Justin Erik Halldór Smith

This Is Not a Philosophy Blog

And that title is not a riff on Magritte, where I claim of a thing that it is not the thing it obviously is. This is, in a direct and literal sense, not a philosophy blog. I feel the need to make this clear every now and then because, from the fact that I am a philosopher, and from the fact that I have a blog, many have incorrectly inferred that I have a philosophy blog. (I do have a blog that is focused on my work as a philosopher, namely, jehsmith.com/philosophy, but it is to jehsmith.com, without the extension, that people are generally referring when they mention my 'philosophy blog'.) 

A philosophy blog is a very particular thing, and indeed something very, very different from a blog maintained by a person who is also a philosopher. Philosophy blogs tend to involve a great deal of vocational humour (in essence not so different from the Far Side cartoons you might once have found on a paleontologist's office door), and a lot of concerned discussion of state-of-the-discipline issues: what sort of lighting should be used during APA interviews, which journals should be boycotted for their slow response time, etc. Occasionally, interspersed between these items, you will find some discussion of the actual content of the discipline, though the truth is these days it's getting harder to say where the line lies between, on the one hand, the actual, contentful, inspiring questions that motivated us to get into it in the first place and, on the other hand, the business of it, the running of the discipline. One fears that in the near future there will be ever more self-referential, discipline-focused events passing themselves off as philosophy: 'APA Special Session on Seating Arrangements at Philosophy Conferences: Should We Rearrange the Chairs?' 

Now I'm not saying people shouldn't be thinking about stuff like this (especially when it comes to the crucial matter of eliminating cognitive bias). I'm saying I'm not the one who's doing it, not here. There is no state-of-the-discipline chatter here, nor, I hasten to add, any vocational humour. Nor, for that matter, is there much discussion even of the content of the discipline (the content in the old sense of ideas and arguments and stuff). Philosophy comes up fairly regularly, but it has no special pride of place, and is probably less central to my concerns here, year in and year out, than poetry, folklore, literature, music, autobiography, product packaging, and any number of other things I care deeply about. It is not that all these things are of equal or greater importance to philosophy in my life, but rather that this blog serves for me principally as a place to address all those things I care about that cannot find their way into my professional teaching and research profile.

On occasion, I myself have contributed to the confusion by giving in to temptation and ejaculating some opinion or other about the culture of academic philosophy, as when I complained recently of what I see as a strain of conservative pronatalism among North American philosophers of my generation. One of my resolutions for 2013 is to refrain from doing this; if I don't like something about the culture I'm a part of, I am of course free to simply think about other things, as I should have done in this case: like poetry, for example, and all the other beautiful things for which this blog really exists.

One thing I've been thinking about recently --and here I might be lapsing once again into state-of-the-discipline chatter, but hell, it's not 2013 yet-- is how much clearer, and how much more legitimate, the distinction would be between 'my blog' and 'my philosophy blog' if I were principally interested in blogging about sports, or whiskies, or kayaking, or the furniture I'm building, or the children I'm raising. Now I have nothing against these endeavors, but as it happens my interests lie elsewhere; I have nothing to say about Messi or Laphroaig or whatever, and plenty to say about, e.g., Kafka. And this means that my elsewhere is not neutral territory, but is sufficiently philosophoid to be seen as the sort of stuff a philosopher cannot be interested in without being interested in it qua philosopher.

And this is where the old, facile distinction between the continentals and the analytics, as between those whose philosophy emerges from literary preoccupations and those who come to philosophy via a broad concern for scientific explanation, intrudes uninvited upon my blogging idyll, and gives the casual visitor the impression that because I am concerned with literature here, I must belong to the first of these two camps.

So let me make something very clear: not only is this not a philosophy blog, a fortiori it is definitely not a soft philosophy blog. And let me be perfectly honest: I don't have the slightest clue what Derrida or Husserl is on about, and what little fragments I've managed to understand have failed to capture my imagination in any way. When I am writing as a philosopher, Aristotle, Henry More, Spinoza, and Leibniz are my guiding lights. I believe, moreover, that what we call 'science' must be the ultimate arbiter of questions about the nature of reality, and I believe that at least in principle definitive factual answers, i.e., the truth, can be arrived at for such questions.

But anyhow my point is that the vast majority of the time, the interest I take in things here is an interest I take quite apart from the line of work I'm in, and quite apart from my my orientation in that work, even if, admittedly, this interest often lies somewhat closer to philosophy --and even to that philosophy I've confessed to knowing nothing about-- than do, say, the NBA playoffs.

So, to sum up: this is not a philosophy blog. I don't like philosophy blogs. This is a non-philosophy blog about all those things that matter to me that cannot be easily incorporated into my professional profile. And there is no reason why I, a philosopher, should not be free to maintain this sort of non-philosophy blog, any less than my peers should be free to maintain their Monty Python blogs or their blogs about The Wire or their favorite coffee shops in the Tri-State Area or their favorite vacation spots in Tuscany.

There is another discussion to be had about how the project of philosophy came to be so defined that the full range of interests I've mentioned could not be incorporated into it. Leibniz, for example, would have drawn the boundaries of the discipline very differently, and his blog --and Leibniz definitely would have had a blog-- would have been a philosophy blog with notes on the diversity of plant species in Siberia, on how to build a reckoning machine, with poems about cider, and proofs for the existence of God (for me --as for Leibniz, I think-- the crucial distinction is not whether you see philosophy as deriving from science or from sentiment, from truth-seeking or from self-expression, but rather whether or not you see philosophy as appropriately concerned with the great abundance of particular things in the world, with all the res singulares). For now I will simply say that I am well aware of where the bounds of the discipline lie at present, that I am able to respect them in my professional activity, and that they are of absolutely no interest to me here. 

My Idea of Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Pittsburgh

An academic career has a peculiar arc to it. When one is young, and first begins travelling around to various cities for conferences, it is as if one is Axl Rose or something, on tour, in hotels, where ordinary morality does not apply. One feels larger than life, and worthy of a biography or two.

After some years of repetition, though, one comes to feel rather more like Willy Loman, on the road, hawking some cheap unnecessary wares. One notices that it was only a Days Inn all along, and not the Ritz-Carlton, and by now the greatest transgression one can muster is to leave the towels on the floor after the first day, signaling that they are ready to be washed yet again, and that one has more important things to think about than the environment.

And the cities start to repeat themselves: Cincinnati, Bloomington, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh. I never understood what Nietzsche meant by 'eternal return', but when I find myself waiting in exactly the same Super Shuttle queue I must have been in a year ago, and two years ago, and three years ago, standing behind the same overweight, be-Dockered dolt with a Bluetooth stuck in his damn ear, chattering away about the Steelers, or about how it's time to sell, or about how he's ready to take it to the next level with the company he's partnering with in Grand Rapids, I could swear I am stuck in something very much like the metaphysical loop our German soothsayer envisioned. 

And yet... There is something about coming to a new city, even an old new city, that makes me feel like saying: if only I lived here, I would not grow old; I would not be prone to fatal illness; the memories I hold dear, the memories that constitute me and give me my orientation in the world, would not constantly slip further into the irrelevant past. This is where I need to be, not that other place I just happened to end up. Pittsburgh. Not Montreal, not Paris, but Pittsburgh. I love its hills; its solid, steely monuments, the ruins of the golden age of Carnegian optimism; its Native American toponyms, especially 'Allegheny' and 'Monongahela', which themselves seem to be the very causes of the topographical features they pick out; I love that I can see my breath here, this November 1st, when I walk around and breathe. Why didn't I figure this out before? Why didn't I remember this from last time? And why can I already tell, in advance, just a few hours after arriving here, that in another week or so I will be having the same thoughts, mutatis mutandis, in San Diego? 

I suppose I'm at least glad I'm not a traveling salesman. As Arthur Miller understood, such a life warps all too imperceptibly into death. But the world of moving sidewalks, duty free, Super Shuttle, and complimentary toiletries is a world built for traveling salesmen, and it is hard, once the youthful delusion of a larger-than-life life has faded, not to feel oneself sucked into their orbit when one is obliged to travel on their circuit: sucked into their orbit and, one might say, into the same cosmic fate. 

But again, beyond the Lomanesque circuit of check-in desks and conference nametags, there are the cities themselves, the cities that always seem shining and eternal to me: the cities where everyone already was, before me, and without me, just living their lives, as I could have been. In Pittsburgh, for example. 

What It Means to Turn Forty

Before beginning in earnest, a preliminary point about birthdays: I am convinced that one of the crucial moments in the emergence of the modern world was the transition from the celebration of saint days to the fêting of our own anniversaries. We scoff at cultures that believe in reincarnation, but the acknowledgment of saint days that dominated until the 18th century or so (and that still rivals birthdays in parts of Eastern Europe), in fact amounted substantially to just this: to bear the name 'George' for example is to participate in the transmissible essence/soul of St. George, to be one of the iterations of George. It doesn't make much of a difference, either, whether the metaphysics behind the onomastics is grounded in saint worship or a supposedly more simple ancestor worship. When an Inuit grandmother dies, and a girl is born and given the same name as the deceased, she will be referred to by the nickname 'little mother'. It is not that the same individual grandmother, with the same life history, the same original birthdate, the same Canadian social-insurance number, etc., has been reborn, but only that the name-soul has been transmitted. One can expect to see similar character traits appear in the girl as in the grandmother, but if they don't this is not proof of non-identity, since the identity in question was one rooted in shared name-essence, and not in the sort that, say, John Locke or Derek Parfit is ready to examine.

I still conflate my grandfather, John Peterson, with George Washington. I cannot look at a US quarter without thinking that I am looking at a likeness of my mother's father, who was born in 1912 and who died in 1986. No matter how much I learn about the historical-biographical difference between the two persons, there is a sense in which I still believe, deep down, that they are identical, or again, that the one is an iteration of the other. The reason is simple: from an early age, I was presented with the figure of two grey, morally upright, much-praised male authority figures, and I placed them in the same part of my imagination. There are examples of much looser groupings that can only be explained by a private synaesthesia: e.g., October, Kentucky, Thursday, and the color brown all go together for me. The grandfather-George Washington cluster is not like these. It makes natural sense, in the same way, I think, that the system of saint names, and of their endless iterations, makes sense. As for the John/George difference, I believed early on (and in a deep sense still believe) that these are variations on the same name, much as I was expected to learn early on, but could not, in re President Kennedy (whom I never respected as a morally upright authority figure, but always considered a proper salop), that 'Jack' is interchangeable with 'John'.

It seems to me that this de facto system of reincarnation was effectively stamped out when the primary responsibility for registration of vital statistics transferred from the church to the state. In this transfer a new metaphysics of the individual was finally instaured, as the individual person came to be rigidly anchored to his or her bio-historical data, of which the birthdate is surely one of the most important. 

Under the reign of this metaphysics, today is a very important day for me: it is my fortieth birthday. The Department of Vital Statistics of Washoe County, Nevada, can confirm that I was born on July 30, 1972. Saint Justin had little to do with it.

Why is this marker so important? It is an artifact not just of a particular metaphysics, but also of a base-ten arithmetic: years constitute natural units, this much is determined by the passage of the earth around the sun; decades do not. But still, we work the natural meanings of aging into the artificial framework of time-measurement that we have, and whether or not something significant is happening today precisely, it is anyhow clear that something significant is happening. 

Adults, however much power they wield in the world, are really only the ghosts of children. Tomas Tranströmer describes life as a comet: with childhood the blazing head, and senescence the dim straggling tail. What causes childhood to blaze like this is surely, in the end, a neurochemical state: we do what we can to keep kids off drugs, but what this misses is that they are always on drugs, drugs that are being produced by their brains themselves. These drugs induce a constant, ecstatic effervescence, and a strong feeling of immortality. They start to wear off at different times for different people. In my case, their potency dropped off around the age of 27, when I had what might be called my Ivan Il'ich moment, and it finally dawned on me where this process of getting older was ultimately headed. 

Ex-jocks, who had their glory days in high school, complain of the comet's fizzling in terms of their declining hormone levels, their receding hairlines, and so on. And they are right to complain, for there is something of value that is in the course of being lost. But even if the body did not perceptibly decline, the arc of the comet would be no less certain, and aging would require no less readjustment of the thinking mortal in the face of his or her impending death. The way I experience aging (besides the trivial stuff of vanity, like obsessing over my hairline) is as a sort of growing pressure to facilitate a proper shift, to speak with Aristotle, from potentiality to actuality. That is, I experience the age I am now as an age at which I must ensure that I already am what I insist or believe I am going to be.

This is not a very pleasant situation to be in. I miss being able to ride on youthful potentiality, on the promise that I'm going to do something great someday. Few things in this life terrify me more than the prospect of transforming into an older man who has not successfully made the shift, who tires people out with his ever-unrealized plans, who has been able to create no audience for his big ideas, and who writes letters to editors of local newspapers that are destined at the outset for rejection (or anyhow this is how I used to conceive the man I did not want to become; these days he can circumvent the editor by posting incoherent blog comments).

The receding hairline and the rest are perceptible markers of the absurdity of certain forms of behavior. They are not themselves the problem, but only reminders that there is a problem: namely, that at a certain point one would do much better to start preparing for death, and that the time for big dreams is past. What I am saying of course goes entirely against the modern liberal understanding of youth and aging, according to which it is 'never too late', and which would have us believe that the best way to spend one's final years is in checking off items from some 'bucket list': things like skydiving, jet-skiing, and other pursuits positively designed for the passing thrill of the unwise. But this is the same understanding that euphemizes death itself beyond recognition, that focuses obsessively on health and 'wellness' as if the full attainment of these made the slightest dent in the indifferent panzer of mortality. This understanding is utterly wrong: people get old and die, and the best spent life is the one that conforms itself to this arc. 

Anyhow, I'm fairly at peace. I have not totally failed in making the shift from potentiality to actuality. One thing that weighs fairly heavily is that I have not done that other thing described by Aristotle so beautifully: I have not approximated to eternity by cycling back upon myself in kind (if not in number). To put this differently, I have not reproduced, and over the past ten years this has grown from a trivial and contingent fact into one that defines my very being. I am one of those childless adults. I try to weigh the real importance of this fact against the bourgeois chatter about how important it is (I also don't own a set of golf clubs, and thoroughly don't give a shit about that), and the truth is I find this hard to do. I am not terribly comforted by the reassurance so often heard, that I am a man and so have plenty of time, since I do not feel that I have plenty of time to do anything, and a fortiori not something, like raising children, that unfolds over so many years. 

But otherwise, you know, I write books and stuff. I give headbirths. I have hardly been able to keep secret that what I imagine myself to be doing in this world is, principally, writing, and not writing in my capacity as an academic either. I am an academic almost by mistake; I wanted all along to know a lot, and to write about what I know, but I always imagined this would be more in the direction of literary non-fiction than of heavily footnoted scholarship. In this respect, I have not shifted to actuality in quite the way I had intended, and this is the source of a great deal of regret and frustration for me. Part of the weightiness of a milestone like today's arises from the need that it seems to impose of rethinking this fundamental aspiration, of accepting the actuality (that I am a competent scholar and an occasional blogger) rather than continuing to bank on the potentiality (that I am a 'writer'). (I add that every year since 2009 I have made more money than the previous year from literary non-fiction contributions, and I expect this trend to continue. Last year the figure was around $5000. It will be a long time, at this rate, before I can quit my day job.)

In his generally execrable novel, Le Plateforme, Michel Houellebecq tells the story of a 40-year-old man who stretches a Radiohead t-shirt over his gut while on vacation in Southeast Asia, quickly realizes it's hopeless to try to keep looking youthful, and plunges to the depths of gross male abjectness, of the sort for which European men in Southeast Asia are well known. The initial gesture, it seems to me in retrospect, tells the whole story: cut the crap about having favorite bands and stuff. You're forty now, and therefore disgusting. From here on out, I'm thinking today, simply managing to not be disgusting becomes a sort of artform. To accept the diminishing ratio of one's becoming to one's being, to accept that the fates have already largely wrapped up their work with you, and that accordingly some ways of being that once made natural sense are now closed off, or at least can only be accessed if one does not mind appearing ridiculous: this is what it means to turn forty. 

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On Dieting

An uninspired jeu de mots sometimes found in ads for low-end diet products inadvertently asks a deep question: Why weight?

The third-century Patristic author Origen thought that in the beginning all the angels were entirely free of corporeal matter. They spent their time circling around God, concentrating on him, thinking of nothing but him. But some of them grew distracted, and began to fall away, and as they fell they grew sluggish and heavy. The more distracted they became from the divine source of their being, the heavier they grew.

But they did not turn into stones or clods. If only! Instead, they were endowed with a different sort of bodies, precarious bodies that could only remain in existence to the extent that they also remained in perpetual exchange with the world around them, taking it in, turning it into self, and excreting what could not be transformed. “That alone is dead, which eateth not,” wrote the 16th-century iatrochemist Paracelsus. He describes eating as a perpetual replacement of the matter of the body, matter that is perpetually in the course of being burned up. Whereas stones have their identity secured by the fact that their parts remain in more or less stable cohesion with one another, living bodies remain the same bodies, or at least the bodies of the same individuals, only to the extent that they have new matter, food-matter, continually passing through them, like the water through a fountain.

It is in this respect, the English Epicurean philosopher Walter Charleton wrote in the 17th century, that “nutrition is but generation continu’d,” the perpetual re-creation of the corporeal substance that is always in the course of burning up and dying out. Stones have their being from their parts, and in order to keep being they only have to keep sitting there. But a living body is a delicate balance. Its parts have their being only through the sustained performance of an elaborate dance.  Keeping a body alive is more like keeping plates spinning, or like juggling balls in the air, than like guarding some precious jewel in a safe. This condition of our animal bodily existence can give rise to a sense of virtuosity when we feel we are on top of things, keeping the plates spinning fluidly, leaping over hurdles, doing youthful handstands; but it can also seem a particular sort of bondage: keep the damned things spinning, no matter how weary it makes you, or you will die.

Why it is precisely this sort of corporeality that should be our punishment for turning away from the divine is something that is never explained by Origen or anyone else. If, as the Pythagoreans taught, the body is a prison, why does it not simply hold the soul within constant, unchanging, stone-like walls? Our punishment is plainly more Sisyphean than simply carceral, though unlike Sisyphus, condemned to the eternal repetition of a brute task, we are expected to eternally maintain a fragile balance. What a strange predicament this is is something that has gradually retreated from view since the 17th century, when mechanical analogies for the functions of the body first became available. Soon enough, the work of the stomach would come to be comprehended in terms of the work of the factory, and both of these would come to be thought of in terms of mere efficiency (one wonders, though, whether in our post-industrial era we will ever begin to hear more fashionable, information-based or cybernetic accounts of what it is stomachs do). Today, there is a right way to run the work of the digestive system, there are good 'fuels' and bad ones, and children are taught to believe from an early age that if they simply master the rules of healthy eating, of right fueling, of sound industrial management, then there is nothing irreducibly or in principle problematic about this work that has been assigned to them.

It may be that an older form of wisdom speaks to us through proverbs, the sort of wisdom that reeks of grandparents and people even older, that announces 'you are what you eat' as an existential truism, for example. But this sort of wisdom is for the most part drowned out by chatter, about good carbs as opposed to bad ones, about the exalted ideal ratio between carbs, proteins, and fats, about whether food should be free of some negative element or other, whether it should be raw or cooked, whether it is fitting that animals be slaughtered to produce it. And all of this chatter takes place in the mode of facticity: it is put forth as if it were entirely science, and had nothing to do with culture. The striving upper middle class thus avoids McDonald's not because it is where poor fat people go, but rather because the food served there is 'unhealthy', a term that can only conceal its normativity under a thick coat of false consciousness. And thus urban subcultures emerge that condemn gluten, or that advocate a diet based principally upon meat à la Tartare, as if there were no logic of social distinction at work, as if it were simply the case that their way of eating is the correct way, the natural way, the way cavemen ate, the way we ate before we were corrupted by the Agricultural Revolution, by modernity, by supermarkets, or some other hypothetical loss of innocence.

There is no more awareness in either the bourgeois or the Bohemian expressions of this chatter than there is in traditional folk cultures, with their highly prescriptive conceptions of how one ought to eat, that 'the natural' is a contested category, that in nutritional matters as in everything else, grand gestures and elaborate programs that spell out how to live in accordance with nature are at least as artificial as everything else we come up with. Whole Foods occupies a different cultural space than the McDonald's a few blocks away; both are however equidistant from Nature. But it may be that all this moral chatter masquerading as scientific truth, all this unending spelling out of the facts of the matter about how human bodies naturally nourish themselves, is just what enables us to carry on without having to address the real problem that underlies and gives rise to all this talk: that there is no correct formula, and that a body in constant need of nourishment, even when it is well nourished, even when it is nourished as perfectly as is naturally possible, is still a body in a curious predicament, that is always balanced on the brink of annihilation, and whose life is perpetual death.

Today, then, though food is on everyone's mind, as a culture we plainly lack the conceptual resources for reflecting on the bodily condition that food sustains. Many people would have no use for these resources anyway, for they do not experience this condition as peculiar at all. They thrive in the dancing of it, even believing that they are their own choreographers, that their parts fit together in the way they do as a result of their own free design. And their bodies grow beautiful and excellent, at least for a while, and even when they eventually grow tired of dancing, some of them do not complain, or even question the conditions of their existence.

I was never one of these creatures. Anyone who has ever seen me on a dance-floor will be able to confirm that I have no idea what to do there. But what most of them will not have observed is that this unknowing is my general condition. My everyday way of being in my body is really no different from my rarely seen dance moves. In various periods of my life, I have, by force of will, attempted to just ‘get into it’ --a revealing expression--, and have even succeeded for short stretches of time in convincing myself that I was in fact into it (the most joy I have ever felt in a single moment featured a soundtrack by a certain Coolio--something about riding along in a fantasy--with me and three other attractive young people flailing around in a cramped 106th Street apartment, in the summer, it must have been, of 1996). But in the end I have always returned back to my true condition, the one described in Origen’s fable of the fate of God’s distracted angels.

I do not believe in God or sin, but no exercise of intellect will ever rid me of the feeling that my body is a punishment for something, and that the only possible absolution lies in striving to return to some original undistracted state, to stay focused on that thing the body-dancers have forgotten.

 *

Animals, for their part, still do not know that when they are eating, they are eating calories. Animals just eat. Yet they too can be put on a diet, can have their corporeality compromised. Studies of earthworms, pigs, dogs, monkeys, and all the way up the chain of being to humans have shown that, when fed on a regular diet of 20-25% less than the ordinary caloric intake for the species in question, a creature will on average live longer than those of its conspecifics that are left to eat whatever they like.  This datum has served as the scientific justification for the new so-called 'calorie-restriction movement', whose members are typically not teenage girls, but middle-aged men, high-achieving professional men, the sort of insufferable tight-assed perfectionists you might also find running marathons.

The calorie-restrictionists insist that for them there is no such thing as 'dieting'. This word calls to mind the amateurishness of recidivist Jenny Craig clients, who respect an alimentary regime in the same way Sunday painters might dabble in aquarelles, without any real expectation of selling a canvas, let alone of bringing anything truly beautiful into existence. The calorie-restrictionists are, by contrast, professionals, and their commitment is for the longue durée. They recognize that maintaining a low weight is a quantitative science, and not alchemy. One loses weight by reducing the number of calories consumed relative to the number of calories burned, not by recourse to preparations from açai berries and other such elixirs. They also seem to understand what most Americans do not: that a calorie --in contrast with phlogiston and sundry other hypothetical entities adduced in the past to explain the innate heat of bodies-- is a pure abstraction, a unit of measurement of energy, and not a substance that can be physically separated from food. The calorie-restrictionists are in this respect the heirs to Lavoisier: no-bullshit calculators of the bodily economy of energetic input and output.

But if they excel in chemistry, their moral cosmology is fairly disappointing. In perfectly Manichaean fashion, one of the prominent links on their website spells out the various respects in which their movement contrasts with anorexia as light does with darkness (the society's symbol is a radiant sun). Thus, for example, as we learn from one restrictionist website:

 Anorexia: I am bad.

Calorie Restriction: I am good.

Anorexia: Hidden and secret.

Calorie Restriction: Open and public.

Anorexia: Focus is weight.

Calorie Restriction: Focus is calories.

And so on. The last of these distinctions seems momentarily to its authors to drift too far in the direction of the unhealthy and unbalanced. Thus while cautioning that you should not be "obsessed with the scale on your bathroom floor," but instead with the one on your kitchen counter, they rush to add "that 'obsessed' might not be the word you want to aim for." If you are going to obsess, "the kitchen scale is probably better than the bathroom scale. At least you're in the right room!" It is as if the Manichaeanism collapses momentarily, and the authors acknowledge that, in spite of the cheery veneer, any life project that requires its adepts to eat less than their bodies tell them to eat cannot be only about radiant, bright-futured health, but must also have a share of the dark and anorexic force that is its official opposite.

In their bivalent breakdown of the various respects in which they differ from anorexics, the restrictionists fail to notice a third path, distinct from both their own glorification of health and longevity, and from the gloom-and-doom rejectionism of the anorexics, and much more deeply rooted in human history than either of these. This is a path that would more naturally present itself to a person with a predisposition to some sort of eating disorder who is lucky enough to be born into a deep-rooted religious tradition, rather than the secular individualism of both the anorexics and the restrictionists.

I have in mind askêsis, the path of the ascetic, which has nothing to do with either healthy self-cultivation or unhealthy self-absorption, but instead with concentrating upon that thing from which, on a certain understanding, we’ve been distracted. It is by rediscovery of this path, this calling, that we become able to place the desire for weight loss within its proper context, to understand it as a consequence of our metaphysical predicament, and not of glossy magazines and the advertising industry. This is, precisely, the predicament of embodiment.

--

Excerpted from a forthcoming essay.

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A Miracle in Colonel Sanders' Colon (The PTL Club, 1979)

What an amazing historical document. I had not intended to watch the whole thing, but I did, with rapt attention. It recalls deep, vague, long-forgotten memories in me. Perhaps I saw this very episode in 1979, when I was seven; perhaps it is just that Col. Sanders speaks exactly like the elderly people in my American childhood used to speak. I knew Americans from the 19th century, worshipful Americans with their very own pastors who spoke with regional accents uncorrupted by mass media. It's hard to believe now, but I did.

 

There is so much here! Jim Bakker's sidekick's awful doggerel in praise of the Colonel (19'38''); the delightful finale with the giddy KFC regional managers distributing chicken to the PTL crowd, as the Colonel himself enjoys a wing; the squirm-inducing story of the polyp in Col. Sanders' colon and the 'plunk' sound he heard in the commode after his post-op enema (8'40''); Col. Sanders's own creepy pastor who denounces the 'Jewish attorney' (sic) who performed the operation on the Colonel and failed, in his Jewishness, to realize that God himself had already begun his own operation on the chicken-magnate's colon (9'47'').

What is most stunning, of course, is the way this epitomizes so vividly the conspiracy of religion and entrepreneurship in American history. Col. Sanders is 'saved' not nearly so much when his pastor first prays for him, as when the Colonel forks over his first tithe. The simple-minded money-maker and the crafty man of God make a perfect pair. The whole history of the place is a history of duplicity, unctuousness, and unremitting hustling. I miss it.

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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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.