Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Etymology from Memory, #5

'Seminal'

It has recently been brought to my attention that academic philosophers, along with saying 'human beings' instead of 'man' and 'they' instead of 'he', are expected to avoid the word 'seminal' altogether in their published work. This is of particular concern to me (I'm delighted, in contrast, to let 'man' go; as for 'they', I do regret that we were not able to come up with a gender-neutral pronoun that is not at the same time number-ambiguous), since I have just written an entire book on semen (or, more precisely, a book in which one of the central concerns is the variety of explanations given in the 17th century of the role of semen in the generation of animals and in the transmission of specific form), and I am fairly attached to this noun's adjectival form.

Beyond my personal need to go on talking about what I write about, and writing about what I know about, I am also fairly concerned about the way superficial changes, implemented in the name of eliminating bias from academic discourse, inadvertently impoverish that discourse. In the present case, it seems to me that anyone who does not like the word 'seminal' must be a monolingual speaker of English, or at least must not know that, while 'seminal' is the adjectival form of 'semen', 'semen' itself just means 'seed', and the term was likely extended by analogy in the first place from the domain of agriculture to describe the fluid emitted by male animals. When the term is extended by even further analogy to describe abstract principles, e.g., when Augustine speaks of rationes seminales or 'seminal reasons', it is fairly clear that he has in mind plain old seeds --as in the seeds of a pear from which a pear tree might grow, and which are found within the closest thing a pear tree has to ovaries-- and not the fluid he so regrets being tempted to eject. At the more concrete level, well into the 18th century generation theorists regularly referred to a hypothesized 'female semen': for them, as for Augustine, what is seminal is not necessarily male, but simply whatever plays a role in the generation of natural beings, plant or animal (and sometimes also mineral).

Now I take it that it is too much to ask of people, even academic philosophers, that they eliminate all appeal to metaphors of planting and growth in the way they talk about their own ideas and the ideas of others. Strictly speaking, ideas don't grow from seeds, but strictly speaking when we understand something we are not standing under it, and we never really see what other people are saying. Our primary experience of the physical and biological world, and of our physically and biologically embodied existence in it, is the source of many of the linguistic resources we have available to us to describe mental processes, and it is hard to imagine what the language for describing our mental lives would look like without these resources. The growth and development of biological entities is a fairly fundamental process, and thus not surprisingly a source of metaphors, but it is in fact just this sort of metaphor that we are being asked not to use when we are asked not to use the word 'seminal'.

One might reply that de facto 'seminal' has come to connote male animal seed, and thus that when applied to ideas it connotes male ideas (whatever those might be). On this line of thinking, whatever the term may have originally connoted in Latin does not matter, and it is futile to insist on a strict, etymologically based understanding of the term, since actual use determines meaning, and so on. But it seems to me that this very line of thinking brings to light a deeper problem than the one addressed by a cosmetic correction of language: that in our way of thinking, and not only in our way of speaking, generative force, whether of ideas or of offspring, is associated with the male, that it is males who carry the seeds of things. The solution to this problem, however, is not to stop using the word 'seed' and its associated adjectives, of which 'seminal' is one, but rather to seek to revive the full range of possible connotations of these words, to insist that what is seminal is not just the ejaculations, verbal or fluid, of the male of the species. Rather than reducing the number of entries in the lexicon, we should be seeking to increase the number of meanings listed under each entry, especially those with such a rich historical life, and such a basic and deep connection to human experience of the natural world, as 'semen'.

Friday Symptoms, #2

Lâtah

There is no doubt that there is a hereditary tendency to lâtah in almost every Malay. They themselves give a very wide definition to the term, including all, from those who are absolutely automatic to suggestion, to those of a more markedly excitable temperament. Most Malays take very little notice of mild cases-- they are so common, they do not tend to become more severe, they do not, as a rule, interfere with health, and usually very little with business. There is no tendency for the condition to degenerate into insanity-- an orang lâtah (lâtah man) never becomes an orang gila (lunatic).

It has been suggested that the enervating climate of the Malay Peninsula and the archipelago is responsible for the condition. Even Europeans get 'jumpy' and intensely irritable after a few years there, and 'tropical neurasthenia', it is suggested, is the forerunner of what, in a few generations, would be lâtah. On the other hand, an almost identical affection, 'miryachit', occurs in Siberia, and 'Tourette's disease' and the 'jumping Frenchmen of Maine' will immediately occur to those acquainted with the varieties of spasmodic tic...

We come now to the question, What is the connexion, if any, between lâtah and amok? Here a recent experiment of Fletcher's may usefully be considered. Briefly it was as follows: a known lâtah in hospital was taken out of the ward into another room, where she was rendered lâtah. In the interval a dummy figure was put into the bed next hers. When she was brought back she was given a knife, and it was suggested that she should stab the apparently sleeping body. She acted on the suggestion instantly, and struck furiously at the figure. Immediately afterwards the suggestion was withdrawn, and she was horrified at her conduct. It was a correspondingly great relief, therefore, when the sheet was withdrawn and the dummy figure exposed to her eyes.

Suppose, now, that to a lâtah, consumed with a great anger or sorrow, brooding over his wrongs, such a suggestion were made, either by self-suggestion or accident. Owing to his condition, the suggestion would be stronger, more imperative, more lasting than usual. In such a case we would almost certainly get a typical amoker.

It will be obvious that the whole subject is intensely elusive. It is very difficult for the European to get behind the Oriental mind. There are almost no objective signs to go upon: the lâtah, and the amoker, except when under the influence of their affection, behaving like ordinary people, showing no stigmata of degeneracy, giving no signs of madness.

*
From The British Medical Journal, February 24, 1912, p. 438-9.

Wednesday Animals, #11

The Asse is called in Latine Asinus, in Greeke Oros and Killos... The Haebrues call it Chamor, and the Persyans Care... the Italyans, Lasino, the Spaniardes Asno, the French Vng asne, the Germans Esel, Mul, and the Illyrians Osel; the which beast is intituled or phrased with many epithites among Poets; as, slow, burthen-bearing, back-bearing, vile, cart-drawing, mill-labouring, sluggish, crooked, vulgar, slow-paced, long-eared, blockish, braying, ydle, devill-hayred, filthy, saddle-bearer, slow-foot, four-foot, unsavoury, and a beast of miserable condition; beside many other such titles in the Greeke.

Asses are ingendred both by their owne kind and also by horses... An asse is more desirous of copulation than a horse... If a horse cover a female asse which hath been entred by a male asse, he cannot alter the seed of the asse: but if an asse cover a Mare which a horse hath formerly entered, he will destroy the seed of the horse.

When an asse dieth, out of his body are ingendred certaine Flies, called Scarabees. 

*

From Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, Describing the true and lively figure of every Beast, with a discourse of their severall Names, Conditions, Kindes, Vertues (both naturall and medicinall), Countries of their breed, their love and hate to Mankinde, and the wonderfull worke of God in their Creation, Preservation, and Destruction, London, 1607.

Of the Smashing of Ripe Quinces: Notes on Stefan George

The last time I went to a poetry reading, I was made to sit patiently as a preening, college-age jack-ass indignantly declaimed, in verse that could only be called 'free', his strong disapproval of Dick Cheney. A serious issue, to be sure, but certainly not serious in a way that gets my  poetic imagination going. If I confess a sympathy for what Stefan George called 'pure aestheticism' in poetry, this is not because I believe myself to be above politics, but because I believe that poetry is above current events, and by 'current' I mean whatever social world human beings have managed to throw together for themselves, for now, until it comes apart. Leave engagement with that to prose, which is to say to the vastly greater part of what language does in this, what Walter Benjamin rightly called our 'prosaic age'. Prose is the (more or less) formally unrestricted use of natural language for the telling of captivating things about the world. The formal restrictions of poetry, by contrast, bring it about that whatever poetry says about the world, it is always also saying something about language. This means, among other things, that translating poetry is at least something quite close to writing poetry (unless we take as an example Nabokov's hyper-literalist translation of Evgenii Onegin, which was meant precisely to illustrate that a true translation of one language's poetry into another can only come out as prose). Someone who has translated a novel, by contrast, certainly could not be said eo ipso to have written a novel.

What language is poetry about? Generally, it is about the language it is in. In translation, in turn, poetry is about the limitations of the fit of one language with another. These two facts together mean that, in writing poetry, in contrast with prose (more or less), it matters what language one is writing in. I have become convinced, in fact, that good poetry, the best poetry, is the poetry that seeks to lay bare the essence of the language that serves as its medium. Now I understand that from a historical-linguistic point of view languages do not have essences, but are ever-evolving accretions of borrowings, local adaptations, creolizations and mishearings, but that does not change the fact that, in terms of expressive power, 'life', 'earth', and 'kin' sound closer to the soul of English than, say, 'vitality', 'terrestrial', or 'family'. I have thus also come to appreciate the extent to which the essence of English is Anglo-Saxon and Germanic, and to think that no one understood his task as a poet better than Seamus Heaney, when he undertook to translate Beowulf into modern English, in part, as he explained, to come to better know not just the source language, but also the target language.

From the Archives

Emmer, Einkorn, and Spelt

Crex crex, crake. Crex still more.
The quern has no corn in it.
Ergo the ergot · ergo the spore.
Siskin stole a radish ·
Aurochs dropped a perfect pat ·
Boar bled and stank and was, well, fat ·
Bear saw to the law of the cycle of gore.
Crex crex, crake. I'm hungry too,
and eating is a form of war.
But I'll have my store, and I'll have my pelt.
Stay 'round, and peck, and you will be dealt
a crake's share of emmer
and einkorn and spelt.

(Anatolia, April, 2003)

Wednesday Animals, #10

Of the Gorgon, or strange Lybian Beast

Among the manifold and divers sorts of Beasts which are bred in Affricke, it is thought that the Gorgon is brought foorth in that countrey. It is a feareful and terrible beast to behold, it hath high and thicke eie-lids, eies not very great, but much like an Oxes or Bugils, but all fiery-bloudy, which neyther looke directly forwarde, nor yet upwards, but continuallye downe to the earth, and therefore are called in Greeke Catobleponta. From the crowne of their head downe to their nose they have a long hanging mane, which maketh them to look fearefully. It eateth deadly and poysonfull hearbs, and if at any time he see a Bull or other creature whereof he is afraid, he presently causeth his mane to stand upright, and being so lifted up, opening his lips, and gaping wide, sendeth forth of his throat a certaine sharpe and horrible breath, which infecteth and poysoneth the air above his head, so that all living creatures which draw in the breath of that aire are greevously afflicted thereby, loosing both voyce and sight, they fall into leathall and deadly convulsions...

By the consideration of this beast there appeareth one manifest argument of the creators devine wisdome and providence, who hath turned the eies of this beaste downeward to the earth, as it were thereby burying his poyson from the hurt of man; and shaddowing them with rough, long, and strong haire, that their poysoned beames should not reflect upwards, untill the beast were provoked by feare or danger, the heavines[s] of his head being like a clogge to restraine the liberty of his poysonfull nature, but what other partes, vertues, or vices, are contained in the compasse of this monster, God onely knoweth, who peradventure hath permitted it to live uppon the face of the earth, for no other cause but to be a punnishment and scourge unto mankind: and an evident example of his owne wrathfull power to everlasting destruction. And thus much may serve for a discription of this beast, untill by gods providence, more can be known thereof.

*

From Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, Describing the true and lively figure of every Beast, with a discourse of their severall Names, Conditions, Kindes, Vertues (both naturall and medicinall), Countries of their breed, their love and hate to Mankinde, and the wonderfull worke of God in their Creation, Preservation, and Destruction, London, 1607.

Tuesday Image #7

"Philosophy" (New York, 1996)

Is Swimming Natural?

[T]hat man should swim naturally, because we observe it is no lesson unto other animals, we cannot well conclude; for other animals swim in the same manner as they go, and need no other way of motion for natation in the water, then for progression upon the land. And this is true whether they move per latera, that is, two legs of one side together, which is Tollutation or ambling; or per diametrum, lifting one foot before, and the crossfoot behind, which is succussation or trotting; or whether per frontem or quadratum, as Scaliger terms it, upon a square base, the legs of both sides moving together, as Frogs and salient animals, which is properly called leaping. For by these motions they are able to support and impell themselves in the water, without alteration in the stroak of their legs, or position of their bodies.

But with man it is performed otherwise: for in regard of site he alters his naturall posture and swimeth prone, whereas he walketh erect. Again, in progression the arms move parallell to the legs, and the arms and legs unto each other, but in natation they intersect and make all sorts of Angles. And lastly, in progressive motion, the arms and legs do move successively, but in natation both together, all which aptly to peform, and so as to support and advance the body, is a point of Art, and such as some in their young and docile years could never attain. But although it be acquired by art, yet is there somewhat more of nature in it then we observe in other habits, nor will it strictly fall under that definition, for once obtained, it is not to be removed; nor is there any who from disuse ever yet forget it.

*

Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, London, 1658.

Illustration from J. Frost, Scientific Swimming; being a Series of Practical Instructions, on an Original and Progressive Plan, by which the Art of Swimming May Be readily Attained, with every Advantage of Power in the Water, London, 1816.

(Saturday Sports, #1)

The Silly-How

Great conceits are raised of the involution or membranous covering, commonly called the Silly-how, that sometimes is found about the heads of children upon their birth, and is therefore preserved with great care, not only as medical in diseases, but effectual in success, concerning the Infant and others; which is surely no more than a continued superstition. For hereof we read in the life of Antoninus delivered by Spartianus, that children are born sometimes with this natural cap, which Midwives were wont to sell unto credulous Lawyers, who had an opinion it advantaged their promotion.

But to speak strictly, the effect is natural, and thus to be conceived: Animal conceptions have three teguments, or membranous films which cover them in the womb, that is, the Corion, Amnios, and Allantois... Now about the time when the Infant breaketh these coverings, it sometime carrieth with it about the head a part of the Amnios or nearest coat; which, saith Spiegelius, either proceedeth from the toughness of the membrane or weakness of the Infant that cannot get clear thereof. And therefore herein significations are naturall and concluding upon the Infant, but not to be extended unto magical signalities.

*

Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica or, Enquires into Very Many Received Tenents and Commonly Presumed Truths, London, 1658.

For an extensive treatment of the significance of the caul in early modern European folk culture, see Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, University of Chicago Press, 2004 (trans. of Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba, Einaudi, 1989).

(Friday Symptoms #2)

The Mummies of Tenerife

[From “A Relation of the Pico Teneriffe. Receiv’d from some considerable Merchants and Men worthy of Credit who went to the top of it," in Thomas Sprat, A History of the Royal Society, London, 1667]

*

Having furnish’d our selves with a Guide, Servants, and Horses to carry our Wine and Provisions, we set out from Oratava, a Port Town in the Island of Tenariffe, scituated on the North of it at two miles distant from the main Sea. We travelled from twelve at night till eight in the morning, by which time we got to the top of the first Mountain towards the Pico de Terraira...

About six a clock this evening, we began to ascend up the Pico, but being now a mile advanced, and the way no more passable for our Horses, we quitted and left them with our Servants: In this miles ascent some of our company grew very faint and sick, disorder’d by fluxes, vomitings, and Aguish distempers, our Horses hair standing up right like Bristles: but calling for some of our Wine, which was carried in small Barrels on a Horse, we found it so wonderfully cold, that we could not drink it till we had kindled a fire to warm it, although yet the temper of the Air was very calm and moderate...

[We came to a Grot where] for some height, there is Ice and Icicles hanging down to the Snow.  But being quickly weary of this excessive cold place, and drawn up again, we continued our descent from the Mountains by the same passages we went up the day before, and so about five in the evening arrived at Oratava, from whence we set forth, our Faces so red and sore, that to cool them, we were forced to wash and bathe them in Whites of Eggs, &c...

[F]or the Guanchios or antient Inhabitants [a very judicious man] gives this full Account. September the third, about twelve years since, he took his Journey from Guimar (a Town inhabited for the most part by such as derive themselves from the old Guanchios) in the company of some of them, to view their Caves and the Bodies buried in them.  This was a favour they seldome or never permit to any (having in great veneration of the Bodies of their Ancestours, and likewise being most extreamly against any molestation of the Dead) but he had done several Eleemosinary Cures amongst them (for they are generally very poor, yet the poorest thinks himself too good to marry with the best Spaniard) which indeared him to them exceedingly, otherways it is death for any Stranger to visit these Caves or Bodies.

Love Is...

... titillation accompanied by the idea of an external cause.

... titillatio, concomitante idea causae externae.

(Spinoza, Ethics IV, Proposition 44).

Kraftwerk: The Robots (1977)

I recall reading an English translation of Descartes's Meditations some time ago, in which the very important term automate is rendered not as 'automaton' but as 'robot'. In other words, Descartes finds himself worrying in the second Meditation whether those beings moving around out there in the street, beneath their hats and cloaks, are not beings at all, but 'robots'. Now, why is this such an inexcusable anachronism? Certainly, the ancient preoccupation with creating artificial humans has something in common with 20th-century robotics. But whereas the aspiration in ancient and early modern chemistry, hydraulico-pneumatics, and related fields was to create a machine that simulates freedom, the idea of a robot, since the first appearance of the term in 1920, has been associated with the absence of freedom. That is, automata are machines that realize freedom artificially (the Greek automatos is generally translated as 'spontaneous'), while robots are machines that simulate some of the motions of the human body, but with freedom conveniently subtracted. 

Robots are always workers, and they are a product of the same historical moment that saw the aesthetic glorification of industrial labor in, e.g., the Futurist movement, as well concern over the danger of humans becoming mere cogs as expressed in, e.g., Chaplin's Modern Times. Apparently, when Karel Čapek decided on the term 'robota' for his 1920 play, RUR, he had initially considered the Latin-rooted laborus. But in deciding on the Slavic root for 'work', willingly or not Čapek anchored the robot for all time in a particular historical moment with a particular cluster of associated images, many from Soviet iconography, but many also from fascist Futurism, with which Maiakovskii et al., as is well known, had surprisingly close ties. The pull of Soviet futurism is so strong that 57 years later, in what is perhaps the beginning of the second wave of profound artistic engagement with the robot, Kraftwerk inserts a Russian phrase into what is otherwise, for reasons I'll get to, meant to be a working-out of distinctively German preoccupations: Я твой слуга, я твой работник [I am your servant, I am your worker]. That's the essence of the robot: not spontaneity, but a narrowly circumscribed range of actions, all of which are geared towards production (whether for greedy capitalist bosses or for 'the people').

Now, what I want to say is that this video is not at all techno-futurist, but is rather neo-Futurist. That is, it is not, as is generally supposed about Kraftwerk (and as would be the case about even Kraftwerk just a few years later with their fun and frivolous output of the early 1980s, so closely linked to the birth of breakdancing, and scarcely different in spirit from the most ridiculous monuments of that era, such as Midnight Star's 'Freakazoid'), it is not, I say, a crude but promising beginning for the later history of techno music. One is getting it entirely wrong if one's reaction is: well, not bad for 1977.

Look at the microphones and the haircuts and the shirts and ties. These all represent something we are familiar with from German cultural output of that era, something you might call the 'seventies thirties guy', that is, the guy who is clearly in the 1970s, in reality, but who is understood to represent someone in the 1930s, perhaps his own grandfather. In fact, in spite of the 1970s technology on display, here Kraftwerk more compellingly channels the early 20th century than any other film image from the same era that I can think of (and certainly more compellingly than the characters in the Nazi films of Fassbinder or Visconti). Why though are they channeling the early 20th century? Much of the best German art that issues out of the intense efflorescence of creativity between roughly 1968 and 1982 (only to come to a screeching halt after that) is driven by a concern to work through the legacy of some of the most ensorcelling visions of the future that were entertained in the immediate pre-war period. None of the visions conjured in that period is quite so disconcerting as the figure of the robot, which took the ancient dream of artificial freedom represented by the automaton, and turned it into a quest to artificially remove freedom from beings that naturally have it, that is, to turn them into workers. In this respect, the real history of robotics is not about turning machines into humans, but rather humans into machines. This history informs 'The Robots', consciously or not, and thus sets it very much apart from the subsequent history of techno music, in relation to which it supposedly stands as a distinguished ancestor.

Friday Symptoms #1

Clinical Lycanthropy. In the largest modern collection of cases of lycanthropy, Keck and colleagues uncovered the records of 12 American patients who had reported that they were a particular animal and had behaved in a manner reminiscent of that animal. Six patients were manic, 2 were depressed, 2 had schizophrenia, one had borderline personality disorder and one received the diagnosis of atypical psychosis. Two patients, one who claimed to be a Bengal Tiger and one who hopped around a ward like a rabbit admitted that their behaviour was under voluntary control after confrontation by their psychiatrists and were judged to have a factitious element to their accompanying psychiatric disorder. The lycanthropic behaviour was quite varied and 10 patients identified themselves as specific animals, most commonly wolves, dogs or cats. One case who identified himself as a gerbil had raised these animals as pets for many years. One patient believed himself to be a cat for more than 13 years but in all other cases the behaviour was transient and responded to antipsychotic medication. Symptoms associated with lycanthropy can occur in the absence of a full blown syndrome, as in the case reported by Buchanan of a depressed 60-year-old divorcee who barked, grimaced and growled but did not believe that she was transformed into an animal.

*

From T. A. Fahy, Lycanthropy: A Review, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 82, 1, (1989): 37-9.

See also P. E. Keck et al., Lycanthropy: Alive and Well in the Twentieth Century, Psychol Med 18 (1988): 113-20.

Haitian Earthquake Relief

I get so tired of hearing that Haiti is un pays maudit, as if God designated particular geographical regions for exceptional hardship, as if having enough money to build to earthquake code were a question of theodicy. I heard this exact phrase, that Haiti is a damned country, from my French neighbor just this morning, who served as a UN peacekeeper for two years in Port-au-Prince. I hear exactly the same thing from the many Haitians I know, or only briefly encounter in the back of their taxis, in Montreal. They are proud of the fact that Haiti was the first Black republic anywhere, and one of the first republics in the western hemisphere, but are resigned to what they take as a simple fact, that the legacy of Toussaint Louverture was doomed to failure from the outset. In fact, Pat Robertson's senescent account of Haiti's plight --an account that happened to go viral, but was really only meant for the ears of elderly, bedridden Americans who lack the initiative and the computing skills to check these things out for themselves-- is really just a slightly more crude version of what almost everyone says about Haiti. Even Haitians say it.

Most Haitians are probably better able to get their facts straight, though. In his brief summary of the circumstances of the purported deal with the devil, Robertson notes that at the time of the revolution, the Haitians "were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon III, or whatever." In fact, Napoleon III was not born until four years after the Haitian Revolution, in 1808. When Haiti revolted, it was against a France still very much under the reign of Napoleon I (in the course of transitioning from consul to emperor). But maybe this sort of knitpicking is irrelevant, since that 'or whatever' is likely meant to signal that facts are not really what is at issue here. Pat Robertson deals with a higher order of truth.

One curious implication of Robertson's account of things is that he would seem to wish that France had maintained a greater colonial presence in the Western hemisphere: an unusual point of view for so respected a member of the American religious right. Haiti's independence in 1804 comes less than two decades before the introduction of the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the United States the only global power with any right to interfere in the internal affairs of the many burgeoning republics of the Americas. France kept St. Pierre and Miquelon (2009 population: 7,050) and a few other inconsequential clods of earth, but from then on the US had control over everything that mattered.

While popular wisdom, which Robertson is only echoing, has it that the Haitian Revolution was doomed from the start, in fact it was a glorious revolution, and based on many of the same values that motivated the American revolution 28 years earlier. What then could have made things go so wrong, if not a pact with the devil? The short answer is that even though the American and Haitian (and French) revolutions were motivated by the same values --liberty, equality, and so on-- these were values that were never meant to be extended quite so far: they were universal, but only in a local sort of way. The US, still based on a slave economy, was not ready to have a Black republic, sharing in its democratic ideals, so close by. Two centuries of meddling followed, with interventions, puppet governments, anti-communist cronyism, and so on (I'm not going to attempt to summarize the history with names and dates here; for that you have Google), with the result that Haiti is now a fully contained ghetto of the extended United States. Like any ghetto, building codes are different there, and that is why more people died in their earthquake yesterday than would have died in an earthquake of comparable magnitude in Connecticut. 

My usual cynicism about the efficacy of charity still prevails, so I would like to make a different sort of plea: do not give money to the William J. Clinton Foundation to distribute as it sees fit for earthquake relief and recovery efforts. US presidents have had Haiti in their budget for quite some time, and have been expert at sustaining the country in near perfect misery since the early 19th century. Instead, text a $5 or $10 donation by cellphone at www.yele.org. Yéle is a respected humanitarian foundation with a long track record of promoting health, education, and well-being in Haiti. What's more, they have Wyclef Jean as their spokesman, whom I always considered a bit of a buffoon and a showman, and even the Fugees' weakest third, but whom I trust infinitely more than Bill Clinton to get your generous donations where they need to go. I've already texted in $10, which is more than I've given to any cause not motivated by rank nepotism, or by my inordinate concern for non-human animals, in quite some time. 

Thursday Translation #12

From the Краткий философский словарь [Short Philosophical Dictionary] (Moscow, 1951).

Existentialism (Lat. existentia- existence). A decadent, subjective-idealistic philosophical current of the epoch of imperialism, the fundamental purposes of which are the demoralization of social consciousness, the battle against revolutionary proletarian organizations, the moral and political disintegration of progressive social movements. Existentialism is particularly widespread at present in France. This reactionary philosophy was founded by the Danish obscurantist Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a most venomous enemy of socialism and democracy, who considered even Schelling's philosophy of revelation to be insufficiently reactionary. By 'existence' he understands 'individual spiritual life', and he juxtaposes 'existence' to 'being', that is, to the material world, to real physical and social life. Disgust with life, fear of death, despair: these are the basic themes of his works, which it would be largely justified to ascribe rather to psychopathology than to philosophy. This degenerate, misanthropic 'philosophy' was adopted as a weapon by the ideologues of German imperialism (Heidegger, Jaspers). With the new historical circumstances this perverted philosophy presents itself under the falsified guise of 'atheist philosophy', of 'the philosophy of freedom'. Its reactionary essence has remained unchanged; all that changed were its strategies in the battle against revolutionary theory, as well as its methods of disguise. The renegades of the 'Resistance movement' --Sartre, Camus, and their loyal supporters-- now strive to blacken the legacy of the battle against fascism, of the revolutionary workers' struggle for socialism, of the battle of all progressive humanity for peace and democracy, promoting instead an intellectual and moral nihilism, and disregard for science and morality. They call to mind the gang of fashionably reactionary authors of the time of the Stolypin Reaction in Russia, who 'wore their Marxism loosely', pouring scorn on the idea of revolution, boasting about their treachery, and celebrating sexual promiscuity in the name of the 'cult of personality'. Setting out from subjective-idealist premises, making 'pure self-consciousness' into their philosophy's point of departure, the existentialists fight zealously against dialectical and historical materialism, against the Marxist, scientific understanding of the world. Metaphysically separating 'existence' from 'essence', the existentialists set these up in opposition to one another, demonstrating the primacy of 'existence'. This theory is directed against the materialist doctrine of the primacy of matter, and, in application to social life, against the scientific understanding of the role of historical laws. The existentialists understand 'freedom' not as a real social relationship that prevails in the battle against the enslavement of classes and nations, and that is attained with the arrival of socialism, but rather as the idealistic 'freedom of the will' that gives the bourgeois individual the freedom to act according to his whim. In this way the sophistry of the existentialists serves as a defense of the baseness of imperialism, justifying treachery, and libelling all forward-thinking and progressive social movements. The imperialists make broad use of the existentialists for the formation of the cadres of traitors of class and national interests. Another branch of existentialism (Jaspers in Germany, Marcel in France, Lowrie in the USA) amounts to an explicit defence of Papism, and is one of the current manifestations of Catholic or Protestant propaganda.

The Poetry of Jason Boone (1971-2008)

Justin E. H. Smith

"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." --Blaise Pascal (tr. Jason Boone, the epigram to his 2002 poem, "Ho There, Raise Up the Tommy Lift!")

*

I should no doubt begin with what these days is known as a 'full disclosure': I was a friend of Jason Boone's for a short time, towards the end of the 1980s, when he would drive up through the valley from Fresno to Sacramento on weekends to go to rock shows at a night-spot called the Cattle Club, out near Highway 50, where I wasted a lot of time back then. The most peculiar thing about him, as I recall from that period, is that he always maintained that he absolutely loathed the music he heard at the Cattle Club, every bit of it, and yet he solidly refused to give any reason why he kept coming nonetheless.

"I hate guitars," he would often announce. "I hate these flanel shirts and this whole beer and 'fuck yeah' thing." The music was mostly what would come, within a few more years, to be called 'grunge', and featured many of the bands, then in an embryonic state, that were taking shape at that time in Seattle and touring up and down the West Coast. "The worst of all of them is this opening act called Nirvana," Boone once said to me. "They open for Tad, who are almost as insufferably awful, but Tad's probably going somewhere. This is the end of the line for Nirvana. In ten years they'll be working shit jobs, installing cable TV, repairing copying machines, wishing they'd gone to college, and waxing nostalgic about their glory days. You can just sense it when you're watching these bands, you know, you can read their fates." Is that why you watch them, even though you hate them? I asked. "Yes I suppose."

It was more than anything else that halting, self-conscious "yes, I suppose," instead of a thoughtless "yeah, I guess," the elocution so much more natural in our shared milieu, that gave me a sense of Boone's own fate. He was dead wrong about Kurt Cobain, yet I was broadly right about him.

*

Boone lost his life unexpectedly, a little over a year ago, while travelling to Australia, where he had been invited to give a series of readings at cafés, YMCAs, extended learning centers, places like that. He was on the ill-fated Qantas flight 73 from Singapore to Perth on October 6, 2008, which in mid-flight suffered such a severe and sudden loss of altitude that it sent all unbuckled passengers head-first toward the ceiling. Many of Boone's flightmates suffered lacerations and broken bones. Boone himself, who had been in the lavatories at the time of the drop, was the only passenger to lose his life. As if that were not bad enough, to top it all off the autopsy report later revealed that he had been defecating at the fateful moment. Shawn Kumpe, a staff writer for the Fresno News & Review, would later quip: "You can't exactly say [Boone] died as he lived. Who spends their life taking shits at 39,000 feet?"

Boone's legacy might have been limited to cheap one-liners in the free weekly newspaper of his hometown, had a  recent Ph.D. thesis in the 'Postcolonial Discourses' program at the University of Witwatersrand entitled The Boone Rhizome: Interrogating Space in the Poetry of Jason Boone, not sought to bring serious critical attention to Jason Boone's work. The author of the thesis, Augusta Aardappel (reported in the Fresno News & Review to have been Boone's on-again-off-again girlfriend during her undergrad studies at UC Fresno), explained in an interview on Pretoria public-access television that she wanted to "take postcolonial studies to a whole-nother level," by turning its critical eye upon "the postcolonial subject's ultimate other," namely, "the entitled, self-absorbed, totally clueless white Californian male who galavants around the world like he owns it, offering up pat explanations of everything he sees after, like, five minutes of observation."

Prior to Aardappel's thesis, what little critical reaction there had been to Boone's poetry was overwhelmingly negative. If he had any following at all, it was among students --most of his published work during his lifetime, other than one self-financed volume printed by some anarchist collective in Nova Scotia, appeared in the UC Fresno independent student newspaper, The Grapevine-- who saw in him a sort of Bukowski, but less overtly libidinous and less proudly low-class, a poet who, in the American tradition going back to Whitman, had no other goal than to sing the song of himself.

A Ceauşescu Christmas

Among the many signs that the Romanian revolutionaries of 1989 were not thinking of the future was their choice of Christmas day, December 25, for the mediatized execution of the deposed president Nicolae Ceauşescu, along with his wife and controller Elena. One consequence is that now, every year, Romanians get to re-watch, on their ubiquitous televisions, alongside the traditional carols and the kitsch revue shows with teenaged girls in sequined leotards and Santa hats, the wrenching military trial and the bloody execution that quickly followed it. This year, the 20th anniversary of the execution, the Romanian television producers are particularly concerned to show the more gruesome parts. The version I saw 'live', as an adolescent, on NBC nightly news, from within the gates of a Palm Springs country club, was highly censored to suit American sensibilities. The reality is that the Romanian revolution of 1989 did not at all ride that wave of 'velvet' transitions of power, of which the Czechoslovak version, with the media-friendly Vaclav Havel at its helm, will always serve as paradigm.

To Lenin we owe the idea, of which Žižek, Badiou, and others have recently made much, that in the course of human affairs there occasionally comes what may be called a true 'revolutionary moment', a moment that changes everything, when, due to circumstances entirely beyond the will of any individual, the perception of the place of authority shifts, and the legitimacy of the old power structure simply evaporates. There is a new tendency to treat these moments as though their happening were a sort of law of nature, and so today many people are wondering why one failed to happen in Iran recently, why, in spite of the anger of the youth and the total delegitimization of the mullahs in the eyes of the rest of the world, the mullahs themselves went right on as smugly convinced of their own legitimacy as ever.

Anyway, the revolutionary moment in Romania came not with the un-velvety execution on Christmas day, but rather in the middle of a speech, Ceauşescu's last, delivered four days earlier. (Arguably, it was in fact the suppression of the Timişoara miners' strike five days earlier than that, on December 16, but it is probably only at the Bucharest speech on the 21st that we first see the shift taking place in Nicolae's very face.)  I post here a clip --from the crypto-fascist Romanian equivalent of Fox News, regrettably: it was the only one available on YouTube-- of the part of the speech in which the revolutionary moment arrives. It arrives, to be exact, at 2 minutes, 35 seconds into the clip, when a noise starts to swell in the crowd, as Nicolae is simply taking care of the mundane business of thanking the organizers. By 3'12'' the buzz in the crowd has become deafening, and Nicolae shouts 'Allo!' and taps on the microphone: he seems to believe that there is a technical problem, that the people are unable to hear him, and that that is why they are so upset. At 3'43'' or so Elena intervenes, shouting Linişte! [Calm down!]. At 4'58'' an aide seems to say, "This was provoked," i.e., that 'counter-revolutionary' elements must have roused the rabble, since the people on their own would never come up with such an insolent response to the leader's words. At 5'19'' Nicolae meekly begins his signature  wave, the wave of an officially beloved leader, which he has no doubt practiced in front of the mirror for however many hours it is Malcolm Gladwell thinks you need to do something in order to be good at it. At 5'36'' Elena asserts her authority, the true authority, telling her little man to "start talking!" With her help, they start to take control of the event back at around 6'10'', and by now, no doubt, the Securitate agents are swarming through the crowds, trying to figure out who started it, who is to be punished. But although Nicolae managed to finish his speech, the old order would never be regained, and he and his wife would be dead within four days.

Go-Go-Goat! A Romanian Pagan Christmas

It is a commonplace --one that I've heard from numerous native informants, so don't take it up with me if you disagree-- that Orthodox Christianity is, in important respects, a relatively thin sediment covering over vastly deeper strata of culture, and that the folk customs and beliefs of the Orthodox world are in fact a hybrid of the recent, imported, top-down religion of the church, on the one hand, with the vestigial animism and shamanism of the people on the other. Perhaps at no time of the year is this clearer than at Christmas, a holiday known even in the Catholic and Protestant lands to be but a cleaned-up version of the pagan festival of the winter solstice. One element of the Romanian Christmas fesitivities that strikes me as transparently shamanistic is the 'Caprița' dance, in which men and boys with drums and brass instruments wander through towns and villages playing their traditional music, as one or more of the men, dressed in a stylized goat costume, performs a sort of goat dance-- or, if we take the ritualistic side of it seriously, channels the goat spirit through dancing. Occasionally, all the men break into chant: "Ța-ța-ța, caprița-ța!", which means, roughly, "Go-go-go-go-go-goat!"

I was very lucky this year to get some good footage of the goat dance (for which I paid dearly afterwards, as I only had large bills in my pocket when I heard the music and hurried to find it and record it). Note the little boy who is practicing the goat dance, presumably not yet old enough to play the goat himself, and also the Svengali who sees me filming and calls the performers over to swarm around me and put on a proper show.

Field Mice on Trial

From E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, London, William Heinemann, 1906. Appendix C. To read the original German, click 'keep reading' below.

[Stilf, South Tyrol, 1519]

The Allegation

Schwarz... made his allegation against the field mice on the grounds that these harmful animals have brought him great and notable misfortunes, so that if these harmful animals are not chased away, [he] would not be able to pay his annual rent to the feudal manner, and would be forced to move away, since in such circumstances his family would not be able to feed itself.

The Replication

Grienebner prosecuted the matter, and gave this answer and submitted it to the court: he understood [the complaint] against the little animals, but said that it is well known that in general they afford a certain contribution and utility... For their sake, he is hopeful that today their usefulness and their contribution will be recognized, and that there will be no judgment against them. If however the judgment is made that [the mice] must move, he is hopeful that another accommodation and another location will be given to them, in which they will be able to maintain themselves. During this removal they should also be given free passage, safe from their enemies such as dogs, cats, or other enemies. He is also hopeful that, if one of them should be pregnant, she should be allowed to stay until she brings forth her young, and only then should she move out.

The Judgment

In view of the allegation and the replication, the address and the counter-address, and in view of the testimony that has been made and of all that is right, it is by judgment and by rights recognized that the harmful little animals, as the field mice are called, are to vacate the fields and meadows of Stilf within 14 days of the complaint, and are never to return again. If however one or more of the little animals is pregnant, or is unable to be removed because it is too young, these shall be given refuge for 14 [more] days; but those that are able to move must vacate within 14 days. 

A Pig on Trial

From E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, London, William Heinemann, 1906. Appendix N. To read the original French, click 'keep reading' below.

Monday, 18 April, 1499

In view of the criminal trial conducted before us at the request of the prosecutor on behalf of the abbey Jehosephat, against Jean Delalande and his wife, prisoners of the local prison, by reason of the death that came to the person of a young girl, named Gilon, of the age of one and a half years or thereabouts, which child was entrusted by her mother to a nursemaid; the said murder was brought about and committed by a pig, aged three months or thereabouts and belonging to said Delalande and his wife; in view of the confessions of said Delalande and his wife, and of the investigations made by us and by the court clerk of the said jurisdiction at the request of the prosecutor, and on the basis of wise counsel, we condemn the said Jean Delalande and his wife to pay a debt to Justice in the amount of eighteen francs, as it is right and fitting, and they are to be kept in prison until the full payment and satisfaction of this amount, or at least until they have made a good and certain deposit towards the payment of this amount.

And as concerns the said pig, for the reasons given and established in the said trial, we condemn it to be hanged and executed by Justice, in the jurisdiction of my said lords, by our definitive sentence, and by rights.

Signed,

C. Briseg.

Thursday Translation, #11

From Marcel Proust, Correspondance avec sa mère, Paris, Librairie Plon, 1953.

[December, 1903]

My dear little Mother, I am writing this little note to you, as I am unable to fall asleep, to tell you that I am thinking of you. I would so much enjoy, and I want so absolutely, to be able soon to wake up at the same time as you and to take my café au lait next to you. To feel our slumbers and our wakefulness occupying the same space would be, will be, so delightful for me. I went to bed at 1:30 with this goal in mind, but, finding it necessary to get up again, I was unable to find my safety pin (which fastens my boxer shorts and keeps them tight). All this to say that my night was finished. I tried to find another one in your bathroom cabinet, and so on, and so on, but I only managed to catch a severe cold marching around like that (and 'severe' is a joke), yet no safety pin. I went back to bed but there was no hope of rest. Still, at least I am able to fill up the night making plans for a life that will be to your liking, and still more wrapped up materially with your own, a life lived in the same hours, in the same rooms, at the same temperature, according to the same principles, with reciprocal approval, even if for now satisfaction is, alas, forbidden to us. (1) Forgive me for having left the office of the fumoir such a mess, but I worked so hard until the very last moment. (2) And as for this lovely envelope, it's the only one I have handy to me. Make Marie Antoine keep silent, and shut the door to the kitchen that gives passage to her voice.

A thousand tender kisses,

Marcel

I feel as though I will sleep very well now.

Translation

Rainer-Maria Rilke, from the Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

A god could do it. But how, tell me, could
a man follow him through a narrow lyre?
His sense is discord. At the crossing of two
hearts' paths stands no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you teach it, is not desire,
nor the announcement of something finally attained.
Song is existence. For God it is easy.
But when are we? And when will he turn

the earth and the stars toward our being?
It is not this that you love, young one, even if
voice forces open your mouth, -- learn

to forget that you are singing yourself empty. This shall pass.
In truth singing is just another breath.
A breath for nothing. A sighing in God. A wind.

*

Ein Gott vermags. Wie aber, sag mir, soll
ein Mann ihm folgen durch die schmale Leier ?
Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt. An der Kreuzung zweier
Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.

Gesang wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr,
nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;
Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes.
Wann aber sind wir ? Und wann wendet er

an unser Sein die Erde und die Sterne ?
Dies ists nicht, Jüngling, daß du liebst, wenn auch
die Stimme dann den Mund dir aufstößt, - lerne

vergessen, daß du aufsangst. Das verrinnt.
In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.

What Is 'Non-Western' Philosophy?

Part One

Justin E. H. Smith

I.

I used to get very upset at the suggestion that there might be such a thing as 'non-Western philosophy'. Some years ago a German anthropologist friend told me she had heard, out on Broughton Island in Arctic Canada, Inuit elders using their free time, in the dim light of slowly burning seal blubber, to engage in leisurely dialogue about the nature of space and time. That's different, I insisted, because they were only addressing the issue (I supposed) within the comfortable mythological confines of their culture, rather than asking what space and time look like when you strip away your culture's contingent myths, which are, as Spinoza would say, satisfying only to the imagination, and then see what is left over. I had an even stronger complaint about what had come to be called 'African philosophy', 'Native American philosophy', and so on. These, I thought, were more the product of an unfortunate misunderstanding brought about by the politics of identity, which supposed that every identity group --and often what counts as an identity group, I noted, is only slapped together in hasty response to the classificatory schemes of the West: as if there could have been anything like a unified tradition across the African or North American continent prior to the period of colonial expansion-- must come up with its own version of whatever it is that the West is thought to do well. I felt horribly discouraged when, on more than one occasion, while working the 'philosophy table' at my university's open house, I would meet adult Cree and Mohawks thinking of returning to school who, as they explained, might want to study 'your' (i.e., my) philosophy someday, but didn't feel any particular urgency to do so, since "we've got philosophers of our own."

Are there in fact Cree philosophers, not as in academically trained philosophers who are ethnically Cree, but as in full members of Cree communities who, without 'the West' so much as hearing of it, fulfill a role in their communities that could justly be called the role of a philosopher? I now think this is a very important question, and not to be dismissed. John Dewey thought so as well, it seems, and in the foreword to a curious 1927 work by Paul Radin, entitled Primitive Man as Philosopher, the great pragmatist endorses Radin's view that "philosophic origins are not to be sought for in the cruder and conventionalized forms which religious beliefs assumed among the populace at large, but rather in the interpretations of the small intellectual class, whose ideas may have been crude because of limitations of subject matter at their command, but which at least were bold, independent, and free within these limitations." Radin goes on to describe a debate he heard among some Dakota elders over the question whether "the rock and the earth are married or not." Radin says that to us this question may appear 'trivial' (an odd choice of words; I think Radin should have said 'nonsensical'), but nonetheless it is a question "of an entirely speculative nature," and most importantly for Radin, it is a question that will not be of interest to the ordinary lot of men, who "will simply regard it as a fact." It is the speculativeness of the question, together with the exclusivity of the group asking it, that qualifies this domain of Dakota discourse as 'primitive philosophy'.

Naturally, the Cree I speak with at the open houses do not want to be credited with their own primitive or proto-philosophy; they mean to say rather that their tradition does something that is entirely equal to, and entirely separate from, what the tradition that supposedly began with Thales does. Whether this is the case or not is to me the interesting question, rather than whether, as Dewey and Radin both seem to suppose, Native Americans in the pre-contact state did something that bore the same relationship to real philosophy as the one we generally suppose branches of ethnoscience like medicine or astronomy bear to modern science.

The possible reasons to think they did not and could not have had a separate-but-equal philosophy are, I think, four. First, the tradition was entirely oral, so that there could be no body of texts on which to build from generation to generation. Second, as Dewey notes, they were limited in the range of subject matter at their command. Third, as I've already mentioned, and as Radin's chosen example shows, the sort of philosophical questioning that motivated the discussions seems to have been devoted to the fine-tuning, rather than to the clearing away, of myths: there was no radical pursuit of the reality masked by conventions, as there clearly was among the Greeks. Finally, there does not seem to have been the sort of sociocultural complexity to give rise to multiple ways of being within the same community (classes, specialized labor, and so on), and as Aristotle himself noted, it is this sort of social complexity that makes possible a niche for philosophers, who in turn reflect back upon the diversity of their society and take an interest in discovering the unity behind it.

Preacher, London, 1990

The Band and the Beast: Some Concerns about the Results of a Google Search for 'Mastodon'

Some of my readers will likely know that 'Mastodon' is a band formed in Atlanta in 1999, representing the 'new wave' of American heavy metal. I have not myself heard this band, but I gather from certain signs, read directly off of the attire of the youth --with whom I am in near daily contact-- that this is a band, and indeed a movement, not entirely to be ignored. 

I would imagine it is a rather smaller fraction of my readers who will know that the Mastodon is an elephantoid mammal that first appeared in the Oligocene Period, some 30-35 million years ago. As such the Mastodon, whose name means 'breast tooth' in Greek, is something entirely distinct from the woolly mammoth, which appeared only around 150,000 years ago, during a relatively recent Eurasian glaciation.

Before I arrive at my real point, let me stress that it is the last of my intentions to seek to condemn heavy metal. As I understand it, this genre emerges out of the auspicious combination of late '60s psychedelic blues with the multifarious strains of creatively anachronistic neopaganism that became visible in the following decade, but that all, likely, have their roots in 19th-century romanticism, in Waterhouse's fairies, in Wagner's recycling of the Niebelungenlied, and so on. A distinguished genealogy, to be sure. 

The golden age of heavy metal did not last long, however, since many of its leading representatives got it into their heads that the best way to advance the genre was through that distinctly 1970s Gesamtkunstwerk that came to be called 'the concept album'. The problem was that Led Zeppelin was not Monteverdi to begin with, and so, plainly, Styx could not succeed in positioning itself (themselves?) as rock's Wagner. After the concept album came the predictable degradation that echoed the flourishing of operetta, and Tin Pan Alley, and Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber, when it became clear that the total artwork was not really so total after all: Led Zeppelin's cryptic name was weakly echoed in the outright misspelling of 'Def Leppard'; the New Wave of British Heavy Metal gave rise to a whole army of thick working-class men singing falsetto in costumes that would not have been out of place in Walerian Borowczyk's ridiculous 1975 film, The Beast; and then came the American wave of hair metal, and spandex, and subvarieties as peculiar as rap metal, Viking metal, and Christian metal: like so many Galapagos finches.

As I hope I've demonstrated by now, I care a great deal about 'bands'. At this very moment, I am listening to some preposterous Francophone death metal on the radio station of the université de Montréal. I confess --and I say this of course from the perspective of an American Francophile and perpetual learner of French, rather than of a bilingual Canadian-- that for me there is something inherently incongruous about these gruff, demonic incantations in the ethereal language of Rimbaud and Proust. Diamanda Galas, I think, got the closest anyone ever has to uniting French literary language with death rock (and here I'm not respecting actual genre distinctions all too closely) when she set Baudelaire's Litanies of Satan (Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère, etc.) to music, but for the most part Québécois death metal remains a queer clash of registers, at least to this settler's ears. Yet, nonetheless, I'm giving it an earnest chance.

What I have been trying to say is that it's not that I do not care about heavy metal, or that I do not want it to thrive. I think it's wonderful that Mastodon has resurrected Thin Lizzy, and is returning to those purer forms, before hair had anything to do with it, back when the metal in question was understood to be something forged in the Iron Age, and not the stainless steel we've all come to know from the standard-issue cutlery of the bourgeois kitchen. But still, in the long run, I cannot help but think that Mastodons are more important then Mastodon. That is to say, I cannot help but think that there's something wrong with the search-engine algorithm that permits the Atlanta band, Mastodon, to come up in the list of hits before the species, Mammut americanum.

Heavy metal has sprouted many lower order taxa in the past few decades, but they are all sure to go extinct. They will not leave behind thick bones, but only traces in scattered pop-cultural indices, essentially no different from those that recorded for us the relative popularity of Aba Daba Honeymoon vs. I Want to Go Back to Michigan circa 1914. Oligocene megafauna, in contrast, will continue to constitute an important piece of the puzze of mamalian evolution, of the history of climate change, and so on. And all of this makes me think that perhaps the engineers should start thinking --and start thinking now, before all of this becomes irreversible-- about developing search criteria that go beyond the merely quantitative.

Perhaps there could be a sort of ontological weighting of the various significations of plurivocal terms. I don't know how they would go about this, exactly --the weight of the fossils vs. what? the volume of the hair helmet? the decibels of the riff?--, and I understand that it is asking Google to go against its prime directive: to allow the people's will to decide what gets top ranking. But still, one must not lose sight of the longue durée, or of the relative weight of things.