revery on transcendence

 

Borachio, thou art read
In nature and her large philosophy.
Observ'st thou not the very self-same course
Of revolution, both in man and beast?

-         The Atheist’s Tragedy

 

What is the state of transcendence today?

-         One of Derrida’s favorite gambits was to open an article with a totally queer or off kilter sentence: Que vais-je pouvoir inventer encore? For instance. This seems a phrase broken off from a first draft, or an interior monologue, or something eavesdropped upon. Some event to which one was not privy. It sets us, if we are not so irritated that we do not read further, on the path of estrangement, which means hopping, skipping and jumping to an unfamiliar rhythm.

-         “They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.”

-         So: what is the state of transcendence today – as opposed to, say, one hundred or two hundred years ago. The thought came to me as I was lying in bed here on vacation. But what does it mean to approach the state of transcendence now, if transcendence is an intemporal relationship of, say, experience to, say, the world, and plunk it immediately in history? Or more specifically, its state. Because one could say transcendence for the Cro-Magnon man, or for that matter the passenger pigeon, and transcendence for me, lying in bed and feeling the air of the fan on my bare feet, is the same matter.

-         “Transcendence.” It does seem to have migrated from a central concern of philosophy to a central concern of new age self-help books. A keen philosophy student wanting to write about “transcendence” is almost surely going to start with old texts, transcendence in Kant say, and do a little hermeneutic massage to figure out what that was about, perhaps relating it to the latest in the analytic theory of consciousness. His own experience of transcendence is not going to be part of this story, most usually.

-         For instance, re the later, the kiss.

-         Why the kiss? Why kiss? What is the state of transcendence vis-à-vis a passionate kiss?

-         In the stream of analytic philosophy, not only has transcendence been booted out – an intolerably pre-scientific relic – but experience itself is treated almost wholly as an epistemological question. Experience is consciousness, or fills up that space. And this generates questions like: is consciousness a product of the brain, denoting a cerebral mechanism like “fish” denotes certain creatures that swim in the sea? Or does it have a different ontological status?

-         In this way, the kiss dissolves into a business having to do with intentions.

-         The starting point for the pragmatists, however, has to be experience, not consciousness, or knowing. This is their debt to Emerson, which has been underlined by James, Dewey, Cavell, West, Rorty, etc. Experience, say of a kiss, or of time and space in general, is “nagged” by transcendence – by the contained having something in it that is more than the container.

-         Wittgenstein, the story goes, was discussing his sense of the propositional structure of the world with the Italian economist Sraffa. He “insisted that a proposition had the same internal structure as the state of affairs it describes. Sraffa responded with a certain Neapolitan hand gesture… and said: “what is the logical form of that?”

-         Another version of the story is that Sraffa responded by kissing Wittgenstein passionately on the mouth.

-         No. I made that up.

-         In the tv series, Locke and Key, the uncle looks at his childhood home, the House of Keys, and gives it the finger. Bodie, his nephew, sees him, and the uncle smiles sheepishly and explains that the finger means many things. Like aloha, says Bodie, and the uncle agrees. So Bodie goes around, giving the finger and saying aloha. Has Bodie misunderstood the finger, or aloha?

-         There’s the handshake. There’s the embrace. There’s the kiss. Our transcendent gestures? Or is it all… projection?

 

variations on the pathetic fallacy

 

Although we were going upriver to Blois, that day, we had a couple of hours to kill, so we decided to take the train downriver to Saumur and poke around. We got out at the station and headed up the hill to the bridge, which is mighty long. Its left flank crosses one branch of the Loire river, then it runs through an island, then it crosses the right bank of the river.

Saumur is a physically capacious town, with an infrastructure, as a newspaper article in the Petit Temps, December 9, 1893, noted, that could easily support 100,000 people – but like the clothes of  a person who has some wasting disease, the infrastructure is much too large for its current size. What happened to Saumur was that Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had the effect of outlawj g or severely restricting Protestantism. Since half of Saumur at that time was Protestant,  most of the population left. It was the worst thing ever to happen to Saumur. Even the owners of the story-book castle above the town were affected. Since then, the most celebrated fact about Saumur is that the model for Balzac’s Pere Grandet might have lived there. It is slim pickings when a town’s reputation is basically an outtake from the Comedie humaine, but that’s Saumur.

As you cross the left flank bridge, you will notice – you will be forced to notice – that the vast bridge, which is supposed to span one of France’s largest rivers, now spans a mere river bed, overgrown with scrawny vegetation and hosting a few mosquito breeding pools of water. As you cross the right flank bridge, the Loire, which flows beneath it, is visibly shallow, and the banks of the river have most significantly encroached upon the trickle that still claims the name of a river.

France is hot this summer. And France is dry this summer, with a dryness that emerges, in the papers, under various bureaucratic formula as a “crisis”.

« The Loire is perhaps a long tranquil river… but for the moment, it is drying out. The préfecture of Maine-et-Loire has been taking, each week since the commencement of July, new measure ordering water restrictions. Each one is more drastic than the last. »

The Loire is suffering.

2.

When I write “the Loire is suffering”, I am conscious that, according to English literature classes, I am committing the “pathetic fallacy.” That term was coined by John Ruskin in his book, Modern Painters (1856). Ruskin goes about coining his phrase by attacking, firstly, the use of the terms “subjective” and “objective”, suspicious immigrants from German philosophy, and then returning to good plain English:

“… we may go on at our ease to examine the point in question,—namely, the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy;[54] false appearances, I say, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us.

 

155

For instance—

 

"The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould

Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold." [55]

This is very beautiful and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus?”

Ruskin’s other example of this false perception – what he does not call projection, but which I, having read Freud, will- has to do with water. The example is from Tennyson’s Alton Locke:

“It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error, that which the mind admits, when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke,—

 

"They rowed her in across the rolling foam—

The cruel, crawling foam."

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the "Pathetic fallacy."”

Ruskin is a sage, which means that his thought, stretched through some forty volumes of the collected works, is a matter of a sort of gestalt rather than a set of logically derived conclusions. Like other Victorian sages, such as Huxley, one feels that underneath the common sense that dismisses German philosophy and gets right down to true and false appearances, there is a distinct strain of Protestant iconoclasm. In Ruskin’s case, this co-exists uneasily with his ideological elevation of the medieval period as the touchstone for the best social order: an organic order, far different from industrial capitalism. In his autobiography, Ruskin calls himself a “red Tory” – the red part being the aforesaid disgust with capitalism, and the Tory part being his indissoluble Walter Scott-ism. His rejection of an art and language of false appearance, summed up as the pathetic fallacy, is all about the common sense tradition of English philosophy. But his problem comes from annexing common sense to his theory of the heightened and heightening  truths of art. Ruskin solves his conundrum by another division, between first rate art in which the passion that drives the projection is genuine, and second rate art, in which the projection is driven mechanically, by a lower need – the need to be, in this or that instance, artsy.

3.

My belief that the Loire is suffering, I’d contend, is not an instance of either good or bad pathetic fallacy – but a contention against the century in which passion and feeling have been reduced to events – phenomena or epiphenomena – which require a neural substrate.

The discourse on emotion, in the West, is characterized by the strong break, at the end of the early modern period, between a theory of temperament based on “spirits” of some kind in the human body – and in the bodies of certain animals – and the theory of emotion based, eventually, on motions in the neural network. “Emotion” itself, as a word to cover the gamut of the passions, is a nineteenth century invention. Like the temperament theory, it encodes the idea that the internal life is defined by motion itself.

This, however, drives us up to a gap in our explanations. How does neural motion make an emotion? Is the Loire unable to suffer because its motions are not of a certain arrangement and material type? Or is this all a user illusion?

 

a perfect novel: Queneau's A Hard Winter

 

In Obitor, Mircea Cartarescu’s Proust-like novel of growing up in Bucharest, the narrator describes watching a small bug cross the expanse of two pages of Doestoevsky’s The Double.  The bug is, of course, unaware of the characters in The Double, its living space:

It patiently makes its way over the hillocks and ravines of the bad quality paper, tunnels into the pages, then reappears in the yellow light without according the least attention to the complicated psychological processes of Goliadkin, to the black print, larger than it, which codifies them.”

There is a kind of novel I love that does something like this with its characters. In Joyce’s Ulysses, the characters traverse the Odyssey without having any idea that this is how their motions on that June day in 1904 are being accorded – at the most, some of them think they are role-playing Hamlet. In Under the Volcano, a whole astrological, alchemical and numerological world is expressed in the drunken journey towards death of the Consul. One could name, here, Bely’s Petersburg and the novels of  Raymond Queneau.

The difference between  Cartarescu’s bug and the characters of these novels is that the characters have some consciousness of walking through a textified world. It is a flickering consciousness, granted. To give an example from Queneau’s almost perfect novel, Un rude hiver: the wife of the main character, Bernard Lehameau, dies in a fire in a cinema house in Havre on 21 février 1903. That is the date of Raymond Queneau’s birth, but Lehameau has no consciousness of this. The reader who looks up the fire will find it never took place. Yet the Havre Lehameau encounters, the Havre of the Gaumont, the Omnia-Pathe, and the Kursal movie houses, the Havre in which the Belgian government in exile had its seat, the Havre in which a Chinese troupe gave an exposition of dance on Place Thiers in October 1916 did “take place”. Queneau scholars have long noted that in the Queneau’s journal for 1916, the Chinese troupe is described as putting itself in a row to begin its dance; in Un rude Hiver, the Chinese troupe forms a circle. This small upset of a fact is guided by the place of circles in the entire structure of the book, which presents a Havre that exists, as well, in the symbolic form that Queneau wants to give it.

I’ve just finished this novel, taking the train from Paris to where I am writing this now, in Bourgeuil, where we are spending an Airbnb week – Loire country, good for wine and biking. I finished it with the feeling I always get when I’ve read a novel that works, for me, on all levels: the feeling of emerging from something, well, portentous – full of portents. There are novels you go to like a suppliant going to a temple to ask a question. As is well known, the answers the prophetess gives are always enigmas, which require a lifetime of study. Koans, the Kabbalah. Queneau, as his journal shows, was fascinated with “esoteric” knowledge; even as he gave up the path prescribed by Guenon, he retained a fascination with the sage, a fascination fed by Kojeve’s reading of Hegel, in which the sage has a distinct, historically important role. Kojeve’s lectures, given between 1933-1939, were written down by Queneau, and published in 1947 as the Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, which had an enormous impact on the French intellectual scene. I as well have ambitions to be a sage, but I looked out the window, watched the Loire countryside go by, and thought as a suppliant.

Why, though, is it almost perfect? Why do I think, in terms of traditional  novel business, it is better than Witchgrass – Le Chiendent – my favorite Queneau novel?

Well, the character of the protagonist, Bertrand Lehameau is one of the answers. It is hard to write about a protagonist who is so opposed, ideologically, to the author. Moreover, this is a love story with a theme that is every bit as sappy as a Lifetime movie (spoilers ahead): Lehameau falls in love with a British nurse, who fills a void in his life created thirteen years before, when his wife and his mother died in a great fire in a movie theatre. They nearly sleep together – they don’t – the nurse leaves, called back to England – her boat is sunk by a German U-boat. Yet there are other features Lifetime avoids. Lehameau is also attracted to a teen, Annette – and take her and her brother Polo on outings to the movies. The siblings have a sister, Madeleine, who runs a brothel. Lehameau sleeps with Madeleine and proposes marriage at the end of the book. Moreover, his leg, injured in battle, heals, and he heads cheerfully back to the front.

Queneau was a great admirer of Joyce – Joyce rocked his world, one could say, and started him on his career as a novelist – a not uncommon effect. In a sense, Lehameau (literal translation: the hamlet)  is an anti-Bloom. He’s a  thirty-three year old ultra-rightist of Schopenhauerian views and anti-semitic tendencies. Apparently, Queneau took some of Lehameau’s speeches and attitudes from his own father. In an unpublished text meant to begin a memoir, Queneau wrote: “ I am from a petit-bourgeois family: my father was an anti-semitic and my mother epileptic, my aunt practiced an underhanded euthanasia on my grandmother, one of my uncles died of delirium tremens, another managed to avoid the same by way of smoker’s cancer, the third was blind in one eye.” There is a particular form of forgiveness parents reserve for children and children for parents – perhaps this explains the state of grace that surrounds the otherwise dark and unpromising Lehameau. His thirteen years of chastity as well as his war wound are healed at the end of the novel, which ends with a certain insight. Lehameau is discussing life with his friend, the bookstore owner Madame Dutertre:

“Mrs. Dutertre looked at him, making a great effort to decipher the new being that was presenting himself to her.

-Okay, she said, finally, you no longer hate the poor and the miserable, Mr. Lehameau?

- Nor the Germans even, Mrs. Dutertre, he responded, smiling. Not even them. Not even the Havre-ians, he added, laughing.

-Well, it seems you must have become a great sage, said Mrs. Dutertre, trying to kid him.

Bernard got up.

“Well, Mrs. Dutertre, goodbye. I’m going off to the war like everybody else.”

In this novel, “deciphering” plays a great role. At one emotional high point Lehameau and his love, Helena, look at the sea – but Queneau describes them as “deciphering” the sea. Here the bug runs into the letters that it has simply crawled over – and discovers, with contra-bug surprise, that it is indeed a letter. As with bugs transcending their bugness, so to with humans – in Queneau’s world.

the time is here

 

In the Dictionary of Untranslateables – a title that doubles down on the oxymoron – the section on Times, as temps in French, describes, although it doesn’t explain, the remarkable doubleness of the term for both time and weather. The “time and the weather” – when I was a kid in Atlanta, you could call a number and a recorded voice would tell you both the time and the weather.

The time, in English, is connected by the most obscure of routes to weather – in as much as it is connected to the sun, divided into A.M. and P.M. However, most philosophers who have approached time ignore the weather. That the Latin tempestus and the English Tempest have, ticking in them, a term for time is one of those etymological chances, as meaningless, to the philosopher, as  the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

But this decade is proving that time, human time, and the weather are so connected that one can feel the juncture in one’s blood. We’re in Montpellier right now. We go out, every afternoon, to swim in the Mediterranean on the beach near La Grande Motte. Here, the water is still fairly cool. But the local newspaper reports that the water on the Cote D’azur – the most famous of the French coasts, the one that includes St. Tropez and Cannes – is registering at 27 to 30 degrees Celsius. We make much of the difference between climate and weather, but these bits of weather, deformed by our industrial and post-industrial system, are crying out that the time has come.

The notion that time comes to an end is one way of looking at the set to which time belongs – those things or events that are finite. The finitude of time, however, is hard to imagine – while we can imagine, because we are seeing, the finitude of local climates. The weather of a place goes wrong, then deeply wrong. The weather of the water goes wrong, and the dead phyla pile up on the shore. We can see our time in the sky, as any child on a swing in a swingset knows.

The Oxford English Dictionary blog has a nice piece on the etymological origins of weather. Weather was once more than a word denoting the given atmospheric conditions of a given place – it meant, as well, wind, sky, breeze storm. We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing this summer. Can we undo what we have done – unjam our windjam? What I see, right now, is that the swimmers at St. Tropez will just take their boats out a little farther from shore. We accommodate.

And we wait for the next summer to be worse.

a metaphor from Shklovsky

 

In the book of interviews that Serena Vitale  conducted with Viktor Shklovksy, he says a wonderful thing about poetry, quoting Mandelstam: “…poetry is the “deep joy of recognition.” That’s it. The poet searches, gropes in the dark, and my dear contemporaries, so prolific in words, the structuralists, who filled the world with terminology . . . You see, they don’t know this thing, this affliction of the presentiment of art and the joy of recognition. Only the great poets do. They know they’re going to write. They don’t know what will come out, whether it will be a boy or a girl, they only know that it will be poetry. Only the poet knows this tortuous search for the word, the physical joy of “recognition,” and sometimes, also the anguish of defeat. Again, take Mandelstam: “I have forgotten the word I wanted to say. A blind swallow returns to the palace of shadows . . .” I knew Mandelstam, I remember him rushing down the stairs of the House of Arts declaiming these verses. You see, a poem is born from struggle. A rhythm, a word, like an echo, then a word with a different meaning, in the dark you only see individual, separate things, but then, little by little, your eyes adjust to the change in the light, they can see, and it’s poetry.”
 
I like the registers of this remark, from birth to physical joy. It has a long history, this male mimicry of birth – art’s competition with the mother. A competition that is won each time by the mother, of course – try as the poet may, the words that come out are of a different substance and nature to the naked human being. The words are promised the chance at “immortality” – to be passed on for an insignificant geological time in books or by word of mouth. The child, meanwhile, is at the center of a crisis of recognition  – hence the supplement of the name. Poetry is never changed in the cradle with the child, and out of the breakdown of that metaphor – which re-presents itself, neurotically – we find other metaphors, murkier ones – for instance of poetry as a struggle for recognition  in the Manichean dark. A dark that, one finds, is actually simply a change of light, not its annulation. Who struggles, here?
 
 
Later in the interview, Shklovsky says: You should be afraid of the books you agree with, not the ones you disagree with.
 
I figure it is the same thing with metaphors.

two cheers for the inventor of the underground: Constance Garnett!

 

Monroe Beardsley wrote a long and rather brilliant essay about the Underground metaphor in Dostoevsky in which he acknowledges, as an aside, that Doestoevsky’s Notes from the Underground was actually named something like Notes from under the Floorboards, or from a Mousehole.

I bow down to Dostoevsky, but sometimes a translator should be her due. It was Constant Garnett who “mistranslated” that title. I believe Nabokov somewhere takes a shot at Garnett. Frankly, Garnett’s title is an improvement. Dostoevsky’s reputation worldwide depends, in part, on the fact that the “Underground” is a much more powerful image than “the Mousehole.” True, one of Kafka’s great short stories is called “The Burrow”, but it is not one of Kafka’s most known short stories, I think.

How did Constance Garnett bring the Underground to Dostoevsky – a pairing that seems absolutely appropriate?

I imagine – I have no letter or diary entry about this – but I imagine this is a case of cross-pollination. Constance Garnett learned Russian under the tutelage of a man named Sergei Stepniak, who had escaped from Russia and written a memoir, of sorts, about his career as a nihilist and agitator: Underground Russia. This was translated from Italian into English in 1882. It was not until 1893, however, that the Garnetts, who had all become Stepniak’s supporters, learned the real reason he fled Russia. In December, 1893, the New Review published an article from on Ivanoff, a pseudonym, detailing the moment that Stepniak – then under his own name, S. M. Kravchinskii – cut the cord, so to speak.  To quote Thomas Moser on the Stepniak affair from his article of 1992:

“On August 4, 1878, this man [Stepniak] acquired a kitchen knife.. At 9 a.m., “sneaking on tiptoe”, he plunged the knife into [General Mezentsev, the Russian police chief’s] abdomen, turned it round in the wound, jumped into the victoria (carriage) and rode out of St. Petersburg.”

The Garnett’s faced up to the knowledge that their friend was not just a revolutionary in theory, but a man who turned a knife in the abdomen of another man in fact, with a rather admirable tolerance. The General was no innocent. The deed had been committed in retaliation for the torture and capital punishment being meted out by the Czarist regime to revolutionaries. Death for death – as the pamphlet penned latter by Stepniak was entitled.

David Garnett, Constance Garnett’s son, wrote: "I had been brought up to accept acts of political murder and violence with sympathy bordering on admiration; I had known and respected at least two eminent assassins".  Probably Stepniak was one of them. Constance herself was a Fabian and 2^nd International socialist. She knew that the people who shunned Stepniak would shake the hands of torturers and murderers, as long as the latter were in uniform or had an aristocratic title. Although it became fashionable for a while, especially in the wake of Nabokov, to criticize Garnett for “bowdlerizing” Russian literature, the accusation is really this: she was a woman of the Edwardian era. Or, more simply: she was a woman. 

And she did things that few women do today. In 1904, she left her husband and 2 year old son in England and went to Russia, ostensibly to help with famine relief there, and - as a side project - to deliver letters from an exile Russian revolutionary community to revolutionaries inside Russia. 

But she is ever the "Victorian woman", just as Dostoevsky -  whose entire mature life coincides with the Victorian age - is always the modern novelist. This point made well by Claire Davidson-Pignon in the essay: “No Smoke without fire? Mrs Garnett and the Russian Connection.” Garnett’s politics – this was a woman who translated one of the first pamphlets about the Potemkin revolt into English, after returning from Russia in 1905 – is consistently neglected, in favor of terms like “gentility” and “Victorian.” I do wonder how many of her critics would be so “Victorian” as to mingle with an assassin who, according to the press, was a terrorist.

She was very much not a Victorian. She was very much an Edwardian, like Conrad. And as an Edwardian, she was more attracted to “Undergrounds” than mouseholes. In this, she was like H.G. Wells, who also wrote about undergrounds, and even Jules Verne. The ghost of Dostoevsky owes her.

 

 

 

Our little crew of relativists and scoundrels

 

I am among the crew of nominalists, relativists and other scoundrels, who think that universals are made, not given. This crew is often accused of being insufficiently condemnatory of the Holocaust and the Gulag – although the people who make these accusations often shuffle their feet when it comes to the genocide in the Trans-Atlantic slavery trade and the wholesale mass slaughter of indigenous people and the theft of their territory. The latter group often wants us to remember the good things about, say, Thomas Jefferson, and not the fact that he lived on a kidnapped and enslaved work force, and chose his mistress, aka raped, among that work force. The idea is you absolutely condemn Hitler and Stalin, on the one hand, and eyeroll about giving America back to the Indian nations, on the other.

Nominalists can be as excited in their denunciations of Auschwitz as anyone else. It is just that they don’t see the invocation of the absolute, here, as doing any real moral work. Not that the vocabulary of absolute denunciation is useless – it might help create a real institutional response to mass murder. So, from the point of view of universal-making, it would be a great idea for there to be some international go-to court to try all torturers, from Saddam Hussein to George Bush. But so far, in spite of the spirit of absolute moral law promoted proudly by the anti-relativist, the real law goes on rewarding the strong and punishing the weak.

In the name of what or who, that is the question.

An Italian politician and  historian, Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando, delivered a remark, quoted in an essay by Sciascia, that rather sums up the Hegelian point of view: “If history is universal, referring to humanity as a total ideal, its vital center is still squeezed into a determined point: this would be, from epoch to epoch, a little territory like Mesopotamia or the Nile Delta, or a city like Athens, Jerusalem or Rome.”

We know by heart the catalogue of cities and territories, and we know that it is not going to include, say, Khanbaliq, or Tenochtitlan, or the longhouses of the Penans. Instead, the standard catalogue is of places where, gradually, the total ideal of humanity developed, although always with the codicil that the grander form was embodied in the smaller scale of a particular story, according to the teller.

Sceptics have long roamed, like dogs - -cynics by nature – outside the walls of this idea. Voltaire’s Micromegas  is a comic expression of the cynic’s doubt, while Blake’s bird with its “world of delight” which we can’t penetrate is a romantic expression of it. The Saturnian in Micromegas complains of having merely 72 senses, but converses very well with otherwise differently constructed beings, while Blake’s bird converses with other birds.   Neither the Saturnian nor the bird, however, claim to embody the universal.

In a sense, I am not opposed to universal-making. In the name of what or who would I oppose it? However, as the universal comes to earth and becomes this or that project, I find my tongue and oppose it now because of a principle of justice, now because of my own moral feelings, now as a member and on behalf of a collective, etc. Human rights, good taste – the nominalist doesn’t doubt that these things hold power, and function as rules. In practical terms, the absolute works the way any superlative works. It is just that the nominalist, Blake’s bird, and Micromegas’s Saturnian are concerned with the way absolutes tend to go wrong. When they go wrong, they are merciless.

That’s when the dogs outside the city begin to howl.