From a notebook entry about Kafka

 

When Josef K. was around twenty two, his last year at the university, he discovered the existence of a secret society which counted certain students and even professors among its adherents. In fact, it didn’t resemble other secret societies. It was very difficult for certain people to become members. Many, who ardently wanted to become a member, never succeeded. Others, by contrast, became members without trying, or even knowing that they had become members of this society. One was never, besides, totally sure of being a member. There were many who believed they belonged to it and weren’t, in fact, members at all, or were members in name only. However much they had been initiated, they were less part of the society than many who didn’t even have the slightest knowledge of the existence of the society. In fact, the former had undergone the tests of a false initiation, the rituals of which were as codified as those of a true initiation: the false initiation was designed to put off the scent those who were unworthy of being initiated, but who had somehow found out about the secret society. But even the most authentic members, those who had reached the most elevated places in this society, did not know whether their initiation was authentic or not. This was a secret that could not be revealed. It could happen that a member attained, due to a series of authentic initiations, a real rank, and that consequently, without being warned or in any way becoming objects of the confidence of those who supposedly knew these things, they would be instructed to initiate others under the belief that they, being authentic initiates, were licensed to oversee authentic initiations, only to actually oversee false initiations.

Thus, it became the subject of innumerable conversations among the membership whether it was better to be admitted to a lesser but real level in the hierarchy or to occupy an exalted position, but an illusory one, that is, one contaminated with a false initiation somewhere along the path to that high position. In any case, no one was sure of the solidity of their level, and from this arose the ambiguities that surrounded the legitimacy of orders or suggestions issued within the secret society by those who supposedly ran the society.

And, in fact, the situation was even more complicated than this relatively simple divide between false and true initiations make it seem. Certain postulants were admitted to the highest levels without undertaking any tests. Others were invested with offices and powers that they did not even know about, since they could not be told. Who, after all, was certain enough of his or her own rank to tell them? And, frankly, there was no need to be a postulant: certain elevated officers didn’t even know the secret society existed, even though these officers had to be respected if they issued a command.

The powers of the superior members were unlimited; they carried in themselves, in their own presence, a kind of emanation of the secret society as a whole. This emanation had strange powers. For instance, just being in the presence of one of these people was enough to transform an banal meeting or encounter – say, the encounter defined by going up to the counter of a coffee bar and ordering a latte – into a meeting of the secret society. Similarly it could transform a birthday party or a concert into a meeting of the society. From that time afterwards, all the humans present at such occasions became living links within the society to other members. In this way, the extent of the secret society was enormous, and if power corresponded simply to extension, than the secret society was certainly the most powerful secret society that ever existed, at least in this society.

However high the level of the initiation, it was never permitted to inform the initiate of the purpose pursued by the secret society. But there have always been, given the principles governing initiation, and the promiscuity that comes with size, some initiates who were actually informers or traitors, and it was from these that the rumor took root that the goal of the society was to keep its purpose secret. As these informers and traitors could, actually, have been double agents, there has been discussion about, and even papers written to prove, that the purpose of the society was actually guarded by having traitors and informers broadcast the purpose of the society.

Josef K. was horrified to learn that this secret society was so large and so manifold, and even more to learn that he might, without knowing it, be a member of the society, and even a powerful member at that. The latter possibility implicated him in making others, say, those attending a birthday party he attended, members of the secret society; he pondered whether, morally, he had a duty to call up the people at various parties he had attended and warn them that they might, by being in contact with him, been recruited into this secret society. On the other hand, calling people up like this could be construed as betraying the secrets of the society, and this posed the question as to whether he had the moral right to do this.

Such was his position after the day he lost his ticket to the metro, which was the first link in the confusing and contradictory chain of circumstances that put him in contact with the secret society, whose existence until then he had been unaware of.

Para-history

 

 

In the Wolfgang Promies edition of Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher, the beginning note in notebook A, which could be the beginning of this “book”, such as it is, reads: “The great art of making small deviations from the truth in order to get to the truth, on which the whole differential calculus is built, is at the same time the foundation of our most brilliant [witzigen] thoughts, where often the whole thing would collapse if we took the point of view of philosophical strictness in relation to the deviations.”

This is a great way to begin a “waste book” that is no book – neither a book of maxims on the order of the French moralists nor a diary nor an essay, but a mix of all three - and it is also a motto for a certain genre that I would call the “para-historical”.

Writers of all types – bloggers, Sunday researchers, journalists, memoirists – “do” history, but do it outside the strict methodologies and judgments of real historians – academic historians. The latter are absolutely necessary, of course, but the para-historian can provide a “brilliant” thought here and there which casts a light on the past. Especially in as much as history is necessarily burdened with factoids – the cops lies that get into a folder in the archive, a politician’s misquote, a partisan’s distortions, etc. Para-historians are, of course, also prone to factoids – often they pass them on as part of a whole agenda. And para-historians have other problems, too: the emphasis on the anecdotal and the downplaying of context, for instance. The attraction to “mysteries” rather than problems. And the parallel attraction to “solutions”.

I’ve spent a good few years writing a series of factoidal stories, parahistories of a sort. Mine cover the Cold war era. Even that term is an unreliable designator – what kind of war is it? If a war exists where none is declared, but rather polities are hostile to each other, than all eras are eras of Cold War. Hostility is the total story. I think, however, that the Cold War, from whatever beginning date you argue for to whatever ending date you argue for, is distinguished by the way in which the hostility of nations is routinized in ideologies that motivate populations to sponsor them: pay for them, fight for them, make others fight for them, etc. From this point of view, the Cold War as a form started in 1789, with the French revolution, and found its perfect counterrevolutionary expression in Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace. Burke’s pamphlet is at the head of a tradition in Anglophony that one can follow even up to now – the premise that no peace, no coexistence is possible with the ideological enemy. This realigns the nation’s interests in an interesting way – for if the ideology of the Other is the enemy, than those within the nation who adhere or lean towards that ideology are also the enemy.

And so I have concentrated on various crimes that have to do with that simple formula, as it complexified and fortified itself over the time, relatively, that I have been alive.

Christ and Degenerate Art

- I direct your attention to inventory no. 16232, a giant wooden Kruzifixus, accused of Judeo-Bolshevism, from the atelier of one L.G. by way of a Museum in Stettin.

- O. I am beginning with an “I”. Begin. Begat. Begone.

- An inventory number implies an inventory. The number of art objects seized by the Nazis between 1933 and 1939 within the German speaking sphere — Anschluss Austria, conquered Czechoslovakia — is still unknown. But 16232 is a large number. Does it really reflect the number of art pieces seized? Inventories don’t necessarily reflect a number line. For instance, zip codes are a form of inventory. In this case, Mario Andreas von Luttichau has studied the matter and concluded that the inventory numbers that were assigned “coincided to some extent with the sequence of works in the exhibition…” — in other words, operated a bit like zip code numbers. Still, as there was only around 630 some works in the Munich museum, the original sequence, which specified the works, must have come from some other sequence — something having to do with their seizure by the Nazi state. More than 16,000 objects, it seems.

- The Nazi state. I write this, I draw back. Is this a subject that will get inside my dreams? There is more than possible. I remember in the sixth grade, my friend Mike showed me a book about Hiroshima. For months I dreamed of naked people in boiling rivers, their skin sliding from their bones. And these were not only nightmares but wet dreams. Naked people, to my sixth grade mind’s eye, naked women. There is no line, no traumatic DMZ, that will keep the images of all the horrors of the world awake from the world asleep, the world of the sleeper. And I begin to be conscious of my intrusion here, looking back on these things, and this crucifix, this crucified one. Many a vodou metaphysician has noticed that the instrument of torture that became a symbol of Christ is, as well, a cross roads. It marks the spot where the devil, or where Papa Legba, can be met at midnight, in the midst of the traffic between the quick and the dead.

- My “I”, lofted above this story, is illegitimate in many respects; but then I remember my citizenship in the Great Cold War. My history, too. My nightmares and wet dreams.

- The inventory number is helpfully supplied by the book accompanying the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, in 1991, of the “Degenerate Art Exhibit” of 1937. The show as it opened in Munich. The Munich show and its successors — it travelled through the major German cities and those in Austria after the Anschluss, 13 cities in all — was one of the most visited exhibitions of the 20th century, attracting “more than two million people”. The advertising for it was extensive and enticing. “Free admittance. No young people allowed entry.” The papers did front page stories about it whereever it went. Orders from on high? The “show” travelled to Austria, after the Anschluss. A great success.

2.

- “Vandalism In Church” reads the headline in the local newspage of the March 4, 1922 Lübeck Volksbote, a socialist newspaper. The gist: a person or persons had penetrated the Lübeck Cathedral (which was latter to be almost destroyed in a British raid on the city in 1942) carrying equipment that included a ladder, a saw, and a rope. They climbed up to the Kruzifixus, which had been installed on the wall above the area that led into the choral space, and sawed off its head. They used a rope to lower the heavy wooden head to the ground and made off with it — packing up their equipment, too. As well, they injured the nimbus and the rays that highlighted the body. Shortly thereafter: “The head was found in a nearby wastepond. Chained to a stone.”

- Begin. Begat. Begone.

- The newspaper reported that before this ultimate act of vandalism, there had been a great deal of controversy and misinformation about the Kruzifixus. The congregation was disturbed by it. The veteran’s groups were disturbed about it. The Blätter, another Lübeck paper, but which leaned to the right, ran some angry columns about it, using the language that was to reappear, in 1933, as the Nazis started gathering up the art they didn’t like and denouncing the art professors, curators, artists and patrons who produced, exhibited and bought it: it was blasphemous, it mocked the German military, it was ugly, it was insane. Jesus was too dead, too tortured, too big, too hideous.

- There was a rumor that the Kruzifixus had won a contest being held by the Church to select a monument for the German war dead. In fact, it had been submitted, but the statue had not been accepted by the monument committee. However, the Lübeck Cathedral’s artistic advisor, a man named Carl George Heise, had advocated for the statue, and had approved L.G.’s plan for it. Consequently, he made it in his atelier in Berlin, working on it for four months. The statue, made out of oak and in giant proportions — the figure was over nine feet high, the cross was even bigger — was originally supposed to be over a plaque listing the names of those in the congregation who had fallen in the war. L.G. intended this greenish, tortured, dead Jesus to reflect the painting of Jesus on the altar created by the Nordic early modern painter, Bernd Notke. Notke’s painting was created around 1500 (it no longer exists, as it was burned in the British raid on Lübeck in 1942 which destroyed the cathedral). The figure also had thin gilded rays emanating from it, and a gilded nimbus above its head.

- Thus we begin. Is this the story of the Kruzifixus? Or the story of L.G.? Or the story of the crossroads upon which the Kruzifixus gave its gallow’s blessing?

3.

- There are at least two tellers of the tale of the Kruzifixus in our time. One, Katrin Engelhardt, gives us the pertinent details in an article entitled “Nailed to the Cross: the mocking [Verhöhnung] of the Kruzifixus of L.G. in the Weimar Republic and under the Nazis”. It was published in a book that is part of a series concerning “entartete Kunst” — degenerate art — and the fate of outlawed art objects under the Nazis. There is an institution that researches this area of modern art history.

- The other teller is Hans Prolingheuer, a former Social Democratic politician who has devoted his post-legislative life to the exploration or explanation of the intersection between the Nazis and the protestant churches. The cross as crossroads, the exchanges between the sacred and the profane, or perhaps the demonic masked that characterized churchman and Gauleiter. Protestant churches, as observers after 1933 remarked, flourished in Berlin after the Nazis generally put Cabaret and all its attendees and showpeople in the KZ. Where once Weimar decadents watched transvestites and discussed (pro and contra) the communist party, there were now invitations to Christian worship for all — — except decadents, socialists, communists, Jews, Gypsies or Defectives. It is a history of great shame, and like all great shames in the post-war period, when the Cultural Bolshevik enemy shapeshifted, it was felt less by those who had participated in it in the thirties, busy now creating a “miracle” economy, than the grandchildren, waking up like Hansel and Gretel and listening as, beyond the wall, the parents speak in whispers of murder. Prolingheuer feels intensely for the Kruzifixus. For Polingheuer, L.G.’s sculpture lies at the center of the ghastly connection between the Stormtroopers — Sturmabteilung — and the Bildstürmer — the iconoclast. The destruction of images, which occurred, as Polingheuer remarks, in the surge of popular piety in the German countryside around Luther’s break with the Church, was a compound of frenzies we have seen before and will see again, a matter of the same sexual angers and salts, of vengeance and profittaking: then, the destruction of witches, heretics, Jews; in 1937, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals, and other degenerates.

4.

- Begin. Begat. Begone. Words that, as I pronounce them, have a deal of spit in them.

- The week the Kruzifixus was beheaded was a redletter week for the Lübeck intelligentsia. It had been declared Thomas Mann week by the city’s Cultural department. Lübeck’s great son came back to Lübeck — he now lived in Munich — and made a speech at the dedication to the House of the Buddenbrooks. The very house itself, which had been purchased by some patron and dedicated to the great artist.

- Carl Georg Heise was already writing, of inventory number 16232, fourteen years before it was reinstalled for maximum mockery at the entrance to the 1937 exhibition: “One hardly knows what is more significant, the work or its fate.”

- Heise was writing in Genius, the journal he briefly edited. He was writing after the Kruzifixus had been vandalized, which happened a mere month after it was installed in the Lübeck Dom. Heise writes: “Its destruction is a testimony to the increasing difference of feeling between the popular sentiment and the artistic culture of our time. It is a dangerously intensifying situation in which we find ourselves.” Heise also wrote of the deep religious feeling that was expressed in this Crucifixion. The quote was pulled for the Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937 and hung, in a mauled state, on the all next to the Kruzifixus, with a graffiti question mark scrawled over it.

- Carl Georg Heise was a pupil of Aby Warburg. He was not simply an observer of the situation in Lübeck, since he had advocated for the statue as an artistic advisor to the cathedral. He was also the head of the Lübeck Museum of Art and the History of Culture. The post gave him the opportunity to patronize many contemporary artists. In this post, he became one of the great patrons of the sculptor Barlach. “Following… a radio address Barlach gave in January of 1933, protesting the expulsion of Kollwitz and Heirich Mann from the Preussische Akademie, he was forced to give up the house he had built in 1930 in Guestrow, ostensibly because the building permits had been declared null and void and were withdrawn.” Barlach had two works in the Degenerate Art Exhibit.”

- Heise and L.G. “fell from grace” in 1933, after the Nazis seized power.

- A story. In 1933, the official in charge of “culture” was a certain Senator Burgsteller. The Nazis were all about delivering an immediate shock to the cultural system in Germany, and pressured to fire Heise. The Senator left Heise hanging for weeks. Then he agreed to meet with him.

- “My dear Heise, I am sure you must understand why we could not keep you on. It just could not be done. Look here, I need you to help and advise me. As you know, I am no expert in this area, but I have to appoint a successor to you, a man who will carry on in your spirit. Who would you suggest?”

- Heise gave him a list of names.

- “Soon after, he met a man from the Senator’s office, who told him with a grin: don’t you see? Those were the names of candidates I had to cross off the list immediately. (Hellmut Lehman-Haupt).

- Heise must have been there to meet Mann in Lübeck on Thomas Mann week. He’d met Mann in 1921. In 1933, he went to Switzerland to see Mann about emigrating. Mann urged him to stay in Germany, on the assumption that the Nazis would not last forever and an indigenous strain of humanism would then re-emerge. Perhaps Mann thought of Heise when he imagined his humanistic narrator of Doctor Faustus, Serenus Zeitblum.

- Heise asked Mann to write on behalf of art that was being attacked in Germany in 1933. Mann told Heise he was not good with modern art — he was an Ohrmensch — an Earperson.

5.

- The feuillitonists or art critics who might have mocked or grown indignant at the way Germany’s national treasures, all those modern works that were purchased by the progressively inclined curators and directs, were either fired in 1933 and working some other job or in concentration camps or in exile.

- “The wound like a hole out of which a drop of blood falls.” “The giant toes of the feet.” “The impressively overlong legs.”

- In Los Angeles, in the 90s, many of the 615 pieces shown in Munich could not be shown. They had disappeared. That might mean they had been deliberately destroyed. Or it might mean that they had been sold by the network of dealers that sprang up in Europe to take advantage of the Nazi war on Modern Art to acquire and sell pieces. In 1991, archaeologists digging in Berlin, searching for remnants of its distant 14th century past, uncovered a storage room buried underground, among the rubble of some bombardment. In the room were ceramic pieces and a broken statue — Otto Freundlich’s statue, Der neue Mensch, a photograph of which had adorned the cover of “the guide published to accompany the exhibition on tour after it left Munich.” Otto Freundlich’s own ashes disappeared long ago in the Maidenek, in 1943.

6.

- 1937. Note that one of the great landmarks of Nazi cultural policy occurred in a distinctly depressing year for the great hopes of modernism. If we travel, at that date, to Moscow, we can enjoy the beginning of the great Show Trials, in which the cadre of Bolsheviks who participated in and made the Revolution were duly humiliated and, after being found guilty of Capital Crimes, executed. The defendants themselves often pleaded for the most severe sentences.

- The National Socialists had already liquidated as many of the German communist cadre as they could catch — a strategy of pacification that would have a long afterhistory, from Malaysia and Vietnam to Iraq and Guatemala, marking the twentieth century as a movement between Communists killing their enemies (often other Communists) and communists being killed in the name of democracy by the forces and proxies of the Western powers.

- 1937. The degenerate art exhibition was, in its own way, a show trial, and the object was to liquidate a certain kind of modernity in which the 1917 revolution figured. A modernity identified with negativity, squalor, critique, the “dérèglement de tous les sens” and a splendour that refused to share an ethos with heroism.

- Heroism had gone mad on the Western and Eastern Fronts. How much of a hero is the cow that is dragged up the chute to the slaughterhouse?

- Yet the Stalinist turn in Moscow, or the Nazi frenzy in Munich, was caught in the perpetual loop of exaggeration and denunciation that gives it its temperamental being, its trademark attitude. Thus it followed a zombie logic of mimicry. I mean that the Degenerate Art exhibition exhibited many of the tricks and traits of the great Dada installations, and used shock for its own purposes. For instance, the bizarre, swooping scripts on the wall pointing out and denouncing the pieces. Or “the juxtaposition of works of degenerate art by Karl Schmidt Rottluff and Amedeo Modigliani and photographs of facial deformities”. Or photographs of drawings and paintings by the mentally ill. All of which were, indeed, sources of inspiration. The muses live in jails, in asylums, on the street. And what does that mean for us, who do not?

- Who, as a footnote to this representational violence, were to be liquidated physically in the 38 to 40 period. All those muses. The defectives, to whom the doctors and nurses applied the needle. And of course after the Jews, Gypsies, Bolsheviks, Slavs, etc.

- The Dadaist assault was trained on the bourgeois spectator’s perceptual privacy, as though perception itself was a piece of property, a sort of lawn fronting the frockcoated peeper at the pics. The Dadaist glee was imitated, in all unconsciousness, by the organizers (Ziegler, Willrich, Hansen, Hoffman). What could be more Dada than to hang artworks crookedly on the wall? “A photograph of Hitler standing before the Dada Wall at a preview of the exhibition… reveals that the works by Schwitters, Kandinsky and Klee were originally hung crookedly on the wall.”

- In the Camps, all privacy was systematically taken from the inmate. No more of that. In the Degenerate Art exhibition, there was a sense that these works were being tortured for the benefit of the great German Aryan public. It was a pity, really, that nobody thought of putting in a shrieking sound system. The predecessor of the Exhibition, put on by the Nazis in 1934, had called itself a “house of horrors.” Carnivalesque dystopia.

7.

- Begone.

- From the “Administrative Report concerning the Hanseatic city of Lübeck from 1937 to 1952”: “Even more dramatic was the struggle to save the Cathedral… The fire leaped from the museum up the socalled Bishop’s tower of the Cathedral and spread from here through the whole church “ship”… Even the strengthened manpower in place could not control the fire.

- “On March 29, 1942, at around 10:30 a.m. the Northtower, which had stood until then, collapsed, breaking in the middle, and about 2 p.m. the South tower followed. Lübeck was again stripped of a landmark and one of its most valuable cultural monuments.” (Hans Brunswig, 1978)

- Begat. Ended. Turn out the lights, muses from the wards, the camps, the trains. Defectives. Human experiments. Horror shows of all kinds. Turn out the lights. Turn out the lights. Repeat, infinitely.

William James, Effective Altruism, and Sam Bankman-Fried

There is a passage in William James’ essay, The Moral Philosopher – which, by the way, is an excellent analysis of that species we now call the “pundit” or the opinion writer – which sums up the delusion called “effective altruism” and even predicts its course, from the principles it begins with:

 

“A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it, will still further show us the philosopher's perplexities. As a purely theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever come up at all. If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the best imaginable system of goods; he would indeed have an easy task; for all demands as such are prima facie respectable, and the best simply imaginary world would be one in which every demand was gratified as soon as made. Such a world would, however, have to have a physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we inhabit. It would need not only a space, but a time, "of n-﷓dimensions," to include all the acts and experiences incompatible with one another here below, which would then go on in conjunction﷓-such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping our youthful freshness of heart; and the like. There can be no question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create universes a priori, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.”

This is the set of motives that drove that EA excrescence, FTX, and its creator and monster, Sam Bankman-Fried. Frankenstein becomes his own monster, in a variant of Mary Shelley’s cautionary romance.

michael lewis agonistes

 

I have long liked Michael Lewis for one thing: the long essay he wrote after Hurricane Katrina about coming back to New Orleans. In that essay, he defended Nola from the foxification, that is, the racist demonization, that excused the inexcusable U.S. neglect of one of the world's great cities.

So, I felt I owe him one. Well, now the debt is paid. He "embeds' himself with SBF - already a vile and emptyheaded move for a reporter - and then gives us a portrait of a true privileged monster, a man who mistakes intelligence for the mastery of a few video games. A man with no ethics, no organization, and an insatiable greed. Who is his "hero". Whose innoncence, as he put it on Sixty minutes, is a thing he wants to communicate to the jury.

Michael Lewis is not, of course, the only one. The NYT coverage of SBF has leaned over backwards to tell his tale. This is a story of backstage image management that could only be explained by the fact that the parents of the involved know the media honchos who run the presses. But even with favorable NYT coverage - starting back from when they gave him a chance to "share" his story on their stage for some event after FTX fell apart - they are, reluctantly, covering the unfolding of eyewitnessed detail that pretty much sinks the image of Sam Effective Altruism Bankrobber-Fried. Lewis seems as clueless about cryptocurrency platforms as many people of his generation are about the Nigerian email scam.
Pathetic and so so typical.

The thing about that 60 minutes interview that is little commented is how bad the interviewer - Jon Wertheim - is. Whe Lewis says FTX collapsed because of a bank run situation, Wertheim should have stopped him and said FTX was not at all like a bank. A
bank is legally entitled to loan the money you deposit out. The FTX platform
was more like a safety deposit box. You are charged a fee for having the box,
but if the company actually opens the box and uses your stuff, that is called
theft. Pretty simple distinction. That Wertheim apparently knows NOTHING about
FTX makes me wonder - what is the use of television interviews? The NYT had a
story about the average age of network tv viewers now being like 65 - my age. I
think this is partly because tv viewers of a certain generation just got used
to this flatheadedness. But one of the wonderful things about social media and
cable is: this kind of bunk calls out to be de-bunked.

Who is Hamlet to him, or him to Hamlet?

The vogue for Hamlet in the 1920s is, I think, of piece with the culture of the 1920s: the wounded modernity of it all, from the Jazz age drinkers in New York city speakeasies to the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint, etc. World War I showed the great and unspeakable harm of yoking together advanced technology and the senile intellection of the ruling class. The 1920s were despised, later, by people like Wyndham Lewis and reactionaries of all kinds partly due to its unstable mixture of deep mourning and sexual release.

Which was the perfect mood in which to read The Waste Land, or to compose it.

Eliot was producing a lot in the twenties, in order to supplement an income from the bank he worked at that would have been more than ample for another middle manager (500 pounds a year). But Tom and Viv pursued lifestyles that made more money a necessity. Besides, the Eliot of the time was overflowing with ideas. Which is why his essay on Hamlet, the one in which he deplored such mooks as Goethe for misunderstanding the whole failure of the thing, was, on the one hand, so outrageous, and on the other hand, was as close as his criticism came to his art. The Hamlet that he hammered at was all fragments and failure – Shakespeare’s Wasteland.

“Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art.3 The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most mis leading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution – of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s – which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on the play.”

What an astonishing last phrase! Eliot latter omitted this essay from some collection of his essays because it was so impertinent. Highhatting Goethe, Coleridge and Pater in one driveby is a display of sharp elbows that must have made the Edwardian sages, those still around, gasp.

The whole essay is full of other gasp-making passages. For instance, this one, on how clumsy Shakespeare bobbled his source, the (lost) Hamlet of Kyd, which was no doubt a real revenger play and no fooling around. “In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing.”

So much for those who think that the madness theme is all the more convincing for posing the question: what if a madman plays at being a madman, not realizing that he is truly mad? A question at the heart of early modern European literature – Hamlet, meet Don Quixote. This fold in the play made Hamlet a precursor of romanticism, and romanticism was something that the Eliot at this point, with his Maurrassian leanings, wanted rooted out – for reasons not unlike that of his old pal, Wyndham Lewis.

Lewis-like shock effects key passages like this one: “So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed.”

Sloppy Shakespeare, not able to cut and mend. Like, perhaps, Eliot in the midst of his first draft of the Wasteland? I love the “most certainly” of the artistic failure. There the teacher is, turning back the paper that little Will had worked so hard on. Alas, failure – and F!

“And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.”

Of course, the unconscious movement from dissing Pater – who thank God never wrote on Hamlet – to dissing Pater’s painting, his poem, the Mona Lisa – makes the essay all the more interesting as a good old St. Louis stomping. Behind the clerical fussiness there’s the riverside hustler. Eliot makes it clear that there are the cool people, who know what artistic success is, and the hoi polloi, who want the “interesting” – the crossword puzzle, the latest murder, Hamlet.

Eliot doesn’t mention Joyce. Lewis, who shared Eliot’s impersonality of the poet thesis at this time, would certainly have included some dig at J.J. – after all, the “character” of Hamlet figures as a major key in Ulysses. As Stephen might reply to Eliot’s irritated and irritating essay: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

It is in the Hamlet essay that Eliot lets loose upon the world (to his later dismay) the term “objective correlative.” Apparently he can’t find any in Hamlet. “The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.”

It must be said that the “objective correlative” has a certain critical inevitability. Using it to beat up Hamlet, though, gives us a dramatic situation in which the critical emotion is “most certainly” in excess of the facts as they appear. Behind these facts, and this bitching, is Eliot coming into the hard realization – which he made into a worldview – that his was not a synthesizing mind, but a collaging one. Fragments were his poetry. And in his reduction of Hamlet to fragments, he gave himself a pretty good precedent.

philosophy as worry

 

Philosophers are all rather proud of Aristotle’s notion that philosophy begins in “wonder” – it seems such a superior birth, so disinterested, so aristocratically outside the tangle of pleb emotions.

 

For these reasons, that origin story has, for the most part, been more interpreted than questioned.

 

It is, of course, hard to get clear on these things, which depend on self-reporting. Stories that one tells about oneself are, prima facie, self-interested.

 

Myself, my “philosophical” thinking has its roots more in worry than in wonder. Worry about the dark. Worry about abandonment.  Worry about money. Worry about sex. Worry about the parents, the kids, the growing old, the decline of empire, boredom, and the absence of the hosts of promised angels after you graduate from whatever it is you are graduating from.

 

Worry, of course, is socially gendered female. Worry is the knitting, it is mom, not stoic dad, wondering on the lawn.

 

Questions can be treated as innocent grammatical instruments. Science, y’all! But questions are where worry goes in language.  They are large things, the question – they have room for more than anxiety. But from my plebe view, wonder is simply the advance man of worry, the spokesmodel, worry as influencer.