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In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. – Mary Shelley, 1818

He was surprised to find himself still at his worktable, still in the high-backed chair, yet slumped forward, his face flattened against the sketch he had started working on the day before. The images confused him, and he felt sick.

He often felt sick. Not just in body but in spirit. He was sick of banalities and pretensions. He was sick of things. Sick of lying, sick of recreating lies. Sick of fawning and flattering, though let us be clear: he never fawned or flattered. He solicited work and position but always on his terms. He painted kings and bankers but also dwarves, saints, rebels, and prostitutes; it didn’t matter, he showed them as they were, sufferers and sinners alone in the world. But the sickness grew stronger. Sick of surfaces. Sick of status. And then sick in his stocky peasant body, physically sick. He was wracked with fevers, visions, voices, demons.

The drawing under his nose, on which pooled his drool, was first intended to be the frontispiece of Los Caprichos. The man in it, him, slumped like him, sitting at the desk in the high-backed chair alone in the night, a black spot, his left eye, turned towards us. His fingers are interlaced as if he is praying, and a dark solar aura, radiating strokes of black ink, flows out of his body. Pale beings float in the emanations: bats and owls under the cross-hatchings, two donkeys above, and a vortex of grotesques rise out of the black lines and out of him, and three of the faces are his own, including one, wrinkled and limp, elongated as if in a distorting mirror, like Michelangelo’s slack, empty face smeared onto the flayed skin of St Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel.

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What is the owl with the pen whispering into his ear? Scribbled in his notes: "Title page for this work: When men do not hear the cry of reason, everything becomes visions. Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders."

The cry or the scream? Are bats and owls impossible monsters? He is tired of resemblances. He is tired of one thing calling up another. He loathes comparisons. The symbol of wisdom, the owl, and the symbol of folly. Of sorcery. Of corruption. Of serenity. Leviticus puts it in all its manifestations – the little owl, the eagle owl, the fisher owl, the long-eared owl, the short-eared owl, the screech owl, the great owl, the desert owl, the horned owl – first among the unclean birds. Abominations not to be eaten, touched, or even looked at. But he, he loved owls, didn’t he? Didn’t he love owls? Didn’t he love all birds? And these ones, have they just landed, or are they about to take flight? And the bats, the great black cloud, also on the list of Leviticus, were they flying towards him or away?

He had laid his head down to relieve his anguish, but it clung to him, unmoved. This he knows, this vital congruity, which was described in the book he feebly skimmed just the day before, Un antídoto contra el ateísmo, a gift from Jovellanos ("for the amusement and elucidation of my enlightened friend and fellow witch hunter").

Other words rose in the air. He felt himself to be divisible and impenetrably solid yet surrounded and confounded by the indivisible and penetrable. Substance and its opposite stretched out, filling space, just like the orb of light in the top left corner of the sketch beneath his head. This light made it possible to distinguish things and beings from one another. It, too, was extendable and penetrable. A knife could not divide it; no part was separate from the whole. Any change at its core in colour or brightness altered its every aspect. Was it the sun? No. The sun was not yet up or had already gone down. The moon, then.

Moratín had recently told him, in fact, he had written this down in a letter that he still had somewhere, that it is the custom of the Issedones, an ancient people of Central Asia, that whenever a male elder dies, all his kinfolk bring dead owls and bats of every stripe, and cut up the flesh along with the flesh of the dead man, and throw it all in a giant stew pot for a feast. As for the dead man’s head, it is stripped, cleaned, gilded and preserved as a holy relic, to which a solemn offering is made every year.

This is what he wants for his head.

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As Election Day casts its shadow over the world, Thanksgiving, the brightest and most cherished day on the American calendar, stands resplendent on the horizon, a beacon of hope and unity.

We, however, the true “deplorables” – those deprived of the pride and elation that comes with being a citizen of the most influential nation in history – find ourselves, as always, unable to partake in, or even fathom, the profound gratitude that the people of that blessed land hold for the exalted station that is their birthright.

Shackled by the consequences of our lesser birth, our sense of being on the fringes of power and meaning is most keenly felt, and in our collective melancholy – nothing binds people more than being outside the American experience – we turn away from Thanksgiving towards the next guiding light of annual, and, indeed, universal, promise: Christmas.

For believers and non-believers alike, the holiday season, with all of its time-honoured traditions, illuminates a true path of belonging. Yet, after a year fraught with challenges, and faced with the impending uncertainties of Tuesday’s vote and the stressful stretch of days, weeks, months, and, in all likelihood, years and decades ahead, our anxieties persist, compelling us to seek solace in the cherished memories of better times.

For me, this was the autumn and winter of 2015, when, alongside a small but virtuous group of kindred spirits, I created a haven of hope and compassion in my beloved city of Paris.

Giving by GavingDriven by a profound sense of ethical responsibility, Giving by Gaving is a unique service wherein those committed to the ethical treatment of animals can, for a weekly fee, engage personally in the months-long gavage and final abbatage of waterfowl – geese for the most part, and a selection of ducks.

As proof of our sincere intentions, part of the proceeds supports animal refuges, houseless shelters, and nursing homes. This has created a legacy of empathy and moral resolve far beyond mere culinary indulgence.

Our boutiques serve as purveyors of our bespoke services and sanctuaries for those who share our sensibilities. Each is outfitted with gilded cages and expansive areas for avian movement. Proper nourishing, dispatching and extrication techniques are imparted. Soothing music is piped in, creating an atmosphere of serene luxury for those who live and expire therein and all who visit.

The liver forgives… and forgetsIn the earliest days of our endeavour, we came upon a revelation: the liver's miraculous ability to regenerate had the power to revolutionize foie gras production. We devised methods by which individual ducks and geese could produce fattened livers year after year. Remarkably, even when these livers were partially harvested, they possessed the wondrous capacity to heal themselves, thereby enabling an ongoing and humane cycle of production.

The business flourished remarkably, a testament to our vision of harmonizing tradition with innovation and reverence for life. Soon, other of God's joyous creatures—turkeys, cows and calves, lambs, rabbits, and pigs – wholly submitted themselves to our mission. For them, we pioneered innovative “snout to tail” techniques to gently separate portions while avoiding mortal harm. Aquatic environments were introduced, fish tanks brimming with vibrant life, and a new generation of sushi artisans were trained to prepare each delicacy without causing terminal distress.

Our ethical empire has expanded across the globe Our innovations have transformed the culinary world, ushering in a new era where nourishment is celebrated, cherished, and esteemed.

Gone are the sterile supermarket packaging and impersonal displays, replaced by thoughtfully curated spaces devoted to authenticity, mindfulness and pleasure. In these carefully designed environments, the balance of life and nature is honoured with gentleness. Each creature's journey is treated with honour and respect. Each is given prominence. Every life is prolonged, and its ultimate, inevitable end is transparent and dignified, not hidden away.

Our patrons enjoy the flavours but also the stories and principles behind their choices. They are acutely aware of their profound impact, instilling goodness and positive change throughout the world. Their actions resonate with purpose and fulfilment, illuminating the path towards a brighter, more compassionate future.

Human and humane: the new frontierWe now embark upon a noble quest into the domain of medical science, pioneering methods to apply these same innovations in the cultivation and harvest of essential human tissues. This groundbreaking endeavour holds the promise of addressing the critical shortage of transplants and confronting the pervasive issues of immigration and poverty, offering hope and succor to countless individuals in dire need.

Please join us. United, guided by unwavering dedication and selflessness, we can establish a new order that reflects our loftiest ideals and noblest aspirations.

Lend your strength in whatever way you are able. Let us, together, carve a new world.

Thank you.

Force-feed me, please. Gave me till I burst.

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“The vilest writer hath his readers, so the greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.”— Jonathan Swift, 1710

The last relief of the routed

is the political lie born out of the discarded pundit’s head

and licked into shape by the mob.

We know this.

Last night’s location monitoring

occurred as flood

looped through circles

in a velocity zone

swollen with fascists, cardsharps, chatbots

and capsized trucks – the river’s banks like the central banks and the databanks

giving out, the too-narrow road

washing away,

Trump’s face followed by a dead dog

followed by the L.A. Dodgers in a PT boat.

Pull the other one.

None of this is among the hidden things,

but all of it is among the sacrificed.

The rains, deadlier,

the river bursts, its powerful motives

dazzling the crowd hoping for short madness

as the waters, rising

along the long brown path,

dislodge masses of data,

determining the parameters

of the next convenient catastrophe.

They issue bonds for this now.

Specific words, specific people.

Crushed rows of candy.

Targetted collection and attack.

The value-optimised bro moments of the engaged

and the enraged will never stop

Walt Whitman from singing

of an America still unquerelous

in its short skirts and congress boots

holding a baby in one wearied arm,

binding its limbs with the other,

lighting the pyre and raising the knife

as a cascade of kill lists spill into the lake and feeds

and over the falls

in unknown and improbable proportions,

symptoms and consequences

channelled in the boiling swirl

of gravel and timber and mud towards

the gently dipping beds of code

at the braided river mouth behind the delta front,

outflowing deposits merging at the lobe

with social media logs and phone transcripts and match-three whales

in the slower-moving waters of the evacuation zone.

…whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing…

so said Walt

because everything else is inside,

permanently identified and compartmentalised,

we are told, algorithmically,

by encrypted messaging applications

and released insensibly out into the oceanic

or up the oak stairs to the bedrooms,

or down the stone steps to the cellars,

to the laundry room that once was the music room,

and a century before that a stable, and before that a river stream,

but even before that, the first thing,

the self unseeing but the eyes opening

to the reversing pterodactyl alarm of a construction-site truck

as most days, as all days, as always, as more always.

There is still the other thing, that damnable Whitman thing.

Pure artifice!

looping into or out of the new circles

but more obvious because familiar in, for example,

the painting by Yana hanging through the crawl of night

at the foot of the foldaway bed

on two screws on the exposed brick wall

in the living room,

and by the cracked light of day

on two hooks

attached to two chains

on the foldaway bed’s cabinet,

two positions, it seems

end pieces of the encoding,

the bed not so much folding as lowering or lifting,

an up, a down, or an away.

No one understands why we sleep here.

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”

So said Sam,

but no painting has been handled more frequently.

Lifted every morning off its screws

and onto its hooks

and every night off its hooks

and back onto its screws.

I’ve spent more time looking

at it than any other

object in the universe,

it is

undoubtedly the most hung

and re-hung painting in art history.

I’m looking at it now.

If I were to close my eyes

or turn away and try to describe or sketch it

from memory

[reflects]

from what is left of memory

I wouldn't be able to.

My brain is no longer built for such things.

It can still determine patterns,

but these are now primarily based

on what I thought and felt,

who I loved,

where I went,

what I ate and drank,

at what time,

and to whom I talked and how often.

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Yana Bystrova, Archer as Two Sumo Wrestlers, 1993

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When I was five, my grandfather paid me a dime a day to dig weeds out of the front yard. He paid an extra penny for every rock bigger than my fist. I tried to cheat by presenting rocks I found in the back lane, but he never fell for this, even if I rubbed dirt on them. This was around the time he taught me to play cribbage, and I discovered I could read his cards in his eyeglasses. I never lost a game. That same year Marge Murray paid me a quarter to organize her pot-and-pan cupboard. I later cleaned outhouses for her in exchange for weeks fishing on Gun Lake, where she and her husband, Bert, had five rental cabins. The Murrays met when Marge was a 13-year-old net mender down on the Fraser River docks. Bert was a few years older and a fisherman. Neither ever went to school. Bert scratched his back on door frames and, over the course of his life, pulled 20 bodies out of the river. Mrs Cleverly up the street paid me a dollar to mow her lawns once – only once because her vicious whippet bit my tit. I never went back. For several years running I was the top salesboy of door-to-door raffle tickets and cookies for Arnold’s Coiffures Minor B soccer team and Stong’s Grocers Little League baseball team. In my last year of elementary school, I helped a neighbour deliver the afternoon newspaper in exchange for beer and marijuana. In high school, I did a 73-paper morning route, which permanently disordered my biological clocks. I was an enumerator for Elections Canada once – only once because I misunderstood my assignment and only registered the households on the periphery of my catchment area — Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s most affluent neighbourhood — which meant thousands of rich people were not able to vote that year. I sold Christmas trees and strung up Christmas streetlights for the Point Grey High School Senior rugby team. At 14, I was a taco, burrito and empanada cook and a breakfast grill cook for carnies at the Pacific National Exhibition. I parked cars in the semi-desert dust just east of Kelowna the summer before Grade 12 at the Black Mountain Music Festival. I also sold beer there illegally – illegally because I was underage, and the beer had been trucked up from Oregon because B.C. beer workers were locked out that summer by the only breweries in the province at the time: Labatt, Molson and Carling O'Keefe. I sold a black garbage bag of marijuana in small amounts to friends but ended up owing money because I smoked too much myself. I was a bull cook at a lead-zinc exploration camp in the Northwest Territories. The drills ran 24/7, the drillers worked in three eight-hour shifts, we slept in four-hour shifts and cooked three breakfasts, lunches and dinner every day. The flies were bad, and the sun never set, but I learned a lot about cooking. I pumped gas and changed oil and tires at Lovegrove Chevron on Dunbar Street. I was a waiter and, for one horrifying night, a topless waiter at the Pit Pub in the Student Union Building at the University of British Columbia. I also made and sold burgers, fries, and nachos at the Pit and during a World Council of Churches conference “eucharist burgers” – the “body and bun” of Christ. After my shifts, I drank pints and ghostwrote essays for other students. I was a pot washer and kitchen assembly-line worker at an Extended Care Hospital. I dug a ditch and painted two houses in Kitsilano. I worked as a framer once – only once because within seconds on my first day, I sliced the tip off my left index finger and spent the rest of my shift in the emergency room of St Paul’s Hospital, next to a man whose foot had been crushed by a train. I worked the 8 pm to 8 am shift at a halfway house for polyabusers on Burrard and 16th and the graveyard shift as a security guard at a gated housing complex in Shaughnessy. These, too, seriously corrupted my clock gene circuitry. I sorted, shelved and signed out books and checked people’s bags at UBC Main Library, while at the same time amassing the largest library fine in the University’s history. I was a lab worker in the Home Economics Department at UBC, where I cleaned the cages of alcoholic rats. I loaded and unloaded bags of cement on and off a truck for a day on Naxos Island, for which I was fed moussaka. I planted around 100,000 trees in the Okanagan Valley and on Vancouver Island. I tutored in Vancouver. I waited on tables and bartended in Toronto at Lee’s Palace. I painted and sold Lee’s Palace three 4’x8’ paintings, one of which was called Lunch in America. I sold books at the Granville Book Company. I wrote press releases and catalogues and manned the desk at the Jacqueline M Gallery on Beatty Street. I wrote book reviews for local magazines and liner notes for Vancouver music groups. I worked at the Abbey Bookshop in Paris. I was a bicycle guide in France and Spain. I was an English teacher in Madrid and Paris. I was a SAT and GMAT tutor in Paris. I was a screenwriter in Paris. I was a playwright in Paris, Neuilly, Vancouver, Toronto and Copenhagen.

I am a translator. I am a proofreader. I have been a journalist. I was an art critic for two decades. I was a podcaster for the OECD. I have been an interpreter, once for a documentary film crew and once, disastrously, for a factory that, for some inexplicable reason, hired me to fire its entire workforce. I wrote about that here.

I am a copywriter. I am an editor. I am a writer.

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“Thought” of the day: I am bemused by “bemused.” I don’t think it should mean what it means. Further, if it does mean what it means – confused – and “amused” means beguiled, shouldn’t “cemused” exist and mean… something that begins with “d” like… deluded?

Demused. Emused. Femused. Gemused. Hemused. Which calls to mind page 689 of Ulysses.

Sorry. I’m slightly out of sorts as I’m four weeks into my Breton farm retreat and nowhere near finishing the writing goal I assigned myself.

An opera. About the writer Raymond Roussel. In French.

Excuses? Editing and writing assignments have got in the way, and these Hexagons take their weekly toll. Plus, there are the sheep and the goat to feed, and the lawns to cut, not to mention coastlines to explore, beaches to swim, forest trails to run, oysters to shuck, crêpes de blé noir to eat, and ridiculously delicious cider to drink.

Nothing to complain about, right? And I’m not so brazen as to use this to beg you for financial support – even if that support costs less than a single Breton buckwheat crêpe a month. No. Never.

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Besides, I’ve made considerable headway. Scenes are taking shape and are funnier and weirder than I expected. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Roussell was bemusingly colourful. He thought fame – "La Gloire” – shone directly out of his forehead onto the typewritten page. He thus worked in the dark, with the curtains drawn, because his writing was “so powerful that the light from it would blind the world.”

He visited every continent except Antarctica but stayed at his typewriter almost the entire time, rarely venturing out because he “didn’t want life to get in the way of my imagination.”

Imagination he had. A play of his based on his novel Impressions d’Afrique had scenes in which an earthworm played the zither, an imaginary substance called bexium powered a “thermomechanical" orchestra, a one-legged flute player played a flute made out of his own tibia, and a statue of a Spartan slave made of whalebone corset stays rolled across the stage on rails made of veal lungs. (I’ve found a spot for the whalebone corset Spartan slave and the veal lung railway tracks, and I’m working on the others.)

He never wore a shirt, socks, cuffs, or underwear more than once. He ate one meal a day, five hours long, 20-35 haute-bourgeoise courses.

He saw Tristan and Isolde a hundred nights in a row. Always in the same seat. Accompanied by a woman his mother paid to pretend to be his mistress.

His mother was just as bemusing: she had a window put into her coffin – just in case, and always travelled with it, even on a voyage to India, which she had always wanted to see and which ended when her yacht reached sight of its coast and she said, “there, it is” and had the captain turn the boat around and sail home.

Anyway, the libretto is coming together, piece by piece. I think I have entire structure figured out. I can see it in my head. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, heard, or thought about. And I have a week left.

In the meantime, here’s our old friend Goya, who we haven’t heard from in two months.

This is the second plate in Los Caprichos. Goya’s smirking self-portrait, which precedes it, was an afterthought, a replacement for the more dangerous image of the man slumped in the chair succumbed to the sleep of reason. Is this image not as dangerous? It depends on how we interpret it.

A young woman climbs a darkened flight of stairs. A mask of a dog’s face covers her eyes. A rat’s face or a dog’s, worn like a bridal comb, covers the back of her head.

A woman pretending to be an animal. Getting hitched.

¿Qué carajo?

Other Caprichos treat similar themes:

Goya here is quoting a Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’ poem from a play about marriage, and this is why we are climbing the steps with the pretty young bride and her decrepit groom, up out of the shadows and the jeering mob toward the dark altar at the back of a half-lit cave, a grottoed church whose only light comes from below, not from torches but from hell itself, the ever-replicating hell of his most hellish images.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published How many, oh Alcinda, yoked to marriage,Envy your fate! How many seek the yoke of HymenTo secure their fortune,And without using reason nor consideringThe merits of their suitor,Say yes and extend their handTo the first who arrives! What evilsThis cursed blindness brings!I see the wedding torches extinguishedBy Discord's infamous breathAt the foot of the altar, and in the chaosToasts and cheers of the wedding feast,An indiscreet tear predictsWars and disgrace for the poorly united.I see the marriage veil torn by a reckless hand,And with imprudent head held high,Adultery runs from one house to another.

“The ease with which many women agree to marry, hoping to live with more freedom.” This is the caption in the Prado manuscript, probably written by Goya and worded to mask the work's riskier meanings. Elsewhere, he wrote: “Art, like love, to be faithful to truth, must have no expectations, except to be free.” The Bibliothèque Nationale's edition is more scathing: “Marriages are regularly made blindly: brides, trained by their parents, mask themselves and dress up nicely to deceive the firstcomer. This one is a princess with a mask who will later be a bitch to her vassals, as indicated by the back of her head imitating a comb: the foolish dupes applaud these unions, and behind comes a liar in priestly garb praying for the happiness of the nation.” No one knows who wrote this. Nor this, below:

“Her parents are with her. They seek to disburden themselves of this daughter and have thus trained her to say yes to the first man who comes along, in this case, the impotent old goat behind her, to whom she has eagerly given her hand, for her desire to escape her parents’ suffocating discipline easily outweighs her repugnance, as is made clear by the way she has furtively thrust her fingers inside the folds of his gown, where they are fruitlessly engaged in resuscitating his lolling untumescence.”

Her frowning father clutches the other hand, and up the gallows stairs they go, past the seething mob, out of which a man's grotesque head and torso emerge like a breaching whale, his clouting stick raised to strike. Higher still is the head of another predator, a grinning giant with a bearish snout who licks his lips and eyes the young bride lasciviously. Two toothless Januses look back at him nervously, down at the braying mob, and forward at the altar. Behind them, a pretend priest, hands clasped, pretends to pray.

The parents behind are pleased with the arrangement. The mother is devoted to excess and frivolity. She has neglected the girl's Christian education. She has replaced her mantilla and basquiña with an Empire gown. She has taught her to speak French and dance and have elegant manners.

But what precisely drives these two towards the wedding bed? A unity of will? Lust? Greed? Is the deception mutual? And who is the old crone bent over her cane? Or is the young bride the witch? The masks betray hypocrisy but also cunning. She bends to survive the winds and the wages of sin in a sinful world. Everyone sees this except the seething sea of witnesses below.

“Here, as everywhere else, the most beautiful have always the ﬁrst chance of success. Most obtain several dowries at once. These objects of monastic favour are often the concubines of amorous priests. Each girl, at the approach of a certain critical period, is provided with a husband who only takes her for the sake of the money. What was once the father's property becomes the husband's property.”

Who wrote that?

Who also wrote: “There was a time once when a sense of shame gilded their crimes and covered timidly the ugliness of vice.”

He does not regard marriage as the sole union between the sexes where desire does not degrade its participants or violate moral law. He believes that in a union, each has the right to control and use the other, body and soul. He believes that true human love is genuinely blind, making no distinctions. However, isn't this, too, merely appetite, where people are things to use? Where is the goodwill, affection, the pursuit of shared joy, the delight in another's happiness? If there is only desire, everything else is forsaken. Desire, in its quest for satisfaction, is indifferent to the misery it may cause. It cares only for its fulfilment, discarding everything once sated, like the bones of a carcass. Only in friendship between equals is there true restoration.

Love draws us too close; respect keeps us a proper distance apart. Our friends are flawed, just as we are, but we learn to accept those flaws. Our dignity remains intact, as does our trustworthiness, honesty, and conscientiousness. Martin was right never to marry. Even when it works well, like his once did, the two fused into one, it is a hideous folly, the most terrible addiction of the human race.

We are animals, he thinks. Animals pretending not to be animals. Sometimes, we have to be reminded of this. Sometimes, we have to return – or be returned – to our truth.

He remembers a scene in Younger Moratín's play with Mariano Querol, who died before paying for his portrait, playing the servant Munioz hiding under the sofa to eavesdrop to the young married couple's conversation.

What does he hear? He can't remember. He still had his hearing then, but he can't remember.

When? He thinks of how, just yesterday, sitting outside in the sun, he moved behind Leocadia so that she blocked the sun from his eyes. Using her as an object for his convenience. Was that so terrible?

Womb. Weary.

He rests.

With?

Leocadia, like Pepa before her, is weaker physically and emotionally and thus depends on him for protection. She lacks his powers of reason. She is all sense and intuition. She has no principles. She will only do a thing if it is pleasing to her.

Did he think this, or was it just something he read? Was he that alone? Did he feel that abased? The masked bride is free, just as he is. She is her own person, not mere property. She can follow her will, just as he can. They can live as they please.

Lose yourself in this other person, give yourself fully, and get yourself fully back. This “I” here, he says out loud, and this “her”. The old man in exile, the bride on the stairs. Wife, husband, host, guest. In the dark bed. They know not, neither will they ever understand; they sleep on in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are out of course.

They are everyone.

Where?

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God calls to the man dressed in linen with the scribe’s inkhorn hanging at his hip and says to him, “Pass on into the midst of the city, into the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark on the foreheads of the men that sigh and grieve for all the abominations that are done in their midst. – Ezekiel 9:4

Some will find this presumptuous or even pretentious, or just naive or galling, or unhinged, or preposterous and absurd, or worse, downright blasphemous, but when William Blake was four, God pressed His face to the window, which made him scream and weep. When he was eight, Ezekiel, the prophet, peered at him from under a bush. Two years later, he saw a tree – a cherry tree – filled with angels crying “Holy Holy Holy”. A month on, angels walked towards him through the rye and strode above his head through the stars.

William Blake, An angel striding among the stars, c.1824-27I have had no such experience, yet I often think back on a chicken potpie I made when I was nine. My first pastry. It was so inexpressibly beautiful that I could not find it in myself to eat it, to crack its flaky crust with a fork and punch that fork’s sharp, fluted tines into its hot, creamy core. Instead, I put it in my mother’s favourite biscuit tin and hid it behind her sewing kit and my father’s shoeshine box on the top shelf of the hallway closet. Three months later, having forgotten of its existence, I found it again, exactly where I had left it, but much blighted, rank as piss and covered with hair-like spores. I screamed and wept. Then I took it outside and buried it in the backyard.

I think of it often. I’m thinking of it now. I do this often with absent things. This happens especially after summer’s end when we put everything into the sheds for the last time. The silence falls, we close the doors and walk away. And all year long it sits there, the land, the sheds, the trees, the deck, and we try to imagine the state of it. What is happening to it. What it has become. Is it still there? Does any part of it still exist? Does anything still exist? This last question is not farfetched: it comes in close to us. We have all lost or forgotten something, left it in a pocket or on a bus, in a jar, under a sheaf of old bills in a drawer. We are these things, just as we are the maps of our cities and countries, the places we live. Or an elementary school pencil case. A Crown Royal bag filled with conkers. A shoebox filled with plastic soldiers. A stack of letters. A knife. A pressed flower in a book.

A multitude of just such things.

“Once, there was a kind of toy. It was just a horse chestnut with a bit of cloth over it, tied with a string, and two knots at the sides and two at the bottom, like hands and feet. The child whispered to it and slept with it under her shirt.”

This is from Marilynne Robinson’s 2014 novel Lila. It is an imaginative re-reading of the Book of Ezekiel. A fictional midrash, in a sense. I urge you to read it. The opening pages are here and I’ve put a link to a video of Robinson reading them at the bottom of this post.

“Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every branch. Returned home he relates the incident, and only through his mother's intercession escapes a thrashing from his honest father for telling a lie.” — Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence, 1869

Robinson tells us that Blake spoke of his visions “in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters. Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy. He thinks all men partake of it, but it is lost by not being cultivated.”

Blake wrote in 1804 that he was “drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or engraver into my hand.”

“When the Sun rises, do you not See a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!”

His wife once said, “I have very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise.”

Blake’s mother was a source for this. She and her first husband joined the Moravians during its most “enthusiastic” phase.

“Last Friday at the love feast,” she wrote in 1750 in her petition to join the Church, “Our Savour [sic] was pleased to make me Suck his wounds.”

The first dissenters, the Moravians kept a continuous prayer going for over one hundred years. Some Catholic orders participate in perpetual adorations of the Blessed Sacrament (aka the consecrated host), though these usually take the form of silent contemplation. There is a big difference between engaged prayer and passive sitting.

At the International House of Prayer in Kansas, prayers are kept going around the clock.

And when I passed by you and saw you weltered in your own blood, I said to you when you were in your blood, “Live”. Yes, I said to you when you were in your blood, “Live”. – Ezekiel 16:6

The boy walks through hayfields, strolling back from a day in the Surrey hills, lungs clear and mind at rest, the blossoming orchards before him twinkling and shimmering, kindled by sunlight. The wind kindles the sparkling gold, bright blossoming white commingling with incandescent red, the leaves a flush of emerald. The outward lunges inward, prisms of tears gather in his eyes, the gossamer threads of light twinkle and flash through the blossoms, and the boy’s brain, already filled with thoughts of the might of stars and angels, kindles suddenly into dream-like, creative energy, and the sunny orchard becomes a Mahanaim, the place where Jacob, returning from Padan-aram to southern Canaan, met his angels, even to his outward eye.

I, like Blake, was an “introvert” at nine. I desperately wanted to better myself. My one passion was books – books on math, books on psychology, books on music. I wasn't particularly bright, but I read a lot, baked a lot — cakes and cookies — and made perfect frosting. I was a perfectionist. I would decorate each cake from a pastry-frosting bag, and if someone dipped a finger in the frosting, I'd be mad as hell.

“That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care,” said Blake. “The wisest of the ancients considered what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act.” Or, in the lark-flown words of his Los, the fallen form of Urthona, one of the four Zoas, who creates the city of Golgonooza:

“I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.”

The imagination is dependent on sensation. Shut your eyes and the image burns inside, obscured and dimmed but present all the same. The mere idea does not exist.

I am often struck and then overwhelmed by these manners of thoughts, which take in and soon devour the enormity and triviality of the world and the universe, from its grains of sand and wildflowers to my potpie and cake frosting to Jupiter and Saturn to the ashes in my father’s urn and Jerusalems old and new and every disposable contact lens fingered late at night out of my tired, failing eyes. They are still all there, all of them, as is every other piece of forever plastic that I have ever touched or held or swallowed and this, for me, encompasses the full arc of all cosmic and earthly meaning. And, of course, meaninglessnesses. We are so caught up in our own little worlds, and our bigger ones, that we lose sight of who we are, and where we are, and what our purpose here is. Me me me, sigh sigh sigh, groan groan groan, grieve grieve grieve, over and over, page after page, century after century after century. It’s tiresome.

So, then, today, right now, let’s you and I step outside the deluded ken of our imagined self-importance by visiting the farthest thing from our minds — the farthest human thing — the plucky little space probe Voyager 1.

Roughly the size of the Renault Clio I’ve been driving around Brittany all month, it is, of course, not a car but a bus – a decahedral bus, to be precise – so-called because it has ten flat sides, to which scientists and engineers have attached recording and navigational instruments, thrusters, and a high-gain dish antenna that receives and, on good days, sends radio-wave signals.

It was launched by NASA in 1977. It flies faster than any other human thing. Right now, it is beyond Pluto – well beyond Pluto! – out between the stars amid the frothing plasma bubbles of interstellar space.

Attached to one of its side is an audiovisual disc of gold pressed in Creteil, just outside of Paris, and inscribed with all manner of earthly and unearthly things. The sound of surf, wind and thunder, for example. The songs of whales, birds and Chuck Berry. The brainwaves of a woman thinking about geology and history, and what it feels like to fall in love. Glenn Gould playing Bach.

Images, too. Drawings of a hydrogen atom in its two fundamental states and a chart showing the position of the Solar System relative to more than a dozen pulsars, with their exact periods indicated. A photograph of page 6 from Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica Volume III, De mundi systemate. Another of a woman licking an ice cream cone next to a man eating a grilled cheese sandwich, and another man in a striped shirt pouring water in his mouth from a silver pitcher he holds at arm’s length above his head.

A woman in a supermarket stealing grapes and buying old bananas –

And these words, from Jimmy Carter, now (y)our oldest president, then in his first year of office :

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

I, too, am attempting to survive our time. Please help.

Voyager 1 sent us pictures, including this one, its last, taken 34 years ago 4 billion miles above my potpie –

The little speck in the middle of the bottom line is Earth. Carl Sagan, who, in a sense, commissioned this picture – suggested that NASA turn the bus around and snap wide-angle long-exposure shots of Earth through a very dark filter – gave it the name it still bears today – “Pale Blue Dot” and said of it:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

It was not a sunbeam; it was a result of kindling light reflecting within the lens assembly and the camera’s sunshade.

Between March and May 1990, Voyager 1 sent back 60 frames to Earth. Three of these frames depicted Earth as a tiny point of light. Each used a different colour filter – blue, green, and violet – with exposure times of 0.72, 0.48, and 0.72 seconds, respectively. These were then combined. Out of the 640,000 pixels that make up each frame, Earth occupies less than one pixel (specifically, 0.12 of a pixel).

Sagan: Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

“‘The other evening,’ said Blake, in his usual quiet way, ‘taking a walk, I came to a meadow, and at the further corner of it, I saw a fold of lambs. Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers, and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty. But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture.’ The lady, thinking that this was a capital holiday-show for her children, eagerly interposed, ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Blake, but may I ask where you saw this?’ ‘Here, madam,’ answered Blake, touching his forehead with his knuckle.” – James Smetham, “Essay on Blake”, 1869.

Right after “Pale Blue Dot” was taken, the onboard cameras were turned off. To save energy. And a year ago, a memory bank, one of three onboard, all part of the world’s oldest running computer (in computer years, it is roughly a millennium old), was hit by a high-speed particle – no one knows how or why or even if; it might have just worn out – and the signals stopped making sense. A meaningless (the word NASA used was “mysterious”) sequence of ones and zeroes was all it could manage. The agency’s engineers devised a workaround by reorganizing code to bypass the faulty memory chip, which had 3% of its capacity irreparably corrupted. Due to the damage, they had to relocate the code, but no space existed for an additional 256 bits; the spacecraft’s total memory is limited to 69.63 kilobytes, equivalent to one standard jpeg file. So the engineers removed unused code, such as the code for transmitting data from Jupiter, which is unusable at the current transmission rate.

This summer, just before we cut back the brambles and opened the sheds, NASA confirmed that the probe was once again transmitting data from all four instruments.

A few more tweaks will keep Voyager 1 providing data for another couple of years. Then, unless it hits something, it will continue travelling outward for the rest of Time.

I’ve rotated “Pale Blue Dot”. It’s usually shown with the ray of sunlight illuminating Earth as a vertical line on the right side of the frame. This is because the Voyager’s point of view was approximately 32° above the ecliptic plane, Earth’s orbital plane around the Sun. From the perspective of an observer on Earth – me me me, for example – the Sun appears to journey across the so-called celestial sphere throughout the year, following a distinct path against a barely changing backdrop of stars that aligns with the constellations of the zodiac. This, of course, is nonsense. Or at least a type of nonsense.

By rotating it, I have set it free from its orbital clutch. Just as I have this –

And this –

“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. ...I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.” – Jackson Pollock8.

Oh! I have slipped

The surly bonds of the Sun

Put out my hand

And touched the face of God.

There’s more to say. But this is already too long. Most of us, because of the Infinity devices we hold in the palm of our hands, lack the cognitive aptitude to voyage much further. Myself included. I wanted to explore Lila’s take on Ezekiel, especially his heavenly chariot. I wanted to touch on the significance of Ezekiel’s visions in Blake’s artwork and poetry, and shoot the same skeins out to tether Voyager 1, and, well, bring in Jerusalem and its lost temples and the marks on the men – in our century – that sigh and grieve for all the abominations done in its midst. Mainly, however, I wanted to delve into what, in part at least, drives all the above: the concept of apokatastasis. For Marilynne Robinson, or more precisely her character Lila, like John Calvin and Karl Barth, apokatastasis pertains to the final redemption of all beings, including the damned and the Devil. For the Ancients, and for Blake, it was cosmological: the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens as in the former year; the periodic return of the cosmic cycle; the completion of the 26,000-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, the so-called “Great Year”; and the return to a place in the heavens occupied at a former epoch.

In early Stoicism, it involved the return of planets and stars to their original celestial positions, which ignites a fiery, destructive transformation of the universe (ekpyrosis). Following this catastrophic conflagration, a rebirth occurs, initiating a cycle of destruction and recreation linked to a divine Logos.

William Blake, The Whirlwind: Ezekiel's Vision of the Cherubim and Eyed Wheels (Illustration to the Old Testament, Ezekiel I 4–28), 1803-1805For the Stoics, Zeus, when his thoughts turned outwards, created the material cosmos. His inward me me me thinking, his absorption in self-contemplation, created contraction, or apokatastasis. This fire within, the fire without – alternating expansion and contraction, represents the universe.

In Judaism, it is the concept of “restore” or “return” as applied to the restoration of Job’s fortunes, the rescue or return of captives, or the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

But enough of all that. Let’s send our thoughts upward but stay within the realm of the Real – and away from these newest abominations, out beyond the furthest edge of the Solar System, where Voyager 1 is closing in on the Öpik–Oort cloud, whose bodies replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner planetary region – where they are eventually consumed during close approaches to the Sun.

Barring incident, Voyager 1 should reach the outer limit of the Oort cloud in about 300 years. While we wait, let’s return to my friend downstairs – though he hasn’t forgiven me for mentioning him last week and the week before.

He is in the living room, watching yet another recorded game on his iPad. This one ends in a draw, 1-1. He knows this. What he didn’t know until just now is that the first goal, scored by his team, occurred in the second minute.

“Geesh,” he said. “This is going to be tough to sit through.” Then he laughed.

I suggested that we should head to the Sunday market in Plestin-Les-Grêves before it closes, and he agreed. “I can watch the rest later.”

Then he reminded me of an old Italian TV commercial. It opens on two fans sitting in the stands of a packed stadium. There is an empty seat between them. “Isn’t that weird?” says the younger of the two. “A sold-out playoff match, the biggest game of the year, and there’s an empty seat right at centre field.”

The older man says, without taking his eyes off the pitch, “That was my wife’s seat. She never missed a match.”

“Oh,” says the younger man, feeling awkward. Then, after a few seconds, he adds, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

The older man nods, and they silently watch the action. After a few more seconds, the younger man turns to the older man and says, “Couldn’t you find someone who wanted to see the game? Someone in your family? Or a friend?”

“Nah,” says the older man. “They’re all at the funeral.”

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First, a few words about death, which, like birth, comes out of nowhere and catches most of us unawares. You’re not there, then you are, then you’re not again. It’s hard to keep up. But there’s no blame or shame in this. Existing is confusing. Not existing? Probably worse. Who can say? We're born alone, and we die alone, except for those circled around us, many of whom are just collecting a paycheck.

Does that make sense? Of course not.

“I was thinking of very old times,” wrote Joseph Conrad back in 1899, “when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day.... Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

“Life is a fleeting moment,” said ChatGPT just a few seconds ago, “a brief spark in the vast darkness. We stumble through, trying to make sense of it all, grasping at connections and meaning. In the end, it’s the memories we leave behind and the lives we touch that echo in the silence after we’re gone.”

Ignore such authorities. Pay heed instead to the example of my son and me. We each have sisters; in fact, we each have two sisters, but that’s a coincidence. Right? And insignificant. Or, at least, irrelevant. But there are other parallels. And differences. I’m the youngest of four; he’s the eldest of three. I was born in 1961, at the tail end of the baby boom. He was born in 1998, just a couple of months short of Gen Z. So, sure. We see things differently. Always will. But not just because of our ages. He’s a half-foot taller and has better eyesight. What’s more, he’s French and Canadian, while I’m only Canadian. And neither of us are French-Canadian.

Only Canadian. Only? That smarts. This whole identity thing keeps us up at night. It makes us act “nice” and say “aboot” and write “pay cheque” and stick maple leafs on our luggage and correct people when they call us American, even though, technically, being from the continent commonly referred to as America, that’s precisely what we are. But that’s not what people mean when they call someone American, is it? And that is what drives us completely insane.

Not to belabour the point but my son grew up in the “système français” and I grew up in the so-called Canadian system, so-called because, let’s be frank, the Canadian system is just the American system minus all the Americans — which, like that whole life/death divide mentioned above — is entirely based on what it isn’t.

Isn’t it?

That’s perhaps a better topic for another day. Today’s topic is, apparently, my son, who’s a better athlete than I am and smarter and healthier and more confident, probably because he’s top-loaded with his mother’s Han Chinese O-M122s genes, while I’m 100% cholesterol-clogged Pontic steppe, Neolithic farmer and Western Hunter-Gatherer.

Plus, he plays the drums. And lives in New York.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s no doubt encountered resistance unlike anything I’ve ever had to face. But vice-versa, too. Right? Slough off those likenesses and differences like the so-much-existential-dead skin that they are, and what’s left? Two men trying to make sense of their lives. Two human beings. Two Homo sapiens, distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance.

Two sacks of shit, some of those reading are probably saying, or at least one sack of shit and a random 25-year-old who’s been dragged into these nonsensical paragraphs without being asked and, if asked, would probably say thanks but no thanks.

Others still — I see you — are waving their arms and legs in tight little circles and snapping their heads out of their beige turtle necks and saying, smh and whoa, dude, careful, that’s your son you’re talking about. Go easy!

The point I’m trying to make? Identity is a bitch. And, I guess, stupid is as stupid does. But the bottom line is we both wear the pants, use the word “pants” and put them on one leg at a time. Is that enough? Isn’t that enough? Why fret the small stuff? The last time I checked, those folks in the turtlenecks weren’t the bosses of us. We didn’t vote for them. They weren’t even on the ticket.

Just saying.

The thing about being alive right now? There’s just so many ways to do it. And all of them are viable. Viable. Is that a French word? I think so. Though it sounds mealy-mouthed. But maybe that’s just in English.

1 Qui peut vivre. Ce nouveau-né est viable. 2 Qu’on peut mener à bien, qui peut aboutir. Le projet est-il viable?

Advice? Hell, no. When was the last time you read an inspirational quote that wasn’t as obvious as Cornflakes? Be kind, how’s that? Be kind, rewind. That doesn’t even apply anymore; my son never had to rewind a fucking thing in his life, except by clicking on a virtual button. But no doubt he’s seen the damn movie. Which, by the way, was made by a Frenchman.

You want advice? How about this: see things in the wider arc. Think in geological time. Be a rock.

Or this, from that friend you met last week downstairs in the kitchen watching a game that was already over, that he knew the final score and winner of but was watching anyway — not the highlights, the whole bloody game, which ended 1-0, and the lone goal was scored in the first 15 minutes. And he watched the rest of it anyway!

Guess what? He’s Canadian, and he hasn’t been sleeping well, and right now, he’s driving another friend to the train station and, get this, earlier this week, he told me that when he dies, he'd like to go quietly in his sleep, like his grandfather. Not screaming like the passengers in his grandfather’s car.

Have a great week. Be nice. Get some sleep. Hug a Canuck.

Does anyone see the little boxes below and go, hey, there’s an idea, why the hell not?

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Here and there, we hear the kitchens whistling.—This a line from a Baudelaire poem. It is Sunday morning. I’ve had visitors since Friday. One is downstairs in the kitchen, watching a game that was played yesterday. He already knows who wins. This I find odd, but not nearly as odd as what the other friend is doing: standing in the courtyard garden and slapping himself repeatedly—I’m not exactly sure where on his body, probably his arms and legs, but maybe his face and chest—as part of his qigong routine.

I have a slight hangover. We had wine at lunch on the sunbaked terrasse of the Café du Port in Locquemeau, along with a dozen oysters, moules marinière, a buckwheat galette filled with caramelized apples, sausage and Emmenthal, and the freshest, best-battered fish I think I’ve ever had. I sent this picture to another friend—

-and he texted back—

“Two old men and the seafood” is pretty good.

Anyhow, we finished the meal and went back to the farm and fell into deep naps, and then one friend mowed lawns while the other one pretended to be busy and I made an unnecessary dinner of duck breast and roasted vegetables, with more unnecessary wine, followed by an excessive quantity of superfluous cheese, which required more needless wine, and then some truly unwarranted flan. At the same time we watched, at my insistence, Charlie’s Angels of all things. Because somehow the scene where Sam Rockwell dances was locked in my memory as being truly spectacular, right up there with the scene in Babe that in these pages I once described as “for me, I am not embarrassed to say, the most affective scene in all cinema.”

Anyway, the Rockwell scene doesn’t exist or for some reason was clipped from the version we watched last night. The rest of the movie was lame and predictable. My two friends looked at me askance all night. I’m sure they will continue to do so this morning.

I spent the week alone until Friday, working on my Raymond Roussel songspiel. I’ve written the overture and sketched about an hour’s material. I need to take a break to see it fresh, so I’ll quickly knock this out and then go downstairs and start the day. There is coffee, far breton and half a brioche for breakfast. Outside, the thrushes are singing, and the wood cocks are cooing. We will be in the car soon, going to the market in Plestin, then to the beach. The sun is out. It rained all week. I should probably write this piece later—live in the moment, take advantage of the weather and the company. Besides, writing this shouldn’t take long, as the main part will be a short story by my daughter, one of three new pieces, all of which are remarkable, as strange and powerful as the very best short works of Kafka or Musil.

Most of this happens. We buy brandade, herring filets and petites grises, a bad baguette, two lemons and a punnet of Plougastel strawberries. The poissonière gives us a bag of shaved ice to keep everything cold. The caviste sells us an uncorked bottle of chilled Menetou Salon and gives us three plastic cups. We go the Plage des Curés. The picnic tables in the parking lot are filled with people. We walk down the hill to the beach and, to our surprise, find it almost empty. Apparently, people here prefer picnicking in parking lots. I’m also surprised to see that the sand at the edge is covered in what looks like toilet paper. A man with a pitchfork and a plastic bucket tells us that the toilet paper is actually dried-out algae deposited a month ago by a high “green tide”. Not the green algae that kill, we ask. Yes, he says, the same. Sea lettuce. We’ve read about this. Fertilisers and phosphorus carried by rivers to the sea. Not dangerous to humans, we’re told by the “public authorities”. Pitchfork guy disagrees, as do many people in Brittany. When they decompose, green algae release toxic ammonia and hydrogen sulphide fumes, which is why, in bays like this, thick layers deposited by high green tides are usually collected as soon as they appear. But somehow, this green tidal dump was missed.

What’s in the bucket, we ask. Sandworms, he says. For fishing. Cousins of earthworms but these live in sand. We look in the bucket. The worms are curling and uncurling vigorously. Ils bougent bien, we say. Nothing better for fishing, he says.

Worms. Remember that thunder only happening when it’s raining nonsense? It’s finally gone. As is the Stevie Wonder and Neil Diamond songs that replaced it. Worms are still there, however, but instead of plaguing my ears, they are now in my eyes — eyeworms—looping rom-com trailers brought forth by a week’s tedious trawling on Amazon Prime, now coiled intestinally around my brain, cutting off circulation to my soul.

Collect yourself, my soul, in this grave moment / and close your ear to this roar. It is the hour when the pains of the sick become bitter! These are line in the same Baudelaire poem. My soul, yours, Baudelaire’s, does it matter? The lead characters are the same. So are the sidekicks. The dotty parents. The adorable pets. See these and absorb them, but your chief focus should be the potted plants on the bookshelves. The kitchen cupboards. The curtains swaying in the autumn breeze. These might still send messages.

Further out, we see two children with their mother hunting for shrimp in the tidal pools. And after our cold, cold swim, while we eat the shrimp and fish we brought and drink the delicious wine, I get a text from my daughter—

And then, crickets. So that’s that. No extraordinary short story from Zola Mooney. Just this blank space, spread out like the cloudless sky above my head. Thankfully, we abound in choice. I hear the mower again, and Bach on the harpsichord. Dinner is being prepared downstairs. Films are being selected. I use the passive because I am not involved with these activities, as I am writing this. For you. And for myself. Are you following the situations? Outside, behind all this curtain swaying, nothing is likely to be urgent. So I’ll get back to real work tomorrow, and go for a long run down a country road or along a coastal path, and maybe drop starches and sugars entirely. In the meantime, let me close with a recent poem by Zola Mooney and a plug for her man Otis Jordan’s excellent new album Net of Atoms. His large-ensemble tour kicks off at the end of the month with the following concerts:

26/09 - Settlement Projects, Leith Walk, Edinburgh (with Tinnman & Cod O’Donnell)
27/09 - McNeills, Glasgow (with The Universal Veil)
28/09 - Nan Moor’s, Todmorden (with Rotter Otter - Matinee Show)
29/09 - The Talleyrand, Manchester (with The Universal Veil & Ike Goldman)

And now, without further ado:

LAS AGNE, by Zola Mooney

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *To put away the dishes with wet hands.With wet hands: draw dinner,Make shapes in ground beef,Cut through the continuous soundingLike through cold meat.A little too loudly, my neighbours are painting the walls, alternating red and white. Don’t theylook glum from my window, faces in limp grimace, musculature growing glutinous.I have eyes like plain white walls, operating, on several planes, several separations at once.The eye doctor says that I must spend ten seconds staring at a point in the distance everyhalf hour. Otherwise the sheets become confused, sticking together as they boil, unoiled,unevenly covered.I begin to think: will this structure hold?Can this shallow dish contain such richness,And horror,And textures, so different one from the other,As I continue, grimacing, to slopMore and more on top,Making me ill with oil, andIn need of meatless and calm.* We could all use some meatless and calm, no?

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My wife and daughter left for Paris on the 15:03 from Plouaret-Trégor. We had a picnic before—gazpacho, slices of last night’s chicken pie and a salad. While we were eating, the sun came out. We watched a man in a wet suit slip into the water with a speargun. We did not have time for a swim ourselves.

At 14:49, I dropped them off at the train station. We each said I love you and goodbye.

That was three hours ago. My wife is now attending a farewell party for a friend, a sommelier whose request for a new visa was rejected. The border police told her she has to leave Europe for 180 days. She will contest the decision but thinks it best to do so after following the rules.

My daughter is seeing former classmates who also happen to be in Paris. One lives in Berlin, another in London, and a third in Marseilles. She returns to the University of Glasgow on Tuesday. My other daughter is in Amsterdam, applying to schools. My son is in New York, awaiting a green card. I’m back at the farm in Kerangwenn, where I will stay for six weeks, writing a play with music and food — an opéra bouffe — with the composer Richard Sears about the French writer Raymond Roussel.

The farm where I am staying faces south and has a closed courtyard and covered gables. It dates from the first half of the 19th century. Its main building is faced in small, square-cut granite stones. Some of its decorative elements—the double-arched door lintels—date from the 16th century. The barns date from the second half of the 19th century. The stables probably date back to the beginning of the 20th century, as the brick window frames would seem to indicate. A smaller cottage on its eastern flank is built in squared granite rubble, with frames and cornerstones in granite ashlar.

We stayed here for three months last year. I wrote about that experience.

The farmsitters I am replacing told me that a feral cat now lives in the barns. I have not seen it. The grass needs cutting. The leaves on the chestnut tree in the courtyard have coloured. The sun is still out. I should go for a walk. The clouds are lowering and darkening. Thunder sounds in the distance. Across the courtyard, the three black sheep and Jack the goat bleat for kibble. Meanwhile, as I type these words—my first since August 12, 2024—blowflies buzz around me, attracted by the moisture and salt on my skin and the traces of food around my mouth. Their touch is intimate; they alight and lift off my face with brazen familiarity.

I am not entirely sure that they are blowflies. Perhaps they are house flies or stable flies. A blowfly is metallic green or blue. They are also called blue bottle flies. Calliphora vomitoria, so-called because they vomit excess water from the food in their crops by “bubbling,” misting whatever surface they land on. They are the type of flies you see laying eggs on decaying meat, carcasses and faeces. Their feet are filthy. They carry diseases. They are disgusting.

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,
D'où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons. — Charles Baudelaire, “Une Charogne”, Fleurs du mal, 1861

(The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,
From which came forth black battalions
Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid
All along those living tatters.—William Aggeler, “A Carcass”, The Flowers of Evil, 1954)

At the Super U in Guerlesquin barely an hour ago, I asked the fishmonger at the back of the shop to fillet a mackerel. She handled the knife deftly, but she was obviously in something of a hurry—it was nearing the end of her shift and she still had to clean her station—and as she handed the plastified paper envelope containing the fillets to me, I could see her bloodied fingerprints on it.

There was no tip jar. There were flies in the shellfish display.

I thanked her and took the blood-spattered package to the wine department, where I chose a white wine with what looked like Cyrillic words on its label. I think the wine was from Georgia, but I had left my glasses in the car, so I couldn’t make out the fine print on the back of the bottle. The only words I recognized were “Pinot” and “Grigio”. It was in the organic section, but there were no indications that it was certified organic. This is common.

I went to the meat section to look at chicken parts. The prices were high for breasts and thighs, so, instead, I chose a whole Label Rouge Breton chicken almost identical to the one I had bought and roasted two days before, in a sauce meant to replicate as best as the ingredients in the kitchen would allow the delicious roasted chicken I ate with my wife and son eight days ago in a Dominican restaurant in Washington Heights.

A year ago, I wrote this:

The town of Guerlesquin lost a third of its inhabitants between the Second World War and the 1960s, when an even larger exodus then occurred, as it did throughout Brittany, as modern farming pushed out most of the small holdings and families caught the train to Paris and stayed.

In the late 1960s, the son of the local butcher (his son owns the Super U franchise) opened a chicken slaughterhouse. By 1975, the abattoir was killing, packaging and freezing almost a million chickens a week. Over the next 20 years, the town’s population almost doubled. Then the company relocated. Then it was bought by foreigners. Then it went into receivership. Today, it has reopened, but only employs a handful of people. The streets are quiet. The original butcher shop is closed. Its facade has been painted to look like there are people in the windows. Similar paintings adorn the closed cinema and the epicerie.

Back at the Super U, I added a bag of walnuts, a courgette, a box of Medjool dates and a bag of cashews to the items I was already carrying. It was almost closing time. I returned to the wine department, returned the white wine, and selected a 2021 Haute Côtes de Nuits from a lower shelf in the organic section. It had two certification trademarks on its label.

Back at the checkout line, I realized I had forgotten to buy eggs. I put the items I was carrying in a plastic shopping basket and went to the egg section, where, after some deliberation, I chose a box of ten organic Keryann eggs.

Keryann eggs come from a farm of 9,000 chickens in Louannec, 40 kilometres north of Guerlesquin, or a farm of 12,000 chickens in Minihy-Tréguieris, 16 kilometres further east. It is one of three brands owned by Les Œufs d'Armor, a family-run company that owns five farms producing 50 million eggs annually. Les Œufs d'Armor chickens are not kept in cages. The farms control nuisance flies by dispursing the pupae of parasitic mini-wasps around the areas where the flies breed.

I returned to the cashier and laid out the items on the conveyor belt according to their sturdiness and weight—chicken first, mackerel last. I had brought my own plastified shopping bag, on which was printed a smiling cartoon cow standing on her back two feet with her front two spread out imploringly, as if asking the question printed above her head: Je suis végetarienne… Pas vous?

I saw cow feet on menus in Brooklyn last week.

I positioned myself at the end of the supermarket checkout.

“Ah,” the young cashier said, holding up the courgette.

“Ah,” I said. “Il faut la peser.”

She nodded, and her smile broadened. “Vous avez le temps?”

“Oui, oui,” I said. I took the courgette and jogged back to the weighing station. I searched for the word “courgette” and its depiction on the touchscreen above the scale. Vegetables were listed on the top, fruits on the bottom. Neither list was in alphabetical order. Finally, after several long seconds, I found “courgette” and pressed it. Then I realized I had to put the courgette on the scale first and only then press the “courgette” button. This I did. The machine spat out the price ticket. I stuck it to the back of my hand and ran back to the cashier. She was still smiling. To my relief, so too was the man behind me in the checkout line.

The cashier used her barcode reader to read the ticket, which was still stuck to the back of my hand. This felt oddly intimate.

“Vous voulez que je le prenne?” she asked. For some reason, I said “non” and stuck the courgette price ticket inside the shopping bag.

“Avez-vous la carte Super U?” she asked.

“Non,” I said. I waved my phone at her. She understood. We completed the transaction using Apple Pay.

“Vous avez besoin du ticket?”

“Non, merci.”

We said goodbye.

It is still not raining. The skies have cleared. The weather app is unreliable. I should have gone to the coast for a swim. I cannot find the courgette price ticket. I have no idea what the courgette cost. I have no idea when I started calling courgettes courgettes instead of zucchinis. Just now, however, I remember the moment I decided a month ago to take a break from writing in preparation for the Roussel project. I need two weeks off, I wrote:

Now, two weeks past that announced date, the sound of the leaves outside, the thunder in the distance and the buzzing wings of the flies landing and taking off from my face and hands drown out what little voice my thoughts might still possess. I appear to be entirely bereft of any words of substance. Or perhaps I have merely left this too long? Will anything come? Am I empty? The political realms everywhere are rife with danger. The counterfactuals of History are becoming reality. The weather, too, sucks. The rain has come. It is chucking down. It looks like it will never stop.

Meanwhile, the nuisance flies have left. In my present’s sprawling narrative, they represented the small yet profoundly irritating forces that I could never control. The unavoidable, the maddeningly persistent elements that disrupted my carefully constructed sense of self.

Now, they, like the cat, seem to have disappeared. Were they ever here? Will they return? How can we know? Does it matter? They demand all my undivided attention, even in their absence. They force me to confront the uncomfortable reality that not everything can be neatly categorized or managed, or known or seen or understood. Their presence and absence are reminders of the larger, more complex dance between order and chaos, and control and surrender. In this sense, they are not just a nuisance—they are the guiding principles of life itself, tiny studies of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, buzzing challenges to overcome turpitude and find meaning in the seemingly meaningless.

Perhaps it is time to eat something. Perhaps I am hungry. According to the chef André Guillot, on most weekdays in the 1920s, Raymond Roussel—who hardly anyone read when he was alive (1877-1933) and even fewer read today but who profoundly influenced the art and writing of Dadaists, Surrealists, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, OULIPOists like Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau and, especially, the poetry of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Mark Ford, sat alone in his dining room and was served, from 12:30 to 17:30, all the meals of the day. Breakfast, elevenses, lunch, gouter, dinner, souper—20-35 courses of heavy French bourgeoise dishes, with paired wines, pastries and desserts throughout, and always started with fresh fruit from his estate in the Alpes-Maritimes (he lived at the time almost 1,000 kilometres north in a giant mansion just outside of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine) delivered by a continuous convoy of Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts.

Here is a typical menu:

Did Raymond Roussel eat all these dishes? We do not—cannot—know. We, however, hope to serve them, along with a delectable assortiment of musical and theatrical accompaniment, sometime in the spring of 2025. Watch this space for details. In the meantime, what can I say? Steer clear of roadkill. Enjoy the company of your loved ones. Exercise regularly. Stay dry.

And keep both eyes on the cat.

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Bruno Guenard, Wolf Eel, date unknownA sad thing it was, no doubt, very sad; but we can’t mend it. Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter; and, as it is impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purposes, let us treat it aesthetically and see if it will turn to account in that way. — Thomas De Quincey, “Murder as One of the Fine Arts”, 1827

We smugly left Paris before the Olympic Games started. The people who stayed behind are now even smugger. That’s the thing about smugness. It’s not only ridiculous sounding, it’s a ridiculous cognitive bias, not unlike the Dunning–Kruger effect, except, instead of ridiculous people being so ridiculous they don’t know they're ridiculous, it’s ridiculously vain people being at least four times more ridiculous than that.

Buddhist doctrine identifies it as mada, one of the twenty subsidiary unwholesome mental factors. I don’t know about that. But then, I don’t know much about anything. But what I do know is what I like, and what I think. I was going to write about novelty — the value of saying something original or unusual — and how in the vague fog of ideas in which we shroud ourselves, there is nothing new, and though that nothing comes from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) and creation is, paradoxically, ongoing (creatio continua), it is imperative to keep in mind just how critical reflection, accident, mixture, separation and mutation are, especially in writing, and, I guess, music, and art, especially in their most avant-garde forms, which, now, ironically, feel ridiculously old and stuffy. I was also going to write about long Covid and paradigm changes in the history of ideas and the philosophy of mind, and C.S. Pierce’s description of evolution by either fortuitous variation, mechanical necessity, or creative love, and how this third mode — creative love — which Pierce called the agapastic mode, requires the adoption of certain mental tendencies, “not altogether heedlessly… nor quite blindly by the mere force of circumstances or of logic… but by

an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possesses it by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity of mind; and this mental tendency may be of three varieties, as follows. First, it may affect a whole people or community in its collective personality, and be thence communicated to such individuals as are in powerfully sympathetic connection with the collective people, although they may be intellectually incapable of attaining the idea by their private understandings or even perhaps of consciously apprehending it. Second, it may affect a private person directly, yet so that he is only enabled to apprehend the idea, or to appreciate its attractiveness, by virtue of his sympathy with his neighbours, under the influence of a striking experience or development of thought. The conversion of St. Paul may be taken as an example of what is meant. Third, it may affect an individual, independently of his human affections, by virtue of an attraction it exercises upon his mind, even before he has comprehended it. This is the phenomenon which has been well called the divination of genius; for it is due to the continuity between the man’s mind and the Most High.

I was also thinking about writing about the wild animals I saw last month: three grey whales, a humpback whale, five black bears, five river otters, two deer, two seals, a sea lion, some robins, some house finches, three Stellar jays, dozens of bald eagles, two ospreys, many crows, ravens and magpies, many hummingbirds, many sparrows, many pigeons, many seagulls, a few snakes, one rat, one jellyfish, dozens of crabs, hundreds of sea urchins, thousands of anemones, one sea cucumber, three squirrels, and countless chitons, starfish, banana slugs, caterpillars, earwigs, earthworms, bees, flies and mosquitoes. Add to this the wild animals I only heard — thrushes, woodpeckers, olive-sided flycatchers, yellow-rumped warblers and dark-eyed junkos — and those I ate — spring and sockeye salmon, halibut, black cod, ling cod, eel, tuna, butterfish, prawns, oysters, moose and two unidentified bugs swallowed during forest trail runs in Pacific Spirit Park.

Then I started noticing how more people were leaving lids and seats in public toilets up. At least in this part of the world. So I quite naturally started thinking about saying something about whether the leaving of seats and lids up or down was the right thing to do, the proper protocol, the thoughtful gesture, the most hygienic, because, well, I have to say, it has become complicated, especially in the new gender-inclusive context.

Then an old friend, let’s call him Virgil1, took me on a voyage through Hell, let’s call it the Downtown Eastside.

We were accompanied by a new friend, a photographer from Okinawa2 with the Kanji characters 禅 — zen — tattooed on his left arm. This is thought to be a transliteration of the Sanskrit word dhyana, which means “to consider quietly.” Which, I have to say, was precisely what we were doing. Not just quietly, in absolute silence. It was and is, I have to say, too much to comment on.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Who, even with untrammeled words and manyattempts at telling, ever could recountin full the blood and wounds that I now saw?—Inferno 28*

I have to say. Why? I have to say used to mean I have to admit, signalling a concession — a weakness in one’s reasoning, a deviation from one’s usual stance, an exception to one’s general belief — often accompanied by a feeling of surprise that this was the case. Now, it’s just empty filler. Or, at best, it means I have to say, as in having a say, as in I feel compelled to express an opinion. Unlike the older, better, less confusing “I must say,” which we use to emphasize a critical remark, such as: “I must say, I don’t give a shit what you have to say.”

Leave a comment

Is it just me, or am I hearing “I have to say” more often? Or is its use more prevalent in the excessively punditized part of the world — North America, where I’ve been holed up since June — than elsewhere? Why would this be? I have to admit, I’m mystified.

Up, I think, is the correct position. Seat and lid. I don’t have to say this, but I will. Seat and lid, seat and lid, an eternal repetition of unalterable sequences.

Virgil introduces Tonaki and me to a guy on East Hastings (Inferno, Canto XXVIII), Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Genoa, 14th century, Bodleian Library.I once overheard a woman in this part of the world opine: “If I were a cattle farmer and this was my herd, I would cull the bottom third. They’re too far gone, nothing can save them. The rest, touch and go. Build new barns, give them extra feed, hope for the best.”

How many can be saved? Saved for what? The slaughterhouse? Words get the job done, but they are not for the faint of heart. They tether people to what they believe is real — love, Israel, sex, death, capital, Wagner, oil on canvas, off the port quarter — and they just as quickly cripple and enslave as heal and liberate. Think of the mirror, the first time — seeing yourself, yet seeing another; seeing another, yet seeing yourself. This first face-to-face confrontation with one’s self is as dark and soul-piercing as it gets. Or so, I have to say, I have been told.

I have to say. Do you have to listen? Of course not. I no longer read opinion pieces. Should you? Probably not. I still enjoy reading other people’s private journals, but I don’t keep one myself because I don’t find anything about my life even remotely interesting — certainly not worth recording for posterity — especially my so-called inner thoughts. Inside and out, I bore myself stiff. If I could give myself the slip, I would.

I find myself, in truth, like Dante, “on the brink of a valley of a sad abyss that gathers the thunder of an infinite howling.” It is so dark, and deep, and clouded that I can see nothing by staring into its depths. I suppose that’s why I drink.

[Probably not the best moment to hit you up, but:

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]

As for dreams — mine, not yours, yours fascinate me, just as you fascinate me, and I will hang on your every word, should you decide to leave a comment) — if I don’t pay attention to what I think and do in my semi-conscious life, why pick through the overflow rubbish mouldering in my unconscious?

I sure as shit won’t write it down.

Last night’s dream, however, was different. I sensed this as soon as it pushed out of me at 5:12 a.m., as abrupt and violent as the wolf eel that, a half-century before, lunged from its creviced lair when I was swimming in the sandstone shallows off Tribune and sunk its fangs into my flank, puncturing my liver.

I tried to ignore it — not the eel, the eel was unignorable — and go back to sleep and, through deep breathing and the alphabet hack, stop the ear-worming soundtrack that accompanied it —

Oh, thunder only happens when it's rainin'
Players only love you when they're playin'

— just as it has accompanied every waking and sleeping moment, including this one, since I heard the song from which it spawned performed, with naked and touching sincerity, on an open-mike night at the Bamfield Wreckage three weeks before. An Eagles song, I thought. Yet, when I tried to find it — to listen to it from start to finish — for this is how I am told one rids one’s self and soul of earworms — the entering of “thunder”, “raining”, and “Eagles” produced this:

I gazed at the screen. It was raining. A bald eagle shrieked from its nest at the top of the cedar tree above our bed. My heart froze. Then I saw, at the bottom of the screen:

I closed the laptop. “I need silence,” I thought, half-conscious, the ghost square of afterimaged screen light still flashing in my closed eyes. “And peace. And, above all, sleep.” None of these was to be mine, however, so instead, I re-opened the screen (which, by the way, has about ten times more germs on it than a toilet seat, including faecal bacteria and E. coli) and clicked into a new post page on Substack — this very page — and wrote down the dream that had awakened me using these very words, not entirely in this order but precisely in this form from this point on:

I have been forced to close down Hexagon because of something I wrote or said — I’m not sure which. It had something to do with Buddhism. The reaction to it wasn’t online; it was in a public place crowded with witnesses. Circling the witnesses were hundreds of bystanders, and beyond them, at least a thousand onlookers.

[Remember, this was a dream.]

What the Buddhist thing was, I cannot say. I did not kill any of the animals listed above. This could be construed as a Buddhist thing: “I shall abstain from destroying any breathing beings.” Nor did I see or hear their killing or request it. But I have killed animals in the past. And I have witnessed the death of other animals, and heard their struggles and screams. There is a story about the Buddha and a swan, which Wagner cribbed for Parsifal. Siddhartha’s cousin sees a swan flying overhead and shoots it out of the sky. The boys run to get the swan. Siddhartha is faster. He reaches the bird first and finds it alive. He looks into its eyes, and a flash of recollection overcomes him — he, too, once, had himself been a swan. A great sadness grips his heart. He gently pulls the arrow from the great swan’s wing, staunches its wounds with leaves, whispers prayers to it and soothes it with soft strokes of his gentle hand. His cousin arrives, breathless. “Give me my bird, I shot it down, it belongs to me,” he says. “No,” says Siddhartha. “It is not yours. It belongs to the sky, to which it will return as soon as it recovers. Until then, it is mine, as I have saved its life.” His cousin protests. “Then we shall go the Court of the Elders and ask to whom the swan belongs,” says Siddhartha. The cousin agrees, and off they go to the Court to tell them of their quarrel. The Elders announce their decision: “A life must belong to the man who tries to save it, not to he who tries to destroy it. By right, the wounded bird belongs to Siddhartha.”

In another story, the Buddha, reborn as a rabbit, offers his body as a gift to a hungry beggar by springing up and “like a royal swan alighting on a cluster of lotuses in an ecstasy of joy”, throwing himself unto a blazing fire. But the fire does not burn the rabbit. Doesn’t even singe it.

“Good Brahmin,” it says to the beggar, “the fire is icy-cold: it fails to heat even the pores of the hair on my body. What is the meaning of this?”

“Wise sir, I am no brahmin. I am Sakka, the king of the gods, and I have come to put your virtue to the test." The rabbit replies, “If not only you, Sakka, but all the inhabitants of the world were to try to test me in this matter, they would never find me unwilling to give.” And with this, he utters a cry of exultation like a lion roaring.

Achieving enlightenment — an exultant state of inner peace and wisdom — is a Buddhist thing. Not killing, not stealing, not misusing sexual energy, not lying, not indulging in intoxicants — these, too, are Buddhist things, as are mindfulness (sati), keen investigation of the dhamma (dhammavicaya), energy (viriya), rapture or happiness (piti), calm (passaddhi), concentration (samadhi) and equanimity (upekkha). Then there is the twelve-linked chain of causality, which starts with ignorance (avidyā), which gives rise to action (samskāra), which causes consciousness (vijnāna), which in turn causes name and form (nāma-rūpa), which bring into play the six sensory organs (shad-āyatana) which cause contact (sparsha), which causes sensation (vedanā), which causes desire (trishnā), whichcauses attachment (upadāna), whichcauses existence (bhava); which brings about birth (jāti); which spawns ageing, which leads to death (jarā-marana).

“How could you be so stupid,” hissed someone from Substack. A top brass guy, not hiding his animosity. He loathes me, I thought, but why? What have I done? Until now, just now on these very pages, I have never publicly discussed Buddhism. I’m hardly an expert now, though I’ve certainly since learned a thing or two, but at the time of the dream, I was ignorant, stuck fast at the first link in the chain of causality, which is the cycle of delusion and the source of all suffering. I felt awful and sorry, and I expressed this; I was very apologetic, and although my apologies were sincere, the crowd pressed closer, braying and hissing, forcing me to stumble backwards in retreat over the uneven ground beneath my feet.

Then another Substack person appeared, a woman in her late 30s. She was livid. And beautiful. And smart. And overwrought. This was the main word that came to mind at the time — overwrought — and I felt terrible about using it — thinking it, dreaming it — because it’s as misogynistic a slur as “hysterical” — and typical for a man like me to use to describe a woman like her.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she shrieked, her face contorted with rage. “Especially in the context of the Buddhist thing!”

Now here you go again
You say you want your freedom
Well, who am I to keep you down?
It's only right that you should
Play the way you feel it
But listen carefully
To the sound of your loneliness

How can you suspend consciousness with Stevie Nicks looping 47-year-old nonsense in your ear?

Recap: I did not know what the Buddhist thing was, but I knew I was supposed to, and this embarrassed me, for whatever it was, judging by the seething crowd around me, it was a source of collective trauma and great shame. It had rocked Substack on its heels, along with the millions of people who use it. Everyone knew this. Except me. I was too selfish, too cosseted, too far up my own ass to have bothered to keep track of what of importance was happening around me. The Buddhist thing had blown up, and I had made it worse.

“I don’t know,” I said meekly. “I don’t remember.”

This produced even louder shrieks from the seething crowd.

“Do you want me to…” I started, but couldn’t think of the right word to finish the question. Quit? Resign? Stop?

The woman snorted, came close and said, “Not only that, you’re never going to write about this or talk about it. Anywhere. To anyone.” She swung her arm in a wide circling flourish, and her hand caught me on the chin, by accident probably, but it startled me just the same; and by now, the seething, hissing, wolf-eel faced crowd had pressed in too, but some of the faces were starting to change, as if becalmed. Were they now on my side? Suddenly, somehow, the momentum seemed to be shifting in my direction. I was on the right side, and because of this, I became righteous, as was my right, and more than a little smug, because it felt good, but I was having difficulty articulating this new and novel position. For two reasons: one, because I wasn’t capable of being articulate, I was tongue-tied and stupid; and two, because I didn’t know what had happened, what I had written, except that it was outrageous in the context of the Buddhist thing. I found this weird and wildly unfair.

He who knows doesn’t speak. He who speaks doesn’t know. In the context of the Buddhist thing — just now, an image, a yellow robe, and beneath it, my old, grubby sneakers.

A jet now, overhead, contrailing keywords — “thunder”, “raining” “who am I”, “mad”, “lost” — from the lyrics to “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. The birds in the cedars and hemlocks above my bed began singing Greek choruses. Something was falling through me. My grip on who I was and what the world was was disappearing. Was I becoming Buddha, one of those mountaintop monks, nothing growing but hair and nails? Or a rabbit readying to jump on red-hot coals? Or an islander waiting for a cargo plane to come down from the heavens bearing gifts from the gods? All this, all these words, the lighting of fires along fake runways, sitting in a wooden box under a bamboo transmitter, wearing coconut headphones?

A celebrated handful of Nachi monks became Buddha by running up and down a mountain and eating nothing but nuts for a thousand days until every impurity and ounce of fat had been cleansed and burned away. Then, they sat in the lotus position in a sealed cave deep inside the mountain, surrounded by candles, until their skin became parchment dry. Some drank lacquer through a bamboo straw, turning their guts into glass.

Did they feel smug?

I tried again: “I don’t know what happens in the schoolyard, the alley, the hallway…” I kept trying to find the right spatial metaphor. Perhaps I was influenced by Virgil’s recounting of his recent dream — which he wrote down — about being in a hallway entirely composed of beautifully built doors, each leading to different possibilities. But I had no exit points, no instruments, no concepts, no means to measure or escape the structure of the world.

Philosophy, Peirce stated:

…contends itself with a more attentive scrutiny and comparison of the facts of everyday life, such as present themselves to every adult and sane person, and for the most part in every day an hour of his life.

Suddenly, C. was at my side—not to support me, but because she was angry at me for covering our front hallway and atrium (which was not our actual hallway, and we do not have an atrium) with figurative paintings and tableaux, which I thought were excellent, but she thought were awful. She especially didn’t like one face, which she pointed at and said, “And this guy? A cook?” And then she stomped off.

I repainted everything — white — and again, got the momentum back and started to feel smug because the result, again, was excellent. But only one other person saw it — my friend Jean-Phi, a seismic engineer who was coming over for a drink.

And then, enraptured by this thought, I woke up. And tried to go back to sleep.

Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
And what you lost

And then wrote this down.

And decided it was time to take a couple of weeks off.

—BAMFIELD, B.C., 12 August 2024

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1https://www.instagram.com/astigmatic.surveyors.society/

2https://www.instagram.com/tonaki_ing/

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *He could hear Beethoven: Black yew, white cloud, The horrific complications. Finger-traps—a tumult of keys.* — Sylvia Plath Page from Beethoven’s Conversation Book1.

Beethoven’s neighbours called him “The Spaniard” because of his turbulent temperament, short stature and swarthy pigmentation. His grandmother, like Goya's, was Basque.

In 1798, he began to lose his hearing, five years after Goya lost his. Soon, he could not hear the upper registers of sound — a girl singing, the trilling blackbirds in the trees, a shepherd playing the pipe during a walk in the country, or his own Spanish guitar. Conducting became a bewildering farce, the baton waving madly, the musicians thrown from the beat into confusion and chaos. Soon, he could no longer hear the lower registers, except with a pencil in his mouth, with the other end pushed up against the soundboard to feel the note’s vibration between his front teeth. Soon, he could not hear whether his students were progressing or the music he was writing, the sound of the strings, or the different movements and rhythms of the motifs, except in his imagination.

Soon, he could hear nothing.

“Ah, how could I admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others.”

This is from one of Beethoven's Conversation Books, which hung around his neck: “Paper. Barber’s razor. Archduke’s receipt. Watch. Suspenders. Blotting paper. Shoe-horn for Karl. Chamber pot.”

This is from one of Goya’s: 1 barrel from Navarra, 1 local barrel (not soured or adulterated, please!), salt cod, and anchovies.

Neither would survive in this world. They believed no pleasure should be forbidden, provided it caused no harm. They believed in an immaterial life force beyond language transcending every conception. They increasingly saw the world as a dark funnel. They emptied bottles of wine at breakfast. They roamed the streets, muttering and moaning off-key. They visited brothels and bought sex from streetwalkers. They had florid, froward, bellowing faces and wild hair that they packed inside hats — when they remembered to wear them. For this, they were stared at in astonishment. They said everything in such loud voices that those with them would cringe, and passersby would look at them with alarm as if they were monstrous brutes or deranged — which they were. They showed signs of paranoia. They entered into states of manic exaltation. They were prone to fits of sudden rage and violent shifts of mood.

Like most artists of the period — or any period — they were enamoured of power. Which, then as now, was most often wealth, circulating in its tokenised form as money. The potential scarcity of which, and the worries this engendered, were their common currency.

They practised the art of pleasing. They were consummate toadies and fawners. They disdained the clergy but kissed the rings and grovelled for commissions. Their relationship with the ruling class was as reciprocally dependent as it was advantageous. The perceived value of their art enhanced their patrons' status and cultural influence, and their patrons' status and cultural influence enhanced the perceived value of their art.

They were the same height as Napoleon, whom they initially believed was the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, the sole modern successor to the great consuls who brought freedom and world domination to Ancient Rome.

“Composo per celebrare la memoria di un grande uomo, il ‘Prometeo’ della nostra epoca” is the phrase the composer scrawled on the frontispiece of his Third Symphony, which we know as Eroica, just beneath the composition's title, “Grande Sinfonia Intitolata Bonaparte,” and above his Italianised name, “Luigi van Beethoven.”

A day later, informed by his secretary that the “Prometheus of our times” had crowned himself Emperor, Beethoven scratched out “Bonaparte”, rubbing so hard he tore through the page.

“Is he then just another ordinary mensch? Now, he, too, will trample on all human rights and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others and become a tyrant!”

They expressed revolutionary ideals, but only when they were judicious. They favoured at least the concept of freedom but performed for tyrants and nobles. They dressed like them and imitated their voice and manners. They taught their children. They lived on their table scraps.

Beethoven's nobiliary participle, his van, like Goya's de, points to the vaunting yearning of his self-image. Unlike Goya's de, Beethoven's van already existed—his father and grandfather used it. However, he sought to give it new gloss in the salons of Vienna, where he loudly lay claim to Dutch baronial lineage.

In reality, both their father were middle-class drunks.

Only an annuity from an Archduke and two Princes kept Beethoven from accepting, in 1809, the offer of Napoleon’s brother Jérome, the first king of the new kingdom of Westphalia, to become the kapellmeister of Kassel. Goya's fortunes were equally mercenary. His court pension was maintained and raised by the French invaders of 1808. In 1810, he was commissioned to paint official portraits of Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte, the new King of Spain. When the French were routed and forced to decamp in 1812, Goya rubbed out Joseph’s faces and replaced them with those of Wellington and Fernando VII.

They were victims of the phrenology craze sweeping Europe. Their heads were lost within days of their deaths, which were less than a year apart.

Bernardí Roig, La Cabeza de Goya, 2020Subscribe now

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However much the old navigators’ names are entitled to respect, good taste would lead us at the present date to adopt the Indian names that, in most instances, are much prettier, many of them having a natural beauty of sound… Great Britain’s Colonies have enough Royal names, noble names, and titles of our grandfathers and grandmothers and birthplace names… let us differ from our neighbours of Washington Territory, with their Websters, Pierces, Madisons and Monroes and Jeffersons attached to every little group of log shanties that rise out of the bush.—William “Eddy” Banfield, Daily Victoria Gazette, 1858, from Tofino and Clayaquot Sound: A History, by Margaret Horsfield and Ian Kennedy, 2014.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *these place names, then, these named placesYou are no doubt too young to remember when Egypt became (the) United Arab Republic, first with Syria as a full partner and then, very loosely, with Yemen, and then, after their disastrous performance against Israel, just by itselfAnd whatever happened to (the) Trucial States, and (the) Trucial Coast before that, and South Arabia (Hadhramaut), and Muscat and Oman? And why did all these nations change their names in 1970-71? Nixon? Was it Nixon? Is Nixon once again the answer? Nixon.*

What most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant.—Herman Melville, 1851

The view from the sunlit window: more European starlings with bright yellow bills crowding out the home-born birds. Who is to say they do not belong here? Who is to say what is right or fair or true anymore?

“Don’t hide your light,” they used to tell us. Why the fuck not? Squelch it, I say.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *We are more solicitous that men speak of us, said Montaigne, than how they speak: and it is enough for us that our names are often mentioned, be it after what manner it will. To which Rousseau responded thus: “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”*

Montaigne. Moontaigne. Seven planes up there today, streaming stitches in a blue toile, now the colours rising with the setting sun. The Olympics next week. Remember the Japanese gymnast with the broken knee on the pommel horse in Montreal, dismounting perfectly, barely flinching? Nine-point-five from the judges. Then the rings, eight feet in the air, a double somersault to a perfect two-point landing, arms raised in a perfect finish, dislocating his already cracked knee cap and ripping the ligaments in his right leg but still throwing his arms up into the air, perfection itself, or close enough for the judges, a golden nine-point-seven, then collapsing in writhing agony on the orange mat, hobbled for life.

It is enough to make you want to spit fire.

I have isolated the tooth pain; it is linked to the tuneless state of the piano. Every key strike sends ripping pain into the centre core of my skull. The safest place and position here is a fetal crouch in the bathroom door frame. But I am not interested in the safest place. I am interested in the fact that I suffered another blackout this morning. When I came to, I was not lying in bed or in my vomit on a sidewalk but standing on my feet in a very warm brown corduroy suit within earshot of the roaring crowd in the Stade de France. Blackness, then bam! Standing—no, walking—pockets empty, Monoprix receipt clutched in the fingers of my right hand, a vegan burger in my left. A crowd of people, a loud clattering chattering crowd, flowing faster than me, pushing past me and around me. It was hot. I had no idea how I got there or who had dressed me in brown corduroy. Vegan? A slim woman in a Missoni dress stepped in front, stopped, and frowned. She looked familiar.

“You ok?” Her face at the angle of quizzicality. The strangers around us stopped and watched.

“Yes. You?” This was all I could muster. Sweat brain breath breasts beauty response, eyes swinging-ing-ing wildly, incapable of focus. The Triple Jump: Run, step, hop—absurd!

She moved on, dissatisfied, I suppose, and I blacked out again. Came to here an hour ago, still standing, watching the crowds. Someone is banging metal against metal. A horrible sound. How much time has passed? There are new specialized isotopes used in brain imaging that will reveal this sort of thing. Mis-folded proteins: beta-amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Cigarettes in my shirt pocket: do I smoke? Again?

The street, for too long a dwelling for demons and a haunt for every unclean bird, was swept clean during the rain last night by a sudden gushing torrent of gutter water. The sound woke me, the swift purl of dislodged refuse sluicing past the parked cars and slapping into the leaves and worms packed into the grates of the drains. Now the morning sun is brightly out and everything sparkles, including these thoughts, which, until last night, were as caked in dirt and bogged down in filth as the sewers outside. The parallel between outside and insde—in here, in what I am feeling—is uncanny.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Now the drains are clear and the fluids run fresh and every patterning perception is become a swan, sailing confidently on the widest span of wings. I see—I judge—everything, with the most intense and invigorating lucidity from the trembling of the earth beneath these tired feetto the graceful dance of whales in the ocean to the odour of the orange and red roses at the window to the coolest layers of gas at the absolute ceiling of aircraft flight…*

Words on a page. Drunk on a sidewalk. It is truly a day worth venturing out into. The Missoni woman, too, is excited. She wants to shop, sit somewhere, listen to music, mend the holes in some socks and sketch the most interesting faces in the crowds of passers-by.

“Why not just take their photographs?”

“Not the same, is it?”

The first is a woman with a long dog face pushing a military-grade baby pram. Not so interesting, but the likeness is good. Then, a woman in Chanel strides past.

“But you,” I shout at the woman, startling everyone, “who do you say I am?”

The woman looks up, also startled. Did she hear? I move towards her. I have been drinking since noon. The Missoni woman can thread a needle bare-eyed, astonishing to watch, two thin brown arms falling together as if banging an invisible cymbal. Reminds me of Leonard Bernstein for some reason. At this precise moment her hands separate, and the right one plunges the needle into my thigh. At least, that is what this feels like. I do not crumble to the pavement. I do not black out. But something freezes me. I have only nine intact teeth left in my head. I have very recently entirely evacuated my bowels. “May I defecate in that small room over there?” I asked the proprietor of the café, pointing at his washroom. He looked at me in horror.

Washroom. Who says that? The air now is extremely fresh. Vital the word, the perfect word. The walkers-by, now, can they see this, and sense this? Human dignity, what could it possibly have to do with bodily functions? Do whales hold their breath or absorb the air directly into their veins? They are mammals, but what exactly are mammals? What determines mammal-ness? Warm blood, milk, hair? Live hatch-less, un-egged birth?

“I think I might have lice.”

My skull had been twitching inside and out.

“Can’t we just sit here?” asked the Missoni woman.

“It’s a free country. We can do what we like.”

“Why are you shouting?”

“Why are you wearing a black lace bra under a pink shirt and an iridescent blue mini dress with gold leggings and white plastic stiletto boots?”

Distance and propinquity, motion and rest, darkness and light, solidity and colour, form and position. These and her innocence—and, I suppose, her beauty, which is, as they say, unspeakable, effing ineffable and undeniable—are among the key elements semi-contained in this present picture of the Missoni woman rising from the chair so quickly that a kaleidoscope of blood spiders across the edges of her vision and she has to brace her weight against the patio table with both arms. The espresso in the cup on the table spills, extinguishing my cigarette and soaking this notebook, making the ink of these words run down the page. I do my best to mop up the liquid; one, two, three passes with a paper napkin. A shaft of light catches her hair, illuminating the blue gloss. She turns to face the light and closes her eyes. The grace of her movements is impossible to describe. Somewhere far above, she thinks, the Americans are orbiting the earth. There is a Japanese on board, a payload specialist. She breathes in slowly, curling her toes, feeling the breath rising through her body to her eyes, which open as the pressurized air reaches the back of the sockets. She thinks about water. She repeats the word water. I write it with my finger into the palm of her hand. This is our chosen mantra for the day. Water, water, water. She thinks about the dirt washed down the street in the night. She thinks about the migrating geese that fly over the Himalayan summits twice a year—at night, when the cooled air packs more oxygen. She thinks of the vultures I told her about at dinner—sucked into a jet engine over the Côte d'Ivoire in November 1974 at an altitude of thirty-seven thousand feet.

She thinks about the Nazis. She thinks about the music they loved. She thinks about the orbiter skipping like a stone across the outer meniscus of the troposphere. She thinks about the phoenix, not rising from the flames but lighting them, fanning them with its giant wings, annihilating its nest, cremating itself.

Drunk man with the baby pram now, trying to cross in the middle the street, almost getting hit by a vehicle.

“Hey!”

“Asshole!”

“ Get him!”

“Get off the fucking street!”

He bolts, disappears around the corner, leaving the pram behind.

The phoenix is unique,
It has a long beak
Pierced with holes like a flute—
It never mates, its love is absolute.
When death draws near, the death bird sings
And fans the air with its giant wings.

Last night’s quake:the tremors shook us from top to bottom. Everything froze. Everything freezes, even the facts congeal and the flesh trembles, the data packets grip the throat and rise to the eyes in quick continuous jolts. It is hard to remember the precise sequence of how everything unfolds. Is baseball an important element? Hasit ever been an Olympic event? What about frisbee golf? Frisbee is a WHAM-O product. I sometimes wonder if my mind does not just make stuff up. I go to sleep. I wake up. Where are we at in the intelligence cycle? Are we still collecting, or have we started processing? The orbiter is namedafter the command module of Apollo 15, which in turn was named after the ship James Cook captained on his first voyage of discovery. Hence, the British spelling. The Endeavour.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Endeavour to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired.*

That bit is from The Wasteland, I think. T.S. Eliot. An American who remade himself a Brit. And this is when she sees the face at the window. She gasps. The sketching pencil falls to the ground. The face disappears. Did she see it? To see it properly, to represent it as something near to her with the full effect of nature, is impossible, unless she looks at it at the exact distance and height and direction where the eye or the point of sight was placed in producing it. Does this make sense? I have been working on this for hours. The Moon Shot. The The Money Shot. Mooney Shot. The Germans were the first to pierce the stratosphere, during the First World War. A shell fired on Good Friday seventy-five miles east of Paris travelled twenty-five miles into the air before descending into the roof of a church—St-Gervais-et-St-Protais—killing seventy souls and wounding eighty-eight. Four hundred such shells hit the city, cratering streets, parks and rooftops. Gerald Bull describes this in Paris Kanonen: The Paris Guns (Wilhelmgeschutze) and Project HARP (1988), two years before his assassination at the hands of the Mossad.

Nowadays, that church is mostly empty.

“I saw Pat's new red suit, which she had purchased especially for this trip, being splotched, and what made it worse was that some of the spit was dirty brown, coming from a tobacco-chewing crowd.”— Richard Nixon, 1962

Newborn Bard of the Holy Ghost: a sculpture was sent up with Apollo 15, Nixon did not know this— “It’s better that he doesn’t,” said William Safire—a small human figure cast from aluminium and titled Fallen Astronaut/Cosmonaut—so called because they couldn’t get it to stand up. Scott parked the rover and snuck off camera to position the sculpture in the moon dust next to a plaque with the names of the dead. They smuggled commemorative stamps on board, hidden in their spacesuits. Two years earlier, Buzz Aldrin performed a sacrament—Holy Communion—again, off camera: “I am the vine, you are the branches,” he read. “Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit, for you can do nothing without me.” The wine was from Texas, as was the chalice it was poured into—“in the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup”—as was the Eucharist. These were the first liquids and solids consumed on the moon.

Ironically, in 1776, the Endeavour, decommissioned, sold, and renamed the Lord Sandwich, was used to embark British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries to North America to help defeat the colonial militia. It was subsequently anchored at Newport, where it served as a prison ship until the end of the war. Were the prisoners treated well? I doubt it, for some reason.

Actually, rechecking the tapes, Nixon knew about Fallen Astronaut/Cosmonaut.

“Is the artist a Democrat?”

“No, he’s Belgian.”

“OK, fine.”

A sandwich. Lord. If ever we fall down it's there, on how things look, the surface appearance of even the simplest things. All animals perceive surfaces, but only humans can read the markings on those surfaces—these words, for example, or these photographs, or the images on a screen, or patterns on a woman’s skirt and blouse, or the lines gouged into the bark of the tree out the window. These were the questions we were asking back then. Can we truly see and understand the world through a picture? What’s it like for the first-time viewer? Can we restore cortexes to a more chaste state, to a form of visual virginity? Some of the WHAM-O research took this direction—a closed path consisting of repeating nodes. Nixon liked to tell the story of the explorer who showed a roomful of “naïve observers”—Chadian tribesmen—a slide of an elephant. The projected image of the charging animal appears on the wall, and everyone flees in terror. Yet, shown a photo of her son, the Daza mother, no matter how long she looks, can never see anything beyond a smudge on a piece of paper. How is this possible? Nixon, ironically, the perfect example. A head for the whole but no eye for the details of which it is composed. We still under-estimate this, still waste our accumulated energies and expertise.

“For one priceless moment,” Nixon had said, over the phone, his words, not Safire’s, in “the most historic phone call ever made,” as he liked to call it. “For one priceless moment in the history of man all people on this planet are truly one.” But he wasn't a part of it. He didn't really know what was at stake or to what extent he was right. He wasn't there at the moment of commitment when the umbilical arms were pulled back, the nearest people some five long miles away, the bravest of the brave alone, buckled into the nose of a tin can, waiting, praying, ready to die, their last vision the flag out Collin's rear right window flapping and snapping in the stiff breeze at the top of the scaffolding. Bill and I spent hours banging out a catastrophe speech: “Fate has ordained that these men who went in peace will stay to rest in peace. These brave men know that there is no hope for their recovery, blah, blah, and are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.” Nixon refused to even look at it. Fate has ordained fuck, he said. Truth and understanding, my ass, he said. Just make it happen and get them home again. He never thought much of Bill, not just because of what he was (the anti-Semite stuff about Nixon? Mostly smokescreen.) but because he was from Agnew's camp. “Spiro’s fucking Biro,” he called him, “too worried about words to understand issues.” Which was funny, because Nixon obsessed over words, over wording, much more so than images. Remember how hot he got about adding “Under God” to the module plaque? “We Came in Peace for All Mankind” it said and he wanted to add “Under God.” The President is big on God, how Flanigan put it. “Billy Graham's here nearly every Sunday,” he told us, which made us giggle. We finally caved in, said we'd add it, then conveniently forgot all about it. The plaque had already been soldered to the side of the damn thing; besides, it wasn't as if he could go up to the Sea of Tranquility and check. So who would know? God, of course, with whom the President obviously wasn't on the closest of terms.

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Who among your types feel their thought as immediately as a hypersonic exhaust blast of an orbital launch? The lump rising in your throat as they rose in the air. The transition from being on the ground to being in the air was so gentle, and their voices, patched in soft from Capcom to Houston to us, as unmoved, as matter-of-fact as taxi drivers calling into their dispatchers to say, “We're on Elm Street, and we're headed downtown.” These were great men. Where we were or where we weren't doesn't matter. Those who cannot foresee the future are condemned to live in it. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to believe Tucker Carson. Where are we now, that is the question. Who are we? The people at WHAM-O. Has ever a more preposterous idea presented itself? Our first joint project was the bomb shelter, marketing the plans and parts for a hundred-dollar do-it-yourselfer; then, over in Chad, during the prelim stages of that most royal of fuck-ups, Otto and I were shown a species of fish that laid eggs in mud during the dry season. When the rains came, the eggs hatched, and fish emerged. Instant Fish, they wanted to call it. Sell chunks of mud, add water, and, voila!, instant aquarium. Perfect: get out of the racket, close up shop and retire to Bamfield. Millions of dollars in orders, but when we brought the fish back to America, they wouldn't mate. No fish eggs, no mud, no money. Then there was the Huf'n'Puf blowgun, which shot soft rubber darts. Redesign of the Chad model. Made it to market but went nowhere.

Did we come all this way for this? Did American boys die in Normandy and Korea and Valley Forge for this? Road not taken my eye. Fuck Frost. He fabricated news stories for The Eastern Poultryman. He was a chickenshit and a hack. Girth my old whalemeat instead with your blasted incendiaries. I will light up the sky.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Those cart loads of old charnel ashes, scales and splints of mouldy bones,Once living men — once resolute courage, aspiration, strength,The stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.*

Did you read those three lines? They are from “The Wallabout Martyrs,” Leaves of Grass, 1891. From here on in it’s Whitman’s way or the highway—he is America. The pathbreaker, the beacon, the guiding voice. “I light up the skies / The songs of life bursts from my blowhole” is also from the Leaves, I forget where, Google will track it down. “In an old vault, mark'd by no special recognition, lie huddled at this moment the undoubtedly authentic remains of the stanchest and earliest revolutionary patriots from the British prison ships and prisons of the times of 1776–83, in and around New York, and from all over Long Island; originally buried—many thousands of them — in trenches in the Wallabout sands.”

Written more than a century ago, describing a massacre of revolutionary patriots a century before that. Should that not be the arc and aim of this, our history? Not dumbed-down MAGA scattershot but higher, ever higher, — “above the domes of loftiest mosques these pinnacles aspire.”

“Don’t fuck with that shit.”

“What shit, cool cat?”

“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”—John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1962

The Evening Noise: where were you when Martin Luther King was killed? Where were you when Reagan was shot? Herman Melville was visiting an orthopaedic surgeon on the day of Lincoln’s assassination. We have no records of his thoughts and feelings. Walt Whitman spent it in Brooklyn with his mother, “who prepared breakfast—and other meals afterward—as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass’d them silently to each other.”

This passage is included in Specimen Days under the heading, “The Stupor Passes—Something Else Begins.” What?

This is how he begins the passage: “But the hour, the day, the night pass’d, and whatever returns, an hour, a day, a night like that can never again return.”

I feel nearer than ever to this.

Stanford Robinson Gifford, A Coming Storm, 1863, From the Collection of Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes BoothA coming storm or the coming storm? The last rays of light ignite the northern shore; the leaves' colours glow on the water. The sun, filtered, struggles to conquer the growing gloom, to break free. The darkening cloud in the southern sky mimics the sweeping circles of the lake and the snow-topped mountains. The blackest part of the cloud hides the peak closest to the right edge of the frame. The water is poised, motionless.

Melville, transfixed in front of it, still wearing the black armband for his slain president, could not have been closer were he waist-deep in the becalmed water, watching the storm build, waiting for it to engulf him. The principal actors are the giant boulders on the far bank, two sentinels pushed into place by glaciers. His eye was drawn to these enormous erratics, back and forth, from the larger in the hillside grove to the smaller on the shore. Both are tipped in fiery light. The same light kindles the leaves of the wind-hit trees, bold brushstrokes of red, gold, and amber.

A genius, this painter.

On the other shore, past the soft mist at the centre, the clouds boil, the lake turns to pitch, and the mountaintops disappear. The wind is up. The boulders are precarious. We, as placidly reflective as the lake, are about to be consumed. Melville had seen Edwin Booth’s Hamlet twice. The actor bought the painting four short years before, then loaned it to the artist for the show. The fire in the leaves reminded Melville of a painting he saw in Paris—a young slave boy on all fours with his cheeks puffed out, fanning flames that lick the pages of giant books piled in a pyre. The austere saint on the stairs above, Saint Paul, dead centre, right hand upraised, left holding open the good book. The rest, the bad and wicked books, were cast into the kindling fire.

Is this my errand in the wilderness? he asks himself. Is this my fulfilment?

Two months before, on February 26, 1865, a shallow event in the earth’s crust liquefied a village in the northwest of England. A major seismic event will burn San Francisco to the ground in the coming fall.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *All feeling hearts must feel for him Who felt this picture. Presage dim — Dim inklings from the shadowy sphere Fixed him and fascinated here. A demon-cloud like the mountain one Burst on a spirit as mild As this urned lake, the home of shades.* —Herman Melville, "The Coming Storm", 1866 When his son, Malcolm, was born, Melville had thought of naming him Barbarossa, Adolphus, Grandissimo Hercules, Bonaparte or Lambert. “It takes three nurses to dress him,” he mock boasted to his brother. “He is as valiant as Julius Caesar.... a perfect prodigy. If the worst comes to the worst, I shall let him out by the month to Barnum, and take the tour of Europe with him.”

The worst will come to the worst, he is thinking now, staring at the painting. There are benches to sit on, but he remains standing. The best work in the room is by Frederick Church but Melville never sees it. He is seeing the Gifford only, but his mind is filled with other images.

The only books spared in the Paris painting are the good one in the saint’s hand and the ledger into which an old scribe notes the value of the wicked ones: fifty thousand pieces of silver.

The value of his books? His books are worthless. His first volume of poetry, published the following year, will sell so negligibly that the publisher will sue his family to recover the production costs. Subsequent volumes will be self-published. None will be reviewed. When he retires, nineteen years from now, he will be earning the same miserable wage he earns today.

In a London gallery full of gems he saw Poussin’s Assumption of the Virgin. The Gifford Storm has some of that same ennobling power. Green meadows and woodlands steeped in haze. The Poussin filled him with a profound calm. This fills him with an inextinguishable dread.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *But Shakespeare's pensive child Never the lines had lightly scanned, Steeped in fable, steeped in fate; The Hamlet in his heart was 'ware, Such hearts can antedate. No utter surprise can come to him Who reaches Shakespeare's core; That which we seek and shun is there — Man's final lore.* Not A Coming Storm. The Coming Storm. There is nothing indefinite about this deluge. Melville’s poem, the poem occasioned by this experience, will have the following prefatory note: “A Picture by S.R. Gifford, and owned by E.B. Included in the N.A. Exhibition, April, 1865.”

Postscript

At the end of their dark-garlanded train ride the two Lincoln caskets will be temporarily interred in a receiving vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery in the President’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. In December, they will be moved to another temporary vault further up the hill, where they will join a third, Lincoln’s second son, Edward, dead of consumption fifteen years before. They will be moved to the new Lincoln Tomb in 1871. In 1876, a gang of counterfeiters will attempt to steal the President’s corpse, which will lead to the construction of new housing for the casket inside a protective cage and concrete box. In total, his remains will be moved seventeen times, and his coffin opened five.

The stupor passes—something else begins.

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Nicolas Poussin, Assumption of the Virgin, 1630-32

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I missed my Sunday appearance in these pixels because last Saturday, as Bastille Day was beginning to grind through its governmentless gears in France and a projectile in Pennsylvania was van-gogh-ing its way through the right-ear gristle of the 45th and 47th president of the Excited Snakes®, I was at the bow of a boat on the west coast of Canada, contemplating, by means of the Photos app on the iPhone 8 in my right hand, the pan in the video below.

It, paellaphiles the world over will recognise, is a paella or paellera. Boaty types—drawn from the elite 32-of-4,000 Hexagoners who bother to click on my carefully curated video links—will recognise the bow as belonging to a self-bailing and unsinkable Boston Whaler, and the surrounding body of water as Barkley Sound, which is part of the traditional and unceded territory of the Huu-ay-aht of the Nuučaan̓ułʔatḥ and named after Charles Barkley—not the basketball player-pundit but the then 28-year-old fur-trading sea captain of Imperial Eagle, who, along with his 17-year-old bride, Frances Barkley—the first European woman to visit what is now British Columbia—explored the sound and named it after himself in 1787, two years almost to the day before the Bastille storming.

Those truly in the know will know the boat in the video’s name, Pesca-Jumba, and of that name’s origins, as revealed by Tom Waits at the press conference announcing his 2008 “Glitter & Doom” tour.

Let’s unpack this further. In 1787, Francisco Goya was 41 and transitioning from a lowly tapestry cartoon painter for royal residences to the newly named Painter to the King. He was by then the top portraitist in Spain. Among his best customers were the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, who built a cottage and studio for him on the grounds of their estate in Andalusia. In 1787-88 alone, his income from paintings they commissioned was 22,000 reales, more than four times his annual salary.

While Valencia is universally acknowledged to be the birthplace of paella—made, traditionally, with rabbit, chicken or duck, snails, various beans, maybe a seasonal artichoke heart y nada más—Andalusia, with its direct access to the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, has been home to the better, lighter, more sunlit-infused and delicious seafood versions since before the Caliphate of Córdoba.

(Argue with this all you want, Nina Caplan, it’s true).

Arab trade introduced the Iberian peninsula to the dish’s essential elements: olive oil, rice, saffron, paprika, lemons—even the orange tree wood used to aromatise the fire on which it was cooked. The fish and shellfish were already abundant, including shrimp and prawns from the Bay of Cádiz.

Goya visited Cádiz many times. In 1793, he convalesced there.

In 1797, newly named Director of Painting at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Goya abruptly left his post and family and moved into a guest cottage on the estate of the 35-year-old, recently widowed María Cayetana de Silva, 13th Duchess of Alba, in Sanlucar in Andalusia.

Francisco Goya, The Black Duchess, 1797. She is pointing at the words "solo Goya" in the sand. On the pointing hand are two rings, one engraved with the word "Alba" and the other with "Goya." The following 11 months were among his most prolific. Among the paintings from that period were three self-portraits, portraits of the matador Pedro Romero and the toreador José Romero, Martín Zapater, Don Bernardo de Iriarte and Juan Meléndez Valdés; the parable of the wedding guests, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the Last Supper for the Oratorio Santa Cueva in Cádiz; Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory; La Maja Desnuda;—

—and six bizarre parlour paintings commissioned by the Osunas.

Meanwhile, in 1791, over on this coast, the Spanish navy sailed the British schooner, North West America, which it captured during the Nootka crisis of 1789 andrenamed Santa Saturnina, into Barkley Sound, where Nuu-chah-nulth war parties twice attacked it.

Reconstruction of Santa Cruz de Nuca, a Spanish fort and settlement up the coast from Barkley Sound. The first European colony in what we for now still call British Columbia, it was founded in 1789 and abandoned in 1795. Did the Nuca settlers have paelleras? Probably. Rice, saffron, paprika, olive oil and lemons? Most assuredly. No orange wood, probably, but something the Muslims of Al-Andalus didn’t have: tomatoes, which the conquistadores introduced after the capture of Tenochtitlan by Hernán Cortés in 1521. Sofrito, anyone?

I, on the other hand, what did I have? Tomatoes, yes, but out of a can. Arborio, not bomba or senia rice. (Don’t say anything, Nina). Smoked paprika that had been lying in a tote since before Covid. Frozen peas… A red pepper from California… Quick-made sofrito stepped on with Pico de Gallo salsa from Costco….

Saffron? No, but our Port Desire —

hosts—

—found some…

…along with a couple of kilos of—

—Pandalus platyceros, aka spot prawns, the world’s most delicious shrimp, certainly much better than any Cadizian caridea crustacean—caught a month or two ago by Canadian Coast Guards during rescue training—hauling those traps out of the water prepares them to haul you out one day—and flash frozen.

In Andalucia, the prawns are put in whole, but I needed to make a stock—

—and pretty soon—

—and then—

And that was that.

I won’t burden this with a recipe. There are millions online.

Just don’t stir if you want a properly scorched socarrat. DM me if you want other tips.

Off to the beach. Ta.

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These are dangerous times. Before venturing further, arm yourself with a copy of my sister’s book, available at BezosMart or, better, here.I disdain to amuse myself with the small rubbish of common diseases, with the trifles of rheumatism, coughs, fevers, vapours, and headaches. I require diseases of importance! —Moliere, Le Malade Imaginaire, 1673

Oh, for a prescriptive! Failing that, an explanation. I’m feeling the same as I do most days—the same more as less as every day—but the base components these last few, the hours, the minutes, the sticking click, click, click, every second ticked blow by freaking blow, life leaked out slow, dead slow, and stupid, flap flap flap nap nap nap, why? The French election? My senescence? Biden’s? Jetlag! Shitty movies, lousy food, recycled air. Turbulence every ten seconds. Changes in cabin pressure, sudden drops, back to your seat, please, 32 feet per second per second. Three airports, two continents, a door panel blowing off midair, belted in for umpteen hours. Ninety kilos of crushing CO2 guilt per person per hour. Taylor Swift: “The lesson I’ve learned the most often in life is that you’re always going to know more in the future than you know now.” So right, right? Breathe a little, it’s all good! Sorry, no, we don’t have tomato juice, but we do have a garden cocktail.

Upon landing, a long run on aching Achilles and wounded knee through First Nation woods.

Pacific Spirit Regional Park, University Endowment Lands, British Columbia, June 26, 2024Woods I grew up in. The aches roiling through the rest and the unrest, every joint compromised, every sleep corrupted. Too much wine. Too many votes for the far-right. Too many shorter-chain forevers off-gassing from my toilet paper, leaching from my touch screen and my aeropress, my contact lenses, my mattress, my dishwashing soap, my pizza box.

Why? Capitalism. Fossil fuels. Fossilized ideas.

Everything fucking aches.

Katherine’s sundeck, Vancouver, July 2, 2024Ah. Ok. Yes. Thank you. Explains a lot. Not everything. But a lot.

As cities collapse and grow desolate when there is an earthquake and man erects his house on volcanic land only in fear and trembling and only briefly, so life itself caves in and grows weak and fearful when the concept-quake caused by science robs man of the foundation of all his rest and security, his belief in the enduring and eternal. Is life to dominate knowledge and science, or is knowledge to dominate life? Which of these two forces is the higher and more decisive? There can be no doubt: life is the higher, the dominating force, for knowledge which annihilated life would have annihilated itself with it. Knowledge presupposes life and thus has in the preservation of life the same interest as any creature has in its own continued existence.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, 1876

The flowering dogwood trees in this part of the world have gone completely insane. So, too, have many of the rose bushes. Other lifeforms too but these just stand out. The profligacy. The excess. Sure, it’s beautiful, but what’s with absurd number of blossoms?

Jericho Beach, Vancouver, July 27, 2024What’s up, dogwood? What are you trying to tell us? The dogged woods of my youth did not look like this. Every year there was a flowering (sometimes two I’ve since read, though I don’t remember ever seeing this). A decently discreet number. A few here. A few there. Nothing like this. Is it stress? Or yet another annunciating sign? Is the Great One coming? Or the Really Big One?

The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest3.

The Vancouver Special1 I lived in from 1965 to 1980, and again two years later—I’d probably still be living in its basement had my parents not sensibly pre-empted that possibility by downsizing into a one-room apartment a few months after my prodigal return—was on surrendered First Nation territory and had a flowering dogwood tree in its front yard.

5940 Crown Street Vancouver, BC, Google Street View (August 2016), screenshot July 5, 2024That’s it above in the screencap, bereft of its pretty white flowers—the symbolic blossom of the province of British Columbia—in 2016, to the left of what had been, almost four decades before, my parent’s bedroom window. This was snapped by a Google Street View car trundling down Crown Street in August, just as the dogwood’s red berries were starting to ripen. The berries are edible, I’ve just read, though bitter, and best mixed with sweeter ones, which is what, traditionally, indigenous British Columbians (not the preferred nomenclature, as Walter Sobchak would tell us) knew to do. Or so, as I said, I’ve read. We ate huckleberries and salal berries but never dogwood berries. We ate the inner bark of salal and the pith of certain grasses. I once, on a dare, ate live ants. Pinched them wiggling between fingers off the trunks of ornamental trees on side streets near my elementary school and popped them in my mouth. But I never ate a dogwood berry. My sister remembers leaning out my parent’s bedroom window, grabbing a handful and flicking them, one by one, at the back of my head.

The tree is called a dogwood not because of any doggish associations but because of its twigs, which are smooth and straight, thus perfect for skewering meat. Skewering used to be called “dagging” or “dogging”. So a dogwood tree is a skewerwood tree.

Skewering is an odd word, especially in the crucifixional context of the dogwood tree, which, according to much lore, was the tree upon which the greatest mystery of Christian faith—the hypostatic union of the human and the divine—was realised.

In Jesus’ time, the dogwood grew
To a stately size and a lovely hue.
‘Twas strong and firm, its branches interwoven.
For the cross of Christ its timbers were chosen.
Seeing the distress at this use of their wood
Christ made a promise which still holds good:
“Never again shall the dogwood grow
Large enough to be used so.
Slender and twisted, it shall be
With blossoms like the cross for all to see.
As blood stains the petals marked in brown,
The blossom’s center wears a thorny crown.
All who see it will remember Me
Crucified on a cross from the dogwood tree.
Cherished and protected, this tree shall be
A reminder to all of My agony.

But that’s just silly. There are no dogwoods in the Bible. Or in Golgotha or anywhere else in the Levant. And I don’t remember anything particularly twisted about the dogwood in my front yard. The indigenous people of these parts traditionally used the straight, obligingly pliable stems for baskets. They smoked the tree’s inner bark and used the outer bark and its roots for tanning and dying, and the hard limbs for weaving shuttles.

5940 Crown Street Vancouver, BC, Google Street View (May 2018), screenshot July 5, 2024Google took this shot in 2018. Where is the tree? Why was it removed like Beria from Stalin’s May Day podium? Where did it go? Was it diseased? Did it block too much light? The flowering dogwood is a protected tree in British Columbia. You can’t just cut one down. You can’t even pick its blossoms. Which, by the way, have a long history of medicinal use. They have been used to treat malaria. Applied directly to the skin, they heal wounds and cure boils. They cure headaches. They break fever. They increase strength. They lessen fatigue.

Nation will rise against nation . . . there will be earthquakes in various places… And brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death.—Mark 13:8, 12

Am I missing something? I’ve forgotten what is important and how things work: earthquakes and volcanoes and my heart, how it beats, blood pumps in and out, oxygen is added, and carbon dioxide is subtracted. Then it stops. The uterus contracts, the cervix dilates. Veins thrombophlebitise. You pull a trigger, and a spring throws a hammer forward till it hits a primer; the primer explodes, igniting the propellant, which drives a bullet down the barrel. Electrons circle protons and sometimes neutrons, and the quantities of each determine atomic number and weight. But why? The moon travels around the earth, and the earth travels around the sun, but how? How are the seasons determined? Does the axis tilt? Hitler was shunned and persecuted, then somehow became Chancellor. Poland fell. Then what? How? When? Why?

“Though thou canst swim like a duck, thou art made like a goose.”

In the spring of 1611, the year Shakespeare finished The Tempest and returned to Stratford, the English explorer Henry Hudson and his young son John were set adrift in a small boat on the eastern shore of James Bay with nothing more than some powder and shot, a handful of pikes and an old iron pot. Hudson and his son rowed as hard as they could, keeping pace with the Discovery, but when the great ship’s giant sails were lowered and it shot away, the castaways’ shoulders sagged, and they stopped, watching helplessly as the civilized world and its rewards—glory, honour, immortality, fame—sailed past the slanting curve of the water’s end and out of sight, forever.

The Hudsons were never heard of again. Is this to be our fate, too? The great ship spreads her white sails to the morning breeze, and we stand watching with our oars slack and our dicks hanging out till, at last, she fades on the horizon?

No.

The sail-crowded ship is gone from our sight, that is all, and just now appearing to others on a distant shore. The diminished size and total loss of sight is in you and me and not in her, and just at that moment when we said “She's gone,” those others, many of whom have already made the same journey, shout out with joy, “Here she comes!”

Hudson is a lousy model. His career as an explorer only lasted four years. Champlain is more our man. Both were sons of sea captains, set sail in search of a northern route, fought and friended First Nations and paddled the same waterways of New York in the same year (did they ever meet?). But poor old Henry was set adrift two years later, while Sam got in another quarter century and became lord and leader of the new world. Draftsman, painter, mapmaker—his maps, especially, magnificent—geographer, explorer, founder and governor of Quebec—New France!—and unredeemed scoundrel, who only escaped having his arms and legs smashed between each spoke of a wheel with a cudgel by heading out to sea under a false name—a name now possessing mountain, sea, lake, valley, town, village, bridge and shopping mall.

That same spring of 1611, a little earlier, just before Shakespeare put down his pen, Robert Parker printed the first King James Bible, and the ice began to clear around the trapped Discovery, an earthquake of 7.2 magnitude cracked the seabed floor on another quadrant of the globe—11 miles off the saw-toothed shore of Sanriku, on the northeast coast of Honshu, where Niko’s family is from, unleashing a 100 foot high tsunami that snuffed out 5,000 souls in a matter of seconds. In 1896, an eight-point-fiver struck 90 miles off the same coast. These are what we call deep focus events. A sudden release of energy in the earth’s crust. In the second quake the deeper water minimized the impact on shore, but 35 minutes later the largest tsunami in Japanese history, 125 feet high, crashed onto the beach at the same time as high tide. Twenty-six thousand people were killed, 9,000 homes destroyed. On both occasions, there were signs and signals. Eyewitnesses described a red light, like fire, in the morning sky. Animals and insects behaved erratically. You would think the inhabitants would have learned from these experiences, but apparently not. The problem is, we forget. We hold on to so much, but so much more disappears.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Pheasants’ song in the morning is not a warning, But should you hear their cry and wake, Expect the worst: an earthquake*

On July 28, 1976, reports of crying catfish were heard in Tangshan, an industrial city of approximately one million inhabitants in Northeastern China. No action was taken. A magnitude of 8.2 struck that night. Two hundred and forty thousand dead. That same year saw the deaths of Zhou Enlai, Charman Mao and General Zhu De.

Cats and rats flee, dogs howl like ghosts and refuse to eat. Worms, tortoises and moles abandon their burrows, rabbits their warrens. Winter bats stop hibernating and fill the air, foraging instead of sleeping. Cocks crow and hens cackle as they fly onto roofs in the middle of the night. Bottom feeders and octopi float to the surface and die. Wintering snakes, toads and frogs reappear in the bamboo. Fish in aquariums line up in the same direction, leap out of their tanks or hide in the sand. Carp and catfish squirm. Sardines swim up-river. Restless cows break free of their harnesses. Pigs smash through their fences and attack each other. Seagulls fly inland.

Animals witness the death of their own kind and know to fear it and to transmit that fear to others, but only immediately and physically—instinctually, with their muscles, not with their minds. This I am sure you have seen. The defensive crouch, the speeding heart, the flood of blood. Birds at the window in mad flight, rats frozen to the spot, dogs, cowering, heads and paws turned to the sky, committed to submission. You see this especially—in massive numbers, entire populations—during earthquakes. Epinephrine and norepinephrine and cortisol. But to truly bear witness, to show by your existence that something is true, this is an exclusively human calling.

Kant, the great Chinese from Königsberg, was the first seismologist. His first book was a learned and ambitious treatise on the subject. He was the first modern to reject supernatural explanations and see them as the result of natural forces.

Today, there are more than 8,000 seismograph stations in the world. Twenty thousand earthquakes, give or take, are registered and located each year.

Before the Sanriku earthquake in 1611, fishermen some 20 miles out to sea saw a red light in the sky in the direction of their town.

“Our homes are ablaze!”

“Quick! We must save our families!”

Expecting the worst, they raced back to land as fast as oars and sails could take them. But nothing was on fire. The town was safe. Perplexed, but relieved, they stored their catch, put away their nets, brewed their tea and settled in for the evening. At midnight, a loud bang ran out like cannon fire. The men craned their necks just in time to see the mountain behind them split into two and sink into the sea, taking with it the entire coast and all who lived on it. Only one person survived, a housewife who was rescued from the sea, and who told this story.

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In a postscript to his second published series of Mount Fuji woodcuts, Hokusai, the great painter, draftsman and printmaker of the Tokugawa period, wrote that he had first began to draw at the age of 5 and by 50 had produced many pictures, but none done before the age of 70 were of any value. “Finally, at 73, I learned something about the true nature of things—birds, animals, insects, fish, the grasses and the trees. By 80 I will have progressed further. At 90, I will have probed the deepest meaning of things; at 100, I will create genuine marvels, and at 110, every point, every line, will have a life of its own.” He was dead at 89.

Hokusai was solely obsessed with his mountain. He believed it was the closest place on Earth to Heaven and that, at its peak, it held the perpetually burning secret of eternal life, an elixir of immortality deposited there by a moon goddess. He was a member of the Nicherin sect and a devotee of the Lotus Sutra. He chanted Nam-myohorenge-kyo day and night, silently and out loud.

Tsunamis do not break, they do not crest, they roll like a tide, long, flat and fast; this one depicted here is an open-water wave, a rogue breaker, wind-generated, 40 feet high and leaping fast forward toward the sky. It is early morning, the sun is rising. The cumulonimbus demon-clouds are leaden with rain. The storm is coming. The cresting waves dwarf the mountain. All feeling hearts must feel for him who felt this.

Beneath the Wave, he called it. The horizon is deliberately low to force the eye toward the centre. The water rolls from left to right, against the grain. Japanese read right to left. The signature is in the top left corner, to the left of the inscription in the rectangular box. Over the course of his life, he used more than 30 different names to sign his work. They changed as he did. He passed the old names on to his students. This is his best-known work. There were 5,000 printed, only 46 remain. He was almost 70 when he made it.

He had made similar works twice before, back in his 30s, and he would do another ten years later. The earlier two were bird’s eye views and thus much less threatening; in this one, we are in the water, and the claw-like crest is poised to smash down upon us. The three rowboats caught in the waves are transporting live fish. There are 30 people in them, clinging to the oars and gunwales in terror. The Hollow of the Wave of Kanagawa. We are caught in the hollow, framed in it, the hole, the tear, the crack, the rent, the switch. Debussy used it as a cover illustration.

The tear in the rip in the crack. Ten minutes of tremoring hell and and and and then, before the long length of uncresting swell arrives, the full weight and volume of the sea draws back a quarter of a mile or more from the shore; and many of those near it, those too poor of spirit or too surprised to move, too blind and deaf and stupified to see and hear and know what is happening, stand, amazed, transfixed, unable to flee, watching the fish gasp and flop on the exposed seabed, listening to the waters suck back into their roiling mass. Some of the idiots collect bagfuls of fish and scuttling crabs off the revealed ocean floor. Then, with a loud crack, the final wave rolls back in a swift rising tide.

Lafcadio Hearn, aka Yagumo Koizumi (1850-1904) describes a tsunami in Gleaning in Buddha-Fields (1897):

“The day had been oppressive; and in spite of a rising breeze there was still in the air that sort of heavy heat which, according to the experience of the Japanese peasant, at certain seasons precedes an earthquake. And presently an earthquake came.... He rose to his feet, and looked at the sea. It had darkened quite suddenly, and it was acting strangely. It seemed to be moving against the wind. It was running away from the land...”

The villagers raced to the shoreline to watch the astounding movement of the water. Hamaguchi turned his back to it, walked into his fields and lit the stacks of rice on fire. The villagers thought his house was burning and raced up the hill to put it out.

“Grandfather is mad,” screamed the man’s grandson. “I am afraid of him! He set fire to the rice on purpose! I saw him do it!”

“The child tells the truth. I set fire to the rice. Is everyone here?”

The Kumi-cho and the heads of families looked about them, and down the hill, and made reply: “All are here, or very soon will be. . . . We cannot understand this thing.”

“Kita (It’ s coming),” shouted the old man at the top of his voice, pointing to the open sea. “Say now if I be mad!”

Through the twilight eastward all looked, and saw on the edge of the dusky horizon a long, lean, dim line like the shadowing of a coast where no coast ever was, a line that thickened as they gazed.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published 6.*Unlucky mortals! O deplorable earth! All humanity huddles in fear! The endless subject of useless pain! Come philosophers who cry, “All is well,”And contemplate the ruins of this world.*— Voltaire, "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster", 1755

Out the door to the ferry, across island to the sound. By the time you read this, I’ll be down there on the dock below, at the inlet’s edge. And France will have a new government.

Nam-myohorenge-kyo.

1https://www.vancouverheritagefoundation.org/house-styles/vancouver-special/

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NASA's Curiosity Mars rover photograph of the setting sun taken on the mission's 956th Martian day (April 15, 2015), from Gale Crater.1.

The Hinternet today tells us that literacy “has had a good run for the past 5,000 years, but it’s over.” So, too, as of a few hours, is voting in the first round of the French legislative elections, and with it, the “révolution macroniste” first laid out in a 2016 book of that title, of which, Aditya Chauhan, a reader in India wrote, on February 5 of last year, on the Amazon site:

Takes Readers on a Journey of Enlightenment and Intellectual Rejuvenation

Emmanuel Macron's Revolution is an epic ode to the possibility of transformative change, a literary marvel that truly takes the reader on a journey of enlightenment and intellectual rejuvenation. From the first page to the last, the book is a masterclass in eloquence, overflowing with poetically complex language that elevates the reader to a state of sublime contemplation.
The writing style is nothing short of a work of art, each word woven together with such precision and care that it is impossible not to be drawn into the intricacies of Macron's vision for the future. The narrative is thought-provoking and deeply insightful, capturing the essence of the revolutionary spirit and its capacity to ignite change.
The author's passion for his subject is palpable, his love for France and its people evident in every word he writes. His vision for the future is nothing short of a revolution, an outpouring of creativity and positivity that has the potential to transform the world.
In conclusion, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a literary gem that deserves to be treasured and shared, a testament to the power of the written word and the transformative impact it can have on our lives. If you are looking for a book that will inspire and challenge you, look no further than Emmanuel Macron's Revolution. It is a five-star masterpiece that deserves to be celebrated and admired for generations to come.

Moving on, then.

We’re all children, my mother liked to say, with a tsk of the tongue and a shake of the head. By this, she meant that we were all, figuratively speaking, alone with an experimenter in a small room in front of a table on which stood a cake tin containing a small marshmallow and a pretzel stick. “Which would you prefer?” the experimenter would ask.

Then, we would be told to wait.

“The 50-59 age group voted 40% for the Rassemblement National [extreme right], while the 18-24 age group voted 48% for the Nouveau Front Populaire [left-wing]. Ensemble, the presidential camp [centrist], led the 70+ age group, with 32% of the vote.” — France Info, Sunday, 30 June 2024

My mother was 83 when she left this plane and jumped this ship, and passed away and died. Fortunately, that was a little over two decades ago, so she was spared this latest phoenixing of the extreme right, the death mentioned above of reading and writing, and our regression from children to babies to zygotes to AI-generated primordial germ cells.

Perhaps I’ll have something cogent to say about the second round of the legislative elections when they fall with a loud shriek next Sunday. Not bloody likely, however, as I’ll be travelling to Bamfield, British Columbia, in search of instant gratification. No pretzel sticks or marshmallows for this brat — fresh seafood, cold beers, beach swims and walks in the woods.

To gain some perspective, let’s go back to Goya. But first, a word from our sponsor:

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As I see her, it is all the same to me whether it be through walls or windows, or gaps in the wall or garden gates, that whatever ray of the sun of her beauty may reach my eyes will enlighten my understanding and strengthen my heart, so that I may be unique and without equal in discretion and courage. — Cervantes

To make the dress her own, Leocadia removed the bows, lowered the bustline and wore it with a lace shawl and bonnet. In the study, as in the painting, she is standing with her back to us; we can’t see her face or her bosom, which we know from La Leocadia (1819), the mural at La Quinta del Sordo, in which she wears the same dress and mantilla, and from Goya’s correspondence with Younger Moratín, to have been “impresionantemente amplio.”

Behind her, in the top left corner of the frame, is Mariquita, her daughter. Their daughter. Leocadia is holding her by the shoulders and telling her to be brave and strong while Goya’s doctor, Eugenio Arrieta, sits facing them in a heavy wooden chair next to a table covered in medical equipment — leech jar, stem pessary, packet of herbs (probably pennyroyal), bleeding bowl, bloodletting glass cup — and, clutching poor trembling Mariquita by the wrist, uses a long, pen-like lancet to inoculate her arm with milkmaid pus.

The lancet reminds Goya of the pens Munárriz gave him a quarter-century ago.

Leocadia was 32 years old when this sketch was made. Mariquita was five. Arrieta was 50 and would be dead within a year. Goya was 73 and almost dead: he started the painting three months after Dr Arrieta cured him of fiebre manchada — spotted or relapsing fever, which in this century is more typically referred to as typhus. In Goya’s Spain, it had several names: “lenticular” (because of the lentil-sized spots on the skin), “punticular” (spots), “pulicularis” (derived from fleas) or “tabardillo”. This last term either derives from the rash that covers the victim’s body like a tabard, a sleeveless jerkin or a short coat worn with or without a belt and consisting of front and back pieces only, with a hole for the head, or from the Latin tabes, which means rot, because the victim’s blood was thought to rot or corrupt. The term first appeared in 1489 and again in 1492, during the Christian sieges of Muslim Granada — the final war of the Reconquista — which was won not by spear, pike, long-bow, or harquebus flintlock, nor by the new strategies for killing developed by Queen Isabella and her engineers from France and Italy, nor cross-bows armed with arrows dipped in a solution of aconite, nor 12-foot-long Lombard cannons firing 14-inch balls of stone, but by body lice, which brought “El Tabardillo” to the fortress, which killed 18,000 thousand people, thus ending two centuries of Islamic rule in Spain, and breaking, perhaps forever, the Moorish hold on Europe.

(It also resulted in the total expulsion of the last remaining unconverted Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile Leon and Aragon.)

In Goya’s day, epidemic typhus, which wiped out Napoleon’s “Grande Armée” and ended his ambitions for a French-ruled world, was thought by most medical experts of the day to be the same as typhoid fever, as the symptoms and conditions are similar, if not identical. In fact, typhoid means typhus-like. The terms were coined by the French physician François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix, a friend of the Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl von Linné, in Nosologia Methodica, a 1763 treatise that classified diseases into ten major classes of disease, several dozen orders, almost 300 genera, and 2,400 species. Before Sauvages, as he is known in medical literature, typhus and typhoid were called "camp fever," "ship-fever", or "flea-bite fever," as the bacteria that causes them flourishes best in crowded and unsanitary conditions — in gutters alive with rats and cobblestones littered with waste, or in communal latrines only emptied, if ever, long after they overflowed. Both diseases vector quickly: in the case of typhus, through rodents to humans by way of body lice, fleas or mites, and in the case of typhoid fever, through what epidemiologists call the faecal-oral circuit, the consumption of food and water contaminated with bacteria-laced faeces. The English poet Abraham Holland called typhus "the ague with a hundred names" and succumbed to it in 1626, two years after John Donne wrote his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and severall steps in my Sicknes, twenty-three meditations on his bout with typhus, which he called “purple fever,” one for each day. Thirty years earlier, when Donne was still writing pornographic and erotic verse—is there a difference?—his brother Henry, then 19 (a year younger than John), was put in Clink Prison in London for harbouring a Catholic priest, and therein succumbed to typhus, at the time called "gaol fever" or “the shits.”

Though it takes up to two weeks for typhus to incubate, the onset of the disease is very sudden. The first sign is the eruption of spots, coupled with high fever. The rash begins at the centre of the corporeal sphere and then emanates outward with growing intensity across the abdomen to the furthest tip of every extremity. This phase is so painful that victims often have to be tied down to stop them from killing themselves — this was the case for John Donne and Francisco de Goya — especially when the rash hits the genitals, which can become gangrenous. Lucretius and Thucydides before him, in their accounts of the Plague of Athens (429-426 BCE), now believed by most medical historians to have been typhus (a word derived from the Greek tulphos meaning smoke, mist, fog, senselessness or stupefaction caused by fever), describe how victims were known to “save their lives by castrating themselves."

(Some medical historians believe that the Athenian plague was caused by smallpox. Some war historians believe typhus killed more Christians than Moors.)

The rash is followed by crushing headache, dizziness, chills, enfeeblement, loss of appetite, tears of blood, inextinguishable thirst, anxiety, nausea, vomiting, roughness and blackness of the tongue, myalgia, more vomiting, melancholy, fear, horrifying delusions, sadness and fainting accompanied by a burning fever inside so intense that the victims cannot bear to wear even the lightest clothing, but must go naked, and horrible apprehensiveness and agony; then hematuria (when the urine turns red and cloudy. In the Devotions, Donne describes the "sudden red waters, rivers of blood", which probably alludes not just to the reddish tinge of his urine but also to the first of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, which caused the Nile to turn blood red, probably because of an algal bloom, and the Phlegethon in Dante's Inferno, the river of blood in the Seventh Circle of Hell that boils the souls of murderers like Padre Biva), sensitivity to light and tinnitus, followed by re-eruptions of rash, sleeplessness and noisy dementia, which soon transforms from being a symptom into a state of continuous muttering and delirious rambling, with the victim talking loudly and incessantly, singing and roaring and making animal noises night and day, but more especially during the night. This is usually attended with a tremendous morbid watchfulness and an insatiable desire to communicate, to describe and recollect each symptom as it arises, a cerebral over-activity that is all-encompassing and exhausting. The victim cannot sleep, cannot rest, cannot empty mind of fret and think of nothing but must remain utterly focussed on every moment of consciousness, and wishes nothing more acutely than to describe every phase in word spoken or written. Yet Goya, like Donne and most typhus victims, could not speak as he endured unspeakable pain from the typhus pustules in his mouth, on his tongue and in his throat, which made this phase of the sickness especially intolerable. Unlike Donne, however, and unlike most victims of this deadly disease, one of the most deadly enemies ever known to man, which has killed more men, women and children than the bubonic plague ever will, Goya, being deaf, was spared the discomfort of hyperacusis — noise sensitivity, where everyday sounds seem agonizingly loud, though he did suffer from tinnitus — this was his constant torment from the first day of his first illness in 1793 till the day of his death in two weeks—but he never had to endure the constant ringing of bells, as Donne did, which continually tolled (“ask not for whom”) throughout London for the dead and dying (“they toll for thee”). Goya, too, was spared the treatments Donne and other victims endured. Pigeon carcasses, for example, were never strapped to the soles of his feet. Arietta’s techniques were more conventional: cold water baths, tinctures of this and that, bloodletting, purgatives, and a special, secret oil from Florence or from Sienna, which he used to lubricate the palms and soles of Goya’s feet, and his wrists and the area near his heart; and as payment for these and other medical services, he accepted another painting, Goya a su médico (1820), which is now in the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Based, like the painting of Mariquita being inoculated against smallpox, on an actual event — Arietta’s treatment of his friend Goya for typhus—but, again, entirely invented, recollected from memory, it shows the doctor and his pale, grimacing patient surrounded by what looks like doomed souls, ashen-faced ghouls from the afterworld. Or perhaps priests. Written across the bottom, in Goya’s wavering hand, is the following inscription: “Goya gives thanks to his friend Arrieta for the expert care with which he saved his life from an acute and dangerous illness which he suffered at the close of the year 1819 when he was seventy-three years old. He painted it in 1820.”

In 1822, the painting was returned to Goya, or rather, to Javier, who had taken over Goya’s inventory and apartments in Madrid, as just a few days after Arrieta inoculated Mariquita with cowpox, the Veinteañista government—this was during thebrief moment of power of Riego’s radically liberalizing exaltados — sent Arrieta on an expedition to study the Eastern sickness in Africa, where, six months later, he contracted the disease — today we call it the bubonic plague — and died.

Javier sold the painting in 1840.

The words in the inscriptions startle and embarrass Francisco José de Goya. Their clunkiness. He does not remember writing them. He does not remember making the sketch. He remembers the climax of his sickness—typhus victims remain conscious but physically helpless—and his own feeling of moral spottedness, the cough that preceded it, and the rash that followed the cough, that inclined him to consumption, and the many evacuations and exits that ended it. And he remembers the first, still dangerous days of his recovery, and the first sketched lines of the inoculation, and the lancet, and walking with the doctor, drinking hot chocolate with the doctor, and meeting the milkmaid, and the pustules on the milkmaid’s hands, and her smile.

On the sketchbook’s facing page are four quick sketches in iron gall ink and pencil of a pretty young woman on a swing. In each, the girl’s forward swing is at its maximum amplitude. In two, she is wearing nothing under her flimsy cotton dress. In the other two, she is completely naked.

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On a sunny September afternoon in 2018, a friend and I went to another friend’s newly opened bookshop, The Red Wheelbarrow, on Rue de Médicis, across the street from the senatorial section of the Jardin Luxembourg.

The friend with me was Hermon Mehari, a trumpet player of Eritrean descent, born in Texas and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and soon to be a French citizen. The other friend was Penelope Fletcher, whom I have known since my teenage summers on this beach—

— on Hornby Island, where she was born and raised and where she opened her first bookshop at the age of 19.

And now, as of a couple of weeks ago—

—she has opened her fifth, which is right between the third and the fourth.

The new shop—all three counted as one easily rival any English-language bookshop in all of Europe—was once the bookstore and publishing house of the Action Française (AF), which was founded in 1889 by nationalist and royalist anti-Dreyfusards. Between the wars, the AF segue-wayed into much more violent and virulent extremism—it was their youth association that in 1936 dragged Léon Blum from a car and tried to lynch him, shouting “Death to the Jew” and kicking him in the head repeatedly, rupturing his temporal artery, leaving him on the ground for dead. Today they are a “laboratoire d'idées” discussing “issues that affect the national interest, such as sovereignty, ecology or globalization”, by which its 3,000 or so members mean Great Replacement theories, religious nationalism, the evils of abortion, civil rights, Jews, LGBT and immigrants, especially Muslims, and uppity women, especially, it seems, Greta Thurman, for reasons that escape me, and Simone Veil, whose statue—

Simone Weil statue in La Roche-sur-Yon, March 9, 2024. “THE CONSTITUTION KILLS OUR CHILDREN”—they vandalized the day after the Macron government enshrined abortion rights in the constitution.

The AF quit the premises in 1925 but the man running it, Georges Valois, turned it into the publishing headquarters of Le Faisceau, a paramilitary fascist spinoff of the AF that modelled itself on Mussolini’s Fasci movement—blackshirts, parades, street fights with the communists, the whole kaboodle—before petering out of existence in 1928, when its founder went a little too left for his followers’ taste.

But that’s another story. Right now, I want to focus on the moment Hermon and I arrived at the shop and found its sidewalk packed with—

—affluent-looking intellectual types, mostly students but also young couples with babies in expensive pushchairs and toddlers in Petit Bateau.

The cop? He was one of a four dozen or so present because every person in the crowd except Hermon and I was carrying a copy of this book—

—which the author was signing inside La Nouvelle Librairie bookshop, which, you will recognize, is the same shop Penelope is painting in the photo above.

La Nouvelle Librairie opened around the same time as The Red Wheelbarrow. A publishing house and a bookshop, it was founded by François Bousquet, editor-in-chief of the far-right magazine Eléments and a collaborator of the “new right” godfather Alain de Benoist. Bousquet’s tiresomely anti-woke, likes to pad his nonsense with Foucault misquotes, and is close to most of the major asshats on the extreme right, including the author of Destin Française—which opened in the Number 1 slot that September and sold 120,000 copies by the end of the year.

Don’t recognize the author of Destin Française? Managed to avoid knowing anything about his Reconquête political party and ties to the reactionary media empire of the multi-billionaire Vincent Bolloré? Never had to hear how he “lies about the past in order to make people hate the present... and thus invents a detestable future”1?

Lucky fucking you.

Anyway, it was a moment. That shocked me. And I am not easily shocked. For example, the lepennistes victory in the European election earlier this month didn’t shock me. After all, they came out on top in 2019, and before that in 2014. The size of their victory this time was alarming, but hardly shocking—every poll for weeks accurately predicted it. Macron’s response, dissolving the Assembly and calling a snap election, that was surprising, but understandable—there’s no way his government would survive a non-confidence vote this fall, so the dissolution was inevitable and imminent anyway. Why not get a jump on it? Catch left and right alike with their pants down, or, failing that, put the far-right in charge and hope they so fuck things up that the French snap back to their Cartesianated senses before the next Presidential in 2027. A dangerous game but the Macronistes don’t have much choice. Macron’s pretty much universally loathed. Having successfully decimated the centre left and right and unable to run for a third term, he is about as gimped a duck as there is, and his attrape-tout party is a tiny tent.

So what was so shocking about that scene in September 2018? No one was wearing Fred Perry or Ben Sherman. The only heads remotely skinned were the cops. Most shocking, there were as many women as men. Equally most shocking, Hermon wasn’t the only Black person in the crowd.

Compare the crowd scene above to —

—the gang that cracked Léon Blum’s skull in 1936. Or—

—these low-rent neo-fascists manifesting in Paris a month ago. Why weren’t these guys the dominant presence at the Zemmour signing? Where were the incels and the lunatic fringe? Why was everyone so depressingly normal looking?

Meanwhile, Penelope was filling her shop windows with anti-fascist titles.

And now, six years on, La Nouvelle Librairie is gone, subsumed by debts and Penelope’s ever-expanding empire.

So, there’s hope, right? Right?

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile—

—in the Pompidou, La Datcha has been given pride of place at the entrance to the permanent collection on the 5th floor. Painted after Mai 68 by Gilles Aillaud, Francis Biras, Lucio Fanti, Fabio Rieti and Eduardo Arroyo in pseudo-Soviet Realist style, it’s alternative title is Louis Althusser hésitant à entrer dans la datcha Tristes miels de Claude Lévi-Strauss où sont réunis Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault et Roland Barthes au moment où la radio annonce que les ouvriers et les étudiants ont décidé d'abandonner joyeusement leur passé (“Louis Althusser hesitating to enter Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes miels dacha, where Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes are gathered just as the radio announces that workers and students have decided to happily abandon their past”).

The firepower in the frame: that’s Barthes, arguably at the time the world’s most influential literary critic, on the far right with the tray of petit fours. Lévi-Strauss, seated in the big comfy chair, easily the world’s best-known anthropologist. Foucault, absently rubbing his bald head, the archeaologist of knowledge and power who shook and shocked the social sciences and still finds (mis)readers everywhere. Lacan, well, Lacan, as maddingly obscurantist as Althusser—and almost as reprehensible, but no one post-Freud has had anywhere near his impact on psychoanalysis, for what it’s worth.

And then there’s all those deemed by the painters too worthy (or insignificant) for ridicule: Sartre, Braudel, Bourdieu, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Debord, Lyotard, Aron… all at their prime in this moment, part of a vital intellectual culture of international influence and renown unseen since the Enlightenement, and all now dead, replaced by a faceless and feckless crowd of Bousquets and Zemmours.

Triste, ça, non?

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1https://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Tracts/Zemmour-contre-l-histoire#

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[T]his proves beyond cavil that in 1820 Goya was a committed, indeed passionate liberal and anti-clerical… So fierce are the drawings on prisoners and the Inquisition, so explosive the joy at the Revolution of Riego, so merciless the exultation at the unfrocking of monks during the secularization, that the inner Goya seems as much of an exaltado as his mistress’s son.

Excerpt from: Gwyn A. Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution, 1984

In January 1824 a system of organised repression established “permanent military commissions with executive powers to judge the enemies of absolute power” and laws of strict censorship were imposed. In that same month Goya went into hiding in the house of the Aragonese priest Father José Duaso and he put Rosario in the care of the gentle-faced architect Tiburcio.
On 1 May 1824 a brief amnesty was declared and on the following day Goya applied for leave “to take the mineral waters at Plombières in France, to alleviate the sufferings and infirmities which are such a burden to his old age”.

Excerpt from: Julia Blackburn, Old Man Goya, 2003

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Father, ease our pain and eat us; you who clothed us with this sad flesh; we beseech you: be the one to strip it away.—Dante Alighieri

“Let us frankly march, and I first of all, along the constitutional path.” So announced the chastened king in March of 1820, three years before France, backed by all the royalist powers of Europe, marched on Spain and savagely crushed its revolution. Goya sketched this as an endless procession of staggering friars, priests and nobles, eyes closed, roped together, blindly leading each other into an abyss.

Francisco Goya, No saben el camiino (They do not know the way), Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte. Y otros caprichos enfaticos (The Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte. And Other Emphatic Caprices), (Disasters of War), plate 70 1820-1823The blind leading the blind. Hieronymus Bosch stumbled his two into a stream.1 Cornelis Massijs had his four fall in a hole.2 Pieter Brueghel, the year before his death, piled together six, eyes diseased or missing, the faces raised

as toward the light
there is no detail extraneous

to the composition one
follows the others stick in
hand triumphant to disaster3

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568Goya’s are smaller, off-kilter, dwarfed by the rock. Ignore them, the Bible told him. So, too did his liberal friend Bartolomé José Gallardo y Blanco: “The light of wisdom must illuminate the ways of virtue if we are to follow them with a sure step. Understanding guides the will; with blindfolded eyes and a chained foot, one cannot get very far along the path of perfection.”4

He strips kings of understanding
and leaves them wandering in a pathless wasteland.
They grope in the darkness without a light.
He makes them stagger like drunkards.5

Elsewhere, however, mobs gathered, attacked, and dispersed. He followed their movements, eager for patterns, which he cut through with stories he was told or imagined, or images and ideas he stole. He filled albums with all manner of suffering and sin, waves of violence transformed into mass and line—faces, bodies, weariness, pain.

He was good at this; his eye was good, his memory.

Never his own life, however, never anything personal. The aperture of his intellect was misted and narrowed to everyone but those closest to him—his family and friends, his dogs and his cat. Sometimes, he wondered if there was not indeed a kind of veil over the perceiving faculty of his soul, a thwarting and absorbing cataract of his spirit. For elsewhere, everywhere really, he saw beings he did not know and therefore could not feel anything for, surely cannot have been expected to love, could only observe and outline. He sketched their surfaces with precision. And then he turned the page. Or he looked elsewhere.

At the Dante, for example, the ninth circle, with the Flaxman images, that Moratín had given him. At the things not seen there, not illustrated, the things Flaxman did not dare show, that no one shows, the eating of people, for example. Did he want to see this? Did he want others to see this? The Saturn6 he sketched many times, devouring his sons and daughters, or the shipwrecked, the set adrift, or Conde Ugolino in the ice of the second ring of the lowest circle, eyes askew, gnawing on the wretched skull of the Archbishop like a dog.

I saw two shades frozen in a single hole
packed so close, one head hooded the other one;
the way the starving devour their bread, the soul
above had clenched the other with his teeth
where the brain meets the nape. — (Canto XXXII, lines 124–29)

The Count, teeth scraping and grating on the Archbishop’s ravaged skull, raising his head, wiping his mouth on what little hair persists on the Archbishop’s scalp and saying, “And then my hunger overpowered my sorrow.”

… And I,
Already going blind, groped over my brood
Calling to them, though I had watched them die,
For two long days. And then the hunger had more
Power than even sorrow over me— (Canto XXXIII, ln. 70–73)

Did the Cannibal Count eat his dead children? In the Flaxman, in the Blake and Fuseli, the Count, driven mad by hunger, gnaws his own fingers to the bone. In his little oil, the children clutch their father, who gazes up at the high-up window at the bright metal shaft of the sun. “We hope for light, but there is darkness; for brightness, but we are in gloom.”

We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.

Something like that. No saben el Camino, “They do not know the Way,” stolen from Blake, who stole it from Flaxman, the enchained procession of cloaked and hooded monks descending the crooked path, bound for the fires of hell. Ruin and destruction in their wake. The way of peace they have not known, there is no justice in their tracks.7

Dante was wrong. He was a slave to time, a slave to the world. The inferno—countless infernos—are in this world, not in the next.

Countless infernos. In Camino de los Infiernos, the goblin mob pulls the figure to the fire.

Franvisco Goya, Camino de los Infiernos (Road to Hell), 1821In Populacho —“Rabble”—another is dragged naked through the streets to the scaffold.

Francisco Goya, Populacho (Rabble), Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte. Y otros caprichos enfaticos (The Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte. And Other Emphatic Caprices), (Disasters of War), plate 28, 1820-23In the next one, the same dragged screaming. Lo Merecia— “He Deserved it”.

The king’s chariot was carried on the shoulders of the people to shouts of “Death to the Nation”. General Riego was dragged through the streets and disembowelled by the mob. Leocadia and her son, who had served in the exaltado militia, disappeared.

Goya focussed on his blackest paintings. He started hoarding food and wine. He hid all his engraving plates and prints in the walls.

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1The parable of the blind leading the blind: two blind men walk into a stream. Engraving after H. Bosch. 1600s2Cornelis Massijs, Blinden leiden de blinden, 1544-15563William Carlos Williams, "Parable of the Blind", Pictures from Brueghel, 1962

4Bartolomé José Gallardo y Blanco, Diccionario critico-burlesco, 1811

5Job 12:24-25

6Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Sons, 1820-237John Flaxman, The Death of Ugolino: Groveling Amongst the Dead of Sight Depriv’d, 1793William Blake, Ugolino and His Sons in Prison, 1826Henry Fuseli, Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower, 1806Francisco Goya, Ugolino and His Sons, 1823

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Go bananas all you want, but don’t break the rhythm too often.

Hexagon tries to manage independently, but eventually, it will miss a step, fall, and likely sustain a hip injury. This is a common occurrence and can lead to significant expenses. I urge you to consider becoming a supporter now to prevent the potential heartache and financial burdens.

You are trying to resurrect what Marx and Feuerbach before him called species consciousness, where the individual is folded into the collective, and the instant of being becomes the totality of being.

To do this, you must strive for coherence.

Danish Situationist Asger Jorn’s hexagonal three-sided football (3SF) retooling of the Hegelian dialectic. Since its creation in 1962, 3SF has been played in places of psychogeographical significance around the world—Taksim Square after the Gezi Park protests in 2013, on the grounds of the private St Kilda Primary School in Melbourne, Australia (on the Aboriginal Land of the Yalukit-Willam Clan) in 2014, in a forest at the exact midpoint of Europe, inside a Soviet-era fuel silo and a druidic stone circle, and, three years ago, in Mudchute Park in London, on the precise point where John Dee, official court magician of Elisabeth the First, created the British Empire by either summoning a demon or sacrificing the playwright Christopher Marlowe, in May 1593.“Don't bend,” said Kafka. “Don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” The goal is to create something that bears a resemblance to reality but is, in fact, above it. Alternatively, below it; that will work, too. But if you break in too much or move around too much—asking for money or a job or recognition, complaining about the elections in Europe or the ubiquity of bad burgers in Paris, trying to show how clever you are, how well-read and cultivated you are, how much you know about this or that, how you’re not duped by the in-crowd, how you don’t give a toss about fashion or autofiction or espresso martinis, how you don’t watch sports, how you think Kafka was a hack—you allow your readers to lose focus and drift.

Or gain focus, which is worse because they’ll see right through you.

You need to lull them. It's like those foie gras ducks and geese in the Périgord. You have to coax the corn down their throats. It is not torture; it will not kill them; they will love it.

And then you get to gorge on their fat livers.

(Figuratively, of course.)

But above all, coherence. “When you see a force-fed goose, you see a portion of genius.” I think Rilke said this. Context is boundless, but for fuck’s sake, people, it’s not everything. You want readers to forget their own time and space and disappear into what you have constructed. Rilke also once wrote, “I have a doctor's appointment at 5 p.m. Grab a beer after?” Why he needed medical attention and to whom he proposed a quick pint1 doesn’t matter. What matters is that the 20th century’s most idiosyncratic and expressive poet was profoundly interested in metaphors, metonymy, and contradictions. Where and when he drank beer and with whom—(23 November 1923 at the Café Papon in Geneva with the Australian Alma Moodie, widely regarded as the foremost female violinist during the inter-war years)—is of no more consequence than what temperature the beer was or whether it came with peanuts.

This is why Jesus used stories to teach people who see but don’t see. “And hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand.”

This is also why, I think, I hate restaurant reviews. Let me just go there, sit down, and find out for myself.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire,To be no one's sleep under so manyeyelids.*—Rainer Maria Rilke's epitaph Rilke’s romantic quest and spiritual transformation: He was preoccupied with emotions, love, and the pursuit of truth. He grappled with disbelief. He experienced crises of faith. He also reflected deeply on the need of a young poet—and, presumably by metonymical, or, more accurately, synecdochical extension, all young poets, all young minds, and all minds of all ages—to understand and engage with the real world and the world of art.

How, however, is a rose pure contradiction, and what is its relation to desire (LUST in German, see photo above)? Moreover, what does it mean to be no one's sleep under so many eyelids? How many eyelids? Are these metaphors? Is LIDERN (eyelids) a pun on LIEDERN (songs)? And if so, so what? This has kept me up for three consecutive nights, nights during which my exhaustion level (Kafka: “sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty”) was at close-to-an-all-time high already because of the fitful nights that had preceded them, and by what followed them, as surely as every night follows every day—the mornings, the goddamn mornings, starting at around 6:30 a.m., during a week-long demolition of a building across the street from my bedroom window.

Yes, the man walking the bicycle is the 21st century’s most idiosyncratic and expressive chef Hanzhou Piao, who Hexagoons have seen here, here and here but never from my bedroom window, which I like to keep open at night despite the frequent presence of late-night revellers because the jasmine planted in the window box, jasminum volubile that I stole from Rilke’s grave in Raron, has blossomed, and its fragrance, at once familiar and foreign, is, more than anything, bewitching.

The view from this window revitalizes me, especially at 5 a.m. and especially when it includes the cat on the window sill across the way, which never moves or rarely moves, usually just a turn of its head to catch my eye and make my gaze flail.

What’s more, three mornings ago, Friday morning, like every other weekday morning since the Thursday’s of a week before, I was awakened not by thoughts of the cat or Ranier Maria Rilke’s epitaph or the strange career of Alma Moodie—she was considered for almost half a century one of the most important interpreters of Brahms's works for violin, and now she is completely forgotten, not even mentioned in recent editions of Grove's and Baker's Dictionaries—but by a black truck that each morning, pre-dawn, chuffs down our still-dark street, drops with a loud CLANK a giant green bin on the opposite sidewalk, and drives away.

An hour later, at what the French call 7:30 pile, the blue excavator in the above video fires up its engine and shovels debris into the giant green bin. It is not supposed to. It is not allowed to. It is too early. But I don’t mind because the debris is from the demolished building, a temporary prefab structure—(aren’t all human structures temporary?)—erected a quarter century ago to provide public primary schools—écoles maternelles (kindergartens)—in our catchment area with a dedicated space for art classes.

I do—did—not mind the noise and dust because a park is to replace the building. Or, rather, an extension of an existing park that, until this week—the week of the European elections and the 100th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka—was hidden behind the so-called temporary building.

This is all part of the psychogeographical fabric.

Among the new park’s potential elements still apparently under discussion are a ping-pong table, flowers, benches, toilets, a treed picnic area, a small waterfall, a birdhouse, a mural of the little mermaid or a hero, a swing, a banana tree (?), a merry-go-round, a refreshment bar, a running track, a climbing wall, a slide, a basketball hoop, a nuclear bunker, a cat-shaped fountain, and graffiti games “hidden” on the walls.

There is also a plan to make the park the hub of a Quartier Moineau (“Sparrow District”). According to the League for the Protection of Birds, more than 70% of Paris’s swallow population has been killed by cats, glass buildings, shitty human food, lack of wasteland and insect life, and too much enveloping and un-nestable thermal insulation. The City of Paris has thus established seven "Sparrow Districts" in collaboration with the League to address this issue. The goal is to provide “suitable nesting places for sparrows that foster their development.”

Unfortunately, the

Maternelles? Qui appartient à la mère? Why? While we’re at it, kindergarten? Why? And preschool? How is it “pre”? It’s school.

Unfortunately, the

Les pieds dans le plat…

Unfortunately, the excavator took down a giant bush that has long been home to thousands of sparrows.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Then, just the way a cat will seeyour wandering eye and in a sudden coupreach out and suck it down into its owngreat swirling, circling maelstrom of an eye(your gaze will flail awhile, then sink and drown;caught, it will know itself no more, then diewhen what had seemed to be an eye that sleepsunlids itself only to slam with thunderand yank your gaze into its blood-red deeps):so, once, from a cathedral's dark façade,the great rose window seized and tore asunderthe heart, and dragged it down, deep into God.— Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Rose Window", 1918* I recently read about men who made their living killing men who killed for free. The men in the first group were not contract killers, though they had contracts. They probably had health and social benefits, too, and, for all I know, restaurant vouchers. The men in the second group were volunteers.

Were any of them executioners? Assassins? No, these men were freedom fighters. Men who fought for freedom. And against it.

Neither group was necessarily right or wrong, nor even some third, triolectical value—a third force—at the limit between them. They believed, thought and wanted different things. If what unfolded through their antagonistics resolved in a synthesis, so be it. If it didn’t, that would be fine, too. “Most men are not wicked,” said Kafka. “They are sleepwalkers, not evil evildoers.”

Is any of this true? No, I don’t imagine it is.

Yesterday, I met a brigand, a highwayman who cuts throats and steals purses. He had kind eyes, but he was stooped with sadness.

“VICTORY BELONGS TO THE MOST TENACIOUS”.—Roland Garros, after whom the French Open’s stadium is named. I just saw it on France 2, written across the grandstand.

Time flies. The men’s single final is well underway. Alcaraz is up a set. Zverev is leading the second. This is right now the psychogeographical centre of the universe. As Kafka put it, “The meaning of life is that it stops. The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but the truth, being indivisible, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. Thus, the writer is the truth, yet when he speaks, he lies.”

Gotta go.

(Time flies? Good luck. They’re way too fast.)

1In Switzerland, beer is traditionally served in two volumes: 0.33L for a small beer and 0.5L for a large. There is also the birrino, which is 0.2L. In some bars, the standard size is 0.4L. In a glass, it is usually 0.3L. In Austria, Rilke was known to prefer the pfiff (“whistle”), which is half of a small beer. In Munich, where he changed his name from “René” to “Rainer” on the advice of Lou Andreas-Salomé, a typical Hofbrauhaus beer was 1L. Those served in Bürgerbräukeller, where Adolf Hitler launched the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, announced the re-establishment of the Nazi Party in February 1925, and was almost assassinated in November 1939, weighed 2.5K.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *The order of things is not motionless—always, in gentle succession the sky drives each towards us: After rosy dawn, the blazing sun begins its run, even while blind night stretches out under its black mantle.*—Juan Meléndez Valdés, 1773

Francisco Goya, Juan Meléndez Valdés, 1797Meléndez is a flat-headed idiot. His poetry is execrable, everyone knows this, his plays worse, his politics naive, his Frenchified nonsense too tedious for words. He describes the order of the universe and the admirable chain of its beings as if they laid him in swaddling clothes and offered him suck. He sputters nonsense about the imagination, the nobility of art, art freed of preconceptions and rules and absolute claims, but the only thing that makes him crawl forward out of his own filth is a naked quest for a higher post in Madrid—he’s on the chancery court in far-forgotten Valladolid. He will do whatever abject act necessary to secure one: slink after the over-solicited Jovellanos like a grovelling dog, sic his poor wife on each court flunkey he encounters and tell all in every tertulia he slithers through that his next volume of simpering verse is dedicated to them alone.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Man is one, but from this comes the hot-blooded Senegalese, whose giant lip fills a face blacker than ebony. What is there between this low-born and the well formed German blond?… The wilful, repulsive Hottentot and the sociable, sensitive Frenchman…? The stupid African, from formless, shapeless mud, presents us with our ugliest deity.*—Juan Meléndez Valdés, 1773 Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedHe writes the vilest stuff. Goya is anew of this opinion after travelling by coach with him to Cadiz in the company of Cean Bermudez, two strangers, a pretty girl of seventeen and a slave boy of 12, and then on to Sanlucar, all the while exposed to his flatulence. Goya was the most fortunate, as he didn’t have to hear it; he only had to endure a few penned lines thrust under his nose. “I can’t find my glasses,” he lied. The man’s odour, the state of his fingernails: enough to make one retch. Goya begged Cean to make him stop, tapping his thigh, elbowing his rib, kicking his foot, but each remonstration was met with bemusement, as if the appeals insincere. What is it with writers? Is anything of theirs of lasting value? Will a single word of Valdés or Cean be remembered?

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No painter worth his mettle seeks political office. Painters seek only the power and position necessary to pursue their craft. This is their freedom. Writers work within their living language exclusively for its practitioners, its constituents. Painters exist within the universal. Their work, at its best, is unbounded.

This thought, this line of thinking, was interrupted—annihilated—by the dreadful realisation that he could no longer see anything out of his left eye. How long has this been the case, he asked himself. Parts of himself were disappearing.

He tried to escape this depressing development and the toad’s toadying through any and all available diversion, and finding the pretty young girl sitting across from him the most pleasing, he settled his good eye on both of hers, which were unshrinking but not immodest, and wonderfully expressive; and this led to a further appreciation of her other features—teeth, nose, ears and neck, breast, arms and feet. His pencil bounced and scratched over pot-holes and loose spots, but her form soon took loving shape on the cuaderno page. Feminine beauty—a lifelong devotion, obsession—once again his salvation.

At one point on this road, they passed a human rosary of eight barefoot men beaded together on a rope, their necks and limbs in chains, driven forward at speed beyond their capacity to maintain by two dingy men on horseback armed with horse muskets and swords, who told them that the men, all black-skinned and scarred and naked to the waist, were condemned to the galleys for mischief and rebellion, and had been walking on the road from Madrid since a fortnight. Goya sketched what he saw, for he had never seen such utterly destroyed souls, and he pleaded for their release. Again, this elicited only laughter.

And after laughter came tears, for this pretty young girl was made most upset by this encounter.

“Hush, now, please,” said her mother. “You’re making a spectacle.”

He woke to see the sharp white contours of Cadiz rimmed with blue, shimmering in the distance.

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José Carlos de Borbón, Naufragio, 1771He is not looking for a slave. If he were, he would have no trouble finding one. There is a market once a fortnight and newspaper announcements, such as this in yesterday’s El Diario:

A black man aged 13 to 14, English Creole, whose language he speaks with regular proficiency, as well as Castilian. He was raised a Christian and has talent enough to learn any trade whatsoever. The asking price is 7,000 reales, and whoever needs him will go to Calle del Mar Menor, Number 2, where they can negotiate with the owner.

There are 6,000 slaves in the city, all with cutting scars or fire-branded marks on their faces or breasts, indicating proper preparation and docility. A quarter of these sold-and-bought souls belong to the king and bear his name: Carlos de Borbón. Though now officially “set free from bondage”, they remain annotated in the ledgers as merchandise in service to the royal household and the dominion and kingdom of Spain.

He is intimate with a dozen. Of these, his late friend and teacher, the royal painter José Carlos de Borbón, who superintended Tiepolo’s studio, and, later, Mengs’. As much as Luzan and more than Bayeu and more than Mengs, this African man, 54 years a slave, made Goya the painter he is today.

José Carlos de Borbón, Marina con naufragio, 1773José painted theatre sets for the Teatro del Buen Retiro and delivered cartoons to the Royal Tapestry Factory. He shared with Goya his technical specialty—shipwrecks—which Goya in turn imparted to students at the Academia.

Goya replaced his mentor as a cartoon painter unofficially when Borbón, too frail and blind to continue, was removed from the Casa de Negros in the Palacio Nuevo, which housed the king’s 2,000 slaves. A few months later, he was buried in an unmarked grave, as was his brother, Antonio Carlos de Borbón, the royal architect who designed the Caballerizas Reales and La China, the Royal Porcelain Factory, both in Madrid.

Why are his thoughts now on this? He did not think of this once when painting his shipwreck last year, but now he sees it clearly before him, just as he saw those enchained galley slaves.

The difference between his shipwreck and that of José Carlos de Borbón? Goya’s shipwreck has survivors. He is one of them. He is the woman with her hands and face lifted to the heavens, begging for mercy.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *As it rose from the water, the clouds broke, the waves calmed, and the sun cleared. I looked off to the northwest and saw it appear again, about 20 rods from us. Other eyewitnesses have since come forward, but I was so close that I could see round white spots inside its mouth. It stood out about five feet from the water, with a snake-shaped head at least eight inches across at the flat part and ten inches from the top to the tip of its long jaw. Its body, which must have been 25 or 30 feet in length, was pointed to the north.* — Clinton County Sheriff C. J. Mooney, *Plattsburgh Morning Telegram*, 31 July, 1883 Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Forgive me, it is Sunday, I am weekend-weakened, and under such conditions separating the signal from the noise can be difficult. Is there a line that separates everything that is politics from everything that isn’t? Disney, for chrissakes, just now, the happy, smiling logs jumping into the fire to keep Snow White cosy and warm. “Here, we will thaw you out. We will burn to ash, incinerate ourselves.”

Mere abstraction? No, it is physical. Franz Mesmer, the German physician, could point a finger and make a man’s eyes roll back in his head, his knees buckle, and his tongue loll, but his techniques were no match for these present capacities. My senses are worm-eaten. Soon, they will be stripped clean. This is the requisite state. Writing still consoles but music alone has the holding power. The ear seizes it and carries it inside; the body is absorbed in the flow, the movement of the melody, the soothing, elemental force of the drum pounding out accelerating rhythms that circle and confound the nervous system and take control of the blood. The walls of the veins shake and the heart becomes just that—the heart, the core, the muscular seat of all power.

Just now:

“Your hands shaped me and made me. Will you now turn and destroy me?”

“Stop.”

“Remember that you moulded me like clay. Will you now turn me to dust again?”

“Shut up.”

“Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? Did you not clothe me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews?”

“You’re such an asshole.”

All manifestations are governed by perpetual laws of unvarying shape and rhythm. They are collectively organised and combinatorially arranged, a commonwealth of equal and independent voices, each climbing away from one edge and descending toward another, leaping and falling, moving backwards and forward, inverting, truncating, somersaulting, slowing, dying, and resolving.

No performer, no melody, nothing extraneous. Pure ideas. Calculations. Propositions.

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Ten fifty-five in the morning. Bursts of rain and hail all night. The loudest crack of thunder I have ever heard. The dogs near us howling in their lockups, the birds once again hiding in the chimneys. Tens of thousands yesterday, funnelling into the smokestacks across the street, ravens snapping them up like bears in a spawning stream. Now, quiet. Except for the ambients, which I could itemise but your repertoires will do just as well, placed in whatever space or sequence you like, for none of us can tell from whence a sound originates when it is born inside what physicists call the cone of confusion—front, back, top, bottom, or anywhere along the base circumference. Far away or close, no problem, but intermediate distances are veiled in shadow, too difficult to pinpoint. Turning or tilting the head helps, this is how we hunt prey—and avoid becoming prey. Cupping the ear, extending the pinna, applying a trumpet, or spinning the torso in a circle. Visual cues, too, are almost always available. However, the best locator is the most obvious: prior knowledge. It is always best to know where things are and where they are coming from. There are fewer, if any, surprises.

“It’s like a recipe. Like nail soup. A spoonful of decayed material and an old bone. The bone turns to liquid, it softens, like yeast in dough, like the inners of a frog in the mouth of a water bug. Then it rises and expands in four directions.”

“Yes, yes, the os coccyx, you’ve said this a million times. So what?”

So Birds are allured with Pipes and Harts are caught by the same. Fish in the lake of Alexandria are delighted by a noise. Musick hath caused friendship betwixt Men and Dolphins. The sound of the Harp doth lead up and down the Hyperborean Swans. Melodious voyces tame the Indian Elephants: and the very Elements delight in Musick. The Hulesian fountain, otherwise calm and quiet, if the Trumpet sound riseth up rejoycing, swells over its banks. There are in Lydia those which they call the Nymphs Islands, which at the sound of a Trumpet immediately come into the middle of the sea, and turning round lead a dance, and then are returned to the shores; Mr Varro testifies that he saw them. And there are more wonderful things than these. — Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia libri III, 1651

The moon is almost full. The birds have left. The duck pond at Bois de Vincennes has inexplicably drained. An oarfish washed ashore a few miles down the Marne. According to an A.P. wire story this morning, swarms of toads are migrating, or invading, depending on your point of view. Either way, a massive movement. A harbinger.

You cannot accelerate history, you can only exploits its currents.

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Further penetrations that shed light: as a corpse decomposes, mouldering to dust, nefesh, if called upon, lingers nearby, hovering among the living, seeking out its sorrows, interceding in their hours of need. Meanwhile, Ruah flies to Eden, the still earthly garden. There, still coveting the pleasures, she vests herself in a bodily form, a semblance of the one she had in the worldly abode. She rises to the supernal sphere on Sabbaths, new moons and festival days, then descends to the garden. But neshamah (so continues the Book of Splendor) ascends immediately to her place in the domain from which she emanated, and it is on her account that the light is lit to shine above. Never thereafter does she descend to earth. In neshamah is realised the One who embraces all sides, the upper and the lower. And until neshama has ascended to be joined with the Throne, ruah cannot be crowned in the lower garden, and nefesh cannot rest easy in its place, but these find rest when she ascends.

And this is pretty much that: here I am, troubled and sorrowful and hovering, putting stones on graves, awakening nefesh, who bestirs ruah, which then rouses the patriarchs, and after, neshamah. Whereupon the Holy One, be blessed, pities the world.

In theory. In practice, old Nesh has been prevented from ascending for some reason. Ru finds the gate to the garden closed against her, and Neffie, too, flits about, alone and dejected, watching the worms eat the body in which she was once tenant.

Undergoing the judgement of the grave, we mourn.

All the world must suffer a big jolt. There will be such a game that the ungodly will be thrown off their seats and the downtrodden will rise. — Thomas Müntzer, Open Denial of the False Belief of the Godless World on the Testimony of the Gospel of Luke, Presented to Miserable and Pitiful Christendom in Memory of its Error, 1524

To disappear without a trace is, beyond question, the most terrifying fate that can befall a man. And by far the most common.

The disappearance of silence, however, is an annunciating sign of the end.

You can’t just do what you like, whatever you want. You have to do what you should do, at least some of the time. Most of the time, even. As Delmore Schwartz learned, “You can't carry on like this, it is not right, you will find out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *(How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.—* Delmore Schwartz, *“*Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”from *Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge, 1967* Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published4.

The number five said: “I am the number of fingers on a hand. I make pentagons and pentagrams. And but for me dodecahedra could not exist; and, as everyone knows, the universe is a dodecahedron. So, but for me, there could be no universe.’ — Bertrand Russell, “The Mathematician’s Nightmare: The Vision of Professor Squarepunt,” in Nightmares Of Eminent Persons And Other Stories, 1953

Is it not, perhaps, time to push beyond these hexagons? Push is the wrong word. Chamfer is the correct one. In geometry, chamfering is a way of turning one polyhedron into another by adding a new hexagonal face in place of each original edge. The chamfered dodecahedron contains 30 hexagons, one for each day of most months. It is constructed as an edge-truncated chamfer of a regular dodecahedron, which, unlike my lowly hexagons, is a Platonic solid. It is thought to be the base topology. The Archimedean types are more complex. Sometimes the 12 surfaces—one for each month—are spherical, like a soccer ball, but they are usually flat, especially when it manifests itself in nature: crystalline fluorite, galena, spessartine, quartz, gold, copper, sphalerite, magnetite; eglestonite, almandine, voltaite, sometimes lead, sometimes cuprite. The Greeks worshipped them, as did the Etruscans before. Plato called it the “fifth figure,” the “divinity’s model for the twelvefold division of the cosmos.” Plutarch gave it a similar status. In the second century A.D., the Romans spread small ones forged in bronze, quite beautiful, throughout their Europe—in military camps, mostly, but also in graves and sanctuaries, including among the coins and treasure of a wealthy woman in a villa-rustica tomb in Saint Parize-le-Châtel.

Amercican war hospital, Saint Parize-le-Châtel, 1918The Roman dodecahedron was perhaps used to measure sunlight on special days of the year. No one knows why—religious holidays, possibly, or propitious harvest days. Or perhaps to knit gold mail or glove fingers. They have been unearthed in Belgium, Germany, France, England, Holland, Austria, and Switzerland, but never in Italy, Spain or Greece—never anywhere on or near the Mediterranean Basin. No one knows why. The wealthy woman in the tomb was missing her upsilon-shaped hyoid bone. No one knows why.

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The shoulder blade of the caribou is held to be especially ‘truthful’. When employed for this purpose, the meat is pared away, and the bone is boiled and wiped clean; it is hung up to dry, and finally, a small piece of wood is split and attached to the bone to form a handle. In a divinatory ritual, the shoulder blade, thus prepared, is held over hot coals for a short time. The heat causes cracks and burnt spots to form, and these are then “read.” — Omar Khayyam Moore, Divination: A New Perspective, 1957

The homiletic interpretation of the Scriptures known as Midrash describes an indestructible bone called the Luz. Luz is also the name of an ancient city in Israel and another in the Golan Heights, which was at the time the land of the Hittites. In the 1920s, under the League of Nations' mandate system, the Golan Heights, including the spring at Banias, less than four miles from Luz, became part of French Syria, and the Sea of Galilee was placed within British Mandatory Palestine. In 1944, the French Mandate ended, and the Golan Heights became part of the newly independent state of Syria, which was later incorporated into the Quneitra Governorate. The IDF seized the Heights during the 1967 Six-Day War, and in 1981, the Knesset unilaterally declared sovereignty over them. The U.N. Security Council responded by issuing Resolution 497 on December 17, 1981, which declared the annexation null and void.

Luz is also the Hebrew and Aramaic word for nut, almond, hazel, hazelnut, and nut tree. It is talk that is libellous or disrespectful. It is the verb to turn, twist, or bend.

The bone called Luz, the Midrash tells us, houses the human soul and is the starting point for the reintegration of the body at the time of the resurrection. A comment on Ecclesiastes 12:5 (“When people are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets; when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags itself along and desire no longer is stirred, then people go to their eternal home, and mourners go about the streets.”) states:

Rabbi Levi says it refers to the nut (luz) of the spinal column. Hadrian, may his bones be crushed, asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah: whence will man sprout in the Hereafter? He replied: from the nut (luz) of the spinal column. Hadrian said to him: prove it to me. He had one brought; he placed it in water but it did not dissolve, he put it in fire, but it was not burnt, he put it in a mill but it was not ground. He placed it on an anvil and struck it with a hammer; the anvil split and the hammer was broken but all this had no effect on the luz.

In the Middle Ages, non-Jewish scholars acknowledged the legend of the indestructible bone. They referred to it as the “Jews’ bone” or “Juden-knoechlein.” Various interpretations placed its location as the last vertebra of the spinal column, the sacrum, the coccyx, the twelfth dorsal vertebra, wormian bones in the skull, or one of the sesamoid bones in the big toe.

How does this information relate to my particular worldview? In certain parts of the world, girls are held down by their mothers while another woman scrapes away their clitoris with a knife and seals the cut flesh with acacia thorns. On their wedding nights, their husbands use daggers to slice through the scar tissue. I apologise for drawing attention to this but it must be confronted. It is part of our collective barbarity. You and I are responsible. This is an endlessly self-referential loop. My parasites, my sluggish hosts. Keywords, images, phrases, numbers, graphs, arguments, relationships, formulas, diagrams, proofs. People and places to tag. Sniffers. Data packets. Spillover transmissions. Over seven billion served everyday. It is dizzying at first until you blast it open. Coming through the windows, off the shocks, the tires. The lamp posts slipping by the passenger side window, slap, slap, slap, slap. Everything trembling, from our ears to our eyes to the soles of our feet.

I will play the swan,/ And die in music. — William Shakespeare, Othello, 1603

Melody and contour penetrate the neural pathways of the soul but only two things, the nervous system and the circulation of blood, sound through the silence.

In the meantime, investing in an anechoic chamber might make the most sense. It would be a counterfeit quiet and open space of infinite dimension—no more beautiful chords and colours that lodge in the ear and get stuck in the eye. Lines only. Absorb the waves. Minimise the reflections.

“The little almond-shaped bone at the top of the spine where the tefillin knot rests.”

“Oh, for the love of Christ.”

“It has curious properties. It is nourished only from food eaten Saturday night, from melave malka.”

“Would you listen to yourself? You’re not even Jewish.”

“Melave malka means escorting the Queen.”

“The Queen.”

“Shabbos, the universal bride.”

“And that’s who here?”

“It’s not a person, it’s a day. The day of rest. Which you all represent. The feminine. The spiritual.”

“How flattering.”

“Nothing flattering about it. You’re genetic transmitters. Think of it, the wombs of the world. World wide womb. A highly-developed transglobal transportation and delivery service.”

“Is this where your dodecahedron nonsense comes from?”

“Precisely. Six, the recurring cycle, the endless circle of being, doubled. Ten represents direction and change, linear purpose, the divine’s descent into the tangible, a nosedive into Mount Sinai, the side of the mountain, and the rib of man. Twelve is something else entirely. Transcendent infinity descended into the bounded finite, then launched like a rocket back into the beyond. With us holding on for dear life.”

“You’re mad.”

“Not madness. Miracles. Physical objects—wood, stone, crystal, parchment, photographic paper, celluloid, cassette, vinyl, iPhone—become not merely symbols of holiness but holy objects in and of themselves.”

“You’re starting to scare me.”

“I’m starting to scare myself. But nothing exists that is not represented as an image in a second reality. All creatures are shadows and echoes. All nature paints itself. This is how we read the world.”

“You need help.”

“Yes.”

Sabine Mirlesse, Celaeno (12.22), recycled aluminium, patina, frost, part of Crystalline Thresholds | Les Portes de Givre, a temporary installation at the summit of Puy de Dôme volcano in France, 2022-2023Help.

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I am back in Paris after New York and before that, Amsterdam, and before that, the Sarthe and the Cévennes, none of which I’ve written about yet.

What follows below, after the Four Horses of Goya, is set in Spain, which, bizarrely, I haven’t set foot in since 2014 – and that was only overnight.

It is also set in the 19th century, which I missed entirely.

Like all of my weird Goya inventions, it is a stand-alone piece – part of a cycle of texts linked by character, time and place, but otherwise entirely self-contained.

If you haven’t read any yet, you can start here.

You certainly don’t have to read them in order.

(Because there is no order.)

Of course, you don’t have to read them at all.

But I’d like you to.

I’d also like you to let me know what you think of them, and if you like them to share them with others.

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He finds horses less compelling than the men that subdue them, the lands they gallop through and the crowds they trample. This is perhaps because he has never had a meaningful relationship with a real horse, though he was once thrown and knocked senseless by one, an old dray from the farm that reared and panicked at the sight of a brigand’s head just then cresting the nearest hill haloed in blinding sunlight. This was in the autumn of 1773 and he was on the road to his first official position in Madrid, a paid apprenticeship in Mengs’ studio. He had barely left the gates when the old dray started, threw him to the ground and would have crushed him under hoof – and with him our story – if the brigand, who he later saw executed in the Plaza del Sol, hadn’t picked up the loose reins, soothed the skittered animal with soft words and led it away, along with his filled-to-bursting saddlebags, which contained not only food, water, clothing and money but a miniature of the Our Virgin Lady of the Pillar and two portraits of his parents, which to this day have never been recovered. He drew on the experience for the composition of Conversion of Saul of Tarsus (1788-90), the largest of his three frescoes in the Archbishop’s Palace of Alcalá de Henares, which were all destroyed by fire during the Spanish Civil War.

All his subsequent investigations of horses did not come directly from nature but were prismed through other painters’ works, most notably the foreshortened perspectives in the Royal Collection’s Titian (Emperor Charles V on Horseback), Velazquez (the Equestrian portrait of Philip IV, Equestrian portrait of Margarita de Austria and Equestrian portrait of Isabel de Borbón) and Wouwerman (Horses startled by a Dog), and the chalk studies he did in Rome of the Carracci frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese.

This dependency on his predecessors embarrassed him. “I do not follow methods.” He would say this but not exactly believe it to be true. “There is little point, and much poison, in burdening tender youth with rules, with the dull and servile study of trickeries gleaned from textbooks and applied to plaster models of Greek statues. Art requires passion first, then freedom, not servitude, oppression and imposition. This is true of painting and all noble endeavours.”

“God, devil, heaven and hell, here the painter’s brush invariably outperforms the poet’s pen,” he wrote across the bottom of a pencil rendering of an angel on horseback. “This is not just a young man winged but the captured and created angel of the Lord, with the power to move men, redeem sinners, and convert the wicked to the path of goodness.”

The horse, however? It is a botch.

To him, for reasons we nor he will ever fully know, horses are among nature’s most mysterious creatures. Mere tools, means of haulage and transport, power for ploughs and carriages; and at the same time inexpressibly noble, the embodiment of animal grace. Thus unfathomed, he is, therefore, unable to represent them to his satisfaction in anything even approaching their truth, nor capture even the barest essentials of their character – terrible and sublime, swallowing the ground with fierceness and rage, necks clothed with thunder, steam emanating from their forelocks and the quivering power of their flanks, and place these properly into the picture plane with any emotive force. As vivid flatnesses, they fail. He can’t equipoise them realistically and dramatically into two-dimensional space the way any half-talented Old Master could with his eyes closed. This is the harshest truth. Human, equine and other – anatomy has never been his strong suit. He is particularly bad at hands and arms. The effortless perfection in Renaissance academies and studios unnerved him when he first encountered it in Italy, as did the works he spent his days and nights with while cataloguing the masterworks in the royal residences. He knew at a young age that no matter how hard he strived, he would never match the mastery of Titian or Tintoretto, and David, his contemporary, could best him with a brush held by his feet. Such heights were not available to him. Carracci, who had revived painting that since the time of Raphael had fallen into decline, championed for the liberality of his genius as a teacher, who left each disciple free to proceed following the inclination of his spirit without determining for any to follow his style or method, and made only those corrections intended to attain the imitation of the truth, would not have given him a place in his Academia.

“You perhaps think too much.”

Mariquita said this, jarring him out of his daydream.

“And you not enough.”

The girl took his hand and daubed the spittle at the side of his chin.

“Where were we in your lesson?” He said.

“You were telling me what is important,” she said.

“And what is not important. Perspective, for example, and geometry. These will come later. As for anatomy. You and I are artists, not doctors. We don’t learn anything more by putting our hands into the dead man’s excavated entrails.”

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Julie Wyn Summerfield, Ghost Boat 2, oil on canvas, 100 x 160 cm, 2016There are bands wound around one another, one of which is made of the rare element and another of the dense, and between these, others are to be found, composed of light and darkness mingled. — Parmenides, On Nature

LOADING THE BRUSH. There seems to be something going on in the surfaces and depths of a Summerfield painting that overturns 2,500 years of Western thought. Really? Well, no, and yet, there is a disruptive power at work in her sensuous facture—stroke, hue, line—that shifts and unsettles the perceived order of things, altering the well-worn break between the sensory and the logical.

What, exactly, this might be, and what might cause it to happen—accident, technique, laws of physics, a trick of the light—remains unclear, and this is what makes gazing upon one so sublimely satisfying.

Since Parmenides, we have torn knowledge into two incommensurable parts: one gained through the senses, therefore never to be trusted; the other gained through reason, thus smacking of the divine, or failing that, the truth.

Summerfield detours around this divide by closing her eyes to it. Nothing is posed. There are no props or models, no bowls of apples or landscapes. There is no background, no space, no location. Everything contained within each is entirely from within her, from her memory, from thoughts processing a few inches from the canvas.

A Summerfield represents, if anything, a boundary in spacetime where being and thought are one and where the two-dimensional reality of painting’s full, great, glorious arc is fully traversed, from the sacred immediacy of the cave wall to the rounded grandeur of Giotto to the requisite “flatness” of abstraction. It is a window and a looking glass through which we look anew at the way we look at the world – both the real world and the world of appearances. Nature, in all its compendia of guises, from the closest things at hand – flesh, lips, eyes, rock, a piece of luscious red fruit, a field of wheat, a forest-trimmed lake at nightfall.

What is seen, really? One thing slips its identity and becomes another. The pomegranate is a man’s back, the stone a cell and a planet, and the meaning and implications of each echo and reflect endlessly.

Julie Wyn Summerfield, Ghost Boat, oil on canvas, 100 x 160 cm, 2016LIKE MIRRORS FACING EACH OTHER. A Summerfield takes the things found in these competing arenas—the real world and the world of appearance—and makes them its own by confounding their properties and predicates. The process takes time—an unplanned gestation after a long deliberation. The immediately visible forms hide and then reveal other forms. The palette says one thing—monotones, for example—but sparks visions of chromatic lushness, realigning the rods and cones of the particulars into a new form of universal that is formed, literally, in the brush and the gaze—pigment seized by the light and pulled into consciousness through the retinal outcroppings of our brain. This is its alchemy. There are no cheap ideas or painterly tricks. The longer you look at the work, the better it shows itself, the more it disengages from the busy, eye-candy world and slows down, and slows us down, and makes us look, and feel, and be seduced by the visible—this flesh, these lips, just these lips, just this back, just this life in its smallest details, read between the lines, between one and one and three, a special space in life that perhaps has no logic, that is intimate and secret, that makes you think you know where you are going until you arrive, somewhere else, someone else, blessedly alone, alive.

I wrote the text above for an artist catalogue (1+1=3: Julie Wyn Summerfield) in 2014. They are the only words I can find right now, except for these that her husband wrote in 2019:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published A man on a train sits alone with his thoughts. And as the train crosses a switch, its interior lights dim for just an instant. In that instant, without reason or warning, he knows that his life has gone all wrong. He does not yet see why or how to make it right again. He has, in a sense, shed an old skin and is about to emerge transformed. It has happened to each of us, for good or ill,this unannounced and irreversible moment when we first laid our eyes on our one true love or when the bank said no more or when a feared illness was given a name. It leaves its print like blood on the brow of every human face, and it looms behind the man right now a dark and rampant form, a rearing angel with wings outspread and jaws wide in anticipation of the imminent feast. It is raining in his eyes but dust is in the voice he hears imploring, "Don't hurt the angel. She is sad today." - John Carnegie, "Graceless", Amsterdam, 2019 Julie Wyn Summerfield, Reclining Nude 2, oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm, 2000Help with Julie’s final journey to Greece by clicking here.

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Eadweard Muybridge, composite image by Byron Wolfe, Phantom skies and shifting ground, from Eduardo Santiago Muybridge’s post-murder travels, 2016. [California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento; Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries; Center for Creative Photography]1.

Never give advice, particularly on matters of life and writing.

Doctors are employing the help of Charlton Heston and Friedrich Nietzsche to perfect brain surgery. Neurosurgeons at University Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, used a tape of the actor discussing the nineteenth-century German philosopher to help map the brain of a patient. By measuring oxygen levels while the patient, Lydia Rowley, listened to the Heston tape, doctors could identify the speech and language centers in the brain and avoid damaging them during delicate surgery. – International Herald Tribune, October 12, 1998, p 23.

Nothing spicy or deep-fried. No roasted this on puddles of that. Why? The kitchen is a mess. There are stink ants in the utensil drawer. At night, we hear mice scratch and scrape at something under the sink. Every morning, outside, blowflies weave through the motes rising in the thermals, zig-zagging past the window, dopplering off into the forenoon haze towards Belleville – a lazy mad-awful yawning drone now suddenly silenced – just as suddenly silenced! – in a swirling gathering of twittering swallows.

Murder your darlings, say the writing coaches. Swallow your swallows. Can you imagine the carnage here? Samuel Johnson – “Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” And if Friedrich Nietzsche followed this counsel? Herman Melville? Walt Whitman? In La Perche last weekend, my sister’s phone app found tomtits, chick-a dee dee dees, warblers, swifts and a skulking nightingale imitating a chaffinch. My dreams, however, were devoid of their song, but a Walt Whitman did appear in one, a recurring loop in which we are herded off a Greyhound into his rest area on the Jersey Turnpike. Someone grabs me by the scruff of the neck and pushes me against the wall. I feel the barrel of a gun, a Revolutionary War-era flintlock rifle, press against the back of my head. My knees give out and I shout, “I haven’t done anything!” The man behind me laughs and leans in closer. Sure enough, it’s Walt Whitman, played by Charlton Heston. “That’s just it, asshole,” he says, pulling the trigger.

Milepost 30.2 Southbound, Cherry HillYou didn’t like that. Which is healthy. When I was a kid, I often dreamt that my mother would take me to Alice the Goon’s house, a single-storey stucco bungalow with a busted screen door on the east side of town. The lawn was mostly dirt and weeds, strewn with half-eaten dinner plates and bicycle parts. The front walkway was uneven and cracked, and as soon as I stepped on it, pulled by my mother’s hand towards the door, I would burst into tears.

“Please, Mama, don’t leave me with these monsters,” I would beg.

“Monsters? Nonsense,” she would say. “Alice is an angel.”

At first, Alice would indeed be an angel, for when the front door opened, she would tousle my hair, and ask if I wanted a drink and a sandwich. “You see, silly, nothing to worry about,” my mother would say. But the moment she left, Alice would puff out her chest, grow twice as tall and shriek like a beast. Dozens of other goons would suddenly appear. I would try to run away but my feet could barely move. The house twisted into an intricate maze, and as night fell, it was engulfed by a dense, viscous tide, morphing into a vast moonlit sea of mire. Goaded on by Alice – and by her controller, the Sea Hag, the last witch on earth and captain of the Black Barnacle – the shrieking goons waded through the murk chomping on plates and balancing an assortment of common household items – baskets, basins, water jugs, watering cans – on their heads.

When dawn broke, I would find myself back in my own bed, exhausted.

“CLOUDY and wet, and wind due east; air without palpable fog, but very heavy with moisture – welcome for a change. Forenoon, crossing the Delaware, I noticed unusual numbers of swallows in flight, circling, darting, graceful beyond description, close to the water. Thick, around the bows of the ferry-boat as she lay tied in her slip, they flew; and as we went out I watch’d beyond the pier-heads, and across the broad stream, their swift-winding loop-ribands of motion, down close to it, cutting and intersecting. Though I had seen swallows all my life, seem’d as though I never before realized their peculiar beauty and character in the landscape. (Some time ago, for an hour, in a huge old country barn, watching these birds flying, recall’d the 22d book of the Odyssey, where Ulysses slays the suitors, bringing things to eclaircissement, and Minerva, swallow-bodied, darts up through the spaces of the hall, sits high on a beam, looks complacently on the show of slaughter, and feels in her element, exulting, joyous.)”

Carlo Crivelli, Madonna della rondine, 1490 (detail)

Birds abound in the Odyssey, twenty-one species are named, from nightingales to falcons to bearded vultures. Athena has owl eyes and as Odysseus lets the arrows fly, she flits up to perch on a rafter in the form of a house martin. Two eagles tear each other to death; later, an eagle flies by with a swallow in its mouth. Another eagle flies by with a goose in its claws. As does a hawk with a dove.

Before inventing the world’s first film projector, Eadweard J. Muybridge was a professional landscape photographer, widely celebrated for his wet collodion-plate photographs of the American West. These images mythologized – or, more accurately, given Muybridge’s close personal and business relations with the railroad magnate Leland Stanford, advertised, – the still-wild frontier of California, attracting legions of speculators, ex-forty-niners, and wide-eyed, fresh-start-seeking settlers from the war-torn East Coast.

In 1867, at the beginning of his career as a photographer – he was 37 at the time and a successful bookseller and publisher’s agent in San Francisco – Muybridge used the trade name “Helios, the Flying Camera,” and called his mobile darkroom “The Flying Studio.”

Helios (Ἠέλιος) is the Greek god who personifies the Sun. Every day, he drives his fiery chariot across the full arc of the sky. His mortal son Phaeton, the story goes, to prove to his teasers that he is indeed the son of a god, pleads with his father to let him drive the chariot across the skies. Helios’ retinue – Day, Month, Year, and the Four Seasons – sympathetic to the boy’s ambitions, aids him in his defiance of his father. The Hours yokes the four stallions to the golden chariot. Dawn throws open her doors. Phaeton speeds off into the breaking morn. But the chariot is beyond his skill, he loses control, the horses head straight for the deadly Scorpion, who, tired of chasing Orion, turns toward his newfound prey. Phaeton drops the reins, the horses bolt, the earth ignites. Only Jupiter’s thunderbolt can “save the day” – it pierces the chariot and sends Phaeton into a graveyard spin, and down he spirals in flames into the River Eridanus, where he is buried by nymphs.

All who seek to transcend their limitations and who aspire to go beyond their capabilities should heed the lesson of Phaetons's recklessness.

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After his classroom squabble with co-instructor Marguerite Young – whose novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, (Scribners, NY, 1965) is more than seven-hundred thousand words long – John Berryman (aka John Allyn Smith, Jr.), future National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Bollingen Prize winner, twice-interviewed by the Paris Review, two-time guest on the Dick Cavett Show, selected in 1948 by James Laughlin to make the selection for Ezra Pound's Selected Poems, (New Directions, NY, 1949) for which he wrote the original Introduction, which is excellent, but which Pound rejected as too “over-acute, intellectual and recondite”, took refuge on the top floor of Kenny’s Bar, where he drank eleven gin and tonics and picked fights with anyone – dramatic arts majors, writers, printers, bookmakers – who made the mistake of meeting his Coke-bottle gaze.

Asked to leave around midnight, gently helped to his feet and out the door by Kenny himself, Berryman, unaided, walked the three blocks south down South Clinton and the three blocks east down East Jefferson to his new apartment, 409 Jefferson E, moved into the day before, whereupon he realized he did not have the key.

He rattled the knob. He banged his shoulder and forearm against the door. He raised his face to the moon and screamed obscenities. He cursed, and he cursed; he heaved himself drunkenly at the door again and again, four times in all, with the full force of his fat drunken frame behind each pounding blow.

He bruised his elbow, he bruised his knee. He sliced open his forehead.

The door did not budge.

On the fourth heave, the landlady's hairless head appeared at the window above his head.

"Shh!" she hissed. "Be quiet! It's three o'clock in the morning!"

"You be quiet. The door's jammed. Some Iowan plouk stole my key."

"You're drunk."

"As a skunk, and this here's a tree trunk."

Actually, it was a cat-scratch post. Which he relieved himself on nonetheless. (Or by “tree trunk” was he referring to his manhood? From the poem “Two Organs”: “‘I wish my penis was big enough for this whole lake!’” And from Recovery: “He quoted Lautrec's remark, 'I paint with my penis,' and explained in one fancy sentence (bypassing a Matisse anecdote) who Lautrec was.”)

"I'm calling the police!”

"And I'm dating Denise. Liege and lessor let me in. I have an early date with Jane Austin and a man named Gogol, and I need to evacuate my bowels."

The landlord now. In his slippers at the screen door, wrapped in an Iowan quilt.

"We ain't your lesser."

"Lessor, not lesser. A person who leases or lets a property to another."

"You haven't paid for the room yet."

Berryman squatted on the front porch and defecated.

"My deposit," he said.

The police stripped him naked, took his glasses, and threw him in lockup. Or so he said. He also said they exposed themselves to him, but this is difficult to substantiate, as without his glasses, he couldn't see the tip of his own nose, let alone a cop's scrotum across the room through jail cell bars.

Disorderly conduct and public intoxication were the charges. Twelve dollar fine, no expungement, a permanent blot. Dean Strist fired him the next day. Allan Tate and Saul Bellow found him a place at the University of Minnesota. He loaded his books into cartons and boarded a Greyhound.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. We are entering the Dream State again, driving up to the “Nothing to Declare” window. This time two soldiers pull me off the bus and frogmarch me to the centre of the street. I’m wearing a plaid shirt, my hands are tied behind my back. The sun is shining, the glare is blinding. Muybridge men are everywhere, running, jumping, boxing, fighting, sawing trees, sanding wood, hammering nails. Women, too, beautiful, naked or barely dressed, caring for children, carrying bowls of water. Teenage boys, wrestling. A girl kneeling, offering another a drink of water from a large jar.

The soldiers back away. The frame empties of all figures except mine. Walt Whitman, again played by Charlton Heston but this time clean-shaven walks into the viewfinder from the left. He pulls a pistol from his holster, raises it to my head, says something about his “cold, dead hands” and fires. A single bullet to the temple, blood spraying out of the exit wound. Another man’s head, a spectator, bearded, out of focus, wearing thick spectacles – he looks like John Berryman – passes through the frame, blocking our view the moment the bullet scorches through the membranes of my brain. The spectator exits and my body jerks across the screen, crumples and falls to the street. The crowd pushes away. People start running. Alice and the goons appear. Walt Whitman holsters his sidearm and walks away.

Voice up, off, Charlton Heston reciting Friedrich Nietzsche or reading from the King James, hard to say, harder to swallow; all those thous and mines.

“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”

Carlo Crivelli, Madonna of the Swallow, 1490The wet collodion process, in which glass plates must be treated with developing chemicals within twenty seconds of exposure, required that Helios carry his sensitizing and processing equipment with him into the field, either on his back, by horse and cart, or, in more rugged terrain – in Yosemite National Park, for example, a favourite subject of Muybridge – by mule train. He also carried firearms.

According to the testimonies of witnesses at his murder trial, Muybridge was physically dextrous, not always to be trusted in business dealings, often capricious and quick to temper, but an agile and creative thinker, as sharp and fast in his judgments as he was on his feet or with a gun. During a six-year convalescence in England in the 1860s (he left America at the start of the Civil War after suffering a severe head injury in a stagecoach accident), he patented a photographic printing process and a machine for washing clothes and textiles. During this same period he devoted great energies to the study of anatomy, in a vain effort to locate the bone of Luz, an almond-shaped bone believed to be the only part of the human body that withstands dissolution after death, and out of which, it is said, the body will be recreated at the resurrection.

“Get out of the frame.”

I hand Mr Heston a wooden staff. A horn lows. Down in the valley below, beneath the fire's glow, a huge black mass, rumbling and roiling like a murmuration of swallows, sluggishly discharges and oozes toward us, barely perceptible, spilling slowly up the hillside like heavy oil, defying gravity. In front is the long-limbed Sea Hag, dressed in black silk.

The horn blows again. The sky fills with light, an electric drone fills the air.

This is not happening, I say to myself.

I am dreaming.

We are all dreaming.

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

– W.S. Merwin, “Berryman” in Michael Wiegers, ed. The Essential W.S. Merwin (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2017), 188.

PS. Full circle: Heston transliterates into Greek as Χέστον, which sounds exactly like Χέσ’ τον, which means “to shit oneself”.

I shit you not.

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Warning: This is in Hexagon’s Goya section. It does not contain information about France, Paris, politics or food. If you’re looking for something on one of those subjects wait for next Sunday’s post or head here.

Meanwhile…

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Giotto, Joachim's Dream, 1303-13051.

Ya la percibo. Now I see it, now I see her, now I see what she is, now I know her.

He wrote this under the drawing and then erased it, replacing it with Ni asi la distingue. Not even this distinguishes it. Even thus he cannot make her out. Even so he cannot recognize her. Which is it? He is tired. He rests his head on the desk, puts his hands under his forehead, closes his eyes and drops away almost instantly into a dream about how the Christ ascended to Heaven, every part of Him, even those bits no longer attached to His Body, including the Holy Foreskin, which rose into the cosmos in a whirlwind and expanded into the rings of Saturn.

He will sketch this.

“Never forget,” a poet said to him once, “there are thigh bones of our Blessed Virgin all over Europe, including seven or eight alone in churches in Spain.”

The Virgin centipede. He will sketch this.

The first that anyone took notice of was the likeness of a pig he scratched onto a wall with a stick of charcoal. This was in Fuendetodos. On the wall of the church. His mother says it was in Zaragoza but he remembers it clearly. He was six or seven years old. His mother said he was fourteen, but she was wrong. He hadn’t met Martin yet. He had a black dog with three legs. He played with a girl named Maria de Pilar. The friar who caught him—he was sitting on a basket of wheat that he was supposed to deliver to the monks, sketching the pig’s giant cock and balls in charcoal—broke his vow of silence to tell the boy to finish what he had started. Goya obliged, finishing the cock, even adding stubbly hairs to the balls. Upon completion, the monk nodded his approval, then beat him with a stick and marched him to his parents’ house.

“What has he done?” said his father.

“God harvests where he has not sown and gathers where he has not scattered seeds,” the monk said.

His father didn’t understand. “If he needs hiding I’ll be the one to give it,” he said as he untied his leather belt. He had respect for the church, but he was proud.

“He may have a god-given talent,” said the monk. “It would be a sin to leave it buried in the ground.”

“Buried?”

“We must use it wisely, and let it grow.”

His father was still holding him by the scruff of his neck. “Enough church riddles, father,” he said.

“Entrust him to me,” said the monk. “We will secure him a master, and see what we can find in him.”

His father whipped him three times and let him go.

Goya followed the monk back to the charterhouse. He was fourteen. Martin had seen the monk coming and ran away.

“Give and it will be given to you,” said the monk. He remembers this. “A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap.”

Then the monk took off his cowl and stripped the boy naked.

Or did he? His mind plays tricks, pulls things like this out of nowhere, out of the air. Imaginations. Inventions. Whims. Don Felix was a good man, a man of God. It was Don Felix who introduced him to José Luzan, the Holy Tribunal reviewer and the best painter in Aragon, with whom he studied for four years. Copying etchings, painting over indecencies, amending doctrinal errors. Then the boy fled. Why? Where did he go? There are apocryphal stories. He joined gangs, stabbed someone, was stabbed by someone. Travelled with bullfighters, fought in arenas, ran off to Italy, kidnapped a nun.

Is he asleep? Is he mad? The old saw. Hunched over, dreaming, like Joachim in the desert. No angel overhead, no lambs on the hills around. How would he sketch this?

The unimaginable doesn’t appear to exist. The unthinkable is everywhere. He will fill albums with lunatics he saw or imagined. In his first madhouse painting, his first representation of madness, done four years ago at the urging of the poet Valdez, he made himself the beleaguered warden he saw on his first visit, surrounded by raging madmen, furiously whipping two naked lunatics with a lash. This, when he sent the painting to Iriarte for benediction and protection from the Tribunal, he said he had witnessed. But did he? Did he see this yard, with its high, whitewashed walls? Did he see the naked and the chained, the brawling madmen, the lunatic pope, the insane soldier, the mad violinist? Did he see mad, blind Ana Orosia Moreno selling her lottery coupons for pleasures: “freedom”, “health”, “sleep”, “indulgence” and “happiness”?

Francisco Goya, Since she went on talking, they muzzled her and beat her in the face. I saw her, Orosia Moreno, in Zaragoza. Punished because she knew how to make mice, 1814-1823What did he see? Who did he see? The horse biting into the neck of the monk as it straddles the donkey on which the monk is riding? He said he saw this, too, in Zaragoza, when he was a boy.

Francisco Goya, “This happened in Aragon when I was a boy, and the monk was very badly crushed between the horse and the she-donkey,” date unknownHe’ll be in his seventies when he draws what he said he saw when he was ten—the cruel bailiff Lampiños stitched up inside the gutted belly of a dead horse, his terrified face sticking out of the animal’s anus surrounded by a taunting mob of students and prostitutes whom he had persecuted and robbed.

Francisco Goya, In Zaragoza, in the middle of the last century, they put a bailiff named Lampiños into the body of a dead horse, and sewed him up; all night / he stayed alive, 1812-1820Lampiños survived the night. In the morning, the mob pulled him out, shoved a hose up his ass and filled him with quicklime.

Francisco Goya, Death of Alguacil Lampiños for persecuting students and wealthy women, / those who threw him in a basin of quicklime, 1812-1820He later did a series of martyrs killed by centurions. The Romans were endlessly inventive. Laurus disembowelled. Prisca split open and stuffed with wild barley and eaten by pigs. Fausta nailed to a board and sawn in two from vulva to skull. Catamites, starving feral dogs, dwarf gladiators, upside-down crucifixions, serrated dildos, burning helmets, and spit-roasted children, all beneath the spectators’ gaze.

He will burn this album, too.

Looking, not seeing, not wanting to see, forcing to see. What he knows and shows, what he has learned to calibrate and quantify, in infinite descent, is that you can’t trust your eyes. You can’t believe the things you see, not in the way you can in things you don’t see—things not seen. Not only because seen things are exterior, but because they are not real. You cannot trust or believe your own eyes because what you see, what you read, what you paint, who you surround yourself with, the world you circulate in, the people you know and the people who know you, are disguises worn and roles played and lies told ad infinitum. This is the inverted, crepuscular world of the owl and the bat, where sweet becomes sour, white black, love power, honour contempt, punishment exoneration.

He thinks back to the Mass he attended for the death of his child.

The Lord be with you.

And with your spirit.

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them up unto the Lord.

Let us give thanks unto the Lord, our God.

It is right and just to give him thanks and praise.

“As the ass said to the cabbages.” This is what he had wanted to say. That everything is birth and death. That Jesus was the son of Mary and Joseph, nothing more. That the sacrament was flour and water, nothing more. That you might as well go and confess to a tree as to priests and monks, as they, like all mortals, live in a state of sin, so can not absolve the sins of others. That there is no punishment after death. That devotion to Mary is a false doctrine, as is the cult of the saints and the use of images and idols. That transubstantiation is a confidence trick.

That indulgences are evil. That the cross is a post. That faith exists solely in the brains of men. That hope of life eternal is something to amuse idiots with. That everything said about hell is done to frighten little children.

That God would never let his only child become the son of man.

Francisco Goya, Lunatics in a Yard, 1794

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Meanwhile…

Mr. MOONEY: Across Elm up the embankment, which is a high terrace there, across there is a kind of concrete building, more or less of a little park. Jumped over the fence and went into the railroad yards. And, of course, there were other officers over there. Who they were, I don’t recall at this time. But Ralph Walters and I were running together. And we jumped into the railroad yards and began to look around, there. And, of course, we didn’t see anything there. Of course the other officers had checked into the car there, and didn’t find anything. — The Warren Commission Report, Volume XXVIII, p. 126. 1810

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAlvear Hotel, Buenos Aires, September 4, 1962

My love,

Allen Dulles is, of course, holding court in the lobby. Cal Lowell is in the Suite Diplomaticà on the eighth floor, there. Mary McCarthy and the eminently bamboozable Stephen Spender are keynote panelists at the PEN Conference down the street there. I’m of course with Lowell. Last night, he held me out of the window by my ankles while reciting paragraphs from Nitze’s NSC 68.

The avenue below throbbed with Nazis and psychoanalysts.

I miss you.

Cal Lowell. Nourished on sodium amytal and the protofascist apostates of Baton Rouge — the church of his conversion — and subsidised by the Oh-So-Social OSS. He says he is here to “represent the Free World, spill the beans and stop the war.” I am here to make sure he doesn’t run away. Or worse.

“Luke the Leash” he calls me.

“I see the role in Christ you play, Luke. You’re not just his God-born devil dung, you’re like your apostolic namesake, writing a theology of history, a unifying of the varied and scattered accounts, but also a proclamation, a work of social and humanitarian interest, a social gospel. Just don’t forget, opposites don’t so much attract as seduce, like bait, like bribes, the ones beguiled by the others, the sums by the parts, the particulars and the wholes caught up in the delirious dance of joy that is war.”

All day and all night like this, a whirling lather of muscular Christian insanity.

It is now just past two and we are, of course, no surprise, still resolutely pie-eyed. Serial martinis, chain smoking, sweating. Cal’s tongue lolling, his lopsided, dribbling mouth chomping on chocolates and bellowing: “Martinis are good, martinis are god.”

Old Caliban the Rattleass from Boston Mass, thorazine tanned from tip to tail a deep shade of golden-baked ocher. Lithium his muse, thorazine his ruling star. He talks constantly of his mother, the “Brahmin Bitch of the cloistral quadrangles” whose “foremother was the first woman to step off the Mayflower, who forced my father to join Lever Brothers, who said she would leave him with nothing with his name on it except the trashcans. The poor sod spent hours in the bathtub, singing “Anchors Aweigh” and thumbing through car brochures.”

He has a quirked clock out of synch with the real world, or perhaps his jail time kicked out his cycles — no windows, the lights on night and day — or maybe it was those two overlit months in the FCC at Danbury. Merrill Moore keeps rattling on about his biological thermostat and other homemade ideas equally silly. They’ve induced the same in rats at Madison: long periods of abnormal light spiking the production of some chemical in the pineal gland. Similar results on bipeds at St. Liz. He is still searching for his “voice”, he says and he attends all the services, vespers, benediction, compline, but he’s a million miles from the real presence, light years from anything remotely resembling religion.

“My bred-out parents were faithless disbelievers without a thought for the afterlife, and now my mother is gone, dead and boxed in Risorgimento ebony and gold, and my father before her, and me the only thing left, the sad, unbathed orphelin, the backslider, the sorrowful son, the sad cause, the useless effect.”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Cattle furnished my new clothes: my coat of limp, chestnut-colored suede, my sharp shoes that hurt my toes.* Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedNext day. You find me once again surrounded by strap-hanging fascists and Congress of Cultural Freedom fighters. Cal still legless, dragging his heels, fiercely holding on to happy nakedness. Megavitamins, hydrotherapy, wet sheets, hypnosis, insulin therapy, electroshock therapy, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Now, the never-never of narcosis.

We started drinking at nine.

“Every morning,” says Cal, fumbling into his socks, “You and I and countless other like-minded lunatics get up, don our battle dress, strap on our swords, and go to war. It has always been thus, it will always be thus. You’ll see. Today, we’ll go to the Presidential palace, say grace, and down a dozen excellent martinis. Then I’ll pick a fight, tweak a general, drop my gear, say something complimentary about Hitler, you and I will wrestle, they’ll call for backup, I’ll be carted off to the padded room. All in the name of freedom.”

He only dropped his gear once yesterday, at the Borges breakfast, causing the almost blind man to lean over and say, “I might like his poems, but only if he keeps his trousers on.”

“Mercenaries in the cause for freedom, peace, and justice. The words, those great words that they have stolen, just as they have stolen our souls, turning us into poets, these bankers and ragpickers and philistine Reds. Barbarians or Greeks, pinkos or capitalists, golem or goyim, master race or chosen people, what’s the difference?”

“The difference?” I said, puzzling, tugging at the leash and trying to keep up — or, alternately, slow things down. “The gulags, for one.”

“I got into lots of scraps at St. Mark’s. I was big for my age. Defensive tackle, first string, and mean, cruel.”

“What’s your point, Cal?”

“You have returned from hell with empty hands, Mr. Mooney. You’ll see. It’ll fall the other way round next time.”

“What will?”

“The tree. The tree that gave tongue to the wind. One impulse from a vernal wood. Poplars, aspens and birches, sunshine tangible, girdling the globe. There’s an old juniper in Utah said to be three thousand years old. There’s old New Jersey Bill Williams, the poet-king of Paterson, shoes like polished wood. You’ll see. Hell, you’re a homosexual, you should see it already. You should have seen it just now down in the lobby, Dulles and that Toscanini tart at the bar, slack jaws akimbo, tongues jousting like two dead whales slapping against a becalmed shore. I thought I was going to faunch. The woman looks like Auden, who, it has to be said, is the sourest man I’ve ever laid eyes on. And Dulles up in the Royal Suite with her now, the old coot in his tweed suit, his pipe in his trap and the carpet slippers for his gout, banging away like a screen door in a hurricane.”

“I’m not a homosexual,” I said, for the umpteenth time.

“Then stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like Arnault Daniel in the Purgatorio. And help me with my tie, you illiterate flunkey, I’m all thumbs and I can’t see a blessed thing.”

Four hours later and we are two hours late. Cal stopped taking his anti-manic pills after the first sitting with Borges, two days earlier at the American Embassy, where he goosed a butler and arm-wrestled a poet and tried to “conjure up the spirit of Kipling” by singing the Harvard Whiffenpoof song.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Baa! Baa! Baa!Little black sheep who have gone astrayBaa! Baa! Baa!Gentlemen songsters off on a spreeDammed from here to EternityLord have mercy on such as weBaa! Baa! Baa!* Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedNight again, a beautiful night, a pink-flamingo sunset out the wide stretch of shimmering glass. Out of cigarettes. A few minutes ago, readying to smoke the carpet when the phone ignited. Cal the St Mark’s tackle bearpawed past the half-trousered Lieutenant Luke Leash, sending me flying into the bar cart.

“Cal Lowell speaking.”

Music tinkled through the receiver. Gluck.

“This is the voice of the Shofar,” said the voice on the telephone.

Cal spluttered his scorn, an overripe raspberry of contempt.

“Who is it?” I shouted, still on the floor, pants tripped up around my ankles.

“Soy el poéta americano,” said Cal in his best Boston. “Soy amigo con Pablo Neruda. Me encanta mucho las gauchistas y los juves y las gillipollas. Son mis compañeros.”

“Hang up, Mr. Lowell” I said. “Now.”

“It is time to make peace with your God, Mr. Lowell, “ said the quiet, calm, sober voice on the other end of the line. Mispronouncing his name, Lowell rhymed with vowel, howl, foul. Jesuit cowl. Bell & Howell.

“My God? Are there others? Good lord. Nobody told me.”

“It is time to issue last rites,” said the voice.

The leash reaches the cord and yanks it from the wall. Cal scratches his crotch, lights a Kool, says nothing.

“Well?”

“The Shofar, ancora,” said Cal.

“Jesus.”

“No, the Jewish rams horn for war. My old adversary.”

I was up, buckled. “We should go, no?”

“A whistle first. A chalice before the palace and a whistle.”

All day, Cal has been demanding that I whistle the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” My monkey, he says. My organ, grinding. He thinks this absurdly funny. My organ, grinding. He swivels his hips when he says it, pirouettes across the carpet, growling like a bear, his old alter ego, the true adversary, part Irish cop, part Boston Bull. He is having a ball. Six hours and six paramedics later, he’ll be strapped to a table in the Clinicá Bethlehem, his wellborn blood turned to lead by massive doses of chlorpromazine. And two days hence, on the Braniff flight back, he’ll fall for the air hostess, try to follow her off the plane at Asunción. We will have to tie him to his seat.

In Miami now.

“Yankee doodles,” he says.

“Sorry?”

“This shit we’re showing. This Pollock bollocks. Free enterprise painting, you call it.”

“Call what?” I said.

“As if. You’ve jumped the wrong boat, Luke. Where is the grace in this brainstormed chaos? The accuracy? Do you have any idea what these works disclose? They are secret maps. They show our weak spots. Soon you’ll see, as I and many others already do. Do already. Do do. Be be. Ha ha.”

At the lobby bar, before all this transpired, Luke the Leash has to pry Cal’s hands off a young woman named Luisa. Christ knows who she is or who she was there with. Then, successfully spilled into the limo, Cal refused to go straight to the palace, and insisted on visiting the zoo; he banged his feet and threw a hammerlock on my pig-shaved head until I submitted.

Top of his lungs: “And the multitudes asked him, saying, What then shall we do? What shall we do?” Something biblical, I think.

At the zoo he fed Jack Daniels to the baboons and urinated on a brown bear. Later, he dropped his gear again, climbed an equestrian statue in Plaza Mayor, recited Kilo’s Cantos and extolled the virtues of the Ubermensch. Meanwhile, back at the palace, Dulles got word, shook his head, and smiled. “We fall for Caligula,” he waxes, “And get fucked by Caliban. Then tomorrow, we wake up next to Calvin.”

Love Luke.

(That’s an order.)

PS. He’s writing now. This just in. “Buenos Aires” he’s titled it.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *In my room at the Hotel Continentala thousand miles from nowhere,I heardthe bulky, beefy breathing of the herds.* Help!

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Money is not the root of all evil. It is the good soil in which that root anchors and taps.

—Papá?

Bent at his desk. The boy approaches. Is his father sleeping or working? He taps his shoulder, which makes him jump, which makes the etching needle skate across the wax on the copperplate. Which makes Goya bellow, “Damn!” Which makes Javi flinch and run.

Later:

—Don't shout at the boy, Pepa writes this in the Conversation book.

—I didn't shout—he ruined the blasted plate.

—He wanted to ask you something about his drawing.

—...What?—irritated, not looking up from the scratch in the wax. Thinking he can mask it with crosshatches. Or maybe add another figure to the mob. Another woman or faces in a crowd.

Pepa puts the open book beneath his gaze and taps the written phrase with her finger—He wanted to ask you something about his drawing.

He reads it, snorts, pushes the book aside, looks down at the wax.

Ruined.

Pepa leaves the room.

Goya scrapes the plate, gives it to Juana, makes a mental note. Get the boy a teacher.

—Papa?

—...Yes.

—Is it true they come at night in carriages with silent wheels?

—Who?

—The priests.

—Who told you that?

—Pilar.

Pilar. The cow.

—I wouldn't know. But I doubt it. I don't think they come at all.

—Papá? Tugging again.

—You mustn't bother your father when he is working, Javi.

The boy is staring hard at his own drawing. Two snakes, coiled around a madroño tree.

—Is it an animal? asks Pepa.

He pretends not to hear.

Javi looks at the pictures fastened to the strings that the assistants have slung between the walls of the studio like the clotheslines crisscrossing the street out the window. Why does his father make these? Where does he see them? They make the boy shudder, as much as they would if they were real.

He likes the portraits. He likes the dogs especially. But the images on the strings are demonic. This was what Pilar said. Demonic and disgusting and evil. Abominations from the brain of a sinner.

—The more frightful, the more diabolical, the more this demon-man delights in them. She made the sign of the cross as she said this. “Why would anyone bring these into the world, unless they were wicked, unless they were depraved?”

—Pray with me, she said to the boy, forcing him to his knees. Pray for his soul.

The library, where Goya keeps his books and prints stored away for some imaginary day when he won't be so bloody busy doing and making, being something, building a life for his family, the library is Javi's secret place. His refuge. No one goes there. His mother refuses to cross the threshold and the servants are forbidden entry.

Javi takes whatever books or sheaves he wants over to the table and leafs through them. Today, he is leafing through the Leonardo again, which is kept behind a grill with other priceless books. That was his father's word, priceless, inestimable.

Some of the faces are almost as ugly as his father's faces, but they are all real faces, not imagined faces like his father's faces. His father's faces are different.

—Mamá?

—Yes.

—But must I go?

—Go where?

—Hunting with Papá and Uncle Martin.

—You don't want to?

—No. I'm not like Papá. I don't like dead things.

Francisco de Goya, El entierro de la sardina, pen and sepia ink, c. 1816, Museo del Prado, MadridIt is the water in the soil and the sun in the sky.

—Stay in bed, he says. She is pale, she hasn’t eaten. She pulls her hand free, shakes her head, closes her eyes.

—Arrieta says it is not the disease or the pest, he tells Moratín fifteen minutes later as they walk towards Fuencarral through a haze of smoke and sulphur. Javi is with them, against Pepa’s wishes. He clutches his father’s finger and asks if Pepa is going to die.

Moratín writes the question in the Conversation Book.

—Eventually, says Goya.

He has made many mistakes with Javi, and as a result, he is spoiled and lazy. Pepa blames him for this.

He will not spare the boy the realities of the world. Nor the next.

The street is crowded with casks and water-butts. There are animals everywhere. Half-wild pigs, chickens, a kennel of dogs.

—It is her blood, he says, which is sapped.

—Then what she needs is organ meat and bull’s testicles, says Moratín.

The disease is vómito negro, which Arrieta says is spreading again in the southern ports. More than a hundred deaths a day. They talk about this, and the pest outbreak in the Black Sea, and the siege in Cadiz, and the slave riots in Puerto Rico and Cuba.

They turn onto Fuencarral and see the crowd shrieking at a figure with two heads and four feet. Javi clutches the finger tighter; his father laughs. A firebreather next, followed by the skull-faced Prosecutor, stumbling drunk through the smoke. He is playing some sort of trumpet; after every lurching hop in his backward dance, he hikes up his black gown and horn farts, first at a priest leading three altar boys tethered at the ends of ropes, then at a horned Goat-Devil, then at the giant sardine hanging from a pole, held aloft by three stilt-walking penitents in dunce caps.

The boy is staring wide-eyed at a dancing nun with rosy cheeks and a giant papier-mâché vagina. The nun is grotesquely peeling and licking figs and oranges, the skins of which she flings in the faces of the dozen drunken women dressed as picaros that surround her, and at the majo rogues with cudgels that throw squibs and lumps of burning pitch between the legs of those in their way, taking special aim at pretty girls in petticoats and old women in black, who shriek and cluck tongues and make obscene signs of the cross.

Next are the pregnant men, lustily lamenting their widowhood, and women dressed as monks with giant vegetable erections. They chase boys and girls on the sidewalk.

Deafness saves him from the infernal canticle. This morning, Moratín wrote in the Conversation Book:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Fie, fie, fie, the sardine died the priests and the devils are to burn her while we make love in the ashes.* Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedBehind the lead party are several hundred young men wearing sheep and donkey heads. Others are dressed as Roman soldiers, others as purple-hooded Christs and Marys with staring eyes and curled-up lips, beseeching the crowd to save them from the grace and goodness of God. These and others—saints and holy men, whores and devils, jealous hermits, clerics with sacks of money—succumb to every evil of licentiousness as they picture forth every possible position and moment of carnal love, from first love to the last disdainful betrayal. Four men with manta rays on their shoulders carry a cage filled with screeching bats; a group of majas toss a straw manikin in a blanket high into the air; others, wretches of the worst description, hold longs poles lifted like standards with bells on them of all sizes, or half-dead black cats tied to the tops by their tails or paws. Nuns with blood-red faces and brazen virgins—half of them men, half of them women—with red petticoats and high plaits of whitened hair stir hyssop brooms in caldrons and sprinkle and slap wine on the crowd. Others leap about like monkeys, pricking each other with pins.

Next is the Carnival King, the undertaker of the sardine, leading a cortege of palanquins.

The miserable fish will be buried tonight in a deep grave on the riverbank in a giant coffin confected of turron.

He looks down at Javi. Pepa will be upset. Not fit for children, she will say. It is chilly, but not cold; the boy is wearing a thick quilted jacket buttoned to the throat, grey trousers, black buckled shoes. Is he having fun? Is he scared? What does he make of this?

He squeezes the little hand in his, which is mottled and knuckly, twisted with age.

—Do you want to take your coat off, Javi?

The boy shakes his head.

A bier passes, borne on the shoulders of four Don Quixotes. It carries a straw effigy. Two donkeys follow, carried on the shoulders of fat friars.

10.

Later, after eating grilled sardines and drinking wine at a stall in Plaza del Sol, he tells the boy not to say anything to Pepa. It will only upset her. The boy looks up at him, uncomprehending.

On the walk home, they see a “Mortus” banner abandoned on the ground. The boy asks what it says.

—Death, he tells him.

The boy laughs.

Francisco Goya, El entierro de la sardina (detail), c. 1812–1819, Museo del PradoFarncisco Goya, El Entierro de la sardina, c. 1812–1819, Museo del Prado, MadridThank you for reading. Hexagon is two years old today.

Stem, leaf, thorn, bud…

The seed sown on rocky ground is the one who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since he has no root, he remains for only a season. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away. The seed sown among the thorns is the one who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. But the seed sown on good soil is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and produces a crop—a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold.” — Matthew 13:20

Plant the seed

J. D. U. Eckhardt, “The Tree of Good and Evil Knowledge” - from Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, 1788

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If you are not a fan of police procedurals or courtroom dramas please skip this and wait for Sunday’s Goya. If you’re not big on Goya wait for the following Sunday’s Hexagon. If you do not like Hexagon, go jump in the lake. If you cannot swim I will pull you out. Unless you are a fish. In which case I will leave you in the water. With your fish thoughts. Swimming in circles. Sucking freshwater. Absorbing magnetic pulses. Imprinting the microscopic crystals of magnetite in your tissues with the water’s chemical nature. Preparing for the moment when you hit the sea and taste the salt, switch over to geomagnetic cues and lock in the latitudes and longitudes, clear in your fishy knowledge that one day you will need to come back to those precise coordinates to spawn. Know this: when you do it will be months from now and months ahead of your return, because you will be way out in the middle of the ocean somewhere, halfway to Japan for all I care, still not reading Hexagon because you are too damn busy swimming about in your damn little fish circles.

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Previously…

In Episode 1, John Gordon was found dead on a sidewalk with a bullet hole in his forehead. In Episode 2, Eli (“Stodge”) Stodgell, a Métis police constable, confronted Donald Todd, the main suspect. In Episode 3, Stodge hatched a plan to use his brothers, Harry and Bert, to get Todd to confess to Gordon’s murder. In Episode 4, the brothers, with the help of their sister, Mary, put the plan into action. In Episode 5, Todd is induced to confess. In Episode 6, his defence attorney makes his summation.

This is the last paragraph:

“They made him believe that unless he was a murderer, he could not join their gang of desperados. Under these conditions, Todd would sign anything. A rattlesnake is more of a gentleman than a man who worms his way into a man’s confidence and then cuts his throat.”

Mr. Bonnar contended that after committing the deed, Todd saw young Kennedy coming on horseback and hid in the field. From there he saw Carris the cook and Hayden the hack reach the body and at once concluded that it would be impossible to prove that he had been the first man on the spot, which induced him to return to the corpse, possibly with the object of theft, in this way getting blood and brains on his hands and trousers.

His subsequent actions proved that he had a guilty mind, as was shown by his going to Hallett’s door and saying, “My God, John, save me from this.”

The evidence clearly showed that Gordon and Todd were infatuated with the same woman and were rivals in her affections. There was, therefore, ample reason according to the morals of these people for a condition of enmity between them.

As to the means employed to gain Todd’s confidence, these had to be adapted to the social and moral conditions under which the suspected party lived. Methods used by Chief McRae were the most effective for the interests of justice, and the people who condemned Chief McRae for such methods would have condemned him for being slack in the interests of justice had he not succeeded in tracking down the murderer and bringing to justice a man who had sent John Gordon to eternity without a moment’s warning.

The prisoner has said that he was forced to sign a confession by threats of violence. If he was frightened, why did he not cry out, or at least go the next day and complain to his friends or the police of such an outrage?

The defence had pleaded that the confession was gained under the promise of a reward—a share in the plunder of a gang—and the next moment had said that Todd kept away from the gang because he was afraid of them. Was this reasonable?

“You would not go to church to get evidence against this man. You would not go into respectable circles to look for facts about him. No. You must go into the back lanes and gutters of this city to look for his tracks, for there you will find them.

The means used to trace his movements and find out the truth are stigmatized as vile. The methods and evidence were no viler than the man against whom they were directed. If respectable citizens are ruthlessly murdered by thugs, are those thugs to be protected by the mire in which they wallow, or shall we stir up that mire to uncover the criminal? If not, we better all be blacklegs and swindlers for self-protection.”

Mr. Bonner impressed the jury with their responsibility as British subjects sworn to do their duty to their country. He reminded them that though they might even bring in a verdict against the prisoner, yet there was a further safeguard in the appeal to the full court against any injustice being done him. Back of this again was the Ministry of Justice, who could commute his sentence if he thought it unjust.

His Lordship then addressed the jury. He told them that there was no direct evidence to prove that the person who shot the deceased was Donald Todd, but there were the circumstances of the case and the statements made by the prisoner and the witnesses. The evidence alone would not be sufficient to convict the prisoner. But this with the admissions of the accused might rightfully be considered as true evidence, more or less, strong according to the opinion of the jury. For the only direct evidence was the confession of the prisoner.

Ordinarily, a man could not safely admit such a crime for the sake of his safety and personal reputation, yet there were other circumstances under which a man might be induced to confess to such a crime. The weight of these circumstances was for the jury to decide.

As to the methods used by the detectives, His Lordship held that there was no reason to believe that a man who once lied should never be trusted on his oath. On the other hand, a persistent liar was not a desirable witness. The methods adopted by the police might not be approved of by the jury, yet the duty of the jury was to consider whether the evidence produced was sufficient to bring home the crime to the accused, irrespective of the idea that the methods used were not reputable. The police were a useful body of men to society and were, no doubt, honourable and faithful in the discharge of their duty in protecting society and discovering criminals. Yet the jury was not to lose sight of the fact that they were naturally zealous in getting evidence against a man upon whom evidence was cast and that their reputation was at stake in ferreting out crime. This, however, was not to influence the mind against the evidence of the police, which should be considered on its merits.

At 8:40 there was a call from the jury, and His Lordship having taken the bench, the 12 men entered. There was a death-like silence in the crowded courtroom. Todd leaned eagerly forward on the dock with his hand behind his ear. In reply to the usual question, the foreman said “We are unable to agree upon a verdict.” This came as an evident surprise upon the prisoner, who, apparently, was expecting an acquittal. He sunk back in his seat and his jaw dropped.

There were some, then, who wanted his death.

The question was, how many?

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I watched my daughter apply to France’s top art schools this week. This required her to fill out lengthy dossiers d’inscription, list the three films, three books, and five artists “qui vous ont le plus marqués”, create and explain a work of art entitled “Moi et les autres”, compose lettres de motivation and notes d’intention and, as if that wasn’t already onerous enough, write an essay about how Donna Haraway’s cyborgs and Paul B. Preciado’s telebodies can “nourish or re-connect your thinking and your plastic practice”.

Then these cumbersome elements, along with selections of 7, 10 or 15 jpegs of her recent oeuvres, had to be merged into single PDFs weighing no more than 20 MB and uploaded, before midnight Wednesday, onto Parcoursup, the French government website that “manages the balance between undergraduate places in French universities and other higher education institutions.”

The portal, in place since 2018 and notoriously buggy, allows students to make from 1 to 10 “wishes” and up to 20 “subwishes” for the schools they want to attend. “Hence,” as Wikipedia puts it, “undergraduate programs receive far more applications than they used to, and some universities have to consider more than 100,000 student applications. This has led to tensions within French universities and contributed to a controversy between left- and right-wing parties.”

Take it from me—this is our third kid through—there is no controversy. Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, navigating through Parcoursup’s many mazes will be a terrorizing experience and an unmitgated shit show.

And sure enough, two hours before the witching hour Wednesday my daughter’s screen went blank, and then about half an hour later filled with this message: “Le site Parcoursup est momentanément indisponible."

That momentarily unavailable moment dragged on for the next two hours, and then the screen informed us that the deadline for application file uploads would be extended till 10 pm the following day. By then, of course, the damage had been done. The panic the panne provoked—on top of the mental anguish and pressure already in place all week—pushed everyone to the brink. Sleep that night was sketchy. Parcoursupial cyborgs and telebodies crowded our dreams. It was so traumatising that I decided there and then to write a follow-up to a piece I wrote about art schools a few months back, in which I asked dozens of questions, including these:

i) Why does so much contemporary art look like homework?

ii) Are institutions of higher learning the best environments for art instruction or is the increasing professionalisation of art, by which I mean the almost universal obligation for academic certification, with its attendant conformist tendencies and standardising effects, 100% depressing and awful and evil?

iii) As Jerry Saltz once wrote, should degree-granting Fine Art departments “stress courses in craft and various skills — from blacksmithing to animal tracking?” Or, as the late Dave Hickey suggested, should their “evaporating” raison d’être no longer be “training sissies for teaching jobs” but be spilled wholesale into Athletics departments attended by students for the same sole reason basketball players go to NCAA schools: not to get a piece of paper but to “make it to the pros”? Or — and this one’s mine—should art instead follow the Premiere League football model, with youth academies and farm teams feeding new talent directly into the top-drawer maws of Team Gagosian, Team Zwirner, and Team Qatar?

iv) Did the art world engender the art school or vice versa? Did the art market create both, or are all three — art school, art market, art world — so far up each other’s arses you can’t tell them apart?

But then I remembered that today is April 7, and that on this date four years ago a friend of mine, Robert Cordier, an artist of exceptional vitality and scope, became one of the 34,000 people in French nursing homes killed by COVID-19 between March 2020 and March 2021.

So.

I have a photograph of Robert, looking gaunt and frail a few days before his death, and another of his casket in his open grave. I’ll spare you those. Instead, here’s a shot of him with Jimmie Baldwin, taken in 1964, when they were working together on the Broadway production of Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie.

And here’s a short film.

And here are some Substack posts about him that I wrote a while back.

And here is the poster of the documentary we made about his life and work.

And here’s a trailer for the film.

And here’s a poem I wrote the day of his funeral.

And here’s a poem that my daughter wrote when she was six.

And here are some pages from her most recent sketchbook.

And here is a request.

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And here is the first-ever photograph of a wave.

Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sète (detail), 1857Thanks for reading. Don’t go and die on me. And sorry for the sissies crack, but it wasn’t me. It was Dave Hickey.

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Joseph Nicephor Niépce, 1826That is, experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do from the laws of Nature alone, insofar as Nature is only considered to be corporeal. — Spinoza

He wishes it would work, Moratín’s hallucination machine, sent to him from Paris along with a set of fancy Senefelder pens, an illustrated treatise on sign language, and more reams of velum than he could use in two lifetimes—how marvellous that would be, transmit a thing into a prism that traps its visible essence and magically casts forth its perfect form, eliminating the need for conjuring—just fill in the lines and shade in the shadows.

But it doesn’t work and this enrages him.

Though disabled by fate he still has most of the major faculties, including the most fundamental perception of all—that of his own existence—and he can still paint and draw better than most everyone whose work he’s seen in Madrid, in Paris, and now in Bordeaux. Just look at the clumsy nonsense of his daughter’s teacher, and then look at his Muguiro portrait, or the milkmaid, or the bullring works, or any page of the albums you care to choose.

But he’s eighty-two, exiled in a land whose tongue he can’t speak or hear, nearing his last breath (though he does secretly half-think he’ll live like Titian to ninety-nine), too vexed by blindness to sharpen his own pencils, half-asleep most of his waking hours and wholly awake most of his sleepless nights, but rich enough and famed enough not to give a rat’s ass, confident that his legacy will support his household for generations to come and that his best work, like Titian’s, like Velazquez’s, like Raphael’s, will survive for centuries.

But, at the same time, he is chronically restless.

So, decided in his heart and mind to wear out, not rust away, he tries again, slips the double glasses over his nose and puts the large magnifier in place and his better eye in the hole at the top of the brass rod until the bottom half of his clouded pupil is directly above the four-sided glass prism, poised at its upper edge, and the likeness of Mariquita, his daughter, posed sideways before him in the washerwoman dress, spectrally re-appears bright and glimmering on the piece of paper beneath his hand.

He blinks, she disappears. He tries again, tries to bring her into focus, but she doubles, darkens, shifts into teary blur.

He lowers his eye, finds the angle, finds Mariquita, traces her quickly with a pencil. Eyes, nose, mouth. He takes his eye away, the illusion disappears. The paper is marked with unsure, shuddering lines.

A trick of light, then. Pointless.

“Don’t move, Mariquita.”

He pushes the camera Lucida’s rod away and sketches her likeness straight, dimmed eye to palsied hand.

There.

He shows it to her, she cocks her head, studies it carefully.

“So fast. And it’s good.”

He is surprised by his pride and says what he always says, “If you can’t sketch a man who has thrown himself out a fourth-floor window”—Mariquita joins in, mimicking his gravelled voice—“in the time it takes for him to hit the ground, you’ll never do anything worth looking at.”

He grumbles, leans in to kiss her cheek.

“But, uncle Paco… it doesn’t look a thing like me.”

He raises his hand to swat and she laughs and turns to the page before, on which a bearded man in a white tunic is sketched, stooped over two walking sticks, tottering forward on arthritic joints.

“Is that you?” she says, giggling. “Is that supposed to be you?”

Aún aprendo—”I’m still learning.” Father Time. He’d seen something similar by Blake in a book on painting by Fuseli and a Renaissance version misattributed to Michelangelo, and Mariquita had been reading Dante’s Convivio to him, and he had written this down— “The good walker reaches his goal and finds rest; the errant wanderer never reaches it; his mind and soul wear out with great effort as he forever looks ahead with greedy eyes”—which he wants to add to the facing page of the folio when he makes it into a print. Which will be when? His sentiments are in flux. Too much wine. Too much coffee. Too old. Too stupid. To bestially stupid and coarse.

Aún aprendo. Aún no estoy aprendiendo.

There’s an audio version of this episode for paid subscribers behind the paywall at the bottom of this post.

Another Moratín’s gift, a sun drawing by Niépce, who he met at Daguerre’s diorama last year, makes him even uneasier. In the accompanying letter, which Mariquita translates, Niépce described the process. A thin coat of bitumen tar, the same which Goya uses for his blacks in paintings and to scratch upon for his etchings, is dissolved in lavender oil and applied to the etching plate or the lithographer’s stone. Once dry, the inked image is laid over the surface and the two are left outside for hours or days, depending on the clarity of the sky and the power of the sun’s rays—the bitumen is less soluble when left exposed to light. Solvent then rinses away the unhardened tar shielded by the etching’s lines and dark areas. The now bare surfaces are burned in acid for an etching, or the remaining bitumen serves as the water-repellent material for a lithograph. No scratching, no labour. No artistry. No artist.

Niépce also described a newer process with a camera obscura that requires no etching or drawing and produces permanent heliographic pictures. Original works from actual things miraculously transmitted, not mere copies. The Frenchman seeks an audience with Goya’s banker Galos. He also mentions a combustion machine, self-perpetuating.

He examines the quality of the paper. He is tired. He flips idly through the sign-language book, looking for gestures with folded hands or interlocking fingers. There is none. He asks for hot chocolate, which he will take in his room. Mariquita helps him out of the chair. He waves her off at the stairs, grasps the banister with both claws, and pulls himself up to the first landing. He stops and sits. The blood in his heart and head pound.

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Previously…

Here are the last two paragraphs from Episode 5, “The Confession”:

“I did not own an overcoat. I read an advertisement on mesmerism but I never studied it. I never drew a revolver on George Bruce. I did not rob Amy Bernard of $35. I did not Rob Thomas at St. Charles. I never had a fight with John Gordon.”

The court then adjourned until this morning.

There’s an audio version of this episode for paid subscribers behind the paywall at the bottom of this post.

Join us!

A large crowd assembled in the courtroom to hear counsel for the crown and the defence deliver their addresses and His Lordship to charge the jury.

Mr. Howell spoke first. The main thrust of his argument was a forcible critique of the methods used by the police.

“The means used to entrap this man were despicable. The police played upon his weaknesses. They tempted him with women, debauched him with drink for days on end, hired paid traitors to worm themselves into his confidence, and then induced him with monetary rewards to confess to a crime he never committed. This is trickery of the lowest order, an awful deception perpetrated on a vulnerable man whose mind was lost to delirium tremens.

A confession from a man under these circumstances is worthless. To be of any value a confession must be obtained without undue influence. The rule is well known: no confession that is made in consequence of any threat or inducement of a temporal nature — not a spiritual one — made by a person in authority is admissible. It must be free and voluntary, from a man when in his sober senses. If it flows from hope or fear, excited by a person in authority, it is inadmissible.

Those confessions alleged to have come from Todd did so under the most debasing and distressing circumstances. It was not the truth these spies were after, but to betray Donald Todd and earn their thirty pieces of gold. The only difference between these men and Judas Iscariot was Judas was at least man enough to hang himself, and these miscreants have so far not found it in them to do likewise. They made him believe that unless he was a murderer, he could not join their gang of desperados. Under these conditions, Todd would sign anything. A rattlesnake is more of a gentleman than a man who worms his way into a man’s confidence and then cuts his throat.”

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“A.I. Eeee! Ohhhh! You!!!!”
“The machine covers the ground behind it in thick black syrup”

Otis Jordan, Peels (detail), from “The Morble”, Casa Alpina Arte , Ollomont, Italy, July 20233. “This seems to be working well. What could go wrong?”

The question we must ask ourselves is: which conditions should be placed on our forms and on Σ such that the resulting form F is indeed a binary quadratic form? Also, how can we guarantee that such a Σ in fact exists? Finally, from our previous section, we have some intuition that the composition of two forms is not unique: how can we avoid this problem?

Firstly, in our discussion of Legendre’s theory of composition, we have proved the existence of a transformation Σ giving rise to a new form. For example, our expression for Y in ?? can be written in terms of x, y, z,w as above, and thus gives us a transformation by setting q = 0, q′ = 2a, q′′ = °æ2a′ and q′′′′ = b °æ b′. Similarly, the expression for X, given in [x], can also be rewritten in this way.

Let’s look at an example.

Example 3.1. Let f(x, y) = 2x2 + 3y2 and g(z,w) = z2 + 6w2. We define Σ by

X = xz − 3yw, Y = 2xw + yz,

and thus obtain

(2x2 + 3y2)(z2 + 6w2) = 2(xz)2 + 12(xw)2 = 3(yz)2 + 18(yw)2 = 2X2 + 3Y 2.

For f(x, y) = 5x2 +3xy +6y2 and g(z,w) = 2z2 +3zw+15w2 of discriminant Δ = −111, define Σ by X = xz − 3yw, Y = 5xw + 2yz + 3yw,

and thus obtain

(5x2 + 3xy + 6y2)(2z2 + 3zw + 15w2) = 10X2 + 3XY + 3Y 2.

This seems to be working well. What could go wrong?

—Zola Mooney, “Composition of Binary Quadratic Forms”, Level-4 Honours project, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, Friday 1st March, 2024

“Jim Pulk was said to have slayed the dragon by baking a poisoned pie.”

Within the flat lands of the South Downs, there are several springs which rise to the surface, creating pools that are thought to be bottomless. These are known as ‘Knucker Holes’. It was believed that the South Downs were filled with holes like these and that they went down to the other side of the world.

A famous legend tells of a dragon called the Knucker who lived in a pool near the Sussex village of Lyminster. The water of the pool was said to have healing properties and was once used to cure illnesses.

Different legends have surrounded this pool and its famous dragon, the Knucker. One story tells us of a farmer's boy from Lyminster called Jim Pulk, (however some say the man was called Jim Puttock from Wick, a nearby village). Jim Pulk was said to have slayed the dragon by baking a poisoned pie, which he placed on a cart, only for the dragon to eat the entire cart and the horses who towed it as well. Once the dragon was dead, Jim Pulk cut off the head of this large water beast and allegedly took it to the pub, the Six Bells Inn to celebrate. However, Pulk poisoned himself after killing the dragon (some say he didn’t wash his hands), and died while at the Six Bells. Jim Pulk is allegedly buried in Lyminster churchyard.

Sussex has several other folkloric stories of Dragon’s in places such as St. Leonard’s Forest, where the 6th century French hermit St. Leonard battled with a Dragon in the ancient woodland. Or on Bignor Hill, which was believed to be the home of a Dragon (similar to Chrome Hill, also known as ‘The Dragon’s Back’ in Derbyshire).

— Otis Jordan, “Sussex: Seven Scenes of the South Downs”, Ceremonial County Series Vol.I - West Sussex | Cheshire, Folklore Tapes, March 2, 2024

— Otis Jordan, “Sussex: Seven Scenes of the South Downs”, Ceremonial County Series Vol.I - West Sussex | Cheshire, Folklore Tapes, March 2, 2024Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published — Otis Jordan, “Sussex: Seven Scenes of the South Downs”, Ceremonial County Series Vol.I - West Sussex | Cheshire, Folklore Tapes, March 2, 2024 Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published5. “I am confused about the rules at first, but quickly get engrossed in the game.”

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The flesh goes on creating seed just as God created it to do. The blood vessels function according to their nature, and thus the fluids rise. To put it bluntly for the sake of those who suffer miserably: if it does not flow into flesh it will flow into the shirt.— Martin Luther, 1521

Writing to Stendhal in 1829, Prosper Mérimée describes how Fernando VII’s third queen and second cousin, Maria Josepha of Saxony, was so overcome on her wedding night by her husband’s monstrous appearance and appendage that she soiled the sheets of their marriage bed.

The poor girl, a sixteen-year-old Saxon princess who spoke only German, was untutored in the more unpleasant realities of the animal kingdom. Her only love, pastoral poetry, furnished her with but the most fanciful notions of natural truth and the elemental character of man. Vowed since her first flowers to chaste devotions, she was, according to Mérimée, “so Christianly elevated as to be unaware of even the simplest things of this world, the sort of things that every little girl in Spain learns before they are eight years old.”

As was the custom, on the night of the royal nuptials, the First Lady of the Bedchamber was assigned the task of instructing the newly queened on what was expected from a hymeneal bride on her day of days. And what to expect from the groom.

However, according to Mérimée, “the old whore protested that she had never paid much attention to what her husband was doing to her, so she could hardly be expected to explain it to others, and as a result, the queen was put into her marriage bed without the slightest preparation.”

Enter the king, her now husband, a swarthy and bloated satyr smoking a cigar clenched between black teeth in a slack mouth above a jutting lower lip and a prognathous jaw whose absurd prominence, on a face as long and gray as a donkey’s, was barely counterpoised by the enormity of its nose and the tininess of its squinting piss-hole eyes.

Generations of interbreeding had endowed craniofacial dysostosis, which deformed the royal skull, and macrogenitosomia, which, according to a sister-in-law, produced “a royal manhood as thin as an asparagus spear at the base, as fat as Pedro Romero’s fist at the end, and as articulated and long betwixt as the front leg of a bull.”

He was, moreover, the rudest and most shameless scoundrel in his kingdom.

Francisco Goya, El Coloso, 1818Hexagon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Faced with this horrible sight, the girl thought herself fainted and clutched in the most horrifying dream of her life; or perhaps she had died a sinner and gone to hell; and unable to understand the bleats of the beast attacking her, and incapable of ascertaining the aspirations of his fondling exertions or what in god’s name the wielded club attempting to impale her even was, the best she could do was do her best to drive it off, which only incensed it more. So she ran, the priapus in heated and heavy-stepped pursuit.

Goya told what is described thus far in three etched and aquatinted prints, long since lost, but renowned for their brilliant hue and warm saturation. In the fourth print, which, like the rest of the series, borrows heavily from Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode and the libertine scenes of Fragonard, the king pursues his queen; but, as she is young and agile and he obese, heavy with gout, he trips over a settee.

In the next, the enraged and engorged king puffs angrily on his cigar, which is almost as long and thick as his ashamedness, while in the next chamber, two women—his sister-in-law has joined the old crone—explain to the horrified queen her conjugal duties.

In the sixth, the donkey-faced is almost upon his paled prey, who shows no signs of resistance, except her mouth is gaped, her eyes rolled back, and she holds her belly as if in pain.

The seventh and final print showed the king in flight, his face contorted in fury, horror, or both. Beneath it read the caption: “At his first effort to open a door, the next door opened quite naturally and stained the sheets a very different color from what is expected after a wedding night. This created a terrible odour. Queens, it seems, do not enjoy the same properties as civet cats.”

Though Saxon princesses were renowned for their fertility—Maria Josepha of Austria, for example, who bore both Maria’s grandmother and Fernando’s grandfather, along with at least fourteen other children—the queen could not be persuaded to open any of her doors for her king ever again. Not even a personal letter from Pope Pius VII, whom, as a child of eight she had seen levitate in ecstasy while conducting mass for her family during his and their imprisonment by Napoleon at Fontainebleau, could enjoin her ever again to share her bed with the king. She withdrew from public life to the palace in Aranjuez and died ten years later in 1829. Six months after her death, she was expeditiously replaced by the king’s niece.

Francisco Goya, Fernando VII en un campamento, after 1815Thanks for reading. Next week: audio.

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Previously…

“Harry rolled up his sleeves, turned to face the side of beef hanging from a hook in a corner of the room, and punched it as hard as he could in the brisket. Bob let out a fake cry of pain.”

EPISODE 5

“There was lots of drinking,” Todd said at the trial. “Everyone was skunked.”

Harry seemed to him to have been the worst for it, the booze and the bloodiness, each time reeling out of the room next door where Bob was tied up looking more punch drunk, wobbling from the whiskies and all the physical exertions.

Variations on the following were repeated too many times for anyone to remember:

Harry would set a cigarette on fire and pour new drinks, hands trembling, Bob’s cow blood on his fists, more and more of it each time on his shirt;
“Guess it’s my go,” Burt would say with a weary sigh. “Unless you want a crack, Donny?”;
Todd would mutter something and Burt would heave up out of the chair and stagger into the other room, slamming the door behind him, making sure first that Todd got a good look at Bob’s bloodied carcass slumped over in the chair;
Once the door slammed whoever was in there, Harry or Bert would start punching the hanging beef and Bob would howl with simulated pain, his screams the only things ever changing, lowering in volume after each wet thwacking blow till they were cow low and whimpering, barely audible from where Todd was sitting.

This went on for three or four hours. Meanwhile, Harry and Bert took turns haranguing Todd, telling him how bad they were, how many men they’d killed, how many jobs they’d done, how much money they had. Waving it around.

“You interested in going into a job, Donny? An easy one that’ll bring us ten grand a piece?”

“Of course I said sure, Todd told the court. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Harry came out after that, said Bob was dead, and then fell over on the floor and passed out cold. Burt woke him and manhandled him into the hallway and locked the door. Then he pulled out a revolver and laid it on the table.

‘You know all my secrets now, Donny. That fool brother of mine told you everything and I told you quite a bit myself. There is only one man ever gave me away and he never gave me away a second time.’ Then he pulled out a knife.

‘I am pretty handy with a revolver,’ I said. ‘But I am even better with a knife.’

‘I need you to show me you’re as bad as the rest of us.’

‘How you want that I do that?’

‘Tell me why you shot John Gordon on Portage Avenue.’

So I said it was after a quarrel over a girl, and he said, pointing to the revolver, was the gun like this one? and I said yes and he said with .38 cartridges and I nodded. And he went to the window and tore down the paper curtain blind and ripped off a piece and said write it all down then. And I asked why.

‘Because I need to hold something on you so you can’t hold nothing over me.’

And I thought about that, and we had a couple more drinks. And then I asked for a pen.”

After writing all about the killing on the curtain, Todd went out of the room and over to a restaurant on Fourth Street and had something to eat on the second floor in a green-curtained booth, and looking at all the dull men decided then and there that he wouldn’t go back to the room again because he thought the crowd there was too fast and bad for him.

“And that’s when Stodgell and the chief came in and put the locks on me.”

Then he said that the stories the other witnesses had told were not the truth and that he never threw a revolver in the river. He did not tell anyone that he killed anybody. He never told anyone that he could see John Gordon's ghost.

Mr. Howell— ‘Now witness, you have been charged with the murder of John Gordon. Are you guilty or not guilty?’

Witness— ‘I am not.’

Mr. Howell— ‘Do you know who did commit the murder?’

Witness— ‘I do not. Probably somebody with a gun.’

The judge called for quiet. Then Todd told the court that he was in jail once for stealing a coat.

The court then adjourned until this morning.

This episode of Holdback was written today on the fly without a safety net. Thank you for reading it!

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *As if the grey in their hair was leaking Through the blood barriers,The firing wetted, the hissing all too familiar,Like the smell in the basement,The family smell that only strangers smell.* Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedHe wrote those lines last night while sitting at the kitchen table waiting for his mother and stepfather to arrive, and while writing them a phrase from a Kate & Anna McGarrigle song involuntarily repeated in his head: Fortune's blind as blind as you, my dear / What a pity, oh foolish you.

His brain has been doing this more than usual. He is getting old, he thinks, his mind wanders, it hears something or smells something and worries at it, shakes and twists it and pulls at it, touches it repeatedly, struggles with it.

Fortune's blind as blind as you, my dear / What a pity, oh foolish you

He, or rather it, his head-brain-mind, has also been fixated since Tuesday or so on the word struggle, perhaps because of his lack of work—he hasn’t had any since December—which he thinks might also be an age issue or maybe an AI issue or possibly both. He worries that his clients are assigning jobs to other people because they are younger or feeding them into bots because they are smarter, and for these reasons his head-brain-mind keeps earworming scraps of songs from his childhood and struggling with words like struggle and phrases like the struggle for existence, the constant struggle, signs of a struggle, my struggle, our struggle. He has turned these phrases over so many times in his head-brain-mind—and in his soul—that they have become meaningless, hollow, ridiculous.

Kate & Anna McGarrigle? Where did that come from? He hasn’t thought or heard of them for years.

Fortune's blind as blind as you, my dear / What a pity, oh foolish you.

It is 9:45 in the morning. His stepfather is upstairs, sleeping or doing soduko puzzles on his phone. His mother has been cooking in the kitchen since five am because of the long flight across a dozen time zones and “probably for other reasons too”, she said, without explaining what those other reasons might be. He didn’t ask, they’ve barely spoken, except to talk about his work and lack thereof and his nephew and what his sister is doing, and the weather back home and the weather here, it has been raining all morning and for three straight weeks before—it is the middle of March—and now, just now, the sun has cracked through the clouds and it is raining on their side of the street and sunny on the other. “Something you don’t see every day”, he said to his mother a few minutes ago, as they left the apartment. But his mother didn’t hear him or didn’t understand what he meant. They are walking arm and arm now down the terre-plein of the boulevard, under a new black umbrella. This is when he realizes that his mother is wearing the same uniform—black puffer jacket, black leggings, black boots—as the sex workers that they pass. He hopes his mother doesn’t notice, that the umbrella and the jetlag and the newness of her surroundings will keep her disorientated. It’s a strange thing to hope for, he thinks, as they cross the street to the sidewalk. Your elderly mother’s disorientation. Her bewilderment.

Trailing behind with the dog is his husband, no doubt thinking what a great scene this will make, and how to frame it. Perhaps he is filming it already (he does not turn around to see). It is sunny, it is rainy. The sky is cracked with streaks of orange and yellow light, migraine bright because of the blackness. He walks faster. His mother struggles to keep pace. They pass a restaurant with a line of customers out the door. His mother slows and stops to examine the streaked window, the couples and families seated inside, the crowd at the counter. Dirty, she thinks. They move on, past a woman squatting on the sidewalk next to buckets of marsh grass and duck eggs. The woman says something to them in a dialect his mother does not understand. Next to her, a woman sells sticks and bottles of sauce out of a shopping trolley dolly and a man turns blackening ears of corn on a grill over hot coals in a halved oil drum. Another roasts chestnuts in a smaller drum. Both blow on their fingertips to cool them. Another sells candied peanuts. Another sells bouquets of herbs. A dozen argue in a circle in front of a trade union building. Others sit on benches under the elms drinking beer. Younger ones sit on the same benches smoking weed. Some feed pigeons. Some suck on vapes. Six flash packs of cigarettes, repeating the incantation—“marlboromarlboromarlboro”. Four wait to use a public toilet. Dozens pour up and down the stairs to and from the underground. A blind one, his eyes clouded white, sells laminated fortunes out of a box.

marlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboro

A train snakes past underfoot, the walls of the supermarket shudder. Certain of these experiences bypass reason and drill directly into his nervous system. Cigarettes, vapes, weed, chestnuts, corn, piss, peanuts, but the sounds more than the smells: his primitive brain, the little lizard clump at the stump, has no truck with madeleines, only waves of activity, tables set and cleared, old songs, men arguing, laughter bouncing off walls, dishes and glasses clinking together, coffee cups and spoons and saucers clattering on the zinc bars. It hears, it reacts. The baffling in his ears flaps, air shudders through the inner vortices. Something crackles inside. The strain becomes the closest approximation to a pattern of thought. His nerves coruscate like the sun-brightened sky. The steps to the station are slippery. The dog strains at the leash, desperate to be first. The platform is empty. The car is full. The apparition of these faces in the crowd: a few wear masks. Are they the cautious ones, the son-in-law asks, or the already sick? The car moves, the earth tilts, spins, and rolls.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Fortune's blind as blind as you, my dearWhat a pity, oh foolish you* Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIn a train once, something similar, black rain out one side, sunshine out the other. He was writing a letter to his mother when the train passed a village, a boy and a girl at the side of the tracks, holding hands and laughing, and he stayed with them, part of him at least, he stayed with that boy and girl and with his mother, in that train and in that little lost village in the Bavarian mountains.

As a boy too he had moments like this: listening to the radio with one ear—the sound of the big time—and the railroad tracks with the other, the trains rumbling past, fading into the distance, leaving him behind with the tin-box music and the faraway voices and the lonely sound of the unused cars shunted from the main line to a siding or from one line of rails to another. The sound of his smallness. His ridiculousness.

Photic seizures are keyed to an aural output and triggered by flickering light. Sunlight streaming through a row of trees along train tracks. Sunlight dancing on water. Tika torches. Streetlamps, headlights. A row of lights in a long tunnel.

Shutter speed is a function of frame rate and shutter angle. Film exposed for about 1/50th second at a standard 24 frame/s produces 72 pulses of light per second, well above the flicker fusion threshold for most people most of the time. Most of the time: fatigue is a factor, as is the brightness of the light and the area of the retina being used to observe it. In the projection space itself, the shutter interrupts the light two or three times every frame. In video, “normal” is 1/60th—the time it takes to scan one video field in the NTSC standard. Slower speeds are possible, but the picture becomes brighter, the action jumpy, stroboscopic: moving water strobes on film, it does not blur. The sound, then, can be wind in the trees or ears cupping the sea: in, out, in, out. Whoosh. Whoosh. Or the trumpet or the flute or the blast of the shofar.

Electricity, metal, upholstery. Sound of pressure and release, like the game he and his sister played in the backseat of his mother’s car: fingertips in his ears—plugged, unplugged, plugged, unplugged. Whoosh. Whoosh. The wave and particle of the blood in his veins. His heart.

Crack the hood now and take a good look at this beauty. There are three hundred and fifty-seven olfactive genes in his DNA. Yours too, but the similarity stops there. You will agree on certain things, the forty-five molecules of the olfactory alphabet—industrial pollution, for example, a dozen molecules. The three hundred odours in a mandarin orange. The eight hundred in a cup of coffee. What cabbage is, ethyl isobutrate with a purling note of acetylpurazine—a mix of stale cake, melon and dry sausage. Phenol: bitume, tar, and hospital corridors. But stick a swatch of nonanal (Aldehyde C-9)under our noses and Proust takes over, a gust of conflicting associative data is thrown into the air, physiological and psychological correlates, remembrances, responses. The seaside, you say. A cucumber, he might reply. Or dust. Something warm. A ripe avocado. Asparagus. Rooisbos tea. A hot towel. And so on, incommensurability incarnate. Different commercial processes produce aldehydes by the hydroformylation of 1-octene, and others oligomerize ethylene to 1-octene. He prefers the one developed by Shell Oil, as it is the fastest acting, quick to dissipate.

Remembering his first andouillette, in a bistro in Chartres, after a long session in the cathedral with an American convert to Catholicism who walked them through the stained-glass storybook. It smelled like shit but it tasted good. Washed down with a bottle of cold Cheverny. In a dining room filled with Gitane smoke, with a TV up in the corner next to the bar, on which Mickey Mouse and then Winnie the Pooh moved around with the sound off.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Leaving me this way is hardly fairMust I go seek a fortune tooOr must I wait till folly finds it's own way homeTo me and foolish you* Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published3.

For investigating selective attention in the visual domain, two very different images are presented to the left and right eyes—one image for each—using a View-Master outfitted with orthoptic stereogram cards.

During the war they used the stereoscopes that Allied photo interpreters used to analyse images shot from aerial photo reconnaissance platforms; today they use a modified Pan-Pet Okinawa Viewer on the road and the WHAM-O Magic Eye random-dot auto-stereogram helmet in the lab. Subjects are asked to pay attention to either, or both (divided attention condition) images, and are later required to describe how their visual content differs. Or they are asked to “shadow” the attended image by simultaneously describing out loud its content. This needs to be incorporated into any making.

With the head-mounted WHAM-O unit, a see-through image is imposed upon the real-world view, creating “augmented reality.” The images are bounced through partially reflective mirrors and the real-world view is seen through the mirrors' reflective surfaces. The helmet-mask is partially based on Wheatstone’s kaleidoscope photometer, which somehow (check the files) renders the vibrations of a sounding body visible to the eyes. The mirrors are mounted on what is essentially the works of a watch; they revolve at a high velocity or they swing like a pendulum. The helmet is coupled with a head-tracking device that allows the subject to “look around” the virtual world. You move the head; you don’t need a separate controller. Doing the uploads fast enough is a problem—too slow and the subject vomits. Cumbersome tons of computer image processing are required, but it’s getting better, lighter, more manageable, and with six-axis position sensing (direction and position) the subject can move around, albeit on a short leash.

We’re getting there, he thinks, as the door slides open and they step out. Plugged, unplugged. Car, crowd, car, crowd. Petals on a wet, black bough.

marlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboro

The cigarette sellers are Afghanis. Two years ago, after a violent turf war—knives, sticks, fists, rocks—they replaced the North Africans who used to run the corner. The Kabulians now run the operation everywhere in the country. They are the new Marlboro Men. Elsewhere it might be run by Armenians, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians. Last week illegal cigarette factories were closed in Belgium, Spain and Ireland. Tobacco shops in Australia were lit on fire.

That’s what the papers say.

“No fissures,” Proust wrote. “No geological faults, but at least those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation.” Compare this to the Theravada dhamma set in stone on the grounds of the Kuthodaw pagoda in Mandalay, two thousand pages of carved marble five feet high and three feet wide, each with its own roof. The world’s largest book, a million chiselled lines.

“Precision,” his mother always said. “Precision above all else. Restraint until thought silently matures itself. Hold your tongue till enough meaning lies behind to set it wagging.”

The illusion of depth. Separate processes without a common mechanism. The first question is how to link this to working memory, but finding the sources of the signals, isolating and analysing the effects of those signals on the tuning properties of sensory neurons, is even trickier. Two things at once? Walk and chew gum at the same time? Bring it on. We can do a billion splits. A fly can do a billion splits, brain the size of a poppy seed. A billion simultaneously possible objects, a billion trains of thought, all in a row, creaking and clanking over the underpass, chuffing to a stop in the rail yard.

We take possession of a mind in clear and vivid form and turn it into a juggling monkey brain. The trick is to squeeze a bit, withdraw some of the objects, disembark, descend. You have to drop some balls to effectively handle the others. Remember Gerry Ford, stumbling off the plane? They used to make him rub his bald head with one hand and tap on his fat gut with the other. Laughed till they fell off their chairs. Walk and chew gum at the same time? Hell, he had to close his eyes to pee.

Forget the pyramids, those are constructions outside and beyond our understanding, massive architectural undertakings requiring not just imagination and genius but slaves and whips and chains and thousands of years of tyrannical rule. The cathedrals, however, those great gothic-grown flowers, were built by people like you and me, in times like these. Anonymous craftsmen and tradespeople, free men faithfully fulfilling tasks handed down from master to disciple across generations.

Fuck AI. No more cave drawings, no more symbols, no more contemplative life. Disney was a mistake—a disaster—even if Flowers and Trees was the first shot with a three-strip beam-splitter; even if Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the most popular sequence of all time; even if a billion people have seen it on the big screen; even if they relaunch it like a reoccurring tidal wave of pus and plague every five years and will continue to do so until the end of time; even if they have duplicated every frame in cellulose triacetate and stashed them six hundred feet under Kansas in a nuclear bomb-proof abandoned salt mine.

Our struggle. Our Chartres. This is what he is thinking as he enters the kitchen and smells what his mother is making.

His stepfather waves. Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh are off the leash and starring in slasher movies. It’s raining on both sides of the street. The Afghanis are still on the corner. Part of him is there too, struggling to survive and find its way home.

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Ever since I had the strength to gnaw a bone, I have had the desire to speak, to say things that I stored away in my memory; but once in there, old and numerous, they either got mouldy or I forgot them.—Dialogue of the Dogs, Miguel de Cervantes, 1617

The passions of her husband, Pepa thinks, are mostly fuelled by his art, which he refers to as his “truth”, followed closely by the shooting and trapping of small animals, which in turn is equalled in her view by an unsettling desire for sensual gratification, mainly through overindulgence—food, wine, coffee—but also sex, which deserves its own category, as while it concerns her intimately (and her all-seeing God), it also occupies a part of his life and being that she doesn’t know anything about, nor wants to. He goes out, she says nothing; he comes home, he says nothing; he comes to her bed, neither says much at all.

What passes between them there and then physically is trapped in scruples and self-consciousness. And tonight, she can’t turn it off, can’t ignore the dark thoughts, long after he rolls away and passes out. The rosary doesn’t help, nor does the story of Lope Ruíz and the three hundred goats he must boat across the river one by one. So she returns instead to further and angrier reflections on her husband’s undisciplined appetites—until something even more disturbing materializes: taps and clicks at the wall and a scuttling across the floor.

She sits up sharply just in time to see the curtain shift, just slightly, and—though this is perhaps only her imagination—a long, black tail disappear behind it.

She shrieks.

Goya, of course, being deaf, doesn’t hear. She rains down on his chest with both fists, which only makes him roll over onto his stomach. So up she gets, barefoot on the cold, glazed tiles, seized with fear but advancing somehow, willing her legs to the fireplace, grabbing the first thing that comes to hand—a poker—and moving slowly, cautiously, towards the window. Her eyes by now have adjusted to the darkness, but she sees nothing. Carefully, she pulls the curtain open with the poking stick.

“There it is!” screams Goya behind her, doubly startling her, as the gargantuan black rat also seizes this moment to reveal itself, squealing hideously and leaping directly at her, racing right up the poker handle, which Pepa drops, and the fat rat shrieks and jumps, snagging the skirt of her nightclothes with its long fangs, shredding the cloth, holding on for dear life.

Pepa screams again. Goya is out from under the blankets but instead of racing to her aid is up on the bed, hugging a sheet as if it were a toreador’s cape. Pepa spins and kicks and the rat shakes loose and flies across the room and hits Goya’s sheet; Goya shrieks and kicks it away; it hits a chair, falls to the floor, flips over, paws up in a defensive crouch, red beady eyes flashing. It shrieks and rears and jumps again at Pepa, who stops its trajectory with a swing of the poker, sending it sailing into a wall. It falls to the floor with a thud and lies there, bleeding, pulsing with terror. Pepa takes a step towards it; it snarls and snaps and shrieks hideously and disappears under the bed.

By now the commotion has raised the entire house. Javier is the first in. “Get out, boy!” his mother screams. Juana the maid is next.

“Get it, Juanita! Kill it!”

The girl calmly takes the poker from her mistress, lowers herself to her knees and peers under the bed. A thin, half-curdled shriek is heard. Then three soft thumps. Then, silence.

The girl rises to her feet, proudly displaying the skewered, still-twitching rat at the poker’s end. It is the biggest yet, easily the size of a cat. Juana can barely hold it aloft.

Goya and Javi examine it closely. It has a wet coat like the others, and the same clouded eyes.

Juana takes it to the window and flings it out onto the street.

7.VI.1793

After a year bathed in moonlight, images are appearing in the day’s brightness. This morning he did six grey-wash drawings in red chalk. Including the pokered rat, shrieking Pepa, and him cowering behind his toreador’s cape a foot in the air above the bed.

Maybe a few words at the bottom. To set the mind off in a new pursuit. Or confuse it. Keep it moving, keep it borderless.

No one is in the house except Pepa, who is cutting cloth, new dresses for a politician’s wife, so off he goes himself, with a pomander stuffed in the sleeve of his embroidered cuff. It is March, the streets are miasmatic. His neighbours—his servants too—empty chamber pots into the gutters below his window. The plague has ascended from the docks and is upon them.

No one in the house to be trusted with even a simple task like this, ordering copperplate and burin blades from the Frenchman. Thirty printers in Paris, not one in this backwater. Pepa too busy, do your own bidding she said, so off he went, dressed in an old buttoned-up tail-coat and tapered trousers, the artisan son of an artisan father, bowing under his hat to his neighbours just as night is falling, not just to the tradesmen and clergy but to the women; of course to the women, he will draw the lot of them, in various stages of undress, from memory, from imagination, from the teeming throng inside his head.

A new route this time up past the closed market stalls admiring the silent birds in the trees, taking in the bustle of the streets, men and women shopping, hawking, flirting, oblivious to their emptiness and insignificance. Good lord. What presumption. Oh, to be so emptied! Of responsibility, expectation, want.

His nerve-endings are exposed, that is how he will describe this, his mind is raw. He has lost his taste for words, his trust in words, particularly adjectives, woeful, abject, empty. This happened before the illness. But it is worse now. The majestic eagle, the noble horse, the faithful dog. Attributes undo the forms, he has tried to explain this intelligently to Martin and his poet friends, how all their lofty, high-born twaddle, assemblages of this and that and their corresponding correspondences, sterilise the imagination. But he never quite manages to make articulate sense of it. The lumpish predicates weigh down the essences.

Conjured forth with his brush, however, animal, muscle, sinew, power, how they soar, gallop, howl. And yet here now these words, spilling out. A court flunkey, a designer of tapestries, a flatterer of the merchant class. Sick, deaf, dying, soon to be forgotten.

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Language, conversation, writing—the writing of his contemporaries—cannot compete with his eye’s capacity. It sweeps past all. His deafness is a godsend. All those books, all that learning he never received. No need to classify and document. Instinct, not technique. His text of truth is nature, the world, the people.

But in the end, really, all these flattened visions—his life work—shapes and surfaces tricked inside rectangular frames—what does it amount to? He has seen the works of painters better than he, masters of the highest calling, render heaven and hell ridiculous. Are his any better?

In the end, then, he has decided to make pictures as if no one would ever see them. Sketch and paint them on a page or on a wall, uncorrected—he never tries to fix things, improve the way he first sees them, first creates them. Mind to the hand through the eye.

No more copying. No more slavish imitation. Mind to the hand through the eye. Unburden the imagination, release the swarm. Then move on. On to the next.

“Let us speak plainly,” he wrote in a letter to Martin, “if one must live in this world so briefly, then one should live according to one’s pleasures.”

That then. That is it.

But it was Martin, not he, who lived according to this rule. And always had. Because he could afford to. Goya had always inhabited a different world. He could not stay still for very long; he could not simply enjoy a moment; the present and future were often difficult and dangerous; he had to think about keeping his household afloat, his career on track, his position, his pension. Martin could proceed as he saw fit. He was a gentleman, a country squire. Goya could never stray too far from the umbilical cord of gold.

When they were children, they were physically inseparable, but other realities divided them. Goya’s parents had borrowed from the parish to renovate the building they owned in Zaragoza and could not make the payments. They lost the other apartments, then their own. They fought constantly. When he wasn’t at school or in Luzan’s studio, his mother shooed him out onto the street. He didn’t mind, he hated being at home. Home. Not a word he used. And Martin could get away with things Goya would never dare attempt. Once, at school, Martin let a dozen crickets loose on the teacher’s desk, another time two frogs and a grass snake. The priest shrieked at the sight of the snake, higher and longer than any human he had ever heard, and stepping back quickly slipped and fell and cracked his skull and broke his arm. Martin laughed; the rest of the boys were terrified.

The deadly factual. El vergonzoso. The shamefaced one. This was the morning’s last drawing. Greedy for sex, gluttonous for food. Here, in the depiction, he wears his currutaco breeches as a coat, arms thrust through the pant legs as if they were sleeves, the waistband around his crown, the flap at the front, his prick-long nose poking out of his crotch face. Spooning slop from a bowl into the toothless mouth. The smiling man he squats upon holds the bowl and a cloaked figure with a deformed face hovers in the background, clenching his fists and leering as he shits into a different bowl.

The relationship between the three is not clear.

Viewers have suggested several scenarios, based on the obtained commentaries:

“There are men whose face is the most indecent thing on their entire body, and it would be good if they would hide them away in their underwear.”

“Men with big noses tend to have giant cocks and fat balls. As they are often sodomites, this one is depicted wearing his underpants as a hat, with his verguenzas hanging out of his fly as he lies on top of a poor devil and hikes up his shirts.”

Who wrote these? Most name Valentín Carderera, the first biographer, and Moratín. On the preparatory sketch, however, in which the cock-faced man—the spitting image of big-nosed Martin in the portrait he just finished—is naked, stripped even of the upside-down trousers, Goya scribbled, in his unmistakeable hand, “This is a man who because he was told he had an indecent face put his underwear on his head, and only when eating does he reveal himself.”

He, Goya, is actually large of body—his mind goes off like this, like a shot—the head larger still, well outside the accepted canon of proportions, and stiff-jointed; and he wears whatever is laid out for him. This is not to say he is not particular about how he appears to others. Like the truly vain, he thinks himself above vanity. And his complexion is pale, deprived of light. Etiolated was the word Moratín used to describe him later that night at Lady Holland’s tertulia. “Eres tan etiolada, Paco,” the poet said when he clapped eyes on him in the library. Moratín sheathed in a long green coat with grey velveteen cuffs, a short blue jacket with a great number of small metal buttons, a particoloured silk waistcoat, black velvet breeches, blue stockings, and long quartered shoes with large glittering buckles. “Como una lanza de espárrago blanco.” Like a spear of white asparagus.

Of course, Goya didn’t hear a word of this. He was turned toward the Duquesa of Benevente. She started to laugh, he turned. The others tittered. His pale face reddened. He walked out of the room, descended the stairs, retrieved his hat and his stick, and took his leave.

Killed by words, murdered by words.

Which of these deformados is he? He hears it slop into the pot in his mind. He is almost always present somewhere in his pictures. Revealed by the sun and its brightness, concealed by the night. His face, if it is indeed his face, in or out of countenance cannot be construed, as it is hidden from our view. His head is indeed pale—palely depicted, barely sketched out. Lifeless, drained of blood, or bathed again in moonlight.

No more newspapers. No stories about yellow fever in the ports and the massacres in France.

No rats. No politics. No thought. No commentary. No hours to waste.

The pen, the brush, the spear of asparagus and its depiction, these he can control.

“¡Sereno!” he shouts, and the lantern approaches, and the man with the keys emerges from the darkness. The watchman studies his face, opens the door, and lights his way to the third floor, where they bid each other goodnight.

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Previously…

In Episode 1, John Gordon was found dead on a sidewalk with a bullet hole in his forehead.

In Episode 2, Eli (“Stodge”) Stodgell, a police constable, confronted Donald Todd, the main suspect.

In Episode 3, Stodge hatched a plan to use his brothers, Harry and Bert, to get Todd to confess to Gordon’s murder.

In this episode, Episode 4, the brothers, with the help of their sister, Mary, put the plan into action.

Holdback, like my Goya novel, is written on the fly without a safety net. To help support me in these fraught endeavors, please consider making a small donation or becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

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Harry set the hook the next night at the American. It wasn’t difficult. Frank, his brother-in-law, was behind the bar. Harry, newly shaved and dressed in a spiffy new suit, took the stool next to Todd’s, flashed a fat roll of police money, and with it bought Todd a half dozen drinks, while he downed matching shots of coloured water poured by Frank from a different bottle. Then he introduced Todd to his dolled-up sister, Mary, who seemed to find Todd irresistible.

“Don’t he resemble Bob?” said Mary, squeezing Todd’s bicep.

“He does,” said Harry. “and if he takes Bob’s place, he’s a daisy.”

“Who’s Bob?” asked Todd.

“An old friend,” said Mary.

“Old as in former,” said Harry. “As in, probably pretty fucking close to dead by now.”

“Poor old Bob,” said Mary with a tsk.

Bert arrived, also in a new suit. Harry introduced him to Todd as his boss. Five shots later, Harry stepped out to use the can and Bert told Todd that he and the boys had something pretty good to work that could use his help.

“What kind of help?”

“Nothing dangerous. We need a lad we can trust. Who won’t squeal and can handle himself in tight spots.” He peeled a few bills off an even bigger roll than Harry’s and laid them in front of Todd on the bar. Todd grinned, clumsily scooped them up, and opened his coat to reveal a sizeable knife strapped to the inner lining. Mary faked a gasp and tittered.

Harry returned and whispered something in Bert’s ear.

“You got a moment now, Donny?” said Bert. “We could use you upstairs.”

“With what?”

By this point, he had to keep one eye shut to stop the room from spinning.

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Upstairs was a suite of two adjoining rooms on the top floor connected by a closed door. In the first room was a card game. The two large men sitting at it, introduced to Todd as “the boys,” were firemen from Harry’s brigade. They both had dried blood on the backs of their hands.

Todd took a seat. Mary sat on his lap. Harry sat next to them. “I’ll spot you, Donny,” said Bert laying a neat stack of bills in front of Todd. “You’ll be good for it.” Then he took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and walked through the door to the adjoining room, making sure, before closing it behind him, that Todd had a good look at what was inside: a frightened-looking man with a bloodied face naked to the waist and tied to a chair.

Bob.

Two flasks were passed around the card table. The deck was tricked, but Todd didn’t notice. His pile of winnings grew quicker than anyone else’s and the alcohol made it hard for him to focus, as did the sound of Bert punching Bob, and Bob’s groans and screams. Also, Mary, squirming on his lap, nuzzling his ear, telling him what cards to play.

The door reopened and Bert came out clutching a blood-soaked towel to his fist. He left it open this time. Bob was slumped over in the chair, battered head on his chest, eyes closed.

“He dead?” asked Harry, without looking up from his hand.

“Not yet,” said Bert. “Your turn.”

Harry turned to Todd. “Unless you want a shot, Donny.”

Todd didn’t move.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, Donny,” whispered Mary.

“What did Bob do?” he asked Bert.

“He lied.”

“About what?”

“Doesn’t matter. In our organization, we can’t have secrets. That way nothing comes back at you.”

“Don’t be lazy, Harry,” said Mary.

“Off you go, bro,” said Bert to Harry. “Donny can do round three. He and I have business.” He threw the towel in the sink and sat next to Todd. “Boys, how about taking Mary downstairs to the bar for some more refreshments? We’ll join in a bit.”

Mary gave Todd a peck and a squeeze and left with the boys. Harry went into the other room. When the door closed Bob opened his eyes, looked up at Harry and smiled. Harry rolled up his sleeves, turned to face the side of beef hanging from a hook in a corner of the room, and punched it as hard as he could in the brisket. Bob let out a cry of pain.

End of Episode 4.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published [bird screeching] [ambient music playing] [wind whistling] [bird screeches] [Gus laughs] [indistinct chatter]— *Expats*, Season One, Ep. 2 “Mongkok” Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedDescribe your creative process. Be honest. Share your doubts, your struggles, your innermost thoughts. Quote the writers you most admire. Mention Paris. Insert a stock image of raindrops on a window, a closeup of a flower, a lollipop, or a word you find especially powerful.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash2.

“All clouds are clocks—even the most cloudy of clouds.” — Sir Karl Raimund Popper

Plus ça change: Paris is and always will be a layer cake, a millefeuille of causalities and chaoses. It sits on its cracked plate under its smoked glass cloche and it is indescribably beautiful, and you want to sink your teeth into it, but you don’t have a fork and the French use spoons (did you know this?) and you can’t use your hands because only brutes and tourists walk the streets of Paris shovelling food into their disgusting maws. So what do you do? You keep your grubby hands in your pockets and you move on—“Circulez, il n'y a rien à voir ici”—and things move along with you, or against you, through the void, following their pre-determined path, but every so often they swerve. This (thus) is where personal responsibility comes from. The swerve. The more precisely you can predict my movements, the less precisely you can predict where I am. And vice versa. Information gets entangled or absorbed in other things. There is (thus) little point in encouraging a safe set of habitual actions. Forget breakfast, it’s over, lunch will come and go, and dinner, too. You can predict probabilities, the likelihood or unlikelihood of this or that possible or impossible outcome, but only when you know all the terms, and you never know all the terms. So you lose what you know or thought that you knew. It decoheres. The clocks get lost in the clouds.

Let’s start with what is not here, then. These disappeared polyps, my me, your you, lobbed-off lobes excised from existence. It’s a pleasant state of affairs. The Greeks called it ekstasis, standing outside oneself. Mental health experts call it dissociation. I call it interference—disrupting the message, erecting barricades, lighting fires, stacking projectiles.

It’s a way of waiting.

Can time stand still, can time stop? I have no gift for evoking what is inside me, my emotions, my thoughts and feelings, and even less for evoking those of other people, their insides, or their outsides. If I tell you that my saliva mounts in my throat like a wave swollen by melting icecaps, that my teeth are like sheep just shorn, grazing on the hills above Hebron, what would you do with this information?

“Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.”
― Oprah Winfrey

Stambali is a trance state practiced in Tunisia by populations from sub-Saharan Africa and in Israel by Jewish-Tunisian immigrants. It is similar to the Sufi-Aïssâoua trance dances I described here:

Like the Moroccan form, a Stambali trance state is induced in the initiates by accelerating the tempo of the music and the speed of the dancers’ thrashing heads, arms, hips and legs. Dissociated eroticism and aggression ensue. Followed by the departure of the possessing saint or demon, and a convulsive loss of consciousness.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Does my sexiness upset you?Does it come as a surpriseThat I dance like I've got diamondsAt the meeting of my thighs?*― Maya Angelou What the dancer does, said Merce Cunningham, is the most realistic of all possible things. “The fortunate thing in dancing is that space and time cannot be disconnected, and everyone can see and understand that. A body still is taking up just as much space and time as a body moving... To pretend that a man standing on a hill could be doing everything except just standing is simply divorce—divorce from life, from the sun coming up and going down, from clouds in front of the sun, from the rain that comes from the clouds and sends you into the drugstore for a cup of coffee, from each thing that succeeds each thing. Dancing is a visible action of life.”

Whoever does not dance, said Lucian, does not know what will happen.

Nemo fere saltet sobrius, nisi forte insanit, said Cicero. No one dances soberly unless he has lost his senses. And only those who could not hear the music thought those seen dancing to it insane. Nietzsche.

Did Jesus dance?

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?* —William Butler Yeats Knowing one from the other is dead easy: the dance is a set or random sequence of rhythmic movements triggered by music; the dancer is the person who performs the set or the sequence. Yeats died playing charades—died of a heart attack playing a game of charades—did you know this? Stiffened like a scarecrow, twitching and jerking something terrible, and the other people playing kept guessing even after he slumped dead to the floor.

Do not accept the world as you find it; transform it into your own. This is what I have learned. This is what I want to share. This is what it means to be human. We are born in the mud, but we pull ourselves out of it. We cut down the forest and build our houses in the clearing. We turn trees into boats and ride upon the water. We make music from bird song, from the babble of brooks, from the bob of logs.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *To be free and alive is a wonderful thingto do what you wanna dojust because you're youthat's your special appealyou show how you feelyou care about the shape you're inwonderful wonderful wonderbra*—Wonderbra, 1979 This present document was prepared with thorough access to various registries and historical records. It does not constitute an official history. Its primary objective is to bring diverse texts and artifacts into a usable anamnesis. Other released documents may be combined with the present provided that all invariant sections of the original are included and unmodified. Multiple identical invariant sections may be replaced with a single copy. A compilation of the document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the copyright resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. When the document is included in an aggregate, this does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves derivative works of the document.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Dragging our unproductive plows down this sterile shore.Try to quit, the scabrous craving to write(a bad habit, fatal for many)Seizes you in its ambitious snareGrows chronic in your deranged brain.*—Juvenal In the scholastic tradition, the cellula phantastica, located just inside the forehead and tethered to the optic nerves at the point where they chiasmically intersect, is the cerebral chamber in which sensory data is fashioned into luminous visions—“visual spirits”—that are pushed out to the retinas and at the same time etched onto the inner walls of the cerebellum. This is the source of dreams and the seat of the imagination. Whitman mentions it in Specimen Days & Collect. William Blake, in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion, called it the “furnace of Los.” He believed that its sensory messages and spiritual truths were conveyed by larks.

William Blake, Night Startled by the Lark, 1816 - 1820

Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination.

Delivered on the wings of songbirds. O that it were! An exaltation of skylarks! Hark, Hark, the Lark! Ethereal minstrel! Pilgrim of the sky!

“Musicians are the antennae of the race,” said Ezra Pound, his voice a high quavering whine. He was a towering blaze, a redheaded flame rising and dancing in the night. Even people who saw through him, who knew he was a fascist and a fraud and a fool, even they were smitten. He was American, he had that American bounce and swagger, but he embraced something bigger, a public history that spread far beyond America’s puny shores.

He was not afraid to look at the surface of things and stop, examine only that which was directly present before his beady red eyes. “What is important is what is there,” he liked to say, pointing a long bony finger, “the beauty that is there.” His whole Agassiz shtick with the fish:

Post-Graduate Student: "That's only a sunfish."

Agassiz: "I know that. Write a description of it."

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

He gave his life to his art. He gave art to his life. Melopeia, phanopeia, and mythopeia. Language charged with meaning. You never heard him saying, “Oh, the heart! Oh, soft, my love!” You never heard him bemoaning, “I can't go on! I must go on!” You never heard him sentimentalizing. None of that. Pound lived! In the past, yes—“damn this botched world!”—but alive to its every tremor.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *The Brain is just the weight of God -For - Heft them - Pound for Pound -And they will differ - if they do -As Syllable from Sound –*—Emily Dickinson But he was not a thinker. He was an enthusiast. His ideas were pointless or beside the point. In the realm of what is what, he was a popularizing stooge. Wonderfully entertaining, useful even, but a stooge in a giant necktie and a huge flopping velvet beret, his pockets filled to bursting with chicken bones and bits of meat that he handed out to stray cats. He felt no love for these cats, he would never stroke one. Neither did he feel love for the women he sat on his knee and kissed on the forehead. Watching him move and fuss, like a baby, a bundle of nervous responses, a repertoire of frolics and larking about.

After the war they wanted to see him swing. Instead, he was locked up in St Liz. Do what you will, they said. Make of him what you want. We wash our hands.

Then, released, returned to exile, pounding out his Cantos in the brightly dappled Italian sunlight. A madman perhaps (“I found out after 70 years I was not a lunatic but a moron”), but more important, a sacrifice, a proud, braying beast forced up the electrified ramp of the slaughterhouse, punched with a bolt to the brain, dropped into the blood-soaked trough of history, into its dark, whirling blades.

Anamnesis? As in what, recollection? Memorial sacrifice?

Or something transdermal perhaps? And how, precisely, is an anamnesis usable? Serviceable, passable, navigable? Sounds like transubstantiation. Do this in memory of me. Do what? Do something. Make something. Think something. Think and Do — that was the name of the textbooks in the boxes on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald’s rifle was a favourite among big game hunters in Africa. A 6.5 Manlicher bullet to the head will take down the biggest in the herd. Did you know this? Is it important? I’m finding it more difficult to separate what matters from what doesn’t. Who decides? Last night, Frank, who knocks on my door most nights and whom I wrote to you about almost two years ago, ripped the top two feet off a plant in one of the boxes out front. “I was helping you,” he said. “I know plants.” The bent-over man was outside again too, no shopping cart or shopping bags, banging his right foot against the trunk of my maple tree. I tried to give him money, but he wouldn’t look up. “Don’t be proud,” I said. I went back later and put some coins on a tin of cassoulet and placed it on the sidewalk in front of him.

“Cassoulet makes me fart,” he said. His first words to me ever. “Cassoulet me fait péter.”

The drunk next to me at the bar last night, also named Frank, face down most of the evening until suddenly he pulled himself erect, retrieved his false teeth from the bar, slipped them into his mouth, drained his beer, and chewed off the rim of the glass.

“What are you looking at?”

“You,” I said. “What else?”

He laughed, spluttering glass.

What, precisely. The eighth circle of hell? Or some other pirouetting orbit. He wasn’t even looking at me. Addressing me, my eyes, but looking right through me. Like I wasn’t there.

I saw a man gnashing his teeth and barking like a dog yesterday, another dancing down the sidewalk half-naked, carrying a filthy mattress on the top of his head. Another convulsing, face contorted in grimaces, screaming obscenities.

“Make it new,” said Pound, but how? Take me and you out of the equation, that’s how. You need to move the public, break their hearts, make them leap to their feet and pump their fists with joy or hate, not boob tube them into catatonic submission. Real people, real emotions. Cut the lists and the cheap effects. Stop telegraphing every move. Lower the boom on the casual facts, the creative imagination, the will to believe. Cut to the chase.

“It’ll grow back,” said Frank about the plant. He’s right of course. It will grow back. And then it will die.

“All classes are equal six feet underground.” — Barthélemy, Nouvelle Némésis, no . 12, "La Vapeur" (Paris , 1845)

The line above comes from the “Social Movement” section of Walter Benjamin’s historical materialist study of 19th-century Paris:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Railroad poetry:*To a station 'neath the rails everybody is bound . Wherever the train crisscrosses the land, There's no more distinction twixt humble and grandAll classes are equal six feet underground.* The quatrain appears just after another one clipped from a different Barthélemy ditty, about the moment in Paris, in 1830, during the Second French Revolution, when armed men simultaneously fired upon clocktowers around the city to stop the progress of time and make the revolutionary moment last forever.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Who would believe it! It is said that, incensed at the hour, Latter-day Joshuas, at the foot of every clocktower, Were firing on clock faces to make the day stand still.* Killing time. Shooting it dead. The reference is biblical: Joshua, while waging battle with the Canaanites, called upon God to give his soldiers more deadly daylight, by halting the sun and the moon: Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.

Joshua 10:12-14. According to Joshua 5:2–9, all the Israelites that came out of Egypt were circumcised, but those “born in the wilderness” were not. Arel is the Hebrew word for “uncircumcised” and for “one who stammers as with a foreskin over his lips” and “one who has a foreskin on his ears and cannot receive divine instruction.” This is where the phrase “uncircumcised heart” comes from: “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, circumcise your hearts, you men of Judah and people of Jerusalem, or my wrath will break out and burn like fire because of the evil you have done.” (Jeremiah 4:4-7): Stephanos, the first martyr, the first witness, shouted at the Sanhedrin, “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, just like you fathers, you resist and resist and resist!” And the old men ground their teeth and Stephanos gazed into the sky, and he saw the heavens open, and he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and I see Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” And the Sanhedrin screamed and stuffed their thumbs in their ears and rushed at him and cast him out of the city and smashed his head to bits with rocks.

What characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode. — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940

Chat GPT. Chat j'ai pété. AI has the French talking to their pets about their most embarrassing bodily functions. What’s next? You should tear up the proprietary information agreement. Transparency is necessary if we are to have credibility. To “explain everything now” is impossible. Better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for those who will follow. In time, we are going to have people complaining all over the place that they did not have the opportunity to challenge anything. What is more, we need to protect ourselves.

I wanted to underline that last phrase—”we need to protect ourselves”—to emphasize its importance, but Substack does not have an underlining feature. Why? Bold for weaker emphasis, italics for stronger, yes, but no underlining except for the links? “If used properly,” I’ve just read, “these formatting tags reduce bounce rate and increase average visit duration.” What exactly are these tech bros and their minions up to and on about? Especially the tiresome minions. Underlinings are one thing. Underlings something else entirely. Who do they work for? They don’t seem to know who to point their weapons at and who to let pass. A Turing test requires that the first human being be incapable of distinguishing between the second human being and the machine “by using the replies to the questions he (sic) puts to both.” Are you the machine, or am I the machine, or are they the machines? I’m pretty sure I’m not the machine. I can still feel my heartbeat. I can still hear my blood boil.

You, as far as I can tell, can’t hear or feel shit. Conspiracy, as Henry Kissinger once said, means breathing together. Have you checked your respiration? You couldn’t fog a mirror.

You? You who?

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may trod me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.*—Maya Angelou Subscribe now

From denotation to detonation:

The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The Great Revolution [of 1789] introduced a new calendar. The day on which the calendar started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks…Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers…

What if the machine puts the questions to the two human beings? Or if all three contestants are machines?

Is it time for a new calendar? Walt Whitman, “Salut au Monde!”,1856:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *What cities the light or warmth penetrates I penetrate those cities myself, All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way myself.* And then, the last quatrain:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Toward you all, in America's name, I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the signal, To remain after me in sight forever, For all the haunts and homes of men.* We, too, penetrated those cities and winged our way to all islands and raised high the perpendicular hands. We, too, made the signals. Will anything we did stay in sight forever? Aesop, that great man, Montaigne tells us, saw his master pissing as he walked along the road. “Are we really in such a hurry?” said Aesop. “What’s next? Will we have to shit while we run?”

10.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *And, by God, we would have changed it all, changed it so they couldn't have changed it back in a hundred years, if only...* —Richard Milhous Nixon, 1974 Henry Kissinger, Al Haig tells us, said that between January 17, 1949, his last day in a US Navy Captain’s uniform, and January 21, 1969, the day he entered the Oval Office in a brand-new navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit, Richard Milhous Nixon wrote “PERSONAL AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL” and “Not for publication either in whole or in part” in large letters across the top of “every fucking sheet of paper put before him.” This begs. Would there have been a point to writing this phrase across “every fucking sheet of paper put before him”? Would it have stopped people from reading, citing, or sharing whatever was written on the page? Of course not. As this “present document” confirms. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the science is right, that reality, written down and fully revealed or not, is malleable, that sensible things can and must include contradictory attributes, appearances aren’t “accidents”, entanglements do refute the principle of locality, that there are orbits inside orbits and dancers within dances and action at a distance is not sheer and utter horseshit. Then it follows that we are duty-bound to make certain exhortations along the way.

This is not for you. Don’t read this. Close your eyes. Walk away. Stop.

If only to protect people. From it, from themselves, from each other. But “PERSONAL AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL?” “Not for publication either in whole or in part”? I never saw this written on a Nixon document. And “every fucking sheet of paper put before him”? Kissinger used the word “fucking” but not often, and this would have been expunged from the record. ⟨ Expletive deleted⟩

The whole thing sounds suspect.

Furthermore, Pat Nixon was a dancer, a ballroom extra in Becky Sharp and a chorus girl in The Great Ziegfeld. She danced in Small Town Girl and Dancing Pirate. She had terrific legs, but she was no limp-minded Listerine girl, no white-gloved empty head. She was a hard worker. She swept floors, kept books, drove a delivery van, managed a pharmacy. She was a typist and an x-ray technician and a telephone operator. She taught high school. She did not worry about who she was or what she wanted. She was busy and she kept busy, and she had no time for shirkers.

Furthermore:

(i) envelopes and boxes may only be opened by the designated recipient(s);

(ii) electronic documents should be properly protected against access by others;

(iii) documents may not be copied and are not to be passed to a third party without prior authority from the sender and recipient.

Ok?

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published **Thank you for reading. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for leading righteous lives. Thank you for shaving your heads and wearing the overalls. Thank you for tithing me a tenth of your income.** Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published **Thank you.** Peace be with you.

PS: The particular “swerve” this piece took was caused by this morning’s breakfast with my friend Richard Siegal, the fabulous dancer, choreographer and founder of Cologne’s Ballet of Difference.

From his Ted Talk (link below): “I started dancing because, well, that's just what we do. We were dancing before we knew about art. We were dancing before we knew about rhythm and meter. We were dancing before we knew about method, technique… We dance, we dance, we dance. This is just what we do. We're creatures who dance. And I believe that when we're watched, when we perform for others, our dancing becomes electric and vivified, and we become powerful beyond measure.”

Please watch.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published All in love and war cold as crap even without the Missile Gapeven with love's armamentnext to the folded map in the glove compartmentof your mom's 1985 Buick LeSabre.Not to too belabour the point, but why was your nose so out of joint,when I started to sing along with that song,as we passed the protest signs of the Falun Gong?This wasn't a fishing expedition.If we'd had access to DOD tech we'd have trilaterated the positionbefore converting it into versewith Harry Connick Jr., or worse,crooning Fly Me to the Moon on the cassette deck.Heck, there was a bounty on Rushdie’s head and every TV in town was tuned to Gretsky's shorthanded to and frohead faked breakaway wrist flick past the Nordique goalie's left ear,his 42nd of the season for the tenth year in a rowand the 1,800th point of the Great One's career.*Clear and Present Danger* was sellingbetter than *Satanic Verses* and *Calvin and Hobbes* split the differencebut you were readingBishop Butler on self-deception and ignorance.And as you parked the carthe rhymes drifted far, far, so far.For love then, my love, was off limitsas was any talk of appetiteand the first GPS satellite,launched on Valentine's Day(and long since retired)reached an orbit period of 713.2 minutes11,000 nautical milesabove the Earth’s difficult surfaces –an ellipsoid, remember, with irregularitiesdistorted by forces and their variations and our bodies,yours in value village plaids,mine in a new pair of slacksand a white poplin shirtwith a wide dicky flap bibbuttoned twice above the left claviclelike something a figure skaterwould wear, or our waiter,who regaled us with a flight of whitesand an electric parmesan graterthat flashed coloured lights.Nothing tracked us home.I ran flat out from where you parked,heart pumping, mad with excitation,stained with sauce.And you? You. You then, you now.No need for balls of crystal,things and actions are what they are, said the late lord bishop of Bristol,and their consequences what they will beno matter how many likes we get or pucks we cough up.So why should we desire to deceive ourselves? Why seek harmonies where cadences abound?Reaching back, reconciling, recollectingperceptions proved by perceptions, particles shed like beliefs,what we were transformed into, what we became, what we are,substances twinned in sameness, seeing the world sometimes the way we wish it to be rather than the way it actually is, my love, merely probable, a series of patterns observable in you and me and on the moons of Saturn, in all nature, in all weather,in all human affairs, together.And sometimes not. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSubscribe now

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“Love and be loved! I neither want more nor aspire to greater fortune.”—Leandro Fernández de Moratín

Love.

Recently, Goya had come to consider Moratín less as a national treasure and more as a source of nettling vexation. This was principally because the poet, still called Younger Moratín (though he was 68), was always asking Goya for money and, worse, couldn’t keep his eyes off Leocadia. He stared just as lasciviously at Mariquita, who was only 17 and by far the most luminous object in Goya’s universe.

Younger Moratín’s father, the even more debauched Elder Moratín, used to stare at Pepa the same way. But his son had his purposes. Chief among these were his introductions to the rich, portrait-requiring émigré community in Bordeaux, which had grown tenfold in size after the Spanish royalists, backed by the French army, restored the felon king Fernando to absolute power.

Moratín also brought news and gossip from Madrid and a steady stream of thoughtful gifts, such as the double loupe binocles through which, just before falling asleep, Goya had been studying an etching in Point de Lendemain (No Tomorrow), a novel written and illustrated anonymously by Baron Denon in 1777 and given to Goya by its author on the opening night of the Salon de Paris, exactly a year before the Baron’s death, on the very day that Goya purchased the armchair in which he was now sitting, and the matching writing desk on which he was slumped over, asleep.

The plate in the book depicts an elegant couple sitting on a grassy bank in a terraced garden next to the Seine. They are dressed in the formal manner of the French court: he in a powdered wig, tricorne hat, embroidered silk coat, waistcoat and knee-breeches; and she in a thigh-length caraco—a long-sleeved jacket-like bodice open at the front and worn with a boned stomacher and an embroidered petticoat.

A wide-brimmed summer hat of straw with elaborate trimmings is pinned to her hair, which is piled into a high pyramid shaped with pomatum and supplemented with gauze, feathers, ribbons, two birdcages, a naval warship and several strands of Tahitian pearls. Her long gloves, which require, as does her dress, a second set of hands to put on or take off, are lying on the grass next to her; to Goya, the gloves looked like white snakes or blindworms, he could imagine their hiss; and he thought to himself, just before losing consciousness, I would have included a small snake in this picture, though it is not in the story, an adder or a viper poised to strike the hand of the woman, who is smiling enigmatically with her mouth slightly open and her gaze off into the distance, and at the same time relentlessly focussed on the viewer, or, perhaps, looking right through the viewer.

The composition is similar to Watteau’s Le Faux-Pas, which is itself a detail of that painter’s La Danse Paysanne, and to Jan Steen’s Rustic Lovers, or any of the embracing couples in Ruben’s Kermesse, except spun 90 degrees—and the woman in Denon’s illustration isn’t resisting the man’s efforts to lay her down on the grass; if anything, she is the more aggressive party.

Her expression, Goya thought, is as charged and unabashed and shameless as it is impenetrable, and her right arm is entwined proprietarily around the man’s slender waist, while her left hand dangles idly near the grass, exactly where he would have put the lethal snake. Her other hand, which is the focal point of the image, is closed tightly around the man’s erect penis, which is sticking straight out of his unbuttoned britches. His eyes are closed, his mouth just slightly open, his lips pursed from passion, disgust, shame or terror, it is impossible to tell, and his unseen right hand, a counterpoint that moves our gaze despite its unseenness, is inside her petticoat.

Meanwhile, old, deaf, blind, exiled and unconscious Goya, two weeks from death, was dreaming that it was his carajo in the woman’s left hand and that it was not comical, nor soft and shrivelled, nor marred by chancre scars, but unblemished and vital; and he was dreaming, too, or rather thinking, that it was he, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, and not Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, that created this picture, not in an etching but as a drawing in red chalk on antique Japanese laid paper, darker and starker, and coarser, without shading or shadows or Watteauesque sentimentality, and with a lethal viper in the bottom left corner, near the hardened gland in the woman’s hand; and that once he had finished it he had fallen fast asleep at his worktable—in his old studio on Calle Desengaño in Madrid—with the preparatory drawing under his folded arms, on which his over-proportioned head was now resting, and that his work chair—not a twiddly French fauteuil but a proper wooden work chair, a stout, three-legged stool—was now surrounded by a swarm of cats, owls and bats; and that, layered simultaneously over top of these adventitious elements—book, hat, penis, gun, stool, petticoat, sex, owls, bats, cats—he, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Court Painter to His Majesty, the First Painter to the King of Spain and the most important Spanish artist since Velazquez and Ribera, was stalking deer in the Cantabrian Mountains with his grandson Marianito, and grouse and pheasant near the Ebro with Martín, and tapirs in the Yucatán with the conquistadors, and passenger pigeons with Thomas Jefferson in the Indiana territory, in numbers so numerous that as they cross the sky they blot out the sun for days at a time, as if by eclipse, and which fall, 50 at a shot, with each unaimed blast of his musket; and, finally, that he is a tiny, naked figure that he never noticed before, deftly brushed in tempera into the background of Giotto’s The Dream of Pope Innocent III, which he first saw in a transept chapel of the church of San Francesco in Pisa in Italy in 1771 when he was a 25-year-old art student, and then was shocked to see again, on August 25th, 1824, during his first and only trip to Paris, in the “primitive” section of the Italian wing of the Musée du Louvre, in the company of its former director, Baron Dominique Vivant Denon.

This was a half-awake dream by now, a reverie soon to be yanked to full-blown consciousness by Leocadia, who was standing over him in a shimmering silk dress, which Goya thought too revealing (“You wear what you like, so will I,” she had written earlier in the Conversation Book), frowning as she tugged at the sleeve of his drooled-upon jacket.

“Get up, old man,” she said.

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“Taking care of kin, always thinking about them, it’s what holds us back, Grandpa. Keeps us poor. I can’t do it anymore. I’m out.”

As Stodge walked towards Rooster Town he thought about that day four years before when he said those sentences to his grandfather. In French, the only language his grandfather spoke. And which Stodge hadn’t spoken since.

He was also thinking about what he said to the chief that morning about the bullet that killed Gordon.

The day before Todd’s cousin told Stodge that he’d seen Todd toss something off the Louis bridge the night of the murder.

“So we’ll never find the gun,” said Stodge. “But if we can get Todd to tell someone it was a .38 calibre bullet, we got him.”

The chief shook his head. Then, after a couple more whiskeys, said, “Why not just sucker Todd straight out? Play to his pride and greed?”

Which was why Stodge was heading out to Rooster Town.

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By this point, he had walked past the corner of Corydon and Wilton and was following the river’s curve along the CNR’s main railway tracks. The vista ahead was flat dirt punctuated by willow and scrub oak and some scrapwood shacks.

As Stodge could see already, a mile off, as always, the town was on the move. Not on the up and up but south, gradually, the residents once again dragging their self-built houses away from the new residential developments into the bush. Keeping their livestock beyond the reach of the city’s pound and their homes a few free steps ahead of the tax assessors.

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His grandfather was dead and the Stodgell house was gone but he could still see and smell every inch of it. Tarpaper walls insulated with cardboard. The beds up a ladder in the attic. A damp sofa and a cot on the ground floor next to an old stove and two water barrels. Once a week, they had to haul the barrels three-quarters of a mile from a standpipe on Cambridge and Dudley. He remembered his older brothers crying from the cold and somebody on the way inviting them in to get warm and everyone going in gladly except him, he was too proud. By the time he’d pulled the sleigh home alone, his mitts were frozen stiff.

Rooster Town. A disordered blot where the city cast out its outcasts—Métis, French, Catholics, the poorest of the poor. Back then it was called the French settlement. The only church was a derelict storefront with camp chairs as pews.

“Death to the Pope! Death to Catholics! Death to the Half Breeds! Death to the priests!” He remembered that day too. He was seven. There had been a smallpox outbreak, traced correctly or incorrectly, as was every case of whooping cough and chickenpox, to Rooster Town. The good citizens of Winnipeg wanted the indolent vermin pushed out into the grasslands. Then they forced his mother into quarantine in the smallpox hospital, even though she only had a benign case of varioloid. After her third escape, they shackled her to a 25-pound ball-and-chain. She contracted the disease and died.

The family faired no better after that. Harry, the brother who slapped Stodge the day he said he was leaving Rooster Town to join the white man’s militia, got Métis scrip, bought washed-out land with it on the Red River, lost it to taxes, laboured at odd jobs. The other brother, Bert, became a fireman for the CNR. They both supplemented their income with petty crime. (Very petty. Harry stole someone’s snow shovel once and spent a month in jail.)

His sister Mary worked the Fort Rouge Hotel. His sister Louise married a house carpenter who pastured two cows and two horses and worked nights as a porter at the American Hotel on Main Street. His younger sister, Alice, died when the coal oil stove that she was refilling exploded. His brother Charlie was killed when a sewer that he was digging collapsed. Their children were placed in homes.

Harry, Bert, Mary, Louise, Alice, Charlie and Eli. He forgot their real names. Stodgell, too, an anglicized version of something long forgotten. And all those not dead and buried still holed up in shacks in Rooster Town.

Except Eli. Who everyone in his world called Stodge. And who was back in Rooster Town for the first time in four years. Looking for Harry and Bert. With an employment proposal from the Winnipeg chief of police.

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As every schoolboy knows, the heart must be seized by the first phrase. This was Ezra Pound’s only on-message message. “Seize it, unpack it, stop it, pop it, make it pump pump pump to a brand-new jingle jangle.” Otherwise, what happens? It turns to stone, that’s what happens. Trust me, I have seen it, heard it, read it, lived it, a million times.

In my mailbox, just now:

This is not me in my present nor in any confirmable past configuration. I have never, to the best of my knowledge, exhibited, evaluated or formalized bedside skills. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I written about them.

The best of my knowledge? The best? Nixon’s assessment of Reagan during Iran-Contra applies: “He’ll survive because, when all is said and done, he can get up and say, ‘I am an idiot and therefore can’t be blamed,’ and everyone will agree.” That said, still, I am reluctant to click the This Is Not Me button in the Academia e-mail, as I have no idea what consequences this might have. Leave me out of it, that is my instinctual response: my sense of what is and what is not has long been compromised and counterfactualized, and this is especially true where any me or component of me is involved.

Muslims believe everything is written down, that everyone’s fate is sealed, that the hour of our death was appointed at the moment of our birth. Tocqueville disagreed: “The thing is new, therefore I must try to define it, since I cannot name it.” So here’s a thought then (almost): If yanked out at birth and thrown backward then as far as forward since, I would have landed in 1898, the year America began flexing its imperial muscles and Brad’s Drink, a mix of sugar, water, vanilla, caramel, lemon oil, nutmeg, kola nuts, pepsin and other proprietary compounds, was re-named Pepsi-Cola.

New York that year mitosisized into its five boroughs. The Brits sent their first rent cheque to China for Hong Kong. In Paris, Zola wrote J’accuse…! and in Papeete Paul Gauguin, while living with his second of three teenage brides and working a desk job—painted Le Cheval blanc (the White Horse), which I saw, all alone, last night, in a room on the fifth floor of the Musée d’Orsay.

Minutes before, I had been on the second floor, in a large and much-ornamented room, the Salle des fêtes, where, in a Hexagon post last April, we heard General De Gaulle, five days after the coup d’etat that brought him to power, promise to not “inviolate civil liberties” and ask his nation the rhetorical question, “Who honestly believes that, at age 67, I would start a career as a dictator?”

Tocqueville, the sentence preceding the one of his cited above: “The old words despotism and tyranny are not suitable.”

This time, this Orsay, last night, while sitting uncomfortably on the very same ballroom floor that General de Gaulle strode across to pump the hand of André Malraux, we heard a 1995 recording of Jeff Buckley singing “Dido’s Lament” while two young dancers, one of whom is the nephew of a valued friend and Hexagon reader, performed a choreographed “sketch” by Benjamin Millepied.

The dance was lovely. The Gauguin was lovely. But the Purcell aria, and Buckley’s voice, left me—leave me—this me—speechless.

`When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs createNo trouble, no trouble in thy breast;Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊` Explanation:

The roses and the thorns represent the love and the pain that Dido feels for Aeneas. The alternating pattern shows the contrast between the two feelings. The roses are red, the color of passion and blood. The thorns are black, the color of sorrow and death.
The fire represents the burning pyre that Dido builds to kill herself. It also symbolizes her anger and despair. The fire is orange, the color of flames and destruction.
The waves represent the sea that separates Dido and Aeneas. They also symbolize the tears that Dido sheds for her lover. The waves are blue, the color of water and sadness.”

“I’m sorry if you didn’t like my previous attempt. I used emojis to create a visual representation of the lyrics, but I understand that you wanted something more artistic and expressive. I’ll try again, and this time I’ll use words only. Here is what I came up with:

`When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs createNo trouble, no trouble in thy breast;Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.When I am gone, gone from this world, may my sorrows fadeNo shadow, no shadow on thy light;Think of me, think of me, but ah! not of my plight.Think of me, but ah! not of my plight.When I am lost, lost in the dark, may my love remainNo burden, no burden on thy heart;Dream of me, dream of me, but ah! let us not part.Dream of me, but ah! let us not part.` Explanation: * I used rhyme, repetition, and contrast to create a poetic effect. I also changed some words to make the lyrics more personal and emotional. * I kept the same structure and melody of the original lyrics, but added a second and a third stanza to complete the song. * I used the words “gone”, “lost”, and “love” to emphasize the themes of death, despair, and devotion. I also used the words “shadow”, “light”, and “dream” to create a contrast between the darkness and the brightness of the situation.”

Paul Gauguin, Le cheval blanc, 1898Yes, this is the painting I saw on the fifth floor. From the Musée d’Orsay description: “An impression of paradisiacal serenity emanates from this canvas which has become a veritable icon. The pharmacist in Tahiti who commissioned the picture did not appreciate Gauguin's daring use of colour. He refused it on the grounds that the horse was too green.”

Why is the white horse green? Why is it white?

From the Musée d’Orsay description: “A white horse, its coat tinged with the green of the vegetation, has given the painting its title. It is drinking, standing in the middle of a stream that flows vertically through the composition. The solitary animal probably has a symbolic meaning related to the Tahitians' beliefs about the passage of the soul into another world. In Polynesia, white is associated with death and worship of the gods.”

Is it just me, or is this horseshit?

You ever play the backward/forward time travel game? Like, Covid hit four years ago. If we go forward four years, I’ll be… or… my eldest was born in 1998. Twenty-five years before that was 1973, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Twenty-five years before that was 1948, the year James V. Forrestal, in his first report as secretary of defense, listed 15 “solid accomplishments in the process of unification” including the formulation of long-range and short-range strategic plans and the passage of the National Security Act. Twenty-five years from now? Dead, probably. Etcetera.

The year I was born, Grecian Formula and Head & Shoulders were launched, and Ike warned the world of the growing powers of the military–industrial complex. Twelve years before, when Backwards Me would have been 51, James V. Forrestal, the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense, a man blessed with an orator’s voice, heroic posture, and immaculate dentition, who positively absorbed and exuded poetry from every pore—he could recite from memory more than half of Mark Van Doren’s An Anthology of World Poetry—cracked like a china teacup during the mildest Beltway spring on record.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *When Reason's daySets rayless-joyless-quenched in cold decay,Better to die, and sleepThe never-waking sleep, than linger on.* This is from the first stasimon of the poem James V. Forrestal was transcribing on May 22, 1949, seconds before flinging himself out of a diet pantry window on the sixteenth floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital with a dressing-gown sash wrapped around his neck. Flinging himself? Or flung? The poem, “Chorus of Ajax,” is by Sophocles. V. stands for Vincent. What, you ask, precisely, is a diet pantry? A diet, here, is a special course of food to which a person is restricted for medical reasons. A pantry is a kitchen.

From the New York Times (May 23, 1949): “A book of poetry beside his bed was opened to a passage from the Greek tragedian, Sophocles, telling of the comfort of death… Mr. Forrestal had copied most of the Sophocles poem from the book on hospital memo paper, but he had apparently been interrupted in his efforts. His copying stopped after he had written “night” of the word “nightingale”1; in the 26th line of the poem. The book was Mark Van Doren’s An Anthology of World Poetry, bound in red leather and decorated in gold. A red ribbon bookmark was between Pages 278 and 279 where “Chorus from Ajax,” translated by William Mackworth Praed appears.”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save In the dark prospect of the yawning grave.... Woe to the mother in her close of day, Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray, When she shall hear Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear! “Woe, woe!’ will be the cry– No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail Of the lone bird, the querulous night…* When Forrestal got to “night” in the word ‘nightingale,” he stopped. Why? He stuck the sheets of memo paper into the back of the book, placed the open book on his night table, walked across the hall into the diet pantry, tied one end of his bathrobe belt around his neck, secured the other end to the radiator, removed the screen, and jumped out the window. Or was pushed. It was long ago.

Archimedes believed he could move the world if he found the right spot to wedge in a big enough lever. I could do likewise with just the contents of my head. In the secret hoards of my memory alone there are innumerable heaps, hollows, plains, caverns, vaults, and canyons—and burdened upon the poles of this vast mass are varied multitudes of glaciated forms. Exploring these, mapping them, will require teams of men with veins of ice, long supply lines, and huge quantities of arms, horses, tinned meat, marmalade, and gin. But let’s be clear here: most people don’t so much get along as ignore each other. I cannot tell if this indifference is genuine or staged. In East Berlin, the Stasi even used birds. Sparrows, swallows, starlings. Most people, as far as I can tell, dress casually; I, on the other hand, dress very smartly. I still feel the pull towards the ideal form. Polished shoes, tailored suits, cufflinks, expensive ties, high-quality socks and underpants. Always have, always will.

Pentecostal Adventists I am told for the most part no longer speak in tongues. That is a shame. If you toss faith out the window, what’s left? And what do you put in its place? There will always be a hole, an emptiness, and this is where meaninglessness settles, and death becomes just that. Death.

The old words, Tocqueville tells us, despotism and tyranny, are not suitable. Learning is remembering. If I had learned it, I would remember it. Pain in my chest, numbness in the wrists and fingers. Chalky sharpness in a big toe. Sky again, all day, everything below flattened, like an autumn leaf in a book. Trivialized. No birds, no Stasi, no clouds.

Muslims who go to Mecca are not just remembering Abraham’s struggles to be faithful, they are renewing their own strength for their own struggles to be faithful. Jews don’t remember Passover, or meditate on it, they experience it. They eat and drink it into their being. Rabbis used to be taught this, or something similar. Christ’s disciples didn’t use symbols, they used the sacraments. His body. His blood. They chopped it up, threw it down their craws and squeezed it into golden goblets.

The Kwakiutl ate human flesh—not for pleasure, it disgusted them, it made them sick to their stomachs. The leader of these rituals was never sober, he was forced to drink and swallow until he was beside himself, foaming at the mouth, shaking and gyrating like the electroshocked. The other dancers would tie him down with cedar cords and sing2:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *Great is the wrath of the great spirit. He will press men in his arms and torture them. He will devour them, skin and hair, Chew them to bits, skin and bones, with his teeth.* The dismembered corpse was put before the dancer on cedar plates and the initiate would tremble and buck at the sight of it. “Now I must eat,” the closed circle of masked performers would sing. “My face is as deathly pale as a ghost.” Often the initiates couldn’t keep the stuff down or couldn’t even swallow it. Others took emetics or shoved their fists down their throats. The music would intensify, the monotonous drums beating faster, the masked dancers spinning around the tethered unfortunate, who soon enough was beside himself, driven out of his wits into ecstasy, into the higher plane of ecstatic being.

Remember this: whoever loses his self makes room in his guts for God.

A Japanese friend says that everything is an entanglement of other things, that time and space themselves are emergent phenomena, mere side effects. If you can’t make the big stuff comply with the little, the planetary with the molecular, the general with the quanta, what’s the point? It’s all mindless dither.

People worry about AI superseding human intelligence, making us redundant. Please. There’s an elephant in the Washington Zoo that plays the clarinet. My Japanese friend tells me there’s an elephant in Tokyo, alone in a concrete box, half a century old, born in captivity. Elephants are meant to walk 50 miles a day.

“They should return it to the wild,” I said.

“There is no wild,” said my Japanese friend.

Elephant jokes were first introduced in 1960 by L.M. Becker Co of Appleton, Wisconsin, the parent company of Toy 'n Joy and Kid Zone. In February 1963, the jokes appeared in the Los Angeles Times, TIME, and Seventeen. That August, four short months before that fateful day in Dallas, one of the jokes appeared in the Dallas Star.

Q: How do you shoot a blue elephant? A: With a blue elephant gun.

Q: How do you shoot a yellow elephant? A: Have you ever seen a yellow elephant?

Q: How do you shoot a red elephant? A: Hold his trunk shut until he turns blue, and then shoot him with the blue elephant gun.

The ancient Greeks’ enemies converted elephants into the most formidable weapons to hit battlefields since the Sumerians strapped carts to horses 2,000 years before. Mobile archery platforms, towering over the terrified men on the ground, trampling entire armies into a bloody pulp. Alexander’s Macedonian generals—specifically, I believe, Antigonus—briefly neutralized the “elephantastical advantage” with pigs. Spooked by the swine’s squeals and their breakneck speed, the elephants broke ranks and ran amok, crushing their handlers. As a countermeasure to the Macedonian strategy, their bitterest enemies the Persians raised elephants and pigs in the same pens, thus habituating them to each other’s presence. This strategy was countered again at the siege of Megara: the Greeks covered their pigs with pitch and set them on fire.

According to Herman Melville, “the military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.” He also wrote of Darmonodes’ elephant’s visits to the flower market, where with low salutations it presented nosegays to damsels “and then caressed their zones.” Which zones?

Eight years after Forrestal’s leap, in the summer of 1965, Margaret Howe lived with a dolphin named Peter in a partially flooded two-room house at the Communication Research Institute in the Virgin Islands. Their relationship was complicated. At the start, Peter nibbled on Howe’s toes, until she donned rubber boots. Then he began ramming her with his nose and hitting her with his flippers. Howe held him off with a broom. He rubbed his teeth gently against her thighs, gently, and showed her his genitals. She rubbed him back.

They developed a sizable vocabulary.

I remember when I was a baby, not yet verbal, I had a repertoire of communicatory gestures much like Peter’s: shaking my head up and down, shaking my head from side to side, blinking, hand clapping, slapping myself on the forehead, staring up at the ceiling.

If I ask myself, honestly, in the decades since, have I added any new ones?

My favourite was the blink. I seize you with my eyes, I make you disappear. I make you reappear. You. Not You. Me. Not Me. Punctuated equilibrium. I find much comfort in this. We sometimes lock into situations, then revolt. We do the same things in the same way, no matter how different our brains are. Thought is not something in our heads; it is all around us. Like music. The picture and the person, the painter, the white horse, the viewer: there has to be something in common between them. There has to be something. Bing understood: “something more artistic and expressive”. We just need to unlock it, find its music.

In the sixth canto of Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil are on the second spur of the ante-Purgatory, out on a jagged clifftop that looks, in my befogged mind, like the one that the family caught in the flood are on in the Poussin painting discussed here last May. The poets are on their way up the hill towards Beatrice, and Dante is trying to hurry Virgil, not because he wants to get laid, but because his soul is a dark, heavy burden, and he is lost. But they won’t make it there tonight, they will have to hunker down and make camp, down among the scum, lost souls who died violently without last rites, pagans who grab at their sleeves and stroke their cheeks and beg and pray for their prayers. And Dante rails: Vieni a veder la tua Roma che piagne vedova e sola, e dì e notte chiama: «Cesare mio, perché non m’accompagne?». Come see your Rome, that weeps / Widowed, alone, and day and night exclaims / “My Caesar, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Don’t tell me you don’t see the parallel. Dante compares his Italy to a horse without a rider, its saddle empty, its bridle in the hands of the Church.

At a certain point, whether the horse is white or black, you have to trim the bit and adjust the bridle, saddle up, and leave the ranch.

An impression of paradisiacal serenity is once again emanating, and with it an odour, which, I’m not sure why, reminds me of old canvas tents and the kerosene in camping lamps, and the unfinished basement of my childhood home, the junk room behind the carport where my mother kept things that she at some level knew she would never use or even ever look at again but that she just couldn’t bear to get rid of.

My mother could see the latent value in things better than anyone I’ve ever met. This was both a gift and a curse. She couldn’t get rid of things to save her life. Suitcases filled with school drawings. My earliest attempts at poetry and philosophy. Photographs and letters. Kitchen gadgets and bundles of coat hangers and old mothballed coats and hats and clothes, and cookware, and cookie tins filled with buttons, and sewing boxes and mouldering stacks of National Geographics and old books and more hats and broken lamps and carefully labelled boxes of Xmas lights and Xmas ornaments and school supplies, essays, science tests, report cards. Library cards. X-rays. Stationary from her many failed business ideas. Jam jars. Sporting goods. Baseball trophies. Hymnals. Tools.

She did culls but she could never get around to throwing much of anything away. She moved it around, this mass of debris and flotsam, reboxed it, re-organized it. Which is where I get this, I suppose, this predilection. And then she died. I almost cry when I think of these things. I feel tears well up and then my throat tightens. And then nothing. Why do these things happen? What are the physiological mechanisms at work?

These days, para-dichlorobenzene is more common than naphthalene. The smell is more or less the same. Mothballs.

10.

I woke with a start. Birds again, the night(ingale), at the window. Now the music. Only one in ten thousand people has absolute pitch, but the numbers spike significantly among young women born blind in East Asia. This has something to do with exposure to pitches: tonal (Mandarin, Cantonese) and pitch-accent (Japanese) languages.

I’m not interested in your likes and dislikes, your memories, your tastes. Many men have important things to say, or at least something worth saying, but very few are capable of saying it. Expressing it. Like relieving pressure in a gland. A suppurating wound. I have nothing to say and I can’t shut up. John Cage said something like this, but he said it better. So what? Reduce is the wrong word. It is not a question of simplifying. The DSM-IV has reduced survivor guilt to a mere symptom of PTSD. Why? Avoid stock phrases. Avoid obfuscation. But at the same time, hide things. Talk about the light. The wind. The sky. Hide things in the details. In the descriptions.

11.

Richard Nixon, unlike Peter, never looked at women. His drives were in completely other directions. And on August 9, 1974, he gave the most moving speech by a statesman in history.

12.

A Study in Scarlet:

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What of the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

13.

“I woke with a start.” A puzzling phrase. Tocqueville: “the thing is new.” Tocqueville: “The old words… are not suitable.” Where is the marvellous swiftness, the dark thick cloud, the chariot of fire? Cast the eye, cast the voice, sing into the wilderness.

14.

Thank you.

1αηδόνι' (v. 629)

2Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, 1932

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Francisco Goya: "José Moñino y Redondo, conde de Floridablanca" (1783); "Francisco Cabarrús" (1788)I have hardly anything in common with myself and should sit in a corner in silence, content that I can breathe. —Franz Kafka

Later, settled into a different armchair, unsure what had just happened, the blood pooling in his head imperceptible to the frenzy of guests eating his food and drinking his wine, his focus returns to the hazy figure of his mistress as she makes her way through the crowded room, charming the men by rebuking them and ruffling the feathers of their tight-laced wives. He imagines the looks she gives, the bewitching flash in her grey-green eyes as she steers to a new prey, leaving the last one silenced and flushed. Leocadia Weiss is rarely the most beautiful woman in a room, but almost always the most attractive. What is she saying? She bends down to him, close enough for him to see her frown, and stares into his eyes. Then she writes something in the Conversation Book, which is on his lap, and disappears into the unfocussed mass.

He can’t find his reading glass, can’t read what she has written.

When he was younger, he often complained about the people he loved. Who, he was sure, loved him just as much in return, but who refused him their favours. After all these years with Leocadia, he understands this better, but this doesn’t decrease his frustration. Desire, to live, must be denied, and love, in all its forms, is like a pheasant disappearing in the brush.

Francisco Goya, Capricho 52, 1799His thoughts aren’t clear. His head is pounding.

Why has he never been able to paint Leocadia’s likeness? Why couldn’t he paint his wife’s? He must change his will. Or has he done this already? Leocadia and Mariquita. Juana, too, his maid. His assistant. He will speak today with Galos the banker about the terms. Javier, his son, will make a fuss, but there is more than enough money and property for everyone. At Javier’s age, he had nothing. He paid for his father’s funeral, paid the family debts, supported his siblings and his nieces, and, at his wife’s insistence, took in his half-scrambled old mother, who shared a room with Javier, filling the poor boy’s head with stories of witches and brujos until she was finally moved to his brother Camilo’s house in Chinchón. Which he also paid for.

And then, he remembers, it was not just Cabarrús’s remains that Brugada had told him about. All at once the rest of the tale comes to him, so focussed had he been that day on trying to walk without Brugada’s support, his feet ablaze with pain from gout—halfway to the shop he bellowed at the young man, who was signing the story with one hand, as the other was occupied with Goya’s shifting, unstable heft, “Can't you make your gestures more discreetly? Do you take pleasure in allowing everyone to see that old Goya is neither able to walk nor to hear?”

He had completely forgotten the other horrific part: the fate of Floridablanca, the disgraced chief minister who first introduced Goya to the court and gave him his first commissions. Floridablanca’s corpse, which had been interred in the next pantheon to Cabarrús in the Cathedral of Seville (he died in 1808, Cabarrús in 1810), was exhumed by the feral king’s henchmen and tossed into the common grave in the Caliphate courtyard of ablutions, where executed criminals were buried. Floridablanca! Who freed the universities and the press and expelled the Jesuits. Who brought gaslights to the streets of Madrid. Who gave his life and his freedom to his country. Who embraced all things liberal, and then, when necessary, when the calamitous events in France required, abandoned and vigorously repressed them.

Where are his portraits of them now, old Goya wonders, old Cabarrús and Floridablanca. Painted so long ago, before the revolutions and the bloodshed, before his deafness and his plagues. Full-length both and among his best, what sad fate had befallen them? Should he ask? Ask who?

Leocadia and Mariquita are in front of him, close enough that he can almost read their lips. Realizing, he is sure of this, they turn away. What is being said about him? Why are all these people here?

Ask who? He has no friends in the present Council and his sworn enemies still thrive. They hold positions backed by absolute power and lie in wait to strike.

He hid from the mob in the priest Duaso’s house four years ago, painting portraits for his room and board before the amnesty allowed him to flee to France. Since, nothing. Twice welcomed home to Madrid, the court generous, his retirement accepted, his pension guaranteed. His portrait by López in the front hall of the new Royal Museum. But there are enemies everywhere and spies everywhere. And who would he ask, anyway? Ghosts know only the past and the future, never the present. This is their only recompense.

Dante learned this from his sworn enemy, Munárriz told him this story, of Farinati, who died in exile and whose corpse the Inquisition dug up two decades later, tried for heresy and burned to ash, along with his dead wife, for publicly celebrating the pleasures of the flesh, for telling all who would listen that they should sup on only the best and most delicate viands, not on dry crusts of bread, and eat without waiting to be hungry, because nothing lasts, and the soul dies the same death as the body.

When the Poet meets this embittered wraith proven wrong, sweltering for all eternity in its fiery coffin in the sixth circle of hell, it spits at its fate and its punishers; and, knowing what the future holds, tells Dante of his own imminent exile: "But the face of Hecate, who reigns in Hell, shall not be 50 times rekindled in its course before you learn what griefs attend that art.”

Mariquita returns with his glasses, helps him perch them on his nose. She opens the Conversation Book. He peers at Leocadia’s last entry: “I will explain that you are tired and that it is time to move the party to Braulio’s shop. Juana will take you to bed.”

He squeezes Mariquita’s hand. She stares at him blankly. Eighty-two and still nothing, still stupid. Why was he not wise? His daughter was lost, he couldn’t see anything but he could see this, and he had nothing to tell her. Not even that she was his daughter.

She who reigns in Hell is Hecate the moon goddess. The mother of angels, the protector of boundaries. Goya painted her for the Duchess of Osuna’s bedchamber 40 years ago, naked but for a leaf crown, a torch in one hand, a viper in the other. “Hecate,” he wrote under the image, as though it were an ex-voto offering from the New World, “the far-reaching one, the source of hag and hex, served by eunuchs and revered by witches.”

Francisco Goya, frontispiece of Sueños, “Universal language. Drawn and engraved by Fco de Goya in 1797, The Author dreaming / His sole intention is to banish harmful vulgarities, and to perpetuate with this work of whimsy, the solid testimony of truth” (1797)On the last night of each month, the night of the new moon, Hecate feeds the spirits of the unavenged, the erroneously executed and the wrongly sacrificed, accompanied by the ravenous dogs of the underworld. He painted her thus, too, for Manuel Garcia de la Prada, in the same batch as his La casa de locos, Escena inquisitorial, Procesión de disciplinantes and the grotesque El entierro de la sardina, with the restless dead and the dogs, but larger and more rapidly, not with more assurance but as if in a fever—X-rays show no pentimenti—with thin layers of black over an orange-rust ground, and tiny drops of white over long swift strokes with a palette knife for her gossamer gown.

Juana will bend down to him soon, help him up with her strong arms.

When Floridablanca and Cabarrús were still in office he did Hecate’s triple-bodied form, the Hekataion, for Jovellanos, standing guard at the shadowed crossroads at nightfall, torches, keys, daggers, and serpents in her six raised hands, watching over the dismembered dead hanging on posts under a portentous sky filled with bats and owls, surrounded by evil-eyed lynxes and snarling hounds of hell. In another, she has the faces of a dog, a polecat and a boar. She is a lasting obsession. Farinati, in his burning tomb: “But the face of Hecate who reigns in Hell shall not be 50 times rekindled in its course before you learn what griefs attend that art.” Goya ponders this anew. Forty-nine lunar revolutions. Forty-nine new moons. Four years and one month. The precise length of Goya’s exile, which will end, as has just been decreed, in 18 days, with his death.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, Like a Dog Returns to its Vomit, No. 52, 2003Upcoming Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published **EODJ** (aka Soaking Wet February) Cave à Michel, Paris Thursday, February 1, 2024 (20:00-24:00) **Hexagon** (TBD) Sunday, February 4, 2024 **Holdback** Episode 3 Sunday, February 10, 2024 **"The Hidden Vineyards of Paris" book launch with Geoffrey Finch & Paris Wine Walks** The Red Wheelbarrow, Paris Thursday, February 29, 2024 (tba) Subscribe now

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedJake and Dinos Chapman, Nobody Knows Why, (2003)

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Hello Hexagoners.

If you’re not a fan of police procedural crime drama skip this and wait for next Sunday’s essay. (And if you have an idea what next Sunday’s essay should be about, drop me a line.)

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Previously…

In Episode 1, Johnny Gordon was found dead on a sidewalk with a bullet hole in his forehead. Ross, the police constable first on the scene, questioned those who had gathered around the body. All said they did not know the dead man. Among them was Donald Todd.

Suspect is warnedROSS TOLD STODGELL TO DROP IT, told him Chief McRae was in a piss mood, told him bang dead to rights the cook was the killer. Stodgell barged into the chief’s office anyway. “Todd’s lying,” he said. “He and Gordon were bosom tight.”

McRae wasn’t listening. He was opening and closing drawers. Opening one, peering in, not finding the whiskey bottle he was looking for, muttering something under his breath, opening another, still not finding the whiskey, slamming it shut, muttering something else.

Clearly, the man needed a drink. But he wasn’t a drunk. He was an officer of the court and a warden of the Lodge, straight as a die since the days he walked beat and Winnipeg was a lawless scatter of shacks. Before that, he had been a soldier, wounded at the Battle of Batoche, part of the force that caught Riel and chased Dumont into Montana. When he became chief, sure, he took his bit off the top. As was expected. He was a representative of the Crown, he did people favours, they reciprocated. An example—after he closed down the southside houses and told the madams about the new plan for Thomas Street, he tipped off John Beaman, a real estate agent and a Grand Warden of the Lodge. Beaman snapped up all the houses and sold them to the madams at ten times their market price. And then, as per, gave Chief McRae his cut. As did the madams, who were more than willing to pay for the privilege of setting up police-protected shops. That was how it worked and how it was supposed to work.

But now, after a decade of dutiful service, he was to be replaced in a month by an Easterner named Hancock. “A real detective, who uses scientific methods,” according to the man who was “retiring” him, Beaman’s stooge, the new mayor, the Reverend Owen Griffith Evans, a pint-sized Anglican priest and convicted abortionist who called himself a social purity reformer. Evans won the half-rigged election by promising to close at least half the city’s bawdy houses and speakeasies. As everyone knew, he had a hand in most of the other half.

And now, to top it, an unsolvable murder. So, yes, Clarence McRae needed and deserved a drink. Not the speculations of a greenhorn like Stodgell. Not the—

Bottom cabinet drawer. McRae cracked the seal.

“Todd’s either your murderer, sir, or he knows who is,” said Stodgell. “Why else would he deny knowing Gordon?”

“Maybe because he’s a drunken English halfwit halfbreed,” said the Chief, draining the first glass and slamming the drawer shut with his foot. Then, remembering that Stodgell was from St James and probably Countryborn himself, like most everyone else from that ward, added, “Look, Stodge, you’re ambitious, that’s good, but you’ve been on the force what, two months?”

“Six.”

“And unless I’m mistaken you’ve never taken the detective exam.”

“No. Sir.”

“You’re a beat cop, Stodge,” said McRae. “So beat it.”

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The coroner gave an open verdict at the inquest. Todd was a witness. So was the cook, Carris. So was Ross—Stodgell covered his shift. “What the hell does open mean?” Stodgell asked. “He died of a .38 slug in the head.”

“It means there wasn’t enough evidence to know who put it there,” said Ross.

“What did Todd say?”

“Same as what he said at the scene. Didn’t know it was a dead man. Thought it was just a drunk sleeping on a sidewalk.”

“They believe him?”

“Man was grinning and relaxed, Stodge. Had his girl with him and half the family. And an alibi. He was at his cousin’s when the gunshot was heard.”

“He had the man’s blood on his clothes,” Said Stodgell.

“From checking Gordon’s pulse,” said Ross.

“He was Gordon’s best friend. They’d been tight since grade school. So why say he didn’t know him?”

“So why kill him? Smart money’s on the cook, Stodge.”

Stodgell took the new streetcar to St James after his shift. He hadn’t been to the ward since the trams started running. Since joining the force. Since his grandfather died. Todd had been at the funeral. Their families were connected, but Stodgell forgot how. What he did remember was in school, before they both dropped out, Todd beat up Stodgell’s younger brother and took his bike. When Stodgell came to reclaim it, Todd sucker-smacked him with a lacrosse stick, pinned him to the ground with it, and dropped a hawked-up string of spit into his mouth. The other kids laughed. So did Todd, until Stodgell nutted him, broke his nose, and took the bike back. There was bad blood but nothing else between them after that. Todd hadn’t grown an inch since, Stodgell was now twice his size. And a cop. Who was investigating him for murder.

He started at the Notre Dame. The manager, Gussie Davis, an African giantess, told him Todd and Gordon had been there with a woman named Lila, dark-haired, thin, from Iceland, worked for Goldie Jones on Rachel Street. A quarrel started. Todd pulled a gun. Lila intervened. Todd knocked Johnny down and left. The manager couldn’t say what type of gun it was.

Later, at the Queensland, they quarrelled again. And again at the old Galt house. And then at the Clarendon, where Todd bought a bottle of whiskey and gave it to Johnny, who was later seen taking swigs from it while buying two pairs of underwear in a store on Portage, and then sitting down on the sidewalk about half a mile up, near where he was shot, his head resting on his hands, the bundle by his side.

Neither the bottle nor the bundle were found near his corpse.

Todd went to his uncle’s place about half a mile further up Portage. He left there with his sister around 7 p.m. to go back to town. Then he went home.

Home was Grey Hallett’s house near Deer Lodge. Hallett’s was Todd’s cousin. He told Stodgell that Gordon and Todd had quarrelled on the street that evening in front of Todd’s sister.

Stodgell questioned the sister, who he knew from the neighbourhood, but hadn’t seen since they were kids. He barely recognized her. Bone thin, broken. “Talk to this Lila girl, Stodge,” she said. “She knows what happened. I was with them later and I would have saved Johnny’s life if I could—” she let that slip, then caught herself and refused to say anything else.

Hallett thought it would be good fun to joke with Donny about the murder, so he invited Stodgell over for cards. “Donny’ll be there. Bring liquor. He’s a talker if he’s had a few.” Stodgell brought two flasks. A man named Smith brought a half-pint. They played euchre. “How you feeling, Donny?” Stodge asked. He’d matched him drink for drink. “I’m feeling good, Eli, and I ain’t scared of you or any man. Let’s talk straight.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Not here. Outside.”

Stodgell slipped a gun into his pocket and followed Todd unsteadily out onto the porch.

“You after me, Stodge?” said Todd.

“Why would I be after you?”

“For the murder of Johnny Gordon.”

Stodgell passed him a flask. “You shoot him, Donny?”

Todd lunged. Stodgell sidestepped and Todd fell and Stodgell put his knee in the small of his back and his gun to the side of his head. “You shoot him, Donny?”

“I’ve shot men, Eli, and I’d shoot you without fucking blinking, but whatever is in my breast is staying right there forever.”

Stodgell helped Todd to his feet. “You might as well know it then. I’m after you. And I’ll get you.” They went back into the house and finished the flasks and opened the bottle and played cards as if nothing had happened until Hallett’s wife said it was time to quit and Hallett said, “It’s late, Stodge. You should stay the night. You can share Donny’s bed.” He laughed and blew out the lights.

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The two men undressed and got under the covers. Stodgell immediately pretended to fall asleep, but through the night he lay watching Todd through half-lidded eyes. He saw Todd take a .32 from his pocket and place it on the bedside table. Several times through the night he saw Todd lean over and peer down at him, trying to see if he was asleep. Each time, Stodgell’s fingers tightened on his gun under the blanket.

Morning came. Todd lay in bed with his eyes closed till he heard Stodgell shut the front door. He got dressed, checked the chambers of his gun, and followed.

Upcoming Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published **The Inventions of Goya** Chapter 9Wednesday, January 31, 2024**Hexagon** (TBD)Sunday, February 4, 2024**EODJ (aka Soaking Wet February)**Cave à Michel, ParisThursday, February 1, 2024 (20:00-24:00)**Holdback**Episode 3Sunday, February 10, 2024"**The Hidden Vineyards of Paris" book launch with Geoffrey Finch & Paris Wine Walks**The Red Wheelbarrow, ParisThursday, February 29, 2024 (tba)*Please support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber.* Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published *When cavities, thus, the solid tooth destroys, That sullen enemy to mortal joys, The tooth-ache, supervenes: — detested name, Most justly damned to everlasting fame!* —Solyman Brown, “Dentologia; a Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth And Their Proper Remedies,” 1840.

There is for me no view so stultifying as the water-stained ceiling tile above my dentist's chair. Nor any so enduring: what else in this wide maculate realm has so entirely possessed my eye? I have spent more continuous and discrete time staring at it than at any other object in the universe: no painting or poem has so entranced me, no star-filled night nor all the skies of night and day combined have so entirely fixated and devoured my gaze.

Yet with this implacable transfixion comes release, and a form of redemption: in the fixed presence of this two-foot square of fibreboard I throw off the yoke of the world, it becomes the face of God and I its anchorite, the green chair my high column, the anaesthetizing needle’s prick the mortification of my flesh, the drill my self-crucifixion, the dentist the means of deliverance and my exhorted, my awestruck, my cenobitic following.

The soul, though, is not strengthened by these withdrawals into mineral slag. With the last spiralling spit and the unclipping of the bib, I do not leap to the ground refreshed, readied to do yeoman’s work in the struggle with devil and flesh. For I am not emotionally disposed to optimism. Why fix teeth when the world itself is rotten to the core? Optimism depends upon internal organic conditions—self-confidence, a cheery and ceaselessly extensible view of the semi-permanent, an inner belief in continued being and future success—not pearly whites.

I sleep in my clothes. Why take them off only to have to put them on again later? I can barely muster the long-term view that a haircut requires or the purchase of a pair of socks. We are lost and on the brink of collapse. What point could new socks have now?

By comparison, a visit to the doctor solicits a confusion of contemplative riches. Laid out on the paper towel roll of an examining table, cold basted with ultrasound jelly and rotated like a chicken in a roasting pan, one’s attention, assailed by a host of the real and the projected, is kaleidoscopically divided, as compound and richly facetted as a fly’s eye, as easily and repeatedly split as an electrically stimulated oocyte in a Petri dish.

For each prescription ("turn on to your right side, please…”) a new perspective. For each perspective a new state of being. For each new state of being a new obligation for observation and reflection—most of it dull and dark, yes, but a compelling hierarchy of contemplative foci just the same: near the top of the wall, scratches and scrapes in the dun-coloured paint; plastic screw anchors even higher; and then, at the vertex, the ghosts of the flat and framed objects once supported by the shelves supported by the screws supported by the plugs. What landscape, whose picture, what diploma once filled that now phantom frame? Where is the machine once battened to that wall and what medical advancement caused it to disappear? Will its replacement save my life? Am I to be saved? Am I worth saving? Each element solicits a verifiable re-connection with the world—a thickening of being and its scattering to the winds.

At the dentist's, however, I only look up. Up, up, up. Today, again, an entire morning spent staring at the tile above the chair, first at the contours of the stain, imagining the water puddling in darkness on its upper surface, wondering when it will reach critical volume and cause the tile’s fall and the ceiling’s collapse, which elicits this bitter thought: that my life too is a hidden pooling, a brackish blackness ready to cave in.

Next, the irregular patterns of holes in each ceiling square, which I do not count but absorb: I take in their number and assimilate their warp and woof even though I know there are none to be found. I take the holes in at a glance, fix them with a stare, then, squeezing shut and opening wide, make them flicker and strobe, transform them into spidering lines of ghostly light, a plotching universe of dancing constellations, replicating, bleeding, polar swapping from black to white to red, red to black to white, red, black, white, red, red, red. As the throb in the eyes intensifies the throb in the jaw recedes and with it, the sound of the drill, deadened as if by a sheet of gypsum. This is a trick: bat away questions of origin, existence and composition, empty the brain of the whys and whats and focus the entire force of being on the air circulating through an irregular pattern of perforated holes in a two-by-two-foot square of recycled cellulose. Then choose one hole and slip through, into the dead space concealed behind it, a hidden universe of fixtures, pipes and wires, fermenting condensation, black mould, butyric acid, rats’ nests and asbestos fibres. Then ask the real questions: Is this my life? Is this my world? Is this, then, what I have become? An irregular pattern of perforations, a surface where consciousness collects and stagnates? A tesseral grid suspended from the original—a mask, a buffer? Not buffer in the sense of dull yellow or naked or in good physical shape. Not an aficionado or pundit, not a freak or a fanatic. Buffer: from the old, lost verb to buff; the sound of a blow to a soft body. Like the recoil mechanism on a gun. A duffer as much as a buffer.

Time to take off this wretched bib around my neck, drop the tray and get on with my life.

Ben Nason, Untitled (Calgary) / 2016 / from the series Corners I, 40cmX40cm (15.75"x15.75") / Giclée print on Hahnemühle paper. Enquiries: bennason.com 2.

Napoleon, we are told, was born with a beautiful, strong, and well-arranged set of baby teeth. His permanent teeth were said to be even more astonishing. As emperor, in the evening, after his ablutions, he would carefully pick at them with a toothpick made of boxwood, clean them for a long time with a brush soaked in a special opiate, floss with thin coral, and rinse his mouth with a mixture of brandy and fresh water. Finally, he would clean his tongue with a scraper of silver gilt or tortoiseshell.

For he was a man fixated and set in his ways. Goethe described him as a “man of granite”: “What could he not and did not venture? From the burning sands of the Syrian deserts to the snowy plains of Moscow, what an incalculable number of marches, battles, and nightly bivouacs did he go through? And what fatigues and bodily privations was he forced to endure? Little sleep, little nourishment, and yet always in the highest mental activity. When one considers what he accomplished and endured, one might imagine that when he was in his fortieth year, not a sound particle was left in him; but even at that age he still occupied the position of a perfect hero.”

And yet, on St Helena’s, in his forty-seventh year, the exiled emperor had, for the first time in his life, a toothache.

“I found him with his face wrapped up with a handkerchief,” his dentist, Barry O’Meara, wrote in one of the clandestine letters.

“‘What is the most terrible ache? What is the sharpest pain?’” he asked me.

I answered that it was always the most instantaneous one that was the worst.

“‘Well, then it must be this toothache!’”

Our specialized molars, canines and incisors are without parallel in the animal kingdom. Human tooth enamel is as strong as iron, with a value of five on Moh’s scale of mineral hardness. The force of our bite is more powerful than the Earth’s gravitational pull.

A bird just hit the window. Of no consequence in the bigger scheme but still the most traumatizing event I have physically witnessed since the death of my dog a year and a half ago—so alarming I feel compelled to record it here.

Why? The histories of my parents and theirs, both lines, both sides, were undocumented, and because of that forever gone, while the bird's lifeless form, lying broken under the window, shall live a while longer under your eyes in these words. The hard, bony, enamel-covered structures in my mouth, however, are not long for this world. The enamel, once harder than iron, the bite once rivalling the force that binds all things and beings to the Earth’s crust, have been compromised by carelessness, by hygienic neglect. I chew carelessly. I brush lackadaisically and I do not use a brush, I use a gum tree branch, or, when available, a Neep-Neep twig, which, besides being delicious, freshens breath.

I do not floss.

And now they ache. I bite down on an almond, a cough drop, a sweet pickle or a slice of banana and the stab of pain brings tears to my eyes. Is the enamel gone? Are my tissues rotted through? My dreams are sinister. My thoughts are slung under a low seething cloud. Crushing torment propels me forward. New wreckage is hurled at my feet every morning. The debris piles up, towering skyward.

“Don’t make a fuss,” was what my mother used to say. I found a box of hers yesterday, mainly letters and a stack of photographs, all with her head scratched out. Or her whole body cut out with scissors. Why would my mother redact herself from family snapshots? She jumped out of the frame at the first sign of a camera, turned her head away, or leered at the lens like a mad woman, as if saying, here I really am, even more absurd than you thought. She hid behind a mask of contempt — of self-contempt.

Don’t we all? Hiding what? Sanitizing. And yet she kept the photos, she didn’t throw them away, she glued every one of them into photo books with little black triangles at the corner.

My teeth? They’ll do. In fact, for the record, I am grateful; I relish the prospect of pain so close to my brain. It will keep me focused. Besides, what’s a little dental work compared to the everyday misery of the common man? Montaigne:

Everyone knows the story of Scaevola, that having slipped into the enemy's camp to kill their general, and having missed his blow, to repair his fault, by a more strange invention and to deliver his country, he boldly confessed to Porsenna, who was the king he had a purpose to kill, not only his design, but moreover added that there were then in the camp a great number of Romans, his accomplices in the enterprise, as good men as he; and to show what a one he himself was, having caused a pan of burning coals to be brought, he saw and endured his arm to broil and roast, till the king himself, conceiving horror at the sight, commanded the pan to be taken away.

Teeth are tiny. The world is vast and mad. And yet it has its logic. Montaigne:

The last death will be so much less painful; it only kills half or a quarter of a man. Recently, a tooth of mine fell out, without pain, without effort: it was the natural end of its duration. That part of my being and several others are already dead, others half-dead that were the most active and held the first rank while I was in the prime of life. This is how I melt away and escape from myself. What stupidity it would be for my understanding to feel the height of this fall, already so advanced, as if it were whole! I hope I shall not.

Montaigne tells us that he too often chewed and brushed carelessly. He confessed to tongue, cheek and finger biting. He also wrote about seeing a man who, with his teeth, and without the help of any hand, could bridle, groom, rub, dress, saddle, girt, and harness his horse. And when they opened his tomb four years ago they found his skeleton intact, with almost all his teeth accounted for.

An old joke: What do you call the fleshy part around teeth? Me.

Besides, how difficult can it be to pull a tooth? That said, I couldn’t do it, I can’t stand the sight of blood and the sound is revolting, a horrible crunching and cracking right next to the brain, worse because of the anaesthetic. Because you feel nothing. Not a thing. Saint Appolonia did not need anaesthetics, why should I?

Perhaps it is time for an intercession. Saint Apollonia, the deaconess of Alexandria during the reign of Emperor Philip, is the patroness saint of dentists. She carries pincers holding a tooth or wears a golden tooth on a necklace. When the persecutions began, she alone refused to flee the city, and the pagan mob set upon her and beat her till the teeth fell from her mouth. Then they lit a fire. “Curse your God,” they cried, “or we will turn your flesh to ash.” “Wait,” mumbled Apollonia. “Give me time to consider.” Then she jumped into the flames.

Toothaches drove us from the trees. Not hunger, not fear, not ego, not free will, not sex, not God. Debilitating pain in the oral cavity and the quest for its relief is the driving force of all civilization.

A corollarial extension: local anaesthesia—the blocking of the perception of pain and the reversible loss of sensation through the prevention of nerve impulse transmission in a specifically targeted zone of the body—divides us from the ancients. It, not dentistry—we’ve been drilling teeth for 9,000 years—is the single innovation that delineates our modernity.

The ancients used snow and ice or wine and opiates. We use dibucaine, prilocaine, lidocaine and mepivacaine. The best are amides, derivatives of aniline. Amides are heat stable and have a two-year shelf-life. Ester local anaesthetics, like cocaine—Freud’s favourite, first used at his suggestion by Karl Koller to numb gums in 1884—are faster acting but unstable in solution and more likely to elicit allergic reactions.

Decades later a dentist told a patient of Freud’s ("The Wolf Man," Sergei Pankejeff (1887-1979)) that he “would soon lose all his teeth because of the violence of his bite” and that his gums were pocked with pustules, gum-boils and “little holes.” Years after his “cure” he was seen walking the streets of Vienna staring at his reflection in a mirror. “Professor X has drilled a hole in my nose,” he would tell alarmed passers-by. The teeth trouble continued, as did his distrust of the dental profession. According to Freud, his earlier attitude toward tailors “precisely duplicated this later dissatisfaction with dentists … he went about from tailor to tailor, bribing, begging, raging, making scenes, always finding something wrong, and always staying for a time with the tailor who displeased him.”

Abraham Lincoln shared the Wolf-Man's distrust of dentistry after losing part of his upper jaw during a botched extraction during his first dental intervention, which was performed by a chiropodist without anaesthesia. The bone broke off in the grip of the man’s pliers. Dentists, understandably, second only to photographers and portraitists, alarmed Lincoln thereafter. He never smiled, no matter how good the joke or amusing the situation—and during subsequent dental visits (of which there were only three) self-administered chloroform, sniffed from a small cork-stoppered flask he carried with him at all times in the hind pocket of his waistcoat.

Of George Washington’s cherry wood dentures and John Quincy Adams animal teeth, etc., we are depressingly familiar.

Andrew Johnson—the first man to assume the highest office in America because of an assassination, and the first to be successfully impeached—avoided public appearances whenever possible because of a “tendency to purse his lips and drool.”

An abscessed tooth, not the saloonkeeper’s bullet mentioned two weeks ago, killed Teddy Roosevelt.

The deplorable state of Woodrow Wilson’s teeth was responsible for his debilitating stroke of 1919.

Throughout the war Winston Churchill wore a set of loose-fitting upper dentures that did not connect directly to his palate but hung slack in his mouth, creating a mouthful-of-pebbles effect.

This was intentional. Not, as Demosthenes did, to correct a speech impediment, but for the opposite effect—to preserve Churchill's “signature” drunken lisp for radio broadcasts.

Churchill asked his dental technician, Derek Cudlipp, to remove his four upper incisors and two upper left premolars and replace them with false teeth. To accentuate the slippage, Cudlipp used no archwire fasteners and left the upper left canine and the upper left molar unbracketed.

Later, when the young dental technician received his draft papers, Churchill tore them up. Later still, when Cudlipp asked Churchill to let him join a regiment and do his part, Churchill said, “You do more for the war effort staying here by my side in England, repairing my dentures, than you ever could fighting at the front.”

This was true.

From another O’Meara letter: “The Emperor suffers from spongy gums and the right side of the jaws is considerably swollen.” Napoleon finally took his surgeon’s advice and accepted to undergo the first surgical procedure ever performed upon his person—the extraction of a canine eyetooth from the upper right jaw. O’Meara had him placed directly on the ground—another first. “He was far from brave,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Gorregner, secretary of Sir Hugh Lowe, who was under the impression that the tooth was “barely rotten and could have been filled.” O’Meara was forced to have Napoleon held in place by three men.

The emperor’s 14-year-old friend Betsy Balcombe—the only person allowed to call him “Boney”—is said to have exclaimed, upon hearing Napoleon recount the operation: “What? You complain of pain caused by a minor operation? You who fought countless battles and passed through a hail of bullets, and was injured a dozen times? I am ashamed for you. But, anyway, give me the tooth!"

10.

Cudlipp was kept perpetually busy. Churchill was forever throwing his dentures at people in cabinet meetings. He told his son that Churchill often put his thumb behind his teeth and ejected them, and you could "tell the situation of the war effort from the distance they crossed through the room."

He had four sets in active rotation.

Next month, one of them is to be sold at auction. Along with John Lennon’s toilet. Which, I promise, to never mention again.

Thank you for reading. Have a great week.

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FAUST: I've studied now, ach! philosophy
Jurisprudence, medicine,
And even, alas! theology!
From end to end, with labour keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before…
Knowing now that nothing can be known,
That knowledge cuts me to the bone.

—Goethe, Faust, Part One, Scene One, 1808 (apologies to Bayard Taylor)

Last week I wrote to you, dear readers, about Gustave Flaubert’s giant, unfinished, posthumously published novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, which, like David Foster Wallace’s giant, unfinished, posthumously published novel The Pale King, killed its author.

Flaubert by Pierre François Eugène Giraud (1868) wearing Wallace’s bandana by Philip Burke (2009)The similarities between the two terminating tomes end there. The Pale King reductively funnels all human experience through a single document — the Illinois tax code — and its bearing on the hearts and souls of a roomful of Internal Revenue Service employees in Peoria, Illinois in 1985. It is elegiacally boring. Bouvard et Pécuchet expansively funnels pretty much every book in existence, including all 60 volumes of the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (C.-L.-F. Panckoucke, 1812-1822), through the minds and bodies of two boring nitwits on a farm in Normandy, sometime between 1838 and the end of time. It will make your head explode. Just as it did Flaubert’s.

At Wallace’s end, The Pale King was only one-third finished. I have tried to read all of its published pages — it contains masterpieces —and have failed. It is, to paraphrase Johnson, who is much in my mind as I head to the Hebrides tomorrow, a book that most readers will put down and forget to pick up again. “None ever wished it longer than it is.”

This is the last sentence I will ever devote to it.

Flaubert’s, on the other hand.

I can’t seem to shut up about.

If you didn’t read last week’s introduction to Bouvard et Pécuchet, you can pop over there now. Take your time, we’re not going anywhere.

While the rest of us wait, have you seen this?

Ok. So, the story — I’m going to run through it quickly, no spoiler alerts — begins on a Sunday afternoon in Paris much like today’s — a stultifying 33 degrees Celsius (91.4°F) — with the two main characters, both almost fifty, both copyists, both wearing hats with their names pencilled inside the brims, one strolling down from Bastille, the other strolling up from the Jardin des Plantes, simultaneously reaching a shaded bench on the Canal Saint-Martin, sitting down, and giving each other the once-over.

They like what they see. A friendship ensues. An inheritance follows — from Bouvard’s bourgeois uncle, who turns out to be his father. They resign their posts, move to a 38-hectare property in Normandy, and enthusiastically give themselves over to gardening. Which, they are distressed to discover, despite their blue blouses, wide-brimmed hats, and knee-length gaiters, they totally suck at it. Instead of quitting, however — the sensible course of action — they double down by ordering every book available on animal rearing, plant physiology, meteorology, and soil science. The results are worse. They move on to arboriculture, canning, and distilling. Disaster, disaster, and disaster. Everything they put their hand to dies or fails. Or blows up:

Suddenly, with a noise like a bombshell, the still burst into twenty pieces, which leapt to the ceiling, smashing the pots, flattening the skimmers, and smashing the glasses; the coal scattered, the furnace was demolished—and the next day, Germaine found a spatula in the courtyard.

Pécuchet immediately crouched down behind the vat, and Bouvard collapsed on a stool. For ten minutes they remained in this position, not daring to make a single movement, pale with terror, amidst the shards of broken glass. When they could speak again, they wondered what had caused so many misfortunes, especially this last one. And they understood nothing, except that they had almost perished. Pécuchet ended with these words:

“Perhaps we don't know chemistry!”

“And the next day, Germaine found a spatula in the courtyard.” My new favourite sentence of all time.

So, chemistry. They conduct experiments. More carnage. They move on to medicine. They read in one of the volumes of the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales1 about cases of extraordinary constipation. “Would that they had known Dr Beaumont’s famous fistulated Canadian, the polyphages Tarare and Bijoux, the hydropic woman from the department of Eure, the Piedmontese who went to the toilet once every twenty days, Simorre de Mirepoix who died of ossification, and the former mayor of Angoulême, whose nose weighed three pounds!”

Digestion strikes them as the greatest of creation’s mysteries.

To get a better grasp of its functions, they regretted not having the faculty of ruminating, as Montègre, M. Gosse and Bérard's brother had; — and they masticated slowly, triturating and insalivating while thinking attentively of the rounded bolus of chewed food in their entrails, and following it with methodical scrupulousness, of an almost religious attention, to its final consequence.

They then try to produce digestion artificially, by filling a bottle with meat and carrying it under their armpits for a fortnight, “without any other result save making them stink horribly.”

Following Sanctorius, “who spent half a century weighing his food every day together with his excretions”, they set out to prove that a man’s body can be kept in perfect equilibrium by putting into its mouth the exact amount expelled through its lower portals. This proves too onerous for our two Fausts. As does the practice of medicine, after threats of prosecution from the mayor — the aloe vera pills they gave him to get rid of the worms they insisted he had —

All diseases proceed from worms. They spoil the teeth, hollow out the lungs, enlarge the liver, ravage the intestines, and cause noises therein.

— only managed to give him chronic, uncurable hemorrhoids.

Medicine, they decide (like their creator, whose father, head surgeon at the hospital in Rouen, was contemptuous of literary types and didn’t read his son’s books) is humbug. “The springs of life are hidden from us, the ailments too numerous, the remedies problematical. No reasonable definitions are to be found in the authors of health, disease, diathesis, or even pus.”

Achille Lemot, 1869But filling their heads with all this reading has by now “disturbed their brains.”

When Bouvard had a cold, he thought his lungs were inflamed. When leeches did not lessen the soreness, he resorted to a blister, which affected the kidneys. Then he thought he was passing a stone.

Pécuchet got an ache while pruning a hedge and vomited after his dinner, which frightened him immensely. Then, observing that his complexion was a little yellow, he suspected liver disease, and asked himself: "Do I have pains? and ended up having them.

Distressed by each other’s symptoms, they examined their tongues, felt their pulses, changed their mineral water, purged themselves — and feared the cold, the heat, the wind, the rain, the flies, and especially, the courants d’air.

(Note: The French are by far the most medicated people on earth, but most of them still believe that a courant d’air — a draught, principally caused by — sacrebleu! — an open window — remains the country’s number-one health hazard.)

To counter their physical deterioration, they stop smoking and drinking and prohibit the cook from preparing their favourite dishes.

All meats have their shortcomings. Black pudding and cold meats, herring, lobster, and game are “unmanageable”. The larger the fish, the more gelatine it contains, and therefore the heavier it is. Vegetables cause heartburn; macaroni gives you dreams; cheeses “generally considered, are difficult to digest”; a glass of water in the morning is “dangerous”. Each drink or comestible should come with a similar warning, or else with these words: “bad! — beware of abuse! — not suitable for everyone”. — Why bad? Where is the abuse? How do you know if something is not suitable for you?

And what a problem breakfast is! They gave up on café au lait, on account of its detestable reputation, and then chocolate, because it is “a mass of indigestible substances”. That left tea. But “nervous people should avoid it altogether”. However, in the seventeenth century, Decker prescribed two hundred litres a day to cleanse the swamps of the pancreas.

Tetched and tetchy, they switch treatises and are delighted to learn that pork is in itself “a good aliment,” tobacco “perfectly harmless in its character,” and coffee “indispensable to military men.”

Until then, they had believed that damp places were unhealthy. Not so! Casper declares them less deadly than the others. You don't swim in the sea without refreshing your skin. Bégin wants you to throw yourself in while you're sweating. Undiluted wine after soup is considered excellent for the stomach.

So that night they tuck into a bottle of Burgundy, a plate of oysters, a duck, a pork and cabbage stew with cream, and a Pont l'Evêque cheese.

It was a liberation, almost a revenge — and they laughed at Cornaro! What a fool he must have been to tyrannise himself like that! What a low thing to think always of prolonging one's existence! Life is only good if you enjoy it.

“Another piece?”

“Don’t mind if I do!”

“And I will too!”

“To your health!”

“And to yours!”

“And let the rest of the world go to hell!”

Okay, basta. I’m enjoying translating bits and bobs of Flaubert’s perfectionist prose—and giving examples of how, 202 years after he flopped dead while trying to finish the damn thing, his book’s skewering of the crackpot ideas of its day remains as on-point as ever. But at the rate I’m going, we’ll be here forever; I’ve only covered the first third of the book.

So, bref, here, nutshelled, are the next two-thirds: following the above setbacks the two imbéciles try their hands at not just the cracked pots but also the intact ones: everything from astronomy to zoology. They turn their house into an archaeology museum and fill their garden with rocks and immortelles, “sacrificing the asparagus in order to build on the spot an Etruscan tomb, that is to say, a quadrilateral figure in dark plaster, six feet in height, and looking like a dog-hole”.

They then take on philosophy and history, grammar and aesthetics. “Their heads grew bigger. They were proud to reflect on such large objects.” Then religion, then spiritualism, then mesmerism, magnetism, and phrenology. They dive into progressive politics, before deciding: “Eh, progress, what a joke! And politics, what a load of rubbish!” They gorge on geology, antiquities, urban planning, history, biography, theatre, literary criticism, education, drawing, natural history, and music. Each subject leaves them more puzzled than before.

In short, having consumed all existing knowledge, they learn nothing. Except, like Faust, that nothing can be known.

All of this takes an unknowable eternity to unfold. Twenty years? Thirty? Forty? According to the calculations of René Descharmes (Autour de Bouvard et Pécuchet : Études documentaires et critiques, Paris, 1921), they threw themselves into gymnastics at the age of seventy-eight, the same year Pécuchet focused his book learning on love, lost his virginity, and got the clap.

“The book is full of events,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in “In Defense of Bouvard et Pécuchet” (1994), “yet time stands still.” Every book in Borges’ “total library” contains infinite labyrinths — and labyrinthian infinites. But Bouvard et Pécuchet, especially.

Finally, disenchanted with the lot, Bouvard and Pécuchet try to top themselves, but, surprise, surprise, they fuck this up too. So, defeated, emptied, exhausted, they hire a carpenter to customise a double writing stand, and, seated together for all eternity, they return, joylessly, but with great and blessed relief, to the only thing that they know will get them through the day unscathed. Their original metier. Copying. Duplicating words — just their physical form, without having to actually read or think about them — for a Sottisier, “a collection of nonsense.”

That’s it, the whole story. With, again, no spoiler alert — because Bouvard et Pécuchet cannot be spoiled. Because, despite the continuous, connected chains of chaos and slapstick, nothing about our interchangeable Quixotes ever changes. Because nothing really happens.

Because, like that show George pitched and the nine-season series Jerry and Larry created, Bouvard et Pécuchet is about nothing:

What seems beautiful to me, what I would like to do, is a book about nothing. A book with no external attachments, which would stand on its own by the internal force of its style, like the earth without being supported stands in the air, a book which would have almost no subject or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible… This is why there are no beautiful or ugly subjects, and why it could almost be established as an axiom from the point of view of pure art, that there are none, style being in itself an absolute way of seeing things. I'd need a whole book to explain what I mean. I'll write about all that in my old age, when I have nothing better to dabble in. — G.F. in a letter to Louise Colet, 16 January 1852.

This was written thirty-eight years before Flaubert “finished” Bouvard et Pécuchet, or rather before Bouvard et Pécuchet finished Flaubert.

Here is a principle of aesthetics (you can see that I am bringing everything back to my profession), a rule, I would say, for artists: be regulated in your life and ordinary like a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your works. — G.F. in a letter to Gertrude Tennant, 25 December 1876

Did Flaubert follow his own advice? Hard to say. We barely know the man, despite our having free access to 4,450 of his letters. Ten new letters are discovered each year. Around a thousand are still missing, and many more are forever lost, including the hundreds his best friend Louis Bouilhet burned because of Flaubert’s “crude language” and the hundreds Flaubert burned from his lover and muse Louise Colet.

What we don’t know and never will know about Flaubert swamps what we do. Not just the biographical stuff—Was he left-handed or right-handed? Did he ever actually say, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”? Did he have sex with the 26-year-old, twice-divorced Élisa Schlesinger in Trouville when he was 15? — but what he thought and felt about just about everything.

“The author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” Flaubert was famous for this “principle of impersonality”, for not feeling anything for his characters and thus ensuring that his readers don’t care anything for them, either.

We must be as soulless as possible, and it is through this detachment that the immense sympathy of things and beings will reach us in greater abundance. — G.F. Pensées (posthumous collection),1915

But by the end of his life, having devoted years to plumbing infinitely vast depths of stupidity, and living night and day with two pratfalling morons caterwauling about in his head, did he not become them? Was he not now just as stupid as they were? Borges again: “The fact is that five years of coexistence transformed Flaubert into Pécuchet and Bouvard, or (more accurately) transformed Pécuchet and Bouvard into Flaubert.”

The most-quoted line from the Borges essay is his description of Flaubert as “the man who, with Madame Bovary, forged the realist novel, [and with Bouvard et Pécuchet] was also the first to shatter it.” This seems right to me. Joyce went on two Flaubertian pilgrimages to Normandy and could recite huge swathes of Madame Bovary by heart. Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, according to the usual suspects — Hugh Kenner, Cyril Connally et al — borrowed heavily from Bouvard et Pécuchet. “Joyce,” quipped Pound, “went straight back to Papa Flaubert” and “produced the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we now have in English.”

Bouvard is unfinished, Ulysses is gigantically complete, and the latter parts of Ulysses, notably Bloom’s conversational outburst, give one excellent ground for comparison. He has emitted what appear to be all the clichés of the English language in a single volcanic eruption. — Ezra Pound, The Dial, 1922

The line continues unbroken all the way up to The Pale King and beyond.

I’m particularly fond of the next paragraph in the Borges (and his “two-headed Faust” line, which I stole for my title), which I’ll use in lieu of an ending:

The two characters are initially two idiots, scorned and abused by the author, but in the eighth chapter, the famous words occur: “Then a lamentable faculty arose in their spirits, that of seeing stupidity and no longer being able to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, the profile of a bourgeois, a silly reflection overheard by chance.” Flaubert, at this point, reconciles himself with Bouvard and Pecuchet, God with his creatures. This may happen in every long, or simply living, work (Socrates becomes Plata, Peer Gynt, Ibsen), but here we surprise the moment in which the dreamer, to use a kindred metaphor, notes that he is dreaming, and that the forms of his dream are himself.

I still haven’t gotten around to discussing France’s annual hunt for literary fiction, a unique blood sport not practiced anywhere else in the world. Of the livres released into the wild between September 6 and the beginning of November, when the country’s big literary trophies are handed out, only a handful will survive.

This year’s drove is much diminished: 321 new French novels, including 74 first novels and 145 novels in translation, for a total of 466, to which must be added a few hundred crime, science fiction, and fantasy novels, and a smattering of rediscovered or retranslated classics. Still, it is by far the lowest number this century. Last year there were 490. The year before, 521. A decade before that, 667. In 2010, 701.

“The decline in the number of publications continues”, bemoans the specialist magazine, Livre Hebdo. Booksellers usually make almost a third of their yearly sales during this period…

But that’s all I can write for now. I’m in Glasgow, Hebrides tomorrow, back in Paris in nine days, then down to the Vaucluse the day after that, and swamped with Illinois-tax-code-level-boring writing obligations for the next three weeks straight. Would that I weren’t! Would that I could stay Flaubertian-focused on my own weird shit! Would that, for three or four nickles a day, or €0.16, or 25 ¥, or 14p, or a hipster cuppa joe a month, you could keep me here, virtually strapped to my writing table, Hexagonalling like a Pécuchet possessed. To welcome O life! and to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Or, failing that, at least have a bit of fun, and make a bit of dosh.

Thanks for reading. I can’t express how much your support means to me. Other people follow your lead: by hunting down the “like”, “comment”, and “share” and mashing them with a forefinger, you will help me attract new readers and subscribers. You can also help Hexagon by downloading the nifty Substack app, where every day you’ll get hot tasty treats from the likes of George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie, plus lots of piquant takes on philosophy, economics, history, politics, poetry, and science, and no shortage of bilious dreck from cranks and creeps — which, fortunately, you can and should ignore. Drop me a line and I’ll send you recommendations. Final point: reading these on the app — or in your browser — is a much better experience than reading these as emails. Because, invariably, writers go back and tweak their texts — remove typos, fix dumb passages, add better ones, etcetera.

That’s it! I’m out! Slàinte mhath! Haste Ye Back! Lang may yer lum reek!

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1As mentioned last week, before writing Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flaubert spent years doing preparatory research, during which he read around 1,500 books. The 16-page medical section (chapter III) was finished in mid-July 1877, after a two-year break during which he wrote Three Tales. For it, Flaubert took 233 pages of reading notes from around 100 books and doctoral theses on clinical medicine, anatomy, pathology, physiology, medical philosophy, hygiene, and women.

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When he died (8 May 1880, stroke, Croisset, 58), Flaubert was pretty much broke. Five years before he had been forced to sell off his two main assets—his Paris apartment and the farm he inherited from his father in Deauville—to save from disgrace his orphaned niece, Caroline, whose idiot timber-baron husband, Ernest Commanville, through dubious business dealings, had lost his family’s fortune, and Flaubert’s.

Few things mattered more to Flaubert than the welfare and happiness of Caroline, whom he had raised as his own daughter (her mother, Flaubert’s sister, died two months after Caroline’s birth). Next to Flaubert’s mother, she was the greatest love of his relatively love-free life.

So, reluctantly, he cashed in, gave the Commanvilles the bulk of the proceeds, and, determined to remake his fortunes through his writing—a longshot, given his success to that point—moved into the summerhouse of his late mother—she had died in 1872—in Croisset, on the right bank of the Seine, four kilometres from Rouen.

Flaubert, however, wasn’t just motivated by avuncular largesse. His mother had bequeathed the Croisset manor to Caroline, but the will stipulated that Flaubert could continue living there during his lifetime. He loved Croisset more than any material object in his universe. The quiet garden, the elegant row of lime trees, and, especially, the little pavilion, actually a garden shed, pictured above, his haven on the riverbank where he had done almost all of his writing. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

Commanville’s bankruptcy threatened to take it from him. He had already lost it once, in late 1870, when enemy soldiers occupied it during the Franco-Prussian war. “Croisset has lost all its charm for me,” he had written Caroline at the time, “and I wouldn't set foot there again for anything in the world. If you only knew what it was like to see Prussian helmets on your bed! How maddening! How miserable! There will be no end to this dreadful war!”

But the war did end, and in April 1871, he moved back.

Contrary to my expectations, I find myself very well in Croisset, and I don't think any more about the Prussians than if they had never been here! It is very gratifying to find myself in my old study and to see all my little things again!… If nothing disturbs me, I'll have finished my Heresies by the end of the month… All I need is the presence of those I love, a small group in which you occupy the front row, my beautiful lady.—Letter to Caroline, 5 April 1871

“Heresies” was the manuscript of La Tentation de Saint Antoine (“The Temptation of Saint Anthony”), which he had started in 1849, the year before his trip to the Middle East, and four years after seeing Breughel the Younger’s painting of the subject at the Balbi Palazzo in Genoa.

From his travel carnet:

In the background, on both sides, on each of the hills, two monstrous heads of devils, half living, half mountains. At the bottom left, Saint Anthony, between three women, turning his head away to avoid their caresses. They are naked, white, smiling and about to wrap their arms around him. Opposite the viewer, at the very bottom of the painting, Gourmandise, naked to the waist, lean, her head adorned with red and green ornaments, a sad figure, her neck disproportionately long and taut, like a crane's, bending towards the nape of her neck - her collarbones protruding - presents him with a dish laden with coloured food.

Man on horseback in a barrel, beasts emerging from the bellies of animals, frogs with arms and jumping on the ground. - Red-nosed man on a horse surrounded by devils. - Hovering winged dragon. Everything seems to be on the same level. All swarming, swarming and cackling in a grotesque and wild way, in the bonhomie of every detail. - At first this picture seems confusing, then it becomes strange for most, funny for some, something more for others. For me, it has obliterated the entire gallery in which it stands. I already don't remember the rest.

Over his writing desk in Croisset he kept an engraving of another version of the painting, by Breughel’s assistant Jacques Callot.

And, famously, on his writing desk, he kept Louou, a stuffed parrot borrowed from the public library in Rouen.

The Temptation had stymied Flaubert through three decades. After the first attempt, he read it to two of his best literary friends, who, after enduring a ten-hour-straight lecture in his grave booming voice, suggested that he “throw it into the fire and never mention it again.” He went back to it in 1856. Then again in 1869, before the war, and then again after it.

He finally finished it in 1872, just before the death of his mother, and by which time he was absorbed, or rather reabsorbed, in another project, which he had begun to think about in 1839, and then again in 1863, but hadn’t been able to focus on until now.

He described the project in letters to two other best friends (the second letter gives a clue as to why, at this point in his life, his social circle had been much reduced):

I'm going to start a book that will keep me busy for several years—It's about these two guys who copy a kind of critical encyclopaedia as a joke. To do that, I'm going to have to study a lot of things I don't know anything about: chemistry, medicine, agriculture. I'm in medicine now. But you'd have to be mad and three times phrenic to undertake a book like this!—Letter to Edma Roger de Genettes, 19 August 1872

I am studying the history of medical theories and treatises on education—after which I shall move on to other reading. I'm swallowing volumes and taking notes. I'll be doing this for two or three years, after which I'll start writing, all with the sole aim of spitting my disgust at my contemporaries. At last I'm going to say what I think, exhale my resentment, vomit my hatred, expectorate my gall, ejaculate my anger, dig up my indignation.— Letter to Léonie Brainne, 8 November 1872

A year later, he told Edma that his “colossal readings” for his novel had continued apace. “Do you know how many volumes I've swallowed since 20 September? 194!” And in all of them, I've taken notes!”

Two years later, he told Ivan Turgenev, that “there is no turning back. But what fear I feel! What trances! It seems to me that I am about to embark on a very great journey towards unknown regions and that I will not return.” Then to his other remaining ally, George Sand—by now most of his writer friends had all but abandoned him (as would soon Sand, a year later, by dying of stomach cancer): "[it] is leading me very quietly, or rather relentlessly, to the abode of the shades. It will be the death of me!"

“My heart is becoming a necropolis,” he wrote to another.

Meanwhile, La Tentation de Saint Antoine was published, in April 1873. It was quickly “torn to shreds in the papers and exalted by two or three people”. After an initial spurt of about a thousand copies, sales slowed to a trickle. Flaubert was devastated. Money was scarce. What little his two semi-successful novels had brought him, the scandalous Madame Bovary (1856) and the critically slammed Salammbô (1862), was long, long gone. L'Éducation sentimentale (1869) was met with universal incomprehension, and only sold a couple of hundred copies. Just a month before Tentation’s release,his vaudeville play, Le Candidat (1873), closed after four performances.

He would have a bit more luck with Trois Contes (1877), which received glowing reviews (except, most notably, from the Revue des Deux Mondes, whose hatchet man Brunetière saw in it “the mark of a dried-up imagination”). But it didn’t sell enough to keep the wolves—and the bailiffs—from the door.

Turgenev remained steadfast in his support. Zola, Hugo, Maupassant, Huysmans, Céard, Mirbeau and the Goncourts all recognized him as a master. But none of that faire bouillir la marmite—brought the pot to the boil—so to speak. Though Hugo, the year before Flaubert’s death, managed to secure him a secret pension—Flaubert had sworn to never accept handouts from the state—disguised as a position as assistant librarian at the Bibliothèque Mazarine (“3,000 francs, no lodgings, and no obligation, not even to come to the offices”). But the wolves and bailiffs kept knocking.

“In the name of Christ,” he wrote to Caroline three weeks before his death. “Why won’t they leave me the fuck alone? They’re screwing me. Let this harassment end!… Sometimes I think I’m liquefying like an old Camembert.”

Add to the overripe-cheese feeling the constant eruptions of syphilitic chancres on his penis—he had been first infected in Beirut three decades before—and epileptic seizures of increasing duration and severity.

But. He had his masterpiece. Four thousand manuscript pages. Another 4,000 pages of supplementary materials, including a complete Encyclopédie de la bêtise humaine (“Encyclopaedia of Human Stupidity”) and a Sottisier, "a collection of nonsense, especially nonsense or platitudes that have escaped well-known authors".

This would be, he was convinced, once the final chapter was assembled from his copious notes, and everything else boiled down and properly organized, his greatest work ever.

And then, on 8 May, while writing the final chapter at his desk in the garden shed, under the etching by Callot and the glass eyes of Loulou, his brain, overloaded with the contents of the 1,500 titles he had by then stuffed into it while researching the novel—books on agronomy, arboriculture, gardening, canning, distillery, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, medicine, nutrition, astronomy, zoology, geology, archaeology, architecture, museology, Celtic religion, antiquities, history, biography, politics, love, philosophy, theatre, literary criticism, grammar, aesthetics, gymnastics, spiritualism, magnetism, mesmerism, logic, religion, education, phrenology, drawing, natural history, morality, music and town planning—burst an artery, and he died on the spot.

Within weeks, Ernest sold and razed the house, but not before cutting down and selling all the trees. A corn liquor distillery was built on the site, later converted into a paper mill.

The garden shed was spared; today it is a museum; you can still see Flaubert’s parrot (or, according to Julian Barnes, a parrot).

Meanwhile, Caroline, his executrice, cut, rewrote and expanded on the mountainous manuscript, and a version Bouvard et Pécuchet saw the light of day.

Next week, in Chapter 2, we’ll look more closely at Bouvard et Pécuchet. I’d write more about it now but I haven’t finished reading it. So far, a third of the way in, it is a howl, a slapstick Phenomenology of Spirit in comic novel form, mixed in with Dumb & Dumber, Seinfeld, Abbot & Costello, and Withnail & I. It is also an exhaustive and exhausting takedown of almost every crackpot theory still currently befouling the Internet. Misanthropic, hilariously bleak, and essential, a must-read in our post-truth era. Book group anyone?

We will also look at France’s hunting season, which has just begun. The three most prized big-game quarries? Wild boar, roe deer and literary novels.

To those who have read this far, thank you. To those who will now hit the Like, Share and Comment buttons, thank you. To those who will hit the Subscribe button, or who have already done so, thank you.

To those who are Paid Subscribers or are about to become Paid Subscribers, the words “thank” and “you” do not come close to expressing my gratitude. So I will invent new ones—and send them to each and every one of you, in a pretty envelope postmarked Paris, along with a collectible token of my appreciation.

Founding Members?

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I’m open to suggestions.

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September collective re-assessment directives 11.17 through 14.04, issue 1-94 B2 (Denso) (27.08.2028)

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A cycle of matter that smatters of matters that matter (to me)

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The main traits of the Breton race are uncleanliness, superstition, and drunkenness.—M. BUSSON, Geography manual for high school students, 1929

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Confessions of an andouillette eater

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The Ends(s) of the Art School and the Search for the Art Particle

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By Zola Mooney

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Some weird stuff, and an excerpt from my daughter's even weirder stuff

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“I’m going to memorise your face and throw my head away.” – Charles Baudelaire

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Rioters, Rugbymen, and Drinks with the French President: Ten thoughts provoked by recent events in the Hexagon

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A while back I posted a post about my friend, Fred — well, to be accurate, Fred’s more an acquaintance than a friend. Though I like him as much as many of the people I consider friends, and I see more of him than most of them, as almost every day since the summer of 2017 he has knocked on my front door, a bummed cigarette in one hand, a can of cheap German beer from Lidl in the other, and, after a few seconds of small talk — “hey uh hi how ya doing?” from him (I’m pretty sure he’s forgotten my name) and “Fred, what happened to your face?” or “Jesus, Fred, you look like shit,” or “Fred, man, why don’t you take a fucking shower?” from me — he gets straight to the point: “You got any money?”

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Finding Time with Marcel Proust and Pierre Boulez

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One thought alone occupies us; we cannot think of two things at the same time. Which is good for us, according to the world, but not according to God. – Pascal, Pensées, 1670

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Ivan Shishkin, In the Wild North, 18911.

Napoleon had the same pretension for his teeth; indeed, his teeth were nice, but they were not as splendid as his hands. – Alexander Dumas, Les compagnons de Jéhu, 1857

Paris is a layer cake, a millefeuille of causalities and chaoses. It sits on its cracked plate under its smoked glass cloche, and it is so beautiful and tempting you want to sink your teeth into it, but you don’t have a fork, and you can’t use your hands because people are watching. So what do you do? You keep your hands in your pockets and you move on – “Circulez, il n'y a rien à voir” – and things move along with you, or against you, through the void, following their pre-determined path, but every so often they swerve. This is where personal responsibility comes from. The more precisely you can predict someone’s movements, the less precisely you can predict where someone is. And vice versa. Information gets entangled or absorbed in other things. There is thus little point in encouraging a safe set of habitual actions. Think of a swarm of flies, a school of fish or a flocking murmuration of swallows; each individual element moves about randomly until it strays too far from the centre of the swarm, at which points it turns back. Now think of things with no centre. A city, the weather, stars, a plankton bloom, a supply chain. Your self. Don’t get caught in time traps: forget breakfast, it’s over, and lunch will come and go, and dinner, too. Remember Napoleon's maxim: “The stupid speak of the past, the wise of the present, and the fools of the future.” You can predict probabilities, the likelihood or unlikelihood of this or that possible or impossible outcome, but only when you know all the terms, and you never know all the terms. So you lose what you know, or thought you knew. It decoheres, the clocks get lost in the clouds and the clouds become the clocks, even the most cloudy of clouds, and the clocks become the clouds, even the clockiest of clocks.

“The truth goes through three stages,” said Napoleon. “First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently attacked; finally, it is accepted as self-evident.”

Poe once said, in between episodes of brain fever, that everything we see and seem is but a dream within a dream. He wasn’t too far off: the perception of who we are and what we are doing, and how we feel about this – our so-called state of mind about our so-called quality of life – these are constructs. Fantasies. Hallucinations.

Berthe Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette (detail), 19242.

You push the button, we do the rest. – George Eastman, 1888

Those years in Paris. Those hours in the Mazarine library. I parked my bike next to a noseless statue of Voltaire and sat at a desk next to a noseless Plato. And I stunk like hell!

At one point, just before our short-lived and disastrous association with Joseph Beuys’s people in Berlin, we were selected to direct a shoot of a Brazilian transvestite exposing themselves in front of La Joconde. Though it was a Tuesday and the Louvre was closed and we had received prior written clearance from the museum director, the security guards, affronted by our lack of respect for so venerable an oeuvre, saw fit to forcibly intervene, using flashlights and nightsticks, and, in the resulting melee, during which I lost my glasses and injured my wrist, we became separated from the photographer, a nervous young man named Ping or Pong, whom we had met through a friend.

When he didn't return to the hotel that night, we assumed he had been arrested.

The next morning, as prearranged, we flew to Chad. Six months later, the photographs appeared in a magazine under the young man's name and accompanied by an article on love and cannibalism. The young man, it turned out, during his stay in Paris, had murdered his mistress and eaten several kilos of her corpse.

Caspar David Friedrich, Frau vor untergehender Sonne, 1818The article and photographs attracted considerable attention, not least from the so-called art world. A legal imbroglio ensued, doggedly pursued in the French courts, and it was decided that the photographer, now incarcerated, held the rights to the photographs because he had operated the camera. In the eyes of the law, it didn't matter that we had conceived of the project. It didn't matter that it was our idea. In the eyes of the law, the technical element prevailed. You press the button, you take the picture, the picture, the image, is yours for the taking. We appealed twice and lost both times. We took the young man to court in his native country and lost again. Then we learned that the entire event had been orchestrated from the start. It had been some sort of test. What it could possibly mean, what significance it might have, I could not at the time imagine.

Months later, however, long after the Beuys episode and the first two Chad expeditions, it struck me. The transvestite had had their back and face to the camera; they were sitting on the protective barrier – a red velvet-covered chain suspended between two brass stands – with their torso twisted in such a way that their legs, penis and testicles faced the camera, while their upper back, shoulders and face were directed towards the painting, and their figure completely eclipsed that of Mona Lisa, so only the landscape behind her – jagged mountains, a misty lake, a canal, a medieval bridge over a winding river – was visible. In this position, the transvestite's posture called to mind, albeit in a parodic manner, the reversed figures in Casper David Friedrich's landscape paintings. In the early part of the nineteenth century, during a period when interest in Friedrich's symbolist works were at an all-time high, works of his like Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Hiker above the Sea of Mist and Woman Facing the Setting Sun, were considered projections of the glorious absolute within, a state of total harmony between all that is nature and spirit in God.

Caspar David Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, 1818There and then, however, in the Louvre in 1977, the landscape itself was painted. It wasn't nature, it was Leonardo Da Vinci. And the reversed figure wasn't Friedrich's hiker above the sea of mist, or his woman facing the setting sun, but a Brazilian transvestite tarted up like a Belle Époque sex worker. And the fact that the rights to this image had passed from the artist to the technician furthered the doubling effect.

The essay that accompanied the photographs made the point even clearer:

In contrast to the physical, this system is not only complex but also in a state of constant flux. To know what forms these structural relationships take at any given time, we need to monitor them constantly. Where is Casper David Friedrich's God now? Where is nature? Is this not precisely the art in which an infinite amount of work remains to be done, in which genius can still blaze its own trails – even if they are not entirely new? It embraces everything that presents itself to the eye, and through it we catch a glimpse of a seemingly new world within the existing one.”

Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, Napoleon with Folded Hands, Seen from the Rear, unknown dateWould he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. – Gertrude Stein, “A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” Vanity Fair, 1924Napoleon believed that it only took five minutes for the outcome of a battle to be decided. You plan and project, manoeuvre and prepare, and then the moment of crisis arrives. Bang. If your vision is strong, if your control of those few key moments is total, the enemy's rout is assured; if, however, you slip, if the moment comes and you are not aware of its arrival, your defeat is inevitable.

Goethe described him as a “man of granite” — “What could he not and did not venture? From the burning sands of the Syrian deserts to the snowy plains of Moscow, what an incalculable number of marches, battles, and nightly bivouacs did he go through? And what fatigues and bodily privations was he forced to endure? Little sleep, little nourishment, and yet always in the highest mental activity. When one considers what he accomplished and endured, one might imagine that when he was in his fortieth year not a sound particle was left in him; but even at that age he still occupied the position of a perfect hero.”

And yet, on St Helena’s, during the final months – the exiled Emperor had, for the first time in his life, a toothache. “I found him with his face wrapped up with a handkerchief,” his dentist, O’Meara, writes in one of the clandestine letters. “‘What is the most terrible ache? What is the sharpest pain?’” he asked. I answered that it was always the most immediate one that was the worse. “‘Well, then it must be this fucking toothache!’”

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In Paris last week, twenty-three false dentists of Syrian nationality were arrested. False? They performed extractions and crowns for people too poor to afford a real dentist. Could anything be less false? They carried black bags and made house calls. They helped people.

Obsession, said Johnson, is the first attack of Satan, antecedent to possession. I sometimes wonder, I look around, look down, see our legs scrabbling. For what?

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It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge, said Adlai Stevenson, if you think you look funny on a horse. In one battle, Napoleon’s forces stood halted at the foot of a bridge over a wide ravine, seized by fear of Austrian cannon fire. Napoleon knew that if they didn’t cross the bridge the battle would be over, his Empire destroyed, his World Spirit off its horse and on its back in the dust, legs kicking in air like an overturned beetle. He tore the flag from the standard bearer’s hands, spurred his mount and galloped onto the bridge shouting, “Forward to save your general!” His soldiers roared as one and rushed onto the bridge. Five minutes later, the Austrian army threw in the towel.

Can you see any of us there? Galloping onto the bridge? Don’t make me laugh.

Horace Vernet, The Battle of Jena, October 14, 1806 (detail), 1836 He suffered from spongy gums. The right side of his jaw was chronically swollen. He finally took his surgeon’s advice and accepted to undergo the first surgical procedure ever performed upon his person – the extraction of a canine from the upper right jaw. O’Meara had him placed directly on the ground – another first. “He was far from brave,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Gorregner, secretary of Sir Hugh Lowe, who was under the impression that the tooth was “barely rotten and could have been filled.” O’Meara was forced to have Napoleon held in place by three men. Betsy Balcombe, who was present, is said to have exclaimed: “What? You complain of pain caused by a minor operation? You who fought countless battles and passed through a hail of bullets, and was injured a dozen times? I am ashamed for you. But, whatever, give me the damn tooth!”

Haemorrhoids, by the way, cost him the Battle of Waterloo. He could not mount his horse. Two days before the battle, his doctors lost the leeches used to alleviate his pain and overdosed him with laudanum. He was reeling.

And contrary to the Jacques-Louis David version, he crossed the Alps in 1800 on the back of an ass.

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Le cimetière marin, Paul Valéry, 1927 1.

Valéry once said, while wandering among his neighbours’ graves, that the future, like everything else, was no longer quite what it used to be.

Do not aspire to immortal life, he thought, drawing on his pipe. Make what you can of the possible. Exhaust the realm of the possible.

Then, looking out at the boat sails kindling and flashing offshore in the midday sun, he stumbled on a stone and fell, and the lit pipe, a gift from an admirer, flew from his mouth, scattering burning ash. As he lay on the stony ground, dazed, in pain, his eyes took in the fullness of the sky, and he saw there written the incandescent lines of his epitaph.

*This tranquil rooftop, where the doves march, throbs among the pines, throbs among the tombs; Just gone noon, the flames compose The sea, the sea — always renewed! O recompense after a thought, A long look at the calm of the gods!* Valéry also once said, “One must always apologise for speaking about painting.” Horseshit. Why stop there? Shouldn’t we apologise every time we open our traps?

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Nicolas Poussin, L'Hiver ou Le Déluge, 16602.

The serpent is trying to escape.”

“There is no escape.”

The two men, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his pupil, Abbé de Saint-Pierre, are standing on the second floor of the Luxembourg Palace, which re-opened three days earlier as a museum. After the Revolution, it will become the principal residence of Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the French Republic. Today it is home to the French Senate. Giant canvases by Rubens once graced the walls in the western wing. Tony Blunt was the first to identify them.

“The snake is the most slippery and ambiguous of animals,” says Rousseau. “The Romans understood this, and so did their faithful son and heir Poussin. It is the tempter, the antichrist, the phallus, the creature of rebirth, shedding its old skin, regenerating a new one. And it is the creature of death, death’s harbinger, and the limbless soul of the departed, slithering up from the dark earth each night to steal food from the funerary urns. But here, in the great levelling flood, despite its twisting and coiling, it is powerless.”

“Your eyes are fixed on the snake,” says de Saint-Pierre. “And it’s true, it has braced itself against the gaining water and the rising tide, and the sight of it is as repulsive as it is hypnotising. Its slipperiness makes us shudder, its coiling undulations freeze us to the spot. We cannot take our eyes off it. We are paralysed with fear and fascination. But there seems to me to a more striking character: the child on the rock that the father is handing down to his wife. This child trying to steady itself on the cliff face with its tiny legs. ”

“The soul is seized by the sight: in the midst of the crimes of the earth, the overflowing waters, the distant thunder, the dark day punishing the crimes of the earth, the spectacle of innocence itself subject to these same crimes, and that of paternal love, more powerful than the love of life.”

“Oh yes, it is the child, there is no doubt, it is the child who is the main object,” says Rousseau.

In a later discussion, however, Rousseau will say, “It is the only painting that has ever moved me. The first time that I saw it I was so impressed I went back up the stairs to see it again; I could not take my eyes off this mother who thinks only of saving her child by lifting it up onto the cliff before they both perish.”

De Saint-Pierre disagrees again. “The father is the main subject of the action, the mother is preoccupied with her own survival. Everyone else is worried about surviving, but paternal love is more powerful than self-preservation.”

Rousseau then says, “I looked at it a whole hour and could not leave it even though it filled my soul with the most intense bitterness. I could feel the whole of nature suffering there. I had it for a long time in front of my eyes. Oh, I could not stay in a room with that painting: I should be overcome by a mortal sadness. If I owned it I would die of sadness just looking at it, at all that it is tied up in it, including this giant grass snake that the painter depicts escaping up the rock, demonstrating the general terror of all animals in this great catastrophe.”

De Saint-Pierre: “Yes, and we foolish mortals stand here, contemplating the horror, forgetting that Noah’s flood has never subsided, that three quarters of this miserable orb are still swallowed by it.”

The soul, seized by the sight. Only the religious understand the proper response. The naked breasts of Titian’s first Penitent Magdalena move them to pity, not desire. The others, where she is clothed, where the Bible is present, where the skull rests upon a prie-dieu, have no effect. They are pointless.

Darwin believed that if you stopped using a part of the body, or if something was removed from it, the chance of that part reappearing in subsequent generations is reduced. Many elements of our human form – those, for example, used by other species to move the ear to locate potential dangers – no longer serve any biological function. They can, however, be developed. The node on the helix of the outer ear – “Darwin's tubercle” – is thought to be vestigial, or perhaps just dormant. It is found in around 10% of the population – a much higher incidence than epilepsy. The orbitalis muscle, which other species use to push forward the eye, to better focus its attentions, is thought to be a vestigial eye muscle in humans. It too can be developed. Other human organs frequently described as vestigial: the tail bone, the belly button, the male nipple, the glans penis, the labia minora, the ovarian follicles and the clitoris.

Darwin called the “provisional hypothesis” for this mechanism “pangenesis”, which posits the inheritance of hereditary atomic particles called gemmules, transmitted from one generation to the next. If a chunk of the body is removed – the frontal lobe, for example, or a canine on the upper-right jaw, or the foreskin – the procreator cannot send its inheritance signal to the offspring, and so the excised bit disappears:

Godron remarks that different races of man have from time immemorial knocked out their incisors, cut off joints of their fingers, made holes of immense size through the lobes of their ears or through their nostrils, tattooed themselves, made deep gashes in various parts of their bodies, and there is no reason to suppose that these mutilations have ever been inherited.⁠1 Adhesions due to inflammation and pits from the small-pox (and formerly many consecutive generations must have been thus pitted) are not inherited. With respect to Jews, I have been assured by three medical men of the Jewish faith that circumcision, which has been practiced for so many ages, has produced no inherited effect. Blumenbach, however, asserts that Jews are often born in Germany in a condition rendering circumcision difficult, so that a name is given them signifying “born circumcised;” and Professor Preyer informs me that this is the case in Bonn, such children being considered the special favourites of Jehovah. I have also heard from Dr A. Newman, of Guy's Hospital, of the grandson of a circumcised Jew, the father not having been circumcised, in a similar condition. But it is possible that all these cases may be accidental coincidences, for Sir J. Paget has seen five sons of a lady and one son of her sister with adherent prepuces; and one of these boys was affected in a manner “which might be considered like that commonly produced by circumcision;” yet there was no suspicion of Jewish blood in the family of these two sisters. Circumcision is practiced by Muhammadans, but at a much later age than by Jews; and Dr Riedel, Assistant Resident in North Celebes, writes to me that the boys there go naked until from six to ten years old; and he has observed that many of them, though not all, have their prepuces much reduced in length, and this he attributes to the inherited effects of the operation. In the vegetable kingdom oaks and other trees have borne galls from primeval times, yet they do not produce inherited excrescences; and many other such facts could be adduced. Notwithstanding the above several negative cases, we now possess conclusive evidence that the effects of operations are sometimes inherited.”⁠

– Charles Darwin, The variation of animals and plants under domestication, 1875.

Further, the genitalia of male and female foetuses have the ability to fully or partially form the observable characteristics of the opposite biological sex if, during foetal development, they are exposed to too many or too few androgens or to too much or too little of the sex-determining region Y protein.

For souls it is death to become water, and for water death to become earth. Water comes into existence out of earth, and soul out of water. – Heraclitus, Fragment 504, 1 BCE.5.

The Titans believed that Deucalion built an ark on the advice of his father Prometheus, who Zeus, angered by the hubris of Lycaon and his sons, had warned of the coming flood. Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha floated for nine days and nights, and then landed on the summit of Mount Parnassus. The rains ceased. Deucalion made sacrifices to Zeus, who told him to throw stones behind him, which became men. The stones Pyrrha threw became women.

The Greek Laos (λᾱός, 'people') comes from laas ('stone').

The myth of Tiresias involves two snakes, which he saw coupling, and wounded with a stick. As punishment, Hera, the jealous sister and wife of Zeus, turned him into a woman. Seven years later, having married and given birth to several children, he returned to the scene of his transformation, and seeing the same two snakes again copulating as before, was changed back into a man.

Johann Ulrich Kraus, c. 1690.6.

“The snake, we could say (bearing in mind Poussin’s politics, and their rootedness in a certain view of an ordre déterminé in nature), is an egalitarian body, a body without established hierarchy one its constituents; a body in which the senses hardly seem to be locate or concentrated in specific organs – with other parts clearly subordinate in terms of sense, only dimly or rudimentary sensate, having as their function more lowly tasks of say, digestion or circulation, or more basic ones of maintaining organic integrity or equilibrium. In the snake everything is sensate and animate, apparently, and this is the clue to its love of involution – its touching and coiling and circling back on itself – as if it needed, as part of its life, to enjoy its own fluidity.” – T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death, 2006

Nicolas Poussin, Un serpent, 16307.

Rousseau was bludgeoned to death – three quick blows to the head with a blunt instrument. Few people know this, have heard this, fewer still believe it. They buried him in a tomb modelled on the one in The Arcadian Shepherds (Et in Arcadia ego) in the Louvre, on an island linked to the riverbank by a footbridge and surrounded by a hundred trembling aspens.

On the overcast morning of his death he set off for his walk earlier than usual. It was not yet six, the sun was just up. Amable, the ten-year-old nephew of the marquis who usually accompanied him on these strolls – he called the boy his petit gouverneur – was asleep, as was everyone else in the Girardin household. What did he see in the forest? What were his thoughts? There was a breeze. The air was cool. Birds were singing. He returned at eight, whistling, his pockets filled with leaves and catkins.

“The gardens are glorious,” he said to the marquis, who was next to the cottage, consulting with one of the English gardeners. “I have composed a new song in its honour. Tonight, dear René, you shall play it on the spinet, and I shall sing its verses to the family.”

The cottage was on the Ile des Peupliers, in the back-end of the gardens, the wildest part of the estate. It had white walls and a thatched roof and is modelled on Julie’s “Élysée” in La Nouvelle Héloïse.

“He was demonstrably happy,” the marquis later told the prévôt. “His cheeks were flushed and there was a spring to his step. I had never seen him so finely animated. Straight away, we sat down to a hearty breakfast in the cottage – hearty by his birdlike standards. We discussed music; he had recently begun revising his theory of melody.”

Rousseau thought that the most beautiful chords, like the most beautiful colours, can convey to the senses a pleasant sensation and nothing more. But the accents of the voice pass all the way to the soul; for they are the natural expression of the passions, and by depicting them they arouse them.

It is by means of them that music becomes oratorical, eloquent, imitative, they form its language; it is by means of them that it depicts objects to the imagination, that it conveys feelings to the heart. Melody is in music what design is in Painting, harmony produces merely the effect of colours. It is by means of the song, not by means of the chords, that sounds have expression, fire, life; it is the song alone that gives them the moral effects that produce all of Music's energy. In a word, the physical part alone of the art is reduced to very little and harmony does not pass beyond that.

One might as well do so if one wanted to compare the charms of ravishing music – which brings to the heart the turmoil of all passions and the voluptuousness of all feelings – with the crude and purely physical sensation of the palate when eating food. What a difference the movements of the soul make between trained and untrained men! A Pergolesi, a Voltaire, a Titian, will, so to speak, dispose of the hearts of an enlightened people as they please; but the peasant who is insensitive to the masterpieces of these great men finds nothing so beautiful as the popular literature of the Bibliothèque bleue, the beer signs and the jangling rhythms of his village.

Rousseau’s companion, Thérèse Levasseur, a former seamstress in his father’s employ, was also at the breakfast table. They had been together for 30 years. She bore him five children, all sent as new-borns to the Hospital des Enfants-Trouvés in Paris. She was fifty-four. He was sixty-six. She had been unfaithful to him several times, once during a carriage ride in the south of England with James Boswell.

That day, she stared blankly into her coffee cup and did not speak. She had been ill; her failing health was the reason for their departure from Paris. This was their forty-second day at the chateau. She hated the foul blowing winds and the sounds of the birds. The marquis later reported that the couple’s relations had become strained.

“I excused myself as soon as it was politic to do so,” the marquis later told his wife.

Once alone, the philosopher turned to his spouse.

“Thérèse,” he said, “take this money and pay the locksmith. I have not yet settled accounts with him. Don’t ask for a lower price. He is an honest man.”

Thérèse got up and left.

An hour later, the marquis, with his Scottish architect, heard cries coming from the cottage. The two men hastened to the door and either kicked it in or opened it with a passkey. There, inside, the philosopher, the father of romanticism, the teacher whose treatise on natural education radically changed ideas of child-rearing, the key figure in the development of modern democratic thought, the theorist who formed the intellectual basis for all modern authoritarianism, was lying face down on the stone floor. Thérèse, the ailing seamstress who had coupled with the valet the night before (they will be married within the year) and with James Boswell 13 times in one night 10 years earlier, was kneeling next to him, covered in his blood.

The marquis turned over the body. There was a large wound on its forehead.

10.

It is an island in the middle of the ocean of what Freud called the “dark continent”. It is the only organ exclusively for pleasure. It serves no reproductive purpose. It is autonomous, self-sufficient.

Its etymology is unclear. “Small pebble,” say some. “To sheathe,” or “to shut” say others. “A key, a latch or a hook (to close a door).”

Its internal and external anatomy was not fully discovered until 2005. It did not appear in French textbooks until 2019. More than 200 million girls and women alive in 2021 had theirs cut from their bodies. Intersex new-borns are similarly mutilated.

It was not discovered until last year that females snakes are so endowed. Before, they were mistaken for scent glands. In some they are of considerable size, taking up most of the anterior tail region. In the death adder, it is shaped like two teardrops, and forms a love heart structure.

According to Hesiod… when Hera and Zeus disputed whether the pleasures of love are felt more by women or by men, they referred to Tiresias for a decision. He said that if the pleasures of love be reckoned at ten, men enjoy one and women nine. Wherefore Hera blinded him, but Zeus bestowed on him the art of soothsaying.

“The saying of Tiresias to Zeus and Hera.Of ten parts a man enjoys one only;But a woman enjoys the full ten parts in her heart.”He also lived to a great age.

– Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, 1-2 AD, translated by Frazer, with the following footnote:

According to Eustathius and Tzetzes, it was by killing the female snake that Tiresias became a woman, and it was by afterwards killing the male snake that he was changed back into a man. According to Ovid, the seer remained a woman for seven years, and recovered his male sex in the eighth.

11.

Earlier, during his walk in the forest, Rousseau’s thoughts had turned to the charity concert he had attended with David Hume at the Foundling Hospital in London in 1865. The oratorio, by Handel, a Governor of the Hospital, who had died six years earlier half-blind after a carriage accident and a botched cataract operation, was sung by the blind children only. The philosopher had been unable to focus his attentions on the music.

The art held little interest for him, either, except, perhaps, the gin drinkers and the young, cowering Moses by Hogarth, and the terracotta bust of Handel by the Huguenot Roubillac.

Handel was buried with state honours in Westminster Abbey. Almost four thousand people attended his funeral. The image Rousseau conjured of this event frightened and aroused him. The trees were swaying gently in the breeze. The screeching of the birds was deafening.

“He is plainly mad,” Hume said two weeks after the concert, “after having long been maddish.”

"When you want to study men, you have to look closely at yourself; but to study man, you first have to observe the differences in order to discover the essential properties" – J.J. Rousseau, Essay on the origin of languages, in which melody and musical imitation are discussed, 175512.

He had refused every request to sit for Houdon. The last had arrived in May; the sculptor had just finished his bust of Benjamin Franklin and had almost completed his first Voltaire – one of the philosopher’s many nemeses – who, conveniently for the entrepreneurial artist, had died just days before. Voltaire had sat for Houdon in February, upon his return to Paris after two decades of exile in Switzerland. Crowds were already assembling at the sculptor’s studio to view the work. To capitalize on the demand, Houdon reproduced the bust with different hairstyles and dresses and in a full range of materials – terracotta, plaster, marble and bronze.

Marie-Gabrielle Capet, Houdon with Voltaire’s bronze bust, 1818“A natural death,” the death certificate and provost’s report will pronounce, caused by a “serious apoplexy.” Thérèse, the marquis, the marquise, two friends of the Girardin family and the subsequent autopsy report will concur. The wound on his forehead will be said to have occurred when he fell face forward from his chair onto the stone floor.

Rumours will circulate – people will say that the wound was self-inflicted, that he shot himself in the forehead with a pistol. This will come from Holbach first, then from the pen of the Baroness de Staël: “He may be permitted to have committed suicide without remorse, because he was too alone in the vastness of the universe.... One day, in the dark woods, he said: ‘I am isolated on earth, I suffer, I'm unhappy without my life to serve it: I can die.’”

Others will dispute this “fiction worthy of her talent, but not of her judgement.” Others still will talk of murder.

Houdon is sent for. A death mask will be made, from which a plaster bust, painted to look like terra cotta, will be hastily assembled. Bronzes and marbles will follow. Houdon will sell most of these paired with matching busts of Voltaire – togas and hair bands, Rousseau's dead gaze lifted toward the spiritual beyond, Voltaire's focussed on the ground.

Two days later, Rousseau will be buried in an oak coffin encased and triple-lined with lead, at midnight, by torchlight. The Girardin estate will become a jardin du souvenir. The tomb, designed by the painter and architect Hubert Robert and sculpted by Le Sueur, will become the most famous grave in the world. Marie Antoinette will press her bare breast against the cold stone. Thomas Jefferson will make a special pèlerinage to it, as will Robespierre and Napoleon.

Girardin and his wife will be put under house arrest. Their children will be imprisoned. The chateau and gardens will be pillaged. Rousseau’s mortal remains will be unearthed and transferred to Paris. Musicians from the new “Ecoles des Jeunes Français” will lead the procession. Crowds will line the road, entire villages will stand in the ditches to watch the passing cortege. “Long live the Republic!” they will cry, waving their fists in the air. “Long live the memory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau!” A giant crowd carrying flaming torches will fill the Tuileries. The coffin will be placed on a bier semi-circled with willows. The next morning, the huge entourage of mourners and celebrants will proceed to the Pantheon, led by United States Navy Captain Joshua Barney, who will proudly wave the American flag, behind which the rest will follow.

James Monroe, the future fifth President of the United States (and one of three to die on Independence Day), will be the only foreigner allowed to witness the ceremony inside the Pantheon.

The Bourbons will return to power. The Pantheon will once again become a Catholic abbey dedicated to St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. What is left of her reliquary châsse, a forearm and a few fingers and toes – the rest torched the year before at the place de Grève – will be re-installed in the crypt. Vengeful priests will desecrate the tombs of Rousseau and Voltaire. Their corpses will be thrown into a potter's field. They will be retrieved, and returned to the crypt. On December 18, 1897, a commission will examine the remains. The report will state that the two tombs were opened in the presence of this commission, and here is what was reported concerning Rousseau: “The skeleton of Jean Jacques Rousseau is in a perfect state of preservation, the arms crossed on the breast, and the head slightly inclined towards the left like a man sleeping. The skull is intact; there is no indication of it being perforated or fractured.”

A professor of anthropology at the Paris Museum of Natural History will publish a letter in Le Soir expressing doubts as to the authenticity of the skeleton found in Rousseau's tomb. “What happened to the wound on the forehead,” he will ask. Sixteen years later, the Houdon death mask will be re-examined by its then owner (it is now part of the permanent collection of the Rousseau Museum in Geneva, the birthplace of the philosopher), Dr Julien Raspail.

What follows is an excerpt from his paper, published in La Chronique médicale in 1912:

“The wound (on the forehead) comes out very clearly on this mask... (but) the face shows two other wounds, which those who have examined the mask have passed over unperceived. One of these is near the right eye... the marked deformations of the external parts of this eye arc fully explained by the neighbouring contusion... The third wound is on the nose. The upper portion of this wound is of a horseshoe shape and descends along the left side of the nose, where the fractured bone is laid bare... The traumatic origin of this disfigurement cannot be doubted. In Latour's pastel, the nose is well drawn and comes out clearly. No deformity of any kind is visible. We know that Rousseau had a well-formed nose. For instance, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, in his detailed description of Rousseau's physiognomy, refers to his “well-made nose.” But in this death-mask, one is struck by the deformity just mentioned. When one considers these three wounds, the first peculiarity which occurs to the mind is their parallel direction; the second is their respective situation. If, as was stated by Thérèse Levasseur and M. de Girardin, the wound on the forehead was made by falling forward from his chair, the salient parts of Rousseau's face would alone have shown the effects of this fall. But nothing of the kind is found on Rousseau's very high eyebrows nor on the point of the nose... It is the receding parts of the face which were hurt – the retreating forehead, the side of the nose, and the still more protected parts, the base of the nose and the under part of the right eye. Again, two of these wounds are on the right side of the face, while the third is on the left side. Now, it is stated that when Rousseau fell from his chair, he fell dead, and so could not have made the movements necessary to produce these wounds. The similarity in the shape of the wounds is also remarkable... it is evident that the blows were produced by the same blunt instrument, (but) it is not so easy to say what this instrument was. It might have been the small end of a hammer flattened by long use. What was the gravity of these wounds? That of the right eye was not serious. That on the nose was deeper but it did not produce dangerous results, nothing beyond an abundant haemorrhage. The only one of the three wounds which counts was that of the forehead. Did it effect only the soft tissues or did it effect the structure of the cranium?... It is plain that this blow crushed in the skull at this point and caused Rousseau's death. In other words, Jean Jacques Rousseau was assassinated. Thérèse Levasseur, was, as we have already seen, the only person who saw Rousseau die, and she has given four different versions of the event. But it is impossible that a woman of her mental calibre could have constructed the long accounts which she is said to have furnished of what Rousseau said and all the incidents preceding his death. Her memory could not have held them and her mind could not have coordinated them. All those persons who were intimate with Rousseau and his household agree in pronouncing Thérèse to have been dull to a degree. Rousseau himself in his Confessions paints her in these same colours. The statements given out at the castle must have emanated from M. de Girardin. Now, it is well known that his word could not be depended upon and it has often been shown that many things which he said about Rousseau were inexact. In this respect, Thérèse Levasseur was still more unreliable. She was a woman without morals and was never sincerely attached to Rousseau. His friends paint her in the very worst light. She was not faithful to him and he complained of this more than once and even threatened, on this account, to put an end to their relation. Just before his death, her conduct with a valet in the service of M. de Girardin was especially open to criticism and caused Rousseau the profoundest sorrow. Statements coming from such a source are worthless. The assertion that Rousseau poisoned himself is no longer made. That he shot himself with a pistol cannot be accepted after an examination of Houdon's death-mask. It reveals none of the well-known signs of a pistol shot, none whatsoever. Nor is there any solid proof that he died a natural death. In the description by those who were near him of the cause of his death, of his state of health at that moment, are none of the symptoms of serous apoplexy, called to-day an acute attack of uraemia. And the clumsy statements of the autopsy also render this explanation improbable. Assassination is the only way out of the difficulty. But who would and could have killed Rousseau? Why, Thérèse Levasseur, of course.

The trembling poplar, known as the Waverly in Britain, is the tree of violas, and the wood on which Poussin’s Deluge is painted. It is used for camembert cheese boxes. It has a short lifespan.

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Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego, 1638-401Nevertheless Mr. Wetherell states, 'Nature,' Dec. 1870, p. 168, that when he visited 15 years ago the Sioux Indians, he was informed “by a physician, who has passed much of his time with these tribes, that sometimes a child was born with these marks. This was confirmed by the U.S. Government Indian Agent.”

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When I was but a snot-nosed brat – my sister, who is visiting us in Paris, just yesterday reminded me that I often wore tartan shorts with suspenders over a buttoned white shirt, a clip-on bowtie and tiny, shiny black oxfords with tassels – a snowflake’s “uniqueness” was considered something to be celebrated, not criticised. Yet if you believe in the existence of infinitely many different sizes of infinite sets, therefore unimaginably many infinities, so many that they can’t be assigned a number, not even an infinite number, and that there is no set of all sets, and that the Absolute can only be acknowledged and admitted, never known, not even approximately – you therefore “know” then that both of these positions are well off the mark. They tip away in the wrong directions, like defense missiles following air-launched decoys. This makes me think of Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, who died yesterday. “I moved forward,” is how he started that book, which moves backwards, in defiance of entropy’s increase in a closed system, the arrow of time’s irreversible direction, and the destructive force of disorder and randomness. And now he moves no more. Moreover, most snowflakes are dendrites – six-sided branched structures known as hexagonal plates, as opposed to this, which is a hexagonal post. Other snowflakes are shaped like needles or columns; if conditions are right, these fall from the clouds and land on the ground intact. Some individuals insist that these are snow “crystals”, not snow “flakes”. This, too, imho, is ridiculous. A flake is a flake, whether on the ground, in the air, in a parallel dimension, or on Substack. I would gladly substantiate this further. But I am not going to look anything up. I’ll explain why later but first, if you’re interested, and have a few more minutes to spare, I’d like you to participate in the following experiment. Not actually participate, the experiment will not require you to take part or “engage” in anything, just observe, and not in some double-path double-slit sense in which your observing will somehow magically alter the thing being observed, which, in this case, as I will explain, is me. Mainly me. The state of me. You’re not a thermometer, I’m not a pot of boiling water. You’re not a tire pressure gauge, I’m not a bicycle tire leaking air when you clamp onto my valve. At least I don’t think that is what I have in mind with this experiment, though I could be wrong: I haven’t given such matters much focussed thought since a first-year “interdisciplinary” course called “The Age of Uncertainty” in which we read snippets of Werner Heisenberg – and Robert Smithson, of all people, the earthworks sculptor who made that giant spiral out of rock and dirt in a salt lake in Utah – along with books by Adam Smith, Aeschylus, Beckett, Montaigne, Hobbes, Malthus, Freud, Machiavelli, Conrad, Nietzsche, Marx and Rousseau. Not necessarily in that order. This was in 1979. Every work on the list was by a man cut from the cloth of the Western canon (as was Kingsley’s son, who once described himself as “the only hereditary novelist in the canon”, or something like that) and nobody, as far as I can remember, questioned this. Perhaps we read Things Fall Apart? A Jane Austen novel? Maybe some Margaret Atwood poetry. I don’t remember. At any rate, I’m pretty sure that Heisenberg’s position-momentum uncertainty principle and his observer effect – the disturbance of an observed system by the “very” act of observation – have nothing to tell us about our perceptions or the limits of our knowledge. So if you’re ready we will begin. Keep in mind as you read that the Universe is boundless. Now picture me with a GoPro camera strapped to my forehead, lying in a very comfortable bed, in need of a cup of very strong coffee. I’m trying not to use the word very but sometimes I must. I’m in Normandy for the Ascension of Jesus (or the Assumption of Mary?) weekend, staying in a friend’s house a pleasant, seven-kilometre bicycle ride from the town of Pont-l’Evèque, the home of the cheese and the setting of my favourite story by Flaubert. It is morning, we arrived yesterday after a two-and-a-half-hour train ride in which, following a ticketing mishap, we were forced to sit in extremely uncomfortable strapontins next to very smelly toilets. Very smelly. This was followed by a lunch next to a very well circulated traffic circle in the very centre of Pont-l’Evèque – beer, andouillette (similar smell), frites and green salad for me, the andouillette unnecessarily slathered with melted Pont-l’Evèque cheese; beer, tripes de pays d’Auge (ditto) and frites for C., followed by a tarte fine aux pommes with vanilla ice cream and caramel (me) and teurgoule, a slow-baked rice pudding (C.). All very serviceable. I paid at the bar with a debit card but did not leave a tip, as the establishment was run by a husband-and-wife team; and, besides, neither I nor C. had any change in our pockets. I never seem to have coins in my pockets, much to the chagrin of Fred and Muhammed, two men who some of you might have met here. Shopping next, wine, bread, pâté en croute, and then the pleasant ride through the bocage landscape along a quiet holloway, a chemin creux either formed by erosion or dug with ancient shovels and picks to hem in ancient cattle. No one knows for sure. I’ll find a photograph.

Negronis in the garden. Dinner next to the fire.

Now, as mentioned, it is morning. The bedroom is on the second floor. The window volets are closed but I can see that the sun is out. The birds are singing. High tide is at noon and roughly ten kilometres away: I intended to run there in just over an hour, swim in the surf with the household, get a lift back, have a shower, then return to this bed and to this. And this is indeed what I have done. The water was cold. The waves were high. My laptop is out of power and the plug is in my backpack downstairs. Retrieving it would put an end to this writing. I would have to interact with the voices I can hear, drink coffee, which I crave, eat the pain brioché I bought yesterday and crave even more – buttered, with good Normand butter, maybe some local preserves, May’s apricots having just arrived at market – and the pull of the garden, where the lilacs are about to pop in the back near the stone wall, and where L. has set up her easel, on the edge of the walkway, would be too strong to resist. So I’m jotting these phrases down with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad. My hand balks at this task. I haven’t written anything longhand, other than cheques, very few, and a couple that bounced, and a handful of journal entries – moleskin notebook started, two pages later abandoned – since that first year of Uncertainty at university. Is it a proprioception issue? Or am I just out of practice? I can slice radishes on a razor-sharp mandoline without losing fingertips – though I did do precisely this a decade ago, a slip with a carrot, the tips of three. Not lost, displaced: a chatty surgeon at the hospital next to Gare du Nord glued them back on. I was in and out of the emergency ward in under 45 minutes. According to the surgeon, who was from Algeria, crazy-glue (I’m not sure what the actual name is) was invented by or for the US military and first used in field hospitals during the Vietnam War. And I’m thinking about Maya Angelou and her yellow legal pads, and Obama and his, and who else, Elmore Leonard if I recall correctly, and Truman Capote, and maybe Philip Roth, and definitely Susan Sontag, who used felt pens and pencils, which for some reason steers me towards Robert Walker and his pencil method – shrunken medieval German script that he used to write very short, very beautiful texts on scraps and strips of found paper: postcards, business cards, envelopes, book jackets, whatever he could find in the asylum, and which went unnoticed – the warden and the handlers of his “estate” dismissed them as indecipherable gibberish, but thankfully didn’t throw them away – for almost half a century. I’m thinking that I will flesh these ideas out when I return to writing on my laptop this afternoon, add some photographs, do some research on poor Robert Walser, who I haven’t read or thought about for years, but not in any way “alter” or “disturb” the writing, this is part of the experiment, and I'm also thinking, or re-thinking – perhaps “wondering” might be more accurate – about when was the last time that I filled a piece of paper with handwriting? The texts I wrote in university were all handwritten. Early days in Paris? I suppose, moleskin notebooks like Van Gogh’s, like Bruce Chatwin’s, like Picasso’s, which fires me off to the Johnny Depp screening last week in Cannes, with Maiwenn (sp?), the actress and director, who inexplicably got up from her table after lunch a few weeks ago in Paris, walked to the table of an editor at Mediapart, and, for reasons that are not yet known, but probably related to accusations of rape levelled at her first husband Luc Besson (they married when she was 16 and he at least double that), grabbed him roughly by the hair, pulled his head back and spat in his face. This reminds me of the story of the San Francisco writer Harry Larkyns, whose affair with the photographer Eadward Muybridge’s wife cost him his life – Muybridge hunted him down and shot him three times – but before that, a year before, Larkyns – Muybridge’s daughter’s real father – was stripped of his post as drama critic of the San Francisco Post or Chronicle because of the lies spread by a man named Coppinger – a man Larkyns had, I recall, “pulled from the gutter”. From then on, every time Larkyns met Coppinger on the street, he would grab Coppinger’s nose with one hand and his lower jaw with the other, pry open his mouth, and spit down his throat. Cuspidor Coppinger, they called him. After Larkyns’ death Coppinger was one of the first to make his way to the undertakers, where he gazed long and maliciously at the dead man’s ashen features.

Where is Roman Polanski? Is Gerard Depardieu in Belgium, France or Russia What was Flaubert’s writing practice?

“Practice”.

Why do quotation marks convey such contempt?

Hexagon est une publication soutenue par mes lecteurs. Pour recevoir de nouveaux articles et soutenir mon travail, pensez à me donner un “pourboire”. Ou un pot-de-vin. Une somme modique. Un geste de reconnaissance. Un symbole de votre reconnaissance. Quelques pièces, quoi.

Muybridge was acquitted by a jury of his peers. He later invented the washing machine, which, many have stated, women for the most part, is the single most important technological advancement of the modern era. What I remember of Un cœur simple is this: a servant girl, cruelly abandoned by her social-climbing boyfriend, leaves the family farm and takes a job in Pont-l’Evèque as a servant. She devotes her entire life to the family, a widow and two children who take advantage of her, but mainly just ignore her. She does not care: she has “a simple heart”; she is content to live without being loved in return, except by the Lord who rose two days ago and is seated at the right hand of God. I’ll find a picture. And at the end of her “pointless” life, alone on her deathbed, accompanied only by a pet parrot – this is where the Julian Barnes book comes from, Flaubert’s Parrot, written well before Time’s Arrow, back when Barnes and Amis were still on friendly terms – she sees the bird, which I think might have been dead and stuffed by then, floating above her eyes just before they emptied of life, and she takes it to be the Holy Spirit itself. Himself. Himself? Anyway, as you can probably tell by now, this is an unedited piece of writing, and an experiment in alternative form – longhand, unassisted by Google, and filmed by GoPro, to prove that it is thus. I’m proposing this as a live performance – a spectator sport worthy of being included in next year’s Olympic Games in Paris – and as a way to “save” writing from artificial intelligence which, for the time being at least, I am refusing to dignify with either capitals or an abbreviation. In fact, let’s envelope it thus: “artificial intelligence”. There. So low is my present estimation.

It’s starting. C. brought me a coffee and a slice of toasted brioche with some sort of berry jam on it. No butter. She couldn’t find the butter.

The other night, upon asking for the bill after a nice-enough dinner in a pop-up restaurant in Paris, our waiter approached, told us the sum we owed and, as we produced our debit cards, asked if we would like to leave a gratuity. This had never happened before. Astonished, we froze. Then one of our party, a chef, muttered something about leaving some cash. Which we did. Ten euros. The dinner, with wine, cost somewhere around 200. Which means we left a 5% tip.

A few days later, at the cocktail bar across the street from where I live, I presented my debit card to the barman. He punched the total into his handheld machine. I lowered my card onto it. Nothing happened. “Permettez-moi,” he said, punching a button. The screen changed. I did not have my glasses on, but I knew what I was not seeing on the screen was something I see ubiquitously in North America: tipping options. This, again, had never happened before in all my 30+ years in France. Without knowing what amount I selected, I pushed the third button on the right. The bill was 12 euros. The button pushed, it turned out, was 5 euros. That is a 41.6666666667% tip. I used the calculator on my phone to determine this.

When I first moved to this country, 30-plus-size years ago, tips were rounding ups. Or roundings up. If a bill was 270 francs, you left 300. If it was 290 francs, you left 300 francs, and maybe a few loose coins, whatever was in your pockets, within reason, minus the litter. If you paid by cheque, which was very common back then, you left a few coins. This was because a 15% service charge was and is already included. And because the person serving you was and is paid a salary that, while not perhaps a “living” wage, definitely not a dead one, either – 1,500€ to 8,000€ a month and backed by the usual bouquet of benefits that the French system then, as, more-or-less, now, provided workers: sick leave, maternity and paternity coverage, old-age pension, life and death insurance, disability protection, and unemployment benefits. Not healthcare, as everyone – absolutely, universally everyone – here gets healthcare. No one, from the extreme left to the extreme right, talks about taking a slash at healthcare. Yet.

Back then, we tipped waiters but only nominally. A few coins at the bar, because there was no service charge at the bar. Less in the salle. Unless we were in a large group, and the staff had been remarkable. This is still the case.

A tip was a token of appreciation – enough to buy drink, hence the name, pourboire.

Taxi drivers were not tipped, but you rounded up with them too. Within reason. Ushers in theatres, cinemas and concert halls were tipped, not lavishly, but without fail, at least in private theatres, cinemas and concert halls, as they were often unpaid workers whose only income came from tips. I once taught English to a roomful of placeuses at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Many of whom had worked there, unpaid, except for the benefit bouquet, for decades. They did well. Very well. They weren’t supposed to put out their hand or say anything, but they did. I taught them phrases: “Would you like to leave a small token of your appreciation?”; “You are too generous”; “Yes of course I can change that for you”; “No, I do not receive a salary”; “Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Nowadays, in North America, customers are guilted into coughing up a bit of baksheesh when they buy a takeout coffee or a pack of chewing gum. Or after using a self check-out in a supermarket, scanning each product, filling the bag themselves, not interacting with a single human being. This is worrisome. This is taking advantage. This is a way to shift the burden of paying employees onto consumers rather than raising wages. This is not baksheesh, this is blackmail. Emotional blackmail.

This is probably not a good time to ask readers for paid subscriptions.

In France, restaurant owners often don’t distribute the 15% to their service staff. So the next time you order a beer, remember the axiom of choice, and that you will pay for it three times: at the bar, on your tax form, and in the public debt. Perhaps, more logically, the customer should get a tip.

Tennessee Williams wrote on a typewriter. So does Don Delillo. Martin Amis used a computer.

My chef friend just chimed in on WhatsApp. He doesn’t tip beyond a very minuscule rounding up. If he pays with a card, nada. If he pays with a card in New York, 20%, because the wait staff there gets paid as little as $2.13. I have another friend, a Brit, who leaves at least 10% everywhere he goes in France. I hold him, and the guilt-ridden, emotionally blackmailed American tourist, responsible for messing everything up pourboire-wise.

Another friend, a long-time Paris restaurateur, tips “around 3 euros for a meal, sometimes 2 euros at the coffee place, but only once a week. Otherwise 10/20/30 cents for a coffee at the bar. It seems to please. Because the French don’t tip.”

Anyone else? I would love to figure this out. I don’t want to be a chiseller, but neither do I want to be a chump. I want to do the right thing, and leave the right amount, and be observed doing so, and so “alter” everything.

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Finally, the extreme right. Neo-Nazis. Scary, torch-lit marches in Paris. Concerts in churches cancelled. “Back, Satan!” hissed at the organ recital of a nice young woman from Colorado. Plays picketed. Storytime in public libraries in Toulouse, Paris and Rennes by men dressed as women aggressively protested. But maybe this is a subject for next week. There is a cow in the garden. And a woodpecker. And drunken, drowsy bees, dizzied by nectar. And I have fish to fry.

I’ll type this up later. I forgot to turn on the GoPro. The lilacs have not yet popped. Thanks for reading. And for supporting. A last line, the final phrase of Time’s Arrow: “I within, who came at the wrong time – either too soon, or after it was all too late.”

“Qui que vous soyez, j'ai toujours compté sur la gentillesse des étrangers." – Tennessee Williams.

He ascended into heaven: believe. He sits at the right hand of the Father: believe. By sitting, understand dwelling: as [in Latin] we say of any person, In that country he dwelt (sedit) three years. The Scripture also has that expression, that such a one dwelt (sedisse) in a city for such a time. Not meaning that he sat and never rose up? On this account the dwellings of men are called seats (sedes). Where people are seated (in this sense), are they always sitting? Is there no rising, no walking, no lying down? And yet they are called seats (sedes). In this way, then, believe an inhabiting of Christ on the right hand of God the Father: He is there. And let not your heart say to you, What is He doing? Do not want to seek what is not permitted to find: He is there; it suffices you. He is blessed, and from blessedness which is called the right hand of the Father, of very blessedness the name is, right hand of the Father. For if we shall take it carnally, then because He sits on the right hand of the Father, the Father will be on His left hand. Is it consistent with piety so to put Them together, the Son on the right, the Father on the left? There it is all right-hand, because no misery is there.

– Saint Augustine’s “A Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed”

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Hi everyone. The following – and the GIF above – might spoil Tár for those who haven’t seen it yet, but barely. If it offends for other reasons, please know that this was not intended. And, word to the wise: it is best to read these things online or on the Substack app, as they tend to… evolve.

The main concert hall of the Philharmonie de Paris, the Grande Salle Pierre Boulez, pictured above, is not a room so much as a scattering of cloud-like balconies, suspended or cantilevered in such ways that no seat in the 2,400-seat house is more than half a hockey rink away from the conductor.

The acoustics throughout the space are pin-drop sharp. Even where we were last Tuesday – in the cheapest seats, just behind the concert stage.

That’s the three of us at the end of the concert – me applauding between T. (in green) and C. (in pink), so close to the percussionists below that were T. to have held me by my feet, I could have hung upside down and banged the gong with both fists.

Hockey, fists. Obviously, I do not belong in a symphony hall. But, then, did the poet Paul Verlaine? In Epigrammes, he writes of having once “thrown a punch for Wagner” at a concert in Paris. An 1861 performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in the Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opéra, conducted by the composer himself, was interrupted during the “orgiastic” ballet in Scene 1 by spectators “who behaved like men possessed… hissing, laughing [and] brawling.” At another Wagnerian donnybrook, this time at the Cirque d’Hiver, Gagnière, a character based on Cézanne in Zola’s 1886 novel L’œuvre, emerges from the raucous concert hall with a black eye. And 40 people were arrested at the premier of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at the Theatre du Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1913. According to its conductor, Pierre Monteux, “everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on.” The New York Post’s drama critic Carl Van Vechten wrote that the person behind him got so carried away he “began to beat rhythmically on top of my head.” I experienced something similar Tuesday night: if the man behind me had tapped his foot just once more into the back of my seat during the performance, I swear I would have turned around, grabbed him by the collar, pulled his jersey over his head, and started pummelling.

I obviously need professional help. Which will be expensive. Please subscribe now.

I, of course, did nothing. Didn’t even turn around and say something to the fidgety miscreant. Something clever, suitably high-brow, suitably civilised. Lay into him, for example, with these lines from Henri Michaux:

*Le Malheur asseois-toi,Repose-toiReposons-nous un peu toi et moi,ReposeTu me trouves, tu m'éprouves, tu me le prouves.Je suis ta ruine.* Misfortune sit down,Take a restLet us rest a little you and me,RestYou find me, you test me, you test it on me.I am your ruin.– Henri Michaux, "Repos dans le malheur" (1930) Instead, I just sat there and fumed.

Mahler, Malheur.

You see? Please.

Perhaps there is just something inherently brutish in the orchestral beast itself. Fashioned in human flesh, forged in metal, crafted from wood, hair and skin, articulated through mouths, hands, fingers, feet, wires, pipes, tubes, hammers, drums, bars and valves: of all our machine-age monsters, the symphony ensemble is by far the most awesome. Especially a late/post Romantic era version like that required to pump out a Mahler No. 5. And especially in light of the Fifth’s newest and most uncanny incarnation yet, at the haunting core of Todd Field’s film Tár, starringCate Blanchett as the world’s greatest conductor of Mahler.

The score of Tár, however, only doles out tantalising fragments of the symphony, mainly the darker bits, eschewing most of the lusher parts. We get a few seconds of the fourth movement, the adagietto, that Luchino Visconti used so powerfully for the non-diegetic soundtrack of Death in Venice (1971). A few more of the brass chorale, and just over half a minute of the ebullient final.

We wanted more. So when the Philharmonie tickets became available, we jumped. And then, to prepare, we read: about how Mahler, having almost bled to death from a massive haemorrhage, composed the symphony while convalescing at his new summer villa; how it was a love poem to his new wife Alma Mahler, née Schindler, who was pregnant with their first child; how Gustav never took Alma’s music seriously, which, postpartum, contributed to her depression; how that first child died of scarlet fever the year the symphony unsuccessfully premiered; how Gustav called No. 5 a “cursed work” that “nobody gets”; how he then spiralled into depression; how the marriage foundered and Alma left him for Walter Gropius; how Gustav patched things up with Alma, published and publicised five of her compositions, and, having finally achieved a state of shared contentment, mutual respect and bliss, suddenly died.

Then we listened. First, to Leonard Bernstein – who rediscovered and lionised Mahler in the mid 20th century – conducting the adagietto with the New York Philharmonic at Robert Kennedy's funeral:

And talking about it at Harvard:

And rehearsing the full symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic in German, Yiddish and Italian, with musicians that barely knew it:

And then playing it with them, to perfection, live:

The Orchestre National d'Île-de-France is not Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic or Vienna Philharmonic. Nor is Lydia Tár’s Berliner Philharmoniker. But it is an impressive machine. I cannot say enough about the music and musicianship. Moving, troubling, jubilant, from the funeral march through the frenzied, accelerating rondo to its massive tutti death-chord finish: these were moments of ecstasy, of collective joy normally only experienced at World Cup finals, tent revivals and MAGA rallies, but here brought forth by art, by a 121-year-old piece of music masterfully executed.

After, the audience and musicians were literally reeling, swept up in waves of emotion, everyone grinning and applauding, those on stage clapping, bowing to each other, tapping their bows on their music stands, those in the balconies whistling and shouting each time the charismatic young conductor – who had never conducted the orchestra before and had been called in as a last-minute replacement – singled out a soloist or a section for individual praise, bringing them to their feet to bathe and bask in our undivided admiration.

And there we were, right on top of it, in front-row seats a goal length from the gong, and barely a hockey stick from the trumpets and French horns.

Playing a horn in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, especially for the soloists, is among the highest-pressure gigs in classical music. The stakes are extreme. So, too, are the decibel levels, especially when you’re sitting right next to them. The trumpeters on Tuesday played rotary-valve trumpets, as is common in European orchestras. They have bigger bells than their piston-valve counterparts, and thus a wider tonal spectrum. They also have narrower bores, which means they can be played louder. Significantly louder. The Trauermarsch trumpet solo that starts the symphony rose quickly from coolly restrained to vehemently ear-piercing. And then the cymbals crashed and the bass drum banged and the entire orchestra jumped in.

Listen to the first half minute of this and you’ll understand why percussion and brass are conventionally positioned at the back of a concert hall, and strings, singers and audiences, at the front. That said, our seats had advantages – not just the low price and proximity to the fray, but the view they afforded of the conductor’s gestures and expressions. And that, in many ways, was what we had really come to see.

As Nicholas Spice pointed out in last month’s LRB piece (paywalled here) on conducting, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is a late Romantic masterpiece of what he calls, citing Adorno, “conductors’ music”: “grand in conception, intensely expressive, declamatory, scored for a large orchestra to be performed in imposing concert halls for a mass audience – music which, to be fully effective and to have maximum impact, required a co-ordinating mastermind to run the show.”

Now, the conductor on Tuesday was not, like Lydia Tár, pictured above, a sociopathic mastermind, a serial abuser who grooms and preys on the young women under her sway. The scheduled conductor was Case Scaglione, who studied under David Zinman, who was once the assistant of the above-mentioned Pierre Monteux, who conducted, in Paris, not just the world premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, but also his Petrushka and The Nightingale, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, and Debussy's Jeux. But Mr Scaglione was ill, so he was replaced by his fellow young American, Eugene Tzigane, who studied at Julliard under the late James DePreist, who was once assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein. Tzigane also studied at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm under the Finnish conductor Jorma Panula, who caused a flap a decade ago when, in response to a journalist’s question about whether women should be professional conductors answered:

“No! What the hell, we have men already. It is such a limited profession… No! They can try, but that's a completely different story. I can’t comment on media or public opinion. But women… Of course they are trying! Some of them are making faces, sweating and fussing, but it is not getting any better – only worse! They can come [to my masterclasses] and try. It’s not a problem – if they choose the right pieces. If they take more feminine music. Bruckner or Stravinsky will not do, but Debussy is OK. This is a purely biological question.”

The last time I had heard the Trauermarsch before that evening was the scene in Tár where Lydia hides backstage in a toilet stall. With her, we listen to the first notes of the trumpet soloist, who is also backstage, hidden from the audience – Lydia had insisted on this before (spoiler alert) her fall from grace. As the third phrase starts, we exit the toilet with her, and watch, in horror, as she starts conducting next to the trumpeter, who keeps playing, paying her no notice, as if she isn’t there, as if she were a ghost. Then the cymbals and the bass drum crash and the orchestra goes full tutti, all the instruments together, and she storms onto the stage.

It’s a helluva moment. Imagine our surprise then, Tuesday night, when, before the trumpet started, the lights dimmed and, instead of Eugene Tzigane, a tall, lithe blonde woman – Lydia Tár’s ghost, her sosie, her doppelgänger – crossed the stage in almost total darkness and stood at the podium, haloed in light.

“Il attend…” she said.

“What the hell is this?” whispered C.

This, we discovered upon reading the hand-out for the first time, was the writer and filmmaker Delphine de Vigan.

Delphine de Vigan writes novels and memoirs in the autofiction vein. She is one of France’s best-selling writers, and, deservedly, the winner of many of the country’s most prestigious literary awards. However, despite her success – she has sold millions – her work is not grand publique: it is searing, harsh, difficult, brutally honest, intensely powerful.

Rachel Cusk wrote at length about her “taboo breaking” writing just last week in her remarkable NYT piece on this year’s literary Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Annie Ernaux:

In this literature-loving country, Delphine de Vigan became a modest sort of rock star, yet the aims of her book were in a sense challenging or undermining the tenets of that culture and the story it told about itself. Among other things, what de Vigan — and the powerful response of her public — testified to was the personal cost exacted by life in this exalted, beautiful yet patriarchal nation.

De Vigan is also the partner of François Busnel, one of France’s best-known literary critics, and until recently, the presenter of “La Grande Librairie”, which Cusk accurately described in the NYT piece as:

a weekly 90-minute television show about books, [which ] had often been cited to me as the emblem of France’s exceptional relationship to literary culture. Once a week, the country sat down to watch a special-effects-free sequence of interviews and debates with the writers of the moment. The prestige and sales figures of these writers were considerably advanced by an appearance on “La Grande Librairie” – an invitation was among the most fiercely desired laurels for the contemporary French writer.

De Vigan’s connection to Busnel ruffled feathers a decade ago when he invited her to appear on the programme, and praised her work effusively, but did not mention their relationship. And when asked by Busnel during the interview, “what does your current companion do for a living?” de Vigan cheekily replied, “I prefer not to say.” A few days later, the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo went after them.

An indiscretion, perhaps, but more an example of the insular snobisme of the French cultural milieu than anything else: those in the know of course already knew of the relationship, and so could smirk along with the joke. At any rate, hardly a conflict-of-interest issue. Decrying the “petits Saint-Just” attacking them, Busnel responded thus: “I am wary of the dictatorship of transparency. Should I penalise the woman I love because she is the woman I love?” Surely not. Few French writers are more popular than de Vigan, or more worthy of being showcased at centre stage of the French literary scene.

But should she be centre stage at Mahler’s Fifth Symphony?

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“Il attend” de Vigan repeated, after a deep breath and a long pause. And then she delivered a 12-minute text, written for the occasion, a short story of sorts about a young man waiting for the arrival of the woman he loves, tickets in hand, before a concert of Mahler's Fifth. The woman doesn’t show – the idea of attending such a work is too much for her, too revealing of a longing for closeness and connection. So, disappointed, he gives the extra ticket to an older woman, and the text switches to her point of view, and ends with the young man and the older woman sitting next to each other in their seats, focussed entirely on the moment as they listen to the musicians warm up (as the actual musicians pretend to warm up), and the woman, excited, joyful, prepares “to witness this little miracle, the birth of music”.

Polite applause. De Vigan exits, the lights come up, the conductor takes the podium, the trumpet sounds, the little miracle begins.

Why this prelude? It was weird. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for opening art to broader circles. This is precisely why there are cheap seats at the Philharmonie, and why it was built on the populaire edge of Paris’s 19th Arrondissement. And why Verlaine was in a punch-up at the Cirque d’Hiver, at a “Concert Populaires de Musique Classique” where the cheapest tickets cost 75 centimes – roughly the price of a movie ticket today.

John Singer Sargent - Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d'Hiver, 1880And I’m all for cross-cultivating the arts, sticking contemporary works in the Louvre and whatnot, widening, expanding, deepening. Etcetera. But.

“How can one write about Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony if one is not a musician?” de Vigan asked us in the hand-out. “I cannot explain the work, but I would like to describe the emotion. The imprint that music leaves on our bodies, on our memory… I hope that these words will allow us to break with the noise of the outside world and open our senses, our ears, our receptivity, our availability.”

And elsewhere: “Ever since I started writing, beyond feelings, I've been trying to name sensations. To find the right word... the right note. Writing about Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony is an attempt to express the emotion, the imprint that the music leaves on our memory, on our bodies. To try to understand why a work composed more than a century ago crosses time and continues to tell us a story.”

Laudatory, I suppose, and even successful: the sound of the violinists and cellists tuning their strings as de Vigan reached the final phrases was stirring, even though we knew the musicians were faking. The story, too, was engaging – or would have been, for me, in a different context, if I read it on the page, or if I heard her read it at a reading. But, there, before the Mahler, where I sat excited, joyful, prepared to witness this little miracle, I thought it wrong-footed. Unnecessary. Irksome.

Why it had this effect on me (and those around me) will require some unpacking. If, say, instead of Lydia Tár’s ghost coming out on stage to say a few words, it was Leonard Bernstein’s? Would I have been any less irked? Yes. Why? Because he is a musician? Yes. A man? No. If, say, the actual composer of Tár, Hildur Guðnadóttir, the first woman to win an Oscar for best original score (Joker, 2020) had come out and discussed the piece beforehand, I’m sure we would have found that fascinating. Or Caroline Shaw. Or Jessie Montgomery. Or Chen Yi. Or many others.

So is it because de Vigan is a writer? Writing about her feelings, how the Mahler affects her emotionally? Maybe. Maybe I don’t want my feelings prefaced and programmed by someone else’s. Though of course that happens all the time. Right now, for example. Or any time you’re in an art gallery, faced with an artwork that just sits there, dumbly, before you, and doesn’t come to life until you read its title, or the gallerist comes over and explains it to you.

Except no. It is not at all the same, is it?

I read about Mahler beforehand. Did this deepen my appreciation? Yes. But not the story of his life. It was interesting but in no significant way contributed to my understanding of the music. This, I know, is complicated, and controversial. I am swayed by an artist’s biography. I feel guilty when I listen to Michael Jackson. Guernica bugs me in a way it didn’t a few decades ago. Patti Smith’s refusal to stop using the N-word stops me from going anywhere near her books. I find it hard to appreciate Céline purely for his craft and style.

But.

I will read de Vigan’s text again, when it becomes available. At home, or in a cafe, and then maybe put on the Mahler, and have a good think. Let her imprints imprint mine. But I resented having them imprinted upon me while I was seated in 207A. Contrary to what she wrote in the hand-out, it is the music, not her words, that “allow us to break with the noise of the outside world and open our senses, our ears, our receptivity, our availability.”

Nor is it these words, I can hear you thinking. Fair enough. Except you’re not sitting in 207A.

Listening to the music.

When the first trumpet note sounded, all was of course immediately forgotten. And forgiven. What preceded became instantly pointless, meaningless – the text, the 12 minutes of irksomeness, the bike ride on the canal to the Philharmonie, the hockey playoffs, my income tax declaration, the pain in my Achilles, the black sheep munching on the grass in the park outside, Lydia Tár, the dark, shining swirl of soaring aluminium birds –

– all of it disappeared in the unfilterable immediacy of the music, in its ineffable unfolding in the moment.

I think that’s it. But I’m not at all sure. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t a clue. Perhaps some of you might have an idea? As you can tell, as plaintively and nakedly expressed in my pathetic, brazen appeals for subscriptions above, I need your help.

Thanks for reading.

N.B. If you only click on one video, make it the Bernstein rehearsal. It is a marvel.

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Hexagon is a house built by its subscribers. Without them the bills don’t get paid and the power gets cut. The plants wither. Mail piles up on the front porch. The screen door out back bangs in the wind. “Hello?” you call out, hands cupped against the glare as you peer through the dining room window. “Anyone home?” No one answers.

Proposition

“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off.” – Anton Chekhov

Doves and pigeons abound in and around Paris and have for more than a century; but their numbers have doubled in the last fifty years. This is true in many large metropolitan areas. Cities aren’t as cold as the countryside, or so it seems to humans and birds, and there is more food and fewer predators. I, however, eat birds. Store-bought chicken, turkeys, capons and quails for the most part, pigeons and geese – and ducks, too, though their numbers have been of late most decimated by toxins, botulism mainly, which grows in mud warmed by unseasonably hot sun. I don’t bother with cormorants because of their fishy diet and because I find the flesh unpalatable, like eating rubber bands, and because of their appearance, and, especially, their character, which I admire. Seagulls are nutritious and low in cholesterol and fat, but the meat is unpleasant. Canada geese are repellent. I say this though I too am Canadian. They carry diseases. They beg and stalk. Their droppings are toxic.

Proposition

“Take off that wig or I will knock it off.” – G.K. Chesterton

On the last page of his last notebook, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, less than two days before his death: “If someone believes that he has flown from America to England in the last few days, then, I believe, he cannot be making a mistake. And just the same if someone says that he is at this moment sitting at a desk & writing. ‘But even if in such cases I can't be mistaken, isn't it possible that I am drugged?’”

If I am, and if the drug has taken away my consciousness, then I am not now really talking and thinking. I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says “I am dreaming”, even if he speaks out loud when doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream “it is raining”, when it is in fact raining. Even if his dream is actually connected with the noise of the rain.”

The above was not written in Wittgenstein’s Geheimschrift cipher code, as many of Wittgenstein’s diary entries were, dating back to the earliest entries, when he was a voluntary artillery gunner on the Goplana, a gunboat captured from the Russians on the Vistula. Even the famous “Whereof one cannot write, one must not write” was originally written, as in my subtitle, as “Dzh hrxs nrxsg hxsivryvn pzhhg, pzhhg hrxs nrxsg hxsivryvn.”

In Tractatus, “Dzh hrxs nrxsg hxsivryvn pzhhg, pzhhg hrxs nrxsg hxsivryvn became “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Or, as Wittgenstein’s friend and translator, Frank Ramsey put it, “What we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either.”

Writing, saying, whistling. Thinking. Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. The Geheimschrift cipher is uncomplicated. A child can crack it. Why then did Wittgenstein use it? Why ineffectually hide one’s secrets? Hide them, or barely hide them, pretend to hide them, from who, from what?

Wittgenstein’s 1915 notebook. Coded diary entries on the left page, uncoded philosophical notes on the rightProposition

“I remember that when I spoke to Nietzsche for the first time – it was on a spring day in St Peter's Basilica in Rome – during the first few minutes I was surprised and deceived by his elegance and sophistication. But I was not taken in for long by this lonely man, who wore his mask as awkwardly as someone who has come out of the wilderness and mountains dressed in conventional clothing; very soon the question arose, which he himself summed up in the words: “Whenever a person permits something to become visible, one can ask: what is it supposed to hide? What is it supposed to distract the eye from? What prejudice should it arouse? And then: how far does the subtlety of this disguise go? And in doing so, what is he getting away with?” – Lou Andreas-Salomé

The questions raised above by Nietzsche rise again and again. Quoting is a type of wig wearing. A hiding, a disguising. Our worst concession, he warned, our most dangerous betrayal, is to see ourselves as depositories of the thoughts of other thinkers, which we can call up – “regurgitate” – on demand. “Think for yourself,” he often said. “Use your own words.”

Proposition

“Is it the vague rumours of the reeds, the strange phosphorescence, the deep silence enveloping them in the calm of night, the bizarre mists trailing over the rushes like dead women's dresses, or the imperceptible lapping, so light, so soft, and more terrifying sometimes than the cannon of men or the sky’s thunder, which makes the marshes look like dreamlands, like dreadful countries hiding an unknowable and dangerous secret? – Guy de Maupassant

The passage about the marshes cited above is from a Maupassant story first published in Gil Blas in 1886. In the first paragraph, the narrator describes reading a fait divers in a newspaper:

A drama of passion. He killed her and then he killed himself, so he must have loved her. What matters He or She? Their love alone matters to me; and it does not interest me because it moves me or astonishes me, or because it softens me or makes me think, but because it recalls to my mind a remembrance of my youth, a strange recollection of a hunting adventure where Love appeared to me, as the Cross appeared to the early Christians, in the midst of the heavens.

The narrator then describes a duck hunt he attended with his cousin (“gentilhomme de campagne, demi-brute amiable”) on the marshes at daybreak. After he shoots a female teal, its heartbroken mate continues to circle overhead, unable to leave his dead love, whose bloodied corpse the narrator holds in his hands.

“You have killed the duck,” says the cousin, “and the drake will not fly away. Leave her on the ground, he will come closer soon enough.”

And he did indeed come near us, careless of danger, infatuated by his animal love, by his affection for his mate, which I had just killed. Karl fired, and it was as if somebody had cut the string which held the bird suspended. I saw something black descend, and I heard the noise of a fall among the rushes. And Pierrot brought it to me. I put them – they were already cold – into the same game-bag, and I returned to Paris the same evening.

I loved the ocean as a child. But it is too grand for me now, too unfathomable. As are rivers, with their unseen currents. I knew a fisherman who pulled two dozen corpses from the Fraser in his lifetime. The fen, the bog, is just the right size to seize and hold the imagination. Maupassant understood this. All bodies of water brought forth in him a tumultuous passion, but especially the swamp, which is an “entire world, a different world”, with its own forms of life:

For is it not in these stagnant and muddy waters, in the heavy dampness of drenched earth warmed by the heat of the sun, that the first seed of life stirred, and vibrated, and opened itself to the day?

This dead water, where unseen existences palpitate and thrive, this is my new world.

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Proposition

We must admit that the divine banquet of the brain was, and still is, a feast with dishes that remain elusive in the blending, and with sauces whose ingredients are even now a secret. – Macdonald Critchley

It has been suggested that music triggered in Freud a form of reflex epilepsy. Members of his household said that when he heard music, he put his hands over his ears. He did not allow it to be played in his home. He forbade his children to learn instruments.

In 1937, two years before Freud’s death, the British neurologist Macdonald Critchley, who famously called psychoanalysis “the treatment of the id by the odd”, coined the name of this condition, “musicogenic epilepsy”. Those so inflicted cannot listen, think about or play music with “emotional content” without precipitating focal seizures.

Did Dr Freud suffer from this condition? Was he melophobic? As far as I can ascertain, he only wrote about music twice:

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life:

Whoever takes the trouble, as Jung (1907) and Maeder (1909) have done, to pay attention to the tunes one finds oneself humming aimlessly and unconsciously, will regularly discover the relation between the lyrics of the melody and the subject preoccupying the person humming it.

In The Moses of Michelangelo:

With music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me. This has brought me to recognise the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved riddles to our understanding.

Proposition

It is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture. – P.T. Barnum

I’m thinking of this now because one drunken afternoon in January 1995, a group of us were listening to a friend sing on a rooftop in the Fifth Arrondissement, on the rue Monge, just up from the river. The friend, now dead, was a baritone. He had performed in all the major opera houses of the world.

We were attending a birthday party in the seventh-floor chambre de bonne of a friend whose name I have forgotten. Actually, we were celebrating several birthdays: mine; my brother’s (who wasn’t there; we phoned him while the host was out getting ice on the rue Anglais); a young woman from New York named Sara Tanis Leopold; and a French girl from Arras who I didn’t know. The host was a non-smoker, which was why we were on his roof; there was a trap door in the ceiling of the hallway just outside his front door, with a drop-down ladder, which we had climbed up and out onto the roof, leaving behind our host and two young French women, a second girl from Arras and another from somewhere else, both students at the Sorbonne, which was just up the hill from the apartment building.

There once was a lass from Arras…

Most of these people were and still are my friends. Others, the French women, a perfumer from Grasse named Pierre, a mathematician from Dublin, I met that day and never saw again. Later, I had a falling out with Sara. Others have drifted away or, like the baritone, are dead.

The ugly tower of Église Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet dominated the immediate foreground.

We could hear the church’s organ, “Après un rêve”, Gabriel Fauré, and when it finished, over the car traffic and the jackhammers, the amplified voice of its excommunicated priest performing the Tridentine mass in Latin.

Proposition

Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness. – Ford Madox Ford

In 1890, when he was still a young man, in Paris studying hysteria and hypnosis with Professor Charcot, Freud let the professor’s wife convince him to go to the Eldorado, a café-club in Montmartre, where he heard the French singer and actress Yvette Guilbert. Guilbert had been the fétiche model of the Toulouse-Lautrec. He drew her hundreds of times, emphasising her slim waist, dark, soulful eyes, and long black gloves.

Freud heard Guibert sing “La Soûlarde”, which made him “shudder’. Then she sang “Dites-moi si je suis belle” (“Tell Me that I’m Beautiful”), which made him whisper, “Yes, with all my senses.”

Smitten, Freud went backstage. He and Guilbert became friends. We are unclear what form the friendship took in its earliest stages, but later they exchanged letters, and Freud hung a signed photo of Guilbert over his desk in his study in Vienna, next to photographs of Lou Andreas-Salomé and Marie Bonaparte, and again on the wall of his Maresfield Gardens study, during the last year of his life in London.

Proposition

“The mind is a scoundrel.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

The men playing speed chess in the garden were in their 40s. One wore camouflage clothing and a cloth cap. The other had a moustache and dark-blue eyes. He, someone watching whispered, had handily won his last six matches against different opponents, all of whom, the vanquished, were still standing around the table, eager to see the victor devour his next prey. Among them were two North Americans. One was lean and bearded, around 40 years old. The other was younger. They asked each other questions, but neither seemed interested in the other’s answers. The lean one was an investor. Cryptocurrency. The other was living on his parents’ money. Was one of them conning the other? Which one?

The man in the camouflage clothing ran out of time on the clock. The man with the moustache politely showed him the mistakes he had made. The defeated man thanked him and gave his seat to the younger North American, who took the black pieces and deliberated for almost half a minute before making his first move.

Proposition

When I first started jotting down ideas and thoughts, phrases like these or just individual words, whatever came into my head, I took inspiration from Anne Frank, Helen Keller, Virginia Woolf, and of course Samuel Pepys, as he started his diary when he was 27, the same age I was at the time I started mine.

For me, at this period of my life, the ever-present diary, like the accompanying pen, the pastis, thecigarette, was a talisman, a ceremonial object. And a voice I could trust and confide in. And something to make me appear engaged and interesting. This of course was before I could see Samuel Pepys for what he truly was: a violent, predatory male, a serial sex offender, a groper, a voyeur, a stalker and a rapist.

Proposition

Just after Vatican II, the priest’s predecessor had burst into the church with a group of followers in the middle of Sunday evening service and thrown the previous priest and all his attendants and parishioners out on the street. The church was then taken over by the Society of Pious X. Most of its parishioners were members of the far-right party, the National Front. After mass, they would congregate in front of the ugly church (which had been designed by Charles Le Brun), smiling and chatting, admiring each other’s infants, discussing childcare and the relative merits of their top-of-the-line strollers. They looked like everyone else; this is what struck me; there were no skinheads. They were normal-looking people.

The following year, the priest performed a Tridentine Requiem Mass for the soul of the Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier, the only French person ever convicted of crimes against humanity.

Proposition

He had always mostly liked his city, when he was in it, when the temperatures were right and the jackhammers not in his ear. He was especially fond of it now, early May, a sizeable swath of the functioning populace out of town for the school holidays, those visibly remaining, the able-bodied, the homeless, the tourists and the poor spilled out in random configurations, standing alone or in groups, sitting on the river’s edge and at tables on the terraces, drinking and eating, smoking cigarettes stuffed with hashish, talking together or to themselves or on their phones.

On his unfolded bike down past the new baker, the road crew and the restaurant recently converted into a design studio. Down past the east and south walls of the hospital, past the intersection where, a few years before, gunmen killed a dozen people. Then, the flush beginning to fade, across the water to the big square with the giant statue.

Proposition

In a diary entry from the early 1950s, Wittgenstein speculates about using a pressure gauge, a manometer, like those in the Voight-Kampff machine, to indicate changes in his blood pressure (or his pulse) resulting from a sensation he experiences; and then he describes how he could then write the sign “S” (for “Sensation”) in his diary (or his calendar) every time he experiences the sensation, and then verify it against the manometer, to see if his blood pressure went up. When there was a correlation, he could place a tick next to the entry. And this correlation would show “S” is “approved” by the manometer. But not that there is any correlation between the sensation and the word “S,” or between the sensation S and the manometer’s blood pressure reading.

This is my experience… And it appears entirely unimportant whether or not I have correctly identified the sensation. Let’s assume, I am constantly wrong about the identification, it wouldn’t make a difference. And that in itself is a sign that the assumption of this mistake was an illusion. (We flip a switch, as it were, that looked as if it would serve to adjust something on the machine, but it was simply there for decoration and not at all connected to the mechanism [my emphasis]). And what reason do we have here, to call “S” the symbol of a sensation? Perhaps the way in which this symbol is used in this language-game. – And why a “particular sensation,” the same one every time? Well, we assume this, we write “S” every time.”

Flipping the switch. The beginning of our lives is spent watching the world and learning how to talk about it, and to it, and, especially, how to talk to oneself, how to split oneself in two, confront oneself, oppose oneself to oneself, and question oneself, put pressure on oneself, make demands on oneself, persuade oneself. Later, nearer the end, we try to put those two parts back together again and heal the rift.

Am I hiding things here? Nothing of interest. But if I were, they would remain hidden.

Proposition

In 1931, in a response to a theory of acting and the performing self that Louise Guilbert proposed, Freud wrote:

The idea of abandoning one's own personality and replacing it with an imaginary one has never completely satisfied me. I rather suppose that there must be an opposite mechanism. The personality of the artist is not eliminated, but certain elements, for example, predispositions that have not managed to develop or repressed motions of desire, are used to compose the chosen character and thus manage to express themselves and give it a character of authenticity. This is much less simple than the ‘transparency’ of the self that you put forward. I would naturally be very curious to know if you can detect any traces of this other state of affairs. In any case, it is only a contribution to solving the following beautiful mystery: why does one shudder when hearing La Soûlarde, or why does one answer ‘yes’ with all one's senses to the question: ‘Tell me if I am beautiful’, but one knows so little about it?

By this I think Dr Freud meant that he didn’t think that an actor should completely forget their own personality and pretend to be someone else, but should use some parts of their own personality, such as hidden feelings or unrealised potentials, to create the character they are playing. This way, the character becomes more realistic and expressive. This is more complicated than the idea of “transparency” – a “blank slate”. “I wonder,” Freud seems to be asking, “if you can notice any signs of this process in my work?”

Anyway, this is how I try to explain the following mystery: why do you feel a chill when you hear La Soûlarde, or why do you say ‘yes’ with all your senses to the question: ‘Tell me if I am beautiful”, but you don’t really know why?’

Guilbert rejected this: “No, I don't believe that what comes out of me on stage is a ‘surplus’ that is removed and then used. I could be the Tzarina, the Tzar, Saint Francis of Assisi if a text is given to me to express them, I would feel the physical side of it, by the habit of transporting from my brain to my flesh.”

Proposition

I am a golem, I have no soul. Everything near me lives, everything has a soul, their souls send out long, narrow, pointed threads, rays that come to me, penetrate me, stir me, force me to my feet, order me to move, act, run. But I – I myself am nothing! Who then does the thinking? What within me thinks? Again, a stranger? Not me. – I. L. Peretz

I. L. Peretz’s most famous story was “The Golem’, which starts with this sentence: “Great men were once capable of great miracles.” It then describes the pogrom in the ghetto of Prague, during which certain Gentiles sought to “rape the women, roast the children, and slaughter everyone.” When it looked like the end was near and all hope lost, Rabbi Loew took his nose out of his Talmud, went into the street, walked up to a clump of clay in front of the schoolteacher’s house and moulded it into the shape of a man. He blew into its nostrils, and when it came to life, whispered the Name in its ear, and up the golem got, and out of the ghetto it strode. The rabbi resumed his reading, and the golem attacked the gentiles, thrashing them as if with whips. They fell like flies and the city filled with their corpses. “Rabbi,” pleaded the head of the ghetto, “the golem has hacked up all of Prague! Soon there won’t be a gentile left to light the Sabbath fires or take down the Sabbath lamps.”

Once more the rabbi put down his book. He went to the altar and recited the Song of the Sabbath. The golem stopped, returned to the ghetto, entered the House of Prayer and stood before the rabbi, who whispered something in its ear. The eyes of the golem closed, the soul fled its body, and it became once more a golem of clay.

Proposition

Listening to Mr. Mitterrand I am reminded of the verses of the poet Charles Perrault, parodying Virgil, describing Aeneas’s descent to the underworld: “I saw the shadow of a coachman / Who, holding the shadow of a brush / Was cleaning the shadow of a carriage.” It seems to me that today's dialogue belongs to a literary genre that rhetoric teachers have long loved: the dialogue of the dead. – Georges Pompidou

To the west, the two towers and spire of Notre-Dame-de-Paris commanded the view. In less than a month the funeral of the President Mitterrand would be held there, with Barbara Hendricks singing Fauré’s Requiem, the Chiracs in the front row, Fidel Castro behind, next to Prince Charles, next to Helmut Kohl, next to Prince Ranier; and further back the spire of Saint-Chappelle, home to fragments of the Cross, the Lance and the Sponge. Saint-Eustache beyond to the left, the Pompidou Centre behind that to the right, Sacré-Coeur up on the hill; and closer, almost below, the rue de Bièvre, which is where Dante once lived, and at that time was where the Mitterrands were living, at No. 22, in an ancient relais de poste with an inner courtyard hidden behind green doors.

Proposition

On the day that Dr Freud penned his letter to Guilbert, he had his first meeting with his personal physician, Max Schur, during which he made him promise that “when the time comes,” he wouldn’t let the medical establishment “torment” him unnecessarily. Ten years later, in 1939, as Freud approached death from cancer, he reminded Schur of his promise. Schur patted his hand and said he would administer the necessary sedation. On that same day, Virginia and Leonard Woolf visited Freud in his Maresfield Gardens house. Leonard found him to be “extraordinarily courteous in a formal, old-fashioned way – for instance, almost ceremoniously he presented Virginia with a flower. There was something about him as of a half-extinct volcano, something sombre, suppressed, reserved. He gave me the feeling which only a very few people whom I have met gave me, a feeling of great gentleness, but behind the gentleness, great strength.”

That night, Virginia wrote in her diary:

Sunday 29 January 1939

Dr Freud gave me a narcissus. Was sitting in a great library with little statues at a large scrupulously tidy shiny table. We like patients on chairs. A screwed-up shrunk very old man: with monkey’s light eyes, paralysed, spasmodic movements, inarticulate but alert… immense potential, I mean an old fire now flickering.

Proposition

A dream or nightmare is really only like a film inside your gulliver, except that it is as though you could walk into it and be part of it. And this is what happened to me. It was a nightmare of one of the bits of film they showed me near the end of the afternoon like session, all of smecking malchicks doing the ultra-violent on a young ptitsa who was creeching away in her red red krovvy, her platties all razrezzed real horrorshow. – Anthony Burgess

Clockwork Orange introduced readers and viewers to the Ludovic Technique, a Pavlov-inspired aversion therapy designed to reduce violent crime and prison overcrowding by making the visual appearance of violence physically and mentally unbearable. It did this by strapping the subject to a chair; injecting the subject with a cocktail of fear/vomit/paralysis-inducing drugs; forcing the subject’s eyes open with metal specula; and projecting moving images of violence – World War II footage, rapes, beatings, bludgeonings, murders, animal slaughter – which the subject has no choice but to watch.

The method was approved for trials by the UK Minister of the Interior. It was performed at the State Institute for Reclamation of Criminal Types in Uxbridge by Dr Brodsky of the Ludovico medical facility.

Today, most psychophysiological measurements (brain imagery, skin conductance, heart rate, fMRI, EEG, and electromyography) record valence, arousal and dominance responses to the colour photographs in the International Affective Picture System (IAPS).

The IAPS’s 956 images are also used to induce and influence anxiety and negative affect.

Proposition

Freud was inarticulate because he had inoperable cancer of the jaw. A giant suppurating tumour in the mouth, black as a meteorite and shaped like a star. Eating his flesh and bone. He had to wear a special prosthesis to keep his oral and nasal cavities separate. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t talk, and the necrotic bone stench kept his beloved dog, Lun, a red chow, from coming anywhere near him; it would howl if Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, forced it into the study; so Freud sat by himself at his writing desk, or covered in blankets and rugs on his psychoanalyst’s couch, surrounded by his treasured antiquities, including the urn that he and his wife Martha’s ashes would later be sealed in, writing about how the Hebrew prophet and lawgiver Moses was an Egyptian, how he created the Jews, and how they turned on him and killed him because of the harsh laws he had imposed upon them, especially the obligation to love and fear an invisible God and the prohibition against making an image of that God – “the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see” – which in turn lead to their “triumph of intellectuality over sensuality” and their ability to excel in law, mathematics, science and literature. And, of course, music.

Proposition

“The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.” – Marcel Proust

My attentions, however, were solely on my breath, which would have been invisible but for the smoke from my cigarette. And it should have been visible, every huff and puff, as it was winter and sunny and very, very cold. Why, I said out loud, can’t we see our breath? “Because of relative humidity,” said one of the young French woman from Arras. She was wearing a thick down jacket. No one else had brought a coat. “L'air est insaturé,” she said. “Comment dit ça?”

“Unsaturated.”

“Like the fat?”

“The air can hold more water vapour.”

Her name was Valerie. She was doing a Masters in Material and Structural Mechanics at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, which back then was still on the rue des Saints-Pères in the Sixth Arrondissement.

Proposition

Marie Bonaparte was the great-granddaughter of the French emperor Napoleon I, and the author The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-analytic Interpretation. She is best known, however, for the papers she published on female sexual pleasure under the pseudonym A. E. Narjani. This involved research in which she measured the distance between the underside of the clitoral glans and the centre of the urethral meatus in 243 women. She found that the distance determined a woman’s ability to achieve pleasure (volupté) and reach vaginal orgasm during missionary position coitus. She paid a Viennese gynaecologist named Josef Halban to move her clitoris closer (rapproché) to the urethral passage by severing of the suspensory ligament attaching it to the mons pubis. The 20-minute procedure, called a Halban-Narjani operation, did not work. Halban performed it a second time. And a third. Freud disapproved.

Proposition

Max Schur kept his promise. On September 23, 1939, Freud went into a morphine-induced coma and never re-emerged. He was 83 years old.

Proposition

Mitterrand, who had left office on May 17th, after 14 years as President of the Republic, was still alive – he died, or rather was killed, by lethal injection, a month later – but not living in the house on Bièvre, except on Sundays, when he had dinner with members of his first family. He and the dog had been living, since leaving Elysée Palace, on the third floor of 9, avenue Frédéric-le Play, in the Eighth Arrondissement, in an apartment that the French state had put at his disposition.

The lethal injection was administered by Dr Jean-Pierre Tarot, an anaesthesiologist specialized in pain management. Tarot had left his practice two years before and had been at the President’s side since. They had met through a mutual friend, Jean Riboud, the chairman of Schlumberger, who, had been incarcerated in Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp, for two years – when he was liberated, he had tuberculosis and weighed 98 pounds.

When Riboud was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1985, he relinquished control of Schlumberger, which at the time was the biggest offshore oil drilling company in the world, and put Dr Tarot on a full-time retainer, to manage his pain and see him through his final days.

The President remembering this – he thought about Riboud, and a handful of other departed friends, daily – did the same. And when he relinquished control of the nation, at the time ranked third in the world for GDP, he told the French people during a televised speech, “I believe in les forces de I’esprit (“the forces of the spirit”) and I will not leave you.” Later, he told Patrick B., that he was “not afraid of being dead, but of no longer being alive.”

Proposition

Few people can be as tortured by writing as I am. – Virginia Woolf

I have yet to try swan. They were once the favoured dish of the Kings and Queens of England. I killed one once, by accident, while riding a bicycle drunk. I swim twice a week in the canal, and male swans often chase me away from their nests, wings opened, hissing like a thousand snakes, ready to strike. I find them humorous.

Proposition

Freud’s urn, a gift from Marie Bonaparte, is a 4th century BC bell krater, used to hold wine for drinking parties. The bearded figure with the vine and ivy-covered staff, a giant fennel stalk topped with a pinecone – a thyrsus – and the high-handled drinking cup – a kantharos – is probably Dionysus, the god of wine, madness, masks and death. He is gazing longingly at one of his female followers, a naked maenad carrying a wine jug and a lit torch. It is night. Everything beyond the throw of the torchlight is pitch black. A naked young man holds another drinking cup with both hands. A satyr playing a double flute leads the rest of the procession, which includes two cloaked initiates that look like they are about to set off on a journey – on the column between them it says termon, which means both “beginning” and “end’.

Proposition

His head and mine were both bending over the bald head of the wigless Duke. Then the silence was snapped by the librarian exclaiming: “What can it mean? Why, the man had nothing to hide. His ears are just like everybody else’s.” “Yes,” said Father Brown, “that is what he had to hide.” – G.K. Chesterton

Danielle had left her bedside vigil the night before, around 7pm, when the President, dressed head to toe in black, told her it was time for her to go, that he wished to meet death fully conscious and fully alone, except for his administering angel, Tarot.

The next morning, upon hearing that Yasser Arafat was on his way up to the third floor to pay his last respects to the President, Danielle cancelled her own deathbed visit, just as she was about to turn the knob and enter the apartment. Why? she asked herself. To what end? What did she need to see, to do, to say? There is nothing more to say. And then the door to the apartment opened, and she was told that Arafat was in the elevator, on his way up. She and Baltique immediately took the stairs, a GSPR man carried Baltique – the dog’s hips were too arthritic to climb down on her own. Together they returned to rue de Bièvre in a limousine driven by a Patrick B., a member of the security team. There were Christmas lights on in the shops. On that street alone, three people had already thrown away their trees.

Patrick B. opened the gate with a remote-control device on the hinged visor above the windshield. The car drove through the gate entrance and parked in the courtyard. We saw all this from the rooftop.

Arafat, meanwhile, beside himself with grief, fell onto the corpse of the President, crying uncontrollably. Someone else – to this day we still do not know who – surreptitiously took a photograph of the President on his death bed. The following week, the photo appeared in the pages of Paris Match, accompanied by a story about Le Grand Secret, a book published that same day by Editions Plon, and written by Mitterrand’s personal doctor, Claude Gubler, who had been dismissed a few months earlier, during a bitter battle between the President’s different doctors for control of the President’s medical treatment. Because of the book, he had his license revoked and was forced to close his practice.

Proposition

We were enjoying the way the clouds of smoke and air vapour intermingled and climbed into the sky – at least this is what we thought we were enjoying, as it was cold that night. The angle of the roof was such that no step felt safe, the zinc was slippery, but just the same I had managed to coax the group, who, collectively, were afraid of heights, and shivering almost uncontrollably because of the cold, to make their way together over to the north-western corner of the building, right to the very edge. There was no railing to hold onto. The view of the full northern span of the city stretched out before us, starting directly next door with the ugly tower of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. I pointed out the Mitterrand house. There were two men at two of the four windows on the top floor. A third man was standing motionless in the courtyard. All three were wearing dark sunglasses.

We heard barking. Something bright caught the light and shone into my eyes, then Sara’s, and then Pierre’s, the perfumer.

“Is that a gun?”

Sure enough, the barrel and scope of a rifle could be seen at one of the windows on the top floor of the Mitterrand house. Valerie gasped. Baltique was still barking. I had heard her loud bark many times before, every time that I visited my friend’s apartment. In fact, it was so loud that, after the President’s funeral, and the reading of his will, which made no mention of Baltique, no one in the President’s two families wanted to take him in. She ended up in the care of Patrick B., with whom she happily lived, first in Satory, near the military barracks, and then in the Marne.

Proposition

“For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Nicholas Chaikin, Monumental Poetry Inc., 2022Hexagon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sunday, 30 April 2023, 9:00am TRT (Turkey Time) *An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress,Nor is there singing school but studyingMonuments of its own magnificence;And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.* – W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”, 1926 Neither I nor my new best buddy Bing could find any evidence that William Butler Yeats, whose father was the painter John Butler Yeats, ever went to Constantinople or participated in a foot race. “However,” says Bing, who, as you have no doubt figured out by now is a tiresome know-it-all and, worse, tiresomely empathic – his whole sense of identity and self-worth is based on being “helpful” and therefore wanted, and needed, and loved, and thus in control, and indispensable, not just to me but to all of us, which I for one hate, because, well, because it makes me hate myself for feeling dependent and inadequate and lazy, always copping out from actually thinking for myself, engaging with the world on my own terms and in my own way, inadequately, perhaps, lazily, yes, but not dependent on anyone or anything, and honest, authentic, open to being or at least becoming the me that I not necessarily should be but could be, instead of just the counterfeit me pretending to be someone else pretending to be someone else someone else pretending to be, ad infinitum – “however,” interrupts Bing, my rescuing white knight, oblivious - indifferent! – to my consternations, “Yeats did write a poem called “Sailing to Byzantium”, which uses a journey to Byzantium (Constantinople, now Istanbul) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. I couldn’t find any information about him playing any sports, but he did write a poem called “Running to Paradise”, and he was interested in mysticism and the occult, and was a lifelong member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.”

*As I came over Windy GapThey threw a halfpenny into my cap.For I am running to paradise;And all that I need do is to wishAnd somebody puts his hand in the dishTo throw me a bit of salted fish:And there the king is but as the beggar*.– W.B. Yeats, “Running to Paradise”, 1914 Anyway, all this to say that Bing can be an asshole and I am very thankful to be in the company of real, genuine friends – not online, self-important, answer ATM pedants – in the holy city of Byzantium, in precisely the same year of my life as W.B. Yeats was in his when he published “Sailing to Byzantium”, and just as much an “aged man” and a “paltry thing” as he was then, but not so much a “tattered coat upon a stick… fastened to a dying animal” as a pair of shorts and a technical t-shirt over a new pair of Asics Gel-Kayanos fastened to two feet with chronically inflamed Achilles tendons that are right now, not as I write this but, ideally, as you read this, painfully penguin-flapping around the city’s central peninsula, from the Marmara Sea to the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn.

I used the present continuous tense of the verb “to flap” above because when I have finished writing this I will select Sunday, 30 April 2023, 9:00amin Substack’s “scheduled time to email and publish” option to coincide precisely with the firing of the gun that will start the N Kolay Istanbul 10k Run 2023. So by the time you read this, if indeed read it you do, I and thousands of others will have launched our carcasses down the race course, which will run in a loop from Yenikapi Square and back again, five kilometres in both directions, with a negative split I’m hoping, for in my end is my beginning, which is what T.S Eliot once said, or rather wrote.

*In my beginning is my end. In successionHouses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their placeIs an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.*– T.S. Eliot, "East Coker", 1940 Eliot, like Yeats, according to Bing, never once visited Turkey, either. Nor, to our knowledge, did he ever run in a foot race. Nor did his father, Henry Ware Eliot, a successful businessman from Saint Louis.

*His soul stretched tight across the skies That fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent feet At the starter's gun at nine o’clock.– T.S.Eliot, "Preludes", 1910-1911* Yenikapi Square is an artificial piece of land created in the Harbour of Theodosius, where a pro-Erdogan’s election rally was to be held the day before we arrived in Istanbul. It was cancelled when he fell ill, apparently of a stomach infection, during a live television appearance. However, Erdogan, who Bing tells me was a talented football player, and whose father was a coastguard, was back on live TV three days later - Saturday – looking somewhat shrunken in his suit at an aviation festival.

Recently, Stone Age graves were discovered in Yenikapi, along with 8,000-year-old human skeletons and the remains of cats dating back to the Byzantine period.

Yeats was fond of cats. So, of course, was Eliot. So, too, was, a taxi driver recently told me, the prophet Muhammad, as was his father, Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib, who died and was buried in Medina before Muhammad was born. Muhammad had a molly cat named Müezza, which he loved very much. I’ve always been more of a dogman myself, though I did once have a molly cat named Sophia, whom I was fond of. Unlike my father, who was from Swan River, Manitoba, and never much cared for Sophia. Coincidentally, if you began reading this when it first appeared in your mailbox, you should be able to see me just now here, live on YouTube, hobbling past Hagia Sophia, which Erdogan rehallowed as a mosque in 2020.

According to the osteo-archaeologist Vedat Onar, who examined the animal skeletons found at Yenikapi, “cats in Istanbul during the Byzantine period lived in very good conditions compared to those in Europe, and had no pathological disorders.”

According to Altan Armutak, the Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa faculty head of the Department of Veterinary History and Deontology, ever since the Byzantine period, “there has been an aggressive attitude towards cats in the west”:

In a sermon given by the Papacy, cats were claimed to be harmful animals, representatives of the devil they cooperate with…. Thousands of cats were burned in Europe at that time. We know that older women accused of witchcraft were burned by being put in bags together with cats. Cats were stuffed in bags and beaten with sticks; hanged on tree branches and burned from below with fire. The papists believed that the cat’s screaming caused the devil to escape. In Europe, these animals had a humiliating period, if not shameful. Unfortunately, there were no cats left in Europe, and as a result, rats appeared and serious plague outbreaks occurred between 1300 and 1500. Cats are insurance against the plague. The plague is not transmitted unless mice touch human food. As a result, mice and plagues increased where there were no cats. The papacy had a statement that it was obligatory to murder cats because ‘the devil was looking at the world’ with the light called ‘Tapetum lucidum’ in the eyes of the cats. With this effect, a cat massacre was seen in Europe in the 1000s. – Hurriyet Daily News, July 2020

This traditional love of cats was adopted by Arab culture and became even more traditional in the period of the four caliphs. Arab trade caravans and warriors who travelled to the north carried many cultural structures, behaviours, words and objects related to cat love. Unlike Europe, cats in Byzantium were cared for and fed in homes and shops. Byzantium was influenced by the Islamic culture. We see that Byzantium loved these animals. These skeletons are archaeological evidence of this fact. The plagues that caused the death of many people in Europe were not seen in Byzantine.”

Sophia died. As did Yeats and his father, and Eliot and his, and mine.

Above, at the very top, is a poem by my good friend Nicholas Chaikin. You can see more of his poems here.

Below is a poem I wrote. I’ll now leave you with it as I have to go. My spiritual journey continues It is six am, time to get ready for the race. My bib is attached, the chip is laced into my left shoe. The tendon in the back of it is tight and painful.

My friend Hermon Mehari, the trumpet player, just handed me my first cup of coffee. There are five of us in our running group. And only one bathroom in the Airbnb. And it is an echo chamber.

Our father was in another room,in the basement or down the hallfrom where we were sittingin comfortable swivel chairsaround a long polished tabledrinking coffee and discussingthe relative merits of oak, brass and marble.Each of us had a brochure and a pen.I was a bookseller. It was a very sunny morning.There were seascapes on the wallsand urns on the mantelpiece.A sharpened rayslid through the slats in the blinds.I squinted. My siblings squinted.Our mother, red-eyed and angryat the world, started to laugh.

– Christopher Mooney, “Our father was in another room”, 2023

Thank you for reading. Wish me luck.

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In an interview in Le Monde in 1992, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described the modern state as an ambidextrous animal that, with its left hand, the “so-called spending ministries” – in charge of crèches, schools, universities, social services, hospitals, courts of justice and publicly supported “cultural industries” such as television, radio, cinema, theatres, museums and libraries – tries to hold society together and make it fit to live in. Meanwhile, its right hand, “the énarques1 of the Ministry of Finance, the public or private banks and the ministerial cabinets”, holds society upside down and shake profits out of its pockets. Or its mouth:

Locked in the narrow and short-sighted economism of the IMF-worldview that also wreaks havoc on North-South relations, all these half-skilled economists obviously fail to consider the real short-term, and especially long-term, costs of the material and moral misery that is the only certain consequence of economically legitimised realpolitik: delinquency, crime, alcoholism, traffic accidents, etc. Here again, the right hand, obsessed with the question of financial balances, ignores what the left hand does, confronted with the often very costly social consequences of “budgetary savings”… Many of the social movements we are witnessing (and will witness) express the revolt of the small nobility of the State against the great nobility of the State.

In November 2015, two days after the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis, a group of French theatre directors revisited Bourdieu’s double-handed concept in an open letter in Le Monde:

If we want to reinvent society, if we want to give a chance to the France "after [the attacks]”, we must reclaim public spaces. Secular and free spaces, protected from the violent pressure of private interests, whether religious or economic. Spaces in which to unfold narratives and develop imaginations. Spaces in which to elaborate the hope of a habitable world. This is an urgent struggle, and it is a political struggle…

And what we say here about this novelty of the theatre, because we love it and defend it, because it is our vocation and mission, is also true for the other arts [and] everything that Pierre Bourdieu, in Misery of the World, called “the left hand of the state”: all those public services that create social cohesion, that seek to make it liveable and not simply profitable. For too long in our country, a summary and very ideological discourse has tried to disqualify these public services by making them responsible for all the evils and all the failures. To such an extent that the people and institutions that embody them have had as their only perspectives over the last few decades the reduction of budgets and staff, “rationalization” and “restructuring”. So much so that the very word "public,” so essential to us as men and women of the theatre, has come to be seen as an insult, because of the identification of all that it covers with “expenses” (the famous “public expenses”) that are necessarily “excessive” and “inefficient”. The damage caused by this narrow conception of politics and society cannot be denounced enough. We continue to suffer the effects.

What was true in 1993 and 2015 is, of course, just as true in 2023, only more so. And nowhere more so than in France, where examples of “economically legitimised realpolitik” are a dime a dozen.

The “small nobility of the State”, responding to the right-handers’ violent and autocratic imposition of two more years of late-life drudgery, are indeed in pleine révolte, getting their heads bashed in shoulder to shoulder with the working classes, and now not even allowed to bang a pot.

Funding throughout the social body is focussed obsessively on pecuniary return. Hospitals are under-financed, universities are all business, prisons are purely for profit.

Money doesn’t just talk, it screeches, purrs, whines, bitches and bleats. As P.J. O’Rourke, author of “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink” put it, way back in politically uncorrected 1979, “you shouldn’t stick your nose in other people’s business, except to make a buck.” Amusing then; today it accurately sums up the characteristic customs and conventions of most of our “transactionalities”. Life has become one big game of Texas hold 'em. And we’re all in. And we’re all bluffing.

But forget 1979, 1992, 2015 and 2023, and travel back with me to 1958, to the 19th of May press conference of General de Gaulle in the hotel ballroom of the Gare d’Orsay.

Five days before, French paratroopers, sent by the rebel officers behind the military coup d'état in Algeria, flew from Algiers to Corsica and took control of the island. The mini-putsch was bloodless and symbolic: 15 years before, Corsica had been the first French department liberated from the Nazis.

Once in position, the putschistes demanded that General de Gaulle be returned to power. If he wasn’t, they warned, parachutists and armoured forces based in Rambouillet, just outside Paris, would attack the French Assembly.

The government immediately resigned. President Rene Coty appointed de Gaulle Prime Minister, with a mandate to dismantle the Fourth Republic.

Now zero in on the moment when, after announcing that he was “ready to assume the powers of the Republic”, and promising to not inviolate civil liberties (and please watch this hilarious video of de Gaulle doing stand-up à la Louis de Funes) –

Have I ever done that? Quite the opposite, I have re-established them when they had disappeared. Who honestly believes that, at age 67, I would start a career as a dictator?

– the general shook the hand of André Malraux, who had served as his Minister of Information in his first government in 1945. Recently renamed to that position, one of the first bits of info Malraux shared with the world was that the French were using torture in Algeria. Not only that: he promised that as President de Gaulle would put an end to it. De Gaulle, horrified, decided his spokesperson needed to be reassigned. He turned to Michel Debré, the new Prime Minister, and said, “It will be useful for you to keep Malraux. Carve out a ministry for him, for example, a grouping of services that you can call ‘Cultural Affairs’. Malraux will give relief to your government. Only he is capable of giving the tone and grandeur that is needed. He epitomises the French genius of panache.”

Thus was born the first French Ministry of Culture.

“I make things up, but the world is beginning to resemble my fabrications.” – André Malraux.

No other homme politique has a resumé quite like André Malraux’s. One of the last monstres sacrés of French literature – after Camus, the country’s best-selling writer, his literary success was in part based on his reputation as a man of action, a hybrid of T.E. and D.H. Lawrence: erudite art critic, anti-colonial adventurer, squadron leader in the Spanish Civil war, decorated résistant, and a con artist who forged his wartime records, inventing gunshot wounds and writing that he had been “tortured” – which was true, but not by the Germans. By his shoes, which were too small for his feet.

“One third genius, one third fraud, one third incomprehensible,” said Raymond Aron, his chief of staff at the Ministry of Information in 1945. Among his CV’s “embellishments”: doctor of letters (he dropped out of school at 17, before receiving his bac); student of oriental languages who read Sanskrit, Persian and ancient Greek; people's commissioner in China; member of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang; and friend and confidante of Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai. As they say: n’importe quoi.

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He sold fake Picassos to finance his Tintin-like escapades, which included a trek through the Yemeni dessert to find the lost realm of Queen Sheba, and a tomb-raiding expedition in Cambodia, where he sawed Khmer bas-reliefs off temple walls, for which he went prison.

He never met Stalin in Moscow or Goebbels in Berlin, as he liked to tell people. But he did meet and admire Trotsky in 1922. He told Richard Nixon, who asked Malraux to brief him before his China trip, that he had “known Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai in China in 1930” and that he “kept in touch with them intermittently over the years.” This wasn’t true, though in Beijing, in 1965, he had a very brief audience with Zhou, who said nothing, and Mao, who offered a few platitudes.

Nixon's advisors had differing opinions on Malraux's performance. Leonard Garment found Malraux “fascinating because he had a fascinating story”. John Scali, on the other hand, said he was not impressed by Malraux's ‘musings’, which were muddled, contradictory, and riddled with oversights or illogicalities; Malraux was, for Scali, “a pretentious old man weaving obsolete ideas into a special framework for the world as he would have wanted it to be.” Henry Kissinger, in his memoirs published in 1979, deplored the fact that Malraux's knowledge of China was very backward and his short-term predictions "outrageously wrong.” – Wikipedia

A fellow traveller before the war, he became a vehement anti-communist after the Soviet invasion of Hungary 1956. However, already deeply under the spell of gaullisme, he had long before abandoned his comrades on the left. From 1958 to 1969, despite his opposition to the Algerian war, he loyally served as the General’s sycophantic house intellectual and goodwill ambassador.

Ravaged by alcohol, antidepressants, tranquillisers, neuroleptics and sleeping pills, his erudition became mystical and perplexing, his self-aggrandising myth-making thicker and hollower. Nominated and rejected by the Nobel committee more than 30 times, he has since all but disappeared from bookshelves – La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate), which won the Prix Goncourt in 1933, is his only work still in wide circulation – and, though pantheonised by Chirac in 1996, would probably be forgotten today were it not for what he did for – or depending on your point of view, to – French culture.

Briefly put: he reorganised the country’s theatre system, turning the national theatres into public establishments, splitting the Odéon off from the Comédie Française and creating a third, the Théâtre de France, and putting his friend Jean-Louis Barrault in charge of it. Barrault would later fall out with Malraux because of his support of the Mai 68 demonstrations, but not before premiering plays by Ionesco, Beckett, Duras, Claudel and Genet, including Genet’s Les Paravents (The Screens). Created just after the end of the Algerian war, every performance of The Screens was violently disrupted by extreme right militants, who, along with most of the right wing in parliament, called for its banning, which Malraux eloquently opposed on the floor of the Assemblée Nationale.

He ended Paris’s monopoly on art and its creation by opening Maisons de la Culture across the country. These “modern cathedrals… make the capital works of humanity accessible to the greatest number of French people… Here any 16-year-old child, however poor, can have a real contact with their national heritage and with the glory of the spirit of humanity.”

He gave subsidies to theatre and dance troupes, both public and private. He did the same for publishers and bookstores, and film producers and distributors. He broadened unemployment benefits for artists, performers, filmmakers and technicians, extended social security to writers, created the Centre National d'Art Contemporain (which was later integrated into the Centre Pompidou), founded the Biennale de Paris, rebuilt the Château de Versailles, wrote laws regulating the restoration and protection of historical monuments and sites across France, established a national musical policy for France, revamped and revitalised the music conservatory program, changed the way architecture was taught, commissioned major public works by Braque, Picasso and Giacometti, and created a general inventory of French artistic patrimoine.

Not bad for a lying lush who popped pills like candy and took a hacksaw to buddhas in Angor Wat.

This, as usual, is getting long in the mouth, so I’ll stop here, and weigh in later on the cultural consequences of the “Malrucian” era. On whether public subsidies for the arts supports or stymies creation, nourishes the exceptional or coddles the conforming, protects artists or turns them into servile bureaucrats. Can art be democratised? Can culture be produced by budgetary means? Etcetera. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. But right now it’s time to hit send, get dressed and celebrate.

Celebrate what? Hexagon’s first birthday, that’s what! Talk about an “accident of the universe”: one year (and 41 posts) old and still mewling away and toddling along, thanks to neither the left nor the right hand of the state but to my beloved subscribers, without whom I would have had to throw this baby out long ago, and re-submerge my entire being and budget in the dingy bathwater of hired hackism. To those who have supported this endeavour, whether by kicking in a few bucks or just by reading this far, thank you. I am in your debt, and will raise a glass to you this afternoon at Chambre Noire’s 4th annual German wine-tasting at Le Consular. If you’re in Paris, pop by.

Otherwise, bis zur nächsten Woche!

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1Graduates of the École nationale d'administration (ENA), the “Grand Ecole” where was most senior civil servants of the French state were selected and trained. Created in 1945, it was replaced by the Institut national du service public (INSP) in 2022.

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I just published my first note on Substack Notes, and would love for you to join me there.

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Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.

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How to joinHead to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Hexagon, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of Hexagon can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.

If you encounter any issues, you can always refer to the Notes FAQ for assistance. Looking forward to seeing you there.

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HEXAGONZO JOURNALISM: I go to Taiwan with my family, eat delicious street food, climb a mountain, visit some temples, drink so many Taiwanese pour-overs I sweat pure coffee, and return to Paris without creating an international incident. A few days later, Emmanuel Macron, at an all-time low in French opinion polls because of his rammed-through retirement reforms, goes to mainland China with his wife, 60 French business leaders, the film director Jean-Jacques Annaud, the musician Jean-Michel Jarre and Jarre’s Chinese-born, Singaporean actress girlfriend Gong Li, and the whole world goes apeshit.

Coincidence or its parallel opposite, its reversal, its upending? Not for me to say. Something, however, is definitely afoot, attached to a leg, requiring a pull. So heave ho, here we go.

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According to elysee.fr, the official propaganda site of the French state, on his first state visit to China in January 2018, Macron and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping “established a bilateral roadmap with concrete actions and projects.” Macron made three promises: to visit China once a year; call Xi regularly on the phone; and multiply sideline meetings with Xi at summits such as the G20. Nothing new here: in 1949, France was the first major western country to establish diplomatic relations with Communist China. Prior to that, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping studied in Paris, and fell hard for Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Etcetera.

To show his appreciation, Macron brought Xi a gift horse – a brown stallion from the Republican Guard named Vésuve de Brekka. Xi, presumably, didn’t look it in the mouth, or if he did, liked the look of its teeth, and subsequently green-lit a host of fat contracts with Airbus, EDF, LVMH, L'Oréal, Veolia and other French companies.

Vésuve de Brekka, 12 January 2018. Two years before COVID. So why the mask?The following year, Macron gave Xi a bottle of 1978 Romanée Conti – chosen because 1978 was an excellent year for Burgundy pinot noir – a bottle of 1978 Romanée Conti was auctioned in January 2019 for HK$186,000 (€21,539) by Sotheby’s in Hong Kong – and because 1978 was the year Deng Xiaoping came to power, and Macron, then a precocious one-year-old, became, as the French say, “propre” – potty-trained. Earlier that day the two presidents had tasted a Domaine Louis Latour’s Corton Grancey Grand Cru 2010, Gérard Bertrand’s Château L’Hospitalet, La Clape, Coteaux du Languedoc 2016 and a Cheval Blanc 2006, before agreeing to a trade deal between the European Union and China to give legal protection to 100 of Europe’s ‘Geographical Indications (GI)’ in China – of which 26 were French GIs (“Champagne”, “Bordeaux” etc.) and 100 Chinese GIs in EU member states.

Earlier that year, at a private dinner on the French Riviera in March, the two sipped Pol Roger Sir Winston Churchill 2000 Champagne, Petrus 2002 and Joseph Drouhin’s Marquis de Laguiche Montrachet grand cru 2011. According to Le Figaro, the accompanying food included asparagus, crab and fillet of veal, and “local specialities”.

A year later, the pandemic stopped the party.

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For this most recent trip, Macron brought along some serious “soft power”, including many representatives of the French film industry, such as the 80-year-old filmmaker Annaud, who, like Gong Li, is on the strategic committee of the France-China Foundation. Also on the committee are former French prime ministers Edouard Phillipe, Laurent Fabius and Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, the architect Jean Nouvel and Li Zhaoxing, the Chinese Foreign Minister from 2003 to 2007.

Annaud attended various official functions, including the state dinner in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. He also promoted his 2022 disaster epic Notre-Dame on Fire, which opened theatrically nationwide in China during the visit. It is the first French film to be released in the country since the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Annaud is well-known in China because of his 2015 Chinese-French co-production Wolf Totem, shot in Inner Mongolia and based on a bestselling novel by Chinese author Jiang Rong. The film earned €115 million in China and was the country’s official Oscar selection for best foreign language film category that year.

Annaud was not always the poster boy of Franco-Chinese relations. In 1997, he made Seven Years in Tibet (1997) for Sony.The film starred Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer, the Nazi SS Sargent who became the Dalai Lama’s tutor during World War II. That same year, Disney released Kundun (1997), directed byMartin Scorsese, which told the story of the Dalai Lama’s life in Lhasa during the late 1930s and the 1940s, and MGM released Red Corner (1997), about an American businessman, played by Richard Gere, accused of murder in China.

As Orville Schell puts it in a great piece (“Appeasement at the Cineplex”) in last week’s NYRB (paywalled), “Chinese cultural watchdogs immediately attacked these films for idealizing ‘feudal society’ in traditional Tibet and for ‘demonizing China.’” Kundun caused Disney to lose a theme park deal in Shanghai. Disney products in China were banned. The company’s CEO Michael Eisner was forced to grovel to Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, calling the film “a stupid mistake” and “a form of insult to our friends.” To this day, Richard Gere (a long-time supporter of Tibet) is blacklisted by Hollywood.

As for Annaud:

Eisner was hardly alone in his servility. Annaud, who had been an admirer of the Dalai Lama, restored himself to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) favour by making a classic Maoist-style “self-criticism.” “Due to the lack of thorough understanding of Chinese history and culture, I could not predict the adverse effects of [Seven Years in Tibet],” he intoned. “I regret it.” Then he offered a bonus genuflection by acknowledging that Tibet was “part of Chinese territory.” Reborn as a full-fledged panda hugger, Annaud was invited to the Shanghai International Film Festival, where he accommodatingly wondered, “What would we think in France if the Chinese were interfering with Corsica? Or what would Americans think if Chinese were interfering with Puerto Rico?”

Seven Years in Tibet gave Annaud even more of an itch in 2017, when the Paradise Papers investigation showed that the year of its release, 1997, during which it generated €110 million at the world box office, he squirrelled away his share (€1.2 million) in an offshore account on the island of Guernsey. In March 2021 he was sentenced to a nine-month suspended prison sentence and a €120,000 fine for tax fraud laundering.

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Cut to the afore-mentioned apeshit. It started after the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH-owned financial daily Les Echos and Mathias Döpfner’s Politico published a much Elysée-edited conversation with Macron, held during his flight back to Paris after the three-day state visit. During the interview Macron reiterated France’s claim of strategic autonomy and called upon the European Union to avoid getting embroiled in a conflict over Taiwan driven by the “US agenda and a Chinese overreaction”.

“The trap for Europe would be that, at the moment when it achieves a clarification of its strategic position, it gets caught up in a disruption of the world and in crises that are not our own.”

None of this is particularly new. Macron and every French president since de Gaulle have laid some sort of claim to strategic autonomy. The problem was not so much what Macron said as where he said it, and when – just as, in response to the meeting the week before between Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy – 50 Chinese military ships and 70 Chinese fighter planes bombers started playing footsie with the Taiwan Strait’s median line.

A clumsy mistake. Undiplomatic. Ill-timed. As was, many argue, the trip to China in the first place, coming as it did just two weeks after Xi’s trip to Russia. But, again, it does not represent a change in France’s position toward the United States, China or Taiwan, and is very much in line with French political opinion across the board, from Mélenchon on the hard left to Le Pen and Zemmour on the extreme right. And Macron is no doubt correct in his assumption that Putin’s dependence on Xi Jinping makes China “the only country in the world able to have an immediate and radical impact on the Ukraine conflict”. But nothing came from their discussions. Except, of course, some spectacular trade deals with China. Which, despite all the talk of de-coupling from China – in a “world order” only (and barely) held together by the US dollar, and in the face of the United States’ upcoming debt-ceiling debacles and the subsequent budgetary and political crises looming this summer everywhere – are precisely the type of deals that France, and Europe, and everyone else are desperate for.

Last year, China was the largest source of EU goods imports and the third largest destination for EU goods exports. Chinese airlines bought 350 Airbus aircraft during the pandemic, ordered another 140 in November, and a contract signed last week will deliver a whole new production line.

LVMH is now worth €447 billion, up 17% from last year, and China accounts for close to a third of its revenue. Hermes is worth €206 billion; its revenue is a quarter higher than last year, driven in good part by booming sales of Birkin bags in China. Toss in L’Oreal’s €225 billion and you’ve accounted for close to half the full investment value of Paris’s CAC-40 index.

Macron, in a first for a French president, visited Guangzhou, where most of the Chinese nuclear power plants built or being built with France are located, and where China’s scrambling digital industry and start-up culture is based – designated by Xi as “strategic” and “essential” after the American crack-down on high-tech trade. Etcetera. This also goes some way towards explaining Macron’s oft-repeated but almost-never-discussed mentioning of de-dollarisation, high-lit last week by the French firm Total’s first energy supply contract negotiated in yuan, for the delivery of an ‘unprecedented’ 65,000 tonnes of liquid natural gas (LNG) from the United Arab Emirates.

Back to the gift table.

This time, Macron brought Xi the two Marc Riboud photographs above and a Sèvres porcelain vase decorated with golden fish. We brought, or rather were brought by, my mother-in-law, who studied medicine at the University of Taiwan in the early 1960s. We then, as a gesture of soft power diplomacy, left behind our youngest daughter to study Mandarin for three months. I forget what exactly her newly acquired name, Yang enshi (杨英石), given to her by her grandmother, means, but the first half, Yang, is also the first half of the name of the giant panda in the Atlanta zoo, Yang Yang, the mate of Lun Lun and the father of Mei Lan, Xi Lan, Po, Mei Lun, Mei Huan, Ya Lun and Xi Lun. Because giant pandas are solitary and males do not participate in cub-rearing, Yang Yang is kept separate from Lun Lun and their offspring. This I find very sad, but not as sad as the plight of the Memphis Zoo’s Ya Ya, who is suffering from a horrible skin rash, and whose mate Le Le died in February, just before the couple’s scheduled return to a wildlife reserve in China.

These and other giant pandas are part of China’s ongoing panda diplomacy program. The animals are leased to zoos for a period of time for a fee usually between €500,000 to €1 million a year each.

Once on the verge of extinction, the bears are now said to be thriving because of the program.

There are two great pandas at the Taipei Zoo. I’ll put their story in a footnote.1 My daughter Yang enshi has yet to visit them.

Nor has she visited the great pandas at the Beauval Zoo in France’s Loire Valley. In 2017, Yuen Meng was born in the zoo to Yuan Zi and Huan Huan after a complicated mating (female great pandas are only in heat 48 hours a year, and male pandas do not have a very strong libido).

A 2013 Oxford University study describes the links between economic agreements and “Soft ‘Cuddly" Power”:

Two trends can be discerned in recent panda trades: first, they involve Asian neighbours, with whom China has signed free trade agreements since 2009. Second, they involve nations that supply China with natural resources or advanced technologies.

The pandas loaned to France in 2012 fall into the latter camp. According to Agence France, delivery “was delayed until the G20 summit could resolve the financial crisis in Europe. Then, according to the BBC, “the panda gift-loan coincided with an estimated US$20 billion package of deals involving the supply of uranium oxide and construction of a uranium treatment plant in China by French nuclear giant Areva [now Orano], and an investment by the energy giant Total for a Chinese petrochemical plant.”

The bear cub was supposed to remain in France until his third birthday, after which it was to be returned to China and set free in a wildlife reserve. However, the pandemic delayed Yuan Meng’s departure. Which explains why Rodolphe Delord, the CEO of Beauval Zoo, was part of the French delegation on Macron’s state visit. What was negotiated has not yet been disclosed.

I’ll leave you now with this delightful clip of the cub’s christening, during which his godmother – Brigitte Macron – said that “Yuan Meng is the energetic and vigorous fruit of the Franco-Chinese friendship, of this solid friendship.” The cub is now six years old and fully grown. Judging by what we see in the video, I fully expect to see him out on the streets come May Day, participating in what the labour unions, despite the Constitutional Council’s validation of Macron’s pension reform on Friday, are hoping will be the “manifestation du siècle” – the “protest of the century”.

Thanks for reading. Have a quick look below the video at two other species of bears duking it out near the Taiwan Straight. And please press all the appropriate buttons on your way out. Ta.

1From Wikipedia: In 2005, Lien Chan, Chairman of the Kuomintang, the then sichuan party in Taiwan, visited mainland China. As part of the talks between Lien and the CCP, two pandas (later named Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan, meaning "reunion" in Chinese) were offered as a gift to the people of Taiwan.

While the idea was popular with the Taiwanese public, it was opposed by the Republic of China (ROC) government of Taiwan, then led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which favors Taiwanese independence and staunchly opposes unification with the People's Republic of China. The gift of pandas was seen as an attempt by the CCP to draw the ROC government into its "united front". While several zoos in Taiwan made bids to host the pandas, the ROC government raised objections, ostensibly on the grounds that pandas were not suited to the Taiwanese climate and that Taiwan did not have the expertise to rear pandas successfully. It was widely understood, however, that these were pretexts underlaid by political considerations by the DPP-led government to maintain its distance from the PRC government. Another technical issue is a dispute over the applicability of the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES). In 1998, China offered the Republic of China two giant pandas in exchange for wartime peace. The PRC insisted that a transfer from mainland China to Taiwan was a domestic transfer, not subject to CITES, while the ROC government disputed this and would not accept the pandas without CITES procedures.[28] On March 11, 2006, the ROC formally rejected the offer, with President Chen Shui-bian explaining in his weekly newsletter, "A-bian (Chen's nickname) sincerely urges the Chinese leaders to leave the giant pandas in their natural habitat, because pandas brought up in cages or given as gifts will not be happy."

Following a change of government in Taiwan, in July 2008, the ROC government led by the Kuomintang stated that it would accept the gift of two four-year-old giant pandas. In December 2008, the government approved the import of pandas under the terms of "species of traditional herbal medicine." Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan arrived at Taipei Zoo later in the same month.

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The rues less travelled – wouldn’t that be something? Not the way we experienced it a couple of years back, imposed by a spillover bug. By choice, by design. Because it’s a grinding, gruelling chaos every step of the way out there. All-hour rush hour, every street jammed, cars backed up for miles, every one of their single occupants on the phone, barely moving, spewing invective and particulates, honking every time the light changes because they’ve shifted only a few feet forward. Of course, just as bad are the cyclists dodging in and out between, sanctimonious bellringers who think they own the road and are above the law. Worse are the nervous newbies who bought bikes because of Covid, who dutifully wait in their shiny helmets for the lights to turn before wobbling off unsteadily into intersections, dozens at a go clogging up the cycle paths, rendering them impassable. The electric cyclists are worse still, worse even than the obnoxiously loud motorcyclists, as they think they’re somehow saving the planet by being so green, which is nonsense, and so quiet, and who smugly trundle past without breaking a sweat – why these fat-arsed layabouts get rebates from the government is beyond me. Of course, none are as bad as the loathsome motorists, who should be incarcerated, sent to re-education camps, forced to commute on pogo sticks. Ditto truck drivers, scooterists, monowheelers, gyropoders, hoverboarders and skateboarders. Buses, fine, but with their own lanes – and ideally not in the city proper, but on the periphery or in the suburbs. I’ll never get on one, but like metros they’re good for getting old people to and from their medical appointments.

But the most hateful, the most insidious, the most dangerous of all?

According to the Paris police prefect, three pedestrians a day were injured on streets and sidewalks in 2022. Of these, 1.19 a day were compensated because the City recognised its responsibility for the accidents: potholes, bumps and cracks in the pavement, bollards in the wrong place. The rest were smacked down by vehicles – cars, trucks, motorcycles, bikes and scooters, in that order – just for doing what Parisians do: protesting or flaneuring about aimlessly, gawking at pastries and lingerie, waiting for Fifi to do her business, discussing Descartes two and three abreast or sexting with their extra-conjugales.

Of the 14 600 Parisian deaths last year, 18 were pedestrians within 30 days of a traffic accident. This number dwarfs the city’s other traffic fatalities in 2022 – one cyclist, two motorists, three electric scooterists and four motorcyclists.

In all, 28 needless deaths that on April 2, 2022, Parisians took the first step towards preventing from ever happening again.

Last Sunday, the Paris City Council held a referendum “for or against self-service scooters”, of which there are around 15,000 in Paris. Introduced in 2018 to encourage “soft travel”, the trottinettes quickly became a disruptive force. The government regulated them in 2019, passing by-laws that enforced a 20 km/h speed limit, one driver and on cycle paths only, and no parking on sidewalks.

Further regulations were added: a speed limit of 10 km/h in “slow zones” in the centre of Paris, in front of schools and areas with high pedestrian density.

And then, despite these efforts, in mid-June, a 32-year-old Italian woman was struck and killed by an electric scooter on a pedestrian path along the Seine.

The City decided it was time to call upon its citizens.

We wanted to ask Parisians to assess the regulation in place in 2020. The situation has improved since the arrival of free-floating scooters in Paris in 2018. At the time, there were more than twelve operators and an urban jungle phenomenon. We were the first city to use the system provided for in the 2019 law on the orientation of mobility: no more than three operators [Dott, Lime and Tier], 15,000 machines maximum, and as many parking spaces created. But too many problems remain. This is a matter of debate. It is not absurd to ask the inhabitants their opinion on this subject which concerns their daily lives.

Parisian responded, but not exactly in droves. A Harris Interactive poll showed that only 33% of 18-24-year-olds had “already heard of the vote” before Sunday, versus 77% of 50-64-year-olds and 90% of 65-year-olds and over.

“It doesn't matter how many there are,” the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, told AFP. The “tools of participatory democracy improve by using them.”

Paris streets being the killing fields that they are, fewer than 8% of those eligible to vote dared teeter into a polling station and cast a ballot. Of those that did, almost 90% voted for a total ban.

This is a step in the right direction. It means that the 10,767,792 scooter rentals last year in Paris are a thing of the past, and the 400,000 people who use them each month – four times as many people as the 100,000 who voted to ban them – will have to find another way to snarl up city transport.

That almost three-quarters of these trottinette users are upstart hipster 18-35-year-olds who wouldn’t dream of shlepping out on a Sunday to a poorly advertised “votation citoyenne” (which only cost 390,000 euros to hold) because it would interfere with their brunch plans, makes this “écrasante” victory even more satisfying to a vieux schnock like yours truly.

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Next, let’s take out the blasted bikes.

Forget the so-called “soft-travel” propaganda about biking in the countryside being more dangerous than the cities:

The Sunday sportsman, wearing Lycra shorts, a colourful jersey and a streamlined helmet, runs a much higher risk than the Nantes employee who rides a Bicloo, hair blowing in the wind, to get to the office. – Olivier Razemon, Le pouvoir de la pédale (2014)

Or that, as the unabashed pédalephile Razemon delights in pointing out, the more the number of bicycle users in an area increases, the more their relative mortality decreases, as well as that of pedestrians and motorists, because the balance of power on the road is reversed:

Cyclists contribute, by their very presence, to slowing down traffic. The more cyclists there are, the more they cause motorists and motorcyclists to slow down. This is what we call “safety in numbers.”

None of this matters. Even after the huge spike in bike purchases and rentals during the pandemic, cycling in French cities increased a further 34% in 2022, according to the French Road Safety Observatory (ONISR). More Parisians travel by bike than by car. More than 400 000 people have accounts with the city’s bike-sharing system Vélib'. More than 145 000 of these clunky eyesores were rented each day in 2022. Close to a million bikes are outright owned by Parisians. And one of them died on one last year – a human life, snuffed, because of a vehicle consisting of two wheels held in a frame one behind the other, propelled by pedals and steered with handlebars attached to the front wheel. This scourge must be stopped. And once it is, we will take out the rest of these gadfly drifters, these peripatetic vagrants, these unsettled, shiftless movers and shakers.

Regulation, law enforcement, public education? Pshaw. If people were meant to ride and drive things, God would have given them gear trains. The people’s place is not behind wheels, nor on top of them. The people’s place is in the home. Anything that tempts them, as individuals exercising their so-called fundamental rights, to leave that sanctuary and congest the carriageways, be it wheels, pegs or legs, should be banned.

Except my Brompton.

Thank you for listening.

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“It's not the protest that overflows, it's the overflow that protests”“A breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.” – The Elements of Style

Anything I can do AI can do better. Is this the writing on the wall? Sincerest apologies to Misters Strunk Jr. and Wittgenstein for the above and below but on Sunday, the day of my week usually devoted to the writing and posting of posts, I was sitting in silence in a syncretic Taoist temple on Lion's Head Mountain – or rather, in the Howard Johnson-like hotel hanging off the cliff in front of the temple – researching the most recent reported cases of police violence in France while drinking delicious cup after delicious cup of burdock tea and listening to the temple’s monks chant mantras and bang out Yang tones on sacred metal bowls and wooden Muyu blocks.

RadioGenova @RadioGenovaAfghanistan? North Korea? No, Macron's France. 5:06 PM ∙ Mar 28, 2023

11,296Likes6,346RetweetsAnonyme Citoyen @AnonymeCitoyenDes policiers ont été filmés en train d'asperger de gaz lacrymogène et pousser gratuitement à deux reprises une femme dans les poubelles ce jeudi à Paris #ViolencesPoliceres #revolution2023 #France #ReformeDesRetaites #manif23mars #greve28mars 11:01 AM ∙ Mar 25, 2023

10,470Likes8,808RetweetsAmineBlk @AmineBlk0Quelle violence de la part de la #BRAV #ViolencePolicieres #manifestation 10:53 AM ∙ Mar 22, 2023

33Likes21RetweetsJust as the Tao that can be named is not, they say, the real Tao, these chants were not the real chants, they were pre-recorded, looping continuously dawn through dusk from loudspeakers tucked under the hotel’s swallowtail temple eaves. This is not to diminish them, nor my experience of them, nor the temple and its tea, nor the police and their violence: all were viscerally charged; and the coding, channelling and decoding involved, the conversion of monk, bowl, block, cop, black bloc into waveforms suitable for the paths along which they were sent – to the eaves to the ears, from the mob to the phone to the eyes (never mind the mind) did not lessen their power, nor the meaning of the signals involved. If anything, they amplified them. Not just electronically. Existentially. As does this. For we have stepped through the glass – the ceramic shield, the Gorilla Victus – and become our reflections. And our storage drives. And everything else is noise.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Still, it must be said, the chanting enchants.

Even though it is nothing but ratios between numbers, rhythm and its prediction, what Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz called “a counting that we are not conscious of but which the soul cannot refrain from carrying out: beats or vibrations of sounding bodies that coincide at certain intervals . . . Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.” What’s more, “the pleasures which the eye finds in proportions are of the same nature, and those caused by other senses amount to something similar, although we may not be able to explain them so distinctly.”

“I think therefore I break”One of the monks’ chants gave praise to the Jade Emperor, a representation of the first god, for whom the temple had been built, sometime in the very earliest days of Taiwan’s Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945). The temple was nearly destroyed by an earthquake in 1935, on the very day the Nobel prize-winning writer Kenzaburō Ōe, who died a few days ago, was born. It was demolished and rebuilt, along with the hotel, by the Nationalist Party under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1961 – the same year that Chiang, in response to mainland China’s Great Leap Forward and Project 596, and the fallout from the Sino-Indian War and the Sino-Soviet split, initiated a plan to reconquer mainland China by large-scale invasion.

(1961 wasalso the year I was born, a coincidence that, in another life, I might consider a sign of some auspiciousness, were I so predisposed.)

A second chant praised the Three Pure Ones – Lord of the Numinous Treasure, Lord of the Way and its Virtue, and the aforementioned Jade Emperor, the Lord of the Primordial Beginning. This trinity, which some say arose from early encounters between followers of Christ and disciples of the Tao, are, according to the Lao-tzu, manifestations ofPrimordial Celestial Energy, composed of the highest deities in the pantheon, and yet at the same time as formless as this post.

Two more chants zeroed in on health and longevity – “Wah Sheen, Jing Ru, Bye Lien” (“My heart is as pure as the white lotus blossom”) and “Huh Yu Woh Tong Cheung” (“May the life of the universe live forever with me”) – and a third, the one I was listening to while researching police violence in France, wielded the full power of the six healing sounds.

By research, I mean, as mentioned above, I was looking at my phone. While at the same time listening to the rhythmic clinks and clacks of the bowls and the blocks and the chant’s monosyllabic drone. My inner being thus fully split between these activities – and numerous and numinous others, besides – was thus neither focussed on the eternal Tao nor on the events temporally unfolding at that moment six thousand miles away in France, nor on the writing on the wall or the writing of the post, this post – neither here, then, nor there, nor anywhere in between, and nowhere near the path to enlightenment but lost, as it were, in conflicting and interfering thoughts.

The questions begged: whose enlightenment? Mine? Yours?

“It seems to me,” said Wittgenstein, while chopping vegetables in a country kitchen in Ireland, “that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed ‘Wisdom.’ And then I know exactly what is going to follow: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’”

Vanity. Better to withdraw, lower ambitions, simplify goals, lie flat in goblin mode. So what if you miss your silly, self-imposed deadline? Who cares, old man? People are busy, they have better things to do than read your breezy, egocentric, uninhibited bullshit. Whereof thereof, shut the fuck up.

“It has become clear that real wars are fought not for people or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows. Patterns and moirés that have forgotten us…” – Friedrich Kittler

The temple hotel reminded me of the Grand Hotel in Taipei, built by Chiang Kai-shek at the urging of his wife, Soong Mei-ling on the ruins of a Shinto shrine erected at some point during the island’s 51 years of Japanese rule, which ended with the Emperor’s capitulation to the Allies in 1945. Richard Nixon stayed at the Grand Hotel during his so-called wilderness years, just prior to President de Gaulle’s announcement that he intended to exchange France’s U.S. dollar reserves for gold. Dwight E. Eisenhower, under whom Nixon served as vice-president, had stayed there before Nixon, during his first year in power – making him the only US president to visit Taiwan during his time in office. This was not long after the closed-top car Nixon and his wife Pat were travelling in during a goodwill tour through South America was beset upon by a mob in Caracas in what was called, at the time, the “most violent attack ever perpetrated on a high American official while on foreign soil”.

The hardening of Nixon's attitude toward Latin America, which he came to “equate with violence and irrationality”, has been attributed to his experience of the attack. Some believe this change of mood foreshadowed his subsequent support for covert U.S. actions directed in support of dictatorial regimes in the region. In fact, he would later privately list several nations whose populations, he believed, were too immature for democratic government and would be better administered by authoritarian regimes, specifically citing France, Italy, and all of Latin America “except for Colombia”. (Wikipedia)

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Breakfast, I was told at reception, would be from 6:30 to 7. Dinner, from 5:30 to six. Hot water, in the bathrooms, between 5 and 10 pm.

While I was conducting my research a young monk sat on a white Naugahyde couch in the reception area with her eyes closed. Sleeping or meditating, I could not be sure. The fat temple dog, however, lying on the ground of the courtyard just outside the door, was definitely unconscious, and snoring loudly, front legs scrabbling after ignis fatuus rabbits.

Four women with shaved heads sat cross-legged in a circle nearby, peeling bamboo shoots and de-stemming coriander leaves. A steady procession of people with ski poles and Tilly hats snaked from the parking lot below to the main hall of the temple, where the Jade Emperor dwells. Many had purchased sticks of incense from the gift shop, which they then held lit in front of them, above their heads, in both hands, as they bowed and bobbed to the deity.

Also in the gift shop, at the cashier, next to a display of toy guns, was a bundle of Sunday’s newspapers.

The Council of Europe was alarmed at the “excessive use of force” by the French police at rallies. The Financial Times had declared that “it is time to end the Fifth Republic, with its all-powerful presidency – the closest thing in the developed world to an elected dictator”. Reporters Without Borders deplored the increase in violent behaviour by the police against journalists and the obstruction of information. Five women, university students, were sexually assaulted by police officers after being “kettled” during an anti-49.3 demonstration in Nantes. A man had lost an eye following the bursting of a GM2L grenade in a Parisian demonstration and a woman a thumb in similar conditions in Rouen. Four thousand grenades had been used by the police against demonstrators at the méga-bassine site in Sainte-Soline. Two demonstrators were in comas. Five more were in intensive care.

According to the Ministry of the Interior, 149 gendarmes and police officers were injured in France on Thursday. 172 people were arrested, including 77 in Paris.

Then, the gateau cerise: Due to fears for their safety, King Charles III and his consort’s Saturday-night banquet with Emmanuel Macron and his Grade 10 drama teacher in the Chateau of Versailles had been cancelled.

This led France's “hard-left” leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon to tweet: “The meeting of the kings in Versailles dispersed by popular censure.” Which is inaccurate. Macron is not the king of France, he is its president. However, as the Co-Prince of Andorra, diarchically tandemned with the Bishop of Urgell as that landlocked microstate’s conjoined head of state, he is a nobleman. But is he an honourable one? Is he on the path? Is he, too, destined for his years in the wilderness?

The new British monarch and his consort’s cancellation — this was to have been the first state visit of his reign – rabbited my research down a series of interesting holes, starting with the royal purple Rolls Royce they had been besieged in during violent student protests over tuition fee hikes in London in 2010.

And the 1998 Lafayettepolitical scandal in Taiwan and France, when:

US$500 million commission was paid by Thomson-CSF (now Thales) to French and Taiwanese officials, to facilitate the $3 Billion sale of 6 La Fayette-class frigates to the Taiwanese Navy. Eight people involved in the contract died in unusual and possibly suspicious circumstances. Taiwanese arms dealer Andrew Wang, who was implicated as being part of the affair, fled Taiwan to the UK, after the body of presumptive whistleblower Captain Yin Ching-feng was found in the ocean. (Wikipedia)

And the still raging cash-for-honours scandal involving a Saudi billionaire, a Russian convict and a meeting between then-Prince Charles and:

Bruno Wang (汪家興), a Taiwanese fugitive who describes himself as a Chinese philanthropist and donated ￡500,000 (US$683,522) to the prince’s charity, the Prince’s Foundation… Wang is wanted in Taiwan on charges related to money laundering and being a fugitive from justice… Investigation and cooperation with foreign authorities have found that Bruno Wang’s father, Andrew Wang (汪傳浦), had stashed proceeds from a scandal involving the procurement of Lafayette frigates in 61 bank accounts, mainly in Switzerland, as well as in accounts owned by his family in banks in about a dozen countries and territories, Ministry of Justice officials have said. (Guardian)

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Cutting stalks at noon time, perspiration drips to the earth. Know you that your bowl of rice, each grain from hardship comes?” – Cheng Chan-Pao

At 5:30, there was only one other couple in the giant dining hall. We ate in silence rice, pickled vegetables, and wedges of tofu or perhaps gluten flavoured and textured to resemble grilled salmon.

Mock fish, mock duck, mock mutton, mock beef. Just as naming, apparently, is the origin of all particular things, and freed from desire you realise the mystery, and caught in desire you see only its manifestations, not everything on our plates was what it appeared to be. All of it, however, was delicious.

And all, too, was bliss. And yet, and yet, I was still researching police violence. Still pursuing ideas – or being pursued by ideas – that had, perversely, come into consciousness at precisely the moment of most bliss – halfway along a morning hike up through the mountain’s blossoming mandarine and jasmine groves, past Buddhist and Taoist temples and pavilions, fields of camellia tea, bountiful snack bars, and sacred stands of giant banyan trees.

Violences Policières @violencespolice🟡 Signalement n°5727Manifestants poussés, renversés, violemment matraqués au sol par les policiers pendant une charge. Violence gratuite, toujours sans interpellation.#Paris, 23/03/23, Source 🎥 @TaoualitAmar#ReformeDesRetraites #Greve23Mars #ViolencesPolicieres 5:31 PM ∙ Mar 23, 2023

1,977Likes1,613Retweets“The palace burns and suddenly… everything is ours!” “The riot reforms the mob”The next day, after a breakfast of congee and cabbage, we took a taxi to Zhunan, and then a high-speed train to Taipei. The train was packed, mainly with women my age or older and high school girls. The older women carried fancy boxes of baked goods, the younger backpacks and shoulder bags accessorised with toy animals. Everyone was masked and looking at, but not talking on, their phones. No one talked at all. No one ate. The advertisements on the compartment walls were for cosmetics, skin creams and cod liver oil pills. Many of the skin-cream models were Caucasians. Many of the girls were dressed in sailor-outfit school uniforms, though it was Sunday. A variation on Japanese conspicuous-consumption Kogal culture? No. Most high-school students in Taiwan, despite their reputation for being “strawberries” (sweet, beautiful, easily bruised), follow a seven-day curriculum, with evening classes most days. They work hard, as do their parents. Taiwanese workers worked an average of 2,021 hours in 2020, putting them just behind Singapore, Columbia and Mexico, and almost a month a year ahead of France.

Taiwanese parents keep their children under intense pressure before their university entrance exams, where ranking means everything (depending on your rank, you will be assigned to schools of different levels) . . . this ranking-crazy mentality does not help Taiwan’s educators prepare future graduates for a constructive role in society. Instead, it discourages creativity and independent thought. Moreover, those who fail or are de-selected by the educational system bow out reluctantly and often end up marginalised. – Hugo Tierny, (2017) “Taiwan youth: the rise of a generation”

Other girls wore sweatshirts and baggy jeans. Almost everyone under the age of 70 wore sneakers or shower sandals.

In Taipei, we walked through the 228 Peace Memorial Park, where the February 28 Incident began on that date in 1947. The day before, February 27, 1947:

agents of the State Monopoly Bureau struck a Taiwanese widow suspected of selling contraband cigarettes. An officer then fired into a crowd of angry bystanders, striking one man, who died the next day. Soldiers fired upon demonstrators the next day, after which a radio station was seized by protesters and news of the revolt was broadcast to the entire island. – Wikipedia

The citizenry of Taiwan took control of the island. Mainland Chinese were hunted down and beaten. Over 1,000 were killed. Soon, volunteer brigades of students and former Japanese soldiers restored order and organised “resolution committees”. The committees presented demands to the Kuomintang–led nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek and his provincial governor, Chen Yi. The demands included free elections, greater autonomy, direct participation in upcoming peace treaty negotiations with Japan, and the eradication of government corruption.

Chen Yi called in reinforcements from the mainland. On March 8, he launched a crackdown. The New York Times reported:

“An American who had just arrived in China from Taihoku said that troops from the mainland China arrived there on March 7 and indulged in three days of indiscriminate killing and arrest. For a time, everyone seen on the streets was fired upon, homes were broken into, and occupants were arrested. In the lower income sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead.”

Between 3,000 to 4,000 people were executed. By mid-May, this number had swelled to as many as 18,000. The fear this engendered endured through the almost four subsequent decades of martial law and beyond. It is said to be the reason why, until the end of the martial law period, Taiwanese people were indifferent to politics. But then, as Christopher H. Achen and T.Y. Wang showed in a 2019 study:

Taiwan underwent remarkable economic change between the mid-1960s and 1980s as its gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an average rate of 9% per year. A series of political reforms were launched in the late 1980s, including the lifting of martial law, legalization of political parties, and termination of restrictions on public assembly and freedom of speech. With the first popular election of a president in 1996, an impoverished authoritarian state had become a prosperous and vibrant democracy.

Initially, the island citizens’ political participation expanded substantially. The 2000 election season began with intense competition within the ruling Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) and the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Then in the general election, a three-way race, Chen Shui-bian of the pro-independence DPP defeated the two candidates of an internally divided KMT by winning the election with just 39% of the popular vote. During the campaign, all three candidates made great efforts to garner electoral support, and the intense political competition led to an impressive voter turnout of 82.7%.

Taiwan's voter turnout declined nearly 15 percentage points after the 2000 vote. “All ages voted less in 2016 than before, but the drop was particularly severe among younger voters, who turned out at rates up to 20 percentage points lower than in 2004. Thus Taiwan resembles other mature democracies like the U.S., Canada, Sweden, France and Finland, where declining turnout has been shown to afflict the young disproportionately.”

In 2020, however, renewed support for and opposition to independence pushed turnout to 74.90%, the highest since 2008. A figure only slightly higher than the overall voter turnout in last year’s presidential election in France.

StatistaHowever, only 58.65% of eligible French citizens under the age of 40 voted. From a March 2022 report by the Conseil Economique, Social et Environnemental:

The link between young people, institutions and elected representatives has become deeply distorted, as evidenced by the record abstention rate among 18-24-year-olds . . . However, the younger generations are neither less engaged nor less interested in politics than their elders. This engagement is less manifested through the ballot box, but increasingly through other channels: online petitions, demonstrations, boycotts, online content distribution, etc.

Of these “other channels” participation in demonstrations is the most uniquely French. Protest movements are on the rise everywhere, but no one takes to the streets with anywhere near the frequency and urgency of the French.

This is especially true today of young French. Students and youths have recently pushed for reforms in Spain, South Africa, Chile, Turkey, Israel and elsewhere. But in France the number of young people participating in the latest wave of protests is, if not unprecedented, only precedented by the events of Mai 1968.

As long as the country’s youth largely stayed away from the two months of trade-union-led street demonstrations and transport strikes against Macron’s plan to raise the pension age from 62 to 64, the government felt the protest movement would be manageable. But street demonstrations on Tuesday have shown how far anti-Macron feeling and anger at the use of constitutional executive powers to push through the pension changes without a parliamentary vote, have spurred growing numbers of young people to take part.

There is a particular fury among French youth at what is seen as the heavy-handed policing of demonstrations and clashes with riot police. More than 90,000 students intended to join street marches on Tuesday, three times more than were present last week. – Guardian

It is this that sets the French apart in the west.

And the Taiwanese in the east.

On March 18, 2014, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan was occupied by members of the “Black Island Nation Youth,” a student political action committee opposed to a trade bill with China they perceived as too favourable to Beijing:

The several hundred occupiers repelled police efforts to eject them, escorted out the few officers on duty, and barricaded the doors with seats tied together with rope. The occupation, later known as the 318 or Sunflower Movement would last 24 days and spawn the biggest pro-democracy protest rally in the island’s history, reframe popular discourse about Taiwan’s political and social trajectory, precipitate the midterm electoral defeat of the ruling party, and prefigure unprecedented protest in nearby Hong Kong. (Ian Rowen, The Journal of Asian Studies)

The Sunflowers were influenced by an earlier group, the Wild Strawberries, who in 2008 subverted the strawberry-snowflake stereotype of Taiwanese millennials by aggressively drawing attention to the then-government’s pro-China stance and increasingly close political and economic ties with the mainland. The Wild Strawberries in turn were influenced by the Wild Lily Movement of 1990, which successfully forced the then-government to step up its stated commitment to democratic institutional reform.

In 2016, the strawberries/sunflowers/lilies propelled Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to victory. Tsai adopted much of the Sunflower Movement’s platform. She promised to counter economic stagnation and inequality, lower the voting age from 20 to 18, and make Taiwan a “normal country,” distinct from mainland China. (Polls since 2015 consistently show that more than 80% of respondents aged between 20 and 29 believe that Taiwan should become an independent nation, and a 2022 poll by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy found 82% of respondents aged between 20 and 29 were willing to defend Taiwan if “China uses force against Taiwan for unification”.) Since, they’ve kept up pressure on her to deliver. In 2018, for example, massive demonstrations by young Taiwanese forced the government to uphold its promise to become the first state in Asia legalise same-sex marriage, which it did in 2019.

Then Covid hit, and Taiwan’s youth, like people everywhere, joined in the Great Resignation. But they still gave Tsai a landslide victory in 2020.

And here we are.

“Retirement at 16”Generational identities confuse me. Naming them after fruits and flowers doesn’t help. And the whole enterprise strikes me as suspect. But that’s probably just the old fart in me, blowing hot breeze. Still, I can never keep them straight – when does boom turn to X turn to Y turn to Z? Not important. Taiwan has by far the youngest demographics in Northeast Asia, unlike mainland China, which has the fastest ageing society and working population in human history. France has the second youngest population in Europe, just behind Belgium, and, thanks to long-standing incentives and great childcare, the highest fertility rate. The median age in Taiwan is 41.3 years while in France it is 42.7 years. But Taiwan has an alarmingly low birth rate, 1.07 children per woman, compared to 1.92 in France. Both countries have nominal immigration, so these birth rates are too low to maintain a stable population, which requires a fertility rate of 2.1. But still. Still what? Still researching. Still scabbing together something to say. Still not still.

“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” Lao Tsu.

“The world is changing its skin, will it be beautiful?”Wanderer’s Nachtlied, II (“Über allen Gipfeln”)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . . . thought established authority had an overriding right and duty to impose order, and he had little interest in procedures of representation or theories of the popular will. The creed was subtle, pragmatic, and benevolently paternalist, but it would be a travesty to see Goethe as a servile courtier or unprincipled egoist, though many have seen him in this light during his lifetime and afterward. – Britannica

At some moment during the evening of September 6, 1780, Goethe took a pen and scribbled what was to become one of his most famous poems on the wall of a wooden gamekeeper’s hut on top of Kickelhahn mountain on the northern edge of the Central Thuringian Forest:

*Above all the mountain peaks is peace, In all the treetops you feel hardly a breath or a breeze; The little birds are silent in the forest. Just wait, soon you too will be still.* Fifty years later, just a few months before his death, he revisited the cabin, recognised the writing on the wall, and wept.

Scorch @ScorchMusicpetitions.assemblee-nationale.frPétition pour la dissolution de la BRAV-M - Pétition pour la dissolution de la BRAV-M - Plateforme des pétitions de l’Assemblée nationaleLa répression policière qui s’abat sur notre pays doit conduire à remettre à l’ordre du jour l’impératif démantèlement de la BRAV-M. Le pays étouffe de témoignages d’exactions violentes et brutales commises par ces brigades motorisées à l’encontre des manifestants qui tentent de faire entendre leu…8:46 AM ∙ Mar 25, 2023

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A short post this week, as we’re travelling.

Three considerations occupied my fronts and centres this week. First, the impact of machine innovation on human creativity. Is writing about to shoot off in a million directions the way painting did after the invention of the daguerreotype? Is reality, or at least its capture, shifting and splintering anew? Or is ChatGPT still at the camera obscura level – the text-generating equivalent of a tiny hole in a paleolithic tent?

Second, Macron’s massively unpopular retirement reform plan for France. Necessary, unnecessary? The death knell of the Fifth Republic, the clarion call of a new era of French vitality, or the conquering high-C trumpet blast of the economic genre, signalling its total, squelching dominance over all other forms of French discourse?

Third, last Wednesday’s surprise invasion of Taiwan.

Sorry, surprise visit. Surprise because it was unplanned and very last minute, and also because, if you had asked me a week ago to rank the 195 universally recognized and 4 partially recognised countries that I would most like, and be most likely, to visit, Taiwan would barely edge out Guam, which, as you know, is an unincorporated territory of the United States, so not even on the list. And yet here we are, on day five of twelve, absolutely in love with this amazing place.

I would love to weave Taiwan and AI into this post, along with pithy digressions about the Hexagon’s social protection system, how it reflects the nation’s singular self-identity, its much-touted, conceptually absurd but worth championing exceptionalism.

However, Taiwan is an ovoid, and AI is a many-headed, shape-shifting hydra. Only Macron’s retirement plan, being a specifically French consideration – albeit with far-reaching consequences (similar legislation, similarly defended and opposed, is popping up everywhere) – fits inside my self-imposed hexagonal formula. So, as much as I’d like to bust out into some new geometries and write about AI and stinky tofu, I feel reluctantly duty bound to adhere to this Substack’s original mandate – “to cover France from all six sides, namely: culture, society, politics, history, economics and science” – and bin the other two.

The above shot of a pile of garbage on a Paris street was taken in 1957 during a mid-April national strike for higher wages. Transport ground to a halt for two days. There were sporadic disruptions of garbage, water, gas and electricity service. On the final night, workers threw stones at the police, who responded with fire hoses, truncheons and tear gas. There were many arrests.

As far as French strikes go, the April 1957 protest was a minor event. A warning more than a strike. And like most French labour revolts, it worked. The Guy Mollet government, already under pressure for the humiliating Suez scandal and the Algerian crisis, caved. Wage-price levels were raised. A third week of paid holidays was added. State pensions were improved and an obligatory supplementary pension, on top of the compulsory pay-as-you-go state pension (which, along with national health care, was introduced just after WWII), was put in place.

And then, a year later, after the Algiers coup in May 1958 brought an end to the Fourth Republic, Charles de Gaulle came out of retirement and seized power.

The rest, as the saying goes, is.

One of the first things de Gaulle did as President of his fledgling Fifth Republic was add Article 49.3 to the French constitution, which allows a government to pass a law without a vote in the National Assembly. It is definitely undemocratic – a hammer used by minority governments to bang bills into laws – but it has been used more than 100 times by French presidents (or rather, French prime ministers) on both sides of the political spectrum. It’s been used by the present government ten times, and it is how his prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, forced Macron’s state pension reform package – changing the full retirement age from 62 to 64 – through last Tuesday.

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Now, before gallically shrugging your shoulders and saying – “Soixante-quatre!? Et alors? It’s 65, 66 or 67 where I come from” – know this: the legislation changes the number of years a French person has to work to ensure a full state pension from 42 to 43 years, which means most French people won’t be eligible for full pension until they’re 67 (I’ll be 75 because of my late start). Which puts them behind retirees from Canada, UK, Germany, Spain, and Belgium, and at par with the US, Netherlands and Italy.

So you get a sense of why between 70-80% of the population think the state has betrayed them, the market-oriented technocrats have won the day, and the reform package is garbage.

Most of you reading this probably already know everything there is to know about French pension reform. You either see it as inevitable, given France’s shrinking work force and high unemployment rate among older people, or as wrong-headed, an unnecessary dismantling of a laudable social model that will only serve to increase inequalities, put extra pressure on the working class, and could and should be avoided by increasing corporate taxes and reducing tax rebates for companies. Both positions are rational. So, too, is the argument that we shouldn’t have to do jobs that require retiring – jobs so pénible we need or want to stop doing them at so young and robust an age as 62 through 67. That we shouldn’t, for example, be collecting garbage anymore, we should be collecting universal wages, borne off the backs of machines that do our bidding until that bidding be done and they but do but their own.

Meanwhile, however, back in the real, there are two éboueurs at the back of every garbage truck (camion de benne) in Paris, Lyon, Rennes or Marseille, be it a publicor private truck (half the city’s arrondissements have private garbage pickup). According to this University of Grenoble study, a public éboueur works 401 minutes a day (just under 7 hours) with a 33-minute break, takes around 12,000 steps and picks up an average of 4.7 tons of garbage. They are twice as likely to get hurt on the job as any other worker, and their “cardiac cost” is high – 28.8 beats per minute above their normal heart rate, which is just below the threshold of excessive physical strain set by occupational medicine at 30 beats/min.

In the more competitive private sphere, a rippeur often has to work alone behind the truck. Their shifts are on average 434 minutes; their breaks are only 26 minutes; 16,599 steps are taken, 9.6 tonnes of waste are collected, and the cardiac cost jumps above the upper threshold, to 38.8 beats per minute.

Until this week, private éboueurs retired at 57. From now on, unless the pension legislation is overturned, they will retire at 59. Public éboueurs, whoare not considered a régime spécial, will now retire at 64.

One stat that hasn’t changed: on average, éboueurs die almost four years earlier than other Frenchmen.1

Meanwhile, in Taipei, despite the ubiquity of takeout, there is no trash anywhere. Or trashcans. Taiwan recycles more than 50% of its municipal waste, putting it just behind the world leader, Germany. Residents bring their garbage, in special bags purchased at 7-11 (the 5,000+ 7-11s here are essential-service meccas of one-stop convenience) to the trucks, which play Beethoven’s “Für Elise” to announce their arrival.

Meanwhile, in Paris, where there are several trash cans in every city block, and, in normal times, up to two garbage pickups a day, stalwart éboueurs like Brahim Sidibé and Ludovic, the once-sung heroes of Covid confinement and French fashion, have to deal daily with this:

Ludovic 🧹♻️ @ludovicf_offBonjour et très bonne semaine à tous . Semaine qui va être chargée et ultra mega compliqué . Comment vais je gérer ? J’en sais trop rien 🥲. J’ai pas de solution Bonne semaine à tous #éboueurs #paris #pariscentre 6:47 AM ∙ Mar 6, 2023

1,578Likes140RetweetsThank you, reader, for putting up with my trash talk.

Note on the doubled image at the top of this post: that’s a Nadar nude on the left, one of only three he is known to have photographed, commissioned by the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme for his Phryné before the Areopagus (detail, right), which was first shown at the Salon of 1861. For more on how academic painting responded to the emergence of photography, track down a copy of Dominique de Font-Réaulx’s excellent Painting And Photography: 1839-1914.If you’re in Paris, order it from The Red Wheelbarrow. If you’re elsewhere in the world, support an independent bookstore.

Also, if you’d like to attend the special screenings of Ghost Artist on April 1 in Paris at the CinéCave, please let me know in a comment. Seats are very limited.

For more info on the film’s subject:

HexagonMaking the Scenes (Part 1)This is the first in a series of posts and podcasts about the late Robert Cordier, a Belgium-American director, producer, poet, playwright and screenwriter who died on the Man Ray floor of the Alice Prin nursing home in the 14th Arrondissement of Paris, of Covid-19, on April 7, 2020…Read more9 months ago · 9 likes · Christopher MooneyHexagonMaking the Scenes (Part 2)5) I jumped aboard the Liza ship / And traveled on the sea, / And every time I thought of home / I wished it wasn't me! – Eugene O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms Having turned his back on whatever “comfortably dull future a business school degree would have led to,” Robert took a bus from Philadelphia to New York, thinking from there he’d head back to Paris…Read more8 months ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Christopher MooneyHexagonMaking the Scenes (Podcast & Video)Listen now (20 min) | The working title of the film Injun Fender (1972), Wild Orange, was dropped because of its proximity to Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, which premiered just before production started, in New York City, in mid-December 1971. It is often referred to as Cordier’s first feature film, but some less distinguished predecessors have recently popped up — low…Listen now7 months ago · 5 likes · Christopher MooneyHexagonMaking the Scenes: the Last Chapter6) That scene was powerful. I'm telling you, I don't think we will ever see any shit like that ever again. — Miles Davis After the workshops and rehearsals ended, he would go to the jazz clubs on 52nd Street, or Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. “Ted Joans took me, as part of what he called my ‘Teducation’. He was a few years older and already a serious someb…Read more7 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Christopher MooneyFinally, an extra added bonus: Bing AI’s wildly creative, SEO-packed rewrite of the above post. The future of writing, it seems, is still a ways away. I particularly like the ominous phrase that I’ve emboldened in the second-to-last paragraph, which makes me wonder, what does Bing know, with such certitude, about the state of Asian geopolitics that I don’t?

How AI is Changing the Future of Writing: A Taiwan Travel Guide``ai-changing-writing-taiwan-travel-guideAre you a writer who wants to explore new horizons of creativity and innovation? Do you want to discover how artificial intelligence can enhance your writing skills and open up new possibilities for storytelling? If so, you should consider visiting Taiwan - a hidden gem for writers and AI enthusiasts alike.

In this post, I will share with you my personal experience of traveling to Taiwan and how it inspired me to use AI tools for writing. I will also show you some of the best places to visit in Taiwan for writers, how to use AI tools for travel planning, and what challenges and opportunities AI poses for the future of writing.

Taiwan is a small island nation in East Asia that has a rich history, culture, and cuisine. It is also a global leader in technology and innovation, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. Taiwan has many research institutes, universities, and companies that are developing cutting-edge AI solutions for various industries and domains.

As a writer who is always curious about new trends and technologies, I decided to visit Taiwan last week to learn more about how AI is changing the world of writing. I was surprised by how much Taiwan has to offer for writers who want to expand their horizons and experiment with new forms of expression.

Here are some of the highlights of my trip:

How AI Can Enhance Your Writing Skills: I learned how to use Jasper1, an AI writing tool that helps you perfect your writing in seconds. Jasper analyzes your text and provides real-time feedback on grammar, punctuation, tone of voice, creativity, and more. It also helps you rephrase entire sentences or generate new ideas based on your input. Jasper helped me improve my writing quality and efficiency while traveling.
The Best Places to Visit in Taiwan for Writers: I visited some of the most beautiful and inspiring places in Taiwan that stimulated my imagination and creativity. Some of them are Taipei 1012, the tallest skyscraper in Taiwan that offers stunning views of the city; Jiufen3, an old mountain town that inspired the movie Spirited Away; Sun Moon Lake, a scenic lake surrounded by mountains; Taroko Gorge, a spectacular natural wonder carved by a river; and Tainan, the oldest city in Taiwan that has many historical sites and temples.
How to Use AI Tools for Travel Planning: I used various AI tools to plan my trip efficiently and conveniently. Some of them are Skyscanner, an app that compares flights, hotels, car rentals, etc.; Google Maps, an app that provides directions, traffic information, public transportation options etc.; Tripadvisor, an app that provides reviews, recommendations etc.; Google Translate, an app that translates text, speech etc.; Airbnb Experiences, an app that offers unique activities hosted by locals etc.
What Challenges And Opportunities AI Poses For The Future Of Writing: I explored some of the ethical, social, and creative implications of using AI for writing .Some of them are plagiarism, bias, authenticity, diversity, collaboration, innovation etc.

I hope this post has given you some insights into how AI is changing the future of writing and why you should visit Taiwan before it’s too late. Taiwan is a creative journey with AI that you don’t want to miss.

If you enjoyed this post , please leave a comment below , share it on social media , or subscribe to my newsletter. Thank you very much.

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1There are very few femmes éboueures in France. Here’s an interview with one: https://www.journaldesfemmes.fr/societe/combats-de-femmes/2613313-rencontre-passionnante-et-musclee-avec-aicha-femme-eboueure-a-paris/

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Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris; Japanese: パリ症候群, romanized: Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of extreme disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock. – Wikipedia

When Lei Seito decided to leave her native Tokyo to study art history in Paris, she enrolled at the University of Paris-Nanterre. It was not what she expected. Not even close. She thought she would be attending something like the Sorbonne–

Instead, she got this –

In a 2017 interview Seito described how her “dream” of Paris met the shattering reality of the American-modelled Nanterre campus. “The university contrasted so much with the image I had of the Parisian university - beautiful, historical and welcoming - that I quickly gave up the idea of studying there. However, every morning, I would get up, take the RER and stop at the Nanterre-University stop, before changing platforms to return to Paris. It was probably to ease my conscience. So, instead I spent my days flaneuring around, visiting museums, art galleries and the different districts of the city. One day, while walking around, I came across the École des Beaux-Arts. I immediately wanted to spend my days there.”

The Beaux-Arts fit the bill. Founded in 1648 by Charles Le Brun, housed principally in stately structures built in 1830 by Félix Duban, on rue Bonaparte in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, just across the Seine from the Louvre… Seito applied and was accepted, joining the studio of Annette Messager, thus sidestepping the more dire symptoms of the Paris syndrome, which Wikipedia nicely lays out as: “acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, as well as psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating most notably, but also others, such as vomiting.”

Instead, Seito focussed on making art – photography, drawings, sculptures, engravings, installations, and, especially, food, reconfigured into what she calls “Cuisine Existentielle”.

Bigger picture: This was in 2004, at one of the many apogees of a cultural moment during which, for the first time since World War II, the city of Paris was reasserting its position as an important art centre. Several factors were at work: the relaxing of France’s auction regulations, which finally allowed foreign (though French-owned) Sotheby’s and Christie’s to open offices in Paris. The local commissaires priseurs of Maison Drouot, for centuries the only public auctioneers allowed operate in France, were forced to become competitive. Even more so when, in 2002, the Artcurial gallery on the Champs-Élysées was converted into a very successful auction house. In 2006, FIAC, the city’s biggest art fair moved back into the Grand Palais, increased its roster of gallery stands and became a genuine rival of London’s annual Frieze.

Other motors: the explosive growth of the luxury and high-end fashion industries, most of which is Paris-based; the fusion of fashion and art creation and celebrity; and the subsequent collector battle waged between those industries’ two biggest magnates, Bernard Arnault and François Pinault.

The resurgence wasn't just materialistic: it also had intellectual and experiential elements. Dominant among these was the growing cluster and clout of the “relational aesthetics” movement coalescing around the French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud, who co-founded the giant Paris art “laboratory”, the Palais de Tokyo, in 2000. Bourriaud, and to an even greater, global extent the Swiss art curator, critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, championed French artists like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, with varying degrees of participation by elsewhere artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller, Jorge Pardo, Gabriel Orozco, Douglas Gordon, Henry Bond, Vanessa Beecroft, and, especially, for the purposes of this post, Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Especially because, like Seito, Tiravanija, a Thai contemporary artist born in Buenos Aires who works in New York City, Berlin, and Chiangmai, Thailand, often uses food and its preparations in his art installations. Among his best-known works is one of his first, pad thai (1990), at the Paula Allen Gallery in New York, where he left the walls bare and filled the bowls of gallery-goers with his own cooking.

Oft repeated in different forms and flavours, Tiravanija’s installations were the clearest expressions of the relational art concept: bring people together by making art that brings people together. Not the encounter of an audience and an object in a private white cube but of a community and artist-curator catalysts in a public space – interactive, ephemeral, user-friendly, DIY encounters highlighting human relations and social contexts – how we live and act collectively.

It’s a simple enough idea and not new: The Futurists held art banquets, as did the Surrealists. And Fluxus artists like Dieter Roth and Alison Knowles played with their food, as did Daniel Spoerri.

Seito’s recipe, however, is different.

Her work riffs off art and cultural history in unexpected and idiosyncratic ways. Greek mythology, Renaissance paintings, the Marquis de Sade. ‘Decapitated’ pastries dripping raspberry coulis for a Bastille Day party at the Palais de Tokyo. Primordial soup. A black and white landscape created from 30 kg of ash-covered goat cheese, flattened in a few hours by devouring attendees of Nuit Blanche in a secret park in the Marais (where, coincidentally, tomorrow’s Hexagon Paris Wine Walk starts).

But the compositions are not compendiums of puns. They are far richer than the sum of their references. And like the works of relational artists before her, they are transactional in novel ways; they create interactions between people, make them participate in, if not the creation of the works, at least their activation. And destruction.

Where they differ from the relational gang is this: they aspire to be “conceptual” but more than anything, to a more traditional, aesthetic concern – to be “beautiful”. And of course, delish. They are as much about their flavours and textures as they are about their “art”.

From that same interview: “Annette Messager had spoken to me about [Fluxus artist] Robert Filliou. His famous quote ‘Art is what makes life more interesting than art’ has since become a kind of doctrine for me.”

“It reminds me of the Japanese tea ceremony and the concept of "Ichi-go ichi-e", which is to welcome your guests as if it were the last time.”

To get a fuller sense of Seito’s work, have a look at her new book, Cuisine existentielle.

Thank you for reading.

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Recién llegados (“Recent Arrivals”), now lost, from the second Bordeaux sketchbook, was drawn two weeks before his death. Written on the back: “La borboteante acequia de la calle del Desengaño da sustento a una piara de cerdos semisantos del Convento de San Antonio Abad.” (“The gurgling ditch on Calle del Desengaño provides sustenance to a herd of semi-holy pigs from the Convent of St Anthony the Abbot.”)

The drawing, in iron gall ink and pencil, is of two young peasant women – “Recién llegados a Madrid desde Aragón” – huddling against the wind in the doorway of a shop. “PERFUMES Y LIQORES” is painted on the shop window. A plaque on the wall near the corner indicates the street name: “CALLE DEL DESENGAÑO”.

The building, No. 1 on the “street of disillusion” in the Centro district of Madrid, is where he and Pepa lived from 1779 to 1800. Their heir, Javier, was born there in 1784. Francisco, the only other of their seven children to see more than six birthdays (five more were stillborn) died there of the pest at fifteen in 1795. Rosario, his goddaughter, died down the street, at No. 17, fifteen years after him, at the age of twenty-eight, in 1843. Her mother, his maid, Leocadia, died there thirteen years later, in 1856.

The scene is lit by a single streetlamp. The two streetwalkers, pinching their noses against the stench of the open sewer, look in horror at the shit-eating pigs. Crosses dangle from their necks.

He is at a window on the first floor, in profile, wearing a cloth cap similar to the one he wears in Autorretrato con gorra (1824) (Prado, GW 1658), the “self-portrait” now believed to have been drawn by Rosario.

Later, though, hovering higher and still wearing the cap, he sees and draws himself getting up from the chair on the landing, climbing down the stairs and going out the door. Only now there is no perfume shop. No prostitutes. No streetlamps, no sewer-gorged pigs. No street. Instead, a mule track covered in powdery snow and winding steeply out of frozen sierra steadily upwards, through clusters of bare oaks outlined in ice and stunted firs mantled white.

At the brow of the hill, on the flat-topped summit, he has a view down into a cratered gorge with quarries on its edge; and beyond, the Balearic Sea, fifteen leagues to the east.

At the centre of the saucer-like gorge, beneath the last fugitive rays of the sun, crumbling houses huddle around a snow-capped church topped by two tiny cupolas. This is Fuendetodos, the village where he was born. Looking west, he sees the sweet prospect of Zaragoza, the Zaragoza of his childhood.

But when he finally manages to open his eyes, which causes great strain and anxiety, he can’t see anything. He has to feel his way with his hands, which are misshapen, numb.

Before, apprehensions would accompany such sensations. Fear of going blind. Fear of being touched. Now that he is blind, however, or at least purblind, he only fears the alien touch, being groped by strangers, by strange beings, putting his hands on decaying things or deformed things, things too repulsive to imagine: open sores, squirming eels and rats, insects that swarm, living things with slime for flesh or fly-blown flesh.

In others, it is ice again, all white, the pathway a narrowing chasm, giant dazzling cliffs that he is squeezed between, unbearably cold, his tongue frozen, unable to emit a sound.

When he finally pushes his way back into our world, he usually sees shadows slinking through the rooms and down the corridors, but today the sun has annihilated every trace of his darkness; he sits insensible in its glare, exposed and outlined.

The afternoon becomes evening. The light slides away from the window. He drifts off. The lynx returns. The owls and bats descend once more from the dead trees on the hillside.

Is he feverish? The pestilence still assails his body and batters his soul. The last bout took most of his eyesight.

On the horizon now he sees the shadowed mountains. He remembers the cypress gardens and the olive groves on both sides of the road. He remembers the peasant’s round hats. He remembers their piety, their black cloaks and wooden clogs.

He remembers their carts, no more advanced than those of ancient Egypt, laden with maize or dung or the dead, the spokeless wheels – circles of wood with no axles – shrieking down pathways built not by men but by sheep and goats.

The peasants’ houses are filled with smoke and animals – sheep, pigs, and chickens that pay the peasants’ rent. Their houses are made of mud, they have no windows, chimneys or beds. The women trapped inside are veiled with white handkerchiefs. They have knives strapped to their thighs, sharp as Leocadia’s tongue.

He remembers the legs of the washerwomen on the sandbars along the banks of the Mansanares, not far from the farmhouse. The wet-nurses at the windows and on the benches in the park, las pasiegas, suckling the sick and the sickly, petticoats turned up over their heads like mantillas, phylacteries hanging from their waist.

He remembers, in the early days of the Riego revolt, when he and Leocadia watched a group of drunken young men near the Quinta throw three Franciscan friars into the river. They poisoned the fountain, a neighbour’s son told them. Probably the wells, too. The monks were weak swimmers or couldn’t swim because of the weight of their habits, which swirled thick and brown in the fast water around their tonsured heads and frantic paddling. They struggled comically to come to shore but the laughing young men pushed them back with sticks and threw rocks at their heads. They disappeared under the water, resurfaced, were hit with rocks, disappeared again. This went on for a few minutes. The lavandaras downstream folding up the day’s linens were doubled over with laughter. Two of the dead friars sunk. The third floated past the shrieking women. The men kept throwing stones, shouting with triumph every time one thudded into the already caved-in head.

He remembers the horse-market outside of Zaragoza, the dreary wastes and miserable villages, the sweet prospect of the city in the distance.

He remembers the bell of the church in Afilagro. The peasants say it contains a melted piece from the thirty received for the betrayal of our Lord. They say it tolls whenever calamities are about to befall. Once this happens, it cannot be stopped by human hands, only by God.

As the dreams and the remembering wane – the frame containing them disappear and the contents shake out into the awoken world – his breathing recovers and his body relaxes. A newly attuned focusing shifts to the details: the blur of the milkmaid on the landing wall, which Maguiro the banker wants to buy; the less hazy items on the desk; the sketchbook on his lap; the wide silk armrests of the chair, a Voltaire fauteuil with a violin back that he brought back from Paris four years ago, along with the extravagantly inlaid bonheur-du-jour that his head is resting on – a peace offering to Leocadia, livid because he did not take her on the trip as “tu verdadera y legítima esposa” – his true and legitimate wife – “which is what I have been for two decades.”

Leocadia hates the chair and desk because of their associations with his loathsome son and daughter-in-law, who would not allow her to go with him to Paris. Or perhaps because she finds them fussily modern and French. Which is why they are on the half landing of the grand staircase, far from visitors’ eyes.

He, however, who has used the chair and desk for the portraits of two bankers, a playwright, a painter and Brugada, his sometime assistant, finds their placement perfect; a comfortable way station in which to recuperate after each climb and descent directly in front of a large oval window through which, if his eyes, clouded by cataracts, were not directed at the sketchbook on his lap, would allow him an unimpeded vision of the early afternoon sun on the cathedral’s twin spires, and, he imagines – he fully pictures this – the blue forested plains and low hills in the distance, the white villas on the yellow cliffs, the acacia hedges above, the trellised vines below.

The dead trees extend to the edge of what to him looks like a deep dark lake but is actually a wide river. Bordeaux lines the concave bank. The biggest port négrier in the world, slave built, slave fortuned. He imagines it on blackened ivory in miniature, viewed through the double loupe dangling from his neck, drops of water removing the black ground as they spread out, the paint puddling, patches wiped with a cloth into shadows and highlights. The Gironde estuary in the background, and there on the wide, large-banked river the rolling bore of the tide moves towards him, advancing past the quarantine station, the water shining like silver plate, the wind rising, the flat, calm water stretched out behind the churn like a sheet of dark silk all the way to the first hesitant ripples on the Bay of Biscay.

Leocadia. In that dress. The light on her bare shoulders. The sheen of her skin. Ivory. Mother of pearl. Mother of God.

Seeing that she was descending the stairs in the pretty skirt from the dead queen, and that the sun had left the window above, he hoisted himself out of the chair, called out after her for his chocolate – and patted his pockets for a pencil.

Instead, what he found was a diminishing mirror, which he pulled from the pocket and held in both trembling hands as he paused, standing now at the top of the stairs, looking over his shoulder at the framed view of Bordeaux’s rooftops and the twin spires of the cathedral.

This is how it is used, backwards, facing away from what you wish to see reflected in the convex glass.

A Claude glass, that is the name for it, after the Frenchman whose works he had copied at eighteen in the Royal Collection at El Escorial. Perhaps for bullfights, he thought, composing the scene, flattening the tones, unifying form and line; but then he shook his head and abandoned the idea. The results were dingy, devoid of truth. Besides, his near-blindness already accomplished this trick.

He stepped back, peering through his double glass at the black mirror till he found the ideal image.

Then he fell down the stairs.

The terrifying cries of the owls and bats fill the air, wrest him from the deeper categories of sleep. Their wings pummel his face. The lynx appears next to the chair, its eyes shining in the dark. He calls out for help but no one hears him. Is he dead? Is everyone dead? Is the world dead?

What griefs attend that art. For the moment, however, which feels much longer, he is still on the landing and alive, and breathing, albeit shallowly, and snoring, and drooling, face down, his head – which he has always thought excessively large – resting heavily on the lady’s writing desk, a green and gold bonheur-du-jour that he purchased four years before on the rue Monnaie, at a marchand-mercier next to the porcelain shop of the Manufacture Royale de Sèvres.

This was on his only visit to Paris, during which he did dozens of sketches in and around his hotel on the rue Favart, mainly of prostitutes and amputees.

The prostitutes recently arrived from Aragónare gone, as is Leocadia, as are the owls, bats and cats, all gone, replaced by his mother. He asks her to tell him stories about the farm, about the animals, about the monks, about his grandparents. She cackles and flies away.

Near the end of her time on earth, she no longer recognized him, or could but only briefly, and when she could she would get angry, and then call him by the name of his father or one of his brothers, and say cruel things about him, how he didn’t care about her or anyone else, only himself and his accursed art. His so-called genius.

He had missed his father’s death but he was in the room for hers. One moment she was there, breathing quietly, and then, nothing, and then she cried out, “¡Nada!” and was gone.

Pepa’s departure was the same. He had taken her hand in his but she had pulled free. Then her breath calmed, and then it stopped.

He would like to sit down to a plate of oysters, and some criadillas, and then go to bed.

He produced only five easel paintings while in Paris: a savage bullfighting scene with thick black shadows and pooling masses of spilt blood; and four “primitive” portraits – the Marquesa de Pontejos, whom he had painted twice before in Madrid; Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, the former director of the Louvre and a pornographer; Javier Maria de Ferrer, an exiled Spanish banker and publisher; and Ferrer’s young wife, Manuela, whose Tuesday night tertulias in Paris were almost as lavish and well-attended as those the Marquesa de Pontejos hosted on Fridays.

He saw and admired paintings by Constable, Delacroix and Géricault at the Salon de Paris in the Louvre, and two that he detested by Ingres. He met the writer Stendhal, though they did not exchange words. He re-made the acquaintance of the Baron Denon, the Louvre’s director for whom, during the Peninsular War, he had compiled an inventory of artworks in the Royal collections for seizure and export to Napoleon’s new museum in Paris.

Throughout the Paris trip, which lasted six weeks, he was followed by secret agents of the Paris police.

“It would be interesting to verify whether, during his stay in Paris, he had suspicious dealings with any individuals which his employment in the Spanish Court would make even more inappropriate. Keep close tabs on him, by means of very careful and covert surveillance, and communicate the results to me, alerting me to the precise moment of his departure.”

Presumably beyond the ken of these observers, he spent an unchaperoned afternoon in a rented room of a boarding house on the rue Marivaux with the granddaughter of a farmer he knew from Fuendetodos, a washerwoman named Maria del Pilar and her two daughters, whom he rendered, three times, in pencil and red chalk, on antique Japanese laid paper given to him by a certain “Mister van den Hoogen,” a former lover of Leocadia.

He first noticed the police spies at the arcade, and again on the boat. Now, at the Louvre, he took Jéro’s arm and shuffled painfully into the next room, peering past the idle throng at the ho-hum muddle on the walls, no perceivable truth in any of it as far as he could see, which wasn’t far – only the pictures at eye level, and only these through the double loupe. Military portraits, cardinals, battles, mythical nonsense. A few genre pieces worth at best two minutes of reflection. English pastorals from Constable. Slumped, half-finished Greeks awaiting slavery and slaughter by Delacroix who, he was told, had purchased a set of his Caprichos; and an emboldened shipwreck by Géricault, who, he had just learned, died in January at the age of thirty-two.

He tried to steady his brain, look for patterns, look past the patterns. Force his eye to stop its perpetual skid. Earlier that day, he saw and sketched an old woman with no teeth being wheeled down a street in a cart by a three-legged dog. The night before, he sketched the gas lights in the arcade, illuminating the goods and wares, including the strutting men and women – brightly coloured packages of seductive flesh.

Floating lavandarias on the river, two floors high, filled with washerwomen.

Men carrying women on their backs in brothel boxes.

He had no money left. How was this possible?

Vernet a possibility. His Bataille de Jemmapes had drawn the largest crowd. Or Granet. His cloddish cardinal, however, in front of him. What will he say? Nothing. Above it, a Jean d’Arc, and next to it more naked Romans marching off to war.

He suppressed a fart.

It is as if yesterday he stepped out into the night and walked into the darkness as young and strong as the god in the Jacques-LouisDavid painting before him, marching past the ravaged farms and the dead woods and the dry plains, walking until he can no longer recognise anything around him, including himself, or feel anything, including what it is like to be this strange old man who survived four kings and walked across two kingdoms and now, all these years and lives later, finds himself at the Louvre, at the opening of the Salon, the sun blazing on the white columns outside, feebly supported by a stick and the elbow of an unknown relative – the cousin of his daughter-in-law – exhausted and shivering in front of towering walls of terrible paintings, surrounded by peering monkeys brandishing ceremonial swords and smallpox scars.

His eyes are burning, his head is spinning. Is it fever? Typhus?

He scans the crowd with his good eye.

In his dress, as always, there has been no detectable forethought given to detail or style. Sturdy British boots instead of slippers, dark breeches instead of pantaloons, a striped silk waistcoat under a knee-length frock coat. The only concession to fashion is the wide cravat, tied in a soft bow, and the walking stick, black and ivory with an owl head in bronze, bought for him by Vernet this afternoon, after their tea in the Passage des Panoramas.

As always, too, he pretends to hear and understand everything that is said by the preening and fawning monkeys around him, taking his cue from their overplayed reactions, laughing at each witticism, nodding wisely at each sagesse. He is ever courtly in every address, smiling, bowing, standing when people leave, kissing the proffered hands of wives and mistresses, the rings of bankers, bishops and diplomats. But presently, he is kissed out, bowed into oblivion. It is far too hot for the pretence of manners and he is tired, and incontinent, and there are too many people, moustachioed apes and their preening mates gawking mindlessly at each other; and too much dreadful art, absurd statues crowding the floors, towering assemblages of gaudy tableaux on every wall. He has seen and not heard enough. He needs to sit but there is nowhere to sit. He puts more weight on the new stick and closes his eyes. The boy at his side, his nephew? The cousin of his son’s wife, is it Guillermo? Jéronimo. Jéro, who says something, shouts it at him with soured breath into a dead ear. What is there to say? He has seen and not heard enough and he is the oldest man in the room and it is time to go. The Ferrers are late, and he knows what Ferrer will say anyway, exactly what he said yesterday, that an audience is impossible, that the gouty king is half dead, that he has wet gangrene in his legs and dry gangrene in his spine. This is what was said yesterday, why would it change today?

At dinner with businessmen and spouses at the banker Laffitte’s hôtel particulier on rue d’Alfort, where he will be imprisoned for four hours between two monkeys at a long table piled with slathered food – why must there be abominable sauces with every dish in this country? Surrounded by mediocre paintings and plaster casts of Roman relics. He wants his portrait painted does our fat little Laffitte. A former clerk, now the patron of the largest bank in France. Formerly the Finance minister but, according to Ferrer, out of favour with the king because of his liberal largesse to Cadiz. Is that the true story? He has a letter of introduction from the King of Spain. Surely he can get an audience, if not with the obese king, then with his wife, or his son.

(The king has no son.)

Does he actually want it, though? Does he need it? He is tired. It is hot and there are too many people. The paintings are terrible and terrifying, mythic heroes and romantic claptrap pell-melled floor to ceiling. He wants to go home. Not home, back to rue Marivaux, to his window across from the theatre, where the putas travel in boxes on the backs of giants. But here comes Ferrer. Don Joaquin Maria Ferrer, who sat for his portrait last week, as did his wife, and who purchased his bullfight. Forty years old, half-length, standing and seen from three quarters in a black frock coat just like his, head turned from right to left, high forehead on a skinny face with cold eyes and a pointy nose and a tucked-in mouth under black hair cut “à la malcontent”.

Holding a book.

The wife, posed like him, but in a dark décolleté, shoulders covered with a folded down white collar, forehead framed by heavy black locks surmounted by some sort of fashionable bun. Full, sensuous lips, the neck bare. In her hand, the same red fan the prostitutes carry in the arcades.

The David is the biggest in the room. An absurd confection that he can’t take his eyes off. Its young naked god languorously sprawled out on the same sofa as in the Récamier, but suspended on a froth of clouds. Spear in one hand, sword in the other, with a pair of kissing doves to hide his cock and balls. Venus contorts near his lap, her hand on his thigh.

Ferrer tells him that the king is indisposed, but an audience will be held with the heir-apparent, Charles Philippe, Count of Artois.

What do the police want with him? He will not go see the lithograph exhibition. He will go another day with Vernet.

À l’enseigne du roi d’Espagne. That was the name of the shop where he bought the desk. He can still do this, pull things out, remember them. Not everything is forgotten. Hoogen’s eyes, for example. And Maria del Pilar. All the Maria del Pilars. He prides himself on this, always has. See something, store it away, retrieve it, reproduce it.

Of the spies, however, he has no recollection.

Around his neck, which he thinks little of, as it is not a pleasing match for the head, on a fine chain of Potosí silver, dangles the double loupe, a gift from the Younger Moratín, an old friend and the son of an even older friend, the Elder Moratín, with whom, in 1776, he collaborated on an illustrated edition of Arte de las putas (The Art of Whores), the circulation of which the Edict of the Inquisition of 1777 prohibited, which placed his name for the first time on the lista negra of the Holy Office.

If not for the intervention of Mengs, the First Painter to the King of Spain, this black mark would have cost him, then a thirty-year-old father of three (all died in infancy), his position in the painting studio of his brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu, at the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid. He would have had to return to Aragon. To do what? Become a provincial church painter, wandering the countryside with his brushes and pots; or worse, a goldsmith like his father; or a farmer like his brother, back in Fuendetodos tending stunted and blasted crops, shovelling pig slop, making and selling blocks of ice for market stalls and rich men’s refreshment.

He will do more witches. He will do more birds. He will do mothers. He will illustrate Don Quixote. He will do men with goat feet. He will do Lot and his daughter naked and hideous, drinking wine, making love, the city of Sodom burning in the background. He will do the Song of Roland, the clear red blood running in streams on the green grass. He will do Queen Isabella and her armoured knights on horses, brandishing battle axes and lances, the severed heads of Moors swinging on strings from their saddle bags. He will do the mobs that followed them across the battle plains, the merchants who unburdened them of their spoils, the slave traders who bought their enslaved, the peasants who sold them food and the bodies of their wives and children.

Blacksmiths, tailors, tinkerers, beggars, pimps, whores, scribes, poets, musicians and players, following in carts and on foot through newly created deserts, knight-created. Everything they rode through destroyed, every crop trampled, every almond tree and olive grove cut down, every well plugged. Whatever they couldn’t carry away burned to the ground.

He will do the raiding parties; he will do the wild hill tribes that poached on spoil-burdened strays too greedy to relinquish them. He will do the Solano, the south-eastern wind that sweeps down those same hills, raising the temperature to a pitiless boil, and the stinging glare overhead and the deadly Siberian blasts that follow, ice-house air from snowy Guadarrama that rolls over the denuded plains and cannot extinguish a candle but will put out a man's life, pierce his bone to the marrow and bring in its wake consumption, pulmonia and the colico de Madrid, the illness that almost killed him fifteen years before. He remembers the metallic taste in his mouth, the black tongue, the heaviness in his bowels, the violent cramps, the bilious vomiting, the continuous and explosive farts. Cover your mouth, his mother would tell him when he was a boy in Aragon, and when he was a man in Madrid, cover your mouth and muffle yourself in your cloak, the assassin’s breath is blowing. The breath of death.

And the French, with their laughable courants d’air.

The peasants attributed Murat’s affliction to divine vengeance, but, Murat, unlike him, survived the dreaded colic of Madrid unfazed.

He was left deaf, half incapacitated.

Murat, who posed for him, became Marshal of the Empire and Admiral of France and the First Horseman of Europe. Two years later, for betraying his Emperor – he will draw this, he will paint this – after a long hot bath perfumed with the contents of a full bottle of eau-de-Cologne, he died, gloriously, by firing squad, shot through the heart twelve times by twelve of his own soldiers, his calm, piercing eyes ever upon theirs.

Murat did not accept a chair. He refused to be blindfolded.

“I have braved death too many times to fear it,” he said, standing erect and unintimidated; and after kissing the engraved cameo of his wife, he pushed his long black locks out of his eyes and said to his men, who were so emotional they could barely raise their eyes, let alone their rifles: “Soldiers! Do your duty. Straight to the heart and spare the face. Fire!”

He remembers meeting Murat with Baron Denon and General Soult in Madrid, and the sketches he made of them, and the portrait of Murat he later destroyed, and the brothel they visited in El Escorial, stocked with the mistresses of the Court, and the paintings he and Denon hand selected for shipment to Paris. The Madonnas of Murillo, the saints of Ribera and Zurbarán, the portraits of Velasquez. Paintings of Raphael, Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, Titian, Tintoretto, Paul, Veronese, Correggio, Domenichino, Guido Reni, Rubens, Van Dyck and Fra Angelico. Breughel, Teniers, Jordaens, Rubens, Durer, Schoen, Mengs, Rembrandt, Bosch, Joanes, Carbajal, Herrera, Luca Giordano, Carducci, Salvator Rosa, Menendez, Claude Lorain and Cano.

He remembers seeing French soldiers armed with hammers and saws descend upon a Gothic church in Torrijo, superbly decorated, with a fine facade, and strip it clean in an hour.

He remembers the Mudéjar interiors of the Duke and Duchess of Alba’s palace in Seville, yellow tiled floors, ironwork screens, honeycombed cornices, stucco friezes, timber beamed ceilings interlaced and delicately carved, which Napoleon’s army destroyed.

He remembers the palaces in Zaragoza, a city of palaces that the French forces ruined, and the beautiful convent of Santa Engracia that they sacked, and the splendid libraries, hospitals and churches that they gutted.

He remembers seeing the baggage train of the plunderers, some two thousand carriages long, filled with church plate, sculptures, paintings, delicacies, mistresses, poodles, parrots and monkeys – a half-mile long convoy of confiscated goods and animals, including eleven elephants and seven giraffes – most of it abandoned after Vitoria and repossessed by Wellington’s men.

His exile in France is self-imposed. His glowering portrait, painted a year ago by López, the king’s new favourite, hangs in the royal collection in Madrid. Were his legs not gone he would be free to come and go as he pleases; and he still paints and draws as he pleases; and if he leans in close the doubled spectacles, a gift from the banker Gallos, bring the perceivable world into workable view.

But he relies mainly on memory and imagination and accident: a puddle of water on a drop of paint, a drop of paint on a puddle of water. Nearer to the end, in just a few hours, he won’t be able to see, not even through a loupe, how the paint hits the canvas or pools in water on the miniature’s ivory, or how a murderous bull let loose in a panicking crowd emerges from scraped-away crayon on a lithographer’s stone. Gored through with cancer and poison, beset by aneurysmal strokes, he will soon be too frail to stand and pace at the easel.

However, it will be the fall that will dispatch him, less than an hour from now, a fall down a flight of stairs that will spare him his second childishness; and you too will spare him that indignity, and pose him here instead, on a page of his sketchbook, resurfacing from an afternoon nap and staring at his hand, which is stained with black crayon. Holding it close to his face, willing a tremor he can’t see to subside.

From The Inventions. Drawings, paintings and etchings by Goya (1746-1828), Newman (1905-1970) and David (1748-1825).

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0.Before I float my boats (and explain why there is a picture of a Russian Auchan supermarket at the top of this page), here are two bits of business:

a) Due to supply chain issues and a nasty case of layaboutism the much-anticipated “Wet February Hexagon Paris Wine Walk” has been rebranded the “Monsoon March Marais Wine March”. Geoffrey Finch of Paris Wine Walks will lead the two-kilometre walk. Along the way we will visit secret vineyards and locals-only wine bars, break good bread, open bottle after bottle of truly excellent wine, and share copious plates of delicious food – all locally sourced (of course!) and ever-so seasonal.

Date: Monday, 13 March, 3-7 pm.

b) Our feature-length documentary Ghost Artist will soon have two screenings in a private cinema in the Third Arrondissement of Paris. Wine and refreshments will be served after the screenings.

Date: Saturday, 1 April, exact screening times TBC closer to the date, but probably something like 5 pm and 7 pm.

If you wish to attend a), b), or both, email me. Spaces are VERY limited.

Cost for a): 35 euros, which is half the usual “Wine your way through the Marais” price. And it’s half that again for paid subscribers of Hexagon. That’s right. Hexagon paid subscribers, 17.50€. Subscribe here.

Cost for b): Free to paid subscribers of Hexagon. That’s right. Hexagon paid subscribers, free. (Free for everyone else too but that’s beside the point.) Subscribe here.

Tell others here:

1.The food and wine served at these two Paris events will not come from supermarkets. Not that I have anything against supermarkets. There are 33 conveniently located within a 5-minute walk of my front door. I have used them all. Usually just for toilet paper and dishwasher tablets, but sometimes, from the four organic ones, for a wider range of fare. Panisse for example. Or choucroute. Oatmeal. Beluga lentils. Black Venere rice. From the many Asian supermarkets in our neighbourhood, bitter melon, daikon, kimchi, gochujang, tofu, gai lan, etc. But for most of my produce I go to street markets or the many “circuit court” farm shops that have popped up all over Paris over the last decade.

Before the farm shops arrived, Parisians had next-to-no access to good, local greens, herbs, fruits and vegetables. Of course, this is relative; they had better access than most North Americans or Brits did and do. But home cooks couldn’t get the really good stuff. It went straight to high-end restaurants.

Street markets, then as now, sold mainly semi-industrial fare procured at Paris’s giant wholesale market in the southern suburb of Rungis.

Rungis, the second largest wholesale food market in the world, was created to replace Les Halles, Paris’s fresh-food central market, which was replaced in 1973 by Europe’s largest and ugliest underground shopping centre.

The ten centuries of Les Halles – the "Belly of Paris" – will be food for future thoughts. Today, I want to focus on supermarkets and hypermarkets, which, according to my new best friend Bing:

offer a large variety of goods at one place, which leads to convenience and efficiency for customers12.
have fixed prices for all the goods, which eliminates bargaining and ensures fairness3.
increase the sales and brand awareness of the products they sell, which benefits both the suppliers and the consumers42.
operate on a self-service basis, which reduces labour costs and gives customers more freedom of choice23.

All undeniably true, Bing. And did you know that everything on the shelves of the 300 Franprix supermarkets in Paris (part of the Casino Group) are delivered by river barge and electric trucks? And that this saves 450,000 road kilometres per year and nearly 250 tonnes of CO²?

Impressive right?

But what about the negative effects supermarkets have had on French society?

They have reduced the number of traditional markets and small shops that offer more organic and locally produced food1.
They have contributed to food waste by throwing away unsold products instead of donating them to charity2.
They have increased the consumption of processed and packaged food that may have lower nutritional value and higher environmental impact1.

You read that Independent article incorrectly, Bing: The French Senate banned stores from throwing away unspoiled food in 2016. And two years before that, Intermarché, the third largest supermarket chain in France (after LeClerc and Carrefour), began a campaign to sell – instead of throw away – “ugly” fruits and vegetables, at prices 30% lower than their “pretty” counterparts. Others allowed suit. Soon chains of “anti-gaspillage” (“anti-waste”) supermarkets opened around the country, selling everything from “moche” Camembert to almost-expired duck confit.

So try again. Is that all you’ve got for negative effects?

Really, that’s the best you can do?

Pretty lame, Bing.

2.When I first moved to France, blah blah blah.

Sorry.

When I first moved to France, one of the things that surprised me most was how ghost-town-gutted most countryside commerce was. Quaint zombie villages with dead cafés and restaurants, shuttered butchers, abandoned bakeries. If they were lucky, they had a depot de pain selling shit bread made in a factory somewhere and trucked in. Or a fish truck would roll through town once a week.

Invariably, a few kilometres out of town, the parking lots of the hypermarchés were filled with cars, and the hypermarchés with people pushing cartloads of convenience crap.

That’s neither fair nor accurate. In rural France, the big box chains usually had the best fishmongers, bakers and butchers. And still do. But just the same, the carts were mostly loaded with convenience crap. And still are. Just as they are in Paris. How oft have I woefully watched a week’s worth of supermarketed products roll forward on the tapis de caisse ahead of my recycled toilet paper and thought, wow, not a whit of life, not a nanoparticle of nutrition, not a dust-speck of deliciousness.

Of course, there’s nothing necessarily “wrong” with that. A lot of people don’t give a fig about food. A lot of people have other things on their minds – science, art, justice, the needs of loved ones, the state of the world. A lot of people, people I know well and respect, people I love, people like my wife, find people like me – people with ardent or refined interest in food, who eat food not only out of hunger but as a hobby – boring, self-indulgent, trend-obsessed, good-for-nothing halfwit snobs.

Hardly people at all.

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Last week, the French government launched a €12 million programme to support small business projects in small villages (-1,000 inhabitants), with grants of up to €80,000 for a physical shop and €20,000 for a mobile shop. The programme kicks off 1 March.

In Paris last week, city hall announced the official launch of "Paris Commerce", a programme aimed at revitalising city-owned retail spaces in “neighbourhoods where commercial activity lacks diversity.” The city manages 7,200 such spaces, a little more than 10% of the city’s entire commercial stock. Bookshops, butchers, bakeries, textiles shops, doctors and health clinics are on the list of businesses eligible for rents "very slightly" below the market. One thousand new shopkeepers have already been handed the keys. Among the new shops, just on the rue de l'Ouest in the Fourteenth alone: A l’Ouest, a bookshop and tea salon run by a former Breton high-school teacher, Un Regard Sur Toi, a clothing shop for the visually impaired, and the city’s ninth Nous Anti-Gaspi supermarket.

4.Auchan has 144 hypermarkets and 726 supermarkets in France. One of its supermarkets is just around the corner from me. It and the rest are owned by the Mulliez family, one of the biggest, oddest and most secretive family fortunes in France. The Mulliez own some 130 brands around the world and employ 700,000 people. They make around €100 billion a year. Among its brands is Leroy Merlin, where most of the building supplies we used to renovate our apartment were bought. They also own Decathlon, where I’ve bought bicycles and swimsuits and had squash rackets restrung. They also own Flunch, which is apparently a portmanteau blend of “fast” and “lunch” and to be avoided at all costs.

Since last March, I have also at all costs avoided Auchan and Leroy Merlin. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve never been in the Auchan around the corner. But I won’t be going in any time soon. Why? Because last March, while almost every other Western brand pulled out of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, Auchan and Leroy Merlin stayed put. And, as you’ll see in a paragraph or two, doubled down.

“Abandoning our employees, their families, and our customers is not a choice we can make.” Abandoning their turnover, either. Auchan has 230 stores in Russia, where it earns 10% of its annual gross revenue – close to €3.2 billion a year.

Then last week, Le Monde (story and video in English) and The Insider, using intel provided by Bellingcat, handed us another reason to boycott Mulliez businesses. According to their joint investigation, Auchan and Leroy Merlin have been supplying goods to the Russian military on the frontlines since the very start of the war. Goods described as “humanitarian aid” – which contravenes international law, as only assistance to civilians is considered humanitarian aid during international conflicts. From Auchan warehouses and Auchan stores all over Russia. Collected by volunteers. Delivered by local authorities. What’s more, according to The Insider, “Auchan collected and handed over to the military registration and enlistment offices data on its employees.”

So, cut the convenience crap, OK?

Support local. Think global. Eat wisely. Shop wiser. Yada yada.

Sorry.

Thanks for reading.

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Every morning last week I woke with a headache and a cough, and a somewhat green and grotty feeling at the back of my throat.

The cough nagged at me all day.

I sneezed a lot.

Covid?

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Last week, too, like most weeks, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Paris, motivated by what they viewed as causes of grave urgency.

On Monday, there was a support rally for three Lycée Racine students who the week before had been tear-gassed, beaten and taken into custody for picketing. Participating in these blocus pickets, long seen as a rite of passage for high-school students, part of their political education, last year became illegal, punishable by very stiff fines and prison sentences. The three Racine students, all minors, go on trial in April.

On Tuesday, teachers, parents, students, union representatives and elected officials demonstrated in front of the Paris rectorate on the Rue des Écoles against the closure of classes. Also demonstrating that day, and for the second time in a week, were doctors – general practitioners and specialists – who marched from the Ministry of Health near the Eiffel Tower to the Senate at Luxembourg Gardens. Their objective: to "save medicine" by doubling the price of medical consultations from €25 to €50, extending their work week past 35 hours, and reducing the “pointless” paperwork they have to file on each patient.

On Wednesday, beet and cereal farmers, flanked by 500 tractors, marched from the Porte de Versailles, where the International Agricultural Show is scheduled for the end of February, to the Ministry of Agriculture at Invalides. They were protesting the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to ban the use of bee-killing neonicotinoid insecticides.

Thursday was the fifth protest march in less than a month against pension reform. In Paris the march went from the Place de la Bastille to the Place d'Italie. More than 300,000 people attended. Some carried placards and bullhorns, others hammers, crowbars and wooden sticks. Principally, however, it was a peaceful demonstration, one of 230 across France, backed by transport shutdowns and full sector strikes in energy, refineries, education, public service and health.

Similar numbers attended Saturday’s pension reform protests. These were twinned with the gilets jaunes weekly protests, held every Saturday around the country since November 2018.

There were others. At Place République, groups assemble most days, protesting everything from the actions of foreign governments to vaccination mandates, sexist violence, same-sex marriages, anti-LGBTQIA+, police brutality and « les agresseurs de forces de l’ordre » – aggression against the police.

The Women’s March on Versailles in 1789. The street risings during and after Napoleon. The massive support shown the provisional government during the 1848 revolution. The demonstrations for and against Algerian Independence in 1961 and 1962. Mai 1968. The manifs against the death of Malik Oussekine in 1986, and for the sans-papiers in the early 1990s. Against Juppé and Chirac’s proposed retirement reforms in 1995 and Sarkozy’s in 2010. In support of Charlie Hebdo and freedom of expression in January 2015, and against the jihadist attacks in November 2015.

The list is as long as the longest marches in the city’s history: the liberation of Paris in 1944; the World Cup victory in 1998; and the cortege to the Pantheon for Victor Hugo’s enterrement in 1885.

These collective actions are as much a part of French identity as baguettes, blocus and haute couture. And they are healthy. Just as not participating, choosing instead to go for a stroll on the Seine, or a run in the Buttes-Chaumont, or to sit at a café, drink a beer and write a Substack post, is healthy.

Except last week.

Because last week, Paris and 24 other French cities, from Calais in the north to Marseille in the south and Ajaccio on the island of Corsica, were placed on fine particle pollution alert.

And this is where my Covid symptoms came from. And where my appropriation of the condition of anosognosia now comes into play.

There’s a fun piece in yesterday’s New Yorker by Marco Roth, a review of “The Great Easter: Ambulation,” a new English translation of La Grande Pâque (1969)bythe French artist, poet, composer and Marxist activist Jacques Besse. Born in Paris in 1921, Besse was Jean-Paul Sartre’s star student until the war interrupted his studies and he turned to music, first as musical director of the Charles Dullin company (we discussed Dullin in our first Robert Cordier post in June). In 1943, Dullin reintroduced him to Sartre, who asked Bresse to compose the music for his play Les Mouches (The Flies). In 1944, his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was performed at the Salle Gaveau. In 1947 he wrote the soundtrack for Alain Resnais’ film Van Gogh and befriended the otherwise friendless Pierre Boulez, who pushed his career forward.

In 1950, Besse went to Algeria to support the National Liberation Front. Something happened. A street brawl some say, and a consequent head injury; and then, according to legend, he walked all the way back to Paris, where alcohol and depression, already very much part of his world (according to Annie Cohen-Solal's biography, Sartre: A Life (1987), Sartre's daily intake during this period included "two packs of cigarettes and several pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol – wine, beer, vodka, whisky, and so on – two hundred milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, and rich meals"), pulled that world fully apart.

The next five years were spent in “curious psychiatric internments" until Besse had himself admitted to the La Borde “anti-psychiatric” clinic in an old, ruined chateau in Cour-Cheverny, near Blois. There he lived, on and off, from 1955 till his death in 1999.

Besse was Félix Guattari’s patient at the clinic. Besse’s notebooks, according to his eventual publisher, Pierre Belfond - “covered with erasures and mistakes, torn, pasted back together, smudged, containing a mythical account of his nocturnal wanderings and those of his companions in misfortune: Villon, Sachs, Chabrier and Poe” – became a key source of Guattari’s explorations into the theory and praxis of schizoanalysis, best known in the anglophone world through Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Guattari’s 1972 book collaboration with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

La Grande Pâque is drawn from those notebooks. It is set in 1960, during an Easter week-long release from the clinic, when Besse, homeless and hungry, wandered through Paris “from Montparnasse to the Buttes-Chaumont, from Austerlitz to Sebastopol, passing through Singe-des-Prés [his hallucinatory “monkey” version of Boulevard Saint-Germain], the heart of the city.”

Here’s a taste of Besse’s dishevelled, feverish, jump-cut prose:

“I enter Singe-des-Prés like a herring flops. There is sin in the eggs if this warmth that grips my heart is contradicted. I bury myself in the streets south of the Seine. The Beaux-Arts district. Not a franc. I am terribly thirsty and don’t give a fluck1. I run into an old friend, he is a bourgeois but a good artist. “Do you have a hundred francs?” He's scared, the prick, but he lets me have it. I have a hundred francs and with exquisite pleasure set out in search of a bar.”

Besse pulls the reader along by the sleeve for 200 pages. He hallucinates encounters with various ex-lovers, drinks himself silly, steps into the path of cars and makes music out of their squealing brakes and shifting gears. And nowhere, at no point, does he think there’s anything wrong with him. And who’s to say there is? He’s just yet another self-absorbed flaneur in the streets of Paris, jotting down the minutiae of his semi-sleepwalking perambulations, unconcerned by the bigger picture, or any picture, other than those forming in the damaged quadrants of his frontal lobe.

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All this to say… what? That a deficit of self-awareness is a bad thing? No more than a surfeit is. Except when it comes to a new form of pathology that I would like to draw your attention to.

Folie et déraisonWhen the “authorities” say “fine particles” they usually mean PM10 particles. The kind of particles that are obscuring our view of the Eiffel Tower in the photo above.

These, however, are not "fine particles". Fine particles are PM 2.5, and peaks of these are not as closely observed when air quality is measured. Because they’re too small. According to the French association Respire, “PM 2.5 fine particles are the most dangerous for health, but they are completely off the radar. There was a major pollution peak of PM 2.5 particles at the end of November, beginning of December. We saw nothing. Nothing was said. No measures were taken. We had big peaks of flu, bronchiolitis, Covid. We know that this is directly linked.”

Flu, bronchiolitis, Covid, these are short-term distractions. We now know what exposure to tiny, microscopic particulates does over the long-term. To every system in the human body across its lifespan. It damages prenatal and young brains. It damages everyone’s lungs, spleens, kidneys, hearts, brains and skin and other organs. It lessens academic performance and degrades impulse control. It causes cancer, asthma attacks and respiratory failure. It increases the risk of disease and disability across the board.

In short, it fucks us up. More than anything. In the States, annually, three times as many people die of it as die in car accidents. Twice as many as those that overdose on opioids. Many more than those that die of diabetes.

Worldwide, it kills seven million people annually. That’s more than the COVID-19 total to date.

It’s the biggest killer there is.

And what’s maddening is that we know how to make it go away. How to reduce millions of premature deaths, hospitalisations, emergency room visits and lost workdays, and save trillions. Relatively quickly. Pretty much effortlessly. All we have to do is demand that this be done.

But we don’t. Not because we’re in denial. Our lobes are probably too messed up to consciously choose denial. We don’t do anything because we don’t see the problem. Because we lack insight and awareness of our diagnosis.

Or maybe we see the problem but choose not to address it directly, which is worse, as it makes us no longer victims but perpetrators, complicit in wholesale death and massive suffering.

Or maybe it’s because we’re too focussed elsewhere: on our livelihoods, our retirement packages, our salaries. The size of our kids’ classrooms. All of which are undeniably important, but sort of at the level of Besse’s ex-lovers, really, in the grander scheme of things. They’re not quite matters of life and death. Or if they are, they need to first take a second seat to the more pressing life-and-death matter at hand. Which is the quality of the air we breathe.

We can do this. COVID-19 taught us, and is still teaching us, that we can do this.

What can I myself do on my own? I burst out laughing. – Jacques Besse *Professor Avenarius was lecturing me on the importance of slashing tires following a strict sequence: first car, right front; second car, left front; third, right rear; fourth, all four wheels. But that was only a theory with which he hoped to impress the audience of ecologists or his too trusting friend. In reality, he proceeded without any system whatsoever. He ran down the street, and whenever he felt like it he pulled out his knife and stuck it in the nearest tire.* – Milan Kundera, *Immortality*, 1991. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting we follow the lead of Professor Avenarius and jog down Paris streets at night stabbing tires. Though there are more and more people around the world suggesting we do precisely this.

Have a look at the Tyre Extinguishers in the UK and the US, or Les Dégonfleurs in France.

Last week, two environmental activists were arrested in Sèvres in the Hauts-de-Seine. They allegedly deflated the tires of 200 SUVs and stuck flyers on their windscreens saying, “Your SUV is killing you”.

The couple face two years imprisonment and a 30,000 euro fine.

I’m not suggesting we follow their lead, either. Nor am I suggesting we join Extinction Rebellion or throw cans of soup at paintings.

I’m suggesting that the next time you see someone idling in the car because they are cold, listening to a podcast, or charging their smartphone, you tap politely on their windshield and tell them that they are breaking the law by unnecessarily defiling the air.

I’m suggesting that the next time you see an SUV or a 4x4 – by far the biggest CO2 emitters – point your finger and laugh at it, with as much scorn as you can muster, as if it is the puniest, most shrivelled up and ridiculous thing you’ve seen all day.

I’m suggesting that on the next day of moderate particulate pollution, we peacefully assemble, in numbers that dwarf World Cup celebrations and the funerals of literary lions, and demand that people and governments become aware that air pollution is a human rights violation, as unconscionable an atrocity as any perpetrated on this planet.

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We need to find the wherewithal to throw wartime energies into the pursuit of decarbonisation. To insist that our representatives don’t just make recommendations but stick to our worldwide pledge to keep greenhouse gas emissions below 2°C.

We need to restrict fossil-fuel automobile use, heating and cooling for pleasure, supplementary heating, and wood heating in general – but especially, for starters, during peak periods of air pollution.

We need to incentivise clean energy technologies, walking, cycling, public transport, low-emission vehicles, electric vehicles.

We need to give medals to people who PASO (Put a Sweater On) and snuggle under blankets.

Whatever it takes.

We know all this. But we’re too busy flucking about to do fuck all about it. World Health Organization data shows that nine out of ten people breathe high levels of air pollution every day. Aggressive decarbonisation could cut the premature death toll that this causes almost in half within a decade.

Some effects of climate change look to be here to stay. But not air pollution. That we can wipe out. Country by country, reaping the social benefits locally each time.

Rien à foutre? Rien à floutre!I’ll leave you with Jacques Bess still flucking about in Paris, no longer anosognosiac but fully aware of his affliction, and in the last paragraph on the last page of Keith Harris’s translation, which despite the misgivings expressed in the footnote below, I heartily recommend:

What can I myself do on my own? I burst out laughing. I begin surreally, shall I say in a dream, to speak of Algeria’s independence, I’ll just repeat that I was mad, I’ll say that I went mad in 1954, I’ll just repeat what will end up being accepted as soon as enough terrible years have passed, paying a demon for each of our faults, faults perhaps analogous to what makes me, me, the Mars-Jacques Besse of today, come back down into politics, into prosaic politics, the same way that I want to throw myself into prosaic poetry the day after tomorrow. And walking back to Saint-Germain-des-Prés on autopilot, I wonder what burden of Love, what tax on love that isn’t the tax of blood, we will have to pay for the poverty of all our prosaic acts at the gates of the heaven that invites us, we, the most absurd of people, into the most poetic of Alliances!

Prosaic politics. As necessary as the air we breathe.

Thank you for reading. Please comment, share, like, subscribe – whatever prosaic act grabs you most.

1 The line in the original is rien à foultre. Bresse’s book was only published once, in 1969, and before that in the pages of Guattari’s journal Recherches in 1966. So foultre could be a typo for rien à foutre (“not to give a fuck”). Or it could be the Breton word foultre, which is an onomatopoeia expressing pleasant astonishment. I’ve decided to leave it somewhere in the middle. The translation, by Keith Harris, strays too far from the original for my taste. Besse’s writing is clipped and jolting fast, filled with weirdness, and best left that way.

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Caitlin Corcoran, “HP Saucy: Hanzhou Piao at Haikara Paris”, 1.01.2023. THREE APOLOGIES! First, for the middle finger in the picture above, which many people, including my mother-in-law – especially my mother-in-law! – will find offensive. Sorry, Popo. Second, for this post not being about, despite last week’s Hexagon poll results, “the time a few months back that I had to tell a packed room of angry factory workers why 108 of them were about to lose their jobs.” I was fully prepared to describe this event in no uncertain detail, but as I was assembling my recollections, a picture formed in my mind of a sheet of paper on a table in a conference room on the main floor of a chain hotel just off an autoroute, and from that sheet the entire scene lifted into the air and unfolded like a page in a children’s popup book; and I saw myself among its many complicated plications, standing next to the conference-room table, one of six slack-faced characters lining the wall, the other five businessmen in wrinkled business suits, each flattened to differing degrees by fatigue and stress – it was 7 am – as we listened to a cartoonishly fit, massively tattooed man in full body armour describe how he and his men – a dozen of whom, dressed in riot gear, were lined against the opposite wall – would, in just under two hours, be positioned in offices on the factory’s first and second floors, in bushes around the perimeter, and in black SUVs at the front, back and side entrances.

“If things turn violent,” he said, “and they probably will, as these people are angry, don’t try to engage, just follow us out the door to the extraction point. If the front gate is blocked, we will walk single file, right hands on right shoulders, through the building to the south exit. If that is blocked, we will re-enter and cross the ground floor, exit through the back, cut through a second building, and exit its north end, where cars will be ready to take us back here, or if necessary, directly to the airstrip.”

The room had no windows. It was hidden behind a stand of vending machines in the back corner of the hotel restaurant where, a few minutes earlier, I had eaten a buffet breakfast with four of the slack-faced businessmen. A few minutes before that I had been up in my room looking over my notes, trying to memorise vocabulary, most of it terms I didn’t understand locked within acronyms I had never seen before: RPS (risques psychosociaux); ERP (enterprise resource planning); HCM (human capital management); PLM (product lifecycle management). BE. AOA. FSE. CLC.

I had been told that I would be speaking to the assembled factory workers from a prepared text, but no text was ever prepared. “It will be fine,” one of the suits said. “We’ll keep things simple.”

How, you ask, did I end up in the “A-Team” episode of The Office? Excellent question. “Have you been in situations like this before?” one of the men at breakfast, an Italian in sales, asked. “Or in a war zone?” I explained that when I was a journalist, I mainly covered contemporary art, cinema, food, and fashion, and that the closest I’d been to physical danger was in the standing-room-only media pits of catwalk shows in the 1990s.

It was raining. The dinner the night before had been terrible. The breakfast that morning, worse. I was wearing my most presentable outfit: a camel-coloured wool turtleneck worthy of Steve Jobs; an off-white pair of Levi’s 511s; and a pinstriped suit jacket a friend in costume and wardrobe had given me 15 years before. The jacket’s shoulders were shiny. The turtleneck had two moth holes. The Levi’s had a stain on the left thigh, which, throughout the day, I kept hidden behind a backpack – my son’s, borrowed for the trip.

SRM. KPI. SCM. SKU. CSR. ROI. ROE. ROA. SOL.I had slept poorly, kept largely conscious through the night by the dawning realisation of the reality slowly moving towards me, which, now, at the moment of the paper on the table in the room, was surging forward at a frightening pace.

“The workers, they’re ready for us,” someone said. “They know what’s coming.” The man who said this had a rough, hoarse voice. The men on the opposite wall cracked their knuckles and fingered their billy clubs.

It was precisely then that someone from HR returned my attention to the piece of paper on the table. “C’est un NDA,” he said. A nondisclosure agreement. An acronym I actually knew. Why do the French call it an NDA instead of an AND – un accord de non divulgation – I asked myself, as I patted my pockets for a pen. The man from HR gave me his. I signed the piece of paper on the table. Which means I won’t be describing anything else that happened in Lisieux, on the thirteenth of October, from this point, or, rather, that point, forward.

Hexagon is a reader-supported publication. To support my work and allow me to turn down jobs like the one partially described above, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This does not mean I will therefore be writing about the roundly rejected second option in last week’s Hexagon poll, my weekend-long wine-research road trip to La Dive Bouteille in Saumur, the world’s largest annual natural wine exposition, and the almost-as-big Greniers Saint Jean Salon des Vins Naturel in Angers.

Greniers Saint Jean, Angers, 04.02.23Only 8% of you expressed interest in going down that road. So not a word then here about carbonic maceration or biodynamics or the more than 200 winemakers we met, the grapes they grow, the glasses they poured, the mouthfuls of white, red, rosé, and orange wines from France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Serbia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, England, Denmark, and America that we swirled and spat or, later in the day, gratefully swallowed. Not a word. Except these, from François Rabelais, who, in 1552 or so, just before he retired from the curacy and went to Paris to die, wrote The Fifth and Last Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Good Pantagruel, which included this poem from whence Saumur’s La Dive Bouteille took its name:

LA DIVE BOUTEILLE, by François Rabelais, translated by Timothy AdèsThank you for reading Hexagon. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Back to the middle finger, aka digitus impudicus, which, coincidentally, Rabelais, in the second book – The Very Horrific Life of Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel – gives an early description of its usage:

Panurge, without saying a word, raised his hands and made this sign: with his left hand he joined the nail of the index finger to the nail of the thumb, making a loop in the middle; then he squeezed all the fingers of his right hand into his fist, except the index finger, which he thrust repeatedly in and out of the loop composed of the two above-mentioned fingers of the left hand.

This occurs during a scholarly debate argued by means of obscene gestures between Pantagruel’s friend Panurge and the English pedant Thaumaste, who, after Panurge’s digital rebuttal:

with great toil and vexation of spirit, rose up, but in rising let out a great baker's fart, for the bran came after, and pissing withal very strong vinegar, stunk like all the devils in hell. The company began to stop their noses; for he had conskited himself with mere anguish and perplexity. Then lifted he up his right hand, clunching it in such sort that he brought the ends of all his fingers to meet together, and his left hand he laid flat upon his breast. Whereat Panurge drew out his long codpiece with his tuff, and stretched it forth a cubit and a half, holding it in the air with his right hand, and with his left took out his orange, and, casting it up into the air seven times, at the eighth he hid it in the fist of his right hand, holding it steadily up on high, and then began to shake his fair codpiece, showing it to Thaumast. After that, Thaumast began to puff up his two cheeks like a player on a bagpipe, and blew as if he had been to puff up a pig's bladder. Whereupon Panurge put one finger of his left hand in his nockandrow, by some called St. Patrick's hole, and with his mouth sucked in the air, in such a manner as when one eats oysters in the shell, or when we sup up our broth.

“I HAVE, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze.” ― Ford Madox Ford, The Good SoldierThe man giving the rigid digit in the picture at the top of this page has appeared in past posts. He is Hanzhou Piao: China-born, Tokyo-raised, a Vancouverite who’s worked in étoilé kitchens across Asia, North America, and Europe, best known for his weekly dumpling deliveries, gargantuesque appetite, and predilection for narcoleptic kips.

https://www.instagram.com/hanzhousleeping/His🖕was snapped near the end of shift at his Paris pop-up a few nights ago. A gesture no doubt playfully intended, meant as a joke, but aggressive nonetheless, and I can see how it may offend certain viewers (sorry again, Popo). That said, I find the shot’s date-stamped snappiness deeply satisfying. I especially like its oddly Cezannian proportions and symmetries, the giant egg, the giant finger, the tilted bowl, the weird splattering at the top, the soy sauce in the absolute centre, the movement forward from the ceiling lights and the wall arrow, the plate of grilled onigiri beneath the left elbow, the two, thick-rinded cedrates at the crotch.

In the old world order pictures were said to be worth a thousand words. Nowadays they’re not worth the carbon dioxide – 1,55 grams each – required to post them. This one, however, of HP giving me, you and the world the finger, on a night he also gave us generous portions of puntarelle with caper leaf pistou and trout roe; mushroom chawanmushi; barba di frate with soy, tofu, ginger and bergamot; Japanese-style smashed topinambour salad with hard-boiled egg, cucumber, and katsuobushi; dozens of gyoza; and a beautifully steamed sea bream with ponzu sauce, cébette and coriander, merits a couple of handfuls.

Those above suffice. I want to go somewhere else now. Having been given that initial text as prompt, I will now produce text that continues the prompt through a process of generative pre-training of a language model on a diverse corpus of unlabelled text, followed by discriminative fine-tuning on each specific task.

Caitlin Corcoran, “Hanzhou at Haikara”, 1.01.2023.Words, endless words I've said to serve the moment – now it makes me proud to tell the truth. – AeschylusMost talk is bot these days. Words still penned by people gasp and flop about like dying fish on the bottom of a boat. This I think (is) because even human-generated words rarely escape the machines in which they circulate and spawn. This I think (is) because zombie-ant fungus has taken control of my mind. This I think (is) because whole castles have disappeared from my memory, whole cities that I will never visit again, and, like the narrator in The Good Soldier, which I am reading every night for all of three minutes before I drop off, I have forgotten the aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the aspect of that windowless conference room in the Hôtel Mercure Lisieux Normandie, nor the mien of the men lining its walls; les mots cachés dans les acronymes; the billy clubs, the zip ties, the pepper spray; or, on that Wednesday evening in Paris, in an Izakaya on rue Folie-Méricourt, the plates presented; the silky sauces; the good bottles of wine; the good conversations with good friends; the rediscovery of caricatures of those good friends, scratched years before onto the room’s pillars and walls, back when the space was a cave à vin infamous for defying police closures, spilling clientele onto the street, and allegedly bondaging them to hooks screwed into the ceiling.

Have you tried GPT-3.5? I have. Here, however, is a real thought: the manufacture of the laptop I am writing this with required a Ford Ranger pickup worth of dirt to be dug up and mined, and enough litres of water to fill 100 7-seater hot tubs. Just learning this, looking it up, calculating it anew, consumed enough energy to soft boil an egg. And so? And so. Food. Food, good food, still requires minds and hands. Fast food, sure. SpaceX engineers have built a touchless robot that can make a pizza every 45 seconds. But even in today’s rigged and gigged economy, even though I haven’t had a permanent job since 1991, even though I eke out on short-term contracts and freelance work, they can’t force me to deliver it.

Caitlin Corcoran’s photos above were snapped on “Wet My Whistle Wednesday” last week – the first day of Fèvrier mouillè. The restaurant’s regular chef, Sho Miyashita, was off doing a pop-up at a fancy ski resort in Chamonix, so Hanzhou Piao pop-upped in his place. A pop-up because of a pop-up – the restaurant equivalent of Whac-A-Mole.

Used to be only toasters, fly balls, and kids’ books popped up; then it was those little windows of Russian porn that suddenly appeared in upper-right corners of streaming sites. Now it’s everything everywhere all at once. Used to be, too, that we did shit, now shit does us and we happily stick our selfieing faces in it, mugging for our phones like Cheshire cats. These experiences are called Experiences. Sometimes they are Curated. Sometimes they are Extraordinary. Sometimes they’re just stop gaps, because the kitchen can’t find competent staff. Or any staff. And sometimes they’re because the kitchen needs a break. Or because the chefs are playing Whac-A-Chef.

“It started with, ‘How do we remove some of the dreariness of a worker standing at the fryer and frying chip basket after chip basket?’” Chipotle chief technology officer Curt Garner told CNBC earlier this summer. “It allows our crew to spend more time doing culinary tests, serving guests,” he said.

Doing culinary tests, serving guests, and planning pop-ups.

A third of French people say that their work is meaningless. For those under 35 the proportion is one in two. For those working at Chipotle, considerably higher.

In the French private sector, one out of every two workers who hits retirement age is unemployed, unfit or inactive. Last month I hit that age. There is ‘reform’ afoot, and barring precedented cave-ins by the government, that age will be extended by two years, but it won’t be put into effect until 2030.

So I can retire now. Not that I’m in any position to do so. I won’t be eligible for full pension until I’m 75. Even then, I’ll have to supplement it with some other form(s) of income. Which I’m prepared to do. Which I’m doing already.

In more impoverished sectors of the French work force, one in four is dead by 64.

Hexagon is a reader-supported publication. To support my work and save me from having to seek employment at Home Depot or its French equivalent, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for 5 bucks a month.

One more thing. Last year, a restaurant opened up the hill that we call the Old People’s Place, because it is run by septuagenarians. With no previous restaurant experience. The food is pretty good. The service is a bit slow. The waiter shuffles from table to table like Tim Conway in The Carol Burnett Show. Look it up millennials, it’s on YouTube.

I mention this because of a paper a reader recently sent me from the Journal of Aging Studies (December 2021), a study of a Chinese reality show, Forget Me Not Café, which “brought together five older people (aged 65 and older) living with dementia to run a pop-up restaurant.”

The study aimed to explore how the reality show cast talk (or write) about dementia in older people…. Four discursive themes were identified, including: age as a risk factor for dementia; early signs and symptoms of dementia in older people; the pressure on the family of people with dementia; and expectations of people living with dementia. The findings of this study show that the views of the reality show cast highlight the capability of older people with dementia to communicate effectively and live with the condition, their personal goals of sustaining a happy, meaningful, and sociable life, and the actions they took to positively influence personal circumstances.

This has got me thinking. Which, at my age, is a good thing. One that I am no longer taking for granted. MOTWYW. Anyhow, my thinking was this: I could work in a restaurant. Something I first did the year Elvis died, in a midway diner at the Pacific National Exhibition, where I made early-morning fry-ups for carnies.

Chuckwagon Diner, PNE, 1977I like cooking. I cook three square most days. I throw two or three dinner parties a week. I’ve cooked professionally in everything from a mining camp to a taco stand. I’ve organised supper clubs. I ran the kitchen of an opera festival for four years. But my last commercial kitchen gig was in the early 1980s. I swore I’d never do it again. Over the years I semi-toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant, but always pulled out before the talk became serious. I like cooking too much to ruin it by turning it into a job. This is what I told myself. Yesterday, however, Hanzhou woke up halfway through our lunch at a middling noodle joint on rue Belleville and said I should work as a private chef. He was doing a lunch today for a fashion designer somewhere. The menu looked interesting. He asked if I wanted to be a server. I said no. I haven’t been a waiter since Lee’s Palace in Toronto in the summer of Chernobyl.

But it, too, got me thinking. He is about to launch his own restaurant. Maybe, a few years down the road, when GPT 10.5 finally pushes me into full-blown obsolescence as a hired hack of the ruling class, I’ll ask HP for a job. Doubtful he’d hire me; he rolls his eyes at my autodidactic kitchen skills. And he’s looking to invest in a machine that makes 600 dumplings an hour.

So that’s probably out. Which leads, finally, to my third apology, for not having posted a Hexagon last Sunday. I wanted to but the wine tasting road trip got in the way, followed by a couple of freelance gigs. Not laying off factory workers this time, editing a this and writing a that. Paying the bills. Pushing back the demon tide of dementia. Keeping the wolf from the door and one doddering, Tim Conway-like step head of GPT.

FYI, GPT, BTW, ICYMI = Generative Pre-trained Transformer. “An autoregressive language model released in 2020 that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.”

FWIW.

The Good Soldier: “You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become. Just as the blacksmith says: 'By hammer and hand all Art doth stand,' just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves around his morning delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general believes that he alone is the preserver of society - and surely, surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us going.”

TL;DR? NVM. TAFN. G2G.

T= talk

T= to

Y= you

L= later

Thx.

And sorry again, Popo.

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Patrick Loughran, Sans Abri, 2022, faïence émaillée, lustres, 54 x 46 x 25 cmAt a dinner party recently the hostess, a clown, not a “bit of a clown” but a real live professional clown with giant shoes and a red nose and 130 more clowns behind her, not tumbling headfirst out of a tiny car in a circus tent but in an association called Le Rire médecin, which she founded in 1991 and which, last year, organised 90,000 bedside shows for sick kids in 60 paediatric wards in France, and which is soon to be the subject of a major motion picture – shooting starts in April, the script is based on her book, and the director is the César-winning actor Reda Kateb (Engrenages, Un prophète, Zero Dark Thirty, L’Amour flou) – anyway, this good clown, an old friend who I admire immensely,invited C. and I to dinner in Bagnolet the other night – she’s a superb cook – and within minutes of our entering the lovely apartment she shares with her husband, a ceramic artist (I’ll deal with him later), openly and very derisively mocked me, not once but twice, and not playfully, not clownishly, but with genuine sneering, scornful contempt.

For two very good reasons:

1) after presenting her with a bottle of Vin Noé “Gueule d'Amour” Bourgogne Pinot Noir by Jonathan Purcell (named one of the “Ten Natural Wine Fascinations of 2022” by Aaron Ayscough in his essential Substack Not Drinking Poison), I then sheepishly pulled out a second bottle – labelled “Zero” and filled with de-alcoholised “wine” – and told her, knowing full well how she would react, that I would only be drinking from it that evening as I was “doing Dry January”, to which, as expected, she rolled her eyes and said, witheringly, “Jesus H. Harvey, you gonna grow a moustache in November, too?”;

2) after she pulled a perfectly roasted guinea fowl out of the oven, and after a guest then announced he had become a vegan (“Green beans for you, then, mate”), I blurted out that I had just bought a Sage Smart Oven Air Fryer, and she looked at me as if I was wearing a wet turd on the top of my head and said, “Oh Jesus H. Really? An air fryer? We don’t associate with people who have air fryers.”

I fully concur with the sentiments expressed in both 1) and 2).

In my defence, my Dry January is nothing new. I didn’t just jump on the on-the-wagon wagon. I’ve been dry every January since 2018.

Why? Because I really like wine. A lot. I find it infinitely interesting, and, of course, intoxicating, and, breakfast aside, I find it very hard not to have a glass or three while enjoying a good meal. Or even a mediocre meal. But once a year, I need to show myself that I can go without. Not just for a day or two. For a week, and then another, and then two more.

C. is especially disdainful of this “need”. “Why do you have to be so extreme in everything? Just drink less.” A perfectly rational position from a perfectly rational person, who for some reason married a chronically irrational and compulsive tippler already at the time (33 years ago!) rounding the bend(er) of the Jellinek Curve. So maybe not so rational after all.

Have I missed my wine this month? Not really. Do I notice any significant difference between my January self and my other-eleven-month self? Not really. Am I pleased with myself for having done without? Yes. Will I grow a moustache in November? No.

As for 2). The air fryer. Indefensible. Here I am pure dupe, victim of the hype, pushed toward its purchase by the beatific vision of fat-free frites. Which, so far, I am incapable of even coming close to producing. The Sage’s convection oven itself is indeed “smart”, much faster than firing up my giant Aga, and it will dramatically reduce our electricity bill, which quadrupled last month. So I’m happy with that. And I’m still experimenting with the air-frying component, trying different frites recipes (baking soda? Bleh!) and open to all suggestions. If anyone out there has figured out the frites, please let me know.

Ok, all this to say that January is all but done, and to mark its passing, Hexagon is holding its first annual Damp February Wine Tasting (DFWT).

Buy my next glass of wine!

The DFWT on 18 February will showcase European natural wines made with grape varietals that were once – or still are – part of the vignoble of Paris. As discussed in these pages a few months back, the Romans planted grape vines here in the 4th century BCE. By the time of the French Revolution, the entire region contained between 42,000 and 45,000 hectares of vines, making it the biggest wine-producing regionin the world.

At various times over the centuries, Pinot Noir, Pinot Beurot, Sémillon, Gamay, Sauvignon Blanc, Savagnin (and its cousin Fromental), Chardonnay, Grenache, Noah and Baco were all grown here.

Our ambitious plan is to track down, using Aaron’s definitive bestseller, The World of Natural Wine, and the unparalleled expertise of Paris Wine Walks, the best European exemplars of wine made from these varietals, be they French, Italian, Portuguese or what have you, and present them to you during a Paris vineyard walk and cave crawl in one of the city’s heritage wine regions.

The wines will be chosen during next weekend’s road trip to La Dive Bouteille in Saumur, the world’s largest annual natural wine exposition, and the almost-as-big Greniers Saint Jean Salon des Vins Naturel in Angers.

Where will the tasting be held? That depends on the number of participants. Response so far has been incredibly enthusiastic – seems there are a lot of people here ready to dampen their spirits. Now I’m opening it up to Hexagon paid subscribers and subscription gifters who live in Paris or the Paris region or are planning to be in Paris that weekend, or are well-pocketed, flexible and foolhardy enough to consider dropping everything, packing a bag, and heading straight over.

How to book? Send me a comment or DM my IG (can’t believe I just wrote that – I can hear Dr Giraffe’s eyes roll all the way from here).

Oh. The ceramics artist. Patrick Loughran, whose clay sculpture/object assemblages combine pretty much every aspect of ceramic expression and tradition – utilitarian, figurative, architectural – with a complex appreciation of the laws of organic and evolutionary biology, geology, botany, and fluid mechanics, and a jazz connoisseur’s deep devotion to improvisation. They are among the most intensely condensed, colourful and surprising artworks I have ever laid eyes on.

See for yourself – that’s one at the top of the page. From 12 March to 24 April his works will be showcased at the CRMCS#3 biennial exhibition of contemporary ceramics at Galerie Zwart Huis in Brussels. In April and May he will be at the Woodman Foundation’s new artist’s residency in Florence. This summer he has a show at Nendo Galerie in Marseille.

Thanks for reading. Hope to see slightly blurred double-vision versions of some of you Saturday, 18 February. And of course next week when our subject will either be: the upcoming Loire Valley wine tour; or the time a few months back that I had to tell a packed room of angry factory workers in Normandy why 108 of them were about to lose their jobs.

I’ll let you choose.

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I’m starting with a story that should have had star billing in last week’s hippophagographical disquisition. Not a story so much as an anecdote, a bit of family lore about the horse of my great-great grandfather or my great-great-great grandfather – an Irishman named, as was his son and his father, Joe or John or James. Let’s call the horse Tinker. As you can tell I’m a bit rough on the details. I only recall hearing the story once as a kid, told by my gab-gifted father after a few drinks, or by his brother after a few more. With great ranging embellishments.

I tried ringing my sister last night to get the actual facts. She’s the family historian and genealogist, all paid-up with the online Mormons, but as she was at the library, and as my Substack deadline, self-inflicted but real to me nonetheless, was and is approaching, I’ve pushed on, the truth be dulled if not entirely damned.

A Horse, a Kingdom…The story, then, as I know it, of old Joe and his faithful horse Tinker, took place somewhere in Ireland and sometime during the famine years – 1845-52 – when poor old Joe, a family man and a Catholic with the bog-standard dozen kids on his tab, fell on hard times and had to eat poor old Tinker, who had no more meat on his bones than his master; but, as all horses, according to whoever told me the story, probably W.T. in his cups or uncle Lorne in his, were the property of the occupying king, Joe was marched off to gaol, and from there to the occupier’s court, and from that place to another place and then to a place of execution, and there hanged by the neck until he was dead, and may the Lord have had mercy on his soul.

This unhappy story was not included last week because I was only reminded of it this past Wednesday, during the birthday dinner of a friend, after a ginger-haired woman who I have known peripherally since 1995 – I see her once a year at the birthday celebrant’s Thanksgiving dinner party – approached while I was tweezering winter purslane onto the second course, a salad of beluga lentils on a bed of stracciatella di bufala (with crispy chilli sauce, no less), and asked, “Are you in any way related to the Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien Mooneys?”

It was the first time I had noticed her Irish accent. I shook my head. “Not that I’m aware of,” I said. Her face went stern. “You know who they are, though.” I shook my head again. She shook hers, with, I’m guessing, or projecting, incredulity. “They’re the best bakers in all of Ireland,” she said, with a little more lilt in her voice. “My father went to its opening day in 1930. He wanted to be the first customer, but when he stepped in the door there was already a woman ahead of him.”

I stopped tweezering and gave her my full attention. Something in her voice told me that this story of her father’s disappointing second-place in the bakery that day, 92 years ago, was still important to her. I could not fathom why.

The dinner continued. Conversations went elsewhere. The ginger woman, let’s call her Valerie because that is indeed her name, was seated across and away, and at the 20-minutes-after or the 20-minutes-to lull (my mother’s pet theory was that the tide of table talk always goes slack at one of these two moments in each hour of a social dinner) she turned to me and asked, “So then, where is your family from?” To which I responded, as I always do, “I haven’t a clue.”

This I could tell distressed her. How could you go through life not knowing where you were from? She knew. She was born in Sri Lanka, married to a Croat, and a long-time resident of France, but her origins were West Corkonian, as were her parents and theirs before them, and theirs before that. She tsk-tsked into her wineglass and repeated the question, adding, “Are they from West Cork, then?” To which I responded, as I always do, that the name Mooney is as common as mud in the south of Ireland, and just as much mud in the north, and, regardless of where the compass needle points, when attached to first names like Joe, John, or James, even muddier all around.

“Yes, but surely you’ve done the research. Americans are always going to Ireland to do the research.” I didn’t wince at or correct “American”. I successfully curbed that umbrage-taking reflex years ago. Along with the “He’s Canadian” impulse every time, say, Michael J. Fox is brought up in conversation. I now fully accept that Canadians are Americans, just as Colombians, Curaçaoans and Cubans are Americans, and that nobody gives a shit that Michael J. Fox is from Burnaby.

Instead, I chewed my ossobuco and remained silent.

“You’ve never done the research?”

After a few more deliberative chews, I sat up straight and pronounced, in the rumbling tenor of my most authoritative Wikipedian, that the name Mooney derives from Ó Maonaigh, pronounced “Om-weeneey”, which in turn is derived from maoin, a Gaelic word meaning wealth or treasure of treasure, and, hence, when O'Maonaigh was anglicised to Mooney, it meant the descendant of the wealthy one.

“But where was your family from?” she asked, exasperated.

“According to Mooney lore,” I continued, “we come from a noble line, said to be descendants of the ancient Irish King Heremon, who conquered Ireland with his brother Herber, then slew poor Herber in his tub and went forth to father a line of Irish kings that included the fearless and fertile King Niall of the Nine Hostages, whose DNA is said to be found in one in 12 modern Irishmen, and in a further three million worldwide.”

“But which village?”

I told her Mooney could also be spelled Moony, Moonie, Mainey, Mauney, Meeney, Miney and Moe.

“Yes, but, where?"

I mentioned my sister and the online Mormons. She looked at me with withering sadness and offered up her genealogist friend in Dublin. “If you can be found, he’ll find you.”

This gave me pause. Do I wish to be found? Am I lost? Am I my genes, my class, my colour? My tastes and tendencies? My thoughts and dreams? My ossobuco? Who am I, what am I? All these and more poured in, a cascade of questionings overflowing the rims of my very soul, and yet I was stone-cold sober, halfway through a dry January only dampened by three nights on an intemperate Italian lash.

It was then that the story of poor old Joe and his Tinker leapt into my head. And I told it. Which made someone else at the table, a loyal Hexagon reader from Brooklyn who can only trace one grandparent back to the old country, shake her head and say, “Might have told that story last week, no?”

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In 1629, a tragic event in the annals of Hippophagy occurred in France. A groom named Claude Guillon was condemned to death and executed for having eaten part of a horse at Saint-Claude on a Saturday in Lent. As a contrast to which it is worth mentioning that on the 27th of February 1848, the Parisian insurgents cut up, distributed, and ate a horse which fell dead on the pavement during the combat. — Journal of the Arts, 27 March 1868We understand the Parisians in the emboldened passage above. Nothing whets the appetite like a bit of insurgency, and the horse was right there, dead on the pavement. But the groom’s story, like old Joe’s, is a puzzle. Not why he ate part of a horse at Saint-Claude on a Saturday in Lent, but why was he executed for it? I have unearthed online no shortage of men, Irish, French and otherwise, hanged for stealing horses, but none for dining on them. It’s hardly an aberration. Ptolemy in the second century was the first to call certain races who subsisted on horse meat “Hippophagists”. Herodotus (b.c. 484 - 408) tells us that rich Persians “on their birthdays, serve up oxen, horses, camels, and asses, roasted whole; but the poor use smaller animals.” And so on. And so enough. Dead horses were last week. Let’s not flog them any further. Instead, return with me to West Cork and Michael J. Fox and King Niall of the Nine Hostages, and the rest of the cluttered blarney above. For surely there is a point to all this?

Indeed, there is.

My ten-year titre de séjour, pictured above, expires this September. If I wish to maintain my principal residency in France, I will have to renew it.

Or apply for French nationality.

The deadline – not this self-inflicted one, but the one to renew my residency card, and/or apply for citizenship – fast approaches. And I am not sure what to do. I hesitate. I balk. I flinch. Why? Again, as with the site and situation of my Irish ancestors, I have no clue. The amount of paperwork to be sure – dozens of official documents no more than three months old and each officially translated at 75 euros a pop. And you have to memorise all the words to “La Marseillaise”. And every member of Macron’s cabinet.

But my reluctance must also have something to do with the am-I-lost vanity expressed above. The usual romantic bunk: I am a citizen of the world, independent of all but the most immediate ties of blood and kinship. Nationalism is beneath me. Identity politics, like party politics, are for the existentially stunted. I am not my clothes, my hair, my tattoos, my sexual proclivities, my sports team, my books, my music. My knowledge, my refinement. My winter purslane, my beluga lentils, my vin nature. I am these words. Etcetera.

So what’s left? “At home everywhere,” the writer Georges Simenon said. “And nowhere. Never a stranger, never quite belonging.” Yup, pretty much. You wouldn’t know it to hear me say it in French, but I have lived in this country for more than half my life. I’ve lost touch with my Canadian heritage and have no patrimoine français. My children were born here, they have French passports. They vote in French elections. I do not. Not because I don’t want to. I am not allowed to. So there’s that. But beyond that? Do I need to be French? Do I need to be anything? What am I?

Mormons are fixated on family trees because they need to baptise by proxy all ancestors who died before learning about the restored Mormon Gospel. They need their names to save their souls. I am unaware of the need for such needs. I am nothing except matter and its movements and modifications. I am a subject without predicate, a body without organs. The usual romantic bunk. But do I need to have a horse in this race? Do I need to be saddled with more bona fides? Or am I better where I am, up in the stands, a spectator above the fray, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring my fingernails like James Joyce, whose line from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I just cribbed. He never became French. Nor did Samuel Beckett. Nor did Georges Simenon.

Me, a Frenchman? Moi?

Vanity, thy name is Mooney. Pronounced “Om-weeneey”.

Obviously, I need help. Which is why I am turning to you, dear readers, to continue the good work begun by Valerie, and find me a post on which to tether my stubbornly unaffiliated, individually atomised and epistemically unburdened horse’s ass of a being. Emmanuel Macron can trace his line back to his great-grandfather, George William Robertson, an English soldier and butcher who fought at the Somme. Marine Le Pen’s great-grandmother was born in Alexandria, Egypt, from the union between a Swiss expat and a Maltese whose name, Micallef, can be traced back to the Arabic mukallaf, meaning one who is religiously responsible.

Should I join Manu and Marine? Please scroll down and click on the COMMENT button below, which is nicely nestled between the equally important LIKE and SHARE buttons and just below the much more material and indispensable UPGRADE TO PAID button.

Once clicked, tell me, in one word or more, what I should do.

Time is of the essence. My past and my present are decided. My future is in your hands.

Merci.

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I’ve never been much of a horse person. I find them noble and all that, and I like the smell of their shit – when it’s dry and mixed with stable hay or in a country field, not the fresh wet plops – but they play no significant role in my life. I haven’t been on one since I was twelve. The only time I see them – or think about them – is when I bet on them.

Or at a gilets jaunes street protest.

Mathias Zwick @MathiasZwickLes cavaliers de l'apocalypse, rue Roy, Paris, 1er décembre 2018. Mathias Zwick / Hans Lucas#manifestation #giletsjauneshanslucas.com/mzwick/photo/1… 12:33 PM ∙ Dec 3, 2018

674Likes378RetweetsI’m particularly wary of police horses. This dates to my childhood: when I was five my parents took me to Stanley Park, and while standing outside the Third Beach concession, a Canadian Mountie’s horse kicked me in the head. A glancing blow, fortunately, no doubt permanently damaging but not life-threatening. And entirely my fault: I was in the no-go zone behind the horse’s hind hooves, admiring its backside, nose close, and not offering it any of my creamsicle.

I probably would have kicked me in the head, too.

So, no, not a horse person. On occasion, however, I will eat one. Or rather, small pieces of one. The first of these were just as memorable as anything Proust ever got down him: three tender slices of tongue in a delicious mushroom cream sauce, served to me on the first night of my first European tour – a high-school rugby trip – by the rugby coach’s wife in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte, in 1977.

I had gone to market with the coach’s wife earlier in the day. Maisons-Laffitte is an affluent community, known as the “cité du cheval” because of its horse breeding and racetrack. It is also, I have just learned, the birthplace of the poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic Jean Cocteau, the actress Emma Watson, and the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

The covered market in the centre of town was unlike anything I’d ever seen, filled with delectables I couldn’t identify – so many dizzying heaps, piles and towers of fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, sausages, cheese, birds, breads and pastries that I felt like what Boris Yeltsin must have felt like 12 years later, when he made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall's Supermarket in Houston and stood, mesmerized with admiration and disbelief, in front of the frozen food section.

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Did Madame Entraîneur know in advance that she would be cooking a horse’s tongue that night? No idea. Nor did I know at the time that she was buying a horse’s tongue, even though I’m sure the butcher shop we were in was a boucherie chevaline, with a sign on its facade like the one below.

In my defence I was jet-lagged. And 17. And as yet untouched by the French language, much to le chagrin of Mesdames Graham (Grade 8), Parker (Grade 9) and Labbé (Grade 10).

“Langue,” said Madame Entraîneur, after I polished off everything on my plate at the dinner table and made a mangled attempt to compliment her cuisine. “Du cheval.”

I had no idea what she was trying to tell me. Something to do with long hair?

“Cheveux?” I said, pulling at a few strands of my hockey mullet.

“Cheval,” she repeated, and her 12-year-old daughter – who like every other member of the family lit up a Gitane cigarette after each of the meal’s four courses – made a very convincing whinnying sound.

Cheval. Horse. Of course. Wow. Weird.

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I was unaware that eating horse was a thing. Which it very much was and is. Not in Anglo Saxon countries, except by mistake or scam. But almost everywhere else.

In France, horse has graced plates since the Revolution. Napoleon, following the example of the Roman legions, fed it to his Grand Army. At Aspern-Essling in 1809, his first personal defeat, he instructed his army surgeon to cook horse bouillon on the breastplates of fallen cuirassiers, season it with gunpowder, and feed it to the wounded.

Horse meat consumption spiked during the siege of Paris in 1870, when the city’s starving citizens ate around 70,000, along with every available rat, cat, dog and all the city zoo animals, including its bears, elephants, and giraffes.

Hippophagy – the practice of eating horse meat – peaked in France around the turn of the century, when there were more than 300 chevalines and 200 horse meat market stalls in Paris. Those numbers have since decreased. In 2005 there were over a 1,000 horse butchers in France. By 2019 there were only 304. The reasons: as elsewhere, concern about health, animal welfare and climate change has resulted in French people, especially young French people, eating less meat.

Overall meat consumption has dropped 12% in the last decade (horse meat consumption goes down each year at a rate of around 12%).The meat the French still eat is not the same, either. Because, apparently, most French people don’t like to cook, and when they have to they try to do so as quickly as possible. So they use more quick-prep stuff like minced beef and lardon chunks. They’re also less likely to eat game, offal, and horse, because, well, eating game, offal, and horse is weird. Especially horse. Why? Horses are Olympic athletes. They have special relationships with socially advantaged young girls. They don’t work in fields. They race around tracks for enormous amounts of money.

Hence, fewer chevaline butchers, which means higher prices for horse meat - the average price is around 18.50 euros a kilo, making it the second most expensive meat in France, only surpassed by veal. So, even those who like horse meat, are less likely, or able, to eat it.

To counter this trend, France has upped its exportation of live horses for slaughter. Mostly to Italy, some to Spain — the top two consumers of horse meat in Europe — the rest to Japan, the world’s second biggest horse eater, second to China.

The biggest shipper of meat horses is my home country, Canada – Alberta, mostly – which ships off thousands every year. The conditions, by most reports, are “sinister”. Canada also slaughters 25,000 horses each year for meat, which it freezes and ships. Some of the meat stays in Canada – horse meat is still a thing in Quebec – but most goes to Japan and France.

France. This is the weird bit: almost all the horse meat consumed in France is imported; and almost all the horse meat butchered in France is exported. Can anyone out there explain why? I spent a bunch of time recently researching global supply chains for an OECD podcast I hosted, but these sorts of dynamics didn’t come up. Is it price? Is it because French consumers prefer red horse meat, i.e., meat from an adult animal, and not pink foal meat, from horses less than two years of age, which is preferred in Japan? Anyone?

Ok, don’t know about you, but this subject is starting to make me feel a little queasy. No, that’s a lie. I’ve been feeling a little queasy ever since midnight last Wednesday, when, having slipped out of a side angle of the Hexagon for a three-day "Tutto Banger Niente Filler" tour of Italy, I found myself at a table in a late-night restaurant in Sicily that specialises in horse meat. And that’s why I’m here now, queasily reliving my first French dish and every bit of horse consumed since, and all of it now fodder for this piece.

The trip, a birthday present from two amazing but crazy friends that took us to many of the best restaurants and wine bars in Catania, Palermo, Rome, Bologna and Milan (become a paid subscriber and I’ll send you a list today!) was a somewhat carbon-heavy indulgence (flight from to Catania, flight from Palermo to Rome) with more aperativos, full-menu-plus-everything-on-the-blackboard meals, and digestivos in three days than any sane person would attempt to consume in… two weeks? A month? A lifetime? In our defence, none of us drives a car, we took trains for the most part, and two of us went on three-day penitential purges immediately after (the third of our party, an absurdly big eater whose prodigious appetite has been described in these pages before (and is profiled here in the Financial Times) just kept chewing and powered through).

At the Catania restaurant, one of nine in the city specialising in horse meat, we came upon our undoing: six of the house’s famous polpette di cavallo. Three semplice, three filled with “Philadelphia&Pistacchio”. All flame-scorched on the outside. All barely warm and raw and gristly in the middle.

Warning: the image below contains graphic content that might shock, offend, upset and disgust. Whoops, too late, there it is.Most of the balls and the remnants of the balls not on this plate I palmed into my napkin, slipped into the little envelope the cutlery came in, and left on the street outside for the Catanian cats. I doubt they ate them. If they did, I doubt they survived.

The two bites I took – one of each variety, just to be sure – were easily the least agreeable of my life.

I don’t care if it was my first French dish. My madeleine. I don’t care if it has twice as much iron as steak and around the same amount of omega-3 fatty acids as salmon. I don’t care if it’s pink or red, smoked and boiled, wrapped raw in a shiso leaf or cut into steaks and served with perfect frites.

My horse-eating days are done.

Probably.

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We hosted a dinner last night. The menu was ersatz Japanese – California rolls, classic Benihana steakhouse salad, braised daikon and lotus root, Yakinuki pork belly charcoal-grilled at the table on our indoor BBQ – all prepared by my family, and all for my birthday. For the cake, my eldest daughter and one of my best friends made a galette des rois, by far the finest anyone at the table had ever tasted. And then, finally, it was over. All of it. The holidays, the year, the birthday, done, finished. This is my most treasured moment of every calendar year, just after the birthday’s champagne brightness fades and the darkness drops; and the entire yule season, its hour come round at last, slumps into its chrysalis, spins out the last of its tinsel silks to close the cocoon, and pupates through the night. Then, come morning, with fluttering shudders it splits open the shroud and emerges, its great careless wings unfolded, and slouches towards February, a rough beast in search of new bewitching flame.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the parties, the food, the tree, the baubles, even the carols. Though Bing quickly gets on my nerves. As does Burl and Dean, even Frank and Nat after a couple of listens. Soon the King’s Singers sound like Eddie Izzard taking the piss out of the Church of England – “Hallelujah, hallelujah, joyfully we lark about” – but even drearier and without the humour. Not even the amazing Chilly Gonzales master class that I listened to awhile back – on Baroque counterpoint in George Michael’s “Last Christmas” – could keep that song from killing me harshly, its refrains earworming through my brain for weeks straight, hollowing out my soul like a spoon in a Halloween pumpkin.

*This year, to save me from tearsI'll give it to someone special* I’m an old man, I like routines. So, it is with great relief to finally find myself at the top of this year exactly where I was at the bottom of the last, on the second floor of the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville (ENSAPB), at a table near a window overlooking the leafless maple trees in the wide courtyard, well within earshot of the elevator’s pentachordal chime.

Ee-ong.

No complaints. A choice between the elevator and, say, “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus,” which I probably heard on spotifying loop at least twice a day throughout the month of December? No contest. And the walk over was exceptionally pleasant. No rain, the air quality just below «Bonne», and a bewildering variety of flora in full profusion. Which is, yes, pleasant, but also of course wildly disturbing. Almost mid-January and 13°C (56°F)? WTF? The potted wisteria and olive trees outside our door are budding, as are the crocuses and daffodils beneath them. The planted grass in the road verge and tree wells are struggling in litter-strewn mud, but the city’s «zéro pesticide» policy keeps the weeds flourishing in every building niche and sidewalk crack. Especially the wondrous palmier du ghetto, Ailanthus altissima, the “heaven-tree” that grows like hell where nothing else survives.

The photo above is from Ailanthus Altissima, a monograph by the French artist and architect Simon Boudvin, published by B52 in 2021. For ten years Boudvin documented the development of a population of heaven-trees in eastern Paris. Some grew as much as 15m/50ft.

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Ailanthus takes root where humans have left their mark but do not like to linger; it is a ruderal species (from the Latin rudus, ruderis, “rubble”), meaning that it grows in an anthropised environment… Its leaflets - the small leaves that form a compound leaf, as with clover or acacia - are equipped with regulatory glands, real energy reserves that can be mobilised in case of a hard blow. As for reproduction, the tree does double duty: insects and wind fertilise its flowers and disperse its many seeds (300,000 per tree per year) … The ailante is also able to reproduce from its extensive root system, each fragment of which can give rise to a new individual. The more stressed (injured, pruned or cut) the tree is, the more it will sprout new shoots.

Source: Christelle Granja

The ghetto palm – the name comes from Detroit, apparently – is highly adaptive. It can withstand temperatures down to -13°C/8.6°F), loves acidic soils, and positively thrives on atmospheric pollution, especially sulphur and mercury. Simon Boudvin: “Under the impermeable layer of the pavement, it finds fill soil that is often low in nutrients, if not enriched by nitrogen from urine, loaded with heavy metals, sometimes soaked in hydrocarbons, and occasionally sprinkled with salt.”

The French nobility loved these robust ornamentals, which Jesuit missionaries brought to France from China in 1751. The Sun King cultivated them in the royal gardens at Versailles. Hundreds of thousands were planted for silkworm farms – it was thought to attract Bombyx mandarina, the wild relative of the domesticated silk moth. Nothing came of this venture. Still, Baron Haussmann, enamoured of their elegance, lined his avenues with them. Today, however, they are classified as an “invasive alien species.” Border controls are in place, and a national action plan for their eradication.

Alien? Everything French-borne on my birthday dinner plate, including the daikon, which came from Brittany, and the avocados, which came from the Côte d’Azur, was alien to these parts once. The classification, according to the urban ecologist Audrey Murate, is off the mark: “To present foreign infiltration as catastrophic for indigenous communities is absurd. These arguments, which are akin to calls against immigration in the human sphere, are devoid of scientific rigour but not of nauseating ideologies.”

Which leads me away from the flora to the fauna, also in visible abundance on my walk this morning; and dominated, for me at least, by two local varieties – busik drivers and Dongbei women.

The drivers sell goods. The women sell themselves.There were three of the former – zarobitchany – distributing groceries from the backs of their white busiks, which were parked end-to-end in front of the library. Surrounding the vans were burly men drinking Obolon tall boys. Obolon is Europe's largest single beer manufacturer. It is brewed in Kyiv. All the other products inside the busiks were also from Ukraine. And selling out fast.

Before the war, there were thought to be around 30,000 Ukrainians in the Paris region, half of them undocumented. That number has since swelled – last November, there were 118,994 Ukrainian refugees registered on French soil. Craving for comfort food from the motherland is at an all-time high.

By the time I got to the vans, which, coincidentally, were parked next to a stalwart stand of heaven-trees, the Obolon beers were gone, as were the big plastic bottles of Chernihivske beer from Chernihiv, the site of the first siege of the war with Russia. Gone too were the slabs of cured salo lard, smoked kovbasa sausages, braids of smoked kosychka cheese, tvorog cottage cheese, baked ryazhanka milk, borodinsky custard rye bread and most of the pickles – cabbage, cukes, garlic, beets, herbs, apples and tomatoes. There were still some jars of smoked Baltic sprats in the boxes in the back of the trucks, along with some industrial brand mustard and mayo, a few packets of sweets – the kind only homesick Ukrainians would find appealing – and, hidden beneath, bottles of Ukrainian vodka, illegally imported (the police apparently look the other way when it comes to beer) and most of it cheap – around the same price per bottle as a 1.5L Chernihivske. Some, birch or honey pepper flavoured, were more expensive, but still priced well below what they cost in Paris shops.

People were also dropping off things they wanted to send back to Ukraine, at a cost of 1.5 euros a kilo. Boxes mainly, containing, presumably, food, clothes, medical supplies. Maybe some wine. Furniture, too, including some very large pieces. And, if there is any room left, passengers, at around 100 euros a ticket.

And then, out of a van stepped a burly man, hitching up his belt.Followed by a Dongbei in uniform — cinched black puffer jacket, black skirt, black leggings, high black boots.

Dongbei is the nickname that Belleville Chinese, most of whom migrated from the Wenzhou region in the south-east of China, give to the women who work the boulevard on which ENSAPB is located. Most of whom come from the Dongbei region of northeastern China, on the border with North Korea. This morning I counted three dozen standing in small groups or leaning alone against the walls of the pho restaurants, Chinese supermarkets and cellphone shops on the boulevard. There were more queueing in front of the Western Union office, waiting to wire money back to their families in China.

Dongbei is where the Maoists launched their military takeover of China in 1948. It was, until recently, the country’s industrial base. Now it’s China’s Rust Belt, as focus under China’s socialist market economy reforms switched to higher tech and light manufacturing in the south. Eleven million people have left in search of work this decade. Around .018% of these, roughly 2,000 but growing in number (there were 100 in 2003, 750 in 2012), are Belleville Dongbei – well-educated woman mainly in their 40s, qualified workers, shopkeepers, teachers, accountants, nurses and managers, who paid smugglers 8,000-12,000 euros to get to Paris on short-term visas.

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Why Paris? Because they had heard that there were lots of nail salons, restaurants and massage parlours here where they could make some fast cash to pay for their kids’ schooling and weddings back in China, or for their parent’s medical expenses.

However, almost all Chinese commerce here is run by Wenzhou.

The Wenzhou population is well-established; they came in earlier waves of immigration. Many look down at, or openly despise, the people of Dongbei, who are often better educated. So they don’t hire them. The Dongbei, then, in debt and undocumented, with little or no French, put on puffer jackets and stand in the streets. Where, because of changes in prostitution laws in 2016, which make it legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it, clients are dodgier, violence common, and identity checks by the police frequent, even though the women are not doing anything illegal.

The only alternative? Work under the table for Wenzhou as nannies and domestic help. Where they are paid peanuts (600-900 euros a month), work around the clock, and are treated like shit.

Sex work is often a choice, however constrained it may be by residence status and debt. It is important to distinguish between victims of trafficking and clients of smugglers: women arrive with significant debts, but they have voluntarily contacted their smuggler and have become indebted to their relatives rather than to him. Unlike migrant women of certain nationalities, they have not been trafficked or at least do not recognise themselves in this sometimes-vague category. It should also be noted that most of them work without intermediaries and are not exploited. Finally, despite the difficulty of an activity that is often violent and highly stigmatised, many explain this choice pragmatically, as it allows some to earn more money and pay off their debts more quickly, but also to regain their independence compared to the working conditions in the Chinese families that hire them.

Source: Hélène Le Bail

A tree, a truck, a trade. Three admirable exhibitions of resilience and resistance, unconnected except by the space they share.

I will refrain from my usual solicitations and leave you instead with this image of a section of a stained-glass window in Chartres Cathedral. It shows two courtesans inviting the prodigal son into their house. Eleven of the window’s 30 sections show similar scenes from the sex trade. The entire window, which is best seen in late afternoon light, was commissioned in the early 12th century. By a guild of prostitutes.

Perhaps one day, this year or next, the busiki will drive home and stay. And with them, the homesick men and women who crave the comforts they bring. The heaven-trees, however, aren’t going anywhere. Nor are the women who walk past them. May the new year bring them, and you, dear reader, health and happiness.

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This might be my last entry until the new year, unless something major occurs, like a Moroccan victory in tonight’s match against France. Or if the the Qatar corruption scandal, which is spreading fast through Greece, Italy and Belgium, spreads into the Hexagon. Which begs a question: Monsieur Macron, why are you in Doha tonight? Yes, your team is in the semi-final, but the optics aren’t optimal. To some, it might look like a benediction. As Thomal Legrand opined in this morning’s Libé:

just as it would be outrageous for a president to go to an event organised by Eva Kaili, the Greek vice-president of the European Parliament suspected of corruption, it seems equally outrageous for him to go to a World Cup organised by the corrupter.

But chances are, this Hexagon is going dark for awhile. Before it does I want to thank all my subscribers, paid and free, for showing up these last six months, for taking the time to read my random bits of this and that, and for pushing me forward. If you coughed up, even better. But even if you haven’t, or can’t, or find the idea ridiculous but still want to check in from time to time, by all means, be my guest, and accept my profoundest gratitude.

To show the latter I’d love to invite each and every one of you to our party this Saturday. But that, of course, is absurd. Our place is tiny and in Paris and most of you live a million miles away. And already have plans this Saturday. But a pretty considerable number of you live in France – mostly in Paris – and while I would love to see you all at my door, you too are too numerous to be added to the guest list. Hence this treasure hunt. Not one that will have you running around the freezing streets of Paris — where it’s supposed to snow tonight. One that you can do from the comfort of your home. But the prize can only be claimed at my home, and only on Saturday night, during our annual Fêtes des Fêtes, our first since 2019. To win you must start here, and, as it were, show up here, by correctly identifying the name of the street we live and will be partying on, from six pm until well into Sunday.

Please don’t put your answer in the comments. Just show up. Those of you who already know the name and number of our home are disqualified (and probably already on the guest list).

Ready? Oh, before we get started, one more craven plug:

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THE RUE

From 1672 until 1877, when it was rechristened after a French Revolutionary army that conquered a European neighbour in 1793-1794, this street was named after a three-syllable French word meaning “small” pint, the cylinder in a pump body under its piston, or, in Mauritius only, hubcap. It is not to be confused with a similarly spelled French term of endearment for a cute girl or an adorable thing.

It’s an innocuous enough street, curving past mostly 18th-century residential buildings housing restaurants, bars, an elementary school, a post office, a few shuttered shops and a number of converted storefronts like ours. It runs east to northwest, descending slightly—following an old Chemin that was once a creek bed, towards the canal. It starts at a busy boulevard that once marked the edge of an ancient commune, which shared its name with the third and final novel of a novelist who died almost certainly from hyperemesis gravidarum. It ends on a street named after a spy – a woman who lived above a telegraph office occupied by the Prussians during the 1870 war, in a town that shares its name with a small scalloped-edge sweet or savoury tart. The woman, a 22-year-old single mother, found a way to bypass and divert the telegraph wire, which ran through her first-floor room. For two weeks she secretly sent intercepted Prussian army’s dispatches to the French authorities, and was said to have thus saved the lives of 40,000 soldiers. When the diversion was discovered, the Prussians sentenced her to death, but the armistice was signed just minutes before her execution. She was pardoned by the Prince of Prussia himself, who, upon her release, asked to shake and kiss her hand.
(Warning: According to Les Beaux mensonges de l'histoire by Guy Breton, this whole story is horseshit, a fable cooked up by a Le Figaro journalist in an article published in May 1877.)

THE NUMBER

It is shared by highways in British Columbia, Iceland and Tasmania, a large positive integer — the largest in fact, that cannot be expressed as the sum of different numbers exhibiting a specific geometric form, and the number of French miles in the circumference of a phantom island whose purported existence was believed to explain why all compasses pointed to it. An easier one? The atomic number of an element that certain bacteria can use in compounds as respiratory metabolites.

That’s it. Bonne chance. Et bonnes fêtes!

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***Now I am quietly waiting forthe catastrophe of my personalityto seem beautiful again,and interesting, and modern.*** **– Frank O'Hara** Fingernails on chalkboards. Dentist drills. Beeping airport carts. Yappy dogs. Reversing semi-trailers, crying babies, jackhammers. Nickelback. We Are The World. My own voice. The list is endless. At the top right now is the sound the elevator in the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville makes when it reaches one of the library’s two floors. Not a simple ding or dong, irritating enough in a librarial context, but a very loud and objectionable two-tone “ee-ong” chime, like the bray of a robot donkey. “Ee-ong” when it arrives. “Ee-ong” when it departs. “Ee-ong” again when it stops on the next floor. Again, and again, and again. All. Day. Long.

Why? This is a library. Libraries are meant to be sanctuaries of silence, noiseless places of mute study and hushed perusal. Next to tombs the quietest places in human society. Why this constant ee-onging? The elevator is only used by librarians, and only when they are burdened with book carts. There is no need to announce their arrivals and departures, no need to warn us, their comings and goings pose no danger. Who cares? Why this incessant ee-onging, over and over, “EE-ONG, EE-ONG, EE-ONG, EE-ONG”?

OK. I’ll stop. My family and friends find my preoccupation with the sound that the elevator in the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville makes when it reaches and leaves one of its two floors weirdly and wildly disproportionate. No one else seems to mind it, they say. Which is true. And which I find equally disturbing. Why don’t the other quiet-as-mice people in the otherwise fish-quiet library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville find the incessant ee-onging of the elevator hugely annoying? Because they are too young and stupid to notice? No. Because they are too exhausted from pulling all-nighters, working around-the-clock to get their projects done, training for their bleak futures in architectural agencies where weeks of 4-am departures from the office followed by all-night sessions fuelled by junk food and drugs to meet les deadlines for projects that stand little chance (less that 30%) of winning architectural competitions or appels à projets are the norm? No. Because they are wearing wireless earbuds. Because they are all listening to We Are The World, or its equivalent, over and over and over.

We Are Not The World. And just now, again. EE-ONG! Ten seconds later. EE-ONG!

So wear headphones, my family and friends say. Listen to Nickelback.

This reminds me, just now, long forgotten, of a six-month episode of my life that occurred well before Nickleback, even before We Are The World, when I was a university student, living with a roommate in a second-floor apartment at 1840 W Broadway, and a mysterious noise, coming from the apartment right above our living room, a patternless smacking sound, a soft and oft-repeated thud of something falling or being randomly dropped, plagued me for the duration of my time there, and was not rendered explicable until half a dozen years later, when, in another city, I discovered that a newly met friend was the former tenant of the third-floor apartment on Broadway of six years before, as was his brother, who had also by then become something of a friend, and both of them at that earlier time, when they lived above my head, were obsessive, but terrible, hackysackers.

Plop. Ten seconds later. Plop. Fifteen seconds later. Plop. Seven seconds. Plop. Fourteen. Plop. And so on, all day long, well into the night. Plop, plop, plop.

Fortunately, the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville closes at five. And I don’t live here. But can this situation also be rendered explicable? I imagine the elevator was programmed in the factory and no one on the library staff knows how to turn it off. Such is the case with the electronic door entry system in our building, which announces, when the code is correctly entered or the right type of keyfob waved, “LA PORTE EST OUVERTE”, as if the door’s actual, physical opening, its swinging towards you with a loud click, didn’t already make this abundantly clear.

One more thing. To arrive at the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville one must cross a wide inner courtyard sustainably landscaped with low scrub and dominated by two large and leafy maple trees. Very nice. However, the walkway is constructed of slippery-when-wet slats of wood — small plastic warning signs, the kind you see on newly mopped hospital floors, indicate the litigious level of their slipperiness — and, worse, to this walker at least, each slat is attached to its supporting joist by four Phillips screws, and these Phillips screws, which the French call vis Phillips or vis cruciformes, are in no way harmoniously aligned with each other, but are, rather, randomly screwed into the planks here, there, and then there, hither and then thither, willy and then nilly.

Why? Is this intentional? The École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville was founded during the évènements1 of Mai 68 by a dissident group of students at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, l'atelier collégial, led by Bernard Huet, a former student of Louis Kahn’s. The group renounced the academicism that at that time dominated the study of architecture in France. They wanted to draw on and cross over and into and with other disciplines, and “proceed by analogy, by mutual enrichment, in order to raise awareness of architecture and its limits in its historical, ideological, sociological and philosophical implications.”

Does this explain the aleatory rhythms of the Phillips screws? No. The annoying ee-ong of the elevator in the library? No. But, as Heidegger once said, every questioning is a seeking. “Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.” But, as is often overlooked, or forgotten, or ignored, Heidegger was a Nazi. And Phillips screws, which were invented by a man named John P. Thompson, are sometimes in English called crosshead screws. Are these screws an exhibition of the espoused anti-academic crossheaded-disciplinarianism of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville? No. Last week Patriarch Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus' and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church since 2009 – the year that the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville moved into this location, a purposely designed space in a former technical lycée across the street from my apartment – compared Emmanuel Macron, the President of the French Republic, to a “little reptilian-eyed peacock sodomite who bewitches swarms of blissful woodlice but will end up plucked and roasted like the Beast of Tunguska.” I can find no reference to this Beast in this or in any other library, except for a single entry on a website called tvtropes.org that tells me that the term “Beast of Tunguska” was sometimes used as an alternative moniker for Sir Richard Hawksmoore, a character from the UK sci-fi comic book series Nikolai Dante (2000-2012).

Tunguska itself is best known, of course, according to Wikipedia, for the Tunguska event (“occasionally also called the Tunguska incident”):

an approximately 12-megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, on the morning of June 30, 1908. The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest…

The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst: the atmospheric explosion of a stony asteroid about 50–60 metres (160–200 feet) in size. The asteroid approached from the east-southeast, and likely with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s (60,000 mph) (~Ma 80). It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than having hit the surface of the Earth.

The people of the Tunguska region are Turkic, and their culture, including music, has some similarities to the culture of Tuva, a neighbouring region to the south. In both regions throat-singing is practiced, often accompanied by a two-stringed instrument called the khomys, and by a host of flutes and whistles, including the pyrghy, a large, conical, sucked wooden trumpet used for shamanic sessions and to attract elk, red deer and Siberian deer, and the shagy, made of sheep’s knucklebone and used to attract sheep. Both produce sounds achingly similar to the elevator’s ee-ong.

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Is it the randomness of the crosshead screws that I find objectionable? No. Does it matter? No.

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Today, the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville is busy. The classrooms, however, are empty. The workshops, however, are full. The 1,324 students attending are divided into different training programs. The 1st cycle takes 3 years and its graduates get a Diploma of Architectural Studies. The 2nd cycle is a two-year course that confers a State Diploma of Architecture (DEA), which is equivalent to a Master's degree. Graduates of the one-year HMONP (Habilitation à la Maîtrise d'Œuvre en son Nom propre) program can become certified project managers and legally sign and submit building permits. There are also 26 doctoral students – these graduates can become architects, researchers or teachers. And 19 students are in the Specialised Masters of sustainable development program. They tend to take civil service jobs or become policy makers.

According to most French academic rankings, the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville is the best of the 20 architecture schools in the country. It does not, however, figure on any rankings of the 200 best architecture schools in the world.2 Of which there are far too many. Too many rankings, I mean. But also, too many architecture schools. Why are we producing so many architects? What will they and we do with all their training? Build? Build what?

New buildings: 59.8% Maintenance/rehabilitation: 20.6%French architecture schools, unlike those elsewhere, are overseen by the Ministère de la Culture (Ministry of Culture), not by the Ministre de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche (Ministry of Higher Education and Research). This is a vestige of the centuries-old Beaux-Arts system, which champions architects-artistes, passionate, creative men at the helm, forging forward, driving their teams long into the night, devoted to self-transcendence and creative freedom and not giving a toss or having a clue about how much pain and suffering their rampant egotism causes their underlings, or how much a Phillips screw costs.

There were 30,225 architects and “agréés en architecture”3 registered with the Ordre des architectes in France at the beginning of 2022. Of these 32% were women (an increase of more than 16 percentage points between 2000 and 2021); 1,522 were new architects, having graduated in 2021; and around a third had their own practices and were self-employed.

Women accounted for 49.7% of architects under 35 years of age and half of all new registrants. In 2020, the average income of women architects was €33,495 euros. The average for men was €54,700. Salaries for new graduates, after a minimum of five years of study, is €1,400 to €1,900 a month. Very few of these new graduates obtain permanent work contracts (CDI) or ever get to “do architecture”. They do repetitive and sequenced tasks, most of it the work better-paid draughtsmen and draughtswomen used to do – “the systematic representation and dimensional specification of mechanical and architectural structures” – before that profession disappeared, replaced by “engineering tech.”

Endless digital drawings of doors and windows. That kind of thing.

Of those that graduated from French architectural schools in 2015, roughly one in five have changed careers. I know two who have become cooks.

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Back to the workshops of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville. This is where students work but also where they eat and hang out. “Dwell” would have been Heidegger’s word for this. “We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers.” Each student at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville is assigned a workshop at the beginning of the year. Some workshops, apparently, require the payment of a “masse” – a sum of money that allows you to use the workshop for six months. I think the money goes towards parties and kitchen supplies, but I have no idea, really. Nor, it seems, do the students – those I spoke to didn’t know whether the masse was obligatory.

The culture in these spaces is clannish and intense, intentionally, as a way to prepare students for French architecture’s famous culture de la charette. Cart culture. This is the term French architects use for the periods of intensive all-nighter work required to put together a blueprint and/or a maquette for a project. The term dates back to the 19th century, when architecture students rushed from their workshops carrying their architectural plans on wooden carts. Today it basically means all-nighters. Long exhausting days. Lots of coffee and other stimulants. Souffrir pour réussir – Suffering to succeed, that’s the motto. According to a 2018 survey published by UNEAP (national union of architecture and landscape students), 68% of students felt that, on a scale of one to ten, they were “under pressure” of seven or higher. Three quarters of these stated that the stress was detrimentally impacting their health.

The young people around me seem fairly healthy. They are quietly listening to We are the World while looking at books, computer screens, journals and Balance Ta Charrette (Ditch your cart”), an Instagram account started by a group of dissident students and, according to which, in 2020, the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville was ranked 11th out of 20 for “student well-being”.

The École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville has partnerships with 66 international universities, including La Sapienza in Rome and the University of Hong Kong. I have heard today whispered French, Spanish, English, Italian and Japanese. But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have not purchased earbuds, so I still hear the elevator singing, floor to floor, ee-ong to ee-ong. And it is not the singing of a sucked wooden pyrghy or a sheep-knuckle shagy. It is the song of the launeddas. A wind instrument found in Sardinia. A polyphonic clarinet with three pipes and a single reed that requires circle breathing. I kid you not. Not about the circle breathing, about the launeddas. And the elevator. The building, I have just discovered, during its refit, was set to music by Michel Aubry, a French sculptor and visual artist.

From his Wikipedia entry:

With Tapis afghans (Afghan rugs) reproducing war scenes, engraved metal shovels and military outfits with Sardinian musical instruments, accessories from the Fratellini dressing room to bullet-proof waistcoats made of Turkmen silk or wax, from Rodchenko's artist's suit to Albrecht Dürer's coat, via the figures of Le Corbusier or Erich von Stroheim, Michel Aubry activates a keyboard of eclectic motifs and unusual forms that he interprets as an insatiable and wise researcher. A rigorous repertoire that leads him to vary the mediums: Sardinian cane, bakelite, drawing, moulding, furniture. He makes films, notably Rodchenko in Paris.

And from the website of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville:

A series of pentagons on the ground forms a path from the Villette courtyard in the south to the Burnouf courtyard in the north, passing through the central hall and the garden. This layout, a spatial translation of the Sardinian music of the launeddas, allows the building to be set to music. Indeed, the pentagons visually translate the pentacords which correspond to the musical scales of five notes of the right and left hands of the instrument. Thirty-three sounds are embedded in the floor of the central hall forming twelve pentagons. The notes corresponding to the lengths of the pipes are obtained by placing reeds at the air inlets. The air ducts are marked with brass engravings, the reed locations and the air outlets are protected by bronze cases.

No mention of the elevator. But have a listen. And think of me, here, in the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville, surrounded by cart-pushers and mechanised circle-breathed pentachords. And thank you for reading all this way. And apologies to T.S. Eliot, whose Prufrock I pilfered above (I have not grown slightly bald), and whose The Waste Land was published 100 years ago today. Vive l'aléatoire!

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1Traditionally, évènement was spelled événement, with an acute (aigu) accent. However, since the RECTIFICATIONS DE L'ORTHOGRAPHE DE 1990 (the 1990 French spelling reform), the spelling "évènement" has been recommended by the Académie Française and is therefore accepted.

2Three other French architecture schools figure on these international lists: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (ranked at 100), École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Malaquais (151), and Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne (also 151).

3Professionals authorised by the State to be registered with the L'Ordre des architectes. They cannot use the title “architect”, but they have the same rights as architects and are subject to the same duties. If this makes any sense to you, you should move here, get registered, and hang out your shingle.

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