The Zombie Hero of our time

 

On July 11, 1980, there was a traffic accident, a collision,  on the road in the hills above a Club Med in Haiti. One of the involved persons, Emerson Douyon, was a criminologist and anthropologist from Canada. He wrote an article that begins with the details of the accident, and its cause, which was as follows: in the backseat with Douyon was a man who, as the taxi driver in front understood from the conversation they were having, was dead. The name of the man was Clerveus Narcisse. The taxi driver, learning that he had a dead man behind him, panicked and ran into the car in front of him.

Douyon’s introduction to the crossroads of beliefs, practices and crimes is a clever way of showing how the questions asked by policemen and judges derive from classifications that may not completely hold in a population that believes, for instance, in zombies.

Narcisse claimed that he died in the Schweizer Hospital in Deschapelles in Haiti in 1962. There is a folder in the Hospital that shows that a man with that name did die in the Hospital in 1962. This became an issue when Narcisse went to the Hospital in 1980, for a hernia issue. The American doctor there refused to process him, since he was dead, officially. His case, however, was taken over by a Haitian doctor, who performed the necessary operation on the hernia. In the opinion of the Haitian doctor, being dead on a piece of paper and even being buried didn’t necessarily mean that you were dead dead.

Narcissse was one of a “chain of subjects” who researchers were interested in, victims of a ritual that made them ‘morte apparente’ in vaudou. Douyon’s brother was a doctor in Haiti. He himself was interested in the zombie as a victim. This is not a viewpoint that we often encounter: zombie-ism as a crime, perpetrated against someone.

It is an interesting transmutation, on several levels, that led from the zombie as victim of a ritual in Haiti – a crime victim, which has been judged in Haitian courts - and the movie and tv zombie.

The latter has become, for better or worse, one of the great symbols of our age. My off the cuff theory about the plague of zombies is that it is the mirror of the age of Porn. Probably at no time ever have adolescents had such total access to the imagry of fucking as they have today. It is a piece of our social construct that we have no real theoretical framework for. Of course, we know the male bourgeois European in the 19^th century went to brothels as a matter of course, and we know that a great deal of the urban population, fed by a continuous migration from the country, drifted now and then into prostitution and out. But there is a living difference between the nineteenth century experience and our sensu-surround porncast experience since the 1980s, just as we have no total grasp of the effect of the phthalates, phenols, organochlorines, perfluoroalkyls and polyfluoroalkyls, metals, air pollutants and polybrominated diphenyl ethers that are in the things we eat, the wrappings of the things we eat, our deodorants and sprays and plastics and the thousands of minutia that have coated us, infested us, travelled through us and out as consumers.    

The media zombie is, in almost all respects, different from the porn actor or actress. The latter are at least made up to be sexually attractive, with a fetishistic emphasis on dick, pussy, ass, tits, etc., etc. The zombie, on the other hand, is all decay. The high concept of a beautiful zombie has not emerged from the media soup because it violates the sexually depressed or negated being of the zombie. I exempt here Daybreak, but the show is clearly cheating, a raid on vampire motifs that has been grafted onto the zombie. There are definite family likenesses between the zombie and the vampire, but the former is, by the narrative logic in which it figures, essentially non-sexual. Unlike other animals, the zombie does not reproduce sexually. It simply decays and eats.

The slave, of course, did reproduce sexually, and his or her children were sold – were slaves themselves. Under the sign of this inhuman terror, one created by the colonizer, the White Mythology (in which the colonizer is always implicated) created its fetishes and its elaborate erotic mythologies. But the zombie, by its death, is transported into a new and horrible chapter of slavery, a sort of Eros degree zero, where even the emancipation of death is denied. Narcisse claims that after his death he was “resurrected” and forced to work for 18 years. He eventually escaped, and his case was heard in court.

The close tie between slavery and the zombie has been shuttled off by the media zombie, of course. Wokeness – by which I mean consciousness of history – has not touched this theme.

Thus, the zombie. The zombie decays – although it is an F/X mystery how far and to what degree that process of degree proceeds - and eats. Its eating is its reproductive act – it is by biting that the zombie makes other zombies. The undead inversion of sex is, of course, sexually coded. Otherwise, the zombie would not haunt the media. However, it is an odd sexual power.

As Mario Praz noticed, the Byronic hero in early nineteenth century literature had strong links to the vampire and the sexual automats in Sade. It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that the zombie plays a role in our present circs not unlike the Byronic hero of yore – but where is the fun in not exaggerating? Certainly I’d link the odd moral panic about AI to the omnipresence of zombies. AI, of course, supposedly doesn’t decay, and simply eats and eats information – which it then spits out. Brainless, sexless intelligence – for this eating and spitting thing is labelled intelligence by peeps who think that intelligence is a high score on a test. Those aren’t my peeps. Mass produced – exactly as zombies are mass produced in apocalypse movies.

I am waiting for a zombie Hero of our Time, a zombie that goes beyond death to ultradeath, and comes out beautiful. Because though the networks, Silicon Valley and a gaggle of billionaires are all determined to make us believe that chains are forever, I’m betting on emancipation. Clerveus Narcisse escaped. And that does make him a Hero of Our Time.

 

  

The perfect poem

Perfection is a flaw in poetry. Or, to put this another way, the perfect poem must be flawed – it must flow from some essential flaw in the process of thinking or expression, it must bear that impress as fingers bear their fingerprints.

This is my opinion, and it hovers over my canon of poetry, my personal stash.

This morning, I wake up and read the news about Gaza children eating grass to stave off hunger pains and all I can feel is bitterness. The bitterness doesn’t help – it is a feeble attempt at a moral equivalence, but I eat, I drink, my stomach is full. It is in this mood that I wanted to read a poem, one of my stash. So I read Wallace Stevens Sunday Morning.

The flaw in this poem, from which it flows, is the line: “Death is the mother of beauty.” This seems to me utterly untrue, untrue to the cadaver, untrue to the body’s rot. But here the poem departs from argument and even the larger impression of things in order to fulfil or rather fill itself. That line comes in Part V of the poem, and by that point we have been altering between the central persona, the old woman evoked in part one – an old woman much like me on a Sunday morning, with her “late coffee and oranges” and her domestic bric a brac, the cockatoo “upon a rug” which gives us a suggestive ambiguity – is this the beast woven into the rug or a cockatoo in a cage? Is this real or décor? – and the poet’s inevitable sermoning, his revery upon the old woman. What captures and enraptures me, however, are these lines:

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

For those lines, I forgive every flaw. I forgive everything. I am tethered. And that is the perfection of the poem - to tether the reader, or listener. To stop them in mid heartbeat, mid breathing, mid thought, mid middleness of one's muddled life. Flaw and perfection are joined, just for that second.

The strange birth story of the Empire

 

Plutarch, in the life of Romulus, lists several different stories about the founding of Rome. Each of the stories is a variant on the strangeness of birth itself.

1. The first story is that Rome was founded in the wake of the exhaustion of a woman named Roma. Roma was a Trojan noblewoman who became tired of the strategies of the men leading the Trojans into exile. They never stopped anywhere long. Roma got the women to burn the boats.  “When this was done, the men were angry at first, but afterwards, when they had settled of necessity on the Palatine, seeing themselves in a little while more prosperous than they had hoped, since they found the country good and the neighbours made them welcome, they paid high honours to Roma, and actually named the city after her, since she had been the occasion of their founding it. And from that time on, they say, it has been   customary for the women to salute their kinsmen and husbands with a kiss; for those women, after they had burned the ships, made use of such tender salutation as they supplicated their husbands and sought to appease their wrath.” This is a founding worthy of Fellini – or Lisa Wertmuller.

2. The second story is that Romanus, the son of Odyseus and Circe, colonized the city.

3. Others say it was Romus, sent by Diomedes from Troy, or Romis, tyrant of the Latins.

4. Plutarch writes that the most authentic tradition is that it was founded by Romulus. But writers “don’t agree about his lineage.” Some say he was the son of Aeneas and Dexithea.  Others say Roma was wedded to Latinus, the son of Telemachus, who gave birth to Romulus.

5. But another account, which is “altogether fabulous”, goes like this. Tarchetus was a cruel king of the Albans. Whether it was due to his cruelty or for another reason, a strange phantom haunted his house: a penis rose out of his hearth and remained there for several days. A king with a penis in his chimney is bound to lose face, sooner or later. So Tarchetus sent to the oracle of Tethys, who responded that a virgin must have intercourse with the penis. As Chekhov observed, if there is a pistol in the first act, it must go off in the fifth. Similarly, if a phantom penis haunts your hearth, a virgin must copulate with it. Because the oracle promised that the fruit of the virgin and the phantom dick would be an illustrious son, Tarchetius told one of his daughters to do the deed. But she felt that Tarchetius was abusing his patriarchal powers here, so she secretly sent a handmaid in her place. When Tarchetius learned who fucked the phantom phallus, he seized both maidens, and was going to put them to death when the goddess Hestia appeared to him in a dream and told him no. So he locked them up and told them to weave a web. When they finished the web, he would give them in marriage. By day they weaved the web. At night, though, other maidens, under the King’s orders, unwove it. The handmaid soon showed that she was pregnant – pregnant with twins. Tarchetius had been forbidden by the Goddess to kill both of them, but when the handmaiden had the twins, Tarchetius revisited the divine dream and decided that at least he could kill the twins, who he entrusted to a certain Teratius. As in James Bond movies, so in myth: just as the baddie never kills James outright, but always gives orders to have him killed in some  unusual and outrageous way, so too these oracle-ridden kings have threatening boy-childs taken care of by henchman, which never tricks the gods and demons. 

6. Teratius sounds like a name born out of the name Tarchetius.

7. This is the part of the story everyone remembers. “This man, however, carried them to the river-side and laid them down there. Then a she-wolf visited the babes and gave them suck, while all sorts of birds brought morsels of food and put them into their mouths, until a cow-herd spied them, conquered his amazement, ventured to come to them, and took the children home with him. Thus they were saved, and when they were grown up, they set upon Tarchetius and overcame him.  At any rate, this is what a certain Promathion says, who compiled a history of Italy.”

8. But Plutarch gives a longer variant, which he likes better. The material here is slightly transformed – it has the malleability of dreams, such dreams as Freud interpreted: the compromise between the fear of castration and male marvel at his unlikely equipment produces another quasi-virgin birth, this one happening to a Vestal virgin who evidently disobeyed the rules. The twins born to this virgin were to be killed, again, by a servant, who through a bunch of incidences lost the little basket they were in. “They floated down the river a fairly smooth spot which is now called Kermalus”.  And once again, in this scrambled egg of a story, body parts get mixed with philology: “Now there was a wild fig-tree hard by, which they called Ruminalis, either from Romulus, as is generally thought, or because cud-chewing, or ruminating, animals spent the noon-tide there for the sake of the shade, or best of all, from the suckling of the babes there; for the ancient Romans called the teat "ruma," and a certain goddess, who is thought to preside over the rearing of young children, is still called Rumilia, in sacrificing to whom no wine is used, and libations of milk are poured over her victims. 2 Here, then, the babes lay, and the she-wolf of story here gave them suck..”

9. But Plutarch is not satisfied yet with this account, because, frankly, it seems fantastic, and not in that good way that has been authorized by ancient Greek writers. “But some say that the name of the children's nurse, by its ambiguity, deflected the story into the fabulous. For the Latins not only called she-wolves "lupae," but also women of loose character, and such a woman was the wife of Faustulus, the foster-father of the infants…”

10. The founding of Rome, then, involves every kind of Oedipal confabulation. Perhaps this is appropriate for the violently predatory state that grew out of phantom penises, handmaidens and  Vestal virgins. The imperial question is not: is the state legitimate? Rather, it is: who is my mother?

Godzilla, the season's most politically interesting film!

 

So the Force of Nature said, Dad, after Yoga, let’s go see Godzilla. He’d already explained that it was a special showing at the Rex. We’d been there before, when he was nine, to see Pokemon. I said, fine. Monster movies were a staple of my childhood, and it gave me a kick that the force of nature wanted to see the new Godzilla.

And being a cinephile, the FON told me, as we walked to the metro stop to take us on the 8 to Bonne Nouvelle, that it was nominated for an Oscar. Best picture? I asked sceptically. No, best special effects.

The Rex theatre is a big structure that has obviously seen better times. Paris is a cinephile paradise, but the cost of running a movie theatre, even for a chain, means that outside some Gaumonts in Malls, the screens are comparatively small. I love me the MK2 willingness to show the obscurest foreign films, but their theatre spaces aren’t exactly fit for cinemascope.

Well, it turns out that Godzilla matinees hold no charm for the Parisian – only five other people saw the film with us. Their loss. For it was, oddly, one of the most political films of the year.

When I saw Godzilla back in the day, as a kid, I saw it on tv – I have a flickering memory that it might even have been in black and white. As a kid, the concept made me a bit queasy. I knew that atom bombs burned off your skin and did something so that women gave birth to deformed children – or so I had been told. In contrast, this monster born out of radioactivity seemed toylike, and the moviemakers seemed to have a good time destroying the movie sets of the city and having crowds run screaming hither and thither.

Perhaps casting a maturer eye on those first Godzilla’s would reveal the political subtext,

In the case of the new Godzilla, the political subtext was also the text. And an interesting text it was? It combined the pacifism that was the official Japanese doctrine until the U.S. forced the government to change course in the late fifties, against the majority opinion of the nation, with the formation of a revolutionary force. From the liberal point of view, this force was vigilantism. From the point of view of a leftist politics, it was something much more interesting, a sort of Soviet that forms in the interstices of government action – or rather inaction. In thrall to the Americans, and not wanting to provoke the Soviets, the Japanese government does nothing. So the Japanese people arm themselves and overthrow Godzilla.

The nuclear shadow over this film is, evidently, Fukushima – a symptom of the government’s bondage to corporations. The truth about Fukushima is, even now, an uncertain thing. The extent of the longterm damage from that collapsed nuclear power plant is hard to gauge, as the government stands as an impediment to any clarity on the subject.

Adam and I talked about Fukushima and Chernobyl on the walk home. I mentioned the wild divergence between the Greenpeace estimate of the death toll from Chernobyl and the Soviet estimate, which was soon adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is the one Soviet data set that, magically, is accepted by even Cold Warriors in the West.

And we know why.

Anyway, the redemption of the ex kamikaze pilot, who is guilty for not fulfilling his mission, is a nice life affirming thread that is all about what politics should be about, and rarely are about: making for a life more abundant.

claire poems

 

Claire poems

------ Karen Chamisso

 

1.

Claire giving tremendous blank looks

All that slut hauteur

Dior Red Vinyl on her lips

Claire in her bodycon bandage dress

15 year old Claire.

 

Up in the entertainment crib

She danced me around

“You’re gonna have to face it

you’re addicted to Claire”

- I’ve got the look.

 

It’s school rule time, she tells me.

We both study intently

The timeless timely things

Prince’s blue sky (avec nuages) frock coat

Annie Lennox’s quasi-tonte allure

 

And the models fakeplaying guitar

Behind Robert Palmer.

Put your gaze in the air like you just don’t care

And don’t care: it’s the most important part.

Darling, she would say,

 

we’re going to live in Berlin

where Claire had flown with her Mama

just last year. Darling, we called each other.

C’est chic, we would say

Excluding, say, some Gwinnet county import

 

Whose bouffant blonde above the pom-poms

Was just too rich a joke.

The entertainment crib – channel 69

From four to six. The pony pound you could see

From Claire’s windows.

 

The go-arounds of spring have left us all behind

Claire, darling, ghost, so kind, so unkind.

 

2.

Claire taught me the larger gestures

The kabuki theater of entrances and exits

In sky high boots at the Killer club

Sweeping into the backseat of the taxi at 2 a.m.

The seriousness at the center of silliness

A moral position, stoic,

Enduring the battering of ten thousand bragging boys.

Claire taught me the larger gestures but

Claire died. They dragged her body from the river.

She chose the largest exit. And though I see and feel

The moral position, I can only visit, stricken.

They buried her in Alpharetta.

Oh Claire. Honeychild.

 

 

the end of the european pastoral

 

When I was an adolescent, embedded in metro Atlanta, I dreamed of Europe. The Europe I saw in movies. The Europe I read about in books. The Europe I saw in paintings, or to be more specific, reproductions of paintings in books.

In this Europe, people strolled in meadows. Hell, sometimes they lounged naked in meadows. And, significantly for a child of suburban development in land that was once half junkyard, half forest, these Europeans never seemed to worry about being bitten. They swam in streams and didn’t think about water moccasins, they skipped about in meadows without slapping down mosquitos and gnats, and, significantly, they could plop themselves down anywhere without inspecting the area for ant mounds – that is, for fire ants.

I have plenty personal experience of fire ants, and they do disturb the pastoral mood. And o my droogs, they are always on for a skorry up the legs and a little collective stinging. This they are amazingly good at. I remember, once, doing a landscaping job in Louisiana, when I was out of my pissant teens, and somehow rummaging up a metro of the fuckers. It was not a good time to be me.

So imagine my horrors when I read in Liberation that pastoral Europe, the Europe of picnics, prime vacation and retirement spot for cavemen in the paleolithic, the Europe of my teendreams, is going going gone. Fire ants have landed. In fact, there are now metros of them in Sicily.  

“In September, an article in Current Biology revealed the presence of 88 nests near Syracuse. Monday, the same researchers in the same journal confirmed that the species, an especially invasive one, has in reality put down its hooves in the southwest of the island since at least 2017.”

Of mosquitos, the turn of the climate has delivered a nice soupy warm niche for them in Paris and all over France and one gets bitten even in the winter, now. But this dread footfall of the fireant on Sicily is truly the forenote of bitterer things. The last time the order of nature was broken up by some underground force in Sicily was when Proserpine was raped by Hades.

“Neare Enna walles there standes a Lake, Pergusa is the name.

 Cayster heareth not mo songs of Swannes than doth the same.

A wood environs everie side the water round about,

And with his leaves as with a veyle doth keepe the Sunne heate out.

The boughes do yeelde a coole fresh Ayre : the moystnesse of the grounde

 Yeeldes sundrie flowres : continuall spring is all the yeare there founde.

 While in this garden Proserpine was taking hir pastime.

 

In gathering eyther Violets blew, or Lillies white as Lime,

And while of Maidenly desire she fillde hir Maund and Lap,

Endevoring to outgather hir companions there.”

 

The end of that rape story was the start of the seasons – which, as we know, we are now seeing the end of, seemingly frozen in shock. It was another fiery insect – the fire fly – that was lamented in a prophetic essay by Pasolini: Where have all the fireflies gone? This was written in 1975.

“In the early sixties, because of air pollution, and water pollution in the countryside (our blue rivers and limpid irrigation ditches) fireflies began to disappear. The phenomenon was swift and terrible. After a few years the fireflies were not longer there. (They are now a painful memory from the past; and an older man with yet such a memory can no longer see himself in the face of today's youngsters, as he once was, because they have no store of such memories.)”

We all know that extinction is the price of prosperity. But what happens when the prosperity turns, finally, on us? For are we really more useful than the fireflies? A question that the fire ants can answer – we’ve been o so useful to them. Ring down the curtain on a world that endured from Ovid to Pasolini, then. It brings juice to me glazzies, it really does. Finis.

Renata Adler on pre-totalitarianism

 

In 1977, Renata Adler inaugurated a piece for the New York Review of Books with two great, dire paragraphs that seem like banners for that post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War decade:

“When too many scandals have gone on for too long, uninterrupted and inadequately investigated, they tend to merge. What began as isolated instances of corruption grow toward each other and finally interlock. The nursing home operators, and private garbage collectors, and parking lot owners, and film industry executives, and cable television interests, and vending machine distributors, and recording companies, and casino operators, the teamsters, the Mafia, and defense contractors, and finally the investigative agencies of government and elected officials up to the highest level begin to have in common not just a general corruption but joint ventures and even personnel.

That is an extremely dangerous moment in public life. It is almost impossible to understand. People with an abstract turn of mind adopt conspiracy theories—when the problem is not a conspiracy but some other link. Investigative reporters, meanwhile, find sources, gather facts. There is a lot of news. But the meaning, the most obvious inferences, in a time of high scandal, are lost in a deluge of trivially depressing information.|

Those two graphs still give me a contact high. Adler had been a speechwriter for the chairman of the House committee that investigated Nixon in 1973. She was then a self-proclaimed liberal Republican – a species even then suffering a drastic decline in the popular base. The line from Teddy Roosevelt to Teddy Lindsey had been annexed by the Southern strategy, which proved fatal to anything like the centrist politics Adler affected. She located herself in a niche outside of “ideology”, when such positioning seemed viable after the ideological forays of the New Left.

Reading the essay now, one notices that, after beginning with two quotes from Henry and Charles Adam’s great essay on the Eerie Railroad, a prescient warning against corporate power, Adler dismisses the problem of the corporation as an entity in a democratic republic and turns to the corruption of the Teamsters Union.

“What the Adams brothers feared never quite happened; the republic survived its corporate threat. But that threat had all the elements—in particular, the collaboration of the morally and intellectually disoriented victim—which we have recognized, since Hannah Arendt,  as pre-totalitarian. The threat recurs, in other times, in other forms. How close, after all, is the analogy between the present member of any notoriously corrupt union and the Adams brothers’ small investor. Every teamster has for decades had reason to know that his leaders are not only, in some way remote from his own interest, criminal. They are stealing his pension. Still, it is “his” union—in precisely the sense in which the robber barons’ rail-roads were the small investor’s corporation.”

The seventies was the age of de-regulation, a strategy lead – and this has gone down memory hole – by Senator Ted Kennedy. A liberal of the type that doubled down on capitalist competition as the solution to our woes. It was Kennedy that led the fight to deregulate airline travel, resulting eventually in the destruction of the FAA. Out of this fight we get our current airline monopolies and the inability to get to medium sized cities in America as we no longer subvent those flights.

A long-term Kennedy enemy was Jimmy Hoffa. Adler’s shot at the Teamsters was standard for the time. It was also true, to the extent that the Teamsters were in cahoots with the Mafia. Jackie Presser, the Teamsters president, was on everybody’s payroll – including the FBI.

However, a little thing happened on the way to the Union’s “reform.” The Teamster member whose dues were being stolen, much to Adler’s dismay, saw his union taken over by a government oversight committee. A headline from 2016 sums up the result: “How the Teamsters pension disappeared more quickly under Wall Street than the mob.” In fact, what the Adams brothers feared happened just as they imagined it. The learned inability of the state to act as a social democratic entity has given us a far right Court system, deregulation on every level, massive wealth inequality, and a lifestyle only supported by massive household debt. The democratic deficit we are struggling with has nothing to do with the corruptions of unions, and everything to do with legalizing the corruption of corporations.

That said, one does admire the icy clarity of Adler’s prose – even if that clarity is purchased at the expense of pre-suppositions that are not clearly argued for. So here’s a bit about Watergate that is all about our present:

“What we had for a time at the heart of government was not what Ron Ziegler, in the tapes, so memorably called a Rashomon situation, but a scenario from an earlier work. In Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the hero is a man who has been recruited as a police agent in a group of seven anarchists, each of whom has adopted the name of a day of the week. At meeting after meeting, a member of the group is exposed as such an agent. As Friday, Wednesday, and several others are discovered, Thursday fears each time that it is he who has been found out. By the end of the book, it turns out that every single anarchist was really a police agent in disguise. It is, in real life, normal for police and outlaws to be mutually dependent and to share an interest—as prison guards require, for their continued employment, the continued existence of prisoners, and therefore, of crimes. But when they share an identity, when the enforcers of narcotics laws are the sellers of narcotics, when the cops are the robbers, and the investigators the coverers-up, the foundations of common truth and honesty are shattered altogether, and society requires a subtle (and lucky) combination of forces to dig itself out.”

We have long passed the point where this combination of forces is marginal. It is as central to our functioning as flows of untaxed black money from unspecified sources are to the functioning of banks and private equity firms.  We are all Panama, now, Jake.