—Sophocles, Electra (trans. Anne Carson, l. 425)

Before I address the question of desire in Seneca’s Phaedra, I want to pause and reflect on the beauty of the language.

Time silently wears you away, and the moment
that passes you by is pursued by a worse one.

From the Ode to Hippolytus’s Beauty in R. Scott Smith’s translation for Penguin, a dark reminder and with such beauty in itself that it strikes an ironic note in an choral ode about the dangerousness of beauty.

*Part of a series summarizing lectures in The Human Situation

My goal for this lecture was to address the question of “dreadful desire” in the play, but that goal was more literary and less philosophical: to show how one might use the structure of a literary text—in particular, the structure of a drama—to aid us in closely reading Seneca’s tragedy. In order to pose such a question—how does desire help us locate the climax of the play, and hence understand its ultimate stakes—one needs to grapple with the central concept of desire.

Beyond the traditional admonition to define one’s key terms—a necessity of course—to posit how desire works is to make a claim to who errs in this play. This is a tricky question for a play from Greco-Roman antiquity; as Walter Burkert wrote about Oedipus Rex, sometimes the tragic point is that human choice doesn’t enter into the equation at all.

Eugene Dönt once also drew a comparison between the structure of Oedipus and the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka. Both could be termed metaphors for the sudden, complete and relentless breakdown of a human being, a helpless victim of powers beyond his reach, or even termed descriptions of the hopeless human situation as such.

But whether we understand Seneca to be working with the category of hamartia or something more like the tragic flaw that renaissance Europe draws out from this Aristotelian concept, we can still ask who is responsible for poor Hippolytus’ gruesome death. For it may be the gods themselves (Venus in particular) who have cursed Phaedra with this implacable desire for her beautiful stepson—but then again embracing the idea of her curse may just be what allows her to give herself permission to be whom she desires to be.

The climax of a drama usually—nothing is inevitable—occurs in the middle of the play. But it is often ambiguous where it occurs in that broad middle, and locating that precise moment of action or choice after which the rest of the plot necessarily unfolds is often the key to what’s at stake in the drama as a whole. As usual, Hamlet is instructive here:

I, for one, tend to subscribe to the “scourge & minister” scene as the crucial moment, where Hamlet, like the Greek heroes of old, attempts to cross the human/divine boundary. To not kill his uncle because his recently-confessed soul might avoid hell is to don the mantle of divine judgment; but judgment is God’s and God judges Hamlet. Of course, other readers disagree, which is ultimately the point to be made here. What are our options in Phaedra?

The blank spaces in the chart are ones that I could have filled in in my lecture; picked one and ran with it. All well and good. But instead, I wanted to make an argument about how you make an argument, so instead we discussed the one question you would have to answer first: what is desire? Toward this end we could use a précís of the Freudian model of desire thwarted: something emerges within our train of thought, something that cannot be accepted and is thus rejected. This is the traumatic moment, but by definition trauma returns, it repeats—if we could just ignore that thought, it would not in the end be traumatic. But in the logic of the unconscious the repressed returns in another form, a distorted mirror image, a symptom.

The question, then, is how do we analyze this desire? What is one to do with it? For Lacan, that is the question for the subject: “Will it or will it not submit itself to the duty that it feels within like a stranger, beyond, at another level?” (7). Moreover, for Lacan this question is so important that he elevates it to an ethical maxim: “from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire” (319). Setting aside how we should precisely understand this Orphic statement, it is easy to see that for Phaedra herself, it is a life and death question whether or not she will submit to this desire. She herself tells us how much a talking cure might help her: “Take pity, hear out the desire I’ve longed to utter. I want to speak, but to do so makes me ill” (125). With these two tools—an insight into the structural import of a dramatic climax and a concept of desire—we could then venture an answer.

And there my discussion of the text ended. My colleague Marina Trninic took up the theme in her final lecture for us on the play, arguing that it may be in Hippolytus association with nature that he becomes a symbol of something beyond for Phaedra, and that her sexual desire for him is tied up in her desire for freedom—from her father’s legacy, her absent husband, her unwanted crown, and so on. And we might also ask, returning to our chart above, what is the object of all these other characters desires? Might the pivot not be Phaedra at all? It is Theseus, after all, who pronounces the fatal curse upon his son, who errs in his judgment (again, hamartia).

And certainly, desire is central to Hippolytus death: the monstrous beast, a virile and strange and otherworldly bull, emerges from beneath the waves, that hidden realm of life that we cannot see. Hippolytus, literally the unleasher of horses, destroyed by Poseidon (Neptune), tamer of horses and from whose semen the horse originally sprang. His death is a literalization of desire itself, his body torn apart, dis-membered, and like us he falls facing that which must inevitably keep him from being whole; unlike us at times, he does so nobly. And of course, there is the reference to Plato’s Phaedrus, with its light horse and dark horse, one steering us true on the edge of perception toward the world of ideal forms, the other incorrigible, dragging us down to the depths below.

If only briefly, let us imagine the nurse’s desire as well; what does she want, and why does she stoop to such seemingly contemptible depths of deception and betrayal to achieve it? I will only say here that we might read her as a heroine as well, or at least as one striving toward the good on par with the other characters in the play.

But the final consideration I want to give is to another reading of the desire of Phaedra herself. What if, instead of it being a desire for something else (which, after all, is the structure of desire, always for something else, some deeper, and ultimately lost, object), it is that inescapable knot at the heart of her inmost self, “a desire without any other substance than that assured by knots themselves.” What if this is truly how she loves? That is a darker answer than the reading that sees her as having a valid desire (freedom) misplaced onto an invalid object (nature/Hippolytus). Here, Phaedra is a kind of monstrous Antigone, defending not the keeping of the deeper law, but the breaking of it. In that, she might be a very modern heroine of desire, one that asks a profound question about how we deal with the impossible demands that both the world and ourselves make on who we are allowed to be.

The Panchatantra is a classic of Indian antiquity. Its changing series of tales-within-tales-within-tales has seen many lives since, from medieval Persia, to renaissance Europe, to the modern university’s Great Books course. The middle of Book One (the first of the Five Tantras) sees the climax of the frame narrative (though, be assured dear and perhaps perplexed reader, not the meta-frame narrative, or the sub-frame narratives) involving Tawny the lion, king of his little patch of jungle, and Lively the bull, a former caravan beast of burden from the civilized city. What struck me about this moment in Chandra Rajan’s Penguin Classics translation of the text were two problems, the first textual and the second thematic:

*Part of a series summarizing lectures in The Human Situation

First, the aphorism which precedes every tale is repeated at the conclusion, but with a single line or gloss of a line from the full aphorism. Curiously, these often don’t quite match. What’s going on?

Second, a constant theme of these tales is the contact—often funny, sometimes serious, always consequential—between higher and lower strata of the social order. Whether these tend to subvert or uphold that social order seems to me to be crucial to one of the central scholarly debates on the text, namely, whether there’s a streak of amorality running through the tales that prioritizes survival, political power, and social prestige over ethical action.

I suspected that these two things might be connected, at least in the tales from “The Weaver and Princess Charming” to “The Lion and the Lone Ram” (part of the Lapwing sub-cycle). But first, a chart to illustrate the point:

Now, before we begin, Rajan mentions offhand in the introduction that the repetitions are verbatim in the original, so what we may see here is merely one of those moments where the translator has employed their arts to give us a more readable if less realistic translation. But whether textual artifact or not, this discrepancy usefully draws our attention to the fact that the tales are said—they have a sayer, and thus we must inquire into both the ethos of the sayer as well as the logos of the said.

And here, the transformation points to the way that Wily the Jackal will set in motion his lion king’s tragic clash with his friend Lively. Interspersed with tales in this section, Wily sets executes his plan in four movements: Wily turns Tawny against Lively (92), Wily turn Lively against Tawny (112), Wily turns Lively from thoughts of untimely war (129), Wily primes Lively to see betrayal in Tawny (145). The first of the stories in this pivotal section, “The Weaver and Princess Charming,” tells the story of a lovestruck, wealthy merchant who disguises himself as Vishnu to swoop down on his beloved in a mechanical Garuda; in the end, they live happily ever after—after, that is, the real Vishnu has intervened to stop a war on his imposter’s behalf. It is this story that moves Wily to move from contemplation to action. In the final story cycle, “The Lapwing who defied the Ocean,” a married lapwing fails to heed his wife’s wise counsel and loses his eggs to the Ocean, but in the end divine intervention once again saves the day for the second of two protagonists about whom the reader harbors doubts about their worthiness of such mana from heaven.

In each of these tales around which the first tantra pivots, we see a subtle exploration of what links the highest and lowest strata of society, and ultimately a validation of that boundary crossing in the rewarding of those who have the initiative to cross it. Both stories, it seems, argue that an understanding of the circulation between high and low, and the ability to move between those spheres, is crucial to a health polity. But if these stories are told by Wily, an upjumped minor aristocrat outside the legitimate circles of power carefully laid out at the beginning of the first book, does this force the reader to doubt whether such movement between the spheres is, in fact, dangerous—the seeds of the social chaos embodied in the slaying of the innocent Lively?

The ancient bird listened and then spoke, ‘As you all know, Garuda is King of all Birds. In the circumstances the most suitable course of action is this: that all of you should raise your voices in unison in wails of lamentation and cry out to Garuda to stir his deepest feelings, so that he will be moved to redress your grievance.’

Perhaps. But in the end, I think not. Textually, at least in this translation, the difference between the aphorisms Wily begins with and the gloss he gives them at the end hint that he is warping the tales away from their true meaning. And thematically, well, it is after all a certain desperation that leads him to act the way he does—the fact that he and his companion, Wary, have no access to these higher circles, despite their considerable aptitudes. Indeed, they are practically starving to death at a certain point in the story, a motif throughout many of the stories lower down the frame. And in the end, it seems to me the great value of all this boundary crossing is that what looks like a certain amorality from above comes very much to look like a practical morality from below. Besides the deep subversion of the animal tales literalizing the ruler/ruled dichotomy as one of predator and prey, there is a fundamental ambivalence about rigid social hierarchies that can often be read as a kind of roadmap of influence for the weak and disenfranchised. If a mere lapwing can gain the attention of the gods and fight the ocean—chaos swallowing the potentiality of new life—then a more human order can be nurtured and preserved.

_{*Part of a series summarizing lectures in The Human Situation}

Indeed, this is a constant in the Meditations, with the word death appearing over 40 times, not including variants, euphemisms, or contexts where death is clearly the issue. “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. … If there were anything harmful on the other side of death, they would have made sure that the ability to avoid it was within you” (2.11).

This meditation on death is a practical exercise in taking our fears and anxieties to their logical conclusion, a kind of rumination or catastrophizing, not interrupted or rejected, but instead elevated to the Nth degree, with the goal of keeping goals and values front center of a person’s response to the world. And not just about our own death, but about the deaths of those we love the most: our children, our friends, our parents, &c.

If there were anything harmful on the other side of death, they would have made sure that the ability to avoid it was within you.

This is, however, one technique amongst many that Donald J. Robertson, in his recent biography from Yale University Press, has connected to the idea of therapeia, or the care of the soul and from whence we derive our modern concept of psychotherapy: “If the first thing Marcus obtained from Rusticus was a copy of Epictetus’s Discourses, the second was this notion of Stoic philosophy as a form of psychological therapy. The Meditations explicitly states that it was Rusticus who first taught Marcus that his character needed improvement and, indeed, “therapy” (therapeia)” (76). The passage he cites from the Meditations is at 1.7; from the Hays translation: “The recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character. Not to be sidetracked by my interest in rhetoric. … And to behave in a conciliatory way when people who have angered or annoyed us want to make up. To read attentively—not to be satisfied with “just getting the gist of it.” And not to fall for every smooth talker.” The word appears in that first line (θεραπείας, the Greek can be found here), but it is part of a long tradition that stretches back to Socrates. An example from Plato’s dialogue Laches: “SOCRATES: So do we now declare that we are considering a form of study [e] for the sake of the souls of young men?” (185d-e). And of course, any google scholar search for therapeia and Stoicism will turn up a series of investigations on the subject, though I myself am partial to the books and essays by Pierre Hadot (the inner citadel) and Michel Foucault (the care of the self).

For the purposes of this lecture, I was less interested in its modern vestiges as I was in how it solved a particular problem, a seeming tension in the text—what we often call in our teaching an interpretive question. And here, that tension is between that whole series of statements where Marcus Aurelius tells us, in so many words, to ignore other people … and the whole series of other statements where he tells us to study the character of others intently and that primary to being human is the care of others. An example of each. First: “Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind” (3.4). Second: “Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds” (6.53). How can we reconcile these two tendencies? In short, this seeming tension forces us to think deeply about what “nature” is for Marcus Aurelius.

It is not a simple concept. This “nature” is not not just the natural world of trees and the country and simple living, though it can be that, too; it seems instead to be both everything all at once—both substance and soul—and the underlying system that governs said things. “All substance is soon absorbed into nature, all that animates it soon restored to the logos, all trace of them both soon covered over by time” (7.10). A student of the text needs to understand both the theoretical and practical implications of this concept: theoretical, insofar as one needs to have a firm understanding of the deeper systems in play behind reality (stoic doctrine or dogma), and practical, insofar as one needs to implement these in techniques that include the melete thanatou, but are not limited to it. Again, we are in the realm of Foucault’s argument that we not only need to know ourselves (the Socratic injunction), but to care for ourselves. So, in studying the text, we must both define “nature” and tally up the myriad techniques that one uses to put this knowledge into play in one’s own life; if knowing how the world works only makes one feel a paralyzing guilt, then knowledge alone may be the disease, not the cure (to continue our metaphor, with all the risks it entails).

Ultimately, we are interested in what it allows Marcus Aurelius to do, what effects it has for him, here, in this text. And here, it helps overcome what one psychoanalyst called our penchant to become trapped in an “ego to ego rivalry” with others around us, and it does so by bringing to bear a broader, third term, the goals and values that are embedded in the stoic concept of nature. This care of the self or care of the soul, this therapeia, helps move us out of that clash of personalities that characterizes our attempts to control the world around us and creates that critical distance where we can stop getting tangled up in the morass of the small, one-on-one world and focus on what really matters to us—whether we subscribe to Stoic Nature or not. And if we do not, Marcus Aurelius has a whole series of meditations on that as well, and why we can still benefit from this form of relation to our self, which he frames in the ongoing ancient debate between the Stoic world of purpose and the Epicurean world of randomness and atoms (see 6.24, for instance). As such, it may help us survive, Marcus Aurelius hopes, the inevitability of change—profound and fundamental and threatening—in our lives.

Wait for it patiently—annihilation or metamorphosis. (5.33)

I have, of course, the lecture slides linked on the side of this blog, but I tend to keep the focus on the visuals and thus keep the amount text to a minimum (we read longer passages along together in lectures, and I have never found large chunks of text on slides very effective, at least for me). I don’t write scripts, or at least not very often, and while I do have hand-written notes for every lecture, often quite extensive, as any of those Human Situation students can tell you who have been in my discussion sections, my handwriting is … ephemeral, an aide-mémoire that serves its purpose in the moment and afterwards is mostly useful for tormenting future scholars (namely, myself).

So I’ve decided to be a bit more intentional and make at least some record of these every semester, summarizing the thoughts and arguments of the lecture before I move on down this meandering path that Walter Burkert, apropos Sophocles’ Oedipus, called “the hopeless human situation as such.”

—Jackson Mac Low, Words nd Ends from Ez (1989)

—”1777″ (1916), Amy Lowell

Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. 

—”Spring” (`1921), Edna St. Vincent Millay

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

—”Stony Garden” (1949-1950), Theodore Roethke

Mock clay tablets all you want, but at least when you burned ancient Mesopotamian libraries it made their collections more durable, not less. If you tried to read the carbonized scrolls from the library of Herculaneum, the above result—a pile of cinders—was all you would receive.

Until now.

Not a lot about AI gets me excited; ChatGPT is fun to play with, but may be a slow-moving academic Götterdämmerung (the genie will not go back in the bottle; nobody uses memory palaces any more; essays might be next) and thus makes my life significantly more difficult. But reading burned scrolls of ancient philosophy? Works that have literally been lost to the ravages of time. That is something close to a miracle.

The Renaissance was not just defined by the embrace of Graeco-Roman antiquity, but by the literal rediscovery of those texts; many of its largest luminaries were constantly rediscovering and publishing ancient works. With this break through, we may literally be on the verge of a massive expansion of the literary corpus of antiquity. Truly exciting.

And the one thing I’m struck by, in addition to the sheer ingenuity of the prize winners, is the sheer faith of the community that preserved these documents. The belief, against all available evidence, that perhaps, one day, someone might be able to read something so thoroughly destroyed that nothing but ashes remained after the finest minds of their generation attempted it. It’s almost science fiction, and indeed even reminds me of a plot in one of my favorite SF novels, Iain M. Banks’ Excession.

What a time to be a scholar of Epicureanism, or, I suppose, to be an Epicurean.

From the announcement:

“What does the scroll say?To date, our efforts have managed to unroll and read about 5% of the first scroll. Our eminent team of papyrologists has been hard at work and has achieved a preliminary transcription of all the revealed columns. We now know that this scroll is not a duplicate of an existing work; it contains never-before-seen text from antiquity. The papyrology team are preparing to deliver a comprehensive study as soon as they can. You all gave them a lot of work to do! Initial readings already provide glimpses into this philosophical text. From our scholars:

The general subject of the text is pleasure, which, properly understood, is the highest good in Epicurean philosophy. In these two snippets from two consecutive columns of the scroll, the author is concerned with whether and how the availability of goods, such as food, can affect the pleasure which they provide.

Do things that are available in lesser quantities afford more pleasure than those available in abundance? Our author thinks not: “as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.” However, is it easier for us naturally to do without things that are plentiful? “Such questions will be considered frequently.”

Since this is the end of a scroll, this phrasing may suggest that more is coming in subsequent books of the same work. At the beginning of the first text, a certain Xenophantos is mentioned, perhaps the same man — presumably a musician — also mentioned by Philodemus in his work On Music.

Philodemus, of the Epicurean school, is thought to have been the philosopher-in-residence of the villa, working in the small library in which the scrolls were found.”

Source: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the scrolls! | Vesuvius Challenge

“[Sophocles] had first to rid himself of Aeschylean bombast …. to turn to the form of speech which would be ‘the most ethical and the best’ (using the word ēthos in the sense of ‘character’).”

—Karl Reinhardt, Sophocles (7)

“Eugene Dönt once also drew a comparison between the structure of Oedipus and the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka. Both could be termed metaphors for the sudden, complete and relentless breakdown of a human being, a helpless victim of powers beyond his reach, or even termed descriptions of the hopeless human situation as such.“

—Walter Burkert, Oedipus, Oracles, and Meaning (#)

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm

Blood Meridian is one of the three best novels I’ve ever read.

And I am not a big rater-of-books, they are too diverse over too long a period for that to make much sense. But the ecstatic poetry of McCarthy’s restless sentences, the as ifs strung together like he was translating from some other language that saw the same things we did, only different, darker, clearer. One of those authors whom I’m afraid to read all of their work, for fear that I will have nothing new left. Exquisite.

p.s. Other two are Absalom, Absalom! and … room for debate. AA! is, as the name of this site attests, my constant answer to the favorite-book question (people always mean novels, or maybe the occasional biography or memoir, and never history or philosphy, when they ask … in any case). Probably something by Toni Morrison—together the two greatest American novelists of the last century—but I don’t know which I’d choose. I think Beloved, but some of the scenes from The Bluest Eye—which I originally listened to on a long ride from Georgia to Texas, on tape, and read by the author—stuck with me, defined the way I understand basic concepts like poverty. Or maybe Melville. Or maybe … this is why rating novels is futile.

Wittgenstein was always disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended.

I mean, if even Wittgenstein might feel such a way. Then off to the movies, which he equates to dreams, incoming Freud.

In the anecdote, we feel a fierce anxiety that moves him relentlessly to flee the scene, where the words he has just uttered linger in the air (the space of his interlocutors gaze). They are, but he is becoming; they’ve been said, but his thought is restless, in flight, no longer there.

The movie, as the dream space on demand, becomes the realm of self-analysis, of overwhelming emotions, actions, and judgments, and overwhelming in the good sense, crowding out.

onthearts.com/p/how-wittgenstein-watched-movies

It’s like talking about whether your dishwasher really hates dirt and grease.

As a rule parents and authorities analogous to them follow the precepts of their own super-egos in educating children. Whatever understanding their ego may have come to with their super-ego, they are severe and exacting in educating children. They have forgotten the difficulties of their own childhood and they are glad to be able now to identify themselves fully with their own parents who in the past laid such severe restrictions upon them.

1. What, precisely, is the “temporary matter” of the first story?
2. What does a pumpkin have to do with the partition of India?

Obviously, the title of “A Temporary Matter” refers to the brief electrical outages that occur each evening in the story, but by the end we are so far from minor inconveniences and so deep into the intimate pains of living a human life that this is clearly no longer the answer. And, of course, the pumpkin is simply what Jack-o’-Lanterns are made out of, and the Bangladesh Liberation War simply takes place in the autumn of 1971, so the presence of Halloween could be merely an accident of history.

These two questions, only seemingly simple, are going to run us over a very wide gamut of world history, geography, and culture. We could talk about many, many, many things just in these two stories, but I would like to focus your attention on a few key themes that are going to weave together this collection of short stories into a whole that will, by the end, emerge as something greater than it’s parts (though the parts are exquisite): marriage, food, genealogy, and partition. In piecing this list together, I excluded many things. For instance, I said marriage instead of love. Why do you think I made that choice? Why food, instead of music, or culture, or language? Genealogy I’ve used to stand in for that whole complex of our relations to our own past, “our native land, native language, and the laws that govern us” (#). And though the Partition does not appear in every story, a partition occurs throughout (see the end of “A Temporary Matter”).

Nilanjana Sudeshna “Jhumpa” Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for the short story collection you hold in your hand. Published in 1999, it is and was a breathtaking debut for a writer. For me, still slogging my way through the American fiction of the early twentieth-century in 1999—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner—it is a harbinger for the literature of this new millennium, telling at times shockingly similar stories about our everyday experiences, but changed fundamentally by a seemingly simple shift in perspective. Who is telling stories about whom can transform the work of art. You can read her writing about her own writing in her essay “Trading Stories: Notes from an apprenticeship” (here).

Stepping back, one way of viewing our final two texts is precisely this prism of who is telling stories about whom. Some scholars would emphasize the postcolonial context of this writing, emphasizing the thematic similarities of the art produced in the aftermath of the global fall of colonialism in the twentieth century (see Homi Bhabha’s Nation and Narration). Transnationalism, hybridity, and mimicry, not as matters of artistic choice but as matters of historical fact—think of the girls mocking Amusa in the marketplace, or Olunde’s studies abroad. Another aspect of this context is white supremacy: Elesin in slave chains, committing death as his final act of resistance against his colonizers. This is present in Lahiri as well, though often more subtly—think of how Lilia’s teacher thinks that in the context of wars of independence and national origins, the Partition is irrelevant and the Liberation is happening somewhere else (it is, of course, happening in her living room).

But let’s step back in to our stories themselves. I am going to start with our second question first, because it will give us some purchases on the deeper forces of history that are driving the stories in this collection. BUT, I think it is of the utmost significance that Lahiri puts “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” second. “A Temporary Matter” comes first, because the human drama of her characters comes first for Lahiri. The historical forces are crucial, but secondary. I think that just as for Wole Soyinka, the human situation comes first. As he says in his “Author’s Note” to Death and the King’s Horseman: “The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely. The confrontation … is largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle” (6).

I. Carving the Jack-o’-Lantern

What do the end of British Colonialism in South Asia, the Wampanoag Indians of Massachusetts, and the Irish potato famine have in common?

To answer this question here, I’m going to violate my own essay-writing dictum and put my thesis at the end instead of the beginning. If you want, though, you can jump down to the end of this section and see me lay it all out. Or just follow along on this Mr.-Toad’s-Wild-Ride through the history of colonialism …

The Partition of India by the British Empire in 1947 marked the beginning of the end of British colonialism, and western colonialism more broadly (a process that is still ongoing to this day). Through the hallowed, long-established practice of “white men wielding crayons,” India and Pakistan were created by fiat, and three-quarters of a century of war, violence, and bitter recrimination have followed this act. One of those wars is the subject of our story.

A Jack-o‘-Lantern is an object celebrating the Christian holiday Halloween, comprising a hollowed-out pumpkin with an image carved into it, usually of a grotesque face, lit from the inside by a candle, and placed outside a family home. The Jack-o’-Lantern’s origins, however, are obscure to almost every American who, like myself, sits down with their seven year old and their nine year old to draw spooky, impossible-for-dad-to-carve-before-the-heat-death-of-the-universe faces on pumpkins. In fact, it came to America as a practice with “the great wave of Irish immigration” in the nineteenth century (Santino; for something a little less scholarly, check the wiki). One of the great movers of which was another colonialism-induced disaster, The Great Hunger, in Irish an Gorta Mór. If you would like to become blisteringly angry about the depredations of a colonial power, go read about it. It was bad, and it was unnecessary, and the people the did it not only had very little remorse, they often said that all that starvation was actually a good thing. Of course, the Irish anti-colonial struggle also lead to another 20th-century partition by the colonial power, one that is still a live wire in European politics to this very day.

There’s only one problem here: pumpkins are not Irish. In Ireland and Scotland, the tradition involved “turnips or mangel wurzels, hollowed out to act as lanterns and often carved with grotesque faces to represent spirits or goblins” (Hutton). Pumpkins are a North American crop, though widely dispersed by the colonization of native North America. The etymology of the word is obscure, traditionally traced to the French pompon, or melon, though since that word has Latin roots and is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as being in use before 1492, it gives credence to some who argue that the word might derive from a word from Massachusett or the closely related Narragansett (see, in brief, the wiki). Frankly, I see no reason it cannot be both, a sort of linguistic convergence in a contact zone between two different people. What isn’t in dispute, though, is that Cucurbita pepo is a species native to North America and whose introduction to Europeans has long been ascribed to the Wampanoag Indians of Massachusetts (or rather, Massuchusetts is of the Wampanoag, since it is their name and they were there first). Traditionally, it is one of the foods served at the first Thanksgiving.

So, the Halloween pumpkin on Lilia’s porch is carved by a Pakistani man, soon to be Bangladeshi, and an Indian-American girl out of a Wampanoag vegetable that is a means of warding off evil spirits out of pagan Irish folklore that is repurposed as part of a Catholic holiday that was probably written over a pagan Roman harvest festival (“probably” because I didn’t check this last one, but it’s a pretty safe bet), a concatenation of cultural practices marked by a violent history of colonization, partition, migration, and adaptation.

In this one seemingly-benign object, a whole history of histories is symbolized. Indeed, food serves as a continual touchpoint for the history of colonialism. Lilia’s father explained to her the history of partition thusly: “‘One moment we were free and then we were sliced up,’ he explained, drawing an X with his finger on the countertop, ‘like a pie. Hindus here, Muslims there.'” Or take, for instance, the “austere biscuits [dipped] into successive cups of tea” he and Mr. Pirzada have for dessert. This taking of tea is a very British practice. And of course, then, there are the recipes that will figure so prominently in “A Temporary Matter.”

Why does food serve this function? The taking of tea is a very British practice, but tea is not from Britain. In a cup of tea is a whole history of the modern world, and yet it is something that these two men, of different religions, possibly on opposite sides of a war in which their families lives are at stake, are united thousands of miles a way. Food retains this deep symbolic resonance for many reasons. Most deeply, perhaps, is because it may be the singular practice that defines our humanity. Many anthropologists have argued that the cooking fire is the first communal space, the sharing of food integral to not just the survival of the individual, but the thriving of the group. Indeed, cooking our food is likely what freed up all the extra energy for humans to a) grow big brains, which are energetically very expensive and b) expand into every space and ecosystem on the planet. Our cousins, the Great Apes, spend a massive amount of their time and energy just chewing and digesting their food. Cooking is basic; it makes us human. More concretely, cooking is not only culture, it is portable culture. It is portable materially, because seeds are small (that detail of the movie Fury Road is actually quite good, for instance). But more so it is portable immaterially, as culture itself. Consult your own experiences here. Almost all of your families cultural touchstones are organized around food; at times, a religious reason (also portable culture) might predominate, but food is always there, like a bowl of oranges set beside the front door for the new year, or cookies for Santa Claus, or Sugar Skulls, or Jack of the Lanterns warding the house at the time when we remember the dead, as the world dies into winter, and the leaves fall from the trees.

In short, food is a deeply human focal point for culture, survival, and memory. It’s history is our history. We pass it down from generation to generation, and with it the memory of those who came before us toward the promise of those will come after. Sometimes we are ignorant of it’s meaning, but it is there. Think of Lilia praying while eating pieces of candy. Why does she do this? Who is she praying to? To understand this, we need to understand food.

To summarize: the pumpkin in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” is clearly a symbol, but for what? I think there are two plausible alternatives here: the trauma of partition or, conversely, the healing of that trauma. On the one hand, it is a symbol of the trauma and violence of partition. Mr. Pirzada carving it is a miniature of the violence being inflected on his home, and the pumpkin smashed at the end is a whole world smashed to pieces, irretrievable—even though we know what the pumpkin looked like before, there will be no putting its smashed pieces back together. On the other hand, though on the surface it seems like it is just another carved pie, even in the repetition of that trauma, the pumpkin is transformed into something else, into a way beyond the partition of the world by white men with crayons, a warding off of evil spirits. Lilia’s father thinks she is ignorant of the realities of the world, and that she must come to accept the inevitability of the differences that the past has created. For him the partitioning of the world is obvious and permanent, even if he personally deplores it and its consequences, and sees both sides with fairly clear eyes. But for Lilia, these differences seems small in comparison to all the similarities. She is indifferent to those differences. This seems at first to be a naive, childlike perception, but there is wisdom in it. In the carving of the pumpkin, they create a new tradition, one that reaches across all those differences in time and space to create a new way not just of viewing the world, but of being in it. Even though pumpkins are smashed or rot away on our porches, that’s not the point. No pumpkin is forever. The next year, the next generation, we will carve another one.

II. Strangers in a Strange Land

First things second. “A Temporary Matter” is a story that I loved when I first read it. It drew me in to all these other wonderful stories, and between beginning here and ending with “The Third and Final Continent” is to begin and end with a literary work of profound beauty. Between now and when I first read it, though, I have completed my dissertation, gotten married, had two children, and moved thousands of miles across America, here to where I was born but did not grow up, Houston. My wife is an editor. The deadline I set myself for finishing my Ph.D. was before my daughter was born; if not, I thought to myself, it might never happen. I was in my thirties. Between finishing the 299th page of my dissertation and walking across the stage in my robes, Lilah was born, just 4 lbs 8 oz.

Which is all to say, that while I loved this story the first time I read it, this time I wept at the end. Then, driving to see my grandparents for the first time in over a year last week, I listened to the stories on tape so that I could keep writing this essay in my head while I was on the road; I wept again.

Why do I tell you this? Because I think this is Lahiri’s great gift. She tells seemingly simple stories of regular human lives that resonate beyond all reason, making and building connections with our own lives that seem deeply personal. And as I was driving across Texas, I realized that there was another reason that I was connecting so viscerally with these stories this time around. In this time of plague we have all, in some small way, had the experience of Shukumar and Shoba, or Mr. Pirzada with his watch set to Dacca time. We have all been in a sort of internal exile. My entire life, if I had merely desired it, I could have shown up at my grandparents door within 12 hours, 24 at the most. Usually much less. But for fifteen months, there was simply no prospect of visiting them, in their late 80s, at a retirement home. This compelled us all to relate to our families the way that millions of immigrants have been forced to for centuries anyway, by phone or letter, slowly, with our thoughts and hearts often somewhere else besides where we are right now. And throughout, this strange guilt of not being there, and this strange fear that those we loved might be becoming strangers. Or, if we just had to see them, something so basic and so human that of course many of just had to, that we might be, from the unbearable burden of our love, our absolute need for their love, be the cause of their deaths. Or that they might die anyway, alone, and no matter what we wanted to do, how much we wanted to be there, we could do absolutely nothing about it.

I switched between “compelled” and “forced” in the last paragraph for a reason, but I want to come back to it in a minute. First, I want to return to our text, and think about why it made me react the way it did. Maybe it was deeply singular and personal, the way a great work of art often is to us (like the lyrics of a song that we later learn are wrong, but we keep singing it that way in our head anyway). But let’s use it as a way into the text anyway, and by diving deeply into a text dive deeply into ourselves.

My question here is, what does the “temporary matter” of the title refer to? Let me lay out a series of possibilities:

1. It’s just the work on the electricity and I’m just reading too much into it;
2. It’s their marriage;
3. It’s their love;
4. It’s Shooba’s pregnancy;
5. It’s the funk their marriage is in, which is part of every long relationship, and will be better soon if they try and make it work;
6. It’s the food in the fridge, because even frozen foods goes bad eventually;
7. It’s the honesty they find in the dark;
8. It’s life itself.

Okay, that’s sufficient. Now let me approach this in a more straightforward matter than the last section. I’m just going to go down the list and say why it can or cannot be each one:

1. It can’t be that, I’m professional close-reader, and I need a job
2. All marriages are temporary, but yeah, okay, but that’s just factual by the end
3. Alright, this one is good. I think the tension between this one and number 5 is at the heart of the plot, driving it
4. See number 2, but really see number 8
5. Trauma is inevitable, and time is like a river, cleansing all wounds
6. I think that after our discussion of pumpkins, we can see that this is a lot more important than we thought at first
7. This one is, I think, the most intriguing and the biggest challenge to what I’m about to say; explore it if you so desire, but I’m going to leave it aside for now
8. It’s life itself, that’s the answer

I think the two big interpretations, for me, of the title is that it’s whether they are misreading their own situation (the flashbacks show they seem to really love each other, and have a lot in common) or that their relationship is already over and they just can’t face it. I would encourage you to explore the first one, because it seems so against the grain of where we end up, but I’m not sure it’s wrong even if it is a bit counter-intuitive. The question to ask is: how do they imagine their lives will be better? Do they think they can escape the trauma of the stillbirth of their child by escaping each other? That seems unlikely, to say the least, and probably the opposite. Do they think they will find other people more compatible with each other? Oof, that’s a lot harder than you might think (there’s even some good math on this question, go check the “Long Now” podcast archives if you’re interested). In short, isn’t the fantasy of the good life that they’ll have without each other just that, a fantasy? More deeply, how do you make a life, if you can’t make it through the inevitable traumas? Is marriage, much less love, even possible, or is it always a temporary matter?

I tend to think that, yes, those things are all inevitable, and the real trauma here is something deeper, which is that life is a temporary matter. Below the psychological questions the story poses is the existential one. As something like second-generation immigrants, Shooba and Shukumar are cut off from a place that one might call their homeland; they are trying to make a new home, in a new place. Shukumar feels some guilt that a white classmate knows the languages and history of his culture better than he does; but that’s because one doesn’t know culture, one lives it. Shukumar making rogan josh is him trying to communicate with Shooba in the only way he has left, through the language of food. Making rogan josh is making home; Shooba not making it anymore is why he makes it; he knows that she no longer lives here, with him. They are roommates, not a family. And he knows why, even if he cannot admit it: because they have not confronted the trauma they have shared. They have partitioned their own experiences of that trauma from one another, and shared culture is not able to overcome that distance because it is about something more basic, though just as human. This is why he cannot finish his dissertation; he feels guilty about the birth of this book, as if it is an insult to that small body he held in his arms, a desecration of that memory he cannot share until the end (reread the story for all the metaphors about generation and birth, then remember back to Plato and Socrates talking about giving birth in the body and giving birth in the mind, different forms of birth in beauty on the rungs of Diotima’s ladder).

In this way, the personal partitions in “A Temporary Matter” set the stage for the political partitions in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.” Lahiri starts with the existential, the personal, before recasting it in its broader context. And indeed, this is how I experienced rereading these stories. At first, they were deeply personal, resonating with my own life in a way that caught me off guard, even shocked me. Then, it took me outwards to the world, to this time of plague, and reflections on being a refugee and the experience of the immigrant. While I felt compelled to isolate myself, immigrants are forced to: leave, and never come back, or come back and be placed in a prison, separated from your children on purpose, as an act of calculated cruelty, perhaps never to see them again. And thus from the personal, existential questions, we are forced to move outward and ask political questions about the stories, which are also personal. Do we want to be a world of partitions? Of walls, deportations, and refugee flows? More specifically, do we want to be the partitioners, the wall builders, the deporters? Or do we want to become the place, always mythical, that drew so many so far, often bringing with them not much more besides the Jack-o’-Lantern or the rogan josh—namely, culture, that immaterial, extremely portable bundle of ideas, beliefs, and practices that make up the human situation? Lahiri’s stories compel us all to find our own answer to such questions.

In today’s lecture, I am going to address two seemingly simple questions:

1. How does Whitman’s poetry work in “Song of Myself”?

2. What does Whitman’s poetry mean in “Song of Myself”?

I believe that the answer to the first question, how does it work, is crucial to understanding the answer to the second question, what does it mean, perhaps as much as for any poet before or after Whitman. As we have progressed more than halfway through “Song of Myself”, we have all noticed that Whitman does not shy away from incorporating big questions, about good and evil, life and death, sexual ecstasy and brutal violence.

My more specific interpretive question revolves around the lines in my epigraph above, namely, the theme of “opposite equals,” the way they are “knit” together into a singular “identity.” The theme is a challenging one in Whitman, although one that his reader’s often avoid without knowing. It is challenging not simply because it is an abstract philosophical paradox, like those found in the Tao Te Ching that many of you read last semester; it is challenging because it is a very concrete problem in a country riven by strife, strife that will soon erupt into the bloodiest war in American history. Whitman is aware of this challenge, and his Leaves of Grass is a response to it, not just in its content, but in the very form of the poem itself.

To give a précis of the argument: the form of Whitman’s poetry is metonymic, building disparate connections into a grander whole, and this metonymic form reflects and performs a knitting together of opposites in a manner that avoids an attitude of resentment toward life and argues for embracing flux and change—becoming—over static forms of identity—being. In the next section, we’ll deal with the metonymic nature of Whitman’s poem.

I. And, And, And, And; or, How Whitman’s Poetry Works

Flip to section [31]. Don’t focus too closely yet, but simply look at the form the poem takes here. Zooming out, the pattern is easy to see, and with just a little more work we can quantify it: starting in section [30], Whitman starts 14 out of 16 verses with the word “And.” Immediately thereafter, he starts another 9 lines with the phrase “In vain.” What is going on here? To answer this question, we need to first think a little more deeply about how language itself works to see how Whitman’s language here is working on us.

In his famous 1956 essay, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” pioneering linguist Roman Jakobson identified two poles of language: the metaphoric and the metonymic.

“The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The METAPHORIC way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the METONYMIC way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively.” (Fundamentals of Language, 90)

Jakobson identifies these two poles that govern the movement of language by looking at a medical disorder, aphasia. Or rather, two medical disorders, each caused by organic trauma to different areas of the brain (think: a railroad spike through the head, like the famous Phineas Gage), and which prevented people from using either metaphor or metonymy when they spoke. It’s quite fascinating, and Jakobson discusses how it relates to art and poetry as well; you can find the essay and read more about it online just by googling it.

In any case, metaphor equates things together, building an identity or equivalence between different things; metonymy links different things that are close together. Metaphor stacks meaning vertically; metonymy moves sideways. The example Jakobson gives is a word-association test: you say the word “hut.” A metaphorical response, which builds an identity: “is a poor little house”; a metonymic response, which brings in contiguous associations: “burnt out” (91).

But let’s take an example from Whitman, the end of [26]. Here, in about half a page or so, we go from “the echo of sunset” to the “orbic flex of [a tenor’s] mouth” to whirling “wider than Uranus flies” to “bare feet … licked by the indolent waves” to “the puzzle of puzzles/And that we call being.” That is an amazingly long journey, and I skipped several steps. This ever expanding movement outward is characteristic of Whitman’s poetry. The poet chains together long, seemingly divergent descriptions, such as the long section [33], which starts a line with “Where” 35 times and “I” 22 times. As if free associating, Whitman moves from place to place, person to person, idea to idea, ever onward.

It is characteristic, and it is appropriate. This aspect of the form of Whitman’s poetry is part and parcel of its content. It embodies his broader democratic project: “I speak the password primeval . . . . I give the sign of democracy” [24]. In essence, Whitman is arguing that to be the poet of America, as Professor Vollrath’s lecture showed he most certainly aspires to be, is to engage in a project of radical, ever-expanding inclusion. This is where the central image of leaves of grass comes in; the leaves of the book are also leaves of grass. Grass is an organism with no true center, a single entity yet infinitely complex and connected with the world around it. Grass grows through the middle. Every blade of grass is similar, yet slightly different; out of all those little differences emerges one greater whole, but a whole that, despite being made of similar but different parts, presents an aspect of diversity, of non-uniformity. As Whitman famously says in section [6]:

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

Yet it is also precisely in this moment that the problem, the difficulty in what Whitman is attempting emerges. How can you reconcile black and white in a nation that will, in less than a decade, fit a war over slavery? Is such a reconciliation even desirable?

II. The Plenum of Proof; or, What Whitman’s Poetry Means

I hear the bravura of birds . . . . the bustle of growing wheat . . . . gossip of flames . . . . clack of sticks cooking my meals. [26]

Let us put this problem as sharply as possible: if the master and the slave are opposites equals, is Whitman’s attempt to knit the two together into a single identity not an\ violence to the latter and an apology for the former? Should we, in fact, choose not to knit the slaveholder into the poem of America?

Receiving black folk and white alike sounds good in the abstract, but Whitman characteristically does not allow it to remain abstract. He is talking about real people, with real problems, who he wants to find the best in, each and every one. From section [16]:

One of the great nations, the nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,
A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
A Yankee bound my own way . . . . ready for trade . . . . my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth.

A Southerner as soon as a Northerner, and a planter at that. Whitman constantly does this, balancing one perspective with another, opposing perspectives, not letting one predominate; this includes his references to slavery. Take the following lines from section [8] of “The Sleepers,” another poem in Leaves of Grass: “The call of the slave is one with the master’s call . . . . and the master salutes the slave.” Now, I’m not going to answer the question of whether or not Whitman is successful in what he attempts here, but I would like to come back to something I mentioned at the beginning of the essay, about how readers of “Song of Myself” have a tendency to internalize the things they like and ignore or avoid the things they don’t. Whitman is aware of this desire to avoid the unpleasant, to exclude it from the realm of life, to cut it out of his song. Death, shit, the stench of unwashed bodies, semen, blood, gore, venereal disease, pain, smallpox scars, suicide, what Whitman calls in a later poem in Leaves of Grass, “The Body Electric” is also at the same time for the poet the body electric broken. Maimed. Diseased. Murdered. Enslaved.

Whitman refuses to avoid this truth, and he is not ignorant of its consequences. The streets of New York City that he roams as a “rough” are the streets of Scorcese’s Gangs of New York (2002), the streets that will explode into the racial violence and lynching of the New York City Draft Riots in 1863. This is the America in which Senator Charles Sumner will be brutally beaten on the Senate floor by a southern Representative offended by his abolitionist politics and where Bleeding Kansas has already begun. Whitman’s expansive vision of American inclusion is not in spite of this violence, it is because of it. Whitman knows the world he lives in, and he makes sure to punctuate his song of himself with it so that the reader cannot forget it. “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves” [6]. Perhaps this is why he warns us early on about becoming intoxicated in the sensuous world he confronts us with as well [2].

In short, Whitman’s inclusion of the Southern planter is a conscious choice, a choice that is not secondary to his project, but central to it. Why? I think there are two answers to this question, two philosophical objections that Whitman has to such an exclusion. The first is general: rejecting any part of life builds in a resentment toward the present, a hatred of the world as it is that Whitman believes is the root of violence in the first place. The second is both general and specific: Whitman’s ultimate ethical principle is that the world is not static, but changing. To exclude any one thing does so on the basis that it could not become otherwise; it locks identity in place, and presupposes that meaning, and the world of meanings, cannot change. That is precisely what the poet does not want to happen; indeed, poetry itself is for Whitman the making-happen of that change. Whitman is a visionary of America, of America as a series of potentials, not free of violence, but open to change.

i. Resentment

One of the constant imperatives of “Song of Myself” is that the “least” will not be excluded, and in the imperative to include the “least” is the argument that they are not the “least” at all. Thus, the negative eulogy (“Nor”, “Nor”, “Nor,” &c) at the end of section [43] begins with “I cannot fail …” and concludes with “Nor the present, nor the least.” I cannot fail the present, nor the least. This is the necessary conclusion of the shocking statement at the beginning of the poem, that there “will never be any more perfection than there is now” [3]. We could multiply examples of this gesture in Whitman, that of the perfection of the present moment, ad infinitum. But before we get to the why of this perfection, let’s think about the what of it, What are it’s implications?

It seems that what Whitman is arguing against here is a certain attitude toward life, one that sees the world as it is and can only see its flaws and failures. This attitude is what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would later call ressentiment in his work On the Genealogy of Morality, which we often read in The Human Situation. Nietzsche was deeply influenced by authors such as Emerson, and we can see a strong affinity between Whitman’s argument for the perfection of the world and Nietzsche’s critique of an attitude of resentment toward life, of a way of perceiving the world as imperfect, fallen, broken, flawed, disgusting and only redeemable if fundamentally changed. Far from such an attitude being an accommodation to the status quo, with all its flaws, Nietzsche saw as the root of those flaws this resentful attitude toward life, a hatred of the world. The following lines from [22] would fit just as well in Nietsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra:

What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me . . . . I stand indifferent,
My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

Ultimately, the question is, how do we understand what Whitman means by perfection? In the logic of section [3], is it that the slavery is also a form of perfection, or is that the slave is as perfect of a being as everyone else? The former is an apology for domination, while the latter is a radical vision of equality, a revolutionary vision. I think it is almost certainly the latter, and to offer some proof we will turn to another philosophical concept that comes after and is inspired by Whitman’s poetry, that of the precedence of becoming over being, of flux and change over static identity.

ii. Becoming

Let’s finish these musings up with a return to the question of metaphor and metonymy and the extended section of the poem on a runaway slave. Of course, even poetry which is predominantly metonymic still involves metaphors; the two poles of language are ultimately inseparable, so our analysis is interested in which one predominates and what effects that predomination has. Take the following passage from section [33].

I am the hounded slave . . . . I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me . . . . crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence . . . . my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close,
They taunt my dizzy ears . . . . beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments;
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

One objection to my insistence on metonymy, of building linkages between disparate elements, of slippage, connection, and cataloguing (Professor Vollrath again), is that there is one statement that reigns over the poem, and that statement is the ultimate metaphoric statement: “I am ….” Indeed, we see it in the above passage, whose very premise we might question: what is the ethical right of Whitman, a white man, to pretend to understand, much less inhabit, the suffering of a runaway slave? Is this not an unconscionable appropriation of that experience?

Perhaps. But I think that Whitman’s use of “I am” is much less metaphoric than it seems at first. Even in the passage above, look how it changes from beginning to end:

I am the hounded slave . . . . I wince at the bite of the dogs,
…
Agonies are one of my changes of garments;
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person.

The twentieth-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze has argued that Western thought has been obsessed with the question of pinpointing the nature of things-in-themselves (being), and that this has obscured the fundamentally fluctuating, changing nature of those things (becoming). In short, when we focus on the nature of what things are, we necessarily foreclose the basic fact that they can become different. We focus on objects, and not the relations these objects have to everything else around them. Whitman, despite his focus on the “I am,” seems much more interested in the question of flux, change, and becoming, of the relations between different parts of the world rather than their identity. In fact, the sheer profusion of “I am” proves this: no one person can be all these things, but one person can become connected to them, can write them into their poem. In the passage on the runaway slave, we see this philosophical transmutation happen in the words themselves, from being to becoming. I think this is the wager that Whitman is making, that a poetics of radical inclusion is ultimately one that does not colonize the world with the ego of the poet and lock it in place, but one that allows the poet, the reader, and thus the world to become something other than it is, something perfect in the same manner as before, but with a difference. As Whitman says later in the poem:

These become mine and me every one, and they are but little,
I become as much more as I like. [36]

I. A merchant in Venice, but not of it

But even during the kingdom of Christ those people who do not belong to the community of believers, who do not love him, and whom he does not love, stand outside this tie.

—Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (#)

What does it mean to belong to a community? Our theme for the semester seems to naturally invite a sort of utopian thinking about the question, a subtle rephrasing of the question in our head from What is belonging? to What would belonging look like in an ideal society? Luckily, we began our semester with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Why luckily? Because for all of its flaws, The Merchant of Venice will not let us come to any easy conclusions about what is at stake in the question of belonging. We have to remember, that for all its darkness, that the play is a comedy. As our introduction notes, many of the things we find deeply uncomfortable about the play would have been the crowd-pleasing punchlines for its original audience—and for centuries after is debut on the Elizabethan stage.

Even with critics’ most generous reading and even with great actors’ most sympathetic performances, that the play’s representations of Jewish people and Jewish life are antisemitic is difficult to argue, and very few scholars even try. Yet it is hard to imagine that even in Shakespeare’s day it was anything but a very dark comedy, unless the actor played Shylock as a complete and total buffoon. Even then, the comedy already has a clown, and the pathos in many of his lines is undeniable.

In the end, there is always a dark monster stalking this play, one crying out for a grizzly pound of flesh amidst the marriage plots, cross-dressing, role inversion, and daughters being stolen from under their fathers’ noses, living or dead. That the play still has much to teach a modern audience, at least if we are sufficiently inoculated against its racist tropes beforehand, is evinced by its continuing life on the modern stage. Indeed, many famous Jewish actors have played the role on the contemporary stage, and there is even a very interesting academic work on this topic, Wrestling with Shylock: Jewish Responses to The Merchant of Venice.

I think that this is because Shakespeare’s play not only deals with the world as it was, it still continues to reflect the world as it is today. For us, it can no longer be a dark comedy; after the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, the only way we can read The Merchant of Venice today is as a tragedy, with Shylock as it’s hidden protagonist and the minefield of its social divisions a challenge to our own society today.

Ultimately, Shylock simply does not belong. Shylock is a merchant in Venice, but he is not not a merchant of Venice. Indeed, we somewhat shockingly learn that he is literally an “alien” (IV.1.347), an outsider who is tolerated but not included. And it is this status as an alien that is the key to Portia’s counter-charge of murder against him: “It is enacted in the laws of Venice/If it be proved against an alien/That by direct or indirect attempts/He seek the life of any citizen,” etc, etc. (IV.1.346-349, emphasis added). In Shylock’s dispossession at the end of the play and his quiet, unceremonious exit, all of the exclusions of Shakespeare’s world are on display: men vs. women, Christians vs. heathens, citizens vs. foreigners, rich vs. poor, old vs. young, and so on all down the line. The play of these divisions defines who belongs in this society, and while some exclusions are renegotiated in the play (men/women and old/young, most notably), others are reinforced and define what makes the happy ending at the end of this comedy happy indeed, a vision of the (new) good life. Shylock, in the end, does not belong.

One thing that the Merchant of Venice can show us, at least obliquely, is how exclusions can nevertheless serve an important social function. In short, the rise of capitalism in the Italian city-states of the early Renaissance would not have been possible without Shylock, or at least the service he provides. Over the next few centuries, the class represented by Antonio, Bassanio, and Portia would change the entire political and economic structure of the continent, and ultimately the world. The rise of the capitalist class would go on to overthrow the aristocratic political structures of Europe, and the lending of money at interest that is so repugnant to Antonio—and the economy of debt, risk, and reward that it enables—is indeed a necessary prerequisite. Since Roman antiquity, this kind of market activity was looked on with aversion by aristocrats—Senators were notably prohibited from engaging in the merchant trade, but did so by proxy and with gusto in any case—much as Antonio does. While members of the diasporic Jewish communities scattered across Europe often concentrated in banking, trade, and portable luxury goods (diamonds, etc) out of necessity, i.e., because they were often prohibited from owning property/land outright, denied citizenship (Shylock’s status as an alien), and were subjected to periodic pogroms and expulsions (during which it helps if you can pack up all your valuables in a relatively small space, something you cannot do with a landed estate but you can do with money, diamonds, etc). In other words, Shylock is excluded at least partially for his role in the community (lending money at interest), even though that very activity is the driver of the wealth that citizens such as Antonio are thriving upon.

So, then, if we are going to take the lesson of The Merchant of Venice, we must ask ourselves: where can we see these exclusions in Locke’s Second Treatise, and what do they tell us about the type of society he is trying to form. There are two points we need to keep in mind while doing so: First, is this exclusion necessary or contingent? If we removed it, would Locke’s argument still follow? Second, that the primary movement of Locke is a movement of radical inclusion; what does this mean for the very question of the social compact? Do all groups depend on some exclusion, as Freud, a Jew already concerned about the stirrings of proto-fascism in Germany at the end of The Great War, would have it in our epigraph above?

Let’s treat the second of these first. Locke’s call for equality is radical. Full stop. Locke was writing in, about, and for a society so structured by aristocratic rule that even after cutting off the head of their king, they ended up inviting another king to return because they they couldn’t figure out what to do with themselves (a gross oversimplification, but with a grain of real truth).

With regard to arguing for the political empowerment of all men, he professed not just a radical equality, but a right to seize that equality via revolution if it was denied. While we will not be reading the final chapter of the treatise, “Of the Dissolution of Government,” it is perhaps the most important political writing of the modern world, after which revolution after revolution will follow its blueprint, more often than not explicitly invoking it; Locke’s words echo, literally, throughout the writings of the American Revolution, as just the one instance most pertinent to us.

His critique of paternal power (chapter six), is another example of this. His insistence on the separation of powers is not just for branches of government; it is more fundamental, and extends to the most intimate social relations: “these two Powers, Political and Paternal, are so perfectly distinct and separate” (§71). While probably women and definitely children are excluded from full political equality, Locke’s rationalization of the bases of paternal power and separation of it from a vision of nested political power are, relative to Locke’s time, a massive increase in the power of both. For Locke, the father is not the king of his own castle; there are no tyrants in the home (but cf. Shylock and Jessica). Rights, grounded in natural law, extend to women and children. A notion that seems obvious to us now, but only because theorists such as Locke made it so. Even his theory of punishment, seemingly brutal to us insofar as he argues that it is justified to kill a mere thief, is enlightened for the time and holds the seed for the penal reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries. In short, Locke lays the groundwork for the Enlightenment, universal human rights, and the democratic revolutions of the centuries to come. A heady achievement in the realm of political theory.

Which leads us back to our first point to keep in mind: whether the exclusions that Locke does deploy are necessary or contingent. This brings us to the heart of our argument in this essay, but we needed to emphasize Locke’s radically equalizing philosophy first, lest we be lead astray. It is necessary to recognize what and how Locke includes to see what is at stake in what he excludes. As a consequence, if his exclusion is contingent (the byproduct of someone writing 350 years ago), we could revise Locke and simply extend natural law to that excluded group. But if it is necessary, we would need to abandon Locke’s system and begin to think of new and more appropriate foundations for our social compact. Even then, though, Locke at least gives us the right to revolution, to choose our own path, unbeholden to a time immemorial.

II. The Other Side of Reason

Which brings us to our argument: what is the fundamental exclusion for Locke? Here are our candidates: animals, criminals, foreigners, native peoples, slaves, the earth, children, madmen, women, servants. Here is their order of appearance:

Now, let us go ahead and reduce this list from those who are partially excluded to those who are totally excluded from the social compact. Aliens (foreigners) and native peoples (Indians) can both enter into compacts, or have their own compacts; criminals can reenter the compact, children can age into the compact, the compact applies to women (even if their status is unclear at this point), and servants are definitely governed by it. “The Earth” is a strange edge case that we’re going to put aside along with animals, whose exclusion is important but whose inclusion is impossible, according to Locke’s standards. (Feel free to argue about any of these choices in your discussion section!) That leaves us with two categories of individuals structurally excluded from the social compact, the slave and the madman.

At first glance, it seems that the slave is the most fully excluded from the social compact. Indeed, the exclusion of the slave is explicitly framed in this fashion, not only in the chapter on slavery, but in chapter VII on Political Society: “These Men [slaves] having, as I say, forfeited their Lives, and with it their Liberties, and lost their Estates; and being in the State of Slavery, not capable of any Property, cannot in that state be considered as any part of Civil Society” (§85). The whole logic of the social compact is structured by slavery: the slave is the one who violates the law of nature, by planning to murder or enslave someone, and is the reason that men (yes, just men for now) join together and enter a compact in the first place. No need for slavery = no need to enter the social compact. It’s not that you cannot have one without the other, it’s that you do not need one without the other. And in fact, if we recognize that property, and the regulation thereof, is the fundamental tenet of Locke’s system, then it makes sense that slavery, an extreme from of property in humans, is the ultimately exclusion from a system based on property. This is the reason that a person “cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one” (§23). Locke’s system seems to break without slavery.

Or so it seems. My more general argument is that to understand Locke’s system, or indeed any society, we must understand (i) what it excludes, and (ii) how that exclusion functions. But my more specific argument here is that ultimately, it is the figure of Unreason that defines the outside of Locke’s social. It is the figure of the madman, and not the slave, that is more fundamental.

The central reason is that the border between slave and citizen is permeable, but the one between madness and citizenship is not. Locke explicitly tells us that “Slavery ceases, as long as the Compact endures” (§24), and the introduction of any compact ends slavery. While slavery might be structurally necessary, it is not permanently excluded. A slave may become a member of the community once again. This is not possible for anyone lacking reason: “And so Lunaticks and Ideots are never set free from from the Government of their Parents … Madmen, which for the present cannot possible have the use of right Reason to guide themselves, have for their Gude, the Reason that guideth other Men which are Tutors over them” (§60). Locke makes this equation between reason and freedom quite explicit: “But if through defects … any one comes not to such a degree of Reason … he is never capable of being a Free Man” (§60) and “Thus we are born Free, as we are born Rational” (§61). My emphasis here is, of course, on the word “never.”

Moreover, the logic of this exclusion runs throughout all the other exclusions. Children are only born “to” equality, not “in” it because their reason only develops as they age (§55). Animals are excluded because they have no capacity for it, servant’s contracts are limited (and they lose no rights therein) because they enter into them because of it. And if we look closely, we can see that slaves only become so because they are, in effect, momentarily without reason when they violate the natural law, which is structured by reason, and either violate the social compact if it already exists or cause it to be entered into if it does not yet exist. Choosing to make war is, structurally, a moment of madness for Locke, ephemeral like the moment of force in which a person may defend themselves from a criminal.

Thus, unreason is a necessary structuring principle for Locke’s society, whereas slavery is a contingent one. And if we excluded slavery from Locke’s social compact and replaced it with, say, the same punishment that a criminal receives, it would seem to work just as well (a close reading of the 13th Amendment to our constitution is instructive here). Indeed, even criminal punishment per se might be unnecessary, as long as we could achieve reparations and deterrence in some other way; in other words, if we could find another rational basis for the purpose of criminality.

But there is no alternative rationale for rationality. Now, none of this is to apologize for Locke’s inclusion of slavery in his system; he bears real responsibility for that atrocity, not just as a government minister, but as the person who wrote the first constitution for the Carolinas based on slavery (see the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina). Nevertheless, the question of rationality—what reason means, how it functions, who has it, who doesn’t, when someone has it or doesn’t—is ultimately what seems to structure who belongs, and who can never belong to Locke’s social compact. Those who are excluded from reason, and the history of that exclusion, is still central to our political life today.

—“Winter Song for One Who Suffers,” by Brenda Hillman | The New Yorker

Thousands upon thousands of paleolithic paintings discovered in the Amazon, many with images of extinct ice age fauna … (#)

Ask a nonbeliever to describe the QAnon conspiracy theory, and they almost immediately reach for metaphors of madness: batshit insane, fucking crazy, bonkers, etc. Bracketing the real question of stigma attached to these metaphors, the point the speakers are making is the great gap in perception between those who believe in the conspiracy and those who don’t. That which is hard to imagine, outside the bounds of normal mental contexts, is insane.

For instance, it makes no sense that this very American conspiracy theory is going global:

The resilience of QAnon narratives after the election shows just how far and deep this made-in-America conspiracy has spread — and hints at its staying power around the globe.

Yet the Washington Post, the source of the quote above, has an entire article about QAnon conspiracy theorists reacting in wild—wild—ways from New Zealand to Canada to Germany. But while most of the commentary focuses on the why of the phenomenon, it can be a lot more clarifying to focus on the what: not why do these people believe this, but what does believing it allow them to do that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

Put simply, extreme beliefs allow for the breaking of social norms. More complexly, the emergence of apocalyptic modes of thinking—social or theological—reflect the attempt to suture cultural fractures that are hard or impossible to express within that culture. So, in a conspiracy theory that believes that political leadership of more than half of a nation is really just a pedophile protection racket, the point is not the content, but the implication. If it is true, then any action one takes to stop it is justified. Inserting any sufficiently extreme belief into the equation will do, so long as it allows the believer both the emotional and rational (at least, if the first premise is true) ability to act in particular ways.

The best analogy—and structurally it is probably not strictly an analogy at all—is with religious eschatological movements throughout the last millennia. In times of social crises, millennarianism tends to thrive. Of course, if the apocalypse is mere days away, then much of social life is rendered obsolete. Payment of debts and saving of money, work and family obligations, sexual propriety, all of these things not only become irrelevant, they become actively opposed to the demands on the moment.

It is this latter part that is probably necessary, that social norms suddenly become actively opposed to proper behavior. On its face, cutting ties with one’s everyday life would seem to be much easier than showing up at Thanksgiving and telling your daughter that you believe she’s voting for pedophiles and that fact has been communicated to her in code to you via random internet posts.

But is it really? We are deeply social creatures, and we were deeply social before we were even human. We can forgive Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other early philosophers of the social contract their fantasies of the lonely individual in the wilderness, who makes a rational choice to join with others of his own kind. They didn’t have paleoanthropology or ancient DNA or a theory of evolution at their disposal. But even judging by human social bonds alone, between religious conversion and the clean break, the religious conversion is by far the easier path for the individual to revolutionize their social relationships. (The first two chapters of Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of The Unconscious are an elegant testimony to this fact, from demonic possession in Enlightenment Europe to spiritual healing practices in non-Western cultures.)

Obviously, this moment can be purely individual, something between a self-deception and a delusion. But what the radical conversion allows—secular or religious—is a way to pivot within the social, to selectively trim certain forms of social identification while preserving others. In this sense, such end-of-days efflorescences clue us in to deeper cultural currents that most of us might be unable to see. When such a belief begins to concatenate large swathes of an existing culture, it evinces a deeper break in the symbolic order, a gap across which one group can no longer communicate with another group, no longer shares the same truths or moral grounding, an epistemological rupture. But what is causing that rupture? What is its structure?

After first recognizing it’s not why people believe but what believing allows them to do, the question then is precisely that: what does this particular belief enable that another does not. In brief, it seems that QAnon enables two principles: democratic delegitimization and leader purification. The latter is simpler: it allows believers to deflect criticism of the charismatic figure their movement has organized itself around, in this case Trump as the quilting point for their ideological grievances. This is fairly standard, and operates just as the state of being in love does, where the lover identifies so intensely with the object of their love that they can, in such a state, do no wrong.

The democratic delegitimization aspect is ultimately more troubling, because its mechanisms are deeper and more complex. Briefly, we can speculate that it combines a willingness to sanction political violence (Trump will execute his political enemies in this fantasy) with a paranoid concern for social purity (figured by the image of the innocent child exploited). While the desire for violence is the most immediately concerning, the deeper currents are contained within the image of the innocent child exploited. What does it mean? Is it, at one remove, a nostalgia for white supremacy via repressed fear of miscegenation? A primal cry of Rust Belt-esque loss as a generation migrates away (“our children are leaving” is a common lament in cities like Buffalo, NY)? Or just a general directionless feeling that, behind the scenes, elites are stealing something vital from them?

The point of this essay is not to answer that question, though of course to some degree the answer is obvious: it’s all of them, and none. It’s vagueness is precisely what allows for such overdetermination: it can mean all of these things at once to one or many people. But the point here is to say, focusing on the why of these beliefs won’t get you any closer to understanding. But if you look at the question sideways and ask what it permits people who believe it to do, a lot begins to fall in to place. A conspiracy theory is a psychological tool, a weapon even—a secular form of religious extremism. It provides the moral justification for breaking with existing social norms, and the psychological room to do so. When it begins to draw in an ever larger number of people, the spread of the belief outlines the contours of a cultural break. And when it is as strange and febrile as QAnon, it is an ominous sign that a very deep cleavage in the social is emerging. Otherwise, it would have taken more traditional American forms: appeal to a lost pass or a lost cause, religious revivalism, good ol’ white supremacy, or some 1980s-style glorification of capitalism. That it has emerged out of many of these but chosen none of them expresses as clearly as anything a deep-seated well of cultural sentiment that needs to find some way to express itself, but that none of the existing languages we have for such angst will suffice.

As I was doing get-out-the-vote work for a political campaign here in Houston, I was thinking about this study I read about recently that looked at the “Wild West mentality”:

The researchers found that living at both a higher altitude and an elevation relative to the surrounding region—indicating “hilliness”—is associated with a distinct blend of personality traits that fits with “frontier settlement theory”.

“The harsh and remote environment of mountainous frontier regions historically attracted nonconformist settlers strongly motivated by a sense of freedom,” said researcher Friedrich Götz, from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.

Now, let’s forgive and forget what the “wild west” even means for a minute. What I find fascinating about this study is the way that what was once a purely qualitative investigation (from de Tocqueville’s America to Debord’s urban dérive, for instance) opens out into impersonal data points. That a psychological profile can be quantified on a massive and fine-grained scale is … I don’t know, astonishing? Vertiginous?

It certainly induces a sense of vertigo in me. And that’s despite my skepticism of both psychological profiling and big data, each, in general, and the categories specifically deployed here.

In any case, geography as psychological ecology, nourishing mental niches that persist of over transgenerational human time. Wild indeed.

(Source: ‘Wild West’ mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions)

—tao te ching (#)

_{*A virtual lecture for The Human Situation in this time of plague, on Plato’s Symposium from the Introduction through the speech of Pausanias}

I’m not coming to you in video this time (next time, I promise!), but I still have video clips of course. Let us begin with one of three songs about love that all good Houstonians and/or Indie Rock fans are bound to love. Please watch Beyonce’s “Drunk in Love.”

Why this song? I will tell you in a second. First things first, I’m going to tell you my goal in this lecture/essay: to complicate your own, personal definition of love. I hope to do this by begging you to pay careful attention to each of the speeches in the text, not just the big showstoppers at the end. There are many definitions of love in this text, and each of them is worthy of deep consideration. This is my argument: you need to take each of these seriously, or you will miss a lot. This argument is, in some respects, a bad model for you, because the counter-argument it refutes is entirely extratextual: you, the Human Situation student, do not in fact take these early speeches seriously. Between all the discussion sections and papers and final oral exams and random conversations, I think a conservative estimate is that 80% of that time has been spent by students talking about Aristophanes and Socrates. And look, this is fine! These are really great speeches, possibly the two most important things ever said about love outside of 1a. Adam & Eve & 1b. Jesus (at least in the Western tradition).

Now here’s where the argument gets better, at least as a model, because this theme is going on inside the text itself. Plato knows that you are obsessed with Socrates, and he is telling you to pay closer attention to these speeches, too, or you will miss the point (since I’m not giving the last lecture, I’m not going to tell you what I think that is; I also did this in my last lecture on the Iliad). I’m going to run through three contextual elements of the dialogue that demonstrate this fact: the rhetorical, the historical, and the epistemological. I’m going to answer three questions in doing so: why is the beginning (and the end!) so weird, why actually are there no hymns to the god Eros (love), and what school of thought does each speaker in the text represent?

tl;dr your idea of love is too simplistic/bad, desire is as wild, intoxicating, and destructive as it is productive, and if you don’t pay attention to the speeches you’ll miss out/never abandon your bad idea of love (bonus: Eryximachus is the best speech of them all)

I. As a college student, you are required to hold at least one symposium before you graduate; or, the rhetorical context of this Platonic dialogue

Okay, back to: “Why Beyonce?” First, and I cannot stress this enough, one does not need an excuse for Beyonce, ever. Second, because this symposium is literally about being drunk in love. Or on it, maybe, or through it, or even for it. In any case, Beyonce’s song is about not just alocholic intoxication, but also an intoxicating forgetfullness one finds in the body of the lover. You might read the lyrics and think that is the type of “vulgar” love (181B) Pausanias complains of, but no. To quote the man himself: “a lover is encouraged in every possible way; this means that what he does is not considered shameful” (182D). I could basically write the rest of this lecture about this song, but …

… I want to draw us back again to the rhetorical situation of the text, which is foremost a story about a drinking party that features a bunch of people who are intoxicated, yes with philosophy, but also, it is crucial to remember, actual wine (a lot of the exquisite pottery that we still have from antiquity? drinking vessels for wine, often with images of symposia).

But if that’s the foremost context, the first context is really much stranger: a couple of Socrates admirers ten or more years later, talking about this mythic symposium. Two things are highlighted by this rhetorical frame that structures all the speeches and drama we see here: the whole dialogue happens in media res, and this highlights a key question about the transmission of philosophical knowledge.

We get the story from Apollodorus, who is retelling it to Glaucon. But why is he telling it to Glaucon? Because the person man who told him (who heard it from someone else altogether, Phoenix) transmitted it in a form that was “badly garbled” (172B). BUT, there’s a problem here, in what Professor Sommers called the “Russian-doll styled structure” of this dialogue: why is Apollodorus’ version, which came from the same source as Phoenix’s, Aristodemus, any more reliable than the first person who told Glaucon? That is my interpretive question in this section, in fact: why is Apollodorus transmission of philosophical knowledge any more reliable, any less “badly garbled”?

Let me restate this question more formally: Is Plato calling into question the reliability—the authority—of all philosophical knowledge through the rhetorical frame of the Symposium? Or is he arguing that the question of desire is central to understanding the transmission of philosophical knowledge, and thus to philosophy itself?

Let me offer a few additional pieces of evidence that this is indeed a central problem in the text, before we move on to history. First, look at the “you” at 173C. Who is being addressed? This goes back to the first line of the dialogue, which begins with the same you (“In fact, your question”). This dialogic opening in media res is briefly disorienting—we ask ourselves, who is he talking to?—but then we forget, and because we forget, we think that this is part of the conversation with Glaucon. But it isn’t. Apollodorus is recounting an older conversation with Glaucon, it seems, adding another layer to the Russian doll of the dialogue. He’s talking to you, friend.

Second, notice that Apollodorus is not drinking, but still characterized as intoxicated (the god Dionysus is the god of frenzied madness as well as wine and intoxication; these thing are interrelated). He admits that he has a reputation as “a maniac, and I’m raving!” (173E). Throughout the text, philosophy and alcohol are paralleled as two forms of intoxication. Glaucon, Apollodorus, the Friend, Aristodemus, they are all super fans, obsessed with philosophy, but also with Socrates and any-little-thing he-said as much as philosophy itself. They are addicts, addicted to philosophy, the high of climbing the ladder with Socrates to the realm of ideal forms, and this thread of how desire/eros motivates the transmission of philosophical knowledge, guides its spread and interpretation, will continue throughout the text until it reaches it’s climax in Alcibiades speech at the end of the symposium.

Third, there’s a lot of detail given to the setting of philosophical transmission, or where and how it is learned/done. In the symposium itself, the guests are reclining and being served. But in the rhetorical frame, we get a lot of what I like to call “walk and talks” (173B, 174D), a sharp contrast to the symposium, and a form of interaction that Socrates will later use in the dialogue Phaedrus.

Professor Sommers said that he found this rhetorical frame one of the most interesting parts of the dialogue, and I am inclined to agree. Let me give you an interpretation—an answer to my earlier interpretive question—which I think the evidence I’ve pointed to so far supports. The rhetorical frame of Plato’s Symposium functions to instruct the reader against any sense of philosophical mastery, emphasizing something we learn from Socrates, via Diotima, later in the dialogue, namely, that philosophy is an ongoing process, with no endpoint. There is never a point where we can know enough that we could master the world, because that is not what knowledge is. This is the whole “If only wisdom were like water” conversation between Agathon and Socrates (175D-175E), which is my fourth piece of evidence here.

I am also drawn to another striking and seemingly innocuous passage here, where Agathon instructs his slaves on how to serve at the party (fifth). We are very explicitly told that these preparations are crucial to the nature of the conversations to come; our attention is drawn to the serving of wine, but drawn away from the slaves who will serve it. Slavery has been an interesting undercurrent in our theme this semester. Achilles rebels because his slave is stolen away from him, and Euripides has, in one of the most exquisite acts of dramatic narrative in history, seduced his audience of slaveholders into cheering for the leader of a murderous slave revolt. Look closely at what Agathon tells his slaves with regards to how they should serve him tonight: “Imagine that we are all your own guests, myself included. Give us good reason to praise your service” (175B). This is shocking. What audacity, asking the slave to put himself in the place of the master, only to serve him the better! But we should look past what this tells us about Agathon specifically or Greek Antiquity generally, and take it seriously as a philosophical theme. Here, the dialogue is inverting the role of master and slave, and invoking the imagination to do so. In this play of slavery and imagination, inversion and mastery, Plato seems to be commenting on the nature of philosophical mastery, and telling us not to have any, masters that is. Whether Plato’s use of this theme disrupts or entrenches the really-existing ideologies of slavery in his time (which are different, it needs to be said, from chattel slavery in Western modernity) we will have to leave for another time (though I will say I am not optimistic on that front).

What is at stake in this rhetorical framing? It is arguable that the nested narrative of the Symposium is the thing about it; that love, as a philosophical topic, is ultimately secondary to the question of the transmission of philosophy. Just as important as what Socrates says is how we come to know what Socrates says; after all, Socrates himself is merely a witness to his own secondhand account of love, and Alcibiades learns something quite different from what Socrates seemingly intends to transmit to him. Underscoring this is what Socrates tells us about the brand new technology of writing (hupomenmata) in the other great dialogue on love, the Phaedrus, namely, that he thinks it is detrimental to rigorous thought.

II. Love is a myth invented by the Ancient Greeks and they deserve a lot of blame for that; or, the historical context of this Platonic dialogue

This historical context is where we really step outside of Plato’s text, but I think it is nonetheless fascinating and will help you understand what’s going on. Our interpretive question here is a big one that revolves around the central reason given for love being the topic of this symposium: how is it possible for Phaedrus to state that there are no hymns about the “god of love, ancient and powerful as he is” (176A) and for that very same Phaedrus to then immediately cite numerous classical authors talking about just that god, Eros (178B)?

The answer is that the word “love” in this translation is a lie and that gods can be—and are—invented, even the god of love.

What is Eros?

I take it back, it’s not really a lie. But translating the Greek eros as love, when we could just as easily translate it as desire, in itself makes an argument. The name of the god is also a noun; Eros is love, and you can see that’s the case by the context of its use throughout the symposium. You might be tempted to divide eros and love, but I’ll give you a modern and and ancient reason not to. Sigmund Freud, who we may just read in the spring, as we often do, has argued extensively that love is not many different things, but only one. You can see how this directly clashes with the definitions of Pausanias in the dialogue, as well as others. But it seems like, and here’s my ancient reason, Socrates also thinks that love is singular, not many things, as does Aristophanes. One of the central philosophical questions in the dialogue is this: is love one or many things? The debate continues until this very day.

So, despite this strange conflation in the translation, I am all for it; you can see that every step of the way they are talking about love, but also about desire. You can also see that philosophy is intimately tied to this question of love, though perhaps that argues against seeing eros as love. It’s not eros (love) + sophos (wisdom), it’s philo (love) + sophos. What would the difference be, between philosophos and erosophos? Answer that question with respect to the dialogues.

What is a Symposium?

Lastly, Eros has no hymns because Eros is not a real god, historically speaking, or rather, he was a new god (that is, if we distinguish between religious practice and mythology, as we should). Barbara M. Breitenberger’s Aphrodite and Eros: The Development of Erotic Mythology in Early Greek Poetry and Cult observes that “Eros, in contrast to Aphrodite and other companions, did not enjoy cultic veneration” (169). In fact, the rise of Eros as a prominent deity arises with the very institution of the symposium and what scholars call the “sympotic culture” that arose around it. Reflecting changes in the ancient Greek city-states in terms of governance, wealth, international trade, and the creation of a distinct elite culture, the symposium invents Eros, and it does so particularly in relation to the valorization of male homosexuality and the institution of pederasty. “Since the symposium became the place where the male aristocracy could indulge in and express their passion for younger men and boys, it may be argued that the homoerotic ideal of the symposiasts was gradually projected onto, or even divinized by the god Eros” (Breitenberger 172). Think about it for a moment, what this invention of Eros says about human culture, institutions, mythology, and the divine. Fascinating.

Also, a symposium is a drinking party. It is literally what the name means. Never forget that.

Interlude: More Beyonce

Without context, I’ll just say that Beyonce’s insistence here on the singularity of love is proof that she rejects Pausianias’ dualistic schema of desire. The question, then, is this: does Beyonce espouse an Aristophanic completionist vision of a singular love, or a Platonic vision of perpetual externalization (the ladder) a singular love? Discuss.

III. Love is destructive; or, the epistemological context of this Platonic dialogue

We tend to think of love as something productive and positive, but for every speechgiver in the text—barring, perhaps, Eryximachus—love is also fundamentally a destructive force: it is always in danger of approaching a certain wild intoxication, and it always breaks the self out of itself and pushes it toward something else: toward shameful vulgarity, toward beauty, toward civic virtue, toward the gods. In each of these speeches, and, as I hope I’ve shown in the first section above, the framing and minor characters of the dialogue, there are serious and important questions advanced about the philosophical question of love. Each represents a different form of knowledge, thus, an epistemological context. My question here is, if there is a deeper argument about love in each speech, what school of thought does each speaker represent?

Instead of examining each of the first speeches in turn, I will instead give you a schema.

Phaedrus: Religion
Pausanias: Law
Eryximachus: Medicine
Agathon: Rhetoric
Aristophanes: Drama
Socrates: Philosophy

This is a fun game, full of interpretive questions for you, the student/reader. We could spend every discussion for the rest of the semester making arguments and providing evidence for different schemas. Also, beyond what each character represents, what do you see in the arc? What does the order itself of the speeches tell you about this different schools of thought? What do you make of the forgotten (!!!!!) speeches? Here’s another version:

Phaedrus: Student (of Socrates)
Pausanias: Law
Eryximachus: Medicine
Agathon: Tragedy
Aristophanes: Comedy
Socrates: Philosophy

What is at stake shifts in each ordering. But before you get there, you need to dig underneath each one to see what each represents. Phaedrus and Pausanias both link love to the polis, to civic strength and moral virtue, to questions of honor and shame. It gets even more complex, and interesting, if we add back in the other characters, who do not give speeches per se:

Apollodorus & Friend: Students
Diotima: Religion
Alcibiades: Power

As we saw in section one above, merely adding in Apollodorus, etc, immensely deepens the text. Each of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximiachus, and Agathon are all crucial, and they are all interested in various pragmatic aspects of love: how does it work and what is good for, in terms of both the individual and the polis; how does it function? Phaedrus and Pausanias are both interested in the metaphysical grounding or origins of love, and appeal to religious tradition to establish their pragmatic arguments (which arguably means they are not pragmatists, who often argue we should suspend or bracket metaphysical questions). When we get to Aristophanes and Socrates, they are both arguably still functioning within the realm of metaphysics, but they’re not interested in the origins of love as much as in its ontological (the essence of love) foundations.

We could go on, of course, but that is enough for today. On that note, I’ll leave you with one last song about love and desire, perhaps the most Socratic yet.

This impulse–to restrict either the forums in which deliberation occurs or the information which is its lifeblood–has its more florid manifestations, of course. These tend to go viral, like the Georgia school district that suspended the teen who tweeted a picture of crowded, maskless students, showing that all that talk of safely reopening schools was hot, virus-laden air. Then there are the more insidious ones, the creeping erosions of democratic norms that, one-by-one seem innocuous, but taken together paint a more ominous picture. Like floating plans to bar the press from the Republican National Convention because of “health restrictions,” or reports early in the pandemic that congresspersons were using COVID as an excuse to ignore reporters questions.

My colleague Robert Zaretsky highlighted health officials being silenced by political officials in his op-ed on Albert Camus’s canonical novel, The Plague:

For Rieux, we are called upon to recognize facts and draw conclusions regardless of the bacterium. This requires an unflinching fidelity not to your future, but to our future; not to a personal interest, but to general interest. This alone, though, is not enough. By resistance, Camus also meant resistance to our tendency to swap reality for fantasy, information for ignorance.

And in an election year, when public debate is supposed to take center stage in the pageantry of our presidential elections, pundits are already starting to write op-eds calling for the presidential debates to be scrapped, dismissing them as “unrevealing quip contests.”

At times, just as in Camus’s novel, it is enough to provoke in one an existential despair, a deep feeling of groundlessness that sends us searching for answers across the wide-variety of human experience. In addition to literature, there is also respite in history. Another colleague of mine, Nathan Gorelick, has recently written an entertaining essay on coronavirus and cruise ships, and how they relate to the infamous “Ship of Fools” of the middle ages. It was Nate’s earlier work on Daniel Dafoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) that helped me grapple with the long timeframes and deep social changes which have traditionally accompanied plagues; we are perhaps not so exceptional after all. Historian Michael McCormick of Harvard University has recently said in Science magazine that 536 was “the worst year to be alive”. Back then, the Plague of Justinian combined with volcanically induced climate change to induce, finally, the fall of the Roman Empire (though the nature of that “fall” is a fascinating debate in and of itself).

A dark message indeed for the current global hegemon. But the respite of history, though perhaps useful, is not enough. What we need is to foreground the importance of our core, democratic traditions. That robust political debate is under threat during the pandemic is a reality that, as a debate coach, I know all too well. Budgets have been cut across the board at universities, but debate programs can be especially vulnerable. Overshadowed by big-ticket, media-driven items like football or basketball, robust debate programs are often seen as limited luxuries and not as the essential bastions of our deepest democratic traditions that they are.

Nevertheless, when confronted with a myriad of logistical issues and novel situations, we must continue on. What does virtual democratic deliberation look like? How does wearing a mask change the nature of face-to-face discussions? How do we create “bubbles” in which debate is possible? (If basketball can do it, then democracy must do it.) The short answer is we don’t know. But the longer answer is, we’ll figure it out and we’ll make it work.

And in fact, that is something that has already started to happen. Last year, the National Speech and Debate Association hosted the largest series of debates and speeches in the country entirely online (the NSDA is the umbrella organization for high school speech and debate competitions). The collegiate policy debate leagues had to cancel two of their three national tournaments, but they were scheduled much closer to the initial wave of lockdowns, and already they have planned a full season of meetings for next year on the extremely topical question of U.S. international alliances. In other words, what looks impossible now is going to seem commonplace by year’s end. So long as we commit ourselves to debate and not despair, our institutions will adapt, grow, and possibly even thrive. At the very least, we may have developed one more form of immunity to all the various threats to democracy in today’s world.

They have washed their hands for you.

Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry

Outline

I. The Best Title in All of Literature

II. Misery Like a Coastal Shelf

III. The Injury of Intelligence, the Insult of an Education

A. Intelligence is a curse

B. A Martyr to the Desire of the Other; or, that St. Sebastian Painting One More Time

C. The Terror of Identity; or, Meeting Yourself Coming and Going

Richard Sexton,Oak Avenue, Wormsloe Plantation, 2009

I. The Best Title in All of Literature

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

In a second, I’m going to talk to you about the literary genre called the Southern Gothic. It’s the best. It’s weird and uncanny and disturbing, and it’s all ours. After that, I’m going to talk about the cursed intellectuals of O’Connor’s stories in general, and more specifically of our story for today, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1961). You might want to read the last one first, as it does the most close-reading, or the second one, which has lots of maps and stuff. But first, I want to tell you that “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is the best title in all of literature.

From the moment I read it on the syllabus as an undergraduate—circa the turn of the millennium— it took on a life of its own in my head. It’s one of those phrases we encounter in life that returns over and over again, coming to mind unbidden in situations that have nothing remotely to do with the themes of the story. Indeed, every time I go back and reread the story I am struck by how the title, like many of O’Connors, creates this tiny bit of cognitive dissonance, this strangeness that makes it at once both absolutely perfect and deeply unsettling: a stark line of poetry that stands over and above the story, its own little work of art.

And I say this knowing—as you may as well, if you read Giroux’s introduction—that the phrase comes from the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin: “Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge” (xv). Robert Giroux relates that the phrases appears in French, in an anthology he had sent O’Connor of the philosopher’s work. Yet, if anything, going back and reading Teilhard de Chardin and how he uses the phrase makes O’Connor’s usage of the phrase embettered, not worsened, by the repetition. Here’s the version of the passage most often quoted, which is not actually the philosopher’s but one of his students/anthologists. From Max H. Begouen’s Foreword to Building the Earth: “He gave each of them this watchword: ‘Remain true to yourselves, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge’” (13). Here’s one version in his own words, from the essay “Faith in Man,” expressing a major theme in the philosopher’s work: “Followed to their conclusion the two paths must certainly end by coming together: for in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge” (186). In other words, where Teilhard de Chardin is saying something about the nature of our common humanity converging in ever-greater complexity and perfection, O’Connor is injecting something insistent, something dark into this message of hope. In doing so, she is not trying to negate the utopian vision of the philosopher, but to transform it by way of adding in the full range of human experience. For O’Connor, thinking about convergence means thinking about life in a place where sectarianism is stuck on the Catholic/Protestant divide so strongly that to be a Catholic is so alien that one might as well be Jewish (and anything further afield would be meaningless to the young Church of God boys); where buses had only been desegregated in Browder v. Gayle five years before she wrote the story; and where the number of women receiving PhDs in Philosophy in the 1950s—much less in the South—was vanishingly small. In other words, O’Connor injects a certain Southern peculiarity combined with a bit of Gothic uncanniness into this convergence. Faith, theological or not, is easy when it does not have a world to contend with, and if it is easy, it is no faith at all.

But before we talk about the Southern Gothic, I want to return to the title, because I love it so much. Ultimately, beyond any particular meaning it derives from and alongside the story itself, it’s the beauty of a phrase that lingers in one’s mind, insists on coming back again and again, that I want to discuss. I want to discuss it because it gets at the heart of something about literature. For instance, when I say it’s “the best,” on what criteria am I basing that judgement? Are those objective, or purely subjective? Am I repeating a mistake we see from so many of O’Connor’s characters, of assuming that their personal preference can stand in for everyone else’s (and that those who disagree must be wrong)? Short answer: no. I’m saying this for effect. I know it’s just me. But the longer answer is that the particularity of my judgment on this title does give us a clue to the universality of something about language. Our psyches are, ultimately, linguistic; all the sense-experience, emotions, and logic that we deploy emerges out of and is filtered through language. Language makes possible what we can know of our world, and some of the greatest tragedies of our lives are marked by our inability to find a language that fits our experience—of love, of friendship, of betrayal, of death—often because someone else is imposing their language on us, or because there is no language at all for it. Sometimes we have to invent it. I don’t know what part of my self, per se, needs the phrase everything that rises must converge, but some part does. Thank you, Flannery O’Connor.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 1955

II. Misery Like a Coastal Shelf

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

—Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

What is it about the South that lends itself to the gothic? Ever since Edgar Allen Poe’s American reinvention of that European genre—of ancient curses, crumbling castles, monsters and murderers, of innocent women in distress and dark and stormy nights—Southern literature has often veered of into the uncanny and horrific as it’s modus operandi. And the answer as to why? Well, it’s not all the decaying castles scattered across the countryside. The answer is obvious: it’s slavery. The deep secret, the obscure past, the meaningless descent into gratuitous violence, the uncanny return of repressed trauma and desire: slavery.

Let’s take a tour of some maps… First, what do you think this one is?

If you answered “a map of which parts of America started socially distancing when during the pandemic,” then you are a winner. Here’s the key I excised from the original New York Times article the map appeared in (Ganz et al).

You’d be forgiven for mistaking this for a map of a lot of different things, but let’s cut to the chase. Here’s the second map:

In case you’re having difficulty reading the title, let me help with this U.S. Coast Survey from 1861: “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States.”  But just in case the point is not clear yet, here’s map number three:

That, everyone, is a map of the United States as it looked during the late Cretaceous period, many millions of years ago (126-65 mya, to be geologically precise; see Krulwich). That inland sea left rich alluvial deposits that became the fertile crescent of land known as, first geologically and then politically, the Black Belt. Needless to say, the agricultural quality of the land correlates strongly with the intensity of slavery practiced in the American South.

In Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (a book we read often here in The Human Situation), the psychoanalyst uses the metaphor of the ruins of Rome to talk about the deep history of our own human minds. He wants us to understand how, even after they’ve been totally erased and are irretrievable, our earliest experiences shape who we are, just as the long-obliterated strata of Rome each successively dictated what was built after them. For me, when Larkin evoked misery deepening like a coastal shelf, Freud’s ruins of Rome and the cretaceous South sprang immediately to mind; I took it not as simile, but something that could be, often is, literally true.

This is what is meant in Faulkner’s famous epigraph about the past never being dead. Southern Gothic emerged as one of the most distinctive genres, blending mystery and murder and a deep sense of a looming violence in the world. Flannery O’Connor’s stories, as we have all seen, could easily be turned into horror movies, and William Faulkner’s work also includes many of the same themes. If we include Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy (e.g., the hauntings in Beloved or the demonic Judge of Blood Meridian), then the genre is easily the defining movement of twentieth century American literature.  And it is not only slavery, but the history of violence that is the warp and weft of the institution, that colors our Southern Gothic. The Civil War is still the deadliest war in American history, and it’s not even close. Indeed, scholars have argued, often convincingly, that the region has to this day not recovered from the economic, social, and political devastation caused by the military conflict alone, not to mention its aftershocks, the devastation like a modern war fought 75-100 years before its time.  “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

III. The Injury of Intelligence, the Insult of an Education

A. Intelligence Is a Curse

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, O’Connor’s stories are chock full of characters for whom their intelligence is a curse. Hulga almost causes her mother an existential crisis because the pleasure- reading she leaves lying around is Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?”; The Child is clearly the smartest one in the room; even The Misfit was marked off at a young age: “‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘some that can live their whole life out without asking about it an it’s other has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters’” (129). So, too, Julian.

Julian is a writer who does not write. Like Hulga, whose philosophy is solely for herself, Julian’s fantasy world is solely for himself. And he seems to know that he is not a writer—he never expects to make a life/career/money out of it—which forces us to ask: why does he identify as a writer? But before we answer that question, let’s get right to the stakes. The clue is in the title, and O’Connor doesn’t make us wait too long. Immediately after she tells her son that he should be proud that his ancestors owned hundreds of slaves, Julian’s mother gets down to commentary on civil rights: “They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence” (408, emphasis added). So, rise: yes; converge: not so much for Julian’s mother. It is no mistake that this story takes place on a bus, the public space Rosa Parks made famous and which the Supreme Court desegregated in its 1956 ruling in Browder v. Gayle, five years before this story was published; the bus, for O’Connor, is again not a metaphor for race relations, it is the thing itself. Thus, unlike for Hulga, Julian’s fate and choices are going to extend far beyond himself—to the status of racism in America, the history of slavery, and reparations therefore—although they will extend to himself, too. Perhaps O’Connor is saying that the repercussions of the choices of the two, philosopher and writer, have different stakes. Perhaps.

Which brings us back to all these emotionally fraught intellectuals here, decaying slowly, like fish out of water, in their Southern hometowns. This theme is important for O’Connor because it argues intelligence, reason itself even, can serve not as something that enlightens, but something that closes off, distances, and deceives. The dark of reason. Like The Child in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” they can only see the difference in all things, and not the sameness; there are parts of everyday life that they have utterly rejected, and thus cannot connect to; they are alienated on their own soil, homeless in their own homes. And often with good reason! Julian’s mother is an out and out racist, and she represents the norm. He should reject her racism. But, for some reason, he cannot reject her herself. And he cannot reconcile the one to the other. I love her: she’s a racist; I must reject racism: I must reject her. His very love for his mother is a source of immense guilt for Julian, and that right there is the essence of the Southern Gothic.

There is a deeper lesson here, one that we don’t really have time for, about how Julian is actually trying to inhabit two different symbolic worlds, ones with different rules that justify themselves in different ways and that are ultimately incompatible. It’s like he speaks two different languages, but thinks they’re the same one  and so often gets hopelessly confused. And the truth is something like that, when we recognize that culture is like a language that sets up rules for what and how we make meaning of the world. Heidegger famously said: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (217). Hulga and Julian, justifiably reacting to the smallness and violence of the world they grew up in, have learned another world, but tragically cannot see their way back across the divide they have built; they’re emotionally attached, but intellectually distant, so they take refuge in that distance and decay psychologically, along with the old plantation mansion that Julian can’t help but dream about. Perhaps this is a problem O’Connor understood all too well. Her writing teacher in the Iowa MFA program had to ask her “to write down what she had just said” the first time they met her Georgia accent was so thick (vii, all emphasis mine).

B. A Martyr to the Desire of the Other; Or, that St. Sebastian Painting One More Time

When I worked in that highly suggestive, very famous painting of St. Sebastian into my lecture on Voltaire, I had totally forgotten that our erstwhile saint figured into our story for today, even though I had been reading O’Connor again over break. Sometimes the Unconscious, to paraphrase Larkin, fucks you up, but every now and again it does you a favor.

One of Julian’s fantasies is that he is a martyr to his mother. This should right away give us some pause. Take this for instance: “Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him” (405). There is something deeply wrong with Julian’s relationship to his mother here; in fact, this is not a healthy relationship to have with any human being. Why on earth does Julian care what gives his mother pleasure? Shouldn’t he be happy that she is happy, despite it being over a ridiculous hat? Why would you ever arrange it so that, in the most important relationship in your entire world, anything that makes the other person happy makes you sad? That, my friends, is a recipe for disaster, death and disaster and tragedy. You don’t even have to read to the end. This is not going to end well.

To understand characters, you have to understand their motivations. This can be tricky. We can’t assume the characters are us, or anyone else but who they are. There are many possibilities for why Julian does what he does—alien mind control, for instance—but very few plausible ones. What, then, are Julian’s plausible alternatives here to his misery. Alternative one: leave his mother and move far away. He wants to be a writer? New York City, Paris, hell Houston or Atlanta: get thee hence. Anywhere but here (Hulga, too). Why, then, does he stay? We can be very, very cynical and say that Julian is broke and his mom’s supporting him. True! But not really enough. A lot of life can be lived in cheap apartments with ramen noodles, even on the commission of a typewriter salesman. This would be an excuse he would be telling himself, though we should also assume that many of the jobs he might be qualified for he would reject because they would conflict too heavily with his identity (as a writer), or just embarrass him (as being beneath him and his college education).

I think the real clue is in the saint imagery. But it’s not him who’s the saint, it’s his mother—a fair description for her achievements vis-à-vis Julian, which are not small, and which she is justly proud of. Even if taken literally, if he is suffering for his mother, as a saint, that means his mother is Jesus! His non-sacrifice of riding on a bus with his mother—“the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure” (406)— is really her sacrifice. The problem is that, in this twisted relationship, his mother-the-saint is also a racist. Moreover, he knows that she’s not doing this for her pleasure: her doctor has told her she might die if she doesn’t become more active. Yet that’s how he frames it, which makes no sense … unless, here again, we should take this more literally than he means it: she’s staving off death, and as long as she is alive and enjoying life, then of course he cannot enjoy it. Ipso facto, he wants her to die, so he can move on. Again, her very existence is a source of guilt for him. Not because he hates her, but because he loves her.

C. The Terror of Identity; Or, Meeting Yourself Coming and Going

What does the phrase “you won’t meet yourself coming and going” (407) even mean? I had to pause at this phrase after O’Connor repeats it in the story, making sure to remember, as Professor Charara reminded us, that just because it is a cliché for the characters doesn’t mean that it is one for O’Connor. In short, it signifies a desire for uniqueness. If you do not meet yourself coming or going, you will not see someone else that looks like you on your journey.

This desire—to be singular, unique—is a pretty basic one. We all need some manner of distinguishing ourselves from others, otherwise the difference between self and other breaks down, and what it means to be uniquely our self does with it. This loss of self is, in almost all cases, terrifying for us. It is terrifying for Julian, because it is precisely what he fears in relation to his mother: he will never have his own desires, his own identity, but merely be an extension of hers, subsumed by his mother’s identity, her view of him. He will always be, as Professor Wallace discussed, an object and never a subject. (At the same time, to have nothing in common with other human beings is an opposite extreme, untenable as well. What it would even mean, to share no qualities with other people, no common bond over which you could unite, no language, aspirations, or anything else? Nothing.)

Of course, his mother does indeed meet herself going to the reducing class, in the form of a black woman with her child, angered about … something. Long story short, this woman hits Julian’s mother and storms off when she tries to give her child a penny. There is much to be wrung interpretively from whether or not it is this blow that causes his mother’s death, or Julian’s reaction to it. But I think this is a bit beside the point, much as the hat is. The truth of the situation is in Julian’s belated realization of his unacknowledged love for his mother—he calls out to her as a mother would to a child, or even a lover to their beloved, at the end, “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” (420)—and with that, his imminent “entry into the world of guilt and sorrow” (420). His coded wish for his mother’s death has been granted, but in so doing all the compromises he has made will no longer be tenable. He will, of course, blame himself for the way he acted vindictively toward her, even in her last moments, and he might even blame himself for her death.

Most of all, though, he will lose his ability to maintain that ironic distance that he has adopted toward the world, the one that has kept him locked into a fantasy world. There is compensation here: that fantasy allows him to live the life he secretly desires—not incidentally, the one where he can acknowledge his mother’s love and sacrifice, if not in word, then in deed. He does devote himself to his mother; despite what he says he is on that bus. The “in word” part is crucial here. Julian wants to be a writer because it allows him to keep an ironic distance toward the world as the detached observer who can catalogue all the worlds foibles while imagining that he is the hero setting them aright. But not in the real world, which is a bit too messy. When he imagines marrying a black woman, he tempers this fantasy by writing his fictional lover as not too black, her race only a suspicion (414). When he befriends black folk in his fantasies, it is only “the better types” (414). And when he imagines joining a sit-in, this is “possible but he did not linger with it” (414). Of course the possible is not something he lingers with! There is no ironic distance in the possible. Only jail, maybe even death. In fact, in a very real sense, Julian needs injustice to continue, because if it disappeared he would be forced to confront everything that he is fobbing off. Thus: “It gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred miles” (412).

I think a more interesting question than whether or not the child’s mother is responsible for Julian’s mother’s death is why she is angry to begin with. Julian is probably not wrong, that negotiating the casual violence of an antiblack society has shaped her outlook, and primed her for confrontation as an understandable survival strategy (compare her to the man who buries his nose in a newspaper, learning about the world at large while ignoring the world at hand). But perhaps we should look closer to home. If you were a mother negotiating public transit with your child, might you be annoyed if a grown man—a white man, in this very specific instance—forced you to split yourself off from your young child? And, assuming that she’s as good a reader of the world as Julian is, when you realize that he’s forced you into this situation because of some tiff he’s having with his mother? Julian delights in the fact that the children have been split from their mothers; he is himself keenly aware of the dynamic at play here. But because he is trapped in his own bubble—his own decaying mansion of the mind—he cannot see that maybe she does, too. And if Julian’s desire to separate himself from his own mother is achieved in this awkward social situation, it is imposed upon the mother and her child. Yet the stakes for each are different, and Julian knows this, too. He sees it coming from a mile away, but what he can’t see is that the cause is not his mother, but himself, and he cannot see it because then he would be the one thing he cannot be, his mother. He would see himself coming and going, in her.

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Reni, Guido. Saint Sebastian. Circa 1615. Musei di Strada Nuova, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guido_Reni_-_Saint_Sebastian_-_Google_Art_Project_(27740148).jpg.

Sexton, Richard. Oak Avenue, Wormsloe Plantation. 2009, https://richardsextonstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/19-c070.jpg.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Building the Earth. Wilkes-Barre, Pa. : Dimension Books, 1965. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/buildingearth0000teil_y0u0.

——. The Future of Man. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

——. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper Perennial, 1955.

It is a testament of the complexity of the cultural politics of the time that one of the seminal pieces of literary modernism could be influenced by Maurassian misogynistic and antiromantic ideology, while being structured around literary symbolism and stream-of-consciousness techniques that were inspired by Maurras’s enemy, Bergson.

Furled white rose, dessicate upon the branch, from a defunct Gilded Age estate (at Biltmore)

Once again, a class of Honors College students has been introduced to the human situation #uh #uh2021 #gocoogs (at The Honors College at the University of Houston)

Houston’s Love & Williams hunting for a bid to the NDT #gocoogs (at University of Central Oklahoma)

‘Single Atom in an Ion Trap’, by David Nadlinger

houstondebate:

Did you miss UH debaters Jackson Bartling (Honors ‘21) and Katherine Polkinghorne (Honors ‘20) on Red, White, and Blue last weekend? If so, never fear. Catch the episode above from Houston Public Media’s Youtube channel. 

(via Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam” Cy Twombly Shield of Achilles – Art Criticism & Writing)

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, pater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne pater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe filio multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, pater, ave atque vale.

–after Gaius Valerius Catullus, CI

Children hate school because in school they are not free.

We see only the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit. Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and vultures follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a book.

Another year of The Human Situation in the books. We began with Gilgamesh and ended with Saramago, from Conquest to Götterdämmerung. #uh #honors (at The Honors College at the University of Houston)

In his essay on art, “What Children Say,” one becomes engrossed by Deleuze’s argument on the nature of art, the manner in which he opens up the concept by comparing it to the mappings of intensive space by children, by his invocations of Little Hans and to Deligny’s autistic children as the paradigmatic cases of artistic creation. It is, as his wont, subversive and brilliant, and this engrossment progresses apace until, right at the moment of giving a definition of art, one runs into a brick wall—or rather, a stone cairn:

Art is defined, then, as an impersonal process in which the work is composed somewhat like a cairn, with stones carried in by different voyagers and beings in becoming (rather than ghosts) [devenants plutôt que revenants] that may or may not depend on a single author. (#)

It is a typical Deleuzian moment, a typical philosophical moment even. Just as one is about to receive a definition, a statement that clarifies and distills the journey through the text, one is held up short, puzzled and perplexed: art is a cairn? Why? How? What is the connection to mappings and intensities, to children and ghosts?

These moments, though frustrating, are productive; they remind us to not have masters, to become beholden to no singular text. Yet, the mystery of the cairn remains, stubborn and opaque and tugging gently at the back of your mind every time you work on the concept of art, of Deleuze. A rather more than cursory round of research yielded nothing; following Deleuze’s footnotes, usually a winner, cross-referencing other works on Deleuze, even google books (at least when I first searched it) yielded nothing. Researching cairns, I puzzled through analogies such as the work of art is like a grave? a memorial? the upturned earth of a battle? They all resonated, but amounted to nothing.

Nothing, that is, until I spoke with a colleague of mine whose family hails from Scotland. And he told me that the custom is, as one walks about the countryside, that you every time you pass a cairn, you pick up a rock and add it to the top of the cairn. This practice, the living, communal practice of the cairn, was the key. The cairn was not just an inert marker of the past, but a living relationship with the present; it was people interacting with their environment, creating their own history through a collective memory encoded not merely in the exchange of words, but the perpetual work of moving stones: the cairn as assemblage.

The work of art is like a cairn because the work of art is not the object molded by the heroic subject of artistic creation, but an expression of the impersonal forces of accretion and collective pressure. The reference to ghosts also begins to make more sense; the work is not haunted per se, but the haecceities of the past interacting with the present; an impersonal, but non-metaphorical, exchange with the dead, indeed the creation of an assemblage that creates that past itself, but is also created by the subtle pressures it left behind, even over the span of hundreds or thousands of years: modern artists leaving their signatures on caves filled with prehistoric paintings. Cairns remain in a perpetual becoming; they may have a single author, but what defines them as works of art—what defines any work of art—is not the subjectivity of its origin, but the becoming which it produces.

*Thanks to Calum Matheson at the University of Pittsburgh. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia contributor Otter (#)

Yeats by the fountains #uh #thehumansituation (at The Honors College at the University of Houston)

Last day of class II #nostalgia #thehumansituation #valuetolife (at The Honors College at the University of Houston)

Last day of class #nostalgia #thehumansituation #valuetolife (at The Honors College at the University of Houston)

…programmed only with the ability to control and see the game screen, and an urge to increase the score.

Enterococcus, by poisoning its rivals, was saving the worms. This change depended entirely on the presence of Staph. When King exposed 15 generations of worms to Enterococcus alone, the mildly harmful bacterium became slightly more harmful. “On its own, it’s a little bit of a parasite,” says King. “But when it interacts with this much more virulent organism, it shifts along the continuum to be much more beneficial.

“Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first”

(via How a street artist pulled off a 50-building mural in Cairo’s garbage-collector district / Boing Boing)

versobooks:

Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind – Jean-Léon Jérôme, 1896

(via 2,200 Radical Political Posters Digitized: A New Archive | Open Culture)

Lovie Olivia, Elusive, 2015 (from the show DAMASK) (at Art League Houston)

(via Did This Map Guide Columbus? | History | Smithsonian)

I, Librarian Robot!

The Giant Robots That Serve the World’s Largest Library Archives

Though this semester I taught it in a course with several other professors, I have also taught it in Intro to Lit courses before. It’s always a bit of a struggle, as Achebe’s argument that we should exclude the text from the canon are strong, to say the least. 

Yet it is such a powerful pedagogical text, one that seems worth reading if only because it allows one to introduce Achebe’s succinct, powerful critique of representations of Africa. I also feel as if there are few texts that have a similar ability to undermine our assumptions about civilization and subjectivity. In effect, we still live in the world that Conrad’s novel critique; this past is not, in any real sense, past. Apocalypse now. 

What I’m left with is this: does continuing to reread Conrad, especially when it trades off with reading a book such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, simply replicate Achebe’s diagnosis at one remove? 

intaglioer:

“SUGAR LANDING AT ST. PIERRE” from “A Midsummer Trip to the West Indies” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, July/August, 1888

 —Salman Rushdie

discardingimages:

Alexander the Great vs. many-eyed dragons

Miroir du Monde, Normandy before 1463

Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 336, fol. 104r

Opening page of the manuscript for Crash. It seems the first paragraph is relatively untouched, the little seed of a vision pristine and insistent.

… but we tortured some folks

theparisreview:

Alphonse Mucha’s illustrated edition of The Lord’s Prayer

(via Distribution of letters in parts of English words – Boing Boing)

M.73.5.581e: Above figure to the left: “They torture a man or woman who has had sexual relations during menstruation or the period after childbirth by pulling their tongue out of their neck”. Above figure to the right: “angel” [ḥayż nifāsniŋ ičida er maẓlūm jimāʿ qilġan kišiniŋ tilini kičkäsidin tartip ʿaẕāb qilur (farīšta)]

(via Punishment in the Afterlife: an Eastern Turki Manuscript | The Public Domain Review)

millionsmillions:

Next March, Kazuo Ishiguro will publish his first novel since Never Let Me Go. The new book, entitledThe Buried Giant, is said to be about “lost memories, love, revenge and war.”

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

For my class, to discuss …

(via The Shapes of Stories, a Kurt Vonnegut Infographic | Maya Eilam)

8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today | The Guardian

(via MFAH exhibition offers crash course in Latin American modernism – CultureMap Houston)

A little old, but as this blog is really just a digital common place book …

A great exhibit, particularly struck by Roberto Matta. 

Indeed, a study published on ChessBase.com earlier this year showed that in the tournament Mr. Carlsen won to qualify for the world championship match, he played more like a computer than any of his opponents.

(via Houston’s Beer Can House | Boing Boing)

File Under: Art, Texas, Beer

(via Two Timelines of Slang for Genitalia, from 1250 Through Today)

Listen to a story told in a 6000-year-old extinct language – BoingBoing

(via Professor Says He Has Solved a Mystery Over a Slave’s Novel – NYT)

One of the reasons I enjoy archival research so much is how much there remains of everyday lives, lying dormant, waiting to be pieced back together. 

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
William Golding’s 1954 novel The Lord of the Flies has been in the censorship cross-hairs of American parents for decades. Those attempting to ban the book have done so on the grounds that it is excessively violent, racist, and “implies that man is little more than an animal.” But Golding, a schoolteacher himself, wrote the book in response to an 1858 novel by R. M. Ballantyne, TheCoral Island, in which a group of young boys stranded on a desert island get along quite swimmingly. Though Golding enjoyed the book, his experience with schoolchildren led him to take the morality of the situation in…a different direction. 

Except this: http://bit.ly/15pW7F2

pantheonbooks:

window-lickers:

This is my favorite bookstore: The Rust Belt in Buffalo, NY

Shout out to my hometown!

Many, many books from thence …

discardingimages:

tag the sinner 

Cité de Dieu, Paris ca. 1475.

Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, ms. 246, fol. 389r

Dreaming of animals and other warning signs of neurodegeneration

(via Whale-horses and morses: Tolkien and the walrus in the OED | OxfordWords blog)

In trope ontology, we return to the direct perceptions of infancy.

(via When did “The United States” become a singular noun?)

Interesting that it happened so long after the Civil War, though the rise looks like it roughly correlates with the rise of the sectionalist conflict over slavery. 

Indeed. 

Crunching Literary Numbers – NYTimes

Slavery Gives Me a Weird Personal Connection to Assassin’s Creed IV | Kotaku

Wes Anderson’s Worlds by Michael Chabon | The New York Review of Books

natgeofound:

Evening rush hour in Houston, Texas.Photograph by Clifton R. Adams, National Geographic

Our system uses c-fos-tTA transgenic mice, in which the promoter of the c-fos gene drives the expression of the tetracycline transactivator (tTA) to induce expression of a gene of interest downstream of the tetracycline-responsive element (TRE) (8–12). We injected an adeno-associated virus (AAV) encoding TRE-ChR2-mCherry into the DG or CA1 of c-fos-tTA animals (Fig. 1A). Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2)–mCherry expression was completely absent in the DG of animals that had been raised with doxycycline (Dox) in the diet (on Dox) (Fig. 1B). Exploration of a novel context under the condition of Dox withdrawal (off Dox) elicited an increase in ChR2-mCherry expression (Fig. 1C). We confirmed the functionality of the expressed ChR2-mCherry by recording light-induced spikes in cells expressing ChR2-mCherry from both acute hippocampal slices and in anaesthetized animals (Fig. 1, D to F). Furthermore, optical stimulation of ChR2-mCherry–expressing DG cells induced cFos expression throughout the anterior-posterior axis of the DG (fig. S1, A to I).

And that, my friends, is all you need to know if your looking to engage in an inception or any other non-nefarious memory-creation activities you might desire. 

Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus

An alien civilization could send probes traveling no faster than 10% the speed of light to every single solar system in the galaxy in only 10 million years. Which is incredible … As the researchers conclude … “a fleet of self-replicating probes can indeed explore the Galaxy in a sufficiently short time to warrant the existence of the Fermi Paradox.”

It’s Easier for Aliens to Visit Us Than Previously Thought | io9

Fermi Paradox and Von Neumann Machines

Dolphins Have “Names,” Respond When Called

(via Thresher Sharks Hunt with Huge Weaponised Tails – Phenomena: Not Exactly Rocket Science)

As Ed Yong asks:

Best scientific figure ever? From Oliver et al, 2013. PLOS

Wanderlust: GOOD traces the most famous trips in history

(via Surrender leaflet: Meant for Confederate defenders of Vicksburg | Slate)

Of particular interest to me is the friendship reference with which this leaflet concludes. 

The Humanities, Declining? Not According to the Numbers – The Chronicle

Eudonia, indeed.

(via 15 classic science fiction and fantasy novels that publishers rejected | io9)

I could teach a class on this set of novels alone. In fact, that’s actually a good idea for the conceit of the class, something like: Futurity and Rejection: SciFi in Context.  

Jackson Pollock’s Psychoanalytic Drawings, circa 1939-40

via A Brief History of Mental Illness in Art | Brainwaves, Scientific American Blog Network

In other words, we use our noses to smell food after it’s inside us, as well as before. But, in a fascinating snippet of news based on a presentation given yesterday at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting by German food chemist Dr. Peter Schieberle, it seems that our noses may not be not alone in that ability, and that other cells in our bodies are able to “smell” food too. (##)

Cells themselves will move toward volatile organic compounds that even the nose cannot smell in a process called chemotaxis.

The first part, about smelling through the mouth, is an important part of why you should disregard all those articles, usually about wine, that say “you can only taste five tastes, so any complex favor profiles are mumbo jumbo.” I mean, one should discount those based on experience alone, because, like, well, can you taste the difference between broccoli, cauliflower, kale, romaine lettuce, arugula, and sorrel? Yes. Of course. That’s six.

The second part is even more interesting, as if the body itself, beyond any sensory input, craves certain foods and aromas. Or rather, again, we need to redefine and broaden what we mean by the senses.

(via Boing Boing)

From “The Devil Examining the Head of a Boy” Frontspiece to a Manual on Phrenology; 1847, The Wellcome Library.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Google Is Alive, It Has Eyes, and This Is What It Sees

Beautiful art by Samuel J Bland, digital collages composed from google image searches. Lacking intuition, the algorithm finds surreal patterns in mundane images. Mechanism in the articulation of a stuffed woodcock, the echo of a tiger from a fuzzy orange object in a plastic bag, these images percolate up through the digital froth of images and haunt these other, everyday objects, visual ghosts.

As I wrote before, when we imagine alternative/artificial intelligences, we tend to fixate on symbolic consciousness (i.e., the Turing Test) at the expense of what Lacan calls the imaginary, that layer of consciousness closer to animal ethology and the machinic. Consciousness emerges not just out of language, but out of a constant processing of images and environmental stimuli. Give the AI sense, then engage in a constant and distributed Turin reality-testing (Turin avec Freud), and see what emerges.

classicpenguin:

Moby Dick, or, The Card Game is on Kickstarter right now. 

Obviously, I supported this.

(via Incredible Images Of Teenage Freight Train Hitchhikers | So Bad So Good)

Slash is clearly a word to watch. Slash I do mean word, not punctuation mark. The emergence of a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb (let alone one stemming from a punctuation mark) is like a rare-bird sighting in the world of linguistics: an innovation in the slang of young people embedding itself as a function word in the language.

Disapproval Matrix, or how to categorize the haters … (via Boing Boing)

Apparently we have some sort of fixed idea of speed.

About 4 hour into the job after I laid down the first coat of sealer, I became very thirsty. I was unable to exit the morgue due to floor finish not drying as fast as I had anticipated with the humidity level, so I opened the dor to a small refrigerator located to the right of the autopsy table. I assumed I might find some water or anything to drink as I was dehydrated.

What I discovered, changed my life forever! There were dismembered body parts & organs wrapped in plastic. A leg, an arm, a hand, a foot, hearts, lungs, tissue, eyes and even a severed human head! I guess I was in a state of shock when I rushed out of the morgue because a physician asked me “What’s wrong”?

I told him exactly what I had seen & asked him what they did with so many body parts? He looked very strange & did not answer me. Instead, wrote something down on a piece of paper. I suddenly became a prime “person of interest” where my every move was watched & video-taped.

I escorted a young radiology technician to the morgue as she did not believe me. When she saw the body parts and severed head, she could not believe it either. We told every single person in Radiology what was in the old upright refrigerator.

I immediately noticed a change in the atmosphere. Security guards were all of a sudden around me…walking behind me and I could hear video camera’s zooming in on me as I walked down the hallways that night. Security followed me to the time card machine that night for the first time in 14 months.

Here, the individual is confronted with a “fantasmatic anatomical fragmentation,” something shocking to him, the fragility and dissocited body, a moment where he “all of a sudden, mysteriously, God only knows why, becomes decompensated,” decomposed into a world that no longer makes sense (#, #).

And it cannot be just the body parts: we are in a morgue, after all, where the job  is to dismember the occasional body. There is an immediate change, a paranoia that bears on everyone and everything, where the imperceptible (the noise of cameras zooming, security guards) begins to impinge upon and dissociate reality. 

Though, unlike a law suit against a basketball player, one with a political direction, a man who sends ricin, a biological weapon, to senators and the president, with notes bearing witness to this fundamental experience: “No one wanted to listen to me before. There are still ‘Missing Pieces’" (#).

EDIT: Or, potentially, a sociopath mimicking such an enunciation (#), which only makes the circulation of these signifiers more intriguing, not less …

Kevin Curtis’ Ripoff Report

First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death … On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. … Each family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the suppliers and other residents; meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another…

—Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” (##)

Not quite the end of the seventeenth century, but an eerie similarity. Terrorism as the modern plague. A total, city-wide discipline, but updated for our societies of control. Justified or no, haunting in the extreme …

…the “slow language” of stone, as opposed to the fast one of words, the one I live and breathe, the one where I disappoint myself, regularly …

“I leave 25% for family apartments, houses, small mansions in the middle of the land in country with mountain ranges and cultured lands, home grown fruits, vegetables, fish (shrimps), meat, cigarettes, weed, cocaine, beer, liquor and wine, bullet and laser proof cars, trucks, buses, limousines, boats, yachts that goes on and in water, air plain (sic) with inside and outside parachutes and dance and gambling places as (sic) Atlanta all with laser security and security officers (2 woman to 1 man). I leave 10% for hospitals and chemistry labs to work on molecule, atoms, chromosomes, cell death acids, and oxygen on regeneration then I like to be laid to rest in a water chambers (sic) with flowers, TV, and radio.”

In his third Seminar, Lacan speaks of “the sense of the twilight of reality” that characterizes the speech of individuals in the midst of a particularly extreme psychic disturbance (#).

Often, we hear of these as they come to light in legal filings, appeals to the law for restitution of the social order against some corruption,  and, often, fixated on a particular celebrity, a figure that looms larger that life in one’s mind. 

He writes – sues for justice – as if he is already dead, and what we need is research into the infinite decomposition of the world: molecule, atoms, chromosomes, cell death acids, and oxygen. 

Saginaw man asks for FBI wiretap on NBA player, wills ‘laser proof cars’ to father

The Food Channel fetishization of cooking has made it look intimidating …

(via ‘Samson Slaying a Philistine’, by Giambologna, 1560-2 – Victoria and Albert Museum)

Left alone with his judge, he fills the stage with his own sense of apocalypse, a blazing nihilism.

millionsmillions:

Why is it “The Waste Land” and not “The Wasteland”?

[Photo: Ezra Pound’s edits of T. S. Eliot’s original.]

Also noted herein, Whitman’s “tentative plural: ‘The United States are destined …’” Not ‘The United States is …,’ and in that tentative plural, a politics of plurality and multiplicity. 

Also, April remains the cruellest month …

Hot off the presses …

timeshaiku:

A haiku from the article: Senator Portman Sorts Ohio Fallout After Marriage Shift

new-aesthetic:

timeshaiku

“How does our algorithm work? It periodically checks the New York Times home page for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we’ve added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times.” [More about timeshaiku]

Algorithmic serendipity, combing the everyday world for accidental poetry. An ancient Japanese form, ensconced in stark images of nature, culled from the digital jetsam of our era. 

Without a shadow of a doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture.

Literary History, Seen Through Big Data’s Lens | NYT

(via The Penguincubator, a Book Vending Machine – Alexis C. Madrigal | The Atlantic)

Also, more here.

What is particularly crucial to understand is that books were not dragged kicking and screaming into each new area of capitalism. Books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism, they virtually began it. They are part of the fuel that drives it. 

…

In the history of shop design, it is bookstores, strangely enough, that were the precursors of supermarkets. They, alone of all types of shop, made use of shelves that were not behind counters, with the goods arranged for casual browsing, and for what was not yet called self-service.

Exquisite timing, this article, since I free-sampled about twenty books from Amazon last night. I’m not quite sure I agree, that books drive capitalism, unless one approaches the phenomena with a requisite complexity:

Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. (#)

Yes, something like that … books, information as desire, and desire as that which builds up at the edges and overflows. 

Literature’s business model explained, with special reference to the age of the Internet | Boing Boing

By the early 2000s, the research in biology and physics was starting to intersect. Cameras and computer-vision technologies could show the action of individuals in animal swarms, and simulations were producing more and more lifelike results.

“Nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.”

An interesting post with a good point: “But we should also remember that nature is not parsimonious at all.”

However, I’m not sure if anyone cares what Ockham really said. Ockham’s razor is generally formally understood as: “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity)” (see: Wiki). 

He was mediaeval, and probably included god, etc, etc. But the razor remains a good tool, and it really comes down to the “beyond necessity.”

Any bricoleur knows that the razor is not the rule.

What Ockham really said | Boing Boing

(the best part is the quote on the death screen)

A video game where Foucault chases you …

They were also a mainstay of loggers, who could fill an entire train car with boards cut from a single tree. (via Resurrecting A Forest – Phenomena: The Loom)

Contemplating the deextinction of the American Chestnut (which was nigh on annihilated not by logging, but by a blight), I was struck by this photo.

In it I was struck by a momentary sense of historical discontinuity, and with that basic fact that I try to keep in mind in my work: that the past, which seems so familiar, is far stranger, far rarer than it seems to us from moment to moment. 

When someone from the eighteenth or nineteenth century  writes of the majesty of the American forests, well … 

classicpenguin:

Researchers who work on the decoding of human genetic history by tracking gene mutation have recently discovered the date The Iliad was written: “762 B.C., give or take 50 years,” according to this Inside Science article. 

There’s lots more there, too, including how they did it: charting the replication and evolution of the Swadish word list (from mid-century American linguist Morris Swadish), which includes terms apparently found in every language and culture, such as colors and body parts.

Image above comes from The Homer Multitext at The Center for Hellenic Studies, which is absolutely worth more than a few minutes of cruising.

Good to know, and glad to see those genetic linguists pulling their weight around here. But seriously, a really interesting interdisciplinary collaboration. 

(via The bejeweled bugs of Hubert Duprat | The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things)

Let’s not forget, however, that Nerval was a fervent scholar of the occult, steeped in classical myth, Egyptian magic, medieval fables, Teutonic tales of Lorelei, the Gnostic wisdom of the Druses of Lebanon, alchemy, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, the secret teachings of the Illuminati, “the strange legends and bizarre superstitions” of the Valois countryside outside Paris, where he grew up; his work is hermetic, rich in arcane allusions and hidden meanings.

On the numerous potential meanings of Nerval’s pet lobster, from the occult to the marine-biological …

Nerval’s Lobster: Is walking a crustacean any more ridiculous than a dog? – Boing Boing

You should never believe an author if he tells you why he has certain recurring themes.

Un autre événement important est contenu dans ce livre, dans la préface d’Elisabeth Roudinesco : pour la première fois, une historienne éminente de la psychanalyse reconnaît la relation homosexuelle qui a existé entre Anna Freud et Dorothy Burlingham.

And, to accent that fact, Sigmund Freud accepted their companionship as a form of family. 

Tabou : la famille homoparentale de la fille de Freud | Rue89

Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him.

(via The Evolution of English Words and Phrases Since 1520 | MIT Technology Review)

With a link to a page containing rankings of the most popular phrases by year (you can choose one to five word phrases).

The older entries show a more pleasant variance…

ransomcenter:

Read the accompanying article, “Sangorski & Sutcliffe: The Rolls Royce of Bookbinding” on the Ransom Center’s blog, Cultural Compass.

Ornately bound edition of the Selected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Seems to me that it would be appropriate if all editions of Poe were bound in this manner.

Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows

This poem is one of the first things I ever posted here, about four years ago today. It’s hard to agree with Whitman, that the heart of the day is not in the chosen, but in the choosing. 

It is hard to agree, though like all hard things that does not mean the poet is wrong. 

Walt Whitman, “Election Day, November, 1884”

new-aesthetic:

“Blackheath fireworks on our cameras!” – London fireworks captured in infra-red by Metropolitan Police Helicopter, on Twitter.

B.B. How have you raised the problem of choice and nonchoice?
M.F. I will say that, in fact, there should not be any privileged choice. One should be able to read everything, to know all the institutions and all the practices.

I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

07CAIRO2871.txt

Haikus from wikileaks, culled via algorithm …

HaïkuLeaks / Cable is poetry

(via Fire tornado – Boing Boing)

theparisreview:

Wherever I look you are islands

a constellation of flowers breathing on the sea

deep-forested islands mountainous and fragrant

fires on a bright ocean

at the root one fire

all my life I have wanted to touch your ankle

running down to its shore

I beach myself on you

I listen

I see you among still leaves

regard of rock pool

by sun and moon and stars

island waterfalls and their echoes

are your voice your shoulders the whole of you standing

and you turn to me as though your feet were in mist

flowers birds same colors

as your breath

the flowers deliberately smell of you

and the birds make their feathers

not to fly but to

feel of you

—W. S. Merwin, “Islands”

Photography Credit Matthew Brandt

The Shakespearean insult generator:

A quick look into the science of zoning out.

One person’s plowing on mindlessly is another person’s heart of great literature; after all, “it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives” (#)

Tmesis

(via xkcd: Knights)

I’ve been playing a lot of chess lately, and who doesn’t appreciate the Battle of Agincourt?

theparisreview:

English Is Essentially __________.

“English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.”—Benct Philip Jonsson

….

“English is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls.”—Bryan Maloney

—A selection of “Essentialist Explanations.” Thanks to the Penguin Press for pointing out this gem.

My two favorite of the Paris Review’s own favorites. #subset

classicpenguin:

CLASSIC SMUT

While it seems as though Fifty Shades of Grey is at the summit of smut, classic authors have been up to no good for centuries before Anastasia Steele met Christian Grey. Here are some choice quotes from the most salacious pages of some favorite lascivious classics (plus some suggestions of other places to look…).

The Decameron by Boccaccio:

“She had no conception of the kind of horn that men do their butting with, and when she felt what was happening, it was almost as though she regretted having turned a deaf ear to Perricone’s flattery, and could not see why she had waited for an invitation before spending her nights so agreeably.”

(130 – much more in tales I.4, II.7, and III.10) 

 (even the very beginning of) Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence:

“She was perfectly dim and dazed, looking down in a sort of amazement at the rather tender nape of his neck, feeling his face pressing her thighs. In all her burning dismay, she could not help putting her hand with tenderness and compassion on the defenseless nape of his neck, and he trembled in a sudden shudder.”

(25-26 – more on pages 116, 125, 221-22, 246)

Fanny Hill  by John Cleland:

“Oh then! the fiery touch of his fingers determines me, and my fears melting away before the growing intolerable heat, my thighs disclose of themselves and yield all liberty to his hand; and now, a favourable moment giving my petticoats a toss, the avenue lay too fair, too open to be missed; he is now upon me.”

(110 – more on pages 62-3, 66-71, 76-8, 108-13, 118-20, 151-61… and pretty much every other page in the book)

Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch:

“Wanda smiled and sat down in the armchair. ‘Kneel here – here next to my chair.’

I obeyed.

‘Kiss my hand.’

I took hold of her small, cold hand and kissed it.

‘And my lips –’

In a surge of passion I flung my arms around the cruel, beautiful woman and covered her face, her lips, her bust with hot kisses, and, shutting her eyes as if in a dream, she responded with the same fire – until past midnight.”

(61 – more on pages 37, 41-5, 51, 61, and 114-15)

Madame Bovary by Flaubert (also available as an eBook):

“Any minute now she would appear…–in her flounced dress, her gold lorgnette, her thin little boors, all kinds of elegant refinements he had never had a taste of before, and with all the ineffable seductiveness of virtue yielding. The church, like a gigantic boudoir, was arranging itself around her…”

(213 – more on page 164)

Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos:

“It is not enough for me to possess her, I want her to surrender.”

(270 – more on pages 272, 312, 322, and 332)

Stung with Love, a collection of Sappho’s poetry:

“That impossible predator,

Eros the Limb-Loosener,

Bitter-sweetly and afresh

Savages my flesh.”

(21 – more on pages 35, 39, and 75)

Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana:

“Just as a galloping horse,

blind to all else by its pace,

is heedless of a ditch, post or trench

which may be there within its path,

so two lovers blind with passion

in the fray of intercourse

let loose their most intense impulses

and pay no heed to any danger.”

(58-9 – more on most pages, because it’s the Kama Sutra)

And, finally, Philosophy in the Boudoir by Marquis de Sade:

“Fuck – in a word – fuck! … continence is an impossible virtue, which nature, violated in its rights, instantly punishes with a thousand miseries.”

(33-4 – and more on pretty much every page)

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Classic Fridays | The world is full of classics. Every Friday, we close the week with one of our favorites.