Anonymous artist, Krishna Lifts Mount Govardhan, from a History of the Lord (Bhagavata Purana), c. 1760
by Douglas Penick
In the totality of world/self, as past, present, and future, as visible/invisible, known/ unknown, tangible/intangible, the minute and the immeasurable, as audible and inaudible, visible and invisible, all flow together, swirl, twist, mingle, separate, change one into another, dissolve, flow on. We are engulfed and dismembered and reshaped. There is a sharp cramp in my foot and my leg kicks outward. For a moment, I forget what I am doing here. In total, this may be stillness or ceaseless movement. Our decision or belief that the ultimate is stillness, or silence, or unknowable is simply an arbitrary moment when we seek one kind of continuity or another. Words and images make our ignorance approachable.
In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, it is maintained that time moves in continuous cycles of increase and decrease, expansion and contraction, waxing and waning. These cycles are divided in eras called the four Yugas. The first, the Satya Yuga is the longest and most ideal, a time of inner and outer beauty, purity and perfection. Desires and their fulfillment arise simultaneously. It said to last 1,728,000 years. Next is the Treta Yuga of 1,296,000 years. In this era, perfection begins to wane; its luster begins to tarnish. Longings become goals and paths. In the Dvapara Yuga that lasts 864,000 years and desires, intentions, actions and social classes become ever more distinct and varied. Finally, there is our era, the shortest, the Kali Yuga, the time of destruction lasting 432,000 years.
Now, in the Kali Yuga, desire and the objects of desire are separate. We struggle to join them, but the results are temporary. Time accelerates. What one generation believes, the next rejects. The concept of truth itself dies out. Cravings themselves are momentary, marked by anguish, longing, rage. Spiritual, moral, and ethical life degenerates. Material advantage becomes the only accepted value. Pollution, corruption, disease, degeneration, violence fill our minds and poison the world. The only virtue that still can be practiced is compassion. We are moving into the end of time. All will end before another cycle begins.
And indeed, we do feel some kind of end approaching. The tempo of mass destruction has increased. The last century saw unparalleled slaughter, destruction, dislocation: two world wars, internal slaughters in China, Russia, Cambodia, Uganda, the atom bomb, the holocaust, and innumerable smaller episodes of mass violence. Dread and unreality now pervade the mind stream of the age.[1]
VYASA (1500BC)
Vyasa’s name means ‘compiler’ in Sanskrit He was also known as Krishna Dvaipayana or Vedavyasa, and he lived abound 1500 BC. He was a legendary being, and his life was integral, as both a participant and author, to two of the greatest and most important texts in Indian civilization and world culture. He is the exemplar for all whose old age has opened a bridge to a completely new way of seeing.
Vyasa’s earliest achievement was to have edited the ancient Vedas and divided them into sections so that they would be more accessible for ordinary people. Then he wrote or wrote down that greatest of epics, The Mahabharata. Finally, in his very old age, he composed a very different kind of book, The Bhagavata Purana: a text which opens a kind of living bridge between the worlds of deities and humans.
The Mahabharata is a record of events in the eon that immediately preceded the Age of Destruction in which we now live and recounts the convoluted fatal struggles between two clan branches, both descended from Vyasa’s own grandchildren. Vyasa intervened sometimes unsuccessfully at many points in the action of The Mahabharata and thus was a progenitor of the principal actors, an actor himself. and author of this great collective history of humanity, a vast compilation which marked the very end of the era preceding our own.
When Vyasa completed the Mahabharata, he was exhausted and in despair. The Kali Yuga, the age of darkness and destruction had begun, but Vyasa did not die. With his four disciples and his son, Shuka, he retreated deep into the forest of Dandaka. He realized that the Vedas he had compiled would only benefit the priesthood, and that the Mahabharata might guide people to worldly understanding; neither would lead to liberation. Humanity would soon be lost in the darkness, greed, and confusion of the Kali Yuga. Accordingly. the world needed a kind of teaching never before encountered. So, Vyasa meditated, reflecting on all that had come before and all that would come afterwards. His mind moved between sleep and dream and hovered beyond life and death. He saw the Kali Yuga come to an end.
The world and all the forms of consciousness it supported dissolved into a roiling sea of atoms split apart, particles of momentary awareness, light waves without origin or end, flickering thought forms without reference. He saw wave upon wave of transitory shapes, figures, congruences, dissonances, attractions, repulsions, light and dark, vibrant, inert, multi-colored, colorless, warm cold.
Vyasa knew he was dissolving, as human being, as place, as reference point, in the surface of the Pralaya, the Sea of Dreams, dissolving back in the all-pervasive primordial moment before awareness began and after existence ended. He saw the Pralaya rising through the minds of beings in the dark age as forgetting washed away their learning, accomplishments, skills, wisdom, their memories altogether. Vyasa floated in this luminous, lightless void, this infinite expanse, neither space nor time. Here he saw the last dark age dissolve, and a new cosmos emerge. In this infinite expanse, he entered universe after universe, world after world, being after being, as each dissolved to reemerge in different form.
Over and over, he saw, deep within the Sea of Dreams, a faint form coalesces. Slowly, a dark blue light, glowing softly in the depth of the sea, slowly became the form of a baby, asleep and dreaming, cradled and rocking in the coils of an immense green serpent. And Vyasa saw emerging from this sleeping baby’s navel, emerging as its dream, a long emerald stem that gradually rose to the surface of the Pralaya. From its green calyx, over centuries, unfolded a vast thousand petalled pink lotus of shining light. From its pistil and stamen, a delirious scent of love filled the air. On the golden anthers swaying at the center of this lotus in full bloom, the cosmos, fresh, new, and pure, began again just as it had done thousands of times before and would do thousands of times again. Patterns and chaos alternated on both minute and cosmic scales. The radiant lotus petals fluttered softly, and music, inseparable from silence, filled the whole of space. Thus, Vyasa experienced primordial mind.
Then he saw radiant goddesses and gods from time immemorial, Vishnu and his avatars first amongst them, riding in their golden chariots across the shining sky; he saw their loves and battles and heard their wisdom, saw their beauty, their caprices, their paradises. He sat with the sages and danced with the devotees. He heard all the worlds speaking, singing, going to war, doing business, farming, weaving, gambling, drinking, feasting, having sex, giving birth, starving, stealing, dying. He saw how this world too would soon end. As Vyasa aged, all feeling, yearning, understanding, memory, appetites, visions became concentrated in his shrinking body. He was filled with an incommunicable intensity. Thus, the words of the Puranas covered the surface of his mind like the iridescent swirling on a soap-bubble.
Vyasa saw that just as a mayfly’s life is a human day, a human life is an instant in the life of a deity. He saw that all living beings were composed of trillions of other kinds of beings, each with its own lifespan. He saw millions of invisible ghosts and spirits each caught in its own fate. He saw that the living and the dead walked side by side without knowing it, and that ancient civilizations of insects, rodents, reptiles, fish coexisted unsuspected within human the human realm. There were immeasurable kinds of existences moving through life and death, unseen, unheard, unbeknownst to each other.
Vyasa spun together hundreds of thousands of moments in tens of thousands of strands. He wove the Bhagavata Purana so that those in the age of destruction could find their way to a life that was undistorted and uncorrupt. Here, for the first time, were written in one place the lives and deeds of the gods in their celestial domains, the accounts of the sages who bowed down to learn from them, and the history of all humanity’s accomplishments. Thus, these things were not lost. And in these texts, devotion offered paths of liberation. This was Vyasa’s final gift to a cosmos that would soon destroy itself.
Vyasa recited this text to his son, Shuka, whose name means parrot, and who had the ability to remember and repeat everything he had ever heard. At that time, a messenger came to Vyasa, telling him that King Parikśit, the last of the Pandava kings, the victors in the Mahabharata, was sitting by the River Ganges, waiting for his life to end. Vyasa sent Shuka to recite the Purana to this dying lord. Thus did the one who originated the epic seek to liberate the last of the family whose story it was. Shuka went to King Parikśit as he sat dying. The king had no more power, no control over anything or anyone anymore. His wishes and desires meant nothing. Now he could only sit, wait, and watch as the Ganges flowed by before him. He listened as Shuka began his recitation with these words:
This Purana, this Sun has risen for those who have been blinded in the age of Kali[2]
For seven days and nights without interruption, Shuka then recited the Bhagavata Purana, and King Parikśit listened without distraction. Others nearby wrote down the words. When the reading neared its end, Shuka sang:
Time, without end, is the destroyer,
Time, without beginning, is the creator.
Immutable,
Creating beings through other beings.
He destroys through death.
He destroys even the Lord of Death.[3]
And he concluded:
O king, now do not fear death.
Just as when a vase shatters,
Space that was within it does not change.
But merges with space
When a log burns,
Heat dissipates in air.
When a river joins the sea,
Water is inseparable from its vast expanse.
Birth, Life, Death are moments, words.
In old age and death, they lose their meaning
Completely.[4]
When all the Bhagavata Purana had been read to him, King Parikśit, last of his famous lineage, had surrendered completely. The was nothing to perpetuate or to end. He let himself go. His devotion to all appearance his love, his gratitude was total. Thus, the universe was exhausted. There was nothing left. This king died.
Shuka returned to the forest and lived alone. Vyasa waited for his son, but they never met again. Vyasa, grieved at being parted from the son he loved so dearly, he cried out: “Oh my son.” The trees, into whose deep shadows his son had vanished, whispered. Vyasa listened to these wordless sounds; he could no longer interpret them.
About the Author
Douglas Penick’s work has appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Publishers Weekly Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berfrois, 3AM, The Utne Reader and Consequences, among others. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and, on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. His novel, Following The North Star was published by Publerati. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. His book of essays , The Age of Waitingwhich engages the atmospheres of ecological collapse, was published in 2021 by Arrowsmith Press.
Postscript
This essay marks the ending of the lavish and endlessly provocative storehouse of riches known as BERFROIS. Russell Bennetts created and cultivated this journal with such acuity and such an amplitude of taste and spirit that, for 13 years, it has seemed to have a life of its own. It has been a kind of wish-fulfilling tree in the literary landscape and many writers and artists who were otherwise hidden away have found a place in its branches. As one such writer and one of Berfrois’ many many readers, it is somewhat painful to imagine the world in its absence.
Berfrois has only existed because of Russell’s vision and unstinting labor. Now that he turns his attention elsewhere, it will exist as an archive but will grow no further. It is to be hoped that the people who have been part of this splendid and brave venture, in ways large and small, will enjoy an ongoing kinship from their shared collaboration. Perhaps we will all find ways to create something new and unforeseen that will bring as much brilliance, insight and delight as Berfrois has done. And it is even more to be hoped that we can join Russell in any future enterprise he might devise.
Thus we close, extending to Russell our everlasting gratitude, admiration and enduring friendship.
These do not end now.
Thank you so very much.
Notes
[1] Douglas Penick, The Age of Waiting, Arrowsmith Press, 2020, pp. 16-17
[2] Bhagavata Purana tr. Ramesh Menon, Rupa Publications, 2007 .pp.1392-3 ; 1401,2)
[3] BhP. I.2.2- cited in E.H.R. Jarrow- Tales For The Dying, SUNYPress, 2003,,p.47;)BhP/. Jarrow- ibid,,p.58
[4] Adapted from Bhagavana Purnan,, Menon, op cit pp1409-1410; Shrimad Bhagavatam, Gunada Charan Sen, Munshiram Manoharlal1986,pp.190-191
Publication Rights
The essay was adapted from THE WINTER SUN, Douglas Penick pp.136-141.
Post Image
A Master of the First Generation after Manaku and Nainsukh, North India, Punjab Hills, An illustration to a Bhagavata Purana series: The Churning of the Ocean, c. 1790 (detail)
National Library of Ireland: Garda Directing Traffic, O’Connell Bridge, Dublin. 1963
by Jeremy Fernando
15:00
Sitting in the middle of a police station, you can’t help but wonder if these tales drifting their way to you are real. A couple confiding to each other how they both had hoodwinked their investigating officers — neglecting the fact that sound travels. Another who announces on her phone that she was sure she was being let off lightly because the cop might have been an ex. A man promising to forget another’s mug if he told not the fuzz what had happened.
For their sakes you hope ears have walls.
And that the cops drifting past are just drifters. Who seem oddly willing to leave you alone, sitting there — even as you were quite sure letting you be was the last thing that was going to happen. Though, as they wander, they did seem content to let you wonder, mostly about what you were doing there.
One of the things you were certainly wondering about was why there were always in pairs. Almost as if at any moment they would pirouette into a duel. With whom though, at least to you, remains a mystery. As were the fact that all of them looked pretty much twinned.
And how you even got there in the first place.
Well, a series of non-things;
that had taken on not only a significance but a life of their own, disjointed observations collected and collated.
All calling out to each other, making plans, plotting out their own plots — on a telephone
;
Still there, a quarter of your life is almost past, and you’re still not quite sure if it were strange and confused or confused because it were strange.
You were somewhat bored, but fighting against your boredom only makes you even more bored. Thankfully, sound travels.
Whilst you were sitting here, on the dock …
16:00
Desire is always assembled and fabricated, on a plane of immanence or of composition which must itself be constructed at the same time as desire assembles and fabricates.
~ Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet
The possibility of extraction and citational grafting belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written.
~ Jacques Derrida
16:27
You’ve often wondered: what is the quest of a question? Whether it has its own path — and if this were the same road on which the one who put forth the question is traversing.
Let alone how this question found its way into you; and what even possessed you to adopt it, to hitchhike on the same quest, on this adventure you imagine the question were on.
It might have come when they were questioning you.
Provoke respect did said questioner do —
though, throughout question time you were never quite sure exactly how respect would respond to being provoked.
All you knew, if something you felt could be called knowing, were that time is out of joint.
It certainly felt that all of time was seeping out of your joints. Which left you floating, not quite above yourself, but certainly a foot to the right.
See the blind man
Shooting at the world
Bullets flying
Ohh taking toll
Where for the first time you found the sound of what you thought were your voice terribly strange: almost as if by coming out of you it were no longer yours, that exiting you also meant excising itself from you. That it might well have been speaking not just out of turn, but somehow also turning against you.
After all, the questions were not yours, were not coming from you, were being lobbed at you — nor were they truly questions. Their course had already been set up: and they had already rounded the bend from being accusations dressed as complaints and had now donned the accessory of the mark of a question.
Attempting to mark you — to get your voice to mark yourself — as an accessory.
The other thought that came to you, that you felt coming to you, the other feeling that you thought, being: how strange it were to have to use your voice to speak to the veracity of something. As if sound brought something into being — that without this resounding, it hadn’t happened.
Remember me —
where Hamlet’s first act of betrayal, primordial moment of patricide, might well have been in scribbling on his pad; making a mark to make a remark to mommy and Claudius; consigning daddy’s alleged murder to the silence of a mark, to a reminder to defer speaking, to at least momentarily keep mum.
At the same time another thought you were feeling hit you: that you had to keep your body silent. That it were your corpus that was being put into the light, under the spotlight, in order to betray you.
That if it spoke, all it would be saying were, et tu …
Whilst you were tied to a kitchen chair, even as there was never actually anything holding you there. You, floating in an unbearable lightness.
Little wonder that at some point the voice of Djuna Barnes dripped into your ear: “I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further, and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not vanished.”
Not that which you it came to will ever be known to you.
You were both the first.
Sweet child in time
You’ll see the line
The line that’s drawn between
Good and bad
No wonder he were there, had to be there:
a third where the said and the unsaid come together, where sounds and silences haunt each other.
That face though, his face — a jawline from a time before talkies, one which smiled a tired smile, a smile which had no longer all that much to smile about. Which knew he had to smile in order to summon your communication.
Après tout, la communication implique toujours, vous implique dans, un communiqué.
18:03
Sweet child in time
You’ll see the line
The line that’s drawn between
Good and bad
See the blind man
Shooting at the world
Bullets flying
Ohh taking toll
If you’ve been bad
Oh Lord I bet you have
And you’ve not been hit
Oh by flying lead
You’d better close your eyes
Ooohhhh bow your head
Wait for the ricochet
~ Ian Gillan, Ian Paice, Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore, Roger Glover
Dostoyevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs. A young man sits in one.
~ Bruce Robinson
19:24
You might want to say something sir, came a voice from somewhat afar. The lights were very bright, almost blinding, though not enough to keep me from seeing myself. The room was whiter than you thought white could be. In better moments you would have chuckled vana.
Not particularly, though I suppose I should —
silently.
You who were so good with words, and then angels came — winged words with a tendency to take flight from you, even as they were leaving their mark on you.
Not that you didn’t want to say something, particularly something clever: but it’s not all that easy to escape the ropes of your own body, flesh, corpus. Maybe you were just trying to give something unspeakable a sound: after all, how is it even possible to refute a no thing, except with a triduum of negations — no, the no thing is nothing.
Leaving you with nothing other than the silence of sound.
Which be the danger Odysseus was well aware of: that it not the song that kills you — it merely lures you with its beauty, its sadness. All you have to do is to keep yourself from the water: that was what actually led you to the rocks.
For as Kafka continues to sing to us, “the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never. Against the feeling of having triumphed over them by one’s own strength, and the consequent exaltation that bears down everything before it, no earthly powers could have remained intact.”
And that the frown on Odysseus’ face — the very sign that signaled to his companions they could release him from the mast, the expression that was supposed to mark the fact that he was no longer under the spell of the Siren’s song — was due to the fact that all he heard were nothing, but their silence.
Which might well mean that even though he escaped that one time, the song is always also awaiting him. Or, even worse, that each time he sees water, the memory of the silence, of the song that could have been, haunts him.
Even as he might have tried to put it behind him, attempted to have forgotten.
After all, as John Irving tries to never let us forget, “your memory is a monster, you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you — and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
Where each song, every song, any song — or, even worse, any silence, every silence — is quite possibly their song.
Awaiting the moment, their time, to wash over him again.
Where perhaps the very sound of death — if she even makes a sound — is the moment when the rocks and water collide: after all, should the Sirens have bothered with Odysseus, at least in their usual way, that might well have been the last note he would ever hear.
Or dreamt.
20:15
Aletheia: ‘truth, truthfulness’,
from alethes ‘true’, literally ‘not concealing’,
which is a combination of a- ‘not’ & lethe ‘forgetfulness, oblivion’.
Lethe: one of the five river of Hades (whose
water when drunk causes forgetfulness
of the past), from the Greek lethe, literally
‘forgetfulness, oblivion’, which is related
to lethargos, ‘forgetful’, and lathre, ‘secretly, by
stealth’, lathrios, ‘stealthy’, lanthanein, ‘to be
hidden’.
Where even if what one remembers is true, contains a truth, aletheia, there might always be a certain forgetting, oblivion, lethe, inscribed within.
Aye, there’s the rub …
21:43
« Il s’agissait de changer en fichu une poésie », wrote Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno, about a line that came to him in a dream, in a language that was not theirs, not that any language can ever be yours.
It was about changing a poem into a scarf —
always already running the risk that the piece of cloth might well wrap itself around one, like a noose.
Which, if you were honest, might not all be that unwelcome: as the overwhelming feeling that enveloped you was a certain disappointment. With the world. Or, if you wanted to be a little more precise, with people, certain persons.
Especially ones who were too certain about their certainty — despite being certain that all they could be certain about is nothing. But perhaps, certainty never needed any referent nor correspondence. Were always only an article of faith.
Where perhaps, like in a David Wojnarowicz dream, the only salve was “the appearance of night in a room full of strangers, the maze of hallways wandered as in films.”
You think you might well have seen this film before; perhaps this time it might just be best to leave out the side door (through a parenthesis).
Exit music — for a film.
In your head, a buzzing sensation …
23:00
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language.
~ Paul Celan
If you are ‘walking in darkness’ do not try to make the sun rise by self-sacrifice, but wait in confidence for the dawn, and enjoy the pleasure of the night meanwhile.
~ Aleister Crowley
Postscript
Writing for Berfrois has been one of the highlights of my last decade and a bit, i’ll even say my writing-life … Rarely does one find a place, a space, that fully allows one to inscribe freely, to feel as though you are not writing-to-fit-in, writing-to-try-to-please, but just writing … and for which, for Russell and all of the lovely people who have been involved in Berfrois over the years, I will be eternally grateful.
About the Author
Jeremy Fernando reads, writes, and makes things. He works in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and art; and his, more than thirty, books include Reading Blindly, Living with Art, Writing Death, in fidelity, Tómate un paseo por el lado oscuro del camino, resisting art, Writing Skin, A Ghost Never Dies, and The feather of Ma’at. His writing has also been featured in magazines and journals such as Arte al Límite, Berfrois, CTheory, Cenobio, Entropy, Full Bleed, Poiesis, positions, Philosophy World Democracy, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Qui Parle, Testo e Senso, TimeOut, VICE, and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, amongst others; and has been translated into the Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Serbian. Exploring other media has led him to film, music, and the visual arts; and his work has been exhibited in Seoul, Vienna, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He has been invited to perform a reading at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in September 2016; and to deliver a series of performance-talks at the 2018, 2020, and 2022 editions of the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento in Buenos Aires, the latter at which he also curated a filmic omnibus entitled reading dreaming malaya. He is the general editor of Delere Press; curates the thematic magazine One Imperative; is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School; and the writer-at and co-creator-of the private dining experience, People Table Tales.
Image Rights
There are no known copyright restrictions on the article photograph. The post image is Michael: Skellig, Bantry, Ireland, 2017 (Unsplash).
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?
—Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937)
I
On the evening of December 2, 2020, around 10pm, I swallowed the last of what must have been multiple lifetimes’ worth of mouthsful of red wine. Unlike the partisans of AA, I am confident in saying that I will never again in my life consume alcohol. There are things I just don’t do anymore. I am no less morally certain, for example, that I will never go sky-diving. The version of me that believed a good life is constituted from such “fun” diversions as this died a long time ago. Far from having a “bucket list”, I now understand that the proper conduct of the second half of life is to approach something like what the Tibetan Buddhists call tukdam, to do less and less, but only to sit and meditate, and to breathe once every century or so, so that by the time you actually die there will be scarcely any change to register. I can picture a future not so far from now when, to the question, “Is he alive or dead?”, the only fitting response will be: “Who can say?” You might be able to jolt me into some new movement, like a fly removed from its long sleep in a jar of talc that flicks its wing in reluctant palingenesis (the phenomenon of being “born again”, which by the law of nomen est omen has long tricked me into thinking that Sarah Palin must be destined for a comeback); then again you might not. So, yeah, sky-diving’s out, along with drinking. The version of me that drank died two years ago. We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of his death.
I have been, some might say, irrationally vigilant these past two years. In the summer of 2021 we were in Oostende, and I ordered a marmite full of mussels. When they arrived, I tasted one and sensed that the broth had a white-wine base. I spit it out and refused to eat the rest, even though presumably all of the alcohol had been burned off in cooking. A month or so ago I bought a package of pomegranate seeds from Monoprix. When I got home and tasted them, they seemed funny. They had an unmistakable fizz, a kind of spirituousness that told me they were in some early stage of fermentation. I spit them out too.
But what a strange quality that was, and one that I used to know so well! Were they rotting, or were they just now beginning to achieve their perfection? Had they gone bad, or were they just now coming to life? This is the paradox of fermentation — it is the moment when organic matter both goes bad and comes to life. It is the sublation of life and death, the state of living stuff that testifies equally to its mortality and its vitality. To be vital just is to be mortal — that’s an iron law, and fermentation illustrates it by displaying both of these faces of earthly being, perfectly, at once.
II
Not surprisingly, we human beings are not the only ones who are into it. There is a steady stream of news stories telling us of pigs that steal campground booze and become belligerent, monkeys that descend onto the beaches of ClubMed to swipe Mai-Tais. The clickbait writers always treat these events as sheer comedy, as occasions for the condescending alliteration that always accompanies animals in the media (“pugnacious porkers”, etc.). But these reports also testify to the depth of the problem: drunkenness is not some deviation of decadent human culture, but is part of who we always have been. One prominent theory finds the roots of human alcoholism in the frugivory of our primate ancestors, to whom over time natural selection gave a particular preference for fruits with high ethanol content. Even if refined traditions of fermentation only began with the agricultural revolution, it seems likely that opportunistic use of fermented foods was part of our suite of dietary practices already in prehistory. After surpluses of grain, fruit, and honey became a part of social life, beer, wine, and mead followed almost automatically, and indeed there is at least some evidence that these beverages were a driving cause, rather than a fortuitous consequence, of the radical reorganization of human societies around 10,000 years ago into fixed settlements surrounded by agricultural fields. We sedentized, the theory goes, in order to stay drunk all the time.
When jaguars gnaw the quinine from the bark of a red cinchona tree, and perhaps even when reindeer seek out mushrooms on the tundra with a high psilocybin content, we may grant that they are pursuing rational zoopharmacognostic strategies for living their best lives. It is good to avoid malaria, and it is good to see the universe crack open and reveal its secrets, even if only to your small reindeer brain. But what is good about getting drunk?
The Cambridge Platonist Henry More wrote about “the stupid, drunken life of matter”, evidently pairing these two adjectives as synonyms, but also, more importantly, describing the condition of matter itself —inert, passive, dead, in every way the opposite of vital spirit— as akin to what we experience when drunk. This is strange, and again attests to the paradox I tasted in the pomegranate seeds, and that even the monkey probably detects in its fermented nectarine: you consume the spirits because they seem on first encounter to raise your own spirits, to mingle with them and to give you an extra dose of life, but then you quickly realize that this was a false hope and what they have in fact done is brought you closer to the condition of dead matter. This is really just a way of making the very familiar point, iterated countless times in that strange hybrid class known as “Drivers Ed / Sex Ed” that so many of us had to take in American public high schools (parallel parking in the fall semester, condoms in the spring), which also included a bit of “Alcohol Ed” in the scenes of drunk-driving tragedies seared into our brains while watching Red Asphalt (they would have done better to just call the whole year-long sequence “Death Ed”): another way of making the point, I was saying, that alcohol, notwithstanding how fun it is, is technically a depressant.
We can at least understand the “selective” benefit of fermentation when we place it alongside other culinary traditions such as curing and pickling. All of these are techniques for making your food a bit bad, or pushing it right up to the boundary of inedibility, in order to keep the flies and microorganisms away so that you may have it for yourself throughout the season of scarcity or over the course of a long voyage. Beer might be “unhealthy”, but if your choice is between that and the water from a pond covered with lily-pads, then take the beer. Alcohol is surprisingly similar to salt in this regard: it is easy to see how it can help to keep us alive, when times are hard, even if it helps to kill us when times are easy (or hard, but in another way).
Georg Ehret, from Plantae Selectae, c. 1750
If all fermentation techniques are continuous with what we have always done, distillation is another story altogether. It is the business not of the farmer, but of the chemist. Its apparatus is the same as that of the alchemical laboratory. As with science in general, its motive is fundamentally perverse, and Promethean: to intrude into natural processes and make them do what we will them to do. The resulting product of alcoholic distillation is analogous to all the other substances the alchemists sought to squeeze out of the natural bounty of the earth: the purest and most rarefied essences of things that they called “spirit of zinc”, “spirit of lead”, “burning spirit of vinegar”. “Spirit of potato” does perhaps draw out some essence latent in the dull root itself, but everyone knows that vodka is no more “like” a potato than crack is like a coca leaf, or a Gobstopper is like a stalk of sugarcane. You keep pushing nature to give you more of what it has, in higher doses, and eventually it breaks, and gives you something with a causal history rooted in the thing you started with and the thing you wanted more of, but with an opposite and hostile nature. And then we’re so horrified by what we’ve produced that we come up with euphemisms to ironize and conceal its true power: “eau de vie”, or “vodka” — “little water”.
We have some evidence of distillation from classical India and from the Roman Empire, but in both cases the purpose seems to have been mostly alchemical, and at times also extending out to include innovations in the art of perfumery. In the late tenth century al-Zahrawi describes a method for producing what the Latins will call aqua ardens, or “burning water”, but distillation as an art of beverage-making seems to have emerged only in the thirteenth century, in China, and it is in the early fifteenth century that we have the first mention in Europe of Branntwein — which we render in English as “brandy”, but which is literally “burnt wine”. It seems to have been the emergence of globalized trade routes over the next few centuries that precipitated a new demand for fortified wine and other forms of alcohol that could travel across the ocean, packing as much potential drunkenness into the smallest spaces possible.
Hard liquor, in this light, is just one of the many scourges imposed on us with the rise of global capitalism, a centuries-long epidemic, a legal poison, normalized, for the most part, by the efficiency of its cultural laundering — cocktail recipes, jokes, advertisements, the eternal promise of “fun”. When I was thirteen a bottle of this medieval alchemical potion, in the form of bottom-end Smirnoff vodka, came into my secret possession. Convinced that it could not be that bad, since I had seen it in advertisements alongside Swiss fondue sets in a ski lodge and in other such happy settings as these, I drank it. I woke up some time later covered in vomit, and somehow naked. This was perhaps the first time I died.
I haven’t had any hard liquor for many years now. I can recall some ridiculous “early career” jaunts, conferences in places where you’re supposed to feel free to “cut loose”, to “let it all hang out”, getting shit-faced on local varieties of moonshine (самогон, they call it in some of the places my conferences took me, literally “self-fire”, the burnt water you make in your bathtub), with academic philosophers who thought they were living the good life, singing songs together in different languages, waking up with blood matted in our hair and no memory of how it got there. That ended by my early thirties, but what remained, day after day and year after year, was the red red wine.
Living in France gave me an extra layer of cover for the habit. It’s the good life, after all! I have been told more than once over the past two years that the French authorities would do well to reject my currently pending bid for citizenship in view of my non-drinking alone. But the truth is my wine habit was always extremely un-French. I only ever pretended to listen, and sometimes didn’t even pretend, when some wine merchant was droning on about terroir and so on. I never believed for a second that one wine might be more appropriately “paired” with a given dish than another. I never believed that any wine could have hints of “berry” or “persimmon” or “beeswax”, or, if it could, that this would have any relevance to my desire to drink it. Nothing was worse than sharing a bottle with others over dinner — before even realizing what had happened, I would glance around the table and see the other glasses at exactly the same level at which the waiter had poured them, and then my own, covered with fingerprints as if it had been mauled and molested, completely empty. I could never tell if I was furious at them, or at myself, for being built so differently; but furious I was. Then the waiter would come back and refill everyone’s glasses, as if my alien companions, who hadn’t yet taken a sip, needed more. I grew to hate restaurant drinking, and even before our first lockdowns had in any case become a practitioner of what the Finns call kalsarikännit — “pantsdrinking”, as in, underwear, as in, drinking in a setting where you are permitted to remain in your undies; as in, home. I always preferred to get my wine anonymously, at Franprix, rather than at Le Repaire de Bacchus or some other speciality shop where I would have to endure the oenological orations of the salesman. I probably learned more about wine from my Grandpa Von than I ever did from any Frenchman — Grandpa Von, who liked to take his enormous cardboard box full of Ernest and Julio Gallo rosé up on the roof with him as he worked for hours in the hot sun, mixing the tar, replacing the shingles, until one day he he fell off and got a whole mouthful of terroir.
III
I find I am not yet done bemoaning our society’s cult of “experience”.
Is any product of bourgeois consumer ideology more noxious than the “bucket list”? At just the moment a person should be adjusting their orientation, in conformity with their true nature, to focus exclusively on the horizon of mortality, they are rudely solicited one last time, before it’s really too late, for a final blow-out tour of the amusement parks and spectacles that still held out some plausible hope of providing satisfaction back in ignorant youth, when life could still be imagined to be made up of such things. “Travel is a meat thing”, William Gibson wrote, to which we might add that the quest for new experiences in general is really only fitting for those whose meat is still fresh.
But our economic order cannot accept this. Capitalism obscures from view first the meaning of life, which properly understood is a preparation for death, and then it obscures the meaning of death, which properly understood is the all-surrounding horizon of a mortal life. Instead it portrays life as an opportunity to go to amusement parks and accumulate novelty foam hats and so on, which is silly enough, but then, at the end of it all, it has the audacity to portray death itself as an event of life, at which you would do best to arrive with all the right “souvenirs” (what a word: memory congealed into artifact!), all the right photos of the Grand Canyon or your Kenyan safari or whatever stored for you in your personal space in the “cloud”… stored for whom, now? For what? I will not venture any dogmatic claims here about the existence or non-existence of an afterlife, whether conceived as infinite duration or as a state outside of time. What I will say, with as much certainty as I have about anything, is that death is not an event of life, it is not something you pass through and then keep going, and it certainly is not going to matter to you, when you’re dead, if you ever rode a camel or not. It might matter whether you loved another person with all your heart, whether you attained any lucidity about your mortal condition or only lived like a puffed-up fool (you will certainly not be riding your camel through the eye of any needle); it will not matter whether you fed a watermelon to a hippopotamus.
The bucket list is only a final swan-song in an order that keeps most of us in its thrall our whole lives, in which we are expected to ascribe the same value to the collection of new experiences at every age, rather than seeing experience as something whose role in life evolves. Ironically, the uniform value placed on experiences at every age suggests there is nothing really transformative about them at any age — if there were, then it would be difficult to understand the urgency of continually replenishing your stock of them. How many hot-sauces do you need to try, really? In how many different accents, in how many open-air markets around the world, do you need to hear someone say: “Yes please, you like, I make special deal”? At some point, you get the idea. You figure it out. You even start to worry that it’s all staged, not just the sales pitch, not just the market, but everything, for no matter how many different paths you take, no matter how many side-quests you go on, it all keeps coming out the same.
At the same time as I was writing a long and angry philippic against the “simulation argument” a year or so ago, my depression was dictating to me a conclusion exactly opposite to the one I was publicly pursuing: the world is a simulation, it said. It might once have been real but is not anymore. My philosophy colleague Kieran Setiya has written a very nice book about midlife, but as far as I can tell he hasn’t fully comprehended just how bad the crisis of this period can get. For me it has been not just a realization that I already am who I am and will never be anything radically different, that I’ve used up most of the becoming allotted to me. At its worst it has been the realization that I already am nothing, a ghost stalking the world.
This is how it was for me in the first year or so after I quit drinking — which was the solution to one problem, but the beginning of another. For most of 2021 I was indescribably depressed. I tried to describe it to a psychiatrist anyway. “I think I’m a ghost,” I said. “I mean I literally think I’m the ghost of a person who used to live but no longer does.” He didn’t seem to believe me. “I think I died in March, 2020,” I said. “My body was stored in one of the refrigerated trucks outside of Brooklyn General Hospital.” He asked me if I really believe that. “I guess not,” I replied. “But it seems true.”
It would have been more correct to say that I had felt as if the world itself died, and I was still stuck in it. The pandemic, the lockdowns, the sudden collapse of all of the meanings that had kept my life propped up — they were fictions all along, it turned out, but they managed to keep me going, until everything changed. Having already been a non-drinker for several months upon arriving in New York in the summer of 2019, at the beginning of the spring lockdown the first thing I did was to order $600 worth of cheap wine from our neighborhood liquor store on Flatbush Ave. That didn’t last very long, and we replenished it, as best we could, amid the sirens, and the uncertainty, and the refrigerated trucks. Back in Paris by the end of that summer, I kept up with the drinking routine for a few months longer, and then it stopped. How did it stop? I can only invoke a variation of the anthropic principle to account for this transformation: if it hadn’t stopped, I wouldn’t be here writing about it.
Edvard Munch, In the Tavern, 1890 (detail)
IV
Drinking is, in the end, a vain effort to break out of all the immanence and predictability I have attempted to describe, and to secure a bit of transcendence. This is the same thought Dean Martin expressed dimly when he said he feels sorry for people who don’t drink. “When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” It’s hard to say whether the feeling in question is “good”, but it is one that can move a person outside of himself, or give a person a dim glimpse of the parallel existence of another order of reality, which overlaps this one and charges it with a quality the sober cannot know. Or at least this is what Dino and other drunks tell themselves. In fact the experience is not all that unique — music, for example, is particularly good at disclosing the reality of heaven, or at least of what you might take to be heaven when you’re listening to music.
I never liked the French habit of referring not to “depression”, but to “a depression” —“Il a subi une dépression”—, as if this were the sort of thing that could be counted. To say that one may experience “a depression” in life is somewhat like saying that a river may have “a water” flowing in it. And yet I can’t deny that there was something punctuated, événementiel, about what I lived through for the year or so after I quit drinking. As I see it now, what happened is that I was cut off from my long-familiar source of hope, however meager, for transcendence, and was dismally under-practiced in detecting other sources. I got better at that, am still getting better at it.
Yet life now is in certain respects undeniably “less”. It is with the subtraction of alcohol that my new disposition to experience in general took hold of me. I no longer live, as Czesław Miłosz put it, “under orders from the erotic imagination” (he managed to stay in that mode well into his nineties, at least if he is telling the truth in his poetry — chapeau to him, but I personally have no idea how that is possible). To put this another way, I no longer see the world as frothing with possibility, as “open”. That’s what it is, I think, to survive past midlife: your life is not done, yet it is, as we say, “a done deal”.
Can it still, under such circumstances, hold out the hope of being “good”? Hell yes, life is good. It’s a gift, it’s a miracle, &c. And it is surely a blessing to live long enough to learn to stop searching in vain for sources of transcendence in the common substances of this world, however rarefied they are made, however spirit-like, by the long art of men.
About the Author
Justin E.H. Smith is an author and professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, will appear in 2021 from Princeton University Press.
Guilhem Vellut: Collège de France, Paris, 2016 (CC)
by Stuart Elden
In May 1940, the month of the invasion of France by Germany, a short book by the comparative mythologist and linguist Georges Dumézil was published. Entitled Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-Representations of Sovereignty, copies became very hard to find, and after the war Dumézil reedited the text with some changes. That revised edition appeared in March 1948. Forty years later, two years after Dumézil’s death, this second edition was translated into English by Derek Coltman with Zone books, though it has become hard to find and available only in libraries, pirated pdfs, or rather expensive second-hand copies. In 2023, the translation will become available again, in a new critical edition with HAU books.
Dumézil had studied languages at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, served as an artillery officer in the First World War, and taught briefly in a lycée and in Warsaw before undertaking his doctoral work. His two theses were published in 1924. Repeatedly advised his career lay outside France, he spent a formative few years in Istanbul and Uppsala, teaching literature and religious studies. With a remarkable gift for languages he would add several to his repertoire over his years of travel, later remarking that for him, a grammar was like a novel. Claude Lévi-Strauss once claimed that Dumézil only had to read a 100-page bilingual text to understand the language. Dumézil returned to France in 1933 and taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études until his retirement. He was elected to a chair at the Collège de France in 1949, and to the Académie française in 1979.
Dumézil would do important research on languages, particularly of the Caucasus, and is acknowledged as one of the key reasons why the Ubykh language was preserved before the death of its final native speaker. Several of his publications, across a sixty-year career, would attest to the importance languages had to his work. But it is in his writing in comparative mythology that we find his most significant legacy. He would come to reject much of his earliest work, and dates his significant breakthrough to 1938, when he realised that many different mythic, social and religious traditions could be understood as divided along three broad lines. This was his famous trifunctional analysis.
The first function of sovereignty encompassed priests and kings; the second, warriors; and the third, producers or farmers. In Vedic India, the king and brahmin occupy the first position; the warrior class, kshatriya, the second; and the farmers and producers of the vaishya group the third. The three varna, sometimes known as castes, have parallels in several different traditions, notably Roman legends, with the flamen, the military, and the farmers. These social divisions are paralleled in the division between gods in Vedic, Roman, or Norse mythology: Varuna-Indra-Nasatya; Jupiter-Mars-Quirinus; Odhinn-Thor-Freya. Other traditions within the Indo-European language family relate to this in different ways, but broadly the first function is sovereign, the second martial, the third productive.
In this work, Dumézil is building on linguistic analyses which had analysed surviving languages to reconstruct their lost ancestor, generally called Proto-Indo-European. Although there are no surviving texts in that language, through the nineteenth and early twentieth-century much work had been done to reconstruct its vocabulary, and elements of its grammar. In mythology a related approach could be taken – the parallels between religious and social structures of different peoples cannot be dismissed as innate to all humans, or the product of contact and borrowing, but might be able to tell us something about their shared pre-historic ancestors. The idea of a distinct Indo-European people is far from uncontroversial, especially when characteristics of this people are supposed, and in the mid-twentieth-century such ideas often relate to a problematic racial ideal. Dumézil is not entirely immune from such a criticism, as some of his detractors have pointed out.
Mitra-Varuna approaches the first of the three functions, but its most important contribution is to recognise that the operation of sovereignty is itself divided. Building on a crucial 1938 article “La Préhistoire des flamines majeurs”, Dumézil shows how the Vedic and Latin names for a king, rāj- and rēg-, are etymologically related, and so too are the Vedic and Latin names for a priest, brahman and flamen. He argues that these are not two distinct claims, but two parts of the same claim. In these different traditions, there is a divide between the king and the priest as two aspects of sovereignty. He finds such a contrasts in the Roman gods, Jupiter and Dius Fidius, the mythic early kings Romulus and Numa Pompilius, in Norse mythology with Odinn and Tyr, and in the Vedic pair which gives this book its title, Varuna and Mitra. Sovereignty can be terrible, explosive power; or legal contractual obligations. Jupiter is the god who hurls thunderbolts, Dius Fidius the god of oaths. Or as Dumézil says in the book: “Mitra is the sovereign under his reasoning aspect, luminous, ordered, calm, benevolent, priestly; Varuna is the sovereign under his attacking aspect, dark, inspired, violent, terrible, warlike”.
The book Mitra-Varuna takes this initial insight, and explores it through a series of studies of contrasting pairs of gods, mythic figures or concepts, sovereignty in its worldly, juridical form, and in its magical, powerful one. He ranges across Roman history, Norse myths, and Indian and Iranian theology, to more limited analysis of the Greeks, Welsh and Irish. The second edition keeps most of the material from the first edition, with some additional notes to his own developing work and more recent scholarship, and some amended passages. He would continue to work on themes in this book throughout his career, notably in his masterwork Mythe et Epopée which appeared in three volumes between 1968 and 1973, and in Les Dieux souverains des Indo-Européens in 1977. Only parts of Mythe et Epopée are available in English translation – almost of the second volume across three English books, The Stakes of the Warrior, The Plight of the Sorcerer, and The Destiny of a King, and much of the third in Camillus.
Dumézil was a significant figure in the career of Michel Foucault, on whom I have recently completed a four-volume intellectual history with Polity books. Dumézil recommended Foucault to the University of Uppsala for the post he had held twenty years before, and would continue to support his career for the next thirty years. Foucault also acknowledges the importance of Dumézil’s ideas in many places, notably in his lecture courses. In the 1976 course published as ‘Society Must be Defended’, for example, Foucault makes uses of the twofold analysis of sovereignty Dumézil had advanced in Mitra-Varuna and developed in other works. Dumézil’s importance to other, better-known figures such as Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Émile Benveniste and Jean-Pierre Vernant is significant, as these and others would frequently attest.
As part of my new research project on Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France, I was keen to try to bring some of Dumézil’s work back into circulation. Mitra-Varuna seemed a good place to start. Zone did not want to republish the text, but HAU were enthusiastic about the idea. Rather than just reprint Derek Coltman’s fine translation, they liked my idea of a critical edition, comparing the two French editions of the text. That was a slow and painstaking task, but a good way to get to know the text in detail. In this new edition, smaller variants from the first edition are translated in endnotes, two longer passages in appendices. I took on the task of checking, completing and sometimes correcting all of Dumézil’s references, both to primary and secondary sources. He references texts in a wide range of languages, and Coltman had, quite understandably, simply copied these references over. But checking a few showed there were some errors, many somewhat cryptic abbreviations, and many references to classical sources were to older versions of texts, no longer widely available. Doing this slow labour opened a revealing window into how Dumézil worked, and consulting some of his archival papers at the Collège de France further illuminated that approach. I hope the work with the references will make the text more accessible to readers, removing some of the obstacles within the text so people can engage with the ideas.
I also wrote a substantial introduction to the text, expanding on many of the points touched upon here, including the background to the text’s writing, the changing situation between the 1940 and 1948 French editions, and something of the text’s arguments. I also discuss in much more detail the political controversies around Dumézil’s work, and the criticisms made by figures including Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln. Dumézil certainly had traditional, if not reactionary political views, and, for a short period in the 1920s was close to Action française. Other aspects of his work are criticised for their political connotations, including the idea of a hierarchical society, or his emphasis on kings and warriors without equal focus on the third function. In this book he references the work of Stig Wikander, Otto Höfler, Mircea Eliade and Jan de Vries, all problematic figures in Europe’s intellectual history. The political is a highly charged aspect of his legacy.
In his 1943 book Servius et la fortune, Dumézil suggests that he had come across the problem he addresses there at the crossroads where four paths meet. These paths were his previous work on the conception and practice of royal power, particularly the contrast between its terrible and benevolent forms; on social order, and in particular the tripartite division; on the beginnings of Rome, especially its early kings, institutions, and religion; and studies of religious, juridical, and political vocabulary. Georges Canguilhem picks up on this claim and in his 1967 review of Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, The Order of Things, suggests that “by virtue of their meeting at the Dumézil intersection, these four paths have become roads.” Early steps along all these paths can be found in Mitra-Varuna. I therefore suggest that it is an entirely appropriate book to re-introduce Dumézil’s pioneering, though undoubtedly controversial, work to Anglophone audiences.
Utagawa Hiroshige, Wind Blown Grass Across the Moon, c. 1850
by Douglas Penick
I
Here, in the rolling expanse between past and future, we must find our way. Inevitably, we’ve already begun but do not know where things lead. Our uncertainty extends in silence and in every direction, through time, through many futures, pasts and presents.
Imagine. There are, they say, as many Buddhas and Buddha realms as there are atoms. There are as many forms of enlightenment and as many paths as there are sentient beings, included micro-organisms, insects and jellyfish. But how to find that path which is both unique to one self and common to all? There is, as must be, a primordial expanse before there was wisdom, ignorance, ground or path or completion, time or space.
So the stories the gods tell each other are not dependent on words or memory. In the telling, the gods convey the expanse of beginning, transformation, dissolution. Language is the first light. The stories they tell are what, for others, are change and time. Thus, for human beings, the stories of the gods are perceived as life and death, love, loss, comedy, war, gain, empires, family living, architecture, plague, tragedy. For the gods, these stories are unending music.
Humans so often look for a beginning here.
Shortly after time started, the first story tells about a man and a woman living quietly beside the Sea of Japan. They fell in love. Their love began like a breeze, expanded, solidified, became contoured into swales, fields of swaying salt grass, streams bordered by cat-tails and clattering reeds. The love these two shared became a broad rolling plain spreading between two cliffs. Though with the seasons, waters ebbed and flowed, plant life grew and died, the rhythms of their love were constant. They each became a towering pine, rooted in cliffs that seemed far apart, but which were inseparable in the space that appeared between them. Their beings enfolded all that lived around them.
Then, in a later time, Emperors created two great collections of the nation’s poems. Even now, everyone knows that these collections are the inner being of the ancient lovers. The two assemblies of poems have arisen from the old ones’ heart-breath, the continuity of their love, their knowledge of sorrow, and their longing, endless longing.
To the wanderer, these two may still appear as twisted pines on distant cliffs. Both may still be sometimes seen as a very small old man, a very small old woman, humming quietly as they sweep the ground beneath the storm-battered trees.
II
It is our habit to look at the moment that now emerges in the light of what has passed. It does not seem possible to do otherwise. Such looking at the new in the fading light of the old is what we call knowing, as we format wordless arisings in the familiar, the known. We know what is lost, but we do not know what is being born. We do not recognise things in their beginning.
Suddenly, as traffic abates, airplanes stop shaking the sky, a sense of being outside a self. A disjunction in the flow of the familiar, of words.
The cars speed by past the golf course across the highway in the summer sun. Shiny-bright purposeful objects, wheel spinning in a blur, purposes numerous but unknown. It is flying past, alive even when concealed in these manufactured forms.
What we call life is the moment beginning, utterly unknown, beginning as a vector to a form we cannot know. The beginning, over and over beginning, beginning without a rest or resting place. Beginning now and now and now.
The forms achieved are momentary; the understanding derived from forms impermanent.
“I believe,” Hélène Cixous wrote, “that one can only begin to advance along the path of discovery, the discovery of writing or anything else, from mourning and in the reparation of mourning. In the beginning the gesture of writing is linked to the experience of disappearance, to the feeling of having lost the key to the world, of having been thrown outside. Of having suddenly acquired the precious sense of the rare, of the mortal. Of having urgently to regain the entrance, the breath, to keep the trace.”[1]
And so, it is with swift and unquestionable presence, from the world beyond things, that a goddess enters the world of things. Spontaneously, the universe starts. “Her feet are lotus flowers; they are sacred; they are blessings. They are redness, coolness, brightness, fragrance, and all. If you can perceive the inner light of the sun, you can see these lotus flowers bloom. Who is the sun, you may ask, that brings this flower into bloom? It is destiny that these radiant footsteps follow me. The goddess will follow whoever is devoted to her. Her beauty, the intensity of her footsteps, are a great flood; they carry the poet away, they moisten the heart of the devotee.”
On the banks of the Ganges, the ancient poet’s eyes looked at a world as wide and deep as could be imagines. His gaze moved from the Goddess’s feet to her head. Her beauty is only one of her powers. “Her feet,” the poet whispered “are inside my eyes.”
“Oh,” called the poet, his heart filled with longing, “Come and stay in my eyes, in my skin, on my tongue, in my nose, inside my heart.”
“The river named Beauty,” he sang, “has spread across my chest. Adorned with sparkling eddies, it’s turbulent currents narrow and part. You are my chest, waist legs. Beauty descended from the mountain peaks at the top of my head, descended in roaring rivulets, spread, whirled, rushed and became me and all the world.”[2]
Then, wisdom, written teaching and ceremony, began with these sounds:
OM BHŪR BHUVAH SVAH TAT SAVITUR VARENYAM BHARGO DEVASYA DHIMAHI DHIYO YO NAH PRACODAYĀT
Om,
O Earth, O Expanse, O Sky
May we reflect the radiance of desire,
The intensity of the primordial sun,
The life of every thought.
This was written more than 3,000 years ago. No one knows its origin.
It is called the Gāyatrī mantra. Its meter is the goddess, Gāyatrī herself.
It is itself the goddess. Gāyatrī.
She opens the portal through life, death, form and formlessness. She is herself the portal of chaos. (3)
Whether we name her or not, whether we call on her or not, she draws us on.
IV
Only the act of love – the limpid star-like abstraction of feeling – recaptures the unknown moment, the instant hard as crystal and vibrating in the air and life is this untellable instant, larger than the event itself: during love the impersonal jewel of the moment shines in the air, love the strange glory of the body, matter made feeling in the trembling of the instants – and the feeling is both immaterial and so objective that it seems to happen outside your body, sparkling on high joy, joy is time’s material and the essence of the instant.
– Clarice Lispector [4]
V
“He’s in the emergency room. Can you come? He’s in a coma,” my friend’s partner of many years is on the edge. She is inhaling loudly.
And soon I’m there looking down at my friend whose neck and head are in a brace, a white plastic respirator tube in his mouth. His skin is reddish. White hair pokes out from the head cradle which keeps him immobile. “He got food poisoning, then in the night he must have fallen. I found him on the floor. There was a lot of blood.”
“Do they know what’s wrong?”
“Maybe another seizure. I hope it’s not a stroke. They’ve done scans and an x-ray to see if he’s broken his hip. God, that would be a disaster.” She turns and takes his hand. “We’re all here, honey. We’re rooting for you. Please don’t die.” She turns back to me. “It’s an induced coma until they see if he can breathe without the machine. They’ve done the tests. We should know soon.”
She is weeping silently, trying not to sob. The ER nurses move about efficiently. I am aware of my friend, now. It’s almost as if I can feel him moving between realms, apprehensive, a bit curious, aware that there might be other possibilities.
The next day, he has been taken off the ventilator. His voice is low and gravelly, a little hard to understand. He motions me to come close. He begins. “The veils are very… thin” He shrugs, gives a little smile.
Notes
[1] Hélène Cixous – ‘From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History: Pathway of Writing’ in The Hélène Cixous Reader, 1994 (Psychology Press)
[2] Adapted from Suganya Anandakichenin – ‘Drowning in the Beauty of the Lord’ in Cracow Indological Studies, Vol. XXI No1
[3] Adapted from Dominick Haas – Dissertation Proposal: ‘GĀYATRĪ, Mantra and Mother of the Veas’, Universität Wien, June 2019
[4] Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva, 2012 (New Directions)
About the Author
Douglas Penick’s work has appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Publishers Weekly Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berfrois, 3AM, The Utne Reader and Consequences, among others. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and, on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. His novel, Following The North Star was published by Publerati. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. His book of essays , The Age of Waitingwhich engages the atmospheres of ecological collapse, was published in 2021 by Arrowsmith Press.
Gerd Alberti and Uwe Kils: Compound eye of the Antarctic krill Euphausia superba, c. 2005 (CC)
by Justin E.H. Smith
Towards a Planet-Wide Census of Legs, Eyes, and Minds
What! I say, my foot my tutor?
—Prospero, The Tempest
0.
One of the last flashes of creativity I saw before I deactivated my Twitter account, was a question launched by another user (whom I can’t locate now, without Twitter, but to whom I say “thanks”). “Are there,” this user asked, “more eyes or legs in the world?”
To be honest I’ve been thinking about little else for the past few weeks since I encountered this “prompt” (as American undergraduates now say, I’ve learned, of what I still call “paper topics”). Nor is this only the burrowing and obsessing of a curiosity that does not know when to quit. As I am about to show you, I think this question has profound implications for our understanding of certain fundamental matters at the heart of our ongoing debates about scientific realism. In particular, while I’m still on the fence about eyes, I don’t think legs, strictly speaking, exist, and I think the non-existence of legs offers an instructive illustration of the limits of the “manifest image” of the world. Moreover, I think this difference has vast consequences for our understanding of certain prejudices that run throughout the history of philosophy. For example, it becomes clear why René Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” sounds like a serious and laudable stab at explaining the nature of our existence, while Thomas Hobbes’s retort, “Why not: ‘I walk, therefore I am’?” sounds like facetious trouble-making.
In a Hobbesian spirit, then, let us make some trouble.
1.
So, are there more eyes or legs in the world? Somehow, my parochial mind first interpreted the question to be one about human beings alone. We are bipedal, and we typically have two eyes, so there would seem to be a near-equivalence.
Presuming we do not follow Aristotle, who in On the Soul establishes that a blind eye is no more a real eye than is an eye sculpted in wood, since it is the function rather than the arrangement of the matter that makes the organ the organ it is, we can count as “having two eyes” any person who has all or most of that gelatinous substance in the eye socket in virtue of which the sighted are able to see. Aristotle’s reasoning is that “if the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul”, while if you were in the presence of a dead animal, say, your defunct dog, you would be abusing language if you were to keep insisting, in pointing at the cadaver, that you still “have a dog”. You had a dog. But today we reject most elements of Aristotle’s teleology, and so, for us, the non-functioning material part or corpse that might otherwise be an organ or an animal counts as an organ or an animal just as long as it holds together. So, only someone whose eye, blind or not, has been thoroughly gouged out can be said to be “missing an eye”.
If we agree so far, we will probably also agree that there are more people missing at least one leg —defined, let’s say, as amputation above the knee— than are missing at least one eye, given that car accidents, landmines, the progress of diabetes, and countless other unfortunate circumstances may eventuate in leglessness. This means that although we are bipedal, and binocular, the eyes almost certainly have a slight lead among men.
But this is really just the beginning, as the question was not about our species, but about eyes and legs in general. Several terrestrial animals belonging to the antiquated category of “quadrupeds” possess, as their name suggests, four legs. “Tetrapod”, which is really only that term’s Greek equivalent, remains a real taxon today, but it is inexact, as it includes many animals, among them birds and legless amphibians such as the Mexican burrowing caecilian, that have evolved away from leggedness. Some tetrapods have also evolved away from photoreceptivity, but for the most part the vast majority of animals in this wide taxon, which really includes all vertebrates other than fish, have four legs and two eyes. The fish, in turn —which John Dupré has shown to be merely a vestigial class, a class of “leftover” creatures rather than a class with necessary and sufficient conditions for membership—, would seem to balance things out a bit, as they tend to have two eyes and no legs. And so, it would seem that the answer to our initial question might be arrived at by counting the number of tetrapod species and comparing it to the total number of fish species.
It might seem that we’ve arrived at our answer, but this would be only a seeming, since in any case vertebrate species make up only somewhere between four and six percent of the total variety of animal species. The second-to-last flicker of intelligence I saw on Twitter came from Jacob Levy, who observed that if behind the veil of ignorance you were told that you could, if you like, come back into this world reincarnated as “an animal”, you should decline the offer, as it is so highly probable as to be basically a moral certainty that you would come back not as an elephant, a whale, a dog, or even a bat, a mouse, or an eel, but rather as some sort of arthropod. Coming back as anything other than an insect, a spider, a krill, or some other creature of that order is an anomaly practically as remarkable as winning the lottery. In other words, don’t bet on it. (I think Jacob underappreciates, however, the distinct joy that must attach to life as a beetle or a scorpion, too, and I personally would still probably take the offer knowing how it was likely to play out.)
2.
So it turns out not only that dwelling on human beings is parochial, but dwelling on any of the “paradigmatic” animals is as well. If you ask a school-kid what their “favorite animal” is, and the kid tells you “Echinoptilidae”, you will think he is being facetious. That is just not what we mean when we say “animal”, any more than by “bird” we mean “penguin” or “ostrich” — what we mean is our own tiny little neighborhood of the kingdom, where we spin out our fables, where anthropomorphization is no great stretch of the imagination. The teacher just wants to hear “goat” or “bear” or something and to move on.
But goats and bears, even alongside humans and cattle, barely tip the scales. Our “two eyes, four legs” arrangement is a rounding error, alongside the 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 or so individual insects with six legs, and presumably comparable numbers of members of other arthropod species with eight legs (e.g., Arachnida), ten legs (e.g., many species of Crustacea), and more (e.g., Myriapoda, the “many-legged”, including centipedes and millipedes).
We’ll get back to legs in a moment, but what about arthropod eyes? Counting is difficult here. Some have no eyes at all, but most have either median ocelli, “simple eyes”, or they have lateral compound eyes, and many have both sorts. Ocelli are mostly useful for dim-light detection, while compound eyes are specialized for discerning the outlines of figures in the visual field. Many species have single-lensed “stemmata” in their larval stage, but then move on to multi-lensed compound eyes after adult metamorphosis. A compound eye, such as the horse-fly’s, includes thousands of distinct ommatidia, each of which has its own cornea, photoreceptor cells, and other parts that we associate with an individual eye.
Uwe Kils: Ommatidia of eye of Antarctic krill, c. 2005 (CC)
If we count each ommatidium as “one eye”, then it is almost certain that there are more eyes than legs in the world. I am not inclined to count them in this way. As far as I can tell, the structural discreteness of ommatidia never entails even the possibility of functional discreteness, and the clustering of these several eye-like parts is not like, say, the clustering of hairs when you tie them in a ponytail. Rather, compound eyes, like our own eyes, evolved from what were initially only “eyespots” capable of detecting light and dark. Spherical eyes that could focus light into images were a later development, and the arthropod compound eye simply pushes this development further by outfitting individual photoreceptor cells with dedicated corneas, lenses, etc., while in vertebrate eyes the photoreceptors alls share the same corneas, lenses, and other parts. In an evolutionary sense, then, it seems that compound eyes are simply a further development of the singular photoreceptive anatomy of certain animals, rather than the coming together of several anatomical structures into one.
So, a compound eye is one eye, while ocelli are to be counted separately. Arthropods, then, may be said to have no eyes (e.g., blind water beetles, though even these have opsin genes associated with visual organs), two compound eyes (e.g., most flies), five eyes (e.g., the two compound eyes and the three ocelli of most bees), eight eyes (e.g., most spiders). In short it is very hard to say how many eyes there are out there, because this would require us first to survey all of the different arthropod species — some estimates say there are around ten million of these, while only about one million have been discovered and described at the present time; then we would have to count, or reliably estimate, the number of individual members of each of these species. That desideratum is a long way off.
3.
Still, it seems at least in principle possible to count all the eyes out there. When it comes to legs, I don’t think we have even that small comfort, since I don’t think we have any coherent idea of what legs are.
Again, here, we think we know, but only because we start out from ourselves and dwell mostly on our closest neighbors. But even within our own taxonomic neighborhood there is some dispute. Largely bipedal mammals —or “tripodal” ones such as kangaroos— are often said to have front “legs” as well as hind legs, even though these remain practically unused as legs. The reason for this seems to be that bipedality is a sort of nobility, one of the key foundations of our own self-conception, and to see the anterior extremities as anything other than an additional pair of legs, to see them as “arms”, is to encroach upon our human singularity in the natural order.
More on that soon enough. For now what I want to emphasize is that, as with eyes, the distribution of legs among tetrapods barely even scratches the surface of the question of what legs are, and of how they are distributed. But unlike with eyes, there is no single well-defined function analogous to vision or photoreceptivity that we can point to and say: where this function is present, there are legs executing it. You might be tempted to say that that function is “walking”, but where walking leaves off and some other means of locomotion begins is anyone’s guess. Consider the starfish, which typically has five “arms” (an honorary designation), each of which has numerous tubular “podia” on its underside which it uses to brush the surface beneath it and slowly to propel itself along. Should each one of these count as a “leg”? Their function is rather more like that of motile cilia, the hair-like organelles on a cell surface that help it to move, than they are like the four extremities by which a gazelle executes what we easily recognize as running. Is every cilium a “leg”? What about the cephalopods, where while many species have eight “arms”, two of them are partially adapted to execute a running-like motion on the ocean floor? What about animals with metameric or segmented bodies, such as millipedes, which typically have pairs of spike-like appendages, one coming out of each side of a single body segment (which in truth number far fewer than one thousand, despite the creature’s name)?
Even if we restrict ourselves to insects, all of which have six “legs” all of which are attached to the thorax, it’s still not clear that these are any more similar to a quadruped’s legs than, say, animal eyes are similar to the photosensitive features of a sunflower’s physiology that facilitate its heliotropism. An insect’s legs have an entirely different evolutionary history than a mammal’s legs — at the time of the Urbilaterian, our last common ancestor with insects, 570 million or so years ago, there were certainly no legs of any sort. The six thoracic appendages that would evolve much later on the bodies of insects, and that would gradually come to do something somewhat like the locomotive work we observe in the four appendages of many tetrapod species, can be called “legs” if we want to call them that. But nothing about the world requires us to do so.
4.
We have been talking so far only about eyes and legs, but what I really want to talk about are minds. How many are there? Are they more like eyes, with a single causal history extending back to the first photoreceptor molecules in eukaryote protists 1.5 billion years ago, and with a stable and unitary function across all those years (namely, the reception of light)? Or are they more like legs, which only seem to exist when we “stay close to home”, and imagine the experience of other kinds of creatures to be fundamentally like ours?
It may be that the “clarity of purpose” that seems to attach to the visual organs explains, in part, why they have served throughout the history of philosophy as such a rich source of metaphors for the “higher” forms of non-visual mental activity. These metaphors are so embedded in the way we talk that we are almost unable to interpret them as metaphors (“the light of reason”, “I see what you’re saying”, etc.). I believe it was Martin Jay who referred to this habit of ours as a mark of philosophy’s deep-seated “oculocentrism”. To see is to be capable of at least some sort of proto-thinking, we seem to suppose, and indeed empirically we take the evolutionary emergence of photoreceptive “eyespots” as broadly contemporaneous with that of “experientialization”, or the emergence in evolutionary history of “something it’s like to be” a creature of this or that sort.
So it would not have sounded facetious if Thomas Hobbes had tried out, as a response to Descartes’s Cogito, the further variant “I see, therefore I am”. After all, in the Second Meditation Descartes himself had glossed the phrase “thinking thing” as “a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions”, and plainly vision is to count as an instance of this last capacity. Why does seeing seem different than walking here? Hobbes’s exact objection to Descartes is not in fact that one might say Ambulo ergo sum just as easily as Cogito ergo sum, but rather that Descartes’s more elaborate claim, “I think, therefore I am a thinking thing” is no more justified than, “I walk, therefore I am a walking thing” (or, on some variants, “I walk, therefore I am a walking”). Hobbes’s point is that we might just as easily infer, from anything at all that we do, that that thing pertains to our essence — that we are, for example, a res ambulans.
But Descartes had in fact dealt with this sort of attempted substitution in the Second Meditation: the inference doesn’t work with walking, or eating, or breathing, since it is at least in principle possible that we are systematically confused about what our bodies are up to, or about having a body at all, as we see to some partial extent in what is today called phantom-limb syndrome (which Descartes probably saw up close, among the wounded soldiers, when he served as a mercenary in the 1620 Battle of White Mountain — war is hell, and can even turn you into a dualist). You can think you’re walking and be mistaken, but you can’t think you’re seeing and be mistaken, even if all you are seeing are hallucinations. And if you think you’re walking or seeing, whether you are mistaken or not, you are thinking; there is no conceivable scenario in which you are mistaken about what you are doing, and are in fact not thinking. Therefore you may infer from your thinking that you are a thinking thing, but not from your walking that you are a walking thing. Descartes prevails; Hobbes misunderstands.
And yet, Hobbes is not trolling. Or at least he is not just trolling. He is joining up with a long countercurrent in the history of philosophy that proposes bipedalism alongside, or sometimes even in place of, rationality, as our unique species marker. This is the motivating idea behind the jocular proposal in Plato that “man” might be alternatively defined not as the “rational animal”, but as the “featherless biped”. In 1699, when the English anatomist Edward Tyson has the opportunity to perform an anatomical study of an infant chimpanzee that had died within a day of disembarking its ship from Angola, there are two questions that preoccupy him beyond all others. First, are this animal’s vocal chords such that it could in principle be in possession of speech? Second, is this animal’s lower body such that it could in principle walk around on its two hind feet? Tyson answers the latter question in the affirmative, but cannot bring himself to concede the former: even though he sees nothing in the larynx and other vocal organs to suppose that its anatomy does not facilitate the same capacities as those found in a human being, still, speech is an external sign of the inherence of reason, and so there must be something other than anatomy that makes it possible in humans and that is missing in apes — in other words, Tyson’s study of primate anatomy pushes him into dualism. While he concedes in the matter of bipedalism, he is almost as hesitant to do so as to attribute speech to the brute. The apparent encroachment on human particularity is almost as great when we admit that other animals “go on two feet” as when we admit that they have language.
Hobbes and Descartes could not have been aware of the different evolutionary histories of seeing and walking —though Tyson, in his 1680 Phocaena, was perfectly comfortable acknowledging that a dolphin’s fin bones are modified hoof bones—, where seeing has a single, unitary causal story behind it stretching back more than a billion years, and is always “focused” on a single function, with the result that it is extremely hard to contemplate it, as even Darwin observed, without resort to teleology; while walking —or at least some sort of poduncule-propelled “going”— has emerged countless times in evolutionary history, executed in a variety of somewhat similar ways by all sorts of different appendages. But it is perhaps this stability, this singularity of purpose underlying vision that causes us to elevate it so highly, and practically to see it (to “see” it) as synonymous with thinking, which at least for some people is in turn synonymous with being a thinking thing.
The countercurrent, again, reminds us of the limits of this synonymy. For Spinoza an individual is “a proportion of motion and rest”: wherever there is a going, as for example a walking, there is a single being (or at least the closest thing to a being you’re going to get in his ontology). Wherever in turn you have such an individual, you have thought, a mind or something analogous to the mind, since every thing is for Spinoza simultaneously an extended thing and a “thought thing” (where “thought” is the passive participle, not the noun). No thinking without going, in other words, or at least without alternation between going and staying.
The suggestion that going and thinking are part of a package usually appears in connection with arguments against the exceptional character of human beings, against the conceit of an ontological rift between us and all the others. If mindedness, or at least mind-likeness, can be inferred from going as easily as from seeing, well, then, we’ve got a world with lots of minds in it.
5.
I suspect that minds are more like legs than like eyes, in that we could not even in principle hope to make an exhaustive census of them. I’m not a full-fledged Spinozist on this question; I’m not convinced that we’ve got a thought thing wherever we’ve got a going thing (but who knows?). It’s just that I’m inclined to think that the scope of our attribution of mindedness, like that of “pedality”, is not dictated by the world.
It is curious to note in this connection that in the history of philosophy the rejection of rationality as constitutive of our species essence often involves a simultaneous turn to the hiking trails. From Rousseau’s alpine randonnées to Heidegger’s Holzwege, it is almost as if the philosophers have intuited that in order to demonstrate their rejection of the supremacy of reason, they must take to the forest paths and do a little walkabout. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the figure of the flâneur emerged as a distinct expression of resistance to hyperrational, goal-focused modernity. The flâneur goes, and perhaps thinks in the mode of the daydream, but does not think as one is supposed to think in order, the thinking went (“the thinking went”!), to realize his full human potential as a “problem-solver”.
And today, of course, it seems nearly every Anglophone analytic philosopher has a picture of themselves on their webpage out on some hiking trail. I have even seen CV’s where young job applicants list “hiking” among their “Other Interests”. What is that all about? I think this is meant to signal a mastery of what they call “balance” — a concept I have trouble grasping, even if I know it is valued by my peers. It is not that they want to signal they are going full Heideggerian down some dark forest path where the mind gets permanently lost in the thicket, but only that they have preserved a healthy equilibrium between “work” and “life”, where the former involves sober deployment of the rational faculty, while the latter involves a restorative and temporary indulgence of the sort of unprofessional sentiments that might be triggered by an encounter with nature.
We know that a huge amount of our neural bandwidth is taken up by spatial orientation and other elements of navigational cognition. It is worth mentioning here that cognitive scientists have studied the hippocampi of London taxi-drivers with mastery of what is locally called “The Knowledge”, as exemplary of what a human mind does at its most excellent. It is also worth noting that in many non-western contexts, this same cognitive ability that the cabbies display may be experienced as a sort of identity between the mind and its environment. Thus Australian Aboriginal “songlines” are at the same time both embedded in the geography of the continent in the form of natural features, and in the mind as vast bodies of memorized song. Where is the songline exactly — in the world or in the head? Is it a going or is it a thinking? It seems that this question would make no sense from the point of view of anyone who may be said truly to know the songs.
So it is not that going is an alternative to thinking, but only that it marks a shift to a different mode of thinking, the kind that Romantic philosophers have tended to value, and the kind that seems to be more continuous with what we may imagine it is like for other kinds of being to be.
When François Duchesneau and I were translating Georg Ernst Stahl’s Negotium otiosum we got stuck on a peculiar attribution suggested by the German phlogiston theorist. He claimed Aristotle wrote that thinking is an ambulatio animae, a stroll of the soul, but we were unable to find any passage that would justify this attribution. In the Voyage du Monde de Descartes, a 1690 satire written by the French Jesuit Gabriel Daniel, the reader is invited to imagine a world in which Cartesian dualism makes it possible to separate the soul from the body, and to fly around at night as what Carlo Ginzburg would call a benandanto. In Daniel’s story, an African servant gains knowledge of the secret, and decides to go out on a night-flight himself. His soul is far away as his body sits under a tree. In a village near that tree, a maiden is dishonored, and a sort of lynch-mob is formed to catch the perpetrator. When they come upon the African, he cannot think, for his soul is out strolling, but can only go, back and forth, a thoughtless automaton.
Can the soul stroll? On the dualist reading that Daniel is seeking to lampoon, it can, but only by leaving the body behind. In the experience of the singers of songlines, and I suspect also of Ginzburg’s Friulian peasants who fly about at night on stalks of fennel, the soul just is a strolling. Most of us continue to balk at this idea, out of fear that we will be unable to return from our night-flights, that we will no longer have the sense to know when to leave our “Other Interests” behind — and get back to work.
About the Author
Justin E.H. Smith is an author and professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, will appear in 2021 from Princeton University Press.
Vincent van Gogh, Long Grass with Butterflies, 1890
by M. Munro
We seem rather to be before a musical theme, which had first been transposed, the theme as a whole, into a certain number of tones and on which, still the whole theme, different variations had been played, some very simple, others very skillful. As to the original theme, it is everywhere and nowhere.[1]
Desire makes all things bloom, possession withers them all; it’s better to dream one’s life than to live it, although to live it is still to dream.[2]
ZHUANG ZHOU DREAMS HE IS A BUTTERFLY: it’s well known that on awakening he wonders whether he might be a butterfly dreaming s/he is Zhuang Zhou. What’s less well known is where the story goes from there. “Surely, Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities!”[3] Surely. And yet the next and final sentence reads: “Such is what we call the transformation of one thing into another.”[4] Is the distinction the transformation? But is it—are they—“one,” do they count as one, let alone a “thing”? Or is such not rather a blossoming?
Coda: What is Philosophy?
The same dream came to me often in my past life, sometimes in one form and sometimes in another, but always saying the same thing: ‘Socrates,’ it said, ‘make music (μουσικὴν ποίει) and work at it (καὶ ἐργάζου).’[5]
How do you translate désœuvrement? Whether as idleness, inoperativity, or worklessness, or as something else again entirely, something unheard of (even in Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben), the question is: What is given to be understood by désœuvrement in the very unworking of its concept? Might something be carried over by it, preserved in it, stowed away, fugitive, unsounded?
“Two Alaskan Kodiak bears joined a small circus,” so begins an apposite tale, “where the two appeared in a nightly parade
pulling a covered wagon. The two were taught to somersault, to spin, to stand on their heads, and to dance on their hind legs, paw in paw, stepping in unison. Under a spotlight the dancing bears, a male and a female, soon became favorites of the crowd. The circus went south on a west coast tour through Canada to California and on down into Mexico, through Panama into South America, down the Andes the length of Chile to those southernmost isles of Tierra Del Fuego. There a jaguar jumped the juggler, and afterwards, mortally mauled the animal trainer, and the shocked showpeople disbanded in dismay and horror. In the confusion the bears went their own way. Without a master, they wandered off by themselves into the wilderness on those densely wooded, wildly windy, subantarctic islands. Utterly away from people, on an out-of-the-way uninhabited island, and in a climate they found ideal, the bears mated, thrived, multiplied, and after a number of generations populated the entire island. Indeed, after some years, descendants of the two moved out onto half a dozen adjacent islands; and seventy years later, when scientists finally found and enthusiastically studied the bears, it was discovered that all of them, to a bear, were performing splendid circus tricks.
On nights when the sky is bright and the moon in full, they gather to dance. They gather the cubs and the juveniles in a circle around them. They gather together out of the wind at the center of a sparkling, circular crater left by a meteorite which had fallen in a bed of chalk. Its glassy walls are chalk white, its flat floor is covered with white gravel, and it is well drained, and dry. No vegetation grows within. When the moon rises above it, the light reflecting off the walls fills the crater with a pool of moonlight, so that it is twice as bright on the crater floor as anywhere else in that vicinity. Scientists speculate that originally the full moon had reminded the two bears of the circus spotlight, and for that reason they danced. Yet, it might be asked,
“what music do the descendants dance to?
“Paw in paw, stepping in unison . . . what music can they possibly hear inside their heads as they dance under the full moon and the Aurora Australis, as they dance in brilliant silence?”[6]
[1] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1998), 171-2.
[2] Marcel Proust, quoted in Colton Valentine, “The Madeleine’s Metapragmatics: On Michael Lucey’s ‘What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 14, 2022, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-madeleines-metapragmatics-on-michael-luceys-what-proust-heard-novels-and-the-ethnography-of-talk/.
[5] Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 1, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 60e, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DPhaedo
%3Asection%3D60e.
[6] Spencer Holst, “Brilliant Silence,” in Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories, eds. James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1992), 17-18 [17-18].
Jeremy Fernando, Let’s drink to the hard-working people, 2022
by Jeremy Fernando
From the sea come I, compared to a flower oft been
showing myself after long summer days. Missing me
no lands bloom, much as ingredients turn not into dishes
without first a gentle caress of my hand
The single-most important element to good cooking is salt
~ Samin Nosrat
Place me in the midst of she not so I become her
but that Salacia find herself in me. Preserve me
not that I become another nor ossify but that
I find myself in me
Bloom
I don’t make the soya sauce: the microorganisms in the air do it. I just create the right environment for them to do so
~ Yasuo Yamamoto
Trust no one, Cicero says, unless you have eaten much salt with them. Not as a measure of morality
but that the salt of any interesting civilisation is mixture (Antonio Tabucchi). And coming-together be
where mischief is brewed.
Ideally much too.
About the Author
Jeremy Fernando reads, writes, and makes things. He is the writer-at and co-creator — alongside owner and brewer, Eric Lee; chefs, Liaw Wei Loon, Vincent Khoo, Kim Fan; front-of-house story-tellers, Barnabas Tang, Vincent Kwa, Zeek Mah, and Zac Chen; farmers, horticulturalists, craft-persons, potters, painters, sound-artists, and various collaborators — of the dining experience, People Table Tales.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Dutch Proverbs, 1559 (detail)
by Erik Hoel
On Rousseau, Essay Contests, Political Motivations for Revisiting the Origin of Human Civilization, and the Book Is Introduced
In 1754 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, at the comfortable age of 42, was composing a monograph for an essay contest not dissimilar to this one. Hosted by a local university, the prompt for the contest was “What is the origin of inequality among people, and is it authorized by natural law?” Rousseau’s submission, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, became an intellectual sensation. In its long life as one of the foundational documents of the Western world it has been, at times, blamed for the bloody slaughter of The Terror, and, at other times, lauded as the inventor of the progressive Left.
Disqualified from winning the contest due to its unapologetic length, the Discourse’s depiction of an original state of nature populated by noble savages, a state eventually sundered by agriculture and the invention of private property, was monumentally influential. His genius move was to politicize the past, offering up an alternative mirror to Hobbes’ view, itself already political, which portrayed life in prehistorical societies with that oft-repeated phrase: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes, founder of the political Right, and Rousseau, founder of the political Left, both built their arguments on the bedrock of prehistory. But on different bedrocks. The lesson being: if you want to change human society, change the past first.
EnterThe Dawn of Everything, which tries to change the past by taking a third way orthogonal to the Rousseau/Hobbes spectrum. Published to widespread acclaim last year, it was blurbed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Nassim Taleb, and given glowing reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many others. A doorstopping tome of public-facing but dense scholarship, it harkens back to back to an older age—it even has overwrought Victorian section titles calligraphed in ALL CAPS.
It’s a co-authored book by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Davids. First, we have David Graeber, anthropologist, famed author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years, notable figure in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, a playful but snarky writer, almost certainly the reason for the section titles being the way they are, and now deceased at the relatively young age of 59, dying just several weeks before The Dawn of Everything was published, victim of a totally inexplicable and blazingly fast case of necrotizing pancreatitis. The surviving David, David Wengrow, is lesser known but more erudite, more pragmatic, classically academic both in his pedantry but also in his impressive armament of archeological knowledge, and it’s Wengrow who’s been trying to fill the shoes of the more famous Graeber by making the post-publishing media whirlwind tour, sometimes to visible discomfort as he goes on long-winded lectures while the hosts try hastily to cut to the next segment.
What is the version of prehistory the Davids offer in The Dawn of Everything? It is an anti-story. The Davids are offering up an alternative to (as well as a criticism of) thinkers like Steven Pinker or Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari, all of whom give a standard model of human prehistory that goes smallhunter-gatherer tribes → invention of agriculture → civilization (with its associated hierarchies and private property and wealth inequalities).
The original hunter-gatherer tribes are often reasoned about via the analogy of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes (or at least, those in recent history surveyed by anthropologists). Yet which tribe is an “appropriate” analogy changes depending whether the reasoner is a follower of Hobbes or Rousseau; a modern Hobbesian might prefer to use the war-like Yanomami as the analogy, whereas a follower of Rousseau might prefer the more peaceful and egalitarian Hadza, Pygmies, or !Kung.
The thesis of The Dawn of Everything is that neither of these is correct. In fact, the Davids argue the standard model of prehistory isn’t supported at all by modern archeological and anthropological evidence; in its place they offer a complexified account, wherein prehistorical humans lived in a panoply of different political arrangements, from extreme egalitarianism to chattel slavery, and that, just like humans in recorded history, they consciously collectively chose to live in the arrangement they did (well, except for the slaves), with the result being that
the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms. . . Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks or hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines. . .
So for the Davids, the question is not, as it was for Rousseau, “How did inequality arise?” but rather, given the diversity of prehistorical ways of life, “How did we get stuck with the inequalities we have?”
This is a very interesting question to ask and the Davids marshal a veritable trove of evidence, some of which really does convincingly support their theses. But there is a problem with the book. For their own version of prehistory is corrupted by politics, the same corruption they accuse Rousseau and Hobbes and other thinkers of falling prey to before them. After all, the Davids’ express purpose is to argue that humans, in their diverse forms of prehistorical governments, are free, even playful, and capable of imagining new ways of living and consciously choosing to live in these ways, which the authors take to imply that their own beliefs in radical progressivism, or post-capitalism, might therefore be successful in our modern world—and moreso, that their research implies our current world and its ills are, in turn, a choice. The Davids certainly don’t hide their political goals, either in the book or in interviews, and their leanings are evident from the way it’s written as well: their eagerness to line up with progressivism spins throughout like a finely-tuned gyroscope. The result is a tendency to get carried away and issue blanket statements, like how Western civilization is currently great “except if you’re Black,” or outright misrepresentations of their intellectual opponents, like assigning to Steven Pinker the claim that “all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth-century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’” (Pinker doesn’t claim this), or rejecting the science of kinship-based theories of altruism with reasoning like “many humans just don’t like their families very much” (these are all real quotes).
Somewhere, within the morass of innuendo and expressions of their own political leanings, as well as the undeniable encyclopedic display of archeological and anthropological knowledge, there is a truth as to how humans lived prehistorically, and how civilization, with all its ills (and its goods) came to be. But what is that truth?
The Agriculture Revolution Was No Revolution, Nor Did it Inexorably Lead to Inequality; Inequality, Even Chattel Slavery, Already Existed
Our world as it existed just before the dawn of agriculture was anything but a world of roving hunter-gatherer bands. It was marked, in many places, by sedentary villages and towns, some by then already ancient, as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth. . .
And with this the Davids begin their dissection of the idea that agriculture was the root cause of political inequality, arguing that agriculture was not actually a “revolution” that irrevocably changed how humans lived.
Instead, the Davids present a wave of evidence that pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies could be incredibly politically diverse, and, sometimes, rival the worst atrocities of modern societies; at other times, they could rival their best. They zoom into the Native American foragers (not farmers) who lived on the California coastline, and observe substantial political differentiation, even out thousands of years into the past. Particularly between the Yurok in California and their northern neighbors of the Northwest Coast. The Yurok
struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense. . . ambitious Yurok men were ‘exhorted to abstain from any kind of indulgence. . . Repasts were kept bland and spartan, decoration simple, dancing modest and restrained. There were no inherited ranks or titles.
Compare that to the Native Americans of the Northwest Coast, right above them:
Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious among outside observers for the delight they took in displays of excess. . . They became famous for the exuberant ornamentation of their art.
The Yurok and other micro-nations to the south only rarely practiced chattel slavery. In stark contrast,
in any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might have constituted up to a quarter of the population. These figures are striking. As we noted earlier, they rival the demographic balance in the colonial South at the height of the cotton boom and are in line with estimates for household slavery in classical Athens.
Indeed, there is evidence of Native American chattel slavery that goes back to 1850 BC in Northwest Coast societies (again, these are not agricultural societies).
The behavior of the Northwest Coast aristocrats resembles that of Mafia dons, with their strict codes of honour and patronage relationships; or what sociologists refer to as ‘court societies’—the sort of arrangement one might expect in, say, feudal Sicily. . .
So we have slave-owning Mafia dons to the north, and meanwhile, ascetics to the south. Despite both being foragers, they ate extremely different diets, with Californian tribes relying on nuts and acorns, while the Northwest Coast societies were sometimes referred to as ‘fisher-kings’ (presumably due to their two loves: aristocracy and fish). As the Davids say,
this is emphatically not what we are taught to expect among foragers. . . within the tiny communities that did exist, entirely different principles of social life applied.
Furthermore, the Davids make a good case that agriculture was not the sort of parasitic memetic invasion it is often portrayed as by writers like Yuval Noah Harari.
Once cultivation became widespread in Neolithic societies, we might expect to find evidence of a relatively quick or at least continuous transition from wild to domestic forms of cereals. . . but this is not at all what the results of archeological science show.
Instead
the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until much later: as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began (. . . to get a sense of the scale here, think: the time between the putative Trojan War and today).
This is despite the fact that scientific experiments on wheat genetics have revealed that
the key genetic mutation leading to crop domestication could be achieved in as little as twenty to thirty years, or at most 200 years, using simple harvesting techniques like reaping with flint sickles or uprooting by hands. All it would have taken, then, is for humans to follow the cues provided by the crops themselves.
So if it was a revolution, it was one that occurred as slowly as almost all of post-literate human history combined. And not only that, but prehistorical societies seem to occasionally develop agriculture and then consciously abandon it, preferring some other way of life. The Davids give several examples of this, including the builders of Stonehenge, who
were not farmers, or at least, not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the people of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3,300 BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. . .
This sort of laissez-faire attitude toward farming is true in many other places, for example, in the early Amazonia there are seasonal cycles in and out of farming, and same for the habit of keeping pets but not domesticating animals fully, i.e., people who were neither forager or farmer, and often for thousands of years.
Nor did the agricultural revolution, even as it was occurring, result in one way of living; it seems like during the transition toward farming very different societies were possible, even those that lived in proximity to one another, the exact same as hunter-gatherer societies. Consider the upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East; sectors which are themselves demarcated by Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest construction of stone megaliths, dated to around 9,000 BC.
(a) Göbekli Tepe, with its circular and rectangular regions, as seen from above. (b-c) Complex representational stone carvings.
Between the upland and lowland sectors we see, again, political differentiation. North of Göbekli Tepe, in the upland, there was a city wherein at
the centre of the settlement stood a long-lived structure that archeologists call the ‘House of Skulls’, for the simple reason that it was found to hold the remains of over 450 people, including headless corpses and over ninety crania, all crammed into small compartments. . . Human remains in the House of Skulls were stored together with those of large prey animals, and a wild cattle skull was mounted on an outside wall. . . Studies of blood residues from the surface, and from associated objects, led researchers to identify this as an altar on which public sacrifice and processing of bodies took place, the victims both animal and human.
In comparison, lowland villages of the Fertile Crescent also attached a great importance to human heads, but treat them in an altogether different manner, in a way one might describe as touching (despite its macabre nature), like the ‘skull portraits’ found in lowland Early Neolithic villages.
These are heads that are removed from burials of women, men, and occasionally children in a secondary process, after the corpse had decomposed. Once separated from the body, they were cleaned and carefully modelled over with clay, then coated with layers of plaster to become something altogether different. Shells were often fixed into the eye sockets, just as clay and plaster filled in for the flesh and skin. Red and white paint added further life. Skull portraits appeared to be treasured heirlooms, carefully stored and repaired over generations. They reached the height of their popularity in the eighth millennium BC. . . one such modelled head was found in an intimate situation, clutched to the chest of a female burial.
Such details in art and priorities corresponded to political differences: the upland sectors of the Fertile Crescent were
most clearly distinguished by the building of grand monuments in stone, and by a symbolism of male virility and predation. . . By contrast, the art and ritual of the lowland settlements in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys presents women as co-creators of a distinct form of society—learned through the productive routines of cultivation, herding and village life—and celebrated by modelling and binding soft materials, such as clay or fibres, into symbolic forms.
And yet we know that the regions traded with one another. There are plenty of other examples of political differentiation, both pre- and post-agriculture, although even the Davids are forced to admit that agriculture marks a change. Eventually it
saw the creation of patterns of life and ritual that remain doggedly with us millennia later, and have since become fixtures of social existence among a broad sector of humanity: everything from harvest festivals to habits of sitting on benches, putting cheese on bread, entering and exiting via doorways, or looking at the world through windows.
But the fact that humans were able to invent, and then abandon, agriculture, and have inequality or equality to greater degrees throughout the invention of agriculture, and to continue to have political differentiation after agriculture, all suggests to the Davids that our ancestors, despite (as one might say) having the handicap of living in prehistory, were choosing to live a certain way, not simply driven like automaton by environmental inputs or new inventions. They made conscious political choices, just like us.
Conscious Political Choice Among Native Americans and the “Indigenous Critique” of Western Civilization
This thesis may sound surprising, but the Davids bemoan that this is because non-Western, non-European civilizations are consistently stripped of political self-consciousness in standard historical accounts, e.g.,
to Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age. . . this would have come as a great surprise to Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman. . . Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation.
The conversational nature of the Wendat government led most Jesuits to describe French-speaking Native Americans as highly eloquent, as, at least among those who spoke Iroquoian languages, open conversation and debate were how tribe decisions got made, a process that rewarded the more eloquent and convincing of its members (although not all Native American states valued the reasonable debate of the Iroquois).
But somehow the self-consciously political nature of New France was replaced by either the idealized fantasies of Rousseau or the idealized barbarism of Hobbes. The Davids have a story for how that happened, and it actually involves Kandiaronk himself. They argue that Native American intellectuals were the true originators of many of the criticisms of the Western World that would go on to define the political Left, and European intellectuals in turn co-opted their criticisms, using fictional Native Americans as mouthpieces, while the originals were forgotten to mainstream history. This is because Native American intellectuals,
when they appear in European accounts, are assumed to be mere representatives of some Western archetype of the ‘noble savage’ or sock-puppets, used as plausible alibis to an author who might otherwise get into trouble for presenting subversive ideas. . .
The reality was quite different, the Davids suggest, once you investigate evidence from the Great Lakes region where tribes like the Wendat, and Jesuits and fur traders, all mixed together. In the late 1600s, Lahontan, a French aristocrat, spent much time in New France, and there met the Kandiaronk (also called ‘Le Rat’, since his name meant ‘muskrat’). Kandiaronk was
at the time engaged in a complex geopolitical game, trying to play the English, French, and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee off against each other. . . with the long-term goal of creating a comprehensive indigenous alliance to hold off the settler advance. . . Everyone who met him, friend or foe, admitted he was a truly remarkable individual: a courageous warrior, brilliant orator, and unusually skillful politician.
Kandiaronk was known for engaging the Europeans in debate, attending their dinner parties to converse with them, and Lahontan witnessed some of these debates and knew Kandiaronk personally. Later, an old man in Europe, Lahontan would publish Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who has Traveled which was a dialogue between fictional versions of himself and Kandiaronk; the latter offered forth convincing and eloquent critiques of European civilization, from its pitilessness to those in need, to its obsession with money, to its social inequality, to its lack of basic human freedoms that the Wendat still possessed. This “indigenous critique”
won a wide audience, and before long Lahontan had become something of a minor celebrity. He settled at the court of Hanover, which was also the home base for Leibniz, who befriended and supported him. . .
The indigenous critique served as a shock to the European system, setting the path to Rousseau’s Discourses by creating an entire genre of literature, as
just about every major French Enlightenment figure tried their hand at a Lahontan-style critique of their own society, from the perspective of some imagined outsider. Montesquieu chose a Persian; the Marquis d’Argens a Chinese; Diderot a Tahitian; Chateaubriand a Natchez; Voltaire’s L’Ingénu was half Wendat and half French. . . Perhaps the most popular work of this genre, published in 1747, was Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary captured Inca princess. All took up and developed themes and arguments borrowed directly from Kondiaronk. . .
But for a long time the dominant historical view was that Lahontan essentially created a fictional character (with intimate knowledge of European life and customs) to use as a convincing mouthpiece to give European critiques of European culture. Except actually the pieces fit much better that Lahontan was, perhaps with only some exaggeration, writing the real Kandiaronk. This is attested to by Lahontan himself, who claims to have based it off of Kandiaronk, and is backed up by lost historical details like how outside accounts attest that Kondiaronk was indeed invited to debates comparing European life to indigenous life, and also how
there is every reason to believe that Kondiaronk actually had been to France; that’s to say, we know the Wendat Confederation did send an ambassador to visit the court of Louis XIV in 1691, and Kandiaronk’s office at the time was Speaker of the Council, which would have made him the logical person to send.
Judging this, I have to say I think the Davids are correct; there is a good case that there were real and serious intellectual contributions from Native Americans in critiquing the inequalities of European civilization, particularly from the articulate and debate-based Iroquoian-speaking nations.
This is a great hand to be holding, but, in a pattern that repeats throughout the book, the Davids overplay it. They claim the idea of inequality arose in Europe entirely through the indigenous critique, essentially proposing that some conversations being held by Jesuits and fur traders in New France were the mono-causal origin of the political Left. This spills into other ambitious overclaims, like how
one cannot say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social inequality; the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.
Really? In medieval Europe, the role of wealth in the clergy was fractious and constant. And Christ, the most important intellectual figure for medieval Europe, was himself a political radical and revolutionary, overturning the tables of the moneylenders and frequently espousing things like in Matthew 20:25-28:
You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave. . .
What is that if not a statement of disgust at social inequality? And not for the only time in the book, the Davids undercut themselves when they later point out that the conception of inequality was alive and well in European peasantry:
A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day, or Christmas, when much of society reveled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down,’ where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground and made a mockery of. Often the celebrates were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’. . .
So in their overly confident conclusion, the Davids end up pushing a progressive mirror to the conservative take that all the good aspects of the Western world are based entirely on the Christian tradition; the mirror the Davids offer up is that the progressive politics of the Enlightenment are based entirely on the indigenous critique, and therefore, by extension, that the political Left is an extension of Native American thought.
On Seasonality and the “Theatrical” Governments of Prehistorical Societies, As Well as Their Careful Burial of Abnormal Individuals
One of the defining features of prehistoric humanity seems to be their dynamism and ever-changing nature. Even at the times when they are building monuments, things we would think of as “early civilization” like Stonehenge or Göbekli Tepe, it is often not permanent, but rather as celebrations or markers, structures otherwise abandoned for much of the year. For instance, at Göbekli Tepe:
Activities around the stone temples correspond with periods of annual superabundance, between midsummer and autumn, when large herds of gazelle descended on to the Harran Plain.
This goes back even further; almost all the early signs of civilization look seasonal to some degree, like the striking “mammoth houses,” which were constructed from the bones of mammoths, often circular around a central open space, some going back 25,000 years, but not always suggesting continuous habitation—rather, grisly but beautiful meeting places or ceremonial floors.
This seasonality also shows up in anthropologist accounts of hunter-gatherer societies. The Davids quote from a 1903 book on seasonal variations among the Inuit, describing how during the summer,
Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single elder male. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. . . But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.
One might reasonably ask whether this was all responding solely to environmental concerns: altruistic during periods of being flush with resources, despotic during periods of scarcity. But that’s not what we see. Among the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast of Canada
it was winter—not summer—that was the time when society crystallized into its most hierarchical forms, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastline of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over compatriots classified as commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet, these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations—still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter—literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.
Which brings up why an early hierarchical government, like an aristocracy, capable of moving gigantic stones, or coordinating large hunts and storing food, would give up its authority in the off-season so easily—if there were rulers of these people, they did not have the sort of authority those in written history do, for
these would have been kings whose courts and kingdoms existed for only a few months of the year, and otherwise dispersed into small communities of nut gatherers and stock herders. If they possessed the means to marshal labor, pile up food resources and provender armies of year-round retainers, what sort of royalty would consciously elect not to?
So should we really even think of such rulers as royalty? Or are they almost a form of play royalty? There’s a certain theatricality to all this, isn’t there? Like how
among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers (though, often, peculiarly, these ritual police doubled as clowns). In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety, as in the Inuit midwinter orgies.
The Davids suggest that for much of prehistory humans were seeing what fit, playing along, and under such structures formal authority was a wispy, changeable, seasonal, almost humorous thing. And various techniques kept formal authority from ever becoming too real. For instance, the Native Americans of the Plains would
dismantle all means of exercising coercive authority the moment the ritual season was over, they were also careful to rotate which clans or warrior clubs got to wield it: anyone holding sovereignty one year would be subject to the authority of others the next.
Of course, it might be easier to see how prehistorical societies worked if they buried more of their dead. Instead:
Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewellery and artefacts.
But we see some of the weirdness of humans, their political diversity, peeking through. In an oddity of rich Upper Paleolithic burials
a remarkable number of these skeletons (indeed, a majority) bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings. The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance, had pronounced congenital deformities; the bodies in the Romito Cave in Calabria were unusually short, with at least one case of dwarfism; while those in Grimaldi Cave were extremely tall by our standards, and must have seemed veritable giants to their contemporaries.
Such unexpected incongruities humanize our ancestors—perhaps we sometimes buried favored clowns rather than favored kings.
So yes, I think the Davids are right on this as well: there is at least suggestive evidence of a period of time, particularly around or right after 10,000 BC, of what might be called political experimentation by prehistorical humans. These nascent governments and formal systems of law and order might not have been taken all that seriously at first, more theatrical and seasonal in nature, until, slowly, as John Updike said, “the mask eats the face.”
The Sapient Paradox as an Ancient Analog to the Fermi Paradox, and the Great Trap of Prehistory It Implies
Almost everything we’ve talked about so far, with the exception of the mammoth houses and some remains of gathering places, takes place after 10,000 BC. It’s really only in the Upper Paleolithic (12,000-5,000 BC) that there is any good evidence for what we would call civilization, with its associated lavish burials and monumental centers of ritual congregation and pilgrimage and trade networks and specialization of tribes toward certain industries, and it is only at this point that complex representation in art becomes essentially universal.
What was happening before then? Isn’t that the question we’re most interested in? The primal state of human nature? The vast majority of the Davids’ evidence throughout The Dawn of Everything comes from post-10,000 BC societies. And this is a problem, since even the Davids admit in the book that humans have been around for between 100,000 to 200,000 years.
This is a striking mismatch: let’s say modern humans genetically (mostly) and physically (definitely) were around 100,000 years ago: why does it take 90,000 years to get Göbekli Tepe? This perplexing question is called the “Sapient Paradox.” Colin Renfrew, the coiner of the Sapient Paradox, describes it as a
puzzling aspect, which I call the Sapient Paradox. . . we can see in the archeological record. . . the appearance of our own species, Homo Sapiens, about 100 or 150,000 thousand years ago in Africa, and we can follow the out-of-Africa migrations of our species, Homo sapiens, 60-70,000 years ago. . . Apart from the episode of cave art, which was very much limited to Europe and a bit further on to Asia, not a great deal happened until about 10,000 years ago. . . modern genetics has made clear that our genetic composition, speaking in general. . . is very similar to the genetic composition to our ancestors in Africa of about 70,000 years ago.
So, Homo sapiens (broadly: people who wouldn’t look out of place on the subway), go back almost 200,000 years, possibly having language all that time. And who knows, human-level cognitive abilities might even go back further than that—our cousins (and ancestors) the Neanderthals wouldn’t look very out of place on the subway either. Perhaps prehistorical minds were similarly similar.
In asking “What took so long?” the Sapient Paradox is the prehistoric analog of the Fermi Paradox. Instead of: “Why are we alone in the universe?” the Sapient Paradox asks: “Why were we trapped in prehistory?” And just as the Fermi Paradox implies a Great Filter, the Sapient Paradox implies a Great Trap, a trap in which human society lived for, at minimum, 50,000 years, and, at maximum, something like 200,000 years or even more. Depending on your politics, the Great Trap might be an oppressive patriarchy, or perhaps a decadent matriarchy, or a lazy commune, etc (e.g., Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, discusses a “Hobbesian trap” of mutual warfare between tribes—although he does not connect this to the Sapient Paradox).
Some might try to dismiss the Sapient Paradox by pointing to evidence of ongoing human evolution. And while there is some evidence of recent human evolutionary changes, it often seems clustered around things like dietary changes—at least, there’s no well-accepted evidence that human cognitive abilities emerged at 10,000 BC, and almost everyone who tackles these issues, from the Davids to Yuval to Pinker to Diamond, agrees that Homo sapiens was pretty much genetically-intact, at least in the ways we think should matter, somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Indeed, early Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago had brains as large as our own!
In The Dawn of Everything the Davids dismiss the Sapient Paradox in a curt section. It’s one of the worst-reasoned parts of the book. They simply miss what is puzzling about the paradox, instead trying to dissolve it by gesturing to evidence of ancient culture from Africa (which they argue is ignored due to a lack of funding compared to European archeology), with points like:
Rock shelters around the coastlands of South Africa are a key source, trapping prehistoric sediments that yield evidence of hafted tools and the expressive use of shell and ochre around 80,000 BC.
And also how
a cave site on the coast of Kenya called Panga ya Saidi is yielding evidence of shell beads and worked pigments stretching back 60,000 years.
They speculate there is undiscovered complex representational cave art in Africa that goes back equally far. This claim is based on how
research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi is opening vistas on to an unsuspected world of cave art, many thousands of years older than the famous images of Lascaux and Altamira, on the other side of Eurasia.
In other words, the Davids point out that beads, trinkets, pigments, and some (very rare) cave art, does go back quite far, even to 40-50,000 BC. But, wait, this only makes the Sapient Paradox more perplexing! For then, why did it take so long to invent the sort of rich cultural products like megaliths and congregation points, trade networks, or agriculture, or stone carvings, or like, walls? Why did so little go on for so long?A few hafted tools and a couple strings of beads aren’t Göbekli Tepe, and rock art (and representational art in general) gets consistently more complex and omnipresent as time progresses—in the Upper Neolithic there’s rock art almost everywhere globally, but it really is extremely rare before that, even though enough instances prove we were capable of it. Taken altogether, it does appear like we were climbing out of some Great Trap that was our initial condition, our state of nature.
In another example of willful ignorance on this issue, the Davids ask:
Given that humans have been around for upwards of 200,000 years, why didn’t farming develop much earlier?
The answer they give (in fact, the Davids barely give it, they sort of vaguely imply) is that the advent of farming was due to the ending of the Ice Age and retreat of the glaciers. But this is in direct contradiction to a bunch of their previous points around farming, like how the post-Ice Age was actually a “Golden Age” for foragers, that early farming in general was done in more extreme environmental conditions and was often even an act of desperation, that agriculture was easy to discover and evolve as a technology, and that it was a natural, almost inevitable, outcome of the caring relationship hunter-gatherers had with the land.
So the Davids leave the Sapient Paradox unexplained. Of course, the Davids might simply say that there was civilization from the beginning, but their evidence for this would be nonexistent; even they admit there is a cut-off
beginning around 12,000 BC, in which it first becomes possible to trace the outlines of separate ‘cultures’ based on more than just stone tools.
That is, if the cavalcade of cultures that the Davids posit stretched back further than the 12,000 BC boundary of the Upper Neolithic, there would surely be some evidence—prehistorical societies, in their experimentation with different forms of organization and life, would leave traces of their divergences, or inventions of different technologies and art, i.e., all the myriad goings on during the time of political experimentation that the Davids do have suggestive evidence for. Instead, everyone was silent for tens of thousands of years.
And it’s this silence, just like the silence of the stars, that is striking. The question becomes: How were the silent people before the Upper Neolithic living, and also, what accounts for this efflorescence in culture and ways of living in the Upper Neolithic?
The work of Robin Dunbar seems important here, somehow, although no two thinkers on these topics use it in the exact same way. Dunbar’s number is the idea that humans can hold around 150 distinct social relationships in mind at any one time, and that this is a function of their cortex size, for, in primates, the greater the neocortex the larger the average social group size.
It seems there’s likely something special about Dunbar’s number being violated—after all, a lot of the Upper Neolithic revolution is occurring when groups of humans (in the few hundreds) are getting together seasonally into much larger groups, making pilgrimages, joining, and then dispersing. Each theory of prehistory could reasonably be said to have a different relationship to Dunbar’s number; e.g., for the followers of Rousseau, past Dunbar’s number egalitarianism begins to break down, and therefore the terrible necessity of the inventions of hierarchy, state, and bureaucracy. Even the Davids admit that the violation of the Dunbar number is likely important, writing we should
picture our ancestors moving between relatively enclosed environments, dispersing and gathering, tracking the seasonal movements of mammoth, bison and deer herds. While the absolute number of people may still have been startlingly small, the density of human interactions seems to have radically increased, especially at certain times of the year. And with this came remarkable bursts of cultural expression.
Is there any hypothesis that fits all these disparate facts? We somehow need there to be (a) an initial condition to humanity that keeps it in a Great Trap for tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years, and then also (b) we need that initial condition to have led very naturally to the diverse political and cultural experimentation of the Upper Neolithic, which almost looks like it precludes having a single initial condition at all, and finally (c) the explanation would ideally also explains the mechanism by which the violation of Dunbar’s number is important as a step toward civilization.
How can there be an initial condition that doesn’t lead to predictable developmental stages, and yet still kept us in a Great Trap? All the hypotheses on offer seem to not fit the whole story: neither Rousseau’s version, nor Hobbes’, nor the Davids’ (e.g., if egalitarianism or patriarchy or matriarchy or hierarchy was the initial condition, we should see it universally, and leaving that stage should generally involve a next predictable stage, and this is precisely what we don’t see).
All I, all anyone can do, is offer speculations, which should be taken with a grain of salt. But with that said, it does seem to me there is an alternative theory, which tells the story of The Dawn of Everything in a different way. It’s the book I wish the Davids had written.
In Which an Alternative Hypothesis for the Initial Condition of Prehistory Is Proposed, and an Explanation of the Great Trap of Human History Is Given
If we imagine being transported back to 50,000 BC, what would we expect to find? In the end, we have to give a metaphor to current life of how things were organized: a follower of Rousseau would expect Burning Man, a follower of Hobbes might expect to find a bunch of warring gangs, the Davids might expect to find the deliberation of a town council full of Kandiaronks.
But perhaps small groups of humans less than the Dunbar number were organized by none of these, since they didn’t need to be—instead, they could be organized via raw social power. That is, you don’t need a formal chief, nor an official council, nor laws or judges. You just need popular people and unpopular people.
After all, who sits with who is something that comes incredibly naturally to humans—it is our point of greatest anxiety and subject to our constant management. This is extremely similar to the grooming hierarchies of primates, and, presumably, our hominid ancestors. So 50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.
I know the high school metaphor sounds crazy, but given that any metaphor we’re going to give will fail, I think this one possibly fails less than the others. After all, the central message of The Dawn of Everything is that prehistorical people were just people, with all the weirdness, politicking, cultural hilarity and differentness this implies. But, unlike what the Davids seem to want, most people aren’t Kandiaronk—he was exceptional. Most people are not exceptional. They are. . . well, like the people you remember from high school. So if we take the heart of the message of The Dawn of Everything seriously, perhaps entering a new tribe in Africa at 50,000 BC would not involve a bunch of mysterious rituals in the jungle enacted by solemn actors with dirt smeared across their faces. Maybe it was a bit more like the infamous lunch table scene from the movie Mean Girls (I encourage you to watch), with some minor surface alterations, like clothes (picture beads and furs instead).
After all, in high school there is a clear social web but no formal hierarchies. And while there is a social hierarchy, it’s not ordinal—you couldn’t list, mathematically, all the people from least to most popular, like you could with a formal hierarchy. It’s more like everything is organized by a constant and ever-shifting reputational management, all against all. And there’s actually a lot of evidence, even just in what the Davids themselves introduce, that fits with the idea that our initial condition was something like anarchist bands organized by raw social power only.
Because it sure looks like being popular was the primary concern for prehistorical societies, at least if we use the same evidence the Davids do. In 1642, the Jesuit missionary Le Jeune described this phenomenon of a lack of all formal power among the Montagnais-Naskapi, who anthropologists normally consider “egalitarian” bands of hunter-gatherers:
All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.
In fact, chiefs were basically just the most popular people, nothing more, for instance, in Northwest Coast Native Americans a high-status male
had to ‘keep up’ his name through generous feasting, potlatching, and general open-handedness.
The same lack of formal power but attention to popularity was true across America, even in Kandiaronk’s tribe.
Wendat ‘captains’ . . . urge their subjects to provide what it is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.
And similarly:
Wealthy Wendat men hoarded such precious things largely to be able to give them away on dramatic occasions like these. Neither in the case of land and agricultural products, nor that of wampum and similar valuables, was there any way to transform access to material resources into power. . .
That is, material resources were worth almost nothing, all that mattered was the social pressure you could apply. This is true even for things like crime, which was prevented not by a system of laws, but by a system of social pressure, wherein guilty Native Americans were not punished but rather their lineage or clan had to pay compensation (implying that that the anger of one’s lineage or clan would be enough to not lead to recidivism for offenders). This system of social power to prevent crime was highly effective in its implementation, as the Davids describe the Jesuit Le Jeune grudgingly admitting.
It may even be that money, rather than being invented to keep track of trade relationships or debts for private property, was invented to keep track of social relationships instead. For example, consider again the Yurok, who inhabited the northwestern corner of California, and note that
the Yurok were famous for the central role that money—which took the form of white dentalium shells arranged on strings, and headbands made of bright red woodpecker scalps—played in every aspect of their social lives.
The most famous of this sort of “money,” wampum, was not originally used by indigenous Americans as something that could be settled for goods or services, like the way we understand money now, or the way it became once European settlers arrived. Instead, according to the Davids, wampum “largely existed for political purposes,” i.e., to keep track of social capital, not material capital. Even private property itself might have been only an extension of social relations.
Among the Plains societies of North America, for instance, sacred bundles (which normally included not only physical objects but accompanying dances, rituals, and songs) were often the only objects in that society to be treated as private property: not just owned exclusively by individuals, but also inherited, bought and sold.
And this fits with the theatricality and seasonality that the Davids make so much of, like in the case of Native American tribes, wherein
an office holder could give all the orders he or she liked, but no one was under any particular obligation to follow them.
In fact, it’s almost tautological that early societies had to be organized by raw social power—there are no formal powers to enforce anything else, nor combat social pressure when it’s applied (and humans will always apply it). It also explains why early formal governments are theatrical or seasonal, since they are merely a mask of raw social power—which families are important, which are liked, who are friends, who are enemies, who are frenemies. Which means that what the Davids assume is a set of constantly shifting Neolithic “political experiments” is really just a bunch of constantly shifting mores that, like the Gestapo, hide the real power. Which was who was popular and who was not. Heck, the high school metaphor (despite definitely not being perfect) does a better job than the other metaphors of explaining the odd evidence that skeletons given the honor of burials in the Upper Palaeolithic were often dwarfs or giants or bore physical anomalies: they were mascots.
What’s interesting is that anthropologists, from what I’ve read, seem to assume that raw social power is mostly a good thing (one wonders if they’ve ever seen social pressure applied). Mostly they focus on gossip, and if we look at the work of Robin Dunbar, and his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he speculates that the need to gossip was why language was invented in the first place. And gossip has (as far as I can tell), an almost universally positive valence throughout anthropology. In the literature it is portrayed as something that maintains social relationships and rids groups of free-riders and cheats, i.e., gossip is a “leveling mechanism” that prevents individuals from accruing too much power. According to the Davids, in the Hazda
talented hunters are systematically mocked and belittled. . .
And the evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm came to a similar conclusion:
Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggats and bullies down to earth—ridicule, shaming, shunning. . .
In Haiti, G.E. Simpson found that a peasant will seek to disguise his true economic position by purchasing several smaller fields rather than one larger piece of land. For the same reason he will not wear good clothes. He does this intentionally to protect himself against the envious black magic of his neighbors.
But it never seems to strike Dunbar or others that living under a dominion of raw social power, with few to little formal powers anywhere, would be hellish to a citizen of the 21st century (which is why I say the closest analog is high school). My mother used to quote Eleanor Roosevelt all the time:
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
A “gossip trap”is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years. Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school.
And this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization—at a certain size (possibly a lot larger than the actual Dunbar number) you simply can’t organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans. Eventually, you need to create formal structures, which at first are seasonal and changeable and theatrical, and take all sorts of diverse forms, since the initial condition is just who’s popular. But then these formal systems slowly become real.
So then what is civilization? It is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the gossip trap. For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip. Are not our paragons of civilization figures like Supreme Court justices or tenured professors, or protected classes with impunity to speak and present new ideas, like journalists or scientists?
On the Technological Resurrection of the Gossip Trap and the Devolution of Civilization You’ve Been Noticing
A lot of things change as you age, but one that’s particularly strange is finding hairs in weird places. Like your inner ears. It turns out this is because aging is basically genetic confusion, down at the molecular level. As they age, cells get mixed up as to what sort of cell they’re supposed to be. And there’s a lot of ancient instructions, just lying around, still in your cells. Weird hair growth is the result of a cell latching on to some ancient genetic instruction. Our predecessors had lots of hair everywhere, your cells get confused, and you begin to manifest your hirsute ancestors. The hairy tufts springing from your grandfather’s ears are there because parts of him are literally devolving into an ancient creature. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
What if there were a mental equivalent? After all, if we lived in a gossip trap for the majority of our existence as humans, then what would it be, mentally, to atavistically return to that gossip trap?
Well, it sure would look a lot like Twitter.
I’m serious. It would look a lot like Twitter. For it’s on social media that gossip and social manipulation are unbounded, infinitely transmittable. An environment of raw social power, which, despite its endless reign of terror, actually feels kind of good? Wouldn’t we want to go back to forced instances of fission between human groups, exiling those we don’t like? Wouldn’t we punish crimes not with legal proceedings, but via massive social shamings?
The difference between the horror of crabs in a bucket and a human tribe or group living in a gossip trap is actually that the humans are generally quite happy down there in the bucket. It’s our natural environment. Most people like the trap. Oh, it’s terrible for the accused, the exiled, the uncool. But the gossip trap is comfortable. Homey. People like Jonathan Haidt will look at modern life and scratch their heads in The Atlantic to try to pinpoint when and why the social media algorithm began to spread misinformation and sow discord. They miss the truth, which is that all social media does is allow us to overcome Dunbar’s number, which dismantled a barrier erected at the beginning of civilization. Of course we gravitate to cancel culture—it’s our innate evolved form of government.
One obvious sign you’re living in a gossip trap is when the primary mode of dispute resolution becomes social pressure. And almost everywhere you look lately, it’s like social media is wearing a skin suit made of our laws, institutions, and governments. Does it not feel, just in the past decade, as if raw social power has outstripped anything resembling formal power? How protected from public opinion does a judge feel now? How protected does a tenured professor feel? How protected do you feel? To what degree is prosecution of crime a matter of law, or does social media have its billion thumbs on the scale? Putin of late seems more afraid of cancel culture than he is of nuclear weapons. Maybe that’s for a good reason.
Which means that, with the advent of social media, and the resultant triumph of the spread of gossip over Dunbar’s number, we might have just inadvertently performed the equivalent of summoning an Elder God. The ability to organize society through raw social power given back to a species that climbed out of the trap of raw social power only by creating societies large enough they required formal organization. The gossip trap is our first Eldritch Mother, the Garrulous Gorgon With a Thousand Heads, The Beast Made Only of Sound.
And if the gossip trap was humanity’s first form of government, and via technology it’s been resurrected once more into the world, how long until it swallows up the entire globe?
In Which the Truth Is Revealed
An admittance. For it should be obvious by now: this text is corrupted. The same corruption that I accused the Davids of falling victim to, and that they, in turn, accused Rousseau and Hobbes of falling victim to. I have made the past political, and prehistory a sepia reflection of the current day. Just like Rousseau, or Hobbes, or the Davids, I have spun a yarn.
I think it’s a true yarn, I really do. I think the gossip trap is real, or at least, explains more than other hypotheses about prehistorical life I’ve read. I think it’s likely we did accidentally, via social media, summon back the Elder God that is our innate form of government. And I think we should be worried about civilization itself.
This is almost certainly not the conclusion the Davids hoped a reader would get from The Dawn of Everything. But perhaps corruption by the peccadillos we see in our own civilizations is inevitable for all who write about these issues. For the past is political—it does matter what our “natural state” was, it does matter how we lived, it does matter in what environs we evolved. It does matter where we started, for otherwise, how can we see where we’re going?
Maybe the ultimate truth or falsity of prehistorical narratives is unknowable. Maybe speculations such as these are only stumbling through a maze, all of human history a hall of mirrors in which we wander. And, projected in gigantic distortions all around us, we see only our own face.
About the Author
Erik Hoel is an author and researcher. His debut novel THE REVELATIONS (out now from Abrams Books) is a tale of science and murder.
Publication Rights
This essay was first published in The Intrinsic Perspective. Subscribe here. Republished with permission. This essay won 1st place and $5,000 in Scott Alexander’s anonymous book review contest, which was hosted at Astral Codex Ten.
Some Memories of the Life and Work of Bruno Latour (1947-2022)
Down in the crypt of the basilica of Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Baume, in the South of France, there is an exquisitely rare object. It is a skull, behind a wall of glass, and it is described by two separate and very different labels. The one label tells you it comes from a woman in her fifties, likely born in the eastern Mediterranean in the early first century CE. The other label tells you it is the skull of Mary Magdalene. Legends of her late-life migration to Southern Gaul had already been circulating for some time when the discovery of her skeletal remains in Saint-Maximin was announced in 1279, and the basilica was subsequently built up around this gravesite. In the fourteenth century the Genoese Dominican author Jacobus de Voragine tells the full story of Mary Magdalene’s shipwreck off the coast of Marseille, and of her subsequent long career of miracle-working throughout Provence. Europe was made Christian not just by real-time conversion, but also a great deal of retroactive inscription of Biblical personages, apostles, and early Church Fathers into the ancient history of what was not yet a well-delineated cultural-geographical sphere.
In 2017 my spouse and I were standing and looking at the skull behind the glass. I was inspecting the two labels, and thinking about the ironies of the contrasting accounts they presented, when, behind us, we heard a voice: Ah, c’est bien, ils nous donnent un choix, the voice said. We turned around, and saw that it belonged to Bruno Latour.
“It’s nice, they give us a choice.” With this simple, gentle affirmation, our beloved old master, so often derided in the Anglosphere for his role in landing us in the current “post-truth” desert, seemed to sublate all the irony of the contrasting accounts of the skull’s origins, into something that was, well, true — and not only true, but good: a good and true method for navigating the perilous terrain on which the truth-claims of these only purportedly non-overlapping magisteria have done their best to coexist for the past five centuries or so. It is not just a matter of giving everybody what they want, letting each person choose one label, but rather giving all of us both labels. It is not as if one descends into post-truth the minute one chooses to vibe with de Voragine and to represent before the mind the miraculous transit of Mary Magdalene, and in fact we might reasonably fear that a world totally cleansed of such representations would be a sick and impoverished one indeed, with a terribly inadequate idea of truth and what it must involve.
It was not such a surprise to find Bruno in the crypt — we had been at the same wedding outside of town the day before, and there is not much else to see during one’s free time but the basilica. At the celebration he recited a touching poem of his own composition for the young couple, and smoked his cigar and played a multigenerational match of croquet. I have never been much of a Latourian, philosophically speaking. There are considerable portions of his work I don’t understand at all, and he often took what at first looked to me like shared interests off in directions that gave me little to work with — he dissolved G. W. Leibniz, for instance, into the work of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French social theorists, such as Maurice Halbwachs and most of all Gabriel Tarde, who took up the concept of “monad” as if it had only to do with individual human beings in society rather than an all-subtending foundation for a metaphysics of nature. But there are a few texts of his that I teach every year, and a few key ideas of his I always carry with me when I’m doing my own thinking and writing. My Latour is idiosyncratic, pieced together from a selective reading of a vast body of work. But I think I have good reason to characterize him, as I have done in opening here, as a “philosopher of choice”.
If we had had the sad task of writing an elegy for Bruno Latour in, say, 1985, he would indeed have been principally distinguished for his role in the emergence of “science and technology studies” as a distinct subdisciplinary tendency in Anglophone academia (although he was consistently based in France, most of his early impact was in England and the United States). This tendency generally took the scientific discovery of new truths to be largely narrative, and took all the other stuff that goes on in the course of scientific discovery —competition, infighting, networks, ideology— to be just as relevant to our understanding of what science is as are the discoveries on which the scientists themselves would invariably prefer that we focus.
Latour’s role in shaping this tendency was immense, beginning with 1979’s Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, co-written with Steve Woolgar. A number of subsequent milestones of science studies would follow over the next decade, notably Peter Galison’s 1987 book, How Experiments End, which built upon the key Latourian idea of the possibility of taking scientific practice itself as an object of study, deploying essentially the same tools of observation and analysis as if one were studying, say, artists (who were the model, let us not forget, for William Whewell’s coinage of the term “scientist” in the 1830s). Latour always had fun with this “arroseur arrosé” twist, watching the people whose job it was to watch the world. His delight is surely at its most visible in the inherently comical predicament of his work on primatology: turning his eye, like Donna Haraway before him, on the human beings who watch the apes and monkeys who, in turn, it is hoped, will reveal something new about being human.
Now, on a certain facile reading of the work undertaken within this scholarly tendency, to turn to practices and networks and away from scientific discovery is at the same time to retreat from the idea that the truth about the world is discoverable. Admittedly, some of the participants in this tendency encouraged such a facile reading, mostly because it gave an appearance of radicalism — that is, the kind of radicalism that can help to advance an academic career. Be that as it may, you would nonetheless be hard pressed to find anyone in this movement prepared to state outright that the results of scientific research, to the extent that they are the by-products of specific cultural practices, ipso facto do not exist. Even Andrew Pickering, whose 1984 book, Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, I take to be the boldest contribution to the movement I am describing, was always careful to explain that the way we talk about quarks is the result of a specific history of technology that required all sorts of non-scientific circumstances to obtain in order even to make sense at all, rather than saying that the subatomic particles themselves are discursively produced.
Latour, in any case, certainly understood that construction is not the same thing as deconstruction, that to explain the social dimensions of a given object of our scientific ontology is not to explain that object away. In this light, Latour’s much-discussed 2004 article, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, easily appears not so much as a road-to-Damascus moment, or as a radical conversion away from everything he had promoted before, but rather simply as a refinement, an honest update to a general and consistent approach in light of lessons learned from a changing world. He begins the essay with a reflection on climate-change denial, and moves quickly to what seems to him a new epidemic of conspiracy thinking among ordinary people — in this case the villagers in the region of his family’s vineyards (whose Domaine Latour wine he both proudly and ironically served at parties at his home in Paris):
The smoke of the event [September 11] has not yet finished settling before dozens of conspiracy theories begin revising the official account, adding even more ruins to the ruins, adding even more smoke to the smoke. What has become of critique when my neighbor in the little Bourbonnais village where I live looks down on me as someone hopelessly naïve because I believe that the United States had been attacked by terrorists? Remember the good old days when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naïvely believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie? Things have changed a lot, at least in my village. I am now the one who naïvely believes in some facts because I am educated, while the other guys are too unsophisticated to be gullible.
He has the nagging feeling, moreover, that he himself may have played at least some small part in bringing about the cultural conditions for such a reversal:
Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show ‘the lack of scientific certainty’ inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a ‘primary issue.’ But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I’d like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
It seems to me implausible that academic theory could bear much of the responsibility for the cynical manipulations to which we are all exposed today. You can’t have it both ways; academia cannot be both destructive and impotent, and I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s impotent, an arrière-garde after-echo of other material and economic forces that it barely even notices until long after they’ve taken shape. It likewise seems implausible to me to suppose that there is anything phylogenetically “postmodern” about, say, the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which features panoramas of cavemen living side-by-side with dinosaurs, just as the Bible, properly interpreted, dictates (it all makes sense if you read “dinosaur” as “dragon”). Operations like this one have indeed taken advantage of the ambient wisdom according to which truth is an assertion of power, and therefore seeing to it that “your truth” prevails is simply a matter of getting an institutional footing in places like schools and museums (or their carefully staged simulacra). But still, it is not so hard to see why, around 2004, it could easily have seemed to an honest and lucid theorist such as Latour that this was a very good moment indeed to take a break from warning about the danger of premature naturalization of what an institutionally elite class of people uses its power to anoint as “facts”, and instead to start to think, but really hard, about how facts and values might be brought together again, or perhaps not again, but for the first time, in such a way as to contribute to human flourishing.
This then is where we start to see the full significance of the second part of the 2004 article’s title: “From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”. Latour is one of the few philosophers who succeeds at using etymology to illuminate, rather than to obfuscate — very much unlike Martin Heidegger, even when he is offering an explicitly Heideggerian analysis of a word that famously preoccupied his German predecessor. The word Ding, namely, is in the first instance simply the German word for “thing”, as well as being an obvious cognate to the English word. But it is also the word for what we might translate as “council” or “assembly” in the context of ancient Germanic tribal confederations. This meaning of the word is still used in the official name of the Icelandic parliament: the Alþingi. There is an Old Slavic equivalent in вече/véče (“assembly”), cognate to the modern Russian вещь/veshch’ (“thing”); and indeed the Germanic and Slavic terms are fairly close to the Latin res publica, which of course means“republic”, but also, more literally, “the public thing”.
If we take this etymology seriously, as Latour wants to do, we are left with the surprising realization that “things” are, in their original and most archaic sense, political. What we now take as things in the most normal sense, “everyday things”, things that have Dinglichkeit, do not represent some totally disconnected usage of the term, in Latour’s view, but rather are an extension of what we mean, or what the Germanic tribes meant, when we, or they, talk, or talked, about “things”. That is, a thing is a sort of coming together, not just any coming together, but one that is of particular salience for a society in its efforts to chart its course into the future. Some things are assemblies of people, while others are assemblages of material parts. Some things have spatiotemporally cohesive parts (e.g., tables), but others do not (e.g., cutlery sets). Some things might result from several different natural processes (e.g., Uluru), and come to be valued as things by nothing more than the mental representations of human beings who have rearranged none of the relevant parts constituting the material dimension of the thing. What is similar in all of these cases is that the entities in question are “matters of concern”. Some of them are also “matters of fact”: unlike Uluru, tables and cutlery sets are things that had to be “made” (facta) in order to become objects of concern. But some things can be matters of fact and fail to be matters of concern, or, to put it differently, we can fail to be concerned about them — e.g., plastic milk jugs in the ocean, which were made just like any other human artefact, but were then cast off and, at least for a while, ignored.
So, wherever you have a thing, you have a locus of care (or, if you will, a matter of concern). This is something conceptually distinct from an artefact, or from an object. In fact, Latour thinks, in order to get away from all the confusion into which the notion of “objectivity” has led us (a notion that really only takes hold as a dogma in the late nineteenth century, according to Daston and Galison in their celebrated genealogy of the concept, to which Latour provided the preface in its French translation), it might be better to retrain our focus on “things”. And it is in light of this retraining effort, I think, that his twenty-first-century shift to ecology and the climate crisis takes on a particular appeal. It was, recall, only in the mid-twentieth century that we got the first photographic images of our planet as the iconic “pale blue dot” that we all know, and love, today. Arguably, it is at this moment that the Earth itself became a thing, that is, came to be cognized and valued as a suitable locus of our care and solicitude, rather than simply, so to speak, the transcendent ground of our existence. This is the moment, also, when Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which so influenced Latour’s thinking, became conceivable — it is not that no one in antiquity or later had ever suggested the world is an organic whole, but what was meant by “world”, for, e.g., the Stoics, was the cosmos, and not any particular life-supporting sphere within it. In a sense Latour’s late-career emphasis on matters of concern, or, if you will, on “truth as care”, is a continuation of the early-career work for which he was admonished as a partisan of the “post-truth” tendency. But his later work is at least somewhat less playful, more urgent, and in tone it is a universe away from the perceived cynicism of the golden age of constructionist science studies. He is speaking now not in the vein of irony, but of love.
I am on record saying that, whatever else your complaints might be, the idea that human social life is constituted by narrativity (“postmodernism”) is by far preferable to whatever it is we’re stuck with now — this strange new hyperrealism about our social identities and this return to an almost medieval appeal to authority in the admonition to “trust the science”. Latour spent his career warning against premature and ungrounded use of this admonition, began to worry when his warning was misheard as a simple negation —“Don’t trust the science!”—, and spent the latter part of his career working through the full implications of our current crisis of trust.
Bruno Latour was honest and generous, and I don’t think there’s any question he took up that was not, for him, a true matter of concern. He was one of our era’s best guides between the eternal Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatism and skepticism. I am convinced that his comment about the skull in the crypt provides a key to his whole way of thinking. We have a choice — that’s what it all comes down to. Constructionism was never a matter of “just saying whatever”, and science can never be simply a matter of reading the dictates of the natural world off of our instruments, or out of our data, like a new sort of Divine Law. We have a choice as to how read the world, and it’s going to take all of our human ability, and perhaps some superhuman luck or grace as well, to read it for our own good.
About the Author
Justin E. H. Smith is an author and professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, will appear in 2021 from Princeton University Press.
We can ask, when is death bad for the one who dies? Epicureans, holding that death brings to an end all feelings, awareness, thought, and existence itself, say it’s never bad. This is hard to believe. The Deprivation View says, seemingly plausibly, that it is bad not only to feel pain but also to lose out on, or be deprived of, pleasures. That there is no pain for the dead doesn’t, then, establish that death isn’t bad. And probably most philosophers will sign up to the Deprivation View, or what is here called Deprivationism, in some form or other.
Kamm, exploiting her fondness for awkward-sounding neologisms, identifies and discusses three claims, all of which suggest weaknesses in Deprivationism. First, there is Willhavehadism—it is worse to die at 20 than 50 as one would have had more of life in the latter case. Then Alloverism—dying a year from now might be worse than being in a coma for a hundred years, coming round, and then dying a year later. And Insultism—death takes from us not just the future, but a life, something we already had.
It’s worth discussing each of these in a little more detail.
Willhavehadism. Suppose that if you don’t die, you’ll have 10 more years of good life. So then death now is bad, according to Deprivationism. Is it worse to die at 20 than 50 if in both cases you lose 10 good years? Kamm says it is. But why think the Deprivationist would say anything different? Surely the plausible claim is merely that death’s badness is proportional to the goods lost, other things equal. And they are not equal when between two people the age of death differs. This isn’t some last ditch, up against the wall attempt to rescue Deprivationism. The driving idea is that when life is good then more of it is better. This is why even a painless death, in robbing us of this good, is bad for us. It is surely implicit in Deprivationism, from the outset, that it is worse to die at 20 than at 50, worse to have had the smaller amount of good life.
Alloverism. Going out of existence, and forever, is what some of us most dread. And Kamm’s Limbo Man prefers to put this off as long as possible. I might simply make the above point again: having your last year now, or having it a century later, is not a case where other things are equal. So Deprivationism need make no claim that these options are equally bad. But I might instead argue that Limbo Man makes a mistake: it is better to have your last year now, in familiar circumstances, than to have it many years hence, and in utterly alien territory. Suppose we imagine that time continues, but all earthly activity is put on hold for a century. Limbo Man gets what he, on reflection, decides he wants—a good year wholly indiscernible from that available to him now, but, and undetectably, a hundred years later. There is, though, no reason to want this.
Insultism. This is harder. There are, it seems, two ways in which we can be deprived of some portion of a good life; either by keeping birth fixed, but then dying, and going out of existence earlier, or by keeping death fixed, and coming into existence later. But there is an asymmetry here: a shorter life caused by an earlier death seems to be worse than one caused by a later birth. So then we haven’t adequately explained the badness of death merely by pointing to the good life lost. Kamm fills the gap. Unlike pre-natal non-existence, death happens to a person, destroys that person, takes from the person something—a life—that they had, involves a decline from a good to at least a neutral state, and ends all hope of a good future. These are, she says, death’s insult factors.
Scenes of asking for help, staying in place, and women conversing on the Brome-Missisquoi
Queenie claps the geese away from my tent first thing in the morning.
Queenie commands the registration desk at the campground and smiles bemusedly every time I peer through her window to tell her I’m staying just one more night.
I’ve been lying awake for about twenty minutes, listening to the gurgling and munching of the creatures stampeding around my head, but swept over with a profound apathy. As the only tent in an RV park—a testament to one side of “camping” in Quebec—I am left to contend with the local wildlife more or less on my own. Two nights ago, I learned that skunks hate the smell of citrus and lavender. The other night, I made a maelstrom of noise to spook away the marmots growling and nibbling at my tent in the middle of a thunderstorm. At this point, I couldn’t care less about the army of geese marching around my $50 refuge from Canadian Tire, as the clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap announces another day on Lac Brome.
Early in the week of August 8, I was recovering my pride from having ambitiously overshot my intention to push on to Orford in a downpour. Instead, I ended up at the Thirsty Boot somewhere on a highway outside of Knowlton. Actually, I had been on the way to the legendary bar two days prior, when an incident of nothing-really-happened-but— changed the sense of environment.
“Life is old there, older than the trees / Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze / Country roads, take me home …”
“They have one spot left!” says Kristine[1], as she finagles a late arrival at a nearby campground and her husband loads my bicycle onto their Jeep, all of our limbs hanging out the missing sides as we barrel up the darkening road.
I arrived in Knowlton almost by accident—the classic “just a little bit further” that brought me into town with dusk setting in, and far too many closely-surveyed private properties to feel comfortable with getting sassy. Far from being a deterrent, late arrival can work in favour of finding a safe, isolated place to rest on the road to nowhere in particular, but this time things had been feeling uneasy.
“Restez avec nous!” a van of young men screeched by at nearly the instant the road diverged from the Yamaska[2] River onto the highway leading west, as if marking the turning point in the mood. Pushing on from Cowansville, I had been looking for a landing ground east. Anywhere east. The hills and rolling mountains pronounce the isolation of the region. Due south from the main throughways, gravel roads undulate across the mountains that spread on from Sutton and through the northern border of Vermont. Antique stores punctuate roughly the tenth kilometre between destinations.
There might be a field along the route away from Knowlton, I thought, as had proven to be the case in the friendly hamlets spotting the Montérégie where almost every stranger shouted out a greeting, some good luck, or a candid invitation to pitch up on their farm. But Lac Brome is a different story altogether, with the encroachment of mountains on Quebec’s agricultural heartland drawing a subtle divide between a certain sense of free-range movement and a protective insularity.
Just off chemin Lakeside, the region collides into an uncanny combination of quaint New England farmland, mountainous isolation and a feeling faintly evocative of the heavy forests of Washington State and the moody towns like Everett that mingle the shadow of the Wild West with the romantic tinge of ascending toward water. Knowlton itself is a collision of gated English countryhomes, remnants of the New England drawl[3] that staggers over a class divide both sides of the border with Vermont, mansions with Mercedes and Porsches, golf courses and private tennis courts, and miniature chalets for the children. Giant signs, mostly in English, advertise who has the right to park where, prohibited fishing areas, what one must and must not do, and the ubiquitous use of surveillance cameras. On close inspection, cameras do indeed point varyingly toward a public trail, over the lakeside, in all directions over private docks, and even into the lilies where deer emerge without fear at dusk. The self-effacing refrain of “sorry, sorry, sorry” from grocery cashiers contrasts against the rousing and boisterous, but far more infrequent, pattern of “ben ouai, c’est sur, c’est sur”. With an “Um, excuse me, next time—“ I am chastised for riding my bicycle over a five metre footbridge.
Knowlton stands in absurdist contrast to the Harleys and trailers making creative use of land zoning along the highway. and the town of Foster that sits on the lake’s north shore. About eight kilometres to the north, the hamlet of Foster—where Kristine and her husband dispatch me in the Jeep—shrugs out of the rolling hills with aging chalets that don’t seem bothered by their own disrepair, rusting Volkswagens flaunting support for well-water, and vultures staking out the next rodent to be railed down by an oversized pick-up.
Compelled by the strangely evocative name of the town Brill, the road I turned down was romantically illuminated under a golden sunset, splayed across a sky that sighed into the evening. The fields were pristine and tempting, but there was something uncanny about such stunning land being unfenced. What’s the catch? Sure enough, faded signs peer out of the wood that veers in and away from the roadside, warning of hunting grounds. It is as if any land that is not obviously occupied by a mansion or a palatial ranch is marked as hunting grounds.
With the sun setting quickly, I had yet to find a place to sleep. Veering my bicycle back toward the main road that skirts Lac Brome, I passed a man on horseback. Seeming to be in his early thirties, he was stylishly dressed, his sharp gaze flitting behind golden-tinted lenses. Would you happen to know somewhere I can pitch my tent? The feeling of being saturated by kindness of the past days, a strained knee that had begun to whelp roughly 10 kilometres outside of Knowlton, and an exhaustion had crept in to me; at that moment, asking for directions was just that—asking a question, and not the prelude to what could have become a B-rated thriller.
“I can find you a place,” he said after a pause, hypnotically flicking his whip, in a coy voice that had the faintest tone of coldness. Flick. Flick. “But I may have to…” If a voice could lick its lips. The phrase left hanging, he looked me up and down.
The reminder of being a woman alone comes very simply, very quickly. Even comically. It can catch you off-guard on a bicycle, on a trail, even on the usual road home, a block away, or just outside the front door. The subtlest of unstated things can shock, provoking with the cold water of a primitive instinct.
“I think I know a place, it’s just up this way,” he beckoned. Flick. Flick.
It is difficult to tell when turning away immediately could be more of a mistake than following along and turning away at an unexpected moment. Would a man on a bicycle have to negotiate a vague gut feeling while calculating how many more kilometres a strained knee will push? I followed the man on horseback for a few metres, until he veered slightly to the right, and I took the opportunity to spin the loaded bike around to hurtle 5 kilometres south—toward a hill where Kristine saw me taking a breath, and told me how much she loves adventuring alone.
All’s well that ends well, but the incident left me with an unease about the cascading hills of ranches and shooting ranges that skirt the mansions of Knowlton, and a sudden awareness of my gender, which I had otherwise left behind for safekeeping with the old boys at Bar Du Coin. In addition to worrying about the legitimacy of waterproof claims, wrong turns, where to store fresh food for the night, and where to restock water along the way, women have to think about the almosts, could have beens, nothing really happened—but could haves. The nothings that shouldn’t be upsetting, the feeling of over-reacting or embarassment at flight, because technically nothing happened.
With a mug of black tea on the dock before bed, I think back to an intimate conversation from a few nights ago in Bromont, and the desire to move freely through a world where it’s not necessary to second-guess intentions.
Diner. Rain. Man in a hat.
Several gambles with the weather and a frustrated sense of needing to move on resulted instead in staying in place for a few days as the rain opened over Lac Brome.
Marooned by the rain in Foster, I set up in a wood-panelled diner, nearly empty in the early morning in the downpour. A poster advertises music in Granby about 30 kilometres away. A hunting vest hangs on a row of empty coat hangers, cutlery rolls tower on a janky cupboard, stake-grown tomatoes and China Green Tea boxes marked Noël jostle overhead. The bell of a spoon spins sugar into a thin coffee, punctuating the quiet. Arhythmic chatter is sparse, drifting over in muffled tones. A handful of patrons are scattered across the two rooms, with one booth directly facing the entrance occupied on a regular rotation over the course of two hours.
A serious and prim woman with a bun of grown-out blonde dye pulled tight onto the crown of her head sits at the first booth facing the door. When a couple enters after about fifteen minutes, she greets them enthusiastically in French, responding with not much more than a “ça va, ça va” that returns into silence as the pair launches into English with the staff.
A solitary man pulls his pick-up in for a coffee and a sandwich. The men who come into the diner alone share in a sturdy type of solitude. Quiet, confident bearing, a little glum, with a gaze focused decidedly out of the windows. When I glance toward his booth in the first room, I see him looking over with a gentle curiosity, but we both shyly avert our gaze and it doesn’t meet again.
The soft, forceless voice of a small white-haired man breaks over breakfast. “My son, he bought a car,” he recounts to a companion over toast and eggs, stout and red-faced with a bristle of a moustache, his serious bearing offset by an unconscious swinging of his feet just millimetres off the floor of the booth. “A man died in the back of that car,” he concludes, wiping bean sauce from his moustache as his wife peers without reaction over circular glasses, under a dandelion-white bowl cut.
A reservation of two elderly couples comes in. Regional intonations of Quebecois colour the conversation as unruly laughter slaps against the rough wooden walls and plastic tabletops. The boisterous group peppers their conversation with tabarnacs and indistinct references on rich Anglos, interrupted by the arrival of steaming plates of eggs and sausages. The conversation turns back again to what everyone did last summer, breakfasts past, and the best brunch restaurants just across the U.S. border.
Moonrise over Lac Brome
“It is as if the moon is radiating warmth,” says Harriette[4], an elderly lady who has come over to the dock where I am cutting vegetables and resting my sore legs. Harriette has lived on Lac Brome since 2017 and has a multitude of portraits of the evanescent sky over the years. Just the past few days have gifted a different composition each day, each night, never once the same. “The moon is reflecting the sun’s light,” she adds, “but it is as if it is sending us its own warmth.”
She is right. One night away from the full moon, the enormous disc that seems to be flying so swiftly from behind the mountains, and the dancing reflection on the calm water of the lake, beam with an uncanny temperature that reaches us on the opposing shore.
I had made a certain peace with being stuck on the lake here in what would be considered New England, and not tearing down my tent every morning. Trading movement for movement’s sake for the witness of change from one place, and a base for sojourn.
Two or three boats had banked as Harriette walked out on the second dock to take photos of the reddening sky. She was wearing green, with a flirtatious rim of green shadow around her eyes, which narrowed with enjoyment but always preserved a subtle sense of guardedness or hesitation. Her silver hair was pulled back in a cheerful ponytail. Taking photos of the changing clouds, there was a girlish curiousity to her.
“I saw you and thought I’d come over,” she says, a bit shy. We witness the moon’s ascent together, sharing a sense of awe as the enormous disc crests over the edge of the mountain.
Harriette used to live on the river in Drummondville, but like many of the retirees in the park, she visited Lac Brome once and decided to never leave. In the winter, she’ll walk out on the frozen crust of the lake, with snowshoes or skis, a small woman making her pathway alongside the fishermen who trade the rumbling boats upheaving the waters of summer for the stillness of huts on the ice.
“On the river, you couldn’t see the sky, there were so many lights. Here, it is dark,” she describes, as we peer into the rouging clouds to see if we might get a clear view of the stars when the night sets in. Just the other night, the lake was veiled with an immense curtain of white pointillist lace, spreading a wide bridal veil between air and water, curling and contorting into the patterns of mythological creatures and the hem of the Milky Way catching on this corner of the planet.
But the water of Lac Brome is deceptive. A thin line of slick grease traces the quiet breathing of the water. Kristine had advised against swimming in the lake. “There are just so many boats, and the water is so polluted.” “Maybe out toward the middle,” said a man the other day, with a lilting skepticism, relaxing under a sun umbrella by a tiny roadside pool. The campground, churning through retirees and fishermen, is under a boil-water advisory. Motorboats revv in and out every day. Farms and residences located directly on the water[5] seep pollutants and garbage. A nearby duck farm has historically contributed to elevated levels of phosphorous[6] in the lake.
Cruise by Tiffany Park at Fisher’s Point, and you might spot an elderly woman reading a newspaper from a folding chair half-immersed in the water, the rocking waves lapping at the seat every so often, leaving a puddle around her thighs. Signs indicate that boaters should avoid disturbing the lake bed, but this does not deter the traffic. The smell of gasoline mingles with the aroma of fish and wet rocks that precedes rain.
We get tangled in a conversation on pollution. The days prior were full of headlines on public servants making sojourns to Rouyn Noranda. Harriette describes how frustrated people are with the government not doing anything significant about the lung cancer-causing arsenic poisoning where Glencore maintains the Horne Foundry copper smelter—one of the many single-industry towns that trace the industrial heartbeat of Quebec.
“The elections are coming up,” she refers to the CAQ’s campaign for October, with a pointed look down at me from under her green lids, as I’m sitting cross-legged like a girl at her feet. “So the Premier sends the Health Minister to Rouyn-Noranda—”
She glances for a moment at the moon.
Another report published the week of July 4th, in time with Public Health Director Dr. Luc Boileau’s second visit this summer, recommended that Glencore reduce arsenic emmissions. Yet, “They analyse, analyse, analyse. So many years of analysis, and yet nothing has been done!”
“You are alone?” she ventures, after a pause. The same question has been raised by nearly every woman who has stopped to comment on or ask about the trek. Harriette admits that she has wanted to travel alone, but hasn’t worked herself up to do it. I tell her about my nothing-happened encounter with the man on horseback. “J’comprend,” she says, her look suddenly serious. There is a quiet, thoughtful anger that is particular to older women, a full heavy silence that replaces words.
We talk about the spirit of making the journey anyway. That so often, the mentality of it is to wait for another day, a better day, a better moment, and that rather, it is important to seize the moment. “Ok, let’s go!” She exclaims in English, throwing her arms out from her chest as if releasing a tightly-wound spring.
Harriette wants to get a second kayak so that she can invite friends onto the water. Each is a means toward some fateful correspondence of events that leads o a moonrise over Lac Brome, a detour into Bromont, or perhaps a visit to a friend on Îles-de-la-Madeleine who insists that Harriette must come visit. A second kayak is an invitation and a possibility.
Fishermen on a quiet lake, following a stormy day prior
But as the sky darkens and the air grows cold, all the talk dips toward a note of sadness. A sadness over losing time, losing what one loves to do, and losing one’s self in relationships. Over the things women stop doing because they capitulate in the large and small ways to their partners, ways that are unseen even, or especially, by themselves until so much time has passed. They are then seized by an urgency to recover their ‘own’ doing, their ‘own’ way, the nature that is true to them, which has been softened or tamed in order to accommodate—be it their partners’ natures or schedules, the conditions for survival, obligations and the trick of being indispensable for resolving someone else’s mess.
The craving for adventure, for shedding four walls and sleeping under an open sky, for getting drenched and coated in dust, for laughing at frustration and crying at joy, for straining muscles and earning scars. How many women receive a figurative pat on the head for chasing adventures as a cute quirk, or something to tease, an endearing quality that should really be fixed or reigned in a little bit, matured or a phase to grow out of—and ultimately be left to the men? How many women have had to contort themselves into a particular image of an adventurous woman[7] that serves men’s egos, emphasizes traditionally masculine qualities, or demands they choose between poems and hill reps, always making sure to take it easy? How many women have had to retrace their pathways over years to instead embrace their neglected natures as an essential path to vitality, as necessary as oxygen?
Along the way, women of different ages have repeatedly confessed to me the ways they have set their own limitations. “I couldn’t do it alone.” “I thought about it, but never did.” Procrastination. Depleted self-confidence. Comfort zones. Dependency. Fear. And under it all, buying into the belief that if one identifies as one ‘thing’ that one cannot try other things, cannot also be ‘something else’ at the same time.
As for writers, few are shocked that Haruki Murakami, for example, runs marathons[8], including the notoriously tough to qualify for Boston. Look up a list of “authors who were athletes” or “writers who liked sports” and the lists are dominated by men. Tennis: David Foster Wallace. Track and field, and football: Jack Kerouac. Soccer: Albert Camus. Boxing: Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov. Each activity enriched the creative life and profound insights of these men into our inner and outer worlds.
Yet:
You don’t seem the type—You come across as this quiet writer, I didn’t expect this from you—You’re into that? It is well-known that nourishing the body is also nourishing the creative spirit, the chemical cocktail that dances with inspiration in a delicate balance between muse and precise, controlled neural activation. With every note of surprise, there is an undertone from which the contradiction stems: You shouldn’t be into that—I’m uncomfortable with being confused or surprised by you—Stay in your lane.
Looking back at the moon, now dipping behind the clouds, as if a shell being momentarily covered by the liquified sand of a rippling beach, Harriette smiles. “Now I am inspired. Now I will have to go out and get that second kayak.”
About the Author
Lital Khaikin is a writer based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal. Her literary experiments appear in and around 3:AM Magazine, Berfrois, Tripwire, and the “Vestiges” journal by Black Sun Lit. Her journalism appears in Canadian Dimension, Toward Freedom, Warscapes, Briarpatch, and elsewhere. She is completing a novella called flight, and embarking on a second novella called nigredo.
Publication Rights
A version of this essay was first published in Just Passing Through. Subscribe here. Republished with permission.
Notes
[1] Name changed.
[2] The beautiful name of Yamaska is an Abenaki word that is roughly translated into a place of many rushes. Abenaki is considered to be a critically endangered language by UNESCO. Wliwni, n’pedgi.
[7] As I was packing up my gear and tent into a rough-shod, duct-taped, DIY bike-packing situation on the last morning on Lac Brome, a woman from the neighbouring lot came over to chat. Before bidding adieu, she left me with a book called Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers (1994) by Jane Robinson. In the introduction, Jane writes: “It has been too easy in the past to label crowds of that creature ‘the woman traveller’ together to create some vast package tour of them, curious and plucky enough to think of leaving home but hardly serious travellers. The odd eccentric may stand out from the horde (there is always someone in any group like that who insists on embarassing the rest) but, on the whole, they are just harmless sightseers. Their writing, if remembered at all, has for too long been relegated to the cheap and cheerful end of the literary market—or, even worse, to the realms of the freak show.”
Who would have thought about God as an apt topic for an essay about mathematics? Don’t worry, the following discussion is still solidly grounded within an intelligible scientific framework. But the question of whether God can be proved mathematically is intriguing. In fact, over the centuries, several mathematicians have repeatedly tried to prove the existence of a divine being. They range from Blaise Pascal and René Descartes (in the 17th century) to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (in the 18th century) to Kurt Gödel (in the 20th century), whose writings on the subject were published as recently as 1987. And probably the most amazing thing: in a preprint study first posted in 2013 an algorithmic proof wizard checked Gödel’s logical chain of reasoning—and found it to be undoubtedly correct. Has mathematics now finally disproved the claims of all atheists?
As you probably already suspect, it has not. Gödel was indeed able to prove that the existence of something, which he defined as divine, necessarily follows from certain assumptions. But whether these assumptions are justified can be called into doubt. For example, if I assume that all cats are tricolored and know that tricolored cats are almost always female, then I can conclude: almost all cats are female. Even if the logical reasoning is correct, this of course does not hold. For the very assumption that all cats are tricolored is false. If one makes statements about observable things in our environment, such as cats, one can verify them by scientific investigations. But if it is about the proof of a divine existence, the matter becomes a little more complicated.
While Leibniz, Descartes and Gödel relied on an ontological proof of God in which they deduced the existence of a divine being from the mere possibility of it by logical inference, Pascal (1623–1662) chose a slightly different approach: he analyzed the problem from the point of view of what might be considered today as game theory and developed the so-called Pascal’s wager.
To do this, he considered two possibilities. First, God exists. Second, God does not exist. Then he examined the consequences of believing or not believing in God after death. If there is a divine being, and one believes in it, one ends up in paradise; otherwise one goes to hell. If, on the other hand, there is no God, nothing else happens—regardless of whether you are religious or not. The best strategy, Pascal contends, is to believe in God. At best, you end up in paradise; in the worst scenario, nothing happens at all. If, on the other hand, you don’t believe, then in the worst case you could end up in hell.
The signaling behavior of human beings is intricate indeed. Forty years ago a man, seething with desire, issued forth a string of identical second-person singular imperatives followed by a hortatory first-person plural:
Get up, get up, get up, get up, let’s make love tonight.
As far as can be determined the immediate object of desire was not in his presence at the precise moment of his yearning. He might not have had a particular object in mind at all. No one followed the command, no one “made love”, at least not right away, at least not if we exclude the very form of erotopoiesis of which the expression of yearning was already the culmination. If we know about his yearning at all this is only because it came out of him in the presence of a complex arrangement of electrical signals and magnetic tape —basic materials and principles of the physical world—, which “recorded” his voice somewhat in the way tree rings record a season’s rain, and the layers of Antarctic ice record the radioactivity of a nuclear test in the Bikini Atoll. And like radioactivity, once such yearning is caught on tape and released into the world, it is hard indeed to drive it out again.
Two years after the man beseeched an invisible, perhaps nonexistent, person, likely a woman, to awaken and to “make love”, he was shot dead by his own father. The conflict had something to do with money, and likely also, directly or indirectly, with sex. It had to do with passion, in any case, in one of its limited number of species. Casey Kasem leveled with us about it on the radio. The top-40 DJ pronounced the word “murder” more frankly than he could ever bring himself to pronounce the name of the song in question —“Sexual Healing”, still charting at the time—, which he always seemed to censor somehow with his own flat and sexless affect, even if we could still hear all the syllables. He said there was a fight over an insurance policy between Mr. Gay Sr. and his wife, and that Mr. Gaye Jr. (with the e added for show-biz) had tried to intervene. One cannot help but feel for the old man — he deprived the world of a Motown legend, and himself of a son, in a single instant, in the presence of that son’s mother, to the horror of the world.
But still, the life-force lingers, in part, but only in part, thanks to the technologies men have contrived to preserve their desire beyond death. There is a supermarket, one of countless such markets in the Franprix chain, at the corner of the avenue Simon Bolivar and the avenue Mathurin Moreau in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. It is part of the intimate geography of home, for me, along with the gym at the first floor of our apartment building. I can see it right now as I look out across the balcony. I will probably take a break from writing at some point in order to go there and pick up a few things. We never keep much food around the house. There’s not much reason to do so. They keep it for us at the Franprix.
There is a stocky man who seems to be the manager, who always says to me: “Ça va, toi ?” I don’t know what made him presume the privilege of tutoiement with me, but what a nice feeling it is, at least once in the day, to not be called Monsieur, but instead to encounter another person, essentially a stranger other than in the moment of our greetings, in the spirit of brotherhood and equality that are falsely claimed as foundational principles of this republic. This is not the only strange thing that happens in the Franprix. It is a rare day when anyone speaks to me out in public — I just do not give off the right sort of aura. But at the Franprix I am frequently accosted by elderly people, by people who have had strokes, or who have impaired vision, and who want me to read the finer print on the packaging for them, or get an item down from a high shelf, or simply to advise them about a prospective purchase — Vous avez déjà essayé le lapin, monsieur ? an old woman asks, holding up a frozen rabbit dinner (dinner of rabbit, that is, not dinner for rabbits). No, I have to tell her, but I’m honored to be asked. Sometimes it seems these people think I work there. Often the stocky man stops his stocking and appears out of nowhere to take over for me when he sees I am being detained by his stroke patients, imagining I find it disagreeable, and he addresses them all by name and asks how he may help.
Half the time the floor near the refrigerated aisle is covered with puddles (this must be a topic for another occasion, the European continent’s historic inability to master the technology of coolants). Once a mouse was loose in the place, and I thought that added to the overall charm, but the put-upon guard determined it was his duty to stomp on it — every French supermarket, no matter how modest, has a doorman wearing a suit, a sort of “maitre d’”, who welcomes you, who checks the backpacks of teenagers, and who, apparently, when called upon, kills mice with his own feet. I was horrified, and said, pathetically: Mais ne faites pas ça ! C’est un être vivant comme nous ! He said : Vous avez raison, monsieur, and the stunned and injured mouse zig-zagged away somewhere.
Once years ago I attempted to buy some hummus from the kosher section, all labeled in Hebrew with a French sticker pasted hastily on top of it. The young Maghrebin cashier took it upon himself to advise me that I was wasting my money, that all the kosher products come with a surcharge to cover the expenses of castrating the turkeys, according to religious law, whose meat is sold under the same label in the form of thinly sliced chiffon. “Are you Jewish?” he asks me, and I tell him no. “Then why should you pay extra so they can castrate their turkeys? What do you care if a turkey has its nads [couillles] cut off or not?” He did not work there for long. There is a homeless man camped outside the store whose speech has been reduced to a low growl (I can hear him now, as I write), who barks indecipherable words of affection to children going inside with their parents, who goes inside himself sometimes to get a free croissant from the check-out girl. A fat women covered in beads and ribbons wanders the aisles sometimes, and speaks with an Antillais accent, saying to the stocky man: Je te dis, le Seigneur aime quand tu pries. Ah oui, il faut prier. Ça fait danser les anges !
The great Canadian director Guy Maddin once said of My Winnipeg, the quasi-documentary about his hometown, that we Canadians are terrible at mythologizing our cities, and that he thought he could do for the capital of Manitoba at least what, say, Jim Jarmusch had done for lowly Cleveland. I often think something similar about Franprix. I hate generalizing about French people, but it is clear that they have none of the ironic passion for their chain stores and restaurants that we “Anglo-Saxons” have. In the past decade I don’t think I’ve had a single conversation of longer than five minutes with someone from the UK in which there was no mention of Marks & Spencer, or Waitrose, or the humble Tesco. This might be a result of the colonization of British minds by the Americans, but I take it as at least to some extent an indigenous preoccupation, one often thematized in arts and culture — sur le coup I think of Belle and Sebastian’s lyric, “Now I spend my days turning tables round at Marks & Spencer / They don’t seem to mind”, and of the video for “Fake Plastic Trees”, where Thom Yorke rides around in a supermarket cart like an overgrown baby. We Anglo-Saxons love to infantilize ourselves in this way. We love commercial product-packaging; we love our favorite combinations of wheat flour and corn syrup and palm oil when they are personified by a familiar mascot. When we’re too old and sophisticated to love it, we sublimate that love into irony; but it’s still love.
As far as I can tell there is a general lack of feeling for such things in France. Has anyone ever actually eaten at a Buffalo Grill, that chain restaurant you see along the autoroute, so uninspired in its design and concept as to make me think it must be some sort of state-run canteen? If anyone ever did eat there, would they talk about it afterwards, the way you might hear a New York sophisticate regale you with the comical tale of a trip to a Midwestern Applebees, like some descent into the Underworld? It just never happens — these places are a total cultural black hole. They are not talked about. Nothing escapes.
Surely this all has something to do with the longue-durée history of capitalism, with the fact that France still bears the clear markers of an agrarian society, and continues to value forms of consumption that predate our consumerist false consciousness. It often amazes me that what we call postmodernism received its clearest expression from French thinkers, given that the predominant form of life here remains marked in so many ways by premodern habits and values that have largely gone extinct in the Anglosphere. But this means that the full inhabitation of the ironic mode of being that we so strongly associate with the postmodern condition often remains difficult to attain in this country. Jean Baudrillard knew he had to look to America to find the richest examples of this condition. He mocked it —as when for example the Californians try to make their own wine, and then sell it to Safeway without any inherited and instinctive ability to detect whether it’s any good or not—, but he also envied it.
A century earlier Gustave Flaubert created Bouvard and Pécuchet in order to mock them for their false consciousness, for their inability to distinguish between words and things, for their inveterate dabbling and scratching above the surface of the authentic forms of life from which their era had cut them off. But Bouvard and Pécuchet were French, for all that, and so what they dabbled in was still animal husbandry and jardinage. Nor does the urban milieu do anything to conceal from us the essentially agrarian condition of France. Paris is much more like Chicago long was than like New York — a population center, yes, but one that grows up out of cereal crops, and fields of cows and pigs, in order to facilitate the commercial exchange of grains and pork-bellies, or of wine and cheese as the case may be, and where these agricultural products are celebrated and “centered”, in sharp contrast with what we see in the ideal form of the American city — the simulation of an industrial or post-industrial utopia where our total dependence on the earth is screened out and, if possible, forgotten.
But I can’t help who I am, and instead of going to the open-air market, and to the fromagerie and the fruiterie and the others, where you are supposed to be grateful that you can still pay separately for each category of food, I go to Franprix. And though nothing is supposed to escape —“not even light”, as it is almost compulsory to say— from these black-hole zones on the map of France, I find myself moved to celebrate it.
I have already begun to enumerate for you some of the mysteries of that place, the things that happen there that fail to happen elsewhere. Yet another mystery of our Franprix, doubtless of all Franprix, is the consistent excellence of their music (unlike my gym, the Cercles de la Forme, of which I have written previously). I have heard Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane”, Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon”, The Jackson 5’s “I’m Going Back to Indiana”, Stereolab’s “Ticker-Tape of the Unconscious”, and U2’s “One”, the last of which is corny as can be, I know, but always makes me think of the running buffaloes in Mark Pellington’s video, and brings tears to my eyes as I behold their beauty in my memory. Those singular buffaloes! Why were they running? It probably had something to do with desire. Are they still alive? At least in here (in the Franprix, inside my head) they are.
To deepen the mystery, occasionally the songs are interrupted by a voice telling us we are listening to “Radio Franprix”. Sometimes the voice is speaking German, sometimes Spanish, which suggests some sort of pan-European network of chain stores with a standardized music format. Who is behind this? I wonder, as I sing along to Jay-Jay Johanson or Yma Sumac or whatever else is on. It often feels like I’m in a music video myself. The worst song I ever heard there was The Black Eyed Peas’ “I Got a Feeling”, which surely would have been a black mark in my relationship with the store, had the experience not been sublimated into the most surreal and magical moment, when, and I’m not making this up, all of the customers —the bead lady, the stroke victims, the homeless man otherwise lacking human speech, the hummus lovers Jewish or not— all exclaimed in unison, at just the right moment: “Mazel tov!”
Alright, I’m embellishing just a little bit, but only in order to get across the deeper truth that what I am talking about here is a transfigured space, outside of ordinary reality. I am always primed, when I enter it, to be moved, by the music, by memory, by desire, which appear, when we are down at that level of truth I’m trying to sound, to be different manifestations of the same thing.
And so when, a few days ago, I went in for a kilo of “Leader Price” store-brand petits pois congelés and a bag of amandes décortiquées and I heard “Ooh baby, I’m hot just like an oven”, it should not be so surprising that this was enough to make time-travel possible, to make it 1982 again, 1984 again, to make Marvin Gaye die at his father’s hands again, eternal as a Greek tragic hero, to disclose to me my own oven-nature, and the oven-nature of all my fellow beings: all hot for each other, even beyond death. How did he do it? How did he get into the solid-state FM radio on the kitchen counter in Rio Linda, California, into Casey Kasem’s weekly countdown, only to weave his way, across the years and across the globe, into my Franprix? One must be very hot indeed to pull that off.
About the Author
Justin E. H. Smith is an author and professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, will appear in 2021 from Princeton University Press.
Anonymous, Amitābha and Sukhāvatī, c. 1850 (detail)
by Douglas Penick
When a rainbow appears vividly in the sky, you can see its beautiful colours, yet you cannot put it on as a garment or wear it as an ornament. It arises through the conjunction of various factors, but there is nothing about it that can be grasped. Likewise, thoughts that arise in the mind have no tangible existence or intrinsic solidity. There is no logical reason why thoughts, which have no substance, should have such power over you, nor is there any reason why you should become their slave.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
*
Money is a kind of freedom that can be felt and heard; it is an inestimable treasure for a man deprived of true liberty.
– Dostoevsky, The House Of The Dead
*
In Rameau’s 18th century court opera Les Indes Gallantes, two wishful lovers sing:
Indian slave girl –
“Can one love in slavery?
It only intensifies life’s harshness”
Her young owner-
“One must love in slavery
To soften life’s harshness.”
*
We rely on a kind of conventional construction in which our experiences are seen as the outcome of specific (fabricated) events and circumstances. We try (by using “practices”, “therapies”) to make this mechanism of cause and effect work to our advantage. We see only causes and effects that seem to create a world that can be manipulated in this way.
We do not, except in passing, attend to dreams, day-dreams, imagining, flickers in which the previous logic, momentarily, divides and offers us, spontaneously and unsought, a hidden face, a flickering pure realm.
And yet what a larger expanse of being, what unknown dimensions might follow from stripping away, from surrender, to carry us beyond goals, articulation, understanding.
But our practical considerations, our causes and our effects continually limit, imprison, diminish, render unavailable to the senses and mind this unknowable intensity of the borderless.
*
A friend’s mother, in her intense Alzheimer’s took pleasure from the life of nature: flowers, clouds, trees, birds, grass. But utterly she was lost in the face of human artefacts. A fork was not easily distinguished from a toothbrush. The words “dining room” might easily indicate a toilet.
*
Alas, even in the Buddha’s teachings, the direct experience of omnipresent wakefulness falls prey to hierarchies and the need to sustain people on the path. More accurately, the latter seems needed to keep the faithful faithful, to keep the world of the faithful in plain view.
*
The unmediated (non-dual) “knowing” of the awakened state does not admit of enduring form, or limit or
finality.
Shimmering
It cannot quite be taught.
But it is transmitted
It is not quite received or learned.
The recipient falls off a cliff.
Forever and again
Liberation, one form falling away, then another
Eternally, is self-renewing, eternally self-reforming.
*
Once,
I was a person born directly into the desperate longings of imprisonment
Consoled there by those who knew slavery.
A mind/ imagination ever flailing in flight.
And so and fall and fall
In multiform torments
Longings
Lights
About the Author
Douglas Penick’s work has appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Publishers Weekly Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berfrois, 3AM, The Utne Reader and Consequences, among others. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and, on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. His novel, Following The North Star was published by Publerati. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. His book of essays , The Age of Waitingwhich engages the atmospheres of ecological collapse, was published in 2021 by Arrowsmith Press.
Details on the Text
Adapted from the text for the FREEDOM PRI exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, October 16,2022.
“Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in?”
—Juliet
1.
Western Europeans and Americans visiting Romania for the first time will often be told that any association of the place with vampires is really an unfair imposition, having mostly to do with Bram Stoker’s more or less ex-nihilo invention of a Transylvanian setting for his 1897 novel, Dracula. After all, just over a century earlier, in 1780, a Transylvania University could still be founded in Kentucky with no connotation but the generic one of being “across the forest” — an etymology students and faculty at that institution must get very tired of having to explain. The English novelist’s tale, you will hear, is a typically Victorian confession of England’s own deepest fears — of pestilence; of pathologia sexualis, hopelessly interwoven with what would soon be called the “death-drive”; of uncouth swarthy continentals (“The wogs begin at Calais”, it used to be said across the Channel from where I write, and by that measure a Transylvanian was the nec-plus-ultra of wogdom). Depending on your precise location in Romania, as for example in the shadow of the Bran castle that once was home to Vlad the Impaler, you might enjoy the irony of hearing this revisionist history lesson while surrounded by a whole gallery of vampire kitsch — kiosks with plastic fangs for sale; a painted wooden plank in vampire-form with a cut-out oval hole for the face, where infantilised tourists can have their pictures taken in the guise of a sort of Dracula, though one as diminutive and unthreatening as his descendants Count Chocula, of breakfast-cereal fame, or Sesame Street’s own Count von Count.
The History of Wladislaus Drgwyla, 1491
It has been a long time since I was on the receiving end of such a lecture, but back when they still happened I often found myself unable to suppress that exclamation, so completely taboo in our era of stay-in-your-lane deference: “Well, actually…” It is not that I had a particular interest in vampirology, though I had at least done a bit of reading; had seen popular entertainments such as Interview with the Vampire (1994), both F. W. Murnau’s and Werner Herzog’s versions of Nosferatu (1922, 1979), and the memorable Blacula (1972); and I had long enjoyed observing that analytic philosophy preferred to go with “zombies” (or some Americanised form of them unrecognisable from their initial appearance in rural Haitian folk-culture; see my attempt at a deconstruction of the “philosophical zombie” here), rather than this other species of the undead that interests us here today, for reasons that might be instructive about differences between philosophical styles. Vampires have in general been more useful to the imaginations of thinkers descended broadly from Romanticism, while zombies give us all of the conceptual problems about mind and consciousness, but none of the feeling, and are thus perfect water-carriers for whatever it is the analytics are trying to do. To “think with vampires” is by contrast to think about feeling, mood, and the dimensions of human existence these disclose.
My vampirological expertise was in any case deepened somewhat more recently, by circumstance rather than by choice, when, in a world still without Substack, and in which magazine editors were still incomprehensibly rejecting my “pitches”, I took on the project of writing a curious little book, for a $4000 flat fee and no claim to future royalties, called Vampires: Lovesick and Bloodthirsty. If Martin Amis can write a how-to guide for playing Space Invaders, I told myself, there’s no shame in doing some breadwriting (as a Dutch friend refers to my efforts in this space, apparently adapting a common expression from his mother tongue) on a topic that is anyhow not totally unconnected to my long scholarly interest in the history of reflections on the immortality of the soul, of medical debates concerning methods for conclusively establishing the death of a patient, &c. I doubt there are any copies still circulating out there, but if this book served any purpose beyond helping me to pay the bills for a while, surely it is that the research I ended up doing for it provided me a much deeper understanding of the historical process by which the figure of the vampire made the gradual transition, between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, from the proto-ethnography of the Balkans to the imaginations of Gothic littérateurs.
Most succinctly, we may say that the figure of the vampire emerges out of the confluence of three elements. The first is the real historical record of the actions of a certain Vlad Țepeș (1428/31 – 1476/77). The violent transgressions for which he became notorious were indeed extreme —notably, not just impalement, but impalement on rounded and greased spikes, carefully avoiding direct puncture of inner organs so as to prolong the victim’s misery—, but they were also fairly continuous with the sort of things both allies and enemies commonly did, in the absence of any international laws governing war crimes, and the sort of things people are no doubt still doing today, notwithstanding such laws. Woodcuts depicting his deeds were soon published in German books, and as these circulated the legends surrounding him grew beyond all human proportion. More on Vlad soon enough. The second element is the arrival of Germanophone Habsburg administrators in newly subordinated regions of Southeastern Europe, who had been influenced in their practices by the emerging culture of the Republic of Letters, which among many other desiderata encouraged literate travellers in little-known places to note down and to report back to the metropole all rare or mysterious incidents. The third element, finally, are the ancient folk-cultural practices and beliefs that these humble clerks observed and documented.
2.
Of particular importance in the revisionist lesson foreigners in Transylvania often get is the task of clearing Dracula from any association with vampirism. “Dracula”, they explain, is simply the title, but not the name, of Vlad Țepeș / Vlad III / Vlad the Impaler. He inherits it from his father, Vlad II, a member of the Order of the Dragon. In Romanian, dracul derives from the Latin draco, and simply means “the dragon”. Vlad III was “draconian” in his rule, but this is not where the title comes from. He is bloodthirsty, in his own way, but not in the way vampires are. He prefers simply to spill blood, rather than to drink it.
Antique map of the Balkans and the Gulf of Venice, c. 1640
It is not in fact in the castles, but in the villages of Romania that we typically hear rumours of the strigoi, which are in turn close cousins of the vrykolakas of Greece, the upior of the Slavic countries, and other species of revenant still from Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere. These are, in all their regional variants, ghosts of the deceased, poltergeists who return to trouble the living. A common belief holds that one may prevent their apparition by sealing the coffin of the dead shut with extra nails, and by driving a stake through the chest of the corpse. Should one encounter a strigoi, some texts and traditions counsel the use of apotropaics such as garlic or holy water to ward them off. These folkloric characters thus share some, but not all, of the traits associated with the Stokerian vampire. There is as yet no strong association with bats, for example, or with hematophagy.
It is at least true, then, that Stoker’s rendition bumps the vampire up several social classes from where it had always resided in “authentic” folk culture, from the peasantry to the aristocracy. And it is the elevation of traditional village practices to a form of aristocratic decadence that enables Stoker to give his fiction a historical grounding, and to identify his own protagonist’s vampirism as part of an inheritance from none other than Vlad the Impaler:
Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land?
In portraying Vlad as a hero in the war against the Turks, the English novelist is channeling a historiographical tendency more commonly seen in Russia and the Balkans than in Western Europe. In the Orthodox lands, while his cruelty is acknowledged, Vlad is seen foremostly as a valiant defender against the Ottoman menace, and therefore as a bulwark of Christendom. In the German-speaking world, by contrast, his significance as a military leader pales in comparison with his inhuman and gratuitous cruelty. Beginning as early as the 1460s broadsides circulated describing the delight Vlad took in roasting babies alive and forcing their mothers to eat them, in hearing the low moans of his impaled victims as musical accompaniment to his meals.
In 1463 a six-page pamphlet was published, most likely in Vienna, under the title Die geschicht dracole waide [The History of the Voivode Dracula]. It opens with a denunciation. Dracula and his brother (the latter of whom, you will recall, is portrayed unsympathetically in Stoker’s telling), “have abandoned their faith and have promised and sworn to darken the Christian faith.” The previous year, in 1462, Vlad was defeated in battle with enemy forces conspiring to seize power in Wallachia, led by Radu cel Frumos [Radu the Handsome] who conspired, with the assistance of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, to replace Vlad as voivode of the province. Vlad retreated to Hermannstadt in Transylvania (today known by its Romanian name of Braşov), seeking protection from the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus. Together the two contrived various plots to retake Wallachia. In November, 1462, as Vlad set out on his mission from Radu, Corvinus had his erstwhile ally ambushed, arrested, and taken to the Oratea Fortress in Podu Dâmboviţei, deep within Wallachia. The Hungarian king had come to find the constant fight for the Balkans draining, and determined that it was in the greater interest of his political ambitions vis-à-vis the Holy Roman Empire to simply cede as much of Southeastern Europe as possible to the Turks.
According to the historian Matei Cazacu, the 1463 screed published against Vlad was almost certainly the work of parties loyal to Corvinus, perhaps even members of his court. The first version of the pamphlet was most likely in Latin and addressed to Pope Pius II, whose favour the Hungarian king hoped to cultivate. The original text has been lost, but there are four extant manuscript copies in German that are considered faithful to the original. The pamphlet’s obvious intent was to discredit Vlad politically, and in fifteenth-century Europe, an accusation of heresy or, worse yet, entering into a pact with the devil, was indeed an effective strategy to ruin your enemy. Vlad’s inherited title facilitated this association, though when his father joined the Societas Draconistarum, draco still had more to do with the creature of medieval romance and heraldry than with deviltry.
The core message of the screed is undoubtedly correct: Vlad was a sadistic and cruel military leader. Cazacu reports that, upon hearing the moans of his impaled victims, Vlad once sarcastically exclaimed, “Ah, with what adroitness and rhythm you wriggle!” He may indeed have roasted babies and forced their mothers to eat them, and he may have treated a group of supplicant Roma in similar fashion, as we read later in the text: “[Dracula] had imprisoned a Gypsy who had stolen, but the other Gypsies came and begged [him] to give him to them. But he said that he must hang, and that they must themselves carry it out. They said this would not be suitable to them. So Dracula left the Gypsy to simmer in a kettle, and the other Gypsies were made to eat him, flesh and bone.”
We need not believe every anecdote in order to conclude that the historical Dracula must have done some awful things indeed. In the communist period, an important political matter in the construction of Romanian historical memory held that Vlad never drank the blood of his victims. As Cazacu notes, this seems a minor point, compared to the certain historical fact that he “shed rivers of blood and, according to a contemporary source, loved to plunge his hands into it with relish.” It is not hard to speculate that some of it got into his mouth, even if this was only a side-effect of his pursuit of other aims.
3.
Non-fictional writing on strange incidents and curiosities stretches back to antiquity, but it is in the wake of the scientific revolution that a more systematic approach develops to the collection of eyewitness reports. The journal of the Royal Society of London, The Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1666, was meant to be a forum for presenting cutting-edge scientific research in barometry or mechanics. But many of its pages are also taken up with testimonies from far-flung travellers and country doctors telling of what they saw when they went to investigate rumours of two-headed calves, talking dogs, or hauntings.
Early treatments of vampires are often written in a tone that emulates the learned gentlemen of the Royal Society. The first extant treatise on vampirism is De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis [On the Chewing of the Dead in their Tombs] (1725; German edition 1734) by the German Lutheran pastor and historian Michaël Ranfft. Ranfft observes that the phenomenon in question “will of course be revered by the faith of the Roman Catholics as some sort of divine miracle,” but maintains for his part that it will best be explained, along more enlightened and scientific lines, by appeal to “a certain influx in the bodies.” Here Ranfft exemplifies an approach that will be standard throughout the subsequent history of vampirological writing: an affected tone of doubt and distance from the subject matter, a strong denunciation of superstition, but always leaving open to the reader the titillating possibility that the author is himself wrong, or, perhaps not completely forthcoming about his own views, or about the depth of his personal interest in the subject.
In the 1725 work Ranfft helped to make vampires known throughout the German-speaking world by republishing and discussing a report from a minor administrator in the Serbian provinces of the Kingdom of Hungary, who described some peculiar events in the village of Kisolova following the death of a certain Petar Blagojević (perhaps an ancestor of a certain disgraced Illinois politician), of whom “it was stated that, within eight days [of his death], nine people, both old and young, died after enduring an illness of twenty-four hours.” It is reported that “as they still lay alive on their death beds… the above-mentioned Plogojovitz [sic], who had died ten weeks prior, came to them in their sleep, lay down on top of them, and croaked that they must now give up their souls.” Blagojević’s widow, too, reported that her husband had returned to “ask for his oppanki or shoes,” but after this left the village to appear in another.
The author of the report cited by Ranfft uses the word “vampire” in one of its earliest printed occurrences. He reports that “since among similar people (as are called Vampyri) there must be visible various signs, as that their bodies are undecayed, with skin, hair, beard, and nails growing,” the villagers resolved to open up the grave of Petar Blagojević and to see what they might discover there. Here is what they found:
That, first of all, the body and its grave were not in the least touched by the usual smell of the dead. The body, other than the nose, which had somewhat fallen off, was very fresh; the hair and the beard, and also the nails, of which the older ones had fallen away, had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat white, had peeled away, and a new fresh skin had come forth underneath; the face, hands and feet, and the whole body were so composed that they could not have been more perfect during the course of his life. Not without surprise I glimpsed fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common expression, he had sucked from those he had killed.
At issue in part was a puzzlement about some unexpected contingencies in the way bodies decompose (it was only in the sixteenth century that anatomical studies of cadavers became socially accepted, many of them procured by common grave robbery). While they often rot quickly, depending on the circumstances of the air, the temperature, and the presence of microorganisms, bodies can also come to appear, under the right conditions, even more healthy than than they had been just prior to death. Sometimes a corpse is found with blood streaming from the mouth, a natural consequence of the internal breakdown of the organs, which nonetheless can easily be mistaken for a vestige of recent feasting. They frequently become bloated, and in an era in which corpulence was still strongly associated with health, this temporary condition could easily appear as an improvement only to be explained on the assumption that the corpse had been ingesting food — food, that is, or blood.
Another broad social change that precipitates the eighteenth-century fascination with graves and their inhabitants is a growing awareness of the history of burial practices and the variety of methods by which different human cultures have disposed of dead bodies. Already in 1658 the English author Sir Thomas Browne (one of my own most significant influences, I confess) publishes the Hydriotaphia: Urne-Buriall, Or, a Discourse of the Selpuchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk, a strange and meandering treatise occasioned by the discovery of Roman burial urns near that town. The work expands into a broad-scoped reflection on burial practices and rituals surrounding death throughout the world. Browne remarks that “[m]any have taken voluminous pains to determine the state of the soul upon disunion; but men have been most phantasticall in the singular contrivances of their corporall dissolution.” The most sober nations, he continues, “have rested in two ways, of simple inhumation and burning.” Europe, since the end of antiquity, preferred interment. But increased exposure to other funerary rituals through encounters with non-European cultures, notably in India (see François Bernier’s account of sati, or the self-immolation of Indian widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, in his Voyages dans les états du Grand Mogolof 1671), and through an increasingly systematic archaeology of the European past, led Europeans to reflect on what, in fact, the best methods of “corporall dissolution” might be. In the Balkans, cremation was an exceptional measure in the early eighteenth century. Yet we might still see Blagojević’s fate, burnt “down to ashes” to make sure that he can never return, as part of a broader exploration and questioning of traditional funerary practices.
Many of the conventions deployed by Ranfft reappeared throughout the eighteenth century in medical treatises not narrowly concerned with vampires, but rather focused, from a clinical point of view, on the difficulty of determining the precise boundary between life and death. The most interesting example of such work is undoubtedly the Danish-French physician Jacques-Bénigne Winslow’s 1742 Dissertation sur l’incertitude des signes de la mort, & l’abus des enterremens, & embaumemens précipités[Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the Misuse of Burials, and Rushed Embalmings]. Winslow cites several authorities to establish the view that “putrefaction is the only infallible sign of death.” Like Thomas Browne, he surveys the “funeral solemnities” of various nations, attempting to show that human beings across the world developed practices to avoid premature burial of the living.
Winslow also peppers his treatise with macabre reports, many of which read like Gothic fiction. Thus we learn of a lady of Auxbourg, who, “falling into a Syncope, in Consequence of a Suffocation of the Matrix, was buried in a deep Vault, without being covered with Earth… Some Years after, however, one of the same Family happening to die, the Vault was open’d, and the Body of the young Lady found on the Stairs at its Entry, without any Fingers on the Right Hand.” Soon enough, documentary sources such as this were sublimated into fiction. Edgar Allen Poe for one was voracious for materials like these, and indeed some of his short stories, notably “The Premature Burial” (1844), read more like documentary metafiction imitating works like Winslow’s than straight fiction in the usual sense.
Nor are all the antecedents of the high gothic storytelling of the early nineteenth century non-fictional. A significant if neglected current of Romeo & Juliet is the proto-Romantic exploration of the liminal condition of those who are neither alive nor dead. In Act IV, Friar Lawrence, a learnèd reader of grimoires and other unholy sources of knowledge, instructs the Capulet girl on the proper method of inducing all the signs of death without being truly dead:
Take thou this vial, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour; for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease;
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes, thy eyes’ windows fall,
Like death when he shuts up the day of life.
Such poetic representation of the condition of the undead migrates into the quasi-documentary strain of writing from Ranfft through Winslow —authors who, we may suspect, would rather be writing fiction if they were given a choice—, and then migrates back again, beginning from the late eighteenth century, into the Romantic imagination.
4.
The early modern explosion of interest in Balkan “superstition” is, as we have begun to see, in no small measure an effect of the encounter between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, and in particular of the expansion of Habsburg rule into regions of the Balkans that had previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire. This encounter triggered a long —and indeed still ongoing— habit of representing Southeastern Europe as a land of benighted and backwards belief. If you have spent any time in that part of the world it is impossible to escape the dawning awareness that Eastern Europe —roughly whatever lies in the buffer zone between the Turks, the Germans, and the Russians— is Europe’s own first and most familiar “subaltern”. This was already true when, even before the European encounter with the New World, Viennese publishers represented a Wallachian warlord as a cannibalistic savage, but the representation became all the more vivid in the era of the high Enlightenment. In his contribution to the 1776 Dictionnaire philosophique, none other than Voltaire, who never misses an opportunity to scoff at people who happen not to be French, takes up the example of vampires not only as a measure of the distance between Enlightened Europe and those other parts, but also between the rationality of the ancient Greeks and the irrationality of their degenerated modern descendants. “Who would believe that the fashion of vampires came from Greece? This is not the Greece of Alexander, of Aristotle, of Plato, of Epicurus, of Demosthenes, but rather Christian Greece, which is, unfortunately, schismatic.”
Voltaire is a defiant atheist, but his polemical anti-clericalism brings him close to some of the themes of anti-Papism familiar from Protestant lands. For many Protestant authors, the difference between Catholicism and worship of the forces of darkness is but another case of the narcissism of minor differences. And thus it is not surprising to see the theme of vampirism functioning, at least on one level, as an allegory of Catholicism. Voltaire, writing in this same spirit, speaks mockingly of a young skeptic who had dared to question the truth of a number of reported miracles involving the Virgin Mary, and who finally was won over to all manner of Catholic articles of faith as a result of exposure to folk-beliefs about vampires. “This well-known man who refused to believe,” Voltaire writes, “who dared to cast doubts on the appearance of the angel to the holy Virgin, on the star that guided the magi, on the healing of the possessed, on the drowning of two thousand pigs in a lake, on the eclipse of the sun during a full moon, on the resurrection of the dead who walked the streets of Jerusalem: his heart was softened, his mind was illuminated: he believes in vampires!” On Voltaire’s satirical account, it is best for the weak-minded to shelter themselves from stories of vampires, if only because these can all too easily serve as a gateway drug to the Roman religion.
Among Catholic authors, by contrast, we generally see not mockery of folk-beliefs about vampires, but rather a subtle, almost mischievous, effort to occupy the ambiguous space between affirmation and skepticism. The French Dominican Augustin Calmet’s 1751 Traité sur les apparitions des esprits, et sur les vampires, ou les revenans de Hongrie, de Moravie, &c.[Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits, and on Vampires, or the Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, etc.], is noteworthy for its concern to delimit sharply the geographical homeland of vampirism. He declares he has “always been most struck by what is related of vampires or the revenants from Hungary, Moravia, Poland, the brucolacs of Greece, those who have been excommunicated, who, they say, never decay.” Calmet is on the one hand intent on establishing the reality of the phenomena he describes, in order to characterise revenants as true instances of diabolism, and to warn his readers of their danger. Thus, in a chapter entitled “Are Vampires or Revenants Truly Dead?”, the author appeals to the wisdom of crowds. He insists it is impossible “that all at once several people begin to believe they are seeing what does not exist at all, and that they die so quickly after from a sickness that is purely imagined.”
On the other hand, like Browne and Winslow, Calmet seeks to dispel report of apparently supernatural occurrences, tracing the strange phenomena back to plausible medical pathologies or environmental conditions. Thus:
Those who have died of the plague, from poison, from rabies, from drunkenness, and from epidemic are more subject to returning as undead, apparently because their blood coagulates more difficultly, and sometimes those who are not yet dead are buried, in view of the danger that there is in leaving them for long outside of the sepulchre, for fear of the infection that they cause… These Vampires are only known in certain countries, like Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, where these illnesses are more common.
One might reasonably wonder at this point what Calmet really thinks. Is it diabolical forces at work? Or is it just epidemiology? As is typical of vampirologists, the author prefers to keep us suspended between the two registers of explanation, to maintain his reader’s attention by striking the perfect balance between sobriety and gullibility.
A convention emerges in vampirological works over the course of the eighteenth century, whereby the author is generally presented as an intrepid and dedicated, but perhaps somewhat shadowy character. This doubt is in turn offset by an assurance that the author is a man of the cloth, an abbey or a clergyman who has immersed himself in the study of dark forces in order to better combat them for the sake of humanity’s salvation. This is the persona adopted by Augustin Calmet, and it is one that will continue in fictional form into the era of cinema.
Perhaps no one embodies this type more perfectly than the eccentric English Catholic deacon Montague Summers, author of multiple works on witchcraft, demonology, werewolves, and vampires. Throughout his oeuvre Summers repeatedly claims, in a somewhat deadpan tone, to be committed to the reality of all these objects of his study, and to be fighting against them by the power of the pen. A foreword to the 1968 edition of his 1929 study, The Vampire in Europe, tells us that Summers made all his public appearances in clerical dress, and attempted to convince others that he was a Catholic priest, though it is far more likely that he was in fact an unfrocked parson. He was also, as late as the 1930s, a vocal advocate for the public execution of witches. The author of the foreword, himself a Catholic priest, conjectures that Summers’s stern admonitions against necromancy and other dark practices are at once an expression of his own guilt, or of mixed feelings at having engaged in these practices himself. All this, of course, is meant to heighten the interest of the reader. Which side, one constantly wonders, is the author really on?
Whether writing as a science-oriented debunker, or as a pious fighter against the forces of darkness, or indeed as some mixture of these two, vampirologists always seem to be infected by their subject. Skeptics will see them as frivolous for wasting their intellectual energy on an old folk myth, and the pious will see them as rather too interested, for suspicious reasons, in the very thing they are supposed to be fighting against. It is hard to be taken seriously as a vampirologist.
5.
And yet it still seems to me that the vampire is due a certain measure of rehabilitation. The vampire, I think, is at least as “good to think with” as the “philosophical zombie”. The title of the present essay is of course a riff on the late Mark Fisher’s notable 2013 cri-de-coeur, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” but other than that the two pieces of writing have nothing in common. Uncharacteristically, Fisher shows little sensitivity to the full range of meanings with which the figure of the vampire has been endowed in literary and historical tradition, effectively impoverishing it in much the same way that David Chalmers impoverishes the zombie.
In its essence a vampire is a being that knows it is dead, and feels infinite sadness about its plight. This is a paradoxical situation to be in, since death is supposed to be the cessation of all consciousness. But it is also fairly close to what we imagine when we try, per impossibile, to imagine death. We do so, mostly, by feeling our way into it, until we can bear no more and recoil. We do so by allowing what that feeling discloses to us to count for something.
And also in our dreams, notably, we encounter dead people with surprising regularity. They walk and talk, and give us tidings, yet there’s something off about them, by which we understand that they are dead. An impossible condition — yet there they are.
About the Author
Justin E. H. Smith is an author and professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, will appear in 2021 from Princeton University Press.
The colourised Vlad Drăculea of Wallachia is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia. The History of Wladislaus Drgwyla is in the public domain, courtesy of The British Library.
Constantinos Kollias: Acropolis, Parthenon and Erechtheion viewed from Filopappou Hill, Athens, 2020 (Unsplash)
by Douglas Penick
All of us, as life draws towards its end, are waiting. This feeling of waiting pervades the subliminal atmosphere in almost all our remembering, our thinking, our desires. We do not know, of course, what we can look forward to. We can neither accelerate nor retard what is going to happen, in our life or upon our death. We are apprehensive and curious. This attentiveness and uncertainty come subtly to pervade everything.
Last night, I went with my wife and a friend to hear the prodigally gifted pianist, Daniil Trifonov. While the playing itself was always overwhelming, in the first part of his programme, neither the pieces nor his way of rendering them was particularly persuasive or even pleasant. In the second half of the programme, he played Brahms’ 3rd Piano Sonata (op.5), which he performed with genuine conviction. He played with varied attack, a great dynamic range and a polished tone with great sheen. I was completely absorbed, but partly I was simultaneously hearing a performance of the same piece played by a very different artist whose deep bronze sonority focused on an unfolding of the sonata’s chordal structure. This was the first concert I ever went to; the pianist was Dame Myra Hess, and though it was almost 70 years ago, her performance remained completely alive in my memory. Now, I could hear both her in my memory and the much younger Trifonov in the auditorium essentially at the same time. Almost every note of this tumultuous sonata had remained with me and now anchored a double hearing, one long gone, the other present.
Obviously, our make-up does not require that only a single strand can be present in our mind at one time. Some streams of consciousness may come to the fore as others recede. Sitting in a restaurant, we can simultaneously smell perfume while we’re eating seafood, listening to a joke, sensing an argument behind us, having a slight cramp in our leg, noticling a waiter look our way, remembering how much our mother and father liked this place. Our experience of any moment is in fact the weaving of many strands, and as we live through the day, hundreds of thousands of strands from the present and the past — desires, thoughts, emotions — all interact in constantly varying proportions. We take care to recognise patterns of coincidence and divergence. It is our pleasure, our control, in a situation that is always on the verge of chaos.
For a long time, Sigmund Freud’s last essay, “A Disturbance of Memory on The Acropolis” has flickered in and out of my memory. It’s remained clear and I’ve occasionally described it to others. It still sometimes brings me to tears. The essay describes a trip to Greece which Freud took as a young man. Inspired by his classical studies, he longed to see the Acropolis. His father, a practical merchant, objected. It was a waste of time and money; he didn’t see the point. Freud and his brother persisted. Afterwards, Freud could remember the journey clearly in all its details, but he could never remember seeing the Acropolis. His brother remembered it vividly; Freud knew he must have seen it.
Freud returned to this moment of forgetting very near the end of his life when he was tormented by a prosthetic jaw he needed since bone cancer had destroyed his natural one. He was living in London with his daughter, Anna. They had been brought there from Vienna by Princess Marie Bonaparte who had ransomed them from the Nazis. His father was long dead and the cultured world of European Jews lay ravaged.
In his essay, he reflected extensively on similar incidents in medical history and literature, as he worked to search for the meaning of this odd occurrence. Finally, he concluded that he had blocked out seeing this great monument because it would have meant so very little to his father. Freud ends his memoir-analysis saying that he finally understood this forgetting was induced by filial piety. And this was especially poignant to him for now — as I recalled him writing — that he was “old, and ill and will travel no more.” [1]
I wrote this account based on my memory, but to prepare for writing my upcoming book, I re-read the essay for the first time in decades. It pained me to realise that the specific distortion is not quite as I remembered it with such confidence. Freud did remember seeing the Acropolis, but reacted to the monument by thinking: “So, all this really does exist!”[2] On recollection, he was astounded that he once doubted such a thing. It was this doubt, this double consciousness involved in simultaneously doubting and not doubting that puzzled him. In his essay, he does attribute this to the kind of filial piety I recall. He ends: ‘I myself have grown old and stand in need of forbearance and will travel no more.”[3]
For Freud, the original distortion was caused by filial piety, his guilt at persisting in doing something his father found of no value. It expressed the conflict between an orthodox father and sons who were so enthusiastically assimilating themselves into gentile European classical culture. But Freud found himself returning to what might have been a mere psychological hiccup at a time when history placed it in a tragic and terrible light. The world of Freud’s father, that of a Jewish merchant and family man finding acceptance and a haven in Vienna, and that of Freud and his brother, who believed they could fulfil their greatest aspirations in the secular culture of German speaking Central Europe had proved to be a monstrous delusion, a murderous trap.
Thus it was that Freud found the subject of this essay interwoven with the memory of his family’s and all his friends’ and colleagues’ aspirations for a world that could never again be imagined, much less realised, as his siblings were being slaughtered and relatives scattered, as concentration camps and mass murderers were obliterating the cultural landscape of his youth and subsequent fame. The layered density of Freud’s recollection, the methodical way he looked at it, may have allowed him not to be swept away in grief and despair, but it did, perhaps, stand deeply in “need of forbearance”.
Notes
[1] Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works, Tr. and ed. James Strachey, vol XXII, Hogarth Press, 1964, p. 241
[2] ibid,p. 248
[3] ibid, p.248
About the Author
Douglas Penick’s work has appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Publishers Weekly Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berfrois, 3AM, The Utne Reader and Consequences, among others. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and, on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. His novel, Following The North Star was published by Publerati. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. His book of essays , The Age of Waitingwhich engages the atmospheres of ecological collapse, was published in 2021 by Arrowsmith Press.
Publication Details
This essay is adapted from the section on Freud in Chapter 2, Linkages in The Winter Sun (forthcoming).
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