Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Venereal Gadfly: More Notes towards a History of Orgasm

I've observed before that until at least the early 19th century, 'orgasm' did not mean what it does for us today. In La philosophie zoologique of 1809, for example, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck uses the term to describe something like the vital principle in an animal, which in various other iterations has been called élan vital, archaeus, soul, etc. He defines 'orgasme' as "the state preserved by the internal, soft parts of animals insofar as they are alive."

At some point after Lamarck, I imagine, the orgasm comes instead to be seen as a sort of culmination or maximal expression of this force, as the moment in which we are living our bodily life to its fullest. I suppose. I'll try to chart the development of this new meaning some other time, but what interests me here is the matter of how, if not by the term 'orgasm', did authors up to Lamarck's era describe this physiological event?

In my reading of Latin texts on animal generation I've often come across a curious phrase, the true meaning of which escaped my attention until yesterday, when I found it in Tobias Andreae's Brevis explicatio corporis humani prout anima vegetativa pollet of 1669:

Oestro igitur venereo animalia perfectiora irritata, spiritum seminalem tam subtilem emittunt, ut licet (observante Harveo) visibile semen penetralia uteri non intret, hic tamen pervadens spiritus.

The more perfect animals, therefore, agitated by the venereal gadfly, emit a seminal spirit that is so subtle that (as Harvey observes) it does not enter into the innermost reaches of the uterus, but nevertheless the spirit pervades there.

Oestrus venereus, obviously, is a fixed expression for 'orgasm'. But oestrus, in turn, without its venereal modifier, originally had a much broader scope. Thus in Liddell and Scott's dictionary of classical Greek we find:

ΟΙΣΤΡΟΣ. the gadfly, breese... an insect which infests cattle... II. metaph. a sting, anything that drives mad, Eur. : absol. the smart of pain, agony, Soph. 2. mad desire, insane passion, Hdt., Eur., etc. : --generally, madness, frenzy, Soph., Eur.

So oestrus, or oistros, means in the first instance 'gadfly', 'pest', and secondarily, 'irritation'. One striking thing about this term in its later transformations in scientific Latin is its strong association with female physiology: thus 'estrogen' is, etymologically, the hormone productive of sexual irritation in women, while non-human female primates spend a period of each month, 'estrus', that is, in visible sexual agitation.

But why is the sexual itch marked as feminine? One thing that comes as a surprise to people with little historical memory is that it was not until very recently that sexual insatiability came to be associated with men. In the early modern period, these were classic female attributes, and if a man were to exhibit them he would be thought to have lapsed into effeminacy. The idea that men are naturally and essentially the lustful ones, and the pseudoevolutionary explanations that are offered for this idea, are really nothing more than apologetics for our own current set of prejudices. I have never come across a single early modern male author who owns up to his own libidinousness. They write about themselves as if sexuality were not a defining factor of their existence.

But when did the shift of prejudice occur? I suspect that it happened roughly in tandem with the shift in the meaning of 'orgasm', which in turn was a reflection of a much broader shift in the conception of the place of sexuality in an individual person's identity. The culmination of the sexual act came to be described not as the relief of an itch, as a physiological release comparable to sneezing, but rather as the culmination of the vital force of the body, again, as the supreme expression of one's bodily life. And naturally, it was men and not women who came to be seen as charged with this vital force.

This lexical shift, away from an association of sexual climax with feminine 'estrus' (in the Euripidean and Sophoclean sense) and towards an association with masculine 'orgasm' (in the Lamarckian sense), leads me to think that the idea that female orgasm remained largely unknown to men until the sexual revolution is really a symptom of our own era's lack of historical depth, of our tendency to begin our histories in the Victorian period. Female orgasm was well known long before 'orgasm' came to mean what it does today, but it was conceptualized as a physiological disorder to be dissipated, an irritation, and not as a 'positive' force.

I had hoped that something could be said also of Plato's description of Socrates in the Apology as a 'gadfly', which, along with the familiar leitmotif of the Socratic dialogues, according to which the philosopher functions as a 'midwife' for the birthing of ideas, would have perhaps provided some more fuel for the idea that there lies, at the origins of the philosophical tradition, what in some circles might be called a 'genderfuck'. But it turns out that the word Plato used for this sort of gadfly was μύωψ, while the extension of oistros or oestrus to sexual irritation, and the addition of the modifier 'venereal' seems to be an invention of early modern or Renaissance Latin medical writing. Still, I take the shift in our conception of sexual climax, from estrus to orgasm, and at the same time also from female to male, to be no less remarkable a genderfuck, and, if I'm right, to offer a powerful piece of evidence in favor of a revisionist account of the history of sexuality since the beginning of the modern period.

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Progressivism Isn't Funny

One theme to which I often return here is the ill fit between some of my sincere political commitments, on the one hand, and some of what I take to be the even deeper features of my personality on the other. I've had to deal over the years with a tremendous amount of psychological dissonance arising from the fact that, although in my actual earnest commitments I am a fairly standard-model progressive (the fat-cat bankers are bad, imperialist wars are bad, racial and class injustice of all sorts are bad), in my sense of humor I am an arch-conservative. While I do not want to endorse any general theory of the nature of humor, Hobbes's account --that humor is in its essence cruel-- seems to me to correctly describe at least a great deal of humor, and this is the kind of humor moreover that I prefer. It is scoffing, contemptuous, misanthropic... and it makes me laugh.

What passes for progressive humor, by contrast, seldom makes me laugh at all. I gather that here I am largely alone, that this is something people who share my political commitments do not generally experience as a problem. I see signs at demonstrations, or political memes making the rounds on Facebook, and they are supposed to be funny, and my progressive friends love them. But these memes seem to me to be doing exactly the opposite of what humor at its best does: they are serving to strengthen group solidarity, whereas the best humor, the purest humor, says fuck the group; fuck the lot of you, in fact.

Even the postmodern ironic strain of progressive humor that seems to be flourishing so much in the Internet age, such as Feminist Hulk, does not seem funny to me. If the Hulk were saying things even more awful than a giant, green, hypermacho, testosterone-engorged mutant male might ordinarily be expected to say: now that would be funny. But to subject him to a mash-up where he riffs on Judith Butler or something like that simply cannot have the same sort of comical effect. Take, by contrast, another familiar Internet mash-up: the Nietzsche Family Circus. Here we have a subversion of the innocent by the transgressive, and this cannot but be more successful than the Hulk-Judith Butler contrast, which takes us from the monstrous to the righteous. Righteousness isn't funny. In-group affirmation of shared righteousness is downright tedious.

If progressives tend, as conservatives often accuse, towards being snide, elite, and contemptuous, I suspect that this is because snide, contemptuous, and elitist humor is the only kind that progressives have available to them that is really funny. It is hilarious to watch some yokel Republican congressman making a fool of himself going on about his religious faith. Take this for example:

 

Now I have said that this sort of thing is good fodder for humor. But notice, it is Rep. Franks who is doing all the work here. He is making a proper fool of himself, and it is natural and fitting to take delight in that. But still, such delight cannot itself be called progressive humor, since in order to experience it a progressive has to suspend his or her ordinary political commitments, and move into this morally problematic aesthetic mode of perception that I have identified as my own most favorite, and that conservatives, perhaps rightly, see as a sign of 'liberal' hypocrisy.

Part of me wants to say that this deep dissonance is irrelevant, that any psychologically balanced, mature individual should be able to navigate a way between different social registers, at some of which delighting in other people's idiocy and, yes, suffering, is alright, and at others of which the only concern is to alleviate suffering and to challenge idiocy. Another part of me worries that this dissonance reveals that I am in fact an arch-conservative, and that everything else is relatively superficial, most likely a late-coming calque added on to help me fit in in the social circles in which I run. After all, never do I feel more myself than when I am laughing at something I think is truly funny, and contrary to the Scholastic philosophers I do not think that risibility is only a property quarto modo of human beings: I believe it pertains to the human essence.

Either way, I think there is an important philosophical question here about the way the political and the aesthetic (for gelastics is a branch of aesthetics) intersect. It's a question that seems to be of no interest at all to my progressive friends, whom I often hear earnestly hoping out loud that people will someday no longer say (or even think?) nasty, unfair, demeaning things about other people. I doubt this is even cognitively possible, but maybe there's just something wrong with the way my brain works.

Ordinarily I don't care much for the feedback I get here. But this time I am inviting it. I want to know whether anyone else has thought about this problem, and if so whether there are any suggestions as to how to resolve it.

Bisexuality and the Linnean Fallacy

[This is a piece I wrote for the Opinionator series in the New York Times to which I occasionally contribute. Somehow it fell through the cracks, and by now the news item to which it is responding is fairly old (in news terms), so I'll just post it here.]

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A New York Times article of August 22 announced with appropriate irony the results of a recent study by researchers at Northwestern University: "No Surprise for Bisexual Men: Report Indicates They Exist." This study followed another, completed in 2005, which had concluded that “with respect to sexual arousal and attraction, it remains to be shown that male bisexuality exists.” The question of human male bisexuality is starting to look like that of the healthfulness of eggs: we are just going to have to get used to periodic about-faces on the part of the scientists. Or at least the questions would look alike, if sexual orientation were not so much more difficult a concept to get a scientific handle on than that of health.

Both studies on bisexuality used the questionable method of penile plethysmography, in which the flow of blood to the test subject's genitals is measured, as images showing various combinations of men and women engaged in sexual activity are shown. Now I do not wish to question this method here, though I will note in passing that there is good reason to wonder whether a bisexual orientation is something that may be measured by degrees of genital arousal. I will also not discuss the inherent problems in selecting subjects for such a study; the recent one is said to have made improvements over the one conducted in 2005, yet plainly, to the extent that such a study must rely on volunteers, there is always a danger that what is being measured is a disposition of people with the sex-study-volunteering orientation, rather than, so to speak, a naturally occurring one.

I want to focus instead on the a priori commitments that would lead a scientist to go in search of such a creature as a bisexual in the first place. I believe that to do so is no less ridiculous --and will look no less ridiculous some generations from now-- than an early-20th-century attempt to, say, distinguish a quadroon from an octoroon, to draw an example from the history of American racial pseudoscience, looks to us today.

In both the case of race and of sexual orientation, we are witnessing a conflation of social and natural kinds. Complex social and historical factors bring it about that it should make sense to speak of a certain kind of person in a certain place and time (a shaman, a serf, a hysteric, to cite a few examples). Today, these factors in turn cause science to set about looking to establish the real existence of such social kinds in nature, as if society and history had no role in our having come to speak of the kind in the first place.

This point was anticipated by Michel Foucault in his powerfully argued History of Sexuality. The Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, partly inspired by Foucault, would make the case for what he calls 'historical ontology': the process by which historical change brings into being kinds that did not, and need not, always exist. Once such kinds come into existence, however, they appear as if necessary; it becomes difficult to conceptualize the world without them.

It is a grave mistake of science, however, to fall prey to this difficulty, and to neglect the historical conditioning of the kinds of things we go out looking for in nature. This mistake results largely from the lack of communication between psychologists (in this case, the ones specializing in what people once felt comfortable calling 'sexology'), on the one hand, and historians and anthropologists on the other.

I see the history of 'racial science' as involving an overextension of the classificatory project, initiated in the early 18th century by Carl Linnaeus, beyond the real (or relatively real, though certainly not permanent) boundaries between biological species and down to supposed human subtypes, which are in fact only the artefacts of political and ideological preoccupations and have no biological significance whatsoever. The creation of sexual subtypes, I take it (as kinds of person, rather than as different behavioral propensities of people), is a continuation of this misplaced naturalization, of this Linnean overreaching. It shows science at its most historically oblivious.

Yet the most surprising aspect of the scientific 'discovery' of social kinds is the willingness of self-identified sexual minorities to mimic science's naturalistic language and to express something approaching gratitude at having been discovered. In this respect, the Times headline conveys an admirable if misplaced irony. It reminded me when I read it of Thomas Laqueur's riff in Making Sex on Realdus Columbus's discovery in 1559 of the human female clitoris, and of how this in turn echoed that other Columbus's discovery some decades earlier of something exactly half the world already knew about.

But there is a difference in the case of bisexuality. The existence of bisexuality in men might be something with which the men who experience it are familiar without science having to tell them about it. But unlike knowledge of female anatomy or of New World civilization, these men might protest upon being discovered that they are not an entity in nature, like some new species of butterfly. They are not some special variety of men, but rather they are men simpliciter, with a certain range of interests within a domain of life that, for complicated reasons extensively analyzed by Foucault, we take to be overly definitive of who we as human beings are.

But the politics of science being what it is, human beings who fit the profile of the sort of person characterized by a scientific study are much more likely to take their 'discovery' as an affirmation, one that potentially affords them political leverage, than they are to demand not to be treated as a natural kind. And in this way they perpetuate what we might call the 'Linnean fallacy': the extension of the classificatory project that is well-suited for the identification of biological kinds into human social reality, to which it is most poorly suited.

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Money, Aging, and Facial Piercing

I'm currently writing a review of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (a magnificent book, an overwhelming anthropological takedown of the discipline of economics), and am straining to refrain from saying much about it now. But one of countless intriguing observations in the book connects up with something I've been thinking about a lot recently: adornment and its transformations throughout the human life cycle. It's come to seem to me, in particular, that one might best look at the facial piercings and the hair experiments of people aged roughly 12 to 30 almost literally as secondary sex characteristics: like the appearance of acne or the change of voice, these partially exosomatic features (they literally pierce the boundary between the body and the culture through which the body moves) now seem to me impossible to separate from the matter of, as Kierkegaard says, the stages of life's way.

When I was younger I took for granted that the hair experiments would come to an end at some point. But I could not quite understand, nor did I really think about, the question why they would end. Hair is peculiar in that it affords different possibilities at different stages of life; an adolescent male naturally has more freedom to experiment with androgyny, and to beautify himself, than a middle-aged male, in large part because there is more hair there, it can be worn long and full, it can hang down in the eyes, and so on.

I also assumed the piercings would fall away at some unspecified future moment, but never asked why. I suppose that unlike the hair, they could in principle be sustained into one's autumnal years. But the perception of them would be different; now it would be a matter of 'sticking it out', of insisting on keeping the outward signifiers of an inward hormonal activity that everyone knows to have slowed down long ago. So one gives up, and blends in, and no longer considers himself a player in the game of self-display.

Representing the other prominent gender, there are of course the grandes dames who never give up, who pile on the brooches and bracelets, and spend ever-increasing hours at the hairdresser, in exactly the same measure as their nubility wanes: they double up on the outward signifiers of beauty, but the actual social possibilities these signifiers afford necessarily contract.

But here is where Graeber's account of the origins of money has me intrigued. He writes:

Money almost always arises first from objects that are used primarily as adornment of the person. Beads, shells, feathers, dog or whale teeth, gold, and silver are all well-known cases in point. All are useless for any purpose other than making people look more interesting, and hence, more beautiful (145).

This account seems perfectibly plausible, yet it leaves me wondering: if this is the case, then why don't old, grey, bald men lose interest in money? To put this another way: I miss my nose ring less and less with each passing year (some who know me will have noticed that a hole remains, one that could easily accommodate a stud if I should ever choose to insert one), and simultaneously I grow ever more concerned about the meagreness of my retirement savings. The extension of adornments for use as money must therefore have involved a substantial transformation or expansion of the conceptual role these items played. Otherwise, the accumulation of money, like the display of facial piercings, would be simply an age-specific stage, an epiphenomenal expression of a temporary hormonal shift.

I suspect that the transformation has precisely to do with the shift from display to accumulation. Why put it in your nose when you can put it in the bank, and let it cause you to shine indirectly with an aura of importance, even at an age when you are now grizzled and coming apart, and any amount of direct adornment of the body would be of little use? I suspect also that this shift has much to do with the ongoing importance of the adornment of women: both of  young women, who can themselves serve, in exchange for jewelry and other gifts, as a sort of adornment of grizzled men (vestiges of what Graeber calls the 'human economy'); and of old women, who can see no brighter option than to keep participating in the human economy that absorbed them at an early age, even if they are forced to compensate for their ever-diminishing value on this perfidious market with ever-chunkier adornments.

I suspect finally that if men could just remain androgynous ephebes, with their thick bangs hanging down into their eyes, then it would be enough for them to adorn themselves with a piercing or two, or a whale tooth or two, or some red paste made from a camwood bar, spread on the body as a cosmetic (144); and it's only the process of aging that precipitates the shift to accumulation, one of the more irksome consequences of which is our patriarchy.

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Cultural Lycanthropy

I've been rethinking n+1's 2010 intervention, "What Was the Hipster?", which I continue to take as some of the best amateur sociology of recent decades. It alludes explicitly to Anatole Broyard's 1947 "Anatomy of a Hipster," but the real antecedents are works like William Foote Whyte's 1943 Street Corner Society. It is a serious analysis of phenomena that don't exactly make their own case for being taken seriously.

One thing that did not strike me on my first reading of it a year or so ago was the description of a shift, circa 2003, I think, from a sort of Phase 1, which was entirely based upon appropriation of symbols of American whiteness, to a Phase 2 that might be called 'lycanthropic' (in the broad sense in which we understand 'clinical lycanthropy' today, to include not just werewolfism, but any human adoption of the physical or behavioral traits of an animal, cf. T. A. Fahy, "Lycanthropy: A Review,"  J R Soc Med 82, 1 (January, 1989): 37–9). This involved both a new animal-centered totemism that was somewhat continuous with the old irony (the howling-wolf-before-the-full-moon t-shirt might be seen as straddling both Phases), as well as a more literal becoming-animal (to speak with Deleuze, which I try not to do) that involved the growing of thick beards, a sort of coming-out as hirsute beings.

Not since the Sexual Revolution has so much hair been left to grow, laissé pousser, as they say. Even if this time around the additional hair does not provoke conservative outcries about the decline of civilization (perhaps there are too many other symptoms of that for the old and hairless to notice), and instead is immediately taken up into the system of commerce and advertising --thick beards suddenly appearing on the models in the vitrines of FCUK and Stüssy, mere frozen photographs, yet somehow blowing like weathervanes--, even if things are different this time around, I say, to the extent that capitalism has developed quite a bit since 1968 in its ability to swallow whatever comes along, still, this new hair must be seen as pointing beyond itself, as significant.

I don't want to get into what that might be. I suspect that it has something to do with the rise of ecology as a rallying point for the post-political youth in search of something to be earnest about. It also, perhaps, and perhaps relatedly, has something to do with a historical shift in the way we think about our community with animals.

But here is what I did want to get to: those who have been around me for the last month or so have noticed that I am having trouble shutting up about bears. I wrote a review for the Chronicle of Higher Education of a book about the history of the bear as a symbol in medieval Europe. It was an excellent book, and it fit nicely with my current broad interest, both scholarly and belle-lettristic, in the importance of animals in the constitution of human social reality.

Puzzlingly, when I arrived in Brooklyn a month ago, I quickly noticed that everyone around me was on about bears as well: the lad at the café would have one tattooed on his forearm; at least one restaurant would feature a bearskin rug, as if this were some hunting lodge; the names of bands I'd never heard of would bespeak the resurgence of the sort of ursine cult that the Church was supposed to have stamped out by the 11th century.

But here too, perhaps, the cult was waning: the kids had already started regretting their tattooing priorities of 2008; the bands with the ursine names were in close-out bins (bins full of recordings made in the last days of the history of the recording as a material object); and so on. And here I was, a middle-aged man arriving from the far provinces, just getting on to this bear thing!

And the question this has caused me to ask is one that is more Bourdieuian than Deleuzian: is everything, in the end, trickle-down, or do I actually care about bears? Am I like some mom on Facebook trying to use teen lingo? Or is my own 'animal turn', which expresses itself in books and essays and reviews (and blog posts too), rather than in tattoos and t-shirts and new directions in facial hair, something that has arisen quite independently?

In the end it doesn't matter; I'll write about them one way or another. And in a way it is heartening to see such intimate confirmation of what I have long suspected: that there is, so to speak, a regnum in regno, a kingdom within a kingdom --not grace within nature, but ideas within culture-- and intellectual trends might very well track those of fashion, without for that reason being any the less worth pursuing.

In a subsequent post I will attempt to say more about what I take to be the deeper causes of this cultural lycanthropy, and perhaps to make some sense of why I have become swept up in it.

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The Flight of Curiosity

From the 'Stone' series in the online edition of the New York Times. To read the entire article, click here.

Today’s natural scientist easily distinguishes his own work not only from his hobbies, but also from the activity of his pseudoscientific counterpart. When we look back in history, however, it becomes difficult to keep this distinction in view, for it has often happened that false beliefs have produced significant experimental results and have led to real discoveries. It is no less difficult  to separate the history either of science or of pseudoscience from what I will dare to call the “real” history of philosophy, for until very recently, what we now call science was not merely of interest to philosophers, but was in fact constitutive of philosophy. In fact, it was not called science at all, but rather natural philosophy.

Thus, tellingly, among the articles in the Philosophical Transactions of 1666, the first year of the journal’s publication, we find titles such as “Of a Considerable Load-Stone Digged Out of the Ground in Devonshire,” and “Observations Concerning Emmets or Ants, Their Eggs, Production, Progress, Coming to Maturity, Use, &c.” Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, researchers studying the properties of magnetism continued to refer to their area of interest as “the magnetical philosophy,” and as late as 1808  John Dalton published “A New System of Chemical Philosophy.” A year later Jean-Baptiste Lamarck brought out his “Philosophie zoologique.” Yet by the early 20th century, this usage of the word philosophy had entirely vanished. What happened?

Les Bisous

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

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

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

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

But why all this kissing, anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roissy-en-France, May 22, 2011.

Reading The Pisan Cantos

I've only just begun, a few days ago, to work through Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos LXXIV-LXXXIV, after having attempted and failed at this same task a decade or so ago. There is still quite a bit I simply don't understand, and to resort to the explanatory notes whenever they are strictly speaking needed would result in a very different sort of reading than what we have in mind when we say we're reading poetry. Linguistically, the only completely inaccessible parts of the text are the Chinese characters, but the reason for slipping into Old French or German or Italian or Latin or Greek at any particular moment are often obscure to me. Anyway the results of this incomprehensible collage of quotations are, generally, consistently beautiful.

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Often the Cantos read like what one imagines Glenn Beck's blackboards might yield if Beck had studied Homer and Dante and learned classical Chinese, instead of spending his early years hosting an FM-radio 'morning zoo' program. The same preoccupations are there --usury, the gold standard, the Federal Reserve, the illegitimacy of elected officials-- but rendered in a way that places them in a direct lineage with the history of classical literature Pound had so wonderfully internalized, rather than being the outsider scrawling of a talk-show host.

But both Pound and Beck are  distinctly American in their worries about what goes on behind the scenes; and indeed Pound helps to give some kind of historical depth to what otherwise just sounds like incoherent chatter. It is false, and toxic, but it hasn't always just been promoted by subliterate boobies. In fact, Pound and Beck have only one degree of separation between them: a spot held by the rabid anti-Semite and classic American crank Eustace Mullins, who frequently visited the poet while he was convalescing in the post-war years at the St. Elizabeth's Mental Hospital in Washington DC, putting off his treason trial for as long as he could. In 2010 Beck would begin promoting Mullins's book, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, on his Fox Network program. 

That Pound was a Fascist does not in principle bother me-- and here I notice, without being prepared to offer a full defense of myself, a different standard for poets than for philosophers, even as I otherwise insist that the distance between them should not be exaggerated. Heidegger cannot be excused, because his continued vitality is wrapped up with 'using' him for this or that purpose, and so with using a system of thought that was in fact an apologia for National Socialism. I can't imagine any comparable expectation of usability of the Pisan Cantos, unless the deepening of the reader's engagement with language counts as 'use'.

In fact, in a certain respect I appreciate Pound the person, as he stands in relation to his art. I love to see the Soviets' nonplussed reaction that a confirmed psychotic and Fascist would win a prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1948; they were missing something --along with George Orwell, who insisted on the need for a conformity between aesthetic sensibility and common decency-- that the prize's jury understood about the nature of the project.

The open-air US military prison cage in which Pound scrawled out the Cantos' incipit, about Mussolini's lynching, look rather too much like Guantanamo, and the circumstances of Pound's creation rather too reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's mental regimen of daily verse composition while in the Gulag, not to wonder whether there is perhaps an entire variety of creation that is triggered by the unique combination of exposure and confinement characteristic of these instances of imprisonment. (I don't know whether any great new verses have been composed in the minds of the prisoners at Guantanamo, though I'm fairly confident in saying that old, familiar verses have been recited inwardly with greater concentration).

There has been some suggestion that the Pisan Cantos are a variety of 'schizopoetics' in the Deleuzian sense. I'm not really sure I've understood what that is, but I do not think that the firing of the poetic imagination as a result of the mental strain of imprisonment, accompanied by a diagnosis by WW II-era US military psychologists of incipient personality disorder, is quite enough to say that there is anything schizo about the poetry. Again, what jumps out to me, even through the crackpot stuff abut the Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes, is the intense, rigorous embeddedness in litaerary tradition. I think the art brut of Glenn Beck's chalkboards gets somewhat closer to the sort of free-associative, historically rooted yet totally un-self-aware, deeply obsessive theory-of-everything projects that tend to be of interest as examples of the schizopoetic. Pound is not like that. His mental illness seems largely to have been exaggerated in order to avoid trial for treason; and his treasonous sympathy for Fascism was not in itself schizoid, but only toxic.

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It's been noted that the proximity of African-American military prisoners in the camp at Pisa came to play an important role in the Cantos themselves; and was the only central theme of the work imported directly from the American experience (even if Pound's paranoia about global conspiraces itself has an American inflection). When I first began reading the Cantos, by mistake I had failed to turn off iTunes, and at some point the Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 album Enter the Wu-Tang came on. I managed to read and to listen together for about 10 minutes before I had to give up on the aural component of my aesthetic immersion. But one thing that struck me was that aesthetically the two works were not entirely from different universes; both were pastiches of junk and high ideas, thrown together at least in a way that yields up the impression of schizopoiesis (an impression that in Ol' Dirty Bastard's case would eventually be clinically confirmed); both involve invented mythologies pieced together from sundry cultural sources, including a peculiar Sinophilia in both cases; both involve bullshit theories of who's behind the scenes controlling what (in Wu-Tang's case, derivative and fringe spin-off doctrines of the Nation of Islam, already fringe enough on its own); both use the word 'nigger' a great deal, in a way that enhances the poetic force of each of the respective works while pushing them even further to the margins of (in Pound's case) canonizability, or (in Wu-Tang's case) establishment acclaim in places like Cleveland (the pop culture equivalent of high culture's canon).

It struck me during those ten minutes that Pound would have enjoyed Enter the Wu-Tang very much.  But that's just a stupid aside. Or kind of stupid: however condescending, Pound's attitude towards African-American folk culture is one of great admiration; and he even holds African-Americans responsible for the preservation of forms of diction in English that white Americans were, with their lack of concern for folk tradition, carelessly allowing to slip away. I therefore really would like to know what he would have thought about this album, which I consider explosively powerful, very much like the Cantos themselves.

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I keep thinking about There Will Be Blood, a film I only saw once when it came out three or four years ago, but which sits with me and grows within me like few other films I've seen. It's gradually come to seem to me as nothing less than an allegory of the foundation of America: the ruthless, pragmatic, unbelieving entrepreneur; versus the hypocritical monster who takes the shape of a media evangelist. The entrepreneur ends up beating the preacher to death, but there will always be another one to take his place. What this juxtaposition leaves out (and we can't exactly call it a Manichean juxtaposition, since neither of the figures is much of a light-bearer), is the frontier individualist, who doesn't believe the preacher's bullshit, but also does not clamor for wealth and power. He feels something on the boundary between extreme freedom and total alienation. If he is of mediocre intelligence and ambition, he will join a militia within his native Idaho, say. If he is Ezra Pound, born in Idaho in 1885, he will decamp for Europe, and denounce the entire US as an insane asylum. He'll believe weird things, and maybe write some great stuff.

In any case, even if we add this third type to the allegory of America, there's still not much in the way of light-bearing, or, to put it differently, Enlightenment. And it remains a crazy country (and one where I hope to live again permanently someday).

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One remarkable thing about Pound's life-course, which obviates the ridiculously high demand placed by Orwell, is that the poet himself understood, and more lucidly the older he grew, that his anti-Semitism was rooted in self-hatred. His end-of-life confession, that his bigotry resulted from the worst sort of 'suburban' and conventional laziness one can lapse into, to my mind allows us to say that Pound, in acknowledging his self-hating misery, can rest happy in death, in a way that stubborn Heidegger cannot.

Pound redeems himself, and distances himself from the crackpots because he is able to regret who he is. The greatest turn came late in life, when he became embarrassed by the the tremendous waste of time of his suburban dislike of Jews. But it's already there, in the Pisan Cantos, as I read them. At Canto 76. 246-49, for example:

                        J'ai eu pitié des autres

probablement pas assez, and at moments that suited my own convenience

        Le paradis, n'est pas artificiel,

                        L'enfer non plus.

And then again at 80.674-76, the remorse that comes with being broken by cruel imprisonment, the breaking down of the hard man that can't but redeem all the rest:

                Les larmes que j'ai créées m'inondent

Tard, très tard je t'ai connue, la Tristesse

I have been hard as youth sixty years.