VERSATILE VESTIBULE VISTAS

Being accused of hyper-intellectualizing everything is not the worst that can happen to you. Being accused of hyper-intellectualizing at the expense of forgetting about the human touch is bad. My sister, who is also a psychologist, often makes sure to remind me of exercising the ‘soft’ quality on other people – she offers her advice both as a professional and as a family member who has my best interests at her heart.

A week ago, at the final banquet in connection with the EAAS conference in Oslo, a Swede told me that there was no need for me to be so loud. I dared to suggest that the organizers of the conference who have promised us a cruise were obviously erroneous in thinking that they could fit 300 people in a boat that only had room for about 30. I dared to criticize the food: the most boring salmon one can imagine, potato salad full of mayonnaise, and some really bad wine and weak beer to go with the rest. And lastly, I dared to assume that the organizers must have assumed that the participants couldn't tell the difference. Why else go for the cheapest solution possible? As I thought I was justified in voicing my perfectly legitimate objections, given that the conference fee was large enough, I continued being loud, thus ignoring the comment.

When things like that happen, it’s interesting to see how there’s always someone in the witnessing crowd who supports your views, even without saying anything. My good friend Jopi Nyman, president of the NAAS, and a first rate scholar who writes about exquisite food and animal ethics, understood exactly what the whole thing was all about. We had just attended a workshop together and we had just had the best of fun. As we’re both very good at multitasking we had no problem following the papers AND playing third grade kids: we constantly sent small messages to each other with the silliest content one can imagine: we saw ourselves as professors of fromage ancien at the Fois Gras De Gosset University, we embodied one missing person in the workshop, and we laughed at Federman’s Statues of Kings. When we parted he said to me: ‘you know, not everybody gets it.’ ‘No, indeed,’ I said, ‘one has to be part of the club of the initiated ones in matters that transcend boring banality in order to get it.’ As far as I was concerned, I was fine in the company of the Finn and a couple of others who were prompt at observing acts that have a certain understated purpose in spite of their being flamboyantly manifested.

Back at home, however, I was thinking about the meaning and implications of belonging to ‘clubs’. Groucho Marx famously said that he wouldn’t want to be in any club that would want to have him as a member. Indeed, there’s a lot to consider in terms of the implicit question of inclusion vs. exclusion. Suggesting that others may not be very good at their jobs can have a dangerous potential; one simply tends to exclude others on account of their incompetence, only, incompetence sometimes has its reasons. Or one tends to include others into one’s own world for the wrong reasons. Or for the right ones, seen from a different vista.

I’m reminded of myself as a 10 year old. I used to make friends with kids that were somewhat off beat in classroom, which seemed odd to others given that I myself was what one calls popular. I was a prize student, ambitious, and I couldn’t stand it if others got better grades than me. In other words, I was well integrated in the system. I grew out if it, but not before I got a chance to exercise my sense of justice. I liked the idea that my being so far ahead of everybody afforded me the luxury of being generous: I used to let less gifted kids copy my homework, and I would share with them whatever knowledge I possessed at the time. This made some kids eternally grateful and as a consequence they would do anything for me. There was a big gypsy girl who kept failing everything – she was in fact older than the rest of us, as she went through the same grade over and over again – and who beat up small boys without an apparent motive. Or that’s what the boys in question thought. They never learned that the reason why they got beaten up was because I decided. I would send the gypsy to give them a good thrashing whenever they would mob other kids or display unbearable signs of stupidity that resulted in their hurting other kids. Some would call my childhood’s sense of justice a good beginning in terms of exercising the human touch. Others would cross themselves. And others would simply think it ingenious that a tiny girl would use a huge girl to do a dirty job for her. While I stopped behaving like a mamma mafiosa, sometimes I feel close to that 10 year old self. Verbally, now, I cut through things like through cheese. Verbally professionally, now, I’ve been told that I have a special talent for editing. Indeed, my favorite line is: cut the crap. I just sometimes forget to apply that to myself.

I think of all this while standing in line to buy myself lunch at the university’s cafeteria. It occurs to me that I know the names of four people working there. I know that one of the women loves to go on charter vacations, her teenage daughter has really large feet, her husband just turned 40 and they had a garden party, but she would exchange the garden with an additional bathroom any time. I also know that she thinks I’m fascinating. I loved it when one day she turned to a customer behind me and told him, ‘you know, this woman is great.’ Another of the women in the cafeteria loves my silk jersey dresses and my Alessandro de Benedetti trousers. She wants to make sure that I eat a lot so that I might get bigger and then think of giving her some of my clothes, which she would then fit. She also makes fun of my paying rituals: credit card in the morning and cash in the afternoon. The third woman is firm with customers who fiddle too much with their wallets. She shows her discontent only to me when I happen to stand behind such ‘helpless’ people. The man working there doesn’t say much to me, but often personally gets me the first croissant in the morning, which he goes to the kitchen to fetch straight from the oven.

I’m tempted to say that I’ve no idea as to why they do this. We don’t know each other. We must be good at acknowledging that from the vestibule of our existences there are always vistas from whose vantage point our human touch makes our intellectualizing more versatile. In virtute sunt multi ascensus.

AFTERMATH

After my conference paper on Cadillacs in Helsinki (in ref. to my previous two posts: Jove goes Rabbinic and I am's) I eat at a nice Caribbean restaurant downtown Oslo, and a vintage Cadillac parks just outside in plain view. Some things pursue the scholar, who had just mastered the art of driving through cultural texts. This reminds me of Alain Badiou's discussion of Mallarmé in his seminal Being and Event, where he says this:

"Given that the essence of the event is to be undecidable with regard to its belonging to the situation, an event whose content is the eventness of the event (and this is clearly the cast of the dice thrown 'in eternal circumstances') cannot, in turn, have any other form than that of indecision. Since the master must produce the absolute event (the one Mallarmé says, which will abolish chance, being the active effective concept of the 'there is'), he must suspend this production from a hesitation which is itself absolute, and which indicates that the event is that multiple in respect to which we can neither know nor observe whether it belongs to the situation of the site. We shall never see the master throw the dice because our sole access, in the scene of action, is to a hesitation as eternal as the circumstances." (193)

What can I say, if asked to act on my choosing a particular car, I'll say this: in spite of chance circumstances I won't hesitate to drive a Lamborghini over a Cadillac where speed and excitement is concerned - if asked to stand still and savor the moment, I may relinquish the pretense to mastering anything and pick the Cadillac, as my nose would definitely stumble hesitatingly over the rosewood on the steering wheel: is it musk, or cashmere scent I'm smelling?

Savor the journey, or speed up the game.

I AM'S

A promise is a promise. The Cadillac session at the Maple Leaf and Eagle conference in Helsinki? Well, it was a smash, as I thought it would be. But there were other things equally smashing going on. Fortunately. There's nothing worse than a conference that's uninteresting, or with some uninteresting people in it. This being Finland, however, I knew before hand that something interesting was bound to take place. It always does.

It's been some years now, since I've discovered that at conferences I tend to seek out certain academics. The Finns do it for me. It took me some more years to figure out why there was such an amazing affinity between myself and the Finns, but once recognized, it became obvious that our common nerdiness was also a most solid platform on which all things strange and uncommon took place, quite de rigoeur. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing more liberating than being able to say and do the most unlikely things, or say and do the most inappropriate things and have people think that it's the most natural thing in the world. So, what I'm saying is that around Finns it takes a hell of a lot more to make them think that what you say or do is not already perfectly normal.

This is also reflected in the way in which Finns always manage to invite the most exciting speakers. Yesterday George Elliott Clarke delivered the keynote address in a most engaging performance, very similar in fact to the ones one sees only on film and documentaries. A resurrected Malcolm X reminded us of how to approach not only African-Canadian history but also poetry. He is a speaker who exerts his oratorical agency through a combination of formidable writing and body language. As I always sit in the front row for such things, someone was worried that I might have gotten showered by words in more than one way. (Anthropologists such as Daniel Miller have interesting things to say about mixing bodily fluids - spit, to be more precise - with auratic oral delivery in forgotten African cultures.) It didn't happen to me. I hurried instead to get my three copies of his books signed - which he did most graciously especially after having recited a poem in plenum at my request. The volume entitled Black is, by the way, all about spitting words out. Black now contains an implicit reference to white camellias - and my own name in Clarke's handwriting follows suit. No excessive double l's in it, but accents, as he writes on the front page "à Camélia". I'm pleased, as the volume also includes a poem that's dedicated to another friend, the magnificent poet Evie Shockley, whose ink and skin is as black as Clarke's. A standard in fine poetry, and fine bodies, one might add. Here's one of Clarke's poems:

Poetry 1/7/75--1/7/05:

1 - Standards

Each poem perishes and replenishes,
Line by line.

Even if you copy poets
Smashed to smithereens

By iambs
(or "I am's")

Note that the truest black poet
Is a happy-headed Dadaist --

If the poem is in fine form
(No matter how frail),

Tattling the Truth
Outtalking critics.

The good poem stabs like a dagger now,
Explodes later like a grenade.

As soon as someone in the audience wants to pose a question but not before he confesses that he's miserable because he cannot write like Clarke, my mind goes off in other directions. I think of Tony Harrison's eloquence, all the result of struggling with the iambic pentameter, and Tristan Tzara's Romanian poetry, all the result of cutting up words. Rhetoric reduced to smithereens. Clarke is in a trance - and I'm the only one who is close enough to observe that for the entire questioning period, which is long, he delivers answers at the speed of a canoe down Niagara, with his eyes closed - no water can touch him.

Today, in a panel about nature, the first nations are mentioned, and a bizarre story was told. Not long ago, when the Americans wanted to build a gigantic telescope on some Indian land, some members of the Apache people were asked to state their opinion as to whether they thought it was a good idea. The Apaches showed up in court to testify - only their testimony was one of silence. This threw the verbose American judicials off their tracks. An Indian interpreter of the rhetoric of silence was called in to 'translate' this performative nothingness. Today I shook hands with him, and we just looked at each other - talking seemed superfluous. For me it was more interesting to follow his gaze and glance through his fascinating blue eyes fixed in orbits the color of olives. His hair was long and his skin soft. For him.... we got interrupted. Another friend, and a professor of creative writing at Stephens College joined us. She wanted to touch my long string of black pearls. She thought that their lustre and smoothness became me.

Later at a posh Japanese restaurant I stuffed myself with sashimi - each fragment of the 20 fish pieces I got contributed to enhancing the taste of my favorite bite: the salmon. The pink and buttery fish melted on my tongue in such a way that even the cup I was drinking green tea from felt like a pancake drowned in syrup and perfume.

Cultural studies in Helsinki is full of black, yet pirouetting holes.

PS. My last line in my paper on Cadillacs? "Let's see some black swans racing". This line in reference to Cadillac's history of changing logos garnered both laughs and thoughts. I was merely anticipating what would make me savor a moment, as Cadillac's contemporary marketing tagline is all about that: Savor your freedom. Savor the journey. Savor the moment. I didn't think that I was prophesying the future in the past. Savor the grammar. Indeed.

PPS. People have been asking me what kind of car I drive. Well, it's the latest Suzuki Swift. I told them that if I had a choice, however, I would drive this thing below. There's nothing that matches a Lamborghini. The Americans were baffled...

JOVE GOES RABBINIC - and a horse's ass

On my way to Finland, I find myself exclaiming: by Jove, I'm done! What I'm done with are two conference papers that I've managed to write in two days. Not bad.

The first one, a cultural studies paper on Cadillacs, took longer, as it traces some history, which always requires more documenting, more archive work, more checking facts. The 'uh' sound that you can hear coming out of me, makes me feel like a scholar, however. The other paper, on a favorite writer, Raymond Federman, is purely theoretical. Ah, this one makes me feel like a poet. It took no time whatsoever to write. In case you want to know details, here they come.

Theory has always been my thing - just ask my first semester professors at Aalborg University. They'll corroborate, especially as I'm sure that they remember me. They all felt exasperated by my abstractions. Except for one. I live with him now. And just for the record - as was also eloquently established in my short collection of prose poetry, Eight Senses Plus One, (which also for the record, has nothing to do with my academic book on prose poetry soon coming out) - no, we're not married - you can't marry a hard-core Marxist as I - but we've been keeping each other company for the past 12 years.

Now, my partner here, who has a thing for language, and - who also for the record a third time around - is the best wit Denmark has ever produced - wow, you'd say, but by Jove it's true - is accompanying me to the said conferences. In fact we're going to be in the same panel on Cadillacs. Nice work if you can get it, you'd say again, and by Jove, ditto, it's true. It is very amusing to be able to share intellectual thoughts at such, and other close proximities.

So, in this case here, when it comes to conferences, we like to disclose our punchlines to each other. We take them as an indication of the extent to which what we've written has the potential to be a classic. My test is this: if you can lift a sentence of yours from a certain context and place it in another context all together to greater effect, then, what you have written in the first place is a classic. This also means that I believe in reprise, recycling, and self-appropriation. The only problem this time around is that he won't tell me what his last line is. My gut feeling has already told me that our session is simply going to be a smash - stay tuned for a confirmation on this, though I can tell you that my intuition has never failed me - but there's something in the air that makes me anticipate, with a special kind of eagerness, what the whole thing is all about - my other paper, by the way, is all about 'what's this all about' in Federman's pla(y)giarizing of Beckett's line: "the laugh that laughs at the laugh". My sister, the psychoanalyst, would say that the 'all about' is no doubt about transference. But I'm a theorist, and as such, for me the 'all about' is not only textual - that the unconscious can also be read like a text was Freud's biggest insight - but also contextual - if you can afford to think, then you can think, was Marx's biggest insight. By Jove, I love these guys, and the fact that my partner - to whom I refer to as my husband, by the way - makes me guess, excites my curiosity.

So, I'm on my way to Finland to do some cultural studies - even the theory paper wraps around some very good cultural examples that exceed Beckett's philosophy and modernism - and I feel like a rabbi. I permutate what the various possibilities on last lines may be that such goddamn smart - like cardinals in Richelieu's time - partners can invent. At this point a comforting thought crosses my mind: if I'm not a good writer myself, then I like to believe that I'm at least a fairly good reader. Knowing my partner, I should also know that he doesn't write for subtle readers - he prefers culture to philosophy and has none of my über-intellectual and insufferable arrogance. Which reminds me of a note Cioran once wrote on Nietzsche. Says Cioran: "good writers, Nietzsche observes, don't write for 'die spitzen und überscharfen Leser...' It's true, a truly great writer has nothing of an aesthete in him" (Caiete, 1957-1965). I venture to guess that my partner's last line on Cadillacs is going to be similar to the one Audrey Hepburn delivered in the movie My Fair Lady when she coudn't help herself but notice, by shouting, Dover's, the horse, elegant, and fast ass at Ascot: "C'mon Dover, move your bloomin' arse!"

After philosophy then, culture it is.

FRAGMENTO-LOGICAL-REDUX

On the 10th and last installment in the series The Power of Thought (on epistemology and logic), I have nothing to say.

When dealing with reduction to form, such as we find it in syllogistic logic, the discourse takes care of itself. And that is a beautiful process already – in and of itself. As such, it needs no addition and no comment – if it’s fully successful. What remains is the thought that the imagination is more restless than the materiality of language and articulation, body and form. (This reminds me of a great poet, Lyn Hejinian, who said: “restlessness is a form of doubt as well as a form of curiosity” My Life). If one articulates anything at all, however, one’s opinion is bound to take the form of a discursive dilemma: keep talking, keep it simple, or keep quiet. My all time favorite logicians – besides my mother – the two 17th century Jansenists at the Port-Royal Abbey, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, have already thematized the problem with embellishing:

“To be opinionated is very bad for two reasons. First, whoever has convinced himself that he already knows cannot learn. Second, recklessness itself reveals a mind which is not well disposed […] This is why all the philosophers maintained: Sapientem nihil opinari” (35). [A wise person has no opinion.] – ([Ut si!])

So, on to dilemmas – especially the invalid ones. Say the Jansenists, pointing out the fallacies in the following: (at this point, read their book if you want to laugh more, rather than say more).

"If one acts well, one will offend people, which is unfortunate.
If one acts badly, one will offend the gods, which is also unfortunate.
Therefore it is unfortunate in both cases to get involved in the affairs of the Republic." (Logic or The Art of Thinking, 180)

So, I say nothing, act nothing, and interfere with nothing. But I’ll demand something instead, which is different. If there is a sequel, in another time and day, Vincent F. Hendricks MUST invite 10 women on the show who SHALL talk about this top 10 list:

The philosophy of sexuality
The philosophy of language
The philosophy of madness
The philosophy of action
The philosophy of AI
The philosophy of the event
The philosophy of culture
The philosophy of writing
The philosophy of death
The philosophy of infinity

So, now that nothing has been said, there is some space for a gesture – of gratitude.

Thanks for great fun to Vincent and my fan club. The latter has been following my rantings with faithful regularity. I enjoyed all the comments both on and off the record, publicly and privately disclosed, in places likely and unlikely. I’ll stop spamming your emails with links – heeding the fragmentological.

– and of eloquence.

“Only fragments are accurate”. (Lyn Hejinian, My Life)

“Book Ends” (Tony Harrison, The School of Eloquence, read on or listen)

"Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.

Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don't try.

You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare…

The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.

Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.

A night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we're alike!

You're life's all shattered into smithereens.

Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between 's
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books."

QED (Camelia Elias)

BLASTED

As I'm reading some texts by Lyn Hejinian, fragments from her poetical autobiography My Life, her phrase "as for we who 'love to be astonished'" resounds on several levels. I go from remembering my mother to transporting myself back to Carnegie Hall in 2001 when Waltraud Meier and Nadja Michael blasted my brains out with their Tristan and Isolde Wagner performance under Barenboim - well, when you insist on sitting in the front row parkett, this is what happens. My mother had a blasting quality as well. She was a master logician among other things and used to astonish my sister and I on a daily basis. She was good at inventing things. I often think that particularly her language games and scenarios could have been choreographed by Maurice Béjart and set on stage by Cristoph Marthaler. These two plus her are my favourite geniuses in terms of artistic versatility. Mother and Béjart are dead, Marthaler is still around. He blasts me visually, so that I still experience some of the desired astonishment.

Back at Carnegie I was mostly taken with the singers' voices, but there is also another incident which I vividly remember. I was sitting next to a very restless gentleman who was obviously completely infatuated with Michael. I have never experienced sitting next to someone whose body language could speak equally blastingly as a Wagner soprano. He wore expensive red shoes and a striped petroleum color suit. Impeccable attire - no doubt carefully thought about in terms of guessing what Michael was going to wear: a lavish fat silk silver gown. He got it right. Perfect match. When the concert was over, he almost got himself arrested, as he jumped over Barenboim and nearly dragged Michael off the stage. She was taken aback by his violence, but at the same time it was clear that she was also very flattered. And I was very amused.

I'm trying to write my two conference papers for next week, and they have nothing to do with either poets, singers, choreographers, stage directors, or mothers. Embodying their presences, however, and thus astonishing myself, should be a good start. My own performances will form a pay off matrix for the academic games that hopefully can blast our brains.

~
Waltraud Meier's Liebestod