a tendency to examine laughter from the angle of philosophical anthropology. The fascination with tears and laughter came about as a dialectical opposite of the anthropological interest in collective emotions – the expression of emotions that were obligatory in certain social settings. Georges Bataille in his dossier on the pineal eye – with its mixture of brilliant insight and brilliant kookiness – made a psychoanalytically charged connection between laughter and excretion: “The interpretation of laughter as a spasmodic process of the sphincter muscles of the buccal origice, analogous to the sphincter muscles of the anal orifice during defecation, is probably the only satisfying one, on the condition that one attends, in both case, of the primordial place in human existence of such spasmodic processes for excretory purposes.” For Bataille, the Mussolinian grimace was at the very heart, then, of fascism: a literal existential constipation.

Buytendjik and Plessner, in Groningen (the Netherlands) were working from another angle on collective psychology and its expressions, such as tears and laughter – the angle of ethology. Bataille, as well, grounded his work in a (mostly poetic) reference to primates, but Buytendjik actually observed animals - frogs - in the lab. These two put into motion a double movement: first, the reduction of human culture to a collectivity of  muscular movements; and second, to building a plane of signs and meanings – on these movements. In this sense, laughter and tears have a privileged place. They are certainly forms of “excretion”, but they are seemingly feeling-driven. Or it should be said that they are interpreted as feeling-driven. Tears that are not provoked by, say, a cold wind or other elements in the environment, are not the same as sweat, even though, physically, the drop of sweat and the tear-drop are pretty much the same. Yet of course even sweat can be captured by emotion – as any reader of thrillers knows, sweat streams down your face when you are exerting yourself to disarm a bomb. The amount of sweat is disproportionate to the amount of exertion – the remainder, then, has to be explained in some way.

Plessner finished his work, Tears and Laughter, in 1941. In a footnote, he discusses whether laughter is “proper” to animals as well. This was a topic taken up in an essay by Robert Musil in his Posthumous Papers of a Living Person. It is a small essay, but well worth putting in this little mosaic.

Can a horse laugh?

A well known psychologist wrote once wrote down the sentence: “… for the animal does knows neither laughing nor smiling”

This encourages me to tell the story of how I once saw a horse laugh. I thought up to now that this is an everyday phenomenon, and didn’t think of making anything special out of it; however, if it is so rare, I will gladly go into some detail.

Now, this was before the war; it could be that since the war, horses no longer laugh. The horse was hitched to a railing that went around a small courtyard. The sun was shining. The sky was darkblue. The air was extremely mild, although a glance at the calendar showed it was February. And in opposition to all this divine comfortableness there was no human counterpart. In a word, I foiund myself in Rome, on a route before the gates, and the border between the modest outskirts of the city and the beginning of the countryside of Campagna.

The horse, too, was a Compagna horse: young and graceful, with a wellformed, small profile, that wasn’t at all pony-ish, but one which a large rider would look like an adult on a doll’s seat. It was being curried by a jolly lad, the sun shone on its pelt, and in its shoulders it was ticklish. Now the horse had, so to speak, four shoulders, which makes it two times more ticklish than a man. Outside of which, the horse seemed to have a particularly sensitive spot on the innerside of its shoulder, and everytime this was touched, it couldn’t help but laugh.

Thus when the curry brush came near the spot, it laid its ears back, became restless, wanted to bump it away with its muzzle and when it couldn’t, it showed its teeth. The curry brush, however, marched happily on, stroke for stroke, and the lips now gave more and more a sight of the teeth in its mouth, while the ears were ever more laid back and the little horse stamped from one hoof to the other.

And suddenly it began to laugh. It bared its teeth. It sought to bump with its muzzle the boy who was tickling it, as strongly as it could, to brush him away; in the same way that a peasant girl would have done this with her hand, and without wanting to bite him. It tried, as well, to turn with its whole body to block him. But the boy had the advantage. And when he came with the comb in the neighborhood of the shoulders, the horse couldn’t hold it in. Its whole body shuddered, it pulled its lips back from its teach, and far as it could, and it behaved for a second exactly like a person, who one was tickling so much that he could not laugh any more.

The learned sceptic will interject that it could not laugh at all. In response let me say that this is correct in so far as of the both of them the one that neighed with laugher was the boy. But both were visibly playing together, and as soon as one of them began, there could be no doubt, the even the horse wanted to laugh and waited for what was coming next.

So learned skepticism should limit itself to the claim that the animal does not have the ability to laugh at jokes.

But the horse is not always to blame, there.

How important is the presidency, anyway?

One of the hot topics in the (internet) circles I run in is: is Trump the worst president? Which has replaced the hot topic of 2004, which was: is Bush the worst president?

At the time of the Bush is the worst fad, I was all: kinda, sorta, but with reservations.

This is what I wrote back then:

“It is easy to think that our present Bush is the worst Bush who has ever ruled over us. The citizens of Rome, whenever Nero committed some new jape, no doubt cast their eyes back longingly to the good old days of Caligula. Whenever we find out about Bush’s newest low – from the vacations of August, 2001, while the hijackers were asking directions to the nearest airport, to the Spring of 2002, when political intervention cut off the main American chance to deal a stunning military blow to Al Qaeda, to the mass thefts on behalf of the greediest and worst that are bankrupting the state, to, of course, the web of war crimes and lies that compose the entirety of his current foreign policy – we are tempted to sigh, as many liberals do, that this is the worst president of our lifetime.

Yesterday, we picked up a real crime book – Blue Thunder: how the mafia owned and finally murdered Cigarette boat king Donald Aronow, by Thomas Burdick. The book was written in the late eighties. There are amusing period touches – at one point, a DEA agent explains how they spot drug dealers at Julio Iglesias concerts: who else brings a portable phone to a concert? Indeed. Aronow was a Miami business and sportsman, famous in motorboat circles both for the designs of his boats and the records he set racing them. In 1984, he impressed his good friend, Vice President George Bush, by taking him around Miami bay in a prototype speedboat that Bush enjoyed so enormously that, in his (bizarre) position as head of a South Florida drug task force, he recommended ordering grosses of them for the DEA. The boats, named Blue Thunders, were produced by Aronow, apparently, and bought, given this recommendation, by the DEA.

Aronow was gunned down in a mob hit. Burdick, investigating the murder, was puzzled by rumors he heard about the Blue Thunders. The DEA had apparently failed to interdict even one drug craft with the boats. The design of the boats was so bad that the agents using them had to be more alert for engine explosions than for the chugging of speedy boats full of drug smugglers. The enigma was explained when he uncovered the fact that Aronow’s company was secretly owned by Jack and Ben Kramer. Jack and Ben were names in the boat industry – but they were more famous when they were hauled into court and charges with running the largest marijuana smuggling operation in the U.S.

Yes, this happened. The war on drugs had many farcical moments, but this has to be one of the funniest. Bush, it goes without saying, cut his ties of compassion to Widow Aronow, and went on, as President, to intensify the War against drugs to the point that the misery inflicted on one to two million Americans, imprisoned under his draconian regime, and the laws and procedures he introduced that were, with exemplary cowardice, left undisturbed by Clinton, do dwarf the misery inflicted by the current Bush whelp. Although to give him his fair share of abuse, the current Bush, ravening for Iraqi blood, is well on his way to surpassing his pa in terms of sheer feebleness.

Incidentally, Burdick includes a little aside that hints at how, well, lucky the Bushes are in Florida. When Ben Kramer was arrested, apparently original copies of the primary speeches given by Gary Hart were found in his safe. Kramer and Aronow belonged to a ‘swinging” club, Turnberry Isle. It was from Turnberry Isle that Gary Hart extracted his temporary honey, Donna Rice, who was photographed with him on a boat in the Miami harbor. How did the press find out about this? An apparently anonymous tip from another Turnberry hostess. This isn’t to say that the Bush organization, using its dirty connections in Florida, culled the Democratic field in order to organize the elevation of Bush to the presidency. To believe that would be to believe, well, that the Bushes would do anything to retain power, including corrupting an election…”

Back in 2004, to doubt that George W. Bush was the worst president was treated as some kind of treason in some liberal circles. The same thing is happening now for our current shit-for-brains prez. All of which makes for a nice parlor game, but… does it make for real politics?

The real political question should be: how much do presidents count? In other words, the whole point of electing a president is to implement certain policies that the electors want. But once the president is elected, the collected mass of the policies that have been implemented – that overwhelming concrete mass – means that mostly, presidents will try to operate on the trend, rather than revolutionizing the content. This means the experience of governing is always, for those who most favor massive change, an experience of mourning. One mourns the president one thought one was electing.

Certainly that was my experience of the Obama years from 2009-2012. In his second term, I didn’t have high hopes, and Obama was, I think, better in those four years – save for the love of the TPP.

One of the ways in which mourning is averted is to concentrate on those who are attacking the president one has voted for. This makes it easier to think that the president is revolutionizing content, since he is so completely seen as doing so by his opponents.

Yet trends do have an effect. Certain presidents, like Ronald Reagan, worked the trend in such a way that it became the dominant trend for his successors, even today. We are spending about 600 billion dollars to much for the military annually due to Ronald Reagan, and we are spending about a trillion less annually on social insurance – and the collective infrastructure – due to Ronald Reagan. But note that here: Reagan refers less to the man who was president than the collectivity of compromises and agreements by which D.C. was governed in his time. The trends I pick out of Reagan’s presidency were already present in Jimmy Carter’s.

What presidents can do more successfully is negate trends that grew stronger under their successors. For all his military spending and attempts to “shrink government”, Carter was strong about energy saving, ecology, and the environment. Reagan certainly destroyed these things, and they have never come back – hence the disaster we all know we are heading towards, and the hope we have that maybe random volcanic activity will be enough to preserve a livable earth for our children, or that at least these children won’t live in the large swathes of the world in which the water is going to dry up or the seasons are going to become Martian-like.

I suppose the reason that Trump – or any of the Republicans on offer in 2016 – was going to inevitably become the worst president is more because of larger trends that the U.S., and in general the capitalist system, simply is not designed to meet. From an inequality that has pretty much terminated a lot of what we used to have in terms of a democratic culture – one in which, for instance, we had an ideal of equality in the courtroom, now a distant dream – to a global environmental mess, we have deeper and deeper problems. Which is why the choice between Make America Great Again versus America is Already Great is such a farce.  

the strike yesterday in Paris

There were ten police vans going up Rue de la Bretagne, which was a good predictor of a political rally by the left. It was gray, a penetrating over the seasonal deadline gray, a where is spring gray. Weather in cities: I could make a concept album. Everybody was walking around still wrapped up in scarves and long coats. Not gloves, though – the average Parisian seems to have lost the glove habit. Me, I’m a glove man. My hands get cold. I walked along and observed the traffic, which was snarled. The Marais seems to have been converted into a vast chantier since we moved back. It is a sign that the French economy is coming back, but it is also an irritation. The traffic was even worse because streets were arbitrarily blocked and the busses were running on an irregular schedule.  The grève had knocked out a lot of public functions, and one noticed.  Paris without these functions is rather like a sentence that had lost its punctuation, its commas and periods. It becomes a vast run-on.

I headed up to the Bastille. Walking along Beaumarchais, a sweet old lady gave me an anti-globalization handout. There were posters up against the EU. This gave me a sinking feeling. I understand that the EU was designed to spread neo-liberalism in Europe, and that the last ten years have been terrible – it is as if the policymakers at the EU had skipped the economic course about Keynes. Instead of shoveling money into the economy for the workers, the EU’s big solution was to shovel money into the banks for the banks. The reasons for this were multiple, but they all came down to one thing: the poohbahs at the top want to remain as wealthy, and are willing to use the power of the state to do it.

However, the framework of the EU doesn’t necessitate this kind of austerity economics. I’m for a reformed EU. But I think the EU poohbahs have underestimated how they have lost the patience of the people. I still don’t think they get it, don’t get what a massive force popular impatience can become.

Political thoughts. I go on up the street, approach the Bastille monument, which is surrounded at the base by a high wall. I look around. There are signs, posters, but no demonstration, no marchers. I thought they would be here by 3:00, but apparently getting hundreds of thousands of people to move from Bercy to the Bastille takes more time than I had reckoned on. So I hang around with a small group of communists, read their literature. Again, I have a bad feeling. Macron-Holland-Sarkozy reforms work, partly, by shaping the options. Instead of reshaping the options, calling for massive eco infrastructure investment by the state, and raising salaries, etc., the leaflets are all about analyzing the reforms sarcastically and defending the status quo. You don’t win if you don’t promise the goods. You just keep retreating. That, at least, is my feeling.

Alas, after a while, I have to make my way back. I have to get groceries and pick up Adam. So I missed the great assembly of the workers. Like is this a symbol or what? Still, I’m not going to croak like a crow. This day was well worth it. And I’d like to think that my sinking feeling that Macronism is inevitable is one of those momentary internal surrenders that happens with those of us who are prone to mainlining the news for breakfast. Which, don’t do.    

the movie and the stop button

1980 is not a bellweather year. Hostage crisis, inflation, campaign between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, these are the faint associative chimes that ring out for the American goof. But it was quietly decisive in one way for the arts, for that was the year in which the VCR entered the American consciousness as more than just a hobbyists item mentioned in Popular Photography. True, Betamax had come out in 1975, and there were expensive alternatives on the market, but it was roughly around 1980 that a critical mass had been achieved. Meaning that you didn’t have to explain what a VCR was. In 1981, Jack Valenti, stooge of the movie industry, said: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." It is the ritual of technological dissemination that the corporations it seems to threaten throw their lobbyists at it, and then they figure out how to capture it and use it for themselves. Money money money.

What was decisive, it seems to me, was the ability not so much to record film, but to stop it.
This is reflected in the way film was written about. Before the VCR, film exhibition was generally a public thing that the writer on film had to experience like everybody else – that is, as a continuous, forward moving reel. A reel that you could not stop and rewind. In this sense, it fulfilled that cliché about the book whose pages “you can’t stop reading” – except that this magic book would, indeed, have become something unheimlich if you really couldn’t stop reading it, if the pages refused to turn back or to stop.

The VCR put an end to that for the masses.

Jean Epstein, writing in the 1920s, had a prevision that film had yet to be understood in its true metaphysical and lexical glory – the words had to be invented for it, and so did the concepts:

“The Bell-Howell is a brain in a standardized, factory made, commercially distributed metal box, which transforms world exterior to it into art. The Bell-Howell is an artist and only behind it are there other artists: the director and the operator. Finally, you can buy a sensibility and you can find it in the marketplace and pay a tax on it as you do for coffee or an Oriental rug. The gramophone is, from this point of view, a failure – or simply remains undiscovered. We must find what it deforms or where it choses. Have we registered on a disc the sound of the street, of motors, of railroad stations? Some day perhaps we will see that the gramophone is made for music like the cinema is made for theater – that is, not at all, and that it has its proper way. For we must use this unhoped for discovery of a subject which is an object, without a conscience, that is without hesitation nor scruples, without venality, no smugness, nor possible error, an entirely honest artist, exclusively art, the artist type.”

Epstein was an imaginative film writer and maker, like many in the 20s. What he gives us is a machine that is an artist in as much as it transforms the world exterior to it. But what he doesn’t give us is the crucial moment when that machine stops. It stops, and the subject and object fall apart again. Or… perhaps not. Certainly they don’t fall apart again in the traditional way, where reason is the differand – not stopping. We don't have a metaphysics of stopping even now.

I have not had the infinite amount of time necessary to research my thesis, but it seems to me that reading, say, the excellent Gaby Wood article on “In a Lonely Place” in the current LRB, one is not struck with the way she goes into the scene in which Gloria Gayner, playing Laurel Gray, is brought down to the police station to give testimony about Humphrey Bogart, playing Dix Steele, her neighbor. Wood goes “around” that scene, so to speak. She quotes it, she goes into the placement of the characters, the raised eyebrow of Gloria, Bogart with his back to her – it is as if the entire scene were freeze framed, and the method used was the kind of iconographic analysis one expects from, say, Meyer Schapiro. But nobody looks at a Renaissance painting of the crucifixion and thinks of Jesus as an actor, whose personal life infiltrates the picture. The difference between the film and shot cannot be surmounted – they exist in different aesthetic worlds, go on ‘different paths”, to use Epstein’s phrase. But there is a difference in seeing the film in a way that makes its stoppable for the average viewer. It is a possibility in the movies that Epstein, for all his imagination, did not see. Film has becomereadable in another way. And I wonder – if we were in the pre-VCR age, wouldthis be written differently?

“In one of the best seduction scenes in cinema, an interrogation becomes a flirtation: third-person, no eye contact, refracted through the cops’ questions. The setting is the office of Captain Lochner in Beverly Hills police station. The language is the language of evidence. Dix Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter, has been called in over the murder of Mildred Atkinson, a girl he was with the previous evening. We’ve already seen Bogart-as-Dix take little interest in Mildred, whose job was to tell him the plot of a terrible novel he’d bleakly agreed to adapt, and here he takes no interest in her murder either. Lochner sees Dix’s indifference as incriminating – his response to the news, the policeman says, is ‘just petulance. A couple of feeble jokes.’ Dix doesn’t let up. ‘I grant you, the jokes could have been better, but I don’t see why the rest should worry you.’

Enter his alibi: Laurel Gray, a neighbour who saw him come home with Atkinson. At the threshold of the captain’s office she raises an eyebrow, just slightly, and over the next few moments it becomes clear that, for the purposes of irascible romance, Dix and she are the same person: unintimidated, less than ingratiating, sarcastic. She sits down, peers into a near-empty cup of coffee, looks up. Words are unnecessary: she’s nobody’s suspect; men have no manners.
‘Miss Gray, do you know this gentleman?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ever see him before?’
‘Yes, a few times.’
‘Where?’
‘At the patio apartments. We both live there.’
‘Do you know who he is?’
Her back is to Bogart. He has one foot up on the leather sofa, arm resting nonchalantly on his knee. Though he’s sitting behind her, the depth of field is at a maximum, so that they are in almost equal focus. The implication of the framing is clear: throughout this scene, though they say nothing to each other directly, the dialogue is between them.”

the end of poetry? 2

“In an enlightened age there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy, abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abundance of verses, and even of good ones; but little poetry. Men will judge and compare; but they will not create. They will talk about the old poets, and comment on them, and to a certain degree enjoy them. But they will scarcely be able to conceive the effect which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the agony, the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The Greek Rhapsodists, according to Plato, could scarce recite Homer without falling into convulsions. The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping  knife while he shouts his death-song. The power which the ancient bards of Wales and Germany exercised over their auditors seems to modern readers almost miraculous. Such feelings are very rare in a civilised community, and most rare among those who participate most in its improvements. They linger longest among the peasantry.”

Macaulay was born in 1800, and he could easily be presented, in a history-as-coloring-book way, as a transition between the Romantics and the Victorians. But such historical accounts assume the same condescension, the same class-based view, the same cultural absolutism, as Macaulay himself is dabbling in, here.

Of course, these are the early writings of a man who had a tremendous influence, later, on the British policy in India. Rejecting the Indian-ist Enlightenment ideology of such pioneer colonizers as William Jones, the great advocate of Sanskrit literature, Macaulay wrote a famous note on Indian education that urged the worthlessness of Indian literature, in comparison with the power and science of Western literature.

Yet this public view seems to clash violently with his private tastes. Here’s the pin that hooks our moral entrepreneur.

Now, I want to locate Macaulay, but I don’t want to reduce his argument to this location. For the argument winds its way through modernism itself – with that mood of gathering “fragments against our ruin”. Hegel, with whose writings Macaulay was probably not acquainted, was coincidentally writing the vast obituary of art in his lectures between 1823 and 1826. Hegel also (like Macaulay) thinks that the end of art is the end of the power of art – of some power that lay in the past, and that is uncomfortable with, and ultimately incongruous with, an “enlightened” society. Hegel, too, takes it that the enlightened society is a critical one – and that art survives its death by becoming the criticism of art.

Which is a pretty rapid summing up of Hegel, for which I don’t want to be held liable in a court of law. What I want to do is remark on this moment – the shared characteristics between Macaulay and Hegel - and both its truth as a sociological observation and its effect on poetry.

This is an issue that, among critics who are concerned with poetry alone, has been poked rather gingerly of late, with the emphasis being on the “appreciation of poetry” as a marketing problem. Just put a buncha breathless recitations on NPR and voila, we are saved.

But I think that the problem is not even approached in this way. Macaulay and Hegel are both talking of the “space” of the poem. In connecting the Mohawk with the peasant, Macaulay is trying to make a point about levels of “civilization.” One doesn’t have to accept this bourgeois point in order to wonder about the spaces of the poem, where it is read, or spoken, or listened to, how it migrates through media (since I have a very broad view that popular song is poetry too – good or bad), how it lingers in chapbooks and little magazines, I find the question of how a society run on the basis of our society can afford poetry to be an essential one.

Which I’ll approach next.

the end of poetry?

Better theories and worse poems

When Thomas Macaulay went to Cambridge in 1818, everybody expected he would do brilliantly, since he had been born doing brilliantly – talking brilliantly, reading Latin when he was five, making up brilliant arguments when he was 15, and so on. He did shine at Cambridge, but he didn’t take away the highest honors. This was due to his detestation of Mathematics. Classic Barbie said, “math is hard”. Too bad classic Barbie was never stuffed with Macaulay’s words to his Mom about the subject:

“I can scarcely bear to write on Mathematics or Mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of that science, if a name sacred to the useful and embellishing arts may be applied to the perception and recollection of certain properties in numbers and figures! Oh that I had to learn astrology, or demonology, or school divinity! Oh that I were to pore over Thomas Aquinas, and to adjust the relation of Entity with the two Predicaments, so that I were exempted from this miserable study! "Discipline" of the mind! Say rather starvation, confinement, torture, annihilation! But it must be. I feel myself becoming a personification of Algebra, a living trigonometrical canon, a walking table of Logarithms. All my perceptions of elegance and beauty gone, or at least going. By the end of the term my brain will be "as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage." Oh to change Cam for Isis! But such is my destiny; and, since it is so, be the pursuit contemptible, below contempt, or disgusting beyond abhorrence, I shall aim at no second place. … Milton's descriptions have been driven out of my head by such elegant expressions as the following

Cos1 + 1 -   ∕1+2 etc.”

It is fascinating to watch this repulsion towards mathematic grow into the conviction that mathematics and science were the cognitive and cultural rivals of poetry, engaged in a life or death duel. The first and finest expression of this is in an essay Macaulay wrote on Milton – the poet who, in his 1819 letter, was driven out of his head by parody math – that applies these ideas to a primitive but powerful whiggish idea that history put a certain version of Europe at its center. In as much as Europe, here, includes the white dominated Anglosphere, that idea still dominates our politics and intellectual history.

Macaulay’s essay on Milton was a review of Milton’s recently discovered Latin manuscript, Doctrinâ Christianâ libri duo posthumi. Macaulay, quite evidently, was not doing the essay because he was an expert on Christian apologetics. Rather, his interest was on Milton the person and Milton the poet. As a person, Milton was treated by the conservative English intelligentsia rather as Neruda is treated by American conservatives: as an accomplice to terrorism. After all, he was Oliver Cromwell’s secretary, and Cromwell was the great blot on a version of English history that could grudgingly accept the Glorious Revolution, but baulked at the Puritan one. Samuel Johnson’s life of Milton was full of denigrating comments, the best of which is the following:

“Cromwell had now dismissed the parliament by the authority of which he had destroyed monarchy, and commenced monarch himself under the title of protector, but with kingly and more than kingly power. That his authority was lawful, never was pretended; he himself founded his right only in necessity: but Milton, having now tasted the honey of publick employment, would not return to hunger and philosophy, but, continuing to exercise his office under a manifest usurpation, betrayed to his power that liberty which he had defended. Nothing can be more just than that rebellion should end in slavery: that he, who had justified the murder of his king, for some acts which to him seemed unlawful, should now sell his services and his flatteries to a tyrant, of whom it was evident that he could do nothing lawful.”

This is spoken from the very heart of conservatism. It is a heart that must contend with the irreality of its sentiments, in as much as they have to do with the real changes of any established system, and the permeating nostalgia that both incites and distances any re-establishment of a better order, since that is to make the past the rebel of the present.

Macaulay was at the time he wrote his essay an initiate, through his father, of that odd branch of Torydom that plumped for the abolition of slavery. He was on his way to a more robustly whiggish view of things. And though he learned from Johnson’s thunder, he modified it to his own way of tossing lightningbolts.

In any case, before he gets to the merits of Milton’s poetry he inserts a little disquisition on the inevitable decline of poetry in an enlightened age.

Here let me insert a large gorgeous slice of Macaulay-ism:

“We think that, as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. Therefore, though we fervently admire those great works of imagination which have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire them the more because they have appeared in dark ages. On the contrary, we hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilised age. We cannot understand why those who believe in that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the exception. Surely the uniformity of the phænomenon indicates a corresponding uniformity in the cause.

The fact is, that common observers reason from the progress of the experimental sciences to that of the imitative arts. The improvement of the former is gradual and slow. Ages are spent in collecting materials, ages more in separating and combining them. Even when a system has been formed, there is still something to add, to alter, or to reject. Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented [6] by fresh acquisitions, to future ages. In these pursuits, therefore, the first speculators lie under great disadvantages, and, even when they fail, are entitled to praise. Their pupils, with far inferior intellectual powers, speedily surpass them in actual attainments…

But it is not thus with music, with painting, or with sculpture. Still less is it thus with poetry. The progress of refinement rarely supplies these arts with better objects of imitation. It may indeed improve the instruments which are necessary to the mechanical operations of the musician, the sculptor, and the painter. But language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilised people is poetical.”

Those half-civilized people! We are not surprised, when we read that phrase, that we will soon run into the idea that savages are perpetually at the “children’s” phase of intellectual development.

"Truth, indeed, is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness. The reasonings are just; but the premises are false. After the first suppositions have been made, every thing ought to be consistent; but those first suppositions require a degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial and temporary derangement of the intellect. Hence of all people children are the most imaginative. They abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. No man, whatever his sensibility may be, is ever affected by Hamlet or Lear, as a little girl is affected by the story of poor Red Riding-hood. She knows that it is all false, that wolves cannot speak, that there are no wolves in England. Yet in spite of her knowledge she believes; she weeps; she trembles; she dares not go into a dark room lest she should feel the teeth of the monster at her throat. Such is the despotism of the imagination over uncultivated minds.”

The triangle that is drawn here, between the madman, the savage and the child has been analyzed by Johannes Fabian, the anthropologist, in terms of “allochrony” – a way of allotting different time zone types to contemporaneous cultures. The savage in the Americas of 1825 is both a child and living in the “stone age”, while the trousered author of the review of Milton is living in the age of the Enlightenment.  Technological time recapitulates biological time in this paradigm – the child and the savage are both of a type, both poetic, both irrational, both violent, while the reviewer and the colonizer are philosophical, rational, and have a just view of the limits of imaginative power. They have no unconsciousness, while the colonized has, to stretch an antipodes, no consciousness – or little.

Now, as Macaulay was not only an admirer of poetry but a maker of it, and as he was no mathematician or admirer of it, this is a curious view to express. But lifting it away from its biographical anchoring points, it poses a question: is Macaulay right about the effect of a certain society on poetry – both on its prestige and its continuing creation?