On writing and obsession

 

As a writer, I have as little talent for staying on topic as a Mexican jumping bean. This rather subverts my essays in generalization. I get philosophical, I get argumentative, I get distracted, I head straight for the wrong goalposts.

However, as a writer, it must be said that there in one great thing about obsession: you don’t really have to worry too much about staying on topic – you will inevitably find your way back to the topics of your particular cancer. You will inevitably bump against the shore you are seeking, which will, unexpectedly, appear in Shakespeare, or a news story, or a burst of static on the radio. This is a good thing, until it becomes a very bad thing.

The OED claims that obsession derives from the latin for sit opposite (ob -session). It is interestingly different from possession, with the idea that some devil is within the self, taking control. Obsession is the devil sitting outside the self, but fronting the self, always there in one’s line of vision. In Freud’s vocabulary, obsession is paired with compulsion, compulsive thinking – Zwangsvorstellung. That pairs it, ultimately, with possession. Obsession, I’d contend, contains a space that possession abolishes. Which is why I think writers need not fear cultivating obsession, but should fear the devil’s leap from the other side into one’s self. Or is this some unalterable sequence in the structure of obsession? And isn’t there something about “sitting opposite” that reminds one of the caricature of the therapeutic situation?

Being obsessed with obsession today, I turned to psychoanalysis. This is from a recent paper on obsessional neuroses:

“Obsessive neurosis manifests itself through conjuration rites, obsessing symptoms, and permanent mental rumination, in which scruples and doubts interfere with action. It was the French psychiatrist Jules Falret (1824-1902) who used the term obsession to highlight the fact that the subject is affected by pathological ideas and a guilt that obsesses and persecutes him, to the point of being pejoratively compared to a living dead.” (Ronaldo Chicre Araujo, Welerson Silva Carneiro and Gabriel da Costa Duriguetto).

That doesn’t sound good. However, it does sound, to an extent, helpful: in as much as writing, here,  is a substitute act, a succedaneum for power – power being the act in full, outside the text. As if, my inner Derrida sneers. Figuratively attacking one’s enemies is a rather voodooish thing – sticking pins into figures.

I can’t imagine writing without obsession. Like any neurotic, I cling to my wrecks – don’t take them away from me! It does make me wonder if there is literature beyond obsession. My question of the day.

The spirit of the 1619 Project

 

The spirit of a historiography that kicked over the Cold War consensus about America (United States of)  was codified in the 1619 project, which is why the latter drew such fire from such members of the old guard as Sean Wilentz. Wilentz goes on at length with his problems with the post-liberal framework in his review of two new books on the American Revolution and the antebellum American state in the NYRB. The critique is deftly summed up here:

 

“Two ambitious new studies, Liberty Is Sweet by Woody Holton on the Revolution and American Republics by Alan Taylor on the decades that led to the Civil War, examine far more than the history of American slavery and racism. Both take up the array of political and social transformations that shaped the nation’s growth from an aspiring republic hugging the eastern seaboard to a boisterous, even bellicose capitalist democracy that spanned the North American continent. Yet both books advance claims in accord with interpretations of white supremacy as the driving force of American history. Holton and Taylor are serious scholars, and given the larger stakes involved, the reliability of their conclusions on these matters assumes importance in debates that go far beyond the academy.”

 

So much in this paragraph, and in Wilentz’s critique, depends upon the definitive article! Substitute ‘a’ for ‘the’ in the phrase “interpretations of white supremacy as the driving force of American history’ and you have the real stress of the 1619 project, which is about making a judgment call about the degree to which the white supremacist ideology, or assumption, was a driver of American history. The drivers should explain how a rigged up framework holding together thirteen British colonies actually functioned to expand its domain across the continent and assert itself as a nation. It should explain how the ethnic cleansing of the native nations contributed to this expansion; how slavery functioned to furnish the economic foundations of the nation; how Civil War and emancipation failed signally to dissolve white supremacy; and how these various compounding inequalities coexisted with a notion of the nation as the “leader of the Free World’ in the 20^th and 21^st century. Among other things…

 

Wilentz follows in the traces of a liberal centrist interpretation of American history that was strongly inflected by the Cold War and its Manichean anti-communism. In this version, America was uniquely freedom-striving – its Revolution, unlike the French Revolution, was uniquely moderate and led to no totalitarian monstrosity. This was the American Revolution as Hannah Arendt saw it, and was used for left-baiting purposes by a generation of French anti-communists, like  Francois Furet, both to attack the French Revolution (and by implication, the Russian one) and to legitimate the neo-liberal turn towards limiting government “intervention” in the economy.

 

I’m wholeheartedly for the spirit of the 1619 project, and look forward to its expansion to account for twentieth century American history. In particular, it is striking, to me, that here we can close the gap between  American foreign and domestic policy – a gap that has called into being a separation of intellectual labor that misses the big, syncretic picture.  For instance – to give an amateur’s pov – I’d like to see how white supremacy drove one of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive era programs: the idea of the right to “self-determination’ of a people, aka ethnic group, which Wilson successfully interjected into the negotiations at Versailles at the end of WWI.

 

Myself, I see every connection between that high “liberal” project and Wilson’s view of domestic American history, in which the essence of the United States was a white protestant elite. As we know from Wilson’s domestic policies, he was in full retreat from Theodore Roosevelt’s very moderate policy of civil rights for African Americans – in line with a Republican Party tradition -  symbolized by Roosevelt’s reception, in the White House, of  Booker T. Washington. Roosevelt himself was your standard Social Darwinist, convinced of Negro “inferiority’, but as so often with Roosevelt, his timidly radical gestures echoed much more loudly than his personal conservatism. With Wilson, the idea of African-American inferiority was infused much more emphatically in his policies – as in his purging the Civil Service rolls of black Americans. I think this background has been somewhat neglected in its effects on American foreign policy and, specifically, in its junction with a radical ethno-centric ideology in Europe that doomed such multi-ethnic entities as the Austro-Hungarian empire. The notions of self-determination and its shadow side, the notion of some superiority of the chosen ethnic group, was not Wilson’s creation – but the spread of the idea, its legitimacy as a basis for a new world order, owed a lot to Wilson. Wilsonian liberalism in the academic world – with Princeton as its capitol – still flourishes, and still lacks an overarching historical account.

 

I’m a piker in these matters, but I would love to read some such account.

a slow weirdo drives a car

  I’ve been recovering from jetlag that last few days. As well, I’ve been recovering from another, less named lag – which comes from having driven about in a car intensely for a month, and suddenly stopping.

I rather liked it, at first. We get to Georgia, we rent a car, I’m at the wheel, oh momma! But the day by day sitting in that seat and making with the acceleration and the braking and the lane changing and the lights, it began to wear on me. I felt like a much used pencil point – I leaked out my lead. Hmm, that sounds phallic, don’t it?

Anyway, I was going through some journal entries from years ago, in California, when I also drove a bit, and found this account of hobbling about in the aftermath of an operation I had on my leg. It puts together the world of the slow and the world of the speedy in terms that I can’t improve upon.

“One of my fave sequences in one of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satantango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him walking to the village inn to get more liquor. The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired. Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride, walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

Well, at the moment, I have fallen out of the speedy cohort. Get it now? I can barely keep up with the drunken doctor in the flick. My little monster wound, as I affectionately refer to it, keeps me limited to a stately, or if you like, arthritic pace. Of course, I’m supposed to sit around the house, or lie around, and mostly I’m obedient, but it drives me a bit nuts not to be able to go the four blocks up Wilshire to my usual coffee shop. Of course, I do go a bit – I pick up Adam from his school, a trip which, in all, is about eight blocks. And I go those blocks slowly.

The doctor in Satanstango lives in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are dogs and horses. Not a metropole. I live in Santa Monica, which, as in all American cities, cars are the primary entities. Humans are down on the scale. I take a grim, slow person’s satisfaction, now, in crossing the street, holding back that anxious car driver who wants that three seconds – gotta have that three seconds! And is probably cursing me in his or her driver’s seat. Good. I’ve discovered that with slowness comes no spiritual insight, but a certain bitterness, a fuck you attitude. This is evidently not good from the point of view of the Mahatma and Jesus Christ. But let the Mahatma and Jesus Christ walk across the street while a black BMW inhabited by somehow who has never missed a lunch or not gotten what they wanted in their entire fucking life glowers at them. It is … trying.”

I read this now from the other side of the speed gap. Or at least from zooming down Lawrenceville Highway in the morning, with a slight impatience every time I notice a school bus in my lane up ahead. Damn, gotta slow down. Gotta take that needle from 55 to 30. As our civilization and its works goes down – and we are assured by every Netflix post apocalypse film that this is a matter of a few years – how will we remember these speeds? In fact, I’m guessing we won’t remember them – speed like this can be felt, navigated, and managed by the human being, but not really well imagined, and thus, not really well remembered. I imagine few people can remember the feeling of 60 mph when they are lying in their comfy beds – but we can well remember hobbling slowly. Our biology is not adapted to our quotidian. And aint that a bitch

American (U.S. of) impressions

 

There's the geography of maps, where the objects are a town, a river, a mountain, and then there is the subjective map, where the objects are all object-events: getting lost, coming home, being-in-a-strange-apartment. The subjective map has a very different scale - it measures not inches, miles, or kilometers, but uniqueness and repetitions. For instance, the geography of getting lost depends upon its position in the scale of encounters with a place - getting lost in the same place the second time is a harder thing to do, and eventually, if you keep coming back, you aren't lost at all and the lostness that you once experienced seems like a dream.

 

To understand this human dimension of geography is to understand, at least on an initiatory level,  the lure of the traveler’s story. “Human dimension” – I used to be suspicious of all phrases that included “human” in them, since they struck me as engaged in the cloying project of smoothing out the vast spaces between different persons and communities. Now, I understand them more in terms of a kind of tuning, or registering, of the ghostly. The holy ghost has become the dimly lit, ever fleeting, universal subject. The human is just glamour.

 In the case of America – or to use that corporate cutout name, the United States – the traveler’s books preceded the founding and have continued on down to the present day. From John Smith to Jean Baudrillard, description of the curiously blank there, the x that marks the spot, is associated (by a logic that is more libidinal than syllogistic) with prophecy or prediction about that ‘there’ that’s not there. Its fixer-upper possibilities. Get rid of the natives (who will later be said to have “disappeared” – a true discovery, that word, which drifts from the Indian peoples to the Tumpameros and Montoneros of Uruguay and Argentina in the 1970s – drop em from airplanes, put them on reservations, starve them by killing the buffalos, that kind of thing. The there must be made ever more blank – away with the trees. Away with the African-American neighborhoods. Build highways and parking lots. Get the white settlers into the suburbs, away from the atomic bombs. Away then with the factories – we will all be richer, the cheap goods in Walmart, the LBO wealth – when we resite those manufacturers in Mexico or China or the Dominican Republic. The fixer-upper urge is our true inheritance from the original white settlers.

This is the puzzle that sticks in the craw of Henry James, whose American Scene is an excellent book to page through if, as it happens, one is a returning expatriate. Such as me, myself and I. Go, at random, to James’ chapter on Washington, D.C., and you see him, too, feeling that blankness that is barely submerged by settlement and business.

“… quite as the explosion of spring works, even to the near vision, in respect to the American scene at large — dressing it up as if for company, preparing it for social, for human intercourse, making it in fine publicly presentable, with an energy of renewal and an effect of redemption not often to be noted, I imagine, on other continents. Nowhere, truly, can summer have such work cut out for it as here — nowhere has it to take upon itself to repaint the picture so completely. In the "European" landscape, in general, some, at least, of the elements and objects remain upon the canvas ; here, on the other hand, one seems to see intending Nature, the great artist of the season, decline to touch that surface unless it be first ­swept clean — decline, at any rate, to deal with it save by ignoring all its perceived pretensions. Vernal Nature, in England, in France, in Italy, has still a use, often a charmed or amused indulgence, for the material in hand, the furniture of the foreground, the near and middle distances, the heterogeneous human features of the face of the land. She looks at her subject much as the portrait-painter looks at the personal properties, this or that household object, the official uniform, the badges and ornaments, the favourite dress, of his sitter — with an " Oh, yes, I can bring them in ; they're just what I want, and I see how they will help me out." But I try in vain to recall a case in which, either during the New England May and June, or during those of the Middle States (since these groups of weeks have in the two regions a differing identity and value), the genius in question struck me as adopting with any frankness, as doing more than passively, helplessly accept, the supplied paraphernalia, the signs of existing life. The business is clearly to get rid of them as far as may be, to cover and smother them ; dissimulating with the biggest, freest brush their impertinence and their ugliness.”

Nobody is as diffusively cutting as Henry James. Indeed, I think of him as, under all the heavy vestimentary rhetoric, the true American weirdo – not Poe, not Sylvia Plath, not Bobbie Dylan.

The last time I hit the States was, I think, 2018. That’s a long gap for me. The waves of the pandemic, combined with the political news, made me think of the U.S. as more than usually crazy. But when we bought the tickets in the summer, we thought the cray cray was, if not over, at least tempered and teased into a vaccinated state of health comparable to any other. Just our luck, and the luck of all travelers this Christmas season, that the covid mounted a return, a battle of the Bulge in which the good guys, this time, lost, and there we were in the midst of it. For this reason, we never made the leg of the journey to New York City – just visited my family in Atlanta.

 

My expectations were low. I figured we would be challenged on the street as masked liberals. This turned out to be a wild exaggeration. In fact, my impression from the first was of the large disconnect between the official story of the U.S., told by the media and public opinion – that game of three card monte, mounted by thumbsuckers – and the ordinary, banal life that flows through the streets, the houses, the schools, etc. Atlanta is an evidence that the world has landed, all unknown and unrecognized, in the American hinterland. Everywhere there are Korean churches, Indian fast food places, Asian restaurants managed by Jamaicans and Jamaican restaurants managed by Japanese, a wholesale integration that makes life so portlike. All the white blue collar class – according to the elite – are racist as fuck, but the elite are the least integrated class in the country, while the working class, white collar and blue, is incredibly mixed. I go into, say, the Brass Pro Shop at Sugarloaf Mills. Now here, if anywhere, the politics is plain. It is a vast hunting and fishing and outdoor outlet with a large pro-NRA insignia on the wall near the cash registers. Yet the customers I saw busily choosing their gifts – fishing rods for Grandma, a box of bullets for Uncle Lester, etc. – were an Atlanta metro crosssection of ethnic origins and friendly dispositions. I was there to buy some outdoor ornaments for some people on my Christmas list and I found them and nobody paid a lick of attention to the masks we were wearing. A third of that crowd was with us, in the mask wearing department. True, the ritual that I believe makes Paris a safer place – the requirement to show the vax pass before you go into a restaurant or public facility – was incredibly not in place. So we were careful. Not, though, too much more careful than we would have been in Europe.

It is, after all, a universal fuckup, and the spread and monthly renewal of the pandemic follows the trod and true byways of the neocolonial system. It is not just the States that drives the fuckup. One effect of visiting the U.S. is, actually, to have a better sense of proportion about the U.S. – which, in spite of the endless intrusion of its media, is just a country like any other.

I’ll have more to say when I think about how to say it.

Baja by Karen Chamisso

 

 

Wrapped in a digestive absence

the citizen of beachtowels opposes

a dead eye to the inanity

of the ocean’s endless flourishes,

 

as though, perpetual spectator

she already knew the myriad

of plots there - expecting no watery mouth

to pronounce the aggrandizing period.

 

As – so we are told – the gods to demons

the demons to neuroses are fled

belly down, on her territorial towel

she dreams of sex, food and money instead.

 

 

 

 

A tap dance: luck and the unlucky in the land of the free

 

                                                                1.
According to an essay by Arthur Machen (the English ghost story writer who fascinates Javier Marias, the great Spanish novelist), Grimaldi, the most famous clown of Regency England, was performing one night in 1803 in a play called “A Bold Stroke for a Wife” when he was told that there were two men waiting to see him at the stage door that led from the back of the theatre into the street. Grimaldi went to see what they wanted, and confronted two apparent strangers. One was in a white waistcoat, and had evidently been living in the tropics, such was the complexion of his skin. He greeted Grimaldi familiarly. Grimaldi was at a loss as to who this person was until the man unbuttoned his shirt and showed the clown a scar. The man was Grimaldi’s brother John. This was pretty amazing – John had supposedly gone down on a Naval ship years before.

Grimaldi, of course, was overjoyed, and invited the men in. John’s companion demurred – and John, after giving him instructions on when they would meet again in the morning, mounted the stairs with Grimaldi and came into the Green room while his companion disappeared into the London night. Grimaldi still had to complete his part in the play, so he left his brother with another man, a Mr. Wroughten, while he went to do his stage business. John showed Mr. Wroughten that his duffel bag was full of coins, and bragged about his various successes. Grimaldi was in and out of the green room according to his entrances and exits. His idea was that John should come with him, after the play, to see their mother. John asked for her address, which Grimaldi gave, but then he said that they should go together, and that he merely had to change out of his costume in the dressing room.

To quote Machen: “And then the strangeness of it all came with a sudden onset on Grimaldi. "The agitation of his feelings, the suddenness of his brother's return, the good fortune which had attended him in his absence, the gentility of his appearance, and his possession of so much money; all together confused him so that he could scarcely use his hands." He seems to have fallen into the state which the Scots call a "dwam," a manner of waking vision, in which actualities are taken for dreams and the man wonders when he will awake and recognize that he has been amongst the shadows of the night.” It was in this state that Grimaldi returned to the Green room, only to find that his brother had left."

Now here comes the best part of the story, I think – that exponential bit that raises it above the average ghost story. Grimaldi found an actor named Powell in the Green room, and asked if he’d seen John.

"I saw him," he replied, "but a moment ago; he is waiting for you on
the stage. I won't detain you, for he complains that you have been
longer away now than you said you would be."
So Grimaldi hurried to the stage area. John wasn’t there. Another actor was there named Bannister. Bannister asked who Grimaldi was looking for, and after Grimaldi told him he was looking for John, Bannister said:
"Well, and I saw and spoke to him not a minute ago," said Bannister.
"When he left me, he went in that direction (pointing towards the
passage that led towards the stage-door). I should think he had left
the theatre."
So the clown went out of the theater, but he didn’t spot John. The doorkeeper said he’d gone out just a minute before. Grimaldi, out in the street, decided that John had, perhaps, decided to visit an old friend of his who lived close to the theater, Bowley. So he rushed to the Bowley house and knocked, even though it was rather late. Bowley came to the door:
“Mr. Bowley himself opened the door, and was evidently greatly
surprised.
"I have, indeed, seen your brother," said he. "Good God! I was never
so amazed in all my life."
"Is he here now?" was the anxious inquiry.
"No; but he has not been gone a minute; he cannot have gone many
yards."
"Which way?"
"That way--towards Duke Street."”
The clown rushed onwards, then, thinking that his brother was going to see another friend there, a Mr. Bailey. He rattled the door of the house, which was dark, rousing the girl, who spoke to Grimaldi from the window:
“"I tell you again, he is not at home."
"What are you talking about? Who is not at home?"
"Why, Mr. Bailey. I told you so before. What do you keep on knocking for at this time of night?"
In great bewilderment, Grimaldi begged the girl to come downstairs, as he wanted to speak to her, telling her his name. She came down after a short interval.
"I'm sure I beg your pardon, sir," said the maid. "But there was a
gentleman here knocking and ringing very violently not a minute before you came. I told him Mr. Bailey was not at home; and when I heard you at the door I thought It was him, and that he would not go away."

Then Grimaldi asked the girl if she had seen the gentleman's face. She had not; she had looked out of the upper-window, and all that she noticed was that the gentleman had a white waistcoat, whence she inferred that he might have come to take her master out to a party.
Back went the amazed and frightened actor to the theatre. There
nothing had been seen of the lost brother; and then Grimaldi began a sort of mad midnight tour of the houses of old friends round the Lane, knocking and ringing people out of their beds and enquiring after his brother. Some of the people thought Grimaldi was mad; and said so. His manner was wild, and nobody had heard of John Grimaldi for fourteen years. They had long given him up as dead.”
And so Grimaldi finally lost the trail of his brother. He went home. He told his mother. She fainted. The next day, and the next, no sign of John. And no sign ever again. Grimaldi pulled some strings to see if John hadn’t been impressed into the Navy that night. He talked to the London police. But never a hide nor hair of the man was discovered. It was as if he’d never been.
This is what Machen says:
“It is an extraordinary tale. It may be true in every particular. But
there are strange circumstances in the history. For example: why
should John knock up his old friend, Mr. Bowley, only to dart away
from his door in a minute's time? Note that minute in advance all
through the chase. It persisted up to Mr. Bailey's house. The
servant-girl there said, "there was a gentleman here knocking and
ringing very violently not a minute before you came." I do not quite
know why; but this fixed period of a minute inspires me with distrust.”
But it is, of course, the minute that makes the tale. That echoing minute behind, that tardiness as a suddenly autonomous and separate domain of time chunked off of secular time, in which you have a chance to “be on time” – as though one were caught in a world of “too late,” with only one possibility – the unlucky one. If one is looking for the “effect” of the Enlightenment, vide our last post, one of them is surely that the ghost story, the uncanny that so fascinated Freud, fills the place in Western culture that the ghost once filled.

2.

“The man made a mess of things. He got all balled up with Christ. He made a white marriage. He had one son die of tuberculosis, the other shoot himself. He only rode his own space once—Moby-Dick. He had to be wild or he was nothing in particular. He had to go fast, like an American, or he was all torpor. Half horse half alligator. – Charles Olson
The writer no more creates writing than the electrician creates electricity. Invisible currents move at their own speed, out there, among unknown elements – and the writer merely captures a bit of that invisible world in the poor conductors available to him, and measures it and deludes others – though not himself – that he made the conductor, the current, the speeds and fluctuations.
New, yes, to our science, but not to that invisible world itself. Nothing is new or old, there.
So … I received a salutary shock, much like that given to Franklin by the key tied on the wet kite string, from the paragraph I wrote at the end of the first part of this thing: my plebian précis of Machen’s glorious image of Grimaldi the clown pursuing the spectre of his brother through the London streets, always a minute or two behind him at every house. I, or somebody like the ghost of I, wrote:

“That echoing minute behind, that tardiness as a suddenly autonomous and separate domain of time chunked off of secular time, in which you have a chance to “be on time” – as though one were caught in a world of “too late,” with only one possibility – the unlucky one. If one is looking for the “effect” of the Enlightenment, vide our last post, one of them is surely that the ghost story, the uncanny that so fascinated Freud, fills the place in Western culture that the ghost once filled.”

Well, I in my royal flesh look at that graf with a little amazement, because – although not precisely worded, I should have been a little less gnomic about the kingdom of heaven, or being on time, and pandemonium, or being late – I now think, too late, always pursuing the further point – that I should have pointed to the root of meritocracy in the schedule, the saint's luck of always being on time -- I should have pointed out how its negation, being late, is not precisely its negation but a sort of parody, a shadow of being on time that infects its victim even when he is on time, so that his on-timeness is always slightly addled, unlucky –anyway, all of this somehow met in that paragraph, and it seemed to be the missing piece I was looking for, or at least one of them, in my project, my life, the life of that ghost I that is somewhat like I, of understanding success and failure in America. In fact, the psychoanalysis of the meritocracy should definitely accord a large place to the uncanny. Anyone who has read Freud’s essay On the Uncanny will see a parallel in Grimaldi’s hopeless bummel.

And thinking of this, I also thought of a line from Olson’s Maximus poem. A line about failure. I’d stored that line up, put it in some notebook, but I couldn’t find it. I looked for it and stumbled across Olson’s essay on Melville.
That essay has, famously, the spaced intensity of poetry. Olson is an essayist along the same lines as Emerson, or Nietzsche –the pendulum is always swinging between the vatic and the vapid. It is a prose that makes large bets. This excites adolescents, and gives those who have outlived all avatars, moderate souls dessicating their way towards retirement, something to jeer at.

What I like best about Olson was how intensely he felt about failure and success in America – how he knew some bone truths about this gristle hearted country. Of course, poets in the fifties and sixties, like novelists, could be successes. Not in the way they are successes now, with the soft shoe act on NPR, the terrible kindergarten readings, all so educated in not dramatizing a line it is funny, the last horrible debris of modernism combined with the complete eclipse, in America, of oratory – an art that only survives, heavily disguised, in hip hop. Successes nevertheless, in the fifties -- Robert Lowell got his face on the cover of a Time magazine. Meanwhile, Olson taught, delivered the mail, and watched the Organization Man, the tranquilized behemoth, bestride the suburbs.

Anyway, Olson’s essay on Melville gets to the elements right away:

"I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.
It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman's): exploration."

He also gets a basic fact about the culture, one so disguised that you can only see it historically, at a distance, it so goes against the grain of what you are supposed to feel in this place:

“Americans still fancy themselves such democrats. But their triumphs are of the machine. It is the only master of space the average person ever knows, oxwheel to piston, muscle to jet. It gives trajectory.
To Melville it was not the will to be free but the will to overwhelm nature that lies at the bottom of us as individuals and a people. Ahab is no democrat. Moby-Dick, antagonist, is only king of natural force, resource.”

And Olson gets the polarity right. It also gets the mythic names right. The polarity is Melville and Poe:

“He had the tradition in him, deep, in his brain, his words, the salt beat of his blood. He had the sea of himself in a vigorous, stricken way, as Poe the street. It enabled him to draw up from Shakespeare. It made Noah, and Moses, contemporary to him. History was ritual and repetition when Melville's imagination was at its own proper beat.”

The names are strewn through the text (John Henry, for instance, is there) like so much phosphorescence. Here’s an instance of it:
“This Ahab had gone wild. The object of his attention was something unconscionably big and white. He had become a specialist: he had all space concentrated into the form of a whale called Moby-Dick. And he assailed it as Columbus an ocean, LaSalle a continent, the Donner Party their winter Pass.”
That the polarity and the names are all of the peculiar dialectic of success and failure – the way failure searches through the street for its lost other, is killed on the Texas coast and cannibalized in the Sierra Nevada and comes out of that innocent (I’ve always loved that one of the survivors of the Donner Party opened a restaurant in Sacremento – the most American of stories!) – is where you have to begin to look at the whole odd structure of petrified luck and its worship in these here States.
"Whitman we have called our greatest voice because he gave us hope. Melville is the truer man. He lived intensely his people's wrong, their guilt. But he remembered the first dream. The White Whale is more accurate than Leaves of Grass. Because it is America, all of her space, the malice, the root."

What will you give me for the extinction of mankind? Bids start at 600 trillion dollars...

 

In Catastrophe: Risk and Response, Richard Posner, the most coldblooded judge since the eponymous Judge in Blood Meridian, considered the economics and law of human catastrophes. It was reviewed in Slate in 2004, from which I take this precis of one of his thought experiments.

 

“Consider the possibility that atomic particles, colliding in a powerful accelerator such as Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, could reassemble themselves into a compressed object called a stranglet that would destroy the world. Posner sets out to "monetize" the costs and benefits of this "extremely unlikely" disaster. He estimates "the cost of extinction of the human race" at $600 trillion and the annual probability of such a disaster at 1 in 10 million.”

 

The six hundred trillion dollar figure is so absurd that it is … almost touching.  For that 600 trillion dollars, by the Escher-like economics favored by Posner, is equal to zero dollars. In as much as dollars exist as units of exchange, when exchangers don’t exist, the value of the dollar becomes meaningless. However, Posner, who can imagine a world devoid of humans, can’t imagine a world in which money has no value whatsoever. Money, for ideologues of Posner’s type, is something like light – a universal element. This is why the 600 trillion – a sum that has been refined by that other mad economist, Nordhaus, in his insane calculations concerning global climate change – exists as a kind of limit of economics – a philosophical and theological limit.

 

There is about this sum the whiff of the omnipotence paradox, of which the emblematic problem is this: can God  create a rock that he couldn’t lift? The paradox was discussed by George Mavrodes and Wade Savage in the 1960s. Here’s Savage’s critique:

 

“if "God is omnipotent" is necessarily true-as Mavrodes must claim for his solution to work- then his assumption that God exists begs the question of the para doxical argument. For what the argument really tries to establish is that the existence of an omnipotent being is logically impossible. Fourth, the claim that inability to perform a self-contradictory task is no limitation on the agent is not entirely uncontroversial. Descartes suggested that an omnipotent God must be able to perform such self-contradictory tasks as making a mountain without a valley and arrang-ing that the sum of one and two is not three. No doubt Mavrodes and Descartes have different theories about the nature of contradictions; but that is part of the controversy.”

 

The whole point of the omnipotence paradox is to let us see what it is we are saying when we say that God is an omnipotent being. This, of course, is not the way God is thought of in many cultures and times – but it is how God came to be thought of by Christian and other thinkers, all of whom, Nietzsche thought, are part of the “platonic” line. As Savage points out, the stone that both exemplifies and limits the omnipotence of God has implications for what is logically signified by omnipotence: “The essence of the argument is that an omnipotent being must be able to perform this task and yet cannot perform the task.” Which, although Savage doesn’t say it, is at the heart of the Christian doctrine – God become man makes itself vulnerable – mortal. Logic is an airy thing, but there is death at the end of it, as any other human enterprise.

 

Although Posner is as blind as any economist, his six hundred trillion dollar calculation is about the death of money; money as a mortal thing suddenly becomes a very human thing. The worthless dollar, like the stone that God can’t lift or the Son of God dying on the cross, is a story about a material carrier that has suddenly lost all significance.

It is from this point of view that the six hundred trillion dollars becomes  a sort of black hole: the hole into which the Holocene disappeared. No wonder the issue of climate change is pervaded by a sense of the apocalypse. Our evaluations of it, from the point of view of the system of evaluations that gives me the price of my house or of a loaf of bread, goes haywire. This is why I like to think of that mythical, mystical 600 trillion dollars as a sort of being sitting on our shoulders – our planetary momento mori. It is as plain as the Jehovah’s writing on the walls of the King of Babylon, but in a script our most learned calculators of script can’t read. The merest bird of some dying species, though, can read it easily.