The great 20th century novelist William Gaddis once wrote, “That’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight.” Gaddis was born in 1922. He was an unabashed theorist of decline. For him, the novelist’s task was to narrate that decline, all the way until there was nothing left to say, until language itself gave up the ghost and we’d be left with a literature of empty mumbling.

Alas, just when things seemed like they might truly fall apart for Gaddis’ generation, the next comes along and makes sense of the chaos. Human beings are known to adapt. Give each historical catastrophe long enough to settle and the world simply becomes the world again. Thus has the dilemma always been for the apocalyptic mind. It is a mind well suited to show us how bad things really are, but ill-suited to recognize the staying power of that essential badness.

In a funny way, I see Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine as a sequel to the work of William Gaddis. I say that because they describe the same world. It is a world of meaningless work and a language hopelessly diluted into the jargon of commercial transactions and the exchange of goods and services. Baker’s world is as empty as Gaddis ever said it would be. And yet, it is not.

Baker’s protagonist is a man who spends the entirety of the short novel traveling up an escalator to the mezzanine of the corporate building where his office can be found. His job, a nameless one. His relationships, superficial and generally characterized by office chit-chat. The novel spends most of its time following the narrator’s train of thought as his attention wanders from one mundane subject to the next. But Baker manages to show that within this “empty” experience is, in fact, a richness of human subjectivity vast and complicated as to be a wonder.

On page 72 of the Vintage edition of the book, published in 1988, Baker comes as close as he ever does to stating his purpose. Baker’s narrator is musing upon the achievements of mechanical engineering that can be found in the corporate bathroom:

Valves that allow a controlled amount of water to rush into a toilet and no more, shapes of porcelain designed so that the turbulence in them forms almost fixed and decorative (yet highly functional) braids and twists that Hopkins would have liked; a little built-in machine that squirts pink liquefied soap with a special additive that gives it a silvery sheen (also used in shampoo recipes now, I’ve noticed) into the curve of your fingers; and the soap-level indicator, a plastic fish-eye directly into the soap tank, that shows the maintenance man (either Ray or the very one who was now polishing the escalator’s handrail) whether he must unlock the brushed-steel panel that day and replenish the supply ; the beautiful chrome-plated urinal plumbing, a row of four identical states of severe gnarledness, which gives you the impression of walking into a petrochemical plant, with names like Sloan Valve and Delaney Flushboy inscribed on their six-sided half-decorative boltlike caps—names that become completely familiar over the course of your employment even though if asked you couldn’t come up with them.

It’s the reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins that interests me most here. “Look at the world we are given just as Hopkins looked at his,” Baker seems to be saying. And then he goes out and does just that. Hopkins called this way of looking “inscape.” He said, “Poetry is in fact speech employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake.” What he meant was simply that poetry had to pay very close attention to the specific complexity that makes each thing unique. Inscape is that inner uniqueness. Baker, contra Gaddis and in a Hopkins frame of mind, suggests that we are not any more or less able to reflect on experience and “inscape” now than at any other time. All that’s required is a touch of enthusiasm. I mean that in the ancient sense of the term, the Greek sense of the term. For the Greeks, enthusiasm was about entheos or being possessed by a God. It was sort of like channeling. It meant that one had become a vehicle to express something beyond oneself. To be entheos is thus to be fully absorbed. This is almost the exact opposite of the stance Gaddis takes toward the world and his prose. Gaddis wants to reproduce the language of his time in order to make the reader aware of its degradation. He wants to be in language just long enough to get outside it and see it as a whole. That’s how he can express the world and condemn it at the same time.

Baker’s enthusiasm goes head over heels in its immersion. It thus has little to say about the world as such, the era, the relative progress or decline of history. Baker’s narrator simply lets himself go, lets himself interrogate every detail and think through every interaction ad nauseam. The result is an estrangement of the world that, paradoxically, brings it ever closer. The more intently one thinks about what it is really like to tie your shoes, the more it seems a wondrous and fantastical activity and the more, then, we are able to see ourselves as that weird combination of happenstance and habit that is so very human. This is what Hopkins wanted to accomplish in his poetry, to concentrate so intently on the details that the divinity would arise therein. Baker operates without the implicit theology. But he does think that the details will illuminate us, capture us, as it were, in the activities that mark us as a specific people at a specific time. The world, our world. If nothing else, it is inexhaustible in its fascination.

///
Two Deaths
Jim Culleny

1. Mirror

Under cover of light the moon disappears;
goes just like that, following my mother;
travelling not by casket, but instead
by memory and dream, alike
as death and birth, so alike
there’s just this mirror between them.

2. Da’s Marker

In a cemetery overlooking what used to be a lake
my father’s stone’s a tiny dot in space
smaller than a muon, darker than black hole,
more final than his fall from grace,
marking what the earth has swallowed,
naming who can’t be replaced.

//

Edward B. Rackley

Thanks to our financial turmoil, radio talk shows can now probe deeper than the usual ‘house of cards’ metaphor when reporting the quakes of late capitalism to economic illiterates like me. Experts of every stripe are sharing their views on a topic long-shrouded in patriotic orthodoxy. How often in public discourse do Americans openly question the omniscience of the Invisible Hand, a modern myth of cosmologic proportions?

So it’s a glorious time in one respect, given the rarity with which governing assumptions are shattered, their hollowness exposed. But if it sounds revolutionary, such hopes are misplaced. There’s nothing Marxist in this crisis, no collective appropriation of Wall Street’s wealth engines underway. What we have seen is the utter confidence game of our unregulated financial system laid bare, a coup of sorts against manufactured consent.

But I know not whereof I speak. I just listen to the talk shows and wonder what it all means. I compare such ripples, cataclysmic for us, to dramatic events in countries I know much better, developing countries typically described as ‘conflict’ or ‘post conflict’. Both here and there, interpretation is everything, the objectivity of the data moot. Where the crowd goes, so goes the country–or market–a dangerous prospect when the crowd goes wild.

Without trust or confidence in a given financial system, no one steps up to place their bets. Look at the lack of foreign investors in the Congo, where lack of regulation is legion, for proof of the clear connection between regulation and confidence in sustaining volatile or fragile markets. There is an invisible hand at work in the Congo; I’ve described it many times in these pages. It’s called ‘gun barrel greed’, and it runs things impeccably well. For a microscopic few.

The Egyptian miracle

Africa’s natural resources extend across many borders but are not equally abundant for all. Take the Nile River and its extensive tributaries in Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Kenya and Tanzania–all sub-Saharan countries. This neighborhood, also known as the Great Lakes region, comprises the Nile River Basin, the multiple sources of a river on whose lives all Egyptians and many Sudanese depend. Water is literally life for the ancient desert societies of Egypt and northern Sudan, and their skill at conserving water and maximizing its agricultural uses far exceeds that found in upstream Nile countries where water is abundant.

Clearly there is something primordial and miraculous–but alas not causal–in the relationship between scarcity and ingenuity. Take the case of Egypt, whose irrigation capacity precedes its invention of written language, both of which are over 2000 years old. This historical fact becomes amazing in the context of the Nile Basin, whose countries are the poorest in the world. Technologically, they are so far behind Egypt that they still depend entirely on rainfall to grow food. In Burundi, for instance, rivers and lakes abound but basic irrigation and animal traction constitute the unthought for farmers there. As a result, during the three-month dry season rural farmers in Burundi go hungry and die. Egypt learned to solve that problem long before the West existed.

The government of Burundi, like its neighbors with recurrent famine, could move to study and adapt Egypt’s example to mitigate dire poverty and end needless hunger related deaths every year. Unfortunately, authorities in many Great Lakes countries find it more relevant to accuse Egypt of ‘stealing the Nile’, while letting their own people languish in pre-modern darkness and lethal living conditions.

So scarcity is no catalyst for invention, as people continue to die of famine and unclean water in Burundi, Tanzania, Ethiopia despite these countries’ natural abundance and fertility. Were the state of scarcity itself a causal trigger for change, people and their leaders would have figured out solutions to poverty long ago. And given that practical solutions already exist in the world’s poorest neighborhood, like the miracle of Egyptian irrigation in a barren desert, one wonders why Egypt’s destitute neighbors continue to look the other way.

Where no man fears to trust

Created in 1999, the Nile Basin Initiative seeks to introduce the notion of ‘common good’ to nine countries for whom the Nile is political hot-potato, conflict trigger, and means of survival rolled into one. Many NBI countries have been at war in the last decade, and the Nile as casus belli is not unthinkable with climate changes already affecting the region. Obviously a lack of trust permeates the region and prevents cooperation on mutually beneficial initiatives, like Nile water management. If successful, then, the NBI would use the Nile to promote development in the poorer countries in a way that facilitates a common approach to solutions and averts conflict.   

Nearing its tenth anniversary, the folks at NBI headquarters in Entebbe were rightfully wondering about their impact in the region, and whether regional thoughtleaders appreciated NBI efforts. A qualitative study of perceptions among civil society, government, academics and media from NBI’s nine member countries was commissioned; results are coming out now.

Perhaps not surprisingly, our panel found that suspicion is high among countries north and south of the Sahara. There is a tacit sense that Egypt ‘controls the Nile’, in the sense that if all countries upstream had hydroelectric capacity and even rudimentary irrigation, by the time it reached Egyptian soil the Nile would be but a trickle. So Egypt’s foreign policy is Nile-centric, aiming to preserve current Nile levels even if this means chronic under-development and recurrent famines upstream. Perfectly natural, respondents from sub-Saharan countries say, we just wish they wouldn’t oppose our efforts to build dams. Cooperation seems a long way off.

The more cynical view is that Egyptian survival requires massive dysfunction and disorganization upstream, as poor governance in sub-Saharan Africa staves off Nile diversion for agriculture and electricity indefinitely. Always looking for evidence to counter the Afro-pessimists, I was heartened to learn that civil society in sub-Saharan countries is exasperated at their leaders’ inability to provide economic development. Predictably, the leaders themselves think they are making great strides.

But with so many heads of impoverished states answering that ‘sovereignty’ is the primary obstacle to improved collaboration around the Nile, obsessions over power continue to trump basic development initiatives–simple improvements that could increase life expectancy, improve living conditions and endear citizens to their leaders. Why these leaders can’t see this (think of Mugabe, Kabila and their many mini-me’s) is the real riddle of the Sphinx.

Justin E. H. Smith

Anyone assessing the strength of Pascal’s wager –that, though there may be an infinitesimally small chance that Christianity is true, the potential punishment for not believing it, or reward for believing it, is infinitely great, and therefore it is rational to believe it– should watch this video before coming to any conclusions:

There is, we must concede, a non-zero, if vanishingly tiny, possibility that the message of Yoke-Up Ministries is correct, that you, as the woman says, will go to hell.

Pascal had supposed that the persuasiveness of his argument to any rational thinker would result in submission to the long-standing authority of the Catholic church.  But the problem is that the argument is no more, and no less, compelling coming from a 17th-century Catholic philosopher defending traditional faith than coming from a couple of rough and unwashed rednecks in Louisiana in defense of a strain of enthusiastic neo-Protestantism that Pascal himself would have deemed diabolical.

The Yoke-Up version of the wager brings to light something that Pascal’s does not. To accept the wager, to go for it ‘just in case’, is not, or not only, to submit to God’s will. It is also to submit to the will of the person who presents to you the wager, and not just as concerns God’s existence, but also as concerns all sorts of tangential cultural matters that God, if he exists, would have to find perfectly irrelevant.

The only way to adequately convince the illiterate truckdriver and his angry ‘ex-gay’ spouse that one has accepted their message would be, one supposes, not just to declare, “Yes, I believe!”, but also to come to care about things like engine repair, to understand certain sports metaphors, to inhabit a world of small and local concerns that can only make sense if one is already a certain kind of working-class white American. In this particular case, one would likely also have to show signs of the ravages of life prior to being born again, perhaps some tribal or Celtic tattoos hidden under the undershirt, teeth worn down to stubs by meth, a threadbare collection of garments announcing that one has ‘no fear’.

As Pascal might have said, these are attributes of a Christian that do not depend on will, or even intellect. They are not up to the individual considering the wager, but are instead constitutive of the white-trash habitus. In this respect, one senses that the Yoke-Up wager is not for everyone: it is not Good News for all the nations of the earth, but only for that extended clan of born-agains and not-yet-born-agains who all, regardless of the eventual fate of their souls, recognize one another as members of the same community.  You, 3QD readers, may consider yourselves exempt.

*

When I was in high school I called myself a ‘communist’. This was the era of perestroika. Gorbachev’s hardline opponents were generally spoken of as if they were the only communists left in the Soviet Union, while the general secretary himself was a ‘reformer’. In addition to my communism, around the same time I was trying to grow dreadlocks, though somehow, I found, resisting the urge to wash and brush was not quite doing the trick. My matted clumps suggested more the coiffure of a homeless white schizophrenic than, say, Peter Tosh.

My suburban punk-rock girlfriend and I used to watch the news together. She would observe the communist hardliners and say: “They don’t have dreadlocks. They don’t have nose-rings. They look like dumpy versions of Ronald Reagan. What do you want to be like them for?” I was hard pressed to come up with an answer, so great had the gap become between the state-socialist gerontocracy of Eastern Europe and the utopian enthusiasm that had inspired both certain strains of 19th-century socialism –such as that of Foucher, who believed that, someday, liberated man will be able to play the piano with his feet– as well as the hairstyle that was to distinguish me from all the complacent bourgeois idiots by whom I found myself surrounded. 

The gerontocracy collapsed, and I cut my hair. I went to university and began writing for the campus Republican newspaper. It was funded by David Horowitz, and was the only student newspaper with anything close to a sense of humor. Once, years before The Onion would develop a similar feature, our paper published fake, man-in-the-street interviews with students on campus, asking them what they thought of the rival Third World Forum. “I think it’s great that the retarded students have their own paper!”, one fake student declared. “I love the big empty spaces on each page!”, said another.  This last comment seems to have pounded into my head once and for all that iron law, of which I am not the discoverer, of the reverse correlation between marginal politics and high production values. 

What I didn’t tell my fellow conservative students is that, at the time, I thought of myself not as a Republican but as a Menshevik. That is to say, like the opponents of the Bolsheviks who believed that Russia would have to pass through a miserable era of capitalism in order to make it to the proper phase of history for the staging of a revolution, I believed that George H. W. Bush was a necessary stage on the path to something far better than what Clinton represented. I didn’t want Bush to win against Clinton because I liked Republicans. I wanted Bush to win because I believed –sincerely and ironically at once– that Bush was marginally worse than Clinton, and that the urgent task of any young utopian was to ‘heighten the contradictions’, as Marxists say, to do what one could to make things as bad as possible, in the hopes that this would precipitate real change faster than the election of a chubby yokel who gave the impression that everything was going to be alright.   

Needless to say I was not perfectly at home with the campus conservatives. It quickly became clear to me that I had gravitated to them only because the campus left of the early 1990s was so stiflingly dull. I blame Stalin, of course, and all the others who made it impossible to belong to an Internationale one could really believe in, thus leading to the fragmentation and decline of would-be internationalism into petty identity politics. I wanted barricades; the campus liberals wanted gender-neutral pronouns.

*

I remain a bit of a Menshevizer, as I think do many who are suspicious of the options presented by a rigidly bipartisan system. A disillusioned Argentine ex-Marxist recently mentioned to me that the Bush fils era has done wonders for the political landscape of Latin America (the praise went mostly to Morales, and not to Chavez), and he worries that an Obama presidency would compromise these gains. I see what he’s saying, but there’s one thing that continues to keep me in line with ‘liberal’ orthodoxy this time around: we’re at a watershed moment in American trash history, when a candidate for high office can appear as if hand-picked by Yoke-Up Ministries.   

I’m talking of course about Sarah Palin, the primitiveness of whose Christianity makes George W. Bush look like a proper, mainline Protestant. Palin remains in that stage of religious fervor, so vividly described by the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, in which the intensity of the belief is to be measured by the degree to which it, presumably through the vehicle of the holy spirit, exercises control over the very motion of the body and of the mouth. Most of us have seen the video of the African preacher laying hands on Palin, so as to drive out demons. But the aim of this sort of exercise is not to gain perfect self-control and rational autonomy once the demons are gone. It is only to ensure that the self be governed by the right kind of daimon, to wit, the holy spirit. The very idea of rational autonomy is one that does not come up.

I have a lingering admiration for old-fashioned Goldwater-style conservatism, of which I take McCain, in certain respects beyond the merely geographical, to be an heir.  Among other things, it laid a heavy stress on individual autonomy and responsibility, and did not maintain that one could get a free pass to radically dissociate oneself from one’s mistake-ridden past simply by announcing that one has been ‘born again’. It left open the possibility for cultivation of moral character, in the laudable sense in which this was understood in antiquity. McCain gets all this, but is forced to cater to the snake-charming, witch-purging, infantile mentality of a large sector of the American population in order to have any hope of winning.

A deep part of many of us might want to see things get bad, in order that they may get better. But no decent person could hope to see things get as bad as they might quickly be if Sarah Palin gains executive power. The Mensheviks only wanted to instigate a period of free trade and economic inequality in order to make reality match up with Marx’s theory of the stages of history. That would have been a step forward, relatively speaking, from miserable serfdom. A Palin presidency –a likely outcome of her vice-presidency, given McCain’s age and evident feebleness– could easily amount to a step way back, to inquisition and persecution, to the serfdom of the soul that preceded the discovery of autonomy, and to a tribal chauvinism that takes one’s own little clapboard church for the sole channeler of divine truth on earth. This is a spectre that trumps any utopian vision of how much better the world might be than what the democrats have yet envisioned, and any concerns as to the absence of real choice in bipartisan elections.

This, and not any lock-step sense of belonging to the liberal orthodoxy, is why I’ve just checked off ‘Obama’ on my useless absentee ballot, and affixed enough Canadian postage to carry it all the way back to the Board of Elections of Hamilton County, Ohio.

—

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.