Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Bébert

There is a cat that sits on the sidewalk in front of the bistro Chez Bébert near the Gare Montparnasse in Paris (I snapped his picture just yesterday). He does not greet visitors, but he does give them to know, in his silent occupation of that crucial space before the door, that this is his bistro, and that, whatever the surrounding humans may call him, he is Bébert. And anyone who has read Louis-Ferdinand Céline's infamous 1957 novel, D'un château l'autre [From Castle to Castle] cannot help but wonder, upon encountering this Bébert, whether here is not in fact a concrete instance of the well-known feline power of reincarnation.

Céline had been an unrepentant Nazi-collaborationist, a traitor, a bloody anti-Semite, and an otherwise all-around awful person. As the war was drawing to a close, he got it into his head to flee Paris, through the ruins of Germany, to Denmark. He had intended to take only his wife, but his beloved cat, Bébert, imposed himself, refused to let them go alone. So Bébert was stuck in a sack and hauled through the craters and bombed-out castles, and would eventually prove to be the only remotely admirable character in the author's subsquent fictional retelling of the odyssey. On arrival in Copenhagen, Céline was arrested (it is not at all clear why he thought the Danes would have wanted him), and Bébert seized. The cat had cancer, for which, rather remarkably under the circumstances, he was able to receive an operation. Eventually he was returned to France along with his owner, who died in 1961, after years, according to some sources, of eating nothing but noodles. Bébert himself is said to have lived only until 1952. 

Yet it seems somehow vulgar to stamp Bébert with a date of demise, to give him a necrologue and be done with it. For in surviving the war, in becoming the only steady weight and the only bastion of serenity in the most terrible and blazing work of 20th-century literature, Bébert came to stand for survival itself, and demonstrated why in the popular imagination the feline is indestructible (we call it 'reincarnation' and we number the lives at nine, but what we really mean is that there is some indestructible cat essence that just keeps pushing through all the gross violent things men do to cats and around them).

Impressions such as these, no doubt, inspired George Steiner to write:

It is Bébert I want to write about--Bébert the arch-survivor and the incarnation of French cunning... Bébert would be a joy to report on. Céline is not.

Is the cat really the spirit-animal of the French? We know, particularly from Robert Darnton, that the cat was the animal most excessively abused around the period of Revolutionary fervor, bound together and thrown onto bonfires en masse, so that the rowdies, unhappy about their labor conditions or something, could delight in the cats' screeches as a sort of next-best-thing to punitive justice. And we know of Chris Marker's obsessive attempt to impose the figure of the cat heraldically in place of himself, to dissolve the human into the feline. Marker's cat was a composite of the Japanese maneki-neko, Lewis Carroll's Cheshire (another peculiar French obsession), and his own domestic animal, who was called Guillaume. Like Bébert, Guillaume had many lives, and does not always appear to have been hosted by one and the same physical cat. Yet he was always Guillaume.

And then there is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who realizes at the very end of Tristes Tropiques that he did not have to go all the way to the tropics to have a primordial encounter, as there was one waiting for him right there in his apartment:

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to is in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers  in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.

I am not going to venture a theory of national character, or attempt to explain why it was left to a German to write Dog and Man (Konrad Lorenz, following Johan Huizinga, if I remember correctly, attempted to minimize the role of the cat in human society by arguing from medieval transfers of title to estates, which show that cats were always considered part of the property, like trees, while dogs always went with the previous owners; we know however that at least some cats will follow their owners through the apocalypse). But I do think Steiner is right about Bébert's symbolic power as the embodiment of a commendable --because silent-- will to survive, a symbolic power that makes sense only against the deep, deep background of folk beliefs about what cats are capable of. And I would add that if one is looking for national symbols, it is good that France has Bébert, and not only his human companion, who died most definitively in 1961, still a shit (a shit who'd just completed another, final masterpiece called Rigodon), still uninterested in serenity or forgiveness.

And I am convinced also that attention to the cat massacres of the 18th century; to Lévi-Strauss's turn away from the savage toward the feline; to the Cheshire graffiti that still covers Paris in memory of Chris Marker; and to Céline's misanthropic escape into cat-love, to the complimentarity of his anti-semitism and his philo-felinism: that all of this considered together (no doubt alongside other examples I haven't recalled) could tell us a great deal about the cultural and intellectual history of modern France. 

My Idea of Nature

For most of my adult life, beginning, really, in the rebellious years of adolescence, I have been against nature. This phrase, against nature, is the standard title for the English translation of J.-K. Huysmans' splendid 1884 novel, À rebours, but when I use it here, I don't mean generally perverted or out-of-whack. I mean I have cultivated a consummately urban existence, and have insisted that people who rush off to commune with the great outdoors are wasting their time. Part of this is based in a concern --about whose legitimacy I have not begun to doubt-- that modern urbanites who speak of how in tune with nature they are are simply deluding themselves, that they no more succeed in bridging the nature/culture divide when they go off camping for a weekend than I do when I stay home in the city and blog. I've often suspected that typically a philosopher's idea of 'nature' consists in little more than a memory of a trip to R.E.I., or the thought of the picture of themselves kayaking that they selected for their department website. I've wanted none of that, and so have shut it out entirely.

Have I been wrong to do so? Back East, where I've always felt culturally at home but, with respect to nature, utterly against the grain (the other standard title for Huysmans' novel), I don't spend much time thinking about this question. The meteorology of the East Coast is schizophrenic and malign; and the wildlife, as Buffon already understood, is degenerate. The closest thing to mountains over there are the final fading bumps of an ancient range. The only animals are pests. Even when it's not hot it's too hot. But now I am back in California, where I am from, and the Sierra Nevadas are off in the distance and the weather is right and the light is right. It awakens a sensibility in me that I ordinarily am not aware I have. This awakening feels rather like anamnesis: I am remembering something I've always known. I am content to finally fit again with my natural surroundings; but also full of regret, at having so long forgotten, in spite of all the discomfort my straying has caused, that there was need of a fit.

I have been driving nature out with a pitchfork in both possible senses of the wise Terence's adage: I have been attempting to live my entire life in sterile, steely, airport-like atmospheres, and I have been denying who I am. This denial has often been expressed as a contempt not just for nature, but also for the history of the place I am from. And so it is only just yesterday that, for the first time in my life, I picked up and began to read a book by John Muir: The Mountains of California, of 1894.

Muir is close to the American transcendentalists in spirit, who are in turn cousins of the German Romantic idealists. They are what results when you move Romantic aesthetics into the wide open space of a new continent. Muir does not shy away from describing landscapes as 'sublime'. Perhaps he used it when he met with Emerson, who was so impressed by Muir's sensibility as a Naturphilosoph that he offered him a position at Harvard on the spot (the hiring process must have been different back then). Muir's response? "I never for a moment thought of giving up God's big show for a mere profship!"

I stopped watching God's big show years ago, in the hopes of being offered a profship at Harvard, or whatever else I could get. But I know the show; I learned it by heart when my grandfather took me fishing on the lakes in the shadow of Mount Lassen more than 30 years ago. It took Muir to remind me that I know what it's like to be at those lakes in winter. He was there a century before, and saw:

The play of the lights among the crystal angles of these snow-cliffs, the pearly white of the outswelling bosses, the bergs drifting in front, aglow in the sun and edged with green water, and the deep blue disk of the lake itself extending to your feet, -- this forms a picture that enriches all your afterlife, and is never forgotten. But however perfect the season and the day, the cold incompleteness of these young lakes is always keenly felt. We approach them with a kind of mean caution, and steal unconfidingly around their crystal shores, dashed and ill at ease, as if expecting to hear some forbidding voice. But the love-songs of the ouzels and the love-looks of the daisies gradually reassure us, and manifest the warm fountain humanity that pervades the coldest and most solitary of them all.

When Muir says 'afterlife' he means the life that comes after the experience, not after death. But these amount to largely the same thing, if that life is spent in the willful unhearing and unseeing of the love-songs and love-looks nature, perceived in a certain mode, is prepared to give.

Muir was famously always itching to be outdoors, in that mode, and the writing was only an after-trace of this primary experience of life. I place him for this reason at one end of a continuum, at whose opposite extreme we find a person I've long considered my model and inspiration: Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton never went anywhere; he spun out hundreds and hundreds of world-duplicating, world-creating pages entirely from within his own head and his own room. In his preface to a recent edition of the Anatomy, William Gass writes admiringly of   “the width of the world that can be seen from one college window…; what a love of all can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair.” This is how one must write, I have long thought, but am now beginning to doubt. Clearly, one mustn't write, anyhow, anywhere in the middle region of the continuum, where for example Thoreau finds himself sticking it out in a cabin not too far from town, just as long as it takes to confer legitimacy on the Walden project. I will excuse Lévi-Strauss's relatively dabbling approach to his own fieldwork only because he is so wonderfully honest in Tristes Tropiques about how hard a thing it really is, and not for reasons of logistics or distance, to go into the bush.

My friend  Ed Rackley is a great writer, and is someone who, unlike me, is very good at experiencing things. He rides motorcycles around Africa, goes ocean kayaking, stuff like that. And he does not do this in order to post pictures of it afterward, either, or even in order to write about it afterward. The opposition I have set up between Muir and Burton, Ed sets up in the somewhat narrower domain of writing about ocean kayaking as between Jon Turk, who "sets the bar for the genre because expedition kayaking and marine exploration are his life," while "writing is secondary," and Paul Theroux, "for whom paddling is mere source material." Coming from my Burtonian perspective I'm still surprised to discover that one might need to do anything at all in order to have source material, but still, when the difference is set up like this one can't help but agree that Turk triumphs. Without having read Theroux myself, it is nonetheless not hard to guess what is driving him; Turk by contrast remains an enigma.

Ed's contrast, anyhow, compels me to revisit the one I have set up between Muir and Burton, and to notice something in it that should have been obvious but that escaped my attention until now: Burton spins out worlds from the solitude of his chamber, yes, but these are worlds of melancholy. Burton is hilarious, and prolific, but he is singularly incapable of moving out of that register of thought that the ancient doctors knew to be caused by an excess of black bile. Muir, for his part, writes out of joy. He watches God's great show because it brings joy, and it is in the joyous register that he writes afterward.

I feel, here in California, that I am ready to share in at least a small measure of this joy. And this feeling, too, is tinged with regret, because I also know that to stick around long enough for it to take effect would seriously compromise my cosmopolitan schedule. For one thing, I am now awaited in Paris, where I have recently accepted a position.

I am quickly learning that it is not nearly as enjoyable as you might imagine to tell people you're moving to Paris. From the reactions, you would think that life in that city consists in nothing but watching can-can dancers and eating at 3-star Michelin restaurants, without interruption, without end (which would very quickly become my idea of hell). For most Americans the word 'Paris' appears to trigger activity in the same region of the brain as 'Frederick's of Hollywood', 'Emmanuelle', or 'Red Shoe Diaries'. I swear to you I've heard Americans groan ooh la la when I inform them of my career plans. This can't go on. I'm going to have to start telling them I've taken a position in some place Germanic-sounding and offputting, some place that sounds like no fun at all. Perhaps Rostock. 

But whatever I say, and whatever people think, this recent visit to California has me feeling that I am going in the wrong direction, that it is not for me to head to the cities any longer, least of all that city whose very name is synonymous with our idea, however downmarket, of urbanity. I should be heading John Muir's way, not 'back to nature' in general; and not to some new and excellent expression of nature in some far corner of the world, as was the case for Muir the Scot; but to the nature that already shaped my consciousness of the world before I had time to choose, to the nature that saw to it that I had read Muir a priori, so to speak, before even learning how to read, to the oaks and hawks and dry grass and ivy of the Central Valley of California. This is where the truth of pananimism and the glory of God's big show strike me most vividly, and the mendacity of all my urban groping and clawing comes into the clear. It is not that there is more nature here. I'm not even particularly convinced, as the immigrant Muir seems to have been, that its splendor is any more on display in California than elsewhere. But it is here, in this light and through this distinctive cast of beings, that it reveals itself to me.

--

Follow me on Facebook, or on Twitter.

 

Y tú, bello Walt Whitman...

From Federico García Lorca's 'Ode to Walt Whitman' (1930).

Y tú, bello Walt Whitman, duerme a orillas del Hudson
con la barba hacia el polo y las manos abiertas.
Arcilla blanda o nieve, tu lengua está llamando
camaradas que velen tu gacela sin cuerpo.
Duerme, no queda nada.
Una danza de muros agita las praderas
y América se anega de máquinas y llanto.
Quiero que el aire fuerte de la noche más honda
quite flores y letras del arco donde duermes
y un niño negro anuncie a los blancos del oro
la llegada del reino de la espiga.

*

And you, beautiful Walt Whitman, sleep on the banks of the Hudson
with your beard toward the pole and with open hands.
In bland clay or in snow, your tongue cries out for
comrades to watch over your gazelle without a body.
Sleep, nothing remains.
A dance of walls agitates the prairies
and America drowns in machines and lamentation.
I want the strong air of the most profound night
to remove the flowers and letters from the arc where you sleep
and a black boy to announce to the whites with their gold
the coming of the reign of corn.

More on Joan Didion

When it comes to texts in foreign languages, I find the closest reading I can give them is by translating them into my native idiom. Texts in English can't be translated any further, but I can at least transcribe them: already a sort of translatio, a bringing-over from page to screen. There are few authors who inspire me to undertake such a close reading. I've acknowledged before that James Agee is one of them. Joan Didion is another.

I've also acknowledged before a difficult relationship to my fellow Sacramentan. I want to dissect  every sentence, copy it out, parse it, anatomize it, and when I do this what I am left with, on the dissecting table, on my desktop, is a sharp feeling of unreciprocated love. One of Didion's favorite themes is contempt for the people I happen to identify with most closely: the Central Californians who aspire to live in history-less tract houses. The ones perpetually hovering, classwise, between the meth lab and BestBuy. 

Consider Didion's destruction of Ronald Reagan, not as an aggrieved victim of his far-right, aggressively neoliberal policies (the only kind of attack on Reagan most of us even know), but as an aristocrat repulsed by his yokel tastes, and by the fact that democracy has by now spread so far that even those in power aspire to have nothing more than what the great mass of people have, if slightly more of it. Here she is, in 1977, describing the governor's mansion that he and Nancy had had designed in Sacramento (a few miles from where I grew up, and the chatter surrounding which I heard incessantly in my childhood; when Didion took her tour of the place, I was five): "In the entire house," she writes, "there are only enough bookshelves for a set of the World Book and some Books of the Month, plus maybe three Royal Doulton figurines and a back file of Connoisseur, but there is $90,ooo worth of teak cabinetry, including the 'refreshment center' in the 'recreation room'... The place has been called, by Jerry Brown, a 'Taj Mahal'. It has been called a 'white elephant', a 'resort', a 'monument to the colossal ego of our gormer governor'. It is not exactly any of these things. It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolently 'democratic', flattened out, mediocre and 'open' and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn. It is the architecture of 'background music', decorators, and 'good taste'... One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center. It is the kind of hourse in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable."

Or here she is on fundamentalist Christians in the American West: "He seemed to be one of those people, so many of whom gravitate to Pentecostal sects, who move around the West and the South and the Border States forever felling trees in some interior wilderness, secret frontiersmen who walk around right in the ganglia of the fantastic electronic pulsing that is life in the United States and continue to receive information only through the most tenuous chains of rumor, hearsay, haphazard trickledown. In the social conventions by which we now live there is no category for people like Brother Theobold and his congregation, most of whom are young and white and nominally literate; they are neither the possessors nor the dispossessed... In the interior wilderness no one is bloodied by history, and it is no coincidence that the Pentecostal churches have their strongest hold in places where Western civilization has its most superficial hold. There are more than twice as many Pentecostal as Episcopal churches in Los Angeles." (I note that since the rise of the Internet the number of such people, who, online, are by definition tapped into the nerve ganglia of the modern information society but nonetheless are as ignorant as medieval peasants, appears to have expanded a hundredfold.)

And here is Didion's method. On biker films: "I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook." She is preoccupied with a certain kind of people, and sometimes she speaks of them as existing across a class divide, but what she really means, and sometimes grasps, is that these people move in a different existential mode, one that she can't experience first-hand, but that she knows to be more truly hers than the rules of conduct at the Bohemian Club, and all those other institutions she takes surprisingly seriously. Here is her summary of that other existential mode: "Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment's high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple's ranch, the freeway sniper who feels 'real bad' about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lsost childeren, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times and try to tell me news of the world. I listen to call-in shows."

Where I feel like I am in full solidarity with Didion, rather than being the hill-stock object of her fascination and contempt, is with respect to politics. She believes her sensibilities are a product of the 1950s (in general she is too preoccupied with generations and how they forge us; I don't believe of myself that I was forged by my generation at all), and that having grown up when she did has cut her off from the spontaneous political enthusiasm of the 1960s: "I suppose," she writes, "I am talking about... the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise... What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace. Only one person I knew at Berkeley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time... Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest wo say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending."

I had had these passages from The White Album copied out in my hard drive for some time. I went back to read them recently after happening across a too-sad-to-be-true website (procrastinating, I'd Googled 'Didion Sacramento', as, on some other occasion, I might have Googled 'Fred Friendly') that declares this woman 'Sacramento's 5th Gift to the World'. The prose screams out the sort of small-time, hometown-girl-makes-good, low-stakes hokiness one might expect to accompany an honorable-mention plaque from the Jaycees Club, or some other such institution that Didion has focused her career on blowing up, just like she blew up Reagan's mansion.

Forest Paths

I've long held that much of Heidegger's popularity has to do with his mystifying use of language, a use that he draws from the best tradition of German poetry, but that, applied for the aims of positive philosophy, yields nothing more than genre confusion. This mystification is often overemphasized in translation. Thus, for example, Was heißt Denken?, which would be correctly translated as What Does 'Thinking' Mean?, is rendered by the tortured and overliteral What Is Called Thinking? The problem with this is that, in German, it is perfectly normal to use the verb heißen, 'to be called', where in English we would use the verb to mean. Heidegger was not saying something as precious or as extraordinary as the English title implies.

(*Update, May 5, 2011: A sharp reader has written to complain that I misrepresent the title, both in German and in English, of Heidegger's book, since in fact Heidegger did wish to draw attention to the significance of the verb heißen, and to this end ran through many of the ways that 'calling' might be of significance for a philosophical treatment of thinking. For this reason, what I should have said is not that there is nothing extraordinary about the verb heißen as Heidegger treats it, but only that the title of the book in the original German would not strike a German-speaker prima facie as strange, in the way that the English title strikes English-speakers.)

Efforts to make Heidegger more accessible, however, more domestic and approachable, have occasionally resulted in what looks like a sort of pulling back of the curtains on the Wizard of Oz, revealing a rather small man behind the booming voice. One of the more amusing moments of demystification came with the recent retranslation of the philosopher's Holzwege of 1950, a work that had previously been published in English with the title left in the original German, under the new, rather mundane name Off the Beaten Track. What had appeared as dark and impenetrable as the Black Forest at midnight now looked like a common trail-guide for avid hikers!

I was surprised recently to come across an entry for 'Holzweg' in the Grimm Brothers' alphabetical index of the key terms of German folk sayings. The Heidegger text suggests, whether Heidegger meant it to or not, a lone thinker, wandering the forest he calls home, deriving the depth of his thought from the wildness of his surroundings. In fact, however, from Konrad von Haslau in the 13th century through Martin Luther in the 16th, the figure of the Holzweg stood for errancy, for drifting from the true path, God's path. Thus von Haslau writes:

dar an sich manger verschriet, /der einen holzwec geriet: / der dünket in der beste; / dar nâch so vindt er ronen und este, / die von den boumen sint gerêret; / swelch tumber da niht wider kêret, / daz spriche ich wol in sînen hulden, / der muoz vil unrede dulden (verse 1033 ff).  

[Many went astray / in going down a Holzweg / they thought it was the best way / but then they found fallen trunks and boughs / that fell down from the trees / whoever is so foolish and does not turn around / this I say for his own good / that he must put up with the bad things said of him.]

In 1495, the preacher Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg reiterates this connection between the Holzweg and the Irrweg, writing:

man findt under tausent nicht einen, der dem rechten weg nachtrachtet, sonder sie gehn all dem holzweg nach und eilen heftig bisz sie zu der hellen kommen.

[Of a thousand men, you will find not one who strives for the right way, but they all follow the Holzweg, and hasten onward until they end up in hell.]

The institute where I am currently in residence has its own woods, and the members go there, and are encouraged to go there, and to stroll and to think as they stroll. Today I went there, in the horrible heat that hung over the East Coast on June 1, 2011, the end-of-the-world heat, the Jurassic heat. I was there to photograph mushrooms (more on this soon), but I couldn't help but think, as I walked, about the expectation that these woods were there for thinking, that they were a sort of thinking-preserve. These were Holzwege I was walking along, and they were custom-made and preserved for the purpose of doing what we imagine Heidegger did in the Schwarzwald.

Naturally, also, I thought back to the earlier connotations recorded by the Brothers Grimm, who preserved for us a trace of a time when dark forests were exactly what was not recommended for the benefit of the human mind/soul (either because they were not conducive to thinking, or, which is more likely, because thinking itself was already quasi-heathenish). And then I though about the post-Heideggerian attempts to domesticate the dark forests, no longer either Satan's way of leading you astray, or the profound philosopher's natural element, but simply a bunch of 'nature trails', owned and conserved by well-meaning people with money, against the onslaught of housing developments, and to which you should come prepared with a supply of trail mix and a full can of Off.

It was hotter than hell, as I said, and the mosquitoes were buzzing around my ears and the ground was crawling with the sort of creatures that didn't even get names in Genesis. I found some fine fungus specimens, and I suppose that in some way the overall effect of the excursion was to cause me to think. In sum however I found it all rather unpleasant, and after all too short an errancy was happy to return, having made no great contribution either to mycology or to what is called 'thinking', to my air-conditioned apartment.

--

Follow me on Facebook.

The Blog as Mask and Gravestone

(I was asked to write another piece on the Internet, on the virtue of blogging, &c. It is forthcoming, in a venue I won't yet identify. True to form, I itch to post it here and be done with it. But that is not permitted, so I will just post some snippets that I believe stand on their own, and direct you to the published version when it is available.)

*

In a fine introduction to a recent edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), William Gass writes that what he admires most about Robert Burton's life-work is “the width of the world that can be seen from one college window…; what a love of all can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair.” Burton’s Anatomy, indeed, often gives the impression that its author set out to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art whose aim was nothing less than to reproduce the world.

As with the Internet, the result is clumsy and chaotic, and Burton recognizes as much; and yet, in this way, both haphazard and cloistered, he manages to create, over the course of a life, a thousand-page mirror of the world:

I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment. I never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated, as having ever been especially delighted with the study of cosmography… A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.

Burton loved the world, though he knew it almost entirely through the books he kept in his cell. While at nearly the same moment in European history, Burton’s contemporaries, such as René Descartes, were denouncing ‘book learning’ as inauthentic, as an impediment to true knowledge, Burton reminds us, as Gass so well understands of his predecessor, that whether out in the world or locked in our cell, it is the human mind that is doing most of the work of experience anyway; a rich, full life may be led with only the most two-dimensional of stimuli to carry it along. The Anatomy of Melancholy is proof of this.

Today, too, the Internet can seem an impediment to many of what are thought to be our more authentic experiences. But it may also be facilitating the sort of experience we have always had, qua human beings, experience based in love, which can be had just as intensely in virtual form (letters from friends, books about nature, the Internet), as in ‘reality’ (seeing friends face-to-face, going camping). Sometimes I imagine I am feeling a love of the world as strong as Burton’s when I click, say, on a link from the Wikipedia entry on the Finno-Ugric languages to the entry on the Samoyed people of the Russian Arctic, and from there to the entry, written in Samoyed, on reindeer. There is so much out there, and it’s all in here!

True enough, in here, in this hyperlinked, screen-shaped reproduction of the world, what we find for the most part is a great mess “of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, wihout art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry.” But this is nothing new, and as Burton shows, it is the variety stacked upon variety, and the detail squeezed between details, the inexhaustible proliferation of adjectives, that makes this whole mess a mirror of human ingenium.

*

The French anthropologist and sociologist Marcel Mauss identified the category of ‘the person’ (la personne) with that of ‘the self’ (le moi). He maintained, like Taylor and many others after him, that this category is a recent development, emerging contemporaneously with modernity, which also witnessed the rise of bourgeois individualism, new concepts of authorship, property, individual rights, and so on. Mauss contrasts this conception of self with several other, premodern forms. The Pueblo Indians of the Southwestern United States, for example, do indeed conceive their clans as “being made up of a certain number of persons,” yet, on the other hand, “the role of all of them is really to act out… the prefigured totality of the life of the clan.”

It is well known that the Latin term ‘persona’ has its origin in theater and is associated first and foremost with the mask. So a ‘person’ in the most original sense is a role taken up or assumed, and it is only in the modern period that personhood becomes, Mauss maintains, something stable and enduring, something rigidly attached to the individual over the course of a life; or, better, something by reference to which the notion of a single life with a single and unified course can make sense in the first place Mauss attributes to the philosopher J. G. Fichte, as late as the early 19^th century, the final responsibility for consolidating personhood as “the condition of consciousness and of science.” But we have no need for such precision here. In fact, the sort of personhood that interests us most is the one that may be put on or taken off as a mask, for it is this sort that, as we will see, helps us to identify certain emerging practices that transpire on the Internet --performances, you might say-- in a light that is continuous with the pre-digital, indeed pre-modern, human past.

Persons were in premodernity attached to particular social roles, Mauss wants to say, rather than being seen as irreducible metaphysical subjects. But this could not mean for him that in premodernity there was no conception of enduring individuals; indeed, heroes and kings and other exceptional figures could endure beyond death and achieve immortality. Burial monuments are generally monuments to such exceptional figures, with great stone pyramids being a limit-case of this sort of monumental expression of a hope for endurance. Being king or emperor or pharaoh is not a role that is taken on in passing, it is not a fleeting persona, but rather a permanent status that endures beyond the grave.

We may in this connection think of the proliferation of funeral parlors in the modern period, with the ideal of a shining marble monument for every mortal, as a corollary of the general individualizing trend of modernity that has transformed us all (at least in our imaginations) into little kings and queens. In this respect, what Mauss describes as the emergence of our conception of person as a stable, enduring self might better be thought of as a democratization of personhood. These days, we all merit memorialization.

This process has not occurred everywhere in the same way, though the rapid globalization of Western practices rightly causes us to fear that it will sooner or later. Among the Kaulong of Papua New Guinea, there are terms for both what might be translated as ‘self’ (enu), as well as for ‘human’ (potunus). As Jane Goodale explains, the status of potunus is one that must be achieved, that is not given at the outset, but rather accrues through the proper dealings with what Goodale has identified as “the key symbols of Kaulong humanity: pigs, teeth, bones, fire, sex, and song.” Consider her description of what matters most to a Kaulong man as he approaches the end of his life:

Men’s fear that they will die without anyone to bury them is a fear that they will not be replaced in the hamlet. If not replaced, there will be no song and the fire will die, the forest will overtake the abandoned place, and the man’s name will be forgotten. Burial and replacement ensure a degree of immortality since pigs will be sacrificed and their blood will wash over a man’s bones and he will be remembered by name.

Such a fear does not meet Mauss’s count as fear for one’s self, or for one’s person in the distinctly modern sense, to the extent that the Kaulong man wishes only for immortality through the memory of his name; whereas modern self-hood is said to involve a belief in a metaphysical core of one’s individual being, which is unchanging through all the transformations of the life-cycle, and presumably also imperishable (whether it is remembered by friends and family or not).

But the more we consider the richness of the ethnographic record, the more implausible the Maussian distinction between the modern self and the ‘primitive’ self comes to seem. Do we really want our own handsome gravestones because of a prior theory of our individual enduring selfhood? Or do we want them because, in some limited way, we are able to imagine people being prompted, in seeing our names engraved in marble, to recall us fondly? The details of the commemoration are different in different cultural contexts –ours involve no pig’s blood— but the anxiety the commemmoration is expected to resolve (whether it in fact does so or not) seems to be based on a  sort of universal human conception of selfhood, a conception that causes all of us to be preoccupied with our own death, and not just with the death of kings.

Culture, as Clifford Geertz said, is the web on which we human animals live, and increasingly that web is, for many of us, also the Web. One of the things culture does is to mediate, through ritual and mystification, those parts of life that are too potent or terrible to face directly, particularly sex and death. Sex, or something having to do with sex, has already certainly made its presence felt on the Internet. Commemoration of the dead is just beginning, in turn, to take place online. Though I have said already that it is most foolhardy to make predictions of this sort, I anticipate that soon the Internet will become the primary site of such commemoration, that pixels will replace marble in conferring whatever bit of immortality there is to be had.

This shift could be more significant than it first appears. As I’ve said, the Internet is absorbing everything (in fact I used the word ‘destroying’, but we may permit a bit of softening at this point): books, music, telephony, etc. With respect to what has interested us in the previous section, it is worth conjecturing that the Internet will also, similarly, absorb both personae as well as their commemmoration, both masks and gravestones.

Perhaps I should clarify this last point. Philosophers have debated whether death is a suitable preoccupation for human beings at all. The Stoics famously thought it could not be, since insofar as I am dead, I am not; and insofar as I am, I am not dead. More recently Thomas Nagel has argued that death can indeed be plausibly construed as a misfortune, since, whether there is an afterlife or not, quite evidently death deprives us of the things we value in this life.

I often find that the idea of my own death is simply too hard to grasp. It may be that I am more Stoic than Nagelian: what concern is the world of mine, if the world will no longer have me? I expect my loved ones will absorb the loss; I have no large estate that will need worrying about, no mythology of transmitting my legacy through a healthy son weighing upon me; I am more than content to transfer my teaching load to someone else; and so on. I think I can even imagine my own body decaying in its coffin without being too troubled (I shiver a bit, but this is more a titillation arising from a taste for the macabre than it is a horror). But here is the thought that makes death formidable again: it is the moment after which I will never post to my blog again, after which I will never write another Facebook status update, I will never again tweet. My soul cries out: “But I can’t live without doing these things!” And death answers back: “No. But you can die.”

This is to say that my life is wrapped up with an activity from which I will have to leave off at death. But it is also the activity, I am increasingly coming to think, of actively constructing my self, and this activity, when it leaves off in death, will leave an accurate and vivid trace of a life. My online activity is, as I already put it, both mask and gravestone at once.

This may not be an entirely different experience than the one Robert Burton had when he brought out the fourth and fifth and sixth editions of The Anatomy of Melancholy. But the immediacy of blogging, and its lack of finality, make it much more like life itself than a book ever could be, with the backlogged publishers who promise it and the slow-churning presses that produce it. There is no publisher to blame if my blog is not sufficiently far along in its perfection at the moment of my death, no editorial wrangling or grinding production process. There is only me, and what I hope might be a mirror of me, diffused then through the Web of my culture by means I don’t understand: a mirror of me mirroring the world by sitting in a chair and looking at a screen and, every now and again, out the window.

--

Follow me on Facebook.

G. E. Lessing, "On the Use of Animals in Fables" (1759)

I had wanted to use just one passage from Lessing's short essay in an article I am supposed to be writing on the way our moral commitments, or lack of them, towards animals flow from an ungrounded folk-ontology that equates kinds with individuals. I ended up translating the entire essay, and in doing so I've both stalled and complicated my own project. It was Lessing's final point, the one he arrives at through his 'sensibility' rather than through logical conclusions, with which I disagreed most, and wanted to use as a foil. But the middle paragraphs, with the various substitutions of, e.g., 'Nero', 'wolf', and 'priest', I think are very interesting, and do not leave much to object to. Anyway, the article is still to come. Here is Lessing's essay.

*

The great majority of fables feature animals, and still lesser creatures, as acting persons. What is to be learned from this? Is it an essential feature of fables, that the animals in them are elevated to the status of moral beings? Is this a device that shortens and eases the author’s intended point? Is it a usage that in fact has no real purpose, but that has been conserved in honor of the person who first invented it, if only because it is funny—quod risum movet? Or what is it?

In brief: that animals and other lesser creatures have language and reason is presupposed in fables. It is assumed, and should not at all be understand as miraculous. When I read in scripture, “Then the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth, and she said to Balaam…” etc. (Numbers 22:28), I am reading something miraculous.  But when I read in Aesop, “Back in the days when animals still spoke, the sheep said to its shepherd….,” it is quite evident that the fabulist does not wish to relate anything miraculous; but much more, rather, something that he supposes, with the permission of his reader, to have been perfectly in accordance with the common course of nature at that time.

And this is so easy to understand, I mean, that I should be ashamed to say anything more on the subject. I shall come rather at once to the true reason --or which I take to be true, anyway-- why the fabulist often finds animals more convenient than humans for his purposes. I place it in the widely known constancy of their characters.  I suppose that it would also be easy to find an example in history in which this or that moral truth makes itself known. [But] will it be able to be recognized in the example by everyone, without exception, even by those who are unfamiliar with the cahracters of the people of interest here? Impossible! And how many people are so widely known in history that they need only to be mentioned so that at once the notion of the way of thinking that is particular to them, as well as of their other properties, is immediately awakened in everyone? In order thus to avoid circumstantial characterization, in which it is never more than doubtful whether it calls forth the same ideas in everyone, it was necessary to confine oneself to the reduced sphere of those beings about which we reliably know that even for the most ignorant people this [or that] idea corresponds to the mention of them, and no other. And since these creatures are in their nature completely unable to take on the role of free beings for themselves, we preferred to expand the boundaries of their nature, and made them able [to take on the roles of free beings], under certain presumptions of probability.

We hear ‘Britannicus and Nero’. How many of us know what we are hearing? Who was this one? Who the other? In what relations do they stand to one another? But then we hear: ‘the wolf and the lamb’, at once we all know what we are hearing, and we know in what relation the one stands to the other. These words, which straightaway awaken within us their particular images, convey the perceptual knowledge that is prevented by those names [Britannicus and Nero], through which even those to whom they are not unfamiliar nonetheless certainly do not think exactly the same thing. If here the fabulist is not able to rustle up any rational individuals who portray themselves in our faculty of imagination through the mere naming of them, it is still permitted to him, and he has recourse and right, to seek out their equivalents among the animals or among lesser creatures still. If in the fable of the wolf and the lamb we were to place Nero in place of the wolf, and Britannicus in place of the lamb, the fable at once would lose what had made it a fable for the entire human race. But if we put the giant and the troll in place of the lamb and the wolf, it already loses somewhat less, for the giant and the troll are also individuals whose characters are alreadly largely explained without further additions by their being mentioned. Or we can even transform it into the following human fable (2 Samuel 12): “A priest came to the poor man of the prophet and said: ‘Bring your white lamb before the altar, for the gods require a sacrifice’. The poor man replied: ‘my neighbor has a great herd, and I have only this one lamb’. ‘But you made a vow to the gods’, the priest replied, ‘for they blessed your fields’. ‘I have no field’, was the answer. ‘But that’s how it was before, when they healed your son of his illness’. ‘O,’ the poor man replied, ‘the gods took my son himself as a sacrifice!’ ‘You godless man!,’ the priest scolded, ‘You blaspheme!’ And he tore the lamb from his arms…” etc. And if in this transfomation the fable has lost still less, this arises simply from the fact that the character of avarice is unfortunately even more quickly associated with the word ‘priest’ than the character of blood-thirstiness with the word ‘giant’; and through the poor man of the prophet the idea of oppressed innocence is more easily awoken than through the troll.

Indeed, I would like to venture to ascribe yet another purpose to animals and other lesser creatures in fables, to which perhaps I never would have come through [logical] conclusions, if my sensibility had not brought me to it. The fable has as its aim our clear and vital recognition of a moral principle. Nothing obscures our recognition more than the passions. Consequently, the fabulist must avoid the excitation of the passions as much as possible. But how else can he avoid, for example, the arousal of sympathy, than by making the objects of it less perfect, and by putting animals or lesser creatures in place of men? Let us recall again the fable of the wolf and the lamb, as it was transformed above into the fable of the priest and the poor man of the prophet. We sympathize with the lamb, but this sympathy is so weak that it has no noticeable impact upon our intuitive knowledge of the moral principle. How is it by contrast with the poor man? Does it only seem so to me, or is it really true, that we have so much sympathy with him, and we feel much too much indignation against the priest, for the intuitive knowledge of the moral principle to be able to be nearly as clear as it is in the other case?

Herodotus and the Naturkinder

In the 18th century, the figure of the Naturkind was the source of much speculation, the most well-known product of which is, perhaps, the tale of Kaspar Hauser. Philosophers supposed that if a child were to grow up without any exposure to human society, the resulting adult would be a living model of what it is a human being is most purely or naturally. One of the most pressing questions such a child would be able to answer, it was thought, was the matter concerning the origins of language: would it be able to speak at all? And, if so, what sort of words would it use?

Somewhat earlier --peaking as a topic, I think, in the mid-17th century-- there was an intense debate as to which language, if any, was the language spoken prior to the fall of the tower of Babel. The most common candidate was Hebrew, but Chinese, Egyptian, and others are also mentioned. Some argued that the Hebrew of which we have traces was not the real Hebrew, and that there is an earlier, 'Adamic' language that, if rediscovered, would disclose divine knowledge to humans.

Interestingly, in Herodotus, there is a sort of combination of these two varieties of speculation. In Book II of the Histories we are told of the Egyptian king Psammetichus, who wishes to determine whether or not his nation is in fact the oldest on earth. He sets up the following experiment:

He gave a shepherd two new-born infants to rear, from ordinary families, and told him to bring them up among his flocks in such a way that no one ever spoke in their hearing; they were to lie in a remote hut by themselves, and he was to bring them she-goats from time to time, give them their fill of milk, and do whatever else needed doing. Psammetichus made these arrangements because he wanted to find out what the children's very first word would be, once they were past the age of meaningless whimpering. And so it happened. One day, when the shepherd had been carrying out this programme for two years, he opened the door and went into the hut, and both children rushed up to him, reaching out their hands, and said 'bekos' (II 2). 

It turns out, as Herodotus explains, that 'bekos' is the Phrygian word for 'bread', and that from this it may be concluded that it is the Phrygians, and not the Egyptians, who are the most ancient of all people. By this peculiar reasoning, the oldest language is the language that one would naturally speak if not pushed off course by another, newer language. No explanation is given of language change, but presumably Herodotus, or the person who told him this tale, would suppose that all non-Phrygian words for 'bread' are in fact deformations or corruptions of 'bekos'.

This does not seem to imply any special status among languages for Phrygian, or any indication of a need for a return to the natural way of saying things. In this respect, early modern speculation about the origins of language --both the language acquired by an individual over the course of a lifetime, as well as all the natural languages of the world and the relations between them-- could not have been more different. So far as I know, the search for the first language and the speculation about what a Naturkind would be like were never brought together into a single line of questioning.

This is because, unlike Psammetichus and Herodotus, the early moderns supposed that whatever language a Naturkind might end up using, it would not be the original, primordial language of humanity; when the debate as to what that primordial language was was at its peak, moreover, a century before Rousseau and other speculated about children of nature, it was universally assumed that this was not a 'natural' language, that it would not congeal spontaneously over the course of a childhood suckling at the udder of a she-goat. Instead, it had a divine source, and so all subsequent 'natural' languages, like Latin and French, were corruptions of it not in the way that Egyptian was a corruption of Phrygian, but in a way that implied a loss, or, to put it in more overtly theological terms, a Fall.  

A Few Final Words on Egypt

Egypt... has very many remarkable features and has produced more monuments which beggar description than anywhere else in the world. That is why more will be said about it. In keeping with the idiosyncratic climate that prevails there and the fact that their river behaves differently from any other river, almost all Egyptian practices are the opposite of those of everywhere else. For instance, women go out to the town square and retail goods, while men stay at home and do the weaving; and whereas everyone else weaves by pushing the weft upwards, the Egyptians push it downwards. Or again, men carry loads on their heads, while women do so on their shoulders. Women urinate standing up, while men do so squatting. They relieve themselves indoors, but eat outside on the streets; the reason for this, they say, is that things that are embarrassing but unavoidable should be done in private, while things which are not embarrassing should be done out in the open.

--Herodotus, The Histories, Book II, 35.

The French Strikes and the Zomian Highlands: Reading James C. Scott on Anarchism

There was something about the French strikes that, like so many things recently, had me feeling out of step with my peers. It was not the particular content of the strikers' demands, in the particular context in which these demands were made, that bothered me; in fact I strongly supported the strikers' effort, and was disappointed when it failed.

It was rather the assumptions behind most of the international (read: North American academic) support for the strikers that I could not entirely accept. How many times did we hear phrases to the effect that the strikers, in fighting to keep in place the relatively generous social welfare system that had been built up in France over the course of the 20th century, were doing nothing less than fighting to defend the 'minimum conditions for a just society'? This got me asking myself: do the highland peasants of Southeast Asia, who live outside of the scope of nation-state control, live in unjust societies? Is there any conception of justice on which the minimal conditions of its being present need not be met by states, but instead might be met by sub-state associations of people? Even if such associations are not up to the task of maintaining the minimum conditions of justice in today's France or the US, is this sufficient reason to neglect them altogether as possible models for the future?

For a while, I had a tenuous and unsatisfying relationship to anarchism: I contented myself with a sort of 'anarchism of the spirit', which conceded that the abolition of government is wholly impracticable, but still insisted that one may, individually, live one's life free of any externally imposed arche. This 'anarchism' was of course only poorly disguised cosmopolitanism (not that there's anything wrong with cosmopolitanism): it had to do with the cultivation of an individual life and the refusal to anchor it in loyalty to some nation-state, with which a person can only ever hope to be contingently associated, rather than with any real conception of the social good.

There were two considerations that kept me dithering in mere cosmopolitanism: I hate village life, and I am afraid of thugs. As to the first, I supposed that if nation-states were to be phased out as the providers of services, utilities, health care, and so on, this would require a radical scaling back to a form of social life that could not include many of the things I enjoy, such as moving easily between cultures across vast geographical regions, sampling from them, taking what I like and rejecting what I don't. As to the second, I supposed like many people that wherever nation-states fail to exercise their famous monopoly on violence, more craven and ancestral forms of it would move in to take their place.

Reading James C. Scott, particularly The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale, 2009), as well as Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998), has done much to end my dithering. On his treatment, non-state confederations are a sort of endangered species, like indigenous languages and polar megafauna; they are all being encroached upon by very much the same global process. In fact, Scott thinks that Zomia, a mountain region that extends across the borders of several states, including Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and Thailand, is perhaps the last non-state region in the world. (Similar subaltern accounts have been given of the relative vitality of the local economies of Sudanese villagers, a vitality World Bank functionaries for the most part do not even know how to measure.) This is the last remnant of a sort of sub-state or pre-state social organization that once extended as far as Europe with groups such as the Cossacks: groups consisting in people who were not by any viable measure worse off than the 'citizens' they would soon be forced to become.

With respect to my first concern, about the tedium of the sort of village life that can afford to do without state support (a concern which Scott does not share, and so does not address), it should first be admitted that whether or not I would feel comfortable living a certain kind of life says nothing about whether that life could be considered a good one. Second, upon reflection there is no reason in principle why --if the model of social organization presented by the Zomians were, by some miracle, to be adopted in places that currently have trouble conceptualizing a just society except as one whose upholding is the responsibility of the state-- innovations developed under state direction (the Internet being such a one par excellence) could not be retained and maintained collectively (it is a good deal more difficult to imagine the highway system and the aviation industry being maintained in this way, but I say good riddance), and thereby make possible an optique that extends beyond the Kinder, Kirche, Küche mantra that Marx, for example, thought was the inescapable frame of reference of village life.

With respect to my second concern, about the supposed natural tendency of anarchy towards thugocracy, one comes away from reading Scott (even if this is not his central argument) with a sharp sense of the implausibility of the popular belief that it is the state monopoly on violence that is keeping sub-state actors (my neighbor, the mob, a warlord) from doing me in or generally making my life miserable. For one thing, these parties have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of operating within states, frequently making comfortable arrangements with representatives of the state in order to carry on with their business. For another thing, the anthropology of violence simply makes it, like public copulation, unfeasible in most situations: it's not, or not primarily, law that keeps people from acting out, but custom, of which law is a recent accretion. Finally, it would be very difficult to make the case that sub-state aggressors, even if states do provide a genuine service in holding them back, could possibly do any more harm, if given carte blanche to rape and pillage and fill mass graves, than states themselves have done over the past century. Tribal warlords are nasty, but it is unlikely that villagers have had more reason to fear them than to fear the designs of generals with state-conferred authority.

I for one would not at all mind sitting at home, stateless, watching lolcat vids and reading Wikipedia articles about the indigenous languages of Southeast Asia. I would say hello to my neighbors every day, and if they ever got aggressive with me I would say: 'Shame on you'. If it continued, I'd get some local elders to shame them. I'd watch the seasons pass, and I'd get a lot of great writing done. If I were to get sick, there might be a local, natural remedy available, and if not, I might very well die at an earlier age than if there had been the sort of massive state- and corporate-sponsored medical industry most people think of as among the minimum conditions of 'justice'. That would indeed be too bad, but even with my world-renowned Canadian health benefits I note that I am far from immortal, and again, I refuse to admit that the vast majority of communities throughout human history were less just than the one I live in to the extent that they lacked these benefits.

In Marseille this past summer I recall seeing the posters put up by the Socialist Party: Pour nous la retraite, c'est 60 ans! I found myself thinking: wouldn't it be better to strive to bring about a world in which work is not so odious that one dreams of nothing more throughout one's working life than arriving at the age where one may be excused from it? I understand that I risk going off the utopian deep-end in having that sort of reaction to what is in the French context a perfectly laudable demand. But still, I can't help but think, and am very much emboldened by James C. Scott in thinking, that the lack of such a demand among the Zomians is a sign that they are somewhat closer to this utopia than Euro-Canadian democratic socialists are generally capable of seeing.

--

Follow me on Facebook.

A Double Standard in Judgments about the Past

When my mind wanders, as it often does, and I begin to imagine, say, the raids conducted by the Mongol Horde, the psychopathic methods of torture they devised, and the incalculable amount of raping and pillaging that must have gone on, unrecorded, across the Eurasian land mass since the domestication of the horse and the invention of metallurgy, I admit that sometimes I think to myself: Alright! Good show! I am impressed with all this cruelty, not indignant about it, and I suspect you are too. The standards I bring to my assessment of the killers who filled the mass grave at Srebrenica, a little over a decade ago, are completely different. I am still trying to figure out why this is so.  

There is a similar double standard that comes into play in my reading of the history of philosophy. Consider the claim that 'only love does not have to be. God loves without being'. Now it seems to me that if I came across this sort of thing in Gregory of Nyssa or in Nāgārjuna I would think to myself: There is much wisdom here. But when I see this claim in a book written in the 1990s (which is where I in fact saw it), my reaction is very different. What are the author's grounds for claiming such a thing, I want to know. How can he justify this claim?  

Now in both cases it cannot just be that we hold more recent figures to different standards (of morality or of rationality) than past figures as a result of the availability in our age of rules of acting or thinking that were not available then. After all, I spend much of my time insisting on the relative superficiality of the innovations that we think of as distinctly modern. The historical record shows that there were a lot of people being nice to one another long before Kant or Peter Singer or the UN Declaration of Human Rights; and there were a lot of people saying things that were rational and well-founded, by our standards, long before Francis Bacon or A. J. Ayer attempted to spell out for us exactly what such things are like. There is indeed nothing more empirically grounded and practically rational than the 'concrete sciences', like botanical taxonomy, characteristic of la pensée sauvage.  

Given that the distant past featured people who were good and rational in our sense, why not take them as the standard-bearers for their own era, rather than employing different standards for different eras? I think the answer is in part that, with respect to the present, expediency requires something like an ethical suspension of the anthropological: the consequences of actions or beliefs in the distant past are already known. Nothing hangs on my condemnation of Genghis Khan, and so I am freed up to simply observe him and contemplate him as a larger-than-life manifestation of a certain sort of human potential. To disapprove of Genghis Khan would be scarcely different from disapproving of humanity itself (even as, curiously, failing to disapprove of Adolf Hitler is also to disapprove of humanity), for Genghis provides us a useful and vivid demonstration of the vast range of what it is human beings are capable of doing. He is a singular illustration of Clyde Kluckhohn's intriguing but untestable thesis: "During the long course of human history individual men and women have probably thought, felt and done almost everything that was within the range permitted by anatomy, physiology, and the limits of external nature."   

I am freed up by Genghis's historical distance to let him feed my imagination. And it's my imagination, too, that is fed by Gregory of Nyssa: what I want from him is to gain a sense of the range of possible thoughts human beings can have. If I'm looking for the truth here, it's a different order of truth than anything that can be found in the content of his claims. It's a truth about the range of possible beliefs, rather than a particular true belief, that I'm after.  

In the present age by contrast I expect everyone to be straight and narrow, to tell it like it in fact is and to be moderate and sober in their actions. I don't want any new demonstrations of the extremes of human potential or of the range of exotic beliefs people collectively come up with in order to get through their lives. If my wishes are respected, people will be nice and reasonable, rather than mean and unreasonable, with one another, and surely that is good. An unfortunate corollary of this however is that it transforms the past into a sort of age of heroes, and shows our very decency to be a symptom of decline. The present age starts to look like what Goethe feared would be the ultimate result of Enlightenment: a worldwide hospital, where 'everyone is everyone else's humane nurse'.  

I don't want to decide here as between a torture chamber and a hospital, but I do want simply to pause to note the correlation, and possible connection, between the two sorts of double standard. The expectation that our fellow human beings tell it like it is arises together in history with the expectation that they be nice to one another. The chronological upper limit of the exemption that I, and I expect others, allow for saying delirious things about God and angels and spirits and the prophetic power of dreams is roughly the same as the one for raping and pillaging and bludgeoning. If I had to be precise, I would say the boundary lies somewhere around the end of the 15th century (with a good deal of regional variation, and with the non-European world only coming to fall on this side of the historical boundary at the same rate as it is assimilated into the Euro-American global system), and that it is Christopher Columbus who stands as a sort of pioneer of the modern way of being wrong.  

Of course the pillaging and unreason go on as before, not just in spite of the Euro-American global system, but just as often in support of it. Modernity then is not really that period when people begin to think and to act differently--i.e., rationally and morally-- but only that period when disapproval of the default way of human thinking and acting --irrationally and brutally-- begins to make sense.   

--

Not following me on Facebook yet? Well follow me.

Books

What is happening with books? University libraries now have sculptures made out of them in their opulent foyers. These are meant to signal that reading is an adventure, or fun, or something, but what they really announce is that reading, as it has been known for the past 500 years, is dead. Private citizens have rallied to photograph their own books and to post pictures of them on the internet. Some have suggested that this is a new sort of intellectual 'pornography'. I suspect the anxiety is dawning that if the books are not documented in this way, if they are not registered in the single great repository of all that exists, then their status will be merely antiquarian, home-decorative, or, for the more creative, perhaps, sculptural.

Anyone who has ever been invited past the threshold of my home or my office will be able to attest that I am an owner of books. At home or in the workplace, you cannot not notice them. Beyond their simple mass, what most people will also have noticed is that there is absolutely no principle of organization that dictates where they will be placed on the shelf. I make excuses. I tell them that when I moved in I had to hurry to get the books up off the floor, and that I've been meaning to get around to placing them in their natural order. But in fact I'm dissimulating. I have no idea what their proper order would be.

Or no, that's not quite right. I do know what their natural order would be, and this is it. Arranged in this way, with Strabo next to Losev next to Kripke next to Geulincx, I have brought about what Nicholas of Cusa would have called a perfect explicatio of the folds of my soul. The disorder of the bookshelves is an exact report upon what is going on in my head at all times. This is not to say that I have not managed to carve out a more narrow research specialization for myself, and to stick with it, but only that subjectively there is never any way for me to predict which author is going to impose himself upon my thinking next, just as there is no way to predict which book is going to be contiguous to any other. The thoughts come up like bad old tunes from the radio a generation ago. E. T. A. Hoffmann is like Lionel Ritchie: he barges in uninvited.

One of the enduring problems  with this arrangement has been the difficulty of determining which books belong in the office, and which at home. Now I am a philosopher, and I have therefore tried (I really have) to put all the philosophy books in the workplace, where the work of a philosopher is done, while leaving all the other books, on the things that interest me but do not pertain directly to the work of a philosopher, at home. I have failed utterly, for an enormous part of my holdings consists in books from the grey area, books that might conceivably at some point be of relevance to something I am doing as a philosopher, but that for one reason or another cannot be called philosophical texts stricto sensu: Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire comique des états et empires de la Lune; books on the history of craniology; French-Huron dictionaries from the 17th century; Rosalind Krauss's The Originality of the Avant Garde; Richard Rorty.

So I drag these books back and forth a few at a time, never quite sure where their final resting place will be. And now my wife and I are moving again (her books by contrast seem to be ordered according to true natural principles), giving me another chance to randomize the arrangement on the shelves. Just today I bundled up stacks of books with string, and was delighted to fondle the mementos of my youthful modernism --Krapp's Last Tape, Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk, etc.--, amazed to hold Der Zauberberg in my hands again, all 637 pages of it, and to think, I actually read this fucking thing.

The books look sad bundled up like that. They look like they are about to be sent off to the incinerator, which is probably what will happen to them sooner or later. The incinerator or some gaudy sculpture in my university's 'library'.

During my first year in grad school I had some crappy work-study job in the newspaper department in the basement of the library of the School of International and Public Affairs. It was my duty to bundle up all the old newspapers from all around the world with string, and to throw them into the dumpster after their expiration date (10 years, if I recall correctly). This was 1994, which means that I got to throw away newspapers from all over the world dating back to 1984. I threw away all the newspapers that announced that communism had been thrown onto 'the scrapheap of history'. It was around this time that I read Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal's novel about an elderly wastepaper worker in Prague. He loved his job, and I loved mine, too. I read all of those newspapers, many of them in languages I had never studied, and when I sent them to the dumpster I somehow felt that this was an expression of my love.

I love my books, too, even if with each passing year they are looking more and more like old newspaper. I should not have to say, by now, that this has something to do with the encroachment of the internet. This is not of course to say that books will disappear. But they will become, as has already been suggested by the new 'pornographers', a sort of fetish: intensely interesting to a quirky subculture, but wholly unnecessary for the advancement of learning.

A Letter Sent

Montreal, 25 August, 2010

Dear Librarian,

Enclosed please find a replacement copy of V. I. Lenin's Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. As some of your most senior teaching staff might recall, I was a student at Mira Loma High School in the late 1980s. I left the school in poor academic standing in the first semester of my junior year. Shortly before my departure, I had borrowed Lenin's work from the school library, and I never bothered to return it. I ought to have done so, and have for years regretted that I did not. But I was convinced at the time that it was by rights mine, for reasons that I believed were spelled out in the book itself. Now I only find it remarkable that the book was made available in the first place, and regrettable that a subsequent generation of students was unable to access it.

It is not so much that I wish to introduce your current students to Lenin in particular (they could find his texts themselves online, should they be interested), but only that I hope that they might be exposed to the widest range of ideas in your library, and be made to understand the importance of these ideas as reflected by the fact that their school deems them suitable for its library's shelves. I hope that this in turn will help them to develop well-informed views of their own.

Here let me also mention that in connection with my work I receive a great number of unsolicited textbooks of philosophy intended for introductory college courses. I have no use for the great majority of them, and if you are interested I would be pleased to be able to donate them to your collection, along with a number of other books on philosophical topics which for one reason or another I do not need. 

Wishing you and your students continued success,

Justin Smith

Bodies Cannot Be without a Place

[From Valentin Weigel, Der Guldene Griff, Das ist, Alle Ding ohne Irrthumb zu erkennen, vielen Hochgelehrten unbekandt unnd doch allen Menschen nothwendig zu wissen (Neustadt, 1616)]

This visible world... stands in its depth in the Abyss of infinitude, which depth is without limit in its height and without limit in its breadth and without limit in its length and without limit in its depth in such a nothingness does the world stand that in all eternity no man can experience ground touch or conceive it, it is such that in height depth breadth and length no man can ever find its limit. All bodily things are contained and included in this world and beyond this world there is no bodily thing thus also no location or place. Locations and places are only within the world as the world is the place of trees beasts men the water is the place of fishes and nymphs the sky is the place of stars and air indeed the air quickens all bodily things as Theophrastus shows. Thus is the earth divided into Asia, Europe, Africa and America, Europe in turn into Spain, England, France, Germany, etc., Germany in turn into the other places as there are forests cities castles villages and in turn the cities into alleys houses and the houses into rooms chambers kitchens basements and these are all places and locations and there is a distance from the one to the other.  Thus every tree beast man has and needs its own place location or space. For every bodily thing must be definitively here or there surrounded by air like fish by water bodies cannot be without a place.

*

Diese sichtbare Welt stehet... in der Tieffe in Abysso infinitudinis, welche Tieffe ist nach der Höhe ohne Ende und nach der Breite ohne Ende und nach der Lenge ohn Ende und nach der Tieffe ohn Ende in einem solchen nichts stehet die Welt da niemand in Ewigkeit dasselbige erfahren ergründen begreiffen noch bedencken kan, es sey in die Höhe Tieffe Breite oder Lenge so findet man allezeit kein Ende. Alle leibliche Ding seynd in diese sichtbare Welt geschlossen und gefasset und ausserhalben der Welt ist kein leiblich Ding also auch keine Stelle noch Ort. Stellen und Örter sind nur inwendig in der Welt als die Erde ist ein Ort der Bäume Thieren Menschen das Wasser ist ein Ort der Fische und Nymphen der Himmel ist ein Ort der Sternen und Lufft ja die Lufft beschleut alle leibliche Dinge wie Theophrastus bezeuget. Also ist die Erde getheilet in Asiam, Europam, Aphricam und Americam, Europa wiederumb in Hispaniam, Angliam, Galliam, Germaniam, &c. Germania wiederumb in andere Örter als da sind Wälde Städte Schlösser Dörffer und wiederumb die Städte in Gassen Häuser u. Die Häuser in Stuben Kammern Küchen Keller u. das sind alles Örter und Stellen und geben eine Weite von einem zum andern. Also ein jeder Baum Thier Mensch hat und bedarff seines eigenen Ortes Stellen oder Raumes. Dann alle leibliche Ding müssen seyn hie und da beschliesslich mit der Lufft umbgeben wie die Fische mit dem Wasser die Corpora mögen ohn einen Ort nicht seyn. 

From the Bookshelf, #3

More from Aelian, On Animals

The Octopus feeds first on one thing and then on another, for it is terribly greedy and forever plotting some evil, the reason being that it is the most omnivorous of all sea-animals. The proof of this is that, should it fail to catch anything, it eats its own tentacles, and by filling its stomach so, finds a remedy for the lack of prey. Later it renews its missing limb, Nature seeming to provide this as a ready meal in times of famine (I 27).

*

The Red Mullet is of all sea-animals the most gluttonous and indisputably the most unrestrained in tasting everything it comes across. And some of them are known as 'roughies', deriving their name from the places where there are rough rocks full of holes and thick growths of seaweed in them, and where there is a bottom of mud or sand. A Red Mullet would eat the dead body of a man or of a fish, and its special delight is in filthy, ill-smelling food (II 41).

*

The Seal, I am told, vomits up the curdled milk from its stomach so that epileptics may not be cured thereby. Upon my word the Seal is indeed a malignant creature (III 19).

From the Bookshelf, #2

There are creatures called Ephemera that take their name from their span of life, for they are generated in wine, and when the vessel is opened they fly out, see the light, and die.  Thus it is that Nature has permitted them to come to life, but has rescued them as soon as possible from life's evils, so that they are neither aware of their own misfortune nor are spectators of the misfortune of others.

--Aelian, On Animals II. 4.

From the Bookshelf, #1: A Charm Against Bears

Bear, apple of the forest, chunky honey-paws!

When you hear me coming, hear the splendid man stepping along,

make fast your claws in your fur, your teeth in your gums

so that they will never touch me, never stir when you are on the move.

My bear, my darling, honey-paws, my beauty,

throw yourself flat on a tussock, on a lovely crag

while the tall evergreens are swaying above, firs being heard above.

Then bear, turn around, honey-paws, turn yourself about,

as does a ruffled grouse on her nest, a wild goose about to brood.

[From the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala (46: 54-65). Tr. Francis Peabody Magoun Jr.]