Checking in on my decay

 Ah, a report from nine years ago! Found this in my miscellanea, and recognized that frown. It  has now become the American Gothic. I should be holding a pitchfork at all times. Although that might be a little difficult when I have to go through customs.

I figure the writer, or this writer, should check in with his decay every once in a while, push and pull it.  I have aimed to follow the commandment to "know thyself" ever since I read it in the eighth grade, and I take it that it involves the body as well as the soul, the wounds and the warts, the lost hair and lost brain cells - all the self stuff. I'm down with aspectual dualism: Ahab and the Pequod, like body and soul, are one and different, bound and somehow loose.  It is a natural law, and perhaps a moral conundrum, that the captain must go down with the ship - no exceptions. So this was the ship in 2016 in Los Angeles.

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Mirror in the restaurant

The frown that age etches into your face – or at least my face – is a curious thing, at least when I encounter it all suddenly in a mirror. For instance, here, in the mirror that spans the back wall at Wexlers, put there I suppose so that as you stand waiting for your food you can see yourself and as you eat your bagel and drink your coffee you can be vaguely haunted by your virtual image, above you in the mirror, looking over your shoulder if you are sitting on the banquette. Maybe it gets you out of there some seconds quicker, time for the next customer.

Is the frown simply the result of the second law of thermodynamics, the face’s energy, after all these years, drainging into an entropic catchment? Possibly. After all, the smile goes up, against the current. It is a minor monument of our great struggle not to give up. Gravity pulls us down, even our thin lips – or my thin lips. Don’t have much there.

But physiology is not destiny, or at least not all of destiny. There’s an affective history behind our expression. That at least is how we read faces.

This is funny. In my memory, I’m quite the laughin guy. I’m a smiling fool. I’m not the frowning geezer I meet here in the deli.

Perhaps, I think, it is an after-effect of my bad decade, 2001 through 2008, the Bush years. I went through those years like – well, if you’ve ever seen the music video for Peter Gabriel’s Shock the Monkey, that was me. Chattering screaming banging my cage and soiling myself. It was like American culture was out to get me.

But maybe I should just take it as a sign that I need to get happier. Get more Californian. Get all smily and surf’s up. I wonder if this is going to be possible.

Poetry and politics: Marx

One of the more discouraging things about Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is how much its famous opening lines, about tragedy and farce, have absorbed interest in the entire work. (Hegel observed somewhere that all great world historical facts and persons occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce). Those lines weren’t meant as toss offs, any more than the individual witticisms in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest are written to be relished solely outside of their place in the play. Rather, the tragedy/farce duality initiates a series of complex and beautiful inversions which operate, on the literary level, to make this account of the long ago doings of half forgotten Frenchmen still a fast paced read, and on the political level, to give us perhaps the first analysis of the kind of reactionary politics that, it turns out, is the ever-recurring counterpart, in modernity, to modernization itself. The convergence of a literary trope and a political truth is quite astonishing – it is like being able to use a poem as a household cleaner. In other words, the literary and the political ought to come from completely separate conceptual domains. That they don’t is one of the surprises of the text. It is a surprise that destabilizes our ideas of genre, journalism, history, politics and philosophy. In this sense, Marx’s work is close to Swift’s Drapier Letters, Burke’s Reflections, and Paine’s The Rights of Man.

O for a political poet who wouild take on this dumb era, this last twenty five years of American madness!

From the will to control

 

In the early nineteenth century, there was a great romantic fashion for the  “will” in the moral, or ideological sphere. The will seemed like a way out of the dry materialism and sensualism of the 18^th century philosophes.Conveniently, it also had a hero – Napoleon.

However, a curious thing happened as the century went by.  In the sphere of psychology, the will gradually lost any status it had as a psychological object. In the old rational psychology, it was one of the faculties of the intellect. But as psychologists began to measure things, experiment, and consider psychology as an adjunct of the entire biological system, it became clear that the will was a superfluous entity. I raise my arm, and by no train of introspection, and by no degree on  any measuring device, is there an intermediate moment where I will to raise my arm.

At the end of the century, two philosophers – Nietzsche and William James – both took these findings at face value. Nietzsche took the absence of any psychological entity called the will to mock the notion of both those who argued for the free will and those who argued for determinism, in as much as the latter still used this archaic psychological devise. James, with his own sly Yankee wit, also went through the introspective stages that make us see that the will is a conjuring trick.

Yet these two philosophers are associated with the will – the will to power and the will to belief. How did they reconcile these moral insights with their psychological ones? Well, in Nietzsche’s case, the will moved outside the psyche. The psyche, in fact, becomes a manifestation of a will that is unanchored to a self at all. James, on the other hand, creeps close to the admission that the will, being a good thing to believe in, is acceptable at least in moral terms.  In other words, both take the will as a supreme fiction.

In the twentieth century, in the psychological sphere, the will was replaced by a cybernetic model of the psyche, one that emphasized control and coordination. The old questions surrounding the will were simply no longer relevant. This image not only provides psychology with its paradigm – it penetrated, to an extent, into the public consciousness. Into, that is, our moral speech. It is impossible to imagine Jane Austin characters speaking about being out of control or in control. They wouldn’t say it, and they wouldn’t understand it if it was said to them. But this has become a reliable part of ordinary speech for those in the twentieth and twenty first century.

However, it is a part of speech that is not entirely coherent with the will ideology, which still exists, and which still influences the way we speak of ourselves and of the polis. It is easy to see why. We all have the experience of doing things we don’t want to do. I have work to do and it is late, but instead of going to bed, I do the work. And the moment of doing something that is not immediately desirable – over something that is immediately desireable – gives me the impression that I will myself to do this over my circumstances. It is easy to think of a computer – say Hal in 2001 – doing what it “wants” to do. But it is much more difficult thinking of it in a will situation – doing what it doesn’t want to do.

This concept in the moral sphere is, I think, slowly changing. It isn’t rare for a driver, or a computer user, to speak of a machine ‘not wanting’ to do something. Being ‘coaxed” into doing something. Of course, at the bottom of this are the lines of routine that one imagines define the machine – are the machine in the machine, so to speak. There’s no ghost in there.  All I’m saying is that the dialectic between the moral image and the cognitive image might well produce an inflection decisively away from the will.

But I can’t think in that future language

In praise of the nose

In August of 2014, I had a summer cold. And being, or trying to be, a writer on whom no experience or sneeze is lost, I wrote this little monument to the running nose.

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“But these evils are notorious and confessed; even they also whose felicity men stare at and admire, besides their splendour and the sharpness of their light, will, with their appendant sorrows, wring a tear from the most resolved eye; for not only the winter is full of storms and cold and darkness, but the beauteous spring hath blasts and sharp frosts; the fruitful teeming summer is melted with heat, and burnt with the kisses of the sun, her friend, and choked with dust; and the rich autumn is full of sickness; and we are weary of that which we enjoy, because sorrow is its biggest portion; and when we remember, that upon the fairest face is placed one of the worst sinks of the body, the nose, we may use it not only as a mortification to the pride of beauty, but as an allay to the fairest outside of condition which any of the sons and daughters of Adam do posses.”

Jeremy Taylor’s Rules and Exercizes of Holy Dying was one of the 17th century’s bestsellers; through the nineteenth century, it was a prime example of raree, cadenced prose that crawled into the sentences of Johnson, Coleridge, Emerson and many others. Oh that seventeenth century rag, faint bits of which we still dance to today.

Taylor’s notion of the nose as a sink of the body and a monument to our mortification is the place where I start with noses, a subject that has been forced upon me over the last two weeks, as I’ve been dripping from it, or suffering from its drying up, or in general living a little too familiarly with it, like a prisoner trapped within my sinuses and unable to think of anything else.

Of course, poor Jeremy Taylor must have witnessed a good many colds in Golden Grove, the house in South Wales where he wrote the Holy Dying. The book is inspired by the death of his wife, Phoebe, in 1651. Who knows, perhaps she died of a disease that had recently started entering the vocabulary of the English: influenza, named for the influence of the stars that was thought to incubate the disease. In his death sermon on his patroness, Lady Carbery, who died at around the same time, Taylor mentions that many new diseases had appeared lately, and many old ones had changed in circumstances and symptoms, which showed some awareness of the disease landscape around him. So who knows how prominently noses figured in Taylor’s life in 1651, when he wrote his greatest work, or how irritated he was at their running.

On the other side of the channel, we have another religious man, an infinitely greater thinker, Blaise Pascal, who also left a famous remark about noses: Pensee no 29 - “Le nez de Cléopâtre, s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé * Pascal wrote down three versions of this thought, but all of them agree that it was the size of Cleopatra’s schnozzle, and not its cuteness, its diminuity, its slightness, that made the face a regal beauty. Thus, Pascal enrolls himself among the truly rare connoisseurs of excess in the nose, or at least more splendor than you get down the slope of some nose-changed blonde extra. An essay by Paul Strapper in 1879 pointed out that we really don’t know the dimensions of Cleopatra’s nose anyway. But Strapper, undetered by the fact that we really have no guide to Cleopatra’s body, imagines it anyway, seeing her as an imperfect beauty, and thus a modern one, since we appreciate the disruption of the line, the flaw, as integral to our vision of beauty – one that supposes a mercurial mind in a feu follet body. This doesn’t seem to be Pascal’s idea, but at the same time, he surely thought about the fact that the nose he was using as a monument for the mortification of human vanity was large, or at least regal, and not short, or demure.

In his notebooks, Leonardo decides that there are ten types: "straight, bulbous, hollow, prominent above or below the middle, aquiline, regular, flat, round or pointed." Oddly, the size of the nose doesn't figure in his nosology. Pascal was, perhaps, too geometrical in his thinking re Cleopatra's proboscis: a nose is not simply a nose, an extension of so many degrees, but a whole discourse on the beauty of the human form. Or its fragility and horror.

The seventeenth century seemed to have been especially interested in noses and legendary nose figures. Cyrano de Bergerac was a seventeenth century libertine.The legend of his nose became a fixture of 19th century literature after Cyrano’s work was rediscovered by Nodier – and it might not have been an obsession of his contemporaries. Theophile Gautier, in an essay on Cyrano in his Grotesques, wrote that the Voyage to the Moon and the nose were Cyrano’s great works, one of art and the other of nature . Gautier described it as a mountain comparable to the Himalayas, or as a tapir’s trunk. This is sheer nose trumpeting, or thumbing one’s nose at fact in favor of funny.

The eighteenth century, as far as noses went, was long on farce. One of the great nose writers is Laurence Sterne, of course, who ransacked the connection between the nose and the penis until he owned it. However, myself, I’m interested in another nose man whose marriage could have formed the basis for another kind of Tristam Shandy. Lord Elgin, who stole much Greek statuary for the British in the early nineteenth century, lost his wife to his nose – or rather, his lack of one. It seems that Elgin contracted some horrible disease in the Middle East that ate his nose. His wife, according to testimony at their divorce trial, then lost all interest in her husband, and took up with a neighbor who, presumably, had a nose: a Mr. Robert Ferguson.

Byron, of course, made up a gossipy couplet about Elgin:

Noseless himself, he brings home noseless blocks

To show what time has done and what… the pox.

And so we reach what I consider the height of the nose in literature if not life: the nineteenth century, and Gogol’s The Nose. Here, finally, the outer coat of the nose develops an interior interest, a soul – a sinus of a soul. Nabokov, who is often so concerned to be clever, as a critic, that he fails to be interesting, wrote one good critical book – a study of Gogol. Nabokov, among other interesting things, contends that the nose figures majorly in Russian talk – there are hundreds of proverbial sayings that employ the nose. “The point to be noted is that from the very start the nose as such was a funny thing to his mind (as to all Russians).”

The humorousness of the nose leads us away from the mortification it marks, perhaps – or perhaps that mortification finds its true beauty here. But myself, blowing my nose in a wild trumpet solo lasting ten days, have a hard time seeing the comedy here – or rather, I am desensitized to what I know is a ticklish subject. The cold forces us inside the nose, and there – as is similar, in popular sentimentality, with the clown – all is tears. Furthermore, of course, this is my nose, the nose of a man who, having achieved 56 years of nosewearing activity, must acknowledge its rougeur and scaliness, at times – the results of too much sun and too much booze, or at least beer. So even when I am not forced into a stricter intimacy with my nose than I want, I view it with a bit of dismay. There it is, staring back at me in the mirror, and making it very difficult for me to shave over my upper lip.

Yet I have to give the nose some credit. Surely the inner sound of writing – the thing that I go by to get me from a to z – goes much much better when the nose, whatever its outer look, is comfortable inside. That inner noise is something I become partially deaf to when I have a cold, which is why I stop writing.

I write this as, hopefully, the epitaph on the gravestone atop my former cold, and to celebrate the faint re-awakening to my inner tintinabulation. My nose is almost back!

vacation

 

The first definition of vacation in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary is: Intermission of judicial proceedings. The second definition is: leisure: freedom from trouble or perplexity.

Both are capillary links to our origins in paradise, where there is neither judging nor perplexity.

Paradise closed, as we all know, a long time ago – learned bishops in the 17^th century reckoned that the event happened 6000 years ago. We, who are more scientifically minded, have put the freedom from trouble or perplexity a bit earlier than that – it occurred before occurrence could rightly occur, around 12 billion years ago. This is a different paradise than the one in Genesis. Here we must go to Calvino’s old Qfwfq, who tells the story in Cosmicomics:

“What use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines? I say “packed like sardines”, using a literary image. In reality there wasn’t even space to pack us into. Every point of each of us coincided with every point of each of the others in a single point, which was where we all were. In fact, we didn’t even bother one another, except for personality differences, for when space doesn’t exist, having somebody unpleasant like Mr. Pber^t Pber^d  underfoot all the time is the most irritating thing.”

This is a pretty exact description of the train from Montpellier to Agde that we took on Saturday.

Yes, we have moved about – probably more than old Qfwfq would countenance, himself, who just wants to shuffle around and sit for a billion lightyears in his rocking chair, musing – we have, I say, moved about this vacation considerably. America first – ah, awful phrase!- in July and the first week of August, then a little staycation in Paris, and finally here, in this little resort and port on the Meditteranean, Agde. Famed in nudist circles internationally for the Centre Naturiste of Cap D’agde, but this is a long busride away from the little villa we are stayin’ in. According to our taxi driver, we are in an “eccentric” part of the Agde region. Far hence are those civilizing thing, the Super-U grocery store and Lidel. Instead, we shop at the little pokey places in the Grau d’Agde, swim in the non-naturist, popular beach area, and endure the heat with numerous, strategically placed ventilateurs.

When our OUIGO train unstuck itself from Paris and whizzed us through the French countryside, we were visited by a pang – the Paris we were leaving had just experienced a considerable drop in temperature. As all American newspaper readers know, it is hot in Europe, with fires breaking out all over the place. The NYT had a frightening story about the Paris city climate committee, all in a sweat to prepare us for 150 degree days in a few decades. Welcome to the post-baby boomer civilization, which is kissing cousin to Hobbes’s state of nature, except we will be too beaten down by the heat to be red in tooth and claw – we will be sunburned and heatstroked.

Paradise, it turns out, was the Holocene. Remember that?

Still, I don’t want to be all down and bitter like Mr. Pber^t Pber^d   - I am, after all, unworthily vacay-ing near the Meditteranean, and I would have to be one lyrically empty point not to see the poetry in that!

Vacation is one of the great inventions of the social democratic era, and the plutocrats, at least in Europe, haven’t yet snatched it back. In the U.S., vacation used to be a great thing, something to look forward to. This was before the Credit system swallowed the culture. Now vacation is having the weekend free. Except of course for the yachting class, whch pretty much vacations 365 days round. I exaggerate! Still, I wonder if the children of the summer of 2025 will look back on it as an intermission, a freeing from perplexity and trouble, a period laced with lemonade and fireflies, which it seems to have been, astonishingly, in my boyhood. Astonishing when I think of how my parents could have afforded it.

And now we are bogdeep in August and I see, with some fright, that the end of vacation is almost upon us. How can the season have gone so quickly?

travel - the sedentary nomad of Konigsberg

 Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning over the streets and squares, over people’s faces and gesture, always the same and always different, just like scenery.

…

‘Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end the World.’ But the end of the world, when we go around it full circle, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world.” – Pessoa

It is well know that Kant couldn’t be budged. He never saw a city bigger than his Königsberg. His friend, Johann Hamann, did – as did Herder, and Lichtenberg. The philosophe was, usually, a traveler. But in a sense, Kant was one of the great clerks. I admit that it would distort the metaphysics of the Critique of Pure Reason to make it the equivalent of Bartleby’s, I prefer not to – an almost perfect definition of the noumenon! – but there is something definitely going on, here, in the cultural underbrush.

Königsberg was an important city, historically and symbolically, for Prussia. Kant, who like Kafka, later on, loved his travel books, was able, without budging, to experience Russia when the city was occupied for five years during the Seven Years war – a time when Cossacks camped in the countryside and a low intensity struggle broke out in the East Prussian marshes. It was Kurt Stavenhagen who pointed out, in the 40s, the liberation that accompanied Czarin Elizabeth’s troops – in ironic contrast to Friedrich’s enlightened tyranny. Although Kant did not get his wish during this time to be promoted to professor, he apparently enjoyed the company of the Russian officers, along with other townsfolk – Königsberg had a very nice occupation. When it was re-taken, Friedrich refused to step foot in the town.

A quotation from Kant’s description of Königsberg. This is found in a footnote in the preface to the Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. The preface concerns worldly knowledge. Kant could be accused of not having any, never having gotten out into the world. This is his reply.

“A great city, the middle point of a kingdom, in which the landscollegia [offices] of the Government itself are found, which has a university (for the cultivation of sciences) and is as well a port for maritime trade, which flourishes on a river that rises out of the interior of the country as well as with bordering various countries of different languages and custom – such a city, as for example Königsberg on the Pregel, may well be taken as a proper place for the expansion of the knowledge of men as even that of the world; where this, even without traveling, can be gained.”

From Dred Scott to Dobbs

 I think that the SCOTUS decision ending Roe v. Wade has had aftereffects in the States that haven't been fully understood, by which I mean the form of the SCOTUS decision - creating a cookie cutter country in which one's rights depend on the state one lives in - has formally brought us back not only to the days of Jim Crow, but, in many ways, to the days of the fugitive slave act. The Dred Scott decision essentially created a special Constitutionally protected group - slaveowners - and gave them rights exceeding the rights of non-slaveowners. It in effect made slavery Constitutional. Similarly, the Dobbs verdict created a special right for the anti-abortion states, thus preparing the way to Trump's occupation of LA and DC on the premise that certain states are subordinate to others. Dred Scott was rightly seen as a victory for the South - and in its wake, a para-Confederacy sprang up that the Whig party, the party of Northern liberals and merchants, did not have the tools to deal with. Compromise - which had been the great Whig policy - couldn't accomodate what was, in effect, surrender.

The opposition to Trump was in decline, of course, even before Trump. Among the many disappointments of the Obama regime was the prevailing sense of compromise, which sapped the energy of the Democratic party. Its freefall in the odd Biden interregnum signalled an inertia so deep and so widespread among the leadership of the Dems - from Manchin to Sanders - that they did not even recognize what Dobbs meant, or how to oppose it. Rather, the Dem/neo-lib notion that the machinery of the U.S. was in perfect order prevailed in the higher echelons of the party opposed to Trump. The Biden doctrine was, basically, the Buchanon doctrine of 1856: we should all operate normally under a SCOTUS ordered regime of privileging certain states. We should continue apply the tried and true methods of compromise and strike deals.

As a consequaence of the Fugitive Slave act, the Whigs quickly dissolved as a party and a moral center. Will the Dems alos dissolve? The odds for that look good. The stakes in the 2020 election, the pledges to reform SCOTUS, for instance, died due to Dem inertia and the belief that the system was inherently workable, even as it was showing that it was not. Now the unworkable system is at our throats. And the leader of the Dems in the House tells us: the occupation of D.C. is a "distraction". They don't get it at all.