paper in the clenched fist: the waste books

 

There is a certain kind of book that doesn’t have a genre label per se; it falls somewhere between the essay and the treatise; like the the essay, it concentrates on some line of thought aroused by a situation or an idea, although it claims the right to break off at any moment and diverge into some other topic; like the treatise, it is unafraid of abstraction and generalization, although it is wary of universals and likes to consider difference as a positive moment, an unassimilable energy. Some of its authors call their books novels, others fragments, others reflections. Often, the authors are not the collectors of the totality of the book – a job that devolves on the editors. The fragments of classical texts produced, in the literary culture of the seventeenth century, a paradigm for the moralist who first seized on this diffuse genre. Pascal’s Pensees, for instance, are often considered to be a sketch for a book that Pascal meant someday to write – but what if Pascal intended to produce exactly this fragmentary text? Other instances: the Scratch books of Lichtenberg, Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves, Pessoa’s various Books of Disquiet, Ludwig Hohl’s Notizen, Nietzsche’s extensive Nachlass.

A leading theme, here, is the scratching, the hastily scribble gloss, the note one finds in one’s pocket and throws out. Man is a thinking reed – a reed broken off and filled with ink. Waste paper is paper that has been used and lost its use, and perhaps aggressively wadded up. Every wadded up piece of paper is a shadow of a clenched fist, after all. It is paper on the way to the waste paper basket, carrying words that have lost their use. That is the social situation of these books – they are caught somewhere between the desk and the garbage. At least, in the imagination.

The waste book has a strong relation with the philosophical novel – and certain of the latter, such as Paul Valery’s M. Teste, go over the line. Perhaps the reason is that ideas in themselves – ideas in their natural setting – have as limited a place in modern life as mice have in modern homes. They are an accidental, corner feature of life. Even in jobs like research scientist or professor, “having ideas” is not in the job description – at best, creativity squeezes in there, but playing well with others, getting good grades, and producing acres of watertreading non-waste articles for journals is what counts.

Ideas are for losers. Or they are viewed, in the 101 classroom, as emanations of heads. Heads having ideas, which often “influence” other heads having ideas, discuss in 400 words or less.

A mostly forgotten waste book by Antonio Machado, with the title Juan Mairena, should be better known in the Angophone world. Ben Belitt translated it back in 1963, but that edition has long gone out of print. The French edition is published by Anatolia: editions du rocher, who also publish the translations of Rozanov.

Juan Mairena is one of Machado’s “complementaries”. As Pessoa’s critics have pointed out, Machado’s “heteronyms” – Mairena and his teacher, Abel Martin – don’t have the rowdy independence of Pessoa’s personas. But Belitt’s notion that they cast light on Machado as a poet, a light he could not cast in his own name, is a good one. In his foreword, Machado writes that Mairena was “a poet, philosopher and rhetorician, born in Seville in 1865 and buried in Casariego de Tapia in 1909” A nineteenth century man, although is conversations, notes and lectures are evidently saturated with Machado’s own experience after 1909, including his stint attending the lectures of Bergson in Paris in 1910.

Here’s a translation of the French translation of one of Juan de Mairena’s entries. This entry, with its Alice in Wonderland logic, expresses the spirit of the waste book, as opposed to the fictions and factions of the other literary branches.

“One says that there is no rule without an exception. Is that really the case? Myself, I don’t dare affirm it. In any case, if that confirmation contains a partial truth, it must be a truth of fact, the reason for which can’t be fully satisfied. Every exception, one adds, confirms the rule. This does not seem so evident; however, it is more acceptable, from the logical point of view. For if all exceptions belong to a rule, if there is an exception, there is a rule, and he who thinks exception thinks of a rule. This already constitutes a truth of reason, that is to say, a truism, a simple tautology which teaches us nothing. We can’t be satisfied with stopping here. So, let’s be more subtle…

1. If every exception confirms the rule, a rule without an exception would be a non-confirmed rule, although by no means a non-rule.

2. A rule with exceptions will always be stronger than a rule without exceptions, which will lack an exception to have itself confirmed.

3. A rule will be more of a rule the richer it is in exceptions.

4. The ideal rule will be composed of nothing but exceptions.”

a date, a collectivity, a plot

 

Often, Ulysses is read as a novel that has a myth driven plot. And it is true that the Odyssey provides the framework within which Joyce does his magic. But I – who love and honor Ulysses above all other books – have always found fascinating is the idea of a plot that does not follow the usual script but that follows the city, over one day, in bits, as a supreme fiction. Immediately after Ulysses, there was an explosion of city novels, including Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Doblin’s Alexanderplatz, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – the Woolf arising not out of a passion for Joyce, of course. As well, Bely out of another novelistic tradition laid down the tracks of Petersburg.

But gradually the “telling” of a collective deflated. Or perhaps I should say it went into the sci fi genre and the novels of Gaddis and Pynchon and Inga Schulze – among those authors I know – and the subjectivity of some protagonist within what Zadie Smith calls lyrical realism came back to haunt our “best books of the year” lists.

Still, I like collectives. Cities are one example, dates are another.

A day, a year, a decade, these measures have all acquired a rather unjustified weight in our historical consciousness. A history without dates is not only possible, but it is the goal towards which history trends, just as literature, according to Mallarme, aspires to music. One of the great properties of the internet is that, given the massive amount of digitalized material in hundreds of languages that are now accessible to the merest keyboard peasant, it is possible to create pluck a day in the past – say February 2, 1922 – and give it a material body – or at least a phantasmal one.

Which was my mad thought a couple of days ago. Since then, I’ve been gnawing at February 2, 1922 with all my might, and I have considered that maybe I have finally reached the down slope of senility. Or maybe I’ve been there all along!

Some notes:

-         On February 2, 1922, Kafka was on a four week vacation from work. He chose, tubercular weakling that he was, to spend it in the mountains of Spindelmuhle (or Špindlerův Mlýn) in Northern Czechoslovakia. In his journal, he wrote: “Struggle on the road to [the] Tannenstein in the morning, struggle while watching the ski-jumping contest. Happy little B., in all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least in my eyes [, specially his outstretched leg in its gray rolled-up sock], his aimless wandering glance, his aimless talk. In this connection it occurs to me—but this is already forced—that towards evening he wanted to go home with me.”

-         The program of queering the canon has, of course, enjoyed this moment of wobbling heteronormativity. B. with his rolled up stocking in those snowy mountains, and K. with his coughing, summons up another death: The Death in Venice. Although it isn’t as though Kafka was “home” – he took a room a Hotel Krone, which was not to his liking. At the same hotel, his physician and the physician’s daughter was staying. Kafka was writing The Castle – Reiner Stach, his biographer, pins the bits of the geography that went into the novel. Perhaps B. became Barnabas, the odd and awkward messenger sent by the Castle to serve the land surveyor. On the other hand, whatever sexual thoughts Kafka was entertaining, he was mostly a very exhausted man, on the verge of serious lung problems, who kept slipping in the snow. A sexually deflating experience.  

-         On February 2, 1922, the author of Death in Venice, Thomas Mann, sat at his desk in his great villa in the Herzog Park district of Munich and wrote a letter to his friend, Ernst Bertram. Mann was approximately 9 hours south, by bus, of the struggling skinny Insurance man in the health resort of Spindlemuehle. It had been a snowy winter in Munich. A railroad strike throughout Germany was stopping trains, but in Bavaria the railroad workers, and tram drivers, were still on the job.

-         Mann’s letter to Bertram was written a couple days after his brother, Heinrich, had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance in the snow because he was suffering from influenza and appendicitis. The doctors were worried. Thomas Mann’s wife visited Heinrich’s longsuffering wife. And the two brothers, who had avoided each other since 1916, due to their political disagreements – though they lived 15 minutes by tram from each other – reconciled over Heinrich’s “death bed.” Thomas does not foresee a friendship with Heinrich – a “decently human modus vivendi is all it can come to.” Thomas doesn’t say it in so many words, but he has come to a “turning” in his own viewpoint. The TM of that great anti-modern pamphlet, Observations of a Non-Political Man, which was aimed not so subtly at Heinrich’s socialist-humanism (in the midst of WWI, Heinrich wrote a book about Zola, of all people!), has come to realize the price of being celebrated by the extreme right. In the letter to Bertram, however, his complaint is that still, as he has been “assured”, Heinrich never read the ONPM! A deadly insult, this. But at the end of the letter, Thomas speaks of a “certain evolution towards each other” – which is more evident on Thomas’s side than Heinrich’s. Thomas Mann’s “Wende” is generally described as his acceptance of democracy. I think in his perspective this looks a little different. What he was accepting was civilization. The large structural binary of culture v. civilization, Mann’s version of the German Sonderweg, or alternative path, against French civilization and all it implied, was abandoned.

-         On February 2, 1922, a 35 year old woman with her curly dirty blonde hair in a discombobulated bob could be seen at 7a.m at the Gare de Lyon. The weather outside the great vaulted building was cold and windy. The train arrived from Dijon. A man came out of the train and handed the woman a package. She hurried with this package outside, hailed a taxi, and gave the driver an address: 9 Rue de l’Université. The taxi stopped before the address, the woman got out, paid the taxi driver,  went to the door of the building – Hotel Lenox – and rang the bell of the room she was searching for. James Joyce came to the door, and the woman – Sylvia Beach – handed him his copy, the first printed copy ever, of Ulysses. She kept a copy for herself.

-         We know this day must have been windy, with sleet and rain. Benjamin Cremieux wrote his friend, Marcel Proust, on this day: “The glacial rain today is so saddening that I’m afraid you will be uncomfortable. It comes through the walls and spoils the joy of the fire [in the fireplace].” Did Proust read Le Matin, the paper owned by Colette’s husband, to which Colette contributed a column? Did he, as so many writers, follow certain faits divers? On February 2, 1922, the paper reported that  Hippolyte Ferrand had been pronounced not guilty in his trial in Lyon.  Ferrand was being tried for the murder of a trucker named Guillemen – which by itself would have merited little coverage. It was the backstory that drew readers. It was less a Proustian tale than something by Maupassant. Ferrand’s brother had been married to a pretty woman named Louise Grillet. Louise played around on the side. Hippolyte’s brother “coldly” slew his rival, and got off for it. Then the  brother had to march off to war. In the trenches, according to the paper, he received a letter. Who knows what the contents of the letter were! What is known is that he shot himself in the head. Louise went to stay with her husband’s family, and while there met a truck driver named Fayard. They courted, they married, Louise moved into the Fayard house. All would have been well, save for Guillemen – a fellow truck driver. Louise was enchanted, and began an affair. Guillemen, who is generally described as a brute (although his father claimed he was a happy go lucky lad who was always singing and gay), drove his truck to the Fayard house and started loading up Fayard’s furniture in his, Guillemen’s, truck. Hippolyte heard that this was going on, and went to talk to Guillemen, who cursed him out, threatened him, and was going to beat him when Hippolyte pulled out his revolver and shot him five times. At the trial, Le Matin’s reporter claimed, it was evident that Hippolyte, too, was enchanted by the “too beautiful” Louise.

-         A likely story. Perhaps it was read by a woman in the Victoria Place Hotel, about 18 minutes by foot from the Joyce’s place. That woman, Katherine Mansfield, had arrived two days ago from Montana, Switzerland, leaving her husband, John Middleton Murray, behind. She went to a clinic run by a Russian, Manoukhine, who had advertised a technique for treating tubercular cases. In a letter Mansfield wrote that she had 100 pounds saved up, but that she reckoned she’d need another 100 pounds at least to pay for the treatments and her stay in the Hotel. In her Notebook, Mansfield wrote: “ I have a feeling that M. is a really good man. I also have a sneaking feeling (I use   that word ‘sneaking’ advisedly) that he is a kind of unscrupulous imposter.” Sitting in her room and, perhaps, looking out the window at the miserably wet streets, Mansfield wrote to Murray that the other doctor at the clinic had reassured her that Manoukhine’s technique would work. “I am glad I saw this man as well as the other. But isn’t it strange. Now all this is held out to me – now all is at last hope real hope there is not one single throb of gladness in my heart. I can think of nothing but how it will affect us.”

-         Mansfield could call upon a ruthless reserve of common sense when she was face to face with bullshit. There is that beautiful putdown of Howard’s End, on par with any witticism of Oscar Wilde’s: E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. It is not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.” I think she knew, in her heart, that Manoukhine was a rare hand at assuring desperate patients of a cure, but in the end “there ain’t going to be no cure.”

-         Shall I continue this, my own tea warming exercise? I have more on this day, but a little is perhaps too much. Others content themselves with crossword puzzles. These are crossword lives.

 

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.