Slow (revised)

 

There’s a small village center that is reached by a winding road and a bike path from the house we are staying in. The center hosts a grocery store and a pharmacy. Voila, all the modern cons one needs! So I walked to it today to supply a few of our deficiencies (hamburger buns, tomato sauce, fries) and as I was trucking back with the sack the phrase “I come from Alabama. A fur piece” came into my head and I realized – I really did not do justice to slow, in my little post on slow that I am appending. Bela Tarr is one thing. Faulkner is another. Although both tells stories of protagonists who are prisoners of the rural idiocy.

Faulkner is a man of binaries: black/white, male/female. Not for him gender, or intersectionality. Instead, he has sex, he had race, and he has the cave-in of those binaries – the mulattoization that encroaches on the post-Confederate order and was there in the pre-Confederate order, motherfuckers!

Of sex, he has one exemplary fast woman: Temple Drake. Who emerges from a fast car wrecked by her drunken date to a race away from the rapist she recognized from the first glance: Popeye. She is fast and he is faster.

He also has one exemplary slow woman, a woman whose slowness is a force far exceeding her “sex” – which is how Faulkner and his characters classify her: Lena Grove. Lena is slow of speech, with that deep country Alabama accent, and slow of realization, and firm in her resolution. It is a combination that makes her slowness more than sufficient to match Joe Christmas, whose quickness is so baffled that it becomes his tragedy.

Faulkner sets up the match between slow and fast from the very beginning. This is Lena serenely hunting down the man who is father to her as yet unborn child: “backrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.”

This is slow not just as a tempo on a spectrum, but a tempo that projects its own force, or forcefield, one in which other people, caught unknowing in their own tempos, are however briefly extracted. If I were to find an equivalent in mythology, it would be Sati, Daksa’s daughter, Siva’s wife, to whose story Calasso devotes a part of Ka. This is how she talks to Siva.

“But does devotion bring us release?” insisted Sati. “Devotion helps,” said Siva, less and less interested. “Devotion to you doesn’t satisfy me,” said Sati. “You don’t need it. You are me. That is knowledge. Just three words,” said Siva. “And who are you?” said Sati, suddenly gentle, eying her lover. “I am that,” said Siva. “What is that?” Sati insisted, like an obstinate child. “That which tells us we’re talking…”

It is not that Faulkner had these legends in mind when he has Lena escape from her room by a window precisely eight times, or has Joe Christmas, that mulatto, that breaker of the official racial binary, take on different names as he travels. But slowness and devotion make their claims in, so to speak, the subsoil of the text.

We have come a fur piece.

And to this I attach the slow post. Here.

One of my favorite sequences in one of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satanstango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him walking to the village inn to get more liquor. The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired. Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride, walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

I’ve had my experience with slowness. When I had a minor operation on my leg, I was a limper, a crutch-goer. Once, as an afteraffect of a bad case of pneumonia, I would get out of breath after a pitifully small number of paces. However, I viewed these as mere accidents to my essential gait.

Paris is a city with a considerable population of the elderly, stubbornly clinging to apartments that, as any economist will tell you, tongue hanging out, should be put up on the free market and bought by anonymous tycoons with money laundered through Cyprus. But France, shamelessly, supports its non-use population, and so here we are: on sidewalks behind old men and women going at their own pace to whereever. I stride past them, full of pluck, but somewhere in me I know that this pace is coming for me, and sooner rather than later.

The doctor in Satanstango lives in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are dogs and horses. Not a metropole. The slow life in the metropole puts one, perhaps, in the margins, or in the subculture. But what is a major city without a subculture? In the country, especially the country night in the sticks traversed by our out of breath doctor, there’s a less kind spirit. Lamed horses are shot, cows and bulls are only allowed a certain age before they are trucked away and driven up the chute. And surely some give a slow doctor appraising looks. Yet the whole village has a sense of itself as slow, against a faster world.

This is not, I think, my fate. In my imagination, though, I do dip into it. This vacation, I am experiencing the suspended animation of a quasi-country house. Slowness for a time. But not too much time. One of my favorite sequences in one of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satanstango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him walking to the village inn to get more liquor.  The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired. Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride, walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

I’ve had my experience with slowness. When I had a minor operation on my leg, I was a limper, a crutch-goer. Once, as an afteraffect of a bad case of pneumonia, I would get out of breath after a pitifully small number of paces. However, I viewed these as mere accidents to my essential gait.

Paris is a city with a considerable population of the elderly, stubbornly clinging to apartments that, as any economist will tell you, tongue hanging out, should be put up on the free market and bought by anonymous tycoons with money laundered through Cyprus. But France, shamelessly, supports its non-use population, and so here we are: on sidewalks behind old men and women going at their own pace to whereever. I stride past them, full of pluck, but somewhere in me I know that this pace is coming for me, and sooner rather than later. 

The doctor in Satanstango lives in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are dogs and horses. Not a metropole. The slow life in the metropole puts one, perhaps, in the margins, or in the subculture. But what is a major city without a subculture? In the country, especially the country night in the sticks traversed by our out of breath doctor, there’s a less kind spirit. Lamed horses are shot, cows and bulls are only allowed a certain age before they are trucked away and driven up the chute. And surely some give a slow doctor appraising looks. Yet the whole village has a sense of itself as slow, against a faster world.

This is not, I think, my fate. In my imagination, though, I do dip into it. This vacation, I am experiencing the suspended animation of a quasi-country house. Slowness for a time. But not too much time.

 

When the GOP went all wrong: 1928

 

When Harding and Coolidge ran for President in 1920, under the slogan a “Fair deal”, their campaign printed an appeal to women. It makes interesting reading vis a vis the Republican party today.

For instance, H and C pledged that at no time and in no way would American soldiers go to war unless this was deemed necessary by an official act of the legislature. Interesting language, already cutting corners on the old Constitution. And of course regularly violated by all presidents, R and D, since then.

But the beautiful part must be quoted.

“Republican domestic policy is for the strengthening and protecting of all elements which keep life on a high plane. It has been under Republican administration that this country has been an asylum for the less happy people of Europe, the land of promise and a haven.”

The old pro-immigration Republican party! Now, the promise to extend asylum and a haven to the less happy peoples of anywhere – save I suppose Aryan Germans – would cause instant censor by the Repubs.

The twenties saw a crucial reshuffling of a party that was, up until Hoover, still the party that bragged of being the party of Roosevelt and Lincoln. Hoover, that vile man, was the grandfather of Nixon’s Southern strategy, employing the same to Catholic scare the white Dem South and nominating a well known Southern racist for the Supreme Court, one John Parker. I’ve written about this before for Willett’s Magazine.

The roots of the abandonment of Lincoln and Roosevelt were encoded in Hoover’s greatest achievement in the 1920s – his leadership of the Federal response to the great flood of 1927, when the Mississippi river flooded the Delta. As John Barry’s Rising Tide has shown, the flood had a surprisingly large impact on American politics. It was, for one thing, the largest flood ever experience in the U.S. at its greatest extent, had flooded 27,000 square miles. Much of the flooded land was in the state of Mississippi, where cotton plantations depended on a black labor force that they could pay slave wages to. The white elite was very fearful that black laborers would escape the Delta – and where then would they find such a mistreatable labor force? This fear was a powerful driver of the racial atrocities committed during the flood. Hoover was, in fact, informed of these atrocities from numerous sources.

He not only did nothing, he saw the advantage to being seen as the champion of white over black, here.

This is why, in 1928, the party of Lincoln witnessed, for the first time, a considerable desertion by the black Northern voters – the ones that is who made it around the barriers and could vote.

Then came Judge Parker in Hoover’s nadir year, 1930.  He started out as a politician in North Carolina. A republican politician in the South. It was easier to be Republican in the solid South under Hoover, due to that recent history that every black leader knew.

The racial politics of the expansion of the state into the American economy is a complex story, in which, on the one hand, democratic economic policies came about, and, on the other hand, American racism became even more anchored – as if the White working class could only be benefitted if African-Americans were sacrificed.

It is necessary to go into these details in order to understand, for one thing, why the newspaper pundit story of the Republicans being “small government” is wrong, and, for another thing, why this history crucially forgets racist moments in the development of the modern mixed economy

 

So, why Hoover would elevate a North Carolina obscurity to the post of Supreme Court justice? In Hoover’s mind, the South was now in play, and he was on a charm offensive to get Southern votes for 1932. It hadn’t yet penetrated the political mind that the Depression was for real.

Observers saw what Hoover was doing. The New Republic wrote: “it was apparent as soon as President Hoover announced the appointment of John F. Parker of North Carolina that he had chosen an undistinguished candidate for political reasons…”

And, indeed, the fight against Parker was mounted as a political campaign. As the New York World said, sensibly, in an editorial: … the Senate has every right, if it so chooses, to ask the President to maintain on the Supreme Court bench a balance between liberal and conservative opinion. This is of course true – although in the years high decorum of the neo-liberal period, this idea has been systematically mealy-mouthed away as “playing politics” with the Court.

Two forces militated immediately against Parker. One was the NAACP, which noted that Parker, though a Republican, had run a campaign in North Carolina promising to suppress black voting, because “we recognize that he [the negro] has not reached the stage in his development where he can share in the burdens and responsibilities of government.”  The other, stronger force militating against Parker was the AFL. Parker’s record as a judge was unsympathetic to labor in the extreme.

In 1971, in an essay in the NYT, William Rehnquist, who had been nominated for Nixon for a post on the Court, wrote an essay about nominee rejects for the NYT. It is a nicely written essay, centering on Parker’s nomination, which was, Rehnquist writes, “one of the most remarkable battles over a judicial nominee in the upper chamber.” Rehnquist gives a lot of credit for the defeat of Parker to Senator William Borah, a populist Republican senator for whom I myself have a lot of heart. Idaho, before it became famous as neo-Nazi vacationland, was a radical state, and elected senators who thought accordingly, from Borah to Church. I have to give Rehnquist, a standard economic conservative, a lot of credit for giving Borah credit. Most conservative scholars in this area consider Borah a dirty dog, smearing Parker by associating him with his decision on a case involving “yellow dog contracts” – contracts that impressed an obligation on the employee who signed them not to join a union. Borah, and the Union’s, argument against these contracts may seem like an issue from another era, but – in my opinion – these arguments are very relevant to the contract creep we see today, when corporations force employees to sign non-compete and non-disclosure contracts. Borah ended his indictment of Parker’s position with an excellent summation of the duties incumbent on the Senate when deciding on the President’s nominee: : “In passing upon the fitness of the nominee to that court we are bound to take into consideration everything which goes to make up a great judge – his character and standing as a man, his scholarship, his learning in the law, and his statesmanship.”Nobody at that point doubted Parker’s character and standing. It was his learning in the law – his decisions – that doomed him. Parker’s fall presaged Hoover’s own. Hoover lost every state in the South in 1932, including North Caroline, where Roosevelt beat him 497,566 to 208,344. Somehow, I think that loss must have really bit. As for Judge Parker, he went on to a fairly distinguished career. The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography chronicles the life of a state bigwig, crowned by his appointment as one of the lawyers in the Nuremberg trials. Of course, the irony of a man who believed the “negro” was not yet in a state of development to vote representing the Allied moral case at the Nuremberg trial is something I can only contemplate – hoping that by 1945 he had learned something. In 1957 he became the chairman of Billy Graham’s General Crusade committee. Then he died, and was buried with honors.

Life goes on after you are rejected by the Senate. It is all creme.

 

The solipsist's lament

 

 

“There is only one perfect place for a camera at any given moment”

sez the rapist god come down from Mount Sinai

(the mountain, all state of the art digital VFX

was diced and sliced into a number of tax deductible G & A

and everybody lunched at the Polo Lounge that day).

 

And isn’t this life itself? Your perfect place

From which to zoom out and in on

Say the fly landing on your lover’s butt

As you are doing your best to keep on fuck.

Your lens mastery, your life, your death.

 

Later you will ask yourself

(in that deflationary never-never

that epilogues all the roll-the-credits life lessons):

What if there is more than one camera?

- Karen Chamisso

Virginia Woolf and her great great grandfather

 

Virginia Woolf’s great great great grandfather, James Stephen, was confined to the Kings Bench prison, just another debtor out of luck, in 1769. Because the Stephan family was connected by preternatural and ESP links to English literature, one of his cellmates was Christopher Smart.

When Woolf wrote essays on English authors, she treated them, with good reason, as a sort of family, one related to her own.

Woolf would know this fact about James Stephen because her father, the eminent Victorian Leslie Stephen, wrote about him in his biography of his brother, the famed hanging Judge, James Fitzjames Stephen.

The latter, author of one of the great reactionary English tracts, (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) would certainly have contemplated hanging his own great great grandfather, as James Stephen decided the imprisonment of debtors violated habeas corpus, wrote a brief and argued a case on this same line, and organized prisoners to stage a break out and a demonstration to advertise their plight. Someone finally put up the money to free James Stephen, who tried, then, to get into law – only to run into a wall of solicitors and advocates who derided him for his jail term and his lack of training.

Thus, he was forced to go into law through a back door, becoming the practical source of legal knowledge for a shady soliciter. Here is how Leslie Stephen, from his immense Victorian crag above all seediness, describes what happened:

“He had, however, to undertake such business as did not commend itself to the reputable members of the profession. He had a hard struggle and was playing a losing game. He became associated with unfortunate adventurers prosecuting obscure claims against Government, which, even when admitted, did not repay the costs incurred. He had to frequent taverns in order to meet his clients and took to smoking tobacco and possibly to other indulgences.”

“Other indulgences” – the very fount of fiction!

Leslie and his daughter were descended from the second son of this upstart, another James, who stayed with his father in debtors prison and became the pet of Christopher Smart. James, according to Leslie, had a lovecrossed early life, much aided by his reading of romances, and at one point was about to become an “accountant” in Jamaica, another name for overseer, when his elder brother rescued him and sent him to a university in Aberdeen, where he learned a little latin and a lot of cyphering. Then he went back, as a young man, to love affairs. He was a true Bloomsburian avant la lettre – or, perhaps, a true 18th century English buck. His best friend’s sister was the object of his affection, and his best friend was bent on a young beauty named Maria, who lodged at a certain place. So his friend got James a place in Maria’s lodging house and then went on a voyage. The deal was that James would be able to see his friend’s sister and plead his friend’s case with Maria. Of course, this ended up with James falling for Maria and breaking up with his friend’s sister. And so on, turn of the screw time, until eventually as we know from the stories James marries the right girl.

Virginia must have laughed about her ntuple grandfather; one imagines Lytton Strachey enjoying this story.

James, then, eventually married the right girl and went into the law, first in the colonies of course. The colonizing fate of the Stephen family first manifests with James. But it is liberal colonizing, as attitudes turn in the 19th century. On the one hand, against the barbarian practices of the first wave of colonizing, and on the other hand, against the old 18th century curiosity and sense of equality with "native" knowledge.

Before James sailed for Jamaica, he had given an abolitionist talk; once in Jamaica, he quickly became disgusted with the slave system and refused to have slaves. Those who worked for him he manumitted. And he saw, as a judge, the curse adhering to representing justice in a fundamentally unjust system. For these reasons, he became an associate of Wilberforce, and came into touch with other associates, such as Zachary Macaulay.

In a sense, the circles of the Victorian sages overlapped with the family circles of the reformers and the Colonial office. It was a small world.

Of course, when James Stephen's first wife died, he promptly married into the Wilberforce family.

Interestingly, from an American point of view, Virginia Woolf’s ancestor was almost certainly the progenitor of the War of 1812. During the war against Napoleon, American ships were running supplies to supposedly neutral ports, under cover of which they really supplied the Great Beast. Stephen wrote an influential pamphlet urging the government to enforce the old system of the Seven Years war – seizing supposedly neutral vessels and impressing – that is, kidnapping – American sailors.

The numerous critics of Virginia Woolf have insulted her for many things. Curiously, they have forgotten to put “ancestor helped begin the War of 1812” in her debit column.

I, on the other hand, think that no other writer of the 20th century had a family background of such eminent JUICE.

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Kasebier conquers Kurfurstendamm - a great city novel

 

I’ve finished Gabriele Tergit’s unfortunately named Berlin novel, Kasebier conquers Kurfurstendamm. She looked back on it – after the flight from Berlin to Prague, just before the SS came to her door, and the flight to Palestine, and the flight to London, and the bombs  falling and the destruction that decisively ended the moment of time caught in her novel and that no nostalgia, no tv serial or movie FX, will ever really disinter – and admitted that the title was one reason Hans Fallada or Erich Kästner is who we think about when we think about the Neue Sachlichkeit novel, the novel that is all sharp edges and jumpcuts.

Indeed, Tergit, because she is a woman, is read another way, with the common complaint being that she does not fill her characters with empathetic stuff that we can attach to and root for. This was definitely not her purpose in KCK -her purpose was to write a city novel, a novel that would plug into the various worlds that were changing Berlin and Germany – the media, entertainment, financing and above all construction. The novel is, because of this I think, much more gripping. And what operates like fate, here, what supplies our desire for Nemesis, is the complicated financial structure that underlay a largescale real estate project on Kurfurstendamm, which one knows is going to fail.

It does fail, and the bankruptcies at the end have an incredible symbolic power. It is as if these various rentier households, with their money invested in what turns out to be an incredibly risky bank, were bombed. Though written, of course, a decade before Berlin was bombed, Tergit’s account of these households with their old bourgeois treasures withering under the touch of the drastic mark-down that indifferent buyers and auctioneers place on these goods and chattels in essence rips them out of their histories, just as a bomb rips open a household and spills all its goods into the street..

I was all the more moved in the chapter where Doctor Kohler realizes that she has lost all her savings and must start selling her possessions because earlier this year, when we decided to remodel our apartment, we also put most of our things on the block. It is a near death experience. The sofa you think is worth 500 dollars? Throw it away. The table you have eaten at for years, that fine maplewood table - throw it away. Your son's bed? Throw it away. The markdown is not just economic, it is existential. You put your life, unconsciously, into your things. And bang bang bang, they are gone.

Tergit herself was, in the late twenties, one of Germany’s premier trial reporters – she reported on the various scandalous trials for the  Berliner Tageblatt. In the novel, a similar paper plays a decisive role, bringing together all of the characters. That paper, as well, is taken over and destroyed by some moneybags who install an odious character named Fraechter as the head of the paper. Sound familiar?

I am torn, here, by the urge to quote some of the amazing passages in the book and the urge to simply recommend this rather great novel for your summer time reading. I think I’ll leave it like this.

Could a philosophy exist without definitions? Or vice versa?

Both of these are hard questions. They point to the fact that definition, by itself, has not been a great object in philosophy. Aristotle wrote of categories, Frege wrote of Sinn and Bedeutung, but only lesser lights have devoted themselves to the mysteries of the definition. People like the 19th century mathematician Joseph Diez Gergonne, whose Essai sur la théorie des définitions was published in the Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées (a journal he edited) in 1818.

Gergonne was a savant who absorbed certain of the lessons of the materialists before the revolution and the ideologues of the Napoleonic parenthesis – old clanky names like Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, whose work so influenced Stendhal. He is hailed, by Pierre Rosanvallon, for having written a prescient essay on the foundation of parties in a republic in which elections determine the governors, which Gergonne took as a partly mathematical problem: what divisions (territorial, or class, or whatever) exist in the republican set? In his essay on Political Arithmetic, Roanvallon claims, Gergonne sketched out a system whose legitimacy is enacted in our politics today:

“It is already a a vision of the democracy of parties which is sketched out in Gergonne. He was even the first to perceive the forms. “I only, he wrote in an extraordinarily anticipative fashion, “regularize the system of scissions that was in vogue under the Directorate with the difference that each fraction of the electoral college exercises here an effective right, proportioned to its mass; while at the time of the Directorate, each faction claimed for itself alone the deputies of each department.” In understanding that there is a modern and positive usage of factions and in sustaining that they did not only a deviant of pathological functioning of politics, Gergonne fully drew out the conclusions of his new reflection on politics.”

In other words, Gergonne is much more modern and up to date than the usual OPEDer in the NYT, bemoaning the lack of “consensus” nowadays – not like the old days, when every country clubber who paid his dues was basically of the same opinion!

So: Gergonne, born in 1777, before Stendhal, and outliving Stendhal by about 12 years, has a rather Stendhalian sense of the world, a sense that I would call liberal relativism. This, I think, comes out in his essay on definition. Definition, for Gergonne as a mathematician, was not simply a topic for philosophy, but a topic that allows us to advance, mathematically, in as much as it deals with systems of formalization and can, theoretically, be itself formalized as an operation. Or can it? In particular, at this time Gergonne was rather heretically advancing the idea that Descartes conjunction of algebra and geometry could be improved upon, or even, perhaps, reformulated.

The essay pokes at the different philosophical approaches to the definition, mainly as it proves something about thought itself – either the divinity of thought, its perfect tone, when it defines – as per Plato – or the fall of man written into the imperfection of this definitional capacity – as per Pascal.

Gergonne starts out defining definition on a perfectly classical note, dividing words – the things to be defined – between those that apply to one thing and those that apply to a set of things – Charlemagne being one thing, and Emperor being applicable to many things, or having many instances. This seems to be the predefinitional situation.

But of course, Charlemagne as a name of one thing implies a certain knowledge about Charlemagne – that is, a socius, or culture.

« It would be difficult to decide if individual names are less numerous than collective names. But one can remark that in as much as there is only a small portion of individual names that are used in each locality, common names, on the contrary, are used by everyone. Thus, for example, the names of the streets and places in a town, those of the individual by which it is peopled, maybe be ordinarily familiar to those who have inhabited it for a long time, but are unknown by almost everyone who does not live there, the names man, bird, fish, etc. are equally and ceaselessly in the mothers of everybody.”

The image of a language as a town, or city, in which the street names, knicknames and signifying events are unknown to the traveller is a charming one. This is 1818, and cities are, of course, getting much more interesting – a whole line of writers, from Balzac and Baudelaire to Wordsworth and Dickens are finding this out.

Interestingly, just as the city presented its horror to the writer in figural terms as a crowd – the classic man in a crowd trope that one finds in Hoffmann and Poe – the crowd also gets into the problematic of definition for Gergonne. He bumps into the possibility of the crowd nightmare in terms of this contrast between individual definitions – proper names – and collective definitions – common names – given the need, on the one hand, for terms that are more specific and complex, and on the other hand, for rooting those words in the language of ordinary uses.

All of these ways of using and inventing terms have a dimension in the passions – in “I know not what repulsion” felt in the presence of new terms. Of course, academia is a veritable factory for producing new terms – and for expressing repulsion about new terms, and a suspicion that underneath the new term there is vacancy or worse.

What interests me in Gergonne most particularly is the mention of what I’d call the Funes problem: the problem we solve, every day, by having categories and species to work with. But what if, on a deeper level, we get rid of these in some grand nominalist purge?

« Thus, even though individual names are extremely numerous, they are, in relation to each of us, as though they were a small quality, seeing that each of us, for our own use, need only a limited number. And this is how, in language, one uses incomparably more common nouns than proper one, although it could have been the case that the latter were more numerous than the former. However the case might be, one senses that there will always exist an uncountable number of objects with without proper names; and that it is as difficult to name everything as it is to know everything. And that one would be as little inclined to make them names than as might be to a real advantage. Thus, while the stars in the sky, at least those we perceive, have all received names, it is very probable that the trees in our forests and the animals that inhabit them will never be honoured with a parallel distinction.

Ah, the vertigo of the countless – or to trespass a bit on a mathematically exact term, the infinite – is always in our lives, an unconscious fear that haunts our personal cosmologies, every one of us. It is out of this that, in a stroke of genius, Borges created Funes the memorious.

‘With a glance, we perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, though, perceives all the shoots, clusters and grapes that compose a trellis. He know all the forms of the austral clouds on the dawn of April 30 1882 and could compare them to the memory of the marbling design of the page of a book he had seen one time and the lines in the foam raised by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of Quebracho. These memories were not simple; each visual image was tied to muscular and thermal sensations, etc.”

With names we begin the arduous process of simplifying the world, and making it our magi, our image. Science builds on the magic, but don’t think it provides any foundation. Because that is not the work of science, after all.

I have to use words when I talk to you.

All reactions:

2Chris Hudson and Fred Wise

The statue population

 

Besides the insanity of the reaction to a feast of Bacchus featured in the Olympic opening, it has made me think of how a city educates you.

In American cities, the urbanscape educates you in the beloved symbols of fast food, in soaring buildings, and in statuary that is generally clothed, generally figurative, and generally about some general or president.

Even the statue of liberty is heavily draped.

If you grow up in an Anglosphere city, these things are normal. If you grow up in Paris, or Montpellier, or Genua, or Rome, these things aren’t. In these cities, your parents stroll you in the baby carriage, when you are a baby, amidst a wilderness of buttocks, breasts, and penises. The statue with all its human parts showing is part of the landscape. This is one of the enduring effects of the Renaissance “rediscovery” of paganism.

However, even the fact that there is a goodly proportion of bronze and marble statues showing off their privates would not make Continental culture that much different, if the urbanscape in Paris, Rome, Montpellier etc. was not so heavily oriented towards mass transit and walking. New York is, in this respect, a very European city. In most American cities, however, the bus using population is mostly working class. If you are driving your SUV, or Tesla, or pickup truck from your home in Alpharetta to your law office on Peachtree in downtown Atlanta, you are probably not going to be looking out of the window at any sculpture on the way. In fact, in the Atlanta metro area, the common popular experience of sculpture is the side of Stone Mountain, depicting a buncha slaveowners riding horsies.

Perhaps the most be-statued city in the United States is Washington D.C. I can’t imagine living in D.C. and not having some statue friends. Yet, scan the Wiki page of D.C. outdoor sculpture and you will find that there is not an undressed mook among the whole lot. Well, save for some of them in the Hirschhorn statue garden.

Here, by contrast, is a page devoted to the “male appendages” of Paris statues. Asking the perennial question, why are they so small? Which doesn’t puzzle me, since I know, as a man, what it would mean to stand out in my altogether on a cold day in a Paris park.

By these standards, the Bacchanal at the Olympic opening was most notable for its modesty. From Henry V to the bals musettes of Jazz Age Paris, there was mucho display of the human body. Although in the late sixties and early seventies there was a fad for prancing around nude on stage, that – shall I use the old wanker’s word, Rabelaisian? – that carnival culture has faded.

It is an interesting contrast with the deluge of porno in which we live, globally. Which is centered in the United States. I’m not sure of the cultural meaning, of what to make of this stark divide.