Review of Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up by John Allen Paulos

You may know the (almost certainly apocryphal) story of an 18th century encounter between the brilliant Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and the French freethinking encyclopaedist and philosopher Denis Diderot:

Diderot had been invited to the court by Catherine the Great, but then annoyed her by trying to convert everyone to atheism. Catherine asked Euler for help, and he informed Diderot, who was ignorant of mathematics, that he would present in court an algebraic proof of the existence of God, if Diderot wanted to hear it. Diderot was interested, and, according to De Morgan, Euler advanced toward Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: “Sir, ( a + bn )/n = x , hence God exists; reply!” Diderot had no reply, and the court broke into laughter. Diderot immediately returned to France.

Not being ignorant of mathematics, had John Allen Paulos been in the place of Diderot, he would have had no trouble replying. He could just have presented Euler with a copy of his charming and brief book Irreligion. In Irreligion, Paulos provides (in the form of musings about them) refutations of twelve arguments for the existence of God which “range from what might be called the golden oldies of religious thought to those with a more contemporary beat,” and he does so with verve, a robust prose, and a very welcome sense of humor. Along the way, we learn all sorts of interesting mathematical tidbits in short side-discussions of related issues. And there are delicious little anecdotes sprinkled throughout. I can’t resist immediately providing an example of the latter:

[I am reminded] of a story related by Bertrand Russell about when he was entering jail as a conscientious objector during World War I. The admitting clerk asked him his religion, and when Russell responded that he was an agnostic, the clerk shook his head and said he’d never heard of that religion but that all of them worship the same God. [p. 79]

* * *

Let’s get to the meat. To give a sense of Paulos’s modus operandi, I’ll present one of his refutations briefly here. This one, he calls The Argument from Prophecy (and the Bible Codes). For each of the arguments that he discusses, Paulos first distills them into a formal structure. Here’s what that looks like for this argument:

1. A holy book makes prophesies.
2. The same book or adherents of it report that these prophesies have come true.
3. The book is indubitable and asserts that God exists.
4. Therefore God exists.

First, Paulos notes that in any narrative, the more details that are supplied, the more true it starts to seem. For example, if asked which of the following narratives is more likely to be true,

1. Congressman Smith took a bribe last year.
2. Congressman Smith took a bribe last year, took another one this year, used some of the money to rent a secret apartment for his young intern, and spent the rest on luxurious “fact-finding” trips with her.

many people will pick the second one even though mathematically speaking, any statement alone always has a higher probability of being true than its conjunction with any other statement(s):

Embedding God in a holy book’s detailed narrative and building an entire culture around this narrative seem by themselves to confer a kind of existence on Him. Holidays, traditions, ideals, cultural identities, as valuable as they occasionally might be, all seem to add to the unwarranted presuppositions underlying them. Their familiarity also serves to inure us to the vindictive, petty, and repellent aspects of the God character. [p. 62]

Second, Paulos notes that people, even if they are deluded, often reinforce each others beliefs. A kind of “all-of-us-can’t-be-wrong” thinking, and then he points to an interesting mathematical result:

note that testimony that someone is telling the truth is self-undermining if the likelihood of truth-telling is less than 1/2. If people are confused, lying, or otherwise deluded more often than not, than their expressions of support for each other are literally less than worthless.[p.64]

He goes on to give an example with two people who each get the truth right only 1/4 of the time. What is the probability if one of them makes an assertion and the other supports it as true, that it is actually true? Paulos shows with some simple mathematics that the probablity now drops to 1/10:

The Moral: Confirmation of a person’s unreliable statement by another unreliable person makes the statement even less reliable. [p. 65]

The rest of the chapter is devoted to a probabilistic analysis showing that there is nothing unusual about the Bible Codes. Such codes could be extracted from any sufficiently large text, and they have been. For example, War and Peace has been shown to contain codes for “Jordan,” “Chicago,” and “Bulls” very close together, prompting Paulos to sarcastically declare Tolstoy a basketball clairvoyant!

* * *

The book is organized into three sections, each of which deals with four arguments. The first presents traditional ones, such as the ontological argument, and the argument from design. The second deals with subjective arguments such as the one I presented above. And the third section is on psycho-mathematical arguments such as Pascal’s wager. Each section also contains short asides with commonsensical comments on various dubious assertions and practices in religion. For example, discussing Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, Paulos writes:

Assume for the moment that compelling historical documents have just come to light establishing the movie’s and the Bible’s contentions that a group of Jews was instrumental in bringing about the death of Jesus; that Pilate, the Roman governor, was benign and ineffectual; and so on. Even if all this were the case, does it not seem hateful, not to mention un-Christian, to blame contemporary Jews? …even if we give full credit to Plato’s twenty-four-hundred-year-old account of Socrates’ death, what zealous coterie of classicists or philosophers would hold today’s Greeks responsible? [p.92-93]

Nowhere is Paulos preachy or condescending. His tone remains always detached and his humor dry. Paulos is not interested in engaging in polemics or spewing invective. This is a sincere, calm, humane and timely examination of a phenomenon nowadays much in the news, one we can benefit by reading regardless of our beliefs.

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

You may have noticed that I have been posting more poetry recently at 3QD. This is not because I have suddenly become more literate, but because my friend Jim Culleny has been sending me poems almost every day. In addition to having exquisite taste in poetry, Jim is himself a distinguished and fine poet. In fact, we became friends a few years ago when someone sent me something by him, which I posted at 3QD then and reproduce here:

I was just looking through a hole in Van Gogh’s head. The hole I was peering through is a painting some call Terrasse de Cafe. It could be called Fire and Ice. Wonderful would be another apt name for it.

This piece of Vincent is a night sky hung with stellar lanterns as near as lightposts, as if the cosmos was just another canopy slightly beyond the one shielding the cafe. Just a stone’s throw beyond. Within spitting distance. Half a hair’s breadth away.

Stars big as moons hang in this room in Vincent’s skull. Stars ready as wet Cortlands to be plucked from trees in orchards of exploding hydrogen.

Under the cafe canopy nano-figures repose upon cobbles of burning coals.
Sipping wine maybe; savoring oysters; sucking energy from supernovas.
Near and Far opposed as lovers in Vincent’s embracing mind.
There and Here tangled beyond belief.

I am happy and proud to say that Jim has agreed to become 3QD’s Poetry Editor. He will be posting poems daily, and will also contribute original poems on Mondays. You can see his first post just below this one and can read more about Jim on our About Us page. Please join me in welcoming him to 3QD.

I recently spent ten days in L.A., and despite being quite busy, I ended up with a pretty good picture of the food scene in that city-state.  My very first night was somewhat revelatory.  I was lagging, beat and needing to be up by five, and we took refuge around ten in Los Feliz’s Cafe Stella.  Somehow more French-seeming than similar bistro facsimiles in New York City, despite being in a strip mall, Stella calmed our nerves immediately.  I had an excellent steak tartare.  My only complaint was a slight lack of tang to the beef, it was more a clean-tasting piece of sashimi than a gamy lump of bloody beef tenderized under a horse’s saddle.  (Michael Lomanaco’s tartare at Porterhouse is similar, but has more tangy iron in it.) 

The Proustian element of my meal, however, was effected by a glass of Fleurie, which, as you may know, is one of the more elegant vintages of Beaujolais (other good ones being Brouilly, Julienas, Chiroubles and Morgon).  About ten years ago, I drove through Fleurie on my way south and bought a couple of cases of wine from various vineyards.  This glass at Cafe Stella brought back that trip involuntarily, instantly, and uncannily.  The restaurant itself is effortlessly atmospheric and surprisingly expensive, and I recommend it.

On a free afternoon, I snuck off to pay a visit to Pizzeria Mozza, which is at the crest of the current wave of obsessive, Neapolitan-style U.S. pizzamakers that includes the national champ, Phoenix’s Pizzeria Bianco.  Pizzeria Mozza is the brainchild of Nancy Silverton, one of L.A.’s two female superchefs, and a baker of world class, in collaboration with Dionysian ubermensch Mario Batali.  (Big Mario’s own pizza spot, Otto, does not rank in the top class).  I’d heard a lot about Mozza and was eager to compare it to the East Village’s Una Pizza Napoletana, which I believe is New York’s best pizza–better by a shade than the old-school legends, Grimaldi’s and Totonno’s.

And so I pulled my rented Dodge Avenger up to Mozza’s non-descript corner, was greeted by a very friendly maitre’d (they’re way friendlier in Lala; another true truism), and took a seat in front of the wood-burning oven.  Some superb breadsticks quickly appeared, and my water glass was refilled just as I became conscious of its emptiness.  My pie was… stunningly good.  Tomato; long, sliced red chilies; white anchovies.  The chilies were audaciously hot, perhaps reflecting how Mexican food has reoriented Los Angeleno’s taste buds.  I’m going to sound like a dope for saying this, but the plump anchovies were as bracing as the seaside.  Really, they were the perfect complement to a perfectly designed set of flavors that remained distinct yet conversed with each other.  The only reason I will say that Mozza finishes a close second to Una Pizza Napoletana in my book is the crust: Silverton’s is excellent, mottled by amber bubbles, but a touch, just a touch, sweeter and less astringent than Anthony Mangieri’s.  Mozza’s pies are brilliantly executed and more creative.  But Una Pizza’s still barely my champ.  Now I gotta get to Phoenix(!).

We also spent some time at the Mandrake, a bar on Culver City’s art strip that I highly recommend (especially on Wednesday nights).  Their sandwiches and plates are similar in quality and simple elegance to our own Clandestino, but the Mandrake’s vibe is more challenging.  It’s sort a Lynchian lodge that bears some psychogeographic memory of its previous incarnation as a rawhide gay men’s spot.  Drinkswise, it offers an edited, unpretentious yet high-quality selection.  Mandrake is to L.A. what the Club Charles is to Baltimore, and I don’t have many higher compliments for bars.

Later that day, on the way down Mulholland Drive and Laurel Canyon, a pit stop at In-N-Out Burger was decided upon.  Personally, I am starting to prefer Southern California’s thin-pattied, topping-heavy burgers to the New York variety, with its giant puck of beef.  The SoCal version is healthier and fresher than, say, the leviathan burger of Dumont.  Plus, the In-N-Out burger is incredibly cheap, yet you see whole potatoes being peeled, cut and fried in the restaurant, which is more than you can say for thousands of pricier pubs and sports bars that feature frozen fries.  Order “Animal-style” is my advice, though for the rest of the secret menu, check here.

(Speaking of fries, Alia and I had some classic, thick-cut steak fries in Burbank at Frank’s Coffee Shop, a diner that feels, like many things in the ungentrified precincts of Southern California, lost in time in the best possible way.  Hard to say more.  Just go there.)

(I also had some Thai food at Rambutan in Silverlake.  It’s perfectly decent, but the reports that Los Angeleno Thai food kicks New York’s insipid ass may not be entirely true–Queens’ Sripraphai is much better.)

Our last supper was at A.O.C., a project of the other L.A. superchef, Suzanne Goin of Lucques.  (I love the fact that L.A.’s two most celebrated chefs are women.  Does that make me knee-jerkily politically correct?)  The idea at A.O.C. is of sort of haute winebar, with endless courses of small plates.  Memorable ones: rabbit in mustard sauce, chanterelles with ricotta gnocchi, skirt steak with roquefort butter, clams with garlic and sherry, and salt-cod fritters with little orange segments.  The food was excellent and so were the wines, but it was all too rich, everything being fortified with major quantities of butter and cream.  The dependence on Old World technique–flavor enhancement through fat–felt slightly disappointing to me.  I want Los Angeles to be more fearless, less honor-bound, not to pay too many tributes and homages, but to express itself more uniquely.

The meal I enjoyed most, I must say, was a late night dinner at an outdoor white plastic table in front of the little blue shack that is El 7 Mares of East Hollywood.  It was quite late, and we were exhausted and hungry.  We had some blazingly refreshing fish  and shrimp ceviches, some tacos al pastor, and some truly superb fish tacos.  A squeeze of lime, two tortillas, some chunks of fish, white cabbage, and a salsa combined in that miracle of fresh complexity that great Mexican food always delivers.  As our second assistant director said, perspicaciously, “This is the real thing that La Esquina is the fake version of.”

A last word about Mexican food: it couldn’t be clearer that we Americans have assigned the wrong social meaning to it.  Maybe because of the place of Mexican laborers in the U.S. economy, Mexican cooking got associated with low eating, even with gastrointestinal problems.  This is the reverse of what should be: we suffer much more from overeating than undereating, in this historical moment of ours.  Yet we currently fetishize the saturated fat-dependent peasant cuisines of Europe, out of a vague sense that the European peasantry is somehow more authentic and closer to the earth. 

By contrast, most of Mexican cooking, its ceviches and guacamoles and posoles and salsas, depends on raw vegetables for flavor, in the form of cilantro, chilies, avocados, tomatoes, garlic, scallions and radishes.  There’s the habit of drinking fruit juices and infusions: hibiscus, blood orange, etc.  Then there’s all the papaya, the healthiest, most enzymatically active fruit going.  Not that Mexican cuisine shuns meat–in fact, it celebrates its variety more ecstatically than most cuisines, from beef tongue to pork belly to goat’s head.  Mexican cooking is what L.A.’s food truly is and should be: a powerfully flavored melange of the raw and cooked, that upends our outdated senses of high and low.

Café Stella
3932 W. Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 090029
(323) 666-0265

Pizzeria Mozza
641 N. Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 297-0101

Mandrake
2692 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 837-3297

In-N-Out Burger
7009 Sunset Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90028

Frank’s Coffee Shop and Restaurant
916 W. Olive Ave.
Burbank, CA 91506

A.O.C.
8022 W. 3rd St.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 653-6359

El 7 Mares
3131 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026

The rest of my 3qd Dispatches.

Michael Blim

Tears work in American politics, as events in New Hampshire last week show. But they didn’t always work, as a 1972 presidential contender Edmund Muskie learned in New Hampshire 36 years ago. They cost him his presidential bid, even as they propped up Senator Clinton’s.

What has happened in America politics and public life that tears have become so acceptable, even gratifying? Rather than considered mawkish, a sign of instability, a feint or worse, crying now signifies something good about the character of someone who does.

Americans generally need have no fear of suffering from blocked tear ducts. Turn the camera on, and we turn the tears on. Happy people cry, and sad people cry. Soldiers cry, police and fire fighters cry, criminals and victims cry, and game contestants cry. Celebrities cry. Politicians cry. We cry with them.

Sports figures positively blubber. Jemele Hill, an ESPN writer, reacts to sports tears without pity and with a little spice in her May 15, 2007 commentary “Crying Etiquette of the Sports World.” Here are some of her rules:

1. Don’t cry at a news conference where you’re announcing to the world you’ve cheated on you wife (I would add or used steroids).
2. Don’t cry when you’ve been traded.
3. Don’t cry at practice.
4. Don’t cry before the game is over.
5. Don’t cry on camera if hurt; wait until you hit the trainer’s room.

Tears of joy, tears of defeat, tears of pain, and just plain tears. Some tears say, “I am one of you.” Others say, “I feel your pain, or joy, or loss” …or whatever. Some ask for pity; some are pitiable.

Whence all this crying in America, especially in politics? In Italy where I have spent a lot of time, politicians don’t cry, and would be considered addled or a bit ridiculous if they did. Contrary to the weepy Italian stereotypes of movies, women in black throwing themselves on biers and Neapolitans male or female caught in sweaty, tearful embraces, and so on, Italians don’t expect politicians to cry. They chalked it up to senility when one of their favorite Presidents, the octogenarian Sandro Pertini, wept every time he touched the Italian flag. As Machiavellian as Italian politicians are, crying is not part of their playbook. It is a sign of weakness, of fecklessness, and given that there is so much “feck” in Italian politics, better not to show it, as Mark Twain said, and remove all doubt.

In our neck of the woods where politicians are fecking up big time — let’s let two wars and the lust for another stand in as a placeholder here – crying sometimes helps them get over rather than get sown under.

Why? Perhaps like many “68ers,” for me, it all begins with Nixon, the Republican cloth coat, and the blessed dog Checkers. Nixon while Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952 was caught using money from a slush fund his supporters had created to defray expenses not covered by his Senatorial allowance. To prevent Ike from tossing him off the ticket, Nixon gave the first of his many bathos-soaked self-disclosures for which he is justly famous. One scholar considered the so-called “Checkers” speech one of the top 100 speeches in modern American rhetoric.

Well…most speeches in American politics today come down to comments such as “I did not have sex with that woman.” Let’s just say the barrier has been lowered a bit, so that even Nixon’s vicious rambles outclass the mumbles of the current bunch.

To recall, Nixon had not only received the slush money, but some kindly Texas dog owner had sent so opportunely a cocker spaniel along for his kids:

“One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something – a gift – after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”

Nixon’s mouth quivered, his eyes wetted, – and yes, as usual, he perspired. Afterwards, he broke down in sobs. But Americans had begun to get a taste for exhibitionism and self-pity. Even Ike, the great general, “welled up” when he saw Nixon’s speech in Cleveland that night. “Dick, you are my boy,” Ike announced with Nixon at his side the next day in Wheeling, West Virginia, and Nixon broke down again in the weep seen round the world.

It was not always thus. Who would want to ruin a rhetorical high point with a weep? Would William Jennings Bryan, taking a Democratic convention by storm in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech have stopped for a good cry? Teddy Roosevelt and the boys after San Juan Hill? Woodrow Wilson after the Fourteen Points? It’s said that Cal Coolidge could barely stay awake, let alone cry.

Even dogs didn’t make politicians cry before Nixon. For Franklin Roosevelt, it was all in a day’s work of skewering Republicans in 1944 when they came after “his little dog Fala:”

“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him – at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars – his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself – such as the old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house – from laughing.

Thanks to Dick Nixon (alas, poor Dick, we knew thee well), his bathos is now our own. He showed us how to ignore politics and enjoy the spectacle of personal abasement – something the former President Clinton practiced rather ham-handedly, and only just in time to save himself from an impeachment conviction.

Now, Senator Clinton. Does it run in the family, the bitten lip, the wetting eyes, or was it simply a Monday morning desperation Hail Mary? Well, tears for fears — and it worked.

Permit me to recall that famous line of the Army lawyer James Welch responding to a red-baiting attack on a soldier by Senator Joseph McCarthy in April, 1954:

“You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency … at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

In 1938, there was a world’s fair in Glasgow—called the Empire Exhibition—that attracted over 13 million attendants. Modernists from Basel Spence to Jack Coia built dozens of pavilions, most of which have since been demolished. Last month, the Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studio (DDS) launched a digital recreation of the festival, bringing to life many of the buildings from archival film footage, photographs, the memories of surviving participants, and architectural drawings. You can look at a map of the site and click on specific buildings for more detailed perspectives.

I’ve been preoccupied about the implications of such an endeavor since going to Scotland for a walkthrough of the project by the head of the DDS and the researchers involved a few months ago, and it seems to have found a curious counterpart in another recent fixation. Quite by accident, I was revisiting a rather insipid New York blog that I used to read years ago when the author made some mention of a guy called Ben Chappel, a New York-based illustrator and web-whiz who died two years ago.

The post had a link to his website (which still exists), and I clicked on it. The site and his work resonated, for whatever reason, and I Googled him. I’m by no means one of those people who search everyone they know or any stranger’s name they come across, so this in itself was unusual.

Cut to three hours later: I’ve read countless posthumous descriptions of his life and accomplishments. I’ve read email exchanges, instant messenger conversations, and a typed dialogue between him and a friend from an evening spent together during which, rather than talk, they communicated only on a shared computer. I found countless pictures from every angle, of every face, of many locations. I discovered a phenomenon whereby when someone dies, friends and strangers leave them messages on social networking pages (for him, myspace)—wishing them well, missing them, loving them. He seemed a swell guy and a great person with whom to have a romantic entanglement.

I started to realize how limiting traditional obituaries are, how unidimensional and incomplete. The internet, magical place it is, allows for something far more holistic. In its democratic arrangement, it lets anyone join in the grief process and, more importantly, the process of contributing to the story of the deceased.

I hardly need to point out the parallel between this and the aims of the DDS in recreating Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition. The only analogy I can posit is to look back to analytical cubism, where painters like Braque, Picasso, and later Duchamp attempted to create time and space through a style of painting that simultaneously revealed various facets and dimensions of a subject.

Here, the process is curiously Baudriallardian—the result a digital simulation of reality that, despite its verisimilitude, remains set apart from its original subject. But the two things, this young man and this fair, are to a certain degree recast by digital means and through a process that involves third-party participation. Just as with the DDS’s interface, whereby users have the agency to explore the fair grounds and take detailed tours of the various buildings, so too can a web surfer navigate the waters of a life lost and create a multidimensional portrait of that person based on selective research. It’s a terrifying process in certain ways, as though history is almost too elastic and becomes itself a subjective exploration rather than something with a singular definition. Gone are the days of a tombstone with a single epitaph, now not only do we have a person’s life and accomplishments at our fingertips, but also the dynamics of their relationships and intimate correspondences.

In the case of the Glasgow exhibition, there is a shift from the telling of history through gritty black and white photographs to an interactive and experiential portrait mediated, of course, by its very nature as a virtual environment.

And that’s where things get a bit slippery for me. With the rise of phenomena like Second Life, suddenly the creation of digital personae and places begins to blur my understanding of reality and historical occurrences that are retold through the internet. This Ben (who I am exploiting so despicably here, but only because I am truly fascinated by, and may go so far as to say may actually like), just as this Empire Exhibition, are ultimately going to survive in the annals of the internet, sharing a place with Lara Croft as easily as those pets for whom adoring (and perverted, in my opinion) owners make myspace and friendster pages. Their digitization is, rather than bringing them to life, making them ultimately less real, if not more complex, than people and places sitting in an encyclopedia.

Ultimately I grieve for Ben as much as I stand in awe of the remnants of Glasgow’s fair. I am able to understand them as things once tangible, but it’s taken a lot of imagination and a refutation of the source of information by which I’ve come to know them. It’s an active process, but one that brings them to life beyond the confines of the same digital world through which I came to know them. It’s all a bit twisted, I guess.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

The subject of Prometheus has appealed to poets from the Greeks onwards. Though Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound’ is probably the best known poem on the subject, many poets have been drawn to the figure of the trapped and suffering Titan—Byron, Goethe, Ted Hughes (Prometheus on his Crag) and Robert Lowell (translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound).   

Australia’s vast continental landscapes and devastating seasonal bushfires provide both the scenic and metaphysical songlines from which the adjective Promethean could draw a particular music and imagery. 

Here is the opening of my poem ‘Prometheus’. Three voices are dramatised. Prometheus’ speaking voice is caught between a blank verse narrative and lyrics that explore the fire imagery inherent in the subject matter.

                Prometheus

Leaving the past,
Its histories and mutterings,
Now our pitch
Rears from feral backblocks.
So, here in limbo,
At adequate height,
Fate abandons you, leaving
Hollow triumphs
And the dreck of a century,
Freeways ringing oceans
While see-saw skin
Sexes the packed minutes.

Look at the harbour unreeling—
Its cloud wedding cake on a cracked mirror sheen,
Oxygen feeding furnaces,
Strengthening iron,
Industrial shift work stretching
Towers from tired limbs.
We stare at the brilliant sky
Hoping for something large,
A handle to grip
Each failure
Summoning bad grace.
Then at one zone of light,
Near opalescent sea,
On a bare rock, in a hard place,
Prometheus is faxed,
Myth amid technology,
Linkages of lyric,
Monologues and fragments,
Vague beginnings, endings,
Not old certainties.

A superhero skimming heights
Made marvellous by NASA,
Limbs carved to silhouette,
Olympian gesturing?—
Prometheus has dropped
Poses meant for dominance,
Though trapped,
Still glorying in a mood
Named euphoric,
Data banks in stacks.
But there is too much pain
To be contained by formulae
Or measured with an ECG,
Too much inexplicable,
Not defined by chemistry,
Unpaginated nerves
Rippling near texts.

   If I speak, it’s clear
   that I must speak
   with the voice of nations
   and bestiaries—
   I’ve seen the end result
   of evolution’s tramp
   and known cruelty,
   that rational excess
   when species felt the needle plunge.
   Politicians shouted slogans
   too long with no end
   except their re-election,
   true democrats
   left high and dry,
   justice dumped,
   speculators salting
   loot on harbour shelves.

      Lightning highlights clouds,
      Thunder rattles stairs,
      In the bedroom shadows crowd
      Round a loving pair.

      A bolt descends theatrically,
      Attracted to their heat,
      Severs bodies open
      Under ruined sheets.

      Then rain pours through the tiles,
      On this crumpled couple—
      Morning sky is spread
      With cloud-limbs reassembled.

Here is our astrology—
Using words to sew up faults,
Coming to strength
When the shining ends
Of dreaming have sprung up.
There lies within us nature coiled
Which we can bring with splendour
Or quickly finish off;
Waiting at our end
Are a million crackling stars.

      Fire on hills, wheels of light exploding,
      Sheet flame folding valleys and bright birds
      Caught in flying ashes, brought to the bronze moulding
      Of these channels surging through the grass.
      Snake writhing on a log, cattle scorched and sculpted,
      Flickering as a furrow where the steel is poured,
      Hunter trapping fauna in a glowing comer,
      Branch and tree trunk splitting in the branding heat.

      Then the flapping wall of flame perishes with windfall,
      Leaving grey abstractions after purgatorio,
      Stink of soot and stripped design, black predominating.
      Through the haze a form escapes into midnight tremor;
      Madman with a box of matches, grinning at the night,
      Weird with all that reddening he runs to start new fires.

   My charity must search
   beyond failed intent.
   Of course, if you’re content
   with defeat and are smug
   with your own self-hate,
   you’ll never know
   more than curiosity
   for suffering, or sympathy
   for disgrace.
   After disillusion
   I take the world in tow,
   sparking hope again.
   To some I’m naive,
   a philosophe
   who’s lost the drift of things.
   Still, I’ve this to give:
   passion, not knowledge,
   feeling, not incision.

      Bars that turn blue
      In the cooling tank room
      Menace the chocolate box snow.

      Are you excited
      Or just plain frightened
      By this victorious show?

      Yellow cake loads
      Will flatten the roads
      In a manner that’s rather gung ho.

      One flash and you’re ash,
      Done your whole dash,
      Buried alike friend and foe.

      Just transfer the lot
      To the stars you clot
      And the problem will soon disappear.

      A war up in space
      Will not cinder the race—
      It’s goodbye to your out-of-date fears!

Alternative dazzle
As jumbos knife the sky,
Land distanced by the roar
Of engines burning fuel,
Your wanderlust soon gutted,
Lying on a foreign bed, thinking
Of that prize: thunder on the skin;
In that noise the turbulence
That shadowed every pastoral,
Rippling motel rooms,
Ribbing beachtime games.
You wonder then
If beauty lasts;
Its harness sometimes drags
To seaweed in a trench
Or flags stuck on a peak,
Laundering politely,
Only gathering in
When loving is the cause—
Orchids hanging in glass shed stacks,
A stretch of muscle pushing at your own,
An um whose figures freeze up rushing time.

Cont. . . .

Written 1985–1987 Published Such Sweet Thunder 1994 49-64

Elatia Harris

Around last Newton’s Day, I began considering what to write about in this space once 2008 got underway. It was only natural to think of upcoming holidays that might also be headed for revaluation in the clear light of reason; if Newton had supplanted the Christ Child, then surely Marie Curie ought to elbow Mom, but I didn’t want to wait until May.  Riffling through a sexual Psy-Ops manual featuring leaflets distributed to combat soldiers during the wars of the 20th century — the image above is one such, a tasteful Japanese effort from WWII — I could not help recalling we had on the horizon a veritable festival of unreason: Valentine’s Day. 

Now what could that mean to us? Sure, pooh-pooh Valentine’s Day if you like, as nothing more than a tree-killing bonanza for greeting card manufacturers – but its roots go very deep. In 1969, St. Valentine, possibly a martyr of the 3rd Century, C.E., was let go by the Catholic Church as being just that little bit too nebulous for enforced feast day-keeping. But by then, the engraining in Western culture of this apocryphal saint as the patron of affianced couples was done, having been begun, many scholars argue, by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Parliament of Foules.

Twenty years after Chaucer, on Valentine’s Day, 1400, a High Court of Love was convened by noblewomen in Paris.  Nan Seuffert, writing about — among other things — women who kill, tells us in “Domestic Violence, Discourses of Romantic Love, and Complex Personhood in the Law,” an article for the Melbourne University Law Review, that this court was to have jurisdiction “over the rules of love, to hear disputes between lovers, and to hear appeals from other Courts of Love.” Organized in a non-hierarchical manner, the judges were chosen by women after reciting poetry, and judgments were made collectively. The Court of Love addressed “contracts of love, remedies for amorous betrayal, deceit and slander of lovers, responsibilities of separated lovers and punishment of violence against women. Further…the courts often considered disputes between women lovers and between male lovers. What we might today call transgendered identifications may also have been common.”

My, my, I was thinking: what a lot of fascinating stuff — eloquent relics of love gone sour enough to beg for the chat of well placed women — must have been produced in that High Court of Love, those 700 years ago in Paris.  But no such relic has come down to us, for these courts were more like salons or discussion groups than legal entities whose official evidence would survive to go on display as records of actual medieval jurisprudence.

The Museum of Broken Relationships

What about the present, then?  If one of us strode into a non-hierarchical High Court of Love, relics of our acute romantic distress in a special box tucked under an arm, what would those relics be? I found that two Croatian artists – former romantic partners – were on the very same wavelength, with their Museum of Broken Relationships, initiated in Zagreb in 2006.  As Kate Connolly, writing in The Guardian on October 29, 2007, observes, “Cutting the arms off his designer suits, putting her prized wine collection out on the street for passers-by, or burning the collection of love letters are just some of the ways in which jilted lovers are known to have exacted revenge at the end of relationships. But now there is another outlet for their pain – The Museum of Broken Relationships.” The MBR spent the fall and early winter of 2007 in Berlin, and has traveled to Skopje for a Macedonian spring. Plans for future travel include Stockholm, New York, L.A. and Buenos Aires.

There was no lack of media about the MBR, last fall especially, but it passed us by on 3QD, I’m afraid — are we too rational?  Some of us — still incomplete rationalists — are trying awfully hard to swear off the woo, and we may in that push be repressing altogether too enthusiastically even our vicariously Dionysian natures.

See that wedding dress in the photo above – and that hatchet? These are relics with fancy explanations, displayed in Tacheles, a 1930’s department store that’s since become an artists’ squat, where the MBR had its Berlin run.  At present, only a big roomful of the growing collection of artifacts can be installed at any one time, although the initiators of the project, Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic, hope that the MBR may one day find a permanent – and vast – home. Artifacts keep arriving, each with its story: the bike on which a wretched boy simply pedaled away from his unendurable love one hot summer day; the pricey coffeemaker that reminded its donor of too many attempts at a cozy connubial breakfast that somehow never took place; a pair of pink fur handcuffs, with keys; an evening gown which, its donor writes, “one New Year’s Eve was neglected to be put on.”

Boy/Girl, Boy/Boy and Girl/Girl Ruptures – and Their Traces

Since the MBR focuses on physical artifacts of failed romantic relationships, couples out for winter entertainment in Berlin found it a popular destination – fingers crossed inside their mittens, I presume.  Everyone reading this – and the very one writing it – has had some form of romantic disappointment of which there exists a relic — if only a memory artifact — of such symbolic power that it matters not at all that it no longer takes up three-dimensional space, if it ever did.  Perhaps the couple in the painting above left, A Difference of Opinion, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, will be stepping decorously wide of birdbaths forever after their kitschy tiff.   If I were one of the two unconscious women in Courbet’s Le Sommeil, top right, I might wake up mad, battling an urge to hurl that flower vase against a wall.  The scene here depicted has always appeared to me as one of those “it just happened” episodes, not a thing the principals made a habit of. The vase shards would do for a relic, as would the intact vase, if I ran off into the day with it.  Or just recalled it as a container of memories, without needing to own or destroy it. A musical instrument or a dried laurel wreath could be a manageable relic if things went South between the Greeks – one of whom is already pushing the other away — in the 6th century B.C.E. tomb painting, bottom right.  In either the virtual or the veridical Museum of Broken Relationships, literally anything in the surround of coupling can be the highly charged artifact of a failed romance.

But why be so literal-minded? A romance that fails need not be with a human. No, I’m not making an off-color observation, just stating a fact: some of our most torrid and keenly regretted romances are with ideas.

Cerebrally on Fire, to Crash More Cruelly Still

Taking care not to get too distracted by his Dominican garb, consider Fr. Dominique Lacordaire, painted in 1840 by Theodore Chasseriau.  The painting hangs in the Louvre, where it leaps out at you even among depictions of rabid 19th century fanaticism of many kinds. It is perhaps the most ardent face ever painted, as befits the personal history of Fr. Lacordaire, which I won’t go into here. When I first came upon it, I was not actually a grown-up, and it looked like every boy I’d ever seen in a University library who was so turned on by his reading that he could no longer stand it, and had to leave off to walk the aisles and stare lasciviously into carels full of girls.  This was a face that made me understand the willingness of Signor Settembrini and Fr. Naphta to duel to the death over an idea, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, in The Magic Mountain. It is still the face I see when I think of momentous first encounters with philosophy – the kind that truly carry you away, so that no one can bear you for upwards of a week.

Ideas of this sort have in common with romantic love the potential to let anyone beguiled by them down, most cruelly down. How horrible it was, when Nietzsche turned out not to be enough.  Being let down by Fritz is a torment even Fritz would have ranked high – Fritz, who was himself let down by Wagner. There is a twin quality of both religious and sexual dismay to it. And don’t try to tell me different, even if Nietzsche was not the one who did it to you. Because, if you’re reading this, you know what I mean — although you might choose to put it some other way.

It struck me that this kind of disappointment could be entirely characteristic of many 3QD readers. Not just those we know who are professors or grad students in math or philosophy, but readers and writers who are capable of being inspired to the limits of their being, and thrilled utterly, by the purely intellectual. Whoever has undergone this knows there are many possible aftermaths to it, some of them with artifacts worthy of inclusion in the Museum of Broken Relationships.

In Sorrow an Iron Door

As Tosca sings, I have lived for art, I have lived for love… What about those who have lived not just for but largely through art?  Whether as creators, or as non-artists compellingly subject to the experience of art who have, like artists, put art at the center of their lives?  I once knew the owner of a riding stable in Mid-coastal California who followed Dr. Boehm around the world, to wherever he was conducting Beethoven – Fidelio especially. Without attempting to meet him or to draw attention to herself in any way, she was in his audience as often as she could manage to be, and that was very often.  She had found the ideal interpreter, she felt, of the music that most ravished her – nothing could be allowed to come between her and the experience of it. Whether it ever let her down and broke her heart I never knew.  If it did, Rilke had words for the phenomenon, for the devastating failure of art at just the time one most needs to be borne up by it.  Words that sound even better in German: Das Kunst ist im Gluck eine Zier, im Ungluck ein eiserne Tur. (In happiness art is a jewel, in sorrow an iron door.)

When this happens, if you are an artist, you may have barely survived a horrendous rupture with your own source of inspiration. When, on the other hand, things are going well between you and your muse, it is as if all forces had joined for an inevitable work of art to occur, and you had channeled those forces so that the work bears your imprint yet came from someplace far beyond yourself. Poussin paints it in The Inspiration of the Poet, below. Eyes gazing upward, the poet is thronged with divine aid he does not see, an unearthly golden light shining from low on the left.  Apollo and the muse, their intent faces in shadow, look steadily not at the poet but at his notebook, to which the god also points.  In the moment of creation – not later, when the work may have found an audience, but in the moment of creation itself, when it really matters – putti are present with laurel crowns for the poet.  If, as an artist, you have had so much as one hour when you simply showed up for work and, lo… nobody could beat you, then you recognize what’s going on here.

But it’s not always like that, is it? Since I would very much like not to contribute to all the heartfelt prose there is about the failure of artistic inspiration, I won’t.  A related matter, however, is the plain parallel between the presence of the muse and the enchantment of sexual love, between the departure of the muse and the cold eye cast upon sexual love. And this is where the Museum of Broken Relationships might be justified in soliciting a few artifacts from poets, painters, architects and musicians, for the frequent overlap of muse and romantic partner suggests worlds within worlds of fairly glittering dismay.

Giorgio de Chirico has left us his own version of The Poet and His Muse, c. 1925.  And in it, so much is amiss. The poet slouches head down in an armchair, his materials nowhere in sight, an icon of giving up.  The muse at first glance appears to comfort rather than inspire, but her torso is filled with knobby, pointy objects, including a right triangle – there will be no crying at her breast. And her right arm, the one that would direct the poet’s efforts, is altogether missing. The featureless faces of both poet and muse encrypt forever the secrets of their disastrous union. They are but two messengers, come together to share their awful news – and there cannot be an artist who fails to recognize the impasse.

The Ukrainian academic painter Anna Bilinksa-Bohdanowicz must have understood the problem intimately, as she reveals in her Self-Portrait with Apron and Brushes, painted in 1887. Her tools at hand, leaning forward into the mirror, she seems to be showing us that inspiration isn’t strictly necessary, only uncompromising will and the readiness to work. Like many very well known Western European women artists of the same era who left self-portraits, Bilinksa-Bohdanowicz has painted herself tiny-waisted, in stays, entirely girded for the business of the day. She appears exhausted, though, anticipating only the kind of work that need not bring extraordinary rewards. Within several years of completing this self-portrait, she was dead at 36.

All Threads Lead to Rilke

The artists, writers, thinkers and lovers on the cusp of Modernism speak urgently to us now, all in their graves for three quarters of a century.  Like ourselves, they tended to think love and sex should coincide, although many of them lost decades trying to effect that coincidence. Our subject being the Valentine’s Day one month from now, and how we might — as a community — mark it, I believe it is more delicate to write of heroic longing, and the exigencies it brings, than of the other thing.  That special pre-Modern longing has no finer exemplar than Lou Andreas-Salome, a virgin – and enraged about it, too – until she was more than 30.  Today, reading Lou is rather difficult; for a horribly intelligent Russian girl who kept all the best company in Europe, she furnishes us with too little that is readable. One achingly lonely day in her late 20’s, however, she surpassed herself – just not in writing.  So great that day was her longing for Rilke, with whom she was in love, and corresponded, that she actually ate his letters.

Reading Rilke’s letters makes one quite see why.  Knowing, certainly, how astonishing they were, he was often traveling, making camp at a correspondence-necessitating remove from the people who most interested him. The great poet, the first to write of going barefoot, the first to look at the exposed interior walls of a bombed building as if they had a story to tell, was married for exactly one year to a German sculptor, and died at 51, from an infection contracted when, already ill with leukemia, he pricked his finger on the thorn of a rose.

The Love of Animals – Not Afterthought but Aftermath

Animal lovers might send in pet snapshots to the Museum of Broken Relationships, not because animals can make you deeply, deeply unhappy by doing anything but getting sick or lost, or by dying, but because some animal lovers have abandoned romantic hopes of other humans, so that the sheer relief and sweetness of having an animal companion instead of a boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse is, itself, an artifact of at least one failed human/human relationship, and the pet snapshot is the document of the artifact. On Valentine’s Day, I may come clean about this or I may not – but her name is Lucy, and she is a 12-lb. poodle.

My friend, neighbor and fellow animal lover Prof. David Mitten, who teaches classical archeology at Harvard, converted to Islam in Turkey in the 1960’s.  He tells me about a tradition I’ve not heard of elsewhere – that Muslims he knew in Turkey believed the love of animals prepared young children for the love of God. That is, through animals, a child learns of love entailing both duties to perform and perfect trust, which is how God means to be loved.

Who can quarrel with that wordless love which is yet a passionate and soulful attachment, which mingles tender care and emotional abandon?  The real nature of a beloved animal, including its sense of itself, is – like God – unknowable, so we project, imagine and endow it with power.  We are allowed to love our animals beyond reason because it’s “trivial, but not ungratifying,” as Nancy Mitford shrewdly remarked.

Frida Kahlo, in Me and My Parrots, 1941, paints herself amid birds that defend and counsel her, perching on her shoulders like Minerva’s owl, crowding her lap like toddlers.  Can they break her heart?   Probably not, but we know that Diego Rivera did – many, many times. La vida es un gran relajo, she used to say – life is a carnival.

Take the 3QD Valentine’s Day Challenge

Some readers, whose e-mail addresses I have been able to obtain, have already heard from me about the 3QD Valentine’s Day Challenge.  Put simply, it is thus: if you were asked to donate an artifact to the Museum of Broken Relationships, what would that artifact be? 

In today’s post, I wanted to amplify on the rather narrow meaning of romantic love hewed to by the founders of the MBR and its donors.  A poem, a puppy, a film, a painting, a building, a song, and perhaps above all an idea have the potential to incite us to soul-pounding love, to carry us literally away, and examining what is left after feelings of that kind have fallen away will, I believe, reveal the community of writers and readers here in all its creativity and diversity.  Some readers have written back that their emotional life is not a train wreck, and they cannot therefore imagine what to contribute; I hope today’s post may point them towards another reading of the challenge.

On Monday, February 11, when I post the material I shall have gathered, we shall see what there is to see. I’ve already got hold of some great stuff, but 3QD has many more readers than commenters, and I want to cast my net wide.

Please write to me – elatiaharris AT gmail DOT com. If you send visuals, lower their resolution and otherwise scale them to facilitate uploading, no wider than 600 pixels. If you prefer to anonymize yourself via a yahoo account, I promise I won’t analyze your prose style for identity clues, although my mother showed me how to do that, many years ago.  I hope to receive your contribution by February 8, the better to orchestrate it into a real conversation with all the others instead of merely listing contributions in the order they arrive.

Happy bittersweet musing, and — thanks for sending in those thoughts!

Note: Herein I discuss the film in such a way as to ruin it for those who haven’t seen it.

There Will Be Blood is a movie that begins by making good on some of the remarkable formal promise that Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrated in certain key sequences in his last movie, Punch Drunk Love.  (He’s developed quite a way with titles, too.)  In the earlier movie, Anderson was discovering an ability to produce riveting sequences without dialogue or camera movement, simply by sound, composition and cutting.  It was a refreshing improvement on the allusion-heavy style he deployed in his first films, which quoted Altman and Scorcese to no end.  (An example of this would be the fully Scorcese-esque tracking shots in Boogie Nights.)

There Will Be Blood suggests even further independence of technique, that PTA is emerging as a formally unique artist (sometime, I have to investigate my overreliance on the concept of formality in movies).  It begins with a truly striking landscape shot, over which we hear an orchestral swooping, out of a horror movie.  This unmotivated shot leaves much to infer, leaves the viewer in what I’d term a rich state of ignorance.  What follows is also powerfully restrained, as we see Daniel Day-Lewis’ character, Daniel Plainview, discovering oil while mining for silver in circumstances of extreme privation and physical risk.  He lights a fuse, dynamites a wall, blows his tools up while trying to winch them out of the mine, climbs back down, and at a beautifully unexpected moment the rung of a ladder slips away from the wall and down he plunges.  Back to the ominous landscape.  Cue orchestra.  Shiver.

Such moments are staged so freshly that you have the sense, in a way similar to Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (though perhaps not as fully achieved), of a film finding a magical way to make the experience of other times, other forms of consciousness, palpable.  It’s something the best period films do, and even if it’s always all a fake, there is something about the way movies can record being-in-the-world that makes them a special vehicle for this.  The first two-thirds of There Will Be Blood are peppered with revelatory material, non-judgmental observations of Plainview’s Nietzschean will to dominate.  Plainview rejecting a town whose members are too excitable; Plainview bargaining with a sheep-like farmer; Plainview saving his son from a spectacular oil fire that manages to suggest both Kuwait and the Old Testament.  Yet the movie never makes its moral judgment too plain–it never fully betrays its origins in the Upton Sinclair muckraker, Oil!.

Until the last third of film, that is, when Plainview’s paranoid, psychotic nature becomes drastically clear.  He humiliates a preacher, kills a man who had pretended to be his half brother, and after becoming a Howard Hughe-grade recluse, piles up furniture in his living room and shoots at it, viciously abuses his own son, and in the movie’s final scene, he manipulates, bullies, kills the younger preacher, with whom he has contended for the entire movie.  Not only kills, but kills by beating him to death in Plainview’s own private bowling ally, with a bowling pin.  Suddenly, Day-Lewis has become Joe Pesci–and P.T. Anderson again the Scorcese disciple.  It’s acting out as acting.  (The cut from the establishing shot of Plainview’s neo-Gothic mansion to this bowling alley says so much more than the craziness that follows.)  Plainview’s descent into homicidal behavior, though, seems much less menacing than the more ambiguous behavior that came before, when it appeared his love was as dangerous as his hatred.

How does one take this overstated ending?  If you’re me, terribly.  Anderson gives away much of what he has achieved with it.  He re-roots the movie, so unique before, in the American genre tradition of the psychotic picaresque, aligning Day-Lewis with the great Method scenery chewer of modern American film, Al Pacino.  Anderson’s love of movies and desire to point his movie at something, like a sharp stick impaling religion and capitalism together, seem to overtake his purer filmic qualities.  The movie loses its internal cohesion.  It’s probably still a great film, but less great.

Or maybe not.  The day after I saw There Will Be Blood, I spoke about it with a great friend of 3qd occasionalist Descha Daemgen, let’s call him Tittymouse, who loved the ending.  In revealing Plainview’s character to be basically evil, in making itself into an allegory about the unholy alliance of oil and God, said Tittymouse, the film was making visible its desire to critique, and blasting out of a specious naturalism into a more obvious pastiche of genres. This seemed a more honest filmmaking style to Tittymouse, in that it brought our attention to the artificiality, the constructedness, of the movie, rather than “fooling” us by maintaining its tone.  I see Tittymouse’s point, though I feel there is something  important in our disagreement.

For Tittymouse, and those like him, there is no knowledge that can be higher than the knowledge that accepts and signals its own insufficiency.  So postmodern effects like pastiche and artificiality, the showing of seams, are to be admired.  For me, and those like me, I think, the immanence of a piece is more interesting than its signaling of its theoretical sophistication.  In Tittymouse’s worldview, the work is important not for itself but for its expression of certain favored themes in post-Heideggerian Continental philosophy, basically about the impossibility of knowledge of the object.  Because of this, elements like the ending of the movie, that rupture the self-consistency of the film, are admirable.  The auteur of the film is irrelevant, in this post-death-of-the-author mode of understanding.  But to me, a movie shouldn’t be a representative of a school of thought.  It should be a movie.

(I’m being a bit unfair to Tittymouse, ventriloquizing him this way, making him say what I want him to say and then arguing with it.  But he’s partially a literary character, so it’s okay.)

There’s something more interesting to me about seeing a work as immanent, independent of philosophical thought.  You can see it from a productive zone of ignorance, if that’s not too vague.  What I mean by that is that ignorance is what allows you to develop a personal, fully (emotionally) engaged response to a work, while obsessive knowledge, or an obsessive relationship to relating things to other things, makes for a good critical stance but does a kind of violence. 

Maybe another way to get at this is with an anecdote.  I once went to Dia: Beacon, to look at look at those most consecrated of artists, with a friend, Jimmy, who was then the director of a major gallery.  I had expected him to pontificate interestingly on the brilliance of all those titans of contemporary art, the Smithsons and Serras and Lewitts.  Instead, he said, “This stuff is alright, but it’s not that interesting to me, it’s not what’s happening now.”  He was pretty much nonplussed by the stuff–as the director of a downtown gallery specializing in much more contemporary art, he was electrified by his own peers and not the generation before.  Jimmy’s response surprised, intrigued, and has stayed with me.  Rather than a curatorial, reverential relation to artworks, he had more selfish, disrespectful and, in a way, ignorant relation to them ( I say this in a good way, actually).  That was hugely enabling.  He wasn’t worried about the place of a particular in the history of art, as embodiments of conceptual revolutions, or rather, he was, but only to the degree that he was.  The zone of ignorance is productive.

And that, in a way, marks the difference between two worldviews, that are cleaved quite deeply.  You want a work to be immanent in the moment you encounter it, or you want it to somehow symbolize and perform historical transformations.  You either see it as a thing or a representation.  You’re either with us or you’re with the Tittymouses.  And I think your response to the last scene of There Will Be Blood will tell you which.

Justin E. H. Smith

For those travellers departing to Nova Zembla: Please confirm for us whether the snow there gives off its own light, or only reflects that of the moon with unusual intensity.

Hi-ho, to all those expert in the arcana of Finno-Ugric inflection: Won’t you kindly let us know how the vocative case is faring in Samoyed?

To the hardy citizens of Brasov (Kronstadt): We have heard reports of a bear that descended from the mountains right into the medieval city center, and savagely mauled an American woman hoping to take its picture.  Can you please tell us whether, firstly, the victim was targeted in view of her nationality, and, secondly, whether the Carpathian bear population has exploded in consequence of Nicolae Ceausescu’s bear-fertility policies, or some other reason?

We have received news of giant ‘flash-fossilized’ bones from the region of Fairbanks, Alaska.  From what terrible lizards did these bones come?  What great cataclysm made them hard like stone?  Might they be suitable for display in a scientific museum or a church-auxiliary building in Indiana, say, or Orange County?

It is said that Slavs are struck deathly ill when a window is left open at one side of a room, a door at the other.  The cause is said to be a ‘skvozdnyak’, or ‘draft’.  Is this skvozdnyak a spiritual creature of some sort, or a demon?  What makes these people so feeble?  Why can they not appreciate a nice healthy breeze like the rest of us?

For those travellers to Sentinel Island in the fabled Nicobar Chain: Do not try to make nice using cocoa-nuts.  The natives will have your head, and baste it in the ‘milk’.

We have been informed that the Anatolians consider Mustafa Kemal Atatürk a national hero for having ‘heroically’ lopped the dot off of the letter ‘i’ in bending our Latin alphabet to fit his backward tongue.  We would like to know whether the Turks have any idea what the dot was doing there to begin with, and whether they intend any further violent deformation of our vowels, consonants, or punctuation marks.  If this much can be said without risking decapitation oneself, it might be pointed out that they too have not a few extra little marks above and below their letters, that two can play at this game, &c.

For those travelling to Muscovy: Is it true what we have heard, that the Great Ruler is also a Judo master, ready to take on any head-of-state who would challenge him?  Is it true that the sight of him shirtless sends fear into the hearts of neighboring dictators, and that periodic pec flexings on state-controlled television have been enough to re-consolidate this once mighty empire?

It is said that among the Papuans old women are not permitted to participate in the cooking of food for young warriors, as their dessicated, death-heavy bodies transmit impotence and hunting failure through the aliments they have prepared.  Post-menopausal women are required to maintain a distance of at least three arms’ lengths between prepared food and their vaginas.  Won’t some brave explorer ask these savages if they have not heard of “granny’s home cookin’”?  If the natives are keen, we would consider sending a few of our favorite dishes.

For those Cincinnati-bound: How comes it that a great Roman statesman lends his name to what has been called the ‘Sodom of the Ohio River’?  And why, of all possible meal combos, do the Cincinnatians put chili atop their spaghetti?

—

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

A couple of days ago I had posted a video of the famous Pakistani singer Habib Wali Mohammed singing a poem written by the last, and ill-fated, Mughal emperor of India, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Earlier today my wife was listening to it and asked me what the words mean. I told her I would translate the poem for her, but when I sat down to do it, the very first line was impossible, as the Urdu phrase “jee lagna” or “dil lagna” not only doesn’t have an idiomatic equivalent in English, it is difficult even to explain what it means. It is something like becoming comfortable and happy in a place, but that doesn’t quite capture it.

[The picture above shows Bahadur Shah Zafar in exile in Rangoon, where he died. According to Wikipedia, it is the only know photograph of a Mughal emperor.]

Anyhow, I went ahead and did a translation which I present below. I welcome suggestions for improvement from those who understand Urdu (particularly from my sister Azra who is about to publish a book of translations of Urdu poetry into English).

My heart does not settle in this landscape of ruin
Who can feel settled in this evanescent world?

Tell these longings to go live someplace else
This scarred heart no longer has space.

Asking for long life, I was given only days
Half I spent wanting, the other half waiting.

The nightingale complains against groundsman nor trapper
Being caged in springtime was a matter of fate.

How hapless is Zafar, that even for burial,
He could not get a sliver of land near his lover.

And here is the original poem in my very informal transliteration into the Roman alphabet:

Lagta naheen hai jee mera ujray diar mein
Kiss kee banee hai aalam-e-napaedar mein

Keh do in hasraton say kaheen aur ja basein
Itnee jagha kahaan hai dil-e-daghdar main

Umr-e-daraaz maang kay laey thay chaar din
Do arzoo mein kut gaey do intizaar mein

Bulbul ko baghban say na sayyaad say gila
Qismat mein qaid thee likhee fasl-e-bahaar mein

Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar dafn kay leeay
Do gaz zameen bhi mil na sakee koo-e-yaar mein

William Dalrymple recently wrote a book called The Last Mughal about Bahadur Shah Zafar, and my friend and 3QD colleague Ram Manikkalingam wrote about that book in his essay “The Emerald City and the Red Fort.”

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

Like the proverbial emperor and his nonexistent clothes, the ‘Process’ has no ‘Peace’

A serious pandemic of delusion is gripping the world.  Ground Zero for the spread of this scourge was in Annapolis, Maryland in late November.  Within hours, millions of otherwise intelligent people started exhibiting the symptoms of this horrible affliction: uncontrollable optimism, abrupt failure of reasoning, oblivious disregard of reality, and a deeply religious faith in a fictional ‘Peace Process’ that will be the New Messiah that will deliver the world from all evil.

It would be fun to watch this mass hysteria unfold as it infects more and more people, but unfortunately, there are real human costs to the continuation of this delusion.   It is time for sane people everywhere to rise to confront this delusion and break the news to the millions of devout Peace-Processians springing up around the world: like the proverbial Emperor and his nonexistent clothes, this ‘Process’ has no ‘Peace’.   This fictional god you have been worshipping exists only in your brains; just because you insist on seeing it in spite of all evidence does not in any way change the cold hard reality that it is simply not there.

There is utterly no evidence to suggest that any prospects for ‘Peace’ exist from this charade of a ‘Process’.   Israel is finishing the construction of its apartheid wall, the world’s only religiously-segregated road network, and thousands of watch-towers from which it observes everything going on in the life of all Palestinians. Complete towns are locked up behind gates that open arbitrarily according to the whims of callous soldiers. Israeli illegal colonies are growing more than ever—mere days after the conclusion of the Annapolis conference, Israel announced it would expand a crucial colony outside Jerusalem.   More than 400,000 illegal Israeli settlers still litter the West Bank, having benefited from 40 years of expansionist colonialism and generous subsidies from every single Israeli government elected by the Israeli populace. The Gaza Strip remains legally an occupied land, though effectively it is the world’s biggest prison.   Normal service will by all means continue.

It is quite clear to anyone who would care listen to Israeli leaders themselves that Israel has absolutely no intention of giving away anything meaningful in the West Bank—certainly nothing on which anyone could establish a viable state.   It is also painfully clear to anyone who cares to reason that the American government has no intention whatsoever of pressuring the Israelis into any form of concession.   Seeing as these issues are the main issues standing between us and a peaceful solution, one can be sure that there will be no way for a peaceful solution to be achieved.

So why do so many people continue to believe in this mythical ‘Peace Process’?  Like other fictitious beliefs, there are the few who benefit, and then there are the masses who are deluded.   There are also, of course, the many that are harmed.

The biggest beneficiary from this delusion is the Israeli government.  That is why its leaders have gone around the world trumpeting the importance of achieving peace. Olmert claimed that failure to achieve peace would doom Israel; Haim Ramon, his deputy, even beseeched American Jewish groups to work for a peaceful solution for the sake of Israel.   There is a desperate attempt to make sure that Israel appears desperate for peace.  But of course, actions speak louder than words. If Israel really meant any of this, they wouldn’t have approved an illegal colony on stolen Palestinian land in East Jerusalem hours after Annapolis.   It is this hypocrisy that has come to accurately define the past few years, and will be the hallmark of the future: Israeli actions that solidify and perpetuate the occupation, along with Israeli statements desperate for peace.   All that Israel has to do is to play pretend and everything will be fine.  It just needs to pay some lip-service to the possibility of potentially starting some sort of a ‘Process’ that might, with a few miracles, result in something or the other, someday, somewhere, and the entire world will applaud in awe.   Any Peace-processian fundamentalist who still has faith needs to ask themselves the honest question of how they can maintain this delusion in the face of this hypocrisy and this disparity between actions and rhetoric.

As for those who are harmed, they are the millions of Palestinians living under apartheid, repression and murder in Gaza and the West Bank, with their hopes of ever seeing normalcy in their lives evaporating; and the millions of refugees whose legitimate right to return to their homes the world is happy to forget.

The worst thing about this sorry state of affairs is its indomitable sustainability.  Israel will continue expanding settlements, oppressing Palestinians, and murdering an unborn nation with complete impunity.   The Palestinians, left to their fate by the world, will continue to suffer completely unable to do anything to alter Israel’s position.  And the world will cheer on, and assure the Palestinians that all they need is just a little more ‘Process’.   So long as the ‘Process’ goes on; no one pressures Israel to do anything, and Israel won’t do anything. So long as Israel does nothing; the tragedy of the Palestinians continues. So long as the tragedy of the Palestinians continues, the mirage of ‘peace’ will become more unattainable.

What the Peace-Processians don’t realize is that not only is the status quo here to stay, their cult-like enthusiasm for it is the main reason why it is here to stay.   If the hordes of ‘Peace Processians’ want ‘Peace’ and not ‘Process’, they should be condemning Israel’s colonies and occupation, not applauding its empty statements.   So long as the masses continue to convince themselves the emperor is dressed in splendid clothes, he will continue to parade his hideous crotch all over the world, from Jerusalem to Annapolis and beyond.

The title of this post is a translation of a Latin inscription on Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb. This is the fourth year that we at 3QD celebrate the auspicious 25th day of December as Newton’s Day, an idea that we coincidentally came to independently on the same day as Richard Dawkins proposed it. (Newton was born 365 years ago today.) Each year I have given some small snippet about Newton’s life (previous years’ posts here, here, and here in chronological order) and this year I’ll present a simple experiment that changed our understanding of the nature of light. Even though Newton had done the experiment in 1666, he did not publish it as part of his first major bit of scientific writing until 1672. In fact, just as in a more fair world (with a more fair academy in Oslo!) Einstein should have won four Nobels for the work he published as a 26 year-old in 1905 (the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the derivation of the law of the equivalence of mass and energy, E=mc2, from the equations of special relativity), Newton’s achievements of the summer of 1666 (which caused Murray Gell-Mann to joke about that annus mirabilis that Sir Isaac could have written quite a “What I did on my summer vacation” essay!) were no less astounding: the law of gravitation, the laws of motion, the work on optics, and the invention of the calculus!

In addition, Newton refined Galileo’s notion of scientific method to the point where it is basically indistinguishable from a modern statement of it by a scientist today. He writes in the Opticks:

As in mathematics, so in natural philosophy, the investigation of difficult things by the method of analysis, ought ever to precede the method of composition. This analysis consists in making experiments and observations, and in drawing general conclusions from them by induction and admitting of no objections against the conclusions, but such as are taken from experiments, or other certain truths. For hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental philosophy. And although the arguing from experiments and observations by induction be no demonstration of general conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the nature of things admits of, and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the induction is more general. And if` no exception occur from phenomena, the conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if` at any time afterwards any exception shall occur from experiments, it may then begin to be pronounced with such exceptions as occur. By this way of analysis we may proceed from compounds to ingredients, and from motions to the forces producing them; and in general, from effects to their causes, and from particular causes to more general ones, till the argument ends in the most general. This is the method of analysis: And the synthesis consists in assuming the causes discovered, and established as principles, and by them explaining the phenomena proceeding from them, and proving the explanations.

Now just look at the elegant simplicity of this beautiful experiment that Newton performed with just two prisms and a convex lens. This is from a University of California, Riverside, physics webpage:

Newton’s first work as Lucasian Professor was on optics. Every scientist since Aristotle had believed light to be a simple entity, but Newton, through his experience when building telescopes, believed otherwise: it is often found that the observed images have colored rings around them (in fact, he devised the reflecting telescope to minimize this effect). His crucial experiment showing that white light is composite consisted in taking beam of white light and passing it through a prism; the result is a wide beam displaying a spectrum of colors. If this wide beam is made to pass through a second prism, the output is again a narrow beam of white light. If, however, only one color is allowed to pass (using a screen), the beam after the second prism has this one color again. Newton concluded that white light is really a mixture of many different types of colored rays, and that these colored rays are not composed of more basic entities.

So, once again, Happy Newton’s Day to all!

Happy Holidays, dear Reader. Yes, I seem always to get stuck with the holidays (Labor Day, Christmas, and whatever might come next…), hence you get stuck reading me—if, in fact, you read on such supposed holidays.

Kindly note that I’m using PC in my title to refer to Personal Computer, not Politically Correct. See, if you’re reading me now, you’re most likely doing so on a personal computer. I have nothing to say about political correctness between the Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Eid, and any other holiday one might celebrate this season. But if you’re here, there’s little chance you’re with relatives, family, etc. and if you are, you’re ignoring them in favor of this little screen in front of you. That’s what intrigues me. I’ve traveled several hours, and am in the house I grew up in, sleeping in the bed I grew up sleeping in, walking through the woods I grew up walking through. Although nothing much seems to have changed, I have, and my way of interacting with all this has as well. I now sit at a little laptop, with four family members in the same room, and all of us have our attention absorbed in the little screens before them. This intrigues me.

Two weeks ago I carried out and presented a little art project. If this sounds diminutive, it should. I was taking a seminar in “combined media;” flying in the face of most programs, there was a relatively precise assignment for the final critique: everyone was to prepare a site-specific project.

Site-specific: as in, after the minimalists; as in, after Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 Sculpture in the Expanded Field; as in, all those works and ideas I’d heard of but never really thought about. Initially, I tried to think of it as a great opportunity—to do research, to try something outside my comfort zone. Fairly soon I simply had to admit it was just a pain in the ass: what did site mean, anyway? Let alone what specific could have meant. And that’s when I realized I was unbelievably lucky; I was being asked to do something I’d never have volunteered for, but could use to step out of my regular practice, run a real risk, and try something new.

Being a word-oriented gal, I began asking myself what those two terms could mean, and how they could be interpreted in a more creative fashion. Nothing came. After three thesauruses and my trusted OED, still nothing came. And that’s when I made a joke and my brilliant companion rose to the occasion: in jest I discussed wanting to create an utterly non-existent project, an experience, something people would be part of but that would leave no trace, something fleeting and pointed and contemporary and temporary—something like a text message.

*******

Admittedly, I was indebted to a colleague of mine who had presented the previous week. In a brilliant critique of academia, he had written out his previous critique as a script; it ended up literally looking like a theatrical script, with the colleague-characters’ names preceding whatever riveting or banal thing they had said in reaction to his latest works. Those latest works (five small paintings and one larger painting) were represented by tape outlines applied to the wall at the beginning of his final critique. Thus it became a complete, and quite engrossing, performance: he’d recruited three other colleagues to make the masking-tape outlines of six rectangles on the wall, and then handed out printed scripts to all the people who’d spoken during his last crit, who then had to recite their part. This became hilarious when one recited—verbatim—his comment that “the taping is shitty,” critiquing the fuzzy outline of several areas throughout the canvas. The last—and perhaps most important—detail is that the scripted dialogue was written from his memory, not from any recording. I picked up on that when I saw that a few peoples’ comments, including my own, weren’t included, and hence they didn’t get to recite their part.

Aside from being remarkably clever, that piece got me thinking about various sorts of site and space, especially memory as space. His performance was held in the room adjacent to the one where the previous crit had been held; the works we were looking at were blank rectangles roughly the size of the actual paintings we’d looked at before, but were empty, prompting us to conjure up our visual memories of the pieces. The fact that he wrote the script from memory meant that the real space—of the recitation and the supposedly visual work being discussed—was all in our heads.

So I discussed my trepidation about the site-specific project with my companion, described the above project, and began to brainstorm. He’d made a political poster stating that a certain thing would happen at a certain time, and left a blank for the certain place it would happen to be filled in by hand—making a curiously site-specific poster edition by leaving site entirely out of it. But I didn’t care to steal his work, so thought of my own relations to this theme. Although I hardly ever gave site or space a second thought, one of my earliest pertinent memories was the way my brother and I would always divide space as children: in our parents’ car we would stake out our claims, using our index finger to draw an invisible line through the middle of the seat and telling one another not to cross into territory that wasn’t ours. The same happened at an even younger age when we shared the bathtub, and floating bathtub toys: any toy or toe that strayed onto the other’s side was the other’s to do with as he liked. This translated into site as territory, and I considered dividing Manhattan along 42 Street with a chalk line or string, referring to these ancient territorial disputes and the fact that the view of the island from my neighborhood perfectly bisects it along that cavernous line between the surrounding skyscrapers. Deciding that wasn’t very feasible or interesting (and being a regrettably practical-minded gal as well), we considered unwinding a spool of thread through the corridors and stairways of the studio building, still referring to territory and division, but also referencing the idea of a loop and of being traced, or chased. None of these seemed at all inspiring.

Thus uninspired by the task at hand, and admittedly discouraged by a recent bureaucratic nightmare related to some other work I’d recently shown, I decided I wanted my solution to be utterly non-existent, physically speaking, and yet very present. I wanted it to make people think about the site they were in, specifically. I wanted to do so through no physical means, and over time. I’d recently seen the Tino Sehgal piece at Marian Goodman, which I found very thought provoking, albeit problematic (and too lengthy to discuss here, but do go see it if you can). So I ventured to provoke some thought, via sms.

*******

I received and then sent my first text message, or sms, short for “short message service,” in the spring of 2000, when a Roman friend of mine was explaining how we could keep in touch without spending the exorbitant sums calling each other by mobile phone required. It seemed silly at first, but did save a good deal of time and money. I then suddenly awakened to the fact that a good portion of the people around me at any given moment were absorbed in writing messages on their mobiles: while ordering coffee at the bar, while walking down the street, while doing just about anything—their attention was elsewhere. This was a huge phenomenon in Europe because calling to and from mobiles was (and is) so expensive; in the US, the system is completely different, and text messaging made little sense. For several years, no one had heard of it, had the patience for it, or bothered with it—until the marketers stepped in with special “texting” packages, pointing out that it’s great for when you’re in loud clubs and can’t talk, or for not-so-directly letting people know you’re late to a rendezvous, or other supposed necessities. Hence everyone here started “texting” one another while absenting themselves from wherever they were as they frenetically typed away on their tiny mobile keypads.

So I decided the non-site of a text message—and peoples’ very state while writing, receiving, or replying to a text message—would be the site of my project. It was an ideally ambivalent subject for me: sms had allowed me to keep relationships alive across oceans and time zones for years on end, yet the brevity and constraints of such limited communication also bothered me. It fed one of my passions in the form of record keeping (I have almost every sms I’ve ever sent or received, creating a curiously concise portrayal of people, events, and experiences), but was also yet another electronic device I felt divorced me from my surroundings. So I ended up doing the most banal thing thinkable—I sent three brief messages:

1. (7:00 a.m. EST) WHERE ARE YOU?
2. (10:00 a.m. EST) WHERE ARE YOU NOW?
3. (1:00 p.m. EST) & NOW?

These were sent, over six hours’ time, to everyone in the seminar who’d given me their number. The idea was simply to get the receiver to be aware of their location at that given time. People were free to reply, or not reply, in any way they preferred. I chose all caps as a nod to telegrams as ancestors of both sms and e-mail and other brief, relatively immediate, ephemeral means of communication. The last message was sent during the final seminar, so it worked both as a last question and as a theatrical “and now what?” sort of lead-in to the discussion of this piece.

Peoples’ reactions were fascinating. Since newer e-mail conventions are fresher in most peoples’ minds than telegram conventions, some interpreted the ALL CAPS as YELLING. Because of how it was written, I knew many people would think the first note was someone summoning them to a meeting they’d forgotten. I also knew most people would still be asleep. A Japanese participant was clearly awake and telephoned me straightaway, but I didn’t answer, as I wanted any and all communication to be text-based, leaving a record. Several people had forgotten giving me their numbers, and asked who I was. Many replied “home.” One replied not with a place, but with a verb: “sleeping.” But he clearly wasn’t, since he was sending me a text message. One girl was awakened by the message while soundly asleep with her boyfriend and, not recognizing the number, was struck by panic after concluding it could only be some ex of hers trying to get back in touch. The seminar “professor” interpreted it as a sort of surveillance, felt it was prying into his life, didn’t reply to any of them, and was reminded of a past project that predated mobiles wherein the artist had someone bring a phone to him periodically throughout the night and said things like “I know what you’ve done,” “confess,” “everybody can see what you’re up to,” etc.—a curious connection that, given its acutely accusatory mode, had little to do with the piece at hand.

I initially thought of it as a mere nudge for the recipients to meditate on where they were at that moment. I was also fond of the idea that we were all linked at three moments, over space and time, by a little nothing of a note, a few characters appearing on a little screen, which had the potential to open up a dialogue. Several of these conversations of sorts continued throughout the day, both by sms and then in the seminar itself. It was my first non-existent project, and the first time I was able to connect with some specific people, in specific sites, on a specific level.

*******

This holiday brings the project, abstract and abstruse as it may seem, back to mind. Gadgets, toys, PCs, and countless other things have the potential to both bring family and friends closer or further divide them—it’s how we choose to use such devices, and ultimately how aware we choose to be, that decides their role. While we might be geographically farther from those closest to us for these holidays, seemingly cold constructions like the internet and mobile networks and text messages, while they cannot embody a person or an embrace, can convey our thoughts and draw us closer.

On that note, it’s time for me to leave the screen and return to familial festivities. May you enjoy wherever you are right now, whomever you’re with, whatever you’re doing, however you choose.

Thanks for reading; previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

It’s already been a few years since the journal n+1 published its first issue. It included a section called The Intellectual Situation. There was something bold, intellectually exciting about a group of young thinkers uttering proclamations about “the intellectual situation.” It would have seemed to many that the one thing about the intellectual situation today is that there is no intellectual situation. Maybe we could have been persuaded that there are any number of intellectual situations. Maybe these intellectual situations, in their staggering and sometimes upsetting diversity, are connected with one another in a roughly coherent, if bloated, constellation of thoughts and ideas. But such hazy notions tend to melt away in the face of reality, the pudding; sticky and opaque, like all pudding. So even to say it, “The Intellectual Situation,” seemed worthy of our attention.

In one early entry, The Intellectual Situation (Part Two), the n+1ers decided to take on the McSweeney’s empire, the publishing movement started and loosely run by Dave Eggers and having as one of its offshoots The Believer magazine. The piece has lingered in my mind for some time now, partly because I’ve never been sure exactly where I stand on it. But it has nagged me, vexed me. Finally something about it has jelled in my mind, not quite pudding exactly, but a sense of why the debate is so intriguing.

The gist of The Intellectual Situation (Part Two) was that the name of the magazine, The Believer, told you all you needed to know about its content. Believers, so the thinking goes, have abdicated on the intellect altogether and advocate in its place a basic acceptance, if not outright enthusiasm for the immediate conditions in which they find themselves. N+1 opined, “The Believer: now here’s a figure who would have revolted intellectuals of the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s. (The echo in intellectual history is Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer.) Mere belief is hostile to the whole idea of thinking. To wear credulity as one’s badge of intellect is not to be a thinker as such.”

What’s fascinating about this claim is how much it sounds like the debates about reason and its limits that erupted at the end of the 18th century as the Enlightenment met a host of its most cogent critics and as Kant’s three Critiques threw the world into a huge tizzy about just what we’re able to think about and what we’re not. In short, Kant attempted to save Reason by limiting it. This created enemies on two sides; those who didn’t want to be limited (bless their hearts), and those who found the saving effort to be too little too late (the wild boys, Romantics).

Now, you cannot simply paste the terms of the Enlightenment debate directly onto the current imbroglio between n+1 and The Believer. For one thing, most of the people on all sides of the debate in the late 18th and early 19th centuries wanted to save religion and they thought the other side was botching the job. The question doesn’t resonate that way today. But one of the things that the defenders of the Enlightenment liked to do was to accuse their critics of some form of Schwärmerei. The word Schwärmerei comes from the verb schwärmen and sounds just like the English word it is related to, swarm. Schwärmerei is thus literally something like swarmfulness and it came to mean, essentially, enthusiasm, with a further implication that such enthusiasm is excessive or even fanatical. When Enlightenment critics accused their opponents of falling into Schwärmerei, they were accusing them of an irrational belief, mere belief, potentially dangerous belief. In many cases they had a point. Jacobi, for instance, could be a brilliant critic of the universal claims made by Kant. But he advocated in its place a leap into faith that was outright irrationality and mysticism. Hamann and Herder were the first thinkers to show how massively Kant had neglected to look into the particularities of language and culture, which seem to be at the very root of the possibility for having knowledge. But Hamann was close to insane and proclaimed “Nothing seems easier than the leap from one extreme to the other.” Herder was more interested in being understood but his critique of reason led him to a defense of extreme nationalism as the only place where he could ground tradition and meaning. Schwärmerei has not only a dumb side, but a scary side.

*

The final paragraph of n+1’s critique of The Believer reads, “Ultimately, the Believer is a book review. It has attracted writers we admire. It does differ in at least one particular from, say, the New York Review of Books, in that its overt criterion for inclusion is not expertise, but enthusiasm.” Schwärmerei. Of course, there is a dig at the New York Review of Books here and the implication that enthusiasm may be a step up from mere expertise. N+1 has been consistently interested in staking the claim that things do matter and that we ought to write about the world and think about the world as if it really does matter. So they want a little bit of Schwärmerei, but just a little bit. They don’t want to be overwhelmed by it, they don’t want their critical faculties to drown in a sea of swarming enthusiasm.

They want to perform a balancing act. They recognize that there is something to talk about, that we can’t simply stumble forward with the old criterion, the old defense of civilization. At the same time, they want to preserve the idea of critique that is our heirloom from the twentieth century. Here’s a couple of lines from The Intellectual Situation (Part One): “It didn’t have to be this way: if only they [The New Republic] had allowed more positive individuality, cultivated something new, and still kept an old dignified adherence to the Great Tradition, running continuously to them (as they hoped) from the New York Intellectuals, whose ashes were in urns in the TNR vaults if they were anywhere.” N+1 isn’t looking backward, it’s glancing backward with an eye toward what’s ahead.

This is a worthy stance. It is Kantian, not so much in the particularities of the argument but in the structure of the argument. It’s a new defense of the critical tradition that is willing to shake things up a little, that gives the nod to Edmund Wilson without bowing down slavishly before him. Just as Kant realized that to defend anything in the spirit of the Enlightenment he was going to have to acknowledge some major flaws, n+1 has taken on a similar two front war: Attack the dead rot within the critical tradition in order finally to renew it. This is exciting. It’s exciting.

It’s also completely wrong. But I say that with admiration. I’m from the sneaky school of Romantic Ironists for whom being wrong is just another admirable way of being human. Kant was the most powerful philosophic mind since Aristotle. But he couldn’t save the Enlightenment, he couldn’t save reason the way he wanted to and it turns out, I’m sorry to say, that synthetic a priori judgments are not possible. Similarly, n+1 is not going to save the critical tradition. That’s not because the critical tradition was more limited or more wrong than anything else (everything is limited and wrong) but because it was of a time and that time is over, never to return. The basic assumptions that the critical tradition assumed are no longer assumable. N+1 tries to reassume them, if in a reinvigorated guise. It is difficult, however, to reinvigorate a corpse.

*

One of the more successful among a host of interesting and ambitious side projects for n+1 has been their pamphlet series. The second one (What We Should Have Known), in particular, captures the spirit of honest inquiry with a commitment to serious literature and thought that is the very best side of n+1. It is a discussion about our collective past, the days of youth, college. It is a look back to what we wish we had been reading and thinking about given what we know now. It’s a delight to read.

But there’s also a troubling undercurrent to the discussion that is never addressed as such. It’s the implication that something has gone astray, that we were thinking about the wrong things when we could have been thinking about the right ones. This is always true, of course, and therefore simultaneously not true at all. It is perfectly fine to play with this feeling of intellectual regret, to roll it round on the tongue. But it is something different to actually propose it as an ethic. There’s the assumption in the n+1 discussion sometimes that we had everything we needed out there and that somehow we failed to recognize it. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment comes up a number of times. I did my PhD in philosophy at The New School. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is in my bones. But I know in those same bones that The Dialectic of Enlightenment is not the book that’s going to put us back on the right track to critical thinking again, even with its intellectual nod to the Romantic tradition. It is a dusty book right now, a book for our grandchildren to rediscover, a book that needs to sit around in the basement until history cycles itself through once or twice. Hearkening to books of the immediate past in that way is the refuge of reactionaries, be they from the left or the right, and n+1 is better than that. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is critique of the Enlightenment minus even a dollop of Schwärmerei and as even n+1 is willing to admit, it’s going to be difficult to move forward without that dollop.

The debate, then, should rather be about how much Schwärmerei and where to apply it. In a lovely piece by Jacques Barzun written in 1940 and currently republished on the American Scholar website (in a tribute to Barzun’s 100th birthday) he writes, in defending Romanticism that, “Romanticism was full of disbelievers in every kind of creed, but it numbered hardly a single unbeliever.” It is this believing as a basic stance toward the world, this specific form of Schwärmerei, that allows the Romantic to enter into the world again with fresh eyes. As Barzun explains, “Perceiving all forms and conventions to be relative, the romanticist is an individualist, a democrat and a cosmopolitan. Having had the mutability of human affairs brought home to him and being endowed with the spirit of adventure, he values the variety of human experience.” This stance is antithetical to the distance roundly recommended as necessary by the critical tradition. If you were to put it purely in spatial terms you’d say that Romantics always want to run up close to things while the proponents of ‘The Great Tradition’ always want to take another step back. I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide which standpoint is more apt to the moment. I propose to my friends at n+1 that we believers, just as two centuries ago, won’t be so easily brushed aside in our Schwärmerei. Let the games begin.

Michael Blim

The story was buried on page 24 of The Financial Times: “US Carmakers Step Up Russian Drive.” Ford and General Motors are the leading car sellers in the new Russia.

Inwardly, I rejoiced. Maybe American carmakers, via foreign markets at least, can survive. While losing billions at home, they are making money in practically every other market where they compete in the world. Toyota, in other words, maybe number one, but abroad General Motors is its equal, and Ford is not far behind.

I checked myself. Whence the rejoicing? Though nominally American firms, they are multinationals. They are letting go tens of thousands of American workers, and cutting production in the states while expanding production abroad using foreign workers and managers. Their stocks are held by persons, funds and trusts from around the world. Their managements are tied to their firms and not to the nation. They still have an interest in recapturing the American market from transplanted foreign producers, but as opportunities change, what one could call their “loyalties” are in practice are shifting.

Why am I still a booster? Take Ford. Its founder, the first Henry Ford, was perhaps a genius and revolutionized factory production around the world. Lenin, for instance, was a great believer in the Ford’s theories of production. Until the Japanese introduced group tasking, absolute quality control on its factory floors, and just-in-time inventory supply in the sixties, Ford’s assembly line model reigned worldwide. Practitioners sought only to improve its efficiency. Nothing before the Japanese – not unions, strikes, and liberal-social democratic governments – could stop the industrial Leviathan unleashed by Ford.

Yet Ford, genius or no, was a disreputable character. He was a vicious anti-Semite. He personally published a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, whose attacks on Jews were circulated worldwide, particularly in prewar Germany, according to Robert Lacey in Ford: The Men and the Machine (Ballantine Books, 1986). He reprinted millions of copies of the fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a pamphlet apparently authored by the Tsar’s secret police that claimed to reveal a secret Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity and take over the world. Textual analysis of Mein Kampf suggests that Hitler may have used Ford’s anti-Semitic articles in its drafting. Ford’s bid for national power via a presidential run foundered, as his incapacity in public speaking eventually did him in.

Ford was the last major automaker to recognize unions and agree to labor contracts. His close assistant Harry Bennett consorted with the Mafia, buying them off with money and food concessions at Ford plants. Mafia thugs were employed to squash the union movement. In the famous “Battle of the Overpass,” Walter Reuther and scores of union activists were brutally beaten by Mafia soldiers employed by Ford through Bennett. The beatings of union organizers and sympathizers in Ford’s plants continued for two years. In Bennett’s view, unionists were conspiracy-making Jews, “war mongers and mongrelds (sic).” For Ford, Bennett played both sides. He was in frequent contact with J. Edgar Hoover, who in their correspondence regarding combating unionism wrote: “Dear Harry: I wanted you to know how much I appreciate your fine cooperation.” (Lacey, 391)

So this was in part the Ford for whom I rooted. This is the heritage of his family who still controls the company and of his firm. And herein lies the dilemma of at least the part of the American left of which I am a member. Solidarity with American workers requires compromises. As the union compromises, so must we, for the jobs of tens of thousands of workers, their families and their futures that are at stake. Even the firm’s economic gains in Russia, though made without American labor, are helping the firm avoid bankruptcy.

What if Ford were to fail? A Toyota or another foreign producer would doubtless pick up the pieces, cutting out of the firm’s carcass yet more domestic jobs and more household livelihoods. And Toyota does just fine in America without union representation for its workers, though the union has fought hard for it.

Yet solidarity with workers worldwide, from weavers in India to carmakers in Brazil is crucial too. If the world is to emerge as a fairer place, their struggles are our struggles. Their victories advance justice worldwide.

Hence the ambivalence. One can surely support both workers at home and abroad. But the paramount interests of multinationals and national champions from other lands finally force a Hobson’s choice. At each juncture in the growth of the world economy, there are choices, largely controlled by the multinational firms. The development of international union solidarity is developing slowly, evens as the multinationals like Ford race ahead. Big capital says: choose bread for one which means no bread for the other.

American politicians, when it is convenient, stoke the fires of nativism, as they can pick up votes from groups ranging from unionists and protectionist liberals to conservatives and America-firsters. One must never under-estimate the self-interested demagoguery of a corrupted and frankly ignorant American political class.

Even as my rationality enables this column, the ambivalence stimulated by the FT story reveals in me a problem I have yet to solve. I don’t suppose I am alone.

Universalism may seem a thin gruel on this cold day. But it is a premise I live with as I along with so many embark on a search for solutions.

To complement my list of most overrated things, here’s my list of the most underrated things in the same categories. The same rules apply: everything I recommend has to be significantly worse-known or less supported than it should be.

Literature: Pushkin. In Eastern Europe he’s of course not underrated, but here in the US surprisingly many people haven’t read Eugene Onegin.

Leaders: Hamilton. At a time when common wisdom was all about free trade and agricultural wealth, he favored industry and nurtured it with protective tariffs. Jean Chretien, whose austerity program was one of the few that either balanced the budget or promoted growth, and the only one that did both. And Seretse Khama, the only postcolonial leader whose country has remained democratic since independence (though his economic record is conversely overrated: Botswana may have a five-figure GDP per capita, but its social development is disappointing, especially when compared to South Africa’s).

Political movements: third-world liberalism. Because of Singh and Lula, it’s in charge in the majority of the democratic world by population, but in the first world people are dismally ignorant of it, arbitrarily assigning its leaders to either neoliberalism or populism.

Political issues: urban planning. Surprisingly many social problems, such as American and French race riots, owe a lot to dreadful urban planning, which created the modern ghetto.

Linguistics: the comparative method. It’s painstaking and not very sexy, but it teaches us things about ancient cultures that we could never learn otherwise due to lack of writing and paucity of archeological data.

Science: chemistry. For some reason it makes a lot fewer headlines than physics or biology, but it’s at least as forward-looking and important; a cheap way of manufacturing carbon nanotubes would do more to change the world than anything molecular biology’s achieved so far. Biochemistry is of course not underrated, but anything else in chemsitry is.

Economics: import replacement. Every country that’s become developed – the US, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Taiwan – has used it, often with protective tariffs on manufactured goods and restrictions on capital flight. One-way free trade, where developed countries open their markets to third-world goods without expecting reciprocation; this underlay much of South Korea and Taiwan and post-war Germany’s success. And the German economic model, which looks worse than it is only because in 1990 West Germany inherited twenty million people’s worth of a second-world country.

Social science: Cultural Theory of Risk. It’s a robust theory that explains social attitudes better than anything else that’s been tested, and that very few people outside anthropology and cultural geography seem to have heard of.

Philosophy: Thomas Kuhn. His ideas about the philosophy of science contain many sharp observations, which a lot of positivists ignore for purely ideological reasons.

Popular science: I’m going to go out on a limb and say Wikipedia. Popular science books always give me the impression that they leave out any example that’s inconvenient for the author’s thesis; Wikipedia instead is inherently messy and comes off as trying to teach rather than enchant.

Music: Vanessa Carlton. A lot of radio stations refused to play White Houses only because it has a mature view of sex and relationships, and because it’s not exactly the same as A Thousand Miles.

Television: The Wire. It has the depth of a literary novel and portrays politics more realistically than The West Wing, police work more realistically than any police show, crime more realistically than Oz.

Food: Indian. The range and taste of Indian cuisine is far better than what you’d expect from eating at the places in the US that pass for Indian, but even so they’re almost the only outside places I’m willing to spend money eating at. And small delis, whose sandwiches tend to be cheap and good enough that it’s a wonder Subway’s still in business.

Media: Al-Jazeera. Westerners seem to hate it only because it’s Middle Eastern, even though its production values are on a par with those of CNN and the BBC. If it were a British or Japanese station, Donald Rumsfeld and Fox News would’ve never slandered it by saying it shows footage of beheadings.

Books: Jane Jacobs. Her writings about cities are as relevant as ever, but for some reason, the only thing the political establishment has taken from her is that razing neighborhoods to build highways is a bad idea; that was never her main point, and much of today’s transit-oriented development is as poorly planned as urban renewal projects.

Academics: merit admissions. They’re arbitrary and often nonsensical, but also far harder to game by enterprising aristocrats and legacies. And before you tell me about diversity, compare the demographics of Berkeley and Columbia (Columbia’s a lot whiter).

Australian poet and author writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.    

Though you should never live in the past, one must, with reverence and humility, acknowledge and give thanks for what has led to the present. To the past we owe—everything. And from that past comes our society and culture, tragic and bruised, undoubtedly, but trailing clouds of glory too. Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality arose from wanderings in the Lake District, close to mountain water, flowers and ruins. Now, on the evening news, there are all too frequent intimations of mortality. We have become knights of the sorrowful countenance.

People refer to golden ages as if they existed in a time before our own. These ages draw to them nostalgia for apparent greatness, achievements seemingly denied in the present. Yet I have lived through several golden ages which, now, are all too real to me. I did not appreciate them as such when younger.

For one thing, and most importantly, I have lived as a free citizen in a free country for my whole life, a freedom brought about by the sacrifices of previous generations. It probably takes a long time for people who have always had freedom to appreciate that fact. The Aboriginal people of Australia were given the same legal rights and status as other citizens only recently and, naturally enough, they have a different attitude to the freedom question. For a writer, having the freedom to express oneself as one wishes is  precious. That freedom does not mean saying anything that comes to mind, since true freedom should always come with the knowledge that you live and work in a social context. Not everything needs to said, or written. As Truman Capote once said of Jack Kerouac’s work, fairly or not—it wasn’t writing, but typing.

In a civilised country, its institutions working to enhance the economy, cultural life effervescing, one should pause often and think hard about what has brought the moment of pleasure as you listen to the concert or visit the gallery. For the truth is that all golden ages were built from blood over a slew of time. Art especially never came easily into the world, and the struggle to create it was not golden for many, if not most. Goethe once said he could recall only a few days of true happiness in his life, and one knows the miserable endings of a Schubert or a Keats.

Remembrance of things past is essential to keep fresh in the mind the meaning of present glories which we are sometimes in danger of taking for granted. April 25 is Australia’s great commemorative day—Anzac Day—when we pause to remember the dead. Before the Last Post sounds a stanza from Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’ is spoken:   

                                  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
                                  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
                                  At the going down of the sun and in the morning
                                  We will remember them.

On a personal level, I am very much aware of the modern age of dental care which is now available to some, recently having had root canal work on a bad tooth with no discomfort. To me it is a kind of miracle. But some things linger beyond temporary physical satisfactions. My three years (1969–1971) at Armidale Teachers College in the northern part of New South Wales show that fate can sometimes luck out to unexpected advantage.

In beautiful grounds, the college filled with a group of paintings collected by Howard Hinton which are now housed in the nearby New England Regional Art Museum, one was made to encounter intellectual disciplines across the spectrum. And you worked hard. But how pleasurable was the experience of growing more knowledgeable, with the life of the mind being put continuously before you. The library was always getting in new material; it was a model of what a contemporary library should be. And, for someone interested in writing and music, as I was, there was an outstanding teaching staff, and the opportunity to take part in performances of such works as Carmina Burana and West Side Story—Latin and Lenny, not so very far apart in intent. I was also given the opportunity to edit the College literary magazine Anthology. We climbed to the bottom of Wollomombi Falls; tutorials sometimes took place outside in the sun beneath the poplars; long walks about town set different light and sound working in the Sydney city boy.   

Here was  an institution that overcame its frailties, its politics and academic competitiveness, to enhance the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. All this creative superstructure was swept away by one of those governmental purges that regularly need to reinvent the wheel. Leaving well enough alone didn’t enter in the equation.

Those who can do, and those who can’t preach endlessly to the masses who they think are listening to them. They’re not. They’re getting on with getting things done. In contrast to the superfluity of commentary about now, one has the memory of that time where natural rhythms—autumn in Armidale was spectacular—backgrounded personal growth. How turned to the proper order of things seem those years, unlike my first years at work when I had to complete a university degree at evening after teaching during the day.

Now the imperturbable guest is calling more often than he was used to do, and many of the people whom I respect and whose memory I honour are gone. But I remember those times, when the world was young, and there was something humane and profound working beneath the New England skies, in the college on the hill.

A golden age there was then.

                  ATC motto, adapted from Seneca, Epistles   NON SCHOLAE SED VITAE

      1939–1945 Nearly 600 members of the College enlisted in the armed services — 68 killed

                                              In Memoriam   RUTH McDONALD

With apologies to T.C. Boyle

Elatia Harris

In the light from the only good lamp in the room, my widower sits on his end of our green couch, reading Proust.  I used to read it, too — I’d sit in the dark, scanning for the sexy bits, making Proust go fast.  But my widower’s on his thirteenth rereading now.  And in the shadows of the long room, I’m with him, watching everything he does.  If I’d known back in 1984 that I’d still be here, I mightn’t have bothered to die.  Might just have volunteered him for that bother instead.  Then I’d be flesh with a book in its lap in the light.

He’s sixty, my widower.  Already too old to die in his finest raiment — as I did, at a peachy twenty-nine.  However, his hair’s still black.  He hasn’t any new hobbies — just more of what he’s always liked: Proust and booze.  The TV’s still on, too, barely audible.  Over a thirsty sip from a tumbler of wine he shoots it a glance every now and then, though he doesn’t want diverting; if he could, he’d watch a show about a dark-haired man on a green couch who drinks and reads Proust.  There’re no women in his life — I was the last — and no boys.  Absolutely no boys, he swore.  And he wasn’t lying.  I know that now, for I’m inside his head when I choose, wedged into Broca’s area, or strung along those sub-cortical ganglia that are the seat of desire.  I’ve found him out: he doesn’t much like it with anyone, and he never did.  The page turns, the soft yellow musty page.  To him, it’s the rustle of black silk.

I want there to be a knock at the door.  It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and I’ve been here watching him drink alone for more than twenty years.  Mightn’t he welcome some hard-luck straggler from the Reagan era, an old friend whom I died too young to meet?  Robert!  Yes, Robert would be interesting.  Fleeing London, where he owes oodles in all the best clubs, he’d be needing a bed for the night.  Robert’s smashing — a male Princess Diana, wayward and blond, with shiny eyes and an aura of doom. 

Or, Barbara!  She’s pretty interesting, too.  A lunchtime hostess at a local bar and grille, Barbara has plans for my widower.  What a lot of money he must have, to be lunching bibulously every day right under her nose.  Shouldn’t he buy a house for her and her mildly retarded daughter? There’s one that would do nicely — Barbara buses by it on her way to work.  It has a third floor apartment, and she’d let my widower sack out up there.  He’d be like Mrs. Rochester, only quiet.

Oh, I’m antsy, and all set to make more of his life than he does, since I lack a personal fate.  Or, have already dealt myself one.  This world and the world beyond are too alike for my liking, my widower that heavier element around which I orbit still.  I sought only the extinction that knows not of itself, yet I continue in this limbo of limitless insight into precisely those conditions that were fatal to me.  Look — he shifts in his seat, crosses now his right leg over his left; he’ll do it back the other way in another twenty minutes.  Meanwhile, Proust has him by the short and curlies.

Albertine, Marcel the narrator’s shut-in, endlessly rearranges her few possessions, and Marcel’s wretched that her pass-times are those of a common criminal in lock-up when he would greatly prefer that she take in some improving reading.  Well, she can’t.  Settling down to read makes her eyes water; she yawns, lists, and falls deeply asleep.  Ah, Marcel won’t have it.  Though he’d look far to find a woman worse suited to him, he’ll do anything to keep this one awake.  That’s love — a trial to the soul, an assault on taste and judgment.  And my widower on his thirteenth rereading can still spare a tear for Marcel, on the cross for a woman so unworthy.  There’s the tear.  He lifts his chin, lest it trickle onto the page, and he looks at me without knowing it.  I contrive sometimes to be right in his line of sight.  I dangle in front of the tube, transparently, fatelessly, a jellyfish caught in a building wave on a surfers’ beach.  I am that unworthy girl.  My widower and Marcel are one.  He’s got it perfectly worked out.  He lowers his eyes, and reads on. 

I’d like to see something more happen to him — for him, that is.  Though I daren’t let myself hope for much, I’ve got hold of the idea that if his life became eventful I could leave.  Just get the hell out of Dodge.  And go where?  I don’t know; all I seem to know is more and more about the life I exited.  Useless knowledge, if I can’t cook something up with it. 

Come to that, I sure could use a spectral omelette.  Why not whoosh into the kitchen?  It’s just as I left it, but someone’s done the dishes.  And I won’t dirty them — I can’t.  I’ll just go through the motions, like a TV chef whose assistant forgot literally everything, who beats the air with a wire whisk and chats an omelette into being with her wrists.  Horrid, what’s in there — brown-edged deli turkey, a few mushy cherry tomatoes.  Watching my widower beaver away at Proust should irk me more than anything, but, actually, I hate it most when I’m in the kitchen, astrally racketing, and he plows right through me to graze from the fridge.  That’s dinner, and parting me to get it should at least raise gooseflesh on his seeking arms.   

A noise!  A cheerful noise!  I’m perfectly sure it’s the doorbell.  My widower hears it, too.  Without knowing it, he wants company, so he hears the bell, sometimes, when it isn’t really ringing.  I hear him hearing it, and hear also that it doesn’t ring.  This time, however, it’s ringing.  And he’s making for the door, book in hand, his forefinger marking the page.  Maybe it’s only the people downstairs asking him to keep an eye on the place while they take a weekend away.  I ought to drift out and have a look-see.  I’ve been wanting a visitor, too.  God, how I’ve been wanting one.

The scent of gardenias — and a few other things — enters the flat through the crack in the door that he opens as wide as the chain allows.  Moth balls. . . freshly risen croissants fragrant with Normandy butter.  My widower has a most discerning nose, and I’m folded like a condom into those deep cortical wrinkles that sort smells.  Ah!  Could it be the ginger-and-garbage scent of raccoons chowing down on the avocados in the garden?  It’s coonskin, all right, but washed in corn meal and sewn into a fur.  And a live rodent pong: long rats, of a size to be stewed with Aztec spices and gobbled up in Mexico for potency — we’ve been reading about that, too — long rats confined in a cage.  I hear their scaly feet scrambling furiously in the wood shavings. 

He flicks on the dim porch light and meets a pair of feverish eyes.  Wound around the neck and chin of his caller, a white silk scarf sets off rouged lips.  From the narrow shoulders hangs an ankle-length raccoon coat, redolent of mothballs and pinned, in the old way permissible for men, with a gardenia.  One white finger curls under the criss-crossed string of a patissier’s cardboard box.  The other hand closes around the padded leather strap of the cage, which twists and jerks.  The shoulders rise in a gentle Gallic shrug, as if to say, I’d offer my hand, but as you see, I come bearing gifts.  It’s Marcel!  Better than Robert, better than Barbara — it’s Marcel! 

My widower is loathe to shut the door — even for the time it takes to drop the chain and open it wide — on what could easily be a wet-brained fantasy, but is not.  Whose black hair is blacker? — he’s vainly wondering, as he regards Marcel’s lustreless brush, black as coal dust, and notices too the darkened lashes of the pained eyes.  It’s time for me to perform some astral karate — I’ve waited long enough — and I snap the chain. 

Hah!  I’m good with metal that’s been under a strain.  I could liberate the rats, too, but I think I won’t.  I’ll bide my time.  The shiny toe of Marcel’s dancing pump, a flat grosgrain bow at its vamp, rests on the door step.  Under the red silk stocking, his instep is blue with the poorly oxygenated blood veins of the heart patient.  Perhaps he’ll allow my widower to adore his naked foot — foot, not feet, for Marcel would never remove both shoes — later in the evening.  It’s very late now, or Marcel would not be here.

And he is here, slinking ahead of my widower, his long fur swaying as he lowers the croissant box and the cage to the coffee table.  The scent of Normandy butter never brought a maddened rat any relief, I think; that’s the secret of the exquisite adjacence of the two parcels.  Inside the apartment, fit always for no more than one person, we are now three.  My widower thinks to dowse the tube, but Marcel, seated on my shadowy end of the green couch, leans into it, pale face glowing.   

O widower! — who if not you deserves a visit from Marcel?  Your finger still marks your place in The Captive, and you know you should be reading it in French, but have drunk away the knack.  Broca’s area, seat of cognition and language, is flooded clean of French now; a thin layer of ammonia, corrosive to lucidity, separates your shrunken gray matter from its casing.  And you’ve years to go, till the ammonia’s as thick as ground fog, your brain stem an unsheathed serpent blind inside your spacious skull.  In time, in time.

I flutter over to the ficus; I’ve nothing to do with this.  Although it might have been nice of me to rustle up some cafe au lait for Marcel.  That’s all he drinks, widower.  He’s got that ethereal look, but he’s flesh, all right, weighing down the green cushion that used to be mine.  And he’s warm enough to shrug out of that fur. 

Surprise!  He’s wearing a satin Hawaiian shirt, and you’re one of the few ever to see his smooth elbows and small white biceps.  They’re like a girl’s, a fourteen year-old girl’s, the lawn tennis biceps of a Breton princess.  After another greedy sip, your fingers itch to pluck at his shell buttons — but the shirt?  It’s dull, to be Hawaiian, and lacking in palmy vignettes.  Swelling his thin chest, Marcel leans from my shadowy corner into your cone of light, and pulls the shirt tight by its tails.  Behold!  The tactful rosy dawn at Combray, the gray-blue storm of the true Ar-Mor, the dun wall in Delft with its ochreous patch an epiphanial yellow in the precise northern sun.  It’s Marcel, widower, leaning into your light, wearing all the hues of his world, and you do know better than to touch him. 

Again, I’m thinking of food — have we really nothing to offer him?  How pungent the air with pineapple and truffles — that salad of his fiercest longings, lurid yellow and black on glass plates among the gleaming glass knife-rests of Tante Leonie’s table.  I suppose I could cobble it up — you’d want it dressed in walnut oil with ciboulettes, we used to talk of it often — but it’s already a real presence in the apartment, not some olfactory hallucination of yours.  I’m guessing it’s the odor of Marcel himself in a state of arousal, for he’s clamped his kohl-rimmed eyes on the cage of rats.  Noisy in there.  Butter!  They want butter!

Ah!  Wait!  Just who is our guest?  Not Marcel the narrator — there’s been a change!  Wistful, smooth-elbowed Marcel is gone, and it’s Proust himself beside you now, rocking with the acute discomfort of genius, eyes ablaze with a million involuntary memories.  Proust!  Whose seclusion exceeded your own, who looked, when he did go out, like death in life — like last year’s gardenia, a wag of a duchess remarked — yet whose posthumous density and freshness is that of tropical fruit.         

And you’ve cottoned to it!  Gone from your face is that look imploring recognition from Marcel, a bemused being like yourself, mourning the unworthy creature who fled him.  Ah, yes — now you’re in awe.  You should be.  Monsieur Proust of the rats is here, avid frequenter of certain rather specialized brothels.  Oh, he craved nothing carnal there, just to sit after hours in a well-appointed room while an unshockable demi-mondaine with lavish body odor treated rats in a cage to stimulus.  To pain.  Torture, to be exact.  A reliable Parisian spotted him at it, and told another, who also told.  In fact he was often sighted there, until he desisted, and occupied subsequent nights with writing.  That padded strap on the jiggling cage, so easy on uncalloused hands:  I expect he totes it around eternity with him — that, the croissant box, and the gardenia his saintly attributes.  Ah!  He’s about to enlighten us.

Eez not true what zey say.  We both hear the words.  Though the rouged lips don’t move, the sound of his voice is low and clear and we recognize it.  Calm, non-insistent, he might be speaking with gentle regret of the weather, with no more regard for the squealing rats than if they were thunderheads gathering over a picnic in the Bois he didn’t care to attend.  I nevair wanted zem in pain.  Only to watch zem struggle for what zey could not have in a chamber from which zey could not escape.  Voila la condition humaine. 

The scent of pineapple and truffles mingles with the feral stink of the cage, the very odor of Proustian exertion.  For it’s not easy forcing sound through that fine-meshed barrier between worlds — I know — and Proust snuggles down into his fur, flinging a blue-veined wrist across his lashy shut lids.  Surrounding the cage are wood shavings like confetti on the coffee table — a little something to jog your memory in the morning.

Say, widower.  Now that Proust’s regrouping, what if you slid the string from the croissant box and fed the frantic rats a few buttery pills of still-warm dough?  Come on, be a man!  Look at their wet noses poking through the bars of the cage, look at their tongues.  They could struggle successfully for some of what they wanted if you rolled it up really small.  There’s your deli turkey, too.  They wouldn’t sneer at the brown edges.  Oh — widower? 

No soap.  My widower’s busy with the gorgeous prize of those who make it to the thirteenth rereading, and I won’t say it’s the pleasantest thing I ever saw. 

I return my attention to the rats.  What a sturdy cage.  Iron bars, Inquisition hinges, the heart-shaped padlock anything but a breeze.  Like the strap, the eight outside corners are padded, which mutes the sound of jiggling on a hard surface such as the coffee table, but I’ll bet the padding’s there to protect the Proustian thigh from jabs and bruises as he knocks about eternity with the cage.  I’m getting an idea I like, but in all decency, I should wait until my widower and Proust make it off the green couch and over to the dining table.  Eventually, they’ll stop for a snack — let them figure out what’s good to eat apres.  There’ll be just time for them to clamber atop the table when I snap that padlock.  Then, something shall finally have happened here, and I’ll pull right out — yes, I’ll pull right out — meeting extinction head-on like a train.

This story was posted with kind permission of Tima Smith, editor of Per Se, an anthology of fiction by students of the late Arthur Edelstein. For a closer look at Per Se, go to Amazon. To find out about the Arthur Edelstein Literary Fund, which awards a competition prize of $1000 annually to a writer of fiction, go to The Writing Site, and click on “contests.”

by Beth Ann Bovino

The financial markets marked the centennial of the Great Panic of 1907 by holding another panic.  David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poors (and my boss) asked whether it’s an accident that these crises often seem to occur in years ending in ‘7’?  He said that “we had financial problems in 1957, 1967, 1987, 1997, and 2007. That it’s hard to tell about 1977 because the whole decade was one long crisis (maybe just having a “7” is bad).” Going back further, 1937 was a bad year, as were 1897, 1907, and, of course, 1917, with the start of America’s participation in World War I.

So, what is it about “7”?  There’s the “Lucky 7” dice roll (of course, roll it the wrong time at a craps table and everyone loses their money).  According to luckymojo.com, 7 is also said to be found on a lot of hoodoo curio packaging, including 7-day candles, and that Lady Luck wears dice for earnings which always show 7 (the Irish-American World War Two version).   It sounds like numerology. And, of course, 1929 negates the picture.  But it’s still pretty spooky.  Given today’s financial crisis, I wanted to learn more (about panics not numerology).

The Panic of 1907 was a financial crisis in the United States. The stock market fell almost 50% from its peak in 1906, the economy was in recession, and there were numerous runs on banks and trust companies because of a retraction of loans by some banks. It started in New York, but then spread across the nation and led to the closings of banks and businesses. While the 1907 panic was the fourth panic in 34 years, the significance of the 1907 Panic as an economic event went far beyond the usual ‘crash and recovery’ story.  The severity of the downturn was one of the major reasons for the founding of the Federal Reserve System, as Congress decided that the U.S. can’t depend on the good will and ability of private bankers to gets banks to cooperate in a time of crisis.

One book I recommend is The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market’s Perfect Storm, by Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr. It is an academic study which analyzes the financial crisis that gave America the FDIC and the Federal Reserve. Seems pretty boring, right?  However, much of the book covers the events and personalities of the crisis, to make the account rival an episode from the T.V. show 24. The book begins with the earthquake of 1907.  It then follows the Heinze brothers’ failed effort, using borrowed money, to corner the copper market, which led to panic, the failure of banks and trusts and the impending bankruptcy of New York City. Add to this, J. Pierpont Morgan, the man who, superhero-style, was able to halt the spread of bank runs, though without a mask.

In their book, the authors point out the following disturbing similarities a hundred years later:  “War was fresh in mind. Immigration was fueling dramatic changes in society. New technologies were changing people’s everyday lives. Wall Street was wheeling and dealing…”  In the last chapter on theory, the authors describe which factors are required to develop a financial panic:  Buoyant Growth, Systemic Architecture, Inadequate Safety Buffers, Adverse Leadership, Real Economic Shock, Fear and Greed, Failure of Collective Action. They warned that many of these conditions are seen in 2007.  However, what was meant to be a warning, now describes what has just happened.

While the financial system has changed since 1907, the basic reliance on confidence remains. In addition, any long period of stability results in an underestimate of risk, which is followed by a sudden convulsion as risk perceptions return to more normal levels. When the market corrects, it usually overcorrects, at least temporarily.

The turmoil began in the subprime mortgage market, but has extended far beyond that to a general crisis of confidence. We are watching a classic run on the bank.  However, banks have been disintermediated by the short-term money markets, which have become a virtual bank. The central bank’s role in fighting bank runs has been well established, but needs to be extended to the money markets that now support the banking system.

This one will be likely to affect the economy less than in 1907 because the central banks have learned to handle liquidity squeezes better than in the past. We will have to see if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke can do a better job than Mr. Morgan.

Bernanke and company seem to be trying.  Since August, the Fed has lowered interest rates by 100 basis points. They also announced the new Term Auction Facility on December 12th.  The measure is intended to provide liquidity to shore up markets that have been frozen by the current pressures in short-term lending markets.  Swap lines have been established to allow the transfer into other currencies… the coordination among the central banks seems like very good news, but the actual function of this auction facility remains unclear and markets remain skeptical.

Race and Music in America, Part II

Justin E. H. Smith

MC Hammer once boasted: “You’re ’87 and I’m ’89.”  With time, the force of this taunt has weakened considerably, and it should serve as a lesson to anyone who associates too strongly with the Zeitgeist.  Yet, whenever Hammer’s lyric replays in my mind, I find myself protesting: No, no, I too am ’89.  Then, or around then, is when everything more or less came together, when potentials became actual, when my fate became sealed.  It was also then that those surrounding me, and the intensity of everything they took seriously, appeared at the peak of their immortality.

Shostakovich for his part declared that all of his symphonies are, in the end, epitaphs.  He did not mean, in the spirit of a hip-hop toast, that through his music he would ‘bury’ his enemies and dance on their graves.  He meant that his friends were buried quite against his wishes, and that through his music he hoped to commemorate them.  Now I am not a composer of symphonies, but only, however much I resist the title, a composer of ‘posts’.  Nonetheless, I have recently developed the sense that no matter what topic I’m treating, everything I write comes out as a sort of obituary, even if the subject happens not to be dead (yet). 

Recently, death and my topic coincided all too perfectly.  Though the precise date cannot be determined, around the time I began working on my October essay on ‘race and music in America’, my childhood friend, Kyle ‘Tracker’ Brown, overweight, hard-living, music-mad, and black, died of a heart attack alone in his Sacramento apartment.  It was a rock-and-roll life, and death, except that Tracker was not a rock-and-roll star.  He was at best a local legend, and every locality has a few of those.  I’m sure there is more than one 20-year-old in Sacramento right now who is just as full of life and just as bound for local-legend status as Tracker ever was.

Nothing that has been written on any of Tracker’s memorial sites rises above the banalities you might expect to find in a high-school yearbook.  There is much talk of “all those crazy times we had,” and endless folkloric and disingenuous anticipation of some eventual reunion. Will I, I wonder, be able to do him any better?

*

There was a sort of totemism in the provincial teen counterculture of Sacramento of the 1980s, wherein each of the prominent kids was perceived to instantiate or stand in for some great music star unfathomably far away– in London, mostly, but also Scotland, New York, Berlin, places anyway none of us could really conceive as existing in the empirical realm.  The roles were determined by physiognomical and hairstyle-based resemblances, as well as by the elective affinities of the individual stand-ins.  Thus a certain Roger was held to be Peter Murphy, and a certain Jason was that one Ian guy from Echo and the Bunnymen.  There was a Jeff who was taken as Martin Gore, and a Stephanie who, it was understood, was Siouxsie Sioux herself. 

When I say that the teens were the stars, rather than that they bore a cultivated resemblance to them, I mean what I say.  The identity was so complete that, if some newcomer were to attempt to elbow in and claim to be instantiating some British goth idol who had already been claimed, the response would have been: no, that is not possible.  And if one could go back in time to inform them that within a few years ‘Robert Smith’ would find his only true calling as a data-entry specialist, and ‘Ian whats-his-name from the Cult’ as a drywall contractor, and ‘Nena Hagen’ as a dental hygienist, the response would no doubt also have been: no, that is not possible either.  It’s identity or death.

Now folk cultures around the world offer us numerous examples of just this sort of identity relation.  Marshall Sahlins relates for example how the 18th-century Hawai’ians subsumed Captain Cook upon his arrival into their understanding of the sky god Lono: he was an empirical instance of a transcendent deity.  The music scene of London looked no less transcendent from the vantage of 1980s Sacramento than Captain Cook’s London had to the Polynesians, and in the same degree as Captain Cook that scene’s local avatars seemed to pull off the miracle at the heart of so much religious experience: incarnation, pulling the stars down to earth, without extinguishing their glow.

Who, then, was Tracker?  Tracker was called ‘Tracker’ because he was said to track people down who were in need of a beating, and beat the shit out of them.  He grew to legend status by manifesting a powerful paradox: he was a massive black thug, and he was a tender sweetheart and a fan of music that was held to be rigidly, impregnably white.  Yet unlike his white cohort who, with the help of a little Aqua Net and black eyeliner took on an air of divinity, he remained more a sympathetic, if ambiguous, mythical creature than a god, something like a minotaur, or a beast that might help you to cross a river of fire, or might, depending on its whim, swallow you whole.  With respect to the instantiation of musicians, he was Ol’ Dirty Bastard before that meant anything, blabber-mouthed and genial like Louis Armstrong or Flava Flav, borderline insane like Sun Ra or Kool Keith, massive like Mingus (‘He looked like three men wearing a suit,’ Don De Lillo wrote); he spoke in that stream-of-consciousness, free-associative style that was once held to be a core component of Black Power, the verbal correlate of Pharaoh Sanders’ squonked answer to the tight organization of be-bop and cool jazz.  When Tracker happened to utter the adverb ‘absolutely’, he would follow it up with: “And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  He learned that somewhere, filtered down from Bobby Seale or Huey Newton through Public Enemy or KRS-One to his ears, to his enthusiastic soul.

Try as I might, though Tracker introduced me to Joy Division, though he straightened his hair and coiffed it into a new-wave, eye-covering point, and though he actually made it to London, and even Scotland, by the mid-1990s, I still cannot think of him as standing in for anyone who is not American, and who is not black.  That is to say, Tracker was always more of a representative of a real and familiar type than a manifestation of something otherworldly and divine, better known by social science than by theology, secular, physical.  Come to think of it, his wasn’t so much a rock-and-roll death either, as when Kurt Cobain or Jim Morrison takes that final, almost imperceptible step from this world to the next, where in some important sense they always already belonged.  It was a public-health-crisis death.  As when a black man in America dies from lack of access to adequate health care. 

Somewhere Henry Louis Gates writes of the surprise that awaited him the first time he went to London and heard black men and women speaking in British accents.  He had certainly heard of the African diaspora, yet for him, somehow, to be black was essentially to be American.  Even for a Harvard professor the bridge to Britain seemed uncrossable.  Tracker crossed it, but nothing much changed.

*

I do not recall how Tracker and I first became friends.  At one point, early on, he was a big fat local legend, and then at some later point we found ourselves riding around together, listening to and commenting on cassette after cassette, and searching under the seats for enough coins to buy us another ten miles’ or so worth of gas.  This is what most of my memories of him involve.

Once Tracker and I were in the mobile home of the local DJ David X, and I played a mix tape I had made for them, superimposing Sinatra’s ‘Night and Day’ over the beat track from the 12″ of NWA’s ‘Express Yourself’.  Tracker did a funny dance and exclaimed how excellent it was.  David X said the two tracks were not synchronized well, and in any case it was on a crappy, lo-fi cassette, so it was definitely not going to be getting any club play on his watch. We left and drove around listening to that cassette and others: those wonderful, disposable, immortal cassettes!  He had just shoplifted Joy Division’s Substance, and was extolling its virtues to me as ‘Warsaw’ maxed out my little Datsun’s speakers.  I told him that Ian guy couldn’t sing, and he said I was missing the whole point, because he was pouring his heart out before he killed himself, and his natural talents mattered not at all. 

Once Tracker and I went to the home of my mother’s boyfriend, most likely because she was there and I was entirely out of gas money.  I was worried they’d be troubled by his presence, yet within a few seconds of our arrival, there was Tracker talking sports with my soon-to-be stepfather, all that I’m-a-Yankees-man-myself bullshit that I could never even begin to fake.  There was Tracker, speaking his natural language. 

Once there was a big party in the works.  A battalion of the Sacto Skins was said to be coming to beat up Chaz, who had defaulted on a loan, or looked at a skinhead the wrong way, or something.  Chaz had suffered a brain aneurysm, one side of his face drooped, and it was said that if he were punched but once, he would die.  So the plan was to invite a whole horde of Mexican gangsters, as well as Tracker, in order to fend off the attack (no one even considered simply cancelling the party, and as cowardly as I was I never even considered not going).  As the evening wore on, and the skinheads failed to show, the Mexicans began to grow unruly.  I stepped on a gangster’s foot by accident, and his friend said to me: “Hey, you stepped on my homey’s foot,” for at that time ‘homey’ was an authentic street term, and not the property of with-it youth ministers.  “What do you have to say to him?”  I said: Sorry.  He said: “Sorry? Is that all?”  And I said: I’m really, really sorry I stepped on your, uh, homey’s foot.  They let me off, but it was clear there was trouble brewing. 

If only the skinheads had arrived!  The Mexicans had been counting on them, and were boiling over with lust for a racially charged battle with white-power goons.  In the absence of these, Tracker probably seemed to them a suitable ersatz: racially charged in a different way, and in his dimensions something approaching a mob.  The next thing we knew the leader of the Mexicans was brandishing a bat, and he slammed it on the kitchen counter.  The white goths and new wavers and punk rockers formed a circle, cowering and clinging. “Come on, nigger!” the Mexican shouted. Tracker knew that word, and it worked to his rival’s clear disadvantage.  In a maneuver of brute force that I witnessed but have never comprehended, Tracker had his rival pinned to the ground, and the bat pinned to his throat, before any of us could register the sequence of events that led to this radical shift in the balance of power.  He was sitting on the boy, pressing into him with at least a few hundred of his pounds, and bellowing at him all manner of oaths and triumphal proclamations about not fucking with Tracker, about how nobody fucks with Tracker, etc.  Yes! we cheered.  This is why he is a local legend with a nickname, whereas I am just myself.

Once we were driving back to Sacramento from San Francisco –the City– and we had to slow down for a traffic accident somewhere near the Elvas Underpass.  As we we rode past at a crawl we saw a headless body in the middle of the road, wearing a flight jacket and a pair of oxblood Doc Martins.  The laces were black and not white, which signaled to us that the victim was not a Nazi skinhead, but rather a “SHARP”: a skinhead against racial prejudice.  (As I have already said, however, the boundaries were always very fluid.)  It had to be someone from our extended family of lowlifes, but, lacking a head, we could not tell who.  Tracker immediately began freaking out with a litany of holy-shits and no-fucking-ways, barely able to contain his glee at having arrived at the Elvas Underpass at just the right time.

We got the official story, if not the believable one, the next day.  Three boys, all of whom came from my high school, had been racing down Business 80 in a VW Bug.  Two of them, in the back seat, began fighting playfully.  At some point, this caused the back window to shatter, and one of the boys was “sucked out” by the “wind pressure” known to afflict Bugs travelling at high speeds.  They were in an original VW Beetle, probably built in the 1960s, but the scenario described was borrowed from the cinematic representation of a jumbo jet in crisis.  Tracker, anyway, liked the official account, and for as long as I knew him never missed an occasion to tell his eyewitness tale, and to discourse on the dangers of Bug-suction.

Death was all around us, as it no doubt is always and everywhere.  Yet for that brief chapter of life death was more a source of great chatter, of local myth-making, than any real threat.  If it seemed that death could never really take any of us, this is because local thinking about death was based on the primitive belief that, when one exits the empirical realm, one goes on being a member of the same local subculture that meant so much during life, just as the Marines will tell you at a funeral for one of their own that the Gates of Heaven are guarded by barkers of Semper Fi.  In order to truly remain “always faithful,” one must convince oneself that the gang so deserving of fidelity is, well, always relevant, even after one has cast off this mortal coil.  Of course it is not relevant, no more so than what one has for breakfast on the day of extreme unction, and death is at its most tragic when its victim has not yet been able to figure this out.

*

During the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese, already enamored of Gerrman Romantic poetry and convinced of the Mongol origins of the Russians from the time of the Golden Horde, came up with caricatures showing themselves, the Japanese, as noble, broadly Aryan-looking warriors, and showing the Russians as slanty-eyed, buck-toothed cretins (think of Mickey Rourke in Breakfast at Tiffany’s).  In prejudice, imagination will always win out over the bare evidence of the senses. 

Here we see both the distorted perception of the other, as well as the distorted perception of oneself in the shadow of still another, admired other.  In Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s majestic 1936 documentary of the Berlin olympic games, many of the Japanese athletes, coaches, and spectators may be seen wearing perfectly round spectacles, concealing the epicanthic folds that might have set them apart from their hosts.  Was Tracker’s Thompson Twins coiffure something like these glasses?  Perhaps, but in neither case did the disguise really work.  The Aryan ‘race scientists’ spun themselves into the most implausible epicycles in order to account for the racial equality (or near-equality) of the Japanese to the Indo-Europeans, while reserving a decidedly lower rung on the hierarchy for their Chinese neighbors, just as, years later, Chinese merchants in Apartheid South Africa would be registered as ‘coloured’, while Japanese businessmen enjoyed their status as ‘honorary whites’.  At the same time, however much kamikaze pilots enjoyed citing Hölderlin in their suicide notes, the Japanese certainly never really bought into the racial order outlined by the Germans, on the German’s terms: to be an ‘honorary’ white is something very different from being white, and in many respects it only serves to highlight one’s non-whiteness still more.  As a black Depeche Mode fan, Tracker distinguished himself from the culture he was expected to inherit, but still more from the culture he adopted.  Recently, in the New York Times, a journalist proposed the horrid label ‘bapsters’, or perhaps it was ‘blipsters’, to describe black fans of Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, etc.  Being a mere hipster is not an option, just as in spite of an ancient history of cross-pollination in American music, for some reason mixed black-white bands always appear as a novelty. 

Tracker understood all this, and in consequence, I think, race was a large part of his self-presentation in interaction with his white peers.  Tracker’s Myspace page towards the end of his life introduced him as “Tracker: never blacker.”  Years earlier, he used to like to do a rap, from the passenger seat of my Datsun, in which he declared that “Tracker is the blacker/soul-sonic attacker,” whatever that may have meant.  He probably rhymed these two words more times than ‘cool’ and ‘school’ have been placed together in the entire history of advertising.  I thought of this when I first heard the sample included a few years ago in a piece by Miguel Trost Depedro, the Venezuelan experimental electronic musician better known as Kid 606, of a man announcing in an increasingly rapid, increasingly snipped, and increasingly noise-distorted voice:

I’m black y’all, and
I’m black y’all, and
I’m black and I’m black and I’m black y’all.

As the sample becomes more condensed and harsh (I’m black-black-black-black-black and I’m black), one feels that its meaning is simultaneously being reinforced and overcome, inflated and dismissed: is this what Hegel had in mind when he spoke of ‘sublation’?  In any case it seems like an odd thing to announce.  One would think Kid 606 was inventing, yet as I’ve said that brief sample was pretty much Tracker’s curriculum vitae. 

It is clear to me that Tracker enjoyed the roles race permitted him to play.  It may be regrettable that history offered him these roles, but that does not mean they were not enjoyable.  I’ve already said that race is just so much phlogiston: a scientifically bankrupt way of seeing the world that nonetheless permits its adherents to make sense of a wide range of phenomena.  (The one domain of life in which the concept of race still has some scientific legitimacy –health care– is one from which Tracker was evidently cut off.)  This phlogiston is often just as useful to those who break down the barriers of racism as it is for the racists themselves. 

*

Dare I call my dead friend ‘simple’?  Tracker was simple.  Up until his death in his mid-30’s, he remained a loyal attendee at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert.  I have never been to Burning Man, but if I were to show up I imagine I would not be a big hit.  I would start talking about Caesar’s account of the original Wicker Man sacrifices among the ancient Celts, or about René Girard on le bouc émissaire or some goddamned thing, to the first exed-out techno-hippies I came across, and they would no doubt slink away from me as fast as they could, seeking the company of a genial, welcoming soul such as Tracker, who would not lecture them but would listen to them comprehendingly, uttering “it’s cool,” from time to time, and “absolutely,” and “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and other affirmative non sequiturs.

In 2004 I came across Tracker on some primitive social-networking site, which after a few easy steps confirmed for us that we were “friends.”  I wrote him a short but long-thought-out note about what I had been up to and how much I’d like to hear his news.  He sent me back one or two incomplete sentences, filled with misspelled and feverish words, and included his phone number.  If this friendship was to be rekindled, he let me know, it was not going to be of the epistolary sort.  I was daunted by the vast difference that had grown up between our respective forms of self-expression, and I never contacted him again.

When I was 20 years old, I retreated into an intense period of isolation and reinvention.  I stopped frequenting places where folks like Tracker might show up, and I began to study ancient Greek, to interest myself in things like poetic scansion, Shklovsky’s formalism, and the Slavophiles-vs.-Westernizers debate.  At the time I had thought that a greater mastery of language, and languages, would bring me closer to the world and its inhabitants.  15 years on, I understand all this self-imposed Bildung has had just the opposite effect.  With one another my academic colleagues speak mostly of the relative virtues and drawbacks of their respective dental plans, and of whether or not their respective universities have on-site daycares.  With their students they speak awkwardly and expeditiously.  They would cross the street to avoid having to speak to Tracker at all.

My friendship with Tracker was based almost entirely on music: listening to it and talking about it.  That was a long time ago, before I really learned how to talk.  I thank God for that prelinguistic bliss, when friends were accessible directly, and death was mind-blowing in its impossibility.

Berlin, December 8, 2007

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