The oracles are not dead

In his History of Oracles, one of the major texts of the early Enlightenment, Bernard de Fontenelle proposed applyng a sort of Efficient Markets thesis to God:

“For I conceive that God only speaks to man to supplement the weakness of their knowledge, which is not sufficient for their needs, and that everything that he doesn’t say is of such a kind that they can learn it themselves or it is not necessary that they know it. Thus, if the oracles were given by evil demons, God would have taught us this in order to stop us from believing that it was God himself doing this, and that there was something divine in false religions.”

Like the efficient market thesis, which claims that all current information is reflected in the prices of financial commodities, God, in Fontenelle’s view, only gives out information to humans if they need it – having endowed them with reason for all their other information needs. Efficiency is the most secular of concepts, for it quickly purges any disturbance in the community of discourse, whether that is God or evil demons.

But if we upset the whole notion of efficiency, or decide that efficiency is not co-extensive with rationality, but that the latter must encompass our passions, then the oracles return. They return as poetry.

But not just the word itself – the great poets in their lives seem surrounded by a cloud of meanings and symbols that they cannot escape.

Or so I have been thinking, thinking about Baudelaire. In 1864 Baudelaire, seriously ill with the syphilis that was already effecting him, made a trip to Belgium to make money as a lecturer, of all things. We have the testimony of a Belgian writer, Camille Lemmonier, about Baudelaire’s conference about Theophile Gautier, who he called, with some depth of irony that may not even have been irony, “my master”.

The lecture was to be given to the Cercle Litteraire et artistique.

“Le Cercle littéraire et artistique occupied the gothic palace across from the Hôtel de Ville. Its rude and historic architecture, since renovated as a jewel of great price, a shrine exquisitely ornamented, sheltered at the time some businesses selling grain and others selling birds. All the ground floor and the basements had been given to them. This was one of the activities of the Grand Place. But the stage floor was reserved for the Cercle. One climbed onto the porch, then went up a steep staircase. A door opened, which was that of the conference room. It was there that Baudelaire was supposed to speak. »

Already, the idea that Baudelaire was giving a talk on Gautier in a run down building, the ground floor of which was devoted to grains and the wares of bird catchers – Baudelaire, some of whose greatest poems – The Albatross, The Swan – made exactly that correspondence between the poet and the captured bird – is too too suggestive. Lemmonier, a young writer, was late for the conference. He thought that everybody would be there, all the writers of Brussels, all the fans of poetry.

“I glided into the room. It is still, after all these years, a subject of stupor for me, the solitude of that great vessel where I feared to be able to find a place and which, even up to the shadows of the rear of the room, showed lines of unoccupied benches. Baudelaire spoke, that evening, to twenty auditors…”

He spoke for some time, fulfilling his contract, without a doubt.

“At the end of an hour, the poverty of the audience became still more rarified, who judged that the vacuum around the magician of the Word could be emptied out even more. There only remained two benches – which were lightened in their turn. Some backs slumped with sleepiness and incomprehension. Perhaps those who remained were moved by charity. Perhaps they remained like a passerby who accompanies a solitary coffin into a cemetery. Perhaps, as well, they were the doormen and the officials of the building, who were constrained to remain at their posts by a ceremonial duty.”

Where Baudelaire went became Baudelairian – it was his curse, his mystique, his afterlife. Benjamin references Lemonnier’s essay a number of times in the Passages and reads into it the idea that the audience couldn’t believe that Baudelaire was heaping praise on Gautier, thinking that he would reveal, in the end, by some sarcasm, the hoax. I am not sure about this reading. I wonder if the audience even knew who Baudelaire was – although the trial of Fleurs de Mal for obscenity might have made his name known even in Brussels. Lemonnier was young and hip: he knew of both Baudelaire and Gautier. But the whole scene in the floor above the birdcatchers, in the dark and damp building, ends as a sort of foreshadowing of Kafka’s The Trial.

« The poet didn’t seem to notice the desertion that left him speaking alone between high, dimly illuminated walls. A last word swelled out like a yell : I salute Théophile Gautier, my maître, the great poet of the century.” And his rigid figure bowed forward: he made three bows as though before a real audience. Rapidly a door closed. Then the night guardian took away the lamp. I was the last to remain as the night closed in, the night where, without echo, the voice of this father of the Church of literature had risen up and then been snuffed out.”

That’s a great ending. One almost expects Baudelaire, the morning after, to be taken by two guards out to a quarry in the Brussels suburbs. There he’d be stripped of his suit, stretched out on the ground, and while one of the guards held him down, the other would thrust a butcher knife deep in his heart and turn it there thrice, while Baudelaire would say “like a dog”, as though the shame of it would outlive him.

sometimes an ugly thought becomes a poem - Karen Chamisso

The penis sadness of so many men

Who ran in their youth in packs

With fee fie fo and fee fie fum

Confusing sex with jumping jacks

Settles like a pall on their older faces

- The judges, lawyers, the ceo

The aging blade’s jowly disgraces

The thirty-somes nowhere to go.

As pity to pain, so I’ve been taught,

Is the tribute we must as Christians pay

I try to summon up tears for the lot,

Those dogs in their winter play

This little piggy went to market

This little piggy went home

And wrote oink oink oink on his walls

Brooding on his sweetmeats all alone.

- Karen Chamisso

pain pain pain

 

I’m in pain at the moment. In Sete, I made some sudden movement that I cannot now call to mind, review my movements as I will – but I noticed, walking along the seashore, a pain in my back. The next day the pain was double, and I went to the doctor, who – after having me hop up on the cot in his office, which required resolution – poked me here and there and had me raise my legs – easy! The trouble was just sitting there. Well, the doctor concluded, obviously lumbago! He wrote me a prescription for painkillers and a heat treatment lotion, warned me to take the pill for my stomach – he was most concerned with the effect of the pills on my stomach, which I consider very French – and ushered me out of the office.

Pain is a strange thing, as it sucks in your ego. Suddenly, the littlest movement becomes subject to a calculus that would have been the admiration of Bentham. A calculus seldom met with in the real world.

I have often thought that I would not survive more than a week in the concentration camps, and wonder how anyone would. Lumbago makes me think of the men working the rock quarry at Mauthausen. If one had what I have – these urbanites of fifty or retired professional men – that would be it. The politics of pain is imbricated with politics altogether. Interesting how Burke’s essay on the sublime could be seen to have proceeded his Essay on the French Revolution. Burke’s paradox there springs from his idea that pain and pleasure are not parts of a continuum, but are positive and distinct qualities. One is not the negation of the other but a whole new thing.

“Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference. When I am carried from this state into a state of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should pass through the medium of any sort of pain. If in such a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquillity, or call it what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a concert of music; or suppose some object of a fine shape, and bright, lively colours, to be presented before you; or imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a rose; or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some pleasant kind of wine, or to taste of some sweetmeat without being hungry; in all the several senses, of hearing, smelling and tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure; yet if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of pain; or, having satisfied these several senses with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over? Suppose on the other hand, a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.”
Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to the standard measurements – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:
"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness."
Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:
It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”
Burke’s delight is akin to what Tallyrand, in his memoirs, called the “sweetness” of life under the ancien regime – a phrase much dilated upon by Roberto Calasso in his The Ruin of Kasch.
Burke, of course, was not as steady an advocate for the organic order as all that. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systematicity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defense of irreducible human and social qualities that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology.
There, I’ve wandered widely, and now I am back to thinking: where’s the box of painkillers?
                                                                                2.

Paul Valery, after a night of incessant coughing, went to the doctor and got his advice. Valery felt that the doctor didn’t take him seriously – him, an old grand mandarin. So he wrote in his notebook: “But doctors have the great habit of never thinking. I have noticed this a hundred times. They have the strange idea that everything falls under a classification, and that which is not marked with a name does not exist. Each new name that we invents, like metabolism, conditioned reflex, etc. renders them the service of diminishing their direct attention to facts and more than anything else, meditation concerning these facts. There is no doctor who has an idea of the globally functioning person. (Valéry, 1943)
One of the social functions of the poet, I think, is to give us an imaginary of that dullest and most intense of inner experiences: pain. In the introduction to her History of Pain – a strange title, when you think about it, blending natural history with its social offshoot – Roselyne Rey writes: “Pain always has a language, even if this is a cry, a sob, a physiognomic wincing, and it is at the same time a language: under this guise it inserts itself into the norms of the licit and of transgression, between what we can let appear and what it is necessary to shut up about and hide, norms and codes that depend on cultural formations…” I suspect Rey is conflating parole and language – for my own part, I think pain signifies without being caught up in the nets and grammar of language. Or, rather, if we extend the notion of language to pain as within her examples, we have to extend the notion of language to the non-human – a step that would definitely change our sense of the human. The dog or the tree, in this sense, can also be, in Buber’s term, a “Du” – a thou.
The Undying by Ann Boyer, her memoir-meditation about cancer, has generated a sort of cult. Unlike most cancer memoirs, Boyer has a firm sense of her illness as an ecological event, connected by a million threads to the atmosphere, water, and ground in our surround. New chemical compounds are produced at a rate of 10 million a year, according to the Smithsonian, although the vast majority of those compounds don’t get out of the laboratory. But of those that do, most are not checked for their somatic effects at all.
“The amount and diversity of pesticides, pharmaceuticals and other industrial chemicals that humans are releasing into the environment are increasing at rates that match or exceed recent increases in CO2 emissions, nutrient pollution from nitrogen fertilizers and other drivers of global change,” Emily Bernhardt, biogeochemist at Duke University and lead author of the article says in a press release. “But our analysis shows we’re not spending anywhere near the amount of attention or money that we should be to assess their impacts.”
"The lack of knowledge about how synthetic chemicals alter ecological processes represents a critical blind spot in the rapidly developing field of global ecology," the researchers write in the paper.”
Boyer is keenly aware that she is a target – not in her person, but in her body, which is in reaction to thousands of factors over which she has no control whatever. Targeting is a theme in the chemotherapy she undergoes, as are the externalities; and targeting, with the notion of “precision”, is part of her poetics. A poetics that goes awry in the cancer ward: “Language is no longer compliant to its social function. If we use words it is to approach as a misplaced bomb.” It goes awry even as the treatment is targeted. Targeting, of course, is our post atom bomb condition – our post firebomb condition. Our drone condition, our chemo condition. Boyer’s book struggles against the non-said in the ideology of cancer solidarity, that individualism of suffering which is the basis of the cancer memoir – as though all cancer sufferers were freed, in their traumatic conditionm from the intersectional chains that bind the “healthy”, even as the healthcare industry is where facts of class and gender become literal matters of life and death, pain and addiction, therapy and time. Those whose time is spoken for are those whose therapies must be intermittent, or self-fashioned. Emergency to emergency, the life that is saved is frittered away and fettered.
From Boyer: “I come across a headline: “Attitude Is Everything for Breast Cancer Survivor.” I look for the headline “Attitude Is Everything for Ebola Patient” or “Attitude Is Everything for Guy with Diabetes” or “Attitude Is Everything for Those with Congenital Syphilis” or “Attitude Is Everything with Lead Poisoning” or “Attitude Is Everything When a Dog Bites Your Hand” or “Attitude Is Everything for Gunshot Victim” or “Attitude Is Everything for a Tween with a Hangover” or “Attitude Is Everything for a Coyote Struck by a Ford F150” or “Attitude Is Everything for Gravity” or “Attitude Is Everything for the Water Cycle” or “Attitude Is Everything for Survivor of Varicose Veins” or “Attitude Is Everything for Dying Coral Reef.”
Attitude is the style of the self-conscious target. To free yourself of targethood is beyond the individualist ideology, which settles for targeted compromises with targethood. I think Boyer’s book is a gesture towards a larger settlement, not with mortality – which is the kind of settlement John Donne tries to make in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions – but with the conditions impinging on the wildly different destinies summarized in the mortality index of contemporary neoliberalism. But there is some faint promise of paradise in Donne too, which winds its way through our cancers and chemo and echoes, to paraphrase Lou Reed even now, we who have so much, and those who have so little, and those who don’t have anything at all:
“Even my spots belong to thy Son's body, and are part of that which he came down to this earth to fetch, and challenge, and assume to himself. When I open my spots I do but present him with that which is his; and till I do so, I detain and withhold his right. When therefore thou seest them upon me, as his, and seest them by this way of confession, they shall not appear to me as the pinches of death, to decline my fear to hell (for thou hast not left thy holy one in hell, thy Son is not there); but these spots upon my breast, and upon my soul, shall appear to me as the constellations of the firmament, to direct my contemplation to that place where thy Son is, thy right hand.”

stabbed by the stalactite

 Stabbed by the stalactite

There was a fad, in the eighties, for comparing the French Revolution unfavorably to the American Revolution. In that illwind of a decade, the reasoning was reliably coldwar-ish: the French Revolution led straight to the Gulag, whereas the American revolution led to: America!

In hindsight, and even then, one could see what was bogus about this judgment. For instance, its in your face racism. Black people simply didn’t count for the Francois Furet kind of historian. For another thing, the genocide necessary to create a white nation on the North American continent didn’t count. And finally, the judgment was really not about the Gulag, but about the great countervailing egalitarianism of the post-war years. It was that egalitarian that the cold war historians were particularly eager to dismantle.

Of course, this dismantling was never put so crudely. In fact, a synthesis between in-egalitarianism and egalitarianism was established, under the aegis of neo-liberalism. Here, the destruction of egalitarianism as a force in the political economy was coupled with egalitarianism as a civil matter. To put it in the class terms that were such a taboo in the Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand years, the upper class – which was almost entirely white, but was also a compound of people with different sexual desires and genders – accepted a certain kind of feminism and a certain kind of gay rights; both denuded of their original, grass-roots connection with larger issues of class. This meant that feminism was reshaped to consist of “breaking the glass ceiling” for upper class women, and not at all of paying for housework, or extending socialized childcare to all reaches and pockets of society.

The civil egalitarianism borrowed the mythology of the civil rights movement, but – in a gesture of true cultural expropriation – did not borrow the color the skins involved. In 1960, in the U.S., there were almost no rich African-Americans. In 2015, according to a study produced by the Federal Reserve in St. Louis, rich African Americans – defined as the upper one percent – made up a grand total of 1.7% of the whole.

The best model for the political economy – and the politics that has driven it - of the last forty years is that of a stalactite. Small drops have created a large pointy structure. When I was a kid, the idea was that we were in the midst of a stalagmite change – the drops were mounting from the bottom. The switch from one to the other has sort of defined my life, and billions of other lives.

This is worth thinking about when the next headline catastrophe announces itself: the union busting, rightwing Justice Kennedy resigning; children put in cages and left in the Texas heat; trillion dollar giveaways to the wealthy; the gutting of labor unions. It is trivial, but symbolically large, that the official opposition to rightwing plutocrats is very, very, very concerned that we all stay “civil”. The official opposition is almost surely in or connected to the upper 1 percent.

The overwhelming “feeling” of the last forty years has been one of “not being able to afford things.” For instance, medicare for all is a huge “budget-buster”. Which begs the question: how is it that in a society that is at least ten times as wealthy as it was in 1950, or 1960, when large social insurance scheme were put in place, we have run out of money? The answer is pretty simple: since then, the working class – in fact, every household that makes less than 250 thou a year – has run out of money. All the money is packed in the upper 10 percent, and in the upper 10 percent, it is packed in the upper 1 percent. The inequality is staggering: it is, really, ancien regime, as though the French Revolution had never happened. The experiment is running its course: a political economy in which the cultural expectation of egalitarianism are systematically attacked is one that will, eventually, have to take down even the mask of democratic practices. The idea that abortion rights are being threatened because one farty old man on the Court resigns shows a terrifying blindness to what has happened in state after state for twenty years. It is easier to get an abortion in Ireland than it is in, say, Texas or Mississippi. For working class women, abortion rights – not to speak of the vast vast array of healthcare rights – are a sort of ghost. They are dead, but they still haunt us.

I'd add something to this 2018 screed. One of the things that happened which we pretended didn't count was the failure of the ERA amendment, and the failure of the Dems to pick it up as a rallying issue. With that in place, arguments like Alito's about the constitution, whacky as they are, would be that much more whacky. But it never happened. The recognition of the sovereignty of women over their own bodies, which is embedded in our culture, found no constitutional expression. I think now is the moment to cast off numbness and talk less about voting and more about massive civil disobedience - which is the only way the urge to vote gets stirred up. To do nothing, to propose nothing cause "we'd lose in congress" - which disguises the fact proposing nothing is already losing in congress - and to urge we all vote for folks who have done nothing but urge us to vote more - is to lose the political impulse utterly. This can't be the way we go down. This can't be the promised end.

The evil supreme court: a reaction

 I'm reading - and it make sense - that Alito's text makes room for the court to overturn the Obergefell - no more gay marriages - and would make state laws outlawing gay sex legal. The wall of shit is coming. Meanwhile, the Democrats, after a fast start, have twiddled their fingers. Biden has shown more energy about Ukraine than he ever showed about abolishing student debt. It is going to be a debacle in November for Biden's party. As long as the lifesucking centrist party machinery in D.C. has its grip on the party, it will continue to sink - as it did under Obama, who threw away his 2008 win and went on to preside over these losses: "Their share of seats in the United States Senate has fallen from 59 to 48. They’ve lost 62 House seats, 12 governorships, and 958 seats in state legislatures." Thus completing a historic pattern starting with Clinton in 1994, after which Clinton saved himself by turning right and threw his party overboard. The pattern is the same all over Europe as well. The architects of neoliberalism, the centrists in traditionally liberal and left-leaning parties, produced a situation in which these parties withered. Most spectacularly, the Socialist party under the godawful Hollande - who has recently had the gall to reproach the Socialists, currently making 2 percent in the last election, for negotiating with the "extreme" left under Melenchon. How dare Melanchon give mouth to mouth respiration to that drowned corpse!

The fallout on that level is fascinating showbiz. The real fallout is on another level. The clintonites, the obamaoids, all the movers and shakers have gone on to their millions - literally. The people left behind - a good 80 to 90 percent of the population - are the sufferers. They are, in a sense, deprived of the elementary right to representation, because their representatives so manifestly don't represent them. The striking down of Roe v. Wade is a big step. The ruling class is an almost completely white compact, so the violation of the rights of black Americans are tut tutted and allowed under the semi-Jim Crow rules. But the upper class includes a cohort of women and gays, which gives those two groups more reach in the current plutocracy. That is how breaking the glass ceiling replaced being paid for home labor as a "feminist" slogan.

We will see how the plutocracy responds. I wouldn't bet on some socially liberal turn there. Protecting gender rights can be easily done by those who make above 250 thou by individual initiative. The gated community can protect its own.

The Republicans under Trump did an amazing thing: they remade themselves. Fundamental tenets, like free trade, simply disappeared. I don't think the Dems can do the same thing. They are very much a Sears Roebuck organization. They stand for a fog of good intentions and no action. Their competencies have ossified, and they simply don't know how to take advantage of opportunities that are not first backgrounded by six months of think tank papers and then modified to keep from looking extreme and then are stalled and forgotten in the bureaucracy or the geriatric legislature.

on the Adam's Apple

 Although the “body” long ago became an intangible asset of academic study, certain body parts lag behind in the race for recognition Who, for instance, has written a definitive study of the Adam’s Apple? I went to Ebsco, naturally, for the latest gender scholarship, but was disappointed. Aside from an article in something called Pastoral Psychology, the Adam’s apple article that was the longest was, actually, about the apple in Eden that was depicted in Jan van Eyck’s painting of Adam and Eve.

Thomas Browne, in the Seventh book of Pseudodoxia epidemica, devotes a chapter to the inquiry into what fruit, exactly, hung from the tree of good and evil. He goes through the responses of scholars, and even inquires into why, in the Bible, sometime a detail is given, sometimes it is withdrawn – an inquiry pursued in different texts some four hundred years later by Roland Barthes. However, Browne is not a disturber of the critical peace, but bids us be content with outlines and the general moral : “Since thereafter after this fruit curiosity fruitlessely enquireth, and confidence blindly determineth, we shall surcease our Inquisition, rather troubled that it was tasted, then troubling our sevles in its decision; this only we observe, when things are left uncertain men will assure them by determination; which is not only verified concerning the fruit, but the Serpent that perswaded…”

This indetermination of the fruit is curiously suited to the Adam’s apple, in my memory. I don’t hear in memory’s ear my childish piping – at thirteen, I vaguely remember, the voice broke. An excellent word, broke. There are boys whose voices break and heal with amazing swiftness, so that the lower pitch is suddenly coming out of their mouths like it was always at home there. In my memory, one of the characteristic of bullies is that the deep voice comes naturally. Characteristic of victims is that the voice gets caught in the break, and chirps away, as though in a trap, in every sentence. Myself, I was in the middle range – my voice, a sort of whiny, nasal thing with Southern hints, grew in my mouth until it was what I called my voice. It should be noted, the idea of my voice, of one’s voice, is laughable – the voice is a family tree, a sponge that takes in geographical region, class subgroup, etc. The voice of the freak, for instance, in highschool in Atlanta in the seventies was a high school phenomenon – it was the very voice of reefer. These voices were, of course, owned, but as pets are owned – they are never thoroughly owned, always in a deep part of themselves wild.

The voice and the Adam’s apple are somehow paired in my mind. There were certain boys who, from the seventh grade on, had large Adam’s apples. And then there was the jock’s throat, which seemed to be a pure slab, a cut of meat.

Although mucho attention is paid to puberty’s netherworkers, the genitals, little is paid to the thyroid cartilage. It appears, to quote a dictionary of sexual differences, “as a secondary male sex characteristic … at puberty when the male larynx enlarges and the male voice cracks just about the time that penis development ends.” The coincidence of Adam’s apple, the voice cracking, and the “end of development” of that marvelous app and lifelong companion, the dick, is quite the whammy. As well, of course, hair starts appearing on the lower face, and you have to learn to shave with that Adam’s apple making for a slalom that you have to navigate with your razor.

It all, I remember, vaguely offended me. I was ready for adulthood at 13, but certainly not adolescence. Although I am reconciled with facial hair and my increasingly gravelly voice, and have no complaints about the marvelous app, the Adam’s apple still slightly perturbs me. In photographs, I try to slightly lower my chin and thus diminish the Adam’s apple’s place. It is, of course, going to accompany me to the end, so one would think that egotism would do its bit and blur my image of it so it doesn’t bug me, but the self imago drags it along. Georges Bataille wrote of the big toe, and its uncomfortable ugliness – which I interpret as a hesitation on his part, as the Adam’s apple would be much more on the inhuman/human spectrum. But it is true that the Adam’s apple has, to my knowledge, no fetishism attached to it. It has, at most, what Bataille called a “valeur burlesque”. However, I would have to insist, contra Bataille, that the Adam’s Apple is certainly “base”, that is, the opposite of the sublime or the high. The body, as one learns at thirteen, is not so easily interpreted by old categories, by the feet and the head, by the old symbols, as one was taught.

The Face at the window

 

I was reading to Adam from our Sherlock Holmes book a couple of nights ago. Adam is at an age that he still allows, and even likes, his Dad to read to him, and I am, of course, a ham actor from forever, so I love trying on accents and the whole dramatic reading shtick. The vaudeville in my soul gets little chance to act out, so I take it when it comes.

We were reading “The Creeping Man.” Adam didn’t see what was so scary about a creeping man, so I had him turn off the lights and I crept on my belly on the floor. He admitted that it could be the slightest bit scary. Then we read about the man looking in the window at his daughter in the middle of the night. Again, Adam objected to this as objectively non-scary. I was tempted to go outside to demonstrate this, but I didn’t. However, we did talk about the “face at the window”.

When I was around nine or ten, I slept in a room in the downstairs of our house on Nielson Court in Clarkston, Georgia. It could get very dark in the downstairs. One of my nightly duties – or perhaps it was simply the habit of the nervous boy I was – was to make sure the back door was locked. I always forgot to check on the back door until I was in my pyjamas and the lights were all turned off. I slept in the same bedroom as my brothers, and so I couldn’t just turn on a light, so I had to creep out of the bedroom, through the rec room to the door and check the lock. Looking back, I can of course see the neurosis in this routine – the forgetting of the task, the turning out the lights, the going to bed, the remembering and the creeping out to do it. Looking back, I think I needed, for one reason or another, to play a game in which I scared myself. At the time, though, my real dread was that there would be a face staring at me through the window on the door.

The image of the face at the window is related, on the one side, to the face behind a mask, and on the other side, to the face as pure, malevolent other. There’s a wonderful scene in The Turn of the Screw which, in a sense, sums up the whole scare of the plot. The governess had been going to church with the old nursemaid, Mrs. Grose, and had gone back inside the house to get something, when she saw a man’s face at the window, staring at her. She of course rushes out and tries to find the man.

“There were shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just my lines, and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there’s only one I take space to mention. I wondered why she should be scared.”

 

The game of staring through the window – or the way it becomes a game when the governess imitates the man – is a pretty wonderful circuit, something that Lacan should have written about – although God knows, given the infinite number of Seminaires, maybe he did. Between the scariness of the face staring in and the Governess intentionally standing at the place of the man and staring in, something happens – a sort of exorcism that opens the world of the Governess to the possibility of exorcisms.

I didn’t think in this way when I was a brat, creeping out to check the door was locked and trying to avoid seeing the window in the door. But surely the routine of the face at the window had me in its spell. It was intersubjectively scary.

But Adam is nine, and perhaps he doesn’t want his Dad to go on about “intersubjectivity”. I save this for posting on facebook.