Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Jersey Script

As many readers will already know, there is only a very small number of known scripts that remain entirely undeciphered.

There is, for example, the Rongorongo storyboard of Easter Island, which could very likely have been made up by clever Rapa Nuians in the 19th century in order to flummox the missionaries who had been calling them illiterate. There are the Pictish inscriptions of Scotland, that were only discovered to be writing at all, complete with logograms and syllables and everything, as a result of statistical analysis undertaken by a mere machine. And there are the Tărtăria tablets of Romania, dating to the 6th millennium BCE, which, many argue, is far too early for any writing system and therefore could only have given us representational art so rudimentary and stick-figure-like as to resemble letters as if by chance. The same may be said of the oracle bones of Shang Dynasty China.

But there is another undeciphered script that seldom gets mentioned among these more famous cases: the rumored traces of writing found scattered around the island of Jersey, in the English Channel.

If the Jersey Script is seldom mentioned, this is probably because its existence has not been confirmed by any reputable scholar. In fact, for the past century, the rumors of the script have been dismissed as a complete and total fraud.

As is well known, Jersey is home to under 100,000 inhabitants. They are subjects of the United Kingdom, though the island is historically French. A handful of Jerseyans still speak a variety of Norman French known as Jèrriais, though only metropolitan French is recognized, alongside English, as an official language. Many Jèrriais speakers were once formidable whalers and fishermen, and moved in large numbers to Newfoundland at the beginning of the 17th century. In the 1640s King Charles II granted the Jèrriais bailiff George Carteret a large parcel of land between the Delaware and Hudson Rivers. Over time, the settlers who followed him there came to speak an evolved version of Jèrriais that is sometimes called 'Néo-Jèrriais' or New Jerseyan. Although this state has no official tongue, technically, Néo-Jèrriais was the de facto language for administrative, educational, and journalistic communication in New Jersey until well after the Civil War. To this day, students at Princeton University have the option of submitting their written work in Néo-Jèrriais, and of course we are all familiar with the august tradition, at the annual graduation ceremony, of the discourse in that language, held before proud parents, by the graduating cohort's salutatorian. 

It goes without saying that it is Princeton that serves as home to the world's most respected Department of Jerseyan and New Jerseyan Studies, and the rare books and manuscripts room of the university library holds the largest and richest trove of documents in these languages. I myself am an amateur Jerseyist, and have attained a fairly high level of proficiency in Néo-Jèrriais (I'm not too humble to admit). So naturally, during the term I spent at Princeton in 2011, I took advantage of the opportunity to go to the library as often as I was able (given all my other responsibilities), and to search through these materials, hoping to find something that would help me to better understand the French legacy in the New World.

Most of what I was able to turn up was curious, but hardly worth dwelling on. There was a scattering of doctoral dissertations written by quirky students over the past several decades who had decided to avail themselves of the right to submit their work in Néo-Jèrriais. Thus for example I read fragments of Henry Guimauve's 1968 thesis, Lè jèrriais dagns l'mousv'megnt ouvriè àmerikaign d'l'egntr-deû-guerres [Jerseyans in the American Labor Movement of the Inter-War Period]. I read some headlines from the Trenton-based newspaper L'Dgide [The Guide], published in Néo-Jèrriais daily until 1887 (one article that caught my attention, dating from May 2, 1865, spoke of a "Lèttre inecdytte d'Dgonne Ouilquès Bouthe s'là quàstion d'l'indépamdanç dè néo-jèrriais" ["Newly Discovered Letter from John Wilkes Booth on the Question of New Jerseyan Independence"].

But what struck me most among my many disoveries was the cache of letters written by a certain Guy Le Miel between 1903 and 1907. Le Miel, born in Saint Hellier in 1862, maintained an active correspondence with the Princeton linguist and groundbreaking Jerseyist Quincy Gorman, which dealt with many topics, but which often came back to reports of an undeciphered writing system that had turned up in various spots around the island. Gorman remained far more skeptical than Le Miel, yet he was always prepared to at least entertain the Jerseyan's often outlandish speculations. It appears that in April, 1908, the Princeton professor had grown so intrigued that he made a special trip to the English Channel to observe for himself the samples of writing about which Le Miel had written. 

Gorman's trip is already well-known, at least in Jerseyist circles, as he published a summary of it in the scholarly journal Romance Philology (vol. 47, no. 3, October, 1911: pp. 332-334). This short piece is responsible for putting an end to serious inquiry into the Jersey script for the past century, since Gorman came back from the island entirely convinced that Le Miel was a fantasist and that he had led his distinguished guest on a wild goose chase. Gorman does not mince his words in the article: "Monsieur Le Miel led me around from one wooded grove to the next, assuring me always, 'We're sure to find what we're looking for here', or 'Just wait 'til we get to the next hillock, where there's always a new trove of writing that turns up each day'. Truly, I have never seen such pointless chicanery in my long life."

Gorman went on to give a summary of the scholarly evidence for the existence of a Jersey script: "We know that before the various waves of Germanic peoples came to these Channel Islands, they were inhabited by short and dusky Kelts. These may be properly called the aborigenes of Europe, and it was surely a foreshadowing of the eventual conquest of the globe by our own proud race that in ancient times our forefathers had already appropriated all of Europe from its primitive inhabitants-- or at least all but the very most distant fringes of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, where indeed the local people still live out their miserable peat-covered existences just as their ancestors did before them. There is no small debate in the Channel as to how thoroughly those peoples were stamped out by the arrival of the Germanics. On Jersey in particular many residents speak of a small, hairy people --calling them les chevelus--, who live in the most wooded parts of the island, who forage at night, steal chickens from farms, and make fire with sticks. It had been my theory, prior to my visit in 1908, that these people may in fact have thrived until the very latest times, and may have carved stones much in the manner of the Picts. I had earnestly believed that it was to such stones that Le Miel intended to lead me. Nay, indeed, I was sorely mistaken." 

Having myself read through Le Miel's letters to Gorman (Gorman's to Le Miel are presumably either somewhere on Jersey, or lost to this world), I now believe that the Princeton professor was fundamentally ignorant of what the Jerseyan amateur scriptologist had written to him. I suspect that Gorman himself was not able to read Jèrriais, though he spent his entire career playing the expert. To put it very simply, Le Miel was not talking about stones.

Consider what he wrote in a letter of April 7, 1904: "Ie suys allez-cherchè d'l'escryturr ç'matijn. Ô qv'beau-jourr p'cherchè d'l'escryturr!" ["I went out looking for writing this morning. O what a beautiful day to go looking for writing!"]. When I first read this, I assumed I was misunderstanding-- Le Miel has a very idiosyncratic system of spelling, one that appears to be mostly of his own invention (though there are some authors with similar quirks from the bailiwick of Minquiers). Fortunately, in his subsequent letter of September 17, he offers a detailed account of what he had meant by 'looking for writing', one that now makes it all make perfect sense to me (I hope you will forgive me for skipping straight to English here; eventually I will publish a critical edition of the Jèrriais, but before I do that I hesitate to make anything available that may contain errors):

I awoke before dawn and headed to the beach. As I descended the path down to the dunes I could still see, flashing before my mind's eye, all the letters that had cluttered my mind the night before. What was it I had been reading? Darwin? Count Tolstoy? The Gita? I couldn't even remember, but whatever it was it had cluttered up my head, prevented me from seeing.

But then, as I approached the water, I saw it: the foam. The infinite bubbles popped in succession, and when I first arrived I could see no pattern. So I sat, and watched, and soon enough Nature's own code came popping through. Unlike Mr. Morse, whose frantic messages are always announced under the haughty name of 'news', she tells me nothing I don't already know, and everything I'll ever need to know.

(There are those who say the ancient Celts had their own system of writing, which they chinked into stones so that the gods would not ignore them, and so that their descendants would venerate them. That may be so. I've seen some stones with such markings myself, but I was unimpressed, and I threw them out into the sea as far as I could.)

The bubbles popped to me, confirmed to me: yes, they said, today is a good day to look for writing. Get thee up to the meadowlands, they said, to the Noir Pré where the orchids bloom. So I ran to the meadowlands with giddy anticipation, and once there I caught my breath and began to search around on the ground, parting the grasses with my hands like they were the hairs of my own head.

And I saw them there. The three-tonged imprint of the Jersey crapaud: an inviting prologue. And a bit further on I saw what I had most hoped to see, and what the bubbles had promised even before I set out, my very favorite of all this island's works: the delicate track-poem [èmpreijnte-poème] of the lesser white-toothed shrew.

There is writing everywhere, Professor Gorman. Please come to visit Jersey, that I might show it to you.

Yours truly,

Guy Le Miel 

Against Gopnikism

In my outline yesterday of the malady of Gopnikism in American writing on France, I omitted to mention what must be the all-time champion of the genre, indeed a strong contender for the title of most frivolous article in the history of journalism. I am speaking of Elaine Sciolino's 'Letter from Paris' in the New York Times of September 21, 2013, "Trendy Green Mystifies France. It's a Job for the Kale Crusader!" The article describes that chapter of the life of American Kristen Beddard after she has quit her job "as an Ogilvy & Mather account manager in New York to follow her husband to Paris." One night, out in a Paris restaurant with her husband-leader, an angel descended unto her, and caused her to say: "What if I try to bring kale to Paris?"

This is the 'spunky', rule-breaking offshoot of the august tradition of American fawning over French cuisine. I have never understood any of this (I'm with Foucault: "a good club sandwich with a Coke" is just fine for me), and so I'm hardly positioned to be bouleversé by the report of this American ingenue's failure to curtsey at the court of indigenous crudities. I couldn't care less what the French think of kale. I couldn't care less if Beddard fails in her life's mission. What interests me most here is what Sciolino's article reveals about the conventions for American writing on France. The first rule of this genre is that one must assume at the outset that France --like America, in its own way-- is an absolutely exceptional place, with a timeless and unchanging and thoroughly authentic spirit. This authenticity is reflected par excellence in the French relation to food, which, as the subtitle of Adam Gopnik's now canonical book reminds us, stands synecdochically for family, and therefore implicitly also for nation.

France, in other words, is a country that invites ignorant Americans, under cover of apolitical vacationing, of living 'the good life' and of cultivating their faculty of taste, to unwittingly indulge their fantasies of blood-and-soil ideology. You'll say I'm exaggerating, but I mean exactly what I say. From M.F.K. Fisher's Francocentric judgment that jalapeños are for undisciplined peoples stuck in the childhood of humanity, to Gopnik's celebration of Gallic commensality as the tie that binds family and country, French soil has long been portrayed by Americans as uniquely suited for the production of people with the right kind of values. This is dangerous stuff. The longer I'm here, in fact, and the more rhetoric I hear about terroir, the more I'm convinced that preoccupation with this intangible spiritual value directly tracks the cycles of far-right politics in France. This would put people like José Bové closer to Marine Le Pen than most are prepared to see, but, well, the world is a complicated place. I feel like saying to both of these characters, and to Fisher and Gopnik too: we internationalists, we eat while we walk.

In this scheme, Beddard is another Carrie Bradshaw, who gets icy scowls when she enters the Chanel store, but never for a moment doubts that Chanel sets the standards of vestimentation, and anyway she can always stumble back out into the succorous American arms of Mr. Big. In food as in fashion, it is only in front of their countrymen that the Americans' sampling of French authenticity ever had any meaning anyway. But even so it helps to maintain and legitimate the rigid system of cultural chauvinism within France, to ensure that any aspect of culture filtering in from the former colonies will continue to be seen as peculiar, as acceptable for cautious sampling by adults, but never as simply an expression of human culture alongside other such expressions, including those that first evolved in this portion of the western part of the western peninsula of Eurasia.

This sort of sampling, I think, was the logic behind the supposed racial harmony of Paris at the height of the jazz age. Yes, Josephine Baker (a.k.a. Joséphine Baker) was accepted here, and there were no laws requiring her to use the service entrance of the clubs she performed in. But her acceptance was largely conditional on her willingness to wear a banana skirt and to embody the unhinged spirit of the age. Staid and non-famous African-Americans would not have had nearly as warm a reception. In the same era, French intellectuals and artists were fetishizing West African masks and costumes, not in the name of cultural equity (in Alan Lomax's sense), but as inspiration for the imagined rediscovery, within limits, of the irrational in European civilization. They were engaged, in short, in a variety of slumming.

With the recent recrudescence of vicious nativism throughout Europe, it is getting harder to achieve even this level of multicultural hybridity. Not long ago in Italy, there was a town that passed an ordinance, filled with slow-food-style rhetoric, outlawing, no, not McDonalds, but... döner kebap, falafel, and like threats to cultural integrity. The celebrants of terroir and locavorism are of course not themselves fascists, but this does not mean there cannot be an easy elision between some of the legitimate concerns of these good solid 'liberals', on the one hand, and people with concerns about völkisch authenticity on the other. When such things happen in Germany, the world is ready to recognize them for what they really are (the German for terroir is Boden, a term not many people would invoke these days to praise what is good in German culture). When they happen in France or Italy, the priming we have received from M.F.K. Fisher and Adam Gopnik enables us to write it off as a righteous defense of the good life. Which is to say the life Americans would like to sample on their apolitical European vacations. 

"Prose isn't here to stay": The Poetry of Les Murray

Around the same time English-language philosophers were debating whether or not you can know what it is like to be a bat (generally deciding that you can not), the Australian poet Les Murray was busy directly transcribing the thought-world of an imagined representative of this order. Here are the final six lines from his 1986 poem, "Bat's Ultrasound":

ah, eyrie-ire; aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array
err, yaw, row wry—aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.
 
A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

Murray channels the inner language of other species as well. For instance, pigs, in his 1992 poem, "Pigs":

Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.
Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughed
and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us
with weight-buried hooves.  Or bristly, with milk.

While the individual pig refers to the collectivity as 'us', Murray imagines that cattle conceptualize that same first-person plural as 'me'. This from "The Cows on Killing Day" of 1998:

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human   

and is angry. All me look nervously at her

as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy   

of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

 

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

The individual 'me' (to the extent that these can be individuated), the cow that narrates the poem, ends up slaughtered by a blade, and now sees the blood, or perhaps the guts, running out of her as 'me' too:

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.

All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,   

and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

So, it turns out you can know what it is like to be a bat, or a pig, or a cow. As far as I am concerned, Murray proves as much: he offers a verisimilar report on the inner world of these animals. He does so 'shamanistically', to deploy one of his own key concepts. He moves himself poetically into a position of certainty, a position that overcomes the skeptical limitations of philosophers, which are, one now sees, the same limitations that constrain the philosophers to write in prose.

 

Murray is often criticized, particularly by fellow Australians, for his presumption of authority, for his self-assured declamations about how the world really is. But this is to fail to engage with the poet on his own terms. Murray's certainty is not like the 'intuition' of armchair philosophy, which purports to be getting the world right in view of a unique capacity possessed by human beings, called 'reason', a capacity that all too often with distance or retrospection can easily turn out to be a mere cataloguing of prejudices. Murray's reports are rather, by his own description, a result of the proper combination of three varieties of mental activity: daytime consciousness, dreamtime consciousness, and 'the body'. Any writing that does not pay proper respect to all three of these is mendacious. It is the last of them, in particular, that gives the poet access to certainty about how the world, or nature, is, since this certainty is really only something that he shares with everything else in nature, but from which language has the power to cut us off. In an astoundingly simple, direct, self-assured, and utterly true poem of 2002 called "The Meaning of Existence," Murray sums up his metaphysics (if that word may be used):

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence. 
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it 
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would 
have full dignity within it 
but for the ignorant freedom 
of my talking mind.

One of my regular preoccupations in this space is to provide some sort of account for why, in spite of my official job title, I do not feel naturally inclined to philosophy. The most straightforward account might just be to say that I share Murray's metaphysics entirely. I know nature knows what's going on. I believe philosophy, or prosaic argument, or 'daytime consciousness', is the cause of the loss of this certainty, and not at all the best hope for preventing this loss. I believe Descartes's argument that he is not dreaming, quite apart from the question of its soundness or validity, represents the limitations of the tradition in which I am implicated; it takes for granted that dreams are spurious trickery, rather than vehicles of truth. I believe Descartes is mistaken about dreams. (I know I'm sounding like a vapid new-ager, but the fact that I can only sound this way, in saying something that ought to be obvious, is itself a measure of the depth of the prejudice I am trying to expose.) 

Murray has said that poetry beckoned him from an early age "by its not putting humans above other subject matter." He credits his early life on a farm as the initial source of his animistic sensibility. In politics, he claims to be above the left-right divide, but is defiantly anti-Marxist and scornful of the formulae of academic leftism. He believes that the rural point of view is one that is systematically left out of academic attention to the various species of otherness, complaining of his early experience "of being relegated and scorned, as a country bumpkin, an uncultured yahoo, all that sanctified anti-rural prejudice that goes right back to classical times and which no antidiscrimination law or postcolonial rhetoric ever protects you from—so to hell with those." Of course, at the same time, he presumes to know all possible forms of otherness-- if you can know what it is like to be a bat, then it is not so difficult to work your way into the thought-world of an Australian Aborigene, or to imagine that you have worked your way in. Murray's complaint is not that the urban academics do not value otherness enough, but that in their limited daytime consciousness they are unable to appreciate what is really at stake in being other.

I probably value New Left prose and arguments a good deal more than Murray does, but I also appreciate his defiance of the prevailing left ideas about the forms otherness can take. When I hear academics carrying on about 'intersectionality', and composing recipes for social difference from a very short list centered upon race, gender, and sexual identity, I want to ask: but what do we get from the intersection of a Hmong peasant, say, or an Amazonian forager, with the institutions of modern society, institutions to which all intersectionality fans --being essentially urban, western, and bourgeois-- submit as if these were timeless and self-evident (particular inheritance structures, the use of first and last names, monogamous pair-bonding as the basis of child-rearing, the relative importance of fathers and unimportance of maternal uncles, a more or less utilitarian conception of human well-being...)? What about the animals? What about the ancestors? Anthropology has typically done better than philosophy at accounting for the true depth and range of human difference, but it too is constrained to do so in the language of daytime consciousness, even as it comes up against subjects and structures that are understood equally by means of dreaming and the body by the people who live them, the people for whom they have meaning.

Poetry is infinitely better equipped; it is not another domain of inquiry, but rather another modality of thought. It alone enables a person to move away from the circumstances of identity and to claim to speak for others, or for everything at once, with the universal 'me' of a cow. 

Document: June 21, 1994

I'm back in Montreal for the holidays, going little by little, as I do in my free time, through the suitcases full of my private correspondences dating from roughly 1986 to 2001 (after which there is virtually no paper trail at all). I pulled out, at random, a letter I had somehow never noticed before, and I'm not quite sure how it came into my possession. I am not quite sure who wrote it either, nor to whom it was written. It is evidently someone I knew in California in the early 1990s, but nothing in it rings a bell.

I had had the intention of copying out a few extracts, simply in view of their remarkable testimony to the spirit of era, and only after I began the transcription did it dawn on me, with the aid of a bit of Googling, that this letter is even more interesting than I had at first supposed. It was written by a girlfriend, evidently at the tail end of her relationship, to a well-known alternative rock star, identified here only as 'R.'.  This R. was, in 1994, at the cusp of fame. I have decided to abbreviate names to protect anonymity. Astute readers might be able to identify R. nonetheless from the available clues.

Anyhow what interests me about it is the way a report from a fairly mediocre life (and the sort of life that is very familiar to me from that era) can end up, with time, to have a real archival value. Traces of lives are mundane when first left, but then their mundanity warps or rusts or ferments into historicity. And to think that this can happen even with scraps of paper I've been dragging around with me from city to city, as I myself warp and rust: astounding.

*

Hey Dude,

I started a letter to you weeks ago, but you know how that goes! I have 15 minutes now so I'll see what I can fit in. So fucking much has happened I don't know where to begin! I'll start where you left me in Jan. (with R. in my bed and E. on his way.) My life is a T.V. mini series! J. said (he is a character you have not met yet) going out with me is like being on "Hard Copy" or "A Current Affair"...  

J. is part owner of B. Café where I now work. He is a brilliant writer and has the best sense of humor since you and I. He is 30 which means he is very serious about relationships etc. He won't play games and has no tolerance for R.'s B.S. For 2 weeks J. and I had an incredible binge together. Xanax to crack and everything in between. We have some stories that we are lucky enough to live to tell. Don't tell anyone but I've been hanging out at the Viper Room (w/ Johnny Depp and all). Also J.'s best friend is married to Drew Barrymore. I am quite the Hollywood scenster [sic] now...

R.'s album was released on Tuesday on Geffen records. It was the #1 new added on college play lists. He is signing a publishing deal for another $175,000! (and he is still a cheap bastard). I love him so much! He is moving to Connecticut a week from now. We are both moping around depressed and we can't figure out why. We both just achieved huge life goals. My theory is that we love each other and we know we are going to have to be apart soon. We have spoken about marriage and my moving to New York but in an indirect sort of way. I don't know what to do!...

E. is insane! He calls and threatens to do something to my grandparents if I don't pay him. Yikes. He is so gross. My judgement about guys has been so lame. I worry about myself. All the more reason to just settle down with R. At least he is sane...

The death of Kurt Cobain hit us all pretty hard. It still freaks me out. I wish he could have held on to the strength of his creativity to survive instead of letting it drive him over the edge. I'm sure all the drugs did not help. It is so depressing especially when I think that I try to help heal people who are depressed with their creativity. I was hanging w/ J. about the time Kurt offed himself. That marks the beginning of our binge, we couldn't take the grief. We felt all his pain and J. insisted that he was possessed by the spirit of Kurt Cobain as we laughed our way through those crazy punk rock weeks... 

Grim as Blacksmiths

For health reasons, mental and physical, I decided to take a few days' break from my tremendous professional duties and from my long list of looming deadlines for things to be written (most of which I really do not want to write, and can barely even remember agreeing to write), in order to read some books from which I might hope to derive some pleasure, amusement, or inspiration. This is what I used to do in graduate school: in the month before submitting my dissertation, I read Ulysses and Der Zauberberg both, and at the time I felt that this task was equally important to the one that gained greater public acknowledgement. Back then, I found this sort of purposeless reading (or even, perhaps, purposively purposeless, as in zwecklose Zweckmässigkeit) was the best way to ensure that I would continue to think new things, to develop in unpredictable ways. 

And what fine recreation this weekend has been! I've been alternating between two books, László Krasznahorkai's Satantango and a collection of Melville's shorter novels. I have much to say about both, but that would be improper for the moment, since I'm not finished, and the whole point of this weekend was to stop this incessant tapping at the claviature and do some damned reading. But very briefly, the two authors could not be more different, and going back and forth between them is a sort of swing between two extremes of literary pleasure. With Krasznahorkai, I sink into the ground, and feel my own death; I process it all in the lower-back part of my brain, the lizard part that survives when I sleep and that I've always imagined will be the last to go. With Melville, it's all in the front; it makes me smile and want to read it out loud for love of life. 

Now, forthwith to some representative passages.

First, from Krasznahorkai: "'I'll go south', Futaki declared, gazing at the rain. 'At least the winters are shorter there. I'll rent a little land near some town that's growing and spend the day dangling my feet in a bowl of hot water...' Raindrops were gently trickling down both sides of the window because of the finger-wide crack that ran all the way from the wooden beam to the window frame, slowly filling it up then pushing their way along the beam where they divided once more into drops that began to drip into Futaki's lap, while he, being so absorbed in his visions of faraway places that he couldn't get back to reality, failed to notice that he was actually wet. 'Or I might go and take a job as a night watchman in a chocolate factory... or perhaps as a janitor in a girls' boarding school... and I'll try to forget everything, I'll do nothing but soak my feet in a bowl of hot water each night while this filthy life passes'."

And from Melville (this from The Encantadas, or, The Enchanted Isles): "[A]part from [the tortoises'] strictly physical features, there is something strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures. Lasting sorrow and penal helplessness are in no animal form so suppliantly expressed as in theirs; while the thought of their wonderful longevity does not fail to enhance the impression... As I lay in my hammock that night, overhead I heard the slow, weary draggings of the three ponderous strangers along the encumbered deck. Their stupidity or their resolution was so great that they never went aside for any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just before the midwatch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering-ram against the immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth and nail, to force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which so often possesses them. I have known them in their journeyings to ram themselves against rocks and long abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and so hold on their inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world. Meeting with no such hindrance as their companion did, the other tortoises merely fell foul of small stumbling blocks; buckets, blocks, and coils of rigging; and at times in the act of crawling over them would slip with an astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these draggings and concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they came; an isle full of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly into the hearts of splintered mountains, and covered for many miles with inextricable thickets. I then pictured these three straightforward monsters, century after century, writhing through the shades, grim as blacksmiths; crawling so slowly and ponderously, that not only did toadstools and all fungous things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty moss sprouted upon their backs."

Strange. When I had set out to transcribe a few passages, I had been thinking of the two works as opposite in every way. Copying them out, I found they were remarkable similar in imagery... but, still, not at all alike in perspective. Krasznahorkai's humans are Melville's tortoises. Melville's hero stands outside it all with wonder and joy, observing and recording; Krasznahorkai has no heroes, but only men, clamoring as best they can, sinking into the elements. They are not even straightforward or long-lived, like the tortoises. Just mossy and sunken.

I've already said too much. Back to reading.

Abdellatif Kechiche's La Vie d'Adèle

A. O. Scott, in spite of his stealthy persona as the New York Times' nice, sensible, movie reviewer, is one of the great English-language critics active today. This fact hit me once again when I read his stunning review of a stunning film, Abdellatif Kechiche's La Vie d'Adèle (distributed in the US under the title Blue Is the Warmest Color).

The film portrays the life of the adolescent Adèle, of Lille, as she falls in love with the slightly older Emma. Most of the talk surrounding it has been focused on the long, graphic sex scene featuring these two women. This scene won for La Vie d'Adèle an NC-17 rating by the censorship board in the US, and it also won the condemnation of the author of the graphic novel upon which the film is partially based. She complained that, for all the film's pretense of authenticity, this was just another 'steamy' lesbian romp, a product of the male gaze. 

I'll get back to this question in a moment, but what I wanted to focus on was more Scott than Kechiche. Scott liked the sex scene ("Um, wow," was his gloss on the elements of the film that made the censors' meters go full tilt). He also understands the problem of the male gaze and how it has limited the sort of things that have been able to be represented in the history of art. And what comes across, in this simultaneous sensual absorption and critical awareness of the limitations of perspective, is a profound humanism, of the sort that art may be hoped to bring about in a person willing to learn from it, and that is entirely at odds with the increasingly conventional pseudo-wisdom that goes under the name of 'intersectionality': the thoroughly anti-humanist idea that one may only know the experience of members of one's own group, and one must preface any talk of the experience of members of other groups with a list of one's own demographic coordinates (cis, straight, white, male...). 

Scott doesn't bother with such a list: 

[O]ver the course of nearly three hours and what seems like about a half-dozen years... Adèle acquires a depth and grandeur that make her equal to some of the great heroines of literature. For a while, as with Anna Karenina or Elizabeth Bennet or Clarissa Dalloway, her life is also yours, and afterward you may discover that yours has altered as a result of the encounter.        

I also had the sense that Adèle's life was mine, and this in spite of the thoroughly contingent features of my identity that define me socially but not, I'm prepared to say, metaphysically. I liked the sex scene (c'est peu dire!), and I felt that it deepened my identification with the protagonist, rather than removing me from her experience and placing me outside it as a voyeur. I took this deepening as a mark of the film's artistic integrity. 

I recognize that my perspective could well be inflected by my particular list of demographic coordinates, but I am not prepared to accept that my belief, that art takes me outside of myself and facilitates Einfühlung into the lives of people who are not me, is only a sort of false-consciousness or rationalization of the male gaze as something loftier than it actually is. It seems to me much more reasonable to suppose that art has such 'feeling-in' as one of its highest aims, but that it will nonetheless always bear the signature of its creator. The visibility of this signature --in the event, Kechiche's own gaze-- is not necessarily an artisitic failure, and especially not --as Scott notes with his sharp interpretation of the significance of the conversations in the film about Gustav Klimt et al.-- when the artist conveys within the work itself a heightened awareness of the limitations of his own perspective. 

In sum: a glorious work of art, and a bold expression of resistance against our era's self-inflicted ghettoization of human experience. 

In Pomerania

The far-right National-Democratic Party of Germany has put up campaign signs in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with the slogan 'Ausländer raus'. In case you don't believe me, I've provided photographic proof. On closer inspection, the signs in fact read 'Kriminelle Ausländer raus', but this is more a vivid example of the pragmatics of font size, and other elements of graphic design, than it is a mitigation of the political view expressed. The NPD hovers as close as it can to the boundary which, if crossed, would place it in violation of the German constitutional ban on neo-Nazism. In the past decade there have been two failed, but close, attempts to have it outlawed. The MLPD, the Marxist Leninist Party of Germany, has made this one of their principle campaign issues in the current election, which from my American free-speech point of view looks like a frivolous distraction, as there are far better ways to isolate fascists than to give their organizations the extra charge of illegality. The National Socialist Underground has committed at least a dozen murders since 2000; an illegal NPD would be great for their recruitment.

 

According to a 2010 article in Die Zeit, in that year a constitutional court ruled that the phrase 'Ausländer raus' by itself does not necessarily amount to a violation of the constitution; the entire context of the phrase needs to be considered in order to determine whether in a given occurrence it is meant as a reference, or indeed a citation, of the phrase as it was used in the 1930s. Without the addition of 'criminal', however, the NPD would probably not be able to pass off the phrase that follows as independent from the identical phrase as used by the Nazis, as the entire context of the party's existence is the longue durée of fascism in Germany. But as it is they can claim, bald-faced, that they are only pushing for the same desideratum that even center-left parties support: the deportation of non-citizens convicted of felonies. Said by its members to be a party of 'grandparents and grandchildren' (i.e., frightened old bigots and energetic street-fighters), the other campaign signs alternate between 'Sie' and 'du', exhorting the kids for example to 'Vote German!', in the familiar second-person plural, and pleading with them 'Don't be a frog!' (the motif of the complacent amphibian, in water slowly brought to boil, has been borrowed from the Greenpeace campaign against global warming). It's hard not to notice, finally, that the campaign signs for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, often found defaced by NPD activists, are themselves much more aggressively nationalistic than would have been acceptable some years ago ('Deutschland ist stark, und soll es bleiben', etc.), the principal difference being that the CDU stresses Germany's current strength, while the NPD sees the current state as one of dangerous decline, with only one possibility for salvation.I should add that in the ten days I've been in Greifswald I've seen no one who looks like a neo-Nazi. Nor have I seen anyone a neo-Nazi might identify as an 'Ausländer', so perhaps the shock troops feel they've done their job and can stay home and play World of Tanks or whatever it is they do. Interracial contact seems to remain as much an abstraction as it had been in the DDR, with its poster art featuring African workers who somehow still look like the figures one might have seen in poster art for coffee or banana advertisements from a half century before. The theme in the DDR was of course friendship and solidarity, whereas the NPD stresses hatred and separation, but still somehow things remain the same.

 

In Pomerania, Trabants are parked in front of apartment blocks not for the sake of kitsch Ostalgie, which one might see on display for tourists in Berlin. They're just left over, just like anyone older than 25 is left over. The island of Rügen, the gem of East German tourism, still has its monuments to the victory over fascism, still has streets in towns like Binz and Sassnitz named for General Heinz Hoffmann. There's also a town called Gingst and one called Zingst, and one called Libnitz. Some are German deformations of West Slavic words, others adapted from Scandinavian. What used to be the West Pomeranian Voivodship of Usedom is not far away, and I don't know how that word came into being (the Polish equivalent is 'Uznam', which suggests, at least to Russophones, a 'finding out'), but it sounds like an archaic form of 'usury' that one might come across, say, in the Domesday Book. Many places, including the fishing village in which I am lodging near Greifswald, bear the name of 'Wiek', or some variation on it. I am assuming this is an altered form of the Scandinavian 'Vik' (from which we also get Reykjavik and Jorvik, later known as 'York'), and have seen historical documents that mention 'Wyjk', 'Wick', and so on. Vik means place, and there are many such places. I'm in one of them.

 

So there were the Slavic tribes, and there was Swedish Pomerania from the end of the Thirty Years War until 1815, and there was the DDR and then I showed up. But somewhere near the end of this series there was German Romanticism, which became permanently associated with Western Pomerania thanks to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, who captured the landscapes, the seascapes, the dawns and nights of the meadows near Greifswald, the cloister ruins at Eldena, the Backsteingotik churches, the cliffs of Rügen, and the coast of the Eastern Sea. So one walks the same paths, and speaks of the sublime, and of the sea as Urmutter, and as one does so one worries about going too far and getting overexcited about the same sort of shit that declenched the historical process that led to the NPD. But the adolescents, born even after the fall of the DDR, haven't made all the connections yet, and so they go to the cliffs of Rügen and they place locks on the safety fences on which they have engraved their names, and they throw the keys into the sea. One might also indulge one's romantic side, in a slightly but not fully different sense of the word, by jumping into the night-black sea and drowning. If I worked for the Pomeranian tourism board I would propose an ad campaign that plays on the multiple meanings of the romantic: "Looking for a romantic getaway? Try plunging into the void from atop the stark precipices of Rügen!" &c.

 

There are sea swans on Rügen that seem to insist on being symbols of something. The supermarket at Sassnitz features canned lungs. There are slugs on the trails at Jasmund, and dried leaves and humus cluster on their mucous tails as they peristaltate in a relative hurry across dangerous open spaces.  There are two little hardscrabble boys, DDR boys, timeless, chimney-sweep boys, standing on the coast at Rügen selling beach stones from a bucket. The younger one, five or so, asks in a pip voice, "Would you like to buy some stones?" I say I'm not sure I have enough money. "Maybe you want to collect your own stones then?" he says understandingly. That I might not want any stones at all is out of the question.

 

The CDU, led by a woman who comes from the East, is pragmatic and serious, and seems to have been thrust by the worldwide economic crisis into a role that makes it uncomfortable. What else can it do but keep touting Germany's strength, even if in doing so it gives new life to the old stereotypes about Mediterranean folk as work-averse and childishly unable to plan for the future. Even Goethe, sympathetic and world-feeling as he was, could not withstand a few gratuitous comments to this effect in his beautiful Italienische Reise. At the same time, I am certainly convinced that there is such a thing as Prussian discipline. I am at the receiving end of it, teaching a summer-school course on Kant's Critique of Judgment for a well-known government-funded student association at the University of Greifswald, where I am expected to show up promptly every morning at nine, and to have prepared more thoroughly than I can recall doing for quite some time. Come to think of it, in that same work Kant himself argues that die Zucht, discipline, is the highest natural end of humanity (der letzte Naturzweck des Menschen), while Glückseligkeit by contrast, happiness, which had been of supreme importance for Aristotle, comes out as merely fleeting, subordinate, trivial. Aristotle, as you may know, was Greek.

 

But I am always so happy in Germany! A student told me I speak German like Friedrich the Great, and that I would have fit right in at Sans-Souci. I thought this was a compliment, but when I asked him what he meant, he explained that I tend to just use French words, and to tack on German suffixes at the end: thus 'dezidieren' instead of 'entscheiden', 'ambig' instead of 'zweideutig', 'Fidelität' instead of 'Treue', and so on. This breaks my heart, since I am on record insisting that what gives German its great aesthetic advantage over English is precisely its relatively greater resistance to Latinate borrowings: 'Tier' instead of 'animal', 'Gesicht' instead of 'face', 'Fürsorge' instead of 'solicitude', and so on. And now here I am neglecting the very qualities I had come to praise. The reason is simple: another language now stands in the way, prevents me from accessing all the Rilke and Hölderlin and Goethe I read in my twenties, when I learned all those blunt Germanic roots that made me shiver. This other language is one I've taken great pains to learn in more recent years, and whose poets I've barely read. It takes much from Latin, and thankfully a bit from Frankish. I do my best with it. 

"I'm not building my own mausoleum": A Conversation with Marina Abramović

1.

Marina Abramović is seeking to found an institute that will bear her name, in the Hudson Valley, which was formed by the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. She has been on a publicity campaign recently to promote the project, including most importantly a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

On the phone last week (she at a fine hotel in Oslo, I at the Ibis in Bucharest), I asked Abramović about the possible difficulty of carrying over her well-known conception of the performer-audience relation --namely, that in performance art it is precisely this relation that constitutes the work itself, that makes the work happen-- into an institution that bears her name, where she is no longer a person standing in one-to-one relations with the members of her audience, but rather, now, a name etched in stone: a person who becomes a building that becomes a monument to the idea of the mere person she once was.

"The institute is not actually related to my work," she explains. "It's built on experience from my work, and my life." Abramović hopes that by this distinction the institute will remain centered on experience rather than monumentality. "I like, really, ‘institute' because it's really not ‘foundation'. Most of the artists make foundations, and foundation is something that you actually leave after you die."

It seems, here, we're getting to the heart of the matter: a foundation is a mausoleum to a person who did something at one time, but of whom the Romans would say, vixit: the perfective form of the past tense of ‘to live', conveying with understatement that by now all the living has been done. Foundations are for artists who can only figure out a way to have lived; Abramović thinks she has found a way to continue to live.

She happily acknowledges that her project is ‘utopian', and that most utopian projects fail. Hers will avoid failure, she thinks, because in giving her own name to the institute she is quickening it with the "symbol of that kind of vitality, that, you know, ego is not standing in front of it, everything is happening in it that's possible, and I'm open to that."

"But isn't that placing a big bet on your name," I ask her at this point, "that it will always be associated with vitality?" Abramović is unconcerned. She has a strategy, based in large part on the cultivation of a younger generation of successors. "I… have the very big respect and adoration of young people and the young public," she explains.

In pursuit of her strategy, Abramović has selected a few young, and not-so-young, megacelebrities who, she hopes, will be able to serve as conduits for her vitality. "I just made a workshop with Lady Gaga," Abramović tells me, "and at the same time, you know, Lady Gaga has 43 million followers on Facebook. This is a generation of kids from six years old, and these kids now are looking into performance art because Lady Gaga did it, and they are my future followers." The idea is that after her brush with Abramović, Gaga is no longer only doing whatever variety of popular entertainment she had being doing before, but rather, now, something more elevated: performance art. Performance art, on this understanding, is stuff famous people do, plus the approval of Marina Abramović.

I personally can think of few things more tedious than to get individually rapped at by Jay-Z, to mention another member of Abramović's retinue, while being expected to make that somber art-appreciation face the whole time. The Black Album is a masterpiece and the artist behind it deserves his place in our cultural canon, but the faces it causes us to make --even if these are the faces of dorky white guys borrowing a bit of phantasmic street cred in the privacy of our own cars and bedrooms-- are different from the ones we have learned we are supposed to make at MoMA. This is a social fact, and Abramović's christening can do little to change it.

One danger in Abramović's investment strategy is of course that a grown-up, even a genre-defining performance-artist grown-up, might not be in the best position to predict long-term trends in youth culture. Lady Gaga, for example, might turn out, as I suggested to Abramović, "to be less of a transmitter of the sort of vision of art and creativity that you're hoping than it had seemed earlier on."

"What do you mean, 'early on'?"

"Well, than it would seem in the present."

"No, I think she's in a perfect place," Abramović insists, "because, you know, she came to the museum in MoMA to look at my work, and because she was there all the young kids around her did the same, she left, but the kids stayed, and now they're my public… I have this huge amount of people Googling and asking what is performance art now."

Would that Google were of more help here. I've tried that trusty search engine myself, but I'm still not sure I understand by what secret Verwandlung a performing artist becomes a performance artist. This is not the transfiguration of the commonplace, to invoke Arthur Danto's helpful term for ready-mades. This is the diversification of the celebrity portfolio, which only works because the celebrity was already elevated, glimmering, not at all commonplace, prior to receiving the Abramović stamp. Jay-Z is no Campbell's soup can.

2.

Abramović's historical models for the institute mingle together in her mind with the sort of neoliberal utopian initiatives of the Internet era that seem to have no historical models at all. She cites Bauhaus and Monte Verità as inspirations, where, she explains, "really great minds come together and create a new platform."

Repeatedly, Abramović tells me that what she hopes to create at the institute is nothing less than a "marriage between art and science and technology and spirituality in a new context today." Or again, she says that the institute "will embrace only long-durational works of art, and also long-durational work in science and spirituality." She sees herself, like the institute to which she hopes to give life, as constituted out of both a 'spiritual side' and a side that she describes as 'really quite hardcore', which I take to mean 'hard-nosed', 'reality-based', 'science-friendly'. Interestingly, she sees this hybrid identity as arising not out of the general background chatter of techno-fetishist late capitalism, but out of her formative years in Yugoslavia, and more particularly out of generational conflicts within her own family, between the values of church, and those of party.

"It's incredibly important that I was grown up there and not anywhere else," she says. "First of all, the incredible contradiction in my own family, having the grandfather who was patriarch in the Orthodox church, a completely fanatic grandmother, religious, and my two completely atheist parents, who are national heroes and being, you know, in the partisans with Tito." Although she still complains of being persecuted by state and family in her early career in Belgrade and Novi Sad, Abramović acknowledges the Yugoslav experiment in socialism as a source of inspriation. "The entire idea of the sacrifice for the cause, that idea that private life is not important, but the ideas that you have to give your life for are important, the idea of the virtue of the heroic action… All that kind of made me what I am now," she concludes. "One side spiritual, and one side really quite hardcore."

One thing Eastern Bloc generalissimos excelled at, of course, was the building of monuments, often to themselves, often even monuments for the lodging of their own pickled corpses. It was the thought of this preoccupation with monumentality that had led me to ask her about her formative years in Yugoslavia. "I'm thinking of the critical work of Boris Groys," I explain, "who in this context was writing about Stalin as a Gesamtkunstwerk, but growing up under Tito might do just as well in this case. Is there anything about the fact that you spent your formative years in Yugoslavia that impacts on the scope of your projects today?"

"Oh very much so!" she says, before proceeding to tell me the story of her family. The conversation then went where I did not at all expect. Though it didn't quite veer away from politics altogether, soon enough she was informing me that her identity was forged not only out of a mixture of science and spirituality, but indeed out of one part communism, and one part Buddhism. "For me the most interesting concept is the mixture between communism and Buddhism," she says. "That to me was always something that was appealing." She acknowledges that in Cambodia this combination "completely failed," but says that with "raising consciousness" the concept could actually work. "And I'm kind of a product of these two."

I ask her if she knows about the Kalmyk Buddhist temple in Belgrade.

"Yes," she says.

"Those people have always fascinated me," I add, for no good art-critical reason. "I've always wanted to go and see them. The fact that there were Central Asian Buddhists who ended up in Serbia as the westernmost point of migration…"

"Yes," the artist interrupts, with fading interest. "Life is crazy."

3.

One of Abramović's strategies for enduring vitality, as we've seen, is investment in youth. "Utopian societies fail," she says, "because they become hermetic, because at one point they are not having the new energy coming in." Another is to allow herself to be vulnerable, and to embrace failure. In this she sets herself starkly apart from others of her generation, in her view, which is in general "very, very critical of anything that is new and different. And I'm not." Vulnerability and openness to failure are what enable her to "break all these different taboos. And I can go to the different directions any time it's needed."

So if Abramović is a utopian, she is a flexible one, and by being open to failure (such as, perhaps, betting on a pop star who a few years from now will seem as culturally relevant as, say, Laura Branigan), she has a failsafe plan for not coming to appear frozen in time, waxy and yellow like some embalmed tyrant. At the institute, failure will be part of the standard operating procedure, "and the failure can be exposed and discussed. So it's not, you know… especially in America everything's based on success, but with experimenting you can go somewhere new. In this state of experimenting you can fail many times."

The Yugoslav commitment to higher social principles over private comfort; the post-Yugoslav flexibility and aversion to totalizing schemes; the investment of hope in that strange abstraction that Michael Jackson used to like to call 'the children'-- all of this comes together in Abramović's vision of the institute: "If I need to give my life for it I'll do it. I mean for me it's really very serious because, you know, so many utopias fail, they fail for so many different reasons, and I've been studying the failures of different utopias, and why, and one important thing is that we have to embrace the young generation."

4.

But what exactly is supposed to go on at this institute, besides flexibility, failure, and cultivation of the youth?

There is already a great deal of information about the institute available, much of it unclear. As I've been able to understand it, the MAI will serve two principal and interwoven purposes: to promote new forms of artistic experience, and to devise and implement new methods of documentation of performance art, particularly performance art of long duration. These aims, the experiential and the archival, are potentially in conflict with one another, since on a certain understanding it is a violation or a compromise of the integrity of essentially immaterial and experience-based artworks to seek to document them.

But when I ask Abramović about this potential conflict, she responds by downplaying the archival aim at the expense of the experiential: "First of all, I never insist on documentation, that's not true. I think I'm always talking about the very simple fact that the performance is timeless art, and performance is an immaterial form of art, you have to be there to experience it, it's very important that, actually, you are present, because the public and performer complete the work, without this nothing's happening."

So then all of this information in the promotional materials about plans for documenting long-durational works of performance art is misleading? Well, no, it's just that the documents are only 'by-products', not the works themselves, and besides, Abramović is quick to add, these by-products "will be just hard drives," not DVDs or CDs or anything uncomfortably objectual like that. What she is describing sounds to me very much like a traditional multimedia library (which, by definition, is a library of objects, be they books, DVDs, or files on a hard drive), specializing in the history of long-duration artistic performances, where "if you want to see, let's say, long-durational performance work exists long before I invented... I didn't invent any of this. Richard Wagner made an opera 18 hours long, Stockhausen a 29-hour piece. John Cage has a piece for organ, I don't know if you're aware of this, that'll be performed in Germany, it's going to finish in 2630…"  

"Provided we're still around," I interrupt, but my pessimism finds no echo. I could also have added that such a library would be a valuable research center indeed, even if it is also not at all clear how anyone could have a file in a hard drive containing a performance of a work that by definition will not be finished for another 600 years.

In any case Abramović seems generally uneasy about pitching the institute as a research center or library. "You have the recordings," she says again, "but the real thing is the real experience." Yet when we move away from that part of the description that is grounded in the sort of traditional functions of an institution that fail to excite Abramović, from the archival to the experiential, what exactly it is that will be going on becomes much less clear. The visionary does her best to help me envision along with her: "And also we go to the extent that we, you know, you come for six hours and we have long-durational chairs, almost like wheelchairs, that you can fall asleep in, and you can be part of the piece as sleepers, and then you wake up and continue to move the work." There you have it, then.. I suppose if I were to pay a visit, I would very much enjoy curling up in a long-durational chair, watching Der Ring des Nibelungen on a little screen in my lap, dozing off from time to time. I gather, still, that there's supposed to be more to it than that (after all, so far it's still pretty close to what I can do, and what I in fact do, at home). I gather that it's supposed to be all this, plus the approval of Marina Abramović.   

5.

The artist tells me she's getting tired and challenges me to ask one more question, something no one's ever asked before. (Who, I wonder, ever asked her about the Kalmyk temple before?). I decide to plunge to the ontological depths: "What is the work of art, on your view?"

I tell her I've been writing and thinking about one of the younger performance artists, Tino Sehgal (a name which elicits no response). Sehgal, I say, seems to be, to put it crudely, pulling one over on the art establishment; or, to put it more charitably, he is exploring the conditions under which it becomes possible to buy and sell immaterial works of art. This, I add, is an interesting undertaking.

Abramović returns to her formula: "Performance is a dialogue between audience and performer; the audience completes the work. But what is happening there is really energetic, on an energetic level, and it's immaterial, it can't be described, it can only be felt."

"Can it be sold?" I ask.

"No, no, it can be felt."

"Yes, but can it be sold?"

"Of course it can be sold, anything can be sold. The most important work of art sold, it was Yves Klein, in 1956, he sold The Artist's Sensibility. Do you remember this piece?"

"Yes."

"Do you know that he sold in 1956 The Artist's Sensibility on the bridge of the Seine to the collector, and the collector wrote a check, and he gave him the check, and he burned the check and put it in the river. And that was the pure transaction of that kind of energy."

So Abramović's work is not about exploring the limits of what can be sold, investigating the nature of value, etc. She is glad Yves Klein did that a half century ago, and seemingly uninterested in the fact that Sehgal is doing it now. Abramović, rather, is selling something she takes to be of clear and uncontroversial value, something she calls ‘energy': "I think that, for me, energy is the most interesting of all, and that's something which you can't touch, you can't form it, you have to feel it. And that's how it is. It's something very difficult to explain to the materialistic society that we live in."

Energy is a commodity that, when it is not being bought and sold in measurable quanta in the form of oil, coal, or wind, one also finds in much less certain doses in the offerings of wellness spas, lifestyle magazines, and in Chinese remedies made from bear bile. It surely pulses through the crowd at a Jay-Z concert. And it just as surely is what one may be said to feel when one goes in for a session of reciprocal staring with the great performance artist. Abramović's recent work, The Artist Is Present, was, for many who saw it, an undeniably energizing experience. Part of what gave it its charge was the awareness that it could not go on forever.

6.

A glaciologist I know has proposed that it is not the footprint, but rather the death mask, that provides us the best analogy for the imprint left by retreating glaciers. Something great tore the Hudson Valley right into the earth, long ago. You can still look it in the face.

--Berlin, 23 August, 2013

*

The original version of this piece appeared at 3 Quarks Daily on 24 August, 2013. Special thanks to Abbas Raza and to Siena Oristaglio for facilitating the conversation, and to the artist herself for taking the time to speak with me.

How to Get from Paris to Detroit

What is French America? I have been thinking about this strange question a good deal these days, as my relation to that nebulous region winds to a close. My immigration documents inform me that I arrived in Quebec on July 29, 2003. In a little over a week, on July 31, 2013, I will be getting on a one-way flight to Paris, ending a chapter of my life that lasted exactly a decade plus two days. Well, minus the year in Berlin, the eight months in and around New York, the several months away each summer. Still, notwithstanding these sorties, for two days more than a decade French America will have been my constant home and point de repère.

If you were to Google the phrase that serves as our title, you would get some blunt-minded advice about airlines and stopovers, but that's not what I mean. Consider rather this progression: From Paris, you set out to St. Malo, and from there to the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, then on to Quebec City, then Montreal, then Ottawa, then Toronto, Windsor, and, finally, you take the tunnel across the détroit into Détroit. Sorry, I mean Detroit. (In the process of Americanization, it's the accents that are first to go.) You have arrived in that most American of cities (now especially American in its failure), and you have done so by imperceptible degrees.

The most significant transition, in fact, is probably the first one, which takes place entirely within the Hexagon, as you move from the French capital to the peninsular Breton outpost, the walled city of the Malouins with the streets named after their native son Jacques Cartier. From there, you cross an ocean, guided by winds long known to Celts and Basques, but without leaving France: the aforementioned islands are French territoires outre-mer, and from them you can call Paris without using a national dialing code. But North America looms, obviously, and of practical necessity defines, with the migrating birds and the cold fronts and the light, the reality of these tiny settlements that cannot be artificially filtered out with the conventions laid down by the telephone service. So you move down the St. Lawrence a good way, and you come to a capital of sorts, walled like St. Malo, with tourist junk in shop windows like St. Malo, and you could be forgiven for your momentary confusion as to which side of the French Atlantic you are on. And then you continue down the St. Lawrence to the southwest, and you encounter other cities, some big and some small, each more shabby than the previous one, and each more American, more like Detroit, less like Paris, until you hit the great bankrupt ruin itself.

From there, if you like, you can enter out into a whole third of a continent dotted with French names that are now pronounced according to the rules of no known language: Des Moines is neither 'Dess Moynz' nor 'Day Mwahnne'; Terre Haute is 'Terra Hut'. Americans understand that there is some sort of foreignness there that they must respect, even if they don't know quite how. Yet during the Iowa primaries of each US presidential election, Radio-Canada will still send a reporter to find, in that Midwestern capital, a French-speaking American to tell the Québécois what is at stake, and they will act like it is the most natural thing in the world, like the Francophone man in the street had been chosen at random. And they will pronounce the name of the city just as if it were the partitive genitive plural of the French word for 'monk' that were in question. 

How did it get this way? What is French America? We know about the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, of course, and how the overextended French empire, already happy to have thrown the battle against the British at the Plains of Abraham in 1759, was relieved in turn to dump the Mississippi River basin on the newly independent colonies. But that's not what I'm asking about, any more than I was interested before in Expedia itineraries.

One thing is certain to me after a decade in Montreal: French America is not Quebec, and it is a betrayal of a complicated, centuries-long, continent-wide history to circumscribe French America within these reduced provincial boundaries. French America is indeed something that radiates out from the St. Lawrence, and that extends to the Maritime Provinces, New England, the Canadian Prairies, and the American Midwest. I agree with at least the spirit of Pierre Trudeau's argument against the sovereigntists, that Quebec separatism is wrong to the extent that it would reduce a continental legacy, which overlaps in many places with other cultural legacies, to the neat but arbitrary boundaries set by cartography. 

One of the cultural legacies with which French America overlaps in complex and unique ways, ways worth acknowledging and celebrating, is that of Native America (itself of course constituted out of many legacies). I am struck by the frequency with which I come across, in 19th-century non-French texts, the idea that French America (or French Canada, which is a proper part of this) occupies a sort of intermediate position between the native and colonial worlds. Thus Henry David Thoreau writes in 1853:

It has been observed by another that the French Canadians do not extend nor perpetuate their influence. The British, Irish, and other immigrants, who have settled the townships, are found to have imitated the American settlers and not the French. They reminded me in this of the Indians, whom they were slow to displace, and to whose habits of life they themselves more readily conformed than the Indians to theirs.... Thus, while the descendants of the Pilgrims are teaching the English to make pegged boots, the descendants of the French in Canada are wearing the Indian moccasin still.

And a half century earlier the German anatomist and natural philosopher Johann Friedrich Blumenbach took the case of the French Canadians as a classic case of 'racial degeneration' or reversion to the primitive state. He writes in the Contributions to Natural History of 1806:

Europeans enough... have found such a great delight in this wild state of nature as to lose all desire of changing it, and coming back to their own countrymen; nor are there wanting instances of it, especially among the French Canadians, who of their own free-will have gone over to the savages there, and taken up the same kind of life as they. 

The idea is usually expressed in the terms typical of 19th-century progressivist chauvinism, but the authors who express it inadvertently convey an important historical truth: that the French colonial experience in America really was very different from the English one (and for that matter from the Spanish one). They came in small numbers to cold, forested regions. The life of the voyageurs and the coureurs de bois required adaptation to local realities, which meant in large part adaptation to cultural forms, native forms, already adapted to local geographies. This different reality gave rise in time to the Métis nation, to French-Algonquian creoles, and to a French-American identity that existed on a continuum with, rather than across a fundamental conceptual divide from, the native peoples European settlers were in the course of displacing. As I noted in a recent essay on Louis Riel, when this Métis resistance fighter was executed in Saskatchewan in 1885, this was perceived as much in Montreal as a blow against French Canada, as it was in the Prairies as a blow against Native Canada. 

 My mother came to visit from California in the Fall of 2003, shortly after I arrived from my first job in Cincinnati. She looked around my neighborhood (at the time, the Village de Lorimier on the eastern part of the Plateau), and said: "This looks like where you lived before." I was annoyed, in that irrational filial way, that she had placed me right back in the Midwest after my desperate flight away from it (I had been aiming for Europe then too, and was ridiculously sensitive about the fact that I had fallen several thousand kilometers short, and settled for what at the time I took to be some negligible North American simulacrum). "It's totally different!" I snapped back. "Why?" she pushed, "What's so different?"

I paused, and thought, and came up blank. "Because it starts with a 'Q'," I finally said, hoping to deflect my irritability into a joke. 

But this reply may have been more profound than I understood at the time. Québec! What a name! Some sources will tell you that it derives from the Algonquian word Kébec, which means 'where the river narrows'. But of course that makes no sense: the Algonquians no more had the Greek kappa than they did the Latin qv, and what these amateur etymologists really mean to say is that we are looking at a Native word given a typical French orthography. There are other such instances of linguistic métissage, of course, some of them very unexpected: thus the -cad- in Acadie is the same as the -quod- in Passamaquoddy, that cartoonlike placename noticed by any slightly attentive vacationer to Maine. But Acadia has been fully translated into the elevated registers of European mythology (so very close to Arcadia!), and loses altogether its Algonquian force. Québec straddles both worlds perfectly.

In ten years in Montreal I have lived in six different places, three of them east of the Boulevard St. Laurent, and three of them west. Well, there was also that month and a half I'd rather not bring up, which was technically east of the great divide, but could hardly be called living. Then again it does help to tip the scales: I've lived more often on the French side of town than the English. In all, I feel I know Montreal very well. I have also been all around the province, even to that peculiarly circular lake north of Quebec City; to Val d'Or, the miserable gold mining town and gateway to the truly native North, where burly Québécois miners ride choppers with Confederate flags waving from the back; and all the way to Wemindji, on St. James Bay, where I stayed with the Cree, and helped make a ceremonial hut out of moss and twigs, and ate squash and flaked whitefish with admixed blueberries, as one might have done 5000 years ago.

I have flown back and forth to Toronto countless times. I have never been to the Maritimes, nor to the Prairies, nor to the Arctic. I will probably never go. As I said, I'm leaving in a few days.

It is however somewhat more likely that I will find myself again in the Detroit airport, or even passing through Des Moines, on some low-end academic roadshow. And I'll have my own private romance with the toponyms, enriched by this past decade in ways I expect to continue to discover, as those around me go about their history-less American business as if it had just always been that way. 

--

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Being a White Person Who Talks about Race

As many readers will know, I am currently finishing a book about the concept of race in early modern philosophy. I have been working on it for some years, and it occupies much of my thought and energy. At least as many readers will know that I am white. This combination frequently has people trying to figure out --to put it both vaguely and pointedly at once-- what my deal is. 

I have heard much discussion over the few days following the awful verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, most of it well-intentioned, about how white people should and should not talk about race. Naturally my ears perk up like a dog's at passing sirens, since I am nearly always thinking about how to hit just the right tone in my book, the tone that engages a maximum number of readers and that encourages all of them to stray a bit outside of the usual range of names, keywords, and problems they associate with race. 

Most of the suggestions I've been hearing over the past few days would require me to leave off with my work all together, and go do something race-appropriate. I find this extremely troubling. There is a deeply ingrained idea coming from what passes for the Left, and distracting the younger and more naive members of the Left, to their own detriment, according to which we can each only speak for our own group, and in relation to other groups the most we can hope to be is 'allies'.

A good example of this was in the reaction to the phrase that sprang up spontaneously as a call to rally against the verdict: I am Trayvon Martin. This was of course not new, but a recycling of a common reaction to galvanizing events, e.g., the banners around Paris that declared Nous sommes tous américains on September 12, 2001. (I say, with Whitman: I am everyone, I am each of you, at every moment.) By the next morning some bold white internauts had posted video clips of themselves declaring emphatically that they are not Trayvon Martin, that they could not possibly be Trayvon Martin, in view of the many privileges they have that keep them safe from Martin's fate. By nightfall of the same day white people were abuzz in social media about how other white people needed to stop trying to get attention by announcing how not-Trayvon Martin they were, that this was not about what they either were or were not. 

Clearly, the white kids just don't know what to do with themselves. 

A white South African friend of mine in social-media land, a journalist I admire very much who is also a former ANC activist, wrote recently about a limousine ride he took in New York with an unnamed American hip-hop star. The driver was a Palestinian socialist. All three got to talking about the fall of Apartheid, and apparently the American simply could not get it through his head that there were white, Jewish ANC members fighting against Apartheid right alongside Mandela. The Jewish South African and the Palestinian driver in turn were alarmed at the American rapper's black-and-white thinking (as it were): the ANC wasn't made up of black people plus their white 'allies'; it was made up of South Africans who hated Apartheid. Listen to the way Mandela talks about Joe Slovo, for example. Is there any hint that Mandela thinks the Lithuanian Jewish immigrant doesn't get, can't get, what's at stake in bringing down a racist totalitarian system? Of course not. That's not the way racism is defeated. And the distraction of identity politics, perpetuated by well-intentioned young people who take themselves to be on the Left, is, I'm sorry to say, helping to abet and sustain the racist system in the United States.

So what is my deal? Why did I decide to write about race?

I grew up in the United States in a heavily racialized environment, by which I mean that it was taken as a fundamental and essential fact about the people around me that they were, variously, 'black' or 'white'. In my high school there were race-based gangs, and these were affiliated to the race-based gangs that entirely define the existence of millions of incarcerated Americans. Unlike most of the white Americans I know today, who went to high schools that fed into the Ivy League, I went to a high school that was more a sort of prison prep program. We were being trained how to be subjects of the carceral system, which meant first and foremost that we were being trained to think of ourselves in racial terms. There were boys with ties to the Klan, and older brothers in prison who were big-wigs in the Aryan Brotherhood. On the other side, Bloods. I did my best to pass silently under the radar, and I dropped out after a year-and-a-half.

Much of my later life has been spent trying to come to terms with how I, during that period of my life, could have bought into the social ontology of the people around me. I heard a certain highly charged word, not just from teens but also from adults, enough times to inure me to whatever dialogue Tarantino might contrive. It seemed, if I may put it this way, to denote a natural kind. I never had any feeling for racism, in the sense that I never saw any reason to hate the kids who were on the other side of the racial divide, and in terms of my own survival strategies I was certainly no more afraid of them than I was of the Skoal-chewing, pick-up-driving white boys. But I was a racial realist, in the sense that I simply went along with everyone around me in the presumption that these social divisions marked out something true, that they were an adequate world-carving. An interracial couple, on the rare occasions that I saw one, struck me as a highly noteworthy thing.

What strikes me so much now is that the white boys I've briefly described were, mostly, Okies and Arkies, that is, the descendants of Dustbowl migrants to the Central Valley of California, whose grandparents, and possibly also parents, did the sort of low-status, migratory agricultural work for which John Steinbeck labelled them 'Harvest Gypsies'. Now the Dustbowl was not the Middle Passage, but this is not a suffering competition, and the historical fact remains that the Harvest Gypsies and their descendants have been given the shaft by the rich and the powerful throughout American history. Convincing them that they are 'white', and therefore, though poor and without hope, at least better than the blacks, has been one of the most effective tools for distracting this group of people from any awakening of what might be called radical class consciousness (though I'm hesitant to call it that, and wish I could find an equally pointed but less Marxian phrase to do the trick). Convincing the descendants of Dustbowl migrants they are white, I mean, is what has kept them from recognizing common cause with the descendants of African slaves. 

Culturally speaking, too, what looked at the time like an unbridgeable divide now appears like a classic instance of the narcissism of minor differences. My grandmother was a gentle, hardworking woman from Arkansas. Not long ago I was on the 7 train in Queens. Across from me sat an elderly African American woman. I cannot fully explain the feeling I had, and the microsecond in which I had it did not leave me any time for examination or second-guessing, but when I looked up and saw her, something about the way she held her head, or her smile, or I don't know what, made me think: Grandma! Now of course I, like everyone, have had two grandmothers, but that this woman on the train stood for the one from Arkansas, and not the one of Swedish ancestry, was as certain as the sympathy I felt, and the sense of timeless familiarity.*

And is this not also the history of American popular music in nuce: black music, which is in fact just American music simpliciter, inspires white Americans to make music too; yet time and time again we are expected to react as if some uncrossable divide were magically leapt across whenever a white person raps, or swings his pelvis a certain way. We see this over and over again at the lower socioeconomic strata of popular culture in America, where racially coded forms jump the line, and come to seem wholly native within a racially defined scene: think of Old English script in tattoo and poster art, for example. (I would imagine that today Rio Linda High School is overrun with Juggalos, the most perfect expression yet of the instability of racial coding.) The white people I've known who inhabit these strata --and I've known many; if you are from the Northeast and have a Ph.D. in the humanities, I've probably known more such people than you have-- typically carry on about the virtue of white pride, and do so while sporting abundant cultural signifiers that higher status whites would surely associate with African American culture. Things are messy down at the bottom, I mean to say.

Anyhow, these days I am an expat, and the longer I'm away the more implausible the idea of ever living in the US again seems. I try to make intellectual sense out of the forces that initially shaped me, mostly by reading books, and also by talking to people. In Paris I see girls from Françafrique coming out of the écoles, holding hands with white boys, and I have to remember to notice; I mean, I don't notice, until I notice that I'm not noticing. 

To have the opportunity to move from Rio Linda to Paris means among other things to be able to learn that 'race' doesn't always mean the same thing. In the American context, when we say 'race' what we mean is the un-dealt-with legacy of slavery. But it is a gross mistake, and a triumph of the racist system we are supposed to be seeking to overcome, to suppose that this legacy is about phenotypes or skin color. The contingent fact that the slave system in the US was based on the exploitation of the labor of a group of people that tended to be phenotypically different from their captors has created the illusion in the United States that it is the color difference that caused the inequality in the first place. But this is getting it precisely backwards.

There are other, similar forms of social inequality in the world that are not based on a color difference, indeed they are based on social divisions that do not seem from the outside to map onto any significant differences of physical appearance at all: think for example of the Roma of Southeastern Europe, who were sold at slave auctions in Romania until at least the 1860s, and who to this day are expected to avert their eyes when speaking to non-Roma. (They are still waiting for their Martin Luther King.) It took me many years of visiting Romania before I could even detect who was Roma and who was not; and yet for Romanians the difference is clear as day, and the discrimination the Roma face really is significantly and objectively analogous to that faced by African Americans. 

Anyhow, it's a platitude, but travel really does reveal the contingency of the local circumstances in the place from which one hails. And history is a sort of travel, too, so my idea with my research into the concept of race in the 17th century was to try to uncover a context in which the concepts and terms deployed to talk about human diversity had not yet taken the form they have for us today. I think this sort of work can potentially be helpful in moving us beyond certain fixed and sclerotic patterns in the way we think about social problems, regardless of the identity of the person who produces it. But if you wish to know why I began to care in the first place, I would say it's because I feel like 'ally' doesn't quite cut it. I'm an American, and that means that the world into which I was thrown, for better or worse, is one in which race is the defining fact about my existence as much as of all my concitoyens. And I can't help but feel compelled to think about that fact, to try to make sense of it, using the resources I have available to me, and to try, if I can, to overcome it, and to show others that it can be overcome, by laying bare its utter contingency.

--

*Addendum. My father (from his own self-imposed exile in Mexico), writes in with this very infomative addendum about our family history (the picture shows my grandmother, his mother, circa 1938, at the age of 19):

As for having a flash of familiarity in seeing an African-American woman, that has happened to me also, seeing a black woman who reminded me of my mother. I don't have DNA proof, but there is a possibility that my mother had a near African ancestor. Of course, this is not something my Arkansas relatives wanted to discuss, but they were initially quite excited when I announced that I had found records showing my great-great-grandmother to be on the 1790 census as a Cherokee. What the relatives did not want to hear is that the history of South Carolina shows that Cherokees owned slaves and there were mixed-race babies. Cherokee-Africans were free, more or less, and were considered black Cherokees. To this day, there are lawsuits in Oklahoma regarding disputed rights to land and oil royalties by full-blood Cherokees and the black Cherokees.

As a young teen, I remember talking to my grandfather about blacks and whites. For a semi-literate white southerner, he held some unusual views. He told me that in 200 years everybody will be a light brown, a mix of all races. Grandpa Pharis said our ancestors were 'Black Irish' -- a term with various meanings, but which generally refers either to the Protestants from southern France or from northern Spain who migrated to what is now Northern Ireland. The term was also applied to whites in the Carolinas with mixed blood.

Your Grandmother Bertie was teased in high school for being a 'high yellow' and an 'octoroon'. It's a genetic lottery as to which traits are inherited, and Bertie was darker than her six older siblings. My grandmother would not allow my mother to go outside or to help work the fields unless she was fully covered, long skirt, big hat, long sleeves and gloves, because she tanned quickly and became even darker.

This is getting longer than I had intended, so I will skip to genealogy:

Richard Cruce, born 1770, Belfast, Ireland. Immigrated as a child to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Hannah Stone, born 1775, listed on the 1790 census as 'Hannah Stone -- Indian'.

Richard and Hannah were married about 1790 in what is now Cherokee County, South Carolina. 

John Pharis Cruce, born 1807, in South Carolina, died in Beulah, Arkansas.

Pharis Calvin Cruce, born 1876 (when his father was 68!), Beulah, Arkansas.

Bertie Mae Cruce, born 1919, Beulah, Arkansas.

So, assuming the census records are correct, Bertie is one-eighth Cherokee. If Hannah Stone was a tribal cast-off of mixed race, then Bertie would be one-sixteenth African: one step removed from actually being an 'octoroon'.

--

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Notes on Blood Meridian

I want to say a number of different sorts of thing about Blood Meridian, but I think it will be true to the way Cormac McCarthy himself approached the novel in its creation to move out from the most elementary constituents. Let's start with apostrophes.  

There are no quotation marks, nor is speech set off by italics (there are no italics at all, in fact, save for the epilogue, which is entirely italic). But quotations are marked by other punctuational and orthographic cues in a way that flows naturally and clearly. It struck me on my first reading in fact that McCarthy had solved the seemingly impossible problem of capturing spoken language in an adequate and verisimilar way. Out of fidelity to his characters, McCarthy cannot but permit them to drop the terminal g's from gerunds, and to rely on contractions of phrases like I am not, I cannot. But these people are illiterate and anyway unconcerned with the conventions of high speech, and so are not aware in their speaking that they are leaving anything out. And so there is no need for apostrophes that in conventional prose signal the awareness of an absence, and we are left with pure speech:

I aint.

I caint.

We goin to whip up on the Mexicans.

In this way McCarthy avoids lapsing into a condescending campestral in the manner of Snuffy Smith: I'm fixin' to do some shootin', &c., and gives us, one feels, unmediated access to a variety of speech that predates all recording technology by a half century.

Some words are deformed, too, beyond simple contraction, e.g.:

Ort to of shot that one too.

The most significant deformation of this sort comes in the choice --not a small choice-- of the accusative form of the second-person personal pronoun:

You aint seen my dog have ye?

Without context, we naturally incline to reading this in an Elizabethan manner, in a way that rhymes with pee or lee. In the novel however it is always clear that ye lies somewhere between yah and yuh (often approximated in American writing as ya), a very familiar American vowel, as in:

What can I get yuh?

This pronoun, it seems to me, does important work for McCarthy as the bridge between the discursive traditions of the Old and the New Worlds, between Milton and Peckinpah, whose successful bridging is the the principal literary accomplishment of Blood Meridian. 

I said 'Old and New Worlds' and I said 'Milton and Peckinpah', but another way of saying this might have been: between epic and the movies. The novel relies on cinematic conventions throughout; it has wide-focus and narrow-focus shots, images that would not makes sense without an intervening century of film. To cite just one example:

They diminished upon the plain to the west first the sound and then the shape of them dissolving in the heat rising off the sand until they were no more than a mote struggling in that hallucinatory void and then nothing at all. 

Relative to whom, now, are the riders disappearing? In the event, there was no character left behind to watch them. We can only imagine a stationary camera tracking their gradual disappearance: we are the omniscient unspecified perceiver of the events that unfold in literature, but our perception is cinematic to the extent that it is not a view from nowhere, but a 'shot'. 

At the same time, the language is unrelentingly archaicizing, reaching back long before the events recounted in the novel of the mid-19th century, which happen to have been contemporaneous or nearly so with the first proto-cinematic fiction of Flaubert and other French 'realists'. There is a fiddler who stands without the door; there are strange forgotten forms of quantification:

Of humans they saw none.

There is inversion of the standard adjective-noun order of modern English:

They crossed a cinderland of caked slurry and volcanic ash imponderable.

A favorite verb is the Germanic 'reckon', which survives in the contemporary German rechnen, to compute, but which in English suggests a form of deliberation prior to the discovery of mathematics, let alone computers, when deliberation was ultimately modeled after the arbitrary power of God at the final judgment:

...some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man's transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate.

There is frequent reliance on the existential, rather than predicative, use of the verb 'to be':

Before man was, war waited for him.

And McCarthy's favorite archaicism, of which I counted more than a dozen occurrences, is the nor that is not preceded by a neither, which generates a curious impression that everything is, implicitly, negation:

Little was said, nor were they quarrelsome among themselves.

Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go.

Several men pushed forward to feel the iron and to rock it where it stood, nor did the judge lose the opportunity to ventilate himself upon the ferric nature of the heavenly bodies and their powers and claims.

Is McCarthy's archaicism anachronism, as in, mere anachronism? It seems to me that the author has sought to adopt a register that is appropriate to the conditions of the Texas-Mexico borderlands of 1850, and to the people there, who are repeatedly described as 'neolithic' or 'stoneage' (the abolition of hyphens in the novel is also worth noting), as either savage and heathen or 'christian only in name' (and worth noting, too, the strategic deployment of the lower case). The language cannot be contemporary, cannot be 19th-century, because it is describing a region and a sequence of events that in no way fit with the self-conception of that age that European novelists like Flaubert were actively producing. And this is the story of America: when Europeans (including, one supposes, those of Boston and New York) were worrying about who was showing up at whose salon, the settlers of the western frontier were massacring Indians, raping children, and collecting scalps. And what other personal pronoun but ye could work for the psychotic hillbilly epic that tells of this conquest (thanks to which I was able to spend my childhood in the malls and on the freeways of California)? Already completely defunct in the enlightened parts of the English-speaking world, the pronoun would live on in the outer reaches, where Enlightenment was at best a gross joke (a joke underlined moreover in the character of the judge and in his natural-historical researches), and would endure, to this day even, as a link between premodern Anglo-Saxon elementalness and something quintessentially American: 

I'm gonna whoop ye.

Like the pronoun on which we have been dwelling, there is another word, a common and familiar noun, that bridges the Anglo-Saxon and the American Western. I have in mind the word country, which Americans seem to have taken the lead in conflating with 'state' or 'nation', but which has never lost the parallel sense of environment or surrounding wide-open space or campagne: a parallel that perfectly suits the mythology of 'country' that is implicit in the 20th-century idea of 'country-western', an idea whose 19th-century origins McCarthy aims to lay bare. The medieval, pre-nation-state conception of country is explicitly stressed in the author's  summary at the beginning of chapter VI, where he cryptically cites a stock legal phrase descending from Old French: 

Et de ceo se mettent en le pays [And with that they set out into the country].

And toward the end of the novel, when the kid is locked up in San Diego and, so he thinks, soon to be hanged, there is speculation that it was the country that made him crazy. One suspects that this is meant in both senses, both in the sense of the desert and the other landscapes he has endured, and in the sense of the United States, whose imperial expansion is the distal cause of everything that happens to him. 

McCarthy is sometimes called 'nihilistic' by commentators, in view of the fact that his characters engage in horrible violence without any apparent moral reflection. In fact, his characters are almost total ciphers, whose actions are not really actions at all, but events in a cosmos that also prominently features shooting stars and lightning storms. I don't even want to engage the criticism that this novel is 'too violent' (this is much like saying Swan Lake would have been better if there hadn't been quite so much dancing), but I do think it is worthwhile to insist that the absence of reflection, like the violence itself, is entirely necessary to the novel's artistic aim, and entirely appropriate to the author's epic intent. That is, he is describing, I won't say a premodern world, but an extramodern one, one that integrates human beings within an all-encompassing cosmology, but does not set these human beings over against that cosmos as a special kind of agent, the 'moral' kind. This is the point of McCarthy's constant return to the pre-anthropocene geology that anticipates the human events he describes, and in relation to which these events are a sort of degenerate echo.

It has often been argued (though by now somewhat controversially) that the individual moral subject had not yet been discovered in Homeric epic, that the world Homer describes is a cosmos governed by the fates in which war cannot be morally problematized because human action has not yet been sufficiently set apart from, say, meteorology to make bloodshed appear as devious or preventable. 

I suspect that it is only from within such a cosmos that we can adequately reimagine the experience of the violence between the American irregulars and the Native Americans they were charged with annihilating. Although all of the characters, Native and non-Native alike, remain total ciphers, one comes away, astoundingly, with the sense of having understood for the first time what this particular historical encounter was like for the various parties with their various limited perspectives. The breathtaking account of the kid's first encounter with Indians, during a Comanche ambush, involves nothing but a sort of inventory of their wardrobe and ornamentations, but the articles noted are already enough to tell so much of the story of the European conquest of the New World, and of the way this was lived, in medias res, by the lowly ones on both sides with a life-or-death stake in the outcome of the conquest. The passage is worth citing in whole:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear and cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horse's ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotseque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning [note!], screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. 

As it is not difficult to anticipate, unpleasant things ensue. There is a report of a man who has to crawl across the salt flats naked for days to arrive, almost dead, at a settlement. He can't walk, because the Indians have cut off the bottoms, but only the bottoms, of his feet.

It is a victory of McCarthy's epic imagination that such atrocities are recounted without inducing in the reader the slightest interest in 'taking sides'. US imperialism and its ideology of manifest destiny are, we all know, the side that is to be blamed, ultimately, for the fact that some lad lost his soles. But that's not what this novel is about, and in refusing to be about this it already subverts the mythology of the western genre that it also represents par excellence. This novel is about a world Homer already knew, where war is an ontological force that lies deeper in the order and reason of the cosmos than human history, where humans have nothing to learn --where there can be no Bildung for a young hero-- even if they can at least come to know, through its most magnificent instances, the order that precedes them:

He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea. 

--

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Bébert

There is a cat that sits on the sidewalk in front of the bistro Chez Bébert near the Gare Montparnasse in Paris (I snapped his picture just yesterday). He does not greet visitors, but he does give them to know, in his silent occupation of that crucial space before the door, that this is his bistro, and that, whatever the surrounding humans may call him, he is Bébert. And anyone who has read Louis-Ferdinand Céline's infamous 1957 novel, D'un château l'autre [From Castle to Castle] cannot help but wonder, upon encountering this Bébert, whether here is not in fact a concrete instance of the well-known feline power of reincarnation.

Céline had been an unrepentant Nazi-collaborationist, a traitor, a bloody anti-Semite, and an otherwise all-around awful person. As the war was drawing to a close, he got it into his head to flee Paris, through the ruins of Germany, to Denmark. He had intended to take only his wife, but his beloved cat, Bébert, imposed himself, refused to let them go alone. So Bébert was stuck in a sack and hauled through the craters and bombed-out castles, and would eventually prove to be the only remotely admirable character in the author's subsquent fictional retelling of the odyssey. On arrival in Copenhagen, Céline was arrested (it is not at all clear why he thought the Danes would have wanted him), and Bébert seized. The cat had cancer, for which, rather remarkably under the circumstances, he was able to receive an operation. Eventually he was returned to France along with his owner, who died in 1961, after years, according to some sources, of eating nothing but noodles. Bébert himself is said to have lived only until 1952. 

Yet it seems somehow vulgar to stamp Bébert with a date of demise, to give him a necrologue and be done with it. For in surviving the war, in becoming the only steady weight and the only bastion of serenity in the most terrible and blazing work of 20th-century literature, Bébert came to stand for survival itself, and demonstrated why in the popular imagination the feline is indestructible (we call it 'reincarnation' and we number the lives at nine, but what we really mean is that there is some indestructible cat essence that just keeps pushing through all the gross violent things men do to cats and around them).

Impressions such as these, no doubt, inspired George Steiner to write:

It is Bébert I want to write about--Bébert the arch-survivor and the incarnation of French cunning... Bébert would be a joy to report on. Céline is not.

Is the cat really the spirit-animal of the French? We know, particularly from Robert Darnton, that the cat was the animal most excessively abused around the period of Revolutionary fervor, bound together and thrown onto bonfires en masse, so that the rowdies, unhappy about their labor conditions or something, could delight in the cats' screeches as a sort of next-best-thing to punitive justice. And we know of Chris Marker's obsessive attempt to impose the figure of the cat heraldically in place of himself, to dissolve the human into the feline. Marker's cat was a composite of the Japanese maneki-neko, Lewis Carroll's Cheshire (another peculiar French obsession), and his own domestic animal, who was called Guillaume. Like Bébert, Guillaume had many lives, and does not always appear to have been hosted by one and the same physical cat. Yet he was always Guillaume.

And then there is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who realizes at the very end of Tristes Tropiques that he did not have to go all the way to the tropics to have a primordial encounter, as there was one waiting for him right there in his apartment:

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to is in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers  in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.

I am not going to venture a theory of national character, or attempt to explain why it was left to a German to write Dog and Man (Konrad Lorenz, following Johan Huizinga, if I remember correctly, attempted to minimize the role of the cat in human society by arguing from medieval transfers of title to estates, which show that cats were always considered part of the property, like trees, while dogs always went with the previous owners; we know however that at least some cats will follow their owners through the apocalypse). But I do think Steiner is right about Bébert's symbolic power as the embodiment of a commendable --because silent-- will to survive, a symbolic power that makes sense only against the deep, deep background of folk beliefs about what cats are capable of. And I would add that if one is looking for national symbols, it is good that France has Bébert, and not only his human companion, who died most definitively in 1961, still a shit (a shit who'd just completed another, final masterpiece called Rigodon), still uninterested in serenity or forgiveness.

And I am convinced also that attention to the cat massacres of the 18th century; to Lévi-Strauss's turn away from the savage toward the feline; to the Cheshire graffiti that still covers Paris in memory of Chris Marker; and to Céline's misanthropic escape into cat-love, to the complimentarity of his anti-semitism and his philo-felinism: that all of this considered together (no doubt alongside other examples I haven't recalled) could tell us a great deal about the cultural and intellectual history of modern France. 

The Moral Status of Rocks

A student in rural Iceland, of sheep-farming stock, had her guard down, or didn't yet have a guard. She didn't know how to talk to foreigners, or perhaps felt there was something she had to get across to foreigners, or to this foreigner, who showed an interest in her country. She said, in the hope of conveying to me the whole ethical-spiritual outlook of her country in a single concrete example: In Iceland we are taught not to smash rocks. 

In recent years something called 'environmental ethics' is moving into the mainstream, finding space alongside the Kantian, the utilitarian, and so on, which for their part suppose that an ethical relation can only be had toward an ethical subject, and that such subjects are found only among human or at most animal beings. Even environmental ethics tends to imagine the environment with a thick arboreal canopy, with lush grass, and lillypads covering seething green ponds. But in the Arctic and sub-Arctic the 'environment' is mostly a geological rather than a biological phenomenon, and it is not altogether surprising that in such a setting rocks come forward as phenomenally salient, as creatures, as others, more readily than in the Amazon. And still less do the rocks come forward as our petrous co-beings in the big cities of the world, where they only appear ground down and formed into angular artifacts of human ingenuity, which in turn you are not supposed to smash, since in the process of their transformation they have become 'property'. 

I was conveyed back from rural Iceland to Keflavik and was flown from there to JFK, AirTrain to the subway to Manhattan, where the next day I gave a talk for a crowd of people who, I sensed, did not grow up on sheep farms. After the formal talk, the informal talk drifted to the matter of moral status, or, more precisely, of what species of animal we may appropriately eat. There was broad interest in episodic memory as marking a cut-off point on the scale of being: animals that have a conception of self, and of having a past that is their own, are not to be eaten, whereas the others may be eaten. A cow is not really an individual cow with a memory of its own cow youth (let alone an idea of its own impending cow doom), but rather is only a series of succinct time intervals of cowhood. Thus to kill it is not to deprive some particular integral cow of its life, but only to terminate one series of five-minute-long-or-so cow intervals. Or so goes the prevailing theory, the theory that is most in keeping with what we know about nervous systems.

Should I bring up the Icelandic student with the rocks?, I wondered. Jesus I move through worlds too quickly. I paused, stuttered. Yes, I said, nervous systems and episodic memories, fine. But don't we also see, in the world, evidence for something that our predecessors might have called 'conatus'? The tendency of all things to hold together? Is it really such a stretch to suppose that this tendency reveals to us a sort of integrity in things that need not be justified in terms of neurophysiological structure or of the conscious states that are thought to be uniquely grounded in this structure? And isn't it a transgression to violate this integrity?

Or maybe I didn't get that far. Maybe I held back. I know the usual replies too well. But that would mean we'd have to stop eating plants too. We'd all die. That's extreme. That sounds like Buddhism. It also sounds like 12th-century compassion theology, and, I suspect, like what pretty much everyone understood about the world for the vastly greater part of human life on earth, but 'Buddhism' is invoked here as a rhetorical strategy to cause one's deepest truest commitments to come out smelling like a mere dusting of Oriental spice. 

Somewhere Liz Harman gives an argument about abortion in which early-stage fetuses are shown to be no more morally relevant than are plants. But that hardly settles the matter, if you are not starting out from the premise that moral relevance flows from what is going on 'in there', let alone that what is going on in there can be simply and uncontroversially read off of physical structure. Plants are morally relevant, and to deprive them of their integrity and their thriving is not a morally insignificant matter. What gets eaten, what gets aborted, what gets smashed, will never be decisively resolved by an inspection of internal structures and capacities of a given candidate for destruction. Even smashing a mere chunk of solidified lava --evidently purely passive, and homoeomerous from one end to the other-- can be experienced as a  transgression by the person who is properly sensitized, for whom the chunk shows up as salient within her ethically charged environment. Are fetuses morally relevant? Yes, they are. So are chunks of lava. Does that mean you mustn't destroy them? Not necessarily, but you shouldn't suppose that the way to gain license to destroy them, whether this license is conceived cosmically, socially, or individually, is to produce arguments that cut them off from the sphere of moral relevance. 

The prevailing ethical theories suppose that there must be an ethical subject in some bit of matter in order for ethical commitments toward that bit to properly obtain. Parallel to the partial rise of environmental ethics, there is a metaphysical view that is perhaps slowly recrudescing, pananimism, which holds that all of nature is imbued with mind or mind-like powers. There are variations on this; Galen Strawson for example argues that some form of panpsychism is entailed by any realistic physicalism, and in this he is restyling an old argument of the 18th-century materialists, such as Diderot, to the effect that even marble can think-- it simply has to be ground up and sprinkled on grass that is eaten by a cow that is in turn eaten by a thinking human. Many philosophers have understood that to attribute mind-like powers to all of nature logically compels one to adopt the view that every bit of nature harbors an actual subject-- thus we find Ralph Cudworth arguing in 1678 that hylozoism (the view that all matter is alive) entails the 'clubbing together' of infinite minds everywhere (Cudworth saw this as a reductio ad absurdum of hylozoism, just as more recently John Searle has argued against pananimism on the grounds that there must be an individual mental subject wherever there is mental activity). A few years after Cudworth, we find G. W. Leibniz working out the elements of his own theory of monads, which holds precisely that the world is entirely constituted from the activity of infinitely many nodes of perception.

Such theories strike us as outlandish, and indeed as outliers in the modern conceptual landscape. But one thing of which I am growing increasingly convinced as I attempt to broaden my reading from philosophy to anthropology, Religionswissenschaft, and related fields, is that from the perspective of the longue durée something like what the theory of monads articulates has been the default human understanding of nature all along. It is what Heraclitus has in mind when he says that gods dwell in his stove; it is what preoccupies the Inuit when they suppose that in eating walrus meat they are eating the souls of ancestors; and it is the way of thinking that informs Virgil's poetic account of the Zephyr's power to impregnate mares. There are souls, gods, ancestors (whatever!) all around us; they are in evidence in the structure and cohesion of nature; and it is a transgression against them to needlessly violate this structure and cohesion.

This is the sort of thinking in which ethics originates. The ontology of philosophers has changed, and sent us scrambling for a new ethics, on which some things make the cut as relevant targets of ethical concern and others don't. But the old folk-ontology is not entirely extinct, and I suspect that there is much in folk-ethics, in the actual ways people form their ethical commitments (to icons, rocks, fetuses, etc.), that will escape the comprehension of philosophers so long as we continue to dismiss as backward or primitive or unscientific the idea that gods, or something like them, dwell here, for any here, too.

Phyllis Rides Aristotle

The apocryphal story of Phyllis and Aristotle is captivating for a number of reasons. For one thing, it recalls for us a period in the history of culture in which philosophy, and philosophers, were implicated not just in elite disputation, but also in popular lore and moral instruction. The tale of Phyllis and Aristotle is an exemplum, that is, a stock lesson telling you --and here, 'you' is not a subtle follower of philosophical arguments, but a simple fellow influenced by memorable stories accompanied by vivid images-- what you ought not to do. The fact that it was the greatest philosopher in Western history who provided the exemplum is worthy of pause, but we'll get back to that in a second.

Phyllis was the preferred consort, perhaps the wife, of Alexander the Great, who in turn was a disciple of the philosopher. This much is historical fact. A legend arose over the course of the late middle ages according to which Aristotle grew enamored of Alexander's favorite, who for her part consented to give the philosopher what he wanted, but only as his dominatrix. In particular, she wished to ride on the his back, with the peripatetic down on his hands and knees like a beast. 

An anonymous Latin text relates that Aristotle had initially instructed his disciple to abstain from amorous relations with his own wife, since this diverted him from the manly projects in which he was engaged (empire-building, philosophy, e.g.). Phyllis was therefore spurned, and to get revenge she decided to seduce not her own husband, but the old philosopher who had drawn her husband away from her. This proved not so difficult, and soon enough Aristotle began to solicit her carnally. To which solicitations Phyllis responded: 

This I will certainly not do, unless I see a sign of love, lest you be testing me. Therefore, come to my chamber crawling on hand and foot, in order to carry me like a horse. Then I'll know that you aren't deluding me. 

Hans Baldung's 1503 pen-and-ink drawing (to the right), as well as his 1513 woodcut (above), are some of the most vivid representations of the ensuing ride.  In 1512 Lucas van Leyden gives us a depiction of the same scene in which Aristotle is wearing unmistakably Moorish or Islamic gear (below). My favorite rendering of this subject is the 14th-century French bronze aquamanile that shows Phyllis plainly slapping Aristotle's rear, just like she might a horse, in full three-dimensional splendor (final image below). 

What exactly is going on here? It should be pointed out that there is a long tradition of associating Aristotle with the bawdy that, as far as I know, goes back to the mid-16th-century Latin translation, by Theodor Gaza, of the Greek author's biological works treating, most relevantly, the reproduction of animals, and therefore also the cosmic significance of sexual difference, copulation, etc. From this association there arose the countless editions of works bearing the title Aristotle's Masterpiece, which were essentially manuals of advice for midwives, plus a diverse selection of 'secrets' about the feminine sex. I have been told that in Australia one could receive late editions of the Masterpiece, in a plain brown wrapper and by mail order, into the 1930s. 

Even before the Gaza edition, Aristotle's name would have been loosely associated with the topic of animals via Albertus Magnus, the 13th-century teacher of Thomas Aquinas who wrote, among many other works, a treatise De animalibus. Though it might be hard for us to see today, to the extent that animals owe their very existence to copulation, from a certain medieval point of view there is already something bawdy in the very undertaking of zoology. 

I do not know to what extent these associations influenced the rise of the legend of Phyllis and Aristotle, and this present post is really more a query than a report. It seems to me quite likely that in addition to Aristotle the advisor of midwives, another aspect of his legacy that could be playing a role in this legend is that of Aristotle the happily married father and family man. We know in fact that Aristotle went to Macedonia as Alexander's tutor shortly after the death of his wife, Pythias, with whom he had had a daughter; he would later have another female lover who would bear him a son, Nicomachus, for whom he would eventually write one of his two major works on ethics. It is also likely that he had a male lover, but whether he did or not it remains the case that Aristotle was far more active in all that stuff that has to do with social reproduction through opposite-gender pairing than great philosophers have typically been held to be. Nietzsche famously noted that all the great philosophers have been unmarried and non-reproductive-- except for Socrates, who was however married to a shrew, as if to demonstrate precisely the lesson that philosophers ought not to marry. Strangely, Nietzsche does not even mention Aristotle in this connection, but if he had he would have had to acknowledge that the Stagirite is both an exception to the rule as well as an exception to Socrates's exception that supposedly proves the rule. 

The figure of Phyllis riding Aristotle begins to appear at the moment when Aristotle is beginning his slow decline as the preeminent representative of philosophy, as 'the Philosopher'. Several more centuries would follow in which celibacy would function as the norm and implicit ideal among philosophers. Against this background, it seems to me that much of the trouble philosophy as an academic discipline is currently having in the matter of gender equity has to do not just with its legacy of macho grandstanding, the old-boys'-club sense of entitlement that so many of its cocky male practitioners have, etc., but also, at least in part, with the fact that the discipline has its deep historical roots in something akin to monasticism, a commitment whose demise Nietzsche seems to be bemoaning, where the boys' club is constituted not on the basis of a shared commitment to prowling, lecherous domination of women, but rather to an ideal of separateness.

Aristotle betrayed philosophy, at least on a certain understanding, by allowing it to get mixed up with the sensual, corporeal realm. The exemplum thus works at two levels at once, for the initiates and the masses alike. Keep your wits by staying away from temptresses, it tells the masses, while to the philosophers, it says: maintain the standard of pure rationality by not getting mixed up with the natural world and its cycles of generation and corruption.

I don't mean to oversimplify, but my own take on the discipline's current wave of self-criticism is that its demographic problem flows directly and inescapably from the way philosophy continues to define itself as an intellectual project. This is not to say that reason is 'masculine' and the senses are 'feminine'; this is not at all what I think. But I do think that centuries-old associations have a way of insinuating themselves into the way we talk and act far more than most people, and certainly most non-historians, like to think. And I believe that within our supposedly intellectually grounded defense of philosophy as a largely a priori discipline separate from the natural and cultural worlds, there is an echo of that old exemplum, intended for simpletons, about staying pure and free of temptation. 

Immanuel Kant and his Man-Servant Lampe

I've been reading Thomas de Quincey's 1827 essay, The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, which is really little more than a massively long quotation, in English translation, of Ehregott Andreas Wasianski's 1804 work, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren. In fact, Wasianski's entire work is cited, after a few paragraphs of framing from de Quincey, and with a few additional footnotes here and there. I am not really certain why this work is attributed to the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater at all. De Quincey is at most the editor. 

Wasianski had been Kant's friend of long standing, and the account he gives of the philosopher's life, and his ultimate decline, is precious. It is, I suppose, the source of many of the legends we hear about Kant the personality, as that he took a regular constitutional stroll at the same time every day. But many of the details offered by Wasianski never attained to the status of legend. This for example:

Kant never perspired, night or day. Yet it was astonishing how much heat he supported habitually in his study, and in fact was not easy if it wanted but one degree of this heat. Seventy-five degrees of Fahrenheit was the invariable temperature of this room in which he chiefly lived; and if it fell below that point, no matter at what season of the year, he had it raised artificially to the usual standard. In the heats of summer he went thinly dressed, and invariably in silk stockings; yet, as even this dress could not always secure him against perspiring when engaged in active exercise, he had a singular remedy in reserve. Retiring to some shady place, he stood still and motionless--with the air and attitude of a person listening, or in suspense-- until his usual aridity was restored. Even in the most sultry summer night, if the slightest trace of perspiration had sullied his night-dress, he spoke of it with emphasis, as of an accident that perfectly shocked him.

The most delightful scenes of Wasianski's work describe Kant's relationship with his manservant Martin Lampe (delightful to me anyway, who am perhaps overly fascinated by this particular sort of interpersonal relationship, enough so to have invented one from my very imagination. Kant's relationship to Lampe is different from that of Dr. Smith to Isaac --Isaac is smart but subversive, while Lampe is dumb and loyal--, but both strike me similarly as both unhealthy and singularly touching, and in these respects as very much like marriage). 

Here is how Wasianski first introduces Lampe:

Precisely at five minutes before five o'clock, winter or summer, Lampe, Kant's servant, who had formerly served in the army, marched into his master's room with the air of a sentinel on duty, and cried aloud in a military tone, -- 'Mr. Professor, the time is come.'

Wasianski pauses to describe the relationship between the two in some detail. He considers it important to do so, since Kant and Lampe had a falling out two years before the philosopher's death. The nature of the dispute is not entirely clear from what Wasianski is willing to report of it, but it leads to the servant's dismissal, in 1802, and inaugurates the period of Kant's decline and eventual death two years later: 

It was a great misfortune for Kant, in his old age and infirmities, that this man also became old, and subject to a different sort of infirmities. This Lampe had originally served in the Prussian army; on quitting which he entered the service of Kant. In this situation he had lived about forty years; and, though always dull and stupid, had, in the early part of this period, discharged his duties with tolerable fidelity. But latterly, presuming upon his own indispensableness, from his perfect knowledge of all the domestic arrangements, and upon his master's weakness, he had fallen into great irregularities and neglect of his duties. Kant had been obliged, therefore, of late, to threaten repeatedly that he would discharge him. I, who knew that Kant, though one of the kindest-hearted men, was also one of the firmest, foresaw that this discharge, once given, would be irrevocable: for the word of Kant was as sacred as other men's oaths. Consequently, upon every opportunity, I remonstrated with Lampe on the folly of his conduct, and his wife joined me on these occasions. Indeed, it was high time that a change should be made in some quarter; for it now became dangerous to leave Kant, who was constantly falling from weakness, to the care of an old ruffian, who was himself apt to fall from intoxication. The fact was, that from the moment I undertook the management of Kant's affairs, Lampe saw there was an end to his old system of abusing his master's confidence in pecuniary affairs, and the other advantages which he took of his helpless situation. This made him desperate, and he behaved worse and worse; until one morning, in January, 1802, Kant told me, that, humiliating as he felt such a confession, the fact was, that Lampe had just treated him in a way which he was ashamed to repeat.

We know that, in spite of the falling out, Kant felt obliged to include Lampe in his will, and as a result the former servant received a comfortable pension beginning the year Kant died. 

Elsewhere in his éloge, Wasianski describes the routines of the philosopher and his servant in comic detail, the one comically haughty and exigent, the other comically dim-witted and devoted:

For the space of more than thirty years, during which he had been in the habit of reading the newspaper published by Hartung, Lampe delivered it with the same identical blunder on every day of publication. -- 'Mr. Professor, here is Hartmann's journal.' Upon which Kant would reply -- 'Eh! what?-- What's that you say? Hartmann's journal? I tell you, it is not Hartmann, but Hartung: now, repeat it after me-- not Hartmann, but Hartung.' Then Lampe, looking sulky, and drawing himself up with the stiff air of a soldier on guard, and in the very same monotonous tone with which he had been used to sing out his challenge of -- Who goes there? would roar- - 'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now again!' Kant would say: on which again Lampe roared -- 'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now a third time,' cried Kant: on which for a third time the unhappy Lampe would howl out-- 'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' And this whimsical scene of parade duty was continually repeated: duly as the day of publication came, the irreclaimable old dunce was put through the same manoeuvres, which were as invariably followed by the same blunder on the next.

Towards the end of their decades together, Kant grew more irrascible, but Lampe continued to do what he could to placate him. And so, more comedy:

the expressions of his impatience, though from old habit still gentle, were so lively, and had so much of infantine naivete about them, that none of us could forbear smiling. Knowing what would happen, I had taken care that all the preparations should be made beforehand; the coffee was ground; the water was boiling; and the very moment the word was given, his servant shot in like an arrow, and plunged the coffee into the water. All that remained, therefore, was to give it time to boil up. But this trifling delay seemed unendurable to Kant. All consolations were thrown away upon him: vary the formula as we might, he was never at a loss for a reply. If it was said -- 'Dear Professor, the coffee will be brought up in a moment.' Will be!' he would say, 'but there's the rub, that it only will be: Man never is, but always to be blest.'

The most touching part of the essay comes when Wasianski describes his own effort to help maintain the daily routines around the Kant residence after Lampe's dismissal:

One part only there was of the daily ceremonial, where all of us were at a loss, as it was a part which no mortal eyes had ever witnessed but those of Lampe: this was breakfast. However, that we might do all in our power, I myself attended at four o'clock in the morning. The day happened, as I remember, to be the 1st of February, 1802. Precisely at five, Kant made his appearance; and nothing could equal his astonishment on finding me in the room. Fresh from the confusion of dreaming, and bewildered alike by the sight of his new servant, by Lampe's absence, and by my presence, he could with difficulty be made to comprehend the purpose of my visit. A friend in need is a friend indeed; and we would now have given any money to that learned person who could have instructed us in the arrangement of the breakfast table. But this was a mystery revealed to none but Lampe. 

Wasianski concludes his treatment of Lampe by mentioning "an affecting instance of Kant's yearning after his old good-for-nothing servant in his memorandum-book":

Other people record what they wish to remember; but Kant had here recorded what he was to forget. 'Mem.: February, 1802, the name of Lampe must now be remembered no more.'

Lampe is gone, and Kant will mention him no more. He is in decline, and more irrascible than before. He is an old, dying man, but one who can still be made to perk up, like most old men, by a good friend who knows how to coax out his old passions. In Kant's case, significantly, these are not, at the very brink of death, the deep questions of metaphysics and epistemology, but rather the trivia of geography:

[W]hen he became perfectly incapable of conversing with any rational meaning on the ordinary affairs of life, he was still able to answer correctly and distinctly, in a degree that was perfectly astonishing, upon any question of philosophy or of science, especially of physical geography, chemistry, or natural history. He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler's, especially the law of the planetary motions. And I remember in particular, that upon the very last Monday of his life, when the extremity of his weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless, -- even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise of everybody but myself, he immediately gave us a summary account of their habits and customs; and told us by the way, that in the word Algiers, the g ought to be pronounced hard (as in the English word gear).

Within the week, Kant would be dead, and he would die as he lived --as the ancients believed great men do--, which in his case means that he would die without sweating:

About ten o'clock in the forenoon he suffered a remarkable change; his eye was rigid and his face and lips became discolored by a cadaverous pallor. Still, such was the effect of his previous habits, that no trace appeared of the cold sweat which naturally accompanies the last mortal agony... Soon after his death the head of Kant was shaved; and, under the direction of Professor Knorr, a plaster cast was taken, not a masque merely, but a cast of the whole head, designed (I believe) to enrich the craniological collection of Dr. Gall. 

I also wanted to get, in this post, to the question that comes down to us from the ancients: why, namely, should we take an interest in the manners of the deaths of the philosophers? Of course today we suppose that we should not take an interest, that to do so is to do bad philosophy, or to lapse into mere 'philosophical biography' or 'philosophical journalism'. But from Diogenes Laërtius's point of view anyway, philosophical biography, the genre of the bios, was philosophy par excellence. To know a philosopher's views fully, and to grasp how successfully they were implemented, one had to wait to see how he died. This was a corollary to the adage that no man must be called happy until he dies, which held that a man's wisdom too can only be adequately judged post-mortem. Sometimes, of course, the manner of approaching death does indeed show something about character, and character may well be grounded in philosophical commitments. Yet death strikes in many ways, most of which signify nothing. And in any case Kant's not sweating at the time of death does not seem to reveal any more about his philosophy than Kant's not sweating during life.

Yet, contrary to what we usually suppose, Diogenes Laërtius's project died out much later than we tend to think. Leibniz's amanuensis Eckhart gives us a stunning account of his master's demise from gout in 1714, while Wasianski, seeing that his friend did not end his days with a servant up to the task, took it upon himself to document the medical condition of his equal. His presumption seems to have been that this work must be written, simply in view of who Kant had been in life, and in view of the greatness of his thought.

Wasianski included details about interpersonal relations that are missing in Eckhart's account of Leibniz, and in Diogenes Laërtius's summaries of sundry philosophical luminaries in antiquity. He thought it fitting to devote much of this short biography to the relationship between the philosopher and the manservant. Perhaps apart from his relationship to Wasianski himself, which remains surprisingly opaque in Wasianski's account, the relationship Kant had with Lampe appears to be the most significant and interesting one in his entire life, the one that tells us, much more than the manner of his death, who Kant was. 

Why I'm Studying Sanskrit

My month-long ultra-intensive spoken Sanskrit course at the University of Heidelberg has come to an end. I was the oldest student, and probably the weakest (in my defense, I'd had only one semester of formal study prior to beginning the course). This was an extremely humbling experience, but also, in the obvious and clichéd ways, edifying, character-building, etc. The most humbling (or, to be frank, humiliating) moment came on the final day. I had naively signed up to take part in the Saraswati Prize Contest, which is sponsored by the Indian government, pitting non-Indian students of Sanskrit against one another as they each deliver a 10-15 minute speech in that language. I really did not know what I was getting into, but by the time it began to dawn on me that I was in over my head, it was all too late to pull out. So, this past Friday, in front of 50 or so people, many of whom speak Sanskrit as fluently as I speak English, I offered up the following --how should I put it?-- rudiments of sentences on the assigned topic, "Why Study Sanskrit?" (translation follows):

सम्भवतः अहं अधुना सम्भाशणं सम्स्कृतेन कर्तुं उद्युक्तो नस्मि । इदानीमप्यहं एतया भाशया अत्मानं सम्यक् प्रकाशयितुं न शक्नोमि । एकं सुन्दरं सुभाषितं उपदिशति : "मनस्येकं वचस्येकं कर्मण्येकं महात्मनाम् ।मनस्यन्यद्वचस्यन्यत्कर्मण्यन्यद्दुरात्मनाम्" ।। किन्तुवहं दुरात्मनो नास्मि । यो हि पठितुं अर्थयते तस्य अज्ञानं अपचारो नस्ति । अतो यद्यपि मम मनो व्यक्ततरं मम पदेभ्यो अस्ति तथापि एतनि पदनि पौंश्चलीयनि न सन्ति ।  यद अहं सम्स्कृतं पठितुं प्रविश्यमि स्म तदा पुर्वं एव अहं अष्टात्रिंशद्वर्ष आसम् । तदनिम् मया पूर्वं एव कनिचित् पुस्तकनि इतिहस्य दर्शनस्य यूरोपखण्डे विशये  लेखितनि । मह्यम् दर्शनम् जेर्मनि-देशस्य, प्रतमाम् आन्वीक्शिकी महोदयस्य गोत्फ्रिद् विल्हेल्म् लैब्नित्स् रोचते स्म । तदनिम् न किमपि सम्प्रदायस्य दर्शनस्य भारते न जनमि स्म । तत्कालम् मया अपि पदनि "वैशेषिक," "न्याय," "मीमाम्सा" इति तावन्न श्रुतवन्ति । इदनिमपि एतनि दर्शनि न सम्यक् जानामि । परन्तु एतावत् अपि अधुना गुरुतां च अर्थवत्तां च सम्प्रदायाणाम् दरशनस्य भारते अवगच्छमि । कुत एते गुरुता च अर्थवत्ता च ? । आरिष्टतलो लिखितोवन् : यथा पार्सिके तथा युवनदेशे अग्निः तुल्यम् अभिशोचति इति । एवमेव वक्तुं शक्यते : यथा युवनदेशे तथा भारते प्रश्नाः तत्त्वायाः च सत्यस्य च भवस्य च विशये तुल्यम् उत्प्लवन्ते । दर्शनम् युरोप-महदेशे न जयते स्म । युरोप-महदेशः दर्शनस्य स्वमी नस्ति । यद्यपि दर्शनम् एव संपत्ति मानुष्यतायाः अस्ति तथपि सर्वं रष्ट्रम् स्वकीयं विधिम् च स्वकीयां पद्धतिम् च तर्कायाः उपजानीते । परिणामतः यत्र यत्र द्वि दर्शनिकौ अन्यद्भ्याम् रष्ट्राभ्याम् मेलनम् कुरुतः तत्र तत्र अरिषण्यम् नस्ति यत् तौ परस्परम् दर्शनस्य विशये सम्ब्रवितुं शक्श्यतः । ताभ्याम् अपि सम्भक्ता भाषा वक्तव्या । अतः यदि पश्चिमः दर्शनिकः सम्स्कृतम् नावगच्छति, सः स्वकीयम् प्रतियोगिनम् भारतात् न अनुद्रष्टुं शक्श्यति । यः भाषाम् न वदति सः अर्थान् सैद्धान्तिकानाम शब्दाणाम् तस्याः भाषायाः अवगन्तुं न शक्नोति । यथा उदाहरणम् अनुचिन्तयमः शब्दम् "रुप" । एतम् शब्दम् अनुवक्तुं न शक्नामः । अपामित्यम् हि एतस्य शब्दस्य पश्चिमेषु भाषासु नस्ति । 26. यथार्थ अनुवदकाः एतम् शब्दम् कुत्र "matter" इति कुत्र "form" इति अनुवक्तुं । परन्तु पश्चिमदर्शने "matter" च "form" च द्वौ अपष्ठुरौ अर्थौ स्तः । पूर्वतनः हि उपस्तरम् उपरस्य अस्ति । तदर्थम् यदि अनुवदकः अर्थम् अनुपालयितुं इच्छति तर्हि शब्दः "रुप" न अनुवक्तव्यः । अनुचिन्तयमः अन्यकम् उदाहरणम् । अनुचिन्तयमः प्रविभागम् शास्त्रणाम् ।  ज्योतिःशास्त्रस्य प्रतिवस्तुः पश्चिमायाम् किम् अस्ति ? ।  ज्योतिषम् प्रयुक्तगणितम् च सर्वशाकुनम् च व्यतिशजति । इत्थम् एतम् शब्दम् "astrology" इति अनुवक्तुं शक्नुमः । किनु यत् पश्चिमायाम् एतस्य शब्दस्य असमना अर्थगतिः अस्ति तत् अस्मभिः न विस्मरन्तव्यम् । अनुचिन्तयमः अन्ततः न्यायविद्याम् । एषा विद्या षोदश पदार्थान् व्यतिशजति तथा प्रमाणम् च संशयम् च वादम् च जल्पम् च । पश्चिमाः दर्शनिकाः तु सर्वान् एतान् शब्दान् शस्त्रे "logic" न विचन्ति । यत् एतानि दर्शनानि -- मिमंसा वेदन्त न्याय इव -- केवलम् सम्स्कृतेन युक्तम् अवगन्तव्यिनि तत् एतैः निदर्शणैः स्पष्टम् भवति । यदि एतानि दर्शनानि पश्चिमैः दर्शनिकैः न अगतनि तर्हि ते दर्शनम् एवम्, यत्रकुत्रपि एतत् दर्शनम् उत्प्लवते, अवगन्तुं न शक्श्यन्ति । दर्शनम् हि भारते प्रतिध्वनिः च प्रतिच्छाया च दर्शनस्य यवनदेशस्य, आरबदर्शनम् इव, नस्ति । चरित्रम् च वृद्धिः च दर्शनस्य भारते नितरम् अव्यतिकीर्णाः सन्ति स्म । केवलम् भारते पश्चिमाः दर्शनिकाः पूर्णा च स्वयंशासिता च विपारीतता स्वकीयायाः परम्परायाः अनुद्रक्श्यन्ति । तद् अपि  बहवः सहकारिनः कनद-देशे च अमेरिक-देशे च विशवसं कुर्वन्ति यत् दर्शनम् भारते नस्ति, यत् तर्कः सत्यस्य च भवस्य च विशये भारते केवलम् अन्धश्रद्धास्ति । नूनम् खलु तत् केवलम् शुद्धा पक्षपतिता अस्ति । तेषाम् अज्ञानं निर्मूलयितुंर्थे पश्चिमा मद्यसथैः दर्शनिकैः प्रयोजनं अस्ति । याः सुज्ञाः उभयोः सम्प्रदयोः सन्ति, तैः पश्चिमा प्रयोजनं अस्ति । अहं तदृशः दर्शनिकः भवितुं इच्छमि ।

Why Study Sanskrit?

It may be that I am not yet ready to give a speech in Sanskrit. Regrettably, I am still unable to express myself well in this language. A certain beautiful subhāṣita teaches: "wicked people think one thing, say another, and do something else." But I am not wicked, for whoever seeks to learn is at no fault in his ignorance. Thus, although my mind is clearer than my words, nonetheless these words are not meretricious. When I began to study Sanskrit, I was already 38 years old. At that time, I had already written a few books on the history of European philosophy. I was particularly interested in German philosophy, and above all the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz. At that time I didn't know anything about the tradition of philosophy in India. Back then, I had not yet heard words like 'Vaiśeṣika', 'Nyāya', and 'Mīmāṃsā' Still today, I do not know these schools well, but at least now I understand the venerableness and importance of these traditions. In what way are they venerable and important? Aristotle wrote that fire burns in Persia just as it does in Greece. It could likewise be said that as in Greece, so in India, questions concerning reality, truth, and being arise in the same way. Philosophy was not born in Europe, and Europe is not the proprietor of philosophy. Yet although philosophy is in fact the property of all humanity, still, every culture invents its own method and its own system of reasoning. Consequently, whenever two philosophers from two different cultures meet, mutual recognition is not certain. They must also speak a common language. Thus, if a Western philosopher does not know Sanskrit will not be able to recognize his own counterpart in India. Whoever does not speak a language will not be able to understand the (full) meaning of philosophical terms in that language. For instance, let us consider the term rupa. This term is untranslatable, for it has no equivalent in Western languages. As a matter of fact, sometimes translators render this term as 'matter', and sometimes as 'form'. But in Western philosophy 'matter' and 'form' are two opposite concepts, for the former is the substratum (or underlier) of the latter. Thus, if the translator wishes to conserve the meaning, he must not translate the term rupa. Let us consider another example. Let us consider the classification (or division) of the disciplines. What is the equivalent in the West to the science of jyotisha? This discipline includes both applied mathematics and augury. We can translate this term as 'astrology', but we must not forget that this word has a different meaning in the West. Let us consider, finally, the science of Nyaya. This discipline involves sixteen categories, such as 'the means of knowing', 'doubt', 'discussion', and 'wrangling'. Western philosophers do not recognize all of these categories in their science of logic. Is, then, Nyaya 'logic'? The only way to adequately answer this question is to approach it from within the language in which it was articulated. By these examples it is clear that these doctrines --such as Mimamsa, Vedanta, Nyaya-- can only be clearly understood in Sanskrit. If these doctrines are not understood by Western philosophers, moreover, they will not be able to understand philosophy itself, wherever it appears. For philosophy in India is not an echo or a shadow of the philosophy of Greece, as is Arabic philosophy. The history and development of philosophy in India was entirely independent. Only in India will a Western philosopher find a complete and autonomous counterpart of his own tradition. And yet, I have colleagues in Canada and America who still believe that there is no philosophy in India, that speculation about truth and being in India is merely superstition. Of course this is a pure prejudice. In order to eradicate their ignorance, the West needs philosophers who are mediators. The West needs philosophers who are competent in both traditions. I would like to be such a philosopher.

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So that was that. There was some polite applause, and then the next contestant began his speech (this was my Serbian friend Marko, a true Wunderkind who seems to have gained his high proficiency in spoken Sanskrit primarily by watching Sanskrit newsclips on YouTube; I hope he wins the prize). 

Now it should go without saying that what I said is not quite what I would have liked to have said. Rather, what I said was a sort of compromise between what I wanted to say and what I was able to say. The core thought, which I believe I was able to convey, was that India provides the best, and perhaps the only, full-fledged instance of an independent philosophical tradition that covers all of the fundamental questions addressed in the European philosophical tradition. Arabic-language philosophy cannot provide a comparison case, since in fact it is a continuation and development of the same tradition with which Europeans identify; and Chinese philosophy cannot provide as useful a comparison case, since for the most part it is concerned with ethics, statecraft, political philosophy, and rather less with the metaphysics and epistemology that have, arguably, underpinned the Western philosophical tradition (I am waiting for this point to be refuted). For this reason, any serious attempt at understanding the nature of philosophical inquiry through cross-cultural comparison will be one that considers the similarities and differences between the Indian and Western approaches to philosophical questions. 

I take it as a contingent fact about world history that India and Europe developed philosophical traditions, and I take it as a contingent fact, also, that Sanskrit has been the medium for so much important philosophical reflection. To this extent, beyond the fact that my Sanskrit is terrible, there is another reason why I will probably not be winning any prizes from the promoters of Sanskrit in India any time soon: I am not saying what they want to hear about the value of this cornerstone of their cultural heritage.

Within India, Sanskrit is promoted largely by conservative and nationalist factions, and their take on the antiquity and expressiveness of the language is rather different from anything that a linguist or a scholar could assent to about any natural language. In short, they don't really think Sanskrit is a natural language at all. It is, rather, the Devabhasha, the divine language, which exists entirely outside of history. Now in classical Indian philosophy the idea of a transendental language that is channeled through human beings but that is not produced by them yields very interesting reflections about the nature of both language and meaning. But as an understanding of language today, this theory can have no place among thoughtful, reasonable people. Remarkably, many Western students of Sanskrit are perfectly happy to buy into the nationalists' myths about Sanskrit, thus bringing about a strange collusion between idealistic Western aspirations to enlightenment and universal harmony, on the one hand, and a rather conventional sort of ethnic chauvinism on the other. I have heard Western students of Sanskrit rapturously declaring that this language is 'the mother of all languages', that it bears a singular relationship to truth, that it is not of human origin, etc. (For a small sample of this sort of nonsense coming from Westerners, watch this.) Unfortunately, the Indian promoters of Sanskrit do not go out of their way to quell this enthusiasm. Professional Western scholars of India, in the meantime, who surely know better, strive for a delicate balance: they do not wish to offend the people who care most about the thing they themselves study, and so, I gather, are indulgent of unscholarly views about the antiquity and origins of the language.

Sanskrit is important, and the corpus of scientific, philosophical, sacral, and poetic texts produced in this language is surely one of the richest, probably the richest, contributions to global textual culture ever. Millions of these texts remain unstudied. Western philosophy, to the extent that it refuses to take an interest in these texts, will remain, as I've said before (paraphrasing Nietzsche), nothing more than a catalogue of its own prejudices. As far as I'm concerned the case for studying Sanskrit makes itself, and there is no need at all to invoke higher spiritual incentives in order to justify one's interest. 

If only I had been able to put it this way in my speech. 

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Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale

This novel is an important contribution to Icelandic literature. It channels the past millennium's experience of nature and history in that peculiar place, but does not aspire to mere peculiarity. For this reason, it is a great shame that the book has been packaged for foreigners as a sort of offshoot of Björkian quirkiness.

Sjón has long been part of the creative circle that includes Iceland's most marketable pop icon, as are many of the currently dominant generation of Iceland's cultural, and even political, elite. I had thought, when I bought the novel on may way out of Reykjavik yesterday, that I would be mildly amused by the literary effort of a graduate of the '80s punk scene. I also worried that it might not be worth my trouble at all, that this would be another case, comparable to Sven Regener's forgettable novels, which he started writing when the physiognomy of middle age set in and he could no longer front the Berlin band Element of Crime with any dignity. But this is not one of those cases. Sjón is a writer of literature, who happens to have been present at some Sugarcubes shows (and, perhaps revealingly, joined them on stage to play, of all things, the air guitar).

The novel is called Rökkurbýsnir or 'Marvels of Twilight' in the original Icelandic, has for no apparent good reason (other than a disconnected if intriguing flourish in the final few paragraphs) been called The Mouth of the Whale in English. This too must have something to do with marketing. The perennial appeal of Moby-Dick maybe? Of course it is an admirable thing to produce even a faint echo of Melville, but that is not at all what Sjón aims to do. His is prose that frequently lapses into poetry as if by inward inclination. The mood of it is rapturous, at times almost reminiscent of Saint John the Divine's coda to the New Testament.

It tells us the story of a certain Jónas Palmasson 'the Learned', an early-17th-century Icelandic natural philosopher, runic scholar, and healer. He is self-taught, and syncretistic in his commitment to Christian faith and to Icelandic folk-beliefs. He is a devout follower of Paracelsus, and is something like what the Swiss physician and occultist might have ended up being if he had been born, liks Jónas, into what was essentially an Iron Age society, with few books and only a fairly barren natural landscape from which to learn.

Part of the narrative (though this is not a very narrative novel) concerns Jónas's voyage to Copenhagen, at the request of Ole Worm, the actually existing historical character who founded the Museum Wormianum, one of the largest cabinets of curiosities in early modern Europe. Worm has heard of Jónas's learnedness, and hopes that he can help him to decipher runic writing, something Worm in fact attempted in his Runir, seu Danica literatura antiquissima [Runes, Or, the Most Ancient Danish Literature] of 1638. Jónas is hesitant to aid Worm, since he has been persecuted in his home country for sorcery, and is in Denmark in part to clear his name. But he is happy to clarify for Worm the true origin of a purported unicorn skull. It comes from a narwhal: Icelandic traders had for centuries been duping Europeans who were willing to pay enormous sums of money for remedies made from a powder of the marine mammal's tusk, on the presumption that this came from the mythical terrestrial mammal. The build-up to the revelation of the skull's true origin is somewhat tedious for those of us who have read the 1628 treatise De Unicornu by Caspar Bartholin (Worm's brother-in-law), and it all starts to feel a bit too Eco-esque. Not surprisingly, this sequence is the one that is marketed most aggressively in the publisher's packaging of the novel. (Unicorns appeal, I gather, in roughly the same way Björk does.)

When I say that this is an important contribution to Icelandic literature I mean in part that the author channels a tradition that stretches back to a time when literature was meant to do something other than what it has been doing since the 19th century or so. Jónas has few books to read, does not know Latin, but is loyal to the idea that nature can be read, and that books, ideally, are epitomes of nature. Nature in turn is Divine Creation, and learning is the project of mastering the order behind this creation. One of the most touching sequences concerns Jónas's recollection of his first encounters with his future wife, Sigga:

Our courtship was one uninterrupted conversation about the origin of the stars, the nature of land and sea, the behaviour of beasts great and small, and although it was not conducted in Hebrew or in the angleic tongue as it was with Adam and Eve, it was nevertheless our hymn to Creation. We sat together into the early hours, investigating the delightful puzzles of light and shadow, such as what happens to the shadow of your hand when the shadow of mine falls upon it? Have they become one? Or has yours disappeared temporarily? And if so, where to?

In her youth Sigga correctly predicted an eclipse through astronomical calculation. Her kinfolk ran around like it was the end of the world, but she was calm. She and Jónas both embody an approach to learning that is 'scientific', in that it seeks to get things right, but also one step away from sorcery, in that it probes where one really isn't supposed to go (as a boy Jónas specializes in laying his hands upon the bellies of old crones, and diagnosing their 'female illnesses'). This shared disposition unites Jónas and Sigga erotically: science as a hymn to creation, as the basis of erotic love, and finally as a highly charged danger zone that borders on the magical. Sjón reconstructs with sympathy the world in which this all made sense.

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This Year I Betrayed My Country...

From the n+1 2011 Year-in-Review. For other contributors' perspectives on that annus horribilis mirabilisque, please go here. 

This year I betrayed my country. Or at least that’s how it felt, even if, from what I’ve been able to learn, the US tolerates dual citizenship by means of something like a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. There I was, after eight years of paperwork, of interrogations by the Délégation du Québec about my knowledge of that province’s charming folkways, of counting every day outside of Canada lest I go beyond my limit and find my permanent resident status revoked: there I was, I say, in July, in Montreal, before an immigration judge, some Mme. Robichaud or Tremblay, swearing, along with seventy-two other soon-to-be-Canadians from thirty-eight different countries, my allegiance to Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada (a different person, by the way, than Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, even if the two persons inhabit the same physical body). This part was not so hard, as she looks like a kind old lady. But then came the line about “her successors,” and I thought about what it would mean to actually be loyal to that lad William, say, whose birth I remember as if it were yesterday, and I confess I began to mumble my lines. We did the recitation in English and French, and the French part was a good deal easier for me. Hell, I’ll swear anything in a language that resides only in my head and not in my heart. Behind me, by contrast, a man from somewhere in Francophone Africa bellowed out the French part directly from his heart. There were tears in his eyes and his voice quivered. I thought of the Ontario politician Garth Turner, who denounced the “Canadians of convenience,” that is, those who swoop through just long enough to get the passport before moving on. The African behind me was no Canadian of convenience, whereas I, I understood, might very well turn out to be one. In the end my principle motivation to become Canadian was that I might thereby be free to leave the place without having to count the days. I am now at liberty to abscond until 2040, if I feel like it, just in time for a bit of free palliative medicine in my final days. The man behind me believed in the idea of Canada, whereas I, whatever the current reality, cannot deny that it is the United States I believe in, that I carry in my heart, if I may be permitted to put it sentimentally, and that my association with the monarchy to the north will always remain rather more circumstantial. The US is a bloated and aggressive empire populated by snake-charming enemies of Enlightenment, Canada is a decent and sober social democracy, et cetera. But heavens, one is who one is, and in my shiny new Canadian passport, just after Lieu de naissance it says “Reno, USA”: surely the most significant bit of information in that document. It is a question of habitus, which is something so deep that the matter is already more or less settled even before we are begat. Mine in particular took shape in the late 18th century, and hates kings and queens, especially the ones no one believes in anyway. I am proud of my new status: I got 100 percent on the citizenship exam (what does A mari usque ad mare mean? Which province is the leading producer of wood pulp?), and I show off my passport like a fetish. But the taint of the betrayer is not going to go away. 

Life and Death in the Orthodox World

I am not an Orthodox Christian. (I am not an orthodox anything.) Among my immediate blood ancestors there is Scandinavian Lutheranism, Southern Baptism, and Mormonism (I am not just any Smith, either). I wound up in a private Catholic school, and as a strategy to make me fit in better socially I was caused to be baptized at the age of 13 (the strategy didn't work). My mother re-married into the reform Jewish world, and now on that side of the family bar mitzvahs and Passover are as important as any other dates on the calendar. My father, I take it, is a libre penseur, but often mentions how impressed he was by Thomas Aquinas's version of the cosmological argument (that there must be a first cause).

To this not totally atypical history of American mongrelism it should be added that I have spent significant portions of my life in the Orthodox Christian world, and have had many important life experiences within it, involving both love and death. These experiences have at times caused me to respond, at least aesthetically and perhaps even 'spiritually', to Orthodox symbols: to say inwardly, at the sight of a blackened icon, something like, 'I get it'.

If I may attempt to distill some sort of essence out of Orthodox Christianity in just a few words, it is the variety of Christianity that still takes love and death seriously, that continues to have its hand in the way these are lived by individual members of the church, and to actively and minutely prescribe the ritual forms through which they are to be lived. The Enlightenment never happened, there is nothing about sola fide, and religion remains deeply entrenched in, some might say confined by, ritual.

The ritual keeps the realities of human life --particularly death-- constantly in view. Think of the display of Father Zosima's body in The Brothers Karamazov, and how disappointed Alyosha is when it begins to smell: this means he is not a saint after all. A curious way of making such a determination, but what it entails, among other things, is that dead bodies, and not just Zosima's, are left exposed long enough to figure out their prospects for sainthood. Corpses are put out there to reckon with, not hidden away and euphemized. In at least the Romanian variety of Orthodoxy, dead bodies are traditionally dug up by family members after 7 years in order to wash the bones. I've been told the smell is something awful. Death gets in your nose.

To the right is a photograph of Vitaliy Dergachev. It is the only photo I have of him, and most certainly the only one of him online. It was taken in my dorm room in Leningrad in 1990. You will notice my hair-sculpting products on the nightstand, alongside a stack of audiocassettes. He is looking at my train ticket to Moscow.

This Saturday will be the 20th anniversary of Vitaliy's death. On my reckoning, roughly half of the blame for this goes to alcohol, and roughly half to the hardline communist generals who, between 19 and 21 August, 1991, staged a coup d'état against the Gorbachev regime and sent all of Russia into a few days of, let us say, more chaos than usual. The generals' failure marked Yeltsin's unfortunate rise to power (he stood on a tank and looked brave and defiant for a moment), but that's all just politics and that's not what I'm here to write about.

I was a few days late in getting to Russia, thanks to the generals and their tanks in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad. I was waiting at the Warsaw airport for LOT to resume its service to Russia, watching what I could of CNN but mostly making things out from the Polish media. My original ticket would have had me there one day before Vitaliy died; instead, I arrived one day after. Vitaliy fell off the roof of his highrise apartment block. Apparently, he had been drunk, and was amusing himself by balancing on the thin balustrade. Again, it is not as though the putschists killed him directly. They did not shoot him in the head. But if I may engage in some amateur counterfactual history, I suspect that had there not been a coup, Vitaliy would not have been drunk and balancing on the balustrade. Blame who you will.

Anyway, he fell, I was late in getting there, and the first several days of my return to Russia were spent in a vortex of Russian mourning: performative, tragic, tiring. There were a number of hangers-on at Vitaliy's mother's apartment, other Leningrad urchins who, like Vitaliy, loved the Beatles far more than I would have tolerated from Western friends at that point in my life, who had been in and out of jail over the course of the 1980s for trading in bootlegged Beatles albums. There was a self-styled American writer named Winston hanging around, who was probably just some college kid. Vitaliy's mother was up and down, now serving tea and sweets with an ecstatic smile, now face down on the couch, heaving.

After three days or so there was a funeral, and needless to say it was open-casket. Vitaliy had been entirely reconstructed after his fall, and his face was covered with foundation make-up, hastily brushed on to hide the damage. I don't recall much of the service, except that the incense was overwhelming and the women were all putting on a good show of wailing.

What I remember more clearly is the pilgrimage to the cemetery afterwards: the hunchbacked gravediggers; how we all had to line up and kiss Vitaliy just before the coffin was put in the ground (I kissed his forehead, though others, including his mother, went straight for the lips); how we threw little religious trinkets and packs of cigarettes and poured vodka and beer into the coffin just before the lid was closed for good; how we all helped to throw dirt on top of the coffin before the hunchbacks came and finished the job. Sometimes, as I'm walking down the aisle of Whole Foods or something stupid like that, I recall in a flash that I was once involved in such a thing, and it is hard like death to carry on.

Once I was married in the Romanian Orthodox church. While Catholics and at least neo-Protestants like to get married in big flashy palaces (whether of the cathedral or the mega-church variety), the Orthodox seek out the most humble places of workship they can find. Now I was allowed to be involved in all of this without converting to Orthodoxy because I was, so it was emphasized at the time, a Catholic, and in at least this region of the Orthodox world there was some ancient entente with the Catholics that enabled cross-marriage. So there I was getting married in what Californian mega-church-goers would consider a clapboard shack, would associate architecturally with the religion of their own hillbilly ancestors. And yet this shack was actively sought out, and it was deemed pure, and utterly Christian, because primitive. Perhaps the limit case of this primitiveness is a holy site near the Agapia Monastery in northeastern Romania. It is a cave, and it was once the dwelling place of the venerable Mother Theodora of Sihla, who lived there for decades, wrapping her hair around her body instead of wearing clothes, talking to the animals. You can go there today and pray before icons and light candles in the dim glow beneath two slabs of incalculably many tons of rock: slabs leaning against one another, maintaining a tall sliver between them that stands across the centuries. Depending on how the candles flicker, you can sometimes make out the dark faces (not so much chiaroscuro as oscuroscuro) of icons painted directly into the cave walls, much as at Lascaux some millennia earlier.

Once I arrived at the end of a service at a church in Athens. Communion had already been taken, and the priest was on his way out. Some underlings brought the leftover consecrated bread out to the entrance of the church and the beggars and cripples of Athens dug in like pigeons. This was transubstantiated bread, mind you, supposedly the body of Christ. Now it always seemed to me that in Western churches the communion wafer was not really bread any more than it was really Christ: to take it was not just to eat Christ symbolically, but also to eat symbolically (how many calories do you think an Anglican wafer has?). The Athenian poor were at least getting something out of this ceremony, I thought: bread. This was a proper, living mystery. There could be no doubt but that transubstantiation had occurred.

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Heinrich Heine, from the Buch der Lieder (1827)

Die Heimkehr

LXXII

Und bist du erst mein ehlich Weib,
Dann bist du zu beneiden,
Dann lebst du in lauter Zeitvertreib,
In lauter Pläsier und Freuden.

Und wenn du schiltst und wenn du tobst,
Ich werd es geduldig leiden;
Doch wenn du meine Verse nicht lobst,
Laß ich mich von dir scheiden.

*

If you shall be my faithful wife
Then fortune on you shines.
You'll live a gay and carefree life
Of leisurely pastimes.

And if you scold and if you rave
I'll abide it all with pleasure.
But if my poems you will not praise
Then let us split forever.