Poems in Prose: what are they?

In times of crisis... as stocks of toilet paper get low... as one realizes that one is in the higher danger age set... one thinks: have I really made my views on prose poetry clear? Which is why I've been writing this, first of two parts.

What is prose poetry? Part 1

Definitions, like stories and songs and jokes and explanations, do play a role in ordinary life. Usually, however, their role is to be enlisted in argument – not argument as per the ideal case of philosophy, where a case is presented for a certain thesis against other theses, but argument as in emotionally fraught disagreement between two or more people. Philosophy and ordinary life overlap: there is always a bit of a case being made in ordinary life, and there is always a bit of an accusatory edge in the philosophic use of definition. Gorgias, that wonderful dialogue, makes this overlap emerge. Out of the pocket of Gorgias, I’d like to say, came the entire existential novel.

But I digress. Say I am asked to define the spoon, fork and knife that I see before me at the table. I’d say something like the spoon is a handle with a scoop at the end, the fork a handle with tines at the end, and the knife a handle with blades at the end – in other words, all are elaborations on the handle. This being ordinary life, I’d probably add what they are used for, even though I’d recognize that you can eat peas with a fork as well as a spoon, and that you can stir sugar in your coffee with a knife blade as well as a scoop, etc. The particular use of spoon, fork and knife have to do, eventually, with their design genealogy: definition at this point spreads out and becomes a portrait, a “biography”.

These might seem like miserly concerns: we all know what a spoon, a knife, and a fork are! Yet in the law definition often becomes a tricky way of gaining advantages one way or another. Take the definition of a truck. We have an idea of what a truck is, as opposed to a car. Yet “we” are not automobile manufacturer lobbyists and executives. This is from the Wikipedia entry on sports utility vehicles:

“In the United States, many government regulations simply have categories for "off-highway vehicles" which are loosely defined and often result in SUVs (along with pick-up trucks and minivans) being classified as light trucks.[3][16] For example, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations previously included "permit greater cargo-carrying capacity than passenger carrying volume" in the definition for trucks, resulting in SUVs being classified as light trucks.[17]
This classification as trucks allowed SUVs to be regulated less strictly than passenger cars under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act for fuel economy, and the Clean Air Act for emissions.[18] However, from 2004 onwards, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to hold sport utility vehicles to the same tailpipe emissions standards as cars.[19] In 2011 the CAFE regulations were changed to classify small, two-wheel drive SUVs as passenger cars.[20]
However the licensing and traffic enforcement regulations in the United States vary from state to state, and an SUV may be classified as a car in some states but as a truck in others.[21] For industry production statistics, SUVs are counted in the light truck product segment.”

So I hope we can all see, before we get into our SUVs tonight, that definition is more than “mere semantics”. No, definition is part of human life itself. Semantics can be denigrated as you like, its mereness a kind of excommunication from seriousness, but it returns again because – well, I have to use words when I speak to you. And so the definition figures in that image and product of human life itself, literature.

Take this, from Notes from the Underground, which is in the direct line of descent, I’d like to claim, from the Gorgias. Here the Underground man confronts the abstract notion that runs through our ordinary lives, our governance, our place on the planet, our relation to the cosmos: advantage.

“Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of man consists? And what if it so happens that a man's advantage, SOMETIMES, not only may, but even must, consist in his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not advantageous. And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust. What do you think--are there such cases? You laugh; laugh away, gentlemen, but only answer me: have man's advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some which not only have not been included but cannot possibly be included under any classification? You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace--and so on, and so on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine, too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he? But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon up human advantages invariably leave out one?”

The underground man is right to think that definitions often fall into a listing of properties – we even think of definitions, vaguely, as inhabiting that great list, that cultural monument, the dictionary. And he is also right that as we plunge into definitions we come to strange contradictions. As for instance: the prose poem.

Ah, the prose poem, that puzzling platypus of a thing. While Baudelaire was not the first person to write one, I believe that – give or take Gaspard le nuit – he was the first person to write a collection of them, Spleen de Paris (1869). It is a collection that he fronted with a letter to his publisher, where he wrote perhaps the most famous definition, of a sort, of the prose poem:

"Who among us has not, in his days of ambition, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough, bumpy enough that it adapts itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of daydreaming and the summersaults of consciousness?

It is chiefly of the frequenting of enormous cities, the crossing of the innumerable relations that this obsessive ideal is born. You yourself, my friend: haven’t you ever want to translate into song the strident cry of the vitrier, to express in lyric prose all the desolating suggestions that this cry sends up just to the rooftops, high above the level of the street fog? "

In the Petit Parisien of October 29, 1897, a “Jean Frollo” – pseudonym of some of the writers of the paper – wrote an article on street cries that traces them from the thirteenth century to the late 19th through mention in various broadsheets and poems, as well as books of drawings. He reproduces some of the cries – the vender of almonds, the huckster of a bathhouse, etc – and tells this anecdote about two glaziers – vitrier:

On this topic, you know the story about the two vitriers. One, possesses a sonorous organ, threw out his vibrating cry: ohe! Vitriiii!... while the otyher, who followed 15 paces behind him, timidly, profited from the lungs of his comrade by merely saying, softly: me too!”

Baudelaire, one notices, does not give a definition of the prose poem but, rather, gives us a certain atmosphere in which to accept the prose poem – to justify it. That justification is linked to doing it: Baudelaire asks his publisher if he has not himself dreamt of something like a prose poem, had it evoked or provoked in him by the chances of the day, street encounters, the sound of merchant cries, the huckster’s shuffle. The prose poem such as Baudelaire wrote em becomes central to French poetry: Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Max Jacob, Michaux, Ponge, Char, Jacottett, Jabes, all worked in the veins of the prose poem, some exclusively. At the same time as the verse poem disappears from newspapers and magazines, a sort of observing essay, the chronicle, appears there, with features that are indistinguishable from the prose poem. All of which tends to frustrate the searcher for definitions, for the hard and fast, for the base of the argument, the principle of the accusation or the defense.

TBC

Depoliticizing Trump

It is difficult to wipe away our images of things and see the things themselves. Take Trump.

If America was simply a white nation, Trump would have an approval rating in the high fifties. This has an effect on how Trump, whose approval rating has never broken fifty percent and is usually around 45, is seen in the press, which is dominated by white people. And it has an effect on the rump group of whites who are very anti-Trump.
One has to pull back and understand how segregated America is, both by race and income. Take the latter. The collapse of African-American wealth – and to a lesser extent, Latinx wealth – is one of the great stories of our time. And it is pretty uniformly not known to white America.

A 2018 survey found that whites severely underestimate the racial wealth gap. They think that black wealth is about 80% that of whites. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveals that black wealth is about 7% that of whites.
In 2014, the median net worth of non-Hispanic white households was $130,800. The median net worth of black households was $9,590. It was $17,530 for Hispanic households. Native American wealth has not even been measured since 2000. At that time, their median household net worth was just $5,700.
In seeming contrast, Asian American households have more wealth than white households. But that apparent success story hides a wealth gap within the minority. The richest Asian Americans held 168 times more wealth than the poorest Asian Americans. It’s a greater disparity that white households, where the richest 10% owned 121 times more than the poorest 10%.
The gap is worsening. Between 1983 and 2013, white households saw their wealth increased by 14%. But during the same period, black household wealth declined 75%. Median Hispanic household wealth declined 50%.”

One has to begin here. Segregation in the neoliberal era is performed by the market as much as by redlining banks. It is a world that thrusts together people who share an income band. The forty some percent of white Americans who disapprove of Trump live, for the most part, in a world where that is a minority opinion. In that world, it seems like Trump is a much more powerful figure than he is. You can always place an oped piece in the NYT lamenting that one’s parents now watch Fox and support Trump. These stories are almost always written by white people. It is the rare African-American who has to contend with his or her parents supporting Trump. Outside the Hispanic communities in Southern Florida, it is a rare Latinx writer whose parents are afflicted with the Trump cult mentality.

The racial and economic segregation has an enormous effect on the way politics is reported – how the narrative is woven – in the U.S. In certain subgroups – for instance, in academia – there is a curated diversity that serves, to an extent, to create an image of an America that doesn’t exist – rather like the placement of token African-American actors in Little Women to create an illusion that this isn’t all just about white settler descendants.

The diversity mirage is not an entirely bad thing. There is something utopian about it, something that speaks to how things could be. But it has the pernicious effect of marking itself as real, instead of utopian. In that falsely real world, white pundits can confidently pronounce about the black community as though they know all about it. These pundits rarely pronounce about the Latinx community because they ignore it almost entirely. One thing we do know for sure: when these people go home from work, they do not go home to the houses owned by those with a lifetime accumulation of 9,500 dollars to retire on. They go home to their stocks, bonds, and health insurance. They go home to the residential asset that they will someday sell for half a million to a million.

One of the effects of this segregation is that the hatred of Trump is oddly not political. It is a hatred of Trump’s tweets. It is a hatred of Trump as the tool of Putin, which is simply absurd. In that hatred, everything is about defeating Trump, and little is about the future of the country and how to change it. Frankly, from the viewpoint of those sitting in the over 100 thou range, why change? Meanwhile, the income band of all ethnicities below the 100 thousand range are facing changes that will all go against them. In the neoliberal era of nudgery, the government “helping” lower income people – say with the EIC, an idea that comes out of Milton Friedman – is immediately followed by the government hassling lower income people, as the IRS devotes more resources to auditing the janitor who claimed EIC than the CEO whose tax deferred compensation in ten millions of stock is going to be taxed, if at all, at a laughably low rate by an IRS that has radically retreated from auditing the wealthy.

Once one has a real grasp of how desperate things are for the majority of Americans, and how non-desperate things are for a large minority, the weird de-politicizing of the political starts to make sense. I have read many pro-Hilary Clinton pieces, since her documentary came out, that woozily include laments for Elizabeth Warren, as though the real importance of Warren was being a woman just like Clinton. In a trice, identity here simply erases Warren as a political person, who ran on a raft of proposals that HRC has mocked and derided since she was first elected to the Senate in 2000 up through her post-presidential race career. Warren presented a serious and thorough critique of Bill Clinton’s political economy, up to reversing all the “reforms” Clinton signed off on in 1999-2000. And she proposed a billionaire tax that is anathema to Clinton and her allies. Elizabeth Warren proposed eliminating student debt on her first day in office as president. Yet from the viewpoint of the +100 thousand dollar seats, all that one can see is: Elizabeth Warren is a woman, Hillary Clinton is a woman. Voila.

This de-politicizing move is masked by being ostensibly all about politics, just as Hollywood diversity is ostensibly about reality. But it isn’t.

my query letter

This is the year I intend to publish my novel, Made a Few Mistakes: a chapter from the Bush years. I have been sending out query letters, but have not had a nibble. So I thought, okay, people read my blog. Some people, at least. So maybe I should crowdsource editing suggestions on how to make this letter work. When I used to write freelance, I had a sense of how queries worked, but this is apparently not my world. Two thousand words on a topic, well, it doesn't take that much commitment. 208000 words, which is how big my novel is - around 550 pages - well, that takes effort. I know this. I've edited the thing down, but it has large bones.

 So I need help.

I've sent out many query types. This is my latest. I've incorporated an insane number of suggestions, overdosing on books dealing with queries and agent interviews dealing with queries. So I am lost in the maze. 

So, if you have suggestions, please mail me at rogergathmann@gmail.com. Or leave me a comment. 

Thanks

Dear x,

May 1, 2003 was an auspicious day. President Bush gave a speech announcing the end of hostilities in Iraq under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” This was the first mistake. The popular conservative Governor of Texas, Hutch Sterling, went to a victory party that night. There he was captured on a telephone camera making out with one of the beauty contestants of the organization that threw the party, the Patriot Foundation. That was the second mistake. The Governor’s wife, Holly, pulled into the parking lot of Austin Wines, popped into the store for a bottle, and brought it back to the car. Later, at around 11:00, her mutilated body was found in the back seat of her car, which was parked at the side of Lake Austin Boulevard up where it runs past the golf course. That was the third mistake. The next day, Joan Malcolm saw it on the news. Malcolm knew Holly, slightly, had interviewed her. Malcolm was well known writer – most known for her first book, Your Enemies and Mine: Notes on the Goth Aesthetic, a surprise best-seller in 1984. Malcolm decided right away that she had to do this murder. In fact, as the months dragged on, Malcolm, it turned out, would have more success than the police in tracing the line that lead from Holly’s body to Hutch’s seeming culpability. That was the fourth mistake.

“Auspicious”. Auspicious comes, according to one daring etymology, from haruga, the entrails of the victim, and aspicere, look. The Roman aruspice would examine the sacrificed animal’s innards, and find there signs of the future as legible to his experience as the signs of the Zodiac in the sky. The case of Holly Sterling did have a victim, one could even say a sacrifice, but what were the signs signifying? In 2003, they signified the confluence of many social forces: the growth of cable tv stations, often reflecting some billionaire’s predilections, where the content was 24/7; the growth of internet media of all type, where content was 24/7; the global war on terrorism complex, taking over a spot that was once filled by the Cold War complex; an economy that was in recovery from the tech crash by means of a mortgage bubble that was growing and growing, debt creating affluence rather than affluence creating debt. Joan Malcolm, who’d made her bones on finding enemies and attacking them, found this new world as full of enemies as the eighties or the nineties, but somehow they had sunk below the old levels. Even the Iraq war, that spectacular fraud, was not up to her level. But the murder of Holly seemed to be something symbolically more, some final revelation of the era’s infâme, and she threw herself into it with a sort of relief. The story traces both the many paths that led all the characters to their moment, on May 1, 2003, and the paths that led some of them out of it.

My novel, Made a Few Mistakes (208,000 words) is a variation on the usual crime novel (for instance, it never comes to the firm conclusion about who done it and why that anchors most crime novels). It is, as well as a crime novel, also a political novel, a state of the nation novel, like Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted or Susan Choi’s American Woman.  It has an admittedly large word count, but one that encompasses a multitude of Shandian turns, giving a sense of the zigzag that pulls the reader – Joan herself, going over her notes, for instance – further and further in.

I am looking for an agent with highbrow tastes in literature and lowbrow tastes in American marginalia. 

I would like for you to represent my novel. [Put in here some relevant info on why]

I’ve published a non-fiction book (Everyman’s Marx, Mark Blatty, 2012), and a translations from German (The Basho of Economics: An Intercultural Analysis of the Process of Economics, Ontos, 2007), as well as numerous reviews and essays for a number of magazines (American Scholar, Poets and Writers, Salon, Feed, etc.) and newspapers. I was the academic book reviewer for the Austin Statesman from 2008-2011.

I am sending the first chapter with this letter.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Gathmann

Made a Few Mistakes

By Roger Gathmann

Chapter 1

Order out of disorder – A shocking crime– Some bit players –

Consciousness and creepiness.

In Rudolf Arnheim’s dense and fascinating Entropy and Art, the famous art historian makes an extended attempt to translate the thermodynamic definitions of order and disorder into the realm of aesthetics. Arnheim was a crossroads savant, a man who liked the idea of viewing, say, aesthetics through the prism of physics and physics through the prism of aesthetics. One of those polymath European refugee types that were knocked around the twentieth century, ran out of cigarettes in refugee camps in France, died lice-ridden in concentration camps in Galicia or Siberia, or escaped the various traps and cattle train cars to spend quality exile time in the US archipelago of colleges where they were as awed by the raw animal beauty of the students as they were non-plussed by the astonishing childishness of their references and mores. The sororities. The fraternities. The football. The chewing gum. In his book, Arnheim introduces his entitling duality with an illuminating example from one of the great rituals of everyday life: shuffling cards.

The usual interpretation of this operation is that by shuffling, say, a deck of cards one converts an initial order into a reasonably perfect disorder. This, however, can be maintained only if any particular initial sequence of cards in the deck is considered an order and if the purpose of the shuffling operation is ignored. Actually, of course, the deck is shuffled because all players are to have the chance of receiving a comparable assortment of cards.

Now, to tell the truth, I was so struck by this passage that I tossed aside Arnheim’s book for the day to absorb its full implications. Day followed day, semester semester, until the need to read until the end died one of those deaths well known to ambitious but promiscuous readers, those who are always seeing in the book they hold an obstacle to the book they really should be reading. It was years ago, but in looking through my notes about the Sterling case, Arnheim’s example leaped out at me from some shadowy corner in the brain. I hope the Master – or his shade, for consulting the Internet, I find that Arnheim is no longer with us, his death surprisingly recent – will not mind if an unfaithful reader such as myself filches it. Shuffling, to be all structuralist about it, contrasts with another image of order and disorder in our contemporary quotidian – the switch. The switch and its rituals. We live in a world of switches, and probably use them dozens of times a day. I counted once myself, one day, in the interests of precision, and got to fifty-five by cocktail time. They have created an unconscious but powerful idea among us that disorder and order are mechanical. They are perfect antitheses. On/off, live current/dead current, the universe/chaos – such is the model. A chicken, in fact, can be trained to operate a switch. But shuffling! Ah, shuffling has something pathetically human about it, something characteristic of our ambiguity-seeking, ambiguity-fearing species! Order in disorder, disorder out of order. Our public lives we like to think of in terms of switches, our private life in terms of shuffles. Ha! I have my doubts.

We all wish that the case of Holly Sterling conformed to our model of the switch. Guilty/not-guilty, victim/murderer, good/evil – we would prefer to find these things at the base of it. The trial, or trials, were constructed, after all, to satisfy this desire. The system is built on these switches: the system of justice, and of our sentiments, and of our newspapers, and of our moral impressions. But those of us who have considered the case as a whole, with its larger ramifications, keep coming upon a shuffle at the heart of it – in fact, a sort of diabolical shuffling of motives, facts and factoids, as though the game that was being played might be crooked, and not at all, finally, a homogeneous order/disorder satisfactory to each player. Order in disorder, disorder out of order – this is what we keep coming back to, as we grope in the dark for some master switch.

So do we begin the case of Holly Sterling in 1991? That was, you could say, her big media debut. Standing on the Circle City courthouse portico next to her husband, Hutcheson, she was making the prim smile of the picture perfect political wife as her husband announced that he was running for the District Attorney post in Williamsberg County. Because he was a Sterling, there was a bigger than normal crowd for such an announcement. And because this was his maiden speech, Hutch was nervous. Becoming more seasoned, he’d use a teleprompter, but on this occasion he made the rookie mistake of reading from his notes. When he got to the phrase, I will put the full force of my fortune behind my duty, he said: I will put the full force of my duty behind my fortune. He paused, knowing he’d bobbled it. Then Holly did an astonishing thing. Her prim smile became a guffaw. She balled up a fist and playfully whacked her husband on the shoulder. He looked at her, she looked at him, and they both laughed. Holly then leaned over and said into the microphone, ooops! The crowd loved it. They loved all of her at the moment, from her bobbed blond hair to her black Gucci pumps. Later, the newscast of the event was broadcast not only in the Austin area, as local news, but on news programs all over Texas.

Or should we begin two years later, on February 10, 1993, two weeks after the burial of Holly and Hutch’s only child, when the couple stood, again holding hands but this time a little more desperately, clutching hands is more like it, as they gave their lives “back” to Jesus, a transaction presided over by the telegenically beatific gaze of the “Wagon Master” of the Frontier Fellowship, the rangy, ‘g’ droppin’ Jebulon McCord?

Or do we push the case back further into their youth, contrasting Hutch’s Houston opulent youth, full of those intimations of future greatness that were a prominent part of his campaign literature, and Holly’s rags to riches story, in which the omens were more ironic and the smoothing hand of the publicist more challenged?

Well, as far as the public was concerned, the Holly Sterling case proper begins with a conversation between an ACP cycle cop and a police dispatcher. Maury Lockwood, the man with the police scanner who caught this transmission for the world at large, was eventually hauled into court to defend himself re the doubtful legality of the tape, and fined at the end of his trial, but nominally, his lawyer having made several pertinent points about freedom of information and the evident disparity between the law’s prosecution of Lockwood and the blind eye it turned to the media; and what with the sale of the thing to KXOX, Maury about broke even. KXOX did better, selling it at a considerable markup to their national network. From there it was picked up by all of the others. By May 02, 2003, the nation, if it wanted to, had heard it ten times on the regular channels, and some exponentially greater amount on the news cable stations. As a result, this is a very well-preserved tape, and it is now archived by many an amateur on YouTube, where you can find it if you need to refresh your memory. Expert listeners have been here, as well as cranks, whose comments are also available on YouTube and a number of conspiracy web sites that I will leave it to the reader to find on his own. Cleaners of data, clearers of interference, scraping down to the vocal thrust through the matter, the levels of noise, the friction of magnetic flicker rubbing magnetic flicker. The tape is all neatly transcribed, except for one controversial burst of static that gave rise to the well-known rumor… Well, about poor Holly’s head, which has joined Marie Antoinette’s and Jayne Mansfield’s in a very special pantheon -- although Holly’s does not belong there, according to the official version.

            And if we can’t trust the official version? But really, isn’t this what the whole Sterling case was, on one level, about?

The female voice in the dispatch office of the APD is anonymous, and some would say Southern, although the brisk pace, the verbal speed, indicating that she had been trained, at least, in getting straight to the point in the least amount of transmission time possible; on the other hand, the Southern slant of the ACP cycle cop’s voice belongs, as we know from TV interviews since, to Paul Strange. Perhaps it is appropriate – or at least more fun, and what is a media circus without fun? – to enter this case via the small fry, the essential bit player. Paul Strange fits the type. Oh, does he fit the type! Poor Paul. When he was picked up on that transmission, Paul was a twenty-three-year-old who’d moved to Austin (“back to Austin”, he insisted) in 2000, a good year for inflow to the booming Central Texas metropolis. He was short for a cop, in fact that was one of the problems he had to deal with when applying to the Accelerated Cop Program, but at some point, his height gained an inch in the official dossier, and he was in. He was baby faced, with droopy eyelids, sleepy, shadowed eyes. Loose about the mouth, and distinctly lacking in the facial hair department – Paul took out his Bic razor only once a week, and then the lather floating about in the pooled water in the sink disclosed a discouragingly thin scum of dark shavings that would cling for days in a ring around the sink until his girlfriend would tell him it was disgusting and she wasn’t going to clean it up again. He’d been educating himself at the Community College in all the arts necessary for the career he’d dreamt of: criminology, psychology, English 101, and management science, which he imbibed sitting, as he invariably sat, in the back row, staring under those somewhat bluish lids at his instructor with no light of intelligence in his eyes, apparently waiting in vain for the strings of sentences and bullet points to cohere into a possible exam answer. The bullet points were new, but the stare, the scribbled scramble of his essay answers, the pity C, were old news, known (and now forgotten) to Old Mr. Maier (geometry), Mrs. Snail (geography) and Miss Annie Mackeral (reading) in, respectively, high, middle and elementary school. These schools were located in Duluth, Georgia, and so at that time was Paul, much to his chagrin. At the age of two, he’d been stored next to his sister, Amee Lea, and a box bearing the title, “Misc”, in the back seat of the Malibu, and hauled to Duluth, with his mother, Bonnie, controlling sibling rivalries  from the front seat as she nervously navigated the speed on the highways going from Austin to Atlanta, treating herself during the one night stopover at the hotel in Natchez to approximately four martinis (which, she estimated, were the equivalent of the usual one valium) to relax the knot she felt in her chest, the stifled fright accumulated from estimating crash opportunities as they opened up constantly on either side of her. Bob and the furniture were already waiting for her in Duluth. Paul blinked at all this, sucked his thumb, cried when Amee Lea poked him (out of boredom more than meanness – Amee Lea was mostly protective of her Boo) but didn’t think much of it until later. Later began when he was six, which is when he was thrust from the warm blanket and snack of kindergarten into the harsh glare and hard seats of elementary school and began his quest to find an edge. Miss Mackeral, using the most up to date theories in psychology (she’d aced her course at Georgia State) wrote a note to Bonnie describing Paul as “lacking in self-esteem.” By sixteen, the lack had been filled somewhat: by smoking pot, by a fanatical devotion to certain cop shows and to the Stone Temple Pilots, and by weaving around himself a story of being really from Texas. In the crowd of freaks he hung around, he gradually acquired the name Tex. He loved that.

What really closed the self-esteem gap, however, was his discovery, as the end of high school came into view, that a certain kind of girl was just wild about heavy lidded, baby faced boys. This type of girl, he was happy to find, was often “kranked” to “do it like they do it on Discovery channel.” Doing it made him simply happy. Paul was very good at the lineaments of satisfied desire, which set him apart from many of his friends, male and female, although he didn’t know it.

Here is an excerpt from the KXOX broadcast, May 2, 2003:

PS:  DHQ, I’m ACP Paul Strange here. I have a bit of a what you call a tricky, uh, situation here … There’s a car here, silver, 02 Lexus, let’s see ... and I’m knocking at the windows. Over.

DHQ: I’m reading you, PC 40, coordinates please, over ...

PS: And you know I have been told that if I run into….

DHQ: Where are you, PC40, over

PS:  Easing the car door open. Its unlocked…

DHQ: That’s a negative, PC40. Coordinates. Coordinates officer! 

[Various background noises:  something metallic, a muffled what the…  Jesus (expletive) …  oh, god damn, a whooshing sound, expletive shit, a rushed sound of bootfalls on pebble]

DHQ: Did you open the door? Tell me you did not open the door.

PS: Door is open. And this woman, this woman, I think I have a part of her on my

[Background sound of croaking and spilling]

DHQ: Are you all right? Officer…

PS: Paul.  My name is Paul Strange. I’m ACP. Get somebody the (expletive) here... Somebody, some sick, oh man, her (static) head.

DHQ: I’m getting a lock on you. A cruiser is coming. Back away from the car.

PS: My dinner come up.

This transmission gives us these for-murder-fans essential anchoring points: a car, a place, a body. Paul Strange had found the night a little too hot, and at a certain point had taken off his gloves, which is why his prints were on the window, the door, the seat, Holly Sterling’s boot. And Paul’s digestive fluids mixed with food were in the foot area of the back seat. This was unfortunate from the point of view of the clean crime scene, as was made evident at various trials. It was not an encouraging start for a candidate officer, either. And when the Austin Chronicle picked up on the fact that Paul Strange was out there that night with a minimum of training, due to a program that had been run on the quiet for two years to increase the police department’s manpower at a low cost, the ACP program was quietly folded. As for our bit player, Strange, he got into a fight in a bar three months later, and was suspended from the program. However, being interviewed three times on television and at the trial gave him the idea of starting his own private security company, which he did. He went bankrupt in 2006.

As soon as the murder squad came on the scene of Strange, the cruiser, and the Lexus, the license plate became an issue.  Detective Chuck Reilly left his partner to debrief Strange again and personally made the drive back to HQ, calling Ludlum at home on his cell. ‘See me at the office,” Reilly testified later, “something like that. That’s what I told him.”

 When Bennett Ludlum got to the scene at 11:30, he’d had his talk with Reilly.

“I just told him that it was the Governor’s car. No sir, I didn’t tell him we got a bomb on our hands. No, I never used the words bomb, explosion, any of that, to my recollection. No, I don’t know why they printed that, sir. I figure they got the wrong end of the stick.”

Everybody at the scene by 11:30 p.m. was aware that this was on a Need to Know basis.

Everybody at the scene did not include Strange, who was getting tired of going through the same story over and over down at HQ.

Not that the body was identifiable with 100% certainty. For instance, there was no purse or wallet in the car. The contents of the glove compartment had been cleaned out. As for the monuments of our mortal decay – for instance, the smell in the car, which had been modified when Strange opened the door but still preserved the overheated smell of blood, Chanel No. 5, urine and feces – these are general enough to form no reliable standard of identification. The woman, on the back seat, was face up. In a manner of speaking. However, a certain circumstance altered the immediate recognition this face would provoke in the observer – if the observer was minimally interested in state public affairs, or fashion, or the society pages of several Texas newspapers. Just that year the cover story in the Texas Monthly. Three cover stories in the last four years. As a matter of fact, Ludlum had known her, in life, in a manner of speaking, enough that she remembered him the last time he’d been up at the Capital[MOU1]  and she’d spotted him. Her memory for names and faces was definitely an asset, they said so in the Monthly article. 

By 12:00 a.m the car had been hauled down to the APD-HQ. The Austin Police Department had located its headquarters on the shadow line between East Austin, where the shadows were poorer and darker, and Sixth street, which was a contact zone for the collegiate and the vagrant, lined with buildings that, under the raw Austin midday sun, looked dirty and in need of repair, but were lit up at night with neon lights that gave them collectively a shadowy allure, to which was added the amplified music broadcast into the street from every other door, making the entire arrangement seem momentarily legendary if you were in the 18 to 22 demographic. The ten story, rambling building, built between two one-way streets and always seeming to be blocked by construction work on one of the streets, barely accommodated the needs of a force perpetually losing its race with the growth of the city it served, as the loser in the last mayoral race – who used the lack of a police force to tout his “concealed weapons for all” theme – liked to point out. Ludlum had been with the force long enough to remember the old HQ, which was made of brick – rather than the fake slate cladding wrapped around the new HQ – and was now inhabited by the Association of Retired State Employees. He’d liked his old office, which looked out on a block of those central city houses that had been converted into lawyer’s offices or get out of jail bail shops.  His office on the third floor of the new building didn’t have an exterior window. The Lexus was docked in a pen in the back of the building, preparatory to a thorough going over. Ludlum had supervised the transfer of the corpse to a stretcher, and watched three men roll it through the metal doors (with the cringeworthy bang, as if the sad dead meat of the corpse could still feel the indignity of this treatment) which would lead to an elevator, a long underground corridor, and the “toyshop”, the domain ruled by Travis county coroner Dr. Bill Herndon. 

Then Ludlum turned to the business of getting in touch with Sterling. That Ludlum did not as of yet have the first clue proves that Ludlum was not a big fan of local tv news.

The pertinent agencies were alerted: the Austin branch of the Texas Rangers, the Protective Detail attached to the Governor’s office, the Austin D.A.’s office, and as was disclosed in Contrarian.com four months later, King and Crockett, a limited liability corporation with an image management mission in politics, and a long and complex – or in the words of Frank Crockett, a “mutually fruitful” – relationship with the Sterling administration. The quote is from an article in Contrarian.com. One of several. Joan Malcolm’s articles. The one that topped Contrarian’s “most emailed articles” list for 2003.

James Loveless was at the center of this one. James Loveless was the man Ludlum approached in the hall that night. Loveless was connected to the APD as a consultant in, of all things, hypnotherapy. Ludlum had conflicted feelings about hypnosis. It was an issue he thought about a lot in high school, when he’d reached a plateau playing baseball, and began to explore around, reading Zen and the Art of Archery, experimenting in self-hypnotic suggestion, applying certain suggestions about forgetting the monkey mind and being in the ball as it left the pitcher’s hand, and this had paid off in elevating his batting average by one hundred points and making him a quicker, more responsive third baseman, not just simply catching the ball but understanding it as he flipped it from glove to hand to throw to out. This had landed him on the bench at U.T., where he was just below the grade that was good enough to start, and where the whole baseball thing had petered out in pinch hitting and pity substitutions at the bottom of the ninth, when it didn’t matter. But at the same time he’d developed other collegiate interests: namely, popular science books and girls from the art department. Going out with the latter, he learned about Mayan prophecy, Neuro-linguistic programing, tarot and lithium. Reading the former, he gained a surface knowledge of quantum fluctuations, the selfish gene, Schrödinger’s cat, the n+ dimension of strings, and the fact that the human retina receives ten billion bits of information per second, but by the time this information is processed by the brain, we operate on one hundred bits. I am, therefore I edit. Of these two world views, Ludlum put hypnosis in the arty girlfriend category. And yet, he’d worked on cases where hypnosis worked, where witnesses – like Lana, the seventeen year old girlfriend of the killer in the South Congress MacDonald shooting – would, unconsciously, reveal information that they had supposedly forgotten – edited out with the 9 billion 999 million some bits they’d trash at every glance.

There was that. And there was that hypnosis had a very creepy aura.

He also didn’t like the idea of letting the unconscious contaminate a nicely constructed case connecting one material evidence to another, which was the most righteous way to go to court. 

So these conflicts came up and expressed themselves in this instinctive shrinking back whenever Ludlum came into contact with the tall, cadaverous Loveless, with his parchment white skin, that white hair, that skull like face, sporting those bespoke linen suits, bending his way through the halls of APD HQ, confabbing with the D.A.  And this, too, put Ludlum off, because he never knew (”it really pisses me off that I don’t know!” he told Maureen, his girlfriend) who Loveless was working for. The man worked for several masters – the D.A., the new Texas Department of Homeland Security, and of course King and Crockett.  When Ludlum joined the APD in 1993, there was an obvious distinction between the state and business. In those days, while the politicians were forever praising “private enterprise”, there was no notion that business could or should take over the functions of the state: taxing, imprisoning people, teaching, fighting wars. This was, of course, no longer the case in 2003, either at home or abroad. The definitions of graft, insider dealing, of equality before the law, of transparency, had been put on the back burner. Now Ludlum was always bumping into some private consultant, some contractor, demanding information they had no right to or providing ‘advice’ and ‘resources’ that you, a) weren’t going to follow because it was bullshit and more paperwork, and b) that you had to be nice about so the guys at the top saw that you were ‘on board.’

Tonight, however, Ludlum was not so irritated by the thought of dealing with the draculine Loveless for the simple reason that he needed to find someone to entrust with the delicate task of telling Governor Sterling that his wife had been murdered and her eyes… well, he needed to be told, and then later they could fill him in on the details. Loveless, Ludlum knew, was connected to Sterling. Somehow. How was unclear, but everything having to do with Crockett and King was unclear. Everything having to do with the new homeland security mandate was unclear, too, but Loveless was connected to that. Thus, when Loveless’s long, slightly clammy fingers clutched Ludlum’s wrist – the man was a wristclutcher rather than a handshaker, which Ludlum imagined he must have gotten from hypnotherapy – Ludlum did not shake him off, but told him that he needed to see him, that they had a problem.

“I’m glad we are finally interfacing Ben,” Loveless said. 

Down in the toy shop Herndon was saying, “bet you it was an ice pick. She should thank God, I guess, that he didn’t pull out the knife for these (and he pointed) until she was probably beyond mortal consciousness.” 

Pareto: the Pareto "law" and the receipts

Vilfredo Pareto has never been a well known name, outside of economics and a part of sociology. He has, however, entered popular culture due to his so called “80/20” law, a power law that is often used by conservatives to indicate that inequality is not caused by social arrangements but transcends them – is rooted, in fact, in human nature.

In many ways, Pareto, who lived during a time when the classical liberal order was dissolving, prefigured neoliberalism. He advocated for two theses that have become part of neo-liberal doctrine. The first is that inequality isn’t bad, poverty is: thus, growth is the way out of poverty, and the only real economic concern of the state. The other thesis, which he called the “circulation of elites”, is that family wealth – wealth attached, as it were, to the house – does not secure a specific elite over time. In other words, social mobility is such that the rich become poor and some of the poor become rich.

These two theses make up the apologetic for capitalism in our time. It is for this reason that taking a critical view of Pareto is a politically charged act.

It is one of the peculiarities of the secondary literature on Pareto that so few are interested in the sources from which he took his statistics to derive his  famous “law” of the distribution of income. Admittedly, Pareto himself simply articulated a power law in which the significant variable {a} could be a bit different. Still, he was very sure that he had stumbled upon a statistical relation that must, somehow, be rooted in human nature, and he claimed that he did so empirically: by looking at statistics about total income and its distribution in various countries. In other words, Pareto didn’t bring his power law to these stats, they brought the power law to him. Pareto used that law to attack socialistic schemes for equality. Go to twitter and advocate for equality, and [by a special power law I will entitle Gathmann’s law] before the string of replies is complete, someone will have invoked the 80/20 law, or some distorted form of it. It has become business school wisdom, which is where all truisms go to be shined up for perky MBAs to pour forth to the workers.

According to Jean-Sebastian L’enfant’s study of the Pareto law, Pareto viewed statistics from colonial Peru as an affirmation of what he had (supposedly) found in studying income distribution in Europe – his 80/20 law.

“Ainsi, lorsqu’il constate que sa loi peut tout aussi bien décrire la répartition des revenus au Pérou, à la fin du XVIIIème siècle 14, il n’hésite pas à y voir une confirmation et un motif de généralisation : “une coïncidence fortuite est possible mais peu probable, et il se pourrait qu’une même cause eût produit les mêmes effets observés” (Pareto, 1897a, 46). C’est en tout cas un indice supplémentaire que la distribution des revenus n’obéit décidément pas au hazard. [Thus, when he observed that his law could describe, as well, the distribution of incomes at the end of the 18^th century, he didn’t hesitate to see in this a confirmation and a motive to generalization: “a fortuitous coincidence is possible but not very probable, and it could be that the same cause produces the same observed effects.” In any case this was a supplementary index that the distribution of incomes did not obey mere chance.

This statement interested me. Knowing that statistics for colonial Peru, especially as they were available to a historian who was writing in the late eighteenth century in Britain, were unlikely to be extensive, I went to Pareto’s text. Pareto writes:

Curious information is furnished to us by W. Robertson on Peru, at the time of Spanish rule, at the end of the 18^th century. They sold there a certain [papal] bull, said to be from the crusades, and everyone bought it, Spaniard creole or mulatto, at a price fixed by the government.. the price of the bull varied according to the rank of persons.”

Robertson gives us the numbers of persons who bought the bull. We find here, approximately, the law that we saw presiding over the distribution of total income.”

Pareto then constructs a little table of figures derived from Robertson. It is all very neat. Yet when we look at what Robinson says, huge gaps appear in this account. It should be said Robertson uses the figures on the issuances of the bull to make an estimate at the population of Peru, since he has no census figure, (evidently he was not  familiar with the Peruvian census of 1740 – which he would not have had access to anyway in the 1790s). Even so, these figures themselves are shaky. In Robertson’s account, from whence Pareto derives his numbers, the reference source is not quoted, and Robertson falls back on numbers of copies of the bulls printed, not bought.  And one thing Robertson tells us straight out: the figures tell us nothing about the Indian population, since so few Indians bought the bull from the government,  even though he estimates that the Indians were perhaps the majority of the population. Other sources – not Robertson – have implied that there was a strong secondary market in the bula – it was, basically, a bull of indulgence. Thus, Indians may not have bought it from the government, but they did from salesmen who bought it from the government. So we are talking about a product that was bought both for consumption and for sale – which already tells us that we cannot use these figures as a proxy for income distribution, any more than we could use figures about television sets that mix up wholesale and retail sales. Robertson never gives his source for the sales of the bull, although he claims that he believes they are accurate. He gives an estimate for the Indian population as around 2,600,000 from another source before he gets to the bulls.

 “According to an account which I have reason to consider as accurate, the number of copies of the bull of cruzada exported to Peru on each new publication, is 1,171,953; to New Spain, 2,649,326. I am informed that but few Indians purchase bulls, and that they are sold chiefly to the Spanish inhabitants, and those of mixed race.”

Comparing Pareto’s source to what Pareto claims Robertson says, we do have to say that chance plays probably plays little role in the emergence of Pareto’s power law, here. What seems to play the biggest role is Pareto’s own obsession. The printing of these bulls, at different prices, from an indeterminate source, over a period of at least two hundred years, does not offer empirical confirmation except through the most hazardous of conjectures. We have Robertson’s numbers, at best, for the “last predication”, which is undated, although the selling of these bulls goes back to the sixteenth century. So what we have is the essence of an unsound method for making statistical analysis. Far from being an independent confirmation of the Pareto law, the Robertson quote seems to be a confirmation of a hermeneutic tendency: to assume the law and look for instantiations.

Yet I have yet to read any doubt about Pareto’s method for gathering his data. And perhaps his data set  from Italy is sound. Pareto’s leaping upon confirmation in his reading of a hundred year old text about Peru, in spite of its own author’s cautions, gives me pause, though.

poem by Karen Chamisso

Leilah changes my sheets

once every three days

Phillipe and I lay encoupled

in the odor of ironing and sachet.

“According to the naturalist A.N. Bragham

The waters of the Mare Nostrum

are changed complete every 7500 years

- an estimate that like most of ‘em

depends on a host of alterable circumstances.

From Gibraltar to Beirut

the sea turns and tosses

on an undercurrent that would not suit

with Leila’s notions, nor mine

Still, we dive, one after the other

in the water of the Calanque de Port d’Alon

and plunge down into that unmade water.

Intimations of death

are cheap in the eyes of this sea.

We’ll pass before one snorting breath

is exhaled by geology.

Note to Sanders camp: read Invisible Man, chapters 17-19, by tomorrow.

Biden, according to one exit poll, took 60 percent of the black vote in Texas. The same story is writ large across the South.

It is a story with a moral, and the Sanders people better quickly get the punchline here. My suggestion to whoever is advising Sanders: read the section in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man about organizing for the Brotherhood in Harlem. The Brotherhood has a “scientific plan” (it is Ellison’s proxy for the Communist Party in the 30s). And the Invisible Man, with his experience of racism, and his own skin color, is an activist, with a sense of what the “scientific plan” means. But he comes against the limits not of the plan, but of the planners.

The planners, like the Sanders people, seem to have decided to repress difference – the real history of African Americans in this country – for their “own good”. It isn’t that Sanders doesn’t denounce racism, but he is averse to the whole symbolic universe around that struggle, partly because he seems to think that it is hypocritical – a buncha neoliberals celebrating the civil rights era while collaborating with the immiseration of the black working class. But just because a buncha neoliberals celebrate the civil rights era – for instance, by attending the ceremony in Selma to commemorate the 1965 march – doesn’t mean the civil rights era shouldn’t be commemorated. And it certainly doesn’t mean that the black politicians that have inherited, and in many ways squandered, the symbolic succession of that era should be treated with contempt, or kept at arm’s length. That can only lead to disaster.

Universal healthcare will make our lives better, but it is our lives, with all the symbolism and poetry of them, that are the dominant party here. The “scientific plan” should serve the people, not the other way around. Sanders campaign will fatally err if it doesn’t make a very forceful correction here. Do not come on like the social worker who knows better, cause that is only gonna lead to defeat.

What is human life worth? William James and Bossuet

Il a eu le paradoxe pour parrain, et le poesie pour marraine – Delvau on Gerard Nerval

In the third lecture of William James’ Pragmatism (1907), James gives us his sense of the pragmatic response to the great metaphysical question: is there only matter, or is there spirit too? A question which implies: is there a God?  And if there is not, does this have a bearing on the meaning of life in a world that is an ephemeral collection of molecules, which will be utterly swept away as all solar systems are ultimately swept away?

James takes Herbert Spencer as his defender of materialism – although, save for the Darwinism, the position Spencer defends could as well have been taken from Helvetius. Spencer sees no problem in substituting matter for God, and James concedes that Spencer is right not to think of matter as somehow “dirty” (James doesn’t explore, as 20^th century anthropologists will, dirtiness itself as a cultural construct, the abject pole in the sacred economy). At this point in the lecture, James paints an interesting counter-example to matter’s “dirtiness”:

Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact of matter could have taken for a time that precious form ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all life’s purposes.”

The intrusion here of the dead child or parent, this semi-explicit flashback, lends to James’s essay, at this point, a certain hortatory tone that derives from the sermon. It is not for nothing that James’s father was a religious figure, the leading American Swedenborgian. Metaphysics, for James I think, comes out of the funeral – out of death.

Which is my justification to compare what James is doing to a funeral sermon – an oraison funébre – by  Bossuet, the 17^th century French Bishop. England’s Anglican preachers, Donne, John Taylor, etc., were perhaps the greatest English artists of the sermon. In France, Bossuet holds that title. I’ve been reading his famous funeral sermon for Madame – Henriette d’Angleterre, the sister of Charles II of England and the (unfortunate) wife of Monsieur, Louis XIV’s brother . Monsieur was not into the female sex – at least sexually, although he loved dressing up as a woman. Unfortunately for him, he had to be married and his wife had to produce children, hence the incredibly unhappy marriage of Henriette. Not that she was incredibly unhappy – much of the time, she was entertaining lovers too, which probably included Louis XIV. Her problem with her husband came about as much from the fact that she was infinitely intellectually superior to him, and everybody knew it. Henriette was the friend and patron of Corneille, Moliere and Racine, all of whom dedicated work to her. She was, as well, Bossuet’s friend – he was her confessor. Her sudden death has given rise to speculation that she was poisoned, and the case has never been cleared. Monsieur’s second wife was told by a servant a story about one of the friends of Monsieur’s banished lover, the Duc de Lorraine, that seems to have been told to Saint Simon too, who records it in his Memoires. The story could easily be an Edgar Allen Poe story, replete with poisoned cups, substituted drinks, etc., etc.

Bossuet tells us in the sermon that her death, which was so sudden, left him unprepared to prepare her funeral sermon. So opening the Scriptures he came by chance to Ecclesiastes, which offered him the texts that he uses to structure the sermon. Already, then, the listener is clued in to accident as not only possible in the great wide world, striking down princesses, but also as a formal element in the sermon itself. Quite a neat trick.

Accident led to Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiastes leads Bossuet to contemplate vanity. To an extent that is unparalleled in the Bible, the writer of Ecclesiastes seems prepared to write off the creation as an accident – defining our delusive satisfactions in that  accident as vanity.

There has long been a Christian thematic about the vanity of the world, and Bossuet follows it up to a point, where he asks if this is all the story. If man himself is a vanity, did God send his only child to die “for a shadow”?

This moment, this question, begins a re-ascent of the other side of the Christian scold, the discourse of amour de soi. It is a re-ascent that is not only rhetorical, but that points to the desire for “balance” that was not only inscribed in the classical age’s aesthetic, but as well in its metaphysics. Balance is not merely a formal preference, but a sort of end-state towards which rationality pushes the soul.  At the point of balance, the forces arrayed against that the forces arrayed for can be transcended. Balance is the grace of reason.

Balance is, as well, the grace of economics in the classical age. Fortuna plays a zero-sum game. When God exchanges his life for “man”, man must be as valuable as God’s life. Man’s redemption is, then, man’s value. And yet underneath this placid understanding of the ransom of souls is another thought – what if man is not worth God’s death? Or what if our reckoning here is absurd, an exchange of the infinite for the finite, of all for zero, of light for shade?

That fierce baroque irrationality breaks through in Pascal, but not in Bossuet. And even Pascal retreats to a less absurd articulation of the terms – Pascal’s wager is a way out of the question.

Bossuet himself considers the terms as double: on the one hand, the exchange of the infinite for the finite, in the world’s terms, is absurd – instead of revealing the value of the finite, it reveals its insignificance. Measured against God, however, man’s acts become suddenly important.

“Oh God, says the prophet king, you have made my day measurable, and my substance is nothing before you.” It is so, Christians: everything that is measured finishes; and everything that is born to finish never completely escapes nothingness, into which it is soon replunged. If our being, if our substance, is nothing, what about everything we build on it? No edifice is more solid than its foundation, nor is the accident attached to being more real than being itself.”

Bossuet’s movement pre-figures Hegel’s 19^th century notion of the two infinities, one of which is simple endlessness, and one of which is the Idea, the Spirit. The Spirit is the heir of this escape from the universal dissolvent of the bad infinity that is, ultimately, worth nothing more than a program that gives you an algorithm for always adding +1.  A program that is useless.

To return to James: in his pragmatic metaphysics, there is a variation of Bossuet’s dialectic, which goes to an interesting place.

James contrasts two time frames – or, really, two frames of reference which seem to be distinguished temporally.

One is that frame in which the entire contents of the world are irrevocably given – which is how James defines the “past”: “to end at that very moment, and to have no future, and then let a theist and a materialist apply rival explanations to its history.”

Immediately one senses that we are in trouble with this thought experiment when we see it commences with a “then”. Thought experiments are much more difficult to do than is thought of, for the most part, in philosophy. Here in James’ scenario, we encounter a scenario that seems to be larger than the philosopher’s attempt to understand or imagine it. If indeed the world is vanished in some absolute sense, the one thing that we won’t have is a materialist or a theist then applying their analysis to it. This is, in a sense, an example of Hegel’s bad infinity – the confusion of a finite endlessness and the infinite interiorization of the Spirit – which is something like what Christians like Bossuet would call eternity. In James’ scenario, the materialist and the theist exist only in a condition of impossibility. Any recollection, analysis, theory, expression, pulse beat – violates the conditions of their existential credentialing. It is important to remark on the invalidity of the thought experiment – that is, to remark on the fact that if a philosopher can imagine a thing, it doesn’t mean that he or she can imagine it well – before remarking on the fact that for James, this thought experiment is meant to lead us to what we might call the Ecclesiastes doctrine: all is vanity. All distinction between the theist and the materialist, for James, vanishes into uselessness.

Such is the prelude to his second scenario, which presses on the idea of the future:

“… in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert with me to our question and place yourself, this time, in the world we live in, in the worth that has a future, that is yet uncompleted while we speak.”

Here, again, James has an uncertain grasp of the temporal mode. For the first scenario too has a future – unless of course time itself is abolished. Unconsciously, James is supposing a wholly subjective cast to the future – the future is only a human perception of time. It is upon this foundation – a shaky one, from Bossuet’s viewpoint – that he moves to a very American moment of “positive thinking”.

While the materialist has nothing to say about the nihilism of the endpoint, the theist, from James’s point of view, does. “… tragedy is only provisional  and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things… Here, then, is the different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which the differences entail lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism.”

This, then, becomes James’s argument about the truth of the matter:

“Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.” 

For a long period of time after World War One – perhaps all the way up to the 21^st century – this kind of thing was damning to the modernist. Hemingway mocks this kind of American optimism in one of the last lines in The Sun Also Rises:  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” For the modernist, better the nihilism of the final end, as imperfectly envisioned by James, then the flatness of “positive thinking”. In American culture, though, positive thought has had a strong presence as a sort of defense of capitalism and the American order. From James to Dale Carnegie we can draw a line. Oddly, at the turn of the twentieth century there was a strong rush on the citadels of pessimism. Happiness therapy engages in just this kind of pragmatist sleight of hand. At the same time that Happiness therapy started to gain a foothold in academia, the positive thought meme in the general culture at large started to deflate. We have had more than enough evidence, over the last twenty years, of a despair culture – a culture of rising suicide and drug overdose rates. Meanwhile, the vision of the world’s end has become more real, and it doesn’t involve the sun exploding as much as it involves the climate shifting due to our very human success in making this world ours – even to the egotistical extent of calling this the Anthropocene.

Bossuet, in this sense, is less of a monument now, and more of a conversation partner, while James, in this instance, is less of a conversation partner and more of a monument.  Is there any importance to human life if it isn’t validated by some enormous, trans-human sacrifice? Are these our choices?