Intersigne: at the crossroads of magic and positivism

 

In a conference on his friend, Villiers de l’isle-Adam, Mallarme speaks of “an exceptional story at the extremity of which is a tomb.” This story, for Mallarme, is typical both in its subject and in the “outsider” place of its author: it is “an enlargement of the Shadow”. The story is called L’intersigne.
The Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz, in La Légende de la Mort (1893), used a similar reference to the Shadow to define intersignes: Comme l’ombre projetée en avant de ce qui doit arrive – “as a shadow projected in front of what must arrive”. Intersignes, in Breton popular culture, are coincidences or strange events that advertised a coming death. “Intersignes announce death. But the person to whom the intersigne is manifested is rarely the person threatened by death.” The person to whom the intersigne is manifested possesses a gift, but not one that can be obtained by teaching. You must have the “gift of seeing”. “Within this privileged category, those who are ranked first are those “who have passed through holy ground and have come out of it before being baptised.” For instance, a baby who is carried over the ground of a cemetery before being baptised will have the gift of an expanded sight. “Those who deny intersignes receive as many as those who have the gift. They deny them uniquely because they don’t know how to see nor understand them; and they don’t want to understand, at all, nor see anything of the other life.”

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam wrote his story, Intersigne, in 1867. It was eventually included in the collection, Cruel Stories, in 1883, with some editorial changes. Villiers was a native Breton, and evidently had received his knowledge of the phenomenon orally.

It is a “weird” tale of  Xavier de la V…,  who feels suddenly compelled to visit his friend in Brittany, l’abbe Maucombe, who lives in a remote parish of Saint-Maur. Xavier de la V., as we later learn, has every reason to stay in Paris, since he is in the midst of an important law suit. But he feels physically compelled to visit Maucombe, who he has not seen for years. He uses the excuse of hunting. Maucombe and his housekeeper welcome V., who finds himself afflicted with an almost epileptic case of vision – he sees the house, his room, even his friend, for brief moments, in a state of extreme estrangement.
« Is this really the house that I saw just a moment ago ? What age denounces to me, now, the long fissures between pale leaves ?  - this building had a strange air - the tiles illuminated by the rays of the agony of the evening burned with an intense light - the hospitable portal invited me with its three steps; but, in concentrating my attention on these grey stones, I saw that some had been polished, and that traces of letters chiselled in them still remained, and I saw that they came from the neighboring cemetery – whose black crosses appeared to me on one side, about a hundred steps away. And the house seemed changed to the point of giving me the creeps, while the lugubrious echoes of the hammer-knocker, that I let fall, echoed, in my trance, in the interior of this place like the vibrations of a funeral bell. “
Part of the genius of this story is the relation between text and title, Intersigne, a strange word to the reader. It is never explained, never even mentioned in the text. It rides the text, rather, as a sort of fate or curse. The title is felt in the story that V. tells, but is never literally within that story. Which, in short, is that V. has been, in effect, summoned to L’abbe Maucombe’s abode in order to see these things, in these moments; and to have a dream, or vision, of a priest handing him a coat. The dream is realized – L’abbe Maucombe accompanies V., who the day after his arrival wants to flee the house (it is here that we learn that he is in the midst of an important lawsuit), out to the road leading him back to the nearest village, where V. has left his coat – and,due to the rain, lends him his, L’abbe Maucombe’s, own coat. A coat that, as V. learns at the end, that accompanied the priest on his journey to the holy land and “touched the Tomb.”
He learns at the end, too, of course, from a letter, that L’abbe Maucombe died two days after his visit, from a cold caught in the rain of the day he accompanied V. to the road. V. was, in effect, not only the see-er of the death, but its proximate cause.

2.

The term intersigne drifts through a certain literature of folklore and parapsychology, and ends up in some interesting places. The philologist and scholar Louis Massignon, who started out as a Christian mystic and ended as an Islamic one, uses it in a few places in his works to designate a mystically charged coincidence. In Massignon’s work, the intersigne is not just an event of some kind prefiguring a death – it is a name for all significant coincidences – correlation without seeming cause. The notion of cause is not, of course, abandoned – rather the causes aren’t seen, because the witnesses lack the gift of seeing. This gives the mystic a neatly outlined historical place – the mystic can sense in the coincidences that present themselves in symbolic circumstances the overall causes – either the work of God, or the work of some transcendental pattern.

Things get interesting, to me, when the intersigne is taken up as a methodological prompt by Roberto Calasso in his great, reactionary book, the Ruin of Kasch. This is a historical “fiction” that adopts the intersigne as the structure underlying the message, which is a very 1980s, end of the Cold War message: our evils stem from the French revolution. It is a de Maistre hopscotch from the guillotining of Marie Antoinette to the Cambodian genocide of Pol Pot.

Of course, Calasso can’t be entirely reduced to the anti-modern paradigm. Like de Maistre, he is full of paradoxes and special information – he is a great knower of the Upanishads and ancient Greek texts, as well as pockets of European, and especially French, history. Like Carlo Ginzberg, he is fascinated by the savage within the European persona. Almost always when the term “the West” is employed, it refers not to the vast mass of urban and rural peasants and their beliefs, but a very minority group of power brokers, adventurers, scholars and writers. This is a highly distorted picture of the many cultures within Eurasia, from Danish sheepherders to Sicilian sulfur miners. What is said about the Nahautl – for instance, the belief that humans can transform into animals – could be said for respectable bourgeois living in Normandy in the 17th century.

In this sense, the fall of the ancien regime was a colonialist project, with the colonized now being the peasant, the shepherd, the tinker and the tailor, ruthlessly enrolled in rationalism’s project. Or Capital’s – although Calasso takes a very reactionary view of Marx.

I love the passage where Calasso shows his hand, embracing a methodology that is reminiscent of Benjamin’s methodology in the passages, through Adorno’s eyes: at the crossroads of magic and positivism.

“A gnostic history, which we lack, is largely made up of “intersignes” (as Massingon called them), unusual warnings, coincidences (as historians call them, to avoid them), erratic forms, buried relics, physiognomic marks, constellations latent in the sky of thought.”

A gnostic history, a jigsaw puzzle, a frolic of dialectical materialism.

The pessimists: on Antoine Compagnon's Les Anti-modernes

 In Antoine Compagnon’s marvelous and encyclopedic Les Antimodernes (which rustles with excellent quotations – among its other virtues. For reasons I cannot fathom, it has not been translated into English. Some university press better get on the stick!), he attempts to construct an anatomy of reaction. To this end, he posits a number of figures, constellation-creating themes. One is counter-revolution, one is counter-Enlightenment. And then: :”The third figure of antimodernity, which is a moral figure after the historical and philosophical ones, is pessimism, under whatever name one wants to give it: despair, melancholy, mourning, spleen or ‘mal de siècle.’”

I know this devil well – who, living as I have over the decades from the 1960s to now, has not felt the urgent touch of spleen. Yet constitutionally, I am, as ever, a spoiled child. I rarely wake up feeling sad, bad, or in mourning – I usually wake up with a very childish sense that this is gonna be a good day.

Compagnon’s book is subtitled, rather surprisingly, From Joseph de Maistre to Roland Barthes, with the inclusion of Barthes being a little controversial nuance, much noticed in the reviews in France. Thus, it is a historical text, an intellectual history, that deals with the anti-modern as a post- revolutionary phenomenon. His touchstone in the book is Chateaubriand, from whose work he has mined an endless array of quotations – this is a book overflowing with apt and memorable quotations, in this respect reminding me of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s eccentric book about Edmund Burke, The Great Melody. There is a reason for this: the reactionary tends towards the maxim, the conclusion converged upon by the wise. Judgement is the rhetorical tool of reaction par excellence. American liberalism has its credo in the often heard phrase: don't be judgemental. And it is no use telling the liberal that this phrase is itself judgemental, and not in a good way: it dismisses the judgemental without understanding or in any way measuring its considerable sentimental force. If I had a car and thus was in the market for a bumpersticker, I would buy one that says: Apophansis will get ya if you don't watch out! Which might say everything about why I lack bot a car and a bumper sticker. Hmm.

Compagnon uncovers pessimism as the god or afternoon demon at the intersection between the psychological and the “historical”. Here, character forms around the sense of the modern, or contemporary – which is condemned within the present as a decline. This sense of decline is felt both by the reactionary – which measures the decline from the Revolution – and the leftist – who measures the decline in terms of the counter-revolution that followed the Revolution. The persona of the latter was drawn by Flaubert in L’education sentimentale, embodied in the math teacher, Sénécal. For the leftist, the possibilities “opened” by the Revolution, the possibility of liberation, has been foreclosed by the forces of reaction, which have taken hostage the contemporary moment. The leftist is a pessimist by the logic of optimism. Nathaniel Mackay coined the wonderful phrase, oppositional nostalgia, for the dilemma of progressive pessimism. Whereas the anti-modern has to deal with a sense that the entire world, the entire order, has been either irreversibly perverted or lost. The anti-modern lays claim to nostalgia as its own intellectual property. But, as Compagnon points out, the reactionary is implicated in a dialectic that continually throws him into the company of his enemies – for didn’t Rousseau, the arch-devil, begin with a nostalgia for the savage, who is born “without chains”? Whereas the reactionary’s nostalgia is a precisely for chains – the chains of tradition, the chains that will bind those who are, in the reactionaries eyes, born for chains. The great mass of people.

The term “pessimism” was not “au courant” during Baudelaire’s time: “We find, only two occurrences of the term pessimism and tow of pessimiste in the Tresor de la langue francaise between 1800 and 1850, but 129 of pessimism and 47 of pessimist between 1851 and 1900, then the word rapidly vanishes.”
Compagnon points out that Schopenauer was in vogue in Paris during the fin de siècle; the same could be said of Vienna, a city which is not within the geography of Compagnon’s book. Schopenhauer’s literary influence extends to the kind of philosophy of culture that is not practiced by academic philosophers. It is the province of the great reactionary outlaws: Nietzsche, Weininger, and Spengler. Pessimism, for all of them, was a personal escape hatch from history – allowing them to develop their own myths of history.
Pessimism, even if it “rapidly vanished” after 1900, did kill optimism as an intellectually respectable position. In a dialectical pirouette that is amusing, optimism is now a forced gesture of that most reactionary set, the Steven Pinker/”race realist” crowd, which uses it as a club to enforce a program of Western (white male) supremacy. It’s an essentially loveless optimism.
Love is, I think, the great absent in the anti-modern tradition Compagnon outlines. Love is a dangerous force. To anyone raised, as I was, on the Bible School gospels, the oddest thing about the reactionary embrace of Christianity is that it takes the heart out of it. There is no love here. There are only absolute reasons to condemn. Hell, for the reactionary Christian, is a very rich concept; heaven, on the other hand, is simply a reward, a sort of retirement package for the successful moral entrepreneur. Of the anti-modernes that Compagnon deals with, only Baudelaire, I think, had any notion of love, and thus of heaven – even if it was a cracked love, a love, ultimately, of his mother, the mother stolen from him by his stepfather. It was love like wormwood, but the image of love remained with him, made him a poet of a glimpsed, a transient, utopia:
…. Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité ?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici ! trop tard ! jamais peut-être !
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais !

Poem by Karen Chamisso

 

 

In the wisecracker's Bible

sez the man with the plan

no sucker gets an even break.

Shall we “ripen our regard” and see

Judas hanging from a tree?

The “pain of the body is but the body of pain.”

Loss, and loss again

is coin's knowledge, and what I have to go on.

The shiver of the second hand

advancing Alice to the fat throne

and Little Boy Blue

to the enormous anonymity of the chopper

has shadowed my magnus opus:

written in invisible ink,

call it: the art of ending.

Judas should have read the fine print.

Poor little greenie.

Karen Chamisso

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.