Reflections on Sherlock Holmes

 I like reading to Adam at night, before he goes to sleep. It is a ritual which satisfies Adam – he follows the story until he is sleepy, which puts together the two great ends of tale-telling, the enjoyment of following an event as it unfolds itself and is unfolded by the observer, and the enjoyment of being slowly induced into closing your eyes on the way to unconsciousness – and it satisfies me, as I get to try out all kinds of voices, from Huck Finn drawling Southern to Sherlock Holmes nasal British.

Sherlock Holmes has delighted me since I was eleven or so – about a year older than Adam. I’ve read them over countless times. There’s a certain paradox here, since the stories are motivate by the need to solve a human problem, and end on the solution to the problem – which would seem to close them up and make the reader averse to a second reading, not to mention a fifth or seventh. This is the mystery of the mystery – why it transcends, in some small way, its neatly tied two fold structure as problem-solution.

Of course, reading these stories always involves being irritated by the same things that irritated you before – it awakens that irritation again. Certain stories are, really, partners to the reader – even the irritations are dear. For me, the irritation is Holmes’ infamous use of the term deduction.

There are whole books on this subject. Eco and Sebeok’s collection, Dupin, Holmes, Pierce: the Sign of Three, is probably the best. I explained, to Adam, that deduction is something like proving from a given, while what Holmes is doing is an induction, or an inference from probability based in experience. Adam listened and nodded, but the nod was the here comes sleep nod rather than the I get it nod.

Of course, reading Sebeok, I want to retreat from my sophomoric objection. Sebeok makes a good case that Holmes’ guessing – although Holmes claims he never guesses – is illuminated by C.S. Pierce’s notion of retroduction, or hypothetico-deduction, or abduction.

There is quite a literature on the inspiration for Holmes’ method – the human model that Doyle converted into the fictitious device. But for a philosopher, as important is the method itself – philosophers do like a method. Methodus – the Greek for pursuit, which brings us back to the function of “following.” Method is natural to narrative, although how we follow, tripping from topic to topic, is still a misty matter. Holmes’ soliloquies about his method are quite pretty:

“The ideal reasoner ... would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.”

I like to think that this is true. It is fundamentally monism, or its contemporary descendent, connectionism. When Holmes winds himself up and delivers these maxims, he seems like one of the Greek sages whose best hit bits are quoted in Diogenes Laertes.

He also seems a bit like Lichtenberg. Take another Holmes quote:

From a drop of water ... a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagra without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it."

That is a grand view. I relate it to this jotting by Lichtenberg, in his scribble book, when he is considering the vibrational psychology of Hartley (the 18th century predecessor of today’s neuro-philosophers).

“Suppose a pea is blown into the sea at Helvoet [in the Netherlands] and suppose my brain is something like the sea, then you may suppose that there will be an effect on the coast of China. This effect would be strongly modified, however, through every impression made on all the other objects in the sea, through the wind that pushes on it, through the fish and ships that plow through it, through the vaults that break open the shoreline. The form of the surfaces of a land, ist mountains and valleys, etc., is one with a written history of natural signs of all ist changes, every grain of sand is a letter, but the language is mostly unknown to us.”

The adjacency of the largest and the smallest, of the murder that ends a human life and the most trivial thing, a fingerprint, that “proves” who did it, is where crime overlaps with metaphysics. And I suppose that this is one of the reasons that I keep returning to Sherlock Holmes.

christ's shoutout to BLM

 I am greatly enjoying Wolf Hall at the moment. And loving, as well, the takedown of Thomas More, at least as seen by Thomas Cromwell, who is seen by Hilary Mantel. Mantel was born a Catholic and had obviously fought against her Catholic heritage – so much so that certain writers in the pious journals have implied that she relies too much on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a ferociously anti-Catholic book.

I view Mantel’s view of Cromwell’s view of More through Cold War eyes, for it was in the sixties that More became a pop martyr, a truth teller. And, indeed, nobody can deny that More was burnt. Nor deny that he himself burnt – books and Protestants. He had one suspected heretic held in stocks at his own house.

All of which leads us to More’s great antagonist – not Henry VIII, who was merely a king. I’m talking about William Tyndale. The first translator of the Bible, whose translation was the go to crib for the 80 people assembled under King James to translate the Bible. This is not just a matter of the Bible: rather, Tyndale’s was the democratic spirit, re-emerging in common life. In a dispute with a priest who told Tyndale “we were better off to be without God’s law than the Pope’s”, Tyndale replied that he defied the pope’s law and added: “if God spare my life, ere many years I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.” (the story is in Foxe – receive it under that caution).

This remark is not simply a bit of casual repartee, but at the heart of democratic culture. It has since been the aim of those who believe in democracy to cause the boye or girl who dryveth the plough to know more of the secrets of the CIA, more of the sources of money that go into the laws, more of the background considerations of the wheelings and dealings of the Justices, more of the inner workings of corporation honchoes, than any powerful heretic burner would like.

Alas, the ethos of “need to know” is accepted all too docilely by the citizens in our quasi-democracies. As a sign and symbol of this retreat in America, I would point to the tragic decline of knowledge of the Bible.

When I grew up, the Bible was not only in every hotel room but was actually read by high and low. It informed the prose of our culture, both as it came out of the mouths of people and as it poured into media. I was given my first bible, with a nice red cover, when I was six, I believe. I was promptly scolded by my Mom for writing my name in it in my utterly henscratching handwriting. I thought at the time and think now that I did no wrong, there.

If you look at the Hollywood portrayal of Americans – and of religious Americans – you will notice that none of the scriptwriters seem to have more than an impoverished Dummies guide to the Bible knowledge of the text. This reflects a great and sensible diminishment of knowledge of the Bible by those who supposedly are all about it, as for instance Fundamentalist Christians. American Christianity, of course, has long been something other than Christianity, as Jesus’s vita, ending in crucifixion and resurrection, has been replaced by Horatio Alger's Christianity, with Jesus preaching feel good messages that will help you in business as you get rich rich rich. In order to believe the latter, you have to very much cherrypick a few messages from the New Testament and add to it the Gospel as spoken by Ronald Reagan, or Donald Trump.

However, down at groundlevel, it used to be that there was some genuine knowledge of the psalms, the prophets, the histories, the vita, even Paul’s letters. Now, it is a mouthful of rightwing slogans and some knowledge of Revelations, a book that should never have made it past the Nicene Council.

What would Tyndale say about his ploughboys now? Perhaps: wake up! “ Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.” You know, Christ’s shoutout to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The skin of the judge

 

The  third branch of government, the judiciary, has long been the feudal instance in the democratic or quasi-democratic nation-states. It is a system framed by, on one end, cages for people, and on the other end, retainers of the worst and the dullest, otherwise known as Your Honor.

 

I am aware that this feudal instance might work as a bulwark not only against the power of the masses, but against the oppression of the minority. Sometimes, these things overlap. In the United States, for instance, the brief flare of juridical liberalism was one of the great cogs in the machine that battered down apartheid – although it then acted as a great cog to re-Jim Crow the country by caging millions of African-Americans. In same way, the Court is now caging women in their own bodies, merrily making up precedents for its misogyny oujt of quotes from witchhunters and defenders of wife-rape in the 17th century.

 

My favorite quote about judges and the judiciary from a  16th century comes from a Hugh Latimer sermon, perhaps his most famous sermon. Hugh Latimer is famous as a martyr under “bloody Mary.” He was burned to death nearly five hundred years ago, on October 16^th, 1555 with Nicholas Ridley. History today gives a nice short account:

 

“Ridley went to the pyre in a smart black gown, but the grey-haired Latimer, who had a gift for publicity, wore a shabby old garment, which he took off to reveal a shroud. Ridley kissed the stake and both men knelt and prayed. After a fifteen-minute sermon urging them to repent, they were chained to the stake and a bag of gunpowder was hung round each man’s neck. The pyre was made of gorse branches and faggots of wood. As the fire took hold, Latimer was stifled by the smoke and died without pain, but poor Ridley was not so lucky. The wood was piled up above his head, but he writhed in agony and repeatedly cried out, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me’ and ‘I cannot burn’.”

 

This man to be burnt was a great sermon-maker, and this is his sermon about judges. It has the whiff of the pyre about it – Latimer was always primed for the flames, that’s how he lived.

 

“Cambyses was a great Emperor, such another as our master is; he had many Lord deputies, Lord presidents, and Lieutenants under him. It is a great while ago sith I read the history. It chanced he had under him in one of his dominions a briber, a gift taker, a gratifier of rich men, he followed gifts, as fast as he that followed the pudding, a hand maker in his office, to make his son a great man, as the old saying is, Happy is the child whose father goeth to the Devil.

2

The cry of the poor widow came to the Emperor’s ear, and caused him to flay the judge quick, and laid his skin in his chair of judgement, that all judges, that should give judgement afterward, should sit in the same skin. Surely it was a goodly sign, a goodly monument, the sign of the judge’s skin: I pray God we may once see the sign of the skin in England. Ye will say peradventure that this is cruelly and uncharitably spoken: no, no, I do it charitably for a love I bear to my country. God saith, Ego visitabo, I will visit. God hath two visitations. The first is, when he revealeth his word by preachers and where the first is accepted, the second cometh not. The second visitation is vengeance. He went a visitation, when he brought the judge’s skin over his ears. If his word be despised he cometh with his second visitation with vengeance.”   The second visitation I identify with the terrible swift sword in the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I hope that chopping time isn’t coming, but with the SCOTUS poised to issue any ruling it pleases and be obeyed, I think the established order is near a breaking point.

The death of the author, the life of the misprint

 

(Cartoon from Punch)

In the Summer Critical Quarterly, Chris Townsend has published an article that almost directly targets a person like myself – a person who loves to chase through old newspapers and current biographies and pop history books, looking for the errant factoid, the misspelled name, the comedian as, indeed, the added or subtracted letter, messing up names and causing vast comedies of misrecognition among the minor players of history. Forgive me for being obscure – I am writing a story, at the moment, about J., a woman whose head was supposedly shaved in the Liberation because she had collaborated with the Nazis. It is a story that is extremely minor, save for J.’s family relationship with Winston Churchill – a very stretched and tiny one – and her walkon role among the Anglo French glitterati of the thirties and forties.

As I have plumbed what plums there are in her story, I find her misrecognized in dozens of texts, and the story of what she did or didn’t do almost impossible to say for sure. In the breath of stories told at the high table and over cocktails, bits of history or fictionary leap out. It is as if the clinamen of fiction edges the direction of history one way or another.

I’m going on, here. But to return to Chris Townsend’s article: it is an examination of the way a line in Wordsworth’s poem “A slumber did my spirit seal” – precisely that line – has had a frolic of its own, as it gets perpetually misprinted as “a slumber did my spirit steal”. That “t”, like an imp, keeps climbing into that line.

“‘A slumber did my spirit steal, /I had no human fears.’ Given that Wordsworth’s celebrated lyric is suspended in its entirety above this essay, there is a decent chance that you, reader, will have noticed the typographical error in that opening quotation: a slumber did my spirit steal. Then again, perhaps not. Exactly that typo, or misquotation, or mishearing, or misremembering, has proven to be a surprisingly pervasive one, and the poem has been accidentally made into one about stealing by readers both relatively unfamiliar with Wordsworth and those very familiar indeed.”

Among those very familiar indeed is Richard Holmes, who inserted the “t”. So did E.M. Forster (whose name I have often reduced, when writing, to Foster, as though he were the descendent of the man who wrote “Way down upon the Suwannee River”, which I also often misspell). In fact, Forster wrote (with Derridian karma forcing his hand), ‘it does not matter who wrote “A slumber did my spirit steal”’ – surely daring fate as much as the ancient Mariner did when he shot the albatross.

In some essay or another, Gore Vidal made fun of the fact that F.Scott Fitzgerald’s manuscripts are full of spelling mistake, as if the second grade lesson that good writing is good spelling was the law and the prophets. I’ve always been sympathetic to Fitzgerald, being a bad speller myself – C on the report card when I was in fifth grade. In contrast to the A in reading – what happened there? Partly this is because I have always kept reading and music close together – the words sound off in my head – and the musical version of “salmon”, for instance, is not exactly replicated in that devilish “l”.

As Townsend points out, the Oxford Companion to English literature went with the “t” over four editions, from 1932 to 1967, reminding us that one of the “companions” of Jesus was no true friend and sold him out for a bag full of steal. And by a false kiss sealed the deal.

Even, even (sob) Rene Wellek misquoted the poem, in a polemic against all those deconstructors destroying literary studies. That is the thing about polemic – it falls under a charm that inevitably makes one commit the same error that one is decrying.

I don’t know whether that spelling C was the decisive event that decided my whole paraphiliac career of looking for errors in others’ texts, or being fascinated by the game of “Chinese whispers” – as it was once called – because to my mind it is the very model of information transfer. But I am so so glad when I meet fellow obsessives. We all sit in the back of the class and make fun of Miss X when she hands back our pop spelling quizzes.

Voltaire and commercial society

 

Voltaire’s history of the reign of Louis XV begins with a study of the system of John Law, seen from the point of view of the civilizing process – or at least the domesticating process. Voltaire is at pains to put Law’s bubble in the context of the “habit of obedience” ingrained in the French under the reign of Louis XIV, comparing the troubles that the latter Louis faced, in his regency, from an upstart aristocracy, with the mildness faced by the regent, the Duc D’Orleans, even in the exercise of truly autocratic power. Out of the disempowerment of the nobility brought about by autocracy of the Sun King, Voltaire spotted another power on the rise, which would maintain a social order by the somewhat paradoxical support of those whose political power was abridged by it.  This passage should be underlined by those looking for the genealogical ancestors of Marx’s sociology of capitalism:

“Finally, Law’s famous system, which seemed that it must ruin the regency and the state, actually sustained, in effect, both one and the other by consequences nobody had foreseen. The cupidity that it awoke in all conditions of the population, from the basest upt to magistrates, bishops and princes, turned away the attention of all minds from the public welfare, and from all political and ambitious views, in filling them with the fear of losing and the avidity of gaining. It was a new and prodigious game, where all citizens wagered one against the other. The obsessed players hardly quit their cards in order to trouble the government. And so it happened, by a prestige of which the hidden mechanisms could not be seen except by the finest and most practiced eyes, that a chimerical system gave birth to a real commerce, and played the midwife to the rebirth of the Indian company, established in the past by the celebrated Colbert, and ruined by the wars. In the end, if there were many private fortunes destroyed, at least the nation become more commercial and richer. This system enlightened minds, as the civil wars, in the past, had sharpened braveries. It was an epidemic sickness which spread itself in France, Holland and England. It merits the attention of posterity, for here it was not a question of the political interest of one or two princes that sent shockwaves through the nations; rather, the people themselves hurried into this madness which enriched some families, and reduced others to beggary.”

Voltaire sees this as a madness, but it is now a norm. The rise of the financial industry in all its branches is a sort of surprising result of industrial society. In defiance of the economist’s fetish of “efficiency”, the very size of finance in contemporary capitalist society is a marker of vast inefficiencies, of rent-seeking for its own sake.

Because most economists work for the man, though – the financial man – or hope to, this little insight is lost in the footnotes. We don’t want to bring to the floor the fact that our form of capitalism is, by its own standards, a vastly inefficient machine. That would discourage the poky and the plunky – the little ones who have to be taught to identify with the plutocrats.

The Third Wish

 

A. says I am obsessed. She keeps catching me watching Hurricane Ian related videos on YouTube, or Twitter, or Tik Tok. The amazing footage of the waves rolling down the main street in Naples, or the water rising against the window of a house in Fort Myers. The from-the-air footage of drones, or planes, or helicopters. The waters receding, leaving that enormous ring around the shore of houses reduced to gunk. The piling up of everything one had on the sidewalk.

I am obsessed. I understand the hurricane and tornado chasers. The longing and fear that come together in some apocalyptic act, which passes – as all apocalypses in America pass – with aftermaths of junk piled by the street. Our enduring symbol of … what? The pioneer spirit? William Carlos Williams missed an important moment in the American poetic when he passed over junk piled by the side of the street. The rent is way passed due, the billcollectors and the sheriff, in that enduring tandem, are wheeling away the moveables and fixing the lock on the door. In this case, the billcollectors and the sheriff are celestial.
It is my nightmare, and I can’t resist watching it play over and over. The water that claims everything you have, the wind that lifts the roof off the building. I’ve built a thin surface of normality over this mad panic expectation. The third wish is, always, secretly, the death wish.

And here's our old friend, the reindeer

 

I’ve been reading one of Calasso’s last big books – The Celestial Hunter. As is often the case with Calasso, I am struck not just by the “shock of recognition”, but by the shock of deja-ecrit. The theme of this book – the dive into the period 20 thousand years ago when God saw that the world was good and the people in it saw that the world and the animals and the trees and the spirits were immensely bigger than they were – is more than congenial to me. It touches on an obsession of mine, which springs from having read books about the cave paintings and being fascinated by Chauvet (which I have “seen”, in as much as seeing it is going to a cave that is the simulacra of it). Long ago, in 2006, I wrote a review of a book by Greg Curtis, a man who edited Texas Monthly and then just suddenly decided to follow his spirit and write  a book about cave painting, I wrote, in part:

 

“Reading it, we were struck like by 100 000 volts that during the Upper Paleolithic – that wonderful time when there were, max, 150 000 people in Europe, and life was good for around twenty thousand years - the cave artists generally didn’t draw or paint or engrave people. There were your stray vulvas, the masked bird man, many hand prints, but generally – no people. Instead, there were mammoths. There were lions. There were rhinos and horses. Oddly, much fewer reindeer, even though reindeer meat was the spam of the Paleolithic – it was always poached reindeer for breakfast, fricasseed reindeer for lunch, and reindeer pudding for dinner. We are often told how to evolution stories about this or that human habit, but in reality, the way those how to stories are formed is that evo psychologists extrapolate back from ‘primitive people’ of today to those wandering around 200,000 years ago. However, this habit is in serious disconnect from archeologists, who have long held that ethnography of people today, in no matter what state of society they live in, is essentially unhelpful when trying to reconstruct the way the inhabits of the Eurasia 30,000 years ago lived. It is impossible not to imagine back using our PBS/National Geographic images, but what tribe do we know of that doesn’t draw people? Deleuze and Guattari talk of the special faciality of the West – this seems right, on all accounts – but to show so little interest in people when one has mastered perspective, and the expressive character of animals? That seems quite significant. But of what? Well, this is where speculation is dumb, but irresistible.”

I went on to outline my speculative position:  the cave art of 25,000 years ago, with its relative  absence of the human, marks the time when – just perhaps – humans did not assume they would prevail. They did not even assume they were superior, since of course they knew – the horse was superior for speed, the lion and tiger and bear was superior for strength, the bird for flight, and so on.

There wasn’t - I would speculate, in this scene still dotted with other hominid candidates for most likely to survive - the sense that homo sapiens was superior in any department at all.

Calasso’s book is more sophisticated than my speculation, but it shares the sense that “man” was level with “nature” – in fact, that split between the humans and nature was inconceivable because neither category in the modern sense existed. Enemy and friend, transformation and death, hunting and eating existed. “When it began, the hunt was not a person who pursued an animal. It was a being who pursued an other being. No one could say with certainty who was who. The pursued animal could be a transformed man, or a god, or simply an animal, or a spirit or a something dead.”

And so it was I think through most of the Holocene. This recent change of earth time – the Anthropocene – was prefigured when a divide, a borderline was built, in heads and hearts and fields. Did that border have to thicken into plastic strewn oceans and the kind of yuck that we can see in pictures of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian? I don’t believe it. What is strange about the anthopocene story is that we have a story from science that would make sense to the cavepainters – that we are brothers and sisters of other animal tribes, that there is nothing called “nature” that causes anything, that everything has a material unity that we can play with but never overstep, that metamorphosis is life.