Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Burton Diet: Notes on The Anatomy of Melancholy

Some day, perhaps, I will tell the full story of my life-long conflict with the alimentative aspect of my corporeal existence. For now I will only briefly mention one example of how difficult it is to lead a life, as one must, as an eater.

I came up under an anti-fat regime, when foods, or packaged food products, were rated according to their degree of 'fat-freeness', and it was taken for granted that to eat fat was immediately to become fat. This regime made natural sense to me; du bist was du ißt, and all that.

Imagine my surprise then, when, a decade or so ago, the entire value system was suddenly inverted as a sort of Protestant Reformation of the diet occurred, where suddenly it was not the fats but the carbohydrates that were on the index alimentorum prohibitorum. This was difficult to grasp since, as I had always understood, carbohydrates just are the default variety of foodstuff: you get a bit of fat here, and a bit of protein there, but for the most part to eat is just to eat carbs. For these to suddenly be prohibited, and in favor, at that, of at least a certain subvariety of lipid, was all really too much for this old diet-obsessed eater to comprehend. It was more than a Reformation. It was a revaluation of all values.

The anti-carb fever seems to have waned in the most recent years, and now other dietary components are being denounced as the real evil (gluten? Who the hell ever cared about gluten before?); and having lived long enough --having not yet been killed off by the things I eat-- to see dietary rules come and go, I feel emboldened in my reading of the historical record on such matters to conclude that, in general, there must always be some element of diet or other that is prohibited, and it does not matter so much which one it is. The anti-carb revolution was a vivid illustration of a sort of social instability, of a historical period in which competing theories of the proper diet could in a matter of years or even months squeeze out their competitors.

We are, I mean to say, no more advanced than Galenic humoral medicine, or than Ayurveda, in our ascription of values to various foodstuffs.

This came to me most vividly in my recent, and very belated, reading of Robert Burton's wonderful Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621. In the section on diet, what strikes the contemporary reader is the evident arbitrariness of all the praising and damning, as well as the evident relishing of the lists of good or bad foods themselves. If the harmful foods cannot be enjoyed in excess, at least they can be written about in excess. Thus, for example:

All black wines, over-hot, compound, strong, thick drinks, as muscadine, malmsey, rumney, brown bastard, metheglin, and the like, of which they have thirty several kinds in Muscovy, all such made drinks are hurtful in this case, to such as are hot, or of a sanguine, choleric complexion, young, or inclined to head-melancholy (I 2, 223).

In general, Burton is most concerned about the artifice involved in the combination of ingredients. In a stunning passage, he effectively denounces all 'kitchen science' (scientia popinae) as so much alchemical transgression:

To the noxious simples we may reduce an infinite number of compound, artificial made dishes, of which our cooks afford us a great variety, as tailors do fashions in our apparel. Such are puddings stuffed with blood, or otherwise composed; baked meats, soused indurate meats, fired and broiled, buttered meats, condite, powdered, and over-dried; all cakes, simnels, buns, cracknels made with butter, spice, etc., fritters, pancakes, pies, sausages, and those several sauces, sharp, or over-sweet, of which scientia popinae, as Seneca calls it, hath served those Apician tricks and perfumed dishes (I 2, 225).

Burton cites Avicenna and Fernel to confirm his view that the fundamental cause of all illness is overindulgence:

To feed on many dishes... 'tis the fountain of all diseases, which arise out of the repugnancy of gross humours. Thence... come crudities, wind, oppilations, cacochymia, plethora, cachexia, bradypepsia, sudden death, etc., and what not (I 2, 225-6).

But what is that pure core of recommendable foods, that list of simple and moderate dishes, that Burton thinks one can steadily eat while keeping the bodily humors in balance? We don't really seem to get an answer to this question, just as, today, no one can specify a particular food that is safely and unambiguously 'good for you'. Everything you eat is perceived as potentially harmful, and that is not because of any real, measurably physiological effect, but only because we will never be entirely at ease with the alimentary nature of our existence, with, to put it bluntly, the fact that in order to keep on going as creatures we must constantly devour other creatures. That is a charged activity, and one that is bound to give rise to endless disputations as to the right way of going about it.

So much for the history of diet. Now a word on the history of literature. As I've already suggested, it seems to me that Burton relishes listing those things he should not be eating. This is supposed to be non-fiction, but it seems to me that the list, and in particular the list of perverse, curious, unacceptable things, would come to be an essential element of the novel as well. We see it clearly in Sterne, and we see it, to my mind par excellence, in the 'cetology' chapter of Moby Dick, where Melville lists all the curious natural-historical knowledge he has managed to accumulate about whales. Is this a list of recipes? No, not technically, but zoology and cookery have never been all that far apart, and I think Melville sensed as much when he spelled out the properties of whales and the names of all their sundry subtypes, just as Burton spells out, and relishes spelling out, all the names of all the things you aren't supposed to eat.

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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.

Curiosity and Method, Princeton, April 9, 2011

G. E. Lessing, "On the Use of Animals in Fables" (1759)

I had wanted to use just one passage from Lessing's short essay in an article I am supposed to be writing on the way our moral commitments, or lack of them, towards animals flow from an ungrounded folk-ontology that equates kinds with individuals. I ended up translating the entire essay, and in doing so I've both stalled and complicated my own project. It was Lessing's final point, the one he arrives at through his 'sensibility' rather than through logical conclusions, with which I disagreed most, and wanted to use as a foil. But the middle paragraphs, with the various substitutions of, e.g., 'Nero', 'wolf', and 'priest', I think are very interesting, and do not leave much to object to. Anyway, the article is still to come. Here is Lessing's essay.

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The great majority of fables feature animals, and still lesser creatures, as acting persons. What is to be learned from this? Is it an essential feature of fables, that the animals in them are elevated to the status of moral beings? Is this a device that shortens and eases the author’s intended point? Is it a usage that in fact has no real purpose, but that has been conserved in honor of the person who first invented it, if only because it is funny—quod risum movet? Or what is it?

In brief: that animals and other lesser creatures have language and reason is presupposed in fables. It is assumed, and should not at all be understand as miraculous. When I read in scripture, “Then the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth, and she said to Balaam…” etc. (Numbers 22:28), I am reading something miraculous.  But when I read in Aesop, “Back in the days when animals still spoke, the sheep said to its shepherd….,” it is quite evident that the fabulist does not wish to relate anything miraculous; but much more, rather, something that he supposes, with the permission of his reader, to have been perfectly in accordance with the common course of nature at that time.

And this is so easy to understand, I mean, that I should be ashamed to say anything more on the subject. I shall come rather at once to the true reason --or which I take to be true, anyway-- why the fabulist often finds animals more convenient than humans for his purposes. I place it in the widely known constancy of their characters.  I suppose that it would also be easy to find an example in history in which this or that moral truth makes itself known. [But] will it be able to be recognized in the example by everyone, without exception, even by those who are unfamiliar with the cahracters of the people of interest here? Impossible! And how many people are so widely known in history that they need only to be mentioned so that at once the notion of the way of thinking that is particular to them, as well as of their other properties, is immediately awakened in everyone? In order thus to avoid circumstantial characterization, in which it is never more than doubtful whether it calls forth the same ideas in everyone, it was necessary to confine oneself to the reduced sphere of those beings about which we reliably know that even for the most ignorant people this [or that] idea corresponds to the mention of them, and no other. And since these creatures are in their nature completely unable to take on the role of free beings for themselves, we preferred to expand the boundaries of their nature, and made them able [to take on the roles of free beings], under certain presumptions of probability.

We hear ‘Britannicus and Nero’. How many of us know what we are hearing? Who was this one? Who the other? In what relations do they stand to one another? But then we hear: ‘the wolf and the lamb’, at once we all know what we are hearing, and we know in what relation the one stands to the other. These words, which straightaway awaken within us their particular images, convey the perceptual knowledge that is prevented by those names [Britannicus and Nero], through which even those to whom they are not unfamiliar nonetheless certainly do not think exactly the same thing. If here the fabulist is not able to rustle up any rational individuals who portray themselves in our faculty of imagination through the mere naming of them, it is still permitted to him, and he has recourse and right, to seek out their equivalents among the animals or among lesser creatures still. If in the fable of the wolf and the lamb we were to place Nero in place of the wolf, and Britannicus in place of the lamb, the fable at once would lose what had made it a fable for the entire human race. But if we put the giant and the troll in place of the lamb and the wolf, it already loses somewhat less, for the giant and the troll are also individuals whose characters are alreadly largely explained without further additions by their being mentioned. Or we can even transform it into the following human fable (2 Samuel 12): “A priest came to the poor man of the prophet and said: ‘Bring your white lamb before the altar, for the gods require a sacrifice’. The poor man replied: ‘my neighbor has a great herd, and I have only this one lamb’. ‘But you made a vow to the gods’, the priest replied, ‘for they blessed your fields’. ‘I have no field’, was the answer. ‘But that’s how it was before, when they healed your son of his illness’. ‘O,’ the poor man replied, ‘the gods took my son himself as a sacrifice!’ ‘You godless man!,’ the priest scolded, ‘You blaspheme!’ And he tore the lamb from his arms…” etc. And if in this transfomation the fable has lost still less, this arises simply from the fact that the character of avarice is unfortunately even more quickly associated with the word ‘priest’ than the character of blood-thirstiness with the word ‘giant’; and through the poor man of the prophet the idea of oppressed innocence is more easily awoken than through the troll.

Indeed, I would like to venture to ascribe yet another purpose to animals and other lesser creatures in fables, to which perhaps I never would have come through [logical] conclusions, if my sensibility had not brought me to it. The fable has as its aim our clear and vital recognition of a moral principle. Nothing obscures our recognition more than the passions. Consequently, the fabulist must avoid the excitation of the passions as much as possible. But how else can he avoid, for example, the arousal of sympathy, than by making the objects of it less perfect, and by putting animals or lesser creatures in place of men? Let us recall again the fable of the wolf and the lamb, as it was transformed above into the fable of the priest and the poor man of the prophet. We sympathize with the lamb, but this sympathy is so weak that it has no noticeable impact upon our intuitive knowledge of the moral principle. How is it by contrast with the poor man? Does it only seem so to me, or is it really true, that we have so much sympathy with him, and we feel much too much indignation against the priest, for the intuitive knowledge of the moral principle to be able to be nearly as clear as it is in the other case?