Category: Literature

Intoxicated

Michael Pollan’s exploration of marijuana in The Botany of Desire is a lot of fun. He talks of the inexplicable pull that toxic substances have over people. The explanation is a bit predictable to me, as a long exponent of Hunter Thompson’s “I can’t say drugs are for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me” attitude. People just seem naturally impelled to change their view of the world, in some form or another, in all cultures. I suspect that the drug of choice has a great deal to do with what we perceive as the essential nature of a culture. Or, as Pollan argues, Marx got it backwards— “opiates are the religion of the people.” What we grow in our gardens affects our world view. Zappa’s hypothesis about beer and marching seems truer all the time. The Christian fascination with wine also seems to go hand in hand with their obsession with love. But of course, other poisons are what fascinate Pollan:

The medieval apothecary garden cared little for aesthetics, focusing instead on species which healed and intoxicated and occasionally poisoned. Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells”— in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amantita muscaria), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen).

These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the Middle Ages? After a long review of how the marijuana cultivation industry has changed over the last twenty years, Pollan offers an interesting slant on the persistence of cannabis. He ultimately ends up arguing that the effects of marijuana are primarily socially induced. People smoke dope and get paranoid not because there is anything in the drug that induces paranoia, but because the social construction of a marijuana high is governed by the law. Like so many gender theorists, Pollan argues that the juridical construction of the “evil weed” is what causes the bad side effects, and the congenial sociality and laughter is also largely socially induced. Placing all the typically acceptable drugs in the same category, he argues for drug use as a tool:

All these plants are, at least potentially, mental tools; people who know how to use them properly may be able to cope with everyday life better than those who don’t.

It’s the “properly” that troubles me here— the root of normative social behavior. While the beer-drinking marching crowd serves the great protestant work ethic, I find it hard to picture a time when smoking pot and watching brainless TV will be seen as a positive social force. However, I suspect that pot would be far more effective than a nation stoned on melloril or prozac. Personally though, I think the difference is fairly slight. I haven’t needed anything for anxiety control since I grew from adolescence, though I have sympathy for those who do.

Pollan argues for a universal desire to transcend ordinary existence. I remember a conversation I had with a professor a while ago— for a profound alteration of world view, there seem to be two great choices: psychedelic drugs and post-structuralist theory. As a kid, the former option seemed best. But now, I’m enjoying the more theoretical route. It’s much easier on the body for the long haul.

Understanding Moll

One of the great things about reading several books at one time is the way that they intersect. After finishing off the Foucault last night, I returned to the trials and tribulations of Moll Flanders. One of the curiosities of the book for me has been the frequency that she speaks of changing her name. She is referred to as Betty through most of the text; I haven’t yet encountered her calling herself Moll. I’ve reached the turning point noted by many critics used to divide the book into its two main parts (there are no chapters). She’s now been turned into a thief. Being a woman of loose morals isn’t nearly as big of a sin, it seems, as stealing.

But there is a moment of dramatic clarity just before this happens. Her seduction of her fourth husband is an interesting twist— with a bit of an inheritance from her third husband (her half-brother)— she woos a man who seems to have a great fortune, while coyly intimating (as she did with her third husband) that she had one of her own. They both deceived each other, because they were both poor. To make things even more interesting, this fourth husband was a Catholic. Upon the discovery that there was no money available, the husband releases her from her marital bond— but she is with child. Another man, her investment councilor, had managed to rid of his “whorish” wife, and wanted to marry her. The problem was, what about the child?

It is manifest to all that understand any thing of Children, that we are born into the World helpless and incapable, either to supply our own Wants, or so much as make them known; and that without help, we must perish; and this help requires not only an assisting Hand, that is, Care and Skill, without both which, half the Children that are born should die; nay, tho’ they were not to be deny’d Food; and one half more of those that remained would be Cripples or Fools, loose their Limbs, and perhaps their Sense: I Question not, that these are partly the Reasons why Affection was plac’d by Nature in the Hearts of Mothers to their Children; without which they would never be able to give themselves up as ’tis necessary they should, to the Care and waking Pains needful to the Support of their Children.

SINCE this Care is needful to the Life of Children, to neglect them is to Murther them; again to give them up to be Manag’d by those People, who have none of that needful Affection, plac’d by Nature in them, is to Neglect them in the highest Degree; nay, in some it goes farther, and is a Neglect in order to their being Lost; so that ’tis even an intentional Murther, whether the Child lives or dies. (173-4)

In this moment, Moll reveals a rationale behind her own sorry state, and the future state of her child (who she does give up). The concern over “the children” is manifest long before Foucault proposes. Defoe’s moral tale holds parenting as it as its central trope, far more overpowering than any indictment of licentiousness. You have to love Moll’s recounting of her state prior to her fifth marriage:

Then it occurr’d to me that what an abominable Creature am I! and how is this innocent Gentlemen going to be abus’d by me! How little does he think, that having Divorc’d a Whore, he is throwing himself into the Arms of another! that he is going to Marry one who has lain with two Brothers, and has had three children by her own Brother! one that was born in Newgate, whose mother was a Whore, and is now a transported Thief; one that has lain with thirteen Men, and has had a Child since he saw me! poor Gentlemen! said I. (182)

Quite an interesting list of credits for Moll, now 44 years old. More the fate of an orphan, than her own fall due to sin. Her mother-in-law (third marriage) had previously expressed sorrow over the loss of her girl-child (Moll). With the weight of her mother’s sin, the early death of her fifth husband, who leaves her broken and with no recourse but to steal, is predicted. A cautionary tale of parenting gone horribly wrong, a problem that I am sure will be addressed in the end.

Genealogies of Desire

The deeper I dig into Moll Flanders, the more I wonder about the impossibility of relating lives. But the trope that Defoe employs to tell Moll’s story is built around the history of her relationships, and her motives of desire. It’s complicated.

Unlike the relatively lame movie version, the story of her life is complex. In the Forest Gumpy movie version, Moll is seduced, betrayed, and finds true love in the arms of an artist. How twentieth century is that? Of course the story must be related through a well-meaning narrator (Morgan Freeman) through a series of flashbacks. This movie, other than the name, has nothing to do with the book. If you want to digest your popcorn neatly, and get the warm fuzzy happy ending, the movie version is made for you.

The book is messy, inconsistent, and somehow far more real. In the first 140 pages you cross from infancy into the life of a 42-year-old woman who is still filled with desire. Her choices are marked by a duality of desire and practicality. She recounts little in the way of physical description, but much in the way of inner landscape. It seems to me to be the evolution of a perverted, deterministic view of desire.

I was thinking about the progress of Moll, and the complexity. Moll first relinquishes her virtue on a promise— the promise that a man will marry her when he comes into his estate. The story is intense, and yet strangely distant. There are questions as to which parts are ironic, and which are not. Defoe’s narrator is Moll herself, a woman (supposedly redeemed) telling the story of how she fell prey to her circumstances. Money is the constant worry, and yet desire is her constant downfall. Due to her first lover’s duplicity and machinations to rid himself of her, she ends up wedded to his younger brother. Out of fear and most of all, rhetoric, she finds herself in a loveless marriage.

Continue reading “More Moll” →

I am sure—I mean I am not sure at all but I believe— the master poets must come at their poems as a hawk on a pigeon in one dive.

I can’t. I chip away like a stonemason who has got it in his head that there is a pigeon in that block of marble.

But there’s a delight in the chipping. At least there’s a delight in it when your hunch that the pigeon is there is stronger than you as it carries you along. There is no straining then nor are you strained— all assurance and confidence.

Oh, you can be fooled, of course— there may be nothing there but a stone.

Archibald MacLeish

—Photograph by Jill Krementz.

Objects of Desire

Objects of Desire: The Lives of Antiques and Those Who Pursue Them by Thatcher Freund is a peculiar book, but I like it. I’ve been using it to casually take a break as I weed through the heavy stuff (though I’m reading it for a class as well). Reading a chapter or two in between things, a familiar pattern emerges.

It starts with a localized, narrative description of a particular antique auction. Then it digresses into the history of the collector or figure, and then it digresses into the history of the piece. History is fun when it is presented in this way. You get the place, then the person, then the thing. However, I had to pause just for a second to record a curious bit of information about the then 22 year-old head of Sotheby’s Americana division’s first experience at auction:

What Stahl remembered most, however, was that soon after the auction began, a dealer from Philadelphia suffered a heart attack and died on the spot. “The individual was taken away and the sale went right on,” Stahl recalled many years later. “And I said to myself, ‘This is for me.’”

On one level, the reaction is horrific. However, on a deeper level it shows how much we guide ourselves through desire. When a desire is so intense that even death doesn’t interrupt it for long, it enters into the territory of the perverse.

In an interesting way, the book plays on the will to know. These people are intensely involved with knowing everything about the pieces they collect. I sometimes watch Antiques Road Show on PBS, and think to myself that they are all closet scholars, these people who collect and investigate remnants of human junk.

The will to know seems to be the strongest desire of all.

I have one Word to say upon the Subject of Profound Writers, who are grown very numerous of late; And I know very well, the judicious World is resolved to list me in that Number. I conceive, therefore, as to the Business of being Profound that it is with Writers, as with Wells; A Person with good Eyes may see to the Bottom of the deepest, provided any Water be there; and that often, when there is nothing in the World at the Bottom, besides Dryness and Dirt, tho’ it be but a Yard and a half under Ground, it shall pass, however, for a wondrous Deep, upon no wiser a Reason than because it is wondrous Dark.

. . .

I have one concluding Favour to request of my Reader; that he will not expect to be equally diverted and informed by every Line, or every Page of this Discourse; but give some allowance to the Author’s Spleen, and short Fits or Intervals of Dullness, as well as his own; And lay it seriously to the Conscience, whether, if he were walking the Streets, in dirty Weather, or a rainy Day; he would allow it fair in Dealing in Folks at their Ease from a Window, to Critick his Gate, and ridicule his dress at such a Juncture.

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

What They Were Hunting For

Finished the second book of McPhee’s Coming Into The Country. The land is clearly the star of the work. Though the second book is ostensibly about the urban areas, the people are hollow and the forces of nature are pushed center stage. It’s framed around the search for a new capital, to replace the remote and inhospitable Juneau. It rains so much in Juneau that the houses remain unpainted— it’s never dry enough. The wind blows so hard it breaks wind gauges constantly, etc.

There were some interesting facts considering the process of planning a location for a new city, and comparisons with Brasilia and Canberra. I had no idea that Canberra was planned by Walter Burley Griffin of Chicago. McPhee describes Canberra as “a somewhat sterile place, undeniably attractive,”— “it has tended to depress some visitors because it offers nothing but government, and no relief from government” (138). I could say the same thing about the second book of Coming Into The Country.

However, it is worth sharing the discovery that the word “hooch” comes from Alaska. “The Indians of the archipelago distilled a drink they called hoochinoo” (141). The only other passage worthy of note is the argument for keeping the capital in Juneau, because of its remoteness and secrecy:

“Shouldn’t the state capital be near the population center?” I asked him.

“That argument doesn’t hold. The spectrum of public pressure is larger where people are. Can you imagine a march of welfare people? In Juneau, you don’t have pressures like that. You can sit with a clear head and do your work.” (159).

Somehow, one would expect a bureaucrat to respond that way. Secrecy is essential for any bureaucracy.

Metalepsis

But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the peoples we know! . . .

Such is the tragic necessity which strict finds underneath our domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult soul as with whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants sentimental and momentary. We must infer that the ends of thought were preemptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost. They are deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities. They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and dissapears; where the question is, Which is first man or men? where the individual is lost in his source.

But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make right or tolerable. This result is so against nature, such a half-view, that it must be corrected by a common sense and experience. . . .A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, 1870.

Reading Judith Butler, I had to track down exactly what metalepsis meant. I had a feeling it had something to do with metonymy, but of course I had confused metonymy with synecdoche. I thought it had something to do with a stand in value. I was both right and wrong. Once and for all, I can now sort out these rhetorical terms.

Synecdoche is where a part stands in for a whole, as in saying “turn the wheel” when you mean turn the car. Metonymy on the other hand, is using a indexical symbol to refer to a whole, as in saying the crown when you mean the Queen. Metalepsis is a double metonymy.

In other words, metalepsis an indexical symbol which refers to another indexical symbol. An individual’s conception of society is a metalepsis. We refer to our inner symbol of what society is, which can only refer to the outer convention (rather than a thing in and of itself). It is an individual index of a communal index. A game of smoke and mirrors, far removed form any directly referent reality. That’s what makes it so absurd to think about what comes first: self or society? There is no tangible referent, only a vague and nebulous concept. Butler believes that gender is a metalepsis. She has a powerful point.

Hepzibah

I have been s-l-o-w-l-y working my way through Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. Not because it’s a difficult book, far from it, but because I see in it a deep allegory about the American character. I took another pause today, to look up some critical articles. In an article from The Explicator (Winter 2002), Max Loges traces the roots of the name of a major character, Hepzibah. The story arc of Hawthorne’s novel is amazingly parallel to Isaiah 62. What blows me away about it is that this passage, coincidentally, connects with one of William Blake’s major concepts: Beulah.

For Blake, Beulah was the land of dreams where men could mingle with angels. Beulah, in Isaiah 62, is where Hepzibah dwells. Of course, where Hepzibah dwells in Hawthorne’s novel is a ruined house, run down and falling apart, where a descendent of a proud line is forced to turn to commerce to survive. Not much of a dream, really— more like a nightmare. However, in the time-frame of the passage from Isaiah, where Hepzibah hears this prophecy of the married-land where she will dwell, she is in the desolate ruins of a city. This context adds depth to both Blake’s usage, and Hawthorne’s. Both Hepzibah and her brother Clifford were spurned by the people of the town initially, though they are vindicated in the end. What stands out to me most is the conflict that Clifford feels when considering, in his own demented way, the price of society gazing at an organ-grinder’s monkey from his window:

The spectator feels it to be fool’s play, when he can distinguish the tedious commonplace of each man’s visage, with the perspiration and weary self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the stiffness or laxity of his shirt collar, and the dust on the back of his black coat.

In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,— one great life— , — one collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating it. But, on the other hand, an impressible person, standing alone over the brink of one of those processions, should behold it, not in its atoms, but in its aggregate,— as a mighty river of life, massive in its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to the kindred depth within him,— then the contiguity would add to the effect.

It might fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies. (154)

There are many ways to read this passage. Crazy Clifford was thinking of jumping out the window; Hawthorne himself jumped into the utopian experiment at Brook Farm and was the worse for it. It could be a reflection on individuality vs. society. Yet again, it professes an interesting point of view toward representation— it might be best to view things from a distance, rather than in its atoms, because looking too closely, things fall apart. Looking at things from the long-view is always more seductive, and hopeful. Even for a depressive like Hawthorne, there is a sense of hope in the parallel with the arc of Jerusalem in Isaiah.