A Letter to Jean W., about the Vietnam War

Dear Jean,

     Thanks for your recommendation of Tim O'Brien, of whom I had never heard before, but whom I have googled and looked up the Wikipedia entry on--and now I think I understand what you mean when you say the Draft "got" to you, "and so did the bad treatment of the hapless returning vets...in the late 60's and early 70's."   Before I go further, I want to say that, in my opinion, those vets, being good soldiers, were bad Americans, and war criminals, and deserved all the bad treatment they got.  That, at least, is my official position and the tone I took in writing to my draft board.  In practise though, I never hung out at the airport, spitting and throwing dog turds, and yelling "baby killer" at the returning troops; and all I could ever think to say to one of them (and living in San Francisco when I did, I met, and had sex, with quite a few of them) was, "I'm sorry!"  And I'd really mean it--whether they'd been physically injured or not, they were always wounded and hurting inside.   No matter how much his own fault someone's unhappiness is, it doesn't help to tell him so; so I'd just say, "I'm sorry!"--and leave off the "but it's your own damned fault, you dumb son of a bitch."

     In the first place, they were usually no dumber than me.  In the second place, the pain they bore was tinged with sorrow which softened censure, rather than contumely which would have hardened my heart against them, because--their own stupid fault or not--they felt that they had been betrayed:  The society and the government, whose honor and honorable intentions they had believed it foul dishonor to doubt, had cynically and pitilessly used them up and thrown them away.  Even the brightest of them went into the bottomless sink of men and matériel of the Vietnam War believing, that the Cold War was somehow justified, and that a standing army in peacetime is at least a necessary evil.  The actual experience of the so-called war disabused most of them; but pitiful indeed, and contemptible, were the men, turned monsters, who went on believing those satanic lies.   

     We do not forgive the ordinary citizens of the Third Reich who became Nazis because it was their "duty."  "Following orders" was no excuse for the present Pope to have participated--even as a beardless youth--in the rounding up of Jews, aiming his rifle at women and children being herded into cattle cars to be sent to the death camps. Had Ratzinger been a "Mensch," a human being, rather than the cold little pseudopod of the established order that he is and always was, he'd have shot himself rather than bear arms against a child.  You'd think a pope would know that, but he still hasn't copped to it.

     So anyway, I'm going to email you this weblog-entry-in-the-guise-of-a-letter, along with three or four other relevant entries--and now you alone, of all the world, know "Anatole Nozière's" actual identity.  I feel quite a lot like the Lone Ranger with his mask off.  I don't care--yes, I care; but the truth of the matter--what the war was, what Amerika is, and how I deal/dealt with it--is still a pressing issue with me.  And, as you will see, always has been.

     In closing, I'd like to recommend a couple of books to you:  The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up, by Charles Nelson, and Desertion in a Time of Vietnam, by Jack Todd.  Both are good; the former, along with Nelson's other book, Men in the Skins of Panthers, is actually a great work of art.  Both also describe the War from the viewpoint of men of conscience, one gay, the other straight.  I fear I must say that Tim O'Brien was not, and is not, in the same sense a man of conscience, because he participated in the Vietnam War as a soldier.  I will not, therefore, read his books.  

Ciao for nao,

"Anatole"

The Magic of Mrs. Whipple

If you've read this blog with any attention at all, you know that my Sixth Grade (eleventh) year was crucial for me in the number and scope of my declared intentions of going my own way in the world. That was the year I told Girls (my female contemporaries) to stay forever the hell out of my desk and my life.  That was the year I formally renounced Christianity and announced my devotion to Apollo, God of Reason, Music and Light.  That was the year I deliberately, insultingly, and for cause, refused to become a BoyScout.  That was the year I embraced Classicism and rejected Romanticism.  It was also the year that I organized, for a brief while, the "Nazi-Communist Party" (We took over the "Sky Watch" Civilian Air Defense stations, covering them with grafitti of swastikas and hammers-and-sickles).  You're thinking that has got to have been a helluva tough year for my Sixth Grade teacher--but you're wrong in this case, because my Sixth Grade teacher was Mrs. Whipple, and she ate boys like me for breakfast.   How'd she do it?--Well, I offer this in evidence to those who disbelieve in Essential Nature, and who believe that Rôle and Appearance are the only determinants of behavior:

Certainly she was not prepossessing to look at.  Indeed, the clean but shabby oddity of her appearance--the rolled granny stockings, the granny shoes and granny dress; the tatty, nondescript shawl; the outright ugliness of her features, and her partial, undisguised baldness--made one uneasy. On the first day of school, the dozen or so of us who constituted the Sixth Grade in the Lamont Public School that year (1953/54) took our places in a loose semi-circle around the sixty-something old lady (who, being the only adult present, had to be our teacher), fearful of what someone so strange-looking might inflict on us, hoping that at least she would not be such an ogress as our Fifth Grade teacher, Miss Amy, had been.  Then she spoke: "Good morning, young people. I am Mrs. Whipple. Will you tell me your names, please?" Her voice, strangest thing of all, was beautiful--an old woman's voice, to be sure; but clear, charming, with a distinct Southern accent, and a "smile" in it that warmed you right through.  And she hit just the right note in calling us "young people," not "boys and girls."  By the time we had all introduced ourselves, we were friends.  And I, ever the enthusiast, was captivated, even infatuated:  Never had I been treated with such refined courtesy.  Never had I met anyone of such High Culture--except, of course, for my Italian uncle. Mrs. Whipple hailed (But of course!) from Virginia, which for me then, having just read Gone with The Wind (and being moreover, on my mother's mother's father's side, myself a "Musical Moore" of ante-bellum Virginia), was virtually the American Italy.   And therewith she was transformed: Enthralled by the gentle sorcery of her gracious manners and civilized speech, I no longer saw an ugly, dowdy old woman, but a "Wilkes of Virginia."  It's an odd fact that Margaret Mitchell, herself much more an O'Hara than a Wilkes, does quite clearly convey the essential character of a Wilkes-of-Virginia: It doesn't matter at all what a Wilkes looks like, it only matters what a Wilkes is.

So, from the get-go, Mrs. Whipple had me eating out of her hand.  She successfully browbeat me into taking part in the school Christmas pageant (Yo, Balthasar!),  brushing  aside my protest that, for one of my age and gender, to enact a rôle, upon a stage, before an audience, would be unmanly and immodest ("What makes you so special?"). On the other hand, she let me take my head in History, Geography and English, which had me performing far above my grade level in those subjects, not just that year but for the rest of my academic career. I suspect, looking back on it, that I was useful to her, and that a lot, of what the Lamont Public School 1953/54 Sixth Grade Class accomplished (indeed, quite a lot, according to the achievement test scores), was due to my loyal and energetic seconding.  We were, after all, a small class.

I in especial therefore was heartsick when the schoolboard declined to renew Mrs. Whipple's contract for the next year, giving as their reason that she dressed "too poorly and inappropriately for her position."  But then, in that too there was a lesson.

Of Interest To Me Only in the Modern World

Just imagine how perfectly isolated, utterly alone, this makes me!  I'm listening to an 18th century flute concerto on NPR (tuned in in the middle--I suspect--and indeed it is) by Joachim Quantz. Yesterday I tuned in to the middle of another stunningly beautiful flute concerto which turned out to've been written by Friedrich der Grosse Himself.  Even if Mr. Quantz did give him pointers--on its merits, it's an excellent, quirkily original piece of work; I would never have guessed that a mere König could have written anything so wunderschön.   I hear these things; I know, not only that they are beautiful, but I appreciate them.  I guess sometimes correctly who wrote them.  And I am filled with contempt for the witless screaming-nigger-noise that the Modern World imagines Music is, and jerks itself around to the pounding, relentless Beat (beat, beat) of, with an expression of utter, vacant Soullessness.  On the other hand, when I behold these pretty, sad children--tatooed, pierced, mutilated--I can bear to see the visible marks of torture and disfigurement with which they have afflicted themselves, only by knowing--or having reason to believe--that they have not felt them.

Metaphor: the post post-modern Tar Baby

Thanks, and a tip of the hat, to Messers. Johnson and Lakoff for the suggestion that it probably does no good to try to logicize metaphors and turn them into conscious similes; even if by so doing we expose them for the vicious, underhanded, cowardly attempts, to persuade by bullying, while avoiding detection as willfully stupid, which most metaphors actually are.   What else, for example, are bad laws' being characterized as "useful tools," or the holding of the world hostage to the insane machinations of weapons manufacturers and their political bedfellows' being called "the protection afforded by a nuclear umbrella"? Perhaps you get my drift.  It hardly seems that anything is too absurd to be "swallowed" in the bland half-disguise of metaphor.   Why then stick at "rôle-playing"?

Is it not true, as Morry van Ments has written in his 1984 book, The Effective Use of Rôle-Play (A Handbook for Teachers and Trainers), that "[just as] when watching a play the audience needs to identify quickly the position of each character...[and] these titles or rôles are indicated in the cast list before the play even begins...[so] the extension of the concept of rôle to the way people behave in everyday life comes from a similar need in real life for people to summarize or condense what may be complex perceptions of another person's appearance or behavior"?

No, in fact, it's patently not true, so let us stop, for just a moment, to say:  HORSESHIT!  There is no such "similar need in real life" for people to metaphorize the job, duties, obligations, functions, and appearances of other people as the "rôles" they are "playing" (presumably in the Drama of Life).   Not even if we go quickly on to assert, as slipperily Mr. van Ments does without a breath, that "throughout our lives we are bombarded by sensations far greater in quantity than we can cope with."  Again, we say HORSESHIT! as we do to van Ments' next couple of sentences:  "The brain has mechanisms for coding and grouping this information so that we can make comparisons and decisions.  This process is called perception."  Note the wooziness of van Ments' antecedents:  "great quantity of sensations" becomes "information"; "mechanisms" becomes "process."  This fuzziness is deliberate, not inadvertent, for, being a somewhat subterfugitive social constructionist/behavioralist, van Ments is asserting, in quite the approved postmodern manner, that 'to perceive is to simplify, and to simplify is to falsify. The perception of identity, therefore, is a choice among relative essential untruths which we may as well call "rôles" as anything else.'   

(1)"The concept of rôle acts as a shorthand way of identifying and labelling a set of appearances and behaviors on the assumption that these appearances and behaviors are characteristic of a particular person and predictable within a given situation.

   

"In everyday life rôles may be ascribed to people in a variety of ways.  They may be allocated by social position such as teacher...cleaner...juvenile delinquent.  Often these rôles imply reciprocal relationships [parent/child, doctor/patient, etc.--as a matter of sickening fact, this is, apparently, always the case in heterosexual sexual rôle-playing].  A rôle is then a way of expressing group norms and the social pressures acting on an individual or group.  It characterizes a person's social behavior(2).

"Sometimes rôle is defined in terms of the context in which people find themselves such as church, concert hall, football match....

"Rôle may also be defined in terms of function or purpose such as [in a hospital] doctor, administrator, patient, chapelain....

"When people take a particular (2) rôle they are using a repertoire of behaviors (2) which are expected of that rôle...This behavior is often the result of internalizing the expectations of others--in other words doing what people expect of the person in that rôle...It is important for people to identify the framework of behavior and hence whether it is in accordance with the rôle which one assumes the other person is taking."

Rôle-taking  

"The process of rôle-taking is a natural and continuous one for anyone who is socialized within his community.  (3) It is a serious matter; most of our social life consists of such activity and failure to adapt to the right rôle at the right time can lead to a breakdown in communication. In conversation, for example...the ability to predict another person's reponse is partly aided by an awareness of the rôle they are taking at that particular time.  

"Of course a person's rôle will change throughout his life and indeed throughout the day....[One's] behavior at any given moment will indicate to others which rôle he is playing, and he in turn will adjust that behavior to comply with what he feels others expect (4).

"Just because rôles in everyday life are largely determined by a person's surrounding culture and his position in it means that that his rôle behavior will not always correspond to his disposition and feelings.  It is a common observation that people dissimulate and pretend to be a different person to what they really are.  (5) In that sense the rôle-taker may at times 'act out' being a president, judge, shopkeeper or doctor."

Rôle-playing

"The idea of rôle-playing derives from this everyday activity.  In rôle-playing one is practising a set of behaviors which is considered appropriate to a particular rôle.  It is a natural part of children's behavior and everyone will have experienced it as part of their childhood games.  

"There is an unfortunate confusion between rôle-playing and acting.  The essential difference is that acting consists of bringing to life a dramatist's ideas (or one's own ides) in order to influence and entertain an audience, whereas rôle-play is the experiencing of a problem under an unfamiliar set of constraints in order that one's own ideas may emerge and one's understanding increase.

 "The rôle-player, in contradistinction to the professional actor, is not concerned with an audience, but ony with himself and his fellow rôle-players.  His aim is to feel, react, and behave as closely as possible to the way someone placed in that particular situation would do...Thus the 'acting-out' in rôle-playing is, for all practical purposes, no greater than that which is done by the majority of people from time to time in the course of their everyday lives.

"The idea of rôle-playing is simple: to give students the opportunity to practise interacting with others in certain rôles.  The situation is defined by producing a scenario and a set of rôle-descriptions.  The scenario gives a background to the particular problem or environment and indicates the constraints which operate.  The rôle descriptions give profiles of the people involved.  

"The rôle play can be run for a few minutes up to a half an hour or even longer.  At the end there is a debriefing session in which observers may comment on the way in which the characters behaved and the lessons to be drawn from this.  The players will always take an important part in this debriefing.

"As a technique, rôle-play has proved to be very powerful.  It is highly motivating and enables students to put themselves in situations they have never experienced before...Much of our behavior in interpersonal interactions is governed by our assumptions about our own rôle, and other people's rôles, and the way we perceive these rôles...Rôle-playing can be used to teach simple skills of communication, to show how people interact, and their stereotyping of others, and to explore deep personal blocks and emotions." (8)

I am reminded of how, as a sixth-grader, I reacted on learning that in the next year I would be taking formal Physical Education, playing contact sports, and showering with other boys:  "No!  You've got my mind--Never will I surrender my body!"  And I didn't.  There were humiliations, and I was forced to shower with the other boys; but fortunately the spontaneous erections I feared under those conditions didn't happen.  And there was at least one triumph:  When compelled, as a high school sophomore, to go out upon a mat in front of the whole damned gym class and wrestle, one-on-one, with other boys, so great was my horror and panic (I suppose, at the actual physical contact), that my strength became as the strength of ten, and I threw my hapless opponents off like a bucking bronco, while (8) I made for the other side of the gym, much to the mingled consternation and amusement of all those present. My "advantage"--which it took putting me into two consecutive attempted "matches" for our P.E. instructor to begin to appreciate--was that I was not playing.  I had as little notion as a wild animal of "wrestling." Rather, in all earnestness, I was fighting for my life, resisting the embrace of death.  Afterwards, one of the boys who had witnessed my ordeal said to me, "You looked really scared out there today!"  To which I replied, "No doubt. It was horrifying."  "What?"  "I wasn't just frightened--I was horrified."

I am also reminded of my first day in a college American Geography class (in which at end of term I got a well-deserved A), a few years ago.  Our professor, a very intelligent young woman from Connecticut whom I grew to like and respect, had us all in that first hour write our names on slips of paper pinned to our chests, and asked that we go around the room introducing ourselves to one another:  I walked out, and when I returned twenty minutes later, I said quietly to Dr. Gresham, "I will not be socialized."  (7)

And so, to return to Rôles, as calmly and complacently expounded by the the utterly horseshitful Mr. van Ments.  No, (1) I do not for a fucking minute allow that my personal physician, for example, is playing the rôle of doctor.  she is a doctor, and she is who she is--and that is her character.  Period. There's not only no need for labelling and identifying her beyond that,--it would be insulting to do so.

(2) I, for one, am always in character--my own.  Nor do I respect anyone who, regardless of his job or position, behaves as anybody other than himself.  There are absolute standards of polite behavior and I adhere to them (while, of course, never for a fucking minute deviating from my primary responsibility of being true to myself).

(3) If I were ever conscious of myself as "taking a rôle," as if it were second nature to me--much less doing so continuously--I would be filled with such remorse and self-contempt that I would probably kill myself.  I think that I can say truthfully that I have never played any sort of rôle socially, and that I owe my not inconsiderable conversational skill both to my complete absence of "side," and to my pleasant ability to detect the actual character and personality of those I'm conversing with.

(4)  I make quite a studied point of never altering my behavior to suit the expectations of others--and I despise, I should hope, quite openly those who do.

(5)  It goes almost without saying, that, having the sympathetic, exquisitely civilized and compassionate character (a word that Mr. van Ments never uses in the substantive form and seems not to "understand") that I have, there is never any reason for me to pretend to be anything whatsoever. Consequently I am never put to the awful bother of 'acting' anything 'out.'  

One dreary February Day, When I was eight years old,

I complained to my grandfather, the former 'Kid Fleming,' that I was bored.  "What you need," he said, "is something to do.  Chores.  Some sort of work."

"No," I said, "I do not need work.  Work is boring.  I want to have fun."

"And when you grow up....?"

"I won't work.  I will be rich, and have servants who will work for me."

Grandpa Fleming did not smile.  Gravely, slowly he said, "I think, rather, that work is whatever you do that you never regret doing; it is one of life's greatest pleasures.  And you will find that he who hires a servant has hired a master."

It was Mrs. Trollope who (c. 1827), in Domestic Manners of the Americans,

first noticed that amongst the "incessant, remorseless spitting" and the virtual absence of anything else she was used to in the way of manners, domestic or otherwise, there was something besides manners missing; something, which she refers to initially as the "levelling effects" which the 'simple' manner of living in what was then Western America had on the manners of the people.  Then she quotes another Englishman to the effect that Americans lack "loyalty."  She notes that it is virtual treason in the Republic to call anyone "servant"--the politically correct word even then was "help."  But it's when Mrs. Trollope begins to notice American children that she betrays real outrage:  "...rude indifference is so remarkably prevalent in the manners of American children.  [I observed] total want of discipline and subjection universally among children of all ages.  In the state of Ohio they have a law...that if a father strike his son, he shall pay a fine of ten dollars for every such offense...Such a law, they say, generates a spirit of freedom.  What else may it generate?"  

  

Quite a meaty Bone, this fragment of Baudelaire...

Baudelaire as a thinker, a writer, a (God 'elp us all) philosopher, I have always disliked. His wonderfully beautiful, exquisitely ingenious poetry apart--the man has always seemed to me narrow, cold, contrived, and contriving; humorless, conventional, and absurd: just the sort who would suppose that he divined supernal beauty in the narrow, cold, charmlessly contrived work of my countryman-jingleman Edgar Alan Poe.  But I'm still not done with those few paragraphs at the end of l'Ecole Païenne.  I return now to the opening sentences:

     "To repudiate the efforts of the society that came before us, its philosophy and Christianity, would be to commit suicide, to reject the impulse and tools of improvement. To surround oneself exclusively with the seductions of physical art would mean in all probability to lose onself.  In the long run, the very long run, you will see, love, feel only what is beautiful, you will be unable to see anything but beauty.  I use the word in its narrow sense. The world will appear to you as merely material.  The mechanisms that govern its movement will long remain hidden...."

     Nothing in my reading of history has more puzzled me than the dogged unreflecting persistence of just those things, "the efforts, philosophy, and Christianity of the society which came before."  As a ten-year-old, eleven-year-old, twelve-year-old boy growing up in the Far West where Transcendental Individualism, thanks to the Schoolmarm and the circumambience of Open Horizons and Infinite Space, held sway above all creeds and conventions, I found them easy to repudiate, quite naturally so, and I held "the society which came before" in fairly serene and untroubled, offhand contempt--except, of course, for art and music, in which it may be I did lose myself; but in which, in a manner apparently unimaginable to Baudelaire, I also found my truest self.   There was nothing suicidal about it.  Where I come from, you're expected to take responsibility, and to think, for yourself.  The world is material, but scarcely "merely" material. And when you realize that, the "hidden mechanisms which govern it" reveal themselves with astonishing clarity, very early, both to the intuition and to the discerning intellect.  Thus reality never, for me, "appeared as the effect of (social) constructions."  I have always understood, I think--at least from the time that I was ten years old (reflecting, with horror and outrage, on the military service which had been imposed on a couple of much loved older male cousins)--that military conscription in peacetime is an abomination, bespeaking a military/industrial society corrupt to the core, based on violence and the making of victims. It took five or six more years for the full iniquity of the U.S. Criminal Justice/Prison System to penetrate my consciousness....But, let's just say, that there was never any doubt whatsoever in my mind that it was my business in life not to become a victim, not to get caught in the gears of those "hidden mechanisms"--never to do jail time, never to perform any military duty of any sort, never to give orders, and never, ever to follow them.     

Now then, a little Intertextual Comparison

Finally, calling the Apple Hotline, I've figured out how to write in French.  I'll be going back over this thing, as I remember where I laid-in French quotes and observations, putting the accents and even the diphthongs where they belong.  But now, as I promised...

No doubt Jack Fritscher is right:  "Corporations"--the same ones who even now are storing up smallpox, anthrax, and polio viruses in gleeful anticipation of those days (not too far in the future) when vaccinations and innoculations will have lapsed, and there will be no immunity among the general populace against them--Corporations like the United States' Military/Industrial complex (the CIA/FBI/NSA/ATF/DEA, etc.) created the AIDS virus and set it loose in east Africa.  Yes, because they are evil, and, because they are evil, they hate those most who do not fear them; but still, why?  Well, what you must understand first about these monsters of iniquity, world devourers, torturers, murderers, makers of (preferably innocent) victims, is that they are moralists; they believe that the evil they do is necessary and, ultimately, good.  Just stop for a moment and ponder the ruminations of Heinrich Himmler on learning what the Final Solution was to be, and what part he was to play in it (Could he do it? Would he be strong enough?).  Or consider the "scientific curiosity" aroused in Giles de Retz on reading the accounts in Suetonius and Tacitus of the torture of children.  Or think of the pride and satisfaction of George Bush Senior in "riding herd" on the Argentine, Brazilian, Uruguayan, and Central American torturers in the U.S. Army School of the Americas when it was in Panama. Or the simple delight in pain, as pain, evinced in George Bush Junior's essay on the branding with coat hangers practiced in Skull and Bones fraternity initiations.  And think of G. Gordon Liddy's holding his wrist over a candle till it blistered, and saying to the appalled and probably still mystified Timothy Leary, "What you don't understand is that we're serious."  What Liddy didn't say--partly because he thought it too obvious to need saying, and partly because saying it would have betrayed too much about himself and his cause--was that the reason he hated Leary and all he stood for was that Leary wasn't serious.  

Moralists, in the sense that Heinrich Himmler, Giles de Retz, the Georges Bush, and (for the purposes of this essay/blog) Reynold Price (blog 11/28/'07) and Charles Baudelaire are moralists, are those who believe, on the one hand, that certain actions and certain attitudes of persons other than themselves--like sex and the appreciation of beauty--are in themselves moral or immoral, by whatever arbitrary standard they (our conscientious moralists) adhere to; whereas, on the other hand, their own actions are never to be judged of as good or ill, but as whether or not they further that standard of morality to which they adhere.   The obscene, scarcely concealed gloating of Larry Kramer and Reynold Price over the horror of the AIDS epidemic, and their palpable joy at having their own impotence, effeminacy and personal unattractiveness vindicated, are retrospective moralism at its ugliest and most untruthful. Still, AIDS did happen, probably not by accident, and the reasons (in the minds of its inventors) for its invention and introduction into the tribal world of Africa, and thus into the hedonistic world of male homosexuality probably had some resemblance to Reynold Price's envious and spiteful characterization of gay male sexual practices.  

Better, however, and truer, is Baudelaire's explanation.  Baudelaire, fundamentally heterosexual, understands what the pining homosexual envy of Kramer and Price will not permit them to acknowledge, that the basic impulse of male homosexuality is esthetic; that the attraction between two (or more) men is, on both (or all) their parts, that of those who worship beauty, and is as different as night from day, from the beauty/power disequilibrium of male/female attraction [no wonder heterosexuals find rôle-playing so enjoyable--and useful!].   And, as Baudelaire realizes (though he may not realize that male homosexuaity is what he's talking about), "the [hidden] mechanisms that govern [the world's] movement...a healthy, industrious way of life...the pure joys of honest activity...the useful, the true, the good, all that is really lovable...his mother, his nanny, his wife...these things will be unknown to him...He will despise and debase [them]."  And you have only to substitute "women" and "conventional heterosexuality" for the words "the true" and "just" in the following paragraph for its deep meaning to emerge:  "The immoderate pleasure he takes in form [Latin forma = beauty = being in shape] will drive him to monstrous and unprecedented excesses.  Swallowed up by this ferocious passion for the beautiful and the bizarre, the pretty and the picturesque--for the gradations are many--the notions of the true and just will disappear.  The frenetic passion for art [esthetic, gay sex] is a cancer that eats up everything else; and since the drastic absence of the true and just is tantamount to the absence of art [power-based, heterosexual sex], man in his entirety will disappear...."  There is always this privileging of la Bête et la Bêtise femelle with heterosexual men, at least those of Baudelaire's romantic, sexist, and conventional stripe; always this insistence that women are basically--and always, somehow, mysteriously--what's true and real in the world; honest, commonsensical, and, by implication, of infinitely greater worth than "mere esthetic" value.  By which they mean:  They'd fuck a mud fence, if it had a cunt in it. 

Much as I like the Poetry of Charles Baudelaire--

It has always seemed obvious to me that his prose bespeaks the ridiculous, and quite negligible, idiot-dandy.  His adulation of the very 3rd-rate Edgar Poë, and its solemn acceptance by his unfortunate countrymen, would make one scornful if it did not, embarrassingly, evoke a sort of pity--English, after all, was not Baudelaire's first language, and he makes just the sort of silly mistake about what is worthy of note in the writing of English that a rash and impressionable foreigner might be expected to make.  His translations of Poe go wrong precisely at those points where a faithful rendering would belie the "Poe was a misunderstood Genius" pose.  And pose it certainly was.  Moreover, Baudelaire's own attempts at exotic prose-poetry are, to my taste, remarkably nasty and unpleasant, like Chateaubriand (never good) gone bad.  

Imagine my surprise, therefore, at finding something of interest, and not altogether dismissable, in Baudelaire's prose.  I refer to l'Ecole Païenne.  Not that I agree--not in the least--but I see what he means:

     "To repudiate the efforts of the society that came before us, its philosophy and Christianity, would be to commit suicide, to reject the impulse and tools of improvement.  To surround oneself exclusively with the seductions of physical art would mean in all probability to lose oneself.  In the long run, the very long run, you will see, love, feel only what is beautiful, you will be unable to see anything but beauty.  I use the word in its narrow sense.  The world will appear to you as merely material.  The mechanisms that govern its movement will long remain hidden.

      "Religion and philosophy will return one day, forced into being by the cry of desperate men. Such will ever be the destiny of those fools who see nothing in nature but rhythms and shapes. Yet at first philosophy will appear to them as no more than an  interesting game, an amusing form of gymnastics, a fencing in the void.  But how they will be punished for that!  Every child whose poetic spirit is overexcited and who is not immediately presented with the stimulating spectacle of a healthy, industrious way of life, who constantly hears tell of glory and of sensual pleasure, whose senses are every day caressed, inflamed, frightened, aroused, and satisfied by works of art, will become the unhappiest of men and make others unhappy too.  At twelve he will be pulling up his nanny's skirts, and if some special skill in crime or art does not raise him above the crowd, by thirty he will be dying in hospital.  Forever inflamed and dissatisfied, his spirit will go abroad in the world, the busy, industrious world; it will go abroad, I tell you, like a whore, yelling: Plasticity!  Plasticity!  Plasticity, that horrible word makes my flesh creep, plasticity has poisoned him, yet he can't live without his poison now.  He has banished reason from his heart and, as a just punishment for his crime, reason refuses to return.  The happiest thing that can happen to him is that nature strike him with a terrifying call to order.  And such, in fact, is the law of life: he who refuses the pure joys of honest activity can feel nothing but the terrible joys of vice.  Sin contains its own hell, and from time to time nature says to pain and misery: go and destroy those rebels!

     "The useful, the true, the good, all that is really lovable, these things will be unknown to him.  Infatuated by his exhausting dream, he will seek to exhaust others with it.  He will have no time for his mother, his nanny; he will pull his friends to pieces or love them only for their form; his wife too, if he has one, he will despise and debase.

     "The immoderate pleasure he takes in form will drive him to monstrous and unprecedented excesses.  Swallowed up by this ferocious passion for the beautiful and the bizarre, the pretty and the picturesque, for the gradations are many, the notions of the true and just will disappear.  The frenetic passion for art is a cancer that eats up everything else; and since the drastic absence of the true and just is tantamount to the absence of art, man in his entirety will disappear; excessive specialization in a single faculty can only end in emptiness...."

     This, by no means the friendliest, is simply the best and most perceptive description of male homosexuality by a heterosexual male that I have ever read. It portrays to the life, with astonishing clairvoyance, what it would be like, fully a century later, to be young and gay in those few, glorious decades before AIDS, when we were winning. 

Same Old: Berlusconi Sworn In Yesterday

Why, this is hell, nor are we out of it.  So, using up my free Rhapsody downloads, I'm listening with at least half my mind to my alter ego, Jean-Philippe Rameau's Dardanus:

                                        Anon they move

In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood

Of flutes and soft recorders--such as rais'd

To highth of noblest temper heroes old

Arming to battle, and instead of rage

Delib'rate valour breath'd, firm and unmov'd    

With dread of death to flight or foul retreat;

Nor wanting pow'r to mitigate and swage

With solemn touches troubled thoughts. and chase

Anguish and doubt and fear and sorr'w and pain

From mortal or immortal minds.  Thus they,

Breathing united force with fixed thought, 

Mov'd on in silence to soft pipes that charm'd

Their painful steps o'er the burnt soil....

Or, to quote myself, "If some day when I die, I wake up and I'm not dead, and somewhere, someone is singing "Climb Every Mountain," then I'll know I'm in Hell."

Evolutionary Psychology and Beyond

 This is the first time I've ever seen Steven Pinker in interview.  My first thought, watching and listening to him, is what a perfectly nice person he is, in his secular Jewish, Mendelssohnian way.  Lots nicer than Noam Chomsky, though similarly intelligent and (it just occurs to me), I suppose, similarly Jewish.  He makes utter hash of mine and Stephen Jay Gould's silly-ass, knee-jerk objections to the unknowableness of "evolution" in psychology.  Which is good, because I wasn't really at all comfortable sharing opinion/space with that loathsome bugger.   

"Let us hope that it is not true. Or, if it is true, that it does not become generally known."

So spake the wife of the Bishop of Winchester, on hearing of Darwin's theory of evolution.  And so speaking, she spake not only for the privileged and learned classes of Victorian England, but, more generally, for all women everywhere, in every age, about the "parameters" (as they are called in these latter, darkening, pseudo-mathematical days) of permissible candor upon matters regarding women, or things likely to be understood by women.  There are, in fact, a number of things about 'the Sex,'  in respect of both their physical and their moral natures, which men are not supposed to know; or which, if they know them, they are supposed to ignore; or, if they lack the delicacy to ignore them, they must not speak of them; or, if they speak of them, they must on no account be appalled or disgusted by them, or be contemptuous or derisive of them:

1.   The first item in this Feminarum Arcanum Expurgatorium, concerning the moral character (or the lack thereof) of women, is the fact of the mere existence of the Arcanum.  Few women are as candid, or as unconscious, as the Bishopess of Winchester even to hint at its existence. But note the practised assurance of her Ladyship's (Grace's?) proposal of pious mendacity: She was used to lying, and had no regard whatsoever for the Truth as such.  Now, however funny we may think that, it gives one pause to realize that no one, then or since, male or female, has seriously thought that it redounded to her discredit. 

2.  In further elucidation of the "character" of women, I quote from an article entitled "Role Playing" by one Sarah Pierce in the online magazine hitched, which, according to its masthead, "entertains, educates & inspires marriages":  

"What most people don't realize is that they engage in some sort of role-play every time they have sex...Whether you admit it or not, you've fantasized at one point or another while in the middle of sex, whether it's about another person or that you yourself are experiencing a different situation than what's really going on...."

I am reminded of the time when taking an Italian Culture class in Italy, taught by a nice young Italian woman with kitten-sized clumps of hair in her armpits, I being simply incredulous that people so civilized as the Northern Italians I dealt with daily were in any serious sense superstitious, was assured that I "must have" at least once in my life--perhaps before an important test--"purchased a rabbit's foot, or some such charm, in order to avert bad fortune, or to insure good fortune."  "No," I said, "Mai."  Plainly, she didn't believe me.   

3.  In point of blunt physical fact, women stink of piss, owing to the blubbery, unwashable apparatus provided them by nature for the excretion of urine.  Heterosexual men are sexually aroused by and attracted to this pheromonal odor, which women's perfumes, especially those containing musk or civet, are designed both to conceal and to enhance; in the same manner that lemon-juice both mitigates and enhances the taste of fish, and that the incense used in the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Rite both conceals and to a degree resembles the smell of insanitary peasants and the animal dung that clings to them.   The extent to which heterosexual men are consciously aware of  the urinous substantiation of the "smell of a woman," which so entices them is, perhaps, arguable; but that it is urinous has been verified in clinical tests done the last few years, notably in Sweden, exposing gay and straight men and women to EST, "found in women's urine," and to AND found in men's sweat.  According to one of the women subjects, "EST smells like my sister's old used tampon."    

I Stopped Playing-Pretend (Role-Playing) When I Was About Eight Years Old

After that, I imagined, or fantasized what I wanted to--usually schemes of liberation, conquest or the creation of homosexual island-city-states, complete with suitably Adrianic architectural complexes, combining the essential features of Tivoli and Aladdin-and-his-genie's joint palace-building.  I acknowledged in a general way the necessity of the Sex for procreation, but hoped that, like Wonder Woman and her mothers and sisters, they might be confined to some Mysteriously Hidden Island, and the ghastly physicality of their impregnation handled by some sort of turkey baster.  I little realized what I was on to.  What I did not do, or wish to do, was role-play.  

Nor have I ever since.  Then, as now, I utterly disbelieved that: "All of us in our lives play certain social roles, and we all therefore are expected to behave in an appropriate manner.  In any company one can find a Leader, a Clown, and many other roles being enacted.  The choice of concrete roles and models of behavior is defined by the education one has received, the conditions prevailing in our lives, the society surrounding us, and finally [as if it were last of all] our personal preferences.  There is probably no 'ideal model of behavior,' through which one could achieve one's goals all of the time, but it should be interesting for anyone to increase his self-knowledge and to understand his good points and weakness, or even to change his model of behavior in a particular situation...In fact when we play a role we can always observe from the outside: who am I in everyday life?  Why have I chosen this role?  What would I like to change in myself and to what extent?...[R]ole games are of great importance for teenagers in their development of life-skills [?!] and the ability to function in any society or group...."  O horseshit, horseshit, horseshit.   

From that very tender age, I knew that I was no longer playing.  I had a firm sense of myself, and no wish to be playing any "social roles" whatsoever.  I determined, upon a Platonic Greek and Stoic Roman concept of responsibity for myself, not to bother at all about roles.  It was for that reason that when I grew slightly too old to be a Cub Scout, I refused point-blank to join the Boy Scouts , the issue being that I would not take the Boy Scout oath to do my "duty for God and Country." As for there not being "a [single] ideal model of behavior through which one could achieve one's goals all of the time"--I strongly suspected that in fact there was one; and when, at the age of twelve, I discovered Emily Post's Etiquette, I knew that I had found it--for what it was worth.   Not that I thought that, by knowing essentially all there was to know about how things, properly, are done, I would "achieve" anything, but that I never, ever again had the slightest doubt about how to behave.  The acid test, I suppose, was the six months I spent in Italy in 2001, getting along warmly and politely with everybody I met, of all classes and conditions, never feeling a moment's shyness or embarrassment.