So I come to be writing about On the Calculation of Volume, a multi volume late modernist science(?) fiction novel translated from the Danish and published by New Directions. The plot such as it is for our purposes today is simple: antiquarian bookseller Tara Selter has become unstuck from time on the 18th of November, a single date which she experiences repeatedly for slightly more than three years, with volume II concluding with the revelation that someone else is trapped in November 18th with Tara.

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To describe the book in these Wikipedia-plot-summary terms however would be to slight the descriptive passages and musings on her predicament that are the chief reason why you should give On the Calculation of Volume a shot. I wouldn’t call the prose in its translation by Barbara Haveland virtuosic, but the voice it conveys for Tara is an entertaining and (from my perspective) somewhat addictive

It was only when one of the hotel’s other guests dropped a piece of bread on the floor that I began to worry. Not because I don’t know that this sort of thing happens again and again in hotels all over the world, but because the same guest had dropped a piece of bread at that same spot the day before. It was a slice of white bread, the same size as the one he had dropped the day before and its fall occurred at the same speed, a gently swerving descent, slow enough to show that this was a fairly light piece of bread. The hotel guest’s actions were also identical. There was the same hesitation as he bent down for the bread and then, once he had picked it up, seemed unable to decide what to do with it. He was clearly torn between two codes of conduct: one which said you don’t throw away good food, and another which said that food which falls from society’s platters, baskets and plates is to be regarded as waste. Now I observed the same discreet movement as on the previous day when, after a glance around the room he decided to slip the bread into a garbage can and take a croissant instead.

Other reviews have noted at some length how ably the temporal recursion that separates Tara from her husband Thomas, who wakes up on each November 18th shorn of whatever memories might’ve been accumulated with his wife on the preceding November 18th, mirrors the contours, avoidances and miscommunications of a failing relationship in which two people have grown past each other. After explaining her situation to Thomas on the first several repetitions of the day, and enlisting his (perhaps unreasonably accommodating, but this is also part of the book’s charm) assistance to try to determine why and how this has happened to her, but they of course fail, and by the time the book begins in medias res Tara has taken to hiding from Thomas, eventually moving out altogether to an uninhabited and thus perpetually available home elsewhere in town.

I have moved back to the table by the window and before long I hear Thomas’s feet on the stairs and the passage again. I hear him in the kitchen and the hall. I hear him open the door facing the road and go out to fetch a leek from the garden and some onions from the shed. I can hear him pulling on the pair of rubber boots by the door. I can hear him walking down the side of the house, and then nothing until he returns with his vegetables. I hear him chopping vegetables for soup. Hear the rattle of the pot on the stove and, once the soup is ready, the scrape of chair legs on the kitchen floor. A little later I hear the gush of water through the pipes as Thomas washes his plate in the kitchen sink, then I hear him putting the plate back in the cupboard before going through to the living room. He spends his evening reading Jocelyn Miron’s Lucid Investigations and it’s almost midnight before he switches off the hall light and goes upstairs, but that is a while off yet, the evening is just begin-ning. Thomas is getting changed in the bedroom above and 1 am remembering a long succession of November days that have begun to run together in my mınd. There are I2I days to remember. If I can.

The second volume covers just over two years, a period in which Tara endeavors to recover some sense of time via travel, hoping to experience the change of the seasons as best she can in her presently dislocated state. Inevitably this fails to satisfy, but it carries the volume through to roughly the halfway point, and a budding obsession with the Roman Empire, triggered by a Roman sestertius coin which was given to Tara the day before she fell out of time. This search for a sense of time via the seasons-featuring a Christmas in November with her (also very understanding) parents struck me as another deft mirroring, this time of a mood that I associate with deep depression, a desperate yearning to feel something, anything, to laugh, to share with other human beings.

When I sat down to write this review I found myself writing with a certain defensiveness about the enterprise. I want to be careful not to engage in that classic online attitude of treating the opinions of like five people as a hegemony against which righteous war must be waged, but still, these things are present with us. There is a certain fashionable subcultural deprecation of translated literature in the style to which this book belongs, an especially relevant current inasmuch as I suspect it to be related to the primary mode of literary fiction over the preceding decade and a half or so, the “penitential realism” of which we spoke with reference to Ben Lerner’s Transcription several weeks ago. That style is derived to a large part from late modernist European forms, in contradistinction to the big baggy messy American novel of the late 20th century.

The 2020s thus far have witnessed two primary trends( that I know of.) The first might be described (and has been) as Alt lit 2.0, the recrudescence of where the culture had been circa 2013-14 or so, before the politic and social churn of the later 2010s had fully launched itself.1 I have mostly opted not to discuss alt lit 2.0 outside of reviewing Tao Lin, who has proved himself the Alt Lit 1.0 luminary with the greatest staying power. The second trend in this decade has been something I’ve occasionally described as “neohysterical realism,” a handful of authors who share little besides a stylistic debt and ambition to return to something like the scope and x of the big, loose baggy novels of the American late 20th century.2 Into this camp I would place Joshua Cohen, Alexandra Kleeman, and . A list of critics friendly to this movement but not limited or strictly aligned might include figures such , , .3 Neohysterical realism is like its predecessor, somewhat politically opaque, but on the whole liberal with a small l.

In my (very anecdotal and by no means comprehensive) experience dismissals of literature in translation originate primarily from within the latter camp, and a certain angle I am sympathetic. As Henry once asserted in notes, “there’s something to be said against totally abandoning the avant-garde in the anglophone world to this phenomenon— it would be a shame especially bc I think we have a certain special claim to the novel the same way Italians might feel about opera or Germans about philosophy etc.4” My American literary heroes are Morrison, Melville, Pynchon, Ellison, Barnes, and even in a sublimely complicated sense old crazy uncle Ezra. The USAmerican literary voice in its adventurousness and madness should be appreciated and protected. On the other hand-why not both? Shouldn’t it be possible to read and love the best of both traditions, to acknowledge that both 900 page epistolary novels translated from the Hungarian and classic American novels and aspirants to that position are worth our time, at least to the extent that anything is?

I apologize for that long excursus into half-baked literary sociology, I disavow the impulse though recognizing in my heart of hearts that it will happen again. I recommend On the Calculation of Volume to my readers (and anyone else who might stumble upon this piece. I’m very hopeful that the next post will arrive slightly sooner than this one: there are a few things in the tank that might be interesting to you, such as musings on German idealism and a consideration of Cormac McCarthy’s early, pre-Blood Meridian novels, all of which I read for the first time last year (though I began Suttree much earlier than that.) Until then, cheers!

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Misogyny, materialism, corporations, and pesticides had supplanted cooperation, animism, nature, and psychedelics, but the grim chaos seemed to be leading somewhere. Humans seemed to be deep into a brief, failable transition called history—a fifteen-millennia release from matter into the imagination, a place that was to the universe as life was to a book: larger, realer, more complicated.

One reason Li liked this worldview was that it asked him not to worry or panic but to stay calm, like a midwife, and try to facilitate the birthlike, surreal, and probably cosmic process. Hundreds of species, possibly, were flashing out of the galaxy every tew millennia in an inconspicuous metatwinkling, a shower of lifedrops Joining the ocean of immateriality.

The task of relaying the texture of this conversion on the page appears to have fully opened some sort of block that always seemed to imprison Lin in earlier works, and if the authorial stand-in (confusingly renamed despite in some sense obviously being the same person as Paul in Taipei or Andrew in Eee Eee Eee) isn’t exactly likable, he is by far the most interesting of Tao Lin’s fictional avatars. Leave Society isn’t quite what I had initially surmised it might be, an entire novel composed of the kind of elegantly metaphysical sentences I admired i at points in Lin’s earlier works, it nonetheless carries forward something like their mood. It is a book of recovery, of (as the LARB suggested) perhaps redemption, and in this sense it would seem both ethically and aesthetically destined to be Tao Lin’s best work yet. The novel’s narrative is at its most compelling when he is chronicling the way that Li’s new worldview has led to a closer relationship with his aging parents and family in Taiwan, and it is probably this side of the book, as well as a few extended musings on the idea of east Asia being less influenced by post-younger Dryas dominator cultures, which led some of the earlier reviewers of the book to deem it an Asian-futurist work.

Despite four millennia of autocratic patriarchy, China hadn’t fallen as deep into domination as the West, though, it seemed to Li. Confucianism hadn’t violently spread across the planet. After Confucius, Daoist texts had revived archaic partnership ideas. Zhuangzi referred longingly to a time when people cared for their mothers, weren’t aware they had fathers, and didn’t think of harming one another. Daode-jing, a five-thousand-word, poetry-collection-like book by Laozi, promoted the return to a former egalitarian society; viewed de, nature, as the most faithful expression of Dao; and called Dao, which seemed to be synonymous with change, the underlying creative, maternal source of everything.

How accurate this description may be is frankly beyond the purview of this review. It certainly can be argued that Leave Society to some extent inverts the arc of an earlier version of the novel, something like Knut Hamsun’s Hunger or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which the separateness and superiority of the artist-intellect is set above and beyond faith and broader society. Perhaps despite the more new-age, spiritual but not religious metaphysics of the book, Leave Society is still a document of what I have chosen to call the “metaphysical vibe shift” of this decade, the decreased skepticism toward that which cannot be seen or empirically verified amongst the members of bohemia and the intelligentsia, if not necessarily yet the population at large. Oh well, there I go historicizing.

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There are certain objections that one could make to the book. I suppose the first might be that I find the currents to which Lin converted largely unconvincing. Nature may look like reduced inflammation in the gut and musculature, this true, but it also may look like having to pull a calf that developed inside-out from within the womb. Gaia may be our mother, but it is by no means clear that she loves us as much as new age thinkers would have us believe. The “way of nature” may put us right back in the Malthusian trap from which we escaped at the dawn of late modernity. Less concretely it might be argued that the theory of the neolithic matriarchy on which much of the theory of this book rests is somewhat questionable.

Growing up in Florida, reciting “one nation under God” daily at school, seeing God promoted on money, stickers, billboards, and signs, hearing everyone constantly thanking and/or cursing God, he hadn’t realized that God was just one deity out of millions. He’d stayed somewhat confused through his twenties about God, Jesus, Christianity, and the origins of the world. Did things somehow begin at AD O?

He’d finally gotten less confused by reading Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman. God was Yahweh, a god whod emerged at a time (1500 BC) and in a place (the Near East) where a preexisting supreme deity had already, for five-plus millennia, been “revered as Goddess—much as people think of God,” wrote Stone, who argued that the pagans whom Yahweh targeted when he said, “Destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves” had been Goddess worshippers.

I respect the late Marija Gimbutas and have learned much from her work, and it is always worth remembering just how many multitudinous forms human societies have taken in the course of our relatively brief time on this earth.2 On the other hand in my own looking “into the fossil record” so to speak, and in various autodidactic perusals of myriad paleo (and otherwise) anthropological works has tended to leave an impression closer to the skepticism conveyed on this point by Beauvoir in the first part of The Second Sex.

These facts all lead to the supposition that in primitive times a veritable reign of women existed; this hypothesis, proposed by Bachofen, was adopted by Engels; the passage from matriarchy to patriarchy seems to him to be “the great historical defeat of the feminine sex.” But in reality this golden age of Woman is only a myth. To say that woman was the Other is to say that a relationship of reciprocity between the sexes did not exist: whether Earth, Mother, or Goddess, she was never a peer for man; her power asserted itself beyond human rule: she was thus outside of this rule. Society has always been male; political power has always been in men’s hands.

It should perhaps be said by way of a defense for the way some of this review has been formulated that I had an aggressively historicist phase as an undergraduate and subsequently throughout my early 20s, one that I have tried to put behind me in recent years. This is relevant because there’s something about Tao Lin that brings out that latent historicism in me as a critic. In this way he reminds me somewhat of the band Ok Go, another group of artists I would hardly call my favorite, but that nonetheless seem to help me think through where their genre of choice is at in the moment of any given release. While chronicling an earlier period Leave Society arrived roughly halfway through the crisis moment of the Covid-19 pandemic, in the wake of what a certain cohort experienced as one of the periodic Kronstadts that sends disillusioned intellectuals out of the left and into the right or center. This was I believe experienced as a tyrannical revocation by the professional class of the social life which is the primary reason to live in a place like New York City. The critical success of the novel could perhaps be interpreted as an early manifestation of the much-discussed “vibe shift,” the semi-astroturfed swing to the right of a quadrant of urban Bohemia.

All of this, however, is to commit what I take to be the sin of subordinating the evaluation of art to the circumstances of its reception, a gesture which almost always leaves a bad taste in my mouth as a reader. Leave Society is by far the best of Tao Lin’s novels to date, and an engaging depiction of a man receiving the command to change his life. In that sense I can recommend the book without hesitation.

I do not hate the work of Ben Lerner: to be honest I don’t even dislike what of it I’ve put eyes on. In that sense my response is somewhat akin to that with which I received Sally Rooney several years ago. At the same time, there is something in some of Lerner’s writing that strikes me as pernicious. The 2014 essay The Hatred of Poetry for instance, which I digested just before the marathon reading session that produced this post. This a text of the sort that one comes in primed to dislike and are then mildly surprised to find both less offensive than first surmised, and objectionable on unexpected grounds. As a product of the reformed tradition, however attenuated by 19th and 20th century theological liberalism and personally seduced by the Oxford movement I may be, I am not a stranger and nor am I instinctively hostile to the idea that art fails, must always in some sense fail.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

No, what offended me in the final third of the essay was the assertion that poetry fails because it is not politics, because it cannot incarnate the city of the philosophers, de civitatas Dei, on this world, and that those poets who try to represent the universal city in speech are sinning not against the LORD, but against politics.

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It’s all too easy, if your tastes run in a certain direction, to make the fiction a whipping boy for a kind of literary novel that has come to eminence in our time.2 A bit over a decade ago the critic, novelist, and friend of the blog described this sort of thing as a “penitential realism” which has replaced the loose baggy monsters of the turn of the century systems novel as the favored form of the literati.

If Dickens and certain maximalist strains of modernism (Joyce, Faulkner, Ellison, Woolf, Nabokov, Borges, and García Márquez) were the progenitors of hysterical realism, penitential realism can boast of its lineage in a more austere modernism—Conrad, Hamsun, Kafka, Hemingway, Beckett, Sartre, Camus, Spark, Duras.3 Penitential realism does from time to time appropriate other genres (the imperial romance in Coetzee and Kitamura, the domestic novel in Leigh and Levy, the science-fiction dystopia in Ishiguro, the American minority/immigrant Künstlerroman in Cole), but its authors remake these prefabricated narratives with their downbeat dysteleology and intransigent irony. That Coetzee and Kitamura subvert colonialism may be no surprise, but Ishiguro and Cole even undo the certainties of less obviously problematic teleological narrative archetypes concerned with fighting oppression. The overall aesthetic effect sought seems to be a stupefied melancholia–not just an inability to act but the recognition of the frailty and ultimate meaninglessness—or inherent oppressiveness—of all action.

To this catalogue we might add, acknowledging that not every author displays all of these traits in all times and texts, an intense preoccupation with individual subjectivity and a markedly dim sense of our ability to escape from the personal, accompanied by a corresponding over-investment in the redemptive potential of an entirely materialist politics. More than a century ago the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács described the novel as “the epic of a world without God.” This type of fiction might be uncharitably described as the novel without the world. The anhedonia is really the main thing though, and largely why I’ve never loved “autofiction” as a term of abuse for this material. Proust is autofiction. Renata Adler’s two novels are nonfiction. Perhaps most notably for those aware of our long-term fascinations here at Gnocchic Codices, Albert Murray’s three Scooter novels fit most of the metrics associated with the genre, being the reminisces of a lightly-fictionalized authorial stand in. The differentiating the Scooter novels from say Jenny Offill or whet I’ve read of lerner is the sense of the blues aesthetic, of life as something which must be overcome with a canny transcendence and good humor rather than guilty myopia.

After all that, Transcription is… fine. It’s about as much of a breezy read as this sort of dry late modernist thing can be. I read it in a day, and that might’ve been stretching it out a bit much. The opening conceit occasionally warranted an eye roll, surveying a genre of ambivalent horror about our personal devices and perpetual digital interconnection well-worn over the last decade by Byung-Chul Han and more recently by Jonathan Haidt, but once the titular interview began the book remained basically gripping for the duration of its 130 pages

“But perhaps it isn’t about her, perhaps she isn’t in the dream? Instead you are picking up Max from his primary school. It was on the rue du Ranelagh. We lived in Paris seven years. It is my dream, I believe. Or Max’s. A problem with Freud is he thinks we dream only our own dreams. She could be speaking to me—she gives you that word to deliver to me because she doesn’t want me to go to Switzerland. That I am cutting in line. I cannot remember my own dreams, so she visits you.”

Typically for this sort of novel, I ended Transcription not entirely sure I had totally grasped the plot, which I will thus refrain from summarizing for you.4 It concerns fathers and children, phones, art academic inside baseball I don’t pretend to understand, and a few other things besides.

Like so much contemporary literary fiction this is a deeply over-educated book, a condition that I invariably find slightly off-putting even as one is willing to accept that dwindling audiences being what they are, it may well be a more or less accurate descriptor of the common reader and critic of literary fiction, even of those of us who have never set foot in the august halls of Columbia or the University of Chicago. With all that said, after the first few sequences with their somewhat grating emphasis on the inevitable mediating apparatus of the smartphone, I was somewhat surprised at how seldom the book felt bogged down by these intellectualisms, although they did so occasionally. It seems to be a common condition of the contemporary literary novelist. Even an author like the aforementioned John Pistelli, whose recent fiction I generally prefer to Lerner’s, does not always succeed in making the abstruse jargon of his somewhat-more-literate than believable characters feel genuine.5

“We found Emmie an individual therapist we all liked, and Adelle and I started consulting with everyone with a claim to expertise. Emmie had long outgrown FTT, and soon we had a new acronym, ARFID-avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. You go in with a problem— My daughter won’t eat’-they ask you some questions, then they give you a diagnosis that repeats what you said with more technical-sounding language, as if this process of translation constitutes a gain in knowledge. And then there is a second translation, an epistemological sleight of hand, the magical contraction of the diagnosis into an acronym.

‘My daughter won’t eat’ becomes ARFID. The acronym is like a code, moves the alpha toward the numerical; numbers are objective, right, suddenly it’s science! No matter that ARFID denotes the same mystery, is just an envelope for ignorance;

Still, the book has much to recommend it. I may be tired of this kind of novel, but Transcription is a fine example of it.

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Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”— therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.1

In the original Hebrew, so I am told, it’s a just so story-how did the human get his brains, why childbirth hurts, why there is enmity between men and women, why we die. The cosmic morality play came later, with the deepening of what Karl Jaspers called the “axial age.” Hints of it wafted in with Platonism in the Hellenistic period, accumulating like sediment on the pages of the Septuagint, and perhaps wafted out back into into pagan Platonism later on, though that’s a topic for another day. The thinkers have always been troubled by the details. What does “like us” mean? Why does the creation happen twice? Why does God seem to have a body in a few passages? And on and on.

When I first began writing on this platform I did a great deal of blogging about posters on twitter and discourse that annoyed me, as though real life was my twitter feed. In particular, there was a kind of secular acknowledgment of sin that felt at once catastrophizing and unnecessarily letting the poster off the hook. There was a kind of moral neoteny at play here, or so I felt at the time, a way of denying oneself agency that felt fundamentally dishonest.

Once I wrote about this sort of thing with reference to the works of Grant Morrison, describing it as a way of remaining “helpless before the world,” but I didn’t really explain what exactly that meant or why I thought this tendency emerged. To the best of my abilities, I’ll try now. To be helpless before the world is to be clean of sin, to be clean of ever having to know or care that even if only on the most infinitesimal level within your own life you will cause someone to suffer. The late modern westerner is burdened by the vestiges of a middle class Judeo-Christian morality: she may no longer believe in the wrath of the Lord, but she does believe in sin, and sin is woven deeply into the fabric of the world, into our souls or our psyches, take your pick. Too deeply for anyone who imagines themselves good to enjoy life for a moment knowing the bonds of suffering and evil that bind together every link of the chain.

In my darker moments I sometimes think this is why online culture so loves “head empty” posting and the idea of bimbos and himbos. If you’re too stupid to breathe, you’re also too stupid to do harm, too stupid to be complicit in the way that all of us are complicit in the suffering of others, in sin. This is not, as IDW types sometimes claim, a leftist Gnosis, a line connecting Valentinus with Vladimir Lenin and through him to Bernie Sanders, but rather something like a late-modern anti-gnosis, an inability to deal with the terrible knowledge of suffering, of the sin beneath the surface of the world. I suspect this was one of the essential functions of orthodox religion in the west, and especially of Christianity. The death and resurrection of Christ frees the believer from sin, both theirs by will and that which they are born into as an incarnated being sharing in the original sin of Adam, which is in part exactly that incontrovertible fact of causing another human or humans to suffer.

The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!2

But we mostly don’t believe in that anymore. Often we aren’t so sure that we could even if we wanted to. Still, some fundamental emptiness remains. We make stabs at a crude pantheism, talk about “the universe” and maybe pick an esoteric version of Catholicism to adhere to as a kind of joke, an extended pose to strike about how America needs a Francisco Franco while you rail a line of ketamine in NYC, but all too often we don’t really believe, unless in some deep-down unconscious way. Which is a problem, because sin and our awareness of it hasn’t left us. We still cause others to suffer in our day to day lives, and are complicit in a certain amount of it just by existing, but there seems so often to be for us in our fleshy prisons and silicon tablets no Lamb of God to wash away our sins, no alien Lord to liberate the particles of light imprisoned within the fabric of our being, and so we remain down here with our hot takes and our righteousness, scrubbing and scrubbing, trying to get clean.

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Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason.” I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin.! I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.3

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.4”

Reader, I am not pointing all of this out to make you feel badly. I wrote the three paragraphs above nearly three years ago, while I was still working out how to process the experiences that I had lived through in the preceding. There is much in them that I would write differently today. Among other things, these days I do my best to be more mindful of the log in my own eye.

Five years ago during an otherwise unremarkable day at the job I held at the time I had an experience of the risen Christ. In a state of utter despair I called out to Him and He was there, not as an apparition, as the radiant firstborn of the dead as on the less-cited closed panel of Mattias Grunwald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, but the indwelling spirit of Whom Paul wrote to the Galatians.5

Pehaps this will read to you as merely a platitude, but I promise that as much as I have ever known anything I know that He was there, and that He loved me when I was unable to find anything of value in myself. There is none who is too far gone, none for whom the doors will not open if your heart is opened. I understand the feeling that you are excluded from the great procession, I have felt it too. If you repent, if you open yourself to him He is there waiting for you. When he entered the earthly Jerusalem in the last week of his life He told His disciples “and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.6” Do not think dear ones, that He was not speaking of you also.

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Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World (1985)

This is one for the “I read this because of ” file. A penetrating and compelling examination of the role of religion in the formerly Latin west and secularization via a historical and phenomenological lens. Charles Taylor [who wrote the introduction to the (apparently not up to the snuff of the original French) English translation I read] clearly got quite a bit from Gauchet for his lengthy (and somewhat better known to me) 2007 study A Secular Age. I often felt while reading The Disenchantment that I was missing a bit of context for what Gauchet was saying, an impression confirmed by James afterwards.

The first part claims that if we look beyond the still existing Churches and the abiding faith, we will see that the religious has reached the end of its life in the modern world. The second part claims that the modern Western world’s radical originality lies wholly in its reincorporation, into the very heart of human relationships and activities, of the sacral ele-ment, which previously shaped this world from outside. Religion’s demise is not to be ascertained by declining belief, but by the extent of the human-social universe’s restructuring. Though this restructuring originated within religion, it escaped from and reversed its original religious orientation, and this reversal of the age-old organizing influence of the religious will be the book’s main focus.

The book investigates what beneath the Weber-citing title might more properly considered as a structural transition occurring within the Christian west from the time of the reformation on, although Gauchet, following a number of modern thinkers sees something like secularism as implied in Christianity from the beginning.

Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (1970)

This short review was written for a now-defunct thought digest early in this blog’s existence and predates both a more substantial engagement with the canon of continental philosophy and my formal conversion to Christianity. As such there are some things that I would write differently and others that I might not write at all. It has been lightly edited but otherwise is presented as is.

The sex-negative radical feminist Andrea Dworkin has been somewhat of a bogeywoman for subsequent generations of feminist, enjoying a posthumous reputation as a kind of world-loathing, anti-sex gnostic who would rather Christian theocrats call the shots than have one (1) red-blooded straight man enjoy the blue light of a pornographic film. I plan on reading a selection of her major works, beginning with this one, published in 1974. I found it a brisk and heavy-hitting read, presenting some views that are I suspect correct and others I have some reservations about in an atmosphere of dour radicalism that one at times almost wants to mock until one remembers that things really were that bad when Dworkin was writing.

Rape is, in fact, simple straightforward heterosexual behavior in a male dominated society. It offends us when it does, which is rarely, only because it is male-female relations without sham-without the mystifying romance of the couple, without the civility of the money exchange. It happens in the home as well as on the streets. It is not a function of capitalism-it is a function of sexism.

This passage in particular struck me as not only in a sense true, but expressing an idea I’ve often had with regard to incels and PUA’s. These men perceive only the animal logic of the sexual transaction, extrapolating it into systems of economics or pseudoscience without any of the validating romance or mystique that we more well adjusted citizens use to sleep at night. I’ve always appreciated that about Dworkin, that willingness to acknowledge evil and the rottenness in the world and our relations in it, and I think she’s quite right that if one sees it, one really should do something to oppose it.

That said, there really isn’t much air to breathe in the book (again, I can’t be too harsh, things were that bad when it was written) and her theory of art is not mine. This is a common problem I have with a lot of mainstream second wave feminism, this view that art has no independent existence, is only ever propaganda justifying and reinforcing the dominant. Much of the early part of the book is about fairytales, which Dworkin thinks (probably with some grounds to do so) condition men and women’s expectations of the other gender and their place in the world. She seems overall to have a fairly low anthropology (in a psychic rather than metaphysical sense) viewing us seemingly as biological machines programmed by culture.

Take any aspect of behavior and one can find the source of the programmed response in the cultural structure. Western man’s obsessive concern with metaphysical and political freedom is almost laughable in this context.

Perhaps she’s right, but reading that I couldn’t help thinking to myself: “someone needs to read some Dostoevsky and Nietzsche” Dworkin would probably retort that those were men, and fair enough. She advocates for androgyny, which one may be for, but seems to see it as inextricably linked to an de-anthropocentric recognition of the human as just another animal, the human/nature binary being in her view nothing more than a greater instantiation of the male/female binary. She touches on some popular late 20th century ideas: namely that a more idyllic, balanced era of human history had been violently replaced by the squalid domination of patriarchal civilization at some point in the distant past. It was an interesting if somewhat dated and at times simplistic read, I may write more about it at a later date.

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Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice (2014)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s first adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel is about as seamless a translation into the silver screen as one could possibly hope for.1 Inherent Vice trims the fat of the novel by quite a bit, and still winds up a bit indulgently stoned-seeming. Joanna Newsom’s narration as Madame Sortilège is a genuinely inspired touch that restores something like a feminine counterpoint to what is otherwise (as is true of most Pynchon) a very masculine story. Anderson teases out the minor-key quietism that flows through some of Pynchon’s late works, and which (I have still not seen OBAA) it sounds like he did not bring to his Vineland adaptation.

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It is my contention that we have today a culture which is mainly negative, but which, so far as it is positive, is still Christian. I do not think that it can remain negative, because a negative culture has ceased to be efficient in a world where economic as well as spiritual forces are proving the efficiency of cultures which, even when pagan, are positive; and I believe that the choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one.

T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society

As spring thrusts itself upon us in fits and spurts, sometimes snowing and at other moments balmy, I find myself reading too many things to bring together as neatly as might be desired. has assigned Schelling, of whom I am not at this moment capable of speaking, while following along in the Biographia Literaria to see where the damaged archangel plagiarized. In the meantime conversations with inspired by longstanding political suspicions and a personal fascination with the period have sent me scrambling to read various histories of late antiquity.

The first of these is Peter Brown’s 1978 The Making of Late Antiquity, a collection of lectures largely concerned with a broad cultural view of the transition between what the 19th century historian Theodor Mommsen called the Principate, the cultural and political order of the initial few centuries of the Roman Empire, and the “dominate” of the final century of unified Roman rule, a more dictatorial, proto-feudal and explicitly monarchical state which set the pattern for the theocracy which would persist for another millennia in east Rome and haunt the imagination of the west down to the present.1

The contours of the new situation were unmistakable and are well known. “ Soft” government was replaced by “hard” government. The emperors of the second century had ruled the Mediterranean with “magnificent economy of effort,” through a tacit collusion with the upper classes of the cities. “The one sure maxim of extended Empire, a wise and salutary neglect,” had kept the impingement of taxation and of the direct representatives of the state at a very low level in comparison with the Later Empire. This had left the traditional mechanisms sufficiently intact to transmute philotimia into “ sheer willingness” in its most acceptable and traditional form, “with piety towards the gods, and generosity towards men.”

A system of “hard “ government depleted these mechanisms. The collaborators came to identify their status and power with the position they enjoyed in the imperial government. The delicate balance implied in innumerable inscriptions of the second and early third centuries-“friend of the Emperor, friend of the home-town, friend of [its] gods” was irreversibly upset. Whether it was exercised benignly as patrocinium, or abrasively as potentia, this power drew its raison d’itre from beyond the local community. Its more exalted source made it that much less vulnerable to local pressure; and the power itself-which manipulated a system of taxation and of punishment that had increased in weight could win out in a more unambiguous manner. A fourth century potens did not have to pay the insurance premiums for success which his more evenly balanced predecessors of the second century had done. If he did, he paid them in a different currency, which we do not recognize so easily.

Eventually I plan to write something partly speculative and partly inspired by things I’ve heard about and from some of the smarter silicon valley reactionaries tying in the idea of a new principate/dominate transition occurring within the Rome of our time, but this will have to wait until I’ve actually established the contours of the Entomology Cabinet. Among other things I’d like to first discuss the spread during and after the pandemic of what I tend to call “soft NRX-ism” throughout portions of the intelligentsia.2

While in the midst of a number of books on classical and late antique religion, most recently I finished Walter Burkert’s Ancient Mystery Cults, a brief series of lectures surveying the mysteries of the classical world, an institution which multiple literary thinkers of the 20th century considered the wellspring of western poetry. I have mixed feelings on this thesis, which I will digress upon at a later date, but nonetheless the mysteries were of great importance for the Platonists of antiquity, with whom I am of course endlessly fascinated.

Following Plutarch, many Platonic writers invoked the mysteries for confirmation of the basic tenets of their philosophy, for illustration, or for the addition of a religious dimension to the exercises of philosophical dialectic. This went so far that Numenius once felt he had betrayed the secret of Eleusis through philosophy. Personal connections began to play a role, too; Plutarchus, the founder of the last Academy of Athens, was the son or grandson of Nestorius the hierophant. We still have only a faint idea of what Platonic Eleusis was about; apparently it was less concerned with the fate of Kore and sowing grain than with some procedures of the hierophant at the great nocturnal festival.

Like The Making of Late Antiquity Burkert’s text is a collection of lectures, but within this concision he does an admirable survey of a vast quantity of material. One gets a sense of the crazy quilt nature of classical and late antique polytheism and the divide between popular and esoteric practices which characterized that world. Burkert also suggests some of the likely reasons why none of these traditions were able to offer anything like an adequate resistance to the rising tide of Christianity which ultimately swept them away:

Mysteries were too fragile to survive as “religions” on their own. They were options within the multiplicity of pagan polytheism, and they disappeared with it There remains a strange fascination even in the glimpses and guesses at evocative fragments: the darkness and the light, the agony and the ecstasy, the wine, the ear of grain. Logoi remained tentative, without reaching for the level of system or creed. It was enough to know there were doors to a secret that might open up for those who earnestly sought it. This meant that there was a chance to break out of the enclosed and barren ways of predictable existence. Such hopes were attempts to create a context of sense in a banal, depressing, and often absurd world, providing the experience of a great rhythm in which the resonances of the individual psyche could be integrated through an amazing event of sympatheia.

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I’ve been watching the responses to Lindy West’s memoir for the last few weeks, despite having neither thoughts nor feelings about Lindy West herself. In classic “Neo Gene” form, the reactions to the thing itself interest me far more than the thing itself, which you can find written about here, here, here, and here. My following this discourse is mostly downstream of what Katherine Dee described before it had quite become a phenomenon as “the coming wave of sex negativity.3” I suspect that many younger millennial women I feel that writers such as Lindy West sold them a false bill of goods, a model of life and sexuality that they now find draining, flawed, worse than the conventional wisdom they grew up with etc. The widespread ogling at her memoir thus seems to me partly derived from a sense of resentful schadenfreude, although of course I wouldn’t ascribe this motive to every writer to survey this particular trainwreck.

This seems related to a broader semi-rejection of the post-1960s revolution in sexual mores amongst portions of the feminine intelligentsia (femtelligentsia?) that has been brewing since sometime in the mid-2010s, although antecedents date back at least to the 1980s.4 In this view the sexual revolution was the liberation not of women’s but men’s appetites and lusts, and the imposition of male patterns of behavior on women as a marker of “liberation.” This is something it seems to me worth having mixed feelings about. Certainly I would not object that what was liberated in the 1960s was very often a specifically male appetitiveness: the preponderance of a certain style in late 20th and early 21st century pop culture is proof enough of that. That the model of adulthood as perpetual adolescence leaves something to be desired we can probably agree, but as to what alternative model should be adopted we have little consensus.

On the other hand, the worldview that is often taken by the advocates of this semi-rejection, which sometimes threatens to approach a neo-Victorian sense that women are delicate beings endangered by the lust of rough, worldly, Men can be difficult to take if one has a familiarity with thinkers such as Nancy Armstrong or Ann Douglass and seen through their various debunkings the steely will to power which the sentimentality of the “angel in the house” could conceal.

The Fire and the Rose: Two Catholic Toms on either side of the Tiber

This I held because I could think of nothing else. But it was false. For if it were so, a greater part of the earth would have contained a greater part of You, and a lesser a lesser; and all things should be filled with You in such a way that the body of an elephant should contain more of You than the body of a sparrow simply because it is larger and takes up so much more room; and so You would make Your parts present in the parts of the world piece by piece, little pieces in the little pieces, great masses in the great masses. That of course is not the truth of it. But You had not as yet enlightened my darkness.

St. Augustine, Confessions Bk. VII, trans. Frank J. Sheed

Not forgetting one of my ten thousand projects, I’ve been reading T. S. Eliot again, having described him the other day as a “slightly underachieving poet” which I recognized before the sentence was done as a deranged statement, like saying aside from the Last Supper and Mona Lisa Leonardo was just all right, but it is more or less how I feel about Eliot much of the time. The Waste Land is the definitive poem of the 20th century the way Ulysses is the archetypal novel, and my relationship with the poem is much less complicated than with the book. Nonetheless outside of those four great long poems I’ve always felt him somehow more minor than his stature. This I suspect is related to the renunciation of American modernity in favor of a kind of ersatz-medievalism, a charge already brought by a hero of this blog, the critic Albert Murray:

Perhaps the most influential contemporary American statement of these issues is found in The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men.” But in these two unsettling poems, T. S. Eliot implies that the problems of nada are somehow peculiar to contemporary life and that it is essentially a problem of the renewal of lost connections and energies. The title of The Waste Land and the crucial image of the Fisher King clearly establish the fact that Eliot assumes that “things ain’t what they used to be,” that evil days have fallen upon a once prosperous kingdom of once blessed people. And one hastens to concede that his observations, which are not at all like the assumptions of revolutionary politicians, are valid as far as they go. Eliot does not, however, confront the allegation that even in the best of times in the most fruitful lands the winner shall take nothing.5

Those four long poems are the real deal however, and I plan on looking at them in greater detail at a later date.

In the process of sorting through the personal library of my late grandmother (and by extension that of the husband she outlived by nearly five decades) I stumbled across the Selected Poems of another American Catholic Tom, Roman rather than Anglo, a Trappist monk rather than a renouncer merely of America, Thomas Merton. As a first exposure, plus or minus gazing through some of his more explicitly spiritual writings over the years in this or that used bookstore, it makes a good impression, although in general I struggle somewhat to say anything intelligently about poetry.

To the extent that I have any sympathy for the esoteric vision of poetry one finds in various 20th century authors, it is perhaps as a form of creative theurgy, a method for our minds to attain in this world, however temporarily, a vision of that state in which “the fire and the rose are one.”

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the phenomenon I reference—call it brodernism, with apologies for yet another portmanteau—doesn’t end with translated literature. It expands toward works described as “maximalist,” “difficult,” “avant-garde,” “epic,” “excessive,” “oblique,” “speculative,” “experimental,” “modernist,” “postmodernist” and “post-postmodernist.” Though men are not its only practitioners, male writers dominate the corpus, and a tendency for phallic competition underlies the formation’s core texts. These include William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015), William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories (2005), Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (1983), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard (1999), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1987), Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh (out later this year), Miquel de Palol’s The Troiacord (2001), Jon Fosse’s works, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982), Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), Mark de Silva’s The Logos (2022), David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy (2006–09), and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971).1

I am in general not positively inclined toward this term, which manages to combine two major pet peeves of mine: the neotenous, everyone-is-12 cutesiness of millennial and gen z mass aesthetics, and the style of criticism in which sociological concerns, namely irritation with a type of guy (guy here meaning persons male female or other, this is not a gender slop blog) who reads these texts replaces actual engagement with the art object on its own merits. once commented that this negative polemic seems aimed at “like six people,” and this captures much of my discomfort with it. Substack’s own John Pistelli has surveyed this trend on several occasions, throwing strays at Clarice Lispector as he goes.2

a kind of athletics of reading long, hard experimental European fiction, and not the exquisite Proustian and whimsical Steinian kind either, but whatever is grimly-ironically historical and annihilatingly metaphysical.

I would perhaps add to the cloud of discussion around this execrable coinage a new moniker: “post-brodernist.” The obvious objection to this appropriation of Pistelli’s elaboration might be that to engage in the flurry of naming is to dignify an aforementioned variety of hyper-sociological categorization of literature to which I am not fond, but oh well.

Post-brodernism might be conceptualized as the “second generation” of postmodernism, works composed by authors for whom the novelty of the demise of a tangible somethingness has entirely vanished. Dismissed by Perelmuter as “rather too mainstream and easily read” by comparison to the enormous phallic edifice of the block quote above, David Foster Wallace’s mammoth Infinite Jest is perhaps the iconic post-brodernist work. Actually much of what I at least instinctively think of as “lit bro” literature is really more post-brodernist than anything else.3 In any case the point of all this discourse is that Mark Z. Danielewski is a quintessentially post-brodernist author, & House of Leaves and Only Revolutions definitively post-brodernist works.

I have found Only Revolutions deeply frustrating as I continued with it. If House of Leaves isn’t quite a novel, and this is the grain of truth to virtually every negative review of the book, I still read it in a week and found it fascinatingly fun in the same way as a very good comic book of roughly the same period, such as The Sandman, Enigma or The Invisibles.4 Only Revolutions on the other hand seems less obviously worthy at this point. After the first 100 or so pages the novelty has fully worn off, and the residue that remains is a sense of irritation at an all-consuming gimmick. When I pick it back up and read it, the book is fine, at times compelling, but when I regard it sitting on my shelves or on the passenger seat of my car I want nothing to do with it.

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In the cycles and months since we last kept up with them, Sam & Hailey have wandered into something closer to modernity, engaging in similar antics to that which were surveyed last time. Further down the spiral now, on page 128 and cycle-well I’ve lost count frankly, the highlights of the segments were running from the creep, a hostile interaction with what appeared to be early 20th century hobos or perhaps high schoolers, and Hailey being hospitalized for (I believe?) alcohol poisoning.

The time frame appears, if the sidebars throughout the book can be trusted, to be the 1930s, evoked by the occasionally intruding transients and a passerby telling Sam that no work is available. More than that I am having difficulty trying to write. One of the problems with this type of episodic novel is that it is very easy to put a book of this kind down and not return to it for weeks, months, sometimes much longer. Roughly two years separated my readings of the first and second halves of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, which is a considerably more conventional novel than Only Revolutions! I recognize that I have been derelict in updating this series (and my blog in general over the last month) but I hope to turn around the later installments of this series significantly more quickly. I hope to see you all then!

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Near the middle of the 1948 essay collection that made him famous Lionel Trilling remarked on the illiberalism of the great authors of his own time, the literary modernists of the first half of the twentieth century. The paradox of liberalism’s embrace of fundamentally hostile art would be a perplexity for Trilling throughout much of his life as a public intellectual.

if on the other hand we name those writers who, by the general consent of the most serious criticism, by consent too of the very class of educated people of which we speak, are to be thought of as the monumental figures of our time, we see that to these writers the liberal ideology has been at best a matter of indifference. Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Mann (in his creative work), Kafka, Rilke, Gide—all have their own love of justice and the good life, but in not one of them does it take the form of a love of the ideas and emotions which liberal democracy, as known by our educated class, has declared respectable.1

Thirteen years later he would revisit this theme in the 1961 Partisan Review essay which opens his 1965 collection Beyond Culture. Musing on the pedagogy of modernism in the university, Trilling addresses certain anxieties about disservices done both to students and the work itself by dissection in the seminar room.

I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: "Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men."

There is a conservative or reactionary formulation of this misgiving, one that I have occasionally found persuasive myself. What does it mean to have an elite that receives as its literary and philosophical education a teaching that is in some sense hostile to the civilization they are to eventually superintend? We already have reason enough to suppose that these ones will fail to represent the interests of the masses, so the argument goes-why then feed them a literature (in our times of fading readership perhaps television or film might stand in) actively hostile to the lifestyles of the multitude? Writing in late middle age Trilling observed the embourgeoisement of the modern literature he regarded so ambivalently.

More and more as the universities liberalize themselves, and turn their benefice imperialistic gaze upon what is called Life Itself, the feeling grows among our educated classes that little can be experienced unless it validated by some established intellectual discipline, with the resu that experience loses much of its personal immediacy for us an becomes part of an accredited societal activity. This is not entire true and I don't want to play the boring academic game of pretending that it is entirely true, that the university mind wilts and wither whatever it touches. I must believe, and I do believe, that the university study of art is capable of confronting the power of a work of art fully and courageously. I even believe that it can discover and disclose power where it has not been felt before. But the university study of art achieves this end chiefly with works of art of an older period. Time has the effect of seeming to quiet the work of art, domesticating it and making it into a classic, which is often another way of saying that it is an object of merely habitual regard. University study of the right sort can reverse this process and restore to the old work its freshness and force can, indeed, disclose unguessed-at power. But with the works of art of our own present age, university study tends to accelerate the process by which the radical and subversive work becomes the classic work, and university study does this in the degree that it is vivacious and responsive and what is called non-academic.

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Then there is the other objection, arguably itself a species of conservative argument, but in the last decade or so primarily associated with the political and cultural left. These writers as racists, fascists, illiberals, this work as their products, so the argument goes, represents something like a cancer in remission or a deposit of poison within the body of the culture. It is something that should not be celebrated, should not be read. Instead it should be excised. Needless to say. I probably want to throw Pound into the fire more than I do any other major author of that century, and yet I wouldn't, and don’t think anybody else should either. I wrote a whole series about a poem that is in many places explicitly fascist. My generation or generations have been called prudish and censorious, charged with an undue investment in the politics of art, of culture.2 We are, I agree to a point, and yet I can’t shake the impression that this is somehow more honest than the old approach of regarding the work as safely contained, entirely neutralized within a well-wrought critique.3

Awaking to a deteriorating political world outside the walls of the library or the university, one discovers that the canon is something like a laboratory in a horror film, the works themselves the monsters suspended in glass tubes, inert for now, but always waiting to break out and attack at a suitably cinematic moment. Who can blame the young for wanting to pull the plug? I’ve been guilty of this impulse myself, even if I never bought the most totalizing version of it. If I reject the impulse (and I certainly do) to burn books, it nonetheless seems important to acknowledge their danger, even if doing so can perhaps over-flatter the capability of the reader.

But then, Urizen and Los do always change places.

What is I suppose at issue here is a question of the seriousness with which art is received. I sometimes find myself in agreement with Dave Hickey’s line on Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio in The Invisible Dragon that some kind of artistic power may be opaque to the appreciator and transparent to the hostile censor.

Simply, it was their rhetorical acuity, their direct enfranchisement of the secular beholder. It was, exactly, their beauty that had lit the charge and, in this area, I think, you have to credit Senator Jesse Helms, who, in his antediluvian innocence, at least saw what was there, understood what Robert was proposing, and took it, correctly. asp direct challenge to everything he believed in.

Something like this sense of danger is what should always be kept when these works are discussed. We owe it to great works to approach them with open eyes, and not to allow over-familiarity to occlude what is right in front of our faces.

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Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Los Angeles , CA: Art Issues Press, 1993.

Trilling, Lionel. “The Purpose of a Little Magazine” in The Liberal Imagination

Trilling, Lionel. “On The Teaching of Modern Literature.” Essay. In Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, 3–30. New York, NY, 1965.

Elasticity and flexibleness in the simpler forms of animal life are equivalent to a complex system of limbs in the higher; and we have only to be as wise and wily as the serpent, to perform as difficult feats without the vulgar assistance of hands and feet.

Henry David Thoreau, “Natural history of Massachusetts”

In the new year I have been continuing to indulge what one of you recently described as my “intense and varied interests,” although much of it remains for the moment undiscussed here. I’ve been proceeding through about as much of the Falsafa as can be done without having any command of the Arabic language. Al-Farabi is a favorite of mine, as one might guess from the other week’s post, and I have been gazing into the Metaphysics of Ibn Sina’s monumental Kitāb al-Shifāʾ for the last month or so. In the last few weeks Chinese philosophy has been exerting its periodic pull, all of which I may try to write up soon.1 For the time being however, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his disciple Thoreau have been occupying my time.2

Emerson and the other transcendentalists are interesting and important to me for a few reasons. Firstly, as Cornel West has argued in his 1989 The American Evasion of Philosophy, to the extent to which there is an American-born philosophical tradition, it emanates from the mind of the Sage of Concord.

Like Friedrich Nietzsche- and deeply adored by him -Emerson is a singular and unique figure on the North Atlantic intellectual landscape who defies disciplinary classification.

Emerson lacks the patience and persistence to be a great poet. He does not have the deep sense of alienation and marginality to be a profound prophet. And he does not possess the talent for logical precision and sustained argumentation to be a rigorous philosopher. Yet Emerson is more than a mediocre man of letters or a meteoric man of lectures. Rather he is a cultural critic who devised and deployed a vast array of rhetorical strategies in order to exert intellectual and moral leadership over a significant segment of the educated classes of his day. The rhetorical strategies, principally aimed at explaining America to itself, weave novel notions of power, provocation, and personality into a potent and emerging American ideology of voluntaristic invulnerability and utopian possibility.

Secondly, and perhaps of greater significance, they offer a counterbalance to the various intellectual traditions by which I have been formed over the last decade, most of which take a rather dim view of modernity as a fallen state from which humanity must either transcend in a nearly-eschatological overcoming, or reject, RETVRN-ing to some earlier lost state of harmonious being. Against that the optimism of an Emerson or a Fuller seems refreshing and if I might be so bold, perhaps more authentically American (if such a thing can truly be said to exist.)

once remarked that Emerson’s (and we might append to him much of transcendentalism’s) seriousness was a victim of the general self-immolation of WASP culture in the late 20th century. One sees what he means by this on several levels. The quasi-ecclesiastical mode of Emerson’s thought, his concern with the condition of his reader’s soul throughout their life, is lost on contemporary intellectuals unaccustomed to thinking in those terms, shaped as they are by a culture largely conquered by the positivistic sciences of late modernity. The closest thing to a successor might be, as West has asserted, the school of pragmatism founded by Charles Sanders Peirce and established as a going concern by William James.

Even this however is to my mind an imperfect succession. Part of the post-Jamesian pragmatist move was the extension of the new sciences of modernity into every realm of human life, a will to leave nothing un-optimized or without rational basis.3 The Transcendentalists seem to my eyes mostly (if not entirely) free from this sort of thing, and in that sense to be preferred.

We do not learn by inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics, we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom.

-Thoreau

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Introducing the Entomology Cabinet

Those of you who are up on gnocchi lore will know that my academic area of interest, what I would’ve gone to school for if I’d stayed within the visible college is what one of you once described as the “bestiary of the right” style of chronicling the development of conservative intellectualism in the United States (and to a much lesser extent elsewhere.) I’ve written in the past about the Neoconservatives, and am on-again off-again toying with the project I was enlisted for by several readers in last year of writing a book about the students of Leo Strauss.

It has been suggested several times by readers and associates over the years that this is related to some esoteric sympathy for (some) right wing intellectuals, that in the environment in which I was educated having a scrapbook of “weird little guys” as the Ganz tweet goes, was the most acceptable way that one could admit some kind of agreement with them. I don’t know. The joking descriptor I’ve used for my politics, which like all jokes when told too often ceases to be a joke and is simply a declaration of what one actually is, “socially liberal and temperamentally conservative.4”

In the interests of providing some sort of compensation for the paying subscribers of this blog, to whom my eternal gratitude is due, I’m going to be launching a recurring segment to be entitled “the Entomology Closet” (after something Blake Smith once said about people like me not getting enough grad school) In which I will take a look at various rightist texts and tendencies, some of immediate relevance to our contemporary world, and some which I simply find interesting. I’m working on the first entry, optimistically to be out in early March on the late Angelo Codevilla’s 2017 essay “Cold Civil war, and several more are in the pipeline.5 I hope you’ll subscribe, and I look forward to joining you then, I remain open to efforts similar to the Cantos project from last year, with a particular interest in reading Herman Melville’s Clarel and revisiting William Carlos William’s Patterson.

As always, thanks for reading!

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For me, a willingness to acknowledge the dangerous element of Nietzsche has always been one of the more attractive qualities of the thought of Leo Strauss and the climate of opinion which prevails amongst many of his students (and their students, and so on and so on.)

Now Nietzsche opposed both the moderate and the extreme left, but he saw that conservatism had no future, that its fighting was a rear guard action, and conservatism was being eroded evermore. The consequence of this was that Nietzsche pointed to something which we may call the revolutionary right, an atheism of the right. Nietzsche is then the antagonist of Marx, whom he did not know at all as far as I know. Nietzsche produced the climate in which Fascism and Hitlerism could emerge. One must not be squeamish about admitting this dubious paternity. One must emphasize it. Every fool can see and has seen that Nietzsche abhorred the things for which Hitler in particular stood and to which he owed his success. Some liberals have gone so far as to claim Nietzsche for liberalism. Was Nietzsche not the intellectual ancestor of that great liberal, Sigmund Freud? This partial truth [however] must not be permitted to obscure the more massive and the more superficial fact which I have tried to point out.2

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I’ve found the writings of the late Laurence Lampert a useful node in my Straussian Studies/bug collecting, and so I was interested to read through the 2015 Beijing Lectures . The book is structured as a triptych of lecture dyads, each centered around the thought of Leo Strauss, Plato, and Friedrich Nietzsche respectively. In his discussion of Strauss, Lampert mostly reprises the argument of his 1996 Leo Strauss and Nietzsche and 2012 The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, the first of which was covered on this blog early last year.

An odd combination, this late in the day, of Epicurean and Platonist, Strauss dwelt within a carefully walled garden cultivating an observer's naturalistic understanding of the whole while encouraging a public Platonism outside the garden wall as the only possible preservation of both the public and the garden. Perhaps Strauss saw still less reason than did Nietzsche for any hope and therefore prepared as he thought best for the coming night, the eventual collapse of philosophical inquiry in the modern world.

I have not yet read Lampert’s standalone works on Nietzsche, and I am ultimately (and for a variety of reasons) unpersuaded by his assertions of Nietzsche’s correctness. Moreover one probably agrees that this Nietzscheanism leads him to underrate the ways in which Heidegger differs from Nietzsche (and perhaps most important for the political-philosophical entomologist, the ways in which Strauss was influenced by Heidegger.) All the same, these lectures were nothing if not thought-provoking.

That is what the fact of the exoteric/esoteric distinction results in for Nietzsche—will the philosopher today generate a teaching that will cover over the tragedy, the totality of suffering, and make it seem bearable because there is some deliverance, as philosophers in the Platonic tradition have taught till now? Or does the philosopher now judge that the time has come for a new response to the view from above, down on human suffering? Is it time for a new teaching that does not lie about suffering by inventing or endorsing some comedy of a purpose to existence that gives suffering meaning? Nietzsche’s answer is that, yes, the time has come for such a new teaching.

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Leaving Nietzsche behind for a moment, my own half-baked efforts to gaze down into the depths of the “Straussian mystery” have tended to lead in the direction of a suspicion that the ground to which his project seeks to return is perhaps not so much the thought of the ancients as that of the Falsafa of the medieval Islamicate world. Lampert is directionally correct to argue thus in one of his earlier books, citing Strauss’ early essay “Farabi’s Plato” as a major, perhaps too-explicit for republication work.

At the beginning of the treatise with which he prefaces his exposition of the philosophies of Plato and of Aristotle, he employs the distinction between “the happiness of this world in this life” and “the ultimate happiness in the other life” as a matter of course. In the Plato, which is the second and therefore the least exposed part of a tripartite work, the distinction of the two beatitudines is completely dropped. What that silence means, becomes unmistakably clear from the fact that in the whole Plato (which contains after all summaries of the Phaedrus, the Phaedo and the Republic) there is no mention whatsoever of the immortality of the soul: Fārābī’s Plato silently rejects Plato’s doctrine of immortality, or rather he considers it an exoteric doctrine. Fārābī goes so far as to avoid [372] in his summaries of the Phaedo and of the Republic the very term “soul,” and as to observe, throughout the Plato, a deep silence about the νοῦς, to say nothing of the νοῖ.

I have always suspected, on the basis of an essay on Al-Farabi’s Summary of Plato’s Laws that there must be some deeper meaning to Strauss’s own final completed work, the structurally-similar Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws, which on the surface may appear, much as its author once said of Al-Farabi’s “a pedantic, pedestrian and wooden writing which abounds in trivial or insipid remarks.”

Equality on the Right and its Enemies: Harry Jaffa and Sam Francis

I have a hopefully -length piece in the works on the political philosopher and Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa, who died in 2015. An early American student of Leo Strauss, Jaffa is perhaps best known today as the progenitor of the Claremont school of “West Coast Straussianism,” but this (as I hope to argue at some length) is an unfair reduction of a fascinating, frustrating mind. One of the ways one might think about the various camps of Straussians could be, to borrow one of the late Alasdair MacIntyre’s chapter headings from After Virtue, “Aristotle or Nietzsche.” In his published writings Jaffa was very much of the Aristotle camp, at times in the second half of his very long life almost comedically so.

I concluded long ago that, had Aristotle been called upon, in the latter half of the 17th century, to write a guide book for constitution makers, he would have written something very closely approximating Locke’s Second Treatise. For he would have recognized instantly those differences from his Politics that prudential wisdom required, in the world of Christian monotheism, with all its peculiar dangers of tyranny, especially from the union of divine right monarchy and established church.

Today however, I am looking more at the early Jaffa.3 Equality and Liberty is one of the several essay collections which pad out the four decades and change that separate his two big books on Lincoln, and mostly covers output from the period in which he was still nominally a New Deal liberal. This Jaffa, perhaps best represented by his first Lincoln book Crisis of the House Divided and the Aristotle chapter of the first two editions of the Strauss & Cropsey History of Political Philosophy, was interested in something like an ambitious reinterpretation of the American political tradition, especially at founding and the moment of national rebirth that was the Civil War. That conflict was for Jaffa, and especially the earlier Jaffa, the paradigmatic event in American history, the re-founding of the regime by the providential statesman, Abraham Lincoln.

The Civil War, I have written, is the most characteristic phenomenon in American politics, not because it represents a statistical frequency, but because it represents the innermost character of that politics; it is the event in which the things that forever drive us toward and hinder us from achieving our political salvation emerge in the sharpest and most visible confrontation.

It is indeed these attitudes, which when contrasted with many of Jaffa’s contemporaries, feel distinctly forward looking and surprising in a man so strongly of the right. The historiographic trends of the era tended toward a conciliatory, tragic view of the conflict as fundamentally unnecessary, if also perhaps inevitable. I am on the whole sympathetic to Richard Hofstadter, but this was something he got wrong in his The American Political Tradition and the Men who made It, to say nothing of the outright revisionists of the Dunning School.4 The willingness to openly discuss slavery as a moral evil, among other things are admirable aspects of Jaffa’s presentation.

It is in this particular sense that I do not think we have had any American political theory.

Yet the American experience ranks in some ways, in my opinion, with the Athens of Pericles and Socrates, with the Rome of Brutus and Cicero, with the empire-church of Dante and Aquinas, with the England of Elizabeth and Shakespeare (as well as that of Macaulay and Churchill). The American form of government, in its failures as well as in its successes, reveals possibilities in the nature of man as a political animal as distinctive in their way as any revealed by any other regime in the great drama of Western history, possibilities that may have gone unrevealed but for their American apocalypse.

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This week I belatedly read the paleoconservative intellectual Sam Francis’ 1994 essay collection Beautiful Losers. I tend to be skeptical of the idea that “master thinkers” play a significant causal role in the progress of the American right, rather than running behind, justifying. That being said I understand the claims of writers such as that Francis is from the grave perhaps the closest thing MAGA has to one. “Message from MARS” in particular feels like a prophecy unfulfilled for 36 years, although this could be said of many of these essays. To a very large extent Francis’ vision of an American Volk whose traditions and way of life is impinged and threatened by alien, near-colonial elites seem to inform the more down-to-earth segments of the intellectual right.

the continuing civilizational crisis, in its economic and political phases, of what James Burnham called “the managerial resolution.” The liquidation of the middle class and its bourgeois cultural order are essential parts of that revolution, which does not consist only in the material dimension of the rolling up of comparatively small owner-operated business enterprises and farming units by colossal corporate organizations and the replacement of local, legislative, and constitutionalist government by centralized. executive, bureaucratic regimes. It also consists, in its cultural dimensions, in the delegitimization and eventual extirpation of bourgeois culture-first on the grounds that that culture is the product of a selfish “capitalist” oligarchy, and later, in our own times, that it is the institutional framework by which a “white, male, heterosexual, Christian” ruling class maintains cultural hegemony. The technically skilled managerial elites that hold power in corporations, unions, universities, mass media, foundations, and government cannot secure and enhance their dominance without also undermining the cultural basis of bourgeois power, which acts as a constraint on the power of the new elite.

This seems like an appropriate note on which to end this post, given the way in which Francis’s worldview ultimately triumphed on the right in our time. As and others have noted, there has been a significant infusion of paleoconservative views on race and human inequality amongst the Claremonsters. I am drawn to writers upon whom history played cruel tricks, and for the epigones of Jaffa’s school to use his voice to speak words that would not seem out of place in one of Francis’s essays seems an especially bitter fate.

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Alfarabi. Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Translated by Muhsin Mahdi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Jaffa, Harry V. “Aristotle.” Essay. In History of Political Philosophy , edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 1st ed., 64–129. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1963.

Jaffa, Henry V. Equality and liberty: Theory and practice in American politics. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Pr, 1965.

Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist. 4th ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Lampert, Laurence. The Beijing Lectures: Strauss, plato, nietzsche: Philosophy and its poetry. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

Lampert, Laurence. Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Strauss, Leo. Leo Strauss’ published but uncollected English writings. Edited by Steven J Lenzner and Svetozar Minkov. South Bend, IN: Saint Augustine’s Press, Inc, 2024.

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto.

Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans

For as long as I’ve been writing on the internet I’ve been trying and failing to write something about Albert Murray (and by extension his friend and collaborator Ralph Ellison.) Late last year encouraged me to think through Murray’s master’s thesis comparing Hemingway to T.S Eliot for . I haven’t as yet been able to get my hands on the thesis, and needing to brush up on my Hemingway in any case, what follows is perhaps best thought of as a collection of working notes.1

A fairly key theme of Murray and Ellison’s writing was the idea of the American frontier, not quite settled & not quite categorized, in which one might assemble a self.2 The pioneer or woodsman is a recurring character in the theoretical writings of the Blues aesthetic, a prototype for the heroic transcendence of adversity and improvisatory mastery of the twentieth century American hero. From the introduction to Ellison’s Shadow and Act:

to ourselves we were “boys,” members of a wild, free, outlaw tribe which transcended the category of race. Rather we were Americans born into the forty-sixth state, and thus, into the context of Negro-American post-Civil War history, “frontiersmen.” And isn’t one of the implicit functions of the American frontier to encourage the individual to a kind of dreamy wakefulness, a state in which he makes in all ignorance of the accepted limitations of the possible-rash efforts, quixotic gestures, hopeful testings of the complexity of the known and the given?

In Murray’s most definitive work, The Omni-Americans one finds a similar sentiment, drawing on the trailblazing work of Constance Rourke in folklore and American studies.

After all, such is the process by which Americans are made that immigrants, for instance, need trace their roots no further back in either time or space than Ellis Island. By the very act of arrival, they emerge from the bottomless depths and enter the same stream of American tradition as those who landed at Plymouth. In the very act of making their way through customs, they begin the process of becoming, as Constance Rourke would put it, part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian—and part Negro!

No one can deny that in the process many somewhat white immigrants who were so unjustly despised elsewhere not only discover a social, political, and economic value in white skin that they were never able to enjoy before but also become color-poisoned bigots. Indeed, an amazing number of such immigrants seem only too happy to have the people of the United States regard themselves as a nation of two races. (Only two!) Many who readily and rightly oppose such antagonistic categories as Gentile and Jew, gleefully seize upon such designations as the White People and the Black People. But even as they struggle and finagle to become all-white (by playing up their color similarities and playing down their cultural differ-ences), they inevitably acquire basic American characteristics— which is to say, Omni-American —that are part Negro and part Indian.

There is a sense in this work that there are no essences, or at least that we have a somewhat questionable access to them. Murray seemed to view culture as fundamentally the product of accretion, drawing especially from the prologue to Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. This perhaps accounts for the outsized attention to myth and narrative in his works, and at least some of his opposition to movements of racial nationalism.3

According to Mann, a bottomless or formless quality is the essential nature of the space-time continuum of human experience. The deeper one probes into the background of mankind, the further the earliest foundations of culture recede into vagueness and myth.

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I became interested in Murray sometime around 2019-20, at a time when I had certain reservations about elements of what seemed to be more or less ethnic separatism amongst the social justice movements of the late 2010s. As I read The Hero and the Blues and The Omni-Americans during the second and third years of the pandemic, I was in turn becoming increasingly distressed by the style of flat-out racism which was becoming increasingly fashionable as the tide of BLM and the George Floyd Uprisings retreated and urban & suburban Americans increasingly turned to what Murray referred to as “the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology” to explain the upswelling of public disorder which accompanied the pandemic.4 Murray’s argument that white racists and well-intentioned liberals had it wrong, failing to perceive the nuances of an American identity composed of a multiplicity of sources interacting over the centuries thus felt singularly important to me.

even as they struggle and finagle to become all-white (by playing up their color similarities and playing down their cultural differences), they inevitably acquire basic American characteristics— which is to say, Omni-American—that are part Negro and part Indian.

It seemed to me then, and largely still does now, that the blues aesthetic tradition of Murray and Ellison offer to those of us who are interested, and what we must take them up on, is a vision of an America attuned to a fundamentally blended tradition, free from the blinding, death-embracing yearning for an irrevocably lost and probably in the first case imagined purity-white, black, or other-that taints so much thinking about race in the United States. As Murray wrote so memorably five decades ago in The Omni-Americans “the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

Nor is the processing of mundane onomatopoeia, workaday cacophonies and pop inanities, among other things, into no less elegant than soulful melodic and orchestral statement adequate to the emotional needs of the times, entirely unrelated to the miraculous erection of storybook castles or great American metropolitan areas—or, for that matter, the orchestration of a veritable jam session of dissonant colonial voices into a constitutional democracy. E pluribus unum, human nature permitting.

Now that some time has gone on since my first reading of The Omni-Americans charmed the hell out of me and totally changed the way I think about race in America, I do feel a little more able to point out where I agree and disagree with Murray. For one thing I think he underrates the transcendent in a religious sense in a way characteristic of the line of modernist intellectual in whih he placed himself, and that this in some ways hindered him in his consideration of art and literature.5 He tended to compensate for this lack by recourse to an archetypal mythic sensibility borrowed from Frazier, Raglan, Campbell, & Jung, (and analogous in certain respects to the contemporaneous work of Northrop Frye) but how convincing this is to the contemporary reader is bound to vary.

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In an early passage of his Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic the theologian and Reformed minister Reinhold Niebuhr describes how ridiculous it feels to preach as a young man to those who have drank more deeply from the well of experience and sorrow.

There is something ludicrous about a callow young fool like myself standing up to preach a sermon to these good folks. I talk wisely about life and know little about life’s problems. I tell them of the need of sacrifice, although most of them could tell me something about what that really means. I preached a sermon the other day on “The Involuntary Cross,” using the text of Simon the Cyrene bearing the cross of Jesus. A good woman, a little bolder than the rest, asked me in going out whether I had borne many crosses. I think I know a little more about that than I would be willing to confess to her or to the congregation, but her question was justified.

It should be obvious to most of you that blogging and preaching are somewhat different activities, and to boot I am somewhat older than 23. Moreover one shouldn’t overstate the importance of what one does here; still, there are times when I feel that I understand what Niebuhr was saying. All of which is a sort of preliminary deflation of the collection of links to posts from last year of which I am proud.

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The most significant accomplishment on this blog in 2025 was my blogging-through, in ten parts, one of literary modernism’s great “beached whales,” Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

Throughout this project and the weekly or biweekly posts which surround it, one can observe a certain working-out of theories of America and how Americans sometimes go awry. “kulchur-envy” deserves its own post at some point, so here’s a fragment about Don DeLillo and American culture that’s been floating around drafts for a while:

There is a passage or passages somewhere in the center of Don DeLillo’s Underworld that I often think of in which one of the middle aged characters who speaks with DeLillo’s voice ponders the bomb. The threat of nuclear annihilation, he posits, has been the centrifugal force organizing life in the United States since the Manhattan project. At the peak of the end of history, this man of DeLillo’s generation wonders what will become of us now that that spector has faded? Will America drift apart and dissolve? One finds something like this sentiment in many accounts of the malaise that settled over the country following the end of the Cold War.

This was a less productive year for reviewing than I would’ve liked, but I am fond of this study of what I think will turn out to be one of the great books of our moment. So much of this review was spent interrogating the influence of Morrison and Moore that quite a bit was left on the cutting room floor.1

Much of my late spring and summer was spent on a reevaluation of the primary sources of Marxism. I still wouldn’t call myself a Marxist, and to be honest I’m not even sure about “leftist,” but it was nonetheless an important exercise, and I hope we got at least a few good posts out of it.

A post that found an audience despite my assumption that it would be incredibly niche was an April writeup of Harry Neumann’s singular book, the essay collection Liberalism. Neumann is from what I can tell largely not considered a major figure by those who did not study with him directly (there were no pdfs, and no copies in circulation, I had to pay to borrow the book from a university library) but I found Liberalism a fascinating and illuminating read which will certainly receive more attention if I ever start that book on the Straussians some of you are trying to get me to write.

I finally finished the From Hell review essay, and got around to writing probably the only Bloomsday post I’ll ever write, one which lays out my problems with Ulysses and the ways in which it has to be dealt with in (I hope) one place. I also started and did not finish a blogging through of Only Revolutions, which hopefully will be completed in the new year.

Eternal Gnocci Recommendations:

’s Grand Hotel Abyss

’s A Good Hard Stare, which had evolved from

’s Notebook

’s Woman of Letters

’s Ashes and Sparks (and if you can, his interintellect seminars are not to be missed either)

’s Life in Letters

’s Interruptions

’s The Extremely Difficult Realization

’s Unpopular Front

’s To Live is to Maneuver

’s Eminent Americans

Alan Horn’s Invisible Head

New (to me)

’s Blackthorn Hedge

’s Overlong Memories

’s The Truman Show, from which I am still awaiting a Teddy Roosevelt essay.

’s Prefaces

’s Drawn from the Chalice

’s Draw Near with Faith

’s Horace & Friends

’s The Lillian Review of Books

Thanks for reading! Happy 2026!

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About ’s showstopping essay on Alice Munro I have less to say than I might, because I still have never gotten around to reading Munro! As a form, the postwar North American short story has never been terribly interesting to me, and the terms in which Munro’s career is often praised have not necessarily inspired me to seek her out.2 James has praised Munro in stunning enough terms even prior to this essay’s release, and ’s spelunking into this tradition at her blog over the last year has convinced me that I do need to take a look, but at this point I haven’t yet! As such while I heartily recommend Tussing’s essay on Munro, I can’t do much more than that!

I’ll close with a personal anecdote: At some point in the last year, during one of my weekly visits to her room at the retirement home, I mentioned these revelations to my grandmother, who had a shelf full of Alice Munro books. She was (as one would hope) disgusted by it, but at the same time, didn’t really seem surprised. She was two years younger than Munro, part of the same generation that experienced as middle aged women “the change” which Tussing describes as central to Munro’s work.

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’s poems and translations have received somewhat short shrift by comparison to these critical tour de forces. I particularly want to single out this

The house that we don’t live in,

the property we sold,

the things we can’t take with us,

the hands we used to hold,

the mansions of our fathers

long lain unexplored,

the denizens of darkness

drifting and unmoored;

the faith we have forgotten,

the things we do not know,

the places we won’t visit:

Bithynia in the snow.

The wisdom of late antiquity,

the gift of a small estate,

Greek with its participles

passing into space.

Constantinople over

the bay among the trees;

Christ in his translations

rising across the sea.

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How they reconcile Art with… what was I gonna say? Pistelli on Girard

I should begin this perhaps by agreeing with James’ own response to the essay by by saying that it made me feel more inclined to defend Girard than I might otherwise have been. On the other hand I think John basically has Girard’s number as a critic. It is true that his picture of the *true* novel is quite narrow, and one to which I as an American living after the recovery of Melville as the greatest American novel cannot assent. Pistelli is also correct to argue that Girard is ultimately not concerned so much with literature qua literature as with anthropology and religion.

This “absolute banality” of the universal truth, as against the temporal banality of the local prejudice that the Hegelian critic might reanimate with an exercise of historical imagination, stands against what Girard identifies as the “Romantic lie” of “a subjectivity almost divine in its autonomy,” from which subjectivity and its putative genius issue the spurious novelties of modern literature and its apotheosis of vanguardist forms. Moreover, only the “novelistic” works of Girard’s chosen novelists communicate the absolutely banal truth of mimetic desire and its overcoming, whereas their stylized “Romantic” works can be dismissed: Madame Bovary is true, for example, The Temptation of St. Anthony apparently false. (The latter goes entirely unmentioned in Girard’s book, though its theme of religious withdrawal and transcendence may appear germane.) Girard allows that some of his exempla—Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust—participated in the lies of Romanticism or modernism in aspects of their theory and practice, but he elevates the truths told by their most novelistic works over their mendacious lapses into an arrogantly hypertrophic style or aggrandizement of the autonomous imagination. This conviction, however, leads him to dismiss as extraneous—even to pass over without comment—much of what seems most distinctive in the novels he treats. Reading Girard, one almost would not know that Don Quixote is a complex metafiction about the conflict of cultures, that The Red and the Black deals via allusion and mock epigraph in conspicuous Romantic irony, that Madame Bovary is modernism’s very model of the strenuous stylistic achievement, or even that Demons (The Possessed) is unreliably narrated by a participant observer. Questions of form, and their own significance for a theory of mediated desire given form’s mediation of readerly desire, go not only unanswered but unasked.

Perhaps this is the protestant in me talking, but it does not seem at all clear that we who have been living in it now for some two centuries and change even have the option of setting aside the romantic lie. I would like to add that unlike John, I say this as someone who thinks it probably would be better in some sense if everybody went back to church. If we are to arrive on firmer ground, surely the path is through modernity, and thus romanticism, rather than simply renouncing it? On the other hand one does suspect that some limitation of the endless romantic self is probably necessary.

All of this is to say that I find Girard mostly harmless by himself, but taking on a sinister quality when his insights are paired with the view of religion I tend to associate with “East Coast” Straussianism in which a conservative version of Christianity or Judaism is seen as sociologically necessary but essentially false. This discards the redemptive Christianity, the sense that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” by which Girard transcends the grim view of the human he shares with many of his French structuralist and poststructuralist contemporaries. In the end, whatever my qualifications, Pistelli is correct to point out that if one is primarily concerned with the autonomy of art, Girard isn’t your man.

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Spain cannot be blamed for the crassness of the discoverers. They moved out across the seas stirred by instincts, ancient beyond thought as the depths they were crossing, which they obeyed under the names of King or Christ or whatever it might be, while they watched the recreative New unfolding itself miraculously before them, before them, deafened and blinded. Steering beyond familiar horizons they were driven to seek perhaps self-justification for victorious wars against Arab and Moor; but these things are the surface only. At the back, as it remains, it was the evil of the whole world; it was the perennial disappointment which follows, like smoke, the bursting of ideas. It was the spirit of malice which underlies men’s lives and against which nothing offers resistance. And bitter as the thought may be that Tenochtitlan, the barbaric city, its people, its genius wherever found should have been crushed out because of the awkward names men give their emptiness, yet it was no man’s fault. It was the force of the pack whom the dead drive. Cortez was neither malicious, stupid nor blind, but a conqueror like other conquerors.

Religiously I tend to associate Williams with the kind of agnostically-hostile-to-religion poet-is-priest art worship one finds in many of the other great modernists. His poem “The Host” exemplifies this, closing with an assertion that it is the poet, and not the representatives of this or that religion who makes the divine manifest within the created world.

I was thus somewhat surprised to find a number of effusive passages on the Roman church in the middle of the chapter of In the American Grain on Fr. Sebastian Rasles and the 16th and 17th century efforts of the Jesuits in French Canada.

One should read the Lettres Edifiantes, I think one would understand better how much we are like the Indians and how nicely Catholicism fits us. What would Mather think today of Catholic Boston? It is inevitable, I said. THis is America. If the Puritans have damned us with their ab-stinence, removal from the world, denial, slowly we are forced within ourselves upon an emptiness which cannot be supplied,-this IS the soul, according to their tenets. Lost, in this (and its environments) as in a forest, I do believe the average American to be an Indian, but an Indian robbed of his world-unless we call machines a forest in themselves. It would be diverting to believe, if it were so, as I think it’s proving, that despite its obvious benefits, such Protestant-ism, in America, would have Catholicism, as its consequence. This and the accumulation of great staying wealth.

From lack of touch, lack of belief. Steadily the individual loses caste, then the local government loses its authority; the head is more and more removed. Finally the center is reached-totally dehumanized, like a Protestant heaven. Everything is Federalized and all laws become prohibitive in essence.

I was fascinated to find in this chapter premonitions, in a so-canonical you barely-hear-about-him-anymore-outside-the-anthologies author, of an attitude toward Roman Catholicism that I associate very strongly with our own time. This might be thought of as an aestheticist variation of the “mimetic Christianity” recently in vogue on the right, and which , and others have written convincingly against. In this view, the Roman church’s emphasis on external beauty and works provides a more solid basis for an American Aesthetic than the frigid Calvinism of the Dutch and English settlers, and the (in this view) stupid left-liberalism which is their progeny, which sees art only instrumentally and is in any case skeptical of its adoration.

And so America is become the greatest proselytizing ground for the Catholic in the world today-in spite of everything. The difficulty, from lack of sensual application, emoved from without by an authority that represents the mystery itself-leaves hands freed for embraces, a field where tenderness may move, love may awaken and (save by the one blocked door) a way is offered.

Certain it is that the New World suffered greatly from both Puritans and Catholics; but as Père Rasles touched it nearer than his southern neighbors, and as the ghost of Puritanism still binds us by its horrid walls, so, as a corollary, Catholicism gains in that it offers us ALLEVIATION from the dullness, the lack of touch incident upon the steady withdrawal of our liberty.

Each of the various essay-prose poems in the book is to some varying extent written from within the consciousness of its subject, so how much this reflects Williams actual views is unclear. His poetry is not always laudatory to any faith, but one wonders…

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Brief Thoughts on Puddin’head Wilson

I was moved by a recent Invisible College Episode and ’s post on it from last month to once more think about Mark Twain’s Puddin’head Wilson, a book I read between Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in a Major American authors II course at the very end of my undergraduate education. The professor teaching the course described it as “maybe Twain’s most cynical book” while introducing it to us. I have always thought there was something to this, and that the book has a certain kinship with something like Madame Bovary as an ultimately nihilistic attack on the whole of the nineteenth century society which produced it. There is a Homais-like stupidity to the titular character’s attempts to enlighten his community, attempts which only affect the unhappy restoration of what Twain clearly views as an evil social order. The difference I think, is that however nihilistic Flaubert may be, there is a sense in his work that beauty somehow redeems or provides meaning to an otherwise entirely wretched and stupid world. In Twain’s late work this sense is lacking-if all the world is artifice, it is not a pretty painting or an epic so much as a bad joke, meaningless thoughts echoing in empty space forever. Which of these visions one finds more persuasive is probably a matter of temperament.1

The Evasion of American Philosophy: Brief thoughts and excerpts

Over the last few months I’ve been exploring some of the native manifestations of that which passes for philosophy in these United States. Along the way I have often turned to the entertaining, useful survey from within this tradition that is Cornel West’s 1989 book The American Evasion of Philosophy.2

the evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy - from Emerson to Rorty - results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises. In this sense, American pragmatism is less a philosophical tradition putting forward solutions to perennial problems in the Western philosophical conversation initiated by Plato and more a continuous cultural commentary or set of interpretations that attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical moment.

Over the course of drafting this post it’s become clear that West’s book is a rich enough text to justify its own full-fledged post at some point, so I’ll be brief in sketching my main points. In the middle chapters West identifies “crisis of American Pragmatism” that followed John Dewey, when the loyalties of American thinkers became divided between corporate liberalism and various permutations of, and doctrines derived from Marxism.

Dewey’s project never really got off the ground. Like Emerson’s moralism, Dewey’s culturalism was relatively impotent. Why? Principally because his favored historical agents- the professional and reformist elements of the middle class - were seduced by two. strong waves of thought and action: managerial ideologies of corporate liberalism and bureaucratic control, and Marxist ideologies of class struggle and party organization.

This binary strikes me as being, in broad strokes, still true, with the addition of a third temptation on the right. One might call it Hegemonic techno-feudalism, Caesaro-populism, American Bonapartism, or if you really feel that way (and I’m not entirely sure that I do,) fascism. in any case it never quite made it in 20th century America, perhaps excluding Huey Long’s Louisiana, but it’s here now, and provides for some a seductive alternative to these options.

West opposes in an Emersonian spirit the technocratic turn in American life which followed the Second World War, and has survived the various attempts to return to a simpler and more dynamic settlement by means of popular revolt-the upheavals of the 1960s- or various elite actions and aspects of the network of shifts in political economy that have become known as “neoliberalism.” There is something to the critique in our time, which I associate with post-leftists and the practitioners of a “right-critical theory,” of the way that this technocracy has used the “sinister side” of American history to legitimate its own existence.3

The professional incorporation of former New Left activists who now often thrive on a self-serving careerism while espousing rhetorics of oppositional politics of little seriousness and integrity.

On the other hand it has always seemed that the contemporary critique (as distinct from West’s) overcorrects, dismisses the reality of this sinister underside as only an alibi for the will to power. One of the essential dialectics of American history for most of this country’s existence has been oscillation between usually brief, prophetic periods of attempting to “achieve our country” (to steal and possibly misuse Rorty’s phrase,) and long epochs where exhausted ex-reformers settle down and agree to disagree about IE; the humanity of various inhabitants of the nation.4 Some part of me still thinks we’re in one of those refractory periods, but for the fact that the red tribe appears to be trying for a prophetic period of their own at the moment.

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4

was moved by the sentiment that this belonged on a shirt to make this a reality, and was kind enough to allow me to post it here:

Political-aesthetical musings

I am generally a believer that is a spiritually harmful thing to tap dance on anyone’s grave. When Antonin Scalia died a then-roommate of mine audibly whooped for joy, and while I was already well into my exit from the right, and in any case never had any great love for the great proponent of constitutional originalism, still there was something somewhat disconcerting about it.

You won’t find me shedding any crocodile tears for Dick Cheney; he got as long as any of us get, and better medical care to boot, and it certainly cannot be said that he did not have achievements. Would that they were positive ones! It would be difficult to understate how much damage those running the free world in the first decade of this century did. These were (mostly) men who had been in the prime of their lives during the Vietnam war, who should have understood the limitations of power, but instead allowed themselves to be led by their own hubris into a series of imperial boondoggles which claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and devastated the Middle East.1 Trump’s “the veterans are losers, I like people who win” attitude and the various outbursts of bellicosity throughout both of his administrations, such that he and those closest to him seemed to be eying regime change in Iran in 2020 before Covid, and seem to be doing the same at the moment with regards to Venezuela, somewhat obscures the fact that an enormous boost to MAGA early on was his willingness to acknowledge, & indeed stoke the sense, not just of moral indignation as one might find on the left, but of national humiliation, that the United States had been made to look weak by the “forever wars” launched during the second Bush administration.

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The internet has been roiled over the last week or so by the release by the House of Representatives of a large quantity of emails to and from the late disgraced financier and sex criminal Jeffery Epstein. I would be lying if I told you that I had made an especially close, or even more than a cursory study of these materials, but a more off-the cuff, paywalled thought digest seems like an ideal place to think through some of my view on the broader Epstein phenomenon, which has since his 2019 death (if not in fact earlier) become, as John Pistelli once put it on his super-secret Tumblr, a kind of cultural “key to all mythologies” for both sides of the political spectrum.

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Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportioned to their ability AS WRITERS. This is their main use. All other uses are relative, and temporary, and can be estimated only in relation to the views of a particular estimator.

Partisans of particular ideas may value writers who agree with them more than writers who do not, they may, and often do, value bad writers of their own party or religion more than good writers of another party or church.

But there is one basis susceptible of estimation and independent of all questions of viewpoint.

—Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading

If the visionary does not shoot themselves down from the clouds, someone else will.

—Matthew Gasda

I have something of a backlog of reviews of ’s recent work in the pipeline, but I have opted to begin with the simplest and yet most difficult of these to discuss, the book compiling 2023-24 entries of the writer’s diary on his blog What can really be said about collections of aphorisms?

This diary is a sort of loophole in my failed attention span. It’s a picture of it, actually. It’s a picture of many things, too. My diary is an autonomous submarine, recording an ocean trench and sending pictures back up to the boat, which I suppose is you, the reader. Of course I keep another diary, too—a personal diary where I use names and talk about things maybe not fit for public consumption. So I think this writer’s diary is really an aestheticized diary, or a lie… a picture of an essential self, which is neither a self nor essence. In Barth’s words, it is “a patchwork of reactions” in which the self forms and performs itself in language—a “tactics without strategy.”

I’ve mostly tended toward a kind of supportive skepticism of Gasda over the years. As noted last time, even if one is finally not with him on the details, there is something one wants to succeed, some access to art as highest good that one slightly envies even if one in certain respects could not disagree more. He is indisputably quite talented, but I have always found myself with various reservations.1

I know writers who have been critical of me but whose work and criticism I’ve enjoyed. I appreciate their psychoanalysis of my persona and authoritarian tendencies. I’m not looking for morally perfect or noble-minded critics, just interesting ones who are willing to engage. This kind of interaction happened a lot in past artistic movements. I genuinely wonder if I’m working toward something—not necessarily a better world, but at least a more artful and conscious one, capable of planting and growing symbols, dreams, and architectural plans….

The sensibility one gets from these musings, sentences, fragments is late modern Romantic & mostly small c conservative, although sometimes capital C when discussing bureaucracy, patterns of contemporary American life, or what Herbert Marcuse described in the 1960s as “the closed operational universe of advanced industrial civilization with its terrifying harmony of freedom and oppression.”

Whether we know it or not, the 20th century was a war on subsistence, waged by bureaucratic social engineers, in which money replaced land as the common means of survival. The effect this has had on the spirit is incalculable. One no longer pays attention to the sun, wind, rain, the grass; one watches markets, one deals with office managers and payroll.

*

I think what’s been killed most in our culture is the pagan sensuality, and sense of love and poetry as a man’s vocation. The intuitions and the concepts that produce and support this belief, this faith, the social structures that make them possible, are completely gone.

The contents of this book and thus the blog it collects, might be described as ranging from moments of sublime profundity to millennial shower thoughts, sometimes in the span of the same sentence. When reading one is never sure how much they represent the day to day musings of the author, as opposed to the artificial approximations of the same. I found it a compelling blend, even if it leaves the book somewhat uneven from line to line, never-mind page to page.

I guess I have a view of American culture that is like Luther’s view of the Medieval church: no longer deserving of loyalty and piety, strangely heartless and rent-seeking.

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My maternal grandfather was an Italian peasant, a child who moved to America. Once he had the means, he bought a plot of land in the mountains, a little house, and tried to recreate the hills of Calabria in a totally different climate. Now, my sister has moved to Sicily for the summer and lives in a mountain hut. She wants the whole Gasda family to live in it, to invest in a plot of land in the hills of Pennsylvania. And I think that we shouldn’t have sold my grandparents’ original plot back in 2008 for a shockingly tiny sum. If only we had known as a family that the whole collective cycle of ancestral longing for land would just ratchet back and start over within our lifetimes.

There is a very specifically American late-modern quality I hesitate to name, but a midcentury intellectual who’d read their Freud might’ve called a refusal of maturity. Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death, Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History detail this tendency in nonfiction while Graham Green’s The Quiet American and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor dramatize it within the novel.

I don’t think it’s good to dip into Nietzsche for just five minutes. I think the perfect amount is about half an hour. The right dosage is so important for Nietzsche. Too little, and you don’t get it. Too much, and you start to take it too seriously. The trick is to find where the dialectic is oscillating.

One doesn’t want to act as though this is uncomplicated, as though it would be better if we all grew up, subordinated ourselves to the community, and accepted that ordinary unhappiness is the best that can be achieved. Much of what makes American culture at its best is implicated in this tendency, and I no longer think as I once did that it should simply be discarded. At the same time, there is something deeply corrosive about the maintenance of innocence after it has come time to face reality.2 I suppose that at one point in time I associated Gasda what I tend to think of as a bad American romanticism, a yearning to burn down the house in an attempt to recover the free, the brave, the wide open which one feels they once had. “When I was seventeen/I had wrists like steel and I felt complete” as another New York sage once put it. This strikes me now as a mistake.

Scrupulous about seeing every opportunity through, I respond to messages right away; I always follow up with anyone I meet, almost anyone I meet, who shows interest in my work or employing me in any way—only now, with some modicum of success, am I settling back into something approaching my resting state, which is aristocratic indifference to practical matters. In the space that would have been taken up by a salaried job, I have created a wide social network that sustains me in various ways, by feeding opportunities back to the nerve center.

Whatever quibbles and irritating gestures may have been thrown up in the preceding text, I do recommend this book. Gasda is thus far the definitive American prose poet of “this fine conservative night,” to once again do injury to Paul Weller, and as such one of the angels with whom we must all wrestle.

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While wrestling with writer’s block, offline life events, and irritation at Only Revolutions, I’ve been revisiting a bunch of thinking I did in mid-2023, which has been a deeply disorienting experience. In the two years and change since, I’ve taken a prolonged journey through continental philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxism, giving each a degree of scrutiny that I had not paid them in my formal education, or indeed in the years between the end of that education and the start of this blog.1

This exercise has been both very interesting and pretty underwhelming. I was much more concerned two years ago than I am today about the danger posed by theocratic postliberalism, collusion between religious authorities and the state. I was particularly afeared of the Hungary-izing of the United States, the will to Make America Florida of the Christopher Rufo & Ron DeSantis wing of the GOP, them who yearn to utilize the state as a weapon to bludgeon Christendom back into existence. Given this (and a few biographical details from that same period I won’t get into just now, I was much more favorably inclined toward certain kinds of 2) transhumanism than I am today.

The last two years have, if not consistently inverted, at least complicated a number of these commitments. At present I find theocracy more or less reduced in threat, and if the prospect of Hungary-izing isn’t any less distant, the malfeasants on whose behest this would be happening have shifted from the religiously fundamentalist to the promethean tech right, whose belief in natural hierarchies and desire to escape the human has become a more & more central driver of the culture.3

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A particularly baleful element here is a transhumanism of the intellect which fantasizes about the possibility of Mind one day ridding itself of its irritating flesh, of the Machine overcoming its dependence on us for reproductive purposes. The autonomous hunger that runs in secret from Marx down through Bataille, Deleuze, and Lyotard, and blossoms under the influence of amphetamine in Nick Land. The American right that once claimed its purpose was to “stand athwart history shouting stop” has embraced this autonomous vitus, and even now parts of it go quivering before the witches of Silicon Valley to call upon their slain spokesman

the A.I. of Kirk, clearly and obviously not Charlie Kirk himself, is presented not as speaking for Kirk but as Kirk speaking himself. The intent might be spiritual revelation but the effect is something like necromancy mixed with a carnival act.

Indeed, there’s a conservative or reactionary critique of the specific way western modernity has developed, its vision of the human as a sort of automaton made of meat, its desire to “immanatize the eschaton” as the old Voegelin-Buckley chestnut goes, that I have over the course of my political life mostly not found particularly convincing as it has been applied to things such as birth control, racial justice, Coronavirus lockdowns, or transgender people, but that has seemed increasingly relevant over the last few years.4

The ability to replicate the look and feel of a person, while it hardly brings them back from the dead, can be used to create confusion over whether the things their artificial version is saying and doing were really said and done by the living, breathing person in question. As A.I. advances, we should be concerned that this will become an increasingly difficult distinction to make. And the claim that an A.I. image and voice somehow represent a continuation of a deceased person’s thoughts and feelings is a dangerous form of techno-mysticism.

We arrive in a place where the descriptors of Left and Right perhaps break down, and what remains is a more temperamental orientation There’s a passage from Philip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic that I often think about in this context. I disagree with the Feuerbachian-Marxist disregard for that which we cannot see as mere illusion that still characterizes the left and much of the center, but in some moods I see what he means.

the Communist movement may be viewed as culturally conservative, belonging to the classical tradition of moral demand systems. The revolution in the West is profoundly cultural whereas that in the East, withal its defensive doctrine of the cultural as a mere superstructure of the techno-political class system, has been less certainly so. Of the two, our revolution is, I think, the more profound one. Communist culture, no less than the Christian, is in trouble; it cannot stave off a revolution coming out of the West, in part as a repercussion, in that it renounces the renunciatory mode of Communism. The Russian cultural revolution is already being signaled by the liberation, however grudgingly, of the intellectuals from creedal constraints.

In one sense the position I find myself occupying is an almost inverted romanticon-ism, to once more abuse ’s phrase. While I have my own complaints (as anyone who has had to apply for a drivers license or file taxes probably does) with western managerial late modernity, I regard the prospect of placing our trust in the techno-king or the unclean spirits in the datacenter with even greater horror.

It is not from nothing that this sensibility emanates however. I am hopeful that the “new romantics” can avoid some of the mistakes of the past. One of my unverifiable secret speculations about twentieth century culture is that the neoconservatives (by which I mean the greater shift to right amongst previously left-of-center thinkers during the second half of the century, and not just guys who grew up in Brownsville and got spooked by the civil rights moment) inadvertently cauterized the traditions they sought to protect, ceded without meaning to at all any existing vitality to the “school of resentment.” Consider the way the man who coined that phrase’s late-life polemics have overshadowed his remarkably creative and radical method of reading, a method which is in its way as radical as anything cooked up in a trendy Paris salon. I admire, even while finding ultimately inadequate, the acknowledgment of the divine in the already-existing which characterizes this sensibility.

If a man sees the holy in the flower as it grows, in the animal as it moves, in man as he represents a unique individuality, in a special nation, a special culture, a special social system, he is romantic-conservative. For him the given is holy and is the content of his ultimate concern. The analogy of this kind of faith to the sacramental faith is obvious. The romantic-conservative type of humanist faith is secularized sacramental faith: the divine is given here and now. All cultural and Political conservatism is derived from this type of secular faith. It is faith, but it hides the dimension of the ultimate faith. It is faith, but it hides the dimension of the ultimate which it presupposes. Its weakness and its danger is that it may become empty.

This leads somewhat naturally to the next point of this reflection. For about two years now I have been wrestling with the anguished question: “am I a conservative?5 only to come over the last few months, to the deeply underwhelming realization that I am (in spirit, if not in ordination) “a liberal clergyman, sort of in the Paul Tillich mode” to quote , quoting Alice Munro.6 In our moment this might have a certain left-conservative tenor, albeit if only in what I (fully aware of the problems with trying to cordon anything off from politics) think of as a “pre-political” register. Families are good, communities are good. Tradition inasmuch as it is productive and living is good. Breaking things simply because they are old and something else is new is usually a mistake. Evil is real. Sin is real. There are limitations to the perfectibility of the human. None of this releases us from the task of moving forward, of striving to mend what we have broken.

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love

1 Corinthians 13:8-13 RSV

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Works cited, alluded to, etc

Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Edwyn C Hoskins. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed share Volume I: Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2013.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1993.

Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by Michael Bullock. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London, UK: Routledge, 2010.

Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud ; with a new preface. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993.

Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009.

It’s getting so there’s only about five of you who still remember, but this used to be a much more rigidly weekly blog than it is now. When I was working on those posts I often found myself falling into the groove of being irritated by someone on Twitter and writing about it. The actual subject of the discourse is unimportant, the significance is the pattern, the addressing this or that inane commentary, bigot, bien-pensant or other source of digital irritation. For a variety of reasons I had something of a spiritual crisis at the end of 2023 which resulted in the blog lying dormant for a bit and eventually reemerging in the (hopefully) much less chatty and gossipy form it takes now, in which historical musings follow poetic analysis and missives about Jesus & cavemen. Part of this was a desire to follow more closely the words of the savior:

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

On the other hand, it’s hard to escape the feeling that a lot of online discourse is... perhaps less than human somehow? In that these are not genuinely held convictions necessarily so much as calculated efforts to jockey for position in the mimetic hierarchy, in the ravine of animals gnawing on each others skulls which certainly exists here if it does anywhere. The sense of the world one finds in Rene Girard or Pierre Bourdieu might be too grim for society as a whole, but it certainly describes microblogging! By dignifying it you reduce yourself to the level of those animals. It is, and I mean this in a genuine, spiritual sense, corrosive to your immortal soul. If you don’t believe you have one of those, fine-it’s deleterious to your psyche.

He does not desire in his mediator but rather against him. The hero only desires the object which will frustrate his mediator. Ultimately all that interests him is a decisive victory over his insolent mediator.

When people think about internet poisoning they tend to imagine something like the broadcast model: an intort vessel into which malign forces pour their corrupting discourses. This is in part why so much was staked on the censorship of “misinformation” in the last decade, in trying to re-establish some sort of epistemic boden on which the discourse could be sorted. I would argue instead, in the most insufferably Episcopalian way, that the dark side of the internet is more like the Un-man in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, is more like giving away more and more of yourself to a demon until there is nothing left but reflexive action, endless argumentation & stupidity.

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In addition to being bad for you, it’s also just… not good cultural criticism! With a few exceptions, people who spend huge amounts of time online aren’t particularly representative of the general population. Slightly more than 20% of Americans are twitter users. Certainly one can argue that this is useful if one wants to keep tabs on those who are as Pound said of artists, “the antennae of the race” but nonetheless they don’t represent anybody just yet. This is a short life, and one should exercise judgement about just what one’s energy is being expended on.

The other danger to this approach is not just being wrong, or looking stupid, but what once called something like “the cope of the very online.” One form of posters madness is the authoritarian impulse to go around bashing people on the head, imploring “BE NORMAL” as the blood coagulates on the aluminum. Repression only works for so long. This will not be the only time you read me citing this passage, but take heed of what Nietzsche whispers to the conservatives in Twilight of the Idols:

In the ear of the Conservatives. - What was formerly not known, what is known today or could be known - a reversion, a turning back in any sense and to any degree, is quite impossible. We physiologists at least know that. But all priests and moralists have believed it was possible - they have wanted to take mankind back, force it back, to an earlier standard of virtue. Morality has always been a bed of Procrustes. Even politicians have in this matter imitated the preachers of virtue: even today there are parties whose goal is a dream of the crabwise retrogression of all things. But no one is free to be a crab. There is nothing for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into décadence (- this is my definition of modern ‘progress...). One can retard this development and, through retardation, dam and gather up degeneration itself and make it more vehement and sudden: more one cannot do.

Listen to what uncle Ezra said after he tried it:

I sometimes hope that we could be past the peak of this kind of writing, due in part to the continuing enshittification of Elon Musk’s Everything Website Formerly Known as Twitter and the decamping of to Bluesky2. On the other hand perhaps this makes it even more irresistible. With whatever might’ve postured as a center gone, the loudest voices are those least reasonable. On the other hand it has probably occurred to you by now that I am myself arguing as if the little people inside my phone and on the monitor represented something real. None is free of sin!!!!

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He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

RSV 2CE, Colossians 1:15-20

In Western thought, the meaning in history derives from Christianity, which makes of each existence a solitary adventure in which the salvation of the soul is at stake, and gives to mankind as a whole, by means of its mission, one single destiny, between the fall and the redemption. Secularized in the idea of progress, this philosophy nonetheless maintained the double unity on which the existence of history depends, the unity of men and of their development. Certainly, the biological idea of evolution replaces the mystical concept of the reversibility of sins and deserts. But it is not certain that the historian of today still recognizes an evolution; is humanity like the individual who progresses from puerility to wisdom? As for the history of the species, it is even more mysterious than that of societies.

Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: an Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity

Can it be this sad design
Could be the very same?
A wooly man without a face
And a beast without a name

Steely Dan, “The Caves of Altamira”

I’ve been reading Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, partly for comparative reasons, partly in an effort to dispel a certain residual skepticism toward the sort of thought which I have in the past dismissively referred to as “Mayan space aliens built the pyramids,” and for lack of sympathy to I have been chided by fellow writers such as . This is of course being a bit uncharitable to the good father Pierre, who was a faithful Jesuit and a paleontologist of some repute in his lifetime, one of the discoverers of the “Peking man” fossils in China during the 1920s.1

In every domain, when anything exceeds a certain measurement, it suddenly changes its aspect, condition or nature. The curve doubles back, the surface contracts to a point, the solid disintegrates, the liquid boils, the germ cell divides, intuition suddenly bursts on the piled up facts... Critical points have been reached, rungs on the ladder, involving a change of state- jumps of all sorts in the course of development. Henceforward this is the only way in which science can speak of a "first instant”. But it is none the less a true way.

I was impressed by The Phenomenon of Man. The book made me wish I was more familiar with the work of Henri Bergson ( I have a copy of lying around because I read somewhere that both Karl Popper and Leo Strauss nicked the concept of “open” and “closed” societies from it) to whose Creative Evolution Teilhard’s work is often compared. “Cosmic post-Darwinist Christian futurism” is perhaps the best way to describe the position taken within the book. Rather than the ordered categories of the Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis, he posits a worldview evolution and movement toward a “hominization” of the world. The crucial idea, with rather more pessimistic analogues in other roughly contemporary thinkers such as McLuhan, is the Noosphere, or realm of thought to join the other surfaces of the earth.

The recognition and isolation of a new era in evolution, the era of noogenesis, obliges us to distinguish correlatively a support proportionate to the operation—that is to say, yet another membrane in the majestic assembly of telluric layers. A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence.

Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy of this grand phenomenon. Much more coherent and just as extensive as any preceding layer, it is really a new layer, the 'thinking layer', which, since its germination at the end of the Tertiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere there is the noosphere.

It was a perspective I’ve needed, and I’m grateful for and some others who have positioned Teilhard de Chardin as a major thinker within the 20th century Catholic tradition. Certainly a theologian as esteemed as Henri Lubac was convinced enough to write several books explicating his departed Jesuit brother’s ideas. I’ve personally always struggled a bit to reconcile what that eminent Victorian Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet so memorably described as “nature red in tooth and claw” with the basically Christian worldview and metaphysics with which I go about my day-to-day life. How does one look at entropy, indeed how does one consider heterotrophy and still imagine that this world is otherwise good, that only the anthropos is tainted by evil?

This is necessary
This is necessary
Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on
This is necessary
This is necessary
Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life

Tool, “Digustipated”

One can perhaps see why I once found Gnosticism so appealing.

I understand why the Roman church, particularly in its pre-Vatican II form which was still trying to repeal the long nineteenth century five decades into the twentieth, was uncomfortable with Teilhard’s theories, why he was not permitted to publish them within his lifetime. Christianity enters into the schematic of the Phenomenon of Man only climactically, with the otherwise fairly sci-fi seeming concept of the “Omega Point” in which humans escape the heat death of the universe, which collapses into a single point. He ties this into John 17:21 and the Pauline corpus in a way that I found quite profound but I could imagine scandalizing a Thomist.

As early as in St. Paul and St. John we read that to create, to fulfil and to purify the world is, for God, to unify it by uniting it organically with himself? How does he unify it? By partially immersing himself in things, by becoming ' element', and then, from this point of vantage in the heart of matter, assuming the control and leadership of what we now call evolution. Christ, principle of universal vitality because sprung up as man among men, put himself in the position (maintained ever since) to subdue under himself, to purify, to direct and superanimate the general ascent of consciousnesses into which he inserted himself.

By a perennial act of communion and sublimation, he aggregates to himself the total psychism of the earth. And when he has gathered everything together and transformed everything, he will close in upon himself and his conquests, thereby rejoining, in a final gesture, the divine focus he has never left. Then, as St. Paul tells us, God shall be all in all. This is indeed a superior form of ‘ pantheism ’ without trace of the poison of adulteration or annihilation: the expectation of perfect unity, steeped in which each element will reach its consummation at the same time as the universe.

Still, that discomfort seems symptomatic of the way institutional Christianity has often consigned itself over the last two centuries to an essentially reactive position fighting rearguard actions against technological modernity.

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One of my intellectual foibles-pointed out helpfully by some of my interlocutors over the years, is a tendency to overstate the existential certainties afforded to religious persons in premodernity. As one of you has more than once put it to me, there’s a reason the fool who says “there is no God” is a recurring antagonist in the psalms. I find it impossible not to believe, and somehow am still haunted by the parable told by Nietzsche and beloved by Heidegger about the clever animals, itself something of a pessimistic gloss of the opening paragraph of the second volume of Schopenhauer’s World as Will..

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

Clever Animals in the Cold: the “animal-humans” of the Eurasian Pleistocene

On that note, last week I read Silvana Condemi and François Savatier’s recent book The Secret World of the Denisovans: the Epic Story of the Ancient cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals, a fascinating journey through the fundamental revision of our understanding of the evolution of our species caused by the discovery of the genetic signatures of a previously unknown type of human in a pinkie bone discovered in a Siberian cave in 2010.

Thanks to developments in the field of industrial DNA sequencing, and the computing power that had become available in bioinformatics, it was now possible to study the genomes of Paleolitic populations and acquire biological information about them. Prehistorians continued to turn a blind eye when, on December 22, 2010, the same team presented a previously unpublished nuclear DNA extracted from a human, from a phalanx fragment found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Russia, a finding that was to prove extremely significant.

Condemi and Savatier aim for a lay audience, as evinced by the occasional illustration and general literary style of the prose, but the topic is an intricate one, and I'm not sure how clear the book would be to somoene who didn't have a long-running interest in the topic. The posited geneaology of the human is a maze which specialists tread with some confusion after all. Nonetheless the authors make a convincing case for what we can know about the Denisovans, one of at least three offshoots, alongside neanderthals and modern humans, of an ancestor which lived in Africa around a half million years ago before spreading to Europe and Asia. The Neanderthals are by this point at least somewhat familiar to us, no longer the brutish troglodytes of 19th and early 20th century cultural memory, but a people parallel in sophistication to contemporary H. Sapiens. Already by the 1930s there was some appreciation of this as witness the following passage from de Chardin:

By the Middle Quaternary period, on the other hand, except for a moment's hesitation at the Spy cranium or the Neanderthal skull, there is never any serious doubt but that we are studying the vestiges of members of our own race. This great development of the brain, this industry of the caves, and for the first time those incontestable cases of burial-everything goes to show that we are in the presence of true man.

The Denisovans then, might be thought of as an Asiatic variation on the same general “type” as the neanderthal, a robust human adapted to life in Asia during the later part of the last Ice Age. Some of the most interesting passages concern what must have been the richness of that environment by comparison to that inhabited by the Neanderthals and the European cro-magnons, bounded by glaciers and the Mediterranean. Indeed, at close of the book they offer an evaluation of our departed cousins that seems almost to resurrect outside the species the noble savage of the early modern European imagination:

In this sense, Neanderthal and Denisova are in a way the last "animal-humans" of Eurasia, who, like other species, lived in balance with nature without ever exhausting it, taking from it only what they needed. They have not completely disappeared and are still with us, since all Eurasians carry between 1.8 and 2.6 percent Neanderthal DNA, while all East Asians carry between 1 and 5 percent Denisovan DNA.

Something in this presentation, or in the combination of this with rumination from reading The Phenomenon of Man reminded somehow of ’s post of some months ago about The Wet Route to the Stars. Teilhard, to return to our earlier reading, seems to imagine that we will remain on Earth, at least in the medium to long term-for his time of great optimism about space flight, quite presciently.

Now and ever bound to labor
On the sea and in the sky
Every man and beast appeared
A friend as real as I

Steely Dan, “The Caves of Altamira”

My maternal grandmother would’ve been interested to read Condemi and Savatier’s book. She had a MS in biology from West Virginia university, & perhaps if she were graduating today and not in the late 1940s she would have been a researcher of some kind, but instead she spent her career as a high school science teacher, retiring around five years before I was born. I was endlessly fascinated as a child by the variety of animal and plant life, by the creatures peering back at me from the massive tomes my parents took out from the library, and I would prattle about them, and she would say something deeply intelligent or humor me.

She was also to the end of her life a member of the local Congregational church. I would very much have liked to speak to her about how she reconciled those two things, whether she reconciled those two things. Admittedly not at the top of the scale of questions inevitably left unasked or statements that must remain unfinished for as long as one persists in this world, but still, I’ve always wondered. We never discussed faith, but in a way she has served as an anchor for mine. She was brilliant in fields that I barely comprehend, and suffered in ways that I hope never to experience. In some sense, if belief was acceptable to her, it is for me as well.

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For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:

And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God:

KJV Job 19:25-26

Of the primeval Priests assum'd power, When Eternals spurn'd back his religion;

And gave him place in the north, Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.

Eternals I hear your call gladly, Dictate swift winged words, & fear not

To unfold your dark visions of torment.

William Blake, The Book of Urizen

I sometimes think that the greatest works of art both enthrone and condemn their creators, and From Hell is in this respect the most sublime of Alan Moore’s fictions. The 1989-98 comic chronicles in gruesome detail the 1888-91 Whitechapel murders and the efforts of police and others to solve them, although this is a little bit like saying that Ulysses is about a guy going for a walk, or that Gravity’s Rainbow is about a dude getting a boner in WW2.

From Hell is probably the most Blakean of Moore’s major comics, and in some ways the definitive work, where the subtext is text, the one where the obsessions and preoccupations running underneath the skin of the preceding decade of his work break out and simply are, a Promethian-Atonic erection, a phallic tower slashing down the belly of woman as nature, holding in its bloodstained hand the raw essence of Being as perceived by its author.1 The detectives and seekers who wander through the labyrinthine pages of this lengthy book are in the end dupes as much as any Pynchon protagonist, never quite grasping the significance of what they witnessed.

And a roof, vast petrific around,

On all sides he fram'd: like a womb;

Where thousands of rivers in veins

Of blood pour down the mountains to cool

The eternal fires beating without

From Eternals; & like a black globe

View'd by sons of Eternity, standing

On the shore of the infinite ocean

Like a human heart strugling & beating

The vast world of Urizen appear'd.

At the beginning of From Hell’s narrative the book appears to be a brutal deconstruction of Victorian England, an effort to solve the Whitehall murders by diagnosing the whole of the society which produced them. The effort is somewhat clumsy-like the contemporary “hysterical realists” operating across the pond, Moore operates in a sort of “every conspiracy theory is true at once” mode which emphasizes the confusion and brutality of this world.2 A conspiracy to silence the mother and obscure knowledge of a royal bastard (somewhat overrating both the brutality and the casual nature such persons played within the social structure of the period) interlocking with a masonic conspiracy straight out of the most lurid fantasies of the counterrevolutionary or catholic mind, interlocking with a mythic narrative drawn from the more new age elements of the feminist movement, all interweaving around the Whitechapel murders and their investigation. Amidst this mass of detail and image Moore loses interest in the sociopolitical conceit relatively early on, and as a result the comic is simultaneously an aesthetic triumph and something of an ethical failure. The fictionalized version of Sir William Gull cast by Moore as the comic’s ripper gets away from his creator, catastrophically so. I think we all understand that on some level text are seducers, but much less frequently apprehended is that they seduce their creators. The fictional version of William Gull is the fruition of a vein that runs throughout the earlier work. If we may make a comparison to Watchmen, Moore never pulls punches with regard to Veidt-he is at the end of the day utterly lacking in glamor, a concentration camp commandant as shining prince, the nomothete of a world without danger, without a yearning for truth, a plodding builder erecting a not unappealing but somewhat enervating concrete skyscraper on a foundation of gore. Gull meanwhile is the purest of Moore’s Prometheii, a romantic Satan both reacting to and creating the world we live in.

The plot of the comic blends victorian conspiracy theory with late-twentieth century new age pseudo-history of a sort which was common at the time, and has recently come back into vogue via such sources as Tao Lin’s Leave Society. Moore’s anti-Atonist counter history posits civilization as something monstrous, synthetic, essentially male, the product of a violent suppression of femininity at the dawn of human history, a dawn itself “unfledged” by comparison to the reign of the primordial mother goddesses it replaces. This basic thesis was not even entirely fantastical at the time, witness its more respectable manifestations in the speculations of the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas.3 I take as exemplary the following rather dystopic vision from the first section of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae:

The quest romance of male sex is a war between identity and annihilation. An erection is a hope for objectivity, for power to act as a free agent. But at the climax of his success, woman is pulling the male back to her bosom, drinking and quelling his energy. Freud says, "Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling." Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.

The operations of sex are convulsive, from intercourse through menstruation and childbirth: tension and distention, spasm, contraction, expulsion, relief. The body is wrenched in serpentine swelling and sloughing. Sex is not the pleasure principle but the Dionysian bondage of pleasure-pain. So much is a matter of overcoming resistance, in the body or the beloved, that rape will always be a present danger. Male sex is repetition-compulsion: whatever a man writes in the commentary of his phallic projections must be rewritten again and again. Sexual man is the magician sawing the lady in half, yet the serpent head and tail always live and rejoin. Projection is a male curse: forever to need something or someone to make oneself complete. This is one of the sources of art and the secret of its historical domination by males. The artist is the closest man has come to imitating woman's superb self. containment. But the artist needs his art, his projection. The blocked artist, like Leonardo, suffers tortures of the damned. The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, records woman's self-satisfied apartness, her ambiguous mocking smile at the vanity and despair of her many sons.

Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature. The west and not the east has seen the frightful brutality of natural process, the insult to mind in the heavy blind rolling and milling of matter. In loss of self we would find not love or God but primeval squalor. This revelation has historically fallen upon the western male, who is pulled by tidal rhythms back to the oceanic mother. It is to his resentment of this daemonic undertow that we owe the grand constructions of our culture. Apollonianism, cold and absolute, is the west's sublime refusal. The Apollonian is a male line drawn against the dehumanizing magnitude of female nature.

In defense of that lengthy block quote of inverted radical feminism or complementarian essentialism, I would posit that in certain respects it is already what the book is about. Viewed in one light, From Hell is of all Alan Moore’s major comics the most honest he’s ever been about the way his most iconic works metabolize rape and violence against the female body to produce their flights of mastery and grandeur. In one of the most upsettingly transcendent sections, a blow by blow mutilation of the body of Mary Jane Kelly in which Gull achieves something like transcendence in the fourth-dimensional, God’s-Eye style Moore famously utilizes in Watchmen for the perspective of the near-omniscient Dr. Manhattan. In this fugue state he experiences a number of visions, including that of his own death, but the most disturbing is that of a late 20th century office.

This brought to my mind the famously somewhat insane footnote the Russian-French philosopher and civil servant Alexandre Kojéve attached to his 1930s Lectures on the Philosophy of Hegel, of which Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 essay and 1993 book is largely an expansion.4 For Kojéve the end of the dialectic is in some sense also the end of the human.

The disappearance of Man at the end of History, therefore, is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And therefore, it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so-called-that is Action negating the given end Error, or in general the Subject opposed to the Object. In point of fact, the end of human Time or History-that is, the definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called or of the free and historical Individual-means quite simply the cessation of Action in the full sense of the term. Practically this means: the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And also the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man himself no longer changes essentially, there is no longer any reason to change the (true) principles which are at the basis of his understanding of the World and of himself. But all the rest cen be preserved indefinitely; eft, love, play, etc., etc.; in short, everything that makes Man happy. Let us recall that this Hegelian theme, among many others, was taken up by Marx. History properly so-called, in which men ("classes") fight among themselves for recognition and fight against Nature by work, is called in Marx "Realm of necessity" (Reich der Notwendigkeit); beyond (jenseits) is situated the "Realm of freedom" (Reich der Freiheit), in which men (mutually recognizing one another without reservation) no longer fight, and work as little as possible (Nature having been definitively mastered-that is, harmonized with Man). Cf. Das Kapital, Book III, Chapter 48, end of the second paragraph of s III.

The last time I discussed them in depth I implied (hopefully!) that Grant Morrison is of the warring dyad the more metaphysically of the left: in their greatest works seeming to imply that we could have it all, if only we wanted it enough. Alan Moore on the other hand is aligned for all his hammer and sickle t shirts rather more with what has described as the sensibility. There is a cost to the glimpse of the divine, a pound of flesh for ascension to the heavens. Moore is a visionary, but he knows that there is no free lunch, and throughout his early, major phase he consistently represents this price as the brutalization of the female body, as rape. The world of the Victorians is already a time of horror, but for Gull, and for some part of Moore, our time glimpsed through the dark glass of another age’s brutality is more hellish than the gore and misery which saturate these monochrome pages.

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Moore's seduction by his own creation leaves From Hell something of a botch on a political-ethical level. Diminished by time, overcone by a world changed by war the two protagonists wearilly stroll a dreary beach at the narrative's close, as the fraudulent psychic proclaims another war. Against the powers and principalities of the earth nothing can ultimately be done. The harrowing, monochromatic-psychedelic climax of the work in Gull's dying experience of time as a unity and acheiving-oneness-with-God is simultaneously one of Moore's greatest, most bravura sequences, a hairraising vision of a kind of evil transcendence of a sort that haunts the romantic imagination but which is so rarely visualized, and something of a cop-out. Various inexplicable historical phenomenon, the death of Gull’s erstwhile accomplice, the vatic utterances of a deceased colleague at the opening of the comic, the Moors murders, the Yorkshire ripper, appear in something like an apotheosis of small-scale evil that is reason enough to experience the comic. I am unsure that the reprimanding of Gull's spirit by a woman representing the one victim he failed to kill-an inversion of the ending of Goethe's Faust, who snarling sends Gull flying away-works in quite the way Moore seems to have intended it to. Gull is still one with his God, still ascending to some higher realm. We are left down here to pick up the pieces of the horrors bequeathed by the past, as the murderer, madman & artist quits this world for the next.

In a sense this spectacle is what one remembers of From Hell, and I wouldn't blame anyone for preferring one of Moore's relatively more restrained works to this one. On the other hand that vision is striking and horrible, perhaps the most singular in the oeuvre overall. Much of the time I probably prefer it to Watchmen.5 More than this I cannot say.

Have you seen the living
Tired of their own shells?
All the nonbelievers
Torso in the well

The Mars Volta, “Aberinkula”

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There’s a darkly amusing section of the appendices to the book version of the comic in which Moore represents the various “ripperologists” as bird-or butterfly catchers, a mass of net-bearing enthusiasts fruitlessly chasing their quarry down through the ages.