A Karen Chamisso Poem

 Thoughts at the Denfort-Rochereau Metro Stop

The lion prowls in marble

with no lion tamer props

no stool no whip

to lend a civilizing touch

We like our marble lion rampant

but we much prefer

a cage to mediate

our flesh and jaw encounters

of the first kind.

Here the whip is seen

- so why do we so breathlessly wish for

The tumbled stool, the sawdust bloodied?

The meatmarkets I have seen

Birdsong pulled a labyrinth from my ear.

The birds have their nests, the foxes their holes

who will live with me

in the maze?

Wind and unwind, turn and turn back.

The heroes were netted and dispatched.

I stepped on a crack and a dynasty died.

Their ghosts follow me to this address.

A centerfold is at the center of it all.

O land of cockayne, free drinks and pussy!

To every sailor and peasant, tonight:

Tenderloin, tenderloin, the sirens sing.

‘The gates and yssues of this town are kept with watch and wards.”

Ariadne’s blues echo in the common pissoir.

My tears, my tears flow riverwards.

Jack comes to my bed to bone ce soir.

-Karen Chamisso

The News from France

 I've written this too often to write it freshly, but here it is: Macron came into office as a sort of idol of the French media and establishment - he was the perfect neoliberal. Neoliberalism is not simply an economic phenomenon - it is a cultural one. It is a synthesis between the gains of the civil rights era and the dissolution of the institutions of the social democratic era. That synthesis operates to repress class struggle and promote civil rights theater - which is how some billionaire woman can become an exemplar of "feminism", while her janitor can become an exemplar of "reaction".

In France, Macron did the most cute neoliberal thing by lowering the tax paid by the wealthy while at the same time denouncing "colonialism". The former was an actual cost, while the later was theater all the way. And so we were off!

The Left, I thought, two years ago, was actually going to get off its ass. Unfortunately, no. The Left has its own theatrical aspect, and a memory of Mitterand that has led to the politics of the big chief - which is, alas, Melanchon. A man who, unfortunately, failed to make the grade and has since acted as a great impasse to the left actually doing something. Marching in the street and getting beat by cops is supposed to... lead to something. But it didn't. This is not the thirties or the fifties, but NUPES has very much acted as a sort of responder to Macron, and not a very effective one. Although the Left has tried to represent low income communities and the rights of immigrants, it has failed in its major task - to lead the return of the repressed, i.e. class, and to operationalize class struggle. The struggle over immigration is imminently class struggle - for how much outcry is there when the immigrant is rich? It is pretty simple to see that the game is what it has always been - squeeze the worker. Workers can see that with their own eyes. The Left has never convinced the people that they can see what the workers can see - and they have not succeeded in making the rotten system in which worker and immigrant are posed against each other the real issue.

They are not going to do that in the next month. Miracles don't happen.

So it looks like France is going to have a coalition gov, with Bardella as our prime minister, Macron as president.

You drift, you hit the rocks, you sink.

All reaction

the indefinitely postponed real

In the history of the professionalization of philosophy in the Anglo-sphere since the beginning of the Cold War, one notices that there are periodic crises of realism, in which its enemies are warded off in one way or another. In the division of intellectual labor that organizes the universities, the philosophers have taken up the vocation of defending the real. Still, there is the problem of what the real is and how it can be attacked in the first place. On the one hand, there is the inclination to make the real synonymous with what there is – the universe, say. And yet, few realists would say, I think, that the real began with the big bang. If the real is the universe, why not dispense with the term real as a superfluous and confusing lable? Yet one feels that the realists are uncomfortable thinking of the real as having a beginning or end, or having dark matter in it, or black holes. These things are real, but they aren’t in the real. Then there is the tendency to make the real the objective, as opposed to the subjective – thus a black hole is real and a thought is not. But again, this seems an oddly bent way to talk – how could a thought not be real? Is there a domain of irreality? And can I have a ticket to it, please? One way – cause I’m not coming back.

No doubt, the real – reality – is an odd term.

There is an excellent riff on the philosophical use of the real in Engel’s small book on Feuerbach. Engel’s suffers from the self-inflicted wound of never quite being real himself – his commentators will forever compare him to Marx, and take Engel’s writings to be either a translation or a distortion of Marx. This is, however, what Engels wanted. Inevitably, if one member of a dyad is to play the role of the sage, the other must be the fool. If one is the knight, the other is Sancho Panza. If one is Bruno, the other must be Bruno’s ass. And, indeed, Engels is the sensual man compared to the ever harassed Marx. Marx, at one point in his desperate attempt to change the world and not simply understand it, applied for and was refused a humble job as a railroad station accountant; Engels, on the other hand, was apparently a successful manager of a branch of his family’s business in Manchester. It was Engels who turned Marx on to the political economy, not vice versa. It is as if Sancho Panza loaned the romances of chivalry to Don Quixote. Otherwise, Engels seemed to see himself in this dyad.

Engels, who attended lectures at the University of Berlin as a soldier but never took a degree as a student, never imbibed that obsessive stylistic tic of Marx’s that Benjamin (in a different context) calls la culte de la blague. Often, in Marx’s writing, when the reader feels the roof being lifted off the house, we are in the presence of that tremendous, even prophetic sarcasm that makes Marx so pre-eminently a writer, a man of textual strategies. Engels likes a little Hegelian word play as much as the other guy, but when he tells a joke he is sure to label it a joke – not for him Marx’s habit of throwing all his genius into a joke, so that it becomes Satanically, sublimely not funny.

Engels begins his book on Feuerbach by discussing a well known maxim of Hegel’s: all that is real, is rational, and all that is rational, is real. He notes that his has been seen as Hegel’s blessing of Prussian despotism. But Engel’s disagrees. Those who quickly rush to make Hegel a bootlicker of the Prussian court forget that for Hegel, the real is the necessary. It is not an “… arbitrary regime measure – Hegel himself adduces a certain ‘tax adjustment’ that counts, without anything further, as real. But what is real shows itself in the last instance also as rational.

As well, what is necessary, shows itself as rational in the last instance; which, applied to the Prussian state at that time, means, according to the Hegelian proposition, only: this state is rational, that is, corresponds to reason, only in so far as it is necessary; and if it appears terrible to us, and yet, in spite of its badness, continues to exist, the badness of the government finds its justification and explanation in the badness of its subjects [Untertanen]. The Prussian of that time had the government they deserved.

Now, reality – according to Hegel – is not an attribute that a given social or political arrangement retains under all circumstances and times. On the contrary. The Roman republic was real, but so was the Roman empire that crushed it. The French monarchy of 1789 had become so unreal, that is, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed through the great Revolution, that Hegel always spoke of with the highest enthusiasm. Here, the Monarchy was the unreal, the revolution the real. And so it goes that in the course of development, all that was earlier real loses its necessity, its right to existence, its rationality; a new, lively reality steps into the place of the dying real – peacefully, when the old state of affairs is rational enough, without striving to be carried off by death, and violently, when it holds out against this necessity. And so the Hegelian proposition is inverted through Hegelian dialectic into its opposite: everything which is real in the domain of human history will become unreasonable with time, and thus is already according to its pre-determination irrational, is qualified by the irrational from then on; and everything, which is rational in the heads of men, is predetermined, to be real, may it contradict existing reality in ever so many ways. The proposition of the rationality of all the real is dissolved according to the rules of Hegel’s conceptual method into its other; the value of everything that exists is the fact that it dies. [Alles was besteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht]"

I interpret this wonderfully uplifting, almost surrealist credo in terms of the sense of reality. And any newspaper reader of this century in the U.S. must have noticed the loss of this sense of reality in the Americanized part of the world. This loss comes through in two ways: a deep failure of the mechanisms of social cause and effect, and a profusion of symbols that become issues.

Pick any recent events, from immigration to Middle Eastern policy to the persistence of Trump to the age of Biden – one one feels the deep mechanism, the machine, has jumped the track. The real is a climate change that we are simply watching and participating in. The real is plutocracy, with all its trimmings: an utterly corrupt judiciary, a militarized police force, jails for the poor piker who is found with some crack and fines for the evil millionaire who has just invested in some offshore fund that coshares money with fentanyl mafiosos. As politics takes out of our reach the happiness of all, it supplants it with symbols that make for more and more interior rage and despair. Symbols define the politically possible, which nobody even pretends is a response to or solution for the politically impossible, that is, real social problems. These are the lineaments of dysfunction. They go deep. They sap the real. The earthquake is coming. How long will it tarry?

The zig zag life of the fabulous Maryse Choisy

 

There are some people who live lives of such zigs and zags that one feels, summing them up, that they could not have been real. These ziggers and zaggers seem to come out in the great decades – for instance, the 20s and the 60s of the twentieth century. I don’t really have to point out, do I, that the twenty first century still hasn’t had a great decade?

There are still many many undiscovered lives, undiscovered zig-zags, that ran through the 1920s. Among them, the fabulous Maryse Choisy.

She is forgotten now, for the most part. In the U.S., as far as I can tell, only her reportage on life in the brothels (she’d taken a job as a manager in a famous maison close, I believe the Sphinx), A month with the girls, has been translated. Translated in 1960. The book came out in 1929 came out. But this is a bullet point of her life up to then:

- become one of the first women at Oxford to take away a degree in Sanskrit

-moved to India and taught Sanskrit

- moved to Vienna to become a psychoanalyst with Freud. Disagreed with Freud

-returned to France and became a lion tamer

- became a reporter – in the great reporter tradition. After reporting on brothels, she went to Mount Athos and reported on monks. Closed societies, if you will.

This is quite the life. She went on to become a novelist, report regularly on politics and finance, get a degree in psychoanalysis in the United States, create the psychoanalytic journal Psyche,  fall under the influence of Teilhard de Chardin, become a guru, wrote about feminism in the 1970s and voyaged to Tibet for Le Monde to write a series of article about the Dalai Llama.

I’m especially impressed with the part where, arguing with Freud, she returned to France and took some circus training to become a lion tamer. Take that, Wilhelm Reich! She wrote an account of lion taming for Gringoire (this was before Gringoire became the infamous anti-semitic porn sheet). 4 September 1931 was a coup issue for the Gringoire. A story by Marcel Ayme. A column by G. de Pawlowski, Gaston Pawlowski, known to scifi buffs for his Voyage to the Land of the Fourth Dimension. And Choisy’s memoire of working in a “foire menagerie” – a traveling circus zoo.

This is how she begins (oh autofictional muses, gather round!):

“I appeared with my legs naked, a bit of cocotterie, an evening dress that was very low cut, in crepe Georgette. The least paw sweep would be noticeable on my skin. My robe was a bit long. Frank Henry claimed that I needed a train, that would go well with the supple grace of the panthers. Me, I am of the short skirt generation. But as long as, in closing the door behind me, I didn’t get it caught in anything. As long as, in dodging a panther’s leap, my feet didn’t get entangled in the train, and my nose in the sand. Panthers are like men: they’ll fall on you when you are down.  As long as… I advanced three steps. Took six steps backwards. Panther on my right. Stool on my left. “

This is the voice of a woman who is only scared of what she chooses to be scared of. That is the thing with zigzagging – you get tired, but you find that fear is not something that need surprise you – you can surprise it. Scare yourself.

The zig zag life is opposed, in its very essence, to the credentialed life. Later, when Choisy chose to become a psychoanalyst, and even found one of the big psychoanalytic journals, she had an advantage: she’d been breathed on by the big cats.

Oh, as a ps - I found a documentary has been made of Un mois avec des filles. HereHere.

 

 

 

The rain in Paris

 

I as a reader in this twenty first century am bonded to the text by the lesser boredom of the text in contrast with the greater boredom outside the text of other things to read or even, horrors, to do. It is in the balance of boredoms that this little superannuated smartass, this me, shares with the Zeitgeist of other readers of newspapers and magazines and social media and even sometimes print in what used to be called, for the yucks, the meat-osphere. Meat, humans that is, on one side, silicon on the other.

Ennui was once the kind of thing we find in the great Mallarme line, “La chair est triste, hélas ! et j'ai lu tous les livres.”  

But some say the age of all the books has passed. I don't believe it. But I do believe that ennui results from something like a reading or looking too long. The optical equipment sifts through the same content, or content that begins to seem the same, from the office job to the commute, from the same old dinner to the same old tv series. Ennui, in Paris this spring, was the weather. I call it spring because that is the official title of this time between March and June, but a winterish must never really left Paris for the first half of the year. The number of days it rained was an amazing 3,000,000, 000 – or maybe that is just what it seemed like. When I finally cast off my winter coat, about three weeks ago, I quickly had to rethink my decision.

A. tells me that they predict a heat wave soon. So from winter mush we will be tipped into New Delhi hell.

The great Paris poem about rain is Baudelaire’s fourth Spleen poem, which begins:

« Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,
Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,
Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,
S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes. »

It occurred to me that this poem must reflect a rainy season in Paris, some time in the 1850s when it was written. I have not found evidence for the date of the composition, so I cannot connect it, exactly, in all of its Poe funk, with something like our non-spring. However, it does seem like 1852 stands out as a rainy year. It was the year that a man named Vener, who wrote little articles for Le Corsair, the paper Baudelaire contributed to when it was called Le Corsair By

-Satan in 1847. It was edited, then, by a man named LePoitevan, who wanted to fill it with 40 to 60 line little essayettes. He called them vade retor.

By 1852, much ink and blood had gone under the bridge, including a revolution and a coup d’etat which gave France another Napoleon for “emperor”. The Corsaire was still published, and they still favored the vade retor, or what would be called the chronicle. Among their house writers was a hardworking man named Vener.  On June 9, 1852, his little piece was entitled: It rains. It is a clever bit of handwork, and it makes me think of Baudelaire – Benjamin was right to see Baudelaire as both a poet and an atmosphere, a general sensibility among writers. He begins by comparing different types of rain to different types of government: “ – when water falss with that monotone regularity that tells us that the whole sky is taken; it is like a bad government; one sadly awaits, with pain, without hope, for a near end; it seems like it will continue forever.”

Vener makes the rain the subject of the article that is not the article he should be writing – he should be writing “reflections on the budget, on Belgium, on the Empire, on the new state of France; impossible! The rain is against it.

It imprisons my will, it paralyzes my spirit, it conquers me by a negative force, it annihilates me; it might be said that its secret power washes away ideas, words, color, images!”

I rather agree. The rain, this non-season, has kept me inside our apartment. I lie on the couch. I sit at the table. I type to no avail, I read to no avail, I age to no avail.

All of this non-availing, though, is broken by one pleasant day, one spring day, one glimpse of sunlight on the plants on the terrace, one breath of fresh breeze running its fingers over the leafery in the pots. And that spring day is today!

I could be king of infinite space, today.

Absolutely: the novel

 

Certain words are novels – and not just novels, but state of the nation novels, U.S.A. novels.

Absolutely, for instance. Exciting or excited.

Actually.

 

Absolutely that became fixed as a certain sound in my ear years ago. I was living in Santa Fe and, for a time, writing lyrics for a band. The singer would say, absolutely, a lot. The singer was a sweet woman, who couldn’t hold a tune – you could glue it to her tongue and she would still mess it up.

So we would go through the song and she would be asked if she heard it, and she would say: “absolutely”.

 

Like so much in the U.S.A, the word came out of some combo of tv, movies, music and coolhunting. And it ended up in business school.

 

One could probably track it through trendy novels. It begins as a sort of Britishy complement – in phrases like, say, absolutely stunning. It occurs in Less than Zero – a marker of the eighties if there ever was one – both as an affirmative and a complement. But only once as the former. Checking into seventies zeitgeist novels – In Alison Lurie, it occurs in the form of “absolutely sure” or “absolutely necessary” – holding on as a modifier, and not pushing aside the “sure” to star by itself.

 

Ann Beattie, whose signature method as a short story writer and novelist in the seventies was to keep as close as possible to the oral tics of the time, used absolutely the way Alice Lurie did. She only introduced absolutely, as a single word, after the eighties.

 

These are not definitive proofs of the origin of the bogus absolutely, but I’d like to coordinate its mission creep with the “morning in America” that was the Reagan era – an era in which the bogus made a comeback, from Wall Street to the shores of Nicaragua.

Of course, this mutation is not unrelated to other mutations abroad in the land – for instance, the systematic skinning of the working class, from their place in the popular arts to the dignity to their paychecks. “Sure”, the older Americanism,  was both the extended hand and a word to be spoken out of the side of the mouth by private dicks and mobsters. Sure was off the farm – as was the population, draining into Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and Cleveland, making steel in Youngstown and Pittsburg, waging labor war in Flint. Sure was familiar with numbers runners and the overflowing toilets in neighborhood taverns on Friday night. Sure had all beef hotdogs in its teeth and the ball game on the radio. Sure was Rabbit, especially when yes means no, as in “sure sure.” A doubling that allows Rabbit to hop away from his responsibilities in Rabbit Run.

 

Absolutely is Rabbit in his desuetude, Rabbit in Florida, Rabbit self-pitying in the strip club. Absolutely is the fated, that is, planned erosion of the manufacturing sector. Absolutely is the relentless rise of the service sector. Absolutely is waitresses setting out jauntily to make money while going to college and ending up three jobbing it to make payments on the college loan.  Absolutely is the cool music played at Starbucks. Absolutely is emotional labor, while emotional surplus value is hauled off to be plasticized in the cultural industries. But absolutely never reaches into the now dominent upper reaches, who invaded every crannie of the popular arts in the U.S.A. and made it a mirror of their own vanity. Absolutely is said to them. They never say it back. Instead, they say things like, I’ll have the Chilean sea bass.

 

I sure hate what absolutely did to the States.