Blast From the Past

I'm going through my notes and emails, excavating the past in order to perform my maternal function and create a ghastly but beautiful "memory board" for my graduating eighth grader--the kind of practice that relies on the existence of a imaginary "non working" and "stay at home" mom with oodles of time and a thwarted desire to express herself competitively through maintaining and displaying mementos (pictures, symbols) of her child's divine childhood experience.  I'm late with this production, of course, but I have also had the pleasure of finding, sandwiched in between my notes about my children, my own politicking.  First, here's a description of life with me, straight from the horses mouth:

"Saturday night the girls helped me begin and assemble some experimental yeast cinnamon buns. They mixed the sugar/nut/cinnamon mixture and alexandra cut the toasted nuts. They were so sweet, and so diligent, and they both got up on chairs to do the washign up (just like laura and mary!). In the morning I got up early to put the buns in the oven, and then we all had a quiet breakfast together. I, of course, began vibrating from the boredom, just sitting there in the sunny kitchen with nothing to run my eyeballs over.  Alexandra looked up from her bun, smeared with sticky joy, and asked solicitiously "Do you need your paper mommy? I could get it!" 
Later, the same day, I was flipping through the newly redesigned [Local City] magazine and complaining about its awfulness. Alexandra, from the kitchen table, in a voice of cynical weariness "Well, if they want to sell YOU anything, they'd better put in more politics!"

Here's an angry letter to the editor I wrote at about the same time, to the NYT after reading David Brooks:

Let me get this straight, Mr. Brooks. Populist rhetoric from Democrats like John Edwards is angry, and bad. The people turn away from it and "Edwards' political career is probably over" because of these "old fashioned" "angry cries."  Class warfare is so yesterday!  On the other side of the aisle, however, Huckabee wins because he "tapped into realities other Republicans have been slow to recognize." The reality on the ground? Why: "we have a crisis of authority in this country" and "the people have lost faith in their leaders' ability to respond to problems" a reality which Huckabee deals with by (apparently quite reasonably and pleasingly)  addresses by "criticiz[ing] Wall Street and K Street: and implicitly attacking the managerial upper class represented by Romney! /  /What's "angry" in a Democrat is mere "realism" in the Republican candidate. What's impermissible class warfare in those wild eyed Democrats is magically smart thinking when practiced by a Republican.   Thanks for clarifying for your readers something they couldn't work out for themselves--its /always ok as long as you are a Republican!  /Next week no doubt you'll explain to us why war is peace, and poverty is wealth. Oh, wait, that is already the GOP platform!

Regards 

Aimai

Relevance is what you bring to the situation.

Long couple of threads at LGM on geek gatekeeping (and here)--I was procrastinating there instead of working on a piece of bricolage and pastiche in the form of a visual scrapbook of my daughter's life at school for her graduation.  At any rate I thought parts of this comment were on point for the Proust/Genji project.

aimai says:

May 22, 2013 at 7:59 pm

I read that long interaction with anon and I actually thought her points were really pretty good–if you didn’t mean yourself to come across that way you really need to re-examine how you are expressing yourself. In the absence of traditional forms of power and repression–money, ownership, copywrite, patriarchy, labor relationships no heritage is going to be transmitted free of some kind of change–like a game of telephone. If you don’t have a really strict oral tradition which includes beating people for making mistakes or changing the oral text novelty is just going to creep in. People are going to interpret things differently, talk about them differently, introject their own experiences differently. That’s just the way its going to be. You can mourn that and see that as a loss of purity or a loss of tradition, or you can celebrate it, but you simply can’t stop it.

I’m engaged in a totally pointless and self centered blogging project in which I blog a bit every day about Proust, or the Tale of Genji, and/or in a subsidiary fashion whatever I’m reading about. Today I was reading Walter Benjamin on Proust, and Hanna Arendt on Walter Benjamin–that’s all about tradition, cutting bits out of tradition, rearranging quotes and ideas into pastiche, reflecting on our experience through a kind of bricolage of things we’ve read, seen, cared about, held, talked about–In Benjamin’s essay on being a book collector and in his essay on Proust he specifically talks about the ways in which we try to stop time by holding onto the experiences we associate with a thing–like a book–and how we value the search for the book more than even reading the book. How finding it in an out of the way shop, in a new city, is more meaningful than merely ordering a specially bound copy. You might argue–and he does–that Proust tried to do the same thing with particular memories.

But when we read Proust, or a comic, or a comic that we read as a child or a teen–we are not the same person as that person back then, or as Proust. We bring something new to our own experience. So each new geek, coming to geekery (if its a thing) with their own experiences and their own memories, is going to enrich each new interaction. They can’t replicate your (Brad’s) experience anymore than when they eat ice cream they remember cold icecream sitting at Brad’s Aunt Betsy’s table while reading his first Green Arrow. But maybe their telling of their experience can enrich this timeline’s Brad and change his feeling about Green arrow retrospectively?

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Look Ma! Both Sides Do It

The NYT reviews the current research on paranoid conspiracy theories in the US and discovers they start in the Amygdala, have something something something to do with democracy although the author doesn't know what, and that both sides do it.

Alex Jones, a syndicated radio host, can build fame as a conspiracy peddler; politicians can hint at conspiracies for votes and leverage; but if conspiracy theories are a tool the average person uses to reclaim his sense of agency and access to democracy, it’s an ineffective tool. It can even have dangerous health implications. For example, research has shown that African-Americans who believe AIDS is a weapon loosed on them by the government (remembering the abuses of the Tuskegee experiment) are less likely to practice protected sex. And if you believe that governments or corporations are hiding evidence that vaccines harm children, you’re less likely to have your children vaccinated. The result: pockets of measles and whooping-cough infections and a few deaths in places with low child-vaccination rates.
Psychologists aren’t sure whether powerlessness causes conspiracy theories or vice versa. Either way, the current scientific thinking suggests these beliefs are nothing more than an extreme form of cynicism, a turning away from politics and traditional media — which only perpetuates the problem.

The author completely fails to explain why one man's "conspiracy theory" is simply another man's history--the Tuskegee experiment is an actual historical fact.  Low access to health care and health insurance, to good sex ed and to money are also facts.  Despair is a social reality for many people and some populations.  The interesting question and why this ought to rise to the level of political reporting is why individuals and groups who are by no means powerless start to feel powerless and react by lashing out at others and determining that they themselves are the focus of the bad actions that their own group perpetrated on others.  I'd put the "IRS" scandal down right there, in the sweet spot, as well as nearly every trumped up conspiracy theory that Obama has been attacked with. Almost all of them are simply inversions and projections of real things that happened under Reagan, Bush I, or Bush II or some other President aimed at some group who were not white, middle class, and powerful.  Why the white middle class, in the form of the John Birchers and the new GOP, leaped so far so fast on the paranoid bandwagon still needs to be investigated.  Another way of putting it is that powerlessness and ignorance, cynicism and rejection of community are subjective states.  People aren't powerless, they just think they are when some of their privilege has been taken away.

About the Oklahoma Tornado

Elie posted this up on Baloon Juice and I wanted to pick it up to read it again later:

Poem by Tennessee Williams:

Your Blinded Hand.

Suppose that
everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your cry and mine were lost among numberless cries
in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that somehow I would find your blinded hand.
Through flames everywhere
consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
I would
find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you’d hear mine and each of us
would find
the other’s hand.
We know
that it might not be so.
But for this quiet moment, if only for this
moment,
and against all reason,
let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
that somehow it would be so.
I’d hear your cry, you mine—
And each of us would find a blinded hand.

Illuminations

Arendt's introduction is worth lingering over, or picking its pockets and moving on, or both.  She likens Benjamin to a "Pearl Diver" and leads off part of the essay with this epigraph

Full fathom five thy father lies,
of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange (The Tempest I,2)

Which makes me see that I, at least, critically misremember it because I remember it as being "Nothing of him doth fade" which means something substantially different.  Doth that as it may the comparison is to one who dives down and from the bottom of the sea retrieves treasures which are formed from, but not identical to, the original bearer: the fathers, Judaism, tradition.  Perhaps we collect them because they are "rich and strange" or because they remind us of the past and serve as a mnemonic, perhaps as a souvenir of a lost sentimental relationship, perhaps as a way of "throwing illumination on the future" but we aren't collecting them for their mere monetary value- we don't collect the "pearls that were his eyes" because they are pearls, but because they "were his eyes." That's my own preliminary interpretation and I think you have to hit "were" and "his" and perhaps "eyes" all separately and equally as possible emphases.  We treasure them because they are of the past, because they are rich and wonderful, and because they were a way of seeing even though they are now occluded and blind.

Arendt continues on to say:

"Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically it becomes tradition.  Walter Benjamin knew that the break with tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past.  In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissilbility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of "peace of mind,"  the mindless peace of complacency.  "Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions" (Schriften I, 571)...the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power [the power to 'tear out of context, to destroy'] originally were inspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve; and only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional "preservers" all around them did they finally discover that the destructive power of quotations was "the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive--for no other reason than that it was torn out of it."' In this form of "thought fragments," quotations have the double task of interrupting the flow of the representation with "transcendent force" (Schriften I, 142-43) and at the same time of concentrating within themselves that which is presented.  AS to their weight in Benjamin's writings, quotations are comparable only to the very dissimilar Biblical citations which so often replace the immanent consistency of argumentation in medieval treatises."

I can't really speak to that except to juxtapose it to this contemporaneous American practice which, I presume, had its counterpart in Europe but which at the time of Arendt's writing of this introduction was not known or understood in a literary sense--and perhaps we owe its current status in the academy as a field of study precisely to people like Benjamin or people who read Benjamin even though its pretty clear that Benjamin himself would have scorned it.

From page 49 of Writing with Scissors:

"The scrapbooks's ability to transform trash to riches and power, or at least to authority, to make clippings valuable through recontexualizing and repurposing, slid along two axes.  The first was the shift in audience--transporting the clippings either to other people, for whom the clippings would be a rich novelty, or to a future self, who would need the gleaned information and items and could put them to uses unavailable to the earlier self holding the pastepot.  Creating value through a shift in audience implied that the scrapbook maker's selection from the newspaper at the time of pasting were worth preserving and passing along.  Through the coercion of choosing and rearranging items--and obliterating the pasted side of the clipping--the scrapbook maker enforced his or her will on the reader.  The second was moving materials from the flickering ephemerality of an old newspaper into the permanence of a book: giving it the earmarks of value.
As they scissored in and scissored out, amassing and excluding, scrapbook makers imposed their will on what they read.  They created a version of the newspaper that preserves only what they considered worth preserving, and organized that material within their own structure of arrangements and juxtaposition."  

So central was the idea of the scrapbook to 19th century social life and the family that "the scrapbook" and the inheritance of the scrapbook were (apparently) familiar literary motifs.  WWS offers several examples including the fictional story of an adoptive daughter who, cut out of her inheritance by evil relations receives "only" her adopted father's carefully constructed scrapbook of financial information and stories from the newspaper. Embedded in the pages of the scrapbook is his actual will, which makes her his heir.  The father's will

 "in the sense of intention or hope, survives in his scrapbook as his desire that his daughter read his favored reading matter.  He materially rewards her for doing so.  His legacy circumvents the structures of biological kinship both through law and through the intellectual and spiritual connection that impels his adopted daughter to try on her father's reading interests by reading his scrapbook.  The will of other scrapbook makers likewise survives in their scrapbook's selections and arrangements of stories, articles, poems, and pictures."

Elsewhere, in a Louisa May Alcott story("Little Pyramus and Thisbe"), an impoverished street boy charitably makes scrapbooks out of the trash and detritus of the street where he is living and by presenting his art work to a new Immigrant family of artists becomes accepted into their household and trained up as an artist. From street graffiti like bricolage to the middle class? Apparently.

Arendt argues that Benjamin's use of quotations was novel, original, unique, and clearly for the upper class it appeared to be but WWS would argue that both men and women, demotically and rather passionately, had been clipping and quoting and challenging received authority and considering tradition and exploring their relationships with their biological and literary fathers (a very Benjamin/Kafka/Proust issue, from what I can see of Illuminations) for quite some time long before Benjamin or Arendt were born.

Moving Backwards and Forwards Along My Own Timeline

I pause in reading a few other things--or at least in writing about them--to pick up "Illuminations."  This is Hanna Arendt's edited edition of some of Walter Benjamin's writings.  You can't escape Benjamin, or at least allusions to him, and I know I've read some of these essays before or heard about them but this time, of course, its different--this time its different because I'm different.  I'm not better educated in his period or his interests, of course, but I'm a different person than I was thirty years ago when I was in school and someone else, someone older, was making sense of things for me by creating a curriculum that I was following.  This is bittersweet, for me, because I find as I revisit Benjamin and these particular concerns I have at my elbow a hidden interlocutor, my best friend from College, who was always more brilliant and more insightful than I by one, two, three observations.  However far I looked into a text, however wide ranging my interests, she was always ahead of me. I learned as much, or more, from her as from our professors.  But that means that when our friendship ended the part of my past: our discussions, our arguments, the books and the incidents we shared, were also halved.  As I read through Benjamin this time I can almost hear her voice but its becoming fainter.  I can almost remember where we were sitting when we discussed this passage--but not quite.  I wonder whether my new insights are at all insightful, I wonder where she is and what she is reading.   So I suppose, in its own way, this is why I'm drawn to Proust, because he is the great hymner and limner of the lost and the way it surges up, in our own lives, like a ship lost on a long ago ocean voyage that rises again to the surface during a storm.  We can see our old stateroom. We can faintly hear the sound of the crew. But it submerges again and we see nothing but the waves and we have only what we took with us when we leapt overboard.

The Little Note (Proust 29-30)

In the penultimate scene before the famous Maternal Kiss the Narrator goes to hell and back trying to hang on to an experience (his mother's bedtime kiss) which is denied him one evening when M. Swann is visiting at dinnertime.  This scene combines so many Proustian issues that you find yourself wanting to run sticky note footnotes all down the side or making a hyperlink out of every word.

One evening in Combray the routine of the Narrator's existence is disturbed by the arrival of the Swann, whose importance and simultaneous unimportance to the family the Narrator has already described.  The Narrator is focused on getting his night time kiss from his mother, in fact he  is so afraid of the real thing slipping away from him, of his apprehension (in the old fashioned sense of the term) not being enough to handle the evanescence of the experience, that he describes spending an entire family dinner, as a child, strategizing to get the most out of the one kiss he was permitted to give his mother in public. Art and the sacred, the workmanlike task of getting ready for the sitter and the determination of the artist to sacralize a single moment in time are all intermingled:

“And so I promised myself that in the dining room, as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and furtive, everything that my own efforts could muster, would carefully choose in advance the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence.”

To his horror the Narrator is sent up to bed without the longed for kiss and “set [s] forth without viaticum.” (29) The entire setting of this horror—the very scent of the staircase—become intertwined with the Narrator's sense of grievance and loss. This “made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.” (30) The intellect, the will, is over come (as usual) by the sensual triggers associated with an emotional state. The experience becomes so tangled between sight, sound, smell, physical pain (“a toothache”), drama (“ as of a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water,”) or even literature (“or a line of Moliere which we repeat incessantly to ourselves”) that the Narrator doesn't know whether he would prefer to be completely unconscious or fully conscious in order to allow his “intelligence [to] disentangle the ideas” and go from the imaginary, dream state to the reality of the actual toothache pain.

The Narrator describes the entire process of going to bed as digging his “own grave” and wrapping himself “in the shroud” of his nightshirt. He then “bur[ies]” himself in the iron bed. After this description of horror who can blame him for devising a “desperate stratagem” for he is a “condemned prisoner” and isn't he entitled to beg for mercy? Now he jumps from the prison metaphor to one that straddles his reality and what he perceives to be the experience of the servant, Francoise. The Narrator “had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a message to [his] mother when there was a guest would appear as flatly inconceivable as for the door-keeper of a theater to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage.” Francoise is not only a door keeper and functionary, she is also an atavistic throwback to the Old Testament, a hierophant, or a disciple of a cruel mystery:

“On the subject of things which might or might not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant, subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast with prohibitions of exaggerated refinement against “seething the kid in his mother's milk” or “eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh.” (30-31)

Francoise's code comes from somewhere unclear to the Narrator and his family—she's nothing but a little village peasant woman, after all, but the Narrator attributes her strict moral code, her conviction that there are things that are “done” and “not done” to something “latent” in her, something in her “past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, as in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes from Le Miracle de Theophile or Les quatre fils Aymon.” *1

In order to bring his mother to his side, and successfully use Francoise as his messenger—a prefiguring of the many times the adult Narrator and his friends will have to resort to intermediaries to trick a love object into an assignation?--the Narrator insists to Francoise that it is not he who has requested to see his mother but the mother who has requested that the Narrator send her a little note to be delivered during dinner. Of course Francoise, who is often compared to a lower order or something primitive, “disbelieves” him for “like those primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, from signs imperceptible to the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything that we might wish to conceal from her.” But despite her animal nature and her preternatural senses when Francoise attempts to determine, just from looking at the sealed envelope, “to which article of her code she ought to refer the matter” she is stumped. In other words, when confronted with a written document whose meaning is hidden from her, she must fall back on obedience and carries the letter away. The educated child triumphs, momentarily, over the adult whose authority is merely circumstantial and dependent on her vague and atavistic code.

The Little Note

The Narrator's note goes down to his mother and now he imaginatively follows it. Although the “little note” is bound to make him a laughingstock in the eyes of Swann (who is at the dinner and already occupies an important place in the Narrator's imagination, standing in for society, for wit, for something bigger and more interesting than the rather stodgy and unpleasant father and grandfather) the Narrator's anxiety subsides. The little note “would at least admit me, invisible and enraptured, into the same room as herself, would whisper about me into her ear.” The dining room, the stage, the salon, the dance, society itself are all places where, in the future, the Narrator will find himself exiled from his love object and this is true for Swann as well, the Narrator's doppleganger. The lover can only imagine, from outside, the pleasures the lover is enjoying and in a typically Proustian clause that winds from place to place the Narrator throws in this bitter animadversion that his mother, in that “forbidden and unfriendly dining-room,” is enjoying “ pleasures that were baleful an of a mortal sadness” because “Mamma was tasting of them while I was far away.” These pleasures are described mysteriously as a dessert composed of opposites “the ice itself—with burned nuts in it” but this contradictory and rather chilly sounding dessert (ice cream?) is at once transformed, by the note being put into his mother's hand into an open door and a different experience entirely not “ice” and “burnt nuts” but “a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin,” because the knowledge that the note would be read “was going to pour out into my intoxicated heart the sweetness of Mamma's attention while she was reading what I had written.” The dining room here merely prefigures the places where a man, Swann, the Narrator, will later be denied entrance, or not invited. But the note itself bursts those boundaries, however temporarily, because while he imagines his mother is potentially about to read the note, or reading it “I was no longer separated from her; the barriers were down; an exquisite thread united us.”

We must end this section by agreeing with Francoise “Its hard lines on parents having a child like that.”

How often does Proust, in the form of the Narrator, refer to some notion of atavism, of the influence of geography, food, literature and architecture on the almost animal and unconscious mentality of people? Given his half Jewish status and the permanent “unfrenchness” of the Jewish immigrants to the French imaginary –so powerfully demonstrated in the Dreyfus affaire--you have to wonder whether Proust isn't describing a state of French Nature which he must (in his heart) believe can never be accorded to Jews, even if nominally they like others are part of the post Revolutionary French Ideal.