Karen Chamisso, her blues

 

How creep and crawl the future seems

to those of us lying in this house of bones:

rules here the authoritarian spine

and its homo erectus, her jungle gym.

Lumbagos dawn on the painstrewn shores

of all the old girls’ Eldorados.

Oh chiropracter with your spurious art

unspell that post-partum spell

cast on my life force, all obscurely!

Joint sprains, muscle sprains and knots

This is what I gots

Rattling the life force in the house of bones.

These holes I put in the unmarrowed bone

And pipes this song, all alone, all alone.

the dumb ox and the mandarin: Ernest Hemingway and Cyril Connolly

 Sartre’s essay about Jules Renard, ultimately dismissing the search for the most economical way of writing a thing as the search for a way of being outside of “intelligence” – the latter classified as giving reflection its expanse and structure as it is construed in the urban tradition, rather than narrowing it to its reflexes as it is construed in the peasant tradition – was written during the phoney war, though published in 1944. At the same time, Cyril Connolly was revising his book, the Enemies of Promise, which was first published in 1938 and re-issued in the revised form in 1949.

Connolly was a member of the “bright young things” generation, like Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton and Evelyn Waugh, but he was always slightly a figure of fun for Mitford and Waugh. The Ambrose Silk figure in Waugh’s phoney war novel, Put out more flags, has definite echoes of Connolly, whose seriousness is disguised by an outward silliness. Like Connolly, who founded and edited the great British magazine of the war years, Horizon, Ambrose Silk busies himself with founding a magazine, the Ivory Tower. Silk’s friend and underminer, the cheerful villain-hero, Basil Seal, has a great time getting into British security and convincing them that the magazine is a nest of Nazi spies, thus leading to the arrest of the writers and the flight of Silk. and, in a grace note at the end of the novel, we see Silk holed up in a small cottage in Ireland, in a revery about the British imperial heroism. But Silk’s great speech, to a drunk Basil Seal and Silk’s much trodden upon publisher, sets the tone of the novel and – secretly, I think – Waugh’s own view of where things were trending:

 “European scholarship has nover lost its monastic character… Chinese scholarship dealt with taste and wisdom, not with memorizing of facts. In China, the man whom we make a don sat for the Imperial examinations and became a bureaucrat. Their scholars were lonely men of few books and fewer pupils, content with a single concubine, a pine tree and the prospect of a stream. Eureopan culture has become conventual; we must make it coenobitic.”

This is a nice parody of Enemies of Promise. Waugh always knew just where to stick the knife in.

The Enemies of Promise is full of summaries of the literature of the twentieth century, and spends much time on the question: how to write a book that lasts a decade. The subject, of course, brings up and loses one in fashion: in the game of who is up and who is down. Because the “memorizing of facts” is cast aside in this game, the whole thing depends on the critic’s impression. Although Connolly doesn’t know it, his book, in 1939 and in 1949, was already an anachronism. Connolly was too much of a bright young thing to see that the Program era was upon us: the incredible expansion of higher education, and with it the annexation of literature by academia.

In the Enemies of Promise, Connolly treats Hemingway, whom he sure is now out of fashion, to a species of reasoning not unlike that laid on Renard by Sartre. Hemingway, too, wrote with a kind of cult of silence – except in his case it was a cult of toughness. Wordiness and toughness were antithetical. To a criticism of his style by Aldous Huxley, Hemingway wrote a reply in Death in the Afternoon, which contains an interesting defence of his own choices in writing:

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters, which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel, is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skilfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart, and from all there is of him;  If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time.”

I like Hemingway, while recognizing how much masculinist bullshit lies in comparing prose to “architecture” instead of “interior decoration.” For Whom the Bell Tolls is as Baroque as all fuck, and at the time Hemingway went around saying that he read Donne’s sermons for encouragement.

At the same time, Hemingway obviously had a style – the “dumb ox” style that Wyndham Lewis ranted about. Unlike Jules Renard, Hemingway was not born and raised among peasants. His ancestors came from solid New England stock. But the Midwest of Hemingway’s time, and now, did have its own distinctive silence: American Gothic is its totem. The way in which Hemingway speaks of “bulking up” the novel with a buncha interior decoration to make more money speaks to a very Midwest ethos: the farmer that gives good weight, as opposed to the farmer who waters his stock. The Midwest silence is something I have witnessed. The parents of an old ex-friend of mine were Midwesterners of the American Gothic type, who could sit in a room with people they didn’t know and not say anything, not ask a question, not make a remark. This is the heavy  silence of a million dinner tables in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, where the competition between opening your mouth to speak and opening your mouth to eat was right out there in the open – and the latter was preferred.

This silence, to Connolly, Hemingway’s tell: “It is a style in which the body talks rather than the mind, one admirable for rendering emotions; love, fear, joy of battle, despair, sexual appetite, but impoverished for intellectual purposes. Hemingway is fortunate in possessing a physique which is at home in the world of boxing, bull-fighting and big game shooting, fields closed to most writers and especially to Mandarins; he is supreme in the domain of violence and his opportunity will be to write the great book (and there have been no signs of one so far), about the Spanish war.”

Connolly was not intelligent like Sartre was intelligent: the mandarin and the engaged writer are two very different approaches to literature and even life. But they are in agreement with what Derrida called the White Mythology, made up of oppositions such as that of the mind to the body, emotion to reflection, and their consequent styles. When a Hemingway character is presented so wholly from the outside, to this way of thinking, the inside is drained of its depth. While the writer of fiction doesn’t have to present the thought process going on the inside of the heads of his “characters” – that word Hemingway did not like – the idea is that conversation will carry that burden, that there is a seal, a pact, between the thought and the spoken. When that pact is not honored – when what a character speaks does not give one a picture of what the character thinks, which is where Hemingway’s “toughness” comes in – then the critic, the bearer of the oppositions we enumerated above, reverts to the idea that intelligence has been sacrificed to economy. For gesture and act is dumb, in the double sense: unspeaking and unreflective.

And if gesture and act are not dumb?  

potatoes in the Language game: Sartre, Jules Renard and Wittgenstein

 

In Sartre’s notebooks for the phony war, from 1940, you can see a decision being made: Sartre was going to resist the world falling down around him by being intelligent. Since he was very good at being intelligent, this seemed to him one way, the best way, in which he could resist the war, the defeat and the occupation. It is interesting to compare him here to Wittgenstein, who in this same period was more interested in the way intelligence was way too weak a thing to support the weight of the world.

One of the essays Sartre published in 1944 was mined from his notebooks: The tied up man: some notes on the Journal of Jules Renard. It is a ferocious critique, which puts the question of intelligence front and center. Sartre represents himself as the agent of what James Scott called, in Domination and the Arts of Resistance, the Great Tradition. The Great Tradition emerges in the metropole, and is vehiculized by the state, which sends out its functionaries, teachers, policy makers, and renders the world of the Little Tradition, the rural world, the world of the peasants, legible. In this struggle, the peasant is accorded the virtue of the ruse – metis – while the functionary is accorded the virtue of intelligence, of rationality.

James Scott’s book, published in 1990, is startlingly pertinent to Sartre’s 1944 essay. Sartre’s essay is rooted in Sartre’s perception that Renard’s world view, his search for the most economic and laconic of styles, is rooted in his peasant origins – or at least his origins as a bourgeois from the countryside, from Chitry-les-Mines, located midway between Orleans and Dijon. In Sartre’s notes, and in the essay, he made use of an anecdote that Renard wrote down about a peasant smallholder, Papa Bulot. A servant came to Bulot’s house after his legs were paralyzed.

“The first day, she asked: What can I make that you would like to eat?

-          A potato soup.

The next day she asked, what do you want me to make?

-          A potato soup, I already said.

The third day she asked and received the same answer. Then she understood. From that day on, she made potato soup and didn’t ask about it. “

For Sartre, this dialogue was as revelatory as, to take a text being written at the same time – Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations -  the orders shouted between builders at the beginning of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In a sense, I am not bringing in Wittgenstein as an odd philosophical ricochet. Sartre begins his essay on Renard with the sentence: “He created the literature of silence.” Which, for those who’ve read Wittgenstein and remember his most famous maxim from the Tractatus (“that of  which one cannot speak, one must thereof be silent”), has an echo beyond Sartre’s references to French literature. Which makes it all the more interesting that, for Sartre, there is a social background here. To quote Sartre’s notebook: The most sense possible in words, the most sense possible in the phrase, in the articulation. The thing produced here is a supersaturation of sense. Everything crystallizes. Each phrase is a silence closed around itself and supersaturated. And the most curious thing is that Renard, in furious pursuit of saying things with the least words, has absolutely nothing to say.”

The last sentence sums up his critique of Renard, who like Papa Bulot is a paralyzed prisoner in the house of language, who says once and only one time that he wants potato soup, and wants it forever. (Oddly, this brings to mind one of Bela Tarr’s movies, The Horse of Turin, in which peasants eating of potatoes is pretty much the only drama in the whole movie).

Well, I’ve gone on a bit of a ricochet spree here, and I want to finish up with Cyril Connolly’s comments on Hemingway in The Enemies of Promise -via Aldous Huxley’s criticism of Hemingway and Hemingway’s reply to Huxley. But that is for another day.

simmel, paradise and the purposive jam

 

George Simmel’s Philosophy of Money is a hard book to go straight through. I’ve never done so. Simmel has a unique meandering style, which gave rise, I think, to the various early twentieth century philosophical styles: Lukacs and Buber in particular. I can see Simmel through certain of Heidegger’s early works.  Simmel has a way of going on abstractly, and the reader goes hum hum hum, on the verge of sleep or headache, and then suddenly out of nowhere some image will emerge, some passage will coalesce, and it all seems… important and poetic and non-humlike. . Rather like Hegel in the high  styling Phenomenology of Spirit. Talk about that wild mercury sound.

One of those passages occurs In a subsection of the book’s first section on value. It is entitled, in German,   “The economy as distancing (through effort, renunciation, sacrifice) and the simultaneous overcoming of the same)”. You can see why David Frisby, in the standard translation, settles for “Economic activity establishes distances and overcomes them.” Still, leaving out the “gleichzeitige” is a little troubling.

The passage comes after Simmel’s consideration of the aesthetic value of an object, in which the object, as it were, sheds its use value and is appreciated for itself.

“I have chosen the above example because the objectifying effect of what I have called ‘distance’ is particularly clear when it is a question of distance in time. The process is, of course, intensive and qualitative, so that any quantitative designation in terms of distance is more or less symbolic. The same effect can be brought about by a number of other factors, as I have already mentioned: for example, by the scarcity of an object, by the difficulties of acquisition, by the necessity of renunciation. Even though in these economically important instances the signicance of the objects remains a significance for us and so dependent upon our appreciation, the decisive change is that the objects confront us after these developments a independent powers, as a world of substances and forces that determine by their own qualities whether and to what extent they will satisfy our needs and which demand effort and hardship before they will surrender to us. Only if the question of renunciation arises – renunciation of a feeling that really matters – is it necessary to direct attention to the object itself. The situation, which is represented in a stylized form by the concept of Paradise, in which subject and object, desire and satisfaction are not yet divided from each other – a situation that is not restricted to a specific historical epoch, but which appears everywhere in varying degrees – is destined to disintegrate, but also to attain a new reconciliation. The purpose of establishing distance is that is should be overcome.”

There you have it, ladies and germs – the key to all the mythologies!

I jest.

Simmel was impressed with the way our actions tend towards purposes that are define steps that are not reached by any single step, but by a series. Each step has its own subordinate  purposiveness, each step absorbs our energy, and thus each step on the journey is, as it were, a journey in itself, with all the weariness that traversal entails. Elsewhere Simmel writes: “Indeed, it is a common experience for those who finish a long task, say, writing a book or even simply an article, to feel a letdown at the end of the process, as one is simultaneously freed from exerting one’s energy and attention to the matter at hand and at the same time left with a sort of unguided and unstructured moment.” The moment is not a vacation – it is a crowning, a finish, an ending. And yet it doesn’t give one anything to do.

But of course there is more to Simmel’s point than this. Much of the modern life-story is taken up with long-term projects of consumption towards some end. College students, for example, are encouraged from the very beginning to aim at some degree, which is in turn seen as the key to a job. And yet, as the degree is years off, it would be difficult to make a calculation to understand just how much time and energy one should spend on each step. Not that something like this doesn’t happen – a computer science student in an elective English literature class is very often a study in someone who has calculated exactly how little time needs to be spent on a subject that is only a lightly weighted means to his end. Of course, this student intersects with a teacher whose purpose is, in fact, exactly to teach that English literature class. Modern life is full of what we might call purposive jams – like traffic jams, they consist of people who, jostling one another, are going different places but find themselves within the limits of the same narrow situation.

Sometimes purposive jams become more intrusive. They thrust themselves on our attention. I would guess that we are passing through a massive purposive jam right now. Each propelled, for good or evil, by some idea of paradise.

popsicle sticks

 

I have been falling asleep, the last week or two, thinking about popsicle sticks. The last week or two is an exaggeration, okay, the last two weeks it pops into my head, one night or another, that I should think about popsicle sticks. About how many popsicle sticks in the course of my life I have discarded, after the popsicle, or the ice cream, has melted in my mouth, been licked off by my tongue. After my hands have been stickied.

Stickied. A complicated thing for me. Is my discomfort with sticky hands somehow related to some old tabu about masturbation? The Freudian in me has always made that association, and, as is the nature of things Freudian, once the association is made, how could it not be true? However, it is also true that stickiness and the vaguely repulsive, the vaguely dirty feeling of stickiness – from the sugar ice dripping down the popsicle stick, or the honey that creeps up the spoon handle, or the glaze that comes off the glazed cinnamon roll – makes me want, neurotically, to go to the bathroom and clean my hands. What Dostoevsky character – was it Raskolnikov? – had the neurotic compulsion to clean his hands. Of course, Raskolnikov was not dealing with a grape ice – more pawnbroker’s blood. Still.

The thing that impresses me, nights, about the ghosts of popsicle sticks past, is the idea of the vast number of them – the forests, literally, cut down to provide those thin sticks, rounded at the ends, which serve such a small purpose that, in light of the sawmilled wilderness, one wants to ask: is this worth it? Was the spotted owl and the Carolina Parakeet driven to extinction so that American children, on hot summer days, clustered around swimming pools, could unwrap flavored ice water molded in the shape of dollhouse tombstones and suck them into their mouths, guiding them with the grip given by the popsicle stick? And of course that moment when you bite the stick itself, when the wooden taste comes through the melting last remnant of the ice. That taste associated with sweets, in my memory, American sweets – the industrial signature. The chemical signature, the signature of the wooden tongue depressor, itself moulded out of sawdust – most probably. I’ve never been in the factory where all the popsicle sticks are manufactured. No doubt there are many such factories. No doubt they were incountry when I was a kid, and are now in Southeast Asia, or Mexico. I can imagine fleets of these sticks meeting up with myriads of ice molds, somewhere, and once the conjunction was made, then came the plasticized paper wrap, printed with the company’s name.

Popsicle Industries of Edgewood NJ was the major producer of popsicles in the sixties, when I was a boy who ate popsicles,  or whatever the verb for devouring of this kind is, hidden in the vast OED no doubt. In 1986, the New York Times noted in a small human interest story that the company was phasing out its double stick popsicle. “The lost cultural icon in this case is the two-stick Popsicle, the sticky confection of syrup and ice that never quite split down the middle but always seemed just right on days when the sidewalks were so hot they could fry a set of toes through a pair of sneakers.”

There was more to the popsicle stick than its tag team toss – first the paper wrapping, than the wood – into the garbage. Popsicle sticks  took their  outlaw affordance and made little popsicle crafts – protolego cabins, for instance.  There were popsicle stick puppets. There were popsicle stick flowers. There were books on popsicle stick crafts. The schoolroom and the rec room were sites of popsicle stick construction.

On the sites where popsicles were constructed in actuality, popsicle sticks were involved in the struggle between labor and capital. In 1940, the Maine unemployment bureau had to consider the case of a middle aged woman, X,  who was employed as a “winder” at a popsicle stick plant. Her job was to pick out defective sticks as they went down the assembly line via a moving belt. She claimed that, after spending approximately 13 hours at her job, she began to suffer severe headaches and vertigo as she watched the endless rows of sticks go past her. She quit and applied for reinstatement of her  unemployment benefits, and the state of Maine had to decide if her excuse was justified. Should she sacrifice her health to the popsicle belt?

The state of Maine gave her a dispensation. A small victory for worker’s rights. Maine, at the time, hosted many “veneer” factories – this is where sugar maple, beech and yellow birch wood went to be made into toothpicks and popsicle sticks. And high quality plywood. All of which connected to the decentralized frozen novelty industry of my boyish days. I missed the big changes that occurred in the 80s – the great age of leveraged buyouts and squeezing profit margins, destroying local providers of popsicles and making them uniform, rewrapping them, adding vitamin C and new flavors, and launching advertising campaigns to compete against General Foods muscular attempt to monopolize the frozen novelty sector.

This all happened behind my back. My consumption of popsicles in the great summer heat of New Orleans and Austin in the 80s contributed less than ten dollars, I’d guess, to the frozen novelty sector revenue stream. Like X, I’d moved on to other ways of cooling my insides under the hot Dixie sun: namely, beer. The popsicle stick was not entirely removed from my material life: one summer I had a job, under my brother, in the maintenance crew of an apartment complex in Atlanta, and among my duties was emptying the garbage cans around the swimming pool. There, the popsicle stick competed with the coke can, the cigarette butt, the beer and liquor bottle, the wadded up newspaper, the discarded tanning oil tube, and other relicts of the animated life of the pool. Including the occasional roach (marijuana, not insect). The smell of old beer and cigarette ash overcame any vestigial nostalgia I might have felt on seeing the popsicle stick. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn.

And yet here I am, in bed in Paris, thinking that these veneer products were a clue to the great conspiracy of material life in twentieth century America. Where have you gone, Mrs. Robinson?

the romance of hatred

 

The romance of hatred is a real thing. But though we all recognize it, few take it to be a “romance” – a narrative of repulsion that is also about the attraction of the repulsed. To draw it out in dance diagram form, there are three positions, here, roughly: hating – being hated – being hated for hating. To be hateful is, in a sense, to be embarked upon a mission of destruction whose ultimate victim is the self. To rescue the self from its own hatred – that is the moral duty of politics, I think.

Hatred is used, fliply, by the journalist and pundit: back in the 00s, Americans were always learning that they were “hated” for their freedoms, and thus could hate back with their weapons. Weapons that by happy chance liberated their enemies – like the wound that heals, enemies would be turned into friends by seeing their loved ones killed by air bombardment.

 Richard Bessel, in his artlcle:  Hatred after War: Emotion and the Postwar history of East Germany, theorized that in the aftermath of shattering events – like World War II -  hatred had  a foundational, legitimating effect.

“This essay is a brief, admittedly speculative, attempt to suggest that examining hatred after war, and viewing public and political behavior as an expression of that hatred, may offer insights into what occurred in both the public and the private spheres in post-1945 East Germany. The suggestion is that hatred, arising from the violence and brutality of war and Nazism, was a major factor motivating both the leaders and the led in East Germany after World War II. Not just their rational calculations of how to deal with the challenges they faced and the political commitment that framed their actions, but also their emotional responses to what had occurred determined how Germans behaved in the physical and psychological rubble left behind by war and Nazism. This essay, therefore, is a tentative attempt to approach the history of Germany after World War II as a history of sentiments and emotions.”

Bessel’s essay was published in 2005, and since then there has been a massive affective turn in the humanities and social sciences. The anthropology of the detestable, the abject, the untouchable: who has not felt touched at least by great waves of hatred that have swept us about in the last twenty years? The apocalypse or the end of things – the great Planetary suicide – is firmly lodged on our entertainment menu. The horror story  is edging towards the aesthetic center, the defining position, rousting the tragedy and the comedy from their traditional places.

We do live in the post Cold War world.

Bessel fastens on the wave of mass suicides in Germany after the Nazi defeat. This was massive.

It is part of the racist code in which our history is given to us that it was not just  Japan – the Oriental enemy – that  was swept by mass suicide. The suicide of the hostile Other is very much a part of our political  dreamlife. The suicide bombers in Iraq, in France, the suicide hijackers of 9/11. We don’t of course think of ourselves as anything but the victims of these crazies. This thought disguises  the fact that the defense posture of the U.S., during the Cold War and after, depends on our own  suicide bombers. . SAC pilots and crews, parodied in Dr. Stangelove,  knew that they had little chance to survive delivering to their targets. In essence, they were asked to be suicide bombers on a much bigger scale than any kamikaze attack we can imagine. . The risk of dropping an bomb on Moscow is undoubtedly close to the risk of being killed delivering a rigged car to be exploded in front of an embassy. But while we can rally warm feelings in the patriotic homeland base by the idea of the suicide mission, the suicide bomber is a sort of ideogram of hatred, hatred taken to its logical conclusion: the annihilation of the self and other.

 

 “One of the most remarkable features of the collapse of Nazi Germany is the huge wave of suicides that accompanied it. This surge of suicides included not only much of the regime’s political leadership—Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Thierack and Ley—but also dozens of Wehrmacht generals and many lesser Nazis and lower-level functionaries, as well as thousands of civilians who killed themselves as Allied forces pushed their way into Germany and occupied the country. Already in early 1945, as the roof was caving in on the Third Reich, many Germans contemplated killing themselves; according to a report of the German security service about popular morale in the dying days of Nazi Germany, “many are getting used to the idea of making an end of it all. Everywhere there is great demand for poison, for a pistol and other means for ending one’s life. Suicides due to genuine depression about the catastrophe which certainly is expected are an everyday occurrence.”10 The gruesome sight that greeted American soldiers when they arrived at the Neues Rathaus in Leipzig—littered with the bodies of Nazi officials who had killed themselves and their families— was but a spectacular example of a widespread phenomenon.”

And:

“After the German military collapse, the atmosphere in entire communities was colored by such events, as suicide became almost a mass phenomenon. A particularly extreme example is that of the Pomeranian district town of Demmin, where roughly five percent of the entire population killed themselves in 1945;13 when the Landrat, who had been installed by the Soviet authorities in May 1945, surveyed conditions in Demmin in a report for the Interior Administration of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in November 1945, he noted: “365 houses, roughly 70 percent of the city, lay in ruins, over 700 inhabitants had ended their lives through suicide.” In Teterow, a town in Mecklenburg numbering fewer than ten thousand inhabitants in 1946, the burial register included a “Continuation of the Appendix for the Suicide Period (Selbstmordperiode) Early May 1945,” containing details of 120 suicide cases, listing how the act had been carried out: people shot themselves, hanged themselves, drowned themselves, poisoned themselves; frequent reports noted how fathers killed their entire families and then themselves. After years when they had been able to aim massive violence against other people, Germans now turned violence on themselves.”

 Bessel’s notion is that we should pay more attention to the literal truth Goebbels enunciated:

“Germany’s war was fought, as Goebbels boasted in a radio speech on 28 February 1945, not long before his own suicide, “with a hatred that knows no bounds.””

Simmel, in his Sociology, modeled sociological processes on what he took to be the fundamental elements of society – on the one hand, the individual, and on the other hand, the universal. In some ways, this is a dubious translation of medieval logic, that eternal game of the particular and the universal. One wants some meso-level between the I and the community. In Simmel’s schema, however, the third entity is conflict. It is neither a quality of the individual or a property of the universal, but a third thing – a socializing process. The thirdness of violence has been taken up by other thinkers – notably, Rene Girard – and given other directions. The important thing is that it lifts hatred out of its supposedly privileged and limited place as a wholly private and interior affair. Unlike Girard, however, I don’t think the endpoint of the logic of hatred is Christ on the Cross, but the Werewolf – the wolf as the hunter of men becoming inhabited by a man.

Bessel talks about the violent intention encoded in suicide, its use as an instrument to hurt “the important other.” This is an old cliché – and it covers up how the other is already eaten by the suicide. The suicide eating his victim, the wolf eating the man, the werewolf living in and on the wolf that lives on people. The soldier of any army, the partisan of any side,  almost instinctively drifts to the imago of the predator.

The romance of hatred dreams of monsters instead of heroes, the undead instead of the resurrection. Perhaps this is why we are so close to Frankenstein and Dracula. Who absorbed the hatred they inspired as a life force, purged of love.

Liminal figures. Against which we have to pit all we know about reality. I’m with Lucretius. You cannot purge life, you cannot purge the universe, of love.  Frankenstein and Dracula included.

 

abolishing jaywalking

 

On December 1, 1915, the New York Sun published a rousing letter from a Mr. Clarence John Davis, which ended like this:

I think it is time for pedestrians to assert themselves and to prevent the issuing of ukases from certain czars who are appointed to represent and protect and not tyrannize over those who by their votes were foolist enough to aid in appointing them to office. I will “jaywalk” the same as before, and I defy the Police Commissioner or any other civil officer to prevent me.”

The quote marks over “jaywalk” were proof of its uncertain distinction as a dictionary recognized word. The sentiment marks the decade in which city streets first became car streets. The mixed use of streets, between pedestrian and horse, was ceding to the automobile. Pedestrian rights were being sacrificed on the altar of civic safety. Although there was a struggle. Even the president of the United States – at least, the President Calvin Coolidge – was a jaywalker, according to journalist Harry B. Hunt’s Washington Letter of April 30, 1924:

“Brakes squealed and horns honked as drivers swerved or slowed up to avoid collision. But Cal flanked right and left by a secret service man held his course. In the middle of the street he had to pause to let a stream of vehicles pass. At the first opening, however, he plunged in again and made the other curb.”

Walking jay became a convenient devil for the newspaper editorialists, all of course on the side of the harried policeman and driver. The word itself was hyphenated in Mencken’s The American Language, but seems, in newspaper usage, to have settled early into a compound. Walking jay, according to some sources, comes from jay meaning a country bumpkin – a clown, a collonus, a plebe from the country. However, the OED also lists jay as meaning a flamboyantly dressed woman “of light character”. The streetwalker, in other words. Words, like roads, are multi-use items, where everything crosses and runs.

Jaywalking, according to legend, became a legal offense first in California. According to my research, it was already an offense in New Jersey. No matter, the abolition  of the jaywalking law, which was signed five days ago by Governor Newsom, is being celebrated as a blow against the car-centric vision that has weighed like a nightmare on the bent shoulders of the pedestrian for nearly a hundred years. Although not just any pedestrian. Jaywalking laws are used by the cops to single out an persecute the usual suspects: blacks, protestors, leftwingers, Hispanics, and whoever is on the chart at the police station.   

“In the state of New York, a 2019 study shows that 90% of jaywalking tickets were issued to Black and Hispanic Americans even though they represent 55% of the population.”

One spirit that is looking down and smiling at the change in the California law is Michael Brown, the most famous victim of jaywalking. In Ferguson Missouri, where he was murdered, a study found that 95 percent of the people cited for jaywalking were black. Jaywalking, which was promoted as an offense by car companies in the 20s, fits in very well with the growth of policing in the 20^th century.

So, a small victory for better streets, California!  We’ll see how long it lasts.