There’s an App for You
h.saussy
For the last few months I’ve been plagued by a high-pitched whine, like the sound made by an older refrigerator, in both ears. It’s louder sometimes, fainter sometimes, but never really switches off. I finally went in search of a specialist who could help do something about it. The first was an old-school psychoanalyst, a very kind fellow whose German was so classic I had no trouble understanding it. (I learned German to read the writers of 1770-1830, so my vocabulary tends toward the elevated and philosophical.) But I don’t have time just now to commute an hour each way for analysis terminable or interminable; it seemed a bit wide of the mark. He additionally recommended I look into chewing gum, yoga, massage, and iPod apps that mask, reduce or (unverified claim) reprogram the subjective noise.
I got one of those apps last night. It pipes white noise into your ears as a distraction; you can give the white noise a “brown” or “pink” tinge. You can also set it to play an indefinite loop of relaxation sounds, and mix different sounds until you find the thing that relaxes you best.
After half an hour of tweaking, I settled on a combination: Underwater + Bubbles + Monks + Wind. So now you know: the guy whose idea of relaxation is to hear monks chanting underwater, while haschischins tug on their hookahs and a four-knot gale blows, that’s me. In fact, that may be all you need to know about me.
Parciales Magias
h.saussy
The delights of the DSM. Reading about one’s problems in language so alien to the experience-near perspective that it calls to mind Sartre’s man “who sees people as ants.”
Consider this series of pearls (stating the obvious in language that makes it obtuse):
Seeking to change another person might be especially likely to be associated with hopelessness. As explained previously, change agents continue to want change even though their attempts to achieve it have been unsuccessful (Caughlin & Vangelisti, 1999). Melges and Bowlby (1969) argue that hopelessness occurs when people see themselves as incapable of achieving their goals but are unable to detach themselves from these seemingly unachievable goals. Recent research has demonstrated why people do not disengage (Hadley & MacLeod, 2010). Individuals high in hopelessness tend to engage in conditional goal setting such that they link a current goal to larger life goals such as being happy, fulfilled, or having a sense of self-worth. Therefore, they feel that if they disengage from an unattainable goal, they also are giving up other important life goals. Individuals in relationships may see their goal of changing the other person as important to their overall relational satisfaction and therefore keep wanting change even though they feel incapable of causing change…. Change agents might engage in relational disengagement behaviors as a coping mechanism for the hopelessness experienced in the conflict (Driver et al., 2003; Horton-Deutsch & Horton, 2003).
(Courtney Waite Miller, Michael E. Roloff, & Rachel M. Reznik, “Hopelessness and Interpersonal Conflict: Antecedents and Consequences of Losing Hope,” _Western Journal of Communication_ 78.5 [2014], 563-585)
Hilarious. Now, a word about the assumed fit between this generalizing language and particular cases. It may seem that the unfortunate “individuals in relationships” who want to “change the other person” are in a bad racket: manipulators and self-deluders. Of course, you’re thinking of a marriage in which one person wants the other to do or be something against the second person’s will. But what if the relationship is between parent and child? Namely, a relation based on the duty of the parent to shape the child’s personality and behavior, insofar as this can ever be done, in a positive way, so that the child can be a happy and productive member of society? If you, as parent, disengage from this goal as unattainable, you are indeed giving up on other important life goals, and that’s why saying “Stop hitting your brother” two hundred times a day to someone who responds with “You’re mean and stupid and I hate you” is soul-destroying.
When I consider how my light is spent
h.saussy
When I wake up at 3:20 in the morning with thoughts of climate change, the destruction of the rule of law, the erosion of voting rights, the return of overt racism to the political environment, the prosperity dishonesty enjoys, the collapse of the Atlantic alliance, etc., in my head, I go downstairs and write recommendation letters. It’s my way of saying, “Damn it, there will be a future, and these are the young people I choose to shape it.”
About Petitions
h.saussy
If somebody you know, are friendly with, or consider a close ally is accused of e.g. sexual harassment, plagiarism, or other scurrilous crimes, here are some things not to do if you’re invited to sign a petition in his/her defense.
— Don’t announce to the world that you know all the facts and evidence. You probably don’t, unless you are the accused or the plaintiff (and even then…).
— Don’t couch your petition in the mode “X is so brilliant and distinguished that s/he deserves special treatment unlike that meted out to ordinary mortals.” That won’t play well when the letter’s leaked.
— Even if you would probably say, on the street or in a bar, “I can’t believe X would do a thing like that!” do not write a letter in which you claim publicly that “The brilliant and distinguished X, whom I know extremely well, is incapable of such actions and therefore the accusations must be dismissed.”
— It would also be to your and the accused’s advantage not to try the tribalism move, i.e., “An attack on X is an attack on all who belong to our set (or: intellectual distinction in our age, all that is good and holy, etc.).” What if X turns out to be guilty? Then you’ve handed your entire tribe over to the hostiles (who may have no stake in the present accusation but will surely be glad for a chance to dunk their rivals in hot water).
— Above all, don’t attempt to blame the (professed) victim for causing the mess. It looks bad and may make you a co-conspirator in retaliation, should things come to that.
You may, I think, say how much you admire the person’s work, how vital his or her teaching is to an academic program, how deep your trust in him or her runs, how many times he or she has helped you with a problem– in other words, you can step up as a character witness. Not as a witness of fact unless you’ve observed facts. And don’t confuse character (ethos) with acts (praxis) unless you have a really ambitious theory of how the two intertwine. It’s easy to be taken the wrong way. A rule of thumb: if you would be outraged to read a letter if only it had been written in defense of a Republican, don’t sign it.
Spoken in 1945
h.saussy
And yet, we are oppressed by one nightmarish idea: if a dictatorship in Hitler’s style should ever rise in America, all hope would be lost for ages. We in Germany could be freed from the outside. Once a dictatorship has been established, no liberation from within is possible. Should the Anglo-Saxon world be dictatorially conquered from within, as it were, there would no longer be an outside, nor a liberation. The freedom fought for and won… over hundreds, thousands of years would be a thing of the past. The primitivity of despotism would reign again, but with all means of technology. True, man cannot be forever enslaved; but this comfort would then be a very distant one, on a plane with Plato’s dictum that in the course of infinite time everything that is possible will here or there occur or recur as a reality. We see the feelings of moral superiority and are frightened: he who feels absolutely safe from danger is already on the way to fall victim to it.
Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (tr. E. B. Ashton), 93.
(“Technology” was not yet in use as a euphemism for computers. In 1945 it pre-eminently meant the atomic bomb.)
That Helsinking Feeling
h.saussy
Sure sounds like somebody wants an excuse to call off the midterms.
Rehearsal for July 16
h.saussy
DONNY. Vlad, I really admire what you’ve been able to do. Strong leadership, not a peep out of your national press, the Duma is 100% behind you, and you can just reach out and grab Ukraine by the Crimea, and no problem, everybody’s fine. What’s your secret?
VLAD. Easy. I get people in a position where I have leverage over them, and then I have them poisoned if they don’t do as I say.
DONNY. Oh.
VLAD. Now about those emails…
The Pudding, part 1
h.saussy
Convenient round-up of today’s indictments. Wikileaks, Roger Stone, Guccifer getting into the DNC’s sock drawer in order to blow up HRC-Bernie reconciliation. See
https://boingboing.net/2018/07/13/indictment-friday.html
or you could read the whole indictment if you had time.
Creeping Monolingualism
h.saussy
I know Anne Fadiman, and she’s not stupid, blinkered, or chauvinistic. Yet how impenetrable English-speakers can sometimes be to the fact that other languages exist, and count as means of communication and record! See her New Yorker piece on not liking wine, which mentions by-the-by that
Haut-Brion is generally considered the first wine ever to receive a review—by the diarist Samuel Pepys, who visited London’s Royall Oak Tavern, on April 10, 1663, and, as he noted in his journal, “here drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.” Haut-Brion was drunk by Dryden, Swift, Defoe, and Locke. When Thomas Jefferson was the American minister to France, he bought six cases of Haut-Brion and sent them back to Monticello.
“Generally considered” by people whose world is bounded by the approximately five hundred years of the English language that’s easy going for non-philologists, I guess. Isn’t it a pity that over the four thousand or so years that wine drinking has been going on, none of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., ever conceived of the idea of writing down their thoughts about a particular vintage? Or does something count as a “wine review” only if it’s written for English-speakers? Good thing that Pepys, Dryden, Swift, Defoe, Locke and Jefferson were on the job, otherwise the world would never have known of Ho Brian. And it’s really a pity, then, that Odysseus’s words were wasted, inasmuch as he spoke them in a remote provincial palaver unknown to humanity:
With me I had a goat-skin of the dark, sweet wine, which Maro, son of Euanthes, had given me, the priest of Apollo, the god who used to watch over Ismarus. And he had given it me because we had protected him with his child and wife out of reverence; for he dwelt in a wooded grove of Phoebus Apollo. And he gave me splendid gifts: of well-wrought gold he gave me seven talents, and he gave me a mixing-bowl all of silver; and besides these, wine, wherewith he filled twelve jars in all, wine sweet and unmixed, a drink divine. Not one of his slaves nor of the maids in his halls knew thereof, but himself and his dear wife, and one house-dame only. And as often as they drank that honey-sweet red wine he would fill one cup and pour it into twenty measures of water, and a smell would rise from the mixing-bowl marvellously sweet; then verily would one not choose to hold back. (Odyssey, book 9, tr. Murray)
And likewise the consumer report filed by Archilochus:
I know how to strike up the fine dithyrambic song of Dionysos,
when I’m blitzed with wine
(fragment 120)
For locals only?
Pourquoi j’aime la France
h.saussy
C’est parce que, dans ce pays lointain et peut-être imaginaire, il se trouve quelques centaines de passionnés des lettres pour s’en entretenir comme cette bande d’énergumènes. J’ai bien dit “lettres,” pour souligner le fait que ces lecteurs emballés ne se confinent pas à la “littérature,” mais discutent (et bien) de la philosophie, de la théologie, des lois, de plusieurs époques de la littérature latine et grecque, pour critiquer comme des supporters de foot les choix et le calendrier de la série “La Pléiade” de chez Gallimard. Leur amour sans provincialisme des choses de l’esprit me fait revivre.
Last of the Swingers
h.saussy
“If the President does it, it’s not illegal.” Back in the Watergate days, we used to hoot at that assertion, because we recognized it as a formula for dictatorship. And we’re a country of laws, not of men, or so said the civics textbooks. In our back pocket was the ultimate argument, the courts. And the Constitution, which with its separation of powers and brokering of functions, protected us from would-be dictators. We slept securely with that knowledge.
So Kennedy, the occasional swing vote on the Court, has retired. Within a few months– probably before the midterms– we will have to come up with answers to the slogan, “If the President does it and the Supreme Court condones it, it’s not illegal.”
The newspapers are all about the likely outcomes for Roe v. Wade. An important liberty was established by that decision, but not the only liberty. Let’s not forget what else might happen.
First, corruption, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the quashing of civil liberties, draconian anti-immigration measures and other devices to ensure an aging minority of very rich people retains the whip hand in this country. The Bill of Rights will be declared unconstitutional by a majority on the Court that won’t care about stare decisis, case law, controlling instances and other technical matters where law regulates itself (boiling down to such imperatives as “face the facts” and “be consistent”). The First Amendment will be reconstrued in ways that limit permissible speech and cripple the investigative powers of the press. The Second Amendment’s “well-ordered militia” clause will be reinterpreted restrictively, enabling the unlimited possession of arms by bands of irregulars, call them Tontons Macoutes or Siloviki, who terrorize the unarmed population in support of whatever the dictator’s hate campaign of the month is. And so on. If you want to know the future, look to Russia these days, or perhaps the Israel-Gaza relationship: an utterly asymmetrical power ratio between the rulers and a significant party of the ruled, and a lot of pillage going on with the approval of rubber-stamp courts.
But so long as there is enough to eat, five hundred channels of television, and some ongoing celebrity scandal, people will be cool with it, I guess. Those who aren’t cool with it are likely to put up resistance, and it will hurt. I don’t want anybody to get hurt, which is the deep reason for my belief in democracy and the separation of powers: they make it possible to mediate conflicts without the spilling of blood.
Philosophy of History
h.saussy
Further evidence that progress is a thing of the past: George W Bush’s Cabinet was full of Nixon-era revanchists. Trump’s is full of WWII-era revanchists.
“Obama Did It Too”
h.saussy
— is not a good argument. It’s a Republican talking point, which in itself warrants suspicion. But more than that, it distracts our attention from policies to personalities. Obama was good in many ways, but he wasn’t perfect, and like any American president he let some terrible policies be enacted in his time. It was (and is) our job as the American public to let Obama and any successors know when things are going wrong and justice is not being served. Our job is not to cheer on the sidelines of some fantasized Obama-Trump or Hillary-Trump smackdown.
O’erleaping Itself
h.saussy
Disgust, ethologists since Darwin and Richet tell us, is an emotion rooted in self-preservation. You have an instinctive aversion to tastes, sensations, and things that are likely to be harmful. (The history of the concept by Wilfried Menninghaus is worth a read, though it’s definitely the work of a Germanist.) Moral disgust, I suppose, is the same emotion projected onto an ideal body, the body of laws, habits and conventions that make us an “us.”
I find the repeated experience of moral disgust to be corrosive, and thus undermining of the supposed original purpose of the feeling. But there’s no way to let go of it. Perhaps it will outlive me.
Signature Event Conte( )t
h.saussy
For hundreds of years, people who were unable to write attested their consent by scratching an “X” on documents they were unable to read. Why X? Why not A, or I, or O?
Of course, there’s the thought of the cross, which in Christian countries might stand as the sign of any individual.
I’ve long thought— perhaps whimsically— that the validity of “X” as a marker of intention comes from its intersection of two opposite lines. Anything, even a branch falling from a tree, can scratch a diagonal line on a surface, but to do the same thing in the opposite direction and have the two lines meet at a point bespeaks awareness and intent, which a judicially recognized signature aims to confirm. The second line of the “X” is supposed to be a minimal extra added on to nature, and once you’ve done that, you’ve started to act in the world, to “persist and sign” as they say in French.
A Fine Kettle
h.saussy
I often think denouncing others from a position of self-asserted moral purity is a narcissistic way of engaging with an imperfect world. Here’s something from today’s Inbox that reminds me of how things can go askew. The allusion to current US policy is particularly well-aimed.
|