lynyrd skynyrd and Proust

 Unexpectedly, a bit of my teen years in suburban Atlanta visited my son's French elementary school yesterday. As part of a show and tell, one of his roommates brought a guitar and played a riff from Freebird. Freebird! I looked down my seventeen year old nose at Lynyrd Skynnyrd and basically all Southern rock of the seventies. But perhaps that music had its revenge on me, for I can, actually, in a mesmeric trance, lipsync Freebird.

I wonder what Proust would do with this material? The agents of the memory that unleashes In Search of Lost Time are taste and smell - the taste of madeleines, the most common cookie, and the smell of various perfumes and flowers. If, however, the young Marcel had lived in Clarkston, Georgia, I'm pretty sure the agent of memory would be sound - the sound on the radio of pop songs. Some station in Atlanta, in the seventies, got the kids up to go to high school by playing, every day, Dylan's Rainy Day women song (they stone you when you're going to make a buck...). Lynyrd Skynyrd was everywhere in my high school. Or I should say at the white end of my high school - though the school was officially de-segregated, there were few black students in my classes.
If you look at American pop culture and the way it acts as a memory agent, you see some interesting things. Every aging truck driver and secretary is in search of lost time, and they pursue it through the songs of their teen years. Now, we have infinite numbers of concert films from the seventies on YouTube, so you can even wallow in the high with which you went to see the Allman Brothers at Piedmont Park, or whatever. Myself, thinking I was quite the outlaw, never went to any of these concerts, and yet here I am, washed up in France, remembering "and this bird you cannot chaaaange (or is it chain?)" and thinking of comrades, now retiring, who sat next to me in classes that I can barely remember the purpose of. All the ships at sea eventually go down to the bottom.
But this bird you cannot chain.

The expulsion of the giants

 

There is a valiant but small tradition of scholars who see the connection between the so called Western tradition and that of the “East”: among whom the most famous is, perhaps, Martin Buber. Before writing his masterpiece in the twenties, I and Thou, Buber published a “translation” of the Chuang-Tzu that was really a translation of the English translation of the Chuang-Tzu made by James Legge. In a wonderful essay by Jonathan Herman, “The Mysterious Mr. Wang: the search for Martin Buber’s Confucian Ghostwriter” (one of those rare academic titles that evokes the Fu Manchu series by Sax-Rohmer), the background of Buber’s effort is exposed. Sinology was constructed in the German speaking countries in the 19th century on terms that were consistent with a long theme in German culture stemming from Herder, which on one reading promoted a basic equality between cultural productions around the globe. The idea that one should accept the Chinese philosopher as an equal in the dialogue of philosophy is still more valued in theory than in practice. Few really put in that work. But in the German countries, perhaps partly due to German imperial designs on China after the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese studies held a special place. One remembers that Canetti’s Peter Kien, the protagonist of Auto-de-Fe, is a Sinologist. It is through these grids – Sinology and Hassidic Tales – that Buber was enabled to think through the metaphysics of communication that is at the center of the I – thou book. Kafka, too, in The Great Wall of China, sees China through - perhaps - Buber's eyes.

This direct link, in the early twentieth century, and other links going back to Leibniz, should be backgrounded by a certain community of motifs. For instance: the giant. A too often forgotten figure in Western philosophy.

The first chapter of the Chuang-Tzu consists of a comparison between the giant and the small, beginning with the famed fish, K’un:

“IN THE NORTHERN DARKNESS there is a fish and his name is K'un.1 The K'un is so huge I don't know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P'eng. The back of the P'eng measures I don't know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky. When the sea begins to move,2 this bird sets off for the southern darkness, which is the Lake of Heaven. (Burton Watson translation)
Against the wonder of the P’eng is set the laughter of the dove and the cicada:
“The cicada and the little dove laugh at this, saying, "When we make an effort and fly up, we can get as far as the elm or the sapanwood tree, but sometimes we don't make it and just fall down on the ground. Now how is anyone going to go ninety thousand li to the south!”
The chapter then proceeds through other giant/small contrasts in the style peculiar to it – each passage being at once unlinked from the proceeding one and yet bearing the distinct resemblance that one hand of cards bears to another. So giant and small face off against each other in wisdom, in status, in miraculous powers. The final contrast is between Hui Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Hui Tzu, given giant gourd seeds, plants and grows them, but the gourds are too big, so he smashes them Chuang Tzu laughs at this, saying that Hui Tzu, seems to be in thrall to the outward show of the gourds only: “Now you had a gourd big enough to hold five piculs. Why didn't you think of making it into a great tub so you could go floating around the rivers and lakes, instead of worrying because it was too big and unwieldy to dip into things! Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!"
So: what is the Daoist attitude towards the giant – are we looking at things from the perspective of the P’eng or the cicada? Surely Chuang Tzu’s tone of mockery is supposed to release us from the first impression of the giant – the impression of sheer wonder. And that is a motif that has references pointing to the early modern era in Europe: this is when, as a sly maneuver, the writers who were inventing the “novel” used it to attack wonder itself , the glue that officially kept the sacred system together. Rabelais’ mock giants, the windmills that Don Quixote attacks, thinking that they are giants – this is about, in one sense, chasing the giants from the culture. Giordano Bruno uses the same mock heroic means in the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. In the Ash Wednesday colloquy, Nolan (Bruno himself) is extolled in terms that could plug into the Chuang Tzu:
“Now here is he who has pierced the air, penetrated the sky, toured the realm of stars, traversed the boundaries of the world, dissipated the fictitious walls of the first, eighth, ninth, tenth spheres, and whatever else might have been attached to these by the devices of vain mathematicians and by the blind vision of popular philosophers. Thus aided by the fullness of sense and reason, lie opened with the key of most industrious inquiry those enclosures of truth that can be opened to us at all, by presenting naked the shrouded and veiled nature; he gave eyes to moles, illumined the blind who cannot fix their eyes and admire their own images in so many mirrors which surround them from every side. He untied the tongue of the mute who do not know [how to] and did not dare to express their intricate sentiments. He restored strength to the lame who were unable to make that progress in spirit which the ignoble and dissolvable compound [body] cannot make. He provided them with no less a presence [vantage point] than if they were the very inhabitants of the sun, of the moon, and of other nomadic [wandering] stars [planets]. He showed how similar or dissimilar, greater or worse [smaller] are those bodies [stars, planets) which we see afar, compared with that [earth] which is right here and to which we are united. And he opened their eyes to see this deity, this mother of ours, which on her back feeds them and nourishes them after she has produced them from her bosom into which she always gathers them again -- who is not to be considered a body without soul and life, [33. This animistic world view precedes a slightly veiled affirmation of pantheism.] let alone the trash of all bodily substances.”

The moment of mockery, of the exorcism of the giants, gets its juice, its scoffing power, from the practical, from the peasant’s p.o.v. – it is, after all, through Sancho Panza that we know the giants are windmills in Don Quixote. What James Scott calls the Little Tradition – the culture of the peasant and its characteristic skepticism – penetrates the Big Tradition – the tradition of the metropole, with its merchants, scholars, and natural philosophers, all bound together through an intricate system of patronage.
However, it would be a retarded enlightenment indeed that remained frozen in the moment of mockery. The movement, as in the quote from Bruno above, is to another and more abstract view. In the Chuang Tzu, the scale by which the K’un is gigantic and the dove is small is itself neither gigantic nor small. The scale has no size. In Bruno, the attack on the giants is done in the name of a notion of infinity with which Bruno’s name is still associated. When Newton applies the laws of motion on earth to the heavenly bodies, his idea is related to this same notion of a scale of no size – of a force. Newton famously wrote that he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants – showing that he had learned something that would make him free from the reproach Chuang Tzu gives to Hui Tzu: "You certainly are dense when it comes to using big things!” In fact, there is a certain slyness to Newton’s phrase – he does not, as is usual with the phrase (tracked through every maze by Robert Merton in his book) call himself a dwarf – his own stature is, as it were, for the observer to determine.
Although there are many Enlightenment tropes that return us again and again to light, to seeing, to emancipation, the deepest trope, I think, is that which uses the chasses aux geants to make us think of the scale that has no scale – a viewpoint outside the divine.

the murder on trolley track b

 

From my piker’s point of view, moral philosophy can be illuminated by imaginary scenarios, but it can’t be based on imaginary scenarios. If we treat these scenarios like "experiments" -and if we grant there can be experiments that are, by design, possible only in the imagination - than we have to have some idea of what narration is about, and what varying a narrative does. I think the recent riot of utilitarians all exercising their effective altruism is a case of thought experiment poisoning. Too much depends on the “trolley problem”, and not enough interest is put into analysing the narrative of the “trolley problem” – including the odd use of the word “save” which pops up in trolley prob discussions.  When people start to talk about “saving” others, I start to ask about the psychopathology of the saviour complex.

I saved no body today by not driving up on sidewalks and ramming into people. That is a bad, but comic, description of driving down the street. 

If a scenario becomes stereotypical, it limits the imagination, which is why philosophers who indulge too much in imaginary scenarios should definitely read  Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style.

When I first heard tell of the trolley problem, I laughed. My aesthetic instinct, as opposed to my moral one, thought that the narrative structure was joke-like. However, the trolley story has had such a large afterlife since it was formulated by Phillipa Foot that I have given this doubtful scenario a little bit more thought. It does seem like an  illuminating scenario about the “vocational instinct” that causes  philosophers to place themselves automatically in the managerial class and to make moral judgments within that position. The standard scenario is of a driver of a brakeless trolly who can go down track a and hit five people or swerve and go down track b and hit one person. This is often contrasted with the scenario of a surgeon who can “save” lives with some transplants. Here is a version taken from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s The Trolley Problem:

“Now consider a second hypothetical case. This time you are to imagine yourself to be a surgeon, a truly great surgeon. Among other things you do, you transplant organs, and you are such a great surgeon that the organs you transplant always take. At the moment you have five patients who need organs. Two need one lung each, two need a kidney each, and the fifth needs a heart. If they do not get those organs today, they will all die; if you find organs for them today, you can transplant the organs and they will all live. But where to find the lungs, the kidneys, and the heart? The time is almost up when a report is brought to you that a young man who has just come into your clinic for his yearly check-up has exactly the right blood-type, and is in excellent health. Lo, you have a possible donor. All you need do is cut him up and distribute his parts among the five who need them. You ask, but he says, "Sorry. I deeply sympathize, but no." Would it be morally permissible for you to operate anyway? Everybody to whom I have put this second hypothetical case says, No, it would not be morally permissible for you to proceed. Here then is Mrs. Foot's problem: Why is it that the trolley driver may turn his trolley, though the surgeon may not remove the young man's lungs, kidneys, and heart?"

The philosophy story, with some exceptions, puts the philosopher (pace Nietzsche) in the role of the operator, not the operated upon. In the trolley story, we have no input from the operated upon – the laborers – they would be laborers – upon the track. The surgeon, it is emphasized, is a great surgeon. Of course! At least here the patient has some say – namely, I would prefer not to.

The lack of curiosity about the narrating business spoils the moral fun, in my opinion. Phillipa Foot definitely needs to meet Raymond Queneau – the Queneau of Exercises in Style. That little book takes a commonplace and rather drab situation that happens, as it happens, on a trolly – or rather, on busline S. He gets jostled  by another passage, almost sobbingly reproaches the latter, jumps for a recently empty seat, gets off, and is seen two hours later at the gare St. Lazaire, talking to a comrade about a lost button on his overcoat.

From that situation, Queneau extracts 98 other ways of telling this story, ranging from shifting to the first person to a generalizing tone – dubbed philosophique – that seeks to find the phenomenology of coincidence adumbrated in this story – to  a medical account, etc. You could stretch out the trolley problem easily -for instance, while the trolley driver runs over the one person on track two, it turns out the six laborers are part-time circus artists and were well prepared to squeeze into the margins of the track if the trolley came by. Or you could place yourself in the head of the one person, looking down from the afterlife, and wondering if his death was preferable to the possible deaths of the others, or if his death had to do with him being the head of the union of railroad workers and his recent conflict with the management. Or perhaps the one man on the b  track, hated by one of the men on the a track, was murdered through the agency of the trolley driver, as the man on the first track sabotaged the brake and knew the instincts of the trolly driver. A true experiment follows just such a course – you vary the variables. The imaginative scenario is meant to provoke an “instinct”, but it is unclear why this is called an instinct rather than a judgment that depends on the circumstances not only of the imaginary scenario but of its telling. And that narrative plasticity is just the way to put in question the managerial suppositions of the imagined scenario. The philosopher not as king, but as a scribe with labor class sentiments.

Phillipa Foot was, in her youth, Iris Murdoch’s roommate. Murdoch knew Queneau, met him in 1946, and wrote letters to him in which she said various lovely things to him. According to Foot, she and Murdoch read Queneau’s Pierrot, Mon Ami in 1944. I wonder if she read the Exercises in Style?

 

A stomach ache in the heart: American frauds

 

We are all, as Americans – I speak as one of the flock – still at the low stage of civilisation of one of the Mississippi towns in Huck Finn.

By a fortunate coincidence, I’ve been reading Huck Finn each night for the last month  to Adam before he goes to sleep. We have an agreement – a page or three of Huck, then A. reads to him from the Vam-wolf-zom book. We are now deep into the Duke and Dauphin’s  greatest fraud, the imitation of an English minister and his deaf and dumb brother to bedazzle a rube Mississippi Valley family and worm out their goods. It is one of the great episodes. I’m revisiting it just as frauds of a larger scale but basically with the same mirthworthy unctuousness  – the FTX fraud, the Elon Musk twitter jamboree – are leading a dance though the papers, and, more importantly, through Twitter. Twitter has taken up the burden of the tabloid, because the newspapers – the WAPO, the NYT – have become so country club that they don’t know what to do with such rich materials, recognizing in the spoiled children who are the begetters of this scheme their own children from their own prep schools, and hesitating between the scolding and the “aren’t they adorable” talk that they give their progeny when they come home stoned with the fender bent Porsche.

Sad, that. At one time, when it had more hustle, the NYT played the role of a sort of choral character in Gesine Cresspahl novels of Uwe Johnson. No more. To find out what happened at the Bermuda HQ of SBF’s lemonade stand, you have to go to places like AutismCapital and tweets like those of Tiffany Fong. O brave new world, which has such trolls and trombones within it! That it is being shaken by the antics of one of the world’s dimmest characters – a damned good salesman cosplaying an engineer, Elon M. – makes it all the more slapstick.

But to return to the Duke and Dauphin. Their apotheosis comes from the most admired American virtue – the ability to keep a face in the light of discrediting circumstance. The poker face, the face of the stone killer cop, the face of the politician “with his pants down/and money sticking in his hole” going on the attack about his enemies – in Trump’s case, the politically correct, in Clinton’s case, the witchhunters who didn’t understand that running the executive office like the Playboy mansion was not sexual harassment, but mock-Kennedyism. It is all there in Chapter 29 of Huckleberry Finn. The Duke and Dauphin, imitating the Wilkins brothers and stealing their relatives blind, are confronted by the real Wilkins brothers, who have finally arrived at the little tree stump settlement. Huck, naively, thinks the jig is up:

“But I didn’t see no joke about it, and I judged it would strain the duke and the king some to see any. I reckoned they’d turn pale. But no, nary a pale did ¢hey turn. The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was np, but just went a goo-goo- ing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that’s googling out buttermilk; and as for the king, he just gazed and | gazed down sorrowful on them new- comers like it give him the stomach-ache in his very heart to think there could be such frauds and rascals in the world. Oh, he done it admirable.”

A stomach ache in his heart. How much this goes right to the heart of the American dream, gone a little crooked! You do have to sit back and admire the audacity of it all.

JR and SBF - It is Gaddis's world, we just live here

 

In the popular sport of guessing which novel, philosopher, poet etc. will be read a hundred years from now, the answer seems to be mostly – the novelist, philosopher, poet that I like. One likes to think one’s likes will be immortalized by others who are like oneself.

However, I can well imagine a novel and novelist I don’t like at all being read one hundred years from now, and one I adore not being read one hundred years from now. Why not? The community of readers in which I find myself is, I hope, going to socially reproduce. I do my best by writing to help this process along. However, as I am a wee little pea and my writing is certainly not going to be read one hundred years from now, or even one year from now, I am not optimistic about my contribution to the general culture of sweetness and light. It is here that I flash the tears emoticon and move on.

This is why I can’t say if J.R. will be one of those novels, like Moby Dick, that re-emerge after a hundred years as one of the major works, one of the touchstones of literature, American division. I can see similarities: Moby Dick is encyclopedic, and includes everything from a glossary to reflections of a cosmic nature. J.R. is encyclopedic in its way too – it parades such tag ends of culture as Mozart’s letters and the highflying vocabulary of hyper-conglomerates, fall out shelters and the privatization of education, etc. etc. Moby Dick’s characters engage in dramatic dialogues, where’s J.R.’s characters engage in dialogues in which misunderstanding, misspeaking and in general the failure to communicate is the standard of all communication.

But it is not only the unique way Gaddis finds to link together his story, but the story itself, that seems to say something about the America we all know, who have lived in the United States in the last fifty or so years. At the center is a little boy, JR , who – though a mechanism not dissimilar to any of the great swindlers and boy wonders of American capitalism of the past decades – amasses an imaginary fortune on Wall Street. Since J.R.’s voice has not broken, or is breaking – since he’s a boy child – he has to buy and sell using a dirty handkerchief, which he puts over the phone to disguise his voice. And because he needs an adult to help him, he ropes into his scheme a music composer who is a scion of old wealth come down on its downers with the significant name of Bast, which might or might not have anything to do with Forster’s Leonard Bast. But this way of telling the novel, book reporting it, does not convey the experience of the novel. It is huge, and, unfortunately, one reading is not enough. Myself, I started it and stopped it and then, for some reason, picked it up again when I was in the mood, and I was simply astonished by what the novel does. It is never referred to when the tycoons go down, the Milikans or the Lehman Brothers. Shame, that, as Gaddis clearly saw that buying junk – whether junk bonds or junk real estate or whatever – gave you leverage to keep going and blow a financial bubble, and it could be done by a twelve year old boy whose slang and abbreviated speech is taken as the height of financial genius by the press. The special lingo of, say, crypto currency buffs would fit right into JR. And JR has a natural eye for business as an elaborate board game, cause he is a boy who likes to play games and read the back of comic books and junk mail. The junk mail comes in fast as he takes one stock that his class bought and builds an empire of investing on it.

‘See, I read in this thing where you sell everything and lease it right back off the people you sold it to on this like ninety nine  years lease because I mean who cares what’s going to happen in ninety nine years , see so then you stay right in business and get to keep on losing money  just like before only now you have all this here cash.”

I imagine if you took, from this 700 plus page book, all the dialogue of J R, who gets it all from the junk mail he so happily receives – using Bast’s address – you could make an encyclopedia of every get rich quick scheme that has made America the showplace of financialized capitalism. Including such items as integrating old folks homes and medical supply companies to create stores in these homes for the clever prosthetics limb shopper.

The SBF fuckup is special, in one way: apparently all the wisemen of silicon valley and private equity grandly overlooked that the man’s companies didn’t even have real boards. They overlooked the fact that SBF, much like JR, played video games while he was conferencing to get funding from various hotshots. All, of course, via zoom. Gaddis must have looked down from heaven and smiled a big smile. He predicted it all.  

digression

 “Feeds on meat, carcasses, farinaceous grains, but not cabbage; digests bones, vomits up grass; defecates onto stone: Greek white, exceedingly acidic. Drinks licking; urinates to the side, up to one hundred times in good company, sniffs at its neighbor’s anus; moist nose, excellent sense of smell; runs on a diagonal, walks on toes; perspires very little, lets tongue hang out in the heat; circles its sleeping area before retiring; hears rather well while sleeping, dreams. The female is vicious with jealous suitors; fornicates with many partners when in heat; bites them; intimately bound during copulation; gestation is nine weeks, four to eight compose a litter, males resemble the father, females the mother. Loyal above all else; house companion for humans; wags its tail upon master’s approach, defends him; runs ahead on a walk, waits at crossings; teachable, hunts for missing things, makes the rounds at night, warns of those approaching, keeps watch over goods, drives livestock from fields, herds reindeer, guards cattle and sheep from wild animals, holds lions in check, rustles up game, locates ducks, lies in wait before pouncing on the net, retrieves a hunter’s kill without partaking of it, rotates a skewer in France, pulls carts in Siberia. Begs for scraps at the table; after stealing it timidly hides its tail; feeds greedily. Lords it over its home; is the enemy of beggars, attacks strangers without being provoked. Heals wounds, gout and cancers with tongue. Howls to music, bites stones thrown its way; depressed and foul-smelling before a storm. Afflicted by tapeworm. Spreads rabies. Eventually goes blind and gnaws at itself.”

 

This is a quotation from Linneaus, contained in one of Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts, True Stories of Dogs. The broadcast was directed at children – that is, the kind of children that Walter Benjamin might imagine, who seem an even stranger tribe than Linneaus’s dogs.  Benjamin adds:

“After a description like that, most of the stories frequently told about dogs seem rather boring and run-of-the-mill. In any case, they can’t rival this passage in terms of peculiarity or flair, even those told by people out to prove how clever dogs are. Is it not an insult to dogs that the only stories about them are told in order to prove something? As if they’re only interesting as a species? Doesn’t each individual dog have its own special character?

No single dog is physically or temperamentally like another. Each has its own good and bad tendencies, which are often in stark contradiction, giving dog owners precious conversation material. Everyone’s dog is cleverer than his neighbor’s! When an owner recounts his dog’s silly tricks, he is illuminating its character, and when the dog experiences some remarkable fate, it becomes something greater, part of a life story. It is special even in its death.”

It is a bit surprising to hear Benjamin go on like this about dogs – he is associated rather more with the angel of history than the good collie Lassie. But Benjamin, the ultimate freelancer, took all things into his ken. And leaves his mark – here, as elsewhere, it is the description as estrangement that fascinates him. After Linnaeus’s description, Benjamin imagines the dog stories he has read – which most probably tend towards Jack London – with the substitution of the word “dog” by Linnaeus’ description of dog.

It is the fine confusions that result from the substitution of a description for a noun that we begin to wonder about how substitution works at all, and then how noun’s work, and then how we ever convey a meaning in language at all. We are, momentarily, reduced to a muteness.  In Pierre Bayard’s book, Le hors-sujet : Proust et la digression, Bayard begins by asking a simple reader’s question: why is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time so long? He quotes from readers of publishers who rejected the first volume – notably the reader from Fasquelle: “The author concedes that his first volume could have stopped at page 633. But no problem, going forward, for there is almost 80 pages more from that number!

But it could also have been reduced by half, three quarters, nine tenths. On the other hand, there is no reason the author couldn’t have doubled it, or even multiplied it by ten. Given the procedure he employs, writing twenty volumes is as normal as stopping at one or two.”

Here we hear the same exasperation that Johnson felt about Tristan Shandy: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristan Shandy did not last.” This is the eminent classical judgement, which continues in the common sense philosophy to which English philosophers always return. Grice’s rules on implicature, which are beautiful things in their way, tell us that the conditions for perspicacity are the conditions for relaying content – for, in fact, truth itself. Whereas the idea of the digression, the “outside” of the subject – even as the outside moves inside the subject, inside the description – is something too alienating and “odd” to last long.

Proust was one of Benjamin’s sacred authors. It is interesting to think that Proust’s own sacred authors rather skip around the eighteenth century – Saint-Simon’s memoires are rooted in the late seventeeth century of La Bruyere, and Baudelaire is in full revolt against the “stupidity” of Voltaire.

Digression is a great instrument – it puts pressure on the “links” of discourse, as Bayard, who was writing in 1993, saw clearly. And we live and die among the links, us Internet cohorts, now.  

why don't you be stupid instead of smart: on unspelling

 

Does it help that Yeats was dyslexic?

The editors of his letters, where the texts are raw, have decided that Yeats’ spelling was idiosyncratic. That’s a good word. It doesn’t have the same word-injuring psychosis, the same serial killer among the letters, that is baked into dyslexia. Rather, it understands that spelling is a curious procedure, full of mirrors and disorientations.

A spell, as Yeats (who at one point belonged to the same organization as Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn) was always aware, was a matter of magical summoning. Spelling, too, is a magical summoning, made domestic by our schoolrooms and four hundred years of rules, so that the words appear under our pens. That the first words we learn to spell are often animal names makes complete sense from this point of view, for animals were, after all, the first things humans drew. But there’s a certain graffiti impulse that lies just outside the spelling book, under which we run away from the rules concerning what to write on and how to write it, and go cave man for real.

I grow old, I grow old. I am too old for emoticons. And graffiti spelling does sometimes assault my sense of the order of things. Yet I am helped by the thought that Yeats was as apt to spell “there” “their” as not. I really am.

A recent article by Rosenblitt and Siegel proposes that E.E. Cummings, too, was dyslexic. Plus, "it is interesting to note", Cummings was lefthanded - although being born in a time where witchburning had ceased but lefthandedness was disciplined against, his schoolteachers and parents tried to cure him of that. Perhaps Cummings work is a revenge on said anti-sinistralists. Perhaps the unlearning that is the mark of certain modernist poets - Rimbaud, Gottfried Benn - is unlearning the spell. Which is a spell in itself. As Michelet pointed out in La Sorciere, the first and primary act of the witch is to discover that backwards - as in saying the Lord's Prayer backwards - is an independent movement, not at all symmetric to forwards. Which is a good way of doing - and reading - poetry.

Or as James Chace put it in some song: "why doncha be stupid instead of smart?" My rallying cry too.