cold war skies

 

 

“What age was I? Six or seven, I think. I was stretched out in the shadow of some poplar trees contemplating a sky almost without clouds. I saw this sky teeter, and fall into the emptiness. This was my first impression of nothingness, all the  more vivid in that it succeeded that of a full and rich existence. Since then, I have sought to understand why one thing succeeded the other, and in consequence of an erroneous assumption common to those who search with their intelligence instead of their bodies and souls, I thought it was a question of what philosophers call the “problem of evil.” However, it was something deeper and more serious. I had before me not a failure but a lacuna. Everything, literally everything, threatened  to fall into this yawning hole.”

This is from Jean Grenier’s The Islands, a book of “fallen leaves”, brief poem-meditations, published in 1934. Grenier’s sky was the pre-World One sky, from 1906.  Its freight was birds, tree branches, clouds, the sun, the moon, the stars, bats. In other words, no human freight. It was the sky as a non-human scene. Hence, a divine scene – or a natural scene.

When I was  a kid, this sky was long past. My tenth year was, what, 1968? In my suburb, the back yards were dotted with swing sets, which, like the two car garage, were signs of middle class prosperity. Your kids didn’t have to play on the street corner and get into gangs – they had playthings in the yard itself, which was your Crusoe’s island, your claim on the main.

By the age of ten I was outgrowing swinging. But I still liked the ‘sky’ effect. You would kick until you achieved a certain level, then swing easily, face up to the sky, and let yourself fall into it. Fall, at least, into a trance of the sky. It did not disclose emptiness and the hint of the Dao to me, as it did to Grenier, but it did make me pleasingly dizzy.

I think it was that year that my elementary school friend showed me the book he was reading: Hiroshima, by John Hershey. I read a bit of it and it changed my sky.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know what airplanes did. How many world war movies and shows did I see on tv? In my memory, it seems like hundreds. And almost all of them had bombers in them. However, the viewpoint was definitely the bomber’s viewpoint, not the bombed. We weren’t bombed, here in the states. It was our blessing, our sign from God. We bombed. But the little bit I read about the victims of Hiroshima gave me, literally, nightmares. I liked the planes that contrailed across my sky. I liked the way the contrails spread out and disappeared. I never took them as a threat. But whether it was due to John Hershey’s book or whether I was putting two and two together in my little Cold War head, it suddenly struck me that maybe it was possible that the communists could actually bomb us. In which case I knew what would happen: our clothes would burn off, our skin would slither off our bones, we would troop to rivers to cool ourselves and those rivers would be boiling. This landscape was familiar to me: it was Hell. The place of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The Cold War sky stuck with me for a long time, and then it faded. By the time Reagan was resurrecting the idea of “doable” nuclear war, I had not thought about missiles falling down upon us for some time. Rather, I thought of them as an engineering dodge, a way of paying billions to greedy corporations.  The Cold War sky didn’t really come back until 9/11, after the CW was over, and then the threat was not missiles or bombs falling from the sky, but the planes themselves. By this time, I had become a customer of the airlines myself. It was strange to think of that domestic beast, the increasingly uncomfortable jet (where each year corporate profits took a bit more of your legroom) as a predator. I wonder whether the children of that time saw some replica of the Cold War sky I saw when I was a kid? I’m pretty sure that has passed. 9/11 seems to signal, increasingly, an irrational crowd response, like the boom and bust in tulips in  17^th century Amsterdam, than the moment that ‘CHANGED EVERYTHING”. But it did change the sky, literally, for a few days – restoring Jean Grenier’s pre-World War I sky for a moment.

Or a facsimile of that sky. The sky has been too humanized to ever show us, again, a pure nothingness. Its vertigo is attached to our political economy, and perhaps as climate change eats up our rivers and raises our ocean, to our end.

 

 

 

What then is useful to the bee: a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

“Honeysuckle. So named because of the old

but entirely erroneous idea that bees extracted

honey therefrom. The honeysuckle is useless to

the bee.”

 

What, then, is useful to the bee?

My world,  penned in by human pride

Allows me to see as I see

Through the two eyes on either side

 

Of one nose – unlike the bee

Who sports two eyes for domestic tasks

And three ocelli

To make impressionistic tracks

 

Among the flowering vegetation –

What can I know

About such kinds of navigation

About what it’s like to go

 

About, laughing up your sleeve

At the honeysuckle’s vain imposture?

I don’t even bring in the sheeves.

I lay on my sheets as useless as an oyster.

 

 

 

The American blat

  

Ferdinand Lundberg, in 1939, wrote a book about the sixty wealthiest families in America. He made the audacious claim that these families collectively owned and directed most of America’s wealth – her industrial capacity, her speculative/financial sector, her raw materials. He names the families and engages in the tedious geneological work of showing how marriage and strategic alliances maintain and expand fortunes that have their roots, many of them, in the 19^th century. He goes there from the first sentence in the book, which proclaims: “The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth.” He claims that behind the de jure democratic form of government is a de facto government, “absolutist and plutocratic.”

 Now, it is a difficult business, tracking family fortunes. For one thing, “family” is a misleading category. Lundberg’s families are really more like the famous modern Russian clans, blat. Numbers of families and associates are held together in a web of mutual interests, which one can generally call after the family name of those who founded it. Thus, to use Lundberg’s first family, the Rockefellers, we can see that a Carnegie marrying a Rockefeller (a scion of one of the branches), which occurred when J. Stillman Rockefeller married Nancy C. S. Carnegie, grandniece of Andrew. Lundberg, incidentally, is a deadeye for those middle names. Where does “Stillman” come from? It comes from James Stillman, whose daughter married a Rockefeller. Stillman was the founder of National City Bank, now known as Citibank.

 Corporations as fronts for blat are an understudied subject of capitalist culture in America. Scratch the self-made description in Forbes, and you will find some blat money flowing. Famously, General Motors began on Du Pont money. An actual Du Pont was the CEO of GM in the 1920s, but a company doesn’t have to have such a direct connection to be, well, connected. The Ames family fortune helped found General Electric. Apple Corporation was shepherded through its early years by the Nautilus Fund, connected to Eaton Vance, one of the first mutual funds in the U.S., based in Boston. You can find the branches of a number of Brahmin families in looking through the Eatons and the Vances. Their life stories are all edited in the newspapers after the sixties, when it was no longer cool to show, so evidently, the source of the money that sent one to prep school and then to Princeton.

If Lundberg is right, then American historians have truly missed the boat. It would be like historians of 15^th century France ignoring the nobility and misunderstood the form of French government. In other words, historians have treated the United States as though it were permanently the country Tocqueville described, but it is really, since Tocqueville’s time, the country of magnates and their sons and daughters that Henry James wrote about.

 

 

 

 

On method: advice from the puppeteer

 In Kleist's essay, On the Marionette Theater, Kleist presents a dialogue between himself and a marionette master concerning theater and the relation of the marionette to the human actor. The master voices the idea that even human actors display their souls not in their voices but in the bodies and their movements.

"Just look at that girl who dances Daphne", he went on. "Pursued by Apollo, she turns to look at him. At this moment her soul appears to be in the small of her back. As she bends, she look as if she's going to break, like a naiad after the school of Bernini. Or take that young fellow who dances Paris when he's standing among the three goddesses and offering the apple to Venus. His soul is in fact located (and it's a frightful thing to see) in his elbow."

These examples are not neutral - they gather and explode in his next passage:

" Misconceptions like this are unavoidable," he said, " now that we've eaten of the tree of knowledge. But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stands behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back."

That methodological circumnavigation, in search of the back door to paradise, is how the older hermeneutics, the taking of allegory seriously, the gnostic pickings at the lock of Biblical verses projected to the world at large, survived in the culture of bourgeois capitalism. Without paradise, or without scenting some paradise now closed to us, it becomes pointless, out of joint, a mere deathrattle from an automaton.

TSE and me

 Everybody has his or her year of genius, a yar in which neurons configure into revelations. For some it is at age five, for others, at age 65. Everything becomes a portal. You see your life globally. You see your life in a grain of sand or a raindrop. And you see, in a brilliant flash, the alien, strange, other-than-you life of the grain of sand or the raindrop.

For me, that age was approximately fourteen. 1972, 1973 – ninth grade. In the summer between the eighth and ninth grade, I made a fair amount of pocket change, for a kid, bagging ice for my Dad. Dad owned an ice company, due to, well, the absurdity that ruled like a broken mirror’s curse over my Dad. The company went belly up in, I believe, 1975.

For me, this money meant I could buy three things that helped nudge along my revelatory neuronal path: a television set, which I took into my room, a couple of Dylan albums, my first – Bringing it all back Home and Highway 61 – and a subscription to William Buckley’s National Review, then at the height of its intellectual powers. The tv made me independent of my family’s preference for Network programs. I, on the other hand, tuned into public tv, and was thus initiated, via a series of Bergman films and a series on World Cinema hosted by Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin, into the higher civilization of film, where despair was common and an occasional naked woman was to be seen – which was a big plus for a 14 year old.

The Dylan albums are self-explanatory, love em or hate em.

And the National Review was perfect for my self-fashioning as a little conservative. But they were even more than fantastic for my self-fashioning in general, since the standard of the writers in the general section was high, although tending towards the ultra-right – let’s hear it for Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, folks! – and the arts and manners and books section had writers like Guy Davenport and the crazy and now obscure novelist, D. Keith Mano.

Davenport’s review of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era is an oddly important document for me – it was published in May 1972, and I still remember the names, the strange names in it: Apollinaire, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ezra Pound. I had my nose against the shop window of the higher civilization that I knew existed outside of Clarkston Georgia. I have recently been looking through the correspondence between Davenport and Kenner, and enjoying a nostalgic thrill from the names of that time. Frank Meyer, who remembers Frank Meyer? Only old old movement people – the conservative movement, not the SDS.

I remember some of my eighth and ninth grade teachers, lovely people. But this is not, alas, the story of a stripling being taken under the wing of some wise English teacher. That would have been nice and Hollywoodish, but instead, I was taken under the wings of the Clarkston High School Library and the Decatur Library. It was at this time that the library stepped up for me, not as a place to find a picture book for a book report, but as this fantastic paradise where I could pick the fruit for free.

I discovered Dostoevsky, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein. I discovered Joyce – the Dubliners and the Portrait of an Artist. I discovered “modern” art, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Picasso, Duchamp, etc. If I went back to the art books today, I’d probably smile at how bad the photographic reproductions were, but for me at the time, this was all amazing.

As well, I discovered poetry. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, those were my ticket beyond the shop window, aforementioned.

Eliot, I swallowed whole. He’s been my symbiot since. Knock Prufrock and the Wasteland out of me and you might as well kick me to the curb, because much of what makes me the me that is typing this would be lost.

Eliot of course went along with my young conservative styling, the nostalgia I imbibed from all those National Reviews. As I got over my genius year, I drifted far, far away from young conservativism, but I still liked Eliot’s elegant, elegiac sense of our modern decay – desolation row.

When I went to college, Eliot’s grip on the humanities, ie the literature departments, was loosening. It was becoming clearer that subjecting all poetry to critical techniques that work for a few metaphysical poets might be a mistake. The canon of the right ones – Herbert, Donne – and the wrong uns – Shelley, Tennyson – was breaking down.

What if “the existing monuments: did not “form an ideal order among themselves?” What if the monuments were more like kaleidoscopes? What if romanticism wasn’t some horrid blotch? Maybe trading a sour Christian order in which the vast majority was kept in ignorance and fear for the “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” was not a bad deal?

Eliot’s is an odd fate. Here was a man who refused to tread the path he could easily have tread. He could have ended up teaching at Columbia, like Lionel Trilling, instead of being a bank employee on the verge of a nervous breakdown. From which he went not into academia, but into publishing, become a Faber and Faber man. Yet, especially after WWII, and especially in certain American universities, Eliot’s critical stance was embedded in the orthodoxy of literature as a discipline.

That was never going to last. The explosive growth of higher education was moving the great unwashed – such as me – into the classroom. That unwashed was, at first, eager for the washing – and then began to consider that perhaps the washing should go the other way around.

For me, my genius age had some dire and dreadful consequences. It put me on the course of imitating my heroes and never adapting to the discipline of classroom specialization. My reading, even in college, was done under the precepts of idiosyncratic programs I made up for myself, in my head. This made me, in essence, an amateur. An autodidact. A crank. Modernism, as a literary phenomenon, is gloriously, incorrigibly crankish. It embraces Poe in Baudelaire or Mallarme’s translation. It veers with Pound towards Frobenius. It pretends with Wittgenstein to have never read the canonical philsophers.

The crank in me is always making up its own paradigms, which fail, because paradigms, by definition, are common and not idiosyncratic things. Idiosyncratic things are tics. Thus, my genius year and my life as a loser – or, more generously, as a crank – are tied together. This became evident to me when I was in grad school. All the dreaming about garrets when I was fourteen was not good for me.

I think the crankish side of TSE – the man who liked to put on purple lipstick when he went out, from time to time – was taken out of him by his disciples, who were succeeded by people who identified Eliot with his disciples and said: no thanks. I no longer pay much attention to Eliot’s idea of the canon - William Carlos Williams is now in the captain’s tower in my head. But I’m infinitely grateful to him. I’m faithful to the crank I met at fourteen.

The poetry. The poetry. That is the main thing.

Taking the intoxication out: late capitalism, what a drag

 

Walter Benjamin was convinced that gambling – and the gambler – was the temporal coordinate of the stroll, and the flaneur.  The gambler was an intrusion, he thought, into the bourgeois sphere of a custom determined, originally, by the economic conditions of feudalism.  This was in keeping with the Marxist nearsightedness about the function of credit and finance in high capitalism. But within those myopic limits, Benjamin’s theory of the “intoxication” of gambling is interesting.

“With the briefness of the game it [the time factor]  has in fact its own condition. The briefer the play, the rawer emerges the  element of chance, the smaller or the briefer the suite of combinations, that in the course of the party are brought out. In other words: the greater the component of chance in a game, the quicker it happens.   This circumstance becomes decisive when it comes to determining what, exactly, constitutes the intoxication of the gambler. It rests on the property of the game of chance, to provoke the intellectual actuality that brings the constellations forward in quick succession, which – each one quite independently from the others – calls on a completely new, original reaction of the player.”

Benjamin’s model for gambling was cards, and the casino. The very depressing article in Bloomberg about the gambler, Bill Benter, who “cracked” the horseracing code is about taking the joy, the intoxication,  out of addiction – a very 21^st century approach to the problem of killing time. Horse racing was, in the 19^th and 20^th century, presented as the relic of feudal times – the province of aristocrats and Bourbon kings from Kentucky. Bill Benter, as it were, stormed the Bastille with his computer, and has made, according to the article, billions from his algorithmically massaged bets. Never has money seemed a bigger drag.

My first encounter with gambling was at the horse track in Bossier City, to which I was taken by my boss, H. At that time, I was going to college and working part time at a hardware store in Shreveport. H. was the assistant manager of the store, and he wanted to teach me how to bet on a sure thing. The sure things had four legs and jockeys on top of them.  As it turned out, they were not so sure – which H., to his sorrow, discovered. H. covered his debts by “borrowing” from the store, and so the downward spiral goes.

 

My own young self thought gambling, as well as drugs and the rock n roll lifestyle, was romantic. My older self thinks the ultimate gambler was the shooter in Las Vegas, taking a private bet with himself that he could take out x number of lives in a certain time frame and even get away with it. From killing time to killing – freedom’s just another word for nothing much to lose.

As Ferenzi and Turner (2012) point out, problem gambling was late to be medicalized. About the time my friend H. was quietly cleaning out the till and spending it on what he hoped would be a winning trifecta, the DSM-III was putting this kind of gambling on its list of addictions, along with alcohol and other ingested stuff.  There is a lot of  controversy about the addiction model for “deviant” behavior – and this controversy definitely reflects a class bias. A winner – whether a wall street firm making money on derivatives and currency trading or a man who uses algorithms to win horse races – is considered less a deviant than a genius. A loser – my friend H., or my roommate in New Orleans, later on, who lost everything at the horse races including the rent money – is not given such a friendly lens.  H.’s gains were, on the addictive model, pathological. Benter’s gains, on the other hand, are “returns”.

 

“Their returns kept growing. Woods made $10 million in the 1994-95 season and bought a Rolls-Royce that he never drove. Benter purchased a stake in a French vineyard. It was impossible to keep their success secret, and they both attracted employees and hangers-on, some of whom switched back and forth between the Benter and Woods teams. One was Bob Moore, a manic New Zealander whose passions were cocaine and video analysis. He’d watch footage of past races to identify horses that should have won but were bumped or blocked and prevented from doing so. It worked as a kind of bad-luck adjuster and made the algorithms more effective.”

As we all know, chaos is a kind of determinate dynamical system. There are rules here, dude. But why, oh why, does it have to be so fucking joyless?

Running out of experience

  

The pre-modern form of askesis was all about giving up desires. The Greek stoic, the Tuscan saint, and the Chinese Confucian sage all agreed on this point. Epictetus wrote a manual on the “exercise of not exercising desire”. Epictetus would have seen viagra as evidence of the negative path of our civilization. Is this what we use our wills – our voluntas – for?

Modernity said goodbye to all that training. It was training more appropriate for the era of the Malthusian trap than for the era of continuous growth. The wheel of fortuna was a much better image of prosperity and poverty than any upward trending curve on a graph in pre-industrial societies.  The revolution of capitalism +  industry has had a spiritual result: Epictetus has been replaced by the invisible hand.

Desire is a good entry point into experience, that wild country. When we are children, our experience always tastes a little new. The bicycle we learn to ride, division, oysters – all these new things we learn to like or not like, do or not do. The background is filled in with clumsy giants, adults, who hector and coax. As we grow into cars, trig, and sex, we become clumsy giants ourselves, but not exactly adults. Who knows when the fatal equator is passed? For each it is a different age. And then, on the downside, we remember, we eat our oysters, we forget, we wonder how we constructed that geometrical proof, and we take vacations. Desire remains, but experience, that wild country, sometimes seems to empty out. The great headlining experiences of our twenties, where our nervous system was always writing headlines in lightning strokes (COME BACK!  I LOVE YOU! I’M A FAILURE! I’M A WINNER!), seems somehow diminished (RAINED TODAY!).

Writers have a peculiarly intimate relationship with experience, since their own experience often provides the content for what they do. This is not so different from doctors, or teachers, but whereas the latter are all about extracting a techne from experience that they can apply in the future, the writer is about rendering experience itself – in a poem, a story, an essay, a novel. Of course, this rendering comes in various degrees of abstraction and projection, but its first tottering trials often use direct experience – the parents, the girl and boyfriends, the classroom, the road.

My own sense of the writer’s task is not wedded to the rendering of my own experience – far from it. I like writing as a sort of voyage into the Other. Of course, like any other adventure, that voyage has a colonialist subtext – my ego is continually colonizing any Other that I find. On the other hand, I didn’t make that ego myself – it is pre-eminently a shifting product of this body’s commerce with the world, a body as neuronally charged by the sensuround as a vacuum cleaner is to a power source. I is an Other is sound science. Still, my experience is always going to companion even my wildest leaps of empathy.

I’ve been wondering, lately, at my own current “paucity of experience”. That phrase emerged, entire, early in the Victorian era, and has been used, according to my own internet search on the Internet Archive, hundreds of times to describe a low level of experiencing. This gets us to a paradox endemic to categorial terms: experience, it would seem, always has the same level. Whether it is filled with violent sensation or filled with drowsiness shouldn’t make a quantitative difference: a thermometer is not more of a thermometer when it records a higher temperature. Yet one does feel that an experience that is perpetually drowsy is not “used” to the extent it could be – is, in fact, wasted. One wants to shake the drowsy experience and say, let’s see what this baby can do! I often felt like that in my twenties and thirties. I liked the phrase of Blanchot’s: the experience-limit. I wanted to test experience. In the literature of the 20s, and of the 60s and 70s, there is a sense of this urge to test. That testing is not so different from the Stoic askesis, which sought to find the point of maximum alienation from the normal pleasures. In Carlos Ginzburg’s essay on the genealogy of the literary device of estrangement, he quotes Marcus Aurelius’s example of stoic mental discipline as a sort of alienation cure, a way of dissecting experience to get to the delusions of desire:

“Surely it is an excellent plan, when you are seated before delicacies and choice foods, to impress upon your imagination [phantasia] that this is the dead body of a fish, that the dead body of a bird or a pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is grape juice and that robe of purple a lamb's fleece dipped in a shell-fish's blood; and in matters of sex intercourse) that it is attrition of an entrail and a convulsive expulsion of mere mucus. Surely these are excellent imaginations [phantasiai], going to the heart of actual facts and penetrating them so as to see what kind of things they really are. You should adopt this practice all through your life, and where things make an impression which is very plausible, uncover their nakedness, see into their cheapness, strip off the profession on which they vaunt themselves.”

Ginzburg remarks that this passage reads strangely to a modern reader. Perhaps it does, but I think the strangeness is not in the stripping down of the cooked to the raw – this is the central modernist impulse – but the idea that this will give us some kind of contact with the truth. Aurelius’s distant descendent, Leopold Bloom, is introduced to the reader in Ulysses like this:

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

The fine tang of faintly scented urine is not presented as a downer, a rebarbative,  a way of breaking the hold of phantasia, but, on the contrary, a property to be relished, a coming attraction, an entertainment.  Bloom, that inner organ eater, is a modern man, to whom experience is not an alien servitude. The tragedy for such a man is a “paucity of experience”.  Or perhaps the idea of tragedy here is archaic. The horror at the end for such a man is flatness. What is at stake is the heightening or flattening of experience. And that is where I shake hands with Bloom, in my tentatively post-covid crouch, wanting a little heightening to shake up my ... sixty some inertia.

Experience with relish, the relish of experience – that’s what I want.