The evolution of ghosts: Caspar R us!

It has long been my contention that there is no story about life on earth that does not boil down to an evolutionary story. The creationist version of life on earth has, since the 19th century, made large use of the notion of intelligent design – but anybody who knows anything about design knows that it evolves. The intelligent design argument is a mess, since the standards it uses to critique Darwinism are, of course, entirely absent when it tries to construct the meaning of intelligent design. Just as we can trace the evolution of the design of the watch by the material left behind in its wake – diagrams, tools, etc. – so too, if intelligent design were true, we would be able to see the material left behind in its wake – proto-humans, for instance. At this point, intelligent design simply gives up the intelligent part and opts for supernatural design, a design that defies the same physical laws that, on its critique side, intelligent design uses to try to de-legitimate Darwinian evolution.

Of course, creationists aren’t the only ones to ignore the evolutionary nature of all accounts of design. Philosophers, much to my distress, often assume things like zombies without having any sense that a zombie has to come with an evolutionary story, and that has to be packed into their account that a zombie doesn’t sense like a human being. This simply proves that philosophers are bad intelligent designers – something I think Wittgenstein spotted long ago.

At the same time, not all evolution is Darwinian evolution – that is, the statistical effect of selection, while definitely having some effects at the cultural level, does not play the role it plays in Darwinian evolution. Evolution on the cultural level often takes the form of assemblages that bring together different developmental paths as overlapping associations.

All of which is the wordy and way too wordy intro to what I want to do for a lark: understand the evolution of the ghost shape that one sees, in paper cutouts and cartoons, on Halloween.

Jean-Claude Schmitt, the author of Ghosts in the Middle Ages, lists six ways in which ghosts were depicted in the 13th and 14th century: the Lazarus, or resurrected man; as looking like a living person; as looking like a small, naked child, a common way of depicting the soul; wrapped in a diaphonous shroud; as a decomposing corpse; and as invisible, with the convention here depending on the text. In the last case, the text speaks of the ghost being sensed, but not seen.

It is striking how closely this list corresponds to features one finds in the common, commercial construction paper ghosts that are bought before Halloween in the store and strung up on doors and windows to create the “haunted house”.

However, in the age of drawing, painting and stonework, there were certain possibilities, mixes of the above categories, that were beyond the technological imagination. Clearly ectoplasm, that gross but fascinating presence in much of the spiritualist photography of the 19th and 20th century, is a compromise, a condensation, of the decomposing corpse and the diaphonous shroud. It was diaphonous matter in a state of decomposition. And yet, this decomposition was astonishingly lively – presaging the world of synthetics, the jello world, that came after 1945. Which was incidentally not only the year that the war gave up its ghosts, but also the year Casper the Friendly ghost was launched, a sort of Cold War parable – a friendly presence that was doomed to scare those it wished to greet. An image of American ambition throughout the world, or at least through American eyes, where we came with the noblest intention of helping and only seemed to scare and enrage the people we helped – so that we had to help them through other means, for instance, by bombing them or overthrowing their governments. We were the world’s Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Owen Davies popular history of ghost beliefs, The Haunted, proposes a close relationship between the way corpses were dressed for burial and the appearance of the sheeted ghost. The winding sheet as the last bit of clothing a mortal wears was, in the seventeenth century, supplanted by an increasing use of clothing – and yet still a white robe was often worn. “John Aubrey recounted that the Oxford philologist Henry Jacob, who died on 5 November 1652, appeared a week later to his cousin, the doctor William Jacob, “standing by his Bed, in his Shirt, with a white Capon on his Head”, which was presumably how he was dressed in the coffin.” Here we see an evolutionary fluke: the white sheet takes on a life, or afterlife, of its own with the ghost, as the human corpse is dressed increasingly in other raiment. By the nineteenth century the “bedsheet ghost” image had become standard. Davies thinks that the belief in ghosts, however, liberated itself from the contrivance of the bedsheet due to twentieth century movies. Early comedy silents and talkies extensively used the bedsheet ghost for hilarity. Since ghost belief is usually not about the funnies, but about the unheimlich, ghosts were seen not in sheets, but in their clothes – or sometimes wounded, or bleeding. There was, in the evolution of the ghost costume, this break in “seriousness”, with the children’s bedsheet ghost continuing its iconic run while the real ghost of ghost encounters lost the white sheet entirely.

How racism works

Racism has a double aspect: there is a racism of sentiments and a racism of structure. It is a mistake to think that these aspects are governed by the same dynamic, and will reflect the same “moves.” And yet, they are “aspects” – ultimately, sentiments and structure form a unity.

In a society that has bought into the myth of methodological individualism, the unity becomes ever more mysterious. According to that myth, if we operate on the individual sentiments, we are engaged with the determining cause of racism. If, that is, we could through some process make sure that nobody “feels” racist, then we eliminate racism.

Although intellectually many liberals think that structural racism is semi-autonomous, in some way, in everyday discourse these liberals tend to reflect the hegemonic position that it is sentiments that count. Thus, without considering that, objectively, those who achieve some success in a society that is structurally racist are themselves complicit in racism – or to be less wishy washy, are racist – they will much prefer looking at some other as the bearer of racism – the white redneck or trailer trash being, of course, the popular bugbear.

This is understandable. The relationship between sentiments and structure is a complex one, and not always easy to unentangle.

But even if the source of the racism, the aspect that is the larger factor in a particular instance, must be subject to analysis, one can still spot it pretty easily if we think about it. To give an example off the top of my head: Robert Caro’s analysis of LBJ’s election to the senate in 1948. This is how the NYT chose to summarize it:

“Mr. Caro maintains that although ballot fraud was common in the late 1940's in some parts of Texas, the Johnson campaign of 1948 raised it to a new level. Mr. Caro supports his charge with an interview with Luis Salas, an election judge in Jim Wells County who said he acknowledged his role only after all others involved in the theft had died.

Determined to Win at All Costs

It has been alleged for years that Johnson captured his Senate seat through fraud, but Mr. Caro goes into great detail to tell how the future President overcame a 20,000-vote deficit to achieve his famous 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic runoff primary against a former Governor, Coke Stevenson. A South Texas political boss, George Parr, had manufactured thousands of votes, Mr. Caro found. Johnson died in 1973, Stevenson and Parr in 1975. Mr. Caro says the election showed Johnson's determination to win at all costs as well as his coolness under fire and his ability to select gifted lieutenants, whom he then manipulated.”

One notices that the focus on ballot fraud lightly skips over the fact of real voter suppression in Texas in 1948. According to the Census of 1950, the population of Texas was 12.9 percent black, or 977,458, but until 1944, the state law allowed the Democratic party to exclude at its own will voters in the primary. That law was used to create a so called “white primary.” In one of the most important cases that the Supreme Court has ever decided, Smith v. Allwright, the Court ruled that this was an illegal infringement on African American civil riths. Interestingly, the 1948 senate race was one of the first statewide races after the Supreme Court ruling. So instead of speaking of “ballot stuffing” under the assumption that elections before 1948 were more licit, one should be asking whether lifting the long term illegal suppression of black votes made the 1948 election more democratic. More, I say, since grassroots voter suppression of black votes in Texas was still going on. It is only in the context of this much larger scandal that we can talk, with some historical understanding, about white election irregularities.

But the NYT synopsis of Caro’s research doesn’t touch on this, or even seem aware of the irony of talking about election irregularities in a system founded on a gross, systematic election irregularity. After all, that part of the story is in a separate compartment.

feuilleton and psychogeography

 

I came across a fascinating reference in Michael Bienert’s Die eingebildete Metrople – a study of Berlin the the feuilleton of the Weimar Republic – which led me to the Berlin Tageblatt for January 1, 1929. The editor, in a little burst of genius, had the newspaper pay eight writers to take rides on different routes of different buses going through Berlin from Potsdamer Platz to the Halensee neighborhood in Charlottenberg. The headline was “a relay race of writers”: in affect, these writers were to jot down their impressions, in whatever style and whatever way they wanted to. To use a term invented in the 1950s, they were given the task of writing short psychogeographies.

The eight writers were Alfred Doeblin, Alfred Polgar, Oskar Loerke, Arnolt Bronnen, Walter Mering, Walter von Mole, Alice Berend, and Arnold Zweig.

I can imagine some paper, say the Brooklyn Rail, doing the same kind of thing in present day New York. It would be cool.

Walter von Mole was a liberal writer whose sad fate was to have defended Jews in Weimar Germany against Nazis, to have tried to surrender after Hitler’s accession to power, and to be practically destituted by the Nazis in spite of this. His heart was not in pledging loyalty to Hitler, and the brownshirts could smell that. But in 1929, he was a big bestselling author. The little piece he wrote about Potsdamer Platz was a dialogue between a man and a woman who were going to see divorce lawyers, and exchanging spicy barbs about their mutually unsatisfactory sex lives on the way. It is a perfect little piece of mock eavesdropping, which ends at Potsdamer Bridge, where they get off. In the brief argument one gets a sort of precis of the post-war German breakup of sexual and family assumptions. This is the Berlin of decadence, Berlin Babylon, but in a minor key. Doeblin, of course, writes about Alexanderplatz. There are observations about the passing stores, monuments, and prices of goods. But the trip is also about the way the bus shakes, and its big engine – a Maybach engine. The voice is all about such things, the machines that make up the modern metro.

The only woman – Alice Berend – is given Tauenzienstrasse. As Mel Gordon, whose Feral House classic Voluptuous Panic is all about erotic Berlin, “TAUENTZIENGIRLS [were] Bubikopfed streetwalkers in the latest fashions (sometimes in mother-and-daughter teams), who silently solicited customers on Tauentzienstrasse, south of the Memorial Church.” Berend was a figure in the expressionist avant -garde, and a fairly well known novelist. One of her novels was a roman a clef about Carl Schmitt, who she knew in Munich, and who apparently filled her in with the sexual details of his relationship with his wife (Schmitt was the kind of guy who toted up his ejaculations in  his diary – for what that is worth). Her account is of the usual Berlin miseries, the socially come down, the former piano teachers selling postcards, etc., but no hint of Tauentziengirls, unless this is a distant reference: “Women in furs, with red lips, all young, however old they might be…”

Bienert’s thesis is that the feuilleton was an essential part of the metropole. His book is full of fascinating facts. Did you know, Frankfurt School groupies, that Kracauer’s paper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, was financed by I.G. Farben? We ponder the cracks and gaps in which the left intelligentsia had its say. We wonder: is this all going to be horribly relevant?

contempt

 

Mépris is French for contempt. Among aging American cinephiles, Godard’s film Le Mépris is enjoyed best if one retains the title without translating it, much as oeniphile prefer French terms to talk about wine.

The multi-disciplinary Jean Duvignaud – a sociologist, novelist, theater critic and the lover of Clara Malraux – wrote an essay on mépris which takes the word into an etymological socio-historical frolic – my fave kind of thing. The title of the essay is The counterfeit of contempt (La fausse monnaie du mépris) and he finds, in the word’s base, pris, or prendre – to take – a market gesture:

"Here we are at the market or the fair, long before Rabelais. “priser » to take or retain, as one does with a fish or game because it responds to a need, a desire, an expectation. And this give it a price (prix). To take is also to sniff, to aspirate by the nose, and the word was recognized by the Academy in 1878 in a hoomage to this secular practice.

From words grow gestures. Those who turn away from the fish or the duck – it smells bad, or its color is repugnant – disdain or have contempt for, as was meant in the 12th century the prefix “mes”. At what moment, and why here rather than there, did these words become ideas?”

This passage struck me, because lately I’ve been reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s The end of days, and there is a powerful passage connecting the collapse of the Austrian economy at the end of WWI with the daily life of a Jew among anti-semitism. They are somehow joined by the way the vendors of fruit and meat in Vienna are dealing with the influx of refugees, country people who come to a market and touch the goods: by posting signs forbidding, harshly, handling the goods and showing shopkeeperly contempt for those people who look like the type of people who handle goods.

“Every morning she goes to the market and gets in line. In the second year of the war, when she was still new in Vienna and there wasn’t yet a vegetable shortage, she liked to finger the carrots, potatoes, or cabbage, just like back home.

Hands off the merchandise! the Viennese shouted at her, sometimes even slapping her hand away as if she were a disobedient child.

Surely it isn’t forbidden to look a bit before one buys.

Look all you like, but no pawing.

Later they simply pushed her away when she wanted to touch something intended for her stomach. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, bears, foxes, snakes, insects, lice. But did these people ever stop to think about what it really meant to introduce things growing in the world into their bodies?”

The vast contempt of the Viennese shopkeepers for the peasant, the urban ethnic contempt that flowered there, the way it is connected with touching, smelling, and forbidding touching and smelling – there’s a powerful nexus, here, the way contempt transmits itself in the socius, through small but forceful gestures. Erpenbeck is a marvelous suggester – the whole that waits out there, that the reader is conscious of, intrudes in these market interactions.

“In her own shop back home, if she had forbidden the customers to touch her wares, she’d have gone out of business right away. When she thinks of all she left behind when she fled — the eggs, the sacks full of flour and sugar, the barrels of herring, all the apples — she could weep. People here are insolent, and they won’t even give you what you are entitled to according to your ration card. When she stands in line unsuccessfully, she sometimes gathers up a few cabbage leaves, rotten potatoes, or whatever else may have fallen into the snow around the vegetable sellers’ stands, and puts them in her bag.”

I have been away long enough from Publix, from Winn Dixie, from Krogers that I don’t entirely remember the protocol. But I always handle the veggies. Smell strawberries. Sort through the vrac, to use the French term. And I’ve noticed that increasingly, the veggies are put in plastic. Nothing shocks me like seeing broccoli, which you should pick through, feel with you fingers, embalmed in plastic. I feel like they are being strangled in there. It is a feeling that leaps out of my heart of digestive system without me thinking about it at all.

Ah, the sources of contempt, it is a long topic casting a vast shadow over us, the fingering masses.

 

 

Damned and Rammed

 

One of the great books of my teenage life was “The World Turned Upside Down”, Christopher Hill’s masterpiece. Often disputed and disparaged, the book emanated a vibe, implicitly connecting up the Diggers in the English Revolution, and the multitude of wayfaring prophets in the highways and byways of that brief moment of freedom, with the Diggers in 1960s San Francisco, who were not yet through when Hill’s book was published in 1972. Implicitly is the big word here – for readers who were enduring the shocks of Nixon’s re-election, the Vietnam war “winding down” in big big puddles of blood, and the newly militarized younger generation of workers, The World Turned Upside down was not an antiquarian curiosity, but a utopian tract.

Peter Coyote, one of the founders of the diggers, wrote that Winstanley’s writing inspired the name. How did Winstanley arrive on the West Coast of California in 1966? I have to think that the San Francisco Mime Troupe with which both men were involved reflected Kenneth Rexroth’s influence more than the Beats. In Emmet Grogan’s Ringolevio, the name comes from some mysterious British history: “The name “Diggers” had been tossed forward by another member of the troupe who read about the seventeenth-century group in a British history book and felt that Emmett, Billy and their ideas about freedom resembled those of Gerrard Winstanley, William Everard and their one hundred supporters.”  This British history was almost surely Christopher Hill’s, who wrote a number of books in the sixties about the English Revolution. The quicksilver life of a book is something that escapes the academic game of “influence”; a book, a text, a graffitied slogan, a song, these are all things that go out there pentacostally and give people the shakes. Influence my ass - it is a permanent earthquake out there. 

The diggers were all well and good, but among the amazing figures in The World Upside Down, I immediately latched onto the obscure  Abiezer Coppe. This was a prophet to my liking, the kind one sees downtown in any huge urb, begging, getting drunk in the bus stop shelter, wearing garbage sacks. The evangelical movement in America and its awful roots elsewhere has drifted far from its radical beginnings, and is a sort of abusive household writ large. But the English Revolution and its American associates were made of different stuff. The older style of apocalyptic lit digs into the pork and corruption of a world that runs over the oppressed and sees its dark ends – the first who shall be last, here, include the rich evangelical types, being fed into the maw of some rich Bosch-style monster. When the World is turned Upside Down, the values that held it right side up will be turned upside down too – which means that profit seekers will suffer, while the idle will be rewarded for their intense study of the lilies of the field; which means that the pure to whom all was pure – the whores, wankers, tramps, schizos, pennyante artists, Sal Army Hall bedwetters, holy toothless fools, runaways, all the tranquillized children in all the foster homes, etc., etc. – will invade, with much hooting, the halls of power; the meek housewives who took up steak knives and studied their husband’s backs on all those electric lightbulb sick nights, Raymond Chandler’s heroines, will pack like Amazons and destroy the peace of mind we’ve all purchased by disciplining the libido, and banning the Id. Those mean streets, it turns out, are the streets of the New Jerusalem, and the mysteries here are beyond any that Philip Marlowe is programmed to solve.

Coppe, from Hill’s description, was an exemplary Ranter. He believed in free love, and drinking, and throwing himself under the wheels of luxurious carriages. He was a freelance prophet, not connected to the Diggers or Levelers and their more rational political schemes. When he was examined by the court, he supposedly bawled at them and tried to throw fruit about. He was more like Huck Finn’s father crossed with Ezekiel, if Ezekiel had been transplanted to the much colder climes of Albion. Then, of course, imprisonment, Cromwell’s reign, and the Restoration made him as lonely as a recalcitrant Yippie in the Reagan years, and he wilted away.

 Anyway, the intro to his most famous pamphlet, copped from the subgenius site, is rap of the highest caliber.

An inlet into the Land of Promise, the new Hierusalem, and agate into the ensuing Discourse, worthy of seriousconsideration.
My Deare One.
All or None.
Every one under the Sunne.
Mine own. My most excellent Majesty (in me) hath strangely and variously transformed this forme.
And beholde, by mine owne Almightinesse (in me) I have been changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound ofthe Trump.…

And it hath pleased my most excellent Majesty (who is universall love, and whose service is perfecte freedom) to set this forme (the Writer of this Roll) as no small signe and wonder in fleshly Israel; as you may partly see in the ensuing Discourse.

And now (my deare ones!) every one under the Sun, I will onely point at the gate; thorow which I was led into that new City,  Hierusalem, and to the Spirits of just men, made perfect,and to God the Judge of all.First, all my strength, my forces were utterly routed, my house I dwelt in fired; my father and mother forsook me, the wife of my bosome loathed me, mine old name was rotted, perished; and I was utterly plagued, consumed, damned, rammed, and sunke into nothing, into the bowels of the still Eternity (my mother'swomb) out of which I came naked, and whetherto I returned again naked. And lying a while there, rapt up in silence, at length(the body or outward forme being awake all this while) I heard with my outward eare (to my apprehension) a most terrible thunder-clap, and after that a second. And upon the second thunder-clap, which was exceeding terrible, I saw a great body of light, like the light of the Sun, and red as fire, in the forme of a drum (as it were) whereupon with exceeding trembling and amazement on the flesh, and with joy unspeakable in thespirit, I clapt my hands, and cryed out, Amen, Hallelujah,Hallelujah, Amen. And so lay trembling, sweating, and smoaking(for the space of halfe an hour) at length with a loud voyce (Iinwardly) cryed out, Lord, what wilt thou do with me; my most excellent majesty and eternal glory (in me) answered & sayd,Fear Not, I will take thee up into mine everlasting Kingdom. But thou shalt (first) drink a bitter cup, a bitter cup, a bittercup; whereupon (being filled with exceeding amazement) I was throwne into the belly of hell (and take what you can of it inthese expressions, though the matter is beyond expression) I was among all the Devils in hell, even in their most hideous hew.”

Those thunder claps – you won’t hear them in any American church. They sound, instead, in Finnegan’s Wake.  Which is a bittercup commentary on what we have all become, my deare ones, in this age of Late Looting.

 

The deathmarch of dweebs

 

Trump’s admiring remark about Arnie Palmer’s dick sent me back to something I wrote in the olden days of Bush. Remember, the Vulcans, Bush the cowboy, all that shit. Here’s what I wrote

One of the things that struck me as remarkable about the transcripts released by Ken Starr back in the impeachment days – the way in which Monica Lewinsky’s telephone conversations with Linda Tripp often included, as a helpful stage direction, the sigh. The whole bizarreness of the Starr crusade was summed up for me in the sighs of Monica. Sighs were never included, that I could see, in the Watergate transcripts. Sighs weren’t part of the Iran-Contra controversy. But sighs, for a person like Starr, go with women. Women sigh. Women don’t like sex. Women are forced to have sex when they have sex – unless of course they are really, really in love. And so on.

But that gendered subtext was never, ever seized in the press – which is an instrument of patriarchy with some concessions around the edges. The sexual subtext of what comes out of D.C. in reporting for the last six years has been quite comic, and quite unremarked. I wrote something a few weeks ago  about Jon Anderson’s New Yorker profile of the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad . There was a lie in that piece that struck me, since I don’t think it is the usual kind of lying that is pointed to when we criticize the press. Anderson describes Khalilzad as having the lope of a basketball player – or ex basketball player. Now, that is obviously not true. From his description, Khalilzad never played basketball, particularly – and he is described as wearing expensive suits and presumably expensive shoes, and his ecological niche involves much footing over hard marble flooring down many a corridor. And he is in his mid fifties. There is no way he has that lope.

But the lie was part of the lie that the press is partly there to produce and preserve. As we all know, powerful men evoke powerful homoerotic feelings from the people who cover them. The male D.C. reporters are continually trying to get us to feel how powerful the men they are reporting on actually are. Now, I am  a sex friendly guy – I’m as happy as the next fella with homoeroticism. But as is well known, homoeroticism in a homophobic atmosphere generally turns ugly.

In the U.S., the upper class, Ivy league educated male has one ideal form in which to sublimate his homoeroticism: fandom. Fans are, as is well known, always on the sexual edge with regard to the heroes they admire, those tough men with the taut pecs. There is a problem, however, with powerful execs, politicians, etc. They aren’t tough at all. How could they be? They might exercise, but generally they don’t’ have time for the sportif. So the lie that the presscorps sets itself is to convey their own infatuation. Thus, the overwhelming reference to sports when one reads profiles of CEOS. One always feels that with a little more prodding we’d get a description of the big fat cocks they possess – they must possess. God forbid that some CEO isn’t ballsy. Doesn’t have a full foot.

The hilarious thing about the lie with the Bush administration is that here, we have a man who we all know was sportif in a certain way. He was a cheerleader. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, if Hillary Clinton had been a cheerleader, there would be a mention of it almost every week. But with GWB, cheerleader is a hole. Nobody credits him with being a good cheerleader, or mentions the word. No, he is bold. He is a cowboy. He is sooooo fit. He is Mr. Mission Accomplished.

The homoerotic subtext controls the way in which our leaders will be leaders. They will be bold. Even though anybody watching Bush knows that he is spastic, not bold, that is something that has to be suppressed, like cheerleading. Sometimes this is riotously funny. Slate’ Political correspondent, at the moment, is a stooge named John Dickerson. His takedown of Fred Barnes' new bio of Bush -- his ‘love letter” to the President -- is a little scene of homoerotic transformations and rivalries. Dickerson is disturbed that Barnes gushes too much over this manly, this bold, this commanding figure. Dickerson begins by defending the professional sycophants, the White house press corps, from the charge that they have been unfair to the President.

“The White House press corps has flaws: a herd mentality, a fixation on who's ahead politically, and difficulty engaging deeply with policy issues. I know, I was one of them. But Barnes has his boot on the scale, inflating the foolishness of the press to make Bush look better. Perhaps with so many books offering cartoon images of Bush as dumb and evil, the shelves need to be balanced out by one that errs in the opposite direction. But Rebel-in-Chief is such a love note that it fails to counteract the negative myths.”

The love note fails! This is heartbreaking for a guy like Dickerson. Maybe his own love notes will be more successful.

I should note that the homoerotic impulse functions in the lefty discourse too, where much time is spent making up images of fellatio and anal sex as signs of submission -- the press being on its knees, or in some indelicate way bending over, etc., etc. Again, this is also a lie – the lie being that one has overcome our homophobic culture while borrowing homophobic tropes. It is what makes comments so often unpleasant from both sides, as if the struggle, the deeper struggle, were about what male body was the most desirable.”

So – the watermark of the presidential penis that the media does its best to convey without making it clear it is conveying it is just put out there by Trump. Trump’s jestering – his senile gibberish – does hook clearly into the system of our politics. Which is the system, as well, of how our politics are “reported on.” Patriarchy at this point in the millenium is a deathmarch of dweebs, which is throwing us all in the ditch. So utterly appalling.

The metaphysics of the lost and found department

 

Why does Dante’s Divine Comedy start with the poet being lost in the middle of a forest?

Or rather, the way is lost:  ché la diritta via era smarrita.

To ask this question, one must ponder the difference between the meaning of loss in “being lost” and the meaning of loss in “the way was lost”. The second lost might imply the first – but the implication skips over the material condition of ways. Roads, objects that are not alive – these cannot be lost in the same way Dante was lost. The way never loses the way. The loss, here, is purely human.

The scholastics like to puzzle over such paradoxes as: can God make a boulder too heavy for him to lift? As far as I know, they did not puzzle over a simpler paradox: can God get lost. It would seem to me, at least, that all the higher creatures can get lost. Not only humans: dogs, birds, giraffes, etc., all things with “territories” can get lost. Fish probably can get lost – surely dolphins can get lost.  Yet God, in the Judeo-Christian sense, seemingly can’t get lost. Nor can the Greek gods get lost.

As a silly old man, I find myself pondering the philological-philosophical frolic of lost-ness – of losing, of being lost, of things that are lost – quite a lot. Even as a silly young man, I found the word “loser” to contain a world. There was something about “being a loser” in America that I found, on the one hand, distressing, and on the other hand, perversely inviting. For certainly, since I was kneehigh to a three volume set of Capital, I’ve been pretty suspicious of winners. There is something about winning, and especially about being born to win, born to winners, that distorts the character. Well, one could say the same about losing, of course. After I was kneehigh – after I expanded my mental lineaments within the unwilled expansion of all my other lineaments – I came across Nietzsche, took to heart the lesson about resentment, and lost – as much as it was possible to lose – my prejudice against happy winners. Although of course neither I nor Nietzsche could shed the slave morality simply by taking thought. It was more a matter of imagining a state I would never really reach.

There is nothing more metaphysical than a lost and found department. I always smile at the phrase.  Another question for God: if he or she or they are never lost, how could they be found? All problems which stem from the idea of a God with self-consciousness. A god without self-consciousness is such a harsh thing that I rather hope there is no such a thing, but a God with self-consciousness poses a lot of questions about divinity.

In 1893, there were a number of stories about the lost and found department at the Chicago Exposition – the fair that inspired Henry Adams’s chapter on the Dynamo, and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. The Scientific American wrote about the array of objects lost and wondered if there was some statistical significance to the great number of umbrellas. The Chicago Tribune wrote about the man who was put in charge of it, Edward Hood. Hood set it up on a scientific basis, creating a record-keeping system On June 19, 1893, the Tribune reported that there were 550 unclaimed items in the department already, and then gave forth with a few Horatio Alger-esque stories about valuable jewelry lost by wealthy women and returned by humble working men to the department.

“People visiting the Fair seem prone to forgetfulness. Mr. Hood is of the opinion that the glories of the Exposition are so overpowering that little things like umbrellas, canes, and wraps are forgotten in the contemplation of novel sights.”

To be overwhelmed is a condition which, at least in my experience, is conducive to getting lost or losing something. As I grow older, I become more like Beckett’s beggar every day, continually checking my pockets for keys, wallet, phone, etc. There Paris police prefecture has long operated a service of objets trouvés. A city, like an elementary school, is full of people rushing about with loads of things on them. Our packs. A dream: to go out naked, unpacked, unencumbered. But the dream always leads to embarrassment. As pack animals, we like and need our packs. The dream of being naked, nakedness itself, and being lost are connected by many unconscious capillaries.

Alex Purves, in Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative, considers such stories of being lost as Homer’s Odyssey and the Anabasis of Xenophon. Dante in the woods could be a reincarnation of Odysseus, who, as Purves acutely notes, is not only a sea captain who has lost his way home through most of the poem, but who also carries a fate predicted by Tiresias in Hades:  

[Tiresias] bid me to go to many cities of men

Holding in my hands a well-fitted oar,

Until I should ccome upon a people who do not know of the sea,

Who do not eat food that has been mixed with salt,

And who know  nothing of peruple-cheeked ships,

Or of well fitted oars, which are the wings of ships.

But he told this cear sign to me that I will not hide from you.

Whenever some other traveler coming across me in the road

Should say that I carry a winnowing shovel upon my gleaming

Shoulder,

Then he told me to fix the well-fitted oar in the earth,

And to carry out auspicious sacrifices to lord Poseidon

A ram and a bull and a boar who mounts sows,

Then to return home, and to accomplish holy hecatombs

To the Immortal gods who hold Olympus

All of them in order. Death will come to me from the sea…

Purves notes that being lost in spatial terms  is one thing, but being lost so that the very signs and conventions one holds are also lost is to be lost indeed. It is only from within that state of extreme loss that Odysseus can make his peace with Poseidon, his old enemy. In a sense, Poseidon as the god of the sea commands loss, or lostness, as his domain.

Purves quotes an essay by architectural critic Mark Wigley: being lost is defined by an “indeterminate sense of immersion, in which the body cannot separate itself from the space it inhabits.” This is Edward Hood’s Chicago Fair observation about the items in his lost and found department all over again. The sense of being overwhelmed is, of course, a moment in Kant’s construction of the sublime. With the addition of something like a divine instance: one’s consciousness of that grandeur – in the flash of which, human intellectual superiority, or the superiority of reason itself, is redeemed.

Lost, losing, things lost and people lost and people gone and myself gone all the way into this concept I can’t really sum up: these moments of failure I shore against the overwhelming madness of American success. Sooner or later, I’ll take up an oar and hoist it on my shoulder and walk some road alone.