The ethnostate on the downward path: Israel

 The Netanyahu government seems determined to make Israel a major power or destroy it. It is a crazy ambition. And a logical one. Every ethnostate goes irredentist - following an almost Freudian arc - where the Id goes, the ego follows. In this case, the ID is majorly armed, and doesn't hesitate to drop a two thousand pound bomb on the capital of a neighboring state. The ethnostate is best tamed internally, by the development of a theoretically egalitarian, non-ethnic or religious constitution. This has not happened in Israel. Will it? this is where the West's abetting of Israel has damaged not only thousands of murdered Gazans, not only hundred of murdered Lebanese, but, as well, Israel's future chances of survival. Israel had its moment of peace with its neighbors, and could have used that moment to seriously return to the 1967 borders that were internationally recognized - but it has used it, instead, to abet a class of furious nationalists, who think nothing of stealing and killing Palestinians due to a mystical "right". Meanwhile, the Israeli right's alliance with evangelicals is paying off, for the latter. This is the show they've paid for: the Armaggedon of the conversion of the Jews.

Maybe making your allies the people who want to fundamentally eliminate you is not such a great idea.

Is laughter allowed in utopia?

 

I’m a sentimental mook. When a writer dies, I often read something of theirs as a form of commemoration – a remembering together with the dead person, whose memory is, as far as we known, no more. A remembering together with those who have read this person, the invisible community of writer and reader.
So I thought: time to read Archaeologies of the Future. The book that is generally considered a turning point in … in the general consideration, the career, of Fredric Jameson as writer and critic. The turn to science fiction.
Jameson’s approach is through the utopian. My approach to science fiction is through the more marginal science fiction texts, like Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Benjamin Labatut’s When we cease to Understand the World and The Maniac. In Calvino’s case, the Utopian is derived, I think from Nietzsche – specifically, the Nietzsche of The Gay Science, the first book of which opens with the harshest summary of the “truth” of the science of man – that the individual is nothing, the species all – which is a reprise of a certain nineteenth century interpretation of Darwin – and then runs with that dictum like it was a Marx brothers routine. Nietzsche deals with a dialectic that every person must, once in their lives, stumble upon: the amazing difference between one’s non-importance, one’s absolute nullity in the universe, and one’s importance to one thing in that universe: oneself. Dialectic, or comedy routine? This is Nietzsche standup in that first mini-essay, which asks whether there is a future for laughter, a utopian future for laughter, even, against the utopian impulse. Laughter, here, is not an argument – it is a tabooed event, that which, in the absolute, as it is conceived by the moralist, cannot be allowed to have a future, or even a present:
“That drive, which rules in the most superior and most common people alike, the drive of preserving the species, breaks out from time to time as reason and the passion of the mind; it then  goes about in a glorious entourage of reasons  will, with every violence, make us forget that it is fundamentally drive, instinct, foolishness, groundlessness. Life must be loved, then! Man must care for his neightbor, then. And we will call them musts and thens, even in the future! Thereby that which is necessary and forever and happens by itself, from now on will appear as directed towards a goal, and will illuminate men as reason and the last commandment – for this is what the ethical teachers represent, as the teachers of the goal of existence. And thus they invent a second and other existence and elevate by means of their new mechanics this old common existence, unhinge it from its common hinges.  Yes – and the teacher will absolutely not permit us to laugh about existence, or even, and also, about ourselves – nor about him; for him, One is always One, something first and last and enormous, for him there is no type, no sum, no nothings.”
Benjamin Labutet’s When we cease to understand the world was published a decade after Jameson’s book. Some might hesitate to call it science fiction – rather, it is fiction about real scientists. But I think it is in the vein that goes back to Swift’s Island of Laputa, and really to Aristophanes cloud cuckoo land, and is part of the Jameson’s plat, his vision of science fiction. While Calvino’s plunges into the science as a sort of Dada project, with Nietzschian references. For instance, this, from the story, The Meteorites:
“According to the most recent theories, the Earth was originally a tiny, cold body which later increased in size through the incorporation of meteorites and meteor dust.
At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean – old Qfwfq said – since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different, there’s the atmosphere; you look at the sky and say: ‘Oh, how clear it is, how pure!’ But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder white as mothballs, which deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round.”
 

flood

 The destruction of the old world, said the preachers after the New World was discovered, was accomplished and marked by the Flood – the universal flood. Jonathan Edwards even hazarded the interpretation that man, before the flood, subsisted only on herbs of the field. Only after the flood did God allow a further ferocity:

“For we have no account of anything else that should be the occasion of man’s slaying beasts, except to offer them in sacrifice, till after the flood. Men were not wont to eat the flesh of beasts as their common food till after the flood. The first food of man before the fall, was the fruit of the trees of paradise; and after the fall, his food was the produce of the field: Gen. iii. 18. “And thou shalt eat the herb of the field.” The first grant that he had to eat flesh, as his common food, was after the flood: Gen. ix. 3. “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

Edwards world was one in which the great woods, and their inhabitants, was not so far away, and was as unexplored as, well, a flood.

Wilderness and flood, these are the signs and portents in the New World, or at least for the creoles inhabiting that Atlantic Oceanward huddle of real estate, the thirteen colonies.

Forests burn. Rivers flood. Against these sempiternal truths of natural history the United States, that knitting together of real estate deals, has always pitted itself. Pitting, fighting, constructing, damming, roadraging, planting – every moving thing that liveth and that was in our path had to get out of the way.

In one of those great early essays, Holy Water, Joan Didion wrote: “Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is.”

Didion later revisits and downbeats the American triumphalism of her essays about California in Where I was from. This account includes experiences in Sacramento, a town that was often flooded when Didion was a kid.

This is from the infinitely wiser book, Where I was from:

By 1979 , when the State of California published

William L . Kahrl's The California Water Atlas, there were 980 miles

of levee, 438 miles of canal . There were fifty miles of collecting

canals and seepage ditches. There were three drainage pumping

plants, five low-water check dams, thirty-one bridges , ninetyone

gauging stations, and eight automatic shortwave water-stage

transmitters. There were seven weirs opening onto seven bypasses

covering 101,000 acres. There were not only the big headwater

dams, Shasta on the Sacramento and Folsom on the American

and Oroville on the Feather, but all their predecessors and collateral

dams, their afterbays and fore bays and diversions: Thermalito

and Lake Almanor and Frenchman Lake and Little Grass Valley

on the Feather, New Bullard 's Bar and Engle bright and Jackson

Meadows and Lake Spaulding on the Yuba, Camp Far West and

Rollins and Lower Bear on the Bear, Nimbus and Slab Creek

and L. L. Anderson on the American , Box Canyon and Keswick

on the Sacramento. The cost of controlling or rearranging the

Sacramento, which is to say the "reclamation" of the Sacramento

Valley, was largely borne, like the cost of controlling or rearranging many other inconvenient features of California life, by the federal government."

I never had that opportunity, or terror, of facing a flood. The town I lived in, Clarkston, within the Atlanta metro area, was subject to downpour and thunderstorm, and excitingly enough, sometimes the storm gutter running along our southern boundary line would fill up with churning water, which it would take into the mouth of a great corrugated metal pipe, but that is as far as flooding went.

That was one image of flooding, liliputian flooding. But if I find the image of the flood peculiarly terrifying, I owe this terror of my childhood to a book I read about the Johnstown flood when I was eleven. The description of the sudden destruction of that town, the awful mauling of the casualties of the flood, the way people noticed a rise in the water in the street and thought nothing of it, and the way it was presaging the wall of water to come all fed my nightmares for months. In terms of book-caused terrors, it was right up there with Hersey’s Hiroshima.

I have shed that childhood panic, but I am still vastly interested in water, and too much water. There are two books on water in America that, in my opinion, are indispensable – that is, if you don’t know them, your American history knowledge is deficient. One is Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, which is directly in line with Didion’s Holy Water, although giving the Devil’s version – Ambrose Bierce’s devil, the truthteller. The other is John Barry’s Rising Tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

Usually a subtitle like that is so much guff. It is pretty easy to find midrange events in the newspapers of the past and show how they changed, in some little way, America. But Barry traces the flood, state power, and race in this book about one of the largest American disasters so that by the end you see why the Republican party lost its hold on Northern black voters, how that party, under its conservative wing represented by Herbert Hoover, became and remained a real federalist force about infrastructure (there’s some justice in naming that huge dam the Hoover Dam), and how the great black migration to the North went the opposite way of the Mississippi flood after 1927.

Barry’s book is, among other things, a corrective to the measures which, in apartheid and even post apartheid America, are used to measure loss. Officially, the 1927 flood took 1,000 lives. This is because black lives were, of course, undercounted. Not counted at all in many cases.

In 1927, the crucial moment in the great flood of the Delta was the collapse of the levee at Mounds Landing. Here’s Barry:

“The crevasse was immense. Giant billows rose to the tops of tall trees, crushing them, while the force of the current gouged out the earth. Quickly the crevasse widened, until a wall of water three-quarters of a mile across and more than 100 feet high—later its depth was estimated at as much as 130 feet—raged onto the Delta. (Weeks later, engineer Frank Hall sounded the still-open break: “We had a lead line one hundred feet long, and we could find no bottom.”) The water’s force gouged a 100-foot-deep channel half a mile wide for a mile inland.

It was an immense amount of water. The crevasse at Mounds Landing poured out 468,000 second-feet onto the Delta, triple the volume of a flooding Colorado, more than double a flooding Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper Mississippi ever carried, including in 1993. The crevasse was pouring out such volume that in 10 days it could cover nearly 1 million acres with water 10 feet deep. And the river would be pumping water through the crevasse for months.”

Looking at the pictures and videos of the floods that followed and succeeded Hurricane Helene, thinking of people I know in Atlanta and Western North Carolina, I am in shock. Shock here in Paris. I am reminded of these flood scenes, the iconography both biblical and geopolitical. I’m reminded that we all think too little of water. We live in a very populated, very administered, very constructed world - and that world is uniquely vulnerable to the leak under the levee, the storm that hits land 300 miles South of us, events high in the stratosphere that only the satelittes and angels spy on.

Forests burn, rivers flood.

Voices from my dead

 

Yesterday I was boiling water for oatmeal. As I poured a cup of oatmeal flakes into the bubbling pot, a voice from nowhere, a voice from my dead, appeared: it will stick to your ribs. The cartoon bubble works so well to iconograph the thought process – a liquid like bubble, a soap bubble, inside which move words or some mentalese equivalent.

So it was like that, a cartoon bubble, and it came out of my past, maybe sixty years ago, at a table in Clarkston Georgia where my Dad, now dead, said it, or my Mom, now dead, said it. It was poured into my ear, the ear that was picking up a version of the world: stick to your ribs.

Probably my Dad. It sounded like the old man.

Of course, even as a child I did not think that oatmeal literally stuck to your ribs, but the crossing of the evident, gluelike stickiness of oatmeal and the idea of ribs, something I could feel if I put my hands to my sides and squeezed my torso, somehow seemed brilliant. Everything is, eventually, a question of stickiness. Or at least breakfast is: the jam, the butter, the honey, the eggs.

And here I was far far away from that home, listening to my dead wake up for a moment, and hand me that phrase again.

Though I’ve been washed in the blood of the multitudinous wars that have erased the thought of the traditional afterlife from the hivemind, like anybody else, I also have a sense of the afterlife. Not a plan or a map. Not a place. But, like a cartoon bubble, a certain definite floating as weird as the way neural discharges become a breakfast table in the long ago and a phrase: stick to your ribs.  These things are well below the superficial level of reality in which things are “proved”.

negation of the negation

 Ah, the bits that are thrown away by writers in passing! Here I am, for some reason reading an essay collection by Mary McCarthy – yes, I’m one of that phantom audience who reads old essay collections - and in a review of Simone de Beauvoir’s account of her American tour, I come upon this bit of diamond fit for a sceptre that was, as it were, thrown away in a bit of meat for the periodical grinder:

“On an American leafing through the pages of an old library copy, the book has a strange effect. It is as though an inhabitant of Lilliput or Brobdingnag, coming upon a copy of Gulliver's Travels, sat down to read, in a foreign tongue, of his own local customs codified by an observer of a different species: everything is at once familiar and distorted. The landmarks are there, and some of the institutions and personages—Eighth Avenue, Broadway, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, Harvard, Yale, Vassar, literary celebrities concealed under initials; here are the drugstores and the cafeterias and the busses and the traffic lights —and yet it is all wrong, schematized, rationalized, like a scale model under glass.”

This is, first of all, a great idea for a short story, say by Borges. Or by Philip Dick. Second of all, I think it exactly hits the sentiments of those whose lives are taken up, stolen as material, by the writer. At the moment there is a silly lawsuit going on between Scarlett Johanssen and some French novelist who used her name and certain biographic facts for the protagonist of one of his novels. Surely Johanssen – if she has read the book, instead of simply listening to a précis presented by one of her handlers – has had that feeling of déjà jamais vu – which is when something happens that you are sure has happened before, but not like it is happening now. McCarthy was right to choose Swift’s book, since its play on perspectives is so thorough that one never thinks of the Lilliputians reading it, or the Brobdignaians getting out their microscopes to trace its print. Reversal does not, in this world, trump reversal – the negation of the negation does not bring us back to equilibrium. This is what consciousness is like.actions:

terrorism of the approved kind

 Curious that not one "Western" government has condemned Israel's acts of terror - if only out of self interest. Moving into the world of exploding phones, computers, etc. is not going to be good for the civilian populations of the West. But lets all flush ourselves down the toilet for Netanyahu

Impersonality and identity

 

Proust’s idea for a contre-Sainte Beuve criticism was part of a larger movement, within modernism, to escape from the criticism of the portrait, or the biography, and to approach the linguistic object with a certain formalism.

Paul Valery, in 1937, wrote an essay with a very old fashioned, Saint-Beuvian title: Villon and Verlaine. But the first thing he wants to establish is his formalist cred, in rather Nietzschian terms:

« Even in the most favorable cases, it is not in being humans that gives authors their value and endurance, it is in what they have that is a little more than human [Même dans les cas les plus favorables, ce n’est pas ce en quoi les auteurs sont hommes qui leur donne valeur et durée, c’est ce en quoi ils sont un peu plus qu’hommes.] And if I say that biographical curiosity can be harmful, it is because it too often procures an occasion, pretext or means to not confront the precise and organic study of poetry.”

In my time, the whole formalist-modernist apparatus of impersonality has been overthrown by an identity ethos. One used to learn that, precisely, we approach the poem as the thing in itself, or at least the classroom thing in itself. Yet, that was always a game based on a fundamentally contradictory position, for we learned the poem as Shelley’s poem, or Eliot’s – X’s. To attach a name to a poem or novel or essay was already to organize the work, behind the classroom’s back, according to a historic fact, namely, the fact of the author. If, for instance, we attributed The Wasteland to Dostoevsky, we would, frankly, not understand it at all. Biography can be thrown out the window, but it creeps back in through the keyhole.

Hence it is that Valery honors the Contre Saint-Beuve principle in the breach. Somehow, it is necessary, to read Villon, to know something of the life of Villon. In fact, Marcel Schwob, who did a lot of research on the historical facts around Villon, was one of Valery’s friends. In fact, Schwob was an inveterate portrait maker, even though he was not centered, as Sainte Beuve was, on the, as it were, royal family of French writers, the classics – he was more interested in the crazies, the marginals – in this, taking his cues from Nerval, who, crazy himself, insisted on the Illuminés who preceded him.

Villon is a liminal case. He is a royal, in as much as French poetry can’t really be understood, historically, without him. But he was a user of argot, a thief, swindler and perhaps a murderer. And not the good kind of murderer who, under orders as a soldier, butchers for the state. Eventually, it seems, Villon was hung.

On the other hand, Villon’s biography – which Valery sees in parallel with Verlaine, a man who also knew jail and bedbugs – does point to the more than human in the human life. By a certain paradox, what the identity ethos liquidates is the particular, the all too human and the more than human in the poet.

I love this bit about Verlaine. Valery, whose master was Mallarme and certainly not Rimbaud, still pays hommage:

“Verlaine !… How many times I saw him pass by my door, furious, laughing, swearing, striking the ground with his great sickman’s cane – or that of a threatening vagabond! How could one ever imagine that this beaten tramp, sometimes so brutal looking, sordid in word, at the same time anxiety making and inspiring compassion, was however the author of poetic music of the most delicate kind, verbal melodies that are some of the most touching and novel in our language? All the possible vices respected, perhaps seeded, or developed in him that power of suave invention, that expression of sweetness, of fervour, of tender welcome that noone gave like him, for nobody else knew how to dissimulate it like him or could forge the like power of consummate artistry, breaking with all the subtleties of the most skilled poets, in works that appear easy, with a naïve tone, almost childlike.”

This is how I think of the great pop musician-songwriters: the children of Villon and Verlaine.