America the defective

Reading the comfortable neo-liberal comments that overflow the NYT opinion page and twitter, that are obviously pronounced at dinner tables and in emails that contain (attached) the latest "marvelous column by Tom Friedman, who nails it" - all of which are about Trump the barbarian and none of which are about America the defective - I am reminded of a sentence of Montesquieu's: "When Sylla wished to give liberty to Rome, Rome could no longer receive it, having only a feeble remnant of virtue left. And as it had always even less, instead of waking up after Caesar, Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, Nero, Domitian, it was ever more the slave; all blows were directed against the tyrant, none against the tyranny."

New England, 1886

Her little life lay on the bed
Concentrate as that sword
Intent, edged, unsheathed
Prophesized by the Lord

Not to bring peace but more life
Than any outside her closed door
And she interred like a knife
In the kitchen’s silverware drawer.

She awaited her chance for the attack
To be bloodied under his touch
From which there’d be no going back
- but it never came to much.

Her papers were put away
Her dresses were folded up
Her brother was heard to say
She was strange even as a pup.
- Karen Chamisso

the poet

“… the fact that the film presents extreme closeups

Of the genitals in function” made

All the stags grin monomaniacal. One became

a poet and taught the trade. In the flicker

Of his stag film eyes

what was I and I

- genitals in function in extreme closeup

underneath my underneath.

“But I guess they’re really young, and they always look beautiful”

Somebody said to somebody as I carried the party

Home on my back, like Aeneas carrying his daddy.

- Karen Chamisso

The "we" of stupidity

Robert Musil once gave a famous talke entitled “On stupidity” [Ueber Dummheit]. The title is doublesided, at once about a topic and a citation of a previous talk entitle On stupidity given given by a Dr. Johan E. Erdmann, a Hegelian philosopher, in 1866. Erdmann developed a theory of stupidity in this talk that is articulated around the metaphor of the keyhole. The stupid person, in this metaphor, sees things through a keyhole, and from this vision generalizes without limit. Thus, the stupid person sees something about sickness – or reads it in a newspaper – and immediately generalizes what he has seen. Stupidity, in Erdmann’s view, is a curious amalgam of narrowness and absolutism.

“… one’s own I would be the only keyhole, through which he looks into the stocked hall that we name the world. Stupidity is thus to be defined as the spiritual circumstance in which the particular itself and its relationship to itself figures as the single mesure of truth and value, in short: everything is judged according to its own particularity.”

Erdmann appeals to his intuition: surely one could statistically pick out the stupid person through an enumeration of the times certain expressions (always instead of often, all instead of many, and “we” [Man] instead of I) crop up in this person’s speech. Paradoxically, the egotism – the self assertion without self-consciousness – is expressed not by the “I”, which indicates partiality, but the “we”, which indicates absoluteness.

Musil’s talk was given in 1937 – an ominous year in Austria. Already, Austria was ruled by a quasi-Fascist government. The strong labor movement of the 20s had been bloodily quashed. Those who could feel how things were going were searching for tickets out. Musil places his talk in a curious non-genre – it is neither scientific nor artistic. It is speculative, and not generalizable. In short, it is essayistic, a bounding and rebounding between opposites.

In 1937, it was not “clever” to call up, by name, the stupid or the powers of the stupid. This plays a role in Musil’s essay:

“… it can be dumb, to praise oneself as clever, but it is not always clever, as well, to maintain a reputation as stupid. Nothing here allows us to generalize; or rather, the single generalization that seems to apply, must be, that it is cleverest to allow oneself to be remarked in this world as little as possible! And really, this line under all wisdom has been drawn often. Yet more often is half-use or symbolic-representative use made of this misanthropic conclusion, and then it leads our observation into the circle of the commandments against pride and yet more expansive commandments, without letting us leave the realm of dumbness and cleverness completely.”

In 1937, the wisest were becoming aware that there are moments when exiting history turns out to be impossible, and being unremarked does not matter when being remarked is not the question: only being on the list is the question.

There has been a number of literary studies about the emergence of “betise” as a modernistic theme – Roberto Calasso has noticed a lineage between Flaubert, Leon Bloy, and Karl Kraus on the subject. 

Certainly, Erdmann’s essay seems to echo traits in the paper media world, as seen by Kraus: a narrowing “we” that promotes received ideas as eternal truths. Flaubert and Bloy both associated stupidity with the bourgeoisie, the privileged audience of the press. There is another story about the rise of the paper press that is just the opposite – about the broadening of the “information flow”, the globalization that comes with the newspaper. The newspaper embodied a whole new temporal dominant: that of simultaneity. Its very layout made, say, the marriage of a princess and the sex murders of an insane criminal coexist on the front page, which gives us a very different sense of time than the traditional chronicle, where the social hierarchy is reflected in the flow of the narrative.

I would speculate that the history of stupidity in the modern era – from the nineteenth century until now, the era of capitalism – is marked by the separation of the fool from the stupid. The fool – that figure in Erasmus and Shakespeare – is, supremely, a trickster. Being a fool is a vast joke, as well as a form of what you might call transgressive simplicity: it is represented by the fool in King Lear. One of the marks of Lear’s fallen state is that he can be effected by what his fool says – as the fool shrewdly remarks.
That trickster function continues on into the era of mass circulation papers, but is very much on the margin. From the margin, what the fool sees is the power of stupidity, in which the media is complicit. Or perhaps one might say, in which the media is caught up. For Kraus, that meant that all times were end-times – because all times were filled in by stories and comments by the press, by “Zeit-ung”, which was a debasement of Zeit [“time”] itself. 

In the kind of logical paradox that Musil knotted over, this state of perpetual alarm disarmed him before the rise of Hitler, about whom he had “nothing to say.” There are dead-ends everywhere: even in calling out stupidity.

Measuring Progress by refusing to cry

Tränengruss – the greeting by tears – is a ritual that fascinated a number of anthropologists in the early 20th century, especially Georg Friederici, who wrote a monograph entitled Tränengruss der Indianer. Friederici gathered material from the oldest European – Indigenous encounters. The colonialist and exotic fascination was a factor in his descriptions, but clearly the weeping greeting was not a myth:

[Among the Tupi] The women of the family performed the chief role in this ceremony. When a foreigner or even a native of the same tribe neared one of their huts as a visitor, he was allowed to enter and take his place on one of the hammocks. The naked women placed themselves strategically around him, laid both their hands before their faces and began to vigorously weep and lament, pitying the overcome fatigue and dangers of the way of the guest, and making him compliments. The rule demanded that the guest also cry, or, if he, as a European, had no stock of tears on hand, that at least he acted as though he did.”

The naked women and the dry eyed Europeans – it is a powerful colonialist image, no? Marcel Mauss, whose essay, L'expression obligatoire des sentiments, written in 1921, concerned not only about the ritual of tears described by ethnologists but also, as was pointed out by Chris Garce and Alexander Jones (2009), the mass mourning and numbness that was felt across the world after World War I – the European lack of tears – pointed out that the weeping greeting was also known in Australia. Garce and Jones speculate that Mauss was thinking hard about how to mourn the unknown soldier, the unknown flu victim, the unknown civilian casualty, the massacred and the massacre-ers. This was both the obvious question, post-war, and the buried question. Buried, repressed, and returning like the repressed on a national scale with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. As Garce and Jones put it:

“Mourning for those who never returned from the battlefields--i.e. those masses of individuals whose deaths could not be assimilated within the logic of national sacrifice--quickly assumed a spectral quality of unresolved political significance. "The obligatory expression of feelings" thus symptomatically draws attention to "our much missed Robert Hertz and Emile Durkheim" and to these fallen compatriots' studies of Australian funerary rituals. In re-reading his colleagues' ethnological works, Mauss would rediscover Hertz's and Durkheim's arguments that aboriginal women, more than other segments of so-called "archaic societies," occupied a mediating role between the living and the dead. He also noticed the prevalence of "greeting by tears" not just in Australia, but sheer across the ethnological record.”

We’ve seen a return of the idea that women mediate between the living and the dead in the notion that the female leaders of states have been much more competent in dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the neo-liberal ban on tears – except when shed by men, who are, de facto, brave men, preferably with military service – has still been the norm, and has had its effects in the settler countries – the U.S., for instance – as well as elsewhere. Such is the rule that forbids the stock of tears that when the lockdown comes to an end, the story will all be about “rebuilding” the economy, and the dead will have to bury their dead.

It poses a question, doesn’t it? When did the Europeans and all those societies upon which they put their heavy hand lose their stock of tears?

Midlife crisis of the oracle

“To Serapion of Athens, the stoic, who was himself a poet and who criticized the bad literary taste of his times in sustaining the point of view that the verses of the oracles, since they were authored by Apollo, chief of the Muses, could only be excellent, Boethius the Epicurien replied, pertinently and impertinently: have you heard the story of the painter Pauson?

“No”, responded Sarapion.

“You should know this story. Having received a commission to paint a horse rolling on the ground, he painted one that represented a horse running; as the buyer got angry, Pauson began to laugh and turned the canvas upside down: thus, the bottom became the top, and the horse no longer seemed to gallop, but to roll on the ground. This, according to Bion, is the fate of certain trains of reasoning, when they are reversed. Thus some, instead of pretending that the verses of the oracles are beautiful because they are written by God, would say, on the contrary, that God was not their author because they are so bad. The first claim may be uncertain, but what is certain is that the oracles are composed in a manner that is unworthy of divinity.” – The oracle controversy, Robert Flacelière

The oracle is bored, finally, of the future

Ablution in the cold water of the spring  

Autopsy of the victim, the signature

In the disposition of the organs, fate’s writing.

The wisecracks from all the golden codgers on the wall

The epsilon, the laurel wand, moving down the hall

To the chamber where you get your meds and electroshock

So little and so much makes a poet

When the gods have decided to put in their hand

Just as the city’s sack is found where nobody knows it

In the spilled guts of the sacrificed ram

Oh Popeye when you play upon your guitar

Do you play the things that will be or that are?

She sees ambiguity shaped by ambiguity

and that wisdom is hidden in a children’s joke

or in some stray, scrawled obscenity

in a jakes or toted in a poke.

To pose riddles and not ever guess her own

Has turned her voice into a frog’s voice, and her heart into a stone.

A review of Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine

Asclepius was the child of Apollo and Coronis, a mortal princess. Out of jealousy, Apollo struck Coronis with a lightning bolt when she was pregnant, but rescued the child in her womb. Medicine  begins with a femicide. We've always suspected as much.  But as always in the heavily redacted and montaged world of myth (where all that is deep is condensed with all that is shallow, where the cartoon apes the archetype), there is another story too: that Chiron the Centaur, who taught Achilles, also taught Asclepius. He taught music as well, which is how Achilles cured himself of his anger towards Agamemnon. As well, he taught the virtues that calmed the soul. Thus, as is pointed out in Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine, Chiron taught medicine, music and justice as entangled one with the other and, ultimately, one.

There’s a certain kind of medical essay, a book-like essay, that obscurely keeps the faith with that unity. Lewis Thomas in the U.S. is the best known practitioner – Szczeklik was that figure in Poland.

One expects, from these essays, certain doxa: information that has the righteous aura of believe it or not. You will learn, in Catharsis, for instance, that there are 82 distinct terms for different types and properties of the pulse listed in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary. There’s paradoxical pulse, there’s bigeminal pulse, there’s thread pulse, and so on.

The music in Catharsis begins, literally, with the heart beat, and goes through myth and personal experience – the case studies, patient’s whose histories are eccentric, revelatory – and science.

Before the Internet there was Indra’s net. There was as well Ananke’s – Ananke, the Greek goddess of fate. Although Goddess is not quite right – the net of fate was stronger than the Gods. This is the starting point.  The essays in Catharsis are oriented to the modern mythographerk, Roberto Calasso,k taking myth as a soundtrack, lifetrack, culturetrack. In the vocabulary and procedures of medicine,  Szczeklik sees a thousand ties to what lies outside the “science of medicine”. In order to see this, Szczeklik seizes on the terms and practices of the doctor, for instance the “anamnesis” – the name for the patient’s recounting of his history – which Szczeklik associates with Plato’s notion that memory precedes perception in the order of knowledge. In medical terms, the patient’s story precedes the doctor’s observation. The net in which all cause and effect is caught, where memory and observation converge, is what medicine is always going to be about, at least practically. Ethically – which is to say socially and politically – it is about catharsis, purification. 

“Some people have assumed that the text about katharsis in the Poetics has been amputated by an “unknown censor”; others have expressed the view that it was the subject of a separate, irretrievably lost essay. Some have even said in hushed tones that the Stagirite deliberately left the crucial issue of art open ended, because it eludes unambiguous intertpretation. Did he perhaps notatice that in the first syllable of the word he meant to define an ancient, unfathomed mystery lay spellbound? We fist find “Ka” at the beginning of the history of ancient Egypt as “one of the most difficult concepts for the Wewstern mind to grasp”. It was associated with the force that sustains life, the power of creation, and the soul of man. Centuries earlier, at the dawn of Hindu civilization, Kas was the name of the father of the gods, the life-giving element that pervaded the world. The god’s name Ka meant “Who?” – and the first reaction to it was “boundless awe”?”

This is the theme that links Szczeklik’s humanism to his Catholicism. It is a seductive idea that Szczeklik presents without presenting its opposite – something like Bataille’s notion that filth (can) make us free. Something like the feminist notion that the construction of the virtue of purity has participated in that original, Apollonian femicide. The anti-humanistic theme is not addressed or even very addressable from Szczeklik’s point of vantage. 

The strong tones that contrast pollution and purity slow down Catharsis as it travels from Paracelsus to modern discussions of, say, doctor assisted suicide, which prompts credal negations that are all the more disappointing in as much as we know the vast referential pharmacopiea that Szczeklik deals in earlier is dispensed with abruptly by references to Pope John Paul.

Still: I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for medical essays this plague season. It should be cut, I think, with the harsher diatribes of James Le Fanu’s The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, which I reviewed in 2001, here.