Balloons

 

Balloon love goes through three stages. First there is the curious rubber minnow, with the strange mouth. Your mom or dad blows it up, because though you try and try, you just seem to end up with spit all over the minnow. There’s a resistance in the balloon’s embryonic form. When your mom or dad blows the balloon up, they too visibly pause after the first exhale. The embryonic state, midway between minnow and blimp, is an important part of the natural history of the balloon. Professionals – who work in malls – seem to have mastered the smoothest of transitions between minnow and blimp. They don’t visibly pause. Of course, these professionals treat the balloon like it is a fluid substance, twisting it into animal shapes. In the evolutionary history of balloons, these animal shapes correspond, on might hypothesize, to when animals first came out onto land, developed lungs and locomotion. The difference is that the animals flourished and diversified, whereas the balloon’s larger destiny, the dirigible, is definitely foreshadowed by the simplest balloon mechanics.

Second there is the tying and playing. When the balloon achieves that equilibrium between too much – popping – and too little – drooping – the adult ties the mouth. The mouth now has the corded texture of a belly button, an ombilicus. There’s a squeeking sound that comes when the belly button is extended a bit so there is matter to tie. The tying is often a complicated matter, since it one of those operation in which the patient can lose its vital fluid, in this case air. Luckily, we are oversupplied with air, so that the balloon can be blown up again.

There are basically two kinds of knots. One knot is deliberately boobytrapped, so that when the balloon is batted around, the knot will untie and the balloon will, enjoyably, turn into a rocket, rapidly deflating as it shoots away. The other kind of knot is more solid. In the end, this is the knot that wins, since the second phase of balloon love is definitely batting the balloon in the air and following it around – at the risk of it or you knocking into furniture – and keeping it flying. This can satisfy both the balloon and the balloon batter for a surprisingly long time. There are variants to this game, but the point is definitely not to let the balloon touch the floor. If it touches the floor, there’s some kind of negative in the invisible scorekeeping going on.

The third and most mysterious phase of balloon love is finding the balloon the day after it was birthed into a big fat blimp. Now, the balloon is in the winter of its being, shrunken, usually strayed to a corner. It is a lesson in old age, the balloon is. There are two options, of course. One is to let the balloon shrink down to nothing. This option is basically forgetting the balloon – it is indifference. The other is to end it all by popping the balloon. There are those who maintain that the popping is best done to a young balloon, which produces the most surprising sound; and then there are those who keep the balloon in play until distracted by one of the ten million distractions that can capture one’s attention in the day. For the latter, the final popping is not as glorious, but it is not un-fun. At this point, the pop will be a little dumpy, a little curbed, but it will make a definite noise.

Pop, it will go, but more quietly than the defiant pops of its maturity.

It can be enough of a pop to surprise someone who doesn’t know you have the balloon and are planning on popping it.

And then the balloon, an exhausted and shred piece of rubber, is thrown away. Or put, for some reason, in a desk drawer, where years latter it will be taken out and thrown away. But throwing away is fate, and who escapes fate?

Yawn

 

Yawn is an ordered thing

like heartbeat  or equation

-or like the song you sing

on occasion.

 

“Fetal yawing in amniotic fluid

(like a fish’s yawn in water)”

shows yawn is for the stupid

and for dad’s smart daughter.

 

The Sybil in her cave

is yawn in yawn a shiver

like the pink and mauve

King Crimson album cover

 

- Dad’s band, which made me sing

“Da, da da da in the court

Of the crimson king!”

The Greeks thought you’d abort

 

The babe if you yawned in travail.

Yawn blessing an after fuck

is a sign seed’s prevailed

- conception – good luck!

 

though woman’s side has never

been told on that though.

Yawn’s like has ever

been the big O.

 

Condemned to wake

through  night’s keep

yawn, take

my soul to tonic sleep.

- Karen Chamisso

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

A PLEA FOR AN EXISTENTIAL ETHICS OF THE ENVIRONMENT

 

 In the anglosphere, the philosophical discussion about the environment often tends to be about rights and rational choice.

I think it was Anthony Giddens who pointed out that, within modernity, conversation about social matters in almost all spheres tends to translate things into a juridical vocabulary – one of rights. As a pragmatic matter, it might be the case that this is the best available way of presenting environmentalist causes.

However, philosophically, I see a missing dimension here, which also helps us understand the social meaning of “nature”. This is the existential dimension in which the human and the other-than human are involved one with the other. In this dimension, there is more going on with such things as forests, animals, rocks, rivers, oceans, the sky, etc., than rights talk.

In a wonderful essay, A person not completely like the others: the animal and its status (L’homme 1991 31(4) – which I don’t think has been translated into English, but should be - Sergio della Bernardina surveyed rituals of hunting and sacrifice to understand the human/animal interface. And his data showed that, far from thinking of animals as “things” – what Martin Buber called the It domain – hunters and even those committing ritual acts of cruelty thought of their prey and victim as persons. One might think that personhood is a protective status: we recognize a person and accord them “rights”. But in fact personhood is, della Bernardina claims, firstly a matter of being capable of being found guilty.

At the center of della Bernardina’s essay is an account of the Ainu bear sacrifice ritual.

Bernardina quotes an ethnological report about it. In the Ainu village, the villagers first capture a bear cub. The cub becomes the pet of the village. It is cuddled. ‘Even officially” it is treated like a person.

Then comes the fatal day of the ceremony. “He is given a tour of the village, and all the details of the ceremony are gently explained to him, compensation for all the tribe of bears for the future ones put to death. It is necessary that he can recount all the grandeur of the ceremony in order for others to be happy to come to men who treat them so well and not to feel that anger which can destroy the huts of the village.”

Then, according to the ethnologist who Bernardina is quoting, “for reasons that we didn’t quite grasp”, each begins to mistreat the bear, to make it angry, to strike on it from all sides, to poke it with branches, etc. At last it is lead to the center of the village, where everyone is assembled, and then the chief of the ceremony shoots at it with an arrow. Theoretically, this should kill it right away – actually, everybody begins to shoot arrows at it. Then the bear, either dead or dying, is dragged about. Someone breaks its neck.

What the anthropologist doesn’t understand is why this cruelty has to be exercised. This is Bernardina starting point. Far from being an expression of plebian sadism - a very popular claim - Bernardina thinks that the cruelty actually plays a structural role. And that role is about transformation.

His notion is this: there is an idea out there that an animal is a thing. A machine. But Bernardina claims that we have no evidence that the direct human experience of an animal is of a thing. The tendency we find across cultures is that an animal is a person. It has “rights” in the sense that it has a certain personhood. For Bernardina, the idea that an animal is a thing or a machine only makes its entrance when the animal is put to death. It is here that the animal must be demoted from person to beast. The cruelty it is subject to is not, he claims, derived from some sadistic substratum, but is a way of making the beast appear as a beast. It will lash out. It will prove that it is guilty. And it will be put to death.

Bernardina’s notion is an interesting conjunction of Rene Girard’s notion of sacrifice and David Graeber’s notion of debt.

This is where I’d like to think Buber’s theory of the dialogic encounter makes a good case for environmental ethics. But I’ll save that notion for a later post.  

The Trump impeachment - a symbol-event

 In the thumbnail sketch of modernity I carry around in my head, I see it as the result of two revolutions, both of which have failed. The first, or bourgeois revolution was basically about justice and equity. In this revolution, the powerful would no longer solely make the rules to which the powerless were subject, nor would they escape the rules that had been made. Where once the powerful were shielded by a system of immunity from obeying the rules and regulations that whacked the lower class, there would be true equality before the law.

This ideal has shaped a lot of political movements, from the French revolution to the American civil rights era. It has always failed to dissolve the immunity of the powerful, nor has it restrained the whacking of the powerless. It has, however, given that whole process a bad conscience.

The second revolution necessarily comes after the first: it is the revolution of the system of property relations in the broadest sense. This revolution shaped itself first as capitalism, in which capital was, ideally, wrenched free from an entrenched, privileged class and the market system destroyed all privileges that could not be justified by efficiency, and then as a socialist revolution that destroyed the last privilege, that of the holders of mere capital over the producers of goods and services. As we know, this revolution has also failed, and spectacularly failed where it was not preceded by the first, bourgeois revolution.

We live among the corsi and recorsi of these revolutions. The recorsi of the last forty years has been hard. Trump’s acquittal is a symbol-event – either the recorsi continues, and we go down before remorseless reaction, or we actually take up the long task of those revolutions with some chance of success.

There’s no compromise with the tide.

A troop of baboons in Caddies

I know what boys like

I know what guys want

John Dupre, in an nifty little takedown of the use of rational expectations theory as the master key to all the social sciences in Human Nature and the Limits of Science, noted the convergence of the ideology of the theory with the ideology of evolutionary psychology – both emanating from a conservative view of human nature, the one derived from Adam Smith’s notion that we are designed to truck and barter, the other finding justificatory fables in nature for social hierarchies which, in reality, we see dissolve all of the time.

There’s a nice article by Amanda Rees that explores the primatology behind evolutionary psychology in the Fall issue of the History of Science. As anybody knows who has read comments threads on feminist sites, or any site that ventures into that classic boobish trope, men vs. women (why do women do this? why do men do that?), sooner or later the male as hunter and sperm sprinkler will emerge – extra points for the comedic effect of those whose only experience of being a hunter is buying hamburger in a grocery store trying to analogize working in an office with throwing rocks in the savannah.

So where did the images come from? Rees points to the influential work of Sherwood Washburn and Irven Devore, who, in the fifties, studied and filmed baboons. Why baboons? Not because human beings have a close dna kinship. Such taxonomies were undreamt of in the fifties, anyway.

“Baboon social structure and ecology resembled the conditions thought to be characteristic of early man: both species lived in relatively large social groups, including related and unrelated animals of both sexes and all ages; both species had come down from the trees, abandoning the forest for the open savannah. Baboon life, it was thought, was likely therefore to mirror the experiences of early humans. Baboons too would have to learn to manage the tensions inherent in group life when that group includes individuals of different status and conflicting needs, and they would have to face the challenges of life on the plains. Forest primates had the option of disappearing into the trees to escape predators: animals in the open, like early humans, must have developed different defence mechanisms.”

Rees notes the presuppositions in Washburn and Devore’s work:

“When the baboon group moves from one place to another, they suggested, troop members were distributed in such a way as to give the greatest protection to the most vulnerable members. In their own words, As the troop moves, the less dominant adult males, and perhaps a large juvenile or two occupy the van. Females and more of the older juveniles follow, and in the centre of the troop are the females with infants, the young juveniles, and the most dominant males. The back of the troop is a mirror image of its front, with the less dominant males at the rear. Thus, without any fixed or formal order, the arrangement of the troop is such that the females and young are protected at the center.

As they also stressed in a later publication, this arrangement provides maximum protection for the weaker members — approaching predators would be met by large, aggressive adult males on both the troop’s periphery and in the centre, before they could reach the vulnerable animals at the troop’s heart. This model not only reflected the ‘man-the-hunter’ model that dominated anthropology at that time — casting, as it did, the males as the primary sources through which group integrity was derived and maintained — but it was also based on the assumption that it was possible to identify a single primate pattern (essential if one was to be able to generalize from primate to human behaviour), an assumption that derived from the search for species typical behaviour that was central to classical ethology, one of primatology’s

parental disciplines.”

One has to remember that Washburn and Devore are working at the height of the Cold war, when troops of the analogues to baboons – humans – were being planified into cars that drove on highways (in which the weak were crushed) that made possible suburbs that possibly dispersed the urban target from the potential missile hit. It was a man’s man’s man’s baboon world, and those who could not be attracted to buttocks that were inflamed with the right red white and blue as they worked at SAC – or the Soviet colors, as they worked at the Semipalatinsk Test Site – were not members of the order. Oddly enough, female primatologists found a different order indeed. Washburn and Devore’s student, Rowell, found something different: “Rowell’s work on forest baboons in Uganda found no sign of the typical pattern of troop movement: instead, she noted that when danger threatened, the troop’s response was “precipitate flight, with the big males well to the front and the last animals usually the females carrying the heavy babies”. Well, we can’t have deadbeat and cowardly Dad’s in the geneology, can we?

Rees’ account ends without primatology crystallizing around one paradigm. It includes the saga of Sarah Hrdy’s observations of infanticide, and how these were denied – which has become a little parable in primatology, much like Galileo’s condemnation by the Inquisition projected an aura of heroism on physics – but it turns out that infanticide is still a much more disputed event, in its meaning and evolutionary function, than the heroic story would make out.

1Eleanor Courtemanche

Conversation and argument

Philosophers present arguments; other people, lower in the pecking order, just argue.

 

Among the meanings of the Latin verb, arguere, is blame a person for a crime. In Roman law, this is the initial moment in the process of bringing the defendant to trial. James Ayto, in his book Word Origins, takes the arg back to its putative Indo-European origins, where it means white or bright – silvery, as in the French l’argent. How one hop skips and jumps from the silvery moon to “presenting a thesis” is one of those moments in which etymology most slavishly follows an enlightenment ideology, even though it means reasoning by wild analogies. Another etymological school holds that the Hittites, my fave mystery civilization, were at the bottom of the word, with arkuuae – to make a plea. In this history, the quarreling and blaming emotion hidden in argument came out, in English, long after the legal use of the term.

Perhaps: or perhaps, because etymology depends so much on written texts, the legal sense of argument was followed or even proceeded by the ordinary sense of blame. Of course, even on the high cultural plane, argument has a passive aggressive social significance. Anybody who has been in a lounge in a philosophy department and heard “arguments” in favor of, say, realism can testify that blaming is a large part of philosophical reasoning.  Yet it is rare to hear anybody speak in favor of blaming as a guide to practical reasoning, much less reasoning.

In the twentieth century, argument has seemed to some philosophers to be too legal, too formal, to encompass what philosophy does. That last silvery glimmer of “wisdom” is drowned in the arg-ument, according to this view. So there are other candidates to take argument’s place: conversation, dialogue, discourse, deliberation. Martin Buber in the 1920s was proposing dialogue, or, really, conversation. Mikhel Bakhtin, who was the great proponent of plurivocity, claimed that Buber was the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century ... “and perhaps in this puny century, perhaps the sole philosopher on the scene.” Bakhtin was obviously impressed with the book Buber published after I and Thou – Zweisprache, translated as “Dialogue” and included in a collection in English with the very pipesmokin’ title of Between Man and Man.

Richard Rorty ended up, as well, advocating for “conversation” and even dissolving philosophy into conversation. In the Consequences of Pragmatism, he wrote that his conception of pragmatism “...is the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones — no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers.” This seems to give inquiry over to its circumstances without a thought for how those circumstances came to be or how conversation influences and changes them, and maybe Rorty would say that since we have the sciences, which do inquire into and make our social circumstances, then philosophical inquiry just goes on in reference to this greater circumstance.

Or maybe he would not. Myself, I think that democracy produces a difficult mixed mode of discourse, in which argument – the presentation of a thesis – and arguing – the fixing of blame – compete and mate with each other. One of the sociologically interesting things to me about the vids showing the Capitol rioters is that so many of them are so prompt to make speeches. The speeches are, very often, very badly argued, because argument has become almost completely a quick finding of blame – blame for a crime that these people feel has been committed against them. I don’t think that crime is the stealing of the election, which is the surface prompt for the violence. But stealing is definitely at the core of it, the sensation of being the victims of a steal even as they steal. And this poses some interesting questions about how arguing and argument work within an ethos framed by the Atlantic revolutions in the 18^th century.

I’d like it to be the case that Buber has discovered the magic key to lead us out of this moronic inferno. Notoriously, the I and Thou was shattered in the Germany he lived in. And Buber was not happy with the Israel he helped to found, since the conversation there turned exclusionary.

If it isn’t a magic key, though, it is certainly suggestive as to how the current political situation not only in the U.S., but everywhere in the old democracies, can be understood.

 I’m big on the understanding front, since I suck on the persuasion front. Perhaps there is no politics of the “thou” – the kingdom of the you is inside you. It is from the lack of politics that we can work towards politics, maybe. Maybe.

Rilke on the 10

 

Surely, giving the finger

to the man tailgating you on Highway 10

is poetry too, and should be counted

 

where they count such things

in Rilke’s heaven.

Among my tropes and ruses

 

and the CD playing today’s road music

and the ominous signage for Pasadena

looming ahead of me like the SAT

 

there’s room for my own version

of “you must change your life”:

You must change your lane.

- Karen Chamisso