Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Keeping Up with the Republican Primaries

I got all teary-eyed around November, 2008, just like every other non-australopithecine American. But unlike most of my co-evolved concitoyens I was not a sucker. I was delighted that we would now have a rational and evidently morally decent person, rather than a cretinous one, volunteering to take on a role that is for structural reasons morally compromising. But I did not think for a second that this was the dawning of some sort of new era. That would be to misunderstand what a president is.

We have what in places like Turkey is lucidly described as a 'deep state' (though in Turkey it's principally the army that is had in mind, while for us it's a more composite beast). The deep state  limits drastically what elected officals can do. It is the permanent structure that endures behind the constant electoral spectacle, and it ought to be the only thing of interest to political analysts. Do I blame Obama for the continuation of the Iraq War, the non-closure of Guantánamo, etc.? Just a little bit more than I blame his tailor. For Obama is, as they say, a suit, and many, many people conspire to maintain him as the presentable image of American power. I am incapable of conjuring any commiseration with the conventional liberals who believe disappointment in Obama the person is an appropriate reaction to his record as president.

However little Obama interests me, the current clamoring of the Republican candidates is of an altogether different order of uninterestingness. The constant din they are permitted to sustain for so many months ought, as someone put it, to be of no more concern to us than the gossip on Jersey Shore. And doesn't the decision to tune in or not to any one of the endless 'debates' feel exactly like the rest of your television viewing habits: passive, recreational, irrelevant, kind of fun?

But I was never a big TV fan, and I feel a bit betrayed by the Internet in recent years for having sneakily transformed into something so TV-like. It could have been a rejection of everything TV tells us to care about. Instead the blogs and the pundits work in perfect tandem, encouraging us for example to take an interest in the details of Mitt Romney's tax returns. Mitt Romney is a classic plutocrat; of course he's getting away with as much as he can. The problem is not this or that indiscretion in any given year's filing. The problem is that one has to be a plutocrat in order to stand any chance of being elected.

Nor do I care about the dog on the roof of Romney's car, or the miscarried child the Santorums brought home and fondled for a few days. Hell, if it helped them get through it, why not? Stranger rituals have been documented in the rich variety of human experience.

Still less do I care about Newt Gingrich's infidelities. I have heard the argument that it is not Gingrich's personal life itself that interests progressives, but only his hypocrisy: the fact that he dogged Bill Clinton in the 1990s for his extramarital affairs, and now turns out to be no better. But we can still be better: we can hold ourselves to a higher standard, and agree that an aspiring politician's sex life is wholly irrelevant to our assessment of his capacity to govern.

As a good rule of thumb, I don't care about anything, really, that Maureen Dowd cares about. She cares a great deal about Newt Gingrich's sexual prowess, for example, and about Callista Gingrich's fashion sensibilities, whereas I don't. Dowd is a fawning courtisane who satisfies an evidently widespread middle-brow craving for page-six gossip by wrapping it up in faux-feminist indignation and moderately witty word play.

Oh, and Jon Stewart is a sanctimonious boob.

And still less do I care about the simple existence of Ron Paul. I myself have splashed around in the swamps out of which creatures like Paul congeal. They are my extended family. They are the cranks on the call-in AM radio shows that were always on when I was a child (KFBK AM 1530, to be precise). They are the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who nevertheless, for some reason, still don't add up to WASPs. They feel cast off, left out, and the world-view they conjure up as a defense reaction is so muddled that for brief moments it can look as though it's motivated by genuine concern about the betterment of the world. But it never is. 

I will not vote for any of them, not Obama, not the others. This is, I insist, itself a legitimate use of my right to vote: it is a refusal to get sucked into the spectacle.

Alright, next post: back to Rilke, and to things that are beautiful and that matter.

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Why I Quit Facebook

I joined Facebook in September, 2007. My 'timeline', when I studied it for the last time yesterday evening, indicated very little activity until around April, 2008, at which point I, apparently, began posting frivolous status updates about my personal life, my tribulations and thoughts, roughly once a week. A style began to emerge over the coming months, one that was hardly original, but, I believe, still above average in the craft and care put into it.

I alternated between displays of grand, bullshitting erudition --one early update was a variation on a Latin motto from Leibniz, transformed for the social-networking age: Qui me non nisi renovationibus status mei in Libro Vultuum novit, non novit ('Whoever knows me only through my Facebook status updates, does not know me')-- and the confessional mode, which I had the presumption to call 'Montaignean'.

I received my first 'like' in February, 2009. I did not understand what it was, or how it got there. I was in Australia, and it was from someone I had known in high school in California.

I'll skip over some history. By 2010 I had an iPhone, and I had taken to checking for likes every minute or so while walking down the street; I learned even to check for them, surreptitiously, while teaching.

The New York Times put up a firewall, and rather than pay the 99 cents per month required to get around it, I preferred to rely on links posted by my friends: I had 640 of them after all, and collectively they surely made up a reliable team of journalists (I'd estimate 30 to 40 of them were in fact professional journalists; another 200 or so were amateur journalists).

A few weeks ago I decided to get back to the four volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu that remained after I miraculously got through the first three a decade or so ago. But when one attempts to divide one's attention between (i) page 801 of the Gallimard edition of Proust's chef d'oeuvre, and (ii) one's ever-refreshing newsfeed: which do you imagine wins? It is cognitively impossible, I believe, not to prefer the newsfeed. It is glowing and changing, and it doses out what it has to give in easily swallowed, sweet little bits.

That was rock-bottom. I had to cut it off, and set about rewiring my brain, to get it back to the way I know it used to be.

I hasten to add that Facebook is among the most remarkable innovations in human history. In the sweep of centuries it, and the variations that emerge from it, will prove to be more important than books. Books were never themselves fundamental to human learning; in fact their massive proliferation in the Renaissance and early modern periods was at the same time an usurpation and a destruction of established and wonderful technologies of learning-- in particular, practices of memorization that would put Julien Sorel to shame.

So it is not that I am sticking with what is true and right, against what is vulgar and corrupted, but only that there are certain projects that I came to value given the precise historical moment of my birth and earliest education, and these projects had come under serious threat as a result of this mighty usurper.

There are other reasons, too, which I would like to list here, from the more personal ones, unique to my own case, to the more general. Some of these have to do with what Facebook had done to me as a user; others with what I see as the troubling failure of Facebook to live up to its real potential. 

I am by nature a melancholic person, and for a long time I asked myself whether Facebook alleviated or exacerbated this condition. I finally determined it was the latter. I like to write and to share what I write, and I like it when what I write receives acclaim. But when this cycle of expression-and-gratification is reduced to a few hundred characters followed by a dozen or so 'likes', it becomes a parody of the creative process, and impedes any real engagement in that process. It calls to mind this painful indictment from Pascal's Pensées, written just as if he could foresee the invention of the 'like' button:

We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.

Typically what I have to say takes about 1500-3000 words; anything short of that is a compromise. I would never have dreamt of sinking into the swamp of Twitter-speak, where one is required by some arbitrary rule to substitute 'u r' for 'you are', and to indulge in other such adolescent vulgarities. But Facebook only partially enables its user to steer clear of texting code. Again, it is not that I do not want to receive gratification from what I have to say, but only that the formal constraints of the status update do not permit me to say it.

Not only for my ability to read, but for my ability to write as well, I began to fear that Facebook was draining away much of the thinking that could have gone into real essays, articles, books. I work in two distinct modes, both academic/scholarly and essayistic/belle-lettristic, and I came to fear that both of them were more stagnant than they might be if I could just pull myself away from the endless exchange of sweet little bits in my social network. But I emphasize that I am really not certain about my final determination that Facebook was an impediment, any more than I am certain that it exacerbated my melancholy: for quite often I had the experience of writing a status update that would then get some thoughts percolating, that would then transform into a blog post, that would ultimately issue in a book review or even, on at least one occasion, a successful book proposal. It's really hard to say whether on balance it was harmful or helpful. I suppose I just need, now, to test the alternative mode of working, and to see what happens when that all-too familiar, all-too inviting salon is no longer open to me.

Another source of frustration, about which I am much more ambivalent, has to do with the nature of the community one forges on Facebook. A few deep and genuine friendships have emerged out of my years there; some genuinely inspiring intellectual encounters have happened there; some rather mundane but necessary networking has taken place there. It would be dishonest for me to deny the good that has come of it, yet recently it dawned on me that I have a number of important connections with people who are not on Facebook, both intellectual and emotional connections, and in no sense do I feel like they are missing something of me, or I of them. Often, when someone I knew on Facebook wanted to discuss something important with me, they would send me an e-mail instead of a Facebook chat message, as if to signify the importance of the communication by moving into this other forum. I expect this sort of communication will continue.

I've said before that I don't think there's anything more 'real' about so-called real-world friendships. Those, too, come and go, and the truth is I have little interest in finding drinking buddies, or coevals to pursue hobbies with. That's not my concern, not my existential mode. All I really want to do is exchange ideas with people; Facebook was often fairly useful for this, but as I've said I began to fear that the ideas were reduced by the medium, and the nature of their exchange, based as it was in the perpetual ejaculation of short witty insights, often made a mockery of the sort of exchange that was held out as an ideal.

(Am I just getting too serious? In my updates I aspired to be funny. But what is funny in this here eulogy?) 

I was comfortable all along with the equivocity of the concept of friend: I had 640 of them, call them what you will, and some of them were in truth my friends. Some others fulfilled other functions, and some did nothing at all but contribute to my tally. Fine. But again, it strikes me now that it was all somewhat like attending a very long summer camp: people come and go, and if anything worth preserving and cultivating should come about, then this will continue once the summer has drawn to a close.

I have mentioned that some of my reasons for leaving Facebook have to do with my own personal concerns, my projects and the way Facebook perhaps fails to facilitate them. I also mentioned that in my view Facebook is failing to live up to its potential. Recently, when I looked at my wall, it was as if 'Family Circus', 'Marmaduke', Penny Saver and Reader's Digest were spilling right off of Gutenberg's own press: such a wonderful and promising technology, descended into pure idiocy just after its first appearance in the world.

I have in mind in particular this new innovation, whereby whatever trashy meme some friend (in a highly equivocal sense) deems worthy of liking, ends up in my own newsfeed with the purported explanation that such-and-such friend has just deemed it like-worthy. Thus, after having fought so hard to banish Farmville and Cityville and shit like that from my wall, I was now being bombarded with misspelled slogans insisting that Marilyn Monroe's curves are in fact more beautiful than Lindsay Lohan's skin-and-bones, or that Obama is alright because he fist-bumps janitors, while Romney by contrast likes to get shoeshines on airport tarmacs (something I truly doubt, by the way). And most recently George Takei, likeable enough in himself, has entirely drowned out, with his good-spirited and sassy mash-ups, any possibility of using that social network for that higher aim for which it briefly held some promise: the exchange of well-thought-out ideas.

All the way back in 2007 there was something about this endeavor that rubbed me the wrong way: it was born of the dormitories, and to some extent it draws us all back into them. Or perhaps I should not say 'back': I was a commuter, to a state school, and I lived with my mother. I never lived in a dorm, and I never showed up in a yearbook, to be judged for my hotness or my plainness. The culture that produced Facebook is one that I never knew, and do not like. An image of that culture invaded, and invades, my mind every single time I hear the name of Mark Zuckerberg's venture, and every time I hear the name of Mark Zuckerberg.

I still believe Internet-mediated social networks will prove to be more important in human history than printing presses. But my social network will not be Facebook.

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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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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.

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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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.

On Spotting a Rainbow while Waiting at Rite-Aid

I took this picture while waiting outside a pharmacy in Plainsboro, New Jersey, as the Rutgers-trained apothecary prepared my prescription for antidepressants. I don't know why it takes them so long to count out thirty pills and slide them into a little plastic bottle, but from years of experience I know when I go for a refill that I will have to put in a good hour. Sometimes I take my blood pressure; sometimes I pass the time in admiration of the collection of Russell-Stover chocolate gift boxes; sometimes I wander through the makeshift grocery section, and speculate as to the criteria that determine which grocery items belong in a CVS or Rite-Aid (Chef Boyardee, definitely; Lean Cuisine, probably; Manischewitz, no), and which by contrast are meant only for the shelves of a proper Wegman's or Shop-Rite.

This time I decided to go outside. It was the last day of a series of days of rough storms, which I, being from dry California, always think of as 'tropical'. These storms in the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast were the distant and final echo of the same weather system that had, two days prior, killed several hundred people in Alabama and neighboring states. The rainbow seemed to be saying, on behalf of the sky: Sorry for killing all those people. Sometimes I just, you know, lose it.

Over the years I've returned again and again to the metaphor of storm systems in explaining clinical depression to those who know nothing of it. If in my soul I remain Californian (which is to say that I respond to the vegetation and the topography and the sky and the light there as fitting and proper for a creature such as I), in my neurochemistry I am at this point entirely of the East Coast. My brain is like a May storm in the mid-Atlantic, with its menacing cumulonimbus and its hazy instability. The darkness and the thunder appear suddenly, and for no reason, and just as suddenly give way to half-ass rainbows of apology, which to me, at this point, look like nothing so much as portents of the storm's return.

The water cycle makes sense to me in a way that the process of natural selection that produced brains such as mine does not. A recent study showed that well-exercised mice are more likely to anxiously cower in the corner of their cages than lazier ones. A scientist jumped in to caution that we should not extrapolate too much from them to us, since they are prey animals, and it is advantageous to not be excessively at ease. But I am not a prey animal, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what natural utility such a neurometeorological profile could possibly serve.

But that's just how it is, and there's something undignified about dwelling on it overmuch. One doesn't want to let it become the kind of person one is, in the way that Foucault argued so many new kinds of people came into existence in the last few hundred years.

But still, the timing of the rainbow deepened my sense that in the end meteorology and psychology (or psychiatry; whatever) are but two branches of the same science.

The Life of an Ephemeron

Enduring a difficult separation? Feeling lonely? Well I've got just the book for you. It's called After Kinship, and it's by Janet Carsten. She says that the focus on the affine pair as the basic unit of anthropological theory was really only a projection of mid-twentieth-century Euro-American ideology into an ethnographic field where bonds of kinship are by and large much more fluid than Lévy-Bruhl et al. were able to understand. I don't know why they keep this kind of stuff away from the 'self help' section of the bookstore. It cheers me right up.

I went to the Lawrenceville Petco and inquired about getting a cat to keep me company. "I'd really like a cat," I said to the teen-aged employee, "but I'm worried about hygiene."
"Cats are only as filthy as their owners," she said, rehearsing some bit of wisdom she did not seem fully to comprehend.
"Well, suppose I'm filthy," I replied.
"Oh. Maybe you should get, like, a hermit crab?"

I received a message from a former student. "Hey," it started out, "I heard you're retired now. That's too bad! You were a great teacher!" For the record, I'm 38, and I'm on a temporary research sabbatical. And I am not a 'teacher'.

Facebook now has sidebar ads that are supposed to speak to the particular interests and desires of the social-networking site's individual users. Recently I've been getting an ad that beckons: "Hey Philosopher! Find your market!"

Now this is why I can't have a cat: Just today I discovered an uneaten basket of raspberries, purchased in January, at the bottom of my desk drawer. It was sitting on top of the copy of Being and Time that I've been carrying around with me for complicated reasons I need not go into here. Little remained of the raspberries, as they had been gradually replaced by thousands upon thousands of fruit flies. If I had a cat, I would have joked to her: Well look at that, countless generations of them have come and gone since January, and they still haven't outgrown their Heidegger phase.

The other night I was in a café in Princeton and I saw Professor K. sitting and reading at an opposite table. K. is a prominent expert on literary hoaxes and other high-brow shenanigans in 19th-century France, and is well-known to the larger public for his witty interventions about current American politics on NPR's 'All Things Considered'. He cuts a formidable figure, and it was taking a while for me to work up the courage to go and speak with him. But at some point our eyes met, and so I gesticulated a 'hello' and went over to his table, carrying a copy of L'arte della prudenza that I hoped might serve as a conversation-starter.
"That was a great conference last week, wasn't it?" I said. He looked at me blankly. "I particularly enjoyed your paper." Silence.
"Are you sure you don't have me confused with someone else?," he finally replied.
"No," I insisted. "We sat right across from each other at the conference dinner. You're K."
"No, I'm H."
"But you look just like... I mean the hair, the glasses. Everything."
"Be that as it may, I'm H."
"Well, do you know K.?," I pleaded, hoping for some reason that even as identity was slipping away, I could be consoled by at least the faintest connection between this man and his Doppelgänger.
"I've heard of him," H. replied. I still don't know whether I met K. the other night, enacting some 19th-century literary hoax of his own, or whether this man really was, as he claimed, H. Dare I ask K. (whose name is not really K.) the next time I run into him? This is not some elaborate metafictional set-up into which I'm hoping to draw you, dear reader. This is a simple question della prudenza.

Now the sidebar ad is asking: "Proud Mongol?"

My car is at the repair shop so I had to take a taxi home from the grocery store. There aren't very many taxis in Princeton so you have to call in advance. I got the number for "Henri's Jerusalem Taxi" from the grocery store's bulletin board. Henri was Haitian, and we were both delighted to speak a bit of French. He said he'd been driving a taxi in Princeton for 19 years, but that he lived in Trenton. He knew all the names of the streets in Princeton, and he still found it amusing, after all this time, to conduire sur Einstein, that is, to drive on Einstein Drive. At some point he abruptly began emitting incomprehensible gutturals and glottals, and when he could see I had no idea what he was saying, he asked me whether I understood Hebrew. I said I did not. He seemed surprised. He had learned it on his own, at home in Trenton, in order better to comprendre la langue de Dieu. Isn't that what we're here for, he asked: to understand the language of God?

Sometimes things happen to me and I want to say, only in New York. But I'm in New Jersey.

After I killed off Dr. Smith, FRS, in the final installment of my Quaeries series (deeply beloved to me, even though it seems to have inspired little enthusiasm in the broader, non-me public), I received a message from a 3QD reader asking me if everything was alright. Fine, I replied curtly. Assured that I was not suicidal and he would not have to call some hotline on my behalf, he wrote back, worried now that I had signaled, with the death of Dr. Smith from complications of gout, my own intention to retire from 3QD. Hell no, I'm not retiring. I intend to become the Andy Rooney of this site, to keep right on well after my expiration date, imposing my elderly, tone-deaf, eructative voice --the privilege of an eminence grise-- for decades to come, even as other Monday Columnists come and go like the generations of Drosophila, writing with great urgency about things I no longer strain to understand, such as Lady Gaga: things I am certain will turn out not to matter.

I think what I might in fact mean is, only in America. But that's not true either.

In 1675, the Dutch microscopist Jan Swammerdam published his study of the mayfly, entitled Ephemeri vita, of Afbeeldingh van 's menschen leven, which is to say --if my Dutch is not failing me (I am sure, at least, of my Latin)--, The Life of an Ephemeron, or, The Image of a Human Life. Swammerdam was struck by the short duration of the mayfly's life-cycle --no more than a single day--, and he thought this merited poetic comparison to the fleetingness of a human life. A human life lasts more than a day, certainly, but as Pascal had already observed, a day and a century both fall equally short of eternity.

I suppose I am in the early afternoon of my ephemeral day; the shadows are already growing long, yet for the moment there can be no thought of retreating from my labors. 

 --

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The Blog as Mask and Gravestone

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Hungarian Suicide Song: More on YouTube and Iterativity

Perhaps another example will help me to better make the point of the previous post, which may have been occluded by the general Hee-Haw feel of the chosen examples.

What I had meant to say is certainly not that it is only with YouTube that we have learned of the shared quality of popular music, that each song is not uniquely attached to an artist, but rather passes through various artists who give it a distinctive sort of life for two or three minutes. Rather, what I meant to say is that it is only with the rise of YouTube that these different, distinctive lives of songs, these iterations, as I called them, have come to be grouped together. It is only with YouTube that one discovers a song by discovering the variety of the song's possible interpretations.

My second example will be 'Szomorú Vasárnap', the so-called 'Hungarian Suicide Song', composed by Rezső Seress, if my ability to read Hungarian Wikipedia is not failing me, in 1935. Legend has it that if you listen to the song but once, you will die by your own hand. Seress himself committed suicide in 1968. This means that at worst the song's effect comes with a long delay, and in any case we are entirely free of superstition here at jehsmith.com, and so free as well to search out even the most minor keys and the most disorienting Corinthian modes. 

Here is the original version of 'Szomorú Vasárnap':

 

And here it is performed, again in Hungarian, by Erika Marozsán in the 1999 film Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod: a performance which vividly illustrates the song's legendary effect:

 

When the song was eventually translated into English, it was lightened somewhat: it abandoned suicide as its theme for mere everyday gloominess, and styled itself 'Gloomy Sunday'. Here is Paul Robeson:

 

And here is a version by Diamanda Galas. She credits the original song, for some reason, to Billie Holiday:

 

I could not find a watchable version of the Billie Holiday version on YouTube, though I have heard a recording of it and enjoyed it very much. There were plenty of other versions on YouTube by performers whose versions I was not at all eager to discover, including Björk, Marianne Faithfull, and --the horror-- Sarah MacLachlan.

Yet I could have moved smoothly from Rezső Seress to Sarah MacLachlan in a few easy steps. Indeed I could have moved from Seress to Justin Bieber in just one or two more steps, but by that point the cohesion would have been lost, whereas from Seress to Galas there is a plain and certain continuity.

I no longer have to put the pieces together myself, to chart the steps that get us from Budapest in 1935 to a very different time and place and style. Previously, popular musical works were arranged according to time, place, and style, and artist, but not, strangely, according to the works themselves. This, I maintain, gave rise to the illusion of authoritative interpretations, whereas the new arrangement, as I previously suggested, leaves the songs looking a good deal more like folk tales or jokes or other such elements of culture with infinite potential iterations, than like the masterpieces of singular artists.

Not all songs are like this, of course. Some songs are in fact the masterpieces of singular artists. This can be so even when the songs aren't particularly good. All of rap music is non-reiterable in this way: one man's egocentric boasting, while in some sense interchangeable with the next man's, cannot be placed word for word in the next man's mouth.

But rap music compensates for the rigid first-personhood of its lyrics through sampling: the recycling of its other, more straightforwardly musical elements, usually from more straightforwardly musical genres of a generation or two ago. It is by means of such preestablished musical harmonies, in spite of the irreplaceability of the person of its lyrics, that rap music, which for some reason I will always have trouble calling 'hip-hop', participates in the fluidity of folk culture too, the same folk culture in which other forms of popular music, such as that performed by Paul Robeson or Billie Holiday, take part through the iteration of standards.