That Thursday, Isaac Newton decided to repossess the colonies for their debts. He was a fair creditor, had read all of the sentences in the Bible about usury. He was a fair creditor, of generous but not infinite patience. He called the President into his office.

“Mr. President, what are you going to do about my money?”

The President had been called in halfway through a haircut and was being very strategic about angles. “I’ll tell ya, I’ll tell ya, Isaac. What do you know about God?”

“When you think of a room, He is the walls and the floor and the air and the space and the thought itself.”

“That’s interesting. That’s interesting, Isaac. I’ll tell you though, it’s a big country we’ve got ourselves here. Nothing like your England. Inspires big thoughts. Not to diminish the work you do.”

Newton shot back in annoyance. “And what do Americans know about the Lord?”

“Good. Great question. They don’t call him Mr. Gravity for no reason. Here’s how it goes. Once upon a time a washerwoman dropped maybe five packaging peanuts down a well. When she returned that night, the moon shone obliquely and she could see in its surface only a few shifting points. She could not say what they were: foam or water.”

Isaac Newton spied the President’s bald spot reflected in the bald spot of a bronze statue. “I’ll cut straight to the chase, to borrow a stateside expression. The number is thirty-six trillion dollars.”

The President walked to the window and put his hand atop an antique globe. “Some mornings I walk in a field sweet with magnolia and the distant mountaintops ring out with numbers.”

American culture of the turn of the millennium, when the novel was written and set, was hegemonically shallow. We had reached the end of history: communism had fallen, the Timberlands logo was stamped on the face of the future. All important domestic political questions had been settled, save some niggling over details. We had decided that women could participate in the market in more or less the same way men could, same for blacks, though they might encounter some griping about “affirmative action” or “PC culture.” Sure, there was still team Red versus team Blue, Darwin Fish X Bible Belt, the small matter of the GLBT community, but you could get on with your life in various K-Mart parking lots. Mostly, you didn’t have to think.

Mostly not thinking is the default state of all characters in this novel, above all of its protagonist Joe, who at several points describes himself as an “ideas guy.” The novel takes its title after his big idea. The sexual revolution had opened the office doors for women, but it had not addressed the “problem of sexual harassment.” In this context, the problem is conceived in purely economic terms: sexual misconduct in the workspace represented a liability to the company. Joe proposes a simple solution: make entirely anonymous sexual encounters available to “high performing” (essentially identical with “high testosterone”) men by employing “lightning rods,” women employees who would double as sexual objects.

The story is structured as a “how they made it big,” the same sort of hagiographic story that has been told about McDonalds, Berkshire Hathaway, Coca-Cola, tracing an enterprise from a twinkle in a founder’s eye, to early successes and stumbles, to eventual, inevitable success. Inevitable, because at the core of a successful business is a good idea, something that “sells itself.” Or at least, this is the self-understanding of the business community that ripples outward to become the understanding of culture as a whole. In reality, these ideas are queer constructs of pure id repackaged in a set of bromides: Joe’s sentences are over half cliche by volume.

The most persistent cliches concern empathy and understanding. “A good sales person accepts people as they are, not as they would like to be.” In reality, Joe has a shallow and lazy understanding of other people. Two major examples of this cross and structure the novel. While Joe may be an ideas guy, he is certainly not a details guy: he thinks through the lightning rod concept at a basic, mechanical level (how will the guy get to fuck the woman in a way that preserves anonymity for all parties), he does not get “in the weeds” to consider such small details as the legality of the scheme or the social consequences for participants.

The reader, or at least this reader, takes a fundamentally contradictory set of interests in the narrative. On the one hand, we want off this crazy ride—the scheme is disgusting, degrading, in any just world—and on the other hand we want to stay on, to see how far this crazy ride will go. While the story does throw up forces that might put a stop to things (the human resources department, the law, competition), it spoils itself early on that Lightning Rods will be a massive success. Joe succeeds, in the end, not because he is a good businessman staking his future on a good business concept, but because he is gross and shallow in basically the same way his world is gross and shallow, which is only a slight (if really any) exaggeration on how our world is gross and shallow.

Well, that and he has help to cover for his gaps. Two early employees, Lucille and Renée, share Joe’s flippancy towards the morality of the scheme: it’s just a job, not a pleasant one, but one that is “compensated fairly.” An ambitious woman can parlay that remuneration into bigger prospects, finance her way into Harvard Law. These women push Joe to do better. By which, of course, we don’t mean morally better, but commercially better. These are the most sympathetic caricatures on offer, the novel seems in some way to genuinely admire their ambition, their unflappability. But they do not escape the overwhelming shallowness of the setting. Indeed, it is depressing that human intelligence and feeling, such as it exists here, is aimed towards extending and nurturing the realm of shallowness.

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The central metaphor of Lightning Rods equates sex and defecation. In the main instance of the scheme, the transaction takes place inside, or rather across, the disabled stall: a secret door opens between the men’s and the woman’s disabled stalls, the woman inserts her rear through the slot, the man proceeds. This metaphor denigrates and trivializes sex. It also, oddly, elevates shitting.

The second of Joe’s central misunderstandings comes from a trivial encounter. On a bus, an obese man addresses a rude question towards a little person. The latter brushes off any potential offense and responds politely, leading to a brief, friendly interaction. Hegemonic shallowness is not a complete inability to learn or to change one’s mind: but when the mind does change, it does so slowly, superficially. Since Joe already has toilets on the brain (he doesn’t like the ambiance of the disabled stall) he has the powerful insight that, hey, little people and just short guys need to use the potty too: wouldn’t they appreciate one closer to the floor? (Years later he has the even more powerful insight: hey, that fat guy shits. Wouldn’t he like a bigger toilet?)

The kayfabe of Lightning Rods, it’s Gogolian commitment to holding itself to the painfully limited understandings of its characters, holds until a slight wobble at the end. Joe has triumphed almost completely. He has expanded his operations to all 50 states, sorted out all legal troubles, is unfazed by his competition. Yet he doesn’t feel triumphant. Reflecting on his life, he never set out to sell weird, clinical office sex. He started out selling the Encyclopedia Britannica. And if the world were only slightly less shallow, if just a few more people were interested in purchasing the Encyclopedia Brittanica, he might have happily kept on doing that. Alas, the market wants genital stimulation more than it wants to know the capital of Peru.

The insight doesn’t last, doesn’t lead to any sort of freedom. Shallowness has a viral quality: it infects and consumes everything about the world that is strange or beautiful or worrisome and tells you, huh, the way I see it is, you don’t really have to think. American culture of the turn of the millennium was a kind of collective manic depression. Things can’t possibly get any better. Which means, things can only get worse. Which means, hold on for dear life.

Today, our culture is six different schizo-affective disorders. Which can make one nostalgic in a way for trusty old shallowness. The Internet makes a brief cameo in those closing pages, as Joe remarks that Encyclopedia Brittanica will always have its niche, as one really can’t trust Wikipedia to get the details right. (Yes, Wikimedia Foundation, fine. I will fork over $3.25.) I thought of OpenAI’s recent announcement that, having cracked the “mental health problems” associated with ChatGPT, they were opening up the shutters for erotic roleplay. Perhaps Lightning Rods will have a second life as a set of fetish prompts line itemed under an enterprise license. Perhaps feminist separatism will be achieved by means of AI boyfriends.

But God would not suffer me to go on with any quietness; I had great and violent inward struggles, till after many conflicts with wicked inclinations, repeated resolutions, and bonds that I laid myself under by a kind of vows to God, I was brought wholly to break off all former wicked ways, and all ways of known outward sin; and to apply myself to seek salvation, and practice many religious duties; but without that kind of affection and delight which I had formerly experienced. My concern now wrought more by inward struggles and conflicts, and self-reflections. I made seeking my salvation the main business of my life.

— Jonathan Edwards, A Personal Narrative, 1740.

Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood is bookended and pervaded with fog. A fog rimmed with grim certainties: there are dragons here, one cannot survive for long. Indeed, as a Macbeth adaption, these certainties are magically augmented: our Macbeth, Taketoki Washizo, is destined for the throne, though his line will end with him. With this fog, Kurosawa modernizes the central moral decay of Macbeth.

To prepare, a brief plot run down of Macbeth for those who last read it in high school: Macbeth and his best bud Banquo are lords who start the play by putting down a rebellion. On their way to report their victory, a group of witches tell the pair that they’re about to be promoted and that eventually Macbeth will be king and Banquo’s son will be king after.

The promotion arrives as promised. Egged on by his wife, Macbeth hastens the second part of the prophesy by killing the king. He does indeed get the crown, and murders his buddy for good measure trying to escape the second part of the prophesy where he loses it. The guy’s kids get away. Macbeth is such a murderous tyrant that the kingdom falls into disrepair and rebellion. The witches Monkey’s Paw Macbeth into thinking he can defeat the rebellion, but he goes down by way of ironic loophole and the second part of the prophecy comes true — the realm has a good king again.

In briefly discussing Polanski’s Macbeth last time, I noted the apparent brute quality of Macbeth’s ambition. Little attention is given to why Macbeth wants the throne, other than a vague sense that “it’s good to be the king.” Indeed, in the play Macbeth self-consciously is choosing evil for the sake of ambition in the murder of the king.

This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips….

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on the other—

Macbeth then is a fallen character, rotten well before his temptation. In this, though, he is fallen in a traditionally Christian sense. Clearly, Macbeth is imbued with a moral sense and seems even to believe he is damned to Hell. Certainly he is damned to be frustrated on Earth — the witches have promised him so much — even if nothing comes after. This makes Macbeth a dramatic case but not perhaps a unique one: Christendom is filled with true believers who nevertheless sin.

The phenomenon of the sinning believer must be regarded as puzzling even as it is widespread. Indeed, it is an old philosophical problem: that of akrasia or weakness of will. The puzzle starts with a simple picture of decision making: the decider has to make a choice, they come to that choice with beliefs about what their options are, what the outcome of each option might be, and then how good or bad that option is. They think it over, do some mental reckoning, then pick the option with the best outcome.

Of course this picture doesn’t imply that people will pick the actually best option. They might have false beliefs about how their actions will turn out or wacky desires. But what this picture does imply is that people will pick what they believe is the best option. Yet, surely, this just ain’t so. Macbeth is an extreme, fictional example, but one can multiply mundane examples — the fast food stop in the middle of a diet, the late night text message to a particularly unhinged ex.

This problem owes itself to Plato, who gave two incompatible answers at different points in his career. The first is nuh uh (we’ll get back to this) and the second is sure, yeah, people are stupid. In particular, people’s actions are not in general made by careful intellection. Sometimes, but there’s also passion and appetite. Decision making is basically the intellect tug-of-warring with these animal drives and it definitely does not always win.

Which is a fine enough start to an alternative story. But I want to give “nuh uh” a fair shake. Because there’s a superficially similar phenomenon to weakness of will: preference falsification. You’re perhaps familiar with this clunker of a phrase from election polling. There are a certain group of supporters of X candidate who, because say of X’s bad reputation, will lie to pollsters and say they prefer more respectable candidate Y.

It’s not altogether crazy to describe putative cases of weakness of will as instead being preference falsification (especially if we’re willing to countenance self-deception). Order the fried schnitzel rather than the wedge salad? Well you might not like to admit it publicly (or to yourself), but maybe you just think actually gustatory pleasure is more valuable than health. (What’s the value of a long life with no pleasures in it?) Murder an innocent man for the sake of career advancement? You might not tell your priest, but perhaps you just don’t much care for the state of your immortal soul. And if all cases can be described in this way, perhaps we needn’t countenance weakness of will as a genuine phenomenon.

To bring this aside back to Shakespeare (and, eventually I swear, back to Kurosawa), there’s one way to interpret Macbeth’s regicide as a failure of the intellect to govern his actions. Macbeth, a Christian believer, knows this murder is damnable villainy. But he’s just so out of his mind with lusts and ambitions that all it takes is some teasing from his wife for his will to fail and the sword to come out.

This is a reasonable way to understand the drama, but I do think the alternative is more interesting. Clearly, being a tyrant sucks. You have to murder all these people. You have to constantly worry about being murdered back. Sure, you get all these spoils, but when do you find the time to even enjoy them with all this murder to do? It’s not clear if Macbeth really thought all of that through. But what is clear is that he holds on to being a tyrant with both hands. One reading at least is that this is what he truly desires — even if it means death and damnation.

I find this the more interesting and more disturbing reading as it locates the fallenness of Macbeth as a deeper and more essential part of his character. Not a demonic presence that could be cleanly excised, but as much or more a part of him as every noble thought and deed that came before. In particular, this seems to me more of a Christianized reading (hence the opening Jonathan Edwards quote) — Macbeth does not fall or descend into madness, rather he remains as he always was, which circumstances happen to reveal in a dramatic way.

In this way, Macbeth as a story is not all too different from Plato’s Ring of Gyges. Much shorter story: Guy finds ring. Ring makes guy invisible. Guy kills king while invisible and … becomes king. (Not as good a story; Plato was no Shakespeare.) The point: really, people don’t give a guff about goodness and nobility, it’s just that we’re afraid of what other people will do to us if we don’t play nice. To be clear, this isn’t the point Plato is arguing but rather a challenge he takes up. If there’s nothing in it for me, why care about morality?

You might think Christianity has a simple answer for this question: if you kill the king, even if you’re invisible, God will still know and he’ll send you to Hell. But this is at best a very shallow answer to the question, it just denies the possibility that self-interest and morality can come apart (because an eternity of punishment and reward outweigh whatever finite goods you can scrounge in this world) rather than establishing any claim in favor of morality.

But Christianity also has subtler and more promising answers. A traditional bit of Christian metaphysics, for instance, identifies goodness with God: nothing is good except insofar as it participates in God’s being or some such formulation. On this story, to view one’s self-interest on being good on it’s own is a kind of metaphysical mistake, a hubristic one (are you God?). Your self-interest might (might!) have some secondary, dependent goodness insofar as it fits into God’s plan. But, as Jonathan Edwards insists in his autobiography, sometimes it is precisely setbacks to our self-interest, misfortunes, griefs, and illnesses, that force us into consideration of our soul’s relationship to God, and so are good.

Macbeth is obviously not a theological tome. But it is, in a way, a Christian morality play about a conflict between self interest and God-given duty and so must face this kind of question. As I read it, Macbeth gives both the simple and the subtle answer. Macbeth is made miserable for his sins, in this life as well as (presumably) the next. He goes mad. His wife goes madder. But there is also a sense, in how the world goes mad with him, how his evil reaches supernaturally into the landscape, that it is not just that Macbeth has miscalculated about what will make him happy, but that he has trespassed against the fundamental order of things, a trespass that can only be set right with his death and replacement by a good king.

How does this look when we port the story to a non-Christian and contemporary background? A little less than you might expect. Kurosawa has jettisoned more or less Shakespeare’s Christianized vision of “the good king” and the sense that the health of the kingdom (down to its weather) depends on the ruler’s personal virtue. The politics of Throne of Blood are much murkier: the current king after all may well have already won the throne by shedding blood, and all alliances and relationships have an uncertain and a provisional quality.

This I think is consonant with a Buddhist ethic: if all earthly life is suffering, and it is attachment that tethers us to that suffering, then there is no greater attachment, no greater source of suffering, than the pursuit of power and fame. The course of events of earth does not have the directional character of a divine plan, but is instead a labyrinth that must be escaped.

With this change, the course of Washizu’s descent (Throne of Blood’s Macbeth equivalent) is lengthened. Washizu’s murder of his lord is given a (flimsy) justification. His wife convinces him that the king is planning to betray him and it’s kill or be killed. This is not to say that the murder is justified; however, Washizu seems to some extent to believe in this justification. There is an ambiguity in this slide into evil.

We can see this in Washizu’s return to the castle, which his friend Miki (the Banquo equivalent) is guarding. Part of the wife’s conspiracy theory is that Miki is part of the plot to kill Washizu. So there is a genuine possibility in Washizu’s mind that he will be ambushed and killed as he approaches the castle in the fog. And when he is not murdered, the trust and alliance that is restored seems genuine. Washizu plans to make Miki’s son his heir (to reward Miki’s loyalty and not having a son of his own). This, again, feels initially like a genuine plan and opens the possibility that Washizu will be an okay ruler—yes, one that achieved the position on dubious (to be generous) ground, but who quieted down and made way for peace afterwards. The point of real degradation, of no return, is later on after Wahizu murders Miki.

This change actually I think deepens the moral dimension of the story. It brings out the fact that what is truly wrong with Macbeth/Washizu is not a single moment of weakness but rather a deeper way of being that reveals itself across a series of choices. This may sound fatalistic, perhaps Calvinist: the evildoer expresses an essential rottenness in their evildoing, something constitutive and so unchangeable in their being. However, we need not think this way; character in general may not be completely fixed, a simple formula from scenarios to action, but rather is internally complex and flexible. Washizu struggles, at least at the beginning, with the prospect of murderous ambition. It is this struggle, this possibility that he might have chosen better had circumstances been ever so slightly different, that enhances the tragedy.

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We can see this point elaborated in the second Kurosawa film of this post, High and Low. We need at least the plot setup for this. Mr. Gondo runs a struggling shoe-making factory. He is caught between two power blocs among the higher ups: the director, who has kept the company making solid but unfashionable shoes, and a group of other executives who plan to cut costs and quality and pivot to disposable fast-fashion shoemaking. Gondo has a third vision—modernize the style but keep quality high—and a hail-mary scheme: borrow a ton of money to buy enough shares to gain control of the company, implement his vision, achieve profitability, pay back the loan.

This scheme is interrupted by the kidnapping of Gondo’s driver’s son. (The kidnapper intended to nab Gondo’s son but messed up.) He can’t both pay the ransom and execute the scheme. Worse, he’d be paying the ransom with borrowed money and so would end up destitute when the bank came to collect. After a day of tormented consideration, Gondo decides to pay the ransom. This kicks off a desperate police investigation to find the kidnapper and recover the money before the bank collects.

Even more so than in Throne of Blood, this dilemma is surrounded by uncertainty. The kidnapper claims he will kill the child if the ransom is not paid, but would he really do that? It’s possible that, if the police are especially competent or the kidnapper especially incompetent, the money may be recovered quickly enough that the plan could still go ahead. (Or at least the loan repaid to the bank, so that Gondo could keep his wealth.)

This uncertainty, rather than weakening the moral dimension of the dilemma, actually bring out more of Gondo’s character. After all, what a person is willing to risk is as telling about their values as what they’re willing to outright discard. That Washizu is willing to risk murdering a decent man (he has no strong evidence that the king is conspiring against him, only insinuation) to secure his own position is only the slightest if any step down from Macbeth’s cold-blooded assassination of an innocent. And uncertainty provides an opportunity to rationalize, to have one’s values shape one’s belief. To return again to Washizu’s murder: Washizu does seem to believe to some extent that the king and his friend will betray him, but it is of course possible that the belief itself is formed as a pretext, a post hoc justification, for the murder he anyways wanted to commit for the sake of his ambition.

To elaborate this point in Throne of Blood a bit more before returning to High and Low, we can also see uncertainty intensifying the moral character of a decision in Washizu’s decision to betray and murder Miki and his son. What spurs this is his wife’s announcement of her pregnancy, and this mere prospect of having an heir immediately shifts Washizu’s resolve and spurs him to eliminate obstacles to his dynasty (in the form of the competitor Miki) before he has any confidence that the dynasty is even possible. And there are so many ways this could go wrong: his wife could be lying about the pregnancy, the pregnancy could fail, it could succeed with a girl, it could succeed with a boy who dies in childhood, the murder could easily backfire. Hell, part of the prophesy that has been completely correct up to this point is that Washizu will not have an heir and Miki’s son will take the throne. So it is for the tiniest chance at getting the prize of his ambition, weighed against a near certainty of disaster, that Washizu commits this second set of murders.

One of the great dramatic strengths of High and Low is the tension its opening minutes build around Gondo’s decision. Initially, it appears that Gondo’s own son has been kidnapped, and Gondo is immediately willing to pay the ransom. When the kidnapper’s mistake is revealed, he immediately leaps to not paying and proceeding with the scheme. (Not his kid, not his responsibility.) He goes back and forth on this a couple of times: his pride and ambition, his fear of failure and destitution, battling his moral sense augmented by the emotional and moral pressure applied by his wife, his son, the kidnapped child’s father.

For an initial chunk of the film, Gondo is not an attractive figure, given his clear willingness to risk the life of a child for the sake of his own success. It is pretty clear without the considerable pressure exerted on him by his family, he would have chosen his own scheme. The moment he decides on paying the ransom is quite telling. Without announcing anything to his family, the child’s father, who are in the room with him, Gondo calls his bank to arrange the money, as if he is willing to do good only if it can be his initiative, an exercise of his power.

After this and as the movie moves focus to the investigation into the identity of the kidnapper, Gondo becomes gradually more admirable. He assists as he can in the safe recovery of the child and the subsequent investigation. He acquires a resolve and dignity towards his predicament, bearing calmly the increasing certainties that he will lose his position and fortune. This growth is made clear in the final scene, where Gondo converses with the captured and to-be-executed kidnapper. (Executed on murder charges—the kidnapper is a real piece of work.) Here, Gondo’s attitude is not rage or triumph, but instead an even melancholy.

It is a trope in adventure stories that the villain is a dark shadow of the hero, a trope usually expressed in a “We’re not so different, you and I” speech, generally delivered right before the climax where the hero can triumphantly throw off this shadow and prove the goodness of his character by murdering the villain with a very sharp sword. Usually this is enormously unconvincing: by this point the hero has usually spent two hours doing noble and heroic thing and it takes a real imaginative squint to find any comparison between the hero’s and the villain’s character.

The confrontation between Gondo and the kidnapper is a confrontation with the shadow done right. The kidnapper is not just “Gondo but evil,” but what they had in common was a shared attachment to wealth and power. Gondo was clearly extremely motivated to build an empire, to accumulate even more power and wealth, to lay low his enemies. The kidnapper, meanwhile, experienced his distance from that wealth and power, his miserable little apartment stuck on the bottom of the hill, looking up at Gondo’s grand house, as a profoundly wounding source of envy and grievance. The kidnapper, despite his briefly sketched traumatic life, has worthy prospects: he’s a medical student, presumably on track for a socially useful career. Yet he fails to get over the attachment that Gondo managed to break.

The difference, and why I think this confrontation is given a disquieting, melancholic cast, is essentially moral luck. Gondo found himself in an environment conducive to his moral development: he married a good-hearted, wealthy woman and just when he might have given himself over to the nihilistic world of corporate backstabbing, a moral shock to his system forced him down another path. The kidnapper, roiling in the dark places of his society, had no such luck.

It’s hard to feel good, certainly Gondo does not feel good, about the kidnapper’s upcoming execution, given the awareness that has been roused of this luck. It is not that this luck excuses or exonerates the clear evil done, but rather punishing the unlucky seems to make one an executioner of a cruel and arbitrary monarch. There is even perhaps something of this attitude at the end of Throne of Blood—Washizu’s men, rather than fight a losing battle on his behalf, betray him, fire round after round of arrows. The ending of Macbeth, typically, is a cathartic one: the tyrant is slain and there will be a good king again. But Washizu’s death is not triumphant, it is instead torturous, the arrows cutting off his escape again and again, a hunter toying with a wild beast. Washizu is nothing but fear. It doesn’t feel good.

In that, I suppose I find Kurosawa’s moral universe more coherent, more attractive than Shakespeare’s Christianity. Hell has a strange and cruel moral logic. In particular, there a sadism to the thought that God decided not only that it would be appropriate to mete out infinite punishment on finite trespassers, but that he should then create those trespassers to punish, like a child buying an ant farm to have something to drown. Grant that it was good of Him to give us free will, so it would be “up to us” whether we went to Hell. However, clearly He could have made it easier: he could have made a species less violent, more naturally inclined to theology and worship. Not only is the deck stacked, but it seems there are favorites being played: some have an easier path to salvation than others.

Without a Creator in the picture, the moral viciousness of the species, the vagaries of virtue, these are just further misfortunes, bad rolls of the dice. Insofar as one thinks of them, it is with a certain measure of ruefulness. Which is not the same as despair. If after all, the state of the world is governed largely by fortune, things could be better. We could roll again, see where things land.

Two Notes on Adapting Shakespeare

Macbeth, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, takes place mostly in the imagination. This is of course true in the staging: played with limited cast on bare sets, castles and forests and roving armies are depicted only as a line or two of pentameter. It is true also within the mind of the protagonist: Hamlet battles more with his own reservations than with his uncle, Macbeth’s terror and desire wrestle until his death over the meaning of the witches’ prophesy.

Film adaptions of Shakespeare have their own wrestling to do: realize the phantasms, give what is described and alluded to natural, visual form; or leave it unseen or, if it must be seen, stylized. Macbeth has seen strong adaptions on both sides of the spectrum, from the sound-stage/green-screen Gothic of the Welles or Coen version to the grand and eerie vistas of Throne of Blood. Along this gradient, Polanski finds an odd middle ground. His Macbeth is set “on location” (which reportedly caused no end of production troubles) in the Scottish highlands, the castles are real, their interiors well-apportioned with at least some nods given to “historical accuracy.”

Yet nothing surrounds the castles but wastes. No farmlands, no industry, nothing exists to generate the wealth the castles consume. And the castles all have a homogenous quality: Macbeth’s is no worse and no better than that of the king he kills. Macbeth’s ambition therefore has both a brutal and a brute quality: nothing explains or nurtures it; it remains as definite and anomalous as these strange masses of stone.

This halfway-house between naturalism and theater-of-the-mind extends to the treatment of Macbeth’s madness. All of the speeches are there—tamed as voice-overs rather than spoken soliloquys—but they are given tangible form as well: we are shown the dagger, Banquo’s ghost, the vision of the line of kings. Already in the text, Macbeth’s malevolence spills out of his skull and onto the landscape as earthquake and storm and ill harvest. Here, the sense of being dragged into the middle of Macbeth’s nightmarish interior is heightened. There is only power, to be obtained by cruelty and put to yet crueler ends.

Eddie Izzard’s solo performance of Hamlet goes about as far as one can in making the play a product of imagination. In the Globe, you may not have had sets or much by way of props or costuming, but at least you had actors, standing in definite physical relations to one another, each the very image of their characters. One at least knows which characters are present in a scene. In a one-person show, even this much is uncertain, subject to constant reimagination.

Izzard’s performance leaves the text by and large where it was. What was already comic, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the gravedigger, is played up in Izzard’s stuttering absurdism. One of the distinctive traits of Izzard’s delivery is its improvised quality: the sense that she is surprising even herself with what she’s saying, even when the material is clearly rehearsed. This quality lends a pleasingly madcap aspect to the comic delivery, but it also remains in a muted form in the serious part of the text.

With just one actor, Hamlet becomes even more a psycho-drama. With Hamlet almost always in scene, occupying such a central role, peripheral characters might as well be imaginary. Indeed, Izzard represents Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as hand puppets appearing at Hamlet’s shoulders. One fact a solo performance makes evident is how much the reaction of listening characters define the meaning of a performance. The better part of Hamlet’s cruelty consists in Ophelia’s pleas. The bite of his madness is nothing other than Polonius’ befuddlement. Without the social context of other characters, the actions of Hamlet are even more ambiguous and absurd.

The political backdrop of Hamlet is even less distinct than that of Macbeth. Sure, there are ambassadors and foreign princes, the names of kings and countries let slip. The attentive listener can even track these names and why they matter. Still, if an adaption needs to abridge anything, it’s the politics that’s the first to go.

If politics’ role is so marginal, why is it even here? I suspect that the marginal position of politics in these stories is an artefact of a modern conception of politics. If politics is economic policy, legislation, foreign relations, well there is not much of that in these stories, just a thin fabric of warfare and diplomacy. However, from a monarchist’s point of view, these stories are deeply political: both are narratives of the moral degradation of noble lines.

Both Macbeth and Hamlet are genetic terminal points. Hamlet’s rebuke of Ophelia is more a rejection of fatherhood, of furthering a cursed stock, than of romance. The ending of the play is the suicide of one line to make way for another, more vital. Macbeth’s line is abortive, cursed from the start. Moral depravation is both a cause and a symptom of genetic fall. And the happiness of a realm is little more than the personal virtue of its rulers.

Given then the tight connections between virtue, genetics, and politics in the author’s worldview, psycho-drama, family drama, and political drama are then three aspects of the same phenomenon. This is an aspect of these stories that is hard to appreciate and so to translate to a modern audience, given how pre-modern an understanding of history undergirds them. Funnily enough, I think this is an aspect of Shakespeare’s stories best captured not by any modern Shakespeare adaption but by the films of Andrzej Żuławski.

The Glory of the Empire

The Glory of the Empire (1971) is a fictional history of “The Empire.” Where and when this empire existed is very deliberately impossible to determine, but it is somewhere and somewhen on Earth: the book is constantly inventing quotes from real historical figures, historians, politicians, writers about the Empire and its ruler. The primary appeal of the novel is that it contains all of the literary charm of a well-written history without any of the pedantic, anxious concern for accuracy. Or rather the novel manufactures the appearance of pedantry and great erudition, without the need for the reader to have any keenness or learning on their own. (Though, clearly, a great deal of actual erudition was required to produce such a convincing appearance.)

To indulge in a boring aside. I have not, of late, been reading novels. (See the opening to this post.) When I have attempted to return to the hobby, I have felt myself rebuffed by a revulsion towards the endless parade of scenes. The clearest statement of this revulsion I have found comes in Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto.

If the purely informative style, of which the sentence just quoted is a prime example, is virtually the rule rather than the exception in the novel form, it is because, in all fairness, the author’s ambition is severely circumscribed. The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature of each of their notations leads me to believe that they are perpetrating a joke at my expense. I am spared not even one of the character’s slightest vacillations: will he be fairhaired? what will his name be? will we first meet him during the summer? So many questions resolved once and for all, as chance directs; the only discretionary power left me is to close the book, which I am careful to do somewhere in the vicinity of the first page. And the descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared; they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the cliches.

Now, The Glory of the Empire is not a surrealist novel, it is not free of scenes. But because it pastiches genres of writing outside of the novel, it makes much sparer and so much better use of its scenes. Dialogue is included at any length only when the characters have something interesting to discuss. Action is described only where it crosses some threshold into drama. Everything else is freely summarized, discussed, opined upon, theorized about. A creative writing instructor, armed with such dicta as “show don’t tell,” would bleed their red pen dry over the novel. Yet of course such telling is one of the book’s major charms.

Let us cut the rant off there. Needless to say the book is terribly enjoyable. (Go and read it!) I do want to briefly remark on the view of history that gets developed in the novel. It is fair to call the approach of the novel a fairly traditional great man history. Most of the novel recounts the lives of rulers and major figures, how they came to gain power and how they wielded it.

Yet at the same time the novel has a double or triple melancholy about these figures. There is a subtle and melancholy impotence built into the construction of the novel. Though the distant past of the world of the novel diverges greatly from the Earth’s actual past, its more recent history seems to converge. Lenin and Walt Whitman and Sicily and Russia, these nearer figures and places exist much as we already know them. There is something inevitable to the arc of history, then, and so something fatalistic and pointless to the characters’ attempts to leave their mark on history.

Then there is a more ingrained sense of melancholy that comes from the (fictional) epistemic limitations of the form. Read any halfway credible history of the last couple of centuries and you will find constant attention to gaps in evidence, biases and faults in sources, the range of conflicting interpretations of data, the fact that “the past is a foreign country,” and its inhabitants are therefore strange and not fully interpretable to us. The “great men” of the novel act for the sake of a posterity that will never properly remember them and will not understand what it does remember.

Häxan

The Glory of the Empire does not fully commit to the strangeness of its history. Indeed, it is one of those delightful half-paradoxes of its construction. What escapes comprehension or imagination in its world or characters does not exist precisely because the world and the characters do not exist except “fictionally speaking” as what is comprehended or imagined. More prosaically, its characters in general are either recognizably modern in their amoral citizens or, where they are driven by a code, are “ahead of their time” / proto-modern in their morality.

Häxan (1922), by contrast, interrogates a truly alien set of prehistorical beliefs. Since the loose concept of this piece is “Damon recommends random pieces of media,” let me interject a recommendation for Häxan. I know it’s easy to imagine that early silent films are going to be bores: at best, historical curios for the devotees. But Häxan is not boring! Especially as it gets going and transitions from a lightly edifying, somewhat comic account of medieval witch beliefs to an unflinching depiction of the horrors of the Inquisition.

The film’s story of the witch hunt goes roughly as follows. The Middle Ages sucked: the average person dies in childbirth and the exception scrabbles together a marginal subsistence farming in some backwater village. The only culture and learning you’ll have any kind of access to is the Catholic church.

And what does the Catholic church tell you? First, it tells you that your suspicions are right: this world is shit. But, wait, it gets worse: while, there is one way to make your time on this planet go better, magic, that way is literally demonic and you’ll go to Hell if you use it. Oh, and also if we catch you using it, or, you know, just get a tad suspicious that you might be using it, we’ll kill you. Best we can offer is: give us all your money and do everything we tell you and, pinky promise, things’ll be peachy after you kick it. (And, by the way, no skipping to the good bit or else, you guessed it, straight to Hell.)

Couple the strains of living in such depravation with the church’s propaganda campaigns with the general mysteriousness of the world pre-modern science, and you have a large chunk of the population believing in magic and demon’s and witchcraft. In such an environment, a group motivated to find and eradicated witches (because, e.g., they get to keep the witch’s property, or just for the sick and/or righteous pleasures of torturing and murdering “witches”) will have a pretty easy time finding witches. Find an old, crazed woman and she might just tell you she’s a witch, or her neighbors might tell you that, certainly she’ll tell you she is if you tie her to a rack. Tighten it a few notches and she’ll tell you who the other witches are too.

The most ambitious claim of Häxan is that, while, yes, humanity has cooled it mostly on the witch-burning thing over the last couple centuries, and mostly does not even believe in witches, what we haven’t done is start treating the mentally ill with respect. The modern inquisition might label the madwoman as an hysteric rather than a witch. And the treatment will be kinder—the padded cell rather than the stake—but not exactly kind.

Which is to say that while Häxan treats the past as genuinely strange, indeed as absurdly so, what is most familiar about the past is the desires, the limitations, the sufferings of the people in it.

To Attempt a Conclusion

A man can go his whole life understanding nothing and be perfectly happy. Macbeth would live a longer and a better life had he never heard the witch’s prophesy. Hamlet, perhaps, might have let time do the trick and inherited his father’s throne in due course of time, had it not been for the ghost’s commands. Häxan’s Inquisitors are despicable not for their ignorance but for their certainties. All striving has a mad and arbitrary quality.

What exactly it means to be “in” versus “out” of a film is a matter of some subtlety. It’s not like the audience ever actually forgets they are sitting in a darkened room, looking at a screen—otherwise, William Castle’s promotional gimmick for Macabre of offering $1,000 life insurance to any viewer who died of shock might really have had to pay out—we are really talking about the fluidity of pretense, and so really something that comes in degrees. Digital blood splatter may take some viewers out of a film, but for a briefer period, a lesser extent than catching the production crew reflected in a mirror.

Being “taken out of” a film in this way we may think of as going behind the screen. But we can also be taken out by going through the screen. A clear example of this occurs in the original Nosferatu (1922) with a scene in the middle of the film cutting to documentary-like footage of a polyp. (Here’s the scene on YouTube.)

To fill in the context. Nosferatu was an adaption of the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, which the filmmakers, in an attempt to avoid paying for the rights to the film, transplanted to Germany and renamed characters (e.g. Count Dracula became Count Orlok). This attempt failed, the production company was sued by Stoker’s widow out of existence and ordered to destroy the film. Certain prints slipped into America and, thanks to a quirk in U.S. copyright laws at the time, avoided this court-ordered oblivion.

Since we will be discussing two remakes of Nosferatu in a moment, a quick plot summary will help orient us. We open with a recently married real estate agent going to Transylvania to sell a decrepit German estate to an eccentric noble. This noble is, in fact, a vampire and the protagonist’s boss is the vampire’s minion. In the vampire’s castle, the vampire sets his eyes on the hero’s wife; barely surviving his encounter, the hero races the vampire back to Germany.

Since the vampire is cursed to have to sleep in the soil he died and was reborn as an undead in, he ships himself inside his coffin by sea. Along the way, he kills the entire crew of the ship with a plague, which spreads throughout the city when the ship lands. The husband arrives home in a weakened state; it is up to the wife to deal with the supernatural menace. She accomplices this through a sacrifice of her own life, giving herself to the vampire to feast on her blood. She keeps him there as the sun rises, whereupon the curse kicks in and he is destroyed.

Worth noting is that the scene that we are concerned in appears no where in this plot summary. In the story it serves solely as an introduction to a minor character: a scientist who is among the secular authorities dealing with the plague after the vampire arrives. The scientist displays the polyp to his students, describing it in a mixture of naturalistic and quasi-supernatural terms, “a polyp with tentacles,” “almost a phantom,” as the polyp consumes some other microorganism.

This digression of a scene is cut against another: the interrogation of Herr Knock, the vampire’s lackey and the hero’s boss, who has, as far as anyone can tell, gone stark mad and raves about the coming of his master. Locked in a cell in his asylum, the gentleman has taken to raving about blood. Knock points out a spider eating a fly and the camera points to it, framing it in the same cool, documentary style as it applied to the polyp.

In the story, these paired scenes invite an implicit comparison. Both Knock and the scientists imagine themselves as atop nature’s pyramid of death—the scientists because of their understanding, Knock because of his alliance with Death itself. Both are mistaken, but not completely so. The scientists’ ladder has no rung for a vampire, and yet he is in a way just another predator, some exotic species awaiting cataloging. And Knock is right that his master will come and bring death, wrong that he will be rewarded for his subservience, wrong that his side will triumph.

It is in the end, though, not this narrative and thematic context that is most striking about the polyp. Rather, it is that for the seconds that it is on screen, I am taken out of the story but deeper into the film. It feels like I am examining this creature through a microscope. The flatness of the screen makes an almost perfect substitute for the flatness of a petri dish. The unrehearsed, unsettling movements of the polyp bear no relationship to the mannered, expressionist horrors of the rest of Nosferatu: this is a real monster!

We might describe things this way. Any film leads a double life. It is at once a story, something for the viewer to watch, to play along with, and also a series of photographs of real objects taken at specific times (plus post-processing). The viewer is always more or less aware of that second aspect, but that awareness can take two different objects. They might be aware of the artificiality of the image, of how it is contrived, but they might also be aware of the reality of the image: that the camera is after all capturing objects in a light that was really there.

Specifically in the context of horror, this last awareness can be especially potent. We will have to go on a short journey to see how this is.

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For philosophers of art, horror has proved an especially puzzling genre. Being terrified, fearing for one’s life, seeing something upsettingly visceral—these are negative experiences in reality, to be avoided where possible. Yet people go crazy for horror fiction, enjoying what one might otherwise think to be negative emotions: fear, anxiety, disgust.

We won’t solve this “paradox of horror” here. We can merely note that the safety of the fourth wall is a part of any reasonable account. The fear one feels watching a horror film is not a true or at least a full fear. It is only a pretend or at least a qualified fear. The audience, after all, is simply sitting comfortably.

And yet the fear horror films inspires cannot completely be qualified away. After all, though the scenes that terrorize are securely fictional, the basic terrors that animate those scenes, the terrors of suffering and death, are very real. Furthermore, while this safety may be an essential to the appeal of horror, it is not itself an appeal. That is, the audience does not want to be more safe—flubs that take one behind the scenes in a horror film are generally flaws—and often prefers being less safe.

Going through the screen in the way described frays the safety of the fourth wall. We have to confront in a much more direct way the thing that scares us.

The greatness of Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu is largely how it develops this naturalistic aspect of the original. Repeatedly throughout the film, the images on screen exist as elements of fiction and as themselves. Sometimes this is simultaneous. The rats, for instance, that attend Count Orlok, exist both as plague rats in the story and as real rats captured on film in one and the same shots.

And at other times the images flit back and forth. The castle exists as a supernaturally twisted place, a host to a demon, when filmed at night, and more as a physical construction when seen in the daylight. In either case, the effect is to take the viewer out of the story, but in a way that we will see is productive.

The story of Herzog’s Nosferatu is largely identical to that of the original, apart from a divergence in its final few minutes. In terms of its style, the film keeps a small portion of the expressionist imagery of the original and trades the rest for something that alternates between documentary and visionary.

Carried out in this consistent manner, the effect of the film is that of a divided intelligence. With half of its mind, it is pursuing the thread of the story, the world of vampires and plagues and 19th century. With the other half, the real world of rats, disease, political upheaval. These parts are not separate but constantly meeting and diverging in the same set of images.

At the center of these doublings is Count Orlok. He is at once the same demon as haunted Mernau’s original—most of the images repeated from the original are those surrounding Orlok—and yet also a metonym for European aristocracy, and also a physical person who happens to be crossing the camera. This last aspect owes itself to Klaus Kinski’s moody performance, Kinski being an all-time mess of a human being.

There is no difference in terms of technique between a moment of a film that takes us behind-the-scenes versus through-the-screen. The brightness of the castle, for instance, how pleasantly the trees appear through the window in Herzog’s Nosferatu, for instance, could just as easily distract the audience as a shoddy presentation of a set as it could impress us as a breaching of thought out into the physical world of the feudal system’s decaying aftermath. Indeed, perhaps for an unsympathetic audience it will merely distract.

There are aesthetics risks here, undoubtedly. The reward of a film’s leading us through the screen is a moment of direct and palpable connection. When Ellen, the hero’s wife, for instance, walks through the city square during the plague, with its carnival of death and desperate gasp of jubilation, the camera distant, wandering through seemingly uncomposed stretches of rats and pigs and peasants, we understand not merely what is happening to a character in a moment of a story, but what it is like to live in the last gasp of a civilization.

It is only right to end this discussion with the most recent remake of Nosferatu, Egger’s 2024 film. This movie stands as an entirely negative example of the current topic. The fourth wall never slips. The film is instead immaculately styled and obsessively constructed to flesh out its style. The story and most of its principal players have been given more to do, greater depth. The world has been realized with a fanatical attention-to-detail and a high sheen.

The point of this essay is not that taking the audience through the screen is the only or even a superior method of providing meaning. It is not a fault of this most recent Nosferatu that it does not. Yet given how much this Nosferatu takes from the original, and given how richly Egger’s other films take from their historical realities, I cannot help but find it a shame that it remains safely ensconced in its fictionality, how aestheticized the history is.

It is worth perhaps dwelling on this difference. We may get somewhat closer with one of the more trivial bits of discourse surrounding the film: Count Orlok’s moustache. Some commentors found the moustache distracting on such an otherwise movie-monster design. Meanwhile, the moustache arrives at the consequence of a simple historical syllogism: Orlok is a Transylvanian noblemen from the 15th century, all Transylvanian noblemen from the 15th century had facial hair, ergo Orlok has facial hair.

What this detail suggests is that this most recent version has a particular commitment to a sense of verisimilitude, of truth-likeness, despite its fantastical, fairy-tale plot. Yet there is an enormous difference between saying something logically grounded in a reality and saying something true. In fact, it is where the previous versions most breached their own reality, depart from a sense of consistent fiction, that they are most able to be truthful.

I have been thinking about this Louise Glück poem. Like much of the collection and many Glück poems, “Persephone the Wanderer” charts a pulse of personal angst against a network of abstract consideration. In the end, the abstractions peel away and we are left with a white, hot sentiment. (To say this is what we are left with is not to say that this is all there is.) I’ll be charting that evolution in this reading. You can find the text here to follow along with.

The speaker flits between three approaches to the Persephone myth. As a recap, Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest. In the central myth of Persephone, Hades, god of the underworld / afterlife, abducts and rapes Persephone. Demeter, grieved by her daughter’s disappearance, abandons her duties and summer slips into winter. Persephone is eventually allowed to return to the surface; however, in the dream logic of a myth, because she has consumed the fruit of the underworld, she is only allowed to spend half a year on the surface and must return to the underworld for the other half. (Apparently the story I remembered in which) The poem moves between treating

1. the myth as a text and allegory,

2. the narrative reality of the myth (thinking of the story as if it were real),

3. and the speaker’s personal relationship to the myth.

The lines between these are uncertain, complicated. But we can say broadly that the piece moves through these modes in this order, albeit not exactly linearly.

We start immediately with the story as a text, and a text with variations. The narrative is conveyed obliquely, in passive voice, “Persephone / is taken.” The mother she is taken from is “the goddess of the earth.” You might be more familiar with Demeter as goddess of the harvest or as the goddess of summer, but she was treated more broadly and sometimes identified with Gaia as earth goddess.

Characterizing Demeter’s withdrawal as a “punishment” of the earth already veers away from expected discourse about the myth. We will not be getting a scholar’s disinterest in the tale, but an emotionally laden parsing over. Yet, to begin with, the poem gives an abstract gloss on Demeter’s withdrawal — that it is an expression of a general desire to do “harm, particularly / unconscious harm” — and a (pseudo-)theoretical labeling of this as “negative creation.”

I find myself caught between two reactions. In one, this characterization seems unfair, even smug. We’re rendering this unflattering judgment of Demeter and one that, being rendered in the language of general psychology and the unconscious, is hard to deny. (One thinks of Freud: if the Oedipus complex is a general condition of consciousness, there’s no room for the individual to except themselves.) And yet for all that the claim is hard to deny.

We never quite get settled in this poem; the lines between the myth as text and as events are continuously teased and stretched. In this way, questions of the text — what was Persephone’s response to the rape — bleed uncomfortably out of the page. The scholars are not simply studying the text: they are “pawing over” Persephone’s “sensations” (as if Persephone were a real person with her own subjectivity), engaging in the kind of questioning of the victim and their “innocence” that “happens so often now to modern girls.”

We can imagine here the poem veering off in a straightforward, political direction: a take down of rape culture, of patriarchy. But it doesn’t. We keep starting over on the text. As if the speaker were not themselves sure quite where they want to take their thoughts. These restarts are not however, random, there is a momentum a carry over between them.

What we have in both of these first two starts is a moral rupture. Demeter’s “punishment of the earth” has brought on at least the accusation of sadism; howsoever fair, we cannot simply think of her as the benevolent mother. With Persephone’s sensation of the rape we have opened up the thought, the palpably unfair thought, that her innocence has been compromised. Even if we despise the thought, something has changed, Persephone’s return is not a return to the way things were. (“Stained with red juice” is perfect here: of course we know that a juice stain is superficial, easily cleaned, and yet we perceive it the same way we would a blood stain.)

Perhaps this rupture more of a revealing than a change. At least, this is the direction the following series of questions leads us. The speaker starts by questioning their own characterization of the myth, for presupposing that the Earth, Demeter’s house, is her home. Indeed, that it has ever been her home. Or, further, that it has ever been her mother’s home. These are phrased as questions, but the progression carries the force of conviction.

I have been stuck on “hamstrung by ideas of causality.” The language throughout the piece is frequently abstract, academic at times, but this is one of the clunkier phrases. The best case that I can make for the line is this: there is a discomfort here to the suggestion that Persephone is an “existential / replica” of her mother. (The lineation, the odd enjambments, reinforce and lengthen that discomfort.) Previously, we had a rather unflattering contrast: Demeter raged, “punished the earth,” while Persephone is the victim in all this. Yet, the thought goes, the difference may be more of position than nature. What this aside does is permit there to be a difference, while rendering that difference abstract, hard to understand.

The speaker pulls back again. We have gotten dangerously close to treating these characters as if real and must remind ourselves that this is all a myth. “The characters / are not people.” But this reminder also comes with a removing of resistance for the next brush. “You are allowed to like / no one, you know.” Strange. We have an obvious reason to dislike Hades. The poem has suggested a cause for disliking Demeter. But Persephone?

Only, perhaps, if we disliked ourselves.

And on that note the poem suggests two diagrams for mapping the story: superego (Demeter), ego (Persephone), id (Hades); and heaven (Demeter), ego (Persephone), hell (Hades). This last is curious given the earlier identification of Demeter as goddess of the earth. Perhaps we are to understand a succession as having taken place, with Persephone taking up the place of the earth and Demeter reigning above, punishing her with winter. (Yet this identification cannot be taken stably; Persephone is a “born wanderer” not home on the earth.)

This at least is suggested by the next passage.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

But why must we? Because this is the point that the identification of Persephone with the earth turns on. We know the answer even before the cold wind tells us. It is snowing on earth: this is the form Demeter’s punishment takes. But it is snowing on earth precisely because Persephone is not there: she is punished in absentia. She is rather “having sex in hell.”

Here we return to the question of Persephone’s sensations more deeply and more directly. We find no certainty here, only the terrifying possibility that “something / blotted out the idea / of a mind.” This is not exactly death, but a kind of limbo. The limbo of adulthood, which is not exactly a freedom from childhood.

What keeps Persephone here is not just Hades’ incarceration, but a “passion for expiation” (reparation / guilt). Persephone herself seems to accept the terms of her mother’s punishment: she has somehow wronged by being taken. In this she is a perpetual subject. And still, also, diagrammatic: a stand-in for any subject, a “you,” a peg on which hangs ominous truths, “just meat.”

Throughout most of the poem, Hades has taken little attention. As he claims more space to the end, it is more as death itself than a narrative figure. The Freudian psychology here does not end at invoking the superego/ego/id diagram, but takes us to Freud’s death drive: the “rift in the human soul.” We are all inevitable disappointments, we withdraw from the world at first temporarily and then for good. This is a constant threat to society, to the world of mothers, the earth, which in turn asks us to “deny the rift.” (And, recall, the earth and this withdrawal are not something separate from us but an “aspect of a dilemma” we contain.)

The overall effect of “Persephone the Wanderer” is that of a panic attack. The surface incitement of a panic attack is circumstantial, a bad day at work, an argument, bad news, here a story. The anxieties that get worked through, however, quickly lose their particularity. All panic attacks are in the end the same: there is something fundamentally wrong with the human condition. “Where / the rift is, the break is.” The attack ends not in a kind of peace, but simply by exhaustion. At best in some ludicrous hope.

If that introductory sentence caused a nose bleed or a sudden desire to be looking at literally any other web page, I’ll endeavor to explain. A computer, at the end of the day, is an electrical machine that can be rewired on the fly. Nowadays, computers are so cheap and so easy to configure that people stick computers in truly bizarre places, like on the front of toasters.

Back in the day, setting up a computer was serious business. In the earliest days, you had to rewire your computer by hand by carefully plugging things into sockets. Later advances meant you could rejigger your computer by feeding in punchcards with holes carefully cut out. Internally, these punchcards encoded a list of instructions for the computer to carry out. Even later, computers got keyboard inputs and printouts and eventually even screens so that you could type the instructions directly into the computer.

This was amazing. It also really sucked.

1. The format in which you had to type in the instructions was obscure, made for the machine’s convenience rather than yours.

2. Each instruction only did something precise and small, so you needed a heck of a lot of them to do anything useful.

3. Different computers would have different instructions. So if you wanted to do the same thing on two different computers, you’d have to take all of your work and modify it for the new computer.

Eventually, people got sick of this and told the computers to write their own damn instructions.¹ In particular, they wrote a set of instructions that would take input in a certain easier-to-write format and output a corresponding set of instructions. This is called a compiler: the inputs it takes are programs and their format is a programming language.

Despite the names and despite some high schools in America using them to junk Spanish class, programming languages don’t have that much to do with the language you or (maybe) I speak. Instead, they’re artificial and symbolic languages. They follow a set of rules for how they’re constructed much stricter and more precise than the syntax and grammar of natural language. (Except for Perl.) And what gets written in a programming language does not have meaning in the same way natural language does: programs aren’t about anything. An analogy might be with machine schematics: a program is a picture of an abstract machine that the compiler can actually fabricate.

If you want a flavor of what a compiler does, here’s a link to a simple C program (C is an early and still used programming language) with corresponding instructions. Not only is using a programming language to tell computers what to do way less tedious than the alternative, but it unlocks a whole bunch of benefits. So in terms of our three problems above, all of them are immediately addressed.

1. Programming languages are meant to be human readable, helping you understand other people’s programs and your own.

2. Not only do programming languages save you typing so many instructions, but they can (and now universally do) help you reuse functionality across programs, making it much easier to build off past work and the work of others. Many of the programs that get written are “libraries”: programs that don’t do anything themselves, but which define functionality for other programs to use.

3. The work of porting programs across computers is much easier. You just have to port the compiler and then everything written in that language comes along for the ride.

Beyond these advances, programming languages offer new avenues for additional convenience.

1. The programming language can solve entire categories of problems for you. A major example here is memory management. Take as an example a music player app. To play a track from an album, the player needs to load the data for that rack. This will look like: allocating space in memory to put that data, copying it from disk, and then playing the audio.

   Once you go to the next track, the player will do this again. Now, at this point it better release the memory for the previous track. If it doesn’t, the program will “leak” memory, building up more and more garbage memory it’s not using until the computer runs out of memory and it crashes.²

   Most modern programming languages will come bundled with a garbage collector. This is in effect a program inside of your program that watches how your program is using memory and cleans up memory that isn’t being used for you. Makes it much harder to leak memory (although you can still do it, if you really want to).

2. Instead of doing things for you, the language can yell at you when you do things wrong. This might sound annoying, and it is. But in the end it’s much nicer when the compiler tells you you’re stupid than when it doesn’t and you have to wait for reality to do that. (Think about all the forms you’ve ever messed up by putting the wrong information in the wrong box; much better to have an accountant check over your taxes than to turn it in and get audited by the IRS.)

With this second point, we’re almost ready to get to the promised ragging on Uncle Bob. First, though, we need to get a bit more clear about this second advantage.

To the computer, what matters is just the instructions that the compiler spits out and when the program executes at the end of the day all it’s doing is manipulating 1s and 0s according to a set of rules. For the programmer, though, those 1s and 0s have specific meaning. Some of them encode the name of the product the customer is looking at. Yet others hold references to the items already in a customer’s cart.

As a program grows in size and complexity, the more data it will have to keep track of when running and the more different kinds of data. The programming language can help the programmer keep track of this complexity by providing facilities to name data in memory and to make type assertions about that data, stating that it follows a certain format. The compiler can check those type assertions for consistency and reject the program if it tries to do something that doesn’t make sense, like calling the routine check_out_cart on data that is not a user’s cart.

The rules that the compiler follows in checking these type assertions constitute the programming language’s type system. With a type system, the programmer has to put in a constant effort throughout the program of proving to the compiler that they’re following its rules. The tradeoff is that the compiler can then verify that there are some mistakes that the program does not make. This is not at all the same as verifying that the program is mistake-free, but it certainly helps. And type checking is prone to introducing unnecessary friction: rejecting programs that would have worked fine, but happened to transgress a rule.

Not all type systems are created equal. More advanced type systems improve in one of two directions: either increasing the scope of the type system to check more behaviors of the program or increasing the expressiveness of the type system to reduce that friction, making it easier to verify programs. The tradeoff here is generally is that there is more upfront investment on the programmer’s side in learning and using the more advance systems.

With that, we’re close to actually getting to the point of this post. Ultimately, this is a debate over whether the more advanced type systems are worth the extra cost and annoyance it takes to use them. Yes, says I; no, Uncle Bob. To fairly represent the negative position here, we need to cover two more aspects of modern programming languages: exception handling and testing.

Recall one of the advantages of programming languages I had mentioned: the programming language can implement basic features for any program written in the language to use. Memory management is one of the big ones. Exception handling is another.

All over the place, programs try to do things that may fail. They try and read a file with some configuration on it, turns out that file was accidentally deleted. They send a request to another computer, turns out that computer was turned off. They try and charge a customer for the products they’re buying, turns out the customer is flat broke.

These steps that fail generally fall into larger jobs. And when a step fails, the job has to be canceled, the remaining steps skipped (you don’t want to ship items the customer can’t pay for), and recovery steps run. What those failures are, what causes them, what recovery is needed, these will vary on a case-by-case basis, but the basic pattern — try to do X, if it fails skip to recovery R, otherwise proceed to do Y — is ubiquitous across programming.

To make this kind of logic easy to write, modern languages generally provide exception handling: the ability to raise and to handle exceptions. To break that down: an exception is a bit of data that describes what failed. When an exception is raised, the program will make a note of that exception and start skipping everything that follows the point where that exception was raised until it finds a corresponding part of the program that handles that exception and run that part of the program instead.

This functionality is extremely useful. Having separate statements to raise and handle exceptions helps separate out deciding when a failure has occurred from how to recover from it. The programmer might realize that a customer might not have enough money to cover a transaction and put in a check for that and raise an exception when the transaction is attempted, without having to decide then and there when and how they’re going to break that delicate news to the customer. Further, storing information about the exception is helpful if not for recovering from failures then for reporting and triaging failures: generally the compiler will automatically add information about where in a program an exception is raised to the exception.

This kind of exception handling is generally orthogonal to a programming language’s type checking. Programming languages can and do have both. However, this kind of exception handling can make it significantly more feasible for a programming language to do without types. Instead of having a type checker prevent the programmer from compiling code that would do something invalid, you can let them write that bad code and have the language’s runtime detect if something invalid is being attempted and to raise a corresponding exception. The trade-off here is that you’re freeing yourself from the annoyance of a type checker but some of the mistakes that would be caught before the program ever runs are instead exceptions that get raised in the middle of runtime.

Programmers and users generally don’t love it when programs fail, even when they fail with lovely exception messages saying precisely what went wrong. To limit how frequently this happens, programmers use the classic strategy: try it out and see if it works. The simplest version of this strategy is manual testing: run the program on your computer, try some things out, see what happens. This has its place, but when programmers talk about testing software, they’re talking about automated tests: writing programs that run another program (or part of a program) and validate it works as expected.

Decent programmers recognize the necessity of writing tests. Talk to them about testing and you’ll find disagreements about how best to go about writing testing, how to decide when enough is enough before sending the program over to real users, but that there will be tests is a given. What is at issue in “The Dark Path” is over the sufficiency of tests to replace features in the type system.

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And I promise, I promise, we’re about to actually start talking about this article. I just need one last bit of set-up. So far we have talked about programming languages in abstract terms. We need some coverage of actual programming languages and their usage. Let’s sketch a few very broad categories.

1. The default choices. Languages that are company’s first choice for a project, either because they are extremely well-supported (mature runtimes and battle-tested libraries, a steady stream of security updates; e.g. Java and C#) or are the native choice for a certain platform (Javascript for websites, Objective C for iOS).

2. The contenders. Languages that see real industry use, but more as a fringe choice. Often these are positioned as clean upgrades of default choices. The two languages Robert Martin discusses fall in this category. Kotlin is a stand-in replacement for Java: you can use the same great libraries and runtime, the language is similar to Java, just nicer. Similarly, Swift is a replacement for Objective C, letting you write programs for iOS at a somewhat smaller cost to your sanity.

3. Niche/toy/academic/hobby languages. Programming languages have an allure for programmers. They’re fun to write and think about, and given your job as a programmer is mostly wrestling with programming languages, you tend to develop a strong set of opinions on what would make a good programming language. Many programming languages get written that are nothing more than a compiler thrown together over a weekend and, if you’re lucky, a page of documentation.

Programming languages progress in accordance with the dialectics of frustrations. The default choices are not especially lovely. Since the crown moves but slowly, these top languages are on the older side, with decades of accumulated bad decisions. In part, their place at the top has a recursive, arbitrary quality: they get used because they’re well supported and they’re well supported because they get used.

Programming language nerds turn their private frustrations into designs and toy implementations of dream languages: abstract labyrinths of parentheses and type systems cribbed from the formal logic a German mathematician whispered into their ear on his deathbed. Occasionally, the collective frustration of a group of engineers leads to a contender being minted. Facebook will realize they are burning three trucksful of dollar bills fortnightly to PHP being kind of shitty and scratch together a replacement language. A fintech startup might skim a niche functional language from the top of the refuse pile and use it to attract MIT boffins into writing statistical models of grain future options 13-hours a day. Occasionally, the king will stir and notice the riffraff posing around the keep walls and instate a streaming interface to quiet them a moment.

The monarchy has its Loyalists, of course. Such is Robert Martin. As he writes in “The Churn.”

New languages aren’t better; they are just shiny. And the search for the golden fleece of a new language, or a new framework, or a new paradigm, or a new process has reached the point of being unprofessional.

The king’s a funny old man, but his rule is not so bad, is it? Surely you saw the streaming interface he just put up, really brings a touch of color to the oubliettes. And the rabble, with their applicative functors and algebraic steppers, surely they’d just dirty up the place. I am not unsympathetic here, more Whig than Jacobin, but we must consider the possibility that the crowd is crowing about something.

So let’s review Martin’s claims. He has “dabbled in two new languages. Swift and Kotlin.” Having so dabbled, he objects to their type system — “not the fact that Swift and Kotlin are statically typed” — but the “depth of that static typing.” By the grace of God, the king has all the strictness one will ever need. Anything more is perversely puritanical. Just so I don’t have to waffle even further about programming arcana, let’s just take Martin’s first example: Swift’s exception handling.³

If you have a programming language with a type system and exception handling, you’ll have to decide whether and how to represent exceptions in the type system. One of the easy mistakes to make the raise-handle exception handling I described is missing that a part of the program can raise an exception and so failing to handle it. This is especially easy to make when using other people’s code (or code you wrote more than a few hours ago) that may not properly document the exceptions it can raise. (And even then, it’s very easy to gloss over exceptions.)

Swift steps in here with a couple of rules in the type system: every function that can raise an exception must declare that it can raise an exception, and every line that calls a function that may raise an exception must handle that exception. If you don’t know how to handle that exception, you can reraise it and let something higher up handle the exception. All this raising and handling might get tedious, so Swift also has shorthand so that it can be done in a few key presses.

I admit to not having worked in Swift (I have luckily avoided the Apple ecosystem), so I cannot say how this works out in practice. But at a glance it seems like an okay idea. Not my favorite way to handle exceptions (Rust/Haskell union types, if you’re curious), but better than nothing. On the face of it, I agree with Robert Martin’s imagined interlocutor: this is a good thing (or at least a better thing than Martin’s preferred alternative: namely, nothing).

Now, perhaps you think this is a good thing. Perhaps you think that there have been a lot of bugs in systems that have resulted from un-corralled exceptions. Perhaps you think that exceptions that aren’t escorted, step by step, up the calling stack are risky and error prone. And, of course, you would be right about that. Undeclared and unmanaged exceptions are very risky.

Martin’s has a couple of complaints here: (a) all of this catching and raising you have to do to satisfy the compiler is annoying to type, even with the shorthand, and (b) it makes changing a function from one that cannot raise an exception to one that can a breaking change: you have to go and update all of the callers to handle the new exception. The alternative Martin proposes is to get good at writing tests and simply add tests around exceptions being raised and handled properly.

Two quick responses to the complaints and then a long ramble about the alternative. In terms of annoyingness to type: invest in a good mechanical keyboard and learn to type faster. And in the case of adding exceptions being a breaking change, this seems all upside to me: adding an exception is a change very likely to break users of a function; it’s nice that the compiler forces you to react to such changes.

Now for the ramble. My father has always been slapdash handyman. Axing branches from atop a ladder currently resting on said branch. Chucking cheap plywood through a hand-me-down bandsaw barehanded and ungoggled. We were lucky if he wore so much as a shirt when facing oblivion in the form of a $25 Home Depot box of power tools. After a few scrapes and one hospitalization, he’s calmed down a skosh, become willing to offload the life-threatening parts to the professionals.

Was the problem with his work the tools or the technique? One would have to say both. The technique was horrific, but something, anything, by way of protective equipment would have taken the harrowing edge off the work. So when Uncle Bob asks

The question is: Whose job is it to manage that risk? Is it the language’s job? Or is it the programmer’s job?

I can only reply: Yes. Both.

It is a very strange dilemma Robert Martin sets up, a slippery bit of rhetoric preparing the ground for his personal hobbyhorse: You aren’t testing enough. If you were, bucko, Tim Apple wouldn’t have to descend from his carbon-fiber penthouse and wipe the drool from your bib with a lace napkin made of checked exceptions. And though they be covered in a pink felt, these handcuffs are no joking matter.

Why are these languages adopting all these features? Because programmers are not testing their code. And because programmers are not testing their code, we now have languages that force us to put the word open in front of every class we want to derive from. We now have languages that force us to adorn every function, all the way up the calling tree, with try!. We now have languages that are so constraining, and so over-specified, that you have to design the whole system up front before you can code any of it.

Now, Bob, bubbale, I hate the children more than anyone. But I’m not sure there’s a volume of pulverized Adderall Xanther can snort through their rainbow LED nose ring to power enough test coverage to satisfy you. The problem seems less in our discipline than the world: every year there’s more of it.

Like England, software rises a foot a year on an accumulation of cadavers. Every morning, Mark Zuckerberg personally lumbers a sequoia and tosses it into a wood furnace that powers the compilation of the ten thousand lines of additional user tracking the poltergeists at Meta added overnight. And software expands not just upwards and outwards but inwards. Even now, Dave from one department of user analytics is preparing for a meeting with Tina from another department of user analytics (same org, different cost centers; it gets tense) to orchestrate an integration of the ML system that processes user interactions with the ML system that performs genetics and heritage inference so that they can decide when Pat clicks on the slightly risqué advertisement of children’s dresses, whether that was a misclick born of early-onset cerebral palsy (and so they should sell his name, email and SSN to Ipsen Biopharmaceuticals) or the signal of the kind of prurient interest that To Catch a Predator and the FBI would be interested in. We can forgive the youngins for reaching for programming languages created in their own lifetimes.

What is perhaps strangest about Robert Martin’s prescription is that it is so much worse than the disease. The primary consideration Martin avers in favor of the discipline of tests over types is the punishment the type checker inflicts when you have to change your mind. Yet how much harsher the hand of a battery of tests!

Add a checked exception in Swift and in one instant VSCode explodes in a bigarrure of red lines and compilation failures. Spend ten minutes tedium sprinkling trys across the codebase and it’s back to business. The compiler is an obnoxious but fair enforcer, satisfied when you return the forms in triplicate. Without such compiler enforcement, the immediate friction of the change is gone, but the work is much greater.

A danger has been silently introduced: every usage that the compiler flagged is one we still have to look at and decide how to handle this new error. By introducing a new exception to one function, we’ve quietly changed the logic not only of that function, but every function that calls it and every function that calls those and so on. If we are to follow Uncle Bob’s test discipline, that’s an overnight shift of tracking each and every one of those down and supplying a corresponding test.⁴

Isn’t all this bloviating excessive? Yes, it’s explicitly a lark. But there is a deeper point I want to make here that has nothing to do with the relative roles of types and testing in software quality. Leave that for the birds.

Rather, the take away is this: this is a bad field for gurus. As in most domains, expertise is mostly a matter of practical wisdom rather than factual knowledge, i.e. an inarticulable intuition. Advice, even good advice, is of very limited value: if you were wise enough to correctly apply a piece of advice, you’d be wise enough not to need it. At most, advice can function as a directional guide. If smart person says to do X, then maybe try doing more X than you were previously doing. You’ll still fuck it up, but you might develop a better sense of how much X is the right amount.

This is a general problem with advice. In software, good advice is I think harder to come by than most other fields. This is because of (a) the relative youth of the field, (b) the scope and speed of change in the field. It’s entirely possible to find two people in different subfields of programming for whom “good software engineering” looks completely different. It is very likely that for a person “good software engineering” looks quite different at the end of their career than it did from the start. Not to say there are no facts on the ground, but the facts are context dependence. Broad advice is more a product of arrogance than wisdom.

1. Well, actually, the idea of getting a computer to output computer instructions predates computers actually existing.

2. In ye olden times, a memory leak like this would crash the whole computer. Now we have operating systems on the computer in charge of things like memory that will hopefully step in and kill the offending program.

3. Strangely, Martin lists Java as a preferable alternative to Swift and Kotlin; but Java’s exception handling is even more restrictive than either of theirs.

4. To grant Robert Martin a point here, which he insists upon in his follow up, the type checking does not necessarily eliminate the need for testing. At the least though, it makes obvious to the programmer (and to a coverage checker) that the logic of the program as a whole has changed in such a way as to need additional tests. This check otherwise is done entirely by hand and is very easy to miss spots. Martin is certainly wrong in his overall claim that types never replace tests. If you switch from nullable to non-nullable types, you no longer have to write “what happens if this value is null” tests; such tests won’t even compile.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

I have finally staked out some time to participate in ModPo, which is now looking at some Emily Dickinson poems. This poem reminded me of an essay by a different Emily.

In order to be happy, one must have freed oneself of prejudices, one must be virtuous, healthy, have tastes and passions, and be susceptible to illusions; for we owe most of our pleasures to illusions, and unhappy is the one who has lost them. Far then, from seeking to make them disappear by the torch of reason, let us try to thicken the varnish that illusion lays on the majority of objects.

— Emilie Du Châtelet, Discourse on Happiness translated by I. Bour & J.P. Zinsser, p. 349.

I think this idea of the truth being best told at a slant, of illusions being necessary is compelling but slippery. How do you distinguish illusion from falsehood? In the case of self-illusion, a truth one keeps slant from oneself, there is an air of paradox: in order to maintain an illusion about a truth, surely one must apprehend that truth. In the case of maintaining an illusion for the sake of others, there are thorny moral issues. Isn’t it, at best, paternalistic to decide that another person cannot handle the truth? And at worst, maintenance of an illusion turns into straightforward manipulation.

Du Châtelet then, given she has forsworn prejudice and immorality in her quest for happiness, must be careful about illusion. In her discussion she gives us two models. The first is optical illusion.

Such are optical illusions: now optics does not deceive us, although it does not allow us to see objects as they are, because it makes us see them in the manner necessary for them to be useful to us.

Take as an example the Müller-Lyer illusion.

These two lines appear to be of different sizes, but measurement reveals them to be identical. There are different hypotheses explaining the illusion, but they cohere with Du Châtelet’s point: the illusion is a side effect of some general heuristic in visual processing that usually works quite well.

Indeed, Du Châtelet is making a stronger point. We do not see objects as they are. Rather, our perception is mediated, inferential and adapted to our environments. In this view, there is no categorical difference between illusion and normal perception. Rather the difference is practical: with illusion our normal perceptual equipment pushes us in the wrong direction. Its not the perception itself but its consequences that constitute the illusion.

It is only with this stronger sense that we can think of illusions being useful. And even then, it is not so much that illusions are themselves useful. Rather, the perceptual system is useful, subject to illusions, and would actually be less useful were it less subject to illusions. That is, the best way to forestall illusions would be to more skeptical or to expend more effort on discrimination: each of which is costly.

Fortunately, Du Châtelet’s next model is explored in more depth. She asks.

Would we have a moment of pleasure at the theater if we did not lend ourselves to the illusion that makes us see famous individuals that we know have been dead for a long time, speaking in Alexandrine verse?

That is, with stories, we “lend ourselves” or play along with an illusion. Of course, we know that what we see in a theater or on a TV screen is not really happening. Some part of this knowledge remains operative at all times: we might cry at a death on stage, but would never leap out of our red velvet chairs to prevent it.

Taking these two models together, we can see two aspects to this ability, being susceptible to illusions, emerge. On the negative side, there is restricting one’s attention, keeping things out of mind. When driving, simply don’t consider the possibility of crashing. The better part of optimism is ignoring the worst that can happen. As Du Châtelet puts it.

We can choose not to go behind the set, to see the wheels that make flight, and the other machines of theatrical productions.

And then on the positive side, we can play along with a pretense. To use her own melancholic example, we can, as a romantic affair peters off, “love for two” and act as if, allow ourselves to imagine, that it is as strong as its halcyon days.

This example plunges us back into the interpersonal and the normative. Perhaps it is best for the person still in love to ignore signs of decay, to act as if the romance may be revived (who knows, perhaps it can be). Yet, surely, it is cruel and cowardly for the other party to participate in these illusions. And this leads us, circuitously, back to Dickinson.

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On the surface, Dickinson’s lyric is advancing something like Du Châtelet’s case. Tell the truth, sure, but not nothing but the truth. The audience simply cannot handle the truth. However, the lack of further context introduces a deep ambiguity. We do not know who the speaker is, who the subject is, what kind of truths are on the table. The fact that “all the truth” becomes “the Truth’s superb surprise,” suggests we’re talking about truths of the upmost importance: metaphysical, theological truths perhaps.

At stake is not just the telling of the truth, but controlling how the truth is received. By the third couplet, it is not entirely clear that we are considering telling the whole truth.

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind

Here Truth takes on a terrifying aspect as lightning. And at the same time, the subject loses their direct authority on truth. The lightning is happening outside of the subject’s control; the children can see it. They just don’t really know what they’re looking at it. Instead, the subject is made interpreter of the truth. They’re not really telling the truth at all, only offering an account of the truth.

This gets us into the heart of the ambiguity of this poem. While it’s fairly clear what is being said, nothing is given about who is speaking to whom. At most we can tell that the truths in question are a matter of some import: capital T truths, truths which dazzle and surprise, which are as lightning. But we don’t enough to tell if this is good advice.

And if it is just good advice, well, that’s not really telling it slant is it? The poem becomes a straightforward account of the importance of obliqueness. How unsatisfying. We can suppose instead that it is bad advice. Okay. Who knows this?

1. The speaker knows it’s bad advice, but the subject does not. What we have here then is an act of manipulation. The speaker wants to control the speaker, to hold them back from plainly speaking their truth.

2. The subject knows it’s bad advice, but the speaker does not. A farce results. The speaker is prattling on, making a fool of themselves, when we really should know: the truth is simple and best told simply.

3. Both know it’s bad advice. Perhaps this is bad advice that they have both received and are commiserating by reciting it ironically. Or a private joke.

What shall we do with such deep ambiguities as these. I confess they may be too deep for my infirm delight. At the least, they do meld into some stable super position but alternate and chase one another. Each line appears at first one way and then flits into some other tone. It is best to take Du Châtelet’s advice not just for living but for reading as well. Pick your favorite illusion and run with it.

These six feet made the difference, apparently, and my cell phone returned to life with a series of angry beeps. Elsewhere there was a catastrophe. A young relative had been caught cheating on an essay: he had ChatGPT write it for him and anyone with half a brain or a subscription to TurnItIn’s AI detector could tell that plain as day.

The universe is a kind place. The teacher had granted him a mercy: he had one day to rewrite the piece. Well, if he had been able to write it himself, he would have just done so in the first place. That was where I came in. Everyone did this kind of thing. It would be fine.

So, turning from the petroglyphs and the Joshua trees, in those brief oases when the phone connected to a network, I tapped a quick treatise on the space race into a Google document. Not much could be said for it — I knew nothing about the subject and lacked a consistent connection to look anything up — but that ignorance served an effective camouflage: neither did my client. The result was bad, uninformed, dashed off, but would pass the plagiarism checker and, ultimately, the class.

While the details of this case are modern, the basic structure are nothing new. The Chinese civil service exam, for instance, survived the better part of a millennium and never once managed to stamp out cheating. This is not for want of trying. Examiners, for instance, separated stronger from weaker candidates to minimize opportunities for copying. They marked exam pages to prevent candidates from swapping in prepared answers. Qing penal codes provided for the swift decapitation of examiners colluding with candidates.¹

The existence of cheating is not a damning indictment of a system, at least compared to the alternatives. The civil service exam, as a method for selecting bureaucrats, even considering its corruption, at the least improved on the system of pure nepotism that preceded it. The pervasiveness and persistence of cheating, however, does suggest the existence of perverse incentives.

Using a very basic economic model, we can say that people cheat when the expected benefit of cheating — roughly, how much the cheater stands to gain by getting away with cheating multiplied by the likelihood of their getting away with it — outweighs the expected costs of cheating — how much the cheater stands to lose by getting caught multiplied by the likelihood of being caught. Exactly what these amount to varies broadly in the situation and also on the candidate’s likelihood to succeed without cheating. If you’re likely to succeed without cheating, it is not worth taking the risk.

When we think of efforts to tamp down on cheating, i.e. to lower the expected benefits of cheating, we think first either of better detection or increased punishments. Better detection can be a game of whack-a-mole, as cheaters simply change methods, and can impose significant collateral costs on non-cheaters. Any college student who has had to install borderline-malware and send their webcam footage off to a center in Bangalore just to assure their examiner it was really them taking an exam, only to be falsely flagged and failed, has some sense at how dystopian this can get. Similarly, ramping up the punishment can simply intensify a system’s arbitrary cruelties. It is no great surprise that civil service exam was the occasion of much resentment and the occasional riot.

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Lowering the stakes of cheating is less often attempted, but can prove effective. When I was a graduate student, my roommate became a convert and then proselytizer of ungrading: conducting classes without graded assignments or examinations. To him, this practice not only saved a lot of admin, but reoriented student’s relationship to the class and material. Admittedly some would take their newfound freedom and skip town: if nothing was being officially asked of them, they would do nothing. The better part, so my friend insisted, would take the running room to form a personal, authentic relationship to the material: without the extrinsic motivators of grades, the intrinsic motivation of curiosity would propel them forward. If nothing else, it saved a lot of admin.

Every time I filled out a cheating report, I wished I had followed this lead. In an American university, the handling of a case of “academic dishonesty” is a centralized process. The lecturer serves as detective and prosecutor, documenting a case against the student. But it is another department that serves as judge, legislator and executioner. There are the trappings of a court: an appeals process, extra penalties for repeat offenders. It’s so much admin.

And why, exactly, is all of this necessary? If, for example, the liberated, grade-free class could teach students more and prevent cheating, simply because it left nothing to cheat on, why not follow this model? The answer is straightforward but depressing. The university (and, indeed, the education system as a whole) is not in the first instance an institution of learning. It is instead an institution of grading, in the most meat-factory sense of the expression, man handling students and slapping on bright stickers: ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ ‘D,’ ‘F.’

How could it be otherwise? The primary consumers of education are employers. The degree a candidate possesses, the number and institution of this degree, these form the crucial items in a job candidate’s application, especially for an entry-level position. This is a simple fact, universally understood. Universities understand the implications: to maximize the value of degrees, they must be selective, accepting and passing on only the most employable. Students too understand: if they are going to spend four years and five, six figures on a piece of paper, it better be a good-ass piece of paper.

Now, there still might be some room for education in this picture. Universities would like to maximize the value of the degrees they grant, as that translates fairly directly into alumni donations, tuitions, and prestige. However, simply granting more degrees could, like a central bank printing more notes, simply devalue each individual degree as the link between degree and employability weakens. Education promises itself as a means to pump out more degrees without devaluing them.

There is a legitimate question about how much education actually gets accomplished in the education system. I’m inclined to side with skeptics like Bryan Caplan (in The Case Against Education) that the answer is very little. But we can put that question to the side here. The observation that matters here is that education is a secondary means by which “educational” institutions can maximize their primary function: grades. Individual acts of utopic anarchy, like my friend’s ungrading, can survive within the system, indeed at “new” and “alternative” schools can be the primary mode, but this is simply a matter of this system, like any, being less than perfectly efficient, less than perfectly organized to its purpose. Freedom is a temporary anomaly.

All of this might be taken to be an elaborate defense of my being an accomplice to cheating. It is not. For one thing, nothing in the above goes so far as to show that the educational system is unjust or immoral. It may be that this grading function is socially necessary. Certainly it is hard to imagine any economy, capitalist or otherwise, functioning at all without some sort of system of qualifications.

Further, even if we think that the educational system is immoral or unjust in some way or other, this does not justify any and all breaking of rules. Even in an unjust regime, most laws are worth following most of the time. With cheating, the harms are socially dispersed. The cheater does a small damage to their educational institution, weakening the relationship between grade and employability, but this damage redounds to other students who have or will receive that grade.

What we have here then is a tragedy of the commons. Many parties are broadly interested in the integrity of grades: that they serve as a reliable signal of certain skills or abilities. Employers want such a signal directly. Students want to possess qualities employers are interested in, and so want the grade and want employers to want the grades they will earn. Educational institutions want to be in control of something valuable. And broadly, the whole economy benefits to the extent that work broadly gets assigned to those competent to do it. So this integrity is a public good.

We can think of norms against cheating, then, as taxes meant for the preservation of this public good. Each of a set of taxpayers (the students in this case) are asked to pay a cost (the opportunity cost of not cheating) for the maintenance of a public good. Cast in these terms, we can see a central problem: this is a highly regressive tax. Those who are hurt most by the prohibition on cheating are those who are least able to pay it, i.e. those who are most likely to fail if they don’t cheat. Call them the D-students.

Now, we need to be a bit cautious here. I have just made an argument that is very general. We could say something similar not just about cheating but any norm violation. To take the extreme example: murder. Public safety is a public good. So we can say the prohibition on murder is a kind of tax for the maintenance of public safety. We might go on to say that it is a regressive one, falling on those with the most interest in murder. Psycho-sexual sadists, for example.

It sounds silly to describe the sadist as over- or unfairly burdened with the costs of maintaining a society free of murder. But there is a point to be made here, namely that we don’t regard the sadist’s desire to murder as a legitimate interest. Certainly, the sadist might be displeased by enforcement of the prohibition against murder. But this displeasure, along with their desire to murder, are pathological. We do not nor should we regret to any extent the denial of the pleasures of the kill. At most, we pity them for having such disordered desires.

The situation is quite otherwise with an example closer to cheating: stealing. We can similarly say the prohibition against stealing is a regressive tax that burdens most those who have the most to gain by stealing: namely the poor. Here, though, the burden feels all the more real. We have all listened to the soundtrack to Les Miserables, have all felt sympathy for Valjean’s stealing a loaf of bread to survive, have felt disgust at Javert’s insistence at exacting the full measure of the law for this infraction. Certainly there are some would-be thieves whose interest in theft is not respectable — those who shoplift for the thrill, say — but much of the interest is respectable. And as such, there is a real moral tension here: between maintaining the public value of a system of property and fairly sharing the burdens of maintaining a public value.

In this respect, the D-students have a raw deal. So much is at stake with this system of grades. This is true for them, especially, on the broadly-true generalization that parental socio-economic status correlates with a child’s academic performance. Of course there are inclinations to cheating, indolence and sloth, that are indefensible. But these are a minor case. As a rule: the burdens of the system of academic integrity fall on those least able to bear it.

To again insist that this is not an excuse for my own assistance with cheating: in my case, the kid’s parents were reasonably well off. He would have been fine either way. At most, this could be chocked up to a kind of familial loyalty.

Indeed, I am not interested in legislating one way or the other. What I think the above shows is that the moral antagonisms in the matter of academic cheating go deep. On the one hand, a norm against cheating is essential to our educational institutions as they exist: there is no simple, salutary change that does away with cheating or our educational institutions. On the other, in anything like our current economic systems the costs of such norms will be inequitably distributed. Technology my open up new fronts in this conflict, but the war does not change.

1. Elman, Benjamin A. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China. Harvard University Press, 2013. 82–87.↩︎

Ultimately—or at the limit—in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.1

In such a light, one can believe there are such things as colors, that objects really have colors, that one is at last seeing the objects true colors. The day is warm and bright for January. In the morning, I read a book of collected haiku. The author spent the foreword railing against Masaoka Shiki for conjuring the haiku tradition out of thin air, for ripping single stanzas out of long, serial poems, and then proceeds to fill a collection with just such trimmings. Some fantasies are more powerful than the truth.

On May 9, 1889, Masaoka Shiki began coughing up blood.2 In between bouts, he composed forty haiku to the lesser cuckoo, whose call sounds like a cough. Later, Shiki would describe his approach to composition as sashei, life sketches, under an indirect influence from Western art.3 (Think Degas and his many sketches capturing dancers in motion.) The sickness that began that day would take his life twelve years later. In his final journal, Shiki once more took up the theme of sketching, arguing that without it one is left with imagination. And imagination alone recombines familiar objects in familiar situations, so merely imaginative art stagnates. As nature is always in flux, so sketching from life revitalizes art.

It is a curious fact that Shiki, given his interests in direct portrayal of the world around him and in the new literary possibilities opened up the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s contact with Europe, nevertheless remained committed to traditional, Japanese forms: the tanka and haiku. Indeed, in certain moods, Shiki was pessimistic about haiku having any sort of future. In one essay, Shiki noted that, given the restrictions on content and syllable (morae) counts, only so many different haiku could possibly be written. Further, all or almost all of these had already been written.4 Nevertheless, Shiki found haiku inescapable. In particular, he adopted haiku as a natural expression of journey and observation, inspired by Basho’s haibun. The reverse was also true: the haiku poet must journey and observe closely.

You must not stop when you have managed to extract one or two poems from some broad view. Next you must look down at your feet and write about what you see there—the grass, the flowers in bloom.5

There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under a lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.6

André Bazin, in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” claims that the photograph is the modern equivalent of a mummy or a death-mask: a mimetic reproduction so good that it can satisfy us as a magical substitute for the real object. What makes it so for Bazin is not so much the stylistic realism of the photograph, the quality it might share with a Realist oil painting, as the unimaginativeness of the camera. Howsoever careful the painter is to capture things as they appear, each of their brushstrokes is an intentional act. The photographer, on the other hand, merely points the camera and shoots. After the finger releases, the machine does the rest: the photograph then is an industrial object, more Wonderbread than Michelangelo.

Haiku are decidedly more pastoral than industrial. Yet there is an obvious kinship in the (real or imagined) spontaneity of a haiku and a photograph. Shiki mythologized Basho’s composition of “An Ancient Pond” as just such an instant composition: Basho, he supposes, was sitting by a pond when a frog happened to jump in. That instant, the haiku arrived in a moment almost of enlightenment, one at least of unself-conscious awareness. Of course, haiku need not be composed in this way. They can be, as even Shiki’s haiku sometimes are, composed, falsified, imagined. But then so can photographs be posed, faked, doctored, distorted, post-processed. Now, in the world of AI, a photograph (or an image resembling a photograph) need not involve a camera at all. We are talking here in the realm of aesthetic ideals or aesthetic mythology rather than reality.

If you receive a basic instruction in art photography — I have taken exactly one photography class in my life, basic instruction is exactly the level of instruction I have received — you’ll learn a smattering of guidelines like the rule of thirds: the plane should not be divided cleanly in half, but unevenly into two parts, one one-third the picture and the other two-thirds. That is, the natural thing most people do in picking up a camera of putting their subject slap bang in the middle of the frame leads to boring, muddled shots. Get that shit off-center. In the same way, the basic form of the haiku also enforces something like a “rule of thirds.” Haiku traditionally contain a “cutting word” (think: a conjunction or even a bit of punctuation separating two sentences or phrases), usually at the end of the first or second line, dividing the three lines of the haiku into two uneven groups: one group of one and another of two.

From hence I got to the Parsonage a little before Sunset, & saw in my glass a picture, that if I could transmitt to you, & fix it in all the softness of its living colours, would fairly sell for a thousand pounds. this is the sweetest scene I can yet discover in point of pastoral beauty.7

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Such rules of thumb are as much modes of observation as they are compositional suggestions. They cannot be otherwise, given the close bonds between observation and composition in both art forms. But, of course, one can observe one’s surrounding like a photographer or like a haiku-writer without a camera or notebook, on the lookout for a composition to emerge out of the blooming, buzzing confusion of the everyday. It is no great surprise that the rule of thirds emerged in the same time and place (England in the late 18th century) as the Claude glass which Gray totted around the Lake District. Despite the intersection of haiku and Buddhism, this form of aesthetic observation is quite distinct from meditation: it is attention turned relentlessly outward, roving and striving for a beautiful object.

The walk to Green Lake from my apartment is not beautiful. It takes you either across the Ballard or Fremont Bridge. Either one is surrounded on both ends by the kind of post-urban landscape that has taken America over like genital warts. Sidewalks on either side of the road suggest that walking is technically permitted here, but you wouldn’t want to do it. Not with the road noise of four lanes of traffic in your ear. Not with the constant breaks in the sidewalk for parking lots, which Ford F-150s zip in and out of without so much as a glance for the prey species, the pedestrian. The businesses themselves proclaim the dominance of driving: car washes, gas stations, auto-insurance complexes, paid storage facilities, ghost kitchens for delivery apps. It is not that aesthetic observation is impossible here, but it feels distinctly like misery tourism. I pass a bus stop and glance guiltily at the three waiting; unlike them, I don’t have to be here. By some act of mercy, I find a coffee shop along this ersatz highway. I can’t take pictures holding the Americano. I follow the lead of some enterprising driver and drop the cup over a storm drain.

Shiki frequently uses the terms refined (ga) and vulgar (zoku). In his attitude here, he is conservative: the refined is aesthetically worthwhile and the vulgar worthless. One might think that modernity would solve the mathematical exhaustion of haiku that Shiki feared. With new trade and new technology comes new things and new words for those things. Even a few new words, thanks to the explosiveness of combinatorics, would massively increase the possibilities for haiku. And yet, when considering such an influx, Shiki rejects this salvation.

And when one turns to the innumerable social matters to which this enlightened age has given rise, or the so-called conveniences of modem civilization, many are the epitome of the mediocre, the quintessence of the vulgar, and totally useless to a writer.8

Yet even Shiki could not resist the game of finding beauty in the trashpile of the everyday. It is unlikely that any person of sensitivity could. What is essential is that such play does not displace the deep ugliness of the world.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

As it spills over
In the autumn breeze, how red it looks—
My red tooth powder!

— Masaoki Shiki9

I am trying to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to….

We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.¹

The question of this piece is this: while we’re reviving C. S. Lewis’ work, should we be reviving this “Bad, Mad, or God” argument? Well, no. It’s a howler. So much so, that I want to consider it not on its merits but on what it is trying to do. This will require a bit of a jaunt through history and rhetoric.

Never accuse an apologist of novelty. Lewis himself is drawing this argument from, in the first place, G. K. Chesterton, and ultimately from a long apologetic tradition.² The point is that, at least in the New Testament, the character of Jesus Christ does some wild shit: curses fig trees, instructs his followers to abandon their families, promises salvation and the forgiveness of sins, claims, albeit privately, to selective audiences, to literally be the Son of God. If he is not divine, this is, well, megalomaniacal nonsense.

I want to consider, here, as a miniature of what is to come, the variation of this theme in First Corinthians (15:13–18). Quoting the King James Version (as this substack is KJV-onlyism-pilled)

But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.

Who is this rhetoric for? Cleary the Christian, given “your faith,” but the Christian who may still have some doubts. As an argument for Christianity, for the divinity of Christ, it is perfectly useless. What it does accomplish is make clear the stakes of Christ’s divinity for the Christian: Christ promised salvation; if he can’t make good on that promise, well, boy howdy that would suck. (Maybe sing those hymns a little louder, eh?)

The earliest precursors of Lewis’ trilemma, then, are inside baseball, by and for Christians. When one gets to his immediate sources in the 19^th century, we switch to a more apologetic mode, one addressing, or at least purporting to address, the nonbeliever. Henry Liddon, possibly one of Lewis’ sources here, describes the choice here as being between believing in an “historical” Christ — morally excellent but decidedly human — and a “dogmatic” Christ — the Son of God Himself.³ Here in fact Liddon is more explicit than Lewis about the issue and relevance of the historicity of the Gospels: if the Christ of the Gospels is more or less a fictional character, then pondering his divinity is an act of literary criticism rather than theology.

Who is Liddon addressing? Here we must call out the ambiguity of the “addressing” here. Take, say, Plato’s Euthyphro. Here, as in so many of the dialogues, we find Socrates arguing with a Euthyphro who believes he knows what justice is and what it demands and that, in particular, it demands prosecuting his father for murder. In the following arguments over the nature of justice, Euthyphro comes across as so confused and incompetent that we, the reader, must part ways from him out of embarrassment. That is, we must distinguish the interlocutor of an argument, the person or persons it purports to address, from its intended audience.

Frequently in apologetics, though the phenomenon goes quite a bit further than that, the audience and the interlocutor are on opposite sides of the aisle. Anselm’s presentation of his ontological argument for the existence of God, for instance, begins by addressing the atheist as “the fool.” We may reasonably suppose that the audience here is not the fool but instead the good Christian, who, being alive and so not yet able to enjoy the fool’s roasting in the fires of hell, gets to enjoy the lesser spectacle of the fool being roasted in quite a different sense.

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To extend this aside a moment longer, this is not to say that such apologetics is not true apologetics, that is something aiming at the defense and expansion of a faith. A piece of rhetoric can be effective, in the sense of moving its reader’s minds in the author’s intended direction, without being in the least rationally persuasive. The desire not to be a fool is more motivating, generally, than logical consistency.

Granting, then, that Liddon, in sermonistic mode, has the flock’s ear while talking to the fool, which fools is he talking to? Both Liddon and Lewis are frustratingly vague here. We may accept that Liddon, in the 1860s, is writing in the heyday of liberal theology, and with deists and agnostics afoot we might expect attempts to shear Christianity of its supernatural commitments. We may point to, for instance Jefferson’s 1820s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth which extracts Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament, shorn of any reference to miracles. Still, Liddon’s parties for the “historical” and “dogmatic” Christ come to us very vaguely sketched, with an undrawn no-man’s-land between them.

If this question of opponent is difficult to answer for Liddon in 1866, it is more so for Lewis in 1943. Certainly by then our atheists are much more outgoing. But we can perhaps grant that someone might have held that Christ is a great moral teacher while denying his divinity. Indeed, we may point out that George Bernard Shaw gets at least some of the way there. Most charitably, we can grant that Lewis is speaking to his younger self, who believed “that Christianity itself was very sensible, apart from its Christianity.”⁴ Perhaps we should say more than addressing individuals as such, Lewis’s opponent is a character type: the genial, Christian atheist, one who does not go in for any of that supernatural bunkum but still wants to have his vicar over for tea without incident.

To press this line a bit further, let us start with another observation by Shaw.

The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists of a great mass of religious people and a few eccentric atheists. It consists of a huge mass of worldly people, and a small percentage of persons deeply interested in religion and concerned about their own souls and other peoples’; and this section consists mostly of those who are passionately affirming the established religion and those who are passionately attacking it, the genuine philosophers being very few.

The worldly many are religious or irreligious only in a conventional sense. In a western European country of the 20^th and 21^st century, the cultural stakes of religious identification have cooled. Those professing or not professing a religion are expected to get along without incident. “Christ is a great moral teacher,” is a nice, polite thing the irreligious can say to endear themselves to the religious. “We were reading Matthew in our Bible studies group,” the vicar might say, to which the atheist can respond, “Love thy neighbor. Great stuff!”

While Corinthians was trying to turn up the heat on the question of Christianity for the Christian, Lewis’ trilemma turns up the heat on Christianity between Christians and non-Christians. If Lewis is correct, the non-Christian cannot just mouth some pablum about the swellness of Christ but must take a hard stance: lunatic or liar. For the audience, then, for those already inclined towards Christianity, the argument functions to make atheism more personally unappealing. You wouldn’t want an awkward conversation with your vicar.

Here we have a very genteel instance of the general problem of religion in a pluralistic society. Religious differences, when thought through, when taken seriously, cannot simply be smoothed over. The stakes are of unearthly proportion: not merely life-and-death but heaven-and-hell. Christian absolutists, say, who would like to turn the country into a theocracy, are simply being consistent as to the implications of their beliefs: better a tyranny bound for heaven than a democracy bound for hell.

My unease with Lewis’ little argument, then, is an unease with the stakes being turned up on religion. It is by the grace of the worldliness of mankind, their disinterest in their own souls, that modern civilization is at all possible. To that end, I quote a greater moral teacher than Christ.

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.”⁵

1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan, 1952, revised ed), 55f.

2. Brazier, P. H., “God … or a Bad, or Mad, Man” (The Heythrop Journal, 55, 2001), 3f.

3. Henry Liddon, “Our Lord’s Divinity as Witnessed by His Consciousness,” The Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, 1866, 151.

4. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 216.

5. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Andrew Lang, ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd. 1897), 16. I stole the quote from Gerald Gaus’s “On the Difficult Virtue of Minding One’s Own Business.”

Achilles

— R. F. Langley

One is seldom directed by way of
an indigo gate. A life is plunged in
colours, saturations, shades, tints, hues. One
screws one’s eyes up. A mediaeval list
of inks confuses fuscum pulverum
with azure from the Mines of Solomon.
Who knows what perse is? Days lose themselves in
pandia omnia and dip away
between the pinks and blues. But then there is
alizarin which sometimes jumps from the
old leaves. And turquoise is a stone dropped near
the gamboge fence. Who did not notice those?

And shapes. The tree. It shows what one could call
constraint. It bursts through rocks in calluses
that clog into a lump with several
branches lunging out of it, one knot-hole
and a stump. The thing has corners to it,
pockets, ledges, wedges, all chocked in with
lichen on them, found out by the sun that
stabs down from the right, detecting olive
green.

  In sixteen-thirty-three, when she was
twenty-five, on a creamy marble slab
in the south aisle, they drew Elizabeth
Havers. Did she have time to walk out past
a red house? Choose a brush? Paint a picket
white? Step on by? Turn round, look back, and shout
that she could see what it might mean? That that
was the place where she had been? She is a
whisper. Smoke and cream. What had she really
seen? She rolls her eyes and wears her shroud so
that it does not cover her lace cuff.

  The
kylix has been cracked. The mend in it spoils
his cheek-piece and his mouth, but there is still
his eye, under the helmet’s rim, as he
stabs her from the right. She reaches up to
touch his chin. BC. Four-sixty. Killing
Penthesileia. It is his last and
only chance to stare at her. He does so
and he falls in love. Or is it lust or
scorn? Furious concentration? Don’t call
it blue. Not blue. The gate is indigo.

She is engraved on her stone slab. The aisle
window moves its print onto her face. It
stresses her lips, almost rubbed out, and the
scoring of her thick curls. Her tear-ducts. The
look she is giving to her left, which might
be sad because she is remembering
what? Ten minutes of after-glow, when white
campion seemed distilled against grey grass,
the poppy in the crop, alight, red for
itself, and she stood stupefied by that,
hoping the hero had not seen her yet.

If she had lived she would be sixty-five.
Sir Isaac Newton, in a dark room, pins
his paper, sets his prism twenty-two
feet off, and asks a friend, who has not
thought about the harmony of tones in sounds
and colours, if he will mark each hue at
its most brisk and full. If he can, also,
postulate, along the insensible
gradation, the edges of the seven.
Where blue ends. Where the violet begins.
The pencil in hand. The hand and pencil
are suddenly intensely indigo.

The gate is indigo, but when they give
directions people call it blue. To lose
the way is to remember something of
the stump. But can anyone be ready
for the moment when the dusk ignites the
poppy? Or accept that the spectral hand
is his? That it’s he must keep the pencil
steady? Maybe everyone is dazzled
here by simultaneous death and love?

This morning in
the pool at

Lime Kiln Sluice
a heron wades and

his deliberations are
proposing ripples

which reflect on
him, run silver

collars up his
neck, chuckle his

chin, then thin to
sting the silence

where he points
his beak.

His round
and rigid eye.

Perhaps he knows
he is caressed.

As a general comment, I at least, when confronting a piece like this with a bunch of unfamiliar references, tend to give it a few reads without doing any looking-up. So before delving into what Google gave me, let’s start with some first impressions.

• The first couple of stanzas lead us in with some slow reflections. We lead off with a line that gives the vibes of “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow.” The indigo gate might literally be a gate (more on that later), but even early on it feels very symbolically loaded. From the gate, we enter a confusion over colours and in particular over how we think and speak about colours. Colours here are hugely important (a life is plunged in them), but they’re something murky. The imagery of these stanzas feels likes its coming from an impressionist painting, where we’re focusing on the fickleness and changeability of color as the effect of light. There’s a tradition in philosophy of thinking of colour as a secondary, less-real quality of objects, but it’s also possible to think of colour as being more primary.

• By the third stanza, we have our first clear character, Elizabeth Haver. The use of time here is initially odd; we’ve had a few suggested temporal locations, the mediaeval period, ancient / mythical Greece (from the titular Achilles) and the vague contemporary period of the present tense. We’re suddenly at the funeral of a dead young woman in the 17th century, thinking about what she did right before she died. The questions here involve colour, but more fundamentally we have a loss. She might indeed have done something, see something, but whatever that was is covered up by death. Or it was inexpressible in the first place.

• In another temporal leap, we are back in ancient times. But since we get the “she” before we get “Penthesileia,” it feels like Elizabeth Havers is, somehow, involved in this narrative, that she is dead because Achilles killed her. This killing is another mystery, we’re not given a sense of why Achilles is killing her and explicitly left in a cloud of questions about how he’s feeling. This deep uncertainty about feeling is linked back to the uncertainty about colours.

• We’re back to the present in the fifth stanza, kind of. But we’re looking at what seems like a statue of Elizabeth Haver, but one which we’re thinking of as being the person again. We’re back to what happened before her death, but this seems even more of a composite death, the one in 1633 and in 46 BC.

• Stanza six here is literally clear. We’re recounting an experiment Newton did in 1673 (from the math of Haver’s age). We have the famous image of Newton splitting light through a prism into a rainbow of colours and he is asking a friend, an optical naïf, to mark the distinguishing points between colours. (Although we’ve already decided that there are seven.) We return to indigo, which I think we’re focusing as the most liminal of the ROYGBIV. Indigo is apparently a separate shade between blue and violet, but, to me and presumably to the poem, it doesn’t feel like indigo really merits being a rainbow colour, blue seems to blend pretty seamlessly into violet. To insist that there is a point that is intensely indigo is then to insist on the reality of a liminal state.

• The seventh stanza (a nice trick that we have a main stanza for each colour of the rainbow) loops back around to the first. We’re thrust back into a confusion, a room of questions, but to me at least it’s a more profound, we’ll call it mystical bewilderment.

• We end with an odd coda, a series of nine short couplets that is both formally and in subject matter quite a break from what has come before, so that it feels like just a separate poem. We’re in a new location looking carefully at this heron wading through a reservoir. There are echoes of the earlier impressionism, the bedazzlement of colours in the reflection of the water, but we do not spend much time really on questioning. It’s clear what we’re looking at, but not clear at all why.

Now that we’ve given this piece an initial attempt, let’s do some looking up to see if we can dig more out of it. Let’s start with the indigo gate.

One is seldom directed by way of
an indigo gate. A life is plunged in
colours, saturations, shades, tints, hues. One
screws one’s eyes up. A mediaeval list
of inks confuses fuscum pulverum
with azure from the Mines of Solomon.
Who knows what perse is? Days lose themselves in
pandia omnia and dip away
between the pinks and blues. But then there is
alizarin which sometimes jumps from the
old leaves. And turquoise is a stone dropped near
the gamboge fence. Who did not notice those?

First the gate itself. After some Googling, we can discover that there is indeed an Elizabeth Haver who died in 1633 who has an engraved tomb in the Church of St. Peter in Stockerston. From Google’s street view, there is a gate outside of this church before a tree-lined road which looks indeed to be indigo. So we seem to be starting in a real place.

“Indigo” is actually an ambiguous word. Originally, “indigo” referred to an ultramarine (i. e. blue) dye that comes from the indigo plant. (Which was grown in India, “indigo” comes from the Latin “indicum” meaning “India”. I’ll note that Latin has another meaning for “indicum,” namely “index” (from “indico,” to point out). This feels appropriate given all the pointing that happens in this piece.) Originally, “indigo” referred to this deep blue colour, and when Newton fixed on indigo as a colour in the rainbow he actually had this blue in mind.

A careful reading of Newton’s work indicates that the color he called indigo, we would normally call blue; his blue is then what we would name blue-green or cyan. (McLaren, K. (March 2007). “Newton’s indigo”. Color Research & Application.)

It’s extremely appropriate then that we’re focusing on a colour-name over which there’s much historical confusion about what colour it referred to. The points then where the speaker is insisting on distinguishing indigo and blue feel sly (“Don’t call it blue. Not blue. The gate is indigo.”) Such assertions feel like claims or perhaps pretense to a deep knowledge (the hoi polloi call the gate blue, but I know it’s purple). I think there’s a sense of irony here, given these conclusions, it’s not clear what this deep insight might be.

Langley’s mediaeval list of inks seems to come from this manuscript, which conjoins fuscum pulverum (“dark pigment”) with an azure “invented by Solomon”. The specification of the “Mines of Solomon,” puts us in mind of the immense value and importance that colours have had. Blues and purples (and, yes, indigo), have had immense value as very rare colours. Casting this as a “confusion” gives us a sense of decay, as if knowledge of colours were some mystical truth always in the process of being lost. “Who knows what perse is?” hits a similar theme. Perse, incidentally is “of a dark grayish blue resembling indigo.” From Colour and Meaning we learn that the word “perse” has been applied to a wide range of colours. We’re left in a state where it’s not clear that there is even a knowledge itself. Colours and colour names blur together. Pandia in Latin referred both to a range of precious stones and a range of pigments and colours made from those stones.

Pandia omnia is an almost magical pigment that, as the omnia suggests, could have a huge range of colours. The line then “Days lose themselves in / pandia omnia and dip away / between the pinks and blues,” I read as pointing both to the passage of time in which all of these confusions unfold (pandia omnia is also a clear pun on “pandemonium”) and the role of the world in perpetrating this confusion. We can speak loosely of the sky being pink in sunrise and sunset and blue in the day, but the sky as any object is of an everchanging mix of colours. Trying to fix our colour names by reference to objects (which is the only option we have) is bound to lead to confusions as people see different aspects of objects, see objects at different times, or indeed see objects differently.

In the last three sentences, we return more to some sort of present scene. Alizarin is pigment from the roots of the madder plant ranging from orange to deep red; it’s a more accessible pigment given that madder is fairly common across much of Europe (though not, as far as I can tell, in England). Given that the pigment comes to the roots, we’re here I think not literally talking about the pigments being on the leaves, but rather the leaves having the colour of the pigment. So we’re talking autumn leaves, we’re thinking of the turning of the season. And since we’re so focused on colours and the production of colour that we are turning back and thinking of the colours of the natural world in terms of the manufacturing of those colours.

Gamboge is a yellow pigment from an Asian tree. So similar theme, although it’s possible we’re thinking of the fence as being painted with this pigment (rather than merely having a similar colour). In any case, both alizarin and gamboge have been used in painting, which will come back into play. Turquoise is one more play on this fluidity between colours, colour names, and the things which are used to produce colouring agents. So, yes, “turquoise is a stone,” but it’s also a colour, and it’s not just any stone but a precious stone, one often granted magical properties. And like all of these colouring agents it’s not one native to England, where this poem is clearly set, but something imported.

“Who did not notice those?” Here I’m assuming “those” refers to alizarin, turquoise, gamboge. We’re thinking of colours as having a kind of power, the ability to fascinate, to get people to spend vast amounts of time and resources to import the materials needed to create these colours for themselves, to figure out how to produce these agents and to do so. It’s worth calling attention to the fact that these efforts were not always nice or just, that we’re talking about centuries, millenia even, not only of trade but also of conquest. England and Newton acquired indigo through the East India Company, an almost cartoonishly evil agent of imperialism. The communion with colours we’re going through in this piece, a communion that ranges from the cerebral to the mystical, is one that the piece itself seems to point out is not without significant moral complexities.

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And shapes. The tree. It shows what one could call
constraint. It bursts through rocks in calluses
that clog into a lump with several
branches lunging out of it, one knot-hole
and a stump. The thing has corners to it,
pockets, ledges, wedges, all chocked in with
lichen on them, found out by the sun that
stabs down from the right, detecting olive
green.

In an exchange in Plato’s Meno, Socrates, in trying to extract a definition of virtue from Meno, warms him up, gives an example of the kind of definition he is looking for, by forwarding a definition of shape. He says “shape is the only thing which always follows colours,” i.e. where one has colour there one has shapes, as a shape is no more and no less than patch of colour. We can see something along these lines here, as we transition from thinking about colours to thinking about shapes. Though it presented here abruptly, the dangling fragment “And shapes” occurring after a stanza break and in response to a rhetorical question, this thought has been building through the first stanza. There we moved more from thinking about colours and pigments in themselves to their occurrence in bounded forms in a present scene.

The two fragments “And shapes. The tree.” have the curious effect of lurching us out of and then back into the same scene. Although the grammatical continuity with the prior stanza is broken, we can presume the tree is an object by the indigo gate. What exactly is the relationship between “shapes” and “the tree”? It will soon become obvious that the tree is not one shape but an assemblage of a massive variety of shapes. Given the equation of shape and colour we’re working with, that suggests we’re also recognizing that the tree is not one colour but a huge variety of colours, though we will not engage this thought explicitly until the end of the stanza.

In what way does “it” (the tree as an abundance of shapes) show constraint? If shape is a bounding of colour, then it necessarily comes with constraints (its perimeter). In a down-to-earth reading, the tree itself is constrained: this is a gnarled tree growing among rocks. It is working with what it has and that isn’t very much. We might also note that the presentation of this tree in the poem is quite constrained. It is stuffed into the shortest main stanza (not counting the couplets in the codea) and is presented, though not in a received form, but with an intensity of internal rhymes and consideration of rhythm as to evoke the constraints of rhyme and meter. Likewise we’re in a much more imagistic mode here. We have left the complex rhetoric of the first stanza for the difficulties of sculpture or painting.

We should think not only of the constraints applying to the tree, but to those of the speaker and the reader. The confusion over colours of the first stanza comes in part from the confused transmission of colour expressions from speaker to audience (“confused transmission” both in the sense of a confusion itself being transmitted, as in the mistaken mediaeval list, and failures of transmission itself, as in the loss of perse.) Then there are the confusions of perception itself. Even though the tree is a static object, there is sudden and confused motions in its perception. It “bursts through rocks,” its branches lunge “out of it.” If it weren’t for its constraints, the rocks, the clog of callouses, the chocks (an object used to hold something in place) of lichen, the tree might become infinite in extent, but instead it has become this tangled, sharp thing, all corners.

It is clear that the poem will not and cannot provide an exact representation of the tree. We are not given the precise number of branches, nor the angles with which they lunge out of the stump. There is a gap between the tree the speaker has seen and the tree as described by the speaker and a gap there between the description as given and the description as understood. More deeply, there is a gap between the tree as perceived and the tree itself. In the least, this is a result of the partiality, the constraints of any perception of the tree: from a particular standpoint, at a particular time. There is a deeper ambiguity here about the nature of the tree itself, which the poem plays at with the sun that “stabs down from the right detecting olive / green.” Here the sun’s light is a violent, perceiving fire. (One thinks of Plato’s theory of vision in the Timaeus as a kind of divine fire emitted from the eyes.) And yet how seriously can we take “detecting” olive green? As if the tree could, in itself, be olive green apart from its being seen as olive green.

It is worth briefly noting here a comparison between the difficulties of poetic representation and that of sculptural and painterly representation that will return more explicitly as concerns of the poem. Here we can quote from Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual In Art.

A material object  cannot be absolutely reproduced. For good or evil, the artist has eyes and hands,  which are perhaps more artistic than his intentions and refuse to aim at photography alone. Many genuine artists, who cannot be content with a mere inventory of  material objects, seek to express the objects by what was once called “idealization.”

All representation, in language, in painting, in sculpture, in thought, is gestural, is a performance bounded in time and space. In writing, this becomes most obvious in phantom movements, movements which belong not to the perceived but to the perceiver, the lunging of the branches, for instance. In painting and sculpture, this gestural element is direct and literal: the visible path of a paint brush, the texture it leaves against the textured canvas, or the clear imprint of the sculptor’s thumb.

A realist artist might be tempted to mute, to hide, to erase those gestures, to work and rework the surface into an anonymous sheen. However clean the cover-up, we are left with a second-hand copy, an object, to prosecute a broadly Platonic argument, whose apparent fidelity and intelligence is more a stylistic effect than a genuine achievement. Leave reality to the scientist, to Isaac Newton. Granting this problem of representation, Kandinsky and the abstract artist retreat from reality into an inner, spiritual need. Langley, by contrast, recognizes the problem and pushes it farther. As we’ll see: Newton faces the poet’s dilemma.

            In sixteen-thirty-three, when she was
twenty-five, on a creamy marble slab
in the south aisle, they drew Elizabeth
Havers. Did she have time to walk out past
a red house? Choose a brush? Paint a picket
white? Step on by? Turn round, look back, and shout
that she could see what it might mean? That that
was the place where she had been? She is a
whisper. Smoke and cream. What had she really
seen? She rolls her eyes and wears her shroud so
that it does not cover her lace cuff.

My brief archival dig ends with placing Elizabeth Haver as a woman who indeed died and was buried at twenty-five years old in 1633 in the Stockerston Church of St. Peter. Throughout this stanza we have a deliberate equivocation between Havers, her corpse, and the sculpture of her that is atop a slab in the church. Her life and death here are shrouded in mystery. In the text of the poem we have no indication of why we’re suddenly turning to this woman who died nearly four centuries ago. We are given snippets of her life just before her death, but these are framed as questions and the action itself is highly oblique. Nor is this a puzzle or an exercise in research; at least near as I can tell, there is nothing to uncover. Instead, we are left more profoundly with a mystery forever sealed, closed off by death.

Despite the funereal subject matter, there is a marked uptick in vim and fun in the stanza. The sentences get faster, the language more colloquial, the sonic play richer, the mood almost manic until the sudden deceleration of the last sentence, with its coy, polite silence. The action that hits us pell-mell in the rush of sentences picks up all the concerns of the first two stanzas — perception, communication, art — and the experience is of something of importance, something that is at the core of the poem, being lost, being suddenly take away. “She is a / whisper. Smoke and cream.” Heartbreaking stuff.

In these middle stanzas, the poem eases up. Although the narrative here is deliberately obscured, we can loosely follow it. How we’re getting here from the tree and the gate is somewhat obscure, so it might take a minute to get our bearing. The possibility that we’re walking through the gate and into the church to be confronted by Havers’ funerary statue at least offers to give us a reasonable frame narrative to hang the pieces together. But how is this movement developing our central topic?

We are here getting a new application of the problem of the constrained understanding in the moral and social realm. The statue of Elizabeth Havers on the surface poses a similar representational challenge as the tree, but deeper the personhood of Elizabeth Havers opens another layer. In understanding a person we are also seeking to understand the process and phenomenon of their understanding. This means that all of the epistemic difficulties we were having before exist not just between ourselves and our object, but within the object itself and between the object and the world. Here our questions concern not just what’s going on with Elizabeth, but what she thought or knew or realized. And there is always a danger here that the gaze will be returned, and then we’ll really be in trouble.

                                                                                 The
kylix has been cracked. The mend in it spoils
his cheek-piece and his mouth, but there is still
his eye, under the helmet’s rim, as he
stabs her from the right. She reaches up to
touch his chin. BC. Four-sixty. Killing
Penthesileia. It is his last and
only chance to stare at her. He does so
and he falls in love. Or is it lust or
scorn? Furious concentration? Don’t call
it blue. Not blue. The gate is indigo.

At this point, we can hear Hans Zimmer’s horn from Inception blaring as we go deeper into layers of fiction and representation. A kylix is an ancient Greek cup with a shallow bowl. You would have mythological scenes painted around the outside of the bowl and also inside the bowl. There apparently have been bits of Roman pottery found in Stockerton, so it’s possible that we are talking about a real kylix in the church or at least the vicinity. The basic story depicted runs like this. We’re in the middle of the Trojan war. Penthesileia is an Amazon warrior gone to fight on the side of the Trojans. She’s good at it, killing many Greeks, but not quite good enough. Achilles kills here. Depending on the telling, he either does fall or is claimed to have fallen in love with her.

In the broader scheme of the poem, this kylix is another object with a story lost to time. Part of it is physically lost to damage, and part of it is interpretively lost: we can’t quite tell what Achilles is thinking. (These are connected: given that it is the face that’s damaged, the crucial expression is obscured.) And our reading of the kylix is not self-contained, but is connected to the various tellings and iterations of the Penthesileia myth that might have inspired the kylix. The sudden interjection of the date of the cup’s construction draws extra attention to this construction. There is a painter’s mark on the cup, an intention behind it, but as with Elizabeth Havers that artistic thought is lost.

Note the recurrence of stabbing from the right. In the second stanza we had the sun’s light stabbing the tree from the right. So we have a clear linking of the sun and Achilles and the tree and Penthesileia. We can tentatively extend this link to include a link between Penthesileia and Elizabeth Havers—I’ll return to that next stanza—and also between the poet/speaker and Achilles. After all, it’s the looking here that’s violent and violating and the speaker (and, in fact, we the readers) have been doing little but looking.

In this context, the lack of Penthesileia’s perspective marks a conspicuous absence. We are primed to note this absence by the last stanza, where we spent all this time looking for Havers’ perspective on her death. Here we’re stuck in Achilles’ perspective and it’s quite a discomfiting one. Even if we take seriously the possibility that Achilles fell in love with this woman he has just killed, nowadays that is more likely to strike us as gross and ludicrous than romantic or heroic. And of course if we are in some metaphorical sense Achilles, then our confusion over these feelings is a confusion over our own feeling. The feeling itself is difficult, ambiguous, overdetermined.

We are recalled from the scene by “Don’t call / it blue,” which is a slick poetic trick. So far the “it” has been the feeling Achilles has towards Penthesileia, so we naturally read the “blue” as “indecent” or maybe “melancholic.” Read on its own, we can read it as a bit more of that polite coyness. With the rest of the sentences, it instead becomes the poem tapping us on a shoulder, saying “Wasn’t this poem supposed to be about a gate?” And it is, yes, but we do not pop all the way back to the gate, but instead return one layer up back to Elizabeth Haver.

She is engraved on her stone slab. The aisle
window moves its print onto her face. It
stresses her lips, almost rubbed out, and the
scoring of her thick curls. Her tear-ducts. The
look she is giving to her left, which might
be sad because she is remembering
what? Ten minutes of after-glow, when white
campion seemed distilled against grey grass,
the poppy in the crop, alight, red for
itself, and she stood stupefied by that,
hoping the hero had not seen her yet.

It is quite an interesting choice that we’re given a clear view of the statue of Elizabeth Havers here, only after we spent a stanza with it. The poem is pacing out its more descriptive, imagistic passages. This is also an appropriate place for it as, given the identification of Penthesileia and Havers, we’re moving from Achilles’ looking to what he was looking at. What description we’ve already had of the stone slab paints it gentle and indistinct: “smoke and cream.” That haziness, almost sfumato, continues here as we have the moving effect of light from a window, and with the “scoring of her thick curls” and “almost rubbed out” lips, we are again focused in on the material reality of the artworks and the gap between the physical representation and what is represented.

This is a gap we are very happy to take an imaginative leap over. In the poem, we do not make a clear distinction between the engraving, the statue, and Havers herself. And in this imaginative movement we’re running together these various layers of fiction. We’ve had Achilles stabbing to his right and now we have Havers giving a look to the left, as if meeting his (i. e. our) gaze. Our perspective though is nimble and we leap into her imagined memories. Here we are suddenly, after a time of muted colours, in Technicolor with white campion and, especially, red poppies.

We’re again in quite an ambiguous narrative situation. We’re in an after-glow. Something has happened, maybe sex given the word. But we’re also awaiting something else, dreading it. The hero has not seen her, hopefully, but he will, and then what? The stabbing, perhaps. We can loosely connect this vision to the hints of narrative in the third stanza. There Havers had a vision: “What had she really / seen?” We are here getting to see a bit of what she had seen, but neither of us really know what we are looking at. We stand stupefied.

We can delineate then two basic moments in this poem that we go back and forth between. There is a mystery, a spark. We are getting it here in its rawest form with the poppies, but we’ve been dealing with mysteries all the way through. And then there are two modes of reacting: there’s a dwelling in that bewilderment, being stupefied. And then there’s the the attempt to control and discipline the mystery, to sort things out. We’ve had the speaker trying to sort out the colour of the gate, the sun trying to sort out the colour of the tree, trying to sort out what happened with Havers, Achilles sorting out his own feelings.

The audience is thrown between these reactions, is discomfited by them. On the one hand, we’re readers, we have a right to know what’s going on. We can call the manager, i.e. we can stop reading at any time. And yet here satisfying that curiosity is made out to be so violent. Even if we wanted to drop out, to be satisfied in mystery, we are being led along by the speaker, as his accomplice. This trick of the poem only works because it is not really a trick at all. Life just is this way: you have to know. Never mind the consequences. Even if there is not anything to know at all, or no possibility of knowing it.

If she had lived she would be sixty-five.
Sir Isaac Newton, in a dark room, pins
his paper, sets his prism twenty-two
feet off, and asks a friend, who has not
thought about the harmony of tones in sounds
and colours, if he will mark each hue at
its most brisk and full. If he can, also,
postulate, along the insensible
gradation, the edges of the seven.
Where blue ends. Where the violet begins.
The pencil in hand. The hand and pencil
are suddenly intensely indigo.

If there is nothing to know, then we have to make something up. It is not some great revelation that the division of the spectrum of colours into seven or any number of colours is arbitrary, not obviously meaningful. Yet the presentation of that task here, in the bright language of Newton, manages to inject that task with a mythic significance. The ghost of Elizabeth Havers adds to this supernatural shine: we have had her vision of the red poppies, and now we are getting the colours themselves, shorn of shape.

The mystery of colour is this: that there is no visible world without colors — as we have seen, colour and shape are coeval — and yet colour is not some stable property of objects, but a shifting phenomenon of the light and the eye. We cannot sort out exactly what we want to say: philosophers are puzzling out colour to this day. And so we find ourselves, cannot help ourselves, speaking in ways that are confused. If we have an “insensible / gradation,” then there is no line between blue and indigo, indigo and violet. And yet language pulls us to “postulate” and then to seek out such a line. Likewise, do we really want to say that “The hand and pencil / are suddenly intensely indigo,” when it’s not like they’ve been dyed indigo, but merely bathed in indigo light. In such moments, we call things as we see them, knowing neither what we are seeing nor what we are saying. There is no clear line, perhaps no line at all, between observing and inventing.

The gate is indigo, but when they give
directions people call it blue. To lose
the way is to remember something of
the stump. But can anyone be ready
for the moment when the dusk ignites the
poppy? Or accept that the spectral hand
is his? That it’s he must keep the pencil
steady? Maybe everyone is dazzled
here by simultaneous death and love?

All of these troubles are not necessarily practical troubles in carrying out daily affairs. These confusions and mysteries are not the same thing as total imbecility: one can encounter them and dwell with them and still find one’s way to the gate. “Blue” is good enough. Yet this is not to discount these questions.

If we are to take the frame narrative in itself, we have someone following directions, presumably directions to the church. Along the way, perhaps a bit lost, they encounter and consider a runt of a tree, and on entering the church encounter a couple of pieces of art that sends them on an imaginative odyssey. Here we’re coming out of the reverie. What is crucial here is that that reverie was not a hallucination, not, I think, a supernatural encounter, but simply a poetically heightened extension of ordinary experience. The questions here concern ordinary experience. The dusk could ignite the poppies at any time and the responsibility of keeping the pencil steady, of detecting if not inventing distinctions, the boundaries between shapes, is the work of every moment.

Lime Kiln Sluice
a heron wades and

his deliberations are
proposing ripples

which reflect on
him, run silver

collars up his
neck, chuckle his

chin, then thin to
sting the silence

where he points
his beak.

His round
and rigid eye.

Perhaps he knows
he is caressed.

In a poem of bold choices, the boldest is not to end the poem here, but rather to extend the poem with a coda that could easily be an entirely separate poem. To puzzle at briefly what it is doing here, we can note it returns us even more intensely to the imagistic mode we’ve dipped into in the second stanza, replete with intense phantom motion.

We might say here that we are recapitulating all the moments of observation that have run throughout this poem. Certainly, the lyricism of the image at least equals the dusk igniting poppies. And like with our encounters with Havers and Penthesilea, this object looks back. And here there is no suggestion of violence to our looking, but a gentleness, a caress rather than a stabbing, an ease to the pencil which is not an answer to our questions but a living with them.

1.

After the apology, their brains melted. In Junji Ito’s Dissolving series, a boy, Azawa, goes about apologizing profusely to anyone over anything, especially over the mischief wrought by his little sister. Such obsequies earn him the scorn of his classmates and the gentle amusement of adults. Because this is an horror manga, these apologies are neither sincere nor benign, but a form of demon worship. Azawa has pledged himself to a demon which has granted him this power: that whomever he apologizes to should have their brain melt.

As the authors of “The Implications of Apology: Law and Culture in Japan and the United States” (1986), Hiroshi Wagatsuma and Arthur Rosett, point out, apology plays a particularly central role in Japanese life and jurisprudence. Should you run afoul of the law in Japan, innocent or guilty, the most prudent path forward is to admit guilt, to apologize insistently and throw yourself on the mercy of the law and the party you are alleged to have wronged. This is just a special application of a rule of social life: since you are enmeshed in a web of interdependence with the rest of your society, it is best to paper over any ruptures in this web with a quick apology and a resolve to make things right. It is not in this regard, Wagatsuma and Rosett claim, especially important that the apology is sincerely felt, that it arises from genuine remorse — indeed, sincerity or at least blunt honesty are to be discouraged as potential sources of interpersonal conflict, best to maintain an agreeable public persona and leave one’s true opinions to oneself and the occasional intimate — what matters is that one affirms a commitment to the social web.

And yet, questions of intention and interiority cannot be laid entirely to one side. While an apology can certainly be given in the absence of remorse and can even be a meaningful sign, of pacification, of surrender to a social order, when entirely unfelt, it is always and ever an ambiguous sign. While the conventional drama of the apology has its power dynamic — the one giving the apology laid low before the one receiving it — an undercurrent pushes in the other direction. The one giving the apology is also demanding something, an acknowledgment, an acceptance, forgiveness, from the receiver. Sometimes this demand approaches the force of law: in the Jewish tradition, teshuvah, or repentance, the offender must make three attempts to present their apology to the wronged party, but after the third refusal it is, in fact, the apologizer who has been wronged for having their apology rebuked.

Before even placing a normative demand on the object of the apology — find some path towards forgiving the sorry party — acts of apology place an interpretive demand: acknowledge that a wrong was done. In the ordinary course of things, such demands are easily accepted. One person bumps into another. “Pardon.” “No worries.” Among reasonable people in ordinary situations, apologizing takes on a casual, ritualized character. In more serious cases, the practice can degenerate. Martha Nussbaum, in Anger and Forgiveness, discussing teshuvah, argues that this formalized practice becomes a platform for aggressive narcissism — typically on the part of the aggrieved, for whom demanding an apology becomes a means for punishing the perceived wrongdoer, “Apologize! Grovel before me,” and a way of centering oneself in the narrative of wrongdoing, “I, in particular, have been wronged by you,” and rarely on the part of the apologizer, who is likewise centering themselves and demanding something from the apology. The Japanese practice of apology, being less individualized, might promise to avoid these dangers, and yet perhaps merely masks them, buries them into the realm of the demonic.

As a practice, apologies and forgiveness occur in the informal legal world, in the antechambers and side-offices of the law. Typically, an apology has little formal legal role: at most, Stateside, it can constitute an admission of guilt; in Japan, an unofficial ground for lenience. When the stakes of an encounter exceed the thin boundaries of etiquette, when our social power seems flimsy in the face of real violation or true irrationality, we appeal to the power of the law. In the end, it is this power that undoes Azawa. In the final story, a journalist, aided by an early victim of Azawa’s black magic, a rare survivor with a brain only half-melted, tracks down the siblings and snaps a photograph. The shield of anonymity broken, the pair surrender themselves to the police.

2.

A few nights ago, a man flipped me off walking home from a theater. One can only imagine what indignity I must have caused him, passing silently in the other direction. I had just seen Sweeney Todd. A brief synopsis: Sweeney Todd, nee Benjamin Barker, returns to Victorian London having escaped a life sentence in Botany Bay, seeking revenge on the evil judge who falsely imprisoned him for the sake of carrying off his wife and daughter. This being what we in the industry call a dick move, Todd contrives to encounter and dispatch the Judge Turpin. Rescuing his daughter, whom the judge has taken as his ward and wife-to-be, makes up a decidedly secondary priority. By a stroke of bad luck, the first attempt fails and the mission becomes sidetracked into general serial murder and cannibalism, until eventually this train gets rolling again and crashes in spectacular fashion: Todd slits the throat of the Judge and his toady, the beadle, but not before murdering a crazed, beggar-woman who turns out to have been his wife, made mad by a botched suicide attempt brought on by the judge’s violation, in turn murdering his co-conspirator who had lied to him about his wife’s death and in turn murdered by a random boy the pair had adopted after Todd murdered his prior father-figure in the first act for having recognized Todd as Benjamin Barker and blackmailed him. The only survivors of this carnage, Todd’s daughter and the sailor who rescued him and brought him to London, emerge from the wretched kitchen/sewer, let’s call it traumatized.

As this precis suggests, Sweeney Todd plays in a grisly camp. The story, ripped from the pages of penny dreadfuls, tears through a series of coincidences and contrivances to deliver some bloody spectacle and an album’s worth of clever, memorable songs. The musical is madcap but also just mad. We have Todd’s wife, Lucy, brain half-melted by poison, his daughter, Joanna, not mad herself but consigned to Bedlam by the evil judge, his business partner, Mrs. Lovett, madly in love with him, and Todd himself, who lives more in fantasies of revenge and grief than on Earth. Violence and madness revolve in some great, industrial wheel: Turpin’s violence drove Todd mad and, in turn, Todd’s madness drives Toby mad. In both cases, violence redounds to its dealer, the only facsimile of justice permitted in this mad world. In true, Romantic fashion, this madness extends out of the skulls of the characters into London as a whole. The musical is bookended and punctuated by ensemble pieces from unnamed citizens of London, singing about Sweeney Todd as if his obsessions were also theirs. The set design, in the original Broadway staging and in the recent revival I attended, is sparse, industrial, abstract, expressionistic, all garish reds overcoming metal riggings.

The categories of apology, regret, and forgiveness find no purchase on this world. The crimes committed are so heinous, the criminals so warped, so vicious, that we cannot imagine an apology commensurate to them nor can we imagine that any would be forthcoming. Exceeding the bounds of our ordinary moral relations, recourse to a higher power is needed. Since the institutions of the law have become completely corrupted, Sweeny Todd’s “dark and hungry god” will have to do. Or, at least, so a vision of justice as karmic physics leads us, according to which each violation demands an equal and opposite punishment. It is from this moral standpoint that we hallucinate Hell as that place where accounts, so clipped and fragmented and disordered on Earth, will at last be settled and set out to remake the Earth in the image of Hell. Hence, all the infernal imagery in Sweeney Todd, whose subtitle has the title character as The Demon Barber of Fleet Streeet, the gnashing and wailing of Bedlam, the black smoke and ever-burning fire of the bakery’s ovens, blood running red in the streets.

Yet Sweeney Todd also sketches an alternative vision. Anthony, the sailor who saved Sweeney Todd’s life, falls suddenly in love with Joanna, kept under lock and key by the Judge, and hatches his own schemes to rescue her. Their love is inchoate, mad, ludicrously so, on Anthony’s side a chivalric, bolt-from-the-blue attraction and on Joanna’s a feeling clearly born of desperation, the needful love of a fairy-tale princess. Yet it forms the basis of a much more reasonable course of action: forget taking up bloody and ultimately doomed revenge on the world, just reclaim and protect whatever scant treasure you can find. Sweeney Todd is at his most monstruous when he risks everything for the sake of his revenge: after assisting Anthony in rescuing Joanna from an insane asylum, he turns around and uses her as bait to lure the judge to his layer. It is not merely that, driven by anger, one prioritizes punishment, revenge, over other values, but that overcome by a righteous fury, one’s sense of value itself becomes corrupted. And yet, and yet, such bright spots are overshadowed by the sturm und drang of the main revenge plot, not only in terms of narrative priority but simply aesthetically: Sweeney Todd’s murder ballads are much more inventive and captivating than its love songs.

3.

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Seattle is dark at night, much more so than one might expect from a city of its size. Blame the pandemic and the local response thereto; businesses cut their hours and have been slow to extend them back. Blame crime or the American drug crisis; where I live at least, in the penumbra of downtown, streets have grown not exactly unsafe, but discomfiting, sketchy, unkempt. Blame urban planning for the blocks of office buildings that blackout after five, blame whatever. The buildings line the street as so many alien monoliths, the odd street lamp just about limning the outlines of windows, those voids which we might have looked to for signs of life. Aristotle Roufanis captured this effect in his Alone Together series. In these works, Roufanis captures and then stitches together thousands of photographs of a cityscape at night. He selects, almost exclusively, dark frames, so that in a vast, high-resolution composition of hillside apartment blocks only a dozen lights will be on. Otherwise, the gloom permits only the forms of the building and the impression of detail to show. Since the compositing provides a vastness to the image, we can focus in on one clearly defined silhouette against a blank ocean. These images evoke a devouring loneliness, as if one was just a krill clinging for a moment to the baleen of the city. Lovely as they are, Roufanis might have saved himself a lot of time in the editing booth; he could have just come to Seattle.

Well, except that the darkness of these photographs is not quite a real darkness. Although the sources of light have been edited out, the light itself, “light pollution,” has not been removed. There are no stars in the sky. Yet this artifact of the process only enhances the hyperreality of the images. Had Roufanis put the stars back, cleaned his streets of all traces of manmade light, as Thierry Cohen does in his Darkened Cities series, the spectrality, the feeling of human presence at once everywhere and nowhere, would have been lost. These skyscrapers are not cenotaphs but ghosthouses, still crackling with unexplained light.

And the human brain, with its tray of images
Seems a sorcerer’s magic lantern, projecting black and orange cellophane shadows
On the distance of my hand.

— John Ashbery, “The Skaters.”

The formlessness of this general darkness permits the spirit to carve out its own, private sensorium. This luminous bubble is interrupted, and then only partially, as the world reaches its fingers in: one goes to work, one encounters an unwanted hunger, ague, sickness, a man flips you off as you pass by. For my own part, I like to watch films late at night. The theater’s seats offer a minimal, minimally demanding communion. Recently, I saw Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid.

We start with a therapy session. Beau, a middle aged man, expresses anxiety, an anxiety so general and mutable as to encompass every waking and most sleeping moments of his life, here concentrated in an upcoming trip to see his mother. Beau’s anxiety is understandable given his living conditions: the shittiest apartment in the third circle of Hell, a darkly comic exaggeration of a Republican’s picture of urban decay, gaping poverty, lunatics and naked murderers roaming the streets. A spate of ludicrous bad luck prevents him from making his flight back home. From the depths of his misery, news of his mother’s sudden death necessitates making the return. His absence from the funeral, his mother’s lawyer insists, is deeply humiliating.

Beau’s odyssey is, for the most part, an event which happens around and to him. His attempts at exerting control, assuming agency, pass only fitfully and half-heartedly, and then never successfully. This passivity, evidently, has been true of the entire course of his life; all of it traces back to his mother. Beau lives with a constant and crushing guilt, which is substantially the guilt of a faithless son, one who has never once, by his mother’s standards, returned the love and devotion she gave to him unconditionally. Beau is paranoid, convinced that a grand conspiracy guides events around him and that he, in particular, is chased by some Fury which will destroy him for his sins; this turns out to be entirely correct, with his mother as conspirator and Allecto. One of Beau’s crippling neuroses, his belief that he inherited a congenital condition which would trigger a heart failure should he ever orgasm, a condition which killed his father in the moment of his conception, was simply a lie his mother told him.

It is not surprising then that Beau dreams of a life apart from his mother. In an extended fantasia, Beau reimagines himself as an orphan who creates a peaceful and satisfying life for himself, finding a community, practicing a profession, and starting a family. Even this idle turns dark. Anxieties intrude: a storm destroys his life, separates him from his family, he is again lost, guilty, pursued by a spirit of vengeance, a hungry god. It is not only that anxieties destroy the fantasy but that they consume them, feed off fantasy; what kind of son fantasizes about being without his mother? Surely the same kind of son who would fantasize about offing his mother, which is then surely the same, morally speaking, as actually murdering one’s own mother, whose only crime had been to birth you and to love you too dearly. In teshuvah, all apologies are to be addressed in the first instance to God, who is both victim, prosecutor, judge, and executioner. All wrongs are wrongs against God, whose only crime had been to create you and to love you too dearly. Tonight, in Beau Is Afraid, the role of God will be played by mother. The film culminates with a trial in which his mother indicts and sentences Beau. It ends with his drowning.

4.

Apologies form a strict, narrative schema. A wrongdoing has transpired, a perpetrator has wronged a victim. For whatever reason, the perpetrator comes to recognize their wrongdoing and becomes flushed with emotions, shame, guilt, self-incrimination, remorse. This motivates them to action: they apologize to the victim and, in more serious cases, offer to “make things right” somehow. The ball is now in the victim’s court, assuming the apology is sincere, the offered reparation reasonable, they should accept the apology and, contingent on the continued sincerity and efforts to render recompense, forgive the perpetrator, wiping the ledger clean between them. The details might vary between cultures, as we have seen, the scorekeeping might be between perpetrator and God or perpetrator and society as a whole, for whom the victim acts as an agent, but the basic story holds near universally.

In the case of Sweeney Todd, I claimed that sufficiently grave violations break this model. One can rack up an outstanding moral debt of such magnitude that a hundred lifetimes of penance will not suffice for its service. In such cases, we must bring in a higher power to make up the difference or, with Purgatory, to give the sinner an extended repayment plan. Or else the perpetrator, an odious creature, no longer human, must be destroyed bodily in bloody revenge or, if we are feeling generous, to suffer a spiritual death and rebirth. This last possibility of spiritual reincarnation promises to extend the system of apologies to handle infinite wrongs. If we can be reborn, then, in an act of spiritual Sovereign Citizenry, an application of the strawman theory to matters of the soul, we can partition ourselves into a past and future selves and assign our debts to a dead person we are no longer.

So by this shell game and a bit of luck, we can take on ever larger debts, which is good as they are incredibly easy to rack up. Assessing the amount of restitution due is a matter beyond any public accountant. We might start with a vague notion of equality, “an eye for an eye,” which incidentally in Hammurabi’s Code was a significant softening of prior practice, “your life for my eye.” Yet the loss can take any form soever, reputational damage, physical injury, bereavement, most of which cannot be paid back in kind and between which no easy conversion formula exists. Then there are questions of interest and indeed the question of equality again. For surely the victim, infinitely blameless, and the perpetrator, dirt, worse than dirt, cannot be equal in value. There must be some exchange rate between their lives, and as we reflect on the crime, well, remember what happened to Zimbabwe in the oughts? Furthermore, now that we think of it, shouldn’t we say all crimes are equally heinous? The stealer of pears, no less than the serial murderer, disrespects the laws of God and man, things of infinite worth. If one is more jubilant in his expression of that disregard, we should prefer that over the cowardice of the minor crook. These are questions both perpetrator and victim must answer, brain-melting in their weight.

Now, with repo men surely after our very souls, we must consider organizing a jubilee. Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed whom, but instead offer a blanket amnesty, if not from consequences then from blame and reprisal. This is the path in Sweeney Todd that we see Anthony and Joanna follow: the fantasy of escape can tempt more than that of revenge. At least, as long as you keep running. Pause for a moment, achieve if only a partial and temporary safety, and the old categories return, pressing again against the skull. Being what we are, coming from our own homes, we will not surrender anger and resentment and self-loathing easily, all-at-once, or fully. Unconditional forgiveness in practice involves strictures and disciplines of its own. I forgave the man for flipping me off, of course — he was clearly deranged — but did that come naturally? or was there even in that moment a subdued glimmer of revenge? Quell your hate, kindly ones, that fucker isn’t worth it. (That this is the third mention of this trivial incident in this essay certainly suggests a hardness of heart.)

You’d let me be lonely?
I thought I was dead.

— Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.

One already feels the grey matter leaking from one’s nostrils. Thankfully, history has contrived to solve this problem for us. Indeed, our disintegrating neurons are part of the solution. The name of which is atomization, the breakdown of thick or meaningful social relations. By thick, I mean normatively thick, taken to be capable of grounding special demands or privileges. If Timmy Bradshaw in Montana falls into a well, you might watch a news segment and feel a bit sad and maybe pitch five bucks to the “Pull Timmy Bradshaw Out of the Well” GoFundMe campaign. If your grandmother falls into a well, you better be there rigging up a system of pulleys stat. Atomization, then, is not the same as increasing social isolation, though both are occurring and are linked; social networks can become both broader and more atomized, supposing the links as a whole are increasingly casualized.

Why is atomization occurring? We can point to both deep and proximal political-economic causes. At their core, atomization greases free markets. Thick relationships give rise to anti-competitive behavior: collusion, special treatment, nepotism, discrimination (subjugation is a thick normative relation, just a negative one, granting the oppressor special privileges over the oppressed). Down the line, market competition forces labor fluidity. Moving states to get a job, as I have been recently reminded, is a great way to damage one’s existing relationships.

This thinning of one’s relationships has as its further consequence the reduction of cases which demand one to give or to receive apologies. If we will only leave one another alone, sign the equivalent of a society-wide non-aggression pact, we will have no cause for resentment, nothing to feel wounded about. And even if the odd deviant behaves obnoxiously, we can simply not deal with it. Walk along, nothing to see here. Should the misbehavior become intolerable, that’s what we have laws and police and jails for. It is not that discipline disappears, but that it diffuses and hides itself. As a first line of defense, it becomes everyone’s responsibility to monitor themselves. Should that fail, the institutions of the law will silently fill in the gaps. Ideally, the law itself is impersonal, not retributive but simply utilitarian.

5.

In a rather round-about way, many of the artists have provided a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness. The “blackout” that covered the Northeastern states recently, may be seen as a preview of such a future. Far from creating a mood of dread, the power failure created a mood of euphoria. An almost cosmic joy swept over all the darkened cities. Why people felt that way may never be answered.

— Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments.”

Apology has its own architecture: the court room, and especially the Athenian court, which confronts the apologizer with the aggrieved. Beau is Afraid presents the ideal such configuration. The defendant is in a cylindrical pit surrounded by a high-up audience. Given special pride of place is the victim who, chiefly, must be satisfied, though the community too is present and surrounds the defendant on all sides. As he cannot see all of them at once, he must satisfy them not as individuals but as a body. As in a sport’s arena, giant scenes show the moment of transgression, which the prosecutor narrates. He stands, not steadily, but in a boat on troubled waters. The gods will sink him if he answers poorly.

This scene, with all of its drama, if it promises redemption or justice, also threatens failure. We might encounter a Socrates who scatters the plot in a haze of dialectic. Beau’s screens offer an improvement here: if the scene is filmed, if it has already happened, then there is no possibility of its going wrong. Indeed, we can at this point dispense with the physical space altogether and the courtroom can recede into the virtual, a fourth-dimensional object puncturing individual screens in individual apartments. And even then it is encountered as a kind of residual energy. The small voice speaks only through the spirit box: a radio flitting through stations.

The dark glass boxes that house these apartments are, as Smithson calls them, “new monuments” which “cause us to forget the future” rather than “to remember the past.” These monuments exist if not outside of time then at the end of history. To historicize this end of history, we may point out that the Atomic Age sculpture and architecture that concerns Smithson (the essay was published in 1966) is one limned by oblivion of the atom bomb. In the face of such existential stakes, where the central moral question is who will end the world first, to retreat into the unliving, the motionless, the lightless is to retreat into a kind of safety.

To take another observation from Smithson, these new monuments are sourced from science-fiction while having nothing to do with science or fiction. To give an example, consider the Last Redoubt from William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. This novel pioneered the “Dying Earth” subgenre in which far future civilizations decayed before an exhausted sun. These civilizations are reduced to living in a few, far flung pyramids, redoubts, immense megastructures of glass and steel housing entire cities against a hostile outer world of mutants. Against this physical, spatial megastructure, Hodgson sets a spiritual, temporal megastructure: that of metempsychosis. The protagonist of the novel is the reincarnation of a 17th century nobleman and his quest is to save from oblivion the reincarnation of that nobleman’s dead wife. Further, the novel is framed as the vision of that 17th century noble. In this slipstream, woozy sense of time, in the slim archetypes of its plot (a simple, save-the-damsel quest), in its exhaustive length, this science-fiction novel has little to do with fiction. Similarly, in its worldbuilding, keyed off of mistaken speculations by Lord Kelvin on the longevity of the Sun and filled to bursting with psychic powers and abhuman monsters, it has nothing to do with science.

The Night Land, being published in 1912, is in fact more optimistic and more humanist than the mid-century work Smithson is reacting to. It is therefore a useful intermediary point in charting the change in moral life we are describing. As Emily Adler in Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle notes (211f), Hodgson is riffing off neo-Darwinist theories of evolution as aiming towards a higher being. Although the material universe as a whole tends towards entropy and decay, the human being is further and further perfected. The far-future society, facing extinction, has achieved a kind of spiritual perfection (cached out in the narrative mostly as magic powers, which is true of most hagiographies). Far from an atomized, isolated world, The Night Land is fundamentally a romance. (This too is mostly expressed in terms of magic powers; the hero and heroine are linked by a psychic connection.) The night of The Night Land is tragic and heroic, the sputtering out of all that is good and noble.

Nevertheless, as an example of the pulp decadance of fin-de-siècle weird fiction, this moralized element of The Night Land seems vestigial in the face of the horror-poetry of its monsters, its cosmic glumness. And the novel is shot through with atomization and loneliness: the hero and heroine carry out what can only optimistically be described as a “long distance relationship” (and their psychic connection does not even permit video calls), and, even when they (re)unite, the characters are such cardboard cutouts that their love itself feels thin. While these effects arise from what is shoddy and tedious in the novel’s construction, they are real and have a certain power.

The force of suns had waned beyond recall.
Chaos was re-established over all,
Where lifeless atoms through forgetful deeps
Fled unrelated, cold, immusical.

— Clark Ashton Smith, “The Abyss Triumphant”

If The Night Land represents an early moment in a culture becoming unmoored from a thick, moral life, we can follow this movement to its conclusion in our present moment. In this connection, I would like to return to Japanese horror with two quick examples from the filmography of Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

2001’s Pulse presents the Internet as an infinite, Gothic space, a medium for ghosts. (Ghosts are always talking to us through radios and telephones and wires; the subtle pulsing of electricity evidently more amenable to their influence.) The heroine enters a coworker’s apartment after he has missed several days of work and for a moment seems to speak with him, only for the apparition to fade into the image of her coworker’s corpse. He has hanged himself after encountering a series of haunted images online. The hero’s web browser glitches out, jumping to a website showing images of people alone and mad in dark rooms. There is a great deal of being alone and mad in dark rooms. Or worse, being not alone in dark rooms.

The central insight of Pulse, what powers the desperate melancholy of its horror, is the realization that the depths of loneliness consists not merely in a painful distance from others but a profound fear of and a resentment almost a hatred for those, for their power to reject him, the fact that they have already, in his mind, rejected him or, at the least, have not intervened to save him from loneliness. It is this that makes deep loneliness such a persistent, disordered position: the sufferer rejects precisely what might cure them. The hero asks a colleague for advice on his poltergeist of a browser and discovers the screen of their computer is covered in moving dots, which occasionally flit out of existence. They explain the images this way.

“If two dots get too close, they die, but if they get too far apart, they’re drawn closer.”

“What is it for?”

“A miniature model of our world. I wouldn’t suggest staring at it too long.”

The ghosts themselves are not merely representatives of this pathological loneliness; they are fellow sufferers. In the climax, a ghost tells the protagonists that “death was eternal loneliness.” It would be tedious here to dwell too long on the causes of loneliness as Pulse presents them — an early “social” media that sates its users with a thin substitute for human connection, an economic system that dislocates worker, that, and Japan is an extreme case here, captures their time in long hours (the characters in Pulse are mostly colleagues and strangers, not family or friends) — what interests us here is the Gothic core of the film: the temptation the lingers around the horror, the sense that it might be what we most deeply desire. To be alive is to be vulnerable to death; ghosts alone are invulnerable.

This sense of horrible vulnerability present in Pulse is a development on the director’s earlier film Cure (1997). In this noir-horror, a detective investigates a series of killings with a common method of murder but random perpetrators. Eventually, he discovers and encounters the man responsible, a hypnotist who implants uncontrollable, homicidal urges in his victims. Of clear note here is that the victims were all kind to the villain and it was their very kindness that makes them vulnerable. The first victim we see, for instance, takes the hypnotist into his house after finding the man apparently lost and confused on a beach. (As a feint, the hypnotist pretends to have extreme amnesia.) Even with thin social relations, the kind that can exist even between strangers, there is no real safety. Silly as the concept of such hypnotic suggestions is, the distant, almost journalistic filming and mesmerizing (sorry) performances sell their reality and open a deeper anxiety, the instability and vulnerabilities of our own minds.

It is clear that the killers were, given the hypnotism, outside of the moral universe in their killings. They are agents of a natural evil and not themselves blameworthy. The Japanese often attribute wrongdoing to a mushi or “worm,” attributing evil to something outside of the agent. (This makes apology something more of a purification ritual than a moralized drama: a cleansing of the worm.) In Cure, the worm is literalized — there just is an external agent bypassing people’s will and causing them to do evil — but this simply shifts the question of responsibility. What of the hypnotist; does he too have a worm?

Well, yes, actually. In the climax, the detective tracks down and shoots the hypnotist. He discovers a phonograph recording the voice of another, earlier hypnotist, of whom our villain is clearly a disciple. This voice delivers a speech somewhere between a sermon and an act of hypnotism, prescribing the killings we have seen throughout the film as a kind of healing, a cure. In the inevitable horror twist, this recording has its effects and the detective is corrupted into being the next hypnotist.

In this deracinated world, in which evil is something more natural than moral, our response to evil becomes one of anxiety and frustration. Cure is full of malfunctioning machines — a dryer clinking on with nothing inside is a recurring motif — and adopts the language of psychology to portray the evils and madnesses of the world as so many disorders. Of course, just because we have a professionalized, medicalized vocabulary to discuss such things, we do not thereby have the cure for such conditions. The dryer is left on by the detective’s wife, who frequently suffers from memory loss or confusion. He cannot blame her of course; in some sense this is not her doing but her worm’s. This doesn’t help; in some ways it makes it harder.

6.

Prior: I’m a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionnaire’s disease.

Louis: Stop.

Prior: My troubles are lesion.

Louis: Will you stop.

Prior: Don’t you think I’m handling this well? I’m going to die.

Louis: Bullshit.

— Tony Kushner, Angels in America.

In an odd stretch of “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Robert Smithson raises the idea, attributing it to an anonymous scientist, that the fourth dimension is laughter. It is not a serious idea and it is not presented seriously. And yet the idea has a certain undeniable power. Here is the use I want to make of it.

All of the disparate media I have raised here are in the realm of horror and yet they are not so far from comedy. Some, like Beau is Afraid and Sweeney Todd have as much comedy as they have horror in them. The rest are close enough to camp that one might imagine laughing at them; this is broadly true of horror. (This is often observed; the converse is less commonly commented but no less true. Most comedy films would be deeply horrible to experience in real life.) Let’s suggest the following explanation.

Horror, totalizing horror, is a form of myopia. The comedy, say, of Sweeney Todd in large part consists on playing on that myopia. Todd is so unrelentingly dour and hateful, so extreme in his expression of that hatred, that one cannot help but laugh. Even in the more straightforward cases of horror, the audience can find a source of comedy in how artificially narrow the world has been made, how contrived its pessimism. The comedy arises in leaping between perspectives, in dissolving the horror against gentleness. Which is not to say that the horror disappears, but simply that it exists, as all things exist, as part of a ludicrous manifold.

To say that someone “peaked in high school” is to cast a horrible aspersion. The character of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, boozing, dissolute, mourning after the suicide of a best friend / not-quite lover, is all the more pathetic for having come after a promising start as a high school football quarterback. David Velleman took up this point in “Well-being and time” (1993), arguing that a life of steady progress, from rocky beginning to eventual triumph, is worth more than one of gradual deterioration, even if the two in sum contain equal quantities of pleasure or happiness. Whether or not it is the “shape of life,” the ordering of good and bad, pleasant and painful episodes, that counts — one might reasonably instead point out that the glories of youth are of a piece transient joys, ecstasies that flicker like lightning bugs in an autumn oak, or mere promisory notes, the schoolbook laudatory is “Most Likely to Achieve,” as opposed to the more significant accomplishments that we expect of the middle-aged — the shape of a jock’s life, howsoever high its initial peak, is not one much to be desired.

Indeed, such reflections form the basis of a nerd’s schaudenfreude, a revenge they get on the jocks for free by a simple and just ordering of the universe: they will be buying beachside property off an initial public offering at just the moment that the jock’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy forces them to move back into the trailer park with Big Mama and Big Daddy. Such reveries populate the mindscape of the Silicon Valley technological elites, witness the above outpourings of Tim Sweeney or the musings of Scott Aaronson on AI safety wherein concerns of AI pessimists are dismissed because they “rhyme with the worldview of every high-school bully stuffing the nerds into lockers”. If it is contemptible to have peaked in high school, is it any less so to have one’s worldview stuck in such a state of arrested development?

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Yet, to give the Aaronsons of the world their due, they never needed to abandon this worldview. The revenge of the nerd, it turns out, is a sufficient project to absorb one’s whole life. As Aaronson goes on to write.

In short, if my existence on Earth has ever “meant” anything, then it can only have meant: a stick in the eye of the bullies, blankfaces, sneerers, totalitarians, and all who fear others’ intellect and curiosity and seek to squelch it.

In the worldview of the nerd, this stick in the eye, thankfully, consists not in any actual acts of violence, but rather an endless crescendo of “showing them up,” a crescendo which will one day, inevitably reach its limit in the Singularity, in which artificial intelligence, the nerd’s creation in his own image, will learn the master’s trade and improve itself at such a rapid and rapidly improving rate that a technological utopia, a world of infinite abundance, cannot help but arise.

For the nerd, what is required to win this fight against their amorphous roster of enemies is simply for the playing field to be fair and level. It is this conviction that naturally, if not inevitably, turns the nerd on to free speech and free markets: it is only censorship and regulation, the cackling of bullies as they hold you down for your lunch money, by hook and crook, that the enemies have had any chance at all. As Sweeney writes elsewhere in the quoted thread, “an online community like [Twitter] should be a meritocracy,” and indeed thanks to the virtual market of “following & retweeting[, t]he best rose to the top.” Then, of course, the coastal elites, the media libs, took over and invented the blue check mark, corrupting the pure systems of algorithmic recommendation with political backscratching. All this ignores the fact that nerds make terrible posters.

Outside of the confines of the schoolroom, where confined spaces and forced interactions necessitate motley alliances along clique lines, the nerd is scarcely a coherent political identity precisely because anti-intellectualism is not a stable and unified political force but instead an occasional trait appearing in a range of phenomenon. Since no one but the jocks, who anyways peaked in high school and have not been heard from since, has it truly out for the nerds, his revenge fantasies must be a matter of individual interpretation to be applied to whatever localized conflict engrosses him. The nerd’s world is devoid of solidarity and indeed the greatest danger to the nerd is other nerds. To open up a raw meritocracy, an arena in which the participants must “fight fair,” is to invite the possibility of true and abject failure. Indeed, we must note that the fantasy of the Singularity is precisely a fantasy in which the nerd is out-nerded, demoted by the machine which awards him immortality only as a consolation prize, which we must assume he enjoys as the bottom of a bottle of brandy, thinking perhaps of his own Skipper on that summer night after Quiz Bowl, loosening and then removing his plaid bowtie.

Tonight, whilst in your need you cry out. You cry out for someone to come to help you. All your private establishments have gone to their beds. There must be an ambulance somewhere in this long night of blades. “Come to me! Come to me!”. Silence. “Help me!”. Mr John Baron.

— We Will Bury You, Verity Spott, 2017.

In August 2017, the month Verity Spott published We Will Bury You, fascists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. This “Unite the Right” rally saw various factions of the far right — neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, the alt-right — come together in raucous and violent protest which culminated in one far-right protester ramming his car through a crowd of counter protestors, injuring thirty-five and killing Heather Hayer. The rally was the third in a series of far-right protests in Charlottesville precipitated by the planned removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The previous two, in May and July, having been smaller affairs, although marked by breakouts of violence between protestors and counter-protestors, gave little indication of the scale of the third. In all three incidents, police efforts to keep the peace were marred by poor planning and disorganized execution.¹

Rage defined the rally. The members’ tiki-torch raid on the University of Virginia the night before, their faces snarled in anger, opening to yell, produced its defining image. Their sloganeering spoke to a threatened fury, “You will not replace us.” The slogan refers to a white supremacist conspiracy theory variously called “white genocide” or “The Great Replacement,” which blows up the simple demographic fact that the white population of the United States and other western countries has been shrinking, relatively speaking, into a conspiracy on behalf of some powerful cabal (Jews) aimed at the destruction of “white civilization.” Jacob Kessler, organizer of the Unite the Right rally, in a livestream at the start of the rally declared that the far right would not use violence except in self-defense. But of course the far right has an expansive, paranoid conception of what constitutes an assault which provides ground for self-defense: a conception stretching all the way to relative birth rates. For the attitude at the other side, we can turn to a demand from the mother of Heather Hayer, speaking at a memorial for her daughter, to turn “anger to righteous action.”

In this statement, we can find the modern progressive attitude towards anger. This attitude has received recent clear statement and philosophical defense in Martha Nussbaum’s 2018 book Anger and Forgiveness. Nussbaum understands anger, at least the central cases of anger, to consist of an appraisal that one has been wronged coupled with a “payback wish,” a desire to see the perpetrator of this wrong injured (21). This payback wish may or may not involve our directly taking revenge, we might be satisfied for a third party, say the legal system, to inflict punishment on our behalf or just to see the object of our anger come to some great misfortune. Nussbaum contends that while anger can be “well grounded,” in the sense that one might genuinely have been wronged (and so, say, have cause to grieve), the “payback wish” involved in anger is irrational or morally objectionable (26). In its irrational form, the payback wish involves a bit of magical thinking whereby the suffering of the perpetrator of a wrong somehow cancels out or restores that original injury. But of course this is almost never the case. The execution of a murderer is not the resurrection of the murdered. Only in the rare case that what has been injured is one’s “honor” or standing might revenge succeed in restoring what was lost, but this kind of thinking we should hope to leave behind as a relic of the honor cultures of yester century.

That’s it, we remind ourselves that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” and then, what? Here, Nussbaum’s proposal is essentially to turn “anger to righteous action.” It is understandable, of course, that we might initially feel anger when wronged. (Such anger is “well grounded,” after all.) The flush of anger is an evolved and culturally ingrained response. But we ought to master our anger and turn it into a more productive avenue, what Nussbaum calls, in a somewhat clunky phrase, “Transition Anger.” Assuming we really were wronged and not just imagining slights, we may reasonably continue to feel outraged or grieved at our loss, but then we need to decide what we are to do about that. For the smaller slights, the turbulence of the middle realm, we’ll find it best to take a deep breath and get one with our day; for matters of significant moral concern, “righteous action” enters the picture: the wrong, now part of history, cannot be excised or reverted, but we might find a way to mend the carried rupture or to avert similar calamities going forward.

Of course, not all factions broadly within the left have rejected anger. The image of the guillotine more and more populates the posts and fantasies of the edgy online left, and, indeed, the counter-protestors at the Unite the Right Rally were sufficiently eager to “Bash the Fash” for street fights to break out during the event. Verity Spott’s long poem We Will Bury You provides clear expression to the rage and anguish behind the militant left. We can get a sense of the character of this work from the poet’s description.

This text contains the names of all of the MPs who voted against the proposed end of the cap on public sector pay. This is a spell against the character of the idea that seems to have populated the lives of these individuals. It is also a feeling of nausea at seeing the same names cropping up over & over again. The text was composed between 11:35 and 13:03 on the 29th June 2017.

Each stanza of the poem begins “Tonight,” proceeds with a description of a member of parliament dying, alone, from a sudden and inescapable malady, and ends by naming the MP. The claim that the text was composed in a specified two-and-a-half hour period situates the text as an overflowing of presently felt emotion, not a past emotion recalled at leisure, but rather a simmering fury “at seeing the same names” breaking through all restraint.

As voiced anger, We Will Bury you expresses not only the magical thinking that Nussbaum finds in anger generally — a wild and whispered conviction that somehow, someway payback will right wrongs or make whole the sufferer; the deaths of the politicians responsible for a certain government policy does not usually suffice to change that policy — a magical thinking around the consequences of retribution, but also explicit magical thinking about the means of retribution. The diseases that “tonight” will claim the lives of these politician is one with no known cause and certainly no consequence; we are not to think of the members of the politicians’ family or staff to whom the disease might be transmitted, the dying are perfectly alone, the drone strikes targeted with divine precision. Only a god could put this spell into effect and, we must think, tonight the audience, the other half of the titular “we,” will play God’s part and rid the caster of these meddlesome Tories.

We Will Bury You is one note, but it is one note in the way that drone music is one note. Although, or rather precisely because, the sound does not change, it is our attention that wanders about its various overtones. We will come to these in a moment, but let us linger a second longer on this anger as politics. We may easily dismiss anger, in our minds if not our hearts, in our everyday lives as trivial and stupid. Punching the horn when that bastard cuts us off on the interstate is nothing more than infantile tantruming. We may even learn to recoil at public executions, finding in the picnicking spectators more love for blood than justice. “But,” Nussbaum raises, “isn’t anger noble, when society is corrupt and brutal?” (211)

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Nussbaum’s answer to this question emerges from a study of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congresses’ successes in ending South African apartheid. Mandela, Nussbaum claims, practiced a politics of non-anger, empathy, and unconditional forgiveness that allowed a limited, tactical role for the use of violence. Nussbaum’s argument here is essentially pragmatic, that by eschewing the payback wish, the desire to see one’s opponents punished as something itself good, Mandela thereby embraced a politics that could end apartheid and achieve a measure of reconciliation and peace in an integrated society. Does this analysis persuade? As a matter of history, this story is highly selective, focusing in one aspect of Mandela’s politics who in turn represented one of many, frequently more militant, approaches to political revolution. It would take a broader contextual view to establish that non-anger was the decisive or most important factor. Even granting Nussbaum’s understanding of this case, it is not clear how far the morals generalize. Certainly, Nussbaum admits, nonviolence would not have been particularly effective in resisting Nazi Germany. Was or would violence without anger have been effective? Nussbaum does not consider this sort of case, though perhaps we could point out at her behalf that anger in war often lies behind civilian reprisals which, like the firebombing of Dresden, morally appall while often retarding the war effort: wasting resources and reinforcing the enemy’s will to resist.

In any case, for political struggles that inescapably involve conflict, knock-out, drag-out fights to the death with no umpire, no ability to tap-out, anger may have more of a role to play. Certainly for a Marxist like Spott, the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is just such a fight. Perhaps the dictatorship of the proletariat could arise without a “long night of blades,” but only if the rich meekly hand over the keys to the kingdom. And it is not only the nature of the struggle which should determine the shape of one’s strategy and so the arrangement of affects behind it, but where, precisely, one is in relation to that struggle. As Spott sees it, the left is largely outside of the ring, approaching politics as a polite spectacle. In an essay on protest, Spott writes of the dull, frozen-over approach to protest and the language of protest.

What that [the present lack of “insurrectionist poetics”] leads to is this kind of weird situation where screaming isn’t enough, where the same noises are made in the same established patterns again and again and when you say “death to the oppressor” people start jumping down your throat and saying “oh no! We mustn’t go down that route! No violence!”. No violence is not an option,. Violence is what is happening now. What we need to stop. Saying “Death to the oppressor” is in part an invocation of a hope to end the order of oppression.

This blog post, published on June 14^th, 2017, shortly before the composition of We Will Bury You, has attracted one hundred and seventy-six comments. Of these, only the first appears to have been written by a human being in response to Spott’s post. The other one hundred and seventy-five are spam. Presumably because the post makes several references to magic, the vast majority of these comments advertise the service of a magician, taking the form of supposed testimonials of happy customers of these magicians. There is a set formula here: the customer introduces themselves as a normal person and a skeptic of magic, but a skeptic of a magic with a problem (there are two main types here: crushing debt or a broken heart) who therefore decided to take a chance on a magical solution, and, hey, what do you know but that this wizard, PRIEST WISDOM (cited in no less than fourteen of these testimonials) or Dr OSOFO (twelve) or DR OSCAR DILAN (ten), cast the best money spell and / or love spell the esoteric society has ever seen.

As with many scams, it feels scarcely possible than anyone should fall for them. Who could really believe that a Nigerian prince would reach out to a random stranger for help recovering their fortune? And even if you were so mystically inclined to look to spellcasting for the cure of one’s marital woes, wouldn’t this panoply of pitches put one off the project all together? Never mind the implausibility of dozens of readers of an avant-garde English poet having all been rescued by a handful of enchanters and experiencing such gratitude that they cannot help themselves but share how you too can get your ex-lover back in your life, that each of these insists all the rest to be scammers should give on sufficient pause over trusting any of them. I suppose if lures are cheap enough even the worst fisherman can turn a profit.

Leave that to one side and consider in these comments more as a text in their own right. Considered as a whole, they constitute a repetitive, anaphoric poem comparable in formal structure to Spott’s own text. In place of repeated fantasies of divine retribution, we find endless, miraculous liberation. Though each stanza leads us outwards, extends a hand to drag us out, by the next we reset to our lowest point. Though each miracle worker may save his private flock, none is powerful enough to overcome strife, loss, poverty itself. The wheel of fortune spins and spins and if PRIEST WISDOM intercedes with Lady Luck to land us up top, surely some other miscreant just slides down to take our place. In this closed system, the reader finds herself in a sealed affective space turning again and again through the same circuit. These texts, though finite, are infinitely capacious; the reader, should she reach the end, can just as well proceed on her own, replaying the same scenarios with an unlimited stock of characters. Tonight, everyone we hate will find themselves asphyxiating, their own blood filling their throats.

What else can we find in the closed quarters of We Will Bury You? Earlier, I had suggested that anger is the dominant but not the only note in the text. Indeed, turning to the nature of the suffering the text wishes on its enemies, we notice that these imagined deaths mirror the real deaths of those killed by austerity: isolated deaths of illness in a world where no aid, no rescue will be provided. Of course payback wishes often are wishes for a payback “in kind,” giving the target “a taste of their own medicine,” and all that. But in this identification of the injury one has suffered and the injury one hopes to be inflicted, anger loops back around on grief as one’s attention turns back to what was loss even if one never names it as such. Through this mirror, the future comes precisely to resemble the past and the walls of the room yearn with you.

For Nussbaum, anger is the refuge of the helpless — unable to see through their problems, the enraged focus instead on destroying the perceived cause thereof. Allowed to play out, anger destroys and sparks cycles of revenge. What breaks these cycles, at the level of an individual, is self-discipline, emotional regulation, and, at the level of a society, the discipline of the law, political regulation. And law only of a certain caliber, for the law, with its spectacles of execution, mortification, and incarceration, can be nothing more than anger institutionalized. A just law, consistently applied is what we need. We bring Solomon our disputes, we rancor and scream at our neighbor, but Solomon quiets us and makes a pronouncement and we emerge if not happy then at piece, determined to see his justice through. Eventually, we learn to play Solomon in the court of our own experience. The law, then, notice, offers a sealed affective space in which anger is permitted no ingress. We are at peace, our peace is disturbed, we grieve our loss, settle on a path forward and come to another peace. The stream of verdicts constitutes its own infinite poem.

We, in the most expansive sense, are all stuck in various rooms. In my first essay on this site, I sketched some of the walls of these rooms. In this debate about the political role of anger, we can see a parallel dispute over political imagination. In one view, which we can at least read into Spott’s work, since a just world is very far from the present one, a powerful act of political imagination, an “insurrectionist poetics,” is needed to make progress. Such imaginings will of necessity be highly affectively charged, affects which may appear suspect or excessive from the standpoint of polite society. Excess, however, is just what is needed to escape the confines we find ourselves in. If we take up the voice of that polite society, what may concern us is not a matter of decorum but a matter of security. Given the stakes involved, political action must be sure-footed, which in the first instance involves being clear-sighted, being disciplined against fantasies.

This stylized debate occurs at a time where political imagination has grown diseased, at once somehow both fantastical and short-sighted. We can find cause for this in our recent political history, in the diminution of labor power over the last seventy years, and in the more recent technological and economic developments. Put simply, the Internet has colonized and claimed the imagination. The individual has no time alone to think but is instead connected to a shifting imaginarium, a sea of infinite poems whose forms come already defined in which the role of the individuals is to pump out stanzas to spec. Here capital determines not so much the contents but the necessary effects: attention must be captured, which means that closed, affective loops must be found, infinite feeling machines. Anger provides one popular driver, as outrage and numbing self-soothing provide an elegant piston. In such an environment, exercises of either political imagination or emotional discipline are out of the question, as those are exercises by an individual and the individual has been mulched. What becomes essential is that we never expose ourselves to sunlight, never reveal ourselves as we are as opposed to how we are imagined to be. A year after the first, Jason Kessler organized a sequel rally, “Unite the Right, 2.” The police planned carefully, hoping to avoid a repeat of the first rally’s violence. They needn’t have bothered. Nobody came.

1. For a comprehensive breakdown of police (in)action during these protests, see this report commissioned by the Charlottesville government from the law firm Hunton and Williams.

Trash is created by sorting.
— Susan Strasser, Waste and Want.

Can one demonstrate that trash desensitizes us[?]
— Pauline Kael, "Trash, Art, and the Movies."

The dried grasses, fruits of the winter—gosh! Everything is trash!
— John Ashbery, “The Skaters.”

1.

A junior, she skipped the last bus step and asked me out, the second sentence ever exchanged between us. The camera shifts from comedian, holding his impromptu stand-up behind chain link fence, to audience, masked and cackling only roughly in time with the punchlines. She, Christian and cheerful, introduced me to her mother, smoking cigarettes and halfway through a thought aimed at Child Protective Services. Setup: these two colored fellows are in the middle of a street; punchline: they fuck each other in the ass. Certain silences, protracted and evasive, are made tolerable only by the long death of their author. Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers spare the comedian; their laughter is indiscriminate, but their violence employs a perverse discernment. “Noah, and we must remember the sun was much further afield back in those days,” her pastor said and I, masqued blandly agreeable, listened, “lived to six hundred; you know, skin cancer wa’n’t such a concern.” In the trash humpers’ sole soliloquy, the one in a wig and Confederate flag tee shirt, says, “You see these [inaudible] fucking go to church on a Sunday, chili on a Monday, school on a Tuesday, by the time they’re all dead and buried, I’ll just then be catching my second wind.”

2.

I haven’t bothered to recall nor to cross-reference the details. But then Trash Humpers cares little for questions of narrative or continuity. “Eng and Chang Bunker had twenty-one children,” a man says, connected to another by a cheap length of tube about the forehead. Are they meant to be conjoined? The trash humpers’ masks may or may not be skin; with the infidelities of VHS, the possibility of such a distinction is only occasionally suggested. One speaks of the distancing of masks and another of their intimacy, that they might be had from any costume store and slipped over one’s face. A third reminds us that children like masks. An item dropped in the trash acquires a sudden aura; it is almost already trash itself. In an early sequence, the trash humpers laugh at a third-grader, chubby and dressed up, struggling to launch a basketball scarcely to the hem (setup), but then the child shows them a thing or two about trashhumping, laughing that, when one decapitates a doll, one does it “like this” (twist). One speaks of geometric progressions and another of fitness. A third dreams of a pink Cadillac and thinks to warn her son, chubby and dressed up, away from the driver. In the end they died within a couple of hours, Chang first and then Eng; a trash humper scowls, or not scowls exactly, and tuts, “That shit is depressing.”

3.

The fades, the impositions of a tracking “Play,” suggest formlessness, but Trash Humpers has the open-ended structure of a Punch and Judy show. That summer, it took a jumpstart even to get the Civic out of Los Angeles. In its pastoral moments, the camera finds itself considering a street lamp, whose light bursts and blurs. Nevada reached one hundred at midnight and my passenger door opened for a hitch hiker; Miami, but Palm Beach was “close enough.” A trash humper bang snaps the concrete parking structure while a barefoot old man, a Bukowski in maid outfit, recites a poem about “people like them.” He spoke, one does not know exactly how to put this, to some character known only to him. Burke tells us curiosity “quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects.” Not that we are to find utopia in the society of trash humpers (they kill the poet, by the way), and the film wears out its little bag of tricks by the second skit. What surprised was not that the cops pulled us over (the car had no license plate), but that we reached Jacksonville by the time it happened. One finds in that “gosh” a final, inexhaustible novelty, a least uninteresting number. In its last joke, the annoying ditty our cameraman has been humming (“Three little devils jumped over the wall”) morphs into a genuine lullaby as the smurfette of the trash humpers calms an infant she has lifted from the suburbs. The Civic, after the investigation, drew itself off the freeway and my hand lingered too long at the horn. My hitchhiker considered me and withdrew into the early morning. “The balloons drift thoughtfully over the land.” Supposing he never made it to his court date in Miami.

1.

In the end we saw only one deer. There they were, our boys, Old Teddy R. included, crammed into the quartet as a producer's credit. Midnight passed cool over undressed arms. The parking lot imposed a band of illuminated concrete against the impression of tall pines. Set off from a row of flags, the thing itself looked like nothing else than its own postcard. One stared, turned, and redoubled, trying to make out the texture of the rock. It was late and nothing had been arranged.

The surrounding towns were named for western pictures. One pizza stand kept itself open for our sake. I purchased a Pepsi from a mini-fridge beneath the counter. The proprietress offered a word about deer, their density, the damage their bodies might permit a vehicle at speed. Blue varnish wore itself into the shape of a mountain. My carmate thanked her; his body acted as a regulator, the accelerator eased until it released its tension. It was still so far to Seattle. Graciously, now, an artificial lake vouchsafed the western front, but the pines still crowding the road's edge. The map offered no closer stopping places. At such times one is at the mercy of trivial facts of geometry: a complex, three-dimensional object, generates an infinity of silhouettes.

In the darkness, half into sleep, one accepts any smear frame. A post box before a hedgerow? Check. A houselight breaching a conifer's stray branch? Nothing more like antlers in full array. Bends further in the row, snatches of unillumination, offered themselves precisely as a fawn's haunches. A deer's eyes go wide and bright before a car's headlights, but so do many other things. Nothing was said. Music had been left with the presidents. After so much antechamber, hell might be a small and kindly place.

2.

Light drifts apart from bodies. In Simon Liu's Signal 8. Odd squares of sunlight laze against the reflection of an unpersoned escalator. Bubbles catch and reflect light. From the edge of space, at night, a map emerges. For each pixel, a certain quantity of persons in motions. Dim roads like ley lines connect the brilliant city. In the thick of it, the relation is troubled. Lights are left on. In the basement of a construction sight, blue fluorescents keep burning their wattage. A bank of monitors misfires, substituting their portion of an advertisement for static. The camera itself warps and flares, caught on neon and spotlight. A welder's torch lets forth an arc of waste light. Confronted with crowd, with motion, the film strobes and stutters.

The history of the economy is the fall in the price of light. Two candles might illuminate a room to five percent the brightness of a filament bulb at far greater expense (cf. Nordhaus). On my desk, a product branding itself as HappyLight offers a surface illuminated to ten thousand lux, the same brightness as a cloudless day. A bottle of vitamin D pills, advertised with a smiling sun, insinuate the phrase seasonal depression. Otherwise we talk of nothing and Simon Liu’s film climaxes but does not end with fireworks. New years day and on a message board a man shares a shot of the Space Needle. I thank him. I had missed it. I had a sleep mask pulled over my eyes.

In its final shots, Signal 8 escapes the city, Hong Kong. In even, clouded light, a bison turns, hosting a white bird. On our way out of Chicago, he points out that the street numbers keep incrementing. Here, they reach two hundred and define an acre of corn. The shot follows the bison for a moment and lets it leave the frame, refocusing on a scarecrow. CDs dangle from its sleeves and in the moment before the credits we imagine but do not see them glitter. That summer, the streets fill with smoke. They have begun to burn the shadows from the forest. The ones that look like deer.

In Mr. Lonely, directed by Harmony Korine, a young man wanders around Paris, scratching out a living as a Michael Jackson impersonator. The impersonator is an American and speaks no French. Even the crowded street for the impersonator feels empty, lonely. He is both dependent on the citizens about them and isolated from them, able to relate to them only through aether of American popular culture. The man’s impersonation of Michael Jackson is particularly bad, recreating none of Jackson’s artistry, but only the occasional tic and general appearance.

Living where one does not speak the language is an anxious affair. The feeling is one of never quite being sure of the rules. The city is plastered with signs saying how one can and cannot move, but if you cannot read the signs each one is a potential prohibition. You feel like a lost child, not knowing exactly where to grow or who to trust, only there is no parent who might rescue you. Given this problem, the M. J. impersonation is a survival mechanism. This is true not only in the literal sense that it’s a way of earning a living, but in the further sense that the costume is a way for the impersonator to make his presence legible. It gives him a reason to be wandering the streets.

This combination of loneliness and anxiety is the central affect of liminal spaces. Henceforth, I bold liminal space to distinguish the internet aesthetic from the broader anthropological concept. Liminal here means transitional, in-between. As an internet aesthetic, liminal space images depict spaces devoid of people, spaces which therefore are not currently serving their purpose or have no clear purpose. Think large and empty corridors, empty stores, particularly ones which have been cleared of merchandise, e.g. a spot in a mall that has changed hands. The emptiness itself produces a feeling of being out of place. If no one else is here, am I supposed to be here? Is it even safe? This feeling is often reinforced by the pictures being taken at night with poor lighting, so that the location is or appears to be closed. These images often also display a disconcerting combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. The liminal space is both open, its walls recessing into the distance, and closed, the ceiling almost unbearably close.

Van Gennep, in his 1909 Rites of Passage, understands liminal spaces in terms of sacred and secular spaces. For van Gennep, sacrality is best understood as a relation: something is sacred for someone when it lies outside the familiar order, when it is dangerous and strange and wonderful. A liminal place lies between a secular and a sacred place, dividing them. Passage through a liminal space involves a reorientation of the sacred and secular. Within a liminal space, both your origin and your destination are sacred; you are between worlds. Van Gennep gives the example of a Roman general returning from war. This was a protracted and mediated affair; the general and his army did not simply waltz back in, but went through the arch of triumph, a liminal space, and sacrifice to Jupiter Capitoline, a rite of passage. Rites of passage are rituals that order and attend navigation.

Most of the rites of passage van Gennep studies concern not physical movement but social and biological transitions: marriage, pregnancy, maturation, initiation, and so on. The liminal space itself is usually metaphorical. We can draw a further metaphor between the rite of passage and liminal architecture, the architecture of liminal spaces. Just as the rite of passage, liminal architecture both orders liminal space and defines it as liminal. The arch of triumph marks the place for the army’s reentry and marks it as that place. In particular, such architecture distinguishes liminal from normal space, as on an old map monsters guarded the threshold of terra incognita.

What of the people who reside in such places? Victor Turner, building on van Gennep’s work, describes them as threshold people; existing between states, they are both beyond classification and not-yet classified, metaphorically both dead and not yet born. As a result such people are “structurally invisible,” not to be observed or considered.1 Liminal architecture then contains and separates its inhabitants from ordinary society, e.g. as in a prison. Turner further claims that social hierarchies are radically simplified in liminal space; threshold people are equal to one another, though they may also be dominated by the guardians of the threshold, the wardens.

This equality and community may be more illusion than fact; just as liminal persons are structurally invisible, they are correspondingly structurally equivalent. Return to Mister Lonely. Our Michael Jackson impersonator eventually escapes Paris to a community of impersonators in the Scottish Highlands. The impersonators are liminal persons. After all, none of them are ever addressed by their actual names; they have not yet been given a place in society. Their place or at least their situation is transitional: they are trying to integrate into society by starting an impersonation show.

The impersonators’ paradise is troubled by jealousy. Michael Jackson pursues Marilyn Manson, much to the ire of her husband, Charlie Chaplin. His abuse of Manson drives her, in a further unintended act of impersonation, to suicide, in turn leading the Michael Jackson impersonator to leave both the commune and his profession. In this connection, we can see that the homogoneity, the more-or-less equal footing Turner imputes to liminal community, is not necessarily the basis of solidarity. Instead, that equality can be the basis of competition, the liminal space itself a proving ground. After all, freedom from hierarchy is freedom from a kind of order that forestalls competition by deciding outcomes in advance: the serf may hate his lord, but will likely never think to rise up and plunge the duchy into chaotic struggle, as his subordination is already a given.2

We can see this point clearly in the case of internet fora and other social parts of cyberspace. These are liminal spaces, or near enough: they lie between the real words, they hold a community of anonymous or pseudonymous souls, who are in a position of relative equality, and who, because of that anonymity, are more or less freed from enforcement of ordinary norms of communication. As any habitual user of social media can tell you, this combination is not exactly liberating. Such fora strip down the back and forth of social interaction to its competitive core. By stripping out the ambiguities of assessing relative standing — ordinarily, it is hard to tell which of any pair is the more popular, and, if that is clear, which is more popular with the right crowd — in favor of a clear quantitive assessment, who has more likes, these places remove the dodges that allow us to avoid competition. This intensified clarity can lead to spaces that, even while being in some sense liberatory (you can say anything online), feel terribly constraining. Indeed, sociality online can be so denuded that one seems alone, the solitude of being amid a crowd with whom you do not share a language.

While the kind of liminal space Turner was interested in was temporary and bounded — initiation rites transpire in their proscribed periods and then end — cyberspace is unbounded. Consider the most famous liminal space, the Backrooms. “The Backrooms” is a short horror story posted to the anonymous forum 4chan, accompanying an image of a liminal space.

Here cyberspace and the dreamspace meet. We are to imagine that the world has the buggy geometry of LSD: Dream Emulator. To noclip is to pass through an object that is supposed to be solid. The Backrooms thus starts us out in a reality that is already uncanny. In the Backrooms, the liminal person is removed from all protection against the liminal state: the rites that structure his experience, the community of co-liminal persons, and the certainty of an end to liminality.

This uncanniness is more broadly true of liminal spaces, even absent horror trappings. In Turner’s account of the liminal, such states are liberatory and regenerative; the initiate, having for some time exited society, returns changed and reintegrates. But the liminal compresence of death and life can be a form of undeath as easily as rebirth, and certainly with no guide or companion undeath is the more likely. The liminal space is also uncanny in a different way, it is at once familiar and unfamiliar. The Backrooms, for instance, resembles an old office building. But of course it is not a representation of any actual office space. Rather, it is a dreamlike (in this case nightmarish) recollection of an office space. This can provoke a sense of deja vu, the feeling that one has seen this place before, without knowing where, or even while knowing that one has never been there. Such a sense is profoundly discomforting because it threatens our sense of integrity, that we are one and the same person over time and should thereby have a clear sense of where we have or have not been.

Liminal spaces are nearly always outmoded spaces: old offices, empty shops, closed pools. Contributing to this sense, the images are often unusually low quality, as if (and sometimes actually) coming from some time in the past. The outmoded space is one which used to serve some purpose, but remains as fossilized. As Hal Foster (in Compulsive Beauty) points out, the outmoded is uncanny in the sense above, estranged and corpse-like. Liminal spaces rarely though show evidence of being reclaimed, of undergoing active transition. No one seems to be moving in to the old office, the retail space is getting no new occupants. Liminal spaces are places of atrophied, stillborn transitions.

It is not therefore surprising that they have taken a hold of the imaginations of the young adults of today, whose lives themselves are marked by such dashed transitions. As Turner pointed out, rites of passage exist in societies with stable, predictable transitions, where people matured and changed against the background of a fixed social order and into readymade social positions. But American society of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is one in which such stable positions have increasingly collapsed. The markers of having succeeding, of having found some stable place — a certain, decently paying career, a house, a partner — are increasingly unobtainable to the young or even middle-aged. A young person of today is stuck in either ever-longer preparation for a career, seeking a bachelor or graduate degree for a position that a generation ago would not have required it, or some “entry-level,” “temporary” position. They rent rather than own, if they have their own place at all. They date rather than marry, if they have not given up entirely on romance. The liminal space haunts and is haunted by such liminal persons.

Liminal space is the corollary of junkspace, the atrophied dysfunction that junkspace’s hypertrophic function inevitably leaves behind. Recall that junkspace is thoroughly contingent both in parts — a spot in a mall can become unprofitable and be turned over at any time — and as a whole — the mall itself can always become abandoned. The growth of junkspace is viral and predatory: Walmart moves in and overtakes existing retail and, when the tides changes, moves out, leaving little behind. Its movement shrinks the commons on both ends: Walmart contributes much less in taxes, pays much less back to the community, than what was there before, and on the way out leaves decaying, barely usable infrastructure. By being host to Walmart and other big stores, and financing the car-centric infrastructure that requires, towns across America take on massive debts they are unlikely ever to pay. Liminal space is the rancor junkspace leaves behind.

This applies most obviously to retail spaces, a common category of liminal space. We can extend it to functional spaces (roads, hallways, lobbies, etc.) by our prior observation that junkspace cannibalizes infrastructure. There is nothing in itself uncanny about a hallway, it is liminal in only the most pedestrian sense. Once, however, we have the sense that the road leads nowhere or, better, to a non-place, it takes on the unease of liminal space, a transitional ground whose end has been cut off. Junkspace consists exactly of non-places, anesthetized, uniform chambers of commerce.

We can see this in the 2007 Doctor Who episode “Gridlock,” in which, after a disaster, inhabitants of New Earth have been forced into a massive underground motorway under the false promise that they can someday reach an unsoiled part of the planet. Though the motorway contains many lanes of flying cars, it is so jammed that drivers move at the rate of meters a year. These cars are perfectly closed systems, sustaining their inhabitants off reconstituted waste. “Gridlock” then presents an image of the culmination of junkspace, where it has merged with its shadow liminal space. Its inhabitants live in maximally atomized cycles of consumption, waste, and production; though they are technically not alone, they are after all surrounded by other cars, they form no kind of community with others.

As “Gridlock” communicates and as my account of driving in Florida in the last entry also suggests, there is something carceral about liminal spaces. Although there is no one necessarily trapping you in liminal space, one is nevertheless trapped. Indeed, this is worse: if there were someone keeping you there, there would be someone to let you out. A prison, with its guards and other prisoners, is therefore not usually a liminal space, but Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons certainly are. These lithographs depict colossal, classical prisons, arbitrary arrangements of walls, towers, columns, bridges, and arches, which seem neither to be closed nor open-air structures. Though these prisons contain prisoners, cells, torture-devices, these figures are so small relative to the architecture, that it seems entirely inhuman.

Many of the prisoners in Piranesi’s drawings seem able to walk freely. In liminal space, confinement amounts not necessarily to restricted movement but to a want of anywhere to go. Here the spectacle of punishment is ever present, and so the possibility of being punished never far from mind. Here we may return to an early observation that liminal space carry with them the air of transgression, the sense that one has entered somewhere you were not supposed to. This prompts a feeling not merely of danger but of deferred punishment. Piranesi’s torture devices or the Backroom’s vague monsters merely make this element explicit. The danger of miscarriage is of course implicit in all passages, and may be the only thing worse than not making it out at all. If you are thirty-something and stuck in a crappy job and crappier apartment, you have at least the slim consolation that things could be worse.

I had promised birds. The midday disappeared into the highway and I had promised birds. An empty sky hung mutely as the car dragged its absences behind it. Miles trailed off into exits. Sentences trailed off into ellipses. Playlists looped and no birds marked the sky. It had been some years since I had driven in Florida, I began to explain and then stopped.

He shifted in the grey chair, pointed out an out-of-state license plate and then stopped. Some forty minutes north of my parents’ house, the GPS requested a turn. I complied. The westward road led from the beachside city, with its little, pink skyline, to the endless suburban interior, a sprawl of gated communities and squat retail outlets. A sign promised a lake an hour inland. Nothing about the birds. I shut off the music and the road substituted its own static.

Signs gathered: a stretch of farmland, a canal, the silhouette of a watchtower. The GPS again requested a turn. The car clunked over a metal bridge, slowed at a clutch of instructions, swerved around potholes. We had reached the wetland’s northern edge, the map showed, farther away from its entrance than when we had departed. I accepted again its advice to turn, but hit a barrier with a harsh “Do Not Enter” sign. I turned back and tried a different road. The GPS called for an about face and nothing about the scraggy length of asphalt suggested otherwise. We pulled over and walked into the park.

A labyrinth of banks and channels constituted the wetland. Cattails clung to the sharp edges of the shore, playing some important role, a sign half-explained, in water reclamation. A boardwalk spanned ten meters to a small observation deck, amounting to the entire navigable span of this obscure, northern entrance. Some distance further, a dusting of ibises combed the grass for worms. I had promised birds, but not like this, not so few. I could not even follow him down the length of the walkway, but blurted some apology on the way back. A vulture settled atop a pavilion. The stupidity of the digital map and my stupidity for trusting it.

He consoled me. We had after all, if only technically, seen the birds and could now do anything else. Something around here, given we were so unusually far northwest. But I wanted nothing; I wanted, precisely, for a bomb to atomize Florida — birds and all — off the face of the map. I allowed that we might find something on the way back. But really, there could be nothing. Florida was a void.

In fact, worse. A void is at least potentially a place, but Florida is so definitively empty that nothing can be built there. It is a cancer. Driving back was driving from cancer to cancer through cancer. Go more than half a mile inland and Florida is all interstices: roads connect housing complexes to malls, quick service restaurants, gas stations, supermarkets, retail outlets. In a parody of a real place, these vast swaths of tissue promise but do not contain the real places that would justify them. The array of concrete disorients, only the changing names of the intersections marking any sort of forward progress. Without a watch of your own, you would have no idea how close any two points were. Indeed, after the third corner sporting the bland facade of a Pollo Tropical one suspects the nauseating truth that these are supposed to be the real places, the thing on offer. Or, worse, that the distinction between real and junk space has broken down, been washed out by the incubating sun. My hands gripped the steering wheel; I struggled to keep looking down the road.

This condition is not unique to Florida. Rather the anxiety I felt is the effect of what Rem Koolhaas calls “Junkspace.” In his winding essay of that title, Koolhaas sketches but does not provide a clear definition of junkspace. We can get a sense of things by starting with the paradigm case: the mall. For Koolhaas, the mall has three main features that are key to its being junkspace.

1. Malls are big. This is true not just in the sense of size but in the number of uses a mall has: a broad variety of shops, large indoor spaces connecting them, restaurants, play and waiting areas. You need a map to navigate a mall; you cannot hold the whole thing in your head.

2. Malls are mutable. A shop inside the mall can fail and close at any point, to be replaced by anything else. Individual shops can rearrange their interiors at any time. As a result, the space of the mall itself has to serve as a bland, neutral backdrop, making minimal assumptions about what will go on inside it.

3. Malls are for shopping. There are other things that happen in malls, even areas, like playgrounds, dedicated to other activities. But those areas ultimately are in the service of shopping, e.g. they are places to put your kids while you get on with the shopping.

Koolhaas critique of the mall is similarly three-fold. At the level of aesthetics, malls are ugly bits of architecture. Because they have to serve as a neutral backdrop for shops, they are of necessity bland. Since they are big and mutable, they cannot be the product of careful, humanistic design, but spread like so much fat across a broad tarmac. Malls are, to the right kind of leftist, morally offensive: the mall cannibalizes true public places. It is a public place, in the sense that people meet and hang out at the mall, but it is not a place for the public. The mall, unlike the park, the museum, the library, does not provide a public good but instead serves to facilitate so many private goods. If you are in the mall but not shopping, you are loitering and can be removed. This would not be a problem, necessarily, if malls could coexist with these other public spaces.

But malls cannot leave well enough alone, and this is the core of Koolhaas’ jeremiad. The mall bends the world to its image. It replaces not only other shopping centers, killing Main streets, but replaces public places. Rising in the fifties, the mall becomes the center of the new suburbs and ex-urbs. Indeed, the mall makes a certain kind of car-based suburb possible, a downtown in a box surrounded by parking lots. At the same time, other architecture becomes more mall-like. As The Harvard Guide to Shopping, which contains “Junkspace” as a chapter, details, shopping becomes an increasingly important part of other structures; at the time of writing in 2001, the British Airports Authority, the owners of Heathrow among other airports, was listed as a retail stock. Eventually, the mall transcends particular structures and takes over space in general. Florida becomes nothing but an open-air, drive-through mall, edged with the warehouses and cul de sacs the mall demands for itself.

Rae Armantrout’s poem “Exchange” provides a clean statement of this dystopic picture of the present and the near future.

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City of the future
in which each subway station’s stairs
lead to the ground floor
of a casino/
mall.

The phrase “City of the future” summons visions of a High Modernist utopia: somewhere designed to be dense, efficient, and, at the same time, livable. One imagines zeppelins docking to garden skyscrapers, monorails running above pedestrian corridors, parks spilling into the street. The subway station, in particular, has been a site of utopic architecture. Think for example of the Soviet’s Moscow Metro. Opened in 1935, the stations combined Russian classical ornament with Socialist Realist artwork in bright, open spaces.

A subway is, of necessity, enclosed. The bright electric lights of the Moscow Metro replicate the sun where the sun cannot reach. Malls, however, are generally deliberately enclosed. Indeed, as The Harvard Guide to Shopping stresses, the mall was made possible by air conditioning: the extended shopping trips that are the mall’s reason for being only become reliably feasible when one can ensure perfect weather inside. Similarly, the air conditioner also removes the necessity of windows; you no longer have to use the opening and closing of windows to regulate temperature. Eliminating windows serves both a cost-cutting function and indeed can elongate the time shoppers spend in the mall, without an external reference to indicate how long one has spent. Of course, the modern casino is similarly a vast, conditioned interior.

Note that the expression “casino/mall” is ambiguous. It could mean either “casino or mall” or “combination casino plus mall.” The ambiguity suggests that these are equivalent spaces, whether or not they are literally identical: commercial spaces designed to suck up your time and your money. It is worth noting in connection with the previous entry in this series that both shopping and, especially, gambling are abnegatory experiences. The slot machine stimulates without challenging. Shopping requires no greater thought than “Do I like this?” and “Can I afford it?” while throwing up an overwhelming array of textures, colors, and sensations. The effect of such spaces is already a comfortable numbness.

So we move from the interior of a subway, which is an active and purposive place, to the anodyne interior of a casino/mall. This movement replicates the replacement Rem Koolhaas identifies in architecture of ambitious, humanistic projects by junkspace. Actually, “repurposing” is better than “replacement” as the subway still exists but no longer connects to the park, the library, or the project housing.

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What counts
is the role
defined for each piece
by a system of rules saying
how it can move,
not the stuff
the piece is made of.

Anything can be a pawn. Of course, there are standards, but the chess pieces are defined neither by material — sets come in wood, plastic, metal, glass, ice, whatever — nor form — from the classic Staunton set to the sharp abstractions of Man Ray’s set to bullet chess sets. What matters is that the players agree on which objects serve the role of which pieces, and those roles are defined by the pieces’ legal moves. In the Bottom episode “Culture,” the chess game between the show’s leads breaks down not because the pieces are improvised but because one of them simply cannot learn the rules.

The same is true also of money. In theory, anything can be money — from pieces of paper to shells to buckskins to lumps of metal to massive pieces of stone to information itself — so long as some community agrees to use it as money. The desire for money, except for the committed numismatist, is a desire not for green pieces of cotton paper but for a certain power over others. Like chess, then, exchange (and, hence, shopping) is a game constituted by rules. And just as chess, in serious tournaments, has its referees, exchange has enforcers of its own rules: security tags, security agents, monetary security features. As Koolhaas writes, “the secret of Junkspace is that it is both promiscuous and repressive.”

Just as what counts about money is what you can do with it, not what it is, what counts in business is not how but how much money is made. Consider chess. Before the modern age of chess, we had the romantic age. In this period, although the rules were the same, chess playing was also defined by a certain etiquette. You played to win, yes, but to win in style. That style involved bold and lovely attacks, the more sacrifices the better. (On the defender’s side, it was considered rude to decline a sacrifice.) Over the course of the 19th century, this style was simply outcompeted by a colder analytical approach, which substituted memorized openings and careful analysis for blind instinct. The late 20th century finalized the erasure of the human-touch as chess engines overtook humans in ability and a competitive edge could be gained only by playing more and more like a computer.

In business, likewise, the winning strategies are defined by their flexibility rather than their specific commitments. Compare even the top 30 of the Fortune 500 between 1988 and 2017.

Note the replacement of resource and manufacturing companies with general retail, holding, banking, and financial companies. It is now more profitable to control general means of consumption than the means of production. No physical space better encapsulates the mutability of modern money making than the mall, with its shifting array of storefronts.

“How it can move” is an issue of more than metaphorical concern when it comes to the exchange of money. As The Harvard Guide to Shopping details, the financial advantage of malls over an ordinary clutch of stores on a street comes from movement. Shoppers are simply willing to walk farther in the relatively noiseless, climate-controlled interior of a mall than the loud and frequently inclement shopping boulevard. The further one walks, the more merchandise one sees, the more chances one has to make an impulse buy.

A feature of games like chess or the economy is that they are easily made virtual. If what matters is how the stuff moves, not what it is made out of, then it can just easily be made out of nothing at all, be a shared fiction, with its “movements” so many entries in some database. During the pandemic, for instance, professional chess took place entirely on line. In the same way, the “death” of physical malls (a quarter of all malls in the United States are expected to close in the next few years) is as much a rebirth of the mall in virtual form.

Online shopping is the apotheosis of the mall. Cyberspace is indefinitely large. Not only is it primarily an interior but it is all interior: websites have no facade. A screen is more mutable, more intrinsically bland than any physical space has been. Consequently cyberspace is inevitably junkspace. Just as, with physical architecture, junkspace infected and overtook utopic designs, cyber-junkspace has consumed the techno-optimism of the early internet. To survive online one needs to accept advertisements, and to accept advertisements is to become just another subway leading to a digital mall. Online, the mall is never more than a click away.

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In the intersection,
a muscular, shirtless man
with small American
flags tied to each wrist –
so that he looks
like a wrestler –
pushes, no, shoves
then catches, a stroller
piled high with plastic bags –
his stuff.

The “city of the future” is a vast, interconnected series of interiors dominated by the mall. But, in physical space, there must be something outside the mall. While the inside is defined by shopping, the exchange of money for objects, the outside is where two subsidiary processes occur: production and disposal. Production is the precondition of consumption, disposal the necessary result of both; as Koolhaas writes, “Half of mankind pollutes to produce, the other pollutes to consume.”

Hal Foster, in his companion piece to “Junkspace” titled “Running Room,” highlights the “junk” in “junkspace.” For Koolhaas, junkspace is primarily space that is itself junk: useless, undesirable. But it is also a place that contains and produces junk: fast fashion, planned obsolescence, junk food. Insofar as the mall inverts normal human values — it is a place where human wants and needs are satisfied for the sake of selling goods, rather than being a place where goods are sold for the sake of satisfying needs — it is essentially a junk market, wherein any incidental benefit to shoppers must be regarded as a necessary evil.

The ragpicker, one who trades in junk, is the liminal shadow of the shopper. In the extended sense just identified in which the mall already hawks junk, the ragpicker merely replicates outside what goes within. At the same time, the ragpicker exists outside of ordinary standards of what is valuable, picking up on what others would discard. Baudelaire in “The Ragpickers’ Wine” identifies the ragpicker as an anti-hero, “stumbling and bumping into walls like a poet.”

Armantrout’s shirtless man updates this poetic lineage. He no longer carries his junk on his back but carries junk in more junk. His stroller, in recalling a shopping cart, underlines our identification of ragpicker and shopper. Like Baudelaire’s ragpicker, he exists shamelessly outside of the law, but while Baudelaire imagined a figure of the night, this man is presumably strolling about in broad daylight, jaywalking across the intersection. Consider his movement, pushing or rather shoving the stroller before catching up to it. In this too he is a shopper but a deviant shopper, pushing his cart recklessly where it might bump into someone else. If what counts is how a piece can move, what are we to say about such unacceptable movements? Perhaps that he does not count or cannot be accounted for.

Note too that these movements, while deviant, are not revolutionary. Instead, they have a compulsive, repetitive aspect. The man shoves the stroller only to catch it again, recalling Freud’s nephew in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” who threw his toys across the room only to catch them again. We might apply some of Freud’s speculations about the child’s motives to our shirtless man. Perhaps, for instance, he pushes away his stroller to indicate to himself his mastery over it; he does not need this stuff, it does not define him, but could just as easily be free of it. Or perhaps he does know, after all, that he needs his stuff, and this game of pushing it away is a momentary expression of a self-destructive impulse, a death drive. In either case, we should not be looking to the shirtless man as our ticket out of junkspace. He seems to lack the political potential that Foster, following Benjamin and Baudelaire, placed on the ragpicker.

This point is underscored by the man’s appearance. Consider the American flag wristbands, almost certainly more repurposed junk. These are an ambiguous symbol. We could read them as parodic, nothing more American, but they could just as easily be a sincere patriotic expression or simply a fashion choice. The optimist, Foster et. al., assigns aesthetic and political potential to such junk reappropriation. Commenting on such artists, Foster in “Running Room” claims the following.

If there is no other side of Junkspace, indeed no outside at all, they are still able to find fissures within this world, to pressure these cracks, and open up a little running room.

Armantrout, following Koolhaas, strikes one as more pessimistic. A fissure, after all, presupposes another side. A fissure is just a jagged little portal. Howsoever inspiring Foster’s rhetoric, the claim seems incoherent. If the shirtless man is, in his way, only another shopper, then it does not really matter why he is wearing the flags, in parody or appreciation. What they are made of does not count. They are only more junk.

Finally, let us talk about wrestling. The thing everyone knows about wrestling, is that it is fake. As Barthes notes in “The World of Wrestling,” wrestling is spectacle rather than sport. Spectators watch wrestling expecting not fair competition but drama, drama presented with all of the subtlety of a morality play. A wrestler’s role should be immediately obvious from appearance — the face should be classically attractive and the heel, nasty-looking — and they should play that role with studied devotion, a kind of method-acting called kayfabe. Wrestling has all of the simplicity and immediate satisfaction of fast food; the wrestler aims to give the audience exactly what they want. In this way, wrestling is junk art and the wrestler a junk artist. Junkspace promises only junk poetry, only the superficial, the immediate, the palatable, the bland.

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City of the future,
where a tramway to the top
of a peak
opens onto
a wax museum
in which
Michael Jackson
extends one gloved hand

Daniel Lopatin’s eccojam “Demerol” was released as a tribute to Michael Jackson, titled after the pain killer Jackson overdosed on. The song reworks a line from Jackson’s “Morphine,” “Demerol, oh God he’s taking Demerol.” While this is a pretty and gentle sample from a largely dark and intense song, the effects Lopatin layers over it morph it into something uneasy and ominous. It is easy to hear the song as representing drifting off into a morphine sleep, the final terrifying phlanges redolent of death. As later reporting revealed, Jackson had been given the drugs that killed him to treat severe insomnia. These drugs themselves, however, caused a number of issues, including dream deprivation, which likely would have killed Jackson even had he not overdosed.

“Demerol” itself sits uneasily between tribute and sleazy appropriation. After all, the song made it onto a couple of releases. You could buy it, and Lopatin would profit off of Jackson’s work and death. In a way, this is fitting. Michael Jackson after all was an uneasy combination of producer and product, suffering in the role of pop star that was to a large extent chosen for him. “Morphine” dramatizes one aspect of this conflict, Jackson’s dysfunctional relation to his doctors. The song alternates between industrial rock verses, expressing fury at his dependence on these drugs, and an almost new-age bridge from the point of view of the doctor, soothing their patient. Worked into the background is a sample from David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, in which Joseph Merrick, the titular elephant man, expresses similar anxieties over his doctor’s prescription. Jackson felt that he was like Joseph Merrick trapped as a kind of attraction, that instead of actual support he only had handlers.

It is in this respect crucially important that it is Michael Jackson’s wax sculpture that greets us. On “a tramway to the top / of a peak” we should be properly outside, far away from the mall. It “opens onto / a wax museum.” At last. Some culture! Some history! Not the interminable, bland present of the mall. But of course our thesis has been that we cannot really get outside of junkspace, that the mall has left nothing unaffected.

The wax statue of Michael Jackson is the final, cruel victory of the project of turning Michael Jackson into a product. We see in Jackson’s life the same inversion of values that we have seen in the mall: instead of Jackson’s hangers on serving to support and disseminate his artistic achievements, his art was a means for their profit. The same terrible irony exists for art in junkspace. What should be a relief from junk, even a way out, is just more junk. For the Love of God, to pick an easy target, is a fifty-million pound paperweight. As with demerol, the very same stuff which makes your existence bearable can be part of a larger trap. It may even be what kills you.

I know we did not actually get to talking about internet aesthetics this entry. The setup went longer than intended, but this is a natural breakage point. I’ll be back with part 3B soon, covering dead malls, liminal spaces, and a bit more vaporwave.

Sleeplessness can kill. Bad sleep, as we have all experienced, causes a host of maladies — stupidity, exhaustion, headaches — which only compound for the habitual insomniac. Still, we do not sleep enough. About a third of American adults and near 90% of teenagers sleep less than they should. The issue for teenagers is compounded by their greater need for sleep — nine hours as opposed to an adult’s seven — and the conflict of late bedtimes and early school beginnings. This last factor means that the later stages of dream-rich sleep are truncated by alarms. As Demet’s research on dream-deprivation indicates, dreams serve an important function over and above sleep itself.

The nature of that function remains a point of scientific controversy. Common hypotheses give dreaming an important role in learning — memory formation, selective forgetting, generalization — which lends a certain irony to school’s role in cutting short teenage dreams. Particular blame has been levied at technology for its role in cutting sleep short. Certainly, heavy use of the internet, for example, is correlated both with less and worse sleep, as has playing video games. Video games shape not only the quantity but quality of games. As per the Tetris effect, aspects of the imagery of a game (or other repetitive visual experience) can bleed over into hypnagogic imagery, those hallucinations that precede sleep, and dreams.

Video games are also uniquely suited to capture the quality of dreams. Dreams are hallucinatory, surreal, and unreal, perhaps better subreal, lacking the distinctness and solidity of reality. Of course any medium can convey surreality, but the unreality of dreams comes across clearly in the artificiality of games. Take our previous example of repeated dialogue: a video game character, looping through their stock of programmed phrases, can speak as if in a dream, strangely disconnected from their environment. A guard reminisces about a wartime injury as a dragon sets fire to the town. Conventional game design strives to erase the dreaminess of games: “good” games are realistic games, simulations of the look and feel of some real thing.

Some games, though, lean into this natural affinity. LSD: Dream Emulator (1998) seeks to, well, emulate dreams. In the game, or, perhaps better, interactive experience, the player moves around and between hallucinatory landscapes copied from a dream journal. LSD highlights rather than attempting to obscure the digital artifice of the world. The polygons that make up the surroundings are clearly identifiable, often glitching as the player walks, cracking on their edges to reveal that there is nothing solid behind them. Objects flit and shake as one walks, as if not quite sure how to give the impression of stability. In certain scenes, one can fall off the map and see its geometry receding upwards as so many unconvincing surfaces. In a normal game, these would be bugs — indeed, clipping through the geometry is a common problem encountered in 3D games — but serve a clear purpose here, supplying not an unconvincing representation of reality but a convincing representation of unreality.

There is no goal to LSD: Dream Emulator, nothing to do other than to move around and experience the scenes, but there is a clear sense of progress. Each scene presents a small dreamscape — a jumbled suburb, an out-of-place temple, an unnervingly sparse forest — in which one wanders before triggering a cut to the next scene. The scenes are accompanied by spare sound design, dominated by the player character’s oddly loud footsteps, and a series of electronic instrumental tracks inspired by the releases of Warp records of the 80s and 90s.1 As one experiences more and more dreams, the game increasingly manipulates the textures, pushing everything into a pure psychedelic experience.

LSD lacks most of the ordinary appeal of video games. As C Thi Nguyen in Games: Agency as Art puts it, agency is the medium of games. Whereas ordinary fiction demands pretend beliefs from the audience — in watching Lost Highway, I pretend to believe that I am watching a saxophonist murder his wife — games ask us as well to have pretend desires. In playing Skyrim, I pretend that I am the chosen one and I pretend that I want to save Tamriel from dragons. Just as there is a systematic connection in fiction between our real beliefs and our pretend beliefs — we pretend to believe what we believe the fiction is representing — there is a connection between our pretend desires and real desires. I pretend to want to save Tamriel because I really want to feel the satisfaction of overcoming a challenge.

So when a parent complains that a game is rotting their child’s brain, the child’s stand-by retort, that they are doing something much more active and engaging than watching television, has some truth to it. The affect many games aim for is flow: an active, focused engagement with a task that is both pleasurable and engrossing. This is the state of a player who has ceased to recognize the existence of an outside world, to the extent of barely registering the passage of time. Flow is both energizing and consuming: it motivates, but it motivates one to stick to the task at hand.

LSD does not flow. Its effect is more muted, trance-like, a strange yoking of calm and disquiet. However, this effect is not that rare for a video game, indeed even mainstream games achieve something similar. Take Skyrim, a conventional and massively popular game. Skyrim, a fantasy role-playing game, at first glance involves all of the goals and challenges required for flow: as mentioned, you are tasked with slaying a dragon and obviously the dragon wants to stop you. However, the agency of Skyrim has a nebulous quality. The game is filled with optional objectives (side-quests) that the player may pick up and ignore at will. Indeed, it is extremely common for players to give up on the main objective and to devote themselves to whichever side-quests fit their fancy. Moreover, Skyrim is by default quite an easy game. As a result, the effect of Skyrim is not so much flow as abnegation: one of mindless absorption.

Abnegation lies as a neutral ground between boredom, a dysphoric flat affect, and serenity, a euphoric flat affect. It lacks not only any strong qualities but any particular valence, it is a “head empty” feeling, one that results from “vegging out,” receiving just enough stimulus to avoid boredom but not enough to lead to any stronger feeling. Abnegation can be produced not just by video games but by the consumption of television, “binge-watching,” and leisure use of the internet, “mindless scrolling.”

Abnegation is connected to sleep. The exhausted, drained feeling of sleeplessness prompts one to seek abnegation: one is too tired to do anything more ambitious. Further, as observed, such activities can also contribute to lack of sleep. Given this cycle, such abnegatory activities take on the role of a kind of simulated sleep. We should stress in this connection that scrolling through a collection of images belonging to an internet aesthetic, the primary mode of engagement with such aesthetics, is a form of abnegation. After all, as Sianne Ngai argues, the feeling of stuplimity eventually gives way to a flat but open-ended affect, that of abnegation. In effect, after persisting in boredom for long enough one gets bored of being bored and settles into a non-feeling.

Skyrim can be modified to be even more like LSD: Dream Emulator. Like many popular games, players have created a huge offering of “mods,” programs which allow you to change some aspect of the game. Most mods make fairly straightforward improvements or minor tweaks to a game — adding more visual detail and fidelity, fixing bugs, augmenting female characters’ breasts — but some make more radical, artistic changes. Among these is DeepDream Retexture by James Hodge. The mod replaces the textures of Skyrim with versions run through Google’s Deep Dream and randomly swaps sound effects. The result is a Skyrim that plays exactly the same, but which has been turned into an hallucinatory nightmare. The effect is heightened for those familiar with the game: everything has its old shape, but nothing looks or sounds like it should.

The Deep Dream software has been put to artistic use for the psychedelic changes it makes to images. It, however, was initially designed to serve a more practical purpose. Artificial neural networks are a popular and quite successful solution to the problem of image classification: getting a computer to recognize what is in an image. Such networks hook together layers of “neurons,” nodes in a graph which are hooked together and set up to fire in response to the firings of previous nodes. In a properly trained neural network doing image classification, you would expect each layer to represent more and more coarse-grained features of the image. In a classifier trained to recognize faces, perhaps the early layers recognizes particular contours and edges, the middle layers assemble these into bigger features, recognizing eyes and noses, which the last layers put together to figure out whether these make up a face.

However, the way neural networks are trained leaves one with basically no sense of how its working. Even if it successfully recognizes faces, you would not know, say, which neurons were recognizing eyes or even whether the whole network works in the way we expect. Neural networks are black boxes. Deep Dream helps to open up that box. The software, given some part of a neural network and an image, modifies that network to max-out the result of the network. So if that bit of network was, in fact, looking for eyes, Deep Dream will fill the image with eyes.

Such Deep Dream interpretation is a potentially useful form of debugging. Such debugging is required as neural networks often go wrong. The most pervasive problem neural networks face is overfitting: they do great on the examples they were trained on, but rely too much on incidental features of those examples and so mess up on new examples that lack those features. Maybe you trained your face-recognizing network on pictures taken at midday, and when you put it out in the real world it cannot handle different lighting. Note that overfitting is not some weird, technical problem, but is a difficulty even with human learning. A young child might resist classifying an emu as a bird because she’d only seen flying things before.

Erik Hoel points out that effective techniques for combating overfitting resemble dreaming. Examples in the training set are made less realistic, less solid by removing some of their detail, called dropout, a process that applies essentially the inverse of Deep Dream. Other techniques expand the training set by generating examples. In domain randomization, for example, a massive variety (in a qualitative sense) of examples are generated. If you can recognize a cat across hallucinatory dreamscapes, you can recognize them anywhere. Hoel suggests that our dreaming serves a similar purpose: to retrain the neural network inside our skulls.

Websites are metaphorically places. One enters a chatroom and hangs out there. But they lack the solidity, the constancy, the sense of reality of a real place. After all, with enough programming, a website can show almost anything and change at any moment. Modern social media, with its algorithmic personalization, is even more phantasmic: the site appears differently to different users. Internet aesthetics as presented on social media provide a further hallucinatory quality. The images, like the images of our imagination, while generally depicting real objects are linked by similarity and resemblances rather than causal or spatial connections. Two cottagecore cabins might look almost identical, but might well exist on different ends of the Earth.

The experience of scrolling through an aesthetic, then, lacks even the minimal narrative structure of dreaming. Still, dreaming is the natural analogy for the disjointed imagery that makes up an aesthetic online. We can see that this analogy is more than superficial. Both dreaming and scrolling are abnegatory activities, something one does when anything more would be too much to ask. And while scrolling through a social media feed probably does not serve any important cognitive function, it is a learning experience.

Indeed, idle learning is an important part of the appeal of internet aesthetics. These are fundamentally taxonomical exercises. The point is not only to look at a series of images but to recognize them as instances of a type. That’s not actually cottagecore but goblincore, you can tell by how natty the boots are. Certainly, the Aesthetics Wiki, with its list of over 500 aesthetics, displays all the classificatory mania of a Victorian biologist, but even the appeal of more normal, casual approach to a single aesthetic is recognitional. One learns what makes an image a cottagecore image, and this conception is refined over the course of an indefinite number of examples.

A forum devoted to an aesthetic provides opportunities not only to refine but to apply one’s conceptual mastery. One can dislike and criticize images that do not fit, policing the boundaries of the concept. More adventurously, one can produce images of one’s own. Recall that a hallmark of all internet aesthetics is that they are easy to produce, this being a precondition of their being folk art. Submitting an image to a forum is a way of putting one’s understanding to the test. None of this mastery is difficult to come by, but it is precisely this ease that that is essential to their abnegatory appeal.

Understood in this way, internet aesthetics function as simulated dreaming, perfect for a generation who cannot get enough of the actual stuff. This is true of the structure of experiencing these as an endless scroll, but it is often enough also true of the images themselves. We have already noted the hypnagogic elements of vaporwave, but these are even more pronounced in other aesthetics: e.g. dazecore, dreamcore, and liminal spaces. Such dreaminess layers over and mutes the primary affective qualities of the images.

In a dream, threats lose their visceral quality. Even if there is a tiger before you, it might easily turn into a billiard ball before it strikes. The feeling of a nightmare is neither sheer terror nor the safety from terror of the sublime but a kind of vague and bewildered unease. Likewise, the pleasures of dreams are diffuse and unstable. The haziness of these emotions is crucial for the abnegatory use of these images. They do motivate one in any particular direction, do not offer any catharsis or natural stopping point, but, like the images themselves, can infinitely modulate and recur.

In the previous entry in this series, we had identified a family of emotions associated with different internet aesthetics: a tension between some more active emotion and the dullness of indefinite repetition. Here we have identified a further complexity to that dulling effect, as it is not exactly or not entirely a dysphoric boredom but contains also a hazy pleasure, a dream-like effect. There is a modestly active component to this pleasure, that of learning and applying that learning, but also the negative pleasure of relief, the abnegatory pleasure of not having to face anything else. In the next few entries, we will develop these observations in the context of particular internet aesthetics.