a man with back pain speaks - or the poetry of the Ouch

 

Should a man with back pain read the Philosophical Investigations?

I’m the man with back pain in this question. Last Saturday, due to some untoward twist of my posture, I think – I am not certain of this, I have a vague sense of the cause that is mixed up with a vague and exasperated sense of the unfairness of it all – I suddenly got a pain in my back that quickly spread. Lumbago, a word that, like abracadabra, gives us a spell rather than an exact name for the event, is what we all call it. It is my excuse: I say I have lumbago and I can’t do such and such. Although, unlike many of the excuses I make, “can” here is pretty exact: My pain threshold gets passed pretty quickly if, for instance, I walk more than a block or so.  

Famously, Wittgenstein took up the question of “inner sensations” in what is called the Private Language section of the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein lived in England, and the English tradition of reflection typically took pain examples from the high life – the pain of a toothache in the study, for instance – and not from the lowlife – say, the pain of wearing manacles in a slave ship. In the forties, when Wittgenstein was questioning the idea of pain as an utterly closed off property – an inaccessible inner object – pain was being delivered by the air and on the ground in massive shocks. Like Henry Green, who utilized  his volunteer work with the fire department during the London Blitz to write Caught, Wittgenstein, a hospital volunteer during the same time, must have had plenty of opportunities to see pain in a variety of situations. In Caught the upper middle class character, Richard, the volunteer auxiliary fireman, has a talk with a Czech refugee named Ilse about the bombing. Usually, in talking with English women, he gives a speech about the dangers presented by the fires and gets the response that “you’ll be alright”, but Ilse responds by saying Yes, you do have a high chance of dying and then says of the famous English stiff upper lip/jokey attitude: “I, I like you here, but you have no idea how you are hated abroad, yes, even by your own allies.”

Wittgenstein, I think, shared Ilse’s attitude about the English flatness: the idea that if you avoided the depths, they would go away. Far from being “common sense”, this flatness corrupted common sense, making it an obstacle to feeling.

“Why can't a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain? Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behaviour to be real simulation are missing.”

Indeed, I don’t think I am the only one who wonders if my inner dog isn’t simulating pain, limping around: to say I feel pain is not the simple report it seems to be. Back pain is fleeting and then it is not. This week, I have had a lot of encounters with the enemy, but I have not seen through its tricks, or quite understand the hand to hand moments. For me, the morning is a terrible time – then my back feels all of a block, a heavy block, but not a happy one: a crushed in turtle shell. And then I lay down on something called, in French, a tapis champ des fleurs – that is, a towel like thing that has about four dozen “fleur”, bristly plastic circles, that press into your skin, acupuncture like. It works. I can’t lay down naked on it – I need a t shirt or an intervening towel. But long sessions ameliorate the pain, and make me wonder if I wasn’t… well, faking it?

Of the feigning of pain, there is no end. In Patton, the George C. Scott vehicle that gave my seventh grade a patriotic buzz, there is a scene in which Patton slaps a soldier in shell shock. I probably imitated it, as did my friends. You god damned coward! It is, looking back on it, a rather shocking scene. I’m not the first person to say Patton was generally on the Mussolini right. Scott played that role, down to the way Patton angrily breathed through his nose, with a great gusto. And of course Patton was on perma-play in the Nixon White House. The issue of shell shock, though, has always been treated gingerly in American popular culture – it makes bombing people suddenly less fun.

The army put great stock in research devoted to sussing out the malingerer from the truly shell shocked. And in common life, Freud’s patients were neurasthenics who doctors often diagnosed, in fancy terms, as fakers. Fake pain and real pain – the two go arm in arm throughout the fraught history of twentieth century medicine. And especially as that history is gendered: from Chronic Fatigue to Long Covid, the more a condition is identified with women, the more it is likely to be considered “fake”. Even then, however, the pain is not considered “fake”. The pain is like some real physical event – a rock thrown, a brick dropped.

Pain (and not pleasure – sadly, pleasure is not a common object of philosophical reflection) when it is genuine seems no different than other qualia – say, the color red. It requires some sensing apparatus to make its appearance. And in as much as that seems, to some degree, a magic trick, Wittgenstein surrounds pain with questions – as indeed pain is surrounded with questions in a clinic. Do you hurt here? Do you hurt when you do this?

“But isn’t it absurd to say of a body that it has pains? And why would one feel this was absurd? In so far as my hand does not feel pains, but I in my hand?“

And even – as we know from the battlefield – when the hand is gone, there can be phantom pain in that hand. This somehow makes sense: pain may be as real as rocks, but we know that there is an infinitely small but infinitely crowdable margin in which the experience of pain and the expression of pain don’t align. The poetry of the ouch is not dead, but can be as variable as fuck, can be metaphored, signified, lyed and dyed in a million different ways.

This is one of them, wiling away my back getting better.

 

 

cioran's style

 

Unlike, say, happiness or sadness, despair doesn’t easily select, among a repertoire of performances, those which express its substance – or rather, its tone. The attraction, such as it is, of Cioran’s work is that here, one feels, despair gets free play. Massively, in fact. In his essays, the absence of act that characterises despair, its sunken violence – for despair, as Cioran sees it, is the child of a precedent and excessive violence – becomes the substance of the text, and as such fights a rearguard action with its very motive. If despair cuts us off from motive itself, it seems to remove at the same time its elemental right as a mood. This isn’t a matter of auto-erasure, as it is about the futility of all marks.

Cioran started out as an intellectual as a Romanian fascist: this is the point from which, whether overtly or implicitly, he always start in his subsequent writings. It is the image of that intellectual madness that haunts him. He was cured of this set of beliefs/prejudices – including the nastiest and most sinister, anti-semitism; but the rescue was not logical or discursive, but characterological, and as such, confirmed his notion that the logical and discursive were a kind of foam on the wave – an epiphenomenon, and not a matter of the depths.  The Cioran who praised Hitler as a young man had pulled himself out of that violence when, in 1944, he pled for the life of Benjamin Fondane  

-          Cioran went with Jean Paulhan, who he had contacted,  to the police station where the Gestapo was keeping  Fondane and his sister. He wanted to get them to release Fondane, and thought he’d plead the importance of the man.  The Gestapo offered a nasty little deal: Fondane could leave if he’d leave his siser. In an act that Cioran must have reflected on  often, Fondane refused to abandon his sister.  So they took them both, and both were murdered at Auschwitz.

There’s a famous passage in his History and Utopia which outlines Cioran’s notion of what is, for any real writer since the early modern era, the real thing he was after - the Work in all its dark and frustrating glory. But what a self-divided goal it turns out to be!

“The idle man who loves violence safeguards his savoir-vivre in confining it to an abstract hell. Unhanding the individual, letting go of names and faces, he goes after the imprecise, the general, and, orienting his thirst for exterminations toward the impalpable, imagines a new genre: the pamphlet without an object. “

 In Cioran, every lapidary statement is eventually thrown back in his face. In “Drawn and Quartered” one of his last books, Cioran’s idle man conceives a different genre under which to classify his writing:”One should not chain oneself to a Work, one must instead say the kind of thing that can be murmured in the ear of a drunk or a dying person.” The ephemeral and the absolute must, somehow, be forced to merge. This is the very duty of style.

A wonderful and terrifying artistic credo to work under.

Travel notes: Avignon

We were too late to catch the 1:15 train to Avignon from Montpellier, so we went to eat lunch at Le Faune, the pretentious restaurant attached to MOCO, the modern museum just up the street from the gare. Unfortunate choice – inedible fare – but nice exhibition of a very German German artist, Neo Rauch (we discussed whether his birth name was really Neo, but I can’t find different on Google) and then got the train into Avignon and arrived around 5:30. We left Montpellier on a summer day and got to Avignon on an autumn day – the season had changed in the couple hours of our train trip, borne northward on the Mistral. The wind flows like a river over Avignon. Its most famous inhabitant, Petrarch, disliked the town with the dislike of Jonah vis-à-vis Ninevah. He disliked it for the corruption during the brief era when Avignon was the seat of the Popes, but I suspect that the Mistral gave him headaches.

It didn’t give me headaches: in fact, the river of wind above the town, at night, was somehow wildly exciting. But a constant wind in your face is unignorable.

We made a reservation at Le Bercail. However, it was no good. When we walked through the town in the direction of the restaurant, we saw that we would have to cross the Rhone to get to it. There was a navette, a little boat, that crossed the river every fifteen minutes, or so the sign said. But that was no good. The air was cold and the boat was distant, and we calculated that we’d have half an hour to order and eat and finish our meal to catch the last passage on the boat. So we turned reluctantly away and found a small but tasty couscous place. It will be marked in my memory by this: I had my first glass of Algerian wine there, Sidi Brahim. I felt very Hemingway-esque sipping it: somewhere in his memoir of Paris, A moveable feast, Hemingway mentions cheap North African wine. I haven’t read A moveable Feast in a shark’s age, so I might be wrong about this reference, but still: the town, the wind, the square, the little Pied Noir man who served us with a few outdated server’s flourishes, it was all so the American abroad experience.

The next day we went to the Dom. We went to the Palais de Pape. We talked about Petrarch. But the main thing, the striking thing, the civilized thing, was nothing like we had previously planned to do. Walking down from the Dom, we noticed that there was a museum with no line outside the door – unlike the Palais. It was called the Petit Palais. So we ducked into it and there saw a collection of early Renaissance paintings in a space where we could really look at them. They were unframed. We were within real human space of them. And they were all remarkable. They were from Italian masters who travelled the circuit from Florence to Siena to Avignon. There were few pagan references in these paintings, but there was perspective and there were faces that, as Jacob Burkhardt might have said, were individual. Real expressions looked out at us, unsubsumed by their ritual  position, their beatification, their place in Biblical narrative. It was startling and exhilarating and it rapidly became  one of my top museum experiences.

The drain on a painting when it is being gazed at by a moving mass of people makes it as hard to experience them as it is to get to know a politician who shakes your hand at a reception. Acquaintance is not the same as knowing. But here, I knew these paintings.

We agreed, after they chased us out of the place for lunch, that we’d just done something incredibly touching

Then we had another go at Le Bercail, but again there was the problem of time with the navette. So we ate at a bistro with plenty of Provencal items on the menu. I bobbled it, having a middlebrow steak-frite. Then we did a few more tourist routes, got on the train at 5:30, and returned to Montpellier, satisfied with our one day jaunt.  More satisfied than ever Petrarch was with Avignon:

 

nest of treachery, where all the evil,

 

spread through all the world, hatches,

 

slave to wine, delicacies and good living,

 

where Luxury performs her worst.

 

 

age, breath

 

Age puts a hole in your pocket. You reach in there and find out that, without you knowing it, somewhere in the course of your days and wanderings, you’ve lost … well, all kinds of things that you thought you absolutely needed.  Memories. Desires.

Or, for instance, breath.

When I was a child, I thought about breath in terms of holding my breath. I’d exaggerate the whole not breathing thing, mumping out my cheeks, keeping from breathing through my nostrils, until I’d have to stop, breath in, breath out noisily. The rumor was that you could do this and at a certain point you’d turn blue and pass out. For some reason, I thought that sounded great, a feat worth doing. I never passed out, though. I never met anyone that did. I began to think this was a myth.

I also learned to hold my breath when I swam underwater. I tried to make it from one side of the pool to the other underwater, to build up my stamina.

Later, in my spiritual twenties, I took Yoga. As part of the routine, I tried to meditate upon my breathing.

And the Yoga phase passed. Decades passed. Wine and beer and coffee and all the starches and sweets of a developed economy passed.

Then, a few years ago, I came down with pneumonia. I’d had pneumonia before. We were old friends. But this was ultra pneumonia, like I never had before. It carved a month out of my life. Afterwards, I was short of breath whatever I did.

Since then, I am not ever long of breath. I sit here, breathing in and out, nothing simpler, but I know that I can easily get out of breath if I get up and run around. Breath has dribbled out of the hole in my pocket.

Mallarmé, in an essay he pieced together out of three previous essays and published in Divagations – Crise de Vers, 1895 – imagines poetry, or literature itself, as a sort of institution of breathing: “replacing the perceptible respiration of the in-spired ancient lyric (la respiration perceptible en l’ancien souffle lyrique)  or the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase.” I could go all deriddian on this notion of a replacement, but I am more interested in the transfer of the breath in one body, human, with its tongue and lungs, to another, the written, lungless, an imprint of a long lost breathing – rather like the X rays that they took of my lungs when I had pneumonia.

 

One thinks of Mallarmé as the high priest of the blank page, the page addressed in A throw of the dice. But by grounding literature in breath, he foretells such poets as Olson and Snyder. The beats. Ginsberg.

 

How am I to locate, what am I to do with breathlessness? I’ve long thought we build our strengths out of our deficiencies – not in denial, but in experiment, pushing against the limit. So what am I to do with breathlessness?

 

I’m not sure I can follow out some ideology of strength and deficit and make it all a happy end. But what I know is that it makes the stairs more stairs, the hill more hill, the stone stonier. Perhaps shortness of breath, too, is a device. A god in decline, but a god still.

sleep

There's no estate in sleep

nor does it possess

height nor depth

(clumsy crooner!)

 

 

Of the barbarous clangour

that makes up the names of its gods

you cannot transcribe

them with your sublunar diacritics.

 

 

The human tongue’s

euclidean vocables

have no purchase on

sleep’s 'evidently'.

Paul Nizan's love letter

 

One measures the sincerity of a love letter by its attachment to the receiver – the lover, or hoped for lover, on the other end of this outpouring of sentiment. That attachment is signalled by a certain privacy of tone more than anything else. The tone in writing is, overtly, a clumsy thing – it is underlining, italics, exclamation points, a rather miserable attempt to make the hand that writes take on a function of the tongue that speaks. To make the tone work, to rise above these poor instruments, requires, even of the most silly love letter writer, a certain sense of nuance. A certain sense of tickling, so to speak. And we know that some are born ticklish, and others aren’t.

Thus, the love letter is bound to an aesthetic purpose that may not be shareable. Love letters that have passed into literature, that please people beyond the narrow circle of the couple, are rarely the most successful love letters in terms of their immediate purpose.

I came across this love letter from Paul Nizan to his wife, Henriette, dated 5 November 1939. P.N. is in the army, at this point, but the war seems “phony” – nothing seems to be happening. It is one of the rare love letters that delights on the two levels sketched above. So, I thought I’d translate it. Which is inevitably to distort it.

Perhaps this gains in poignancy for me, knowing the end of the story – Nizan’s mysterious death in the woods six months later, and the way his name was dragged in the mud by Stalinists for years, and Sartre’s amazing preface to Aden Araby which brought Nizan’s name back into the light.

    “Rirette my dearest.  Received your letter of Nov. 1 yesterday evening. It is so very nice to be able to say, after fifteen years, that we love each other enough to exchange love letters, and that we have triumphed in the end over everything that separates people. This stay in the army has reminded me a bit of my stay in Arabia [About which Nizan wrote his first and most famous book], but we know more things, we are much more deeply complicit, we have learned to go beyond mere literature. So that without doubt this time will not be lost, if it isn’t prolonged up until I have a long white beard and promenade along the Maginot line in a little tank. Julie de Lespinasse, Juliette Drouet, and other women only had to hold tight. You know, the legend says that, in order to appease the combattants and consecrate them exclusively to thoughts of war and the contemplation of their military destiny, the powers that be put saltpeter or camphor in the wine, the salt, and the coffee. This legend, I think, is frivolous : if there were camphor in the wine and saltpeter in the coffee, men with more sensitive palate would have perceived it, but I have no need for the witness of taste : it is enough that I read a letter of yours, or write one to you, that I think of your rose Piana dress, your pleated dress of last winter, of that return from Prague in December 37 when you could not stop climaxing, in order for me to have a personal and physical proof that they haven’t put saltpeter in the wine.  So that we shouldn’t have any worries for my moment  of leave, and it will be enough for me to see your knees, your thighs, that you, without any previous sign, put your tongue in my mouth for us to arrive at some frank result. Perhaps it will be wise for you to renounce the vain usage of panties. And there will be time to talk and to say important things to each other. A propos of the Talmud, I just read that Eben Haeser prescribes that workers not make love more than twice in the week, that savants confine themselves to the sabbath, that muleteers do it once per week, and camel drivers once per month, and only rentiers can do it every day: I will have to put myself in the last category. Also, I read in the Talmud, a naughtier books than I thought, that anyone who makes love to a woman on the bottom will suffer from delirium: ah, but what a wonderful delirium! I embrace you in this spirit. »

jetlag and the astronaut

 

D.H. Lawrence, drawing on Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, pins the ur-American hero as, famously,  isolate, cold, a killer. In fact it is easy to think that the American Adam, the first man in our cosmology, was clothed in a hazmat suit -  perfect for existing on this planet as a being entirely of the planet, from the rhythms of his blood to the Circadian cycles of his sleep. An astronaut in the anthropocene, a intruder from the beyond, perpetually alien, perpetually exploiter. Bless the alienation and count the money, we all say here.

A brilliant essay by Henry Sussman, The Phenomenology of Jetlag, Kafka is presented as the prophet of our time warped era, the era of insomnia and time zone smuggling – that is, smuggling time zones into other time zones. For instance, my cell phone doesn’t just tell me the time, now, in Paris, where I live, but also the time in the Eastern Time zone of the U.S., where I was visiting. And since I also visited Iowa, which is on Central Time, both of my numbers were off. Kafka, who worked with worker’s insurance and made it to many meetings in Central Europe to talk to factory officials and the like, was well aware of the hazards of sleep deprivation. Its effects could be tabulated in so many injuries, so many fingers cut off, legs wounded, muscles torn, etc. The effects of tearing away the natural attachment of our circadian rhythm from the light and night to which they are primordially coordinate makes for the heavy presence of sleep in his novels and stories. Sleep as something put off, sleep as something that occurs in highly inappropriate settings, such as in the Land Surveyor K.’s meeting with Buergel in The Castle.

Sussman writes: “… the recovering victim of a significant act of spatio-temporal dislocation and abuse, otherwise known as jetlag, is, unwittingly, subject to two sets of spatio-temporal parameters. There is the explicit one, clearly prevalent at the point of disembarkation in the form of a very loose etiquette defining the business day, customary periods for dining and rest and other conventional interactions: and then there is the holdover protocol of what Proust would call habit still operative in the zone of embarkation. It is surely in the most “jarring” and subliminal manner, Fraud would call it “unconscious” and Proust “involuntary,” that the recalcitrant regime operative a the journey-origins asserts itself in such forms oas sudden involuntary waking in a hyper-attentive state or equally abrupt onsets of fatigue at the least felicitous moments of the active day. We associate the sudden-onset phenomena of depth or unforeseen complexity that definitely establish the activity and output of  the parallel and embedded universe of aesthetic sensibility. Via this particular circuit of modernist invention we come to learn that K.’s pronounced episodes of jetlag toward the end of Das Schloss, of a jetlag before the fact, belong to his own heavily disguised apprenticeship as a performance artist.”

I’m unsure about that anachronism of “performance artist” in that last sentence – a phrase from a different embarkation zone than that of K, even if Kafka, as the author of the Hunger Artist, does come close to embodying, with dream-like precision,  the conceptual art theory of the seventies. Sussman’s larger point, though, is something I can affirm in my own disembarked experience now: the grogginess that succeeds a night of highly interruptible sleep on a transatlantic plane flight, and the ordinary surrealism of all the subsequent manoeuvres in the airport, the seemingly endless corridors and stairs and escalators, the passage through security, the waiting for your luggage at the carousel, the barking of the airport security, the awareness of one’s haggard appearance as one waits for the cab, and the sense that one is not in a good state, that one has been pickpocketed of something one didn’t even know one had, i.e. placement in a certain timezone.

Jonathan Crary begins his book, 24/7, with a story about the white crowned sparrow. The Pentagon is very interested in the white crowned sparrow. Why? Because this sparrow can stay awake for up to seven days during the migratory season. The Pentagon wants to unlock the sparrow and apply its lesson to the human astronaut – the astronaut human – in order to correct that flaw, our ability and need to sleep.  For Crary, “The injuring of sleep is inseparable from the ongoing dismantling of social protections in other spheres.”

I’m awake now in the old world, contemplating the injury – and how much coffee it takes to bandage it – and wondering if I really was, yesterday morning, in the New World. What day was that the morning of?  And thinking of the magnificent ending of Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus:

“Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos,⁷¹ affords no advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.

Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon,⁷² I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes.⁷³ The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.⁷⁴ But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?”