mangle of inequality actually sighted again! Excitement builds.

Well, it looks like economists are finally discovered what I - or my blog, Limited Inc - revealed two years ago: the housing bubble was derived from the real driver of our current collapse, increasing income and wealth inequality. What I have labelled the mangle of inequality, for it is a three sided mechanism.

Apparently, according to Alyssa Katz, this is the line of argument of University of Chicago economist, Raghuram Rajan's "upcoming book Fault Lines: “the initial causes of the breakdown were stagnant wages and rising inequality." Also see Rortybomb among my links. My first version of the mangle of inequality is here.

Here's a newsfromthezona post from February, for your dining and dancing pleasure:

Monday, February 16, 2009
I'm psyched to see that Paul Krugman is on the cusp, the very cusp, of LI's Mangle of Inequality thesis.

So I'll just quote the meat of the post here:

"The place to start, of course, is the seventies. Suddenly, after thirty years, we are starting to recognize the shift that began to occur then. Let me remind you – the shift consisted of 1., the crushing of the bargaining power of labor; 2., the de-manufacturing of America – which was partly connected to the fact that manufacturing workers were the most militant, and partly the inevitable effect of the ability of capital to find other, cheaper regions in which to place factories; and 3, the dissolving of traditional constraints on credit.

These events occurred in response to the most serious crisis in capitalism since 1945. Galbraith’s New Industrial state, the liberal Keynesian economy, had created structures that were supposed to resolve such crises. These included the management of aggregate demand by the state, the moderation of labors’ older, utopian demands for a slice of the power in return for a steadily rising paycheck, and management’s movement away from optimizing profits in exchange for lessened volatility. The Keynesian moment unwound for a number of reasons – labour, with increasingly less interest in the political dimension that originally animated unions, became much more vulnerable; the government management of aggregate demand, combined with the government dependence on War, had finally unleashed inflation; and the ROI of the Fortune 500 corporations was finally causing an investor revolt. However, of the three factors I am listing in the shift to the new, Reagonomic paradigm, one and three seem oddly disjoint. How is it possible to diminish the bargaining power of labor – which results in the stagnation of wages – and at the same time dissolve traditional constraints on consumer and other credit?

Of course, from the neo-classical point of view, that makes a lot of sense. Instead of the government actively managing aggregate demand, the private sector, with a freer credit market, can take over. And in fact, even if wages stagnate, household incomes rise. The house itself as an asset appreciates, for one thing; more investment vehicles are made available to the public, for another thing; and finally, there is the great entry of women into the labor market.

Credit, then, is the keystone. It is from this moment on that the financial services sector, which had been relatively unimportant in the Keynesian regime, returns in force. It is what I would call the mangle of inequality – playing on Andrew Pickering’s term, mangle of practice. Contemporary capitalism in America has to effect a straddle – the economy depends on consumption, and yet, the majority of the consumers engross less and less of the productivity gains accrued by the system. Freeing the financial markets had two effects – one was to re-vamp the consumer’s financial horizon. Instead of worrying about making a wage sufficient to live the good life, the consumer worries about making a wage sufficient to have a good credit history – which is the magical key to the world of cars, plasma screen tvs, houses, and all the rest. The other was to make the consumer a shareholder in the system. For simplicity’s sake, call this the 401k world – that stands at the symbolic center of a system by which the ordinary person was hooked into the market. And the market could, consequently, use vast flows of capital to keep easing credit. A virtuous feedback, so to speak.

It had another, symbolically resonant significance. The triumph of the state in the 20th century was in providing for retirement. The state successfully created, within a capitalist economy, a mass ability to finish one’s life without poverty or utter family dependence. It was the template for the structural goods that the state, in a mixed economy, could provide – when the demands of distributive justice could not be aligned with the price creating market in a good or service. Consequently, social security has earned a special hatred from the right. The American system of encouraging private investment was meant, on the surface, to complement social security, but the ultimate aim was always to replace it.

The mangle of inequality, then, was not – as in Marx’s time – a head to head confrontation between classes. It is a more complex machine, in which class interests are blent so that head to head confrontation is systematically differed. The political triumph of the system is that the blending disenfranchised populism, since it became unclear who would really benefit from populist practice."

Honest economists should be shocked by the Fed report, since it goes counter to the mainstream notion of the convergence between expanding the power of the private sphere and wealth for all - every man a king (of his own home equity loan).

Disaster and Us

For those of us who can’t take our eyes off the videos from Haiti, there is something uncanny in the fact that people are walking about without issuing deafening screams, even as they pass by collapsed buildings and corpse after corpse.

There is a long tradition that in disasters, the natural devastation is followed by human savagery - lootings, shootings. Read from this perspective, we know to expect the worst when we start reading Kleist’s short story, Earthquake in Chile. In that story, an earthquake in St. Jago, Chile occurs just before Josephe, a nun, is about to be beheaded for sacrilege. Her crime was that she conceived a child and gave birth to a son, the father of whom was Jeronimo, her former tutor.

In the confusion of the earthquake, the execution doesn't happen. The archibishop dies. The guards flee. Josephe, goes back to her convent, finds her boy, and then searches for her lover, Jeronimo, who has miraculously survived the collapse of his prison. As the next day dawns, the couple find themselves in the midst of refugees who are busy helping each other. They welcome Josephe, Jeronimo and the baby. Then one of them says that at the only church that had been spared, a mass was going to be said, and all agreed to go there. Josephe and Jeronimo at this point are thinking that they will beg for mercy from the viceroy and surely be spared, along with their child. In the church, the canon preaches a sermon that builds to a crescendo of blame, in which the earthquake figures as a punishment for the sinfulness of St. Jago, like the devastation wrought upon Sodom and Gommora. In the exaltation and rage of the crowd, Josephe is recognized and surrounded, and so is a man who is taken for the father – until Jeronimo cries that he is the father. Then he, Jeronimo, and Josephe are surrounded and clubbed to death.

A careless reading of this story would be that man is beast to man. Kleist, in reaction to the French Revolution, is warning us against mob violence. A more careful reading would distinguish between the crowd of refugees with whom Jeronimo and Josephe mingle and the crowd in the church. The difference is, in the church, the structure of organized power – the power that had run St. Jago – asserts itself again.

Rebecca Solint’s last book was about this very topic – the strange discrepancy between the government and media portrayal of disasters – as crises that require eminent force – and the reality of the testimony of disasters.

“We should not be surprised, then, that what transpires in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is nothing like the popular version. People rarely panic or stampede, nor do they often immediately engage in looting or other acts of opportunism. The Scottish-born mathematician Eric Temple Bell, who witnessed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, saw “no running around the streets, or shrieking, or anything of that sort” but instead people who “walked calmly from place to place, and watched the fire with almost indifference, and then with jokes, that were not forced either, but wholly spontaneous.” Another survivor, San Francisco editor Charles B. Sedgwick, noted-perhaps somewhat hyperbolically-that “even the selfish, the sordid and the greedy became transformed that day-and, indeed, throughout that trying period-and true humanity reigned.” This phenomenon of “surprising” human kindness and good sense is replicated time and again.”

Solint’s Harper essay was published just before Katrina hit. Of the reasons I have to curse and forget the 00s, Katrina is as important as Iraq – in that it revealed what I believed, intellectually, but not in my heart. Intellectually, I’ve always known that the poor – which would include myself – are shit in the U.S. But in my heart, I have never really thought that. Watching the film, shown over and over again, of the guys on Claiborne taking out a drug store (that, in the eighties, was my drug store, when I lived in that neighborhood), I could only absolutely identify with them.

I had come South, from New Haven, in 1998 with the intent to live in New Orleans again – that was my original plan, and I merely fucked up by marooning myself in Austin. In 1995, if I had gone through with my original plan, I might well be one of the corpses of Katrina. No transportation out, a minimal amount of money, no place to stay and no person to take me in – of such are the victims made. That's me. It tore something in me to see the condemnation pour in upon the 'black hoodlums" as the country let NOLA sink into the water.

A more heartbreaking image than that of the bushwacking of an empty drug store came from Michael Lewis’ Wading Towards Home, perhaps one of his best essays. Lewis came from one of the aristocratic families, the ones whose relics amaze the tourists riding the streetcar down St. Charles. Back in the 80s, I lived for a while in the Audubon neighborhood, in a mansion that you can see, if you care to look, in a shot in the movie Cat People. Lewis’ family lived in Uptown, and Lewis discovered – and probably was not too surprised by the fact – that most of Uptown was dry when he drove into New Orleans three days after the supposed blockade. Everybody knows Uptown is higher than the rest of the City. And this is the info Lewis came in with:


”Beyond Uptown, here is what I knew, or thought I knew: Orleans Parish prison had been seized by the inmates, who also controlled the armory. Prisoners in their orange uniforms had been spotted outside, roaming around the tilapia ponds - there's a fish farm next to the prison - and whatever that meant, it sounded ominous: I mean, if they were getting into the tilapias, who knew what else they might do? Gangs of young black men were raging through the Garden District, moving toward my parents' house, shooting white people. Armed young black men, on Wednesday, had taken over Uptown Children's Hospital, just six blocks away, and shot patients and doctors. Others had stolen a forklift and carted out the entire contents of a Rite Aid and then removed the whole front of an Ace Hardware store farther uptown, on Oak Street. Most shocking of all, because of its incongruity, was the news that looters had broken into Perlis, the Uptown New Orleans clothing store, and picked the place clean of alligator belts, polo shirts with little crawfish on them and tuxedos most often rented by white kids for debutante parties and the Squires' Ball.”

What he found, of course, was that this was all wrong. Not only all wrong, but pathetically wrong. I still cry reading this paragraph:

“The old houses were also safe. There wasn't a house in the Garden District, or Uptown, that could not have been easily entered; there wasn't a house in either area that didn't have food and water to keep a family of five alive for a week; and there was hardly a house in either place that had been violated in any way. And the grocery stores! I spent some time inside a Whole Foods choosing from the selection of PowerBars. The door was open, the shelves groaned with untouched bottles of water and food. Downtown, 25,000 people spent the previous four days without food and water when a few miles away - and it's a lovely stroll - entire grocery stores, doors ajar, were untouched. From the moment the crisis downtown began, there had been a clear path, requiring maybe an hour's walk, to food, water and shelter. And no one, not a single person, it seemed, took it.”

This is Solnit, about what is revealed by disaster:

“The days after 9/11 constituted a tremendous national opening, as if a door had been unlocked. The aftermath of disaster is often peculiarly hopeful, and in the rupture of the ordinary, real change often emerges. But this means that disaster threatens not only bodies, buildings, and property but also the status quo. Disaster recovery is not just a rescue of the needy but also a scramble for power and legitimacy, one that the status quo usually-but not always-wins. The Bush Administration's response after 9/11 was a desperate and extreme version of this race to extinguish too vital a civil society and reestablish the authority that claims it alone can do what civil society has just done-and, alas, an extremely successful one. For the administration, the crisis wasn't primarily one of death and destruction but one of power. The door had been opened and an anxious administration hastened to slam it shut.
You can see the grounds for that anxiety in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which was the beginning of the end for the one-party rule of the PRI over Mexico. The earthquake, measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale, hit Mexico City early on the morning of September 19 and devastated the central city, the symbolic heart of the nation. An aftershock nearly as large hit the next evening. About ten thousand people died, and as many as a quarter of a million became homeless.
The initial response made it clear that the government cared a lot more about the material city of buildings and wealth than the social city of human beings. In one notorious case, local sweatshop owners paid the police to salvage equipment from their destroyed factories. No effort was made to search for survivors or retrieve the corpses of the night-shift seamstresses. It was as though the earthquake had ripped away a veil concealing the corruption and callousness of the government. International rescue teams were rebuffed, aid money was spent on other programs, supplies were stolen by the police and army, and, in the end, a huge population of the displaced poor was obliged to go on living in tents for many years.”

We will see which narrative prevails in Haiti. Look, though, for signs of the better angels of our nature.

HAITI

There's only one thing to say about today's news: give to the haitian relief fund of your choice, please.

Notes on the gnostic historian

There is a certain kind of skepticism that nests like an ominous crow in the branches of cultural relativism. It is aimed at all the myths and motifs that are used in the hegemonic strata of Western intellectual life – or, taking the nuts and bolts out of my mouth, by orthodoxy, by everything that cultural relativism, since Herder, has sought to take down – Western superiority, a narrow sense of reason, a vulgar notion of progress, all of it. Thus, in the sixties and seventies, when cultural relativism was particularly strong, there were a number of claims that such diverse social phenomena as the practice of cannibalism or the Mafia or European witchcraft were myths. They didn’t exist. There are powerful reasons to take this point of view, as almost always, the existence of the phenomena in question legitimate various forms of repression by established power.

Those reasons, for those who lived in the twentieth century, fell out of the sky, and sent the trains to the barbed wire camps, all as ‘defensive measures’ against an all powerful, and as we know, mythical enemy. Given this disastrous history, given these non-existent enemy others who were glued to the bodies of millions and incinerated in the furnaces, certain historians – notably Norman Cohn, whose The Pursuit of the Millenium is one of the great books in my life – looked back and traced the pattern of fake conspiracies and fictitious entities in Western life back to the Roman era. In a sense, this was a sort of anti-gnostic history.

The insight here is that the powers that be create magic narratives of danger and threat, that they have magic mirrors on the wall, behind which they operate the switches and buttons, also goes back a long way – back to Machiavelli at least, or perhaps to Gyges. In King Lear, the disabused, perfect Machiavellian, Edmund, a bastard and thus by birth an outlaw, confects, out of little hints, Edgar’s plan to take his father Gloucester’s life. His lucidity – which dissolves all traditional bonds (such as the difference between legitimacy and bastardy) and superstitions, such as the connection of the earth to the stars, is the background against which we see him commit his treacheries with the comic glee of one of Shakespeare’s minor hitmen, those spawn of fairground puppet devils:

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar--
Enter EDGAR
And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old
comedy: my cue is villanous melancholy, with a
sigh like Tom o' Bedlam. “

This view of power as manipulated by an absolutely skeptical consciousness that has, as a preliminary to its move, dissolved all pacts with the stars, all differences of birth, has leveled the world to its bare bones and yet – the inexplicable last undissolved illusion – wants to rule over those bones is itself the kind of thing that should prompt our skepticism. Granting that moral panics can be generated in much the way that a movie director can generate a windy scene – using machines that the camera never films – we imagine that those who claim that these fictitious conspiracies and organizations – the Jew, the Witch, the Trotskyite – exist, and work their subterranean evil everywhere, are totally aware of the off-camera machinery. Surely the potter knows his pots. This view, however, is mystifying in its own way. We can find real equivalents for the theatrical cynicism of an Edmund in our history – we can cull statements from Goebbels, Stalin, Mussolini, etc, and take them as sudden illuminations of the arcana imperii – but in doing so, we mirror the tendency we are fighting against, we endow our creatures with a consciousness that has no unconscious, that is impervious to its own mythmaking, that is all machine and no ghost.

I find this interesting because I have come to think of the book I’m writing, the Human Limit, as a Gnostic history. But looking up the current literature on Gnostics, I find a strong current in the scholarship that want to brush the very concept out of our history like a dusty cobweb. Karen King, in What is Gnosticism, my guide to the current scholarship, comes dangerously close to this position. It is understandable in some ways. When you read the exegetes, busy dissolving the texts, it is a wonder and an astonishment. Some postulate a complexity to the making of the texts at Nag Hammadi that would make a a particle physicist proud. Often, the assumptions seem a little, well, non-empirical. I’ve read some of the scholarship about the Gospel of Thomas which takes the fact that it contains ‘doublets”, or passages that repeat each other, as proof that it must have been compiled by many writers. Obviously, these scholars should ask an editor – such as moi – since it is rare that I edit a lengthy manuscript that doesn’t contain doublets.

King does one very good thing, and attempts to disentangle gnosticism from heresy. As the Gnostics were mainly known from the denunciation of them by various hepped up church fathers, it is hard not to think of them through that lens – a lens that seems all their writings as motivated by reaction to orthodoxy. In fact, when we go back early enough, there is no reason to think that orthodoxy is a very good description for what is going on in the spread of the Jesus cult – and its taking into itself other floating notions about salvation – changing one’s life – in the Eastern Mediterranean.

So, what did the Gnostics think, anyhow? One persistent motif has to do with a certain dualism vis-à-vis creation. The world, in this framework, was created by a lesser god, the child of Sophia. Not necessarily an evil one – but certainly lesser, and certainly not all knowing. He doesn’t quite know what he is doing. Lovely Eve discovers this when the helpful serpent suggests eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which was not a sin – but the first revelation. This gives us the Gnostic historian’s equipment – a suspicion about the framework of matter or appearance, the notion that the fundamental elements are the hidden and the plain, the secret and the truth, sides – in other words, the jagged sense that the world isn’t finished and the glorious delusion that what will finish the world is one’s history of it. The demiurge, for the cool Gnostic, is authority in all its helplessness – weaving violence out of its vulnerability. The Gnostic historian proceeds with a film noir sense of the world, in which the femme fatale is actually Sophia’s embodiment here on earth.

Stevan Davies, in an article about the Gospel of Thomas (1983), made a case for it as a fifth gospel. It is a striking text, in that it takes the important thing about Jesus to be what he said. This way of understanding Jesus has, of course, been displaced – it seems to us that there is no contradiction between the Church being a defender of the family and the son of God that this church worships, even though Jesus is much more scathingly anti-family than, say, Rimbaud – there is no giving and receiving of wives and husbands in the Kingdom, and “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple.” This contempt for the family exhibited in Jesus’ every recorded gesture is simply not considered important. It was, however, before the cult erased the person, and the Gospel of Thomas, while lacking any real sense that the important thing about Jesus was that he was resurrected, is full of the sense that the new life begins by breaking utterly with the old rules.

How to think about these things?

“Thomas preserves at least two parables which almost certainly come from Jesus but which exist in a kind of pre-church purity. They allow one, in all likelihood, to hear Jesus without the whispers of centuries encouraging particular interpretations. Here is 97:

Jesus said, the Kingdom of the [Father] is like a woman who was carrying a jar which was full of meal. While she was walking on a distant road, the handle of the jar broke, the meal spilled out behind her onto the road. She did not know; she was not aware of the accident. After she came to her house, she put the jar down; she found it empty.”

The jar – which she didn’t notice – the crumbs in the road – the empty container. The Gnostic historian is like that woman whose things have slowly trickled away from her, every step she takes, leaving a trail behind her for the birds of the air to eat – all of this without her knowing it. Lose everything.

some thoughts about creepiness

I had lunch with my friend M. the other day, who mentioned Hermann Asperger’s original essay on Autistic children. M. was trying to get a copy of this essay, translated by Uda Frith into English, and frustrated that he couldn’t find one – and not at all willing to fork over the 70 bucks needed to buy the book it is within.

I looked it up on Google books, which reveals considerable parts of it – especially the case study of Helmutt, the Ur-Asperger’s child. Asperger described Hellmut as being oddly unaffected by exterior stimulus, and, in contrast, driven by interior stimulae. Thus, he’d suddenly bash someone for no reason, or he would suddenly throw things around in the classroom. Moreover, his gaze was turned inward.

Asperger gave the six year old boy some tests – naturlich – to discover his level of intelligence. One of the tests was to ask about the similarities and differences of different things. I simply can’t express how much I loved Helmutt’s response to the ‘item’, wood and glass: ‘because the glass is more glassy and the wood is more woody”.

Shades of Shklovsky! And the famous formalist motto, to make the stone more stony!

Asperger’s has become a fashionable syndrome, as we all know. I don’t want to suggest that Mann’s Adrian Leverkuehn is an Asperger’s case - but I do want to suggest that there is a certain autistic strain in German lit, which comes out as a mastery of the “creepy.” In Adrian’s case, this one side of his character - his creepiness, his isolation – is what the narrator so wants to protect, and so exposes in his ‘biography.’ Adrian suffers from his one, his only sexual encounter with a woman – who, with a typically autistic single mindedness, was the one woman in the one brothel he went to – sent there as a practical joke by a taxi driver – who touches him on the shoulder. He smell her perfume. That is it – he flees the brother without ever having sex with any of the girls – but eventually, after a year, returns to find the girl who had touched his shoulder. She has left, gone to another town, and Adrian tracks her down. There she tells him that she has a venereal disease, but he has sex with her anyway. His first and last. His first and last syphilitic infection, too. Before the cure for syphilis, there were multitudinous ‘cures’, all false. And by grace of the mysteries of the immune system, one could either live with a low grade infection, or the disease could attack decades later – paralysis, madness, death. Baudelaire, who caught syphilis in his twenties, finally figured out that the doctors hadn’t cured him – figured out he was maudit in actual and gross physical fact – by his late thirties. He knew where he was headed.

To get back to the creepiness – in Adrian’s nearly unsullied virginity, he – or is it the disease? – becomes obsessed with the Little Mermaid. Der kleine Seejungfrau – provides a bizarrely appropriate motif of horror which contrasts, in the writing of the book, with the time of the writing – that is, the time of the destruction of German cities through the bombing campaign, and the destruction of Europe through the Nazis.

Adrian dreams not only of the little mermaid – who exchanges her bottom part, that fish tail – that androgyny – for human bottom parts, with which she could walk in the world outside of the ocean – but only at a price. Every step brings excrutiating pain, as though red hot needles are being driven into her bare feet.

Of course, as is well know, Mann was extremely bi-sexual. The narrator, Zeitblom expresses his homoerotic feelings for Adrian by wishing to ‘unfuck’ him – that negation of the fuck that, as any of us dimestore Freudians can tell you, is the equivalent of fucking in the unconscious. Adrian knows this too, on some level – hence his choice of Zeitblom to confess, in a letter, his accidental visit to the brothel. The mermaid’s loss of a tail and her possession of a human lower part is a movement from the realm of the unfucked, the embryotic, to the realm of the fucked, perchased with pain at every step. That pain is hobbling, and slows walk to a creep – the creep of the creepy.

Can a whole culture fall into a state of autism? Can its collective dreams converge on the image of the mermaid, losing her tail and walking, with infinite pain, into a barbed wire camp?

Humanism, degree zero.

In Vladislav Zubok’s Zhivago’s children, a study of the post-Stalinist intelligentsia, there is a fascinating passage about the effect of Stalin’s purges: “Other university level institutions of higher-learning were re-created in the 1930s as workshops for educated Soviet elites. Yet those elites – the Bolshevik vanguard… - perished in the dungeons of the secret police, in the camps of the gulag, and in mass graves on execution fields. That great bloodletting deprived the revolutionary and Soviet past of its heros and replaced them all with the towering effigy of the Great Leader, Stalin…Most of the survivors of the terror at universities and other cultural institutions were, paradoxically, the professors who did not share the communist idealism. They, who had instead been brought up in the nineteenth century tradition of liberalism and humanism, could not help passing onto their students their manners, habits, ethical standards and aesthetic standards – while keeping their political views to themselves.”

I find this utterly fascinating. I am not, in my old age, afflicted with cancred roots, Spanish moss, or a gauzy picture of humanism. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about Thomas Mann lately. In 1919, he writes his Reflections of a Non-political man, and – in effect – seems to align himself with the conservative revolution. He’d broken with his brother over the war, which he celebrated, and was receiving strokes from people like Spengler. In 1922, he gives his speech on Tolstoi and Goethe, and ends on an odd note in which Tolstoi is associated with the Asiatic, and Goethe is the spirit of Deutschland – which means “refinement, ennoblement and the humanization of the natural – not rational-radical de-naturalisation. It will not be Asiatic and wild, but European, which means gifted with a sense for division, order, measure, and bourgeois in the oldest, most worthy, medieval-german sense…” And, Mann mentions, as well, the “youth” – the youth that had, for instance, murdered Rosa Luxemberg, although he doesn’t mention that: ‘Western humanistic liberalism, politically speak, democracy, has some ground with us, but not all the ground. It is not the worst part of Germany’s youth who, before the decision, Rome or Moscow, opt for Moscow. At the same time these youth err not to say that not Rome, and not Moscow has the answer, but: Germany.”

However, as Mann scholars point out, from the time in which Mann’s essay is published in the Neue Rundschau to the time in which Mann expanded and redacted it as a much longer essay, the emphasis, the tone, the nuance – and Mann is a master of nuance, he lives for his nuances, his sentences are as full of feints as a good pitcher is full of curve balls and changes of pace, what he lives for is the insight that dazzles slowly, ever so slowly – had changed. Terence Reed in Thomas Mann, the uses of tradition, tracks some of the changes in the essay, and in particular this one:

“It is not the moment for Germany to conduct itself anti-humanistically, to take Tolstoi’s pedagogical Bolshevism as a model… On the contrary it is the moment to emphasize our great humane traditions emphatically and proudly, not only for their own sake, but also to visibly show that the claims of “latin civilization’ are unjustified.”

The story is that Mann finally understood the flow of the conservative revolution – understood that he had walked too far out, so to speak, into that ocean. And he could feel that the currents were steadily sucking away at all the aesthetic principles he held dear – as well as destroying the bourgeois – or really, buergerlich - attitude that he had defended so fiercely in the Reflections.

And the current goes out, and the current goes out. To think of the artists, the poets, the filmmakers who had answered the call in the twenties in the Soviet Union – who had, as it were, stepped on the throat of their own song, not that they knew it. Mann, long afterwards, in Hollywood, at the end of the war in which, as he was well aware, the country he was living in had bombed into rubbish the entire history of the buergerliche culture – presents a scene in Doctor Faustus in which Adrian Leverkuehn is uncharacteristically philosophical. He has just seen the performance of his Gesta, and in the after performance excitement, explaining why this work was not so… austere, intellectual, unintelligible to the masses, he says: “Funny, isn’t if, how for a long time music saw itself as a means of redemption, and all the while, like all art, it needed redemption, that is, it needed to be redeemed from a solemn isolation that was the fruit of culture’s emancipation, of the elevation of culture to an ersatz religion – needed to be redeemed from being left alone with a cultured elite, known as the ‘audience’, which will soon no longer exist, which already no longer exists, so that art will soon be all alone, alone to fade away and die, unless, that is, it should find a way to the volk, or to put it un-romantically, to human beings?”

A cry from the heart – except that Adrian’s biographer is not at all pleased by this surrender, this fear of art’s solitude, this retreat to the ‘volk’, to ‘human beings’. It is here that the curious dialectic of humanism as Mann saw it takes a turn – a much more radical turn than that of, say, Heidegger, who for all his anti-humanism had decided, with disastrous – or, in Heidegger’s case, farcical effect – to find a way to the volk.

And that moment – well, I savor that moment in Mann. That humanist contempt for the ‘human being’ as presented by a popularist anti-humanism – that ability to embrace, if necessary, any solitude. That icy, icy clasp, those fingers around my heart.

sound as an acid flashback

When I was a lad, I stockpiled a bunch of songs in my memory. I didn’t consciously do this – I didn’t plan on doing this – but here I am, some thirty five years later, with a head full of Dylan, Beatles, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen songs.

I don’t really listen that much to these singers anymore. Every year, I find myself listening to different singers, and I take a very satirical view of people who go to see the ‘return tour’ of their favorite rock n roll singers, since I think the spectacle of a sixty year old singing a song he made famous at twenty four, when he was full of jism and cockiness, in front of a crowd of homeowners with their hands in the air like they just don’t care, is funny. Although, in truth, the singers I liked best back then have written songs that register their age, just like the great blues singers did. Before they died, I saw both Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, who were certainly and bluntly old. Age is an opportunity for the great songwriter or poet, to state the obvious. But the crowd of handwavers want to re-live the hits – as the radio incessantly intones. O well - in my own decay I descry the decay of the whole frame of the world. But I do sing the songs I learned when I was a kid. When I am on my bike, or when I am putzing around my apartment, I sing these songs. When I was a young guy and rode a motorcycle to my job in a hardware store in Shreveport, I was nicknamed something like “rock star” because I always came in the door finishing up the song I’d been singing as I rode my motorcycle. As you can tell, my fellow workers at the hardware store were full of clever jibes.

All of this is the necessary background and prelude to the gift I got this Christmas from my brother Doug. It came in a box, without instructions, and I admit that I stared at it for a day, not knowing exactly what it was. It said it was an mp3 player, but when I turned it on I couldn’t seem to get it to work. Luckily, a friend came over and kindly pointed out that (ahem) the little screen was still covered with the protective plastic wrap. Once I peeled that off, low and behold, I could actually see a menu, which was the first step in my corruption.

It was the day after Christmas that I attached the earbuds, which are just pillshaped black pills – which seemed to lack the extruding part that fits into the earhole, as maybe that part is now considered bad for your health, I presume because the eardrum cannot endure too much reality sticking its snout in there – anyway, I put them in, then screwed them a little tighter as they seemed to want to fall out, and mounted my bike. And then a wondrous thing happened. My ears filled with Atlas Sound’s Quick Canal – which, by some accident, turned out to be just the kind of music earbuds were made for – and I had an intense aural experience within the capsule of myself, apart from the main of various cars booming and buzzing around me. The only thing I can compare that to was the first time I did mushrooms, when, after a little nausea, suddenly the same encapsulated feeling came over me. I was both entirely in the world of my senses and entirely immune from the world’s cause and effect junk, its tedious way of making you take all your steps to get to your destiny. That junk wears you down.

But this music that was simply filling me and my space – it whisked me away from the junkheap. I seemed to be at a very pleasant distance from what I was doing – pumping up and down on the pedals. It seemed unlikely to me that, say, if I swerved out into the street in front of an oncoming vehicle, anything major would happen. The vehicle would surely go right through me, the way a car can run right over a mirage of a puddle that shimmers before it on a hot road on a hot summer day – without a splash, and without disturbing the mirage’s cohesion. I was non-water.

Of course, I knew right away that this wasn’t going to last. That the more I listened to music on the buds, the more it would become routine, and the junk of the world would creep in. And I also knew that other people, most people, had been listening to music like this for years – all the walkman’s, the ipods, the mp3 players. I was like a man returning to civilization from a long walkabout. It was, however, new, and enormously exciting, to me – this juxtaposition of familiar scenery and my own soundtrack.

This was all the more spectacular for me in that, last year, after having had a severe case of swimmer’s ear, I became aware that the natural soundtrack - cars going by, people’s voices, wind, etc. – was in fact easy to disturb. For two weeks, I had heard it backwards and sideways – I heard the sound of cars going by me as this cross between a large gushing sound and a large sucking sound. I had seen people’s mouths move while their voices occurred behind my head. I’d become aware of myself in the picture – hyperaware that nature was an effect of instant editing.

As it should be, I think – I, who make my money by editing. In the beginning – in my cosmos – God said, let us edit.