Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Cette autre langue qui fait partie de moi

J'ai quelques remarques encore à ajouter à ce que j'ai écrit hier dans une sorte de extase d'affection inattendue pour une langue qui m'est dans un certain sens très proche, presque aussi proche que ma langue maternelle, et sans doute beaucoup plus proche que n'importe quelle autre langue étrangère; mais qui reste à la fois extrêmement étrange, et que je réserve d'habitude pour des buts assez circonscrits.

Je me demande presque chaque jour: qu'est-ce que c'est que cette langue française qui traîne dans ma tête? Qu'est-ce qu'elle fait là? Comment est-ce que ça m'est arrivé de la parler? Et surtout comment est-ce qu'elle peut m'être tellement intime, sans que je puisse la parler comme il faut?

Je dois avouer avant d'aller plus loin que pour moi le fait de parler français et le fait de résider au Québec sont deux choses très différentes. Je ne pense pas que mon français serait beaucoup plus pauvre qu'elle n'est en réalité si j'habitais à New York ou à Berlin. Et même si je ne dois pas le dire,  je soupçonne qu'elle serait plus qu'un peu plus riche si j'habitais à Paris.

Je suis à Montréal depuis plus de huit ans, et j'ai bien compris que mon opinion de la réalité sociolinguistique sur le terrain n'est pas exactement la bienvenue dans le discours publique. Bon, c'est pour ça que je blogue: je n'ai pas besoin ici d'être invité à dire ce que j'ai à dire. Donc voilà: il me semble que, en dépit de toute la rhétorique sur l'importance de franciser les immigrants, y compris les immigrants des pays anglophones, personne au Québec ne veut vraiment m'entendre parler français.

Je ne peux même pas dire combien de fois il m'est arrivé de devoir insister dans les magasins que j'ai le droit inalienable, grâce à la fameuse Charte de la langue française, d'être servi en français. C'est évidemment absurde. Ce n'est pas pour moi, un immigrant américain, qu'on a écrit la Loi 101, mais ça m'offense tout de même quand on refuse, au moment où l'on constate que je ne suis pas d'ici, de parler français avec moi, moi qui a fait un vrai effort, qui a fait ce qu'on m'a dit qu'il fallait faire, pour appartenir à cette société.

J'ai lu récemment un article dans l'un des journaux gratuits 'alternatifs' de Montréal, Le Miroir ou quelque chose de ce genre, dans lequel l'auteur se moquait des dames de Westmount qui travaillent comme bénévoles au Musée des Beaux Arts, et qui font semblant au travail de ne pas comprendre le français, tout en le parlant sans problème quand elles font leurs vacances à Paris. Mais peut être, je me disais, peut être ce n'est pas seulement ces bourgeoises, toujours faciles à ridiculiser, qui sont à blâmer pour ce monolinguisme contextuel. Peut être que c'est lié aussi avec des faits sociolinguistiques dont elles ne sont pas responsables et qui les précèdent. Moi aussi je trouve que c'est beaucoup plus facile, et beaucoup plus agréable, de parler français à Paris qu'à Montréal, et je refuse d'entendre que c'est entièrement de ma faute qu'une vie francophone montréalaise me reste hors d'atteinte.

Donc ce n'est pas le Québec qui m'a francisé. Mais ce n'est pas non plus Mme. Jones, l'institutrice à Mira Loma High School en Californie qui a été censée faire l'impossible: enseigner une langue étrangère à des adolescents américains. En dépit de cette tâche sisyphéenne elle était vraiment sympathique. J'imagine qu'elle était dans la trentaine, et je ne sais pas comment je le savais, mais je savais quand même qu'elle était célibataire. J'avais un peu pitié d'elle, mais ça ne m'empêchais pas de m'en ficher complètement de ce qu'elle avait à dire dans sa capacité de pédagogue. C'est comme ça en fait que j'ai passé tout mon temps à la high school: j'étais vaguement conscient du fait qu'il y avait un adulte qui parlait à l'autre côté de la salle de classe, mais sur quoi, pour quoi, dans quelle langue, avec quelles attentes: tout ça me restait tout à fait mystérieux. Ce n'est pas que je ne voulais pas apprendre, c'est juste que je ne voulais pas qu'on m'enseigne: une différence fondamentale dont je parlerai peut-être une autre fois.

Eventuellement j'ai été guéri de cette maladie infantile, et je suis vite devenu un étudiant exemplaire quand j'étais au premier cycle à l'université. Mais là c'était surtout les langues slaves qui me fascinaient, et ce n'était qu'au niveau doctoral, où je devais lire des textes philosophiques du 17e siècle, que je me suis donné la peine d'apprendre à lire le français. J'ai suivi un cours de 'français pour la recherche doctorale'. L'enseignant était un doctorant américain comme nous. Il s'amusait en se moquant de nous chaque fois que nous faisions des fautes. Il aimait prendre comme exemple des mots qui sont presque identiques dans les deux langues. 'Le chocolat' veut dire 'chocolate', il disait en ironisant. Quelle langue dificile. Ça va de soi que je n'ai pas appris grand-chose de lui, mais au moins à la fin de mes études doctorales j'étais capable de lire le français de Leibniz (qui écrit sa troisième langue, après l'allemand et le latin, dans un style assez basique, mais pour cette même raison assez lucide). 

Donc au moment où je me suis installé au Québec en 2003 le français restait pour moi surtout une langue pour la recherche, peu différent à cet égard du latin. Or, ce ne sera que deux ans après que je deviens l'époux d'une femme qui vient d'un pays quelque part en Europe qui n'est pas francophone, mais qui est fameux pour sa francophilie aussi bien que pour son polyglotisme. En toute franchise, 90% de ce que je suis capable de dire correctement, c'est grâce à elle, alors que les fautes que je continue à faire, c'est à cause du fait que je n'ai pas suivi son exemple irréprochable avec assez d'attention.

Je mentionne ce détail de ma vie intime, une vie que je préfère normalement garder à l'abri des regards des inconnus, seulement parce que c'est tout à fait pertinent à l'explication de mon expérience de la langue française. Le français est la langue officielle de la province où j'habite, mais elle est aussi la langue que je parlais dans ma vie domestique pendant six ans. Je la parlais très imparfaitement, mais c'était tout de même pris pour acquis que le français était en quelque sorte la langue officielle à la maison. Dans ce sens mon expérience domestique contrastait beaucoup avec la vie quotidienne dans le métro, dans les magasins, etc., où, comme je l'ai déjà décrit, je devais me battre sans cesse juste pour pouvoir parler la même langue que je parlais à la maison par défaut.

Tout ça pour dire que maintenant, quand je suis seul dans ma maison, quand je me promène seul en ville, je ne peux pas ne pas me demander: qu'est-ce que cette langue veut de moi? Pourquoi est-ce qu'elle pèse comme ça sur mon esprit? Et surtout, surtout, qu'est-ce que je dois faire avec elle maintenant?

Je commence à me dire récemment que peut être je dois, pour ainsi dire, écrire avec elle. L'écriture, c'est ce qui reste.

Comme vous le voyez bien, il y a plein de progrès à faire. Je suis sûr qu'un francophone qui tient sa langue à coeur trouverait mon petit propos absolument ridicule. Mais ce n'est pas pour lui que je le propose. C'est pour moi: pour me décharger de cette langue qui s'est accumulé dans mes vaisseaux comme un fluide.

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This Year I Betrayed My Country...

From the n+1 2011 Year-in-Review. For other contributors' perspectives on that annus horribilis mirabilisque, please go here. 

This year I betrayed my country. Or at least that’s how it felt, even if, from what I’ve been able to learn, the US tolerates dual citizenship by means of something like a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. There I was, after eight years of paperwork, of interrogations by the Délégation du Québec about my knowledge of that province’s charming folkways, of counting every day outside of Canada lest I go beyond my limit and find my permanent resident status revoked: there I was, I say, in July, in Montreal, before an immigration judge, some Mme. Robichaud or Tremblay, swearing, along with seventy-two other soon-to-be-Canadians from thirty-eight different countries, my allegiance to Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada (a different person, by the way, than Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, even if the two persons inhabit the same physical body). This part was not so hard, as she looks like a kind old lady. But then came the line about “her successors,” and I thought about what it would mean to actually be loyal to that lad William, say, whose birth I remember as if it were yesterday, and I confess I began to mumble my lines. We did the recitation in English and French, and the French part was a good deal easier for me. Hell, I’ll swear anything in a language that resides only in my head and not in my heart. Behind me, by contrast, a man from somewhere in Francophone Africa bellowed out the French part directly from his heart. There were tears in his eyes and his voice quivered. I thought of the Ontario politician Garth Turner, who denounced the “Canadians of convenience,” that is, those who swoop through just long enough to get the passport before moving on. The African behind me was no Canadian of convenience, whereas I, I understood, might very well turn out to be one. In the end my principle motivation to become Canadian was that I might thereby be free to leave the place without having to count the days. I am now at liberty to abscond until 2040, if I feel like it, just in time for a bit of free palliative medicine in my final days. The man behind me believed in the idea of Canada, whereas I, whatever the current reality, cannot deny that it is the United States I believe in, that I carry in my heart, if I may be permitted to put it sentimentally, and that my association with the monarchy to the north will always remain rather more circumstantial. The US is a bloated and aggressive empire populated by snake-charming enemies of Enlightenment, Canada is a decent and sober social democracy, et cetera. But heavens, one is who one is, and in my shiny new Canadian passport, just after Lieu de naissance it says “Reno, USA”: surely the most significant bit of information in that document. It is a question of habitus, which is something so deep that the matter is already more or less settled even before we are begat. Mine in particular took shape in the late 18th century, and hates kings and queens, especially the ones no one believes in anyway. I am proud of my new status: I got 100 percent on the citizenship exam (what does A mari usque ad mare mean? Which province is the leading producer of wood pulp?), and I show off my passport like a fetish. But the taint of the betrayer is not going to go away. 

Christopher Hitchens

I loved and revered Christopher Hitchens. And don't start in with that stuff about Iraq either: I loved him in large part because of his various idiocies, not in spite of them.

Beyond the politics there is also, perhaps, this reason for not loving him: he was aggressively middle-brow. He was wrapped up in the daily news cycle, but was careful to pepper his copy with just enough discussion of timeless literature, to appear on television with just the right sort of timeless Britishness, to drop in just the right number of foreignisms to appear classically learned (mot juste, nil nisi bonum, etc.), to come across as something more than a journalist.

But who am I kidding? That's exactly my level! Or at least it is a good deal of the time. I've often thought of Christopher Hitchens and Perry Anderson as representing the only two models of engaging with the world that are at all attractive to me: the one hot and pugnacious and in the thick of it, the other icy and above-it-all and somehow omniscient; the one more full of shit than the other but for that reason also more human; each occupying his own clearly marked-out spot on the social brow.  I'm sure Anderson thinks Hitchens was a boob, and will say nothing good, or nothing at all, about him now. Both are staunch enemies of the nil nisi bonum rule for speaking of the dead.

For several years the rhythm of my week was structured by Hitchens's Monday column in Slate. I was patient with the more aggressively neo-con pieces (though even here I think I've understood, if not approved, the internal logic of the path from Trotsky to Wolfowitz). His stuff on religion never interested me that much, other than for the insult comedy it afforded him. He seemed to me, here, simply blind to the value of the imaginative, anthropological perspective on belief, but this is by no means his shortcoming alone. I treasured the excoriations of Hillary Clinton, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and other professional fools, and often found myself reading them two or three times in the hope of reliving the pleasure of the first.

Things changed when he got sick. As if afraid of contagion, I stopped reading him. I wrote him off as already dead. I realize now this was a way of managing, however immaturely, the anticipated emotional blow of his death, the loss of that week-structuring dose of whatever it was he had to say. Occasionally I would stumble inadvertently on the articles chronicling his protracted demise, which he was now writing for Vanity Fair. I read these in pained awe. If he was only a journalist, he nonetheless managed to make journalism do what Socrates and Montaigne claimed philosophy, at its most excellent, does: he made it a preparation for death.

This morning I received a group e-mail from my friend Abbas Raza, whose website, 3 Quarks Daily, allows me regularly to dump many of my extra words. 3QD has often seemed to me a sort of electronic shrine to Christopher Hitchens, or to the ideal he represents. The site comes strongly endorsed by Richard Dawkins and the like, yet it has long been clear, I think, that a blurb from Hitchens would have been the real holy grail.

The subject of the e-mail was: 'Hitch, 3qd'. I imagined for a second that Abbas had succeeded in roping the dying man into some project or other: judging some contest, being at the center of some multi-author forum, or something. I am a fan of almost no one but for that second I felt something a bit like I imagine baseball fans do when they catch the home-run balls hit by their idols, or whatever: I thought I was going to come into some sort of contact with the only person to whom, in my adult life, I have written adulatory messages, 'fan letters', some might call them (two, no reply).

Abbas was of course asking for 3QD contributors to memorialize Hitchens, not to interact with him. I don't know, though. What is there to say? Would 'death not be not proud' serve as a mot juste here, as it did for him in his own tribute to Susan Sontag? I could also go on and on rehashing favorite bits from the oeuvre, but one in particular stands out right now. It was about some Virginia Tech administrator whom Hitchens had deemed dim, and who had declared some days after the 2007 massacre on that campus something like: It's OK to be happy again; it's a beautiful day and the birds are singing. The birds were singing during the shooting, too, Hitchens responded. So, anyway, the birds are singing.

On Marriage

[From my forthcoming essay in Lapham's Quarterly]

...The rebranding of couples as “partners” is the sad culmination of the modern transformation of couples into work-love units. Heterosexual couples began calling one another “partners” at some point in the late 1980s or early '90s out of a sense of solidarity with their gay friends who could not yet be spouses. Believing themselves to be friends of sexual otherness, they were at the same time abetting the ongoing transformation of marriage into a variety of modern capitalist work. And it is at precisely this moment in the history of marriage that it became feasible for the institution to subsume same-sex couples: the moment at which the hard work of individuals had fully replaced exchange between families as the basic model of what a marriage ought to be.

When marriage was a matter of exchange, the gender of the units of exchange was a non-negligible factor in the determination of who should be exchanged with whom. When marriage comes to be seen as a line of work, by contrast, and when individuals are seen as free to choose their own vocation, then it correspondingly transforms into a gender-neutral institution. It is thus exactly the historical moment when marriage becomes a variety of work rather than of exchange that the genders of its members cease to matter. Marriage was always an economic matter, but members of marriages were not always its employees, and this is what the awful new talk of “partnership” is really about...

[To read more, look for the 'Family' issue of LQ, coming out in December.]

In Prenzlauer Berg

Among the grimmer thoughts one has to contend with on any visit to Berlin is this: that one could very well be staying not only in the logistical nerve center of the Final Solution, but in the very building, and perhaps in the very same room, in which a Holocaust victim once lived. This possibility rose to 50%, in fact, when I was in Berlin a few days ago, and stayed in a six-unit building which housed, according to the commemorative plaques paved into the sidewalk outside, three separate Jewish couples who did not see the end of the war.

These plaques ensure that no visit to Berlin will ever be too fun. They are also the most decent, and most properly scaled, Holocaust memorials I've seen, anywhere, just the opposite of the misfired maze near the Brandenburger Tor (which induces, paradoxically, a sense of fun one knows one isn't supposed to be having), and a universe away from the grandiose theoretical statement of Libeskind's Jewish Museum. The plaques pull you away from the abstraction of large numbers and into the scene of what must have happened right there, in that building, the scene of individual lives unravelling.

When I hear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying at the UN that there is nothing wrong with 'questioning' the reality of things, as for example the role of Al Qaeda on September 11, or the role of genocidal intentions in the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis, it's hard not to think: would you like also to question the reality of, say, Max and Julie Grünwald, who lived at Prenzlauer Allee 15, and who, it was reported, committed suicide while in a Gestapo prison on April 8, 1933? It has of course been pointed out that Holocaust denial is, rhetorically, a form of shrouded Holocaust affirmation, and what the Iranian president really means to say is not that so-and-so was never killed, or was never even born to begin with, but that if they were, so what? Ahmadinejad is probably motivated by a sense of the disparity between the commemorative resources devoted to this one particular historical instance of human suffering on the one hand, and, on the other, the massive scale of largely uncommemorated, unacknowledged, and ongoing death and murder and cruelty in the part of the world for which he takes himself to be speaking (perhaps the Muslim world, perhaps more broadly the 'global South'). This is in itself not an ungrounded sense to have, and if one can acknowledge it and articulate it without lapsing into disgusting conspiracy theories, one is doing no wrong. But no amount of historical truth will get the basic fallaciousness of the following sort of reasoning through Ahmadinejad's paleolithic skull: that, simply because bad thing b is happening over here, bad thing a must not have happened, or in any event is not worth bringing up.

Anywhow, what struck me about the Grünwalds' story --unlike that of the others at Prenzlauer Allee 15, who were murdered at Auschwitz in 1944-- is that their decision to take their own lives a whole decade before they would have ended up in an extermination camp is openly acknowledged in the commemoration, but this is done by means of a very special, and uniquely German, term: Freitod. A 'Free death' is an honorable suicide, in every respect the semantic opposite of Selbstmord (literally: 'self-murder'; there's also the Latinate Suizid, but that's not really German). This term is certainly resonant of the Stoic reminder that, as Epictetus put it, 'the door is always open', though apparently as a bit of vocabulary it can be traced back only to the early 20th century, and was inspired by the section of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled 'Vom freien Tode' ('On Free Death'). In the period in which the Grünwalds had recourse to it, Freitod was also, no doubt, being used by Nietsche's vulgar sister and others like her to characterize the sort of death one might meet for the sake of one's nation or race or whatever. But for the Grünwalds it was presumably just an open door, the only open door, and had no meaning at all other than as a resolution to a dead-end predicament. 

There is little trace of the DDR in Prenzlauer Berg at this point. Cupcakes and pet supplies are now being sold in shops where, when I first arrived in 1990, one could still see communist signs advertising Obst und Gemüse or Kleidung for sale. These were empty promises, to be sure, but the signs remained for many years after the fall of the wall as beautiful relics of a lost world. Now, even though it is as if East Berlin never existed, Weimar and Nazi Berlin still hang in the air. One still sees the faded paint in the advertisements on the sides of buildings for Conditoreien, that initial pre-spelling-reform 'C' somehow echoing all the fragility and transient joyousness of the 1920s. And one sees the plaques, with names like 'Maurice' and 'Jenny' that also, like the archaic spelling, convey a message from a lost Berlin, one that was at home in the rest of the world in a way the Nazis could not stand, and in a way that, I think, the city has been trying to recover ever since.

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Confessions, between Terence and Trash

Regular readers will have noticed by now what frequent use I make of the word 'I'. Philosophers of language in turn might point out that this is not really a word at all, but a pronoun, which functions rather more as a placeholder than as a proper noun: it doesn't name anything, but only serves as a generic stand-in --which works just as well when you are talking about your self as when I am talking about mine--, a sort of promissory note that can be cashed out by means of a proper name whenever the question as to who is being talked about comes up.

But still, the fact remains that I have been talking about myself a lot here, and moreso of late: I used to carry on about politics; and then my world narrowed (or deepened, I don't know), and I dwelt principally upon the things I really care about, in particular language and animals. Then it started to narrow (or deepen) even more, and I began to write principally in a confessional mode. This is certainly something that I have not thought of as part of my philosophical output. I have gone to great lengths to emphasize that it is a recreation, something quite apart from that output, in which I have, I think, largely mastered the art of impersonal writing, of writing about things that are not me, as if from nowhere.

Certainly, the idea that confessional writing could be philosophical writing at the same time is light-years away from the prevailing conception of the activity of philosophy today. We are all generally aware that there are a few confessional works that were written long ago and that now belong to the canon of philosophy (Augustine, Rousseau), but an implication of this awareness is that one must be an Augustine or a Rousseau in order to be in a position to choose this mode. In 20th-century philosophy, autobiography was generally seen as extracurricular (a few exceptions, perhaps: Feyerabend, Althusser), and was often written by people who seemed to have no inner life worth reporting on (e.g., Quine: a genius, yes; an introspective genius, no). There is certainly nothing in the tenure guidelines of any university, no matter how excellent, mediocre, or quirky, for incorporating memoir into one's dossier. If one is going to go ahead and do it anyway, it is understood that this is a cordless space-walk, so to speak, institutionally unsupported, and even counter to one's productivity goals: the dreary pyatiletki one always has to pretend to be in the course of realizing. Not that I'm not always in the course of realizing something; it's just that what this turns out to be is never something that can be spelled out in advance. If it could be, it would already have been done.

Again, as concerns memoir, if one is going to do it, one had better be confident that one is already the sort of person of whom it might be wished that it be done. One should, ideally, be very old: when Richard Wollheim wrote towards the very end of his life that whenever he hears moral philosophers speaking of 'responsibility' he can't help but recall his introduction in early childhood to the art of using toilet paper, it is understood that he is telling us this, now, because he will die soon, and has nothing more to lose. On the contrary, he understands that the world has something to gain from his sharing of what, in the trash culture of talk shows and sitcoms, might be denounced as 'too much information'.

What does the world have to gain? From a sufficiently lucid and introspective thinker like Wollheim, one might at best hope for a key to understanding the motivations behind the life's oeuvre; when that oeuvre has been focused on art and psychoanalysis, it is not implausible either that in understanding the motivations, one can also gain fuller mastery of the content of the work itself.

But even if this is not what we get, it seems to me that the value of confessional writing lies precisely in the placeholder character of the first-person personal pronoun: the fact that it stands in generically for, potentially, anyone, is what makes it possible that in describing myself well, I am saying something that can be true and valuable for you as well. This is certainly not a new point; it is a variation on Terence's homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto, which would later serve as an important motto for Montaigne, and implicitly as the vindication for his carrying on as he does, page after page, about his favorite and least favorite condiments. The challenge of memoir is to find a way to express the things that are true of oneself, and only of oneself, that at the same time remains true to the Terentian spirit and does not lapse into the Jerry Springerian.

Still, I am not so old, and there is a sort of unspoken statute of limitations on most of the experiences and encounters I would like to address. In some cases, the statute will only run out with the deaths of the parties involved, and in other cases not even then. Because the statute is unspoken, however, it is flexible, and I have recently found that print media are a much more suitable forum for saying what I would really like to say than is the Internet. There, one can tell oneself, it will take a little more than a Google search for the potentially offended or overexposed to discover they have become part of the memoirist's project. Here (and in print, for the most part, to be honest), I remain perhaps excessively discrete, and this discretion itself contributes to the intense reliance upon the 'I'; there's no one else I'm allowed to write about!

This is too bad, for there are many interesting and universal matters I would like to write about, but can't, since in order to do so would require illustrations drawn from experience. In particular --to remain on, and return to, the onomastic theme that often comes up here-- I would like to be able to write about how pet names work, that is, the replacement names that one comes up with in intimate relationships, and that eventually shut out the other person's real name altogether, even coming to seem much more real than what is printed on ID's and baptism rolls. These names can be multiplied through their variations, through the addition of extra diminutive suffixes, through further replacements, based variously on semantics or on rhyme, that can only make secret sense, like some Cockney slang known only to two people in the world.

It's long seemed to me that this proliferation of secret names is the purest expression of love that is possible, and that love endures as long as the so-called Christian name of the other continues to strike one as a false name, as forced, as something to be avoided. It's confounding and amazing, the way this works. Perhaps someday I'll say something more about it.

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Who Will Be the Erasmus of the Internet?

I've been writing significantly less in this space recently, and feeling no small amount of remorse about that. The reason is simple: I have undertaken to write some mid-length pieces (on gay marriage, eating disorders in the middle ages, animal rights, and debt) that will appear, with some delay, in various print media.

This is a strange process. I write; I send what I've written by e-mail (there is a convention at present --how long will it last?-- of signifying the importance of a written text sent electronically by rendering it as a Word or pdf attachment, when in fact it would be far simpler to send it in the body of the e-mail: except that then it would look like, well, an e-mail); I wait again; I get suggestions for revision; I oblige in some cases, hold out in some others; I send it back; and I wait. I wait and wait. By the time I see it on the smelly fresh paper, I have forgotten that I should ever have wanted to say such a thing.

Why do I bother? I confess the temptation is always very great to simply post what I've written here and be done with it. In the past I've even found myself happy to have a piece rejected from a print venue: this permitted me to do what I had wanted to do in the first place, again, to simply post and be done with it. But the most recent month that I spent in New York convinced me that print is not as dead as I have been declaring it to be for the past few years. It looked dead from here, from Quebec, because the titles that matter are generally not available, or not easily or affordably available, in print form, so one ends up extracting what one can from their online presence, and in time comes to take that presence for the real thing, rather than a representation of it. But print is not dead, even if its social role has been greatly transformed. It is no longer for the dissemination of information; there are more effective means of doing that. Its function is rather that of filtering and conferral of legitimacy.

Yet it is only a contingent institutional fact that print is still involved in this legitimation process: it need not be, and probably will not be in the near future. The fact that it is at present surely has something to do with the wealth and clout that became concentrated in the hands of select publishers over a vastly greater span of time than the Internet has been around (let alone the blog).

I suspect that in the history of technology there are a number of parallel examples of a device gradually moving from a strictly functional to a more ceremonial use, without in the process declining in importance. On the contrary, we may suppose that, for example, coats-of-arms increased in importance when, after the Crusades, they evolved from signs telling you which knight was behind which suit of armor into the emblems of family lineages. Today, one must ceremonially have one's name in print in order to be an author, even if one may post as much as one likes online in order to be simply read.

But still, the séjour in New York did not change everything, and the question lingers: what, in this particular historical moment, ought one to be doing? Should one continue to seek access to the waning clout of the Gutenberg era's last generation of rulers? Or should one deny any need of their imprimatur, and instead just keep writing in this strange, new, un-Gutenbergian way, in the hope and faith that history will vindicate this turn?

The problem with this latter approach is that, as yet, there is little sign that people are coming around to thinking of the blog as a legitimate medium for the expression of important ideas, or for the beautiful expression of ideas important or un-. No one, or almost no one, is expecting the blog to evolve and flourish in the way that the printed book had clearly begun to do by the beginning of the 16th century. No one, or almost no one, seriously expects an Erasmus of the bloggers to emerge (though significantly it was a grey eminence of the 20th-century New York magazine world who put this question into my head a few days ago). As far as new writing is concerned (the digitization of old writing is another matter), the Internet is still seen as best suited for ephemera: for the repulsive daily news cycle, and for even more repulsive celebrity gossip.

Yet there are clear respects in which the evolution of the Internet is already in fact echoing that of printing in the Renaissance: as someone pointed out (I think it was Peter Burke), circa 1440, at the earliest appearance of the press in Europe, it certainly appeared as though this innovation would consolidate the total dominance of Latin. As it turned out, however, within some decades the real effect of the press would in fact be to facilitate the spread of 'vulgar' learning in Italian, French, German, etc. Similarly, in 1997 (the first time I saw an html-designed webpage), it certainly seemed as though this technology was going to secure the continued hegemony of English in the world: our own era's Latin. Now the Internet seems rather to be facilitating the rise of a new variety of polyglotism (I myself now often read news articles in languages I've never, strictly speaking, studied), where English by no means enjoys exclusive favor. If the linguistic blossoming of the Internet is already echoing that of the printing press in the 16th century, perhaps this is some sign of the possibility of a similar flourishing of genres, including the still-seemingly contradictory belle-lettristic blog.

Not to sound overly McLuhanian (he never impressed me all that much), but while the medium might not be the message itself, at present the medium certainly has the surprising power to deflate whatever is said through it. It is impossible to say anything timeless or canonizable in blog form, but it remains to be seen whether this is an inherent feature of the medium, or only a stage of its youth. And again, it remains for the producer of words to decide whether he prefers to attach himself to a moribund yet august tradition of the past, or fling himself into the tradition-less technology of an uncertain future.

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A Meaningful Relationship with a Catfish

Note, added September 7, 2011: If you are reading this, it is probably because you have clicked through from Mark P. Shea's blog, or from Rod Dreher's Twitter feed. Welcome! I see that these two writers view my little trifle about bestiality unsympathetically (Dreher, for example, called me a 'perv'), so I wanted to help contextualize it for you, dear reader. I am a philosopher by vocation, and this means most importantly that it is my job to investigate presuppositions. This vocation is not incompatible with religious faith, or even with saintliness. In a number of other posts, I have reflected on my own difficult and unsaintly, but by no means hostile, stance towards my own Catholic heritage and towards the problem of faith in my own adult life (go, e.g., here). I do not see myself as a member of a unified secular academic liberal front, but rather as an unfettered questioner in the tradition of, e.g., Diogenes the Cynic (whose rejection of the prevailing social order appears to have been historically closely linked to Christ's insistence, which I affirm, that 'my kingdom is not of this world' (John 18:36)). My principal purpose in this post was to argue against the standard line in the liberal academic circles I gather you despise, according to which there is an absolute and perfectly clear moral distinction between same-sex sex and interspecies sex. I take it rather that there is a good deal more that needs to be said about a pairing than simply an enumeration of the taxonomies and anatomies of the creatures involved before we can make a judgment as to its salutariness. This is not 'relativism'; this is just the disposition one is required to adopt in order to be able to understand, say, Weerasethakul's film, or any number of Greek myths, with any sophistication. In any event I was arguing as much against Corvino as against Santorum, and if you care to take the time to read attentively, you will notice that. As for bestiality itself, I personally think it's disgusting as a real-world phenomenon (though potentially beautiful as a mythological trope); but whatever my own affective response to it is, it poses interesting conceptual problems that it is very much my business to take on. --JS

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To the extent that philosophers have felt the need to argue against sex with animals at all, the most common strategy has been to appeal to the fact that these beings lack life projects, and thus that a sexual relation with them cannot amount to a shared life project with a human being. It is further presumed, without argument, that any morally praiseworthy sexual relation ought to be such a project.

Something like this account is often heard in response to the conservative complaint that to accept homosexuality in our society will lead quickly to an 'anything goes' atmosphere in which bestiality, among other perversions, thrives. As former congressman Rick Santorum worried, or pretended to worry, in 2003, once you've got man-on-man sex, why not man-on-dog? 

 In a 2005 article ("Homosexuality and the PIB Argument," Ethics 115 (April, 2005): 501-534), the philosopher John Corvino responds to Santorum's reasoning with a lengthy account of the various respects in which same-sex activity differs from what has come to be called 'PIB', that trifecta of unacceptable sexual relations: pedophilia, incest, and bestiality. Corvino would keep bestiality in its traditional place, while promoting same-sex relationships from their traditionally marginal place into a mainstream one. His argument is based largely on the claim that sexual contact with an animal cannot, by definition, contribute to a profound interpersonal interaction, while a same-sex, intraspecies relationship is as well-suited to do so as a heterosexual one.

 Corvino's point is correct, as far as it goes, but it presupposes that such profundity is an intrinsic feature of any morally salutary sexual contact. As Corvino himself acknowledges, it is the job of philosophers to investigate presuppositions.   

 There are in fact all kinds of sexual activity that one could argue are morally salutary, or at least not morally nugatory, but that nonetheless do not involve mutual growth and profound interpersonal communication. Consider Jan Švankmajer's film, Conspirators of Pleasure. This is the story of people who build elaborate masturbation machines, spending weeks or months collecting the requisite equipment, working away with artisanal devotion on the devices that will ultimately bring them sexual gratification. These machines count as projects, to say the least, and it follows that masturbation --a form of sexual activity that cannot by definition involve mutual growth or communication, since there is only one person involved-- is not necessarily just a sexual release. 

 

Potentially, one may approach bestiality in the same way in which Švankmajer’s characters approach masturbation, as a project and a passion. The rural adolescent with limited options is one thing; the protagonist of Edward Albee's play, The Goat --who falls in love with the titular animal after looking into its eyes and sensing, deep in his soul, that the beast understands him-- is quite another.  We may say Albee's character is warped, and leave it at that. But (and this is something Albee clearly wants us to consider) the same point has often been made about same-sex desire, and it is incumbent on any philosopher who takes on the topic of bestiality to provide an account of what it is about this particular class of entities that makes desiring them something only a warped person could do.

We might also consider Roberto Benigni's character in Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth, who recounts to a priest his past affairs, and how he decided to move on from a watermelon to a sheep after realizing that a meaningful sexual encounter involves a creature 'with a soul'. We might, finally, recall the stunning sex scene with a catfish in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's wonderful 2010 film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Here, the catfish is a reincarnation of a dead loved one, and the sex is an act of love if there ever was such a thing.

This is an act of love, moreover, that neither Santorum nor Corvino can fathom: they've got the wrong metaphysics for it. As Wittgenstein would say, they are telling themselves different things. The Buddhist metaphysics underlying Weerasethakul's tale is one according to which species boundaries need not be so rigorously maintained as in the Western tradition flowing from Aristotle, which eventually engulfs Christianity, and, finally, comes to define the secular ethics of the modern world in terms of which same-sex, intraspecies sexual activity has been compellingly defended.

 Now Uncle Boonmee is a work of magical realism, a fiction, and should not be taken as representing the sexual norms of any real culture. But the part of our imagination to which this fiction appeals is one that might also help us to maintain a greater flexibility when it comes to assessing the real-world beliefs and commitments of others, and the way these beliefs and commitments lead them to pursue projects that might seem peculiar, or even perverted, to us. And this in turn would enable those of us who are sure there is nothing wrong with same-sex relationships to respond to a Santorum-style slippery-slope argument about men-on-dogs with something more subtle than indignation. We could respond: maybe there is no categorical moral boundary between same-sex intraspecies sex, on the one hand, and cross-species sex on the other. But give me a richer, more imaginative description of the zoophile's motivations; give me a thicker description of what's going on. Assure me, moreover, that no sentient being will be harmed, and my conclusion about your worry might well turn out to be not, "That's silly, the two cases are completely different," but rather, "Maybe there is a connection. So what's your point?"

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Life and Death in the Orthodox World

I am not an Orthodox Christian. (I am not an orthodox anything.) Among my immediate blood ancestors there is Scandinavian Lutheranism, Southern Baptism, and Mormonism (I am not just any Smith, either). I wound up in a private Catholic school, and as a strategy to make me fit in better socially I was caused to be baptized at the age of 13 (the strategy didn't work). My mother re-married into the reform Jewish world, and now on that side of the family bar mitzvahs and Passover are as important as any other dates on the calendar. My father, I take it, is a libre penseur, but often mentions how impressed he was by Thomas Aquinas's version of the cosmological argument (that there must be a first cause).

To this not totally atypical history of American mongrelism it should be added that I have spent significant portions of my life in the Orthodox Christian world, and have had many important life experiences within it, involving both love and death. These experiences have at times caused me to respond, at least aesthetically and perhaps even 'spiritually', to Orthodox symbols: to say inwardly, at the sight of a blackened icon, something like, 'I get it'.

If I may attempt to distill some sort of essence out of Orthodox Christianity in just a few words, it is the variety of Christianity that still takes love and death seriously, that continues to have its hand in the way these are lived by individual members of the church, and to actively and minutely prescribe the ritual forms through which they are to be lived. The Enlightenment never happened, there is nothing about sola fide, and religion remains deeply entrenched in, some might say confined by, ritual.

The ritual keeps the realities of human life --particularly death-- constantly in view. Think of the display of Father Zosima's body in The Brothers Karamazov, and how disappointed Alyosha is when it begins to smell: this means he is not a saint after all. A curious way of making such a determination, but what it entails, among other things, is that dead bodies, and not just Zosima's, are left exposed long enough to figure out their prospects for sainthood. Corpses are put out there to reckon with, not hidden away and euphemized. In at least the Romanian variety of Orthodoxy, dead bodies are traditionally dug up by family members after 7 years in order to wash the bones. I've been told the smell is something awful. Death gets in your nose.

To the right is a photograph of Vitaliy Dergachev. It is the only photo I have of him, and most certainly the only one of him online. It was taken in my dorm room in Leningrad in 1990. You will notice my hair-sculpting products on the nightstand, alongside a stack of audiocassettes. He is looking at my train ticket to Moscow.

This Saturday will be the 20th anniversary of Vitaliy's death. On my reckoning, roughly half of the blame for this goes to alcohol, and roughly half to the hardline communist generals who, between 19 and 21 August, 1991, staged a coup d'état against the Gorbachev regime and sent all of Russia into a few days of, let us say, more chaos than usual. The generals' failure marked Yeltsin's unfortunate rise to power (he stood on a tank and looked brave and defiant for a moment), but that's all just politics and that's not what I'm here to write about.

I was a few days late in getting to Russia, thanks to the generals and their tanks in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad. I was waiting at the Warsaw airport for LOT to resume its service to Russia, watching what I could of CNN but mostly making things out from the Polish media. My original ticket would have had me there one day before Vitaliy died; instead, I arrived one day after. Vitaliy fell off the roof of his highrise apartment block. Apparently, he had been drunk, and was amusing himself by balancing on the thin balustrade. Again, it is not as though the putschists killed him directly. They did not shoot him in the head. But if I may engage in some amateur counterfactual history, I suspect that had there not been a coup, Vitaliy would not have been drunk and balancing on the balustrade. Blame who you will.

Anyway, he fell, I was late in getting there, and the first several days of my return to Russia were spent in a vortex of Russian mourning: performative, tragic, tiring. There were a number of hangers-on at Vitaliy's mother's apartment, other Leningrad urchins who, like Vitaliy, loved the Beatles far more than I would have tolerated from Western friends at that point in my life, who had been in and out of jail over the course of the 1980s for trading in bootlegged Beatles albums. There was a self-styled American writer named Winston hanging around, who was probably just some college kid. Vitaliy's mother was up and down, now serving tea and sweets with an ecstatic smile, now face down on the couch, heaving.

After three days or so there was a funeral, and needless to say it was open-casket. Vitaliy had been entirely reconstructed after his fall, and his face was covered with foundation make-up, hastily brushed on to hide the damage. I don't recall much of the service, except that the incense was overwhelming and the women were all putting on a good show of wailing.

What I remember more clearly is the pilgrimage to the cemetery afterwards: the hunchbacked gravediggers; how we all had to line up and kiss Vitaliy just before the coffin was put in the ground (I kissed his forehead, though others, including his mother, went straight for the lips); how we threw little religious trinkets and packs of cigarettes and poured vodka and beer into the coffin just before the lid was closed for good; how we all helped to throw dirt on top of the coffin before the hunchbacks came and finished the job. Sometimes, as I'm walking down the aisle of Whole Foods or something stupid like that, I recall in a flash that I was once involved in such a thing, and it is hard like death to carry on.

Once I was married in the Romanian Orthodox church. While Catholics and at least neo-Protestants like to get married in big flashy palaces (whether of the cathedral or the mega-church variety), the Orthodox seek out the most humble places of workship they can find. Now I was allowed to be involved in all of this without converting to Orthodoxy because I was, so it was emphasized at the time, a Catholic, and in at least this region of the Orthodox world there was some ancient entente with the Catholics that enabled cross-marriage. So there I was getting married in what Californian mega-church-goers would consider a clapboard shack, would associate architecturally with the religion of their own hillbilly ancestors. And yet this shack was actively sought out, and it was deemed pure, and utterly Christian, because primitive. Perhaps the limit case of this primitiveness is a holy site near the Agapia Monastery in northeastern Romania. It is a cave, and it was once the dwelling place of the venerable Mother Theodora of Sihla, who lived there for decades, wrapping her hair around her body instead of wearing clothes, talking to the animals. You can go there today and pray before icons and light candles in the dim glow beneath two slabs of incalculably many tons of rock: slabs leaning against one another, maintaining a tall sliver between them that stands across the centuries. Depending on how the candles flicker, you can sometimes make out the dark faces (not so much chiaroscuro as oscuroscuro) of icons painted directly into the cave walls, much as at Lascaux some millennia earlier.

Once I arrived at the end of a service at a church in Athens. Communion had already been taken, and the priest was on his way out. Some underlings brought the leftover consecrated bread out to the entrance of the church and the beggars and cripples of Athens dug in like pigeons. This was transubstantiated bread, mind you, supposedly the body of Christ. Now it always seemed to me that in Western churches the communion wafer was not really bread any more than it was really Christ: to take it was not just to eat Christ symbolically, but also to eat symbolically (how many calories do you think an Anglican wafer has?). The Athenian poor were at least getting something out of this ceremony, I thought: bread. This was a proper, living mystery. There could be no doubt but that transubstantiation had occurred.

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August in Brooklyn

It is early August, 2011. Just last week I became a Canadian citizen, and two days later I turned 39. Two days after that I had already obtained my Canadian passport (a rush job) and I departed forthwith for Park Slope (well, via Princeton, but that part of the story doesn't matter). I sublet my three bedroom apartment in the Plateau of Montreal, only to hand over all of the money I got from that, every last cent of it, for a closet-sized cell, with a sad light bulb hanging from a wire from the ceiling, in a three-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. This is the only city in the world for which, at this point, I would willingly tolerate such a demotion.

And the constant question is: Why? For personal reasons, I had to get out of Montreal right away. I had an anywhere-but-here imperative (I also put out feelers in Berlin, and checked ticket prices on Expedia to Curaçao, Windhoek, and Addis Ababa), but I ended up here (note the shift in indexicals). I ended up having to worry about toothpaste traces in the sink, the position of the toilet seat after use, and where to put my physical dimensions in order to simply write. And to write, in the end, is what I am here to do, is what I am anywhere to do. This is a process that ordinarily should not be seen. My habits are odd, and I mean odd even by authorial standards. I like to write with a head of raw broccoli on the desk, and to gnaw away at it between moments of inspiration. I talk to myself, and in tongues (or so it may appear: fragments of Sanskrit noun declensions, bits of Lermontov, like the poem about the lonely sail that shows white-- there is a verb in Russian for 'showing white', белеть, something that we do not usually think of as an action or event at all).

So why am I going through with all of this? A few years ago I wrote in this space that I would by now be thoroughly unwelcome in Brooklyn (Williamsburg, to be precise), that I was now a family man, a career man, that I'd been spotted wearing Dockers and that it was all really too late for me. But things change, and one turns out to not be as old as one had thought. The train of Chronos stops for no man, but one is free to adjust the seating along the way. So I found myself newly independent, ridiculously independent, in possession of a small sum of money, and increasingly unable to deny the nagging voice in my head, which dictates to me that my generally torrential output of academic writing is not quite doing it for me, that I need, simply need, to work in other genres as well. There is of course the blog (I am working in another genre even as I announce my need to do so). But for now anyway the blog is too lowly, too much an outgrowth of the fanzine, or too anchored to its role as an auxiliary to the godawful evanescent news cycle.

So I came to the place where, I sensed, this overflow of words, words that are going to come out one way or other, might be most productively channeled. I have been here for three days and my presentiment is already turning out to have been well founded. It's a bit embarassing to have to do this. Zadie Smith (no relation) wrote somewhere that the last thing someone who writes should do is to worry about réseautage; if you want to write, just sit down and write: that's what produces writing. But I believe she wrote this after she had written White Teeth, and I assume we know what White Teeth is at all because, by ambition or by inheritance, she had talked to the right people prior to its publication. There may be a Mongolian counterpart to White Teeth sitting in notebooks in some poor Mongolian woman's yurt; but you'll never hear about it.

So yes, this is a month of réseautage, a concept I hate so much I can't bring myself to say it in English, even if it is precisely what I'm doing. I'm doing it in particular from a base in Park Slope, which it turns out, is an odd choice. It is certainly no Williamsburg. My psychogeography of Brooklyn was so poor when I arrived that I assumed I would be seeing nothing but Hasidim and those young skinny people with the skinny bicycles (whatever they're called; what the hell do I know?). In fact I am seeing mostly lesbian couples with strollers. But whatever. It's still a New York address, and I can say in my SMSs and my e-mails: I'm here in the city for a month if you want to meet up to talk over that idea. And this works better than: I'm up in Montreal but perhaps we can hammer out some ideas by e-mail. D'you have Skype set up? Montreal is still a rather more strategic location than Cincinnati, where I once found myself, but let's be honest (and I apologize to my adoptive home country): it is no global center; pretty much anything that happens there will remain of merely regional consequence.

So that's what I'm doing here this month. I'm also finishing a translation of Georg Ernst Stahl'a anti-Leibnizian tirade, the Negotium otiosum of 1720, writing a review for the Chronicle of Higher Education about a book about bears, tying up loose ends on various articles and volume chapters I have floating around out there, working on my Sanskrit. All of this takes about three hours per day. The rest of the time I am either meeting with people (mostly people, I confess, who have something I want), or I am writing the thing that has no anchor either in the world of the blog or the world of the university, which (and this is all I'll say about it for now) is called The Bestiary.

Safe Words

The first thing you need to understand about the BDSM community is that we are committed to one thing above all: mutual respect. We respect each other's kinks, and we seek to help one another to realize our fantasies.

Some people have fantasies of being dominated, and those of us who help them to realize these fantasies are not in the end looking to hurt them, or to abuse them, but only to help them. It might look cruel from the outside, but in the end it's all about respect (and mutual pleasure!).

Some in the community even affirm their commitment to mutual respect by taking a solemn vow. This is what my partner and I did early in our relationship (going strong since 2002). I said, "Laurence, I hereby swear to respect the integrity of your person, to respect your will, and your inherent right to realize your fantasies, and I promise to help you to realize them without harming or abusing you." And he said, "Russell," and then went on to recite the same little speech.

A central part of this commitment to mutual respect is the choice of what are called 'safe words': when the domination becomes too severe, when the fantasy pleasure begins to cross over into real displeasure, the submissive is able to call a halt to the session by exclaiming a word that has been agreed upon in advance, such as usufruct or plutonium, which signals that he has had enough, that the fun is over and he needs to be released.

For a long time this arrangement worked very well for us. I would have him gagged and bound, joyfully raising welts on his buttocks with a bushel of birch twigs, when suddenlly he would mutter through the bandana in his mouth: baleen! Some other day it would be corn pone, or carpetbagger, or drumlin, or orange roughie, but the message always came through loud and clear: Laurence couldn't take it anymore. Laurence had had enough. Cease and desist, Russell. It's about respect.

In 2005 Laurence and I began planning our grand tour of the south of France. He got into his head that he was going to learn French, even though he'd always been terrible at languages and never got beyond the most basic phrases about el baño and so on. Around the time we began planning, we reached an undeniable low in our sex life together. Nothing seemed to do the trick. He was crying out gabardine or pinafore or pinniped or whatever the damned safe word was for the night before I'd even begun tightening the clamps! He just wanted to be done with it so he could get back to reading Foreign Policy (especially when Colin Powell had a featured article).

Things were looking irreparably dreary, until one day Laurence had a breakthrough: what if, he said, we were to kink things up a bit by having a fake safe word that I could cry out and that you coud pretend not to respect? Would that be disrespecting me, or would that be more respectful kink? Sounds good to me, I said. As long as we have a real safe word that continues to bring about the desired result, then why not see what it's like to experience the playful disrespect of the safe-word rule?

For the dummy safe words we agreed on a few French vocabulary items that Laurence was having trouble memorizing; for the real, overriding, torture-annulling term, we settled on glyptodont.

What a session! You should have seen Laurence crying out those French words to no avail, desperately running through his entire vocabulary lesson for the week as I continued to twist his balls: nonobstant! auparavant! dorénavant! jadis! Nothing did the trick! With each word he offered up, he seemed to descend to a new depth of ecstatic, primal, unspeakable pleasure. There was no mention of glyptodonts at all that night.

By the time we pretty much exhausted the Petit Robert (which I had kept since college), Laurence had come up with a new plan. Now, rather than designating individual lexical items as our faux safe words, his dummy pleas would consist in entire stanzas of classical French poetry. And in order to ensure that he learned his poems comme il faut, the new twist on the old safe-word rule, we agreed, was that there could be no mention of hylomorphism or zoophyte until the entire stanza had been properly recited. Such a twist would have been thoroughly condemned by our friends in the community, since at least until the end of a successful recitation it left the submissive with no way out. But a bit of transgression between consenting adults never killed anyone. And anyway, we told ourselves, transgression is what BDSM is all about.

For our first session governed by these new rules, the stanza was the first bit of Paul Verlaine's 'Marine', from the Poèmes saturniens of 1866, and the safe word was camelopardus. That night, Laurence gave the most stunning oration as I bunched his foreskin into a knot:

L’Océan sonore
Palpite sous l’œil
De la lune en deuil
Et palpite encore.

And again, no mention at all of camelopardus.

For the next session (which took place a good many days later; I admit my work as county coroner often sends me into long spells of erotic dormancy), Laurence promised to recite a much more lengthy bit of the Poèmes saturniens, the so-called 'Effet de nuit' segment, before invoking the designated safe word (stagflation). And that night I was treated to the most elegant recitation: 

La nuit. La pluie. Un ciel blafard que déchiquette
De flèches et de tours à jour la silhouette
D'une ville gothique éteinte au lointain gris.
La plaine. Un gibet plein de pendus rabougris
Secoués par le bec avide des corneilles
Et dansant dans l'air noir des gigues nonpareilles,
Tandis que leurs pieds sont la pâture des loups.
Quelques buissons d'épine épars, et quelque houx
Dressant l'horreur de leur feuillage à droite, à gauche,
Sur le fuligineux fouillis d'un fond d'ébauche.
Et puis, autour de trois livides prisonniers
Qui vont pieds nus, un gros de hauts pertuisaniers
En marche, et leurs fers droits, comme des fers de herse,
Luisent à contre-sens des lances de l'averse.

I confess this went on for so long, and I was still so worn out from the afternoon's autopsy, that I dispensed with all pretense of dominance and just sat back and listened. Laurence didn't seem to mind.

We took our trip to France, and accumulated all the pleasant memories one could hope for. But Laurence had changed, that much was certain. At one point he dragged me to some out of the way used-book dealer in Montpellier, which wasn't even on our itinerary and didn't have a beach. I was visibly frustrated, but he insisted, having called all the bookshops of Languedoc-Rousillon, that this was the only place in the region that had what he was looking for. And imagine my surprise when, with a sort of insider wink, the crusty old dealer saw him coming and immediately got out the keys to the glass case that held his prized possession: an original, 1534 edition of Gargantua. Laurence shelled out 40,000 euros right there, and during the whole transaction kept giddily proclaiming that this was to be the 'holy scripture' of safe words. I didn't have the right to complain; Laurence and I both made good money, and we had an agreement that we would each retain independence in our own financial decisions. 

On the way out, Laurence spotted an old paperback, and the dealer happily let him take it for free. It was an English book by some 20th-century philosopher of language named J. P. Austin (or was it J. R.?). It was called, if I remember correctly, How to Do Stuff with Words.

So after getting back to Tulsa for the next several months our sessions consisted in Laurence's Rabelaisian recitations, in perfect Renaissance French, and even with spot-on imitations of 16th-century Occitan dialect. He recounted the story of some great feast or other, or of some obese giant caressing his groin with the head of a duck. I just sat back and listened to it all, without even bothering to specify a 'real' English safe word. This was right at the time of the horrible Wal-Mart slayings, and to be honest spending my long work-days with the mutilated corpses of the victims was hardly helping my libido. 

Things went on like this for what seemed like an eternity, until one day Laurence announced that all this stuff about overeating and flatulence was 'a real turn-off'. He'd had it with the Renaissance, he said, and was now ready to move on. To Georges Perec. He particularly liked La Disparition, Perec's novel written entirely without the letter e. He said that its absence really heightened the sexual tension. When he just couldn't take it anymore, he would begin to blurt out the epigrams that Perec included as an appendix to the novel, which rather than eliminating e featured it as the only vowel. The one in Latin sent him into rapturous throes:

E servem lex est, legemque tenere necesse est? Spes certe nec mens, me referente, deest; sed lege, et ecce even nentemve gregemve tenentem. Perlege, nec me res edere rere leves. 

From Perec's OuLiPo circle Laurence acquired an appreciation for linguistic games. I don't recall who it was exactly, but one of them was keen on so-called 'piems', that is, poems that encode the value of pi through words that contain a number of letters corresponding to the digits of the mathematical constant's infinite decimal points. Of course, there is no infinitely long piem, but some have been composed that are pretty lengthy indeed.

Rather than relying on someone elses pietic composition, Laurence decided he would create his own. And so one night, in our first session after a very long time (and countless Wal-Mart autopsies), I was treated to the results of his oulipian endeavor:

Rus, I have a thing certainly...

he began, verging toward sheer nonsense as he rattled off his own mathematical mnemonic. I was mildly touched that the whole thing was addressed to me, even if I've never gone by 'Russ', and even if, if I did, it would have two s's and not one.

Anyway, at some point Laurence got into his head that piems are a pathetic crutch for weak minds, and that the only real way to go about mastering pi is through the numbers themselves. He said numbers were the purest and most potent of safe words, since they had no outside object to which they corresponded (I responded that that depends on what your ontology is, but he had already decided on the matter). Laurence had read about a Chinese man who in 2006 recited pi out to 68,000 digits, and he became determined to beat that record. Lu Chao's trick, he explained, was to accentuate every occurrence of the number 9 in the decimal series. This might work well in Chinese, Laurence said, but I'm going to put the accent on the 1's. Why 1's?, I asked, and Laurence said something about these being the purest of numbers. 

We had a session just tonight. In fact, Laurence is still having a session. I can hear him counting off blocks of decimals. 4-6-5-4-9-5-8-5-3-7... and here comes the Feynman Point, which is sure to give him a little charge (a brief, false sense that the series is working itself out into something rational?): 4-9-9-9-9-9-9-(oh yeah)-8-(damn!)-3-7...

I left the room to check my e-mail after a few thousand decimal points. His eyes were closed. He didn't seem to mind. I think he had an erection, but who's even checking at this point?

Laurence, I believe, has found his own sort of ecstasy. Entranced for a while by language, he  has kicked out that crutch and moved on to numbers, the very purest ideas one can take before the mind (so he says). Pi is a magical number (he says): it defines the properties of the circle, that most perfect of shapes (Laurence), yet it has no end. It thus injects infinity into the perfect finite objects of our sensory perception (L.), and the more extensively one comes to know it, the closer one comes to unravelling the mystery of the universe (guess who).

This is certainly not where we started out so long ago, and I never could have imagined that this is where we would end up. But that's the thing about our community. It's all about helping each other to realize our fantasies. It's all about respect.

--

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Heinrich Heine, from the Buch der Lieder (1827)

Die Heimkehr

LXXII

Und bist du erst mein ehlich Weib,
Dann bist du zu beneiden,
Dann lebst du in lauter Zeitvertreib,
In lauter Pläsier und Freuden.

Und wenn du schiltst und wenn du tobst,
Ich werd es geduldig leiden;
Doch wenn du meine Verse nicht lobst,
Laß ich mich von dir scheiden.

*

If you shall be my faithful wife
Then fortune on you shines.
You'll live a gay and carefree life
Of leisurely pastimes.

And if you scold and if you rave
I'll abide it all with pleasure.
But if my poems you will not praise
Then let us split forever.

Quaestiones Domitianae

How did the topic of weather come to signal the most banal and everyday of interactions, while that of time continues to have some philosophical weight to it? The two are conceptually related after all (if we look back in history far enough; back before measurement), and in many languages remain lexically identical.

What if death involved a simple, sudden, traceless disappearance of the body, rather than a rotting, ghoulish corpse in need of disposal? What sort of things would we say about it? Would this affect our tendency to believe in an afterlife?

What if dying involved not pain and suffering, as it usually does, but rather a physical sensation of orgasm-like pleasure? What sort of things would we say about death then?

What if there were no animals, but only humans and plants? What would it be like to live without an extended community of beings that are like us but not us?

Here is a guest-quaestio, from Louis Agassiz: What if the lobster were the only articulate (i.e., exoskeletal) animal in existence? Could we then say that its species were the sole member of a genus, an order, a family, and other higher-order taxa that in this world are represented by several articulate species? How would we know? (see Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 1851).

And what is it that articulacy in Agassiz's sense, and articulacy in our sense, have in common, that they should be called by the same name?

We spend one third of our lives in thrall to florid hallucinations. We find this slightly embarrassing, and when we wake up we rush to assure ourselves and others that all that was just an aberration, and all this is what matters. Anyone who tries to take all that on, as intrinsically interesting, is destined to occupy a position at the fringe of acceptable discourse. (Freud is the most acceptable, and he's not all that acceptable.) What might we be missing in our sidelining of dreams?

What is really wrong, after all, with ad hominem arguments? How can these be sharply distinguished from arguments that are de hominibus, that is, arguments that legitimately implicate the character of the person we are arguing against?

What is it that our enjoyment of recorded music replaces? We know every micro-glitch and every barely perceptible throat-twitch of our favorite singers in the authoritative recordings of their songs. We have catalogues in our heads, and when we hear recordings from the canon we open that head catalogue and we find there a recording that is no less verisimilar, no less fidèle, than the grooves on any record. What is that catalogue of cultural experience that people used to build up over the course of their lives? Perhaps when they heard this little bump in a rhythmically related story they were about to hear that little conventional epithet? But each time, it had to have been slightly different; a story cannot be as faithful to earlier iterations as a recording. Where then does our ability to perfectly anticipate all the qualities of a perfect repetition come from? I would carry on in this vein, but this is already turning into more of an essay than a mere quaestio domitiana.

What is it that desire and charity have in common, that they should be called by the same name?

Les Bisous

I get some of my best writing done at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where I now sit.

I could use my time here otherwise; I could learn the layout of the place, something that after countless visits remains entirely mysterious to me. I've made out at least a vague resemblance to some coiled viper that has, at intervals, swallowed several large rodents, causing it to bulge in spots and to narrow in others. The whole snake surrounds a mass of concrete curly-queues, traffic roundabouts at various elevations, each serving its own class of vehicle. Everything is concrete: concrete slabs of ceiling supported on concrete pillars, concrete ramps blocked off by concrete barriers. The ghost of General de Gaulle himself haunts this grey mess. It sings of French third-way-ism, flimsy viennoiseries at certain narrowings along the viper's vertebrae, sad succursales of the Hippopotamus chain at others; the shells of abandoned Minitel cabins: all the sagging, unsustainable sadness of a half-Soviet hybrid. It looks to be on the verge of collapse, and indeed great chunks of it have collapsed. Scrap metal litters the runways and has been known to trip up Concordes. The arrivals screens have been seen to report as retardé what they might more accurately have described as disparu.

I sit and stare at my computer screen and write because, in truth, this place terrifies me.

But I'm sitting here, obviously, because I've been going around France again, which means also going around exchanging bisous. This is problematic for me, as I am an American, and even among Americans am exceptionally awkward when it comes to physical contact. But over the years I've practiced, and have now reached the point where I am able to kiss strange cheeks with passable elegance.

But why all this kissing, anyway?

Something needs to be done to inaugurate social interaction. There must be some signalling of a transition from each doing his or her own thing, to each participating in a shared moment. The Japanese mark this transition by a subtle bow, Americans by a handshake (or sometimes a half-assed 'hug', a concept to which I'll return shortly); bonobos mark it by genital displays. But the merely visual presentation of the Japanese does not seem transformative enough, and in the bonobos' case it seems to misread the character of the impending interaction (or at least to read it in a way that human beings would rather not acknowledge too soon). The American handshake is indissociably linked to commercial interests, to deal-making and to vulgar Mammonism. One needs, as the Europeans have understood, to get the lips involved, to make a little suction noise that announces that two human bodies are in the same place doing the same thing, in order to set a properly human encounter in motion.

Some etymological considerations. The verb 'to kiss' in many languages is formed by onomatopoeia. In Sanskrit the verbal root is chumb- (giving us the lovely syllabic redoubling of the third-person singular perfect form: chuchumba, 'she kissed'). 'Kiss' and 'küssen' hear the sound differently than their Indo-European ancestor, but somehow no less accurately. When the verb is not onomatopoeic, it often emerges from a semantic cluster that is even more revealing than the natural sound of a kiss. Thus the Russian tselovat' is connected to tsel', which is to say 'target'. And isn't that what kiss-compressed lips in fact are? Isn't that what bodily orifices are?

It is the orifical nature of the kiss that scares the Americans and the Japanese away, and that also inevitably associates it with other possibilities of greater consequence. Of excessive consequence for some is that sort of kiss that involves the meeting of two parties' lips. Think of the caricatured American puritan in Alain Resnais' wonderfully titled Pas sur la bouche --which is in turn an ecranization of some early-20th-century operetta-- who will permit labio-buccal contact with the sundry, implausibly desirous demoiselles, but not labio-labial. The association with greater possibilities is clear in French from the (presumably recent) semantic split between the noun baiser and the verb baiser. You can innocently give someone un baiser (n., masc.), but if you offer to baiser (v., inf.) them, you had better be prepared either to passer à l'acte or to endure a vigorous slap. In Spanish the verb besar retains the innocence of the French noun, though if your point of access to the Italic tongues is French, then that Schlager staple 'Besame mucho' will always sound rather less innocent than it should.

As I said, I've attained a certain elegance in the performance of introductory baisers --which perhaps we should keep diminutivizing as bisous in order to avoid any ambiguity--, though certain difficulties remain in respect of their application. I have to be cautious, for when I give them, I give them right. There will be no air-kisses, the two parties silently agreeing to remain strangers; nor will there be any bovine-materteral mmmuhs. There will be a sound, a proper high-pitched sucking sound, there will be mutual labio-buccal contact, and it will happen on both sides of each party's face. There will be no Mediterranean excess, no repetition of the bi-cheekal tour a second or third time, no grabbing of the back of the other's head, no tears.

That's the rough choreography of it. But when, precisely, will it happen? This question would be easy to answer if all meetings were with individual European women of roughly the same age and social status as I. But the problem is that one often (and often regrettably) meets groups, mixed company, some of whose members appear right away as appropriate tseli, others of whom one would rather avoid, and others still whom one must avoid whether one would rather or not.

The first rule is this: I will not exchange bisous with other men. There can be five-way, ten-way inter-sex and same-sex kissing going on, but I will stick to my rule: bisous for the women, handshakes for the men (or fraternal American bear-hugs for old friends: awkward but necessary). For the most part, the handshake reflects exactly the amount of intimacy I hope to have with men: practical intimacy, exchange of goods and services. If it is an exchange of ideas that I am after, then the kiss hardly seems initiatory to that either. There is in fact only one man in this world with whom I habitually exchange bisous upon meeting and parting, and in this particular case I think it has something to do with his religion. It symbolizes something transcendental and divine for him, though from my side it's like kissing sandpaper, and I give thanks to (his) God that he's the only one.

If there is any possible perception of an imbalance of power between me and the woman in question, I avoid the bisous, even in a group where these are going around freely. If the woman is older than I am and of a higher status, then I generally let her initiate it, and if she does I throw myself gladly into the gesture. No degree of desiccation, no striation or deathly pallidity, can repel me. As long as she is European, noblesse oblige.

The most awkward of all possible combinations is the one I call 'the cosmopolitan': when I find myself in the mixed company of Europeans and Americans. Now nothing would be more affected, more pompous and artificial, than for two Americans to exchange bisous à la française. We just don't do it. When we were teenagers we exchanged dumb diagonal hugs, one arm over the other's shoulder, the other arm beneath the armpit and towards the middle of the back; perfunctory, insincere, the gestural equivalent of 'How's it going?' And now everyone is all grown up, and everyone is someone else's 'partner' (are they shaking hands?), and we all know deep down there's no point in preserving this adolescent ritual that never had any significance to begin with, and certainly holds no promise now.

Allow me to denounce the hug a while longer. It is significant that one of the alternative ways to speak of kissing in French is the verb embrasser, which is in its composition identical to the German umarmen, i.e., 'to hug'. Both verbs, when broken down, literally mean 'to en-arm', yet while the German word signifies exactly what it says, the French is a euphemism for something else, and indeed something more. Could this be a case of uncharacteristic Gallic prudishness? It is likely that embrasser means something more than what it says for the same reason the verb baiser does: 'to hug' means to kiss and 'to kiss' means to fuck. There is a general inflationary process going on here, one that probably has more to do with the art of understatement than with pudicity. The act of en-arming itself doesn't register in the French lexicon at all (except for the negligible étreinte, which connotes constraint or compulsion as much as it does embracing).

Anyway, the question remains: what to do when, going down a line of same- or senior-status, coeval or elder European women, doing the sincere, physical, hopeful, two-cheek thing, all of a sudden I land upon a concitoyenne, an amerikanka, a countrywoman who knows I'm American and knows I know she's American? I've just kissed a gauntlet of Europeans. What am I supposed to do now, raise my hand meekly and say 'hi'? Revert back to adolescence and give a mere hug? Acknowledge the awkwardness of the situation and mutter 'the hell with it, let's just pretend for a moment'? Or am I to put on a show, and allow myself to cut that most ridiculous figure: the American who pretends he is not one? I usually go for one of the last two options, and am never comfortable afterwards. My lips tingle with after-awkwardness the way a child's butt tingles with fore-pain when it knows it's in for a spanking (in fact, mine still does, decades after any real possibility of such a response, when I've been caught doing something wrong).

All my blood relations are American, so fortunately I do not have to kiss them. Diogenes cautioned against overuse of slippery-slope arguments by facetiously inferring that to touch one's mother's foot is already to commit incest, since from there everything else differs only by degree. But I think there is really something to this argument, at least if bisous are substituted for digito-podal contact. And this is the very same thing that makes non-familial, intercontinental bisous such a perfect gesture: they are a slippery slope, an opening-up through nothing more than an opening, to another human being, with all the hope and danger that implies.

Roissy-en-France, May 22, 2011.

Reading Ada, or Ardor

I am only now realizing the extent to which I was indirectly caused to buy into the party line as concerns Vladimir Nabokov. When I say 'party line' I mean nothing other than the Soviet Communist Party, which of course took his work to fall entirely outside of anything that might be considered a part of the history of Russian literature. He was a White Russian, an aesthete, and a bit of a pervert. What's more, he wrote mostly in English. And this was not as when, say, a grudgingly exiled Brodsky makes forays into English; this was a full métamorphose américaine, as he described it at some point. For Nabokov, English had the phonetics and the vocabulary to make it --again, in his words-- the most valuable linguistic treasure at his disposition.

So when I was a student of Russian literature Nabokov was certainly not on the list of required reading. They had us reading Sholokhov and Gorky and crap like that just because, at least at the time, the syllabi of American university courses on Russian literature continued to echo the Soviet conception of the canon. So we had the most dreary and predictable sotsrealizm, stuff that may be of interest to the political historian but with absolutely no value as literature, rather than the most talented Russian author of the 20th century, whose language of choice was only one, I think relatively minor, reason for his exclusion.

It strikes me now that in fact Nabokov was drawing more on the richness of the Russian language when he was writing in English than the party-sanctioned authors were when they were writing directly in Russian. Ada, or Ardor, in particular, is a trilingual novel (French being the third, and certainly lesser of the three components), and to say that it was written in English doesn't really do justice to Nabokov's project. It was written through English, mostly, but there would be nothing left of the endeavor if the Russian and French vocabulary, along with the interlinguistic jeux de mots that straddle more than one of the three languages, were to be eliminated. It is through English, but it is about the way different natural languages connect up or fail to connect up with one another. It is about the way language limits expression, and it is an attempt to push through those limits.

One thing Nabokov makes me think is this: it is ridiculous that I, myself, should continue to attempt to string words together at all. I can't even tell a story, but to write an entire novel in which every single word seems simultaneously to be playing the role of vehicle for moving the narrative along as well as being exquisitely selected for its poetic qualities and its multiple layers of signification: that's quite as far beyond my reach as advanced mathematics.

There is a well-known, perhaps apocryphal story of the advice given by Nabokov to a Cornell student who sought tips on how to become a good writer. Learn the names of trees, Nabokov said. This makes me think that Nabokov is writing through English, but that what he's really after is something like what in the early modern period was conceived as 'the Adamic language': the original, perfect system of words, words that zapped right into the essences of the things they named. The cross-linguistic play of a novel like Ada is a sort of exploration, to see which corrupted language brings us closer to the original Adamic one. If there is one thing that Nabokov loves more than language it's the world itself: the proliferation of instances of nature's infinite variety of kinds. As, for example, butterflies.

Working back to the world through the perfection of language: that's real realism for you, and I would be willing to impose it, if I could, as the party line for literature.

But of course in Nabokov there is also the famous work of synaesthesia, which doesn't seek the real names of things, but instead makes private connections between things, connections that we can't expect other people to see. We all do this, most of us more in childhood than later on (I still place Thursday, the color brown, and the state of Tennessee in the same private drawer), but Nabokov cultivated it and built complex worlds out of it throughout his life (coding colors with letters, for example). This seems impossible to square with the realism I just identified, but I think Nabokov may have believed that he, himself, was getting at the genuine correspondences between things, that his private synaesthesia was at the same time a recovery of the Adamic language. Again, the multilingualism of the project is just part of the method of recovering the 'right' word through cross-linguistic comparison. Repeatedly, Nabokov offers examples of the process of corruption in action, of the rate of drift from the Adamic essences of things as we move carelessly from one language to the other (rather than with care, as he moves). Thus for example he has Ada say:

--the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into 'the sky's bed' instead of 'bed ceiler.' But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d'or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d'eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine 'care of the water' -- although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, maybubble, and many other nicknames associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.

I suppose that Nabokov saw Russian very differently than I do; for him, Russian, English, and French were familiar already in the crèche; for me, they are the impossible objects of an adult learner's struggling. They are too late. 

Cross-linguistic playfulness with Russian seems particularly difficult to me because Russian continues to appear as an entirely closed system. Even to see it transliterated into the Latin alphabet is to see something that ought not exist, an impossible adaptation. One of the jokes of Ada, which takes place in another possible world that is mostly like ours except with respect to certain of its geographical, chronological, and linguistic features, is that the Cyrillic alphabet was abandoned at some earlier point in history, and now Russian speakers are unable to so much as read old texts with the backwards 'R's and the letters that look like beetles, such as the one that begins the very word for beetle in Russian: Жук.

The transliteration scheme of this fictional Latinized Russian is based on English orthography; thus, я хочу comes out as 'ya hochu', rather than as 'ja hotschu', as it would be in a German-based system, or 'ia hotchou', as it would be if one's starting point were French (and there's no good way of handling the aspiration there, so for all intents and purposes one may as well write 'ia otchou').

Russian, I mean to say, cannot be transliterated, at least not without anchoring it to some other language that can have no claim to authority over an unrelated East Slavic tongue. But to the extent that it is not transliterated, it cannot really be made to play with English or French. Nabokov does his best, but I wonder if he had any sense of this barrier to cross-fertility, or whether it's just my own problem.

Perhaps my favorite Anglo-Russian play on words, as being the most successful, involves the name of the title character, which in the nominative case (Ada)  is identical to the genitive of the word, a masculine noun, for 'hell' (ad). One possibility that Nabokov declines to pursue here arises from the fact that ad also has an unusual ending in the prepositional case, an -u rather than the more usual -e. Thus 'in hell' is v adu, which as it happens is identical to the accusative construction v Adu, which is to say, 'into Ada'.

I don't know what work this might have done for Nabokov in the novel, but he could have made it work if he wanted to.

Let me finish with a long and stunning sentence that to my mind summarizes all of the points I've been making here. In it, Nabokov urges the return to nature's richness through the mastery of language, he moves through several languages, and the only moments at which this motion seems to stall are, I think, at those clunkily, Anglocentrically transliterated fragments of Russian:

The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact-- that among these billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes.

On Orgasm and Irritability

I recently came across a website ridiculing undergraduates for turning in written work in which they had conflated the words 'organism' and 'orgasm'. But this might not have been so much the usual sign of subliteracy, nor even a Freudian slip (if ever such a thing existed); it might, just might, instead have been a sign of incredible erudition.

In Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's La Philosophie zoologique of 1809, the latter term appears to be taken as more or less synonymous with the former. Chapter 4 of the treatise, entitled 'Of Orgasm and Irritability', defines orgasm as "the state preserved by the internal, soft parts of animals insofar as they are alive." Further on he describes it as sensibilité latente, and thus as a notion that is complementary to irritabilité, which is the capacity of the body to sense and react to external stimuli.

'Orgasm' in today's sense is something like a reduction of what Lamarck meant to only its most extreme instance. Somewhere also I remember Leibniz saying earlier, in the 1670s, that the reproductive act in animals is the summum or culmination of its existence as a sensitive being, and a sensitive being is just what an animal is in its very essence. So the idea is that the sensation involved in reproduction is the ultimate expression of what it is that an animal does qua animal. So it is not at all hard to see how we slide from Lamarck's orgasme to our orgasm(s).

Interestingly, as I and others have argued in more scholarly spaces, a similar shift happens in the history of the term 'organism', which starts out describing an abstract state, like Leninism or Judaism, and ends up being a count noun that can easily be rendered in the plural. One might of course speak of 'multiple Leninisms', but one has to strain to do so, whereas multiple organisms or orgasms are easily tallied.

Anyhow, I don't know when the semantic shift occurs precisely, and would be pleased to learn some more details. I expect the occurrence of Lamarck's technical term in the title of this post will, given the way search engines work, garner more readers for it than I am used to having. But alas these will probably not be readers interested in helping me to fill in gaps in my knowledge of the history of science. 

A Cyber-Attack!

It has come to our attention that late last night jehsmith.com was violently hacked, perhaps by Russian mobsters, perhaps by Anonymous, we just don't know. What we can say is that this criminal operation left a most peculiar signature: rather than simply shutting the site down, they surreptitiously posted a piece that was earnest, heartfelt, and personal. Naturally, it was taken down immediately upon discovery, and we apologize to any readers who may have been made uncomfortable by its inappropriate content. We do not have time, on such short notice, to replace it with new material, so we have decided to run again one of our favorites from the Quaeries series, in which old Dr. Smith FRS nearly dies of the gout. We will be speaking with our lawyers and with our tech department to make sure that there will be no such outbursts of sincerity in the future. Now, back to the usual dissimulation. On with the pasquinade!

*

Quaeries #6: Doctor Smith His Demise

O Isaac? Isaac! Come forthwith! The clamp 'round my gouty ankle must needs be tighten'd. That's right, Isaac. The left ankle. Yes, my loyal Clampsman. Just like that.

Do you know what I've been doing, Isaac? I've been reading about comic sections. Do you know what those are? They are the Curves produced by the Intersection of a Conus by a Plane. Now look here, Isaac. There are not only Circles and Ellipses so form'd, but e'en edifying Parabolae and whimsical Hyperbolae. Some are most comical indeed!

What's that, Isaac? You say it's 'conic' sections about which the immortal Euclid held forth, and not 'comic' sections?

Now, Isaac, did you see a Signe hanging o'er the Door of my den, warning "Let no one enter here who is ignorant of Mathematics?" You didn't? Well that's why you're allowed in, you Orang-Outang! You are here to tighten my ankle-Clamp, not to out-do the great Roberval.

Now, to our Quaeries.

Firstly, for some period, o'er a decade of Years ago now, we repeatedly heard that jubilant Declaration: Whoomp, there it is! What was discover'd at that time, precisely? A great Treasure of Portuguese Bullion? El Dorado? Verulam's Fountain of Youth? In what barbaric Tongue, furthermore, does whoomp translate the wise Archimede's elegant exclamation, εὕρηκα? Wherefore, finally, did the Jubilation cease so suddenly? Was this Discovery at length only a Fata Morgana?

It is said that the dux of what is left of Rome, a certain Berlusconus, is known for taking pleasure in what is call'd the 'Bunga-Bunga'. Now evidently this is a sort of ars amatoria imported from those same Hottentotical regions that have given us whoomp. But we wish to know who would feign prohibit the very Ruler of Rome, who is no reckless youth like Heliogabalus, but a man of years and stature, from going in for such Delectations? What common plebs dares tell this Caesar not to indulge his Desires, yea, e'en when the foremost among them is to cavort upon the Bed of Waldemir Poutine?

And whence comes it that this Poutine, Ruler of all Muscovy, most of foul Tartary, and assorted Borderlands, should lend his very Name to a Dish of Earth-Apples, Cheese-Curde, and Browne-Sauce, otherwise belovèd onely of the Forest-Dwellers of New France? 

Whence, moreover, all this talk of 'Wikileaks'? Wiki, we suppose, is of the same Lingua Hottentotica as whoomp and bunga-bunga, but what is leaking 'round here besides my woe-ridden joints? Information, you say? First of all, Isaac, you know not to interrupt me once I've begun. But more importantly how could 'Information' be a-leaking and a-flowing when we are unable to receive so much as a single sensible Reply to our Quaeries?

O to the Devil with this senseless Exercise! As if it had any-thing to do with Lord Bacon's Project for the Advancement of Learning. I've had quite enough. Let's look at more of those comical sections. But bring the good ones. The ones with Eccentricity.

Isaac, I'm sorry. I've been so irrascible of late. So controll'd by the Passions. Not the womanly Passions (ut de passionibus virium taceam!), but the Passions of a Childe. I move from puerile Delight to the greatest Mournfulnesse as if for no Reason at all. I cannot work. I cannot ratiocinate. Nay, Isaac, 'tis clear. I am not long for this World.

Tell me, though, do you think they'll print a Notice of my Death in the Transactions of the Society?  Or will Squibb, that old Booby, seek to prevent it on these grounds alone, that I compar'd his Wife to the Bahama Mer-Cow lately dissected at Gresham's Caffè-House? I meant it in the mythological sense, I did! You know, the Sirens, &c. 'Tis not my fault if upon the very mention of Mrs. Squibb the old man thought onely of the Gutts and Blubber display'd on the dissecting Table.

No matter. What is a Memorial in a small Journal, whose pages will onely yellow and rot with the passing of cruel Time?

No Isaac, do you know the one Thing that might make this old senex happy for a moment? For you to massage my ankle. You know, just the way you do.

There now, yes. That's the way... O, quam dulce...

--

To be continu'd, God willing...

To read the earlier installments in this series of Quaeries, go here, here, here, here, and here.

To follow Justin Smith on Face-Book, go here.