With romanticism the night took on a temporality all its own

 

This new interest in Africans and the colonies remained limited and was not sufficient to restore to the color black the prestige it had lost many generations earlier. That would occur a few years later, when the Romantic wave began to lead artistic and literary Europe into its dark imaginings and gradually reassign black the position it had formerly held: the first and foremost. The transition did not take place all at once, but in many phases. The first generation of Romantics was not so much attracted by night and the macabre as by nature and dream. By the same token, in terms of colors their preferences were first for green and blue, and only then for black. In the second half of the eighteenth century, for the first time in the West, the idea of nature was no longer systematically associated with the four elements (air, water, earth, fire), as it had been almost ever since Aristotle, but with vegetation. Henceforth nature was made up of fields and woods, trees and forests, leaves and branches. It became a place of repose and meditation and even took on metaphysical value. In the country the Creator seemed to be more present than in the city and to manifest himself there differently, both more directly and more peaceably. Certainly such ideas were not really new, but in about the years 1760–80, they took on enough importance to begin to alter sensibilities, especially with regard to color. Green, neglected or disliked until then by the poets, became the favorite color of nature lovers, those “solitary walkers” whose praises Jean-Jacques Rousseau sang.25Not only was green a favorite, but so was blue, as these strollers lost themselves in their dreams and aspired to inaccessible worlds. The mysterious “blue flower” introduced by Novalis (1772–1801) in his unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, is perhaps the most perfect symbol of these impossible quests.26But it constitutes an end, not a point of departure. The fashion of Romantic blue began a generation earlier, probably in 1774, when Goethe published his epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and gave his hero a blue coat combined with yellow breeches. The work enjoyed immense success in bookstores—one of the biggest best-sellers of all times—and “Werthermania” spread throughout Europe and then America; not only did artists take to representing the principal scenes of the novel in paintings and engravings, but for at least two decades young men dressed “à la Werther,” in the famous blue coat.27 Another color, however, was lurking in the shadows, awaiting its hour. Early in the next century, which marked nearly the end of Romantic or Pre-Romantic blue and green, black began to take over. Following the joys of communing with nature, the dreams of beauty and infinity, came ideas that were distinctly darker and that would dominate the artistic and literary scene for almost three generations. Rejecting the sovereignty of reason, proclaiming the reign of emotion, dissolving in tears and being consumed with self-pity were no longer enough; the Romantic hero had become an unstable, anguished individual who not only claimed “the ineffable happiness of being sad” (Victor Hugo) but believed himself marked by fate and felt an attraction for death. The English gothic novels had launched a trend in the macabre as early as the 1760s, with The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1764. This trend continued into the turn of the century—The Mysteries of Udolfo by Ann Radcliffe (1794), The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis (1795)—and with it, black made its great comeback. This was the triumph of night and death, witches and cemeteries, the strange and fantastic. Satan himself reappeared and became the hero of many poems and stories—in Germany, those of Hoffman; in France, those of Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. Similarly, Goethe’s Faust exerted considerable influence, especially the first part, published in 1808. Inspired by a historical figure—a small-time magician who lived in the sixteenth century and quickly became a figure of legend—Goethe’s hero makes a pact with Mephistopheles (one of the names for the devil, “one who does not love light”): in exchange for his soul the devil promises to restore Faust’s lost youth and with it all the pleasure that could satisfy his senses. The story unfolds in a particularly black atmosphere. Nothing is missing: night, prison, cemetery, castle ruins, dungeon, forest, cavern, witches and sabbat, Walpurgis Night, on the heights of Blocksberg, in the mountains of Harz. The time of Werther seemed like the distant past and under Goethe’s pen his blue suit was replaced by a darker palette.

With romanticism the night took on a temporality all its own: the poets sang of how it was both gentle and ghastly, a place of refuge and nightmares, of fantasies and obscure travels. The Hymnen an die Nacht (1800) by Novalis and Musset’s Nuits (1835–37) echoed back to Night Thoughts by Edward Young, published many decades earlier (1742–45). These meditations, in which the idea of death dominated, were translated into all European languages and then engraved in a hallucinatory style by William Blake in 1797. In his Nuits de décembre, Musset is haunted by a mysterious figure who assumes a series of different appearances (a poor child, an orphan, a stranger) but who is always “dressed in black” and resembles the poet “like a brother.” Chopin did the same thing in many of his Nocturnes (1827–46) by translating into music this theme of the appearance of the double in the night. Everywhere the sense of melancholy triumphed; that century’s ill, which was for the Middle Ages a true illness—etymologically, an excess of black bile—became for the Romantic poets a required condition, almost a virtue. All poets had to be melancholic, to die young (Novalis, Keats, Shelley, Byron), or to retreat into everlasting mourning. Gérard de Nerval did this better than anyone, at the beginning of his sonnet El Desdichado (1853), in the most famous quatrain of all French poetry:

I am the shadowed—the bereaved—the unconsoled,
The Aquitainian prince of the stricken tower:
My one star’s dead, and my constellated lute
Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia.28

This black sun, which reappeared many times in Nerval’s work and which undoubtedly had its pictorial origin in a fourteenth-century miniature, replaced Novalis’s blue flower.29 It constituted the symbol of a whole generation that delighted in morbid states, and it prefigured the frightening verse in the haunting voice of Baudelaire a few years later: “Oh Satan take pity on my pain.”30 Faust’s pact with the devil remained more than ever a matter of current events.

Moreover, a current of the “fantastic” ran through the nineteenth century. Even if this adjective did not become a noun in French until 1821, what it designated predated it.31 It no longer had anything to do at all with the magical supernatural of early romanticism, but was of a much darker nature, bringing together the strange, occult, frenetic, and even the satanic. Esotericism and spiritualism were the fashion; some poets met in cemeteries, others attempted to practice black magic, still others belonged to secret societies or enjoyed taking part in funeral banquets and drinking alcohol from empty skulls. At the end of the century, in his novel À rebours (1884), Joris Karl Huysman (1848–1907) began his account by evoking such a “feast of mourning”: “While a concealed orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked black women, wearing stockings and slippers of silver cloth sprinkled with tears.” Over the course of this meal only black, brown, or purple foods were eaten, and only drinks of these same colors consumed:

From black-rimmed plates they ate turtle soup, Russian rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, salted mullet roe, smokedFrankfurt black puddings, game in gravies the colour of liquorice and boot-blacking, truffled sauces, chocolate caramel creams, plum puddings, nectarines, preserved fruits, mulberries, and heart-cherries; from dark-coloured glasses they drank the wines of Limagne and Rousillon, of Tenedos, Val de Peñas, and Oporto, and, after the coffee and the walnut cordial, they enjoyed kvass, porters, and stouts.32 A similar taste for death and mourning appeared in the theater by the 1820s; there was no longer any hesitation about showing scenes of violence and crime. The late eighteenth century had rediscovered Shakespeare; romanticism would go further and appropriate many of his characters, making tutelary figures out of them. Hamlet, especially, became a Romantic hero, and his famous black costume, a veritable uniform, was more in keeping with the sensibility and style of the era than Werther’s too sensible blue suit, henceforth totally obsolete.33 Society was not to be outdone, making black the dominant color for men’s clothing and for the duration. The phenomenon began in the last years of the eighteenth century, grew during the French Revolution—an honest citizen had to wear a black suit then—triumphed in the Romantic period, lasted throughout the nineteenth century, and only exhausted itself in the 1920s. It involved elegant clothing as well, the dress of dandies and worldly gentlemen, made fashionable in England by Brummel about 1810, and also the limited wardrobes of men of modest means, who believed (naively?) they had found in black a color upon which the increasing filth and pollution seemed to have less impact.34

25. His Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, written between 1776 and 1778 and left unfinished, were published after his death (July 1778) in London in 1782.

26. Unfinished, this novel was published by Ludwig Tieck, Novalis’s friend, in 1802. The book opens with the account of a dream, minstrel Heinrich’s dream: he sees himself crossing marvelous countrysides and discovering near a spring the strange blue flower that offers a glimpse, between its petals, of a young woman’s face. When he wakes, Heinrich decides to go in search of that flower and that woman. This quest, a merging of dream and reality, constitutes the principal theme of German romanticism.

27. Pastoureau, Bleu, 134–41.

28. Text reproduced from Gérard de Nerval, The Chimeras; translated by Peter Jay, with an essay by Richard Holmes (London, 1984). 15.

29. M. Pastoureau, Une histoire symbolique du Moyen Âge occidental (Paris, 2004), 317–26 (“Nerval lecteur des images médiévales”).

30. C. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (Paris, 1857), 92 (“Les litanies de Satan”).

31. In his story “Smarra ou Les démons de la nuit” (1821), Charles Nodier seems to be the first French author to use the term fantastic as a noun and to give it the meaning it still has today. Before that it only existed as an adjective; it characterized what did not exist in reality, what was a matter of the imagination, and the “black” aspect of it was absent.

32. J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature; translated by Margaret Mauldon, edited with an introduction and notes by Nicholas White (Oxford, 1998), 11–12. This “meal of mourning” is the “announcement dinner for a virility momentarily dead” offered by the hero, Des Esseintes.

33. On Hamlet as Romantic hero: Harvey, Des hommes en noir, 105–16.

34. On this long-standing clothing phenomenon, ibid., 133–230.

Black - The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau

A Kinder, Gentler Military

   This of course is only one of numerous problems created by feminization and sexualization. Since the 1970s, it has seriously compromised US military strength and integrity. Standards have been lowered to accommodate women, and women have been exempted from requirements for men. “No sooner did many women begin to enter the armed forces during the 1970s than their presence started giving rise to endless, and continuing, trouble,” writes historian Martin van Creveld, who details “the damage that feminization is causing both in fiscal terms and from the point of view of fighting power.”207  Women have far higher rates of attrition, much greater need for medical care, much higher rates of nonavailability, lower rates of deployability, and of course less strength, endurance, and overall physical capacity. In training, less is expected of female recruits, standards are lowered both for them and for men in a futile pretense at uniformity, and resentment is inspired by men toward women and one another.208  Women require extensive accommodations in battlefield situations, alterations in military structure and organization, and expensive technological changes. Weapons and equipment are redesigned so women can use them, even when the results are inferior. Prior to deployments, women suddenly become pregnant in large numbers and are excused from duty. When combat commences, commanders are “flooded with requests from female soldiers for transfers to the rear.” With little fear of punishment, women simply refuse to participate in training exercises and battlefield operations, desert their posts, and break down in tears.209 

Predictably too, flirtations, romances, sex, and pregnancies quickly develop and further undermine effectiveness. Equally predictably, this in turn provides the material for further politicization — which also strikingly parallels the trajectory of welfare politics. When relationships go sour, accusations of gender crimes against servicemen are now routine: “sexual misconduct,” “sexual harassment,” sexual this and sexual that. Even more than in civilian life, the romance and indulgence create opportunities for feminists to launch accusations of pseudo-crimes against men and thereby also against military values. Rather than being presented as a breakdown of both standard military discipline and traditional sexual morality, the hanky-panky is “judged by newer, feminist standards, which came down hard on the men but went easy on the women.” The result offers huge opportunities to transform standard military discipline into ideological indoctrination. In meting out punishments, the Navy sent “a very important message” that it planned, not to restore traditional discipline, but to impose ideological conformity on its sailors and aviators and purge ideological heterodoxy. 

Extended witch hunts have driven decorated men from the services, including senior officers with distinguished careers: “men who were expert in performing their military missions, men whom the Navy had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to train, men with decades of experience, who had been tested in combat, and who had offered their lives in the service of their country.”210 

Not only in the US, but throughout the Western world, “[h]undreds of regulations aimed at defining, preventing, and punishing ‘sexual harassment’ were instituted,” van Creveld recounts. “In one military after another, ‘hot lines’ were opened to enable female soldiers to inform on their male comrades behind the latters’ backs.” The result now is that “[s]carcely a week goes by without some unfortunate male officer or soldier being accused of ‘sexual harassment’ and being hounded out of the services.” This happens “even if it was the woman who made the initial advances and seduced him, even if his record of service is otherwise excellent, often even if he is found innocent of the charges.”211 

Politicians, including conservative ones eager to display cheap chivalry, naturally weighed in on the side of ideological correctness and injustice. “Officials in Congress, the Pentagon, and the service academies are eager to establish ubiquitous ‘victim advocate’ offices, staffed by professionals [lawyers] who vow to protect military women from the slightest form of harassment, real or imagined,” writes Donnelly. “The same officials simultaneously promote the deliberate exposure of military women to extreme abuse and violence in close, lethal combat, where females do not have an equal opportunity to survive or to help fellow soldiers survive.”212 

Here again the Iron Law is operating. Having erected a “harassment” bureaucracy, the military command needed a problem to justify it. “Five women lined up and publicly accused Army investigators of trying to blackmail them into making false accusations of rape, and threatening to charge them with fraternization and sexual misconduct if they did not cooperate.” One sergeant was convicted, even though “one woman testified that she not only had sex ‘willingly’ but that investigators pressured her into accusing” him falsely. Mitchell characterizes the witch hunts as a “fear of being burned for not burning others,” reminiscent of the fervor driving civilian witch hunts. “Only accusers survive,” he concludes (much as we have seen with rape, campus rape, child abuse, domestic violence, and more). “Everyone else is a suspect.”213 

Here again, it is not only military men that are targeted, but also — with few noticing the sleight of hand — the very values on which military strength depends. “They cannot get a handle on this problem [of ‘sexual harassment’] because of a military culture that is macho,” says Karen Johnson of the National Organization for Women. What connection with reality does such a statement betray? The Army itself absorbs this thinking, becoming ashamed for “the encouragement of a ‘macho’ male image.” “There is nothing inherent in what the Army does that must be done in a masculine way,” argues a West Point study, apparently in all seriousness.214 

As we observed with the welfare state, only more so, the military’s necessarily authoritarian logic makes it the ideal prototype for the “Deep State.” Military discipline offers a unique machinery for social engineering. By necessity, military men are required to follow orders without objecting, and disobedience is severely punished. What better way to inculcate political ideology without dissent than to enforce it using military orders backed with the accompanying punishments? It is this logic, the same power to silence obvious objections and force servicemen to follow non-military orders, that now allows the “woke” state to force them to accept deadly and debilitating vaccine mandates. 

Looting Soldiers  As feminist welfare logic permeates the military, it creates a similar matriarchy with similar agendas of emasculation. It is eerie how faithfully the military has followed the political trajectory pioneered by the welfare machinery.

Even more than civilians, military men are sitting ducks for looting by divorce courts (see Chapter 6). It is no exaggeration to say that military service has been converted into a giant trap to tie the hands of servicemen so they cannot defend themselves as divorce lawyers plunder and criminalize them. “Sometimes I just feel like a sucker,” one veteran tells the Los Angeles Daily Breeze. “My government holds me and other vets in such contempt that it cannot lift a finger to stop a blatant fraud which victimizes tens of thousands of servicemen. Worse, the government actively enforces that fraud.”215  While risking life and limb for their country, servicemen are now routinely divorced unilaterally and without grounds, lose their children and everything else they possess, and even return home to face criminal sentences when they cannot pay the crushing child support imposed on them in their absence. 

Against this betrayal of fighting men, the military services and other institutions in the country for which they have risked their lives will provide no defense or assistance. On the contrary, officials are much more likely to assist the ex-wives and lawyers to ransack their comrades-in-arms. 

Vicariously divorced servicemen are criminally prosecuted for child-support arrearages that are almost impossible not to accrue while they are on duty. Reservists are hit especially hard because their child-support burdens are based on their civilian pay and do not decrease when their income decreases. “As a result, many reservists fall hopelessly behind while serving, and can be subject to arrest for nonpayment of child support upon their return,” write two columnists. “Even those returning servicemen who avoid jail or other sanctions may still spend years trying to pay off their child support debt — a debt created entirely by their willingness to serve their country.”216 

These men fight and die for their families and homes and freedom, all of which are being taken by feminist divorce courts. “Sometimes I wonder what I risked my life for,” one serviceman says. “I went [to Afghanistan] to fight for freedom but what freedom and what rights mean anything if a man doesn’t have the right to be a father to his own child?” Gordon Dollar was a reservist for sixteen years in the National Guard and Naval Reserves. “I’m getting out, and they can go recruit some judge’s son/daughter to go die for the ridiculous laws they enforce,” he tells researcher David Usher. “I regret that I ever served this nation.”217

Who Lost America? ...

Stephen Baskerville 

On Akhmatova

 HINSEY: Akhmatova was born in 1889 and by the time of the revolution, her ethical and aesthetic beliefs were already firmly established—  VENCLOVA: Akhmatova was a living link to a different era, not just the Silver Age, but the entire tradition of Russian culture. First of all, she represented St. Petersburg and its heritage extending back to Pushkin—even to Kantemir, the first professional Russian poet under Peter the Great. It was a poetic as well as an ethical legacy: namely, loyalty to one’s friends, stubborn yet calm resistance to the violence of the state, and, last but not least, irony and self-irony. Here, one might even go further back—to the archpriest Avvakum and his follower Morozova, two seventeenth-century martyrs whom Akhmatova mentioned more than once. In short, she stood for a hierarchy of values: good and evil had to be called by their names, period. Through communicating with her, one became aware that this ethical hierarchy was intimately—if not necessarily directly—connected with authentic poetry. These convictions were a potent antidote to the moral collapse during the Soviet period—as well as to Soviet or semi-Soviet literature.  HINSEY: Nadezhda Mandelstam says that she and Akhmatova were very concerned with the question of “what constitutes courage.” They came to the conclusion that “courage, daring, and fortitude were not synonymous.” What do you think was the source of Akhmatova’s strength?  VENCLOVA: I would say its distinguishing feature was fortitude. Courage and daring are morally neutral qualities—they were also found in many revolutionaries whose actions, in the final account, promoted evil. Fortitude, on the other hand, is usually a sign of moral strength. Soviet dissidents were courageous by definition—and daring more often than not—but many of them lacked fortitude, leading to breakdowns, which at times discredited the cause. This was not the case with these two old women who were brought up according to the prerevolutionary tradition with its Judeo-Christian roots. Brodsky said once of Nadezhda Mandelstam that she was one of the very few people for whom the Ten Commandments were still in force. Akhmatova possibly even surpassed her in this respect.  HINSEY: Having reflected upon the subject for many years, why do you think that Akhmatova was never arrested?  VENCLOVA: The Stalinist terror was a sort of lottery: one might be completely loyal and perish nevertheless. Conversely, one might be considered an “enemy of the people” and survive. I believe this arbitrariness was part of the strategy: no one could be sure of his or her fate, which worked perfectly to Stalin’s advantage. Moreover, Stalin was rather well-informed about literature, and generally understood the relative value of various authors. Figures such as Pasternak, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, or Platonov were preferable to hack writers, particularly if they could be transformed into bards for the regime (in the cases of Bulgakov and Pasternak, Stalin very nearly succeeded). Finally, there was also a sadistic element. Akhmatova lost her husband and several people she loved. Her son was imprisoned, then released, only to be imprisoned again. She was vilified in the official press and school textbooks, and for decades she was forbidden to publish her work. This was perhaps worse than execution—or a prison camp—where one might be more quickly put out of one’s misery.  HINSEY: Akhmatova was sought out by younger writers for advice about their poetry, and she was always very tactful. However, it became known that she had a series of prepared answers with which to respond. Could you explain how this worked?  VENCLOVA: Akhmatova was a good storyteller and possessed numerous real-life anecdotes that she would recite verbatim. She liked to call these her “gramophone recordings.” In the 1960s, she was literally besieged by young people who wished to acquaint her with their scribblings and hoped for encouragement from her. (Once, my friend Evgeny Levitin, an art critic, was introduced to her. After exchanging preliminary courtesies, Akhmatova said: “Well, go ahead and read your poems.” “What poems?” Levitin replied, “I have never written a line of poetry in my life!” “Glory to God Almighty!” she exclaimed, “at last a normal person!”) However, she took pity on young artists and had a fixed set of polite answers with which to respond to their efforts. These were also a type of “gramophone recording.” If she said, for instance, “Your rhymes are astonishing,” or “You are a master of metaphor,” it meant that your poems left much to be desired, after which you would consider throwing yourself into the Neva. If, however, the writing was good, she would remark: “There is some mystery in these poems.” That was what she said to young Brodsky, and to Natasha Gorbanevskaya as well.  HINSEY: In the preceding chapter, we spoke about Akhmatova’s admiration for Solzhenitsyn’s prose. But there is the famous story about him showing her some of his poetry—  VENCLOVA: Solzhenitsyn started out as a poet while in the Gulag—his verses (some of which have now been published) were straightforward and principally political. He was already a celebrity when he came to visit Akhmatova. While she highly valued his prose writings, she could not conceal her disappointment in his poetry. She said: “Well, your poems are somewhat lacking in mystery.” Solzhenitsyn retorted: “Well, Anna Andreyevna, perhaps your poems have too much mystery in them.”

Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova

Subversive trousers

 

January, 1961: a cold, even glacial winter. The heavy snow that had fallen soon after the Christmas festivities did not melt and the streets and pavements were particularly slippery. I was a third-year pupil at the Lycée Michelet in Vanves, in a mixed class, which was a rare phenomenon in such secondary schools, where girls were definitely less numerous than boys and were only accepted in the bottom four classes. In public establishments, mixed classes in the last two years of education were considered to be dangerous. As a general rule, the girls were not allowed to come to school wearing trousers. Only tracksuit bottoms were tolerated, for physical education classes. For the rest of the time skirts or dresses were compulsory. However, one exception could be made: on extremely cold days, trousers were allowed, so long as they were not blue jeans, a garment that was considered to be unsuitable or even subversive.

Despite that tolerance, on one Tuesday morning two sisters, one a pupil in my class, the other in the second-year class, were denied access to the school. They had arrived in trousers and, although these were not jeans, the door-keeper watchdogs decided that their apparel was ‘disgraceful’ (!) and sent them packing. The next day, the affair turned bitter, children’s parents became involved, petitions began to circulate, and so did rumours. Some of the ‘big’ boys in the top and second-to-top classes imagined the trousers in question to be titillating, possibly very tight or adorned with frills and flounces. The younger boys, for their part, found it hard to understand why trousers could create such a stir, especially since both the excluded girls were shy and well-behaved and were also good pupils. Fortunately, the argument did not last and the affair died down. The administration retreated and so did the cold weather. It was only when my classmate returned, one week later, that I learned the real reason for the scandal: the trousers were red.

No red in a lycée of the French Republic! At least, no red clothing. That was the ministerial order of the day for the school-year of 1960–1. To be sure, there was no textual expression of this rule, but the tacit prohibition almost had the force of law. In point of fact, in the lower classes of the school, I cannot remember seeing any of my school-mates wearing red. But in the upper classes I do remember the red scarf of one of our art-teachers, a handsome hunk of a grouch, invariably clad in corduroy so as to look like an inspired artist. The scarf took the place of the tie that he never wore. His son, a young fool of my own age, copied the gear of his father, but, as far as I remember, his scarf was a totally ordinary brown colour.

I do not think that the trousers worn by the girls who were sent home were a violent or aggressive red, such as the red favoured by that artteacher. They were probably a dark, matt, dull red that was widely worn in those days – unless, that is, they were tapering ski-pants, in which case they may have been a brighter, more vermilion ‘winter-sports’ red. But what did the door-keeper and his henchmen – and, higher up, the school administration – really fear would happen if they allowed two children thus dressed to enter the school? What harm would it have done? I hardly think that anyone could have interpreted the colour of the material worn by two pupils aged 11 and 14 as an expression of Communist ideology, a particularly disquieting kind of political and militant red. Even the school administration would not have gone as far as that. Or at least that would not have been their point of view. What obsessed them were not politics, but mores. Any time that a general school supervisor took a child guilty of serious misbehaviour to see the school official in charge of discipline, announcing in ritual fashion that ‘this pupil has committed a very serious mistake’, the disciplinarian, alarmed or even horrified, would ask: ‘Is it a matter of morality?’ When the supervisor hastened to assure him that it was not, he would emit a sigh of relief and the misdemeanour, however serious, would be half-forgiven. In any case, in that winter of 1960–1, no-one – or hardly anyone – in our school was interested in politics, since the danger, for the government, came not from the Communists, but from the OAS [Organisation armée secrète, the terrorist organisation opposed to Algerian independence], which had nothing to do with the colour red.

So the reasons for the rejection of red in educational institutions were more likely to be found in a particular, vague and distant imaginary representation of that colour. Without anyone really being able to explain why, red, in those days – indeed, still today and always – was regarded as a dangerous and transgressive colour. More or less consciously, its everyday symbolism suggested fire and blood, violence and warfare, wrongdoing and sin. Red was too dense, too strong, too attractive, so was set apart from other colours and was hardly granted any place in daily life. For example, it was less present than it is today in the streets (where it is still uncommon). In primary and secondary schools, in note books, hand-outs and exercise books, the only function of red was to correct mistakes, to point something out or to indicate a punishment. It was an unrewarding role for a colour that, elsewhere, was often held to be the most beautiful of all.

THE COLOURS OF OUR MEMORIES

Michel Pastoureau

Translated by Janet Lloyd

On Braudel

 In 1936, during the long voyage back to Brazil in a cargo boat, he told his wife that he had decided to make the Mediterranean the centre of his research. A year later he was offered and accepted a post with a much lower salary at the main research centre in Paris, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, in one of the two nonscientific sections, the IVe Section (historical and philological sciences). By chance the boat on which he and his wife travelled home from Brazil in 1937 was carrying Lucien Febvre back from a lecture tour in Buenos Aires; during the two-week voyage they became close friends. Febvre, now aged sixty and a professor at the Collège de France, had been one of the two young professors at Strasbourg who founded the polemical journal Annales in 1929. The journal sought to create a new and more open approach to history in a provocatively colloquial style, an approach defined mostly by its search for “a larger and a more human history” (Marc Bloch), by its denial of all historical barriers and by its rejection of the traditional history of politics and government in favour of a deeper analysis of social and economic forces. From this time on Febvre became Braudel’s friend, intellectual adviser and confidant.

When war began, Braudel was mobilised in the artillery and stationed on the frontier in Alsace; he saw no fighting, but he was forced to surrender after the Germans encircled the French army. Despite the armistice, in 1940 he was imprisoned at Mainz, where he remained until 1942. Then he was denounced by fellow officers as being a supporter of De Gaulle rather than Pétain and sent to a special “discipline camp” for “enemies of Germany” at Lübeck. He remained until 1945. He was reasonably happy amid all sorts of “dissidents”—partisans of De Gaulle, French Jewish officers, sixty-seven French priests of all descriptions, escapees, “all the best types in the French army,” together with English airmen and Dutch, Swedish and Polish officers. He only missed the German books that he could find in the municipal library of Mainz.

It was during these four years of captivity that Braudel wrote the first  draft of his monumental work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Assisted by a few books, but using mainly his prodigious memory of his prewar researches, he constructed a work that combined a vast chronological and historical sweep with a mass of minute details, covering the entire Mediterranean world from the Renaissance to the sixteenth century. This immense intellectual achievement was written in exercise books on a small plank in a room shared with twenty prisoners. At intervals parcels of the manuscript would arrive in Paris for criticism by Febvre; by the end of the war the work was finished, only to be rewritten at the rate of thirty to fifty pages a day until it was finally presented in 1947 as a thesis of 1,160 pages.

The transformation of Braudel’s thought in captivity remains a mystery, although recent publications of writing from this period offer some insights. In one sense The Mediterranean was, as he said, “a work of contemplation,” his escape into a world that he could control and whose detailed realities he could believe in with greater ease than the artificial world of prison life. In 1941 he wrote a rare letter from Mainz to his wife (who was living in Algeria): “As always I am reading, writing, working. I have decided to expand my work to the period from 1450 to 1650: one must think big, otherwise what is the point of history?” In the two camps he gave miniature university lectures to his fellow prisoners. Notebooks containing the text of some of these have been discovered and were published in 1997. They show that the reflective experience of prison was crucial to his historical thought, for in these lectures he sets out virtually all the great themes that he presented after the war.

Shortly before the presentation of his thesis, Braudel had been passed over as Professor of History at the Sorbonne in favour of a more conventional historian. At his rival’s viva voce examination, he sought to justify the choice, telling Braudel: “You are a geographer; allow me to be the historian.” In retrospect it is clear that this moment marked a turning point in the intellectual history of France: over the next thirty years the Sorbonne stagnated as a conservative backwater, while outside the university system Braudel proceeded to construct his great empire of “the human sciences,” and to open a series of vistas that could perhaps never have found their place within a more conventional university atmosphere, where orthodoxy in teaching was valued above originality of ideas.

Braudel made his reputation with The Mediterranean, which was published in 1949; a second revised and reorganised edition was published in 1966, in preparation for the American edition of 1973, in the magnificent  translation of Siân Reynolds (who takes leave of Braudel with the present book). With this new edition Braudel became the best-known historian in the world. My generation was brought up to believe in the words of its preface: the old history of events was indeed dead, “the action of a few princes and rich men, the trivia of the past, bearing little relation to the slow and powerful march of history … those statesmen were, despite their illusions, more acted upon than actors.” In their place Braudel offered not “the traditional geographical introduction to history that often figures to so little purpose at the beginning of so many books, with its description of the mineral deposits, types of agriculture and typical flora, briefly listed and never mentioned again, as if the flowers did not come back every spring, the flocks of sheep migrate every year, or the ships sail on a real sea that changes with the seasons,” but a whole new way of looking at the past, in which the historian recreated a lost reality through a feat of historical imagination based on detailed knowledge of the habits and techniques of the ploughman, the shepherd, the potter, and the weaver, the skills of the vintage and the olive press, the milling of corn, the keeping of records of bills of lading, tides and winds. It began to seem as important for a historian to be able to ride a horse or sail a ship as to sit in a library. Only the third section of Braudel’s book returned to the history of events, “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” Braudel taught us to see that historical time was divided into three forms of movement—geographical time, social time, and individual time—but that beyond all this the past was a unity and a reality. All these movements belonged together: “history can do more than study walled gardens.”

This was the ultimate expression of the intellectual ambitions of the Annales school, which was reborn after the war and the Nazi execution of Marc Bloch, one of its two founders and a hero of the resistance. Braudel became a member of the Annales editorial board. Meanwhile, in i947, a new section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études had been formed (with the help of money from the Rockefeller Foundation): the famous VIe Section in social sciences, with Febvre as its president and Braudel as his assistant. In 1949 Braudel was elected to the Collége de France, and in the same year he was given the immensely powerful position of president of the agrégation in history, the general qualifying examination for teaching in secondary schools. His reforms were resisted by the conservatives, but they could not dislodge him until 1955. The record of what he sought to achieve is contained in his little textbook for teachers called Grammar of Civilizations (written between  1962 and 1963, republished in 1987), designed to introduce contemporary history and world history to the school curriculum. History was divided into six civilizations—Western, Soviet, Muslim, the Far East, southeast Asia, and black Africa, all of course of relevance to a France still, at least in memory, committed to its status as a colonial power. Braudel’s attempts at reform were destroyed by an unholy alliance of right and left, for he was one of the few French intellectuals who belonged to neither camp. He was therefore hated by Georges Pompidou, who held proto-Thatcherite views on the unimportance of all history apart from the history of one’s own country and who irrationally regarded Braudel as responsible for the events of 1968. At the same time Braudel was denounced by orthodox communists as “a willing slave of American imperialism.”

Lucien Febvre died in 1956, and Braudel inherited the direction of both the Ecole Pratique and the journal Annales. In the first institution he created and fostered one of the most extraordinary collections of talent in the twentieth century through his appointments: to mention only the most famous of his colleagues, they included the historians Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Maurice Aymard; the philosophers Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault; the psychologists Jacques Lacan and Georges Devereux; the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; and the classical scholars Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Braudel worked hard to create a separate institution or building where all his colleagues could work together, and where a succession of foreign visitors could be invited as associate professors; this idea, begun about 1958, did not achieve physical shape until the opening of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in 1970. And it was only after he retired in 1972 that the VIe Section finally metamorphosed into its present status as a new and independent teaching institution, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

In and through Annales Braudel sought to promote and defend his conception of history. For thirty years the great debates on the nature of history took place in its pages. In retrospect one can see four successive but overlapping issues with which he engaged.

The first debate was provoked by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s claims that the theory of structuralism offered an explanation of human social organisation. Braudel had been possibly the first historian to use the word structure in his original thesis, but he saw that the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss was fundamentally antihistorical, in that it sought to explain all human societies  in terms of a single theory of structures. The notions of difference and of change that are basic to all historical thought were simply dismissed as irrelevant to the search for a universal underlying structure, which existed in the human mind if not in the physical universe itself. Against this, in a famous article in Annales (1958) on the “longue durée” Braudel sought to explain his own historical conception of the varieties of underlying forces influencing human society, which he had already formulated during the writing of his thesis in relation to the static forces and the slow movements behind the ephemeral history of events. Braudel’s conception of the longue durée (usually translated rather misleadingly as “the long perspective”) is not easy to express in non-historical terms as a theoretical concept; it is the recognition that human society develops and changes at different rates in relation to different underlying forces, and that all the elements within any human situation interact with one another. There are underlying geographical constraints; there are natural regularities of behaviour related to every activity, whether climatic or seasonal or conventional; there are social customs; there are economic pressures; and there are short-term events in history with their resulting consequences—battles, conquests, powerful rulers, reforms, earthquakes, famines, diseases, tribal loves and hatreds. To translate the messy complications that constitute the essence of history into a general theory is impossible, and this fact represents the ultimate problem of trying to subsume history within any abstract theory, from whatever philosophical or sociological or anthropological source it is derived.

The second debate concerned quantitative history: after The Mediterranean Braudel became more and more attracted to the idea of quantification in economic history, the notion that history could become scientifically respectable through the use of graphs and tables and the collection of hard quantifiable data. It took the example of his disciple Pierre Chaunu, who sought to surpass Braudel with his immense work of 7,800 pages on Seville and the Atlantic trade (finally published in 1963) to convince Braudel that something was missing from this type of statistical history. History was something more than the effect of the fluctuations in the Spanish-American trade or the economic boom and decline of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was in response to this debate that Braudel wrote his second great work, translated as Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (1982). The first volume of this work was originally published in 1967 and translated into English as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400—1800 (1973). It presented a vivid picture of social life and its structures before the Industrial Revolution, in  terms of population, bread, food and drink, fashion, housing, energy sources, technology, money, cities and towns. This was revised and incorporated into a three-volume work with a one-word addition to the title: Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism (1979). The work now approached the whole question of the origins of modern world capitalism. The second volume dealt with the organisation of commerce, manufacture and capitalism, the third with the growth of a world economy and world trade. His conclusion was both historical and practical: it is small-scale business and freedom of trade that both produce and sustain capitalism, not state enterprise or large-scale capitalism. Without the independent small artisan and the merchant-shopkeeper no economic system can survive, and these smaller entities are embedded in the social fabric so that society and economy can never be separated from each other. His work stands therefore as a refutation through the study of history of both communism and capitalism.

The third issue with which Braudel was involved was a consequence of his growing distance from the most talented historians whom he had called to join him in the management of Annales. The new history of the sixties turned away from the factual certainties of economic and descriptive social history, and explored the “history of mentalities.” The historical world was created out of perceptions, not out of events, and we needed to recognise that the whole of history was a construct of human impressions. The crucial problem for a history that still sought a degree of certainty and an escape from arbitrariness or fiction was to analyse the mental world that created an age or a civilisation. It was the medieval historians Duby, Le Goff and Ladurie who pioneered this approach from 1961 onward; it meant a whole-scale return to the old German conceptions of cultural history, and to the use of literary and artistic sources alongside archival material. This was perhaps one of Braudel’s blind spots: to him, it was the realities of peasant or merchant existence that mattered, not the way that they might be expressed inartistic or literary form. He was also more and more interested in the global sweep and saw the detailed studies of the mental world of small communities undertaken by his colleagues as a betrayal of the grand vision. As he said to Ladurie in relation to his famous book Montaillou, “We brought history into the dining room; you are taking it into the bedroom.” His disapproval of these trends cost him the direction of his journal, and by 1969 he had abandoned Annales, sidelined by those whose careers he had started and whom he had originally invited to join him.

Braudel’s reply to this development was long in coming and remains incomplete; it was his last great projected work, The Identity of France. Three  volumes were published before his death, comprising the first two parts on geography and demography and economy: these were for him traditional territory. With the third and fourth he would be entering new territory by writing about the state, culture, and society, and in the fourth about “France outside France.” Fragments of the third volume were published in 1997. They suggest that in this last work he intended to confound his critics by proving that the “mentality” of France was contained within its physical, social and economic history. The peasant was the key to the history of France, and a true history of mentalities could only be written in the longue durée and from a long perspective. History must do more than study walled gardens.

The difficulty of translating longue durée with the phrase “the long perspective” reveals another problem that was perhaps to emerge in the later debates with Michel Foucault. Braudel never claimed that his categories were absolute. They were only means of organising the explanatory factors in any situation, but equally he was not prepared to see them simply as constructs fashioned by the observer for his immediate purposes. However indeterminate and changeable, they did possess a real existence as forces in the field of history. This was challenged by the theories and methods of Foucault in his Words and Things (1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). The idea of historical relativity introduced in these works and adopted by postmodern historians took one step beyond the history of mentalities. Not only did the uncertainty contained in the study of history rest on its derivation from a set of human impressions rather than facts: the crucial role in this process belonged to the historian as interpreter. Indeed, the whole organisation of knowledge could be seen as a construction designed to control the world. History, like all the social sciences, was an aspect of power, so that history was both the history of forms of control and itself a form of control, not an innocent activity. All this is still highly controversial today, but it was of course one step worse for Braudel than the history of mentalities. The historian was no longer the innocent observer but himself complicitous in society’s attempt to marginalize groups such as the women, aboriginal peoples, the mad, criminals, and homosexuals, and through its control of the psychology of humanity to construct mechanisms of social power—or ultimately (in Foucault’s last work) a more beneficent form of the control of the self. Moreover, Foucault singled out the Braudelian conception of history for special attack: it was ideas and the sudden rupture created by them (exemplified in his own books), not the long perspective, which mattered in a history dominated by random change, by discontinuities instead of structures.

 This theoretical debate had just begun in 1968. Braudel was giving a lecture series in Chicago when he was recalled to face—at the age of sixty-two—the revolutionary student movement, Like many radical professors he was sympathetic but uncomprehending of the anarchic streak in youthful protest; his interventions were paternalistic and not well received, and later he condemned the revolution because it made people less rather than more happy. He could not understand the desire to destroy everything that he had personally tried to build outside the university system of which both he and they disapproved, or their contempt for facts and research in face of neocommunist and anarchist ideas.

More dangerous still for Braudel was the reaction, which brought the conservatives under Pompidou to power, and which placed the blame, not on their own resistance to change, but on those who had tried to encourage change. Had not the “events” of 1968 proved the importance of the history of events? Where now was the long perspective? “Has Structuralism Been Killed by May ‘68?,” as a headline in Le Monde put it in November of that year. Either the new history (whatever it was) was responsible for the “events,” or it was disproved by them. As a conservative you could have it both ways, and both implicated Braudel along with all his intellectual opponents. This was of course to accuse the Enlightenment of causing the French Revolution, but the claim was successful in blocking Braudel’s access to government circles almost for the first time in his career. The university conservatives had indeed lost, and the old Sorbonne was swept away, but they also had their revenge on the man who was most responsible for establishing their irrelevance to modern life.

Braudel ended his life as he began it, as an outsider, but not unhappy with this fate. He had always believed in the importance of accepting reality and the relative powerlessness of the individual in the face of his circumstances, even though he had himself ruled French intellectual life “as a prince” for a generation. Above all, despite his recognition of the importance of the grand vision and the power of the longue durée and of structures, he had always upheld that crucial historical value, the centrality of the individual as the subject of history; not the individual great man but the anonymous yet real peasant, the ordinary unknown man. In this sense he remains more truly revolutionary than any of his opponents on the left or the right.

How powerful the legacy of Braudel, and especially of his Mediterranean, still is and how modern its conception still appears, can be seen by considering its  impact on two recent books. The first is Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples (200i), in which Cunliffe seeks to do for the Atlantic what Braudel once did for the Mediterranean. The title of his last chapter makes explicit reference to Braudel’s longue durée. The second is the latest book on the Mediterranean, whose first volume appeared in the year 2000, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. For all its immense learning and resolute up-to-dateness, this work too is inconceivable without the example of Braudel: it is an attempt to answer the same questions as Braudel for the centuries before the age of Philip II. When we were young we all of us indeed dreamed of writing a book on the Mediterranean that would replace in its title Philip II of Spain with that earlier Philip II of Macedon.

It is not therefore surprising that this work, Braudel’s Memory and the Mediterranean, although it was originally writtena generation ago, can still serve as a model. This little book exemplifies all the ideas that Braudel believed in, and for that reason it is richer than most of the detailed books by experts written both before and since its composition. It contains all those elements that he taught us to respect, and offers new surprises. The first is its scope and its exemplification of the meaning of the longue durée. A history of the ancient Mediterranean would normally begin with the Minoan age, or not earlier than 2000 B.C.; Braudel invites us to consider the Mediterranean, not geographically, but as a historical phenomenon beginning in the Paleolithic age or even with the start of geological time; as he points out, the historical period of classical civilization belongs in the last two minutes of the year, and the last two chapters of his book. How Braudel would have relished the new perspectives on the early stages of evolution and the biological history of the universe that are being revealed by the new uses of genetics in archaeology and evolutionary biology. How he would have loved the enrichment of our knowledge of the origins of human art in the Paleolithic age with the new discoveries of the Grotte Chauvet in the Ardèche.

Braudel’s picture also invites us to consider the Mediterranean in its broadest geographical context, inclusive of the great civilisations of Iraq and Egypt, the steppes of Russia, the forests of Germany, and the deserts of the Sahara. For him Mediterranean history is an aspect of world history. Within the context of human history he emphasises two themes. The first is what I would call the reality principle. Human history is a history of technological mastery and the development of the skills basic to ancient civilisation: fire and water technology, pottery, weaving, metalworking, seafaring and finally  writing. This emphasis on the physical realities of early civilisations brings out the actual quality of life with a vividness that no amount of reading other books can achieve. The second is the importance of exchange, especially longdistance exchange: “Our sea was from the very dawn of its protohistory a witness to those imbalances productive of change which would set the rhythm of its entire life.” It is imbalance that creates exchange and therefore leads to progress. These two ideas, first formulated in The Mediterranean and subsequently explored in depth in for the preindustrial world in Civilization and Capitalism, are here applied to the ancient Mediterranean with magnificent effect. This deceptively modest book is indeed the work of the greatest historian of the twentieth century, and the new poem by Christopher Logue will serve as a fitting preamble.*.

Oswyn Murray

Memory and the Mediterranean by Fernand Braudel.

The paticcasamuppāda formulation (as I see it) does not admit of alternative interpretations—there is one and one only

 

In any case, the paticcasamuppāda formulation (as I see it) does not admit of alternative interpretations—there is one and one only. I do not see that anyone offering a number of different interpretations as equally valid can possibly be right in any of them. (It is quite possible that someone actually reaching sotãpatti, and therefore seeing paticcasamuppāda for himself, might still hesitate before deciding on the meaning of the expanded—twelve term—formulation, since what he sees for himself is imasmin sati idam hoti,* etc., and not its expansion in terms—avijjā, sankhārā, and so on—whose meaning he may not know. But one thing is certain: whatever interpretation he gives will be in conformity with his private knowledge, imasmin sati…, and since he has already grasped the essence of the matter he will not look around for alternative interpretations.) But the Ven. Thera may have had something else in mind when he spoke.

Nanavira Thera
**
As I see it at present, the importance of the paṭicca-samuppāda lies not so much in the twelve (or less or more) members as in the relationship imasmiṃ sati … (and its undoing imasmiṃ asati) which is underlined in DN 15. This firstly implies complexity in experience (no complexity: no experience). The choice of the “12 members” is less philosophical than psychological, which is why it is variable. The undoing, as I see it, is the “detail of voidness,” which is the ethical key to the, Dhamma, since it is the “Abschattung” (shading off. —Ed.) of voidness in saṃsāra itself that renders it impossible in the Dhamma to ascribe absolutiveness to any particular value (such as divine grace, justice, etc.) and so enter upon the “War of philosophical systems of the absolute.” The formula imasmiṃ sati, …’ (applied psychologically by a choice of interrelated-instances) is used as an instrument in DN 15 to describe and analyse the mental process of naming (function of nāma-rūpa) and language (nirutti, etc.), and in MN 38 to describe and analyse the peculiar nature of consciousness (viññāṇa) in its constitutive relationship (through mediate states) to being. But both can only be studied in the Pali with careful discrimination of roots…

Nanamoli Thera*

* On his understanding of the paṭicca-samuppāda:

According to Ven Nanamoli, regarding dependent arising, «To the question: “What are these sets of terms intended to describe?”

we may answer tentatively that they are intended to describe experience of any possible kind where ignorance (that is lack of personal realization of the Truths) is present. »

“The Buddha’s purpose is to describe enough of the world to be able to show how suffering can be ended, not to produce full and detailed elaborations, which would be endless and arrive nowhere.”

For him, one can equalise suffering and conceit “I am”, nibbana is the cessation of asmimāna (AN 9:1O one who perceives non-self eradicates the conceit ‘I am,’ [which is] nibbāna here and now.”) Since Suttas define also nibbana as the cessation of bhava (… I know this, I see this: ‘Nibbāna is the cessation of bhava.’” (bhavanirodho nibbānaṃ) SN 12: 68) Ven Nanamoli emphasis the necessity to translate bhava as being:

I argue, to translate (even to interpret to oneself) bhava by ‘becoming’ is an opiate that leaves the illusion of ‘being’ untreated.

According to Ven Nanamoli dependent arising «is not a logical proposition, nor is it a temporal cause-result chain. Such an approach makes an understanding of it impossible.»

As I understand him, he sees dependent arising as a kind of mirror where one can see one’s own ignorance, namely that what was previously taken for granted: one’s own being ( “I am” ) as impermanent, suffering, and dependently arisen upon ignorance. When paticcasamuppada is seen as a process, immediate dependence of one’s own being on ignorance disappears from the vision, so he says: “Such an approach makes an understanding of it impossible”.

As to details he suggests that the Buddha, by the way, has solved seemingly unsolvable philosophical problem:

«But this particular description (dependent arising) is aimed at including everything.

And here a difficulty arises. A description must be made in terms of something other than what it describes, or it is not a description. It has to reproduce in other material certain structures that are in what it describes. This fact makes it impossible for a description to be a description and complete at the same time. How is the D/O complete, then? Or is it not a description after all?

It is in fact both, but it attains that in a rather peculiar way. (…)

The right way of treating this fact is to take the D/O, not as an individual description, but as an integrated set of descriptions. Each member provides in fact a set of terms to describe the rest of the world. Together they cover the whole subjective/objective, positive/negative world.»

According to Ven Nanamoli the relationship between these descriptive items is that of sine qua non.

So for example “with feeling as a condition craving” is not description of temporal process where something is first felt, and than it leads to craving -at least as far as dependent arising goes- but that of dependence, structurally craving can arise only when feeling is present, without feeling there is no possibility of craving to arise. Such vision, unlike cause and effect interpretation makes possible to see now and here one’s own death as impermanent and dependently arisen: as unborn, I cannot die, and to see the body as “this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self” should undermine one’s own certainty of being born.

In other words, Ven Nanamoli regards the death as merely certain event in the field of consciousness, which can be observed objectively, but not experienced subjectively. More or less in the same way as I cannot imagine my own death, however well I exercise my imagination, observing funeral, “my own” dead body and so on, I will always survive as the observer. So he says using so called indirect communication:

In a syllogism (1. All men are mortal. 2. Socrates is a man. 3.Therefore Socrates is mortal), the generalization (all men are mortal) must have been arrived at by induction. No inductive process is ever absolutely certain. There is always the leap, the assumption, of generalizing and therefore one of the premises of a syllogism must have an element of uncertainty. So it cannot prove anything with certainty.

A syllogism is therefore a signpost pointing where to look for direct experience, but can inherently never give information that is 100% certain. But a syllogism (on metaphysical subjects) can also point to what can, inherently, never be experienced; then it is an anomaly.

In other place he says: All the questions asked about death are wrongly put.

All informations provided here can be found in the Thinker’s Notebook, perhaps except an idea of sine qua non relationship between the items of dependent arising, which as far as I remember can be found somewhere in his translation of the Neti."

Tucker Carlson: "You sort of wonder, like, where are the dads here?" Is he himself among the missing?

 

Tucker Carlson is appropriately indignant that public school teachers are using their classrooms to sexualize schoolchildren. He seems genuinely perplexed as to why we allow such an obviously disgusting practice and especially why “parents” allow this to be done to their own children. Frustrated, he adds:

Adults are not allowed to get involved in the sex lives of children unless they’re the parents of those children, period. … I am just against, across the board, creepy teachers talking to other people’s children about those children’s sex lives. That is totally wrong. … I think it’s a crime, and I don’t think any normal father would put up with that. And you sort of wonder, like, where are the dads here, saying, “You talk to my child about his sex life one more time, I’m gonna hurt you”?

Does he really not know? Can such an intelligent commentator on public affairs really be so clueless about “the biggest social issue…facing America”? I realize that the word “parents” still invokes images of two-parent families in suburban houses, as in 1950s television series. Does he really not know that very few such “parents” exist anymore and the few that do remain do not put their children in public schools?

Does he not know — to answer his question — that the dads have either been thrown out of their homes by welfare agencies and divorce courts or were never allowed in in the first place or are so intimidated and emasculated by the possibility of being ejected that they can do nothing to protect their children from this and worse? Many are not allowed even to see their children or know what happens to them in public school, let alone rescue them from it.

I suspect he does know, when he stops to think about it. I think he knows, because for years his commentaries have been laced with little asides indicating that he knows — and cares. He also interviewed Dennis Hannon and Jeffrey Younger, both of whose sons were ordered to be castrated and physically turned into girls by feminist judges. (Neither interview led to a larger investigation of why courts can issue such orders.) In fact, I am certain he knows, because, years ago, he invited me onto his public broadcasting show to discuss my first book on the systematic elimination and destruction of fathers by family courts. That was just before he was dismissed from that network, and the interview never took place. Nor did any other.

So why is he perplexed and why does he persist in this illusion?

Clearly, he is afraid. He may also be a little embarrassed that he has conspicuously never investigated this. Many of us see Carlson as a cut above other journalists, even dissident ones. But in this case he adamantly refuses to “go there”. And he is not alone. The almighty and lucrative divorce juggernaut terrifies far above any other government operation: far more than the FBI, CIA, or Homeland Security. It is the most repressive government machinery ever created in the United States, and it operates with no scrutiny precisely because it intimidates — and yes, emasculates — even the most stout-hearted men, including politicians, journalists, academics, and other public figures with more to lose.

Elsewhere, Carlson himself expresses the impact not just on fathers themselves but on the most powerful men throughout our society, including Republican and conservative politicians, who often talk big about “manhood” and scold others for their alleged deficiency of it, but who are themselves too feminized to act against the government officials and policies that undermine it, even though scrutinizing the abuse of power is their job: “They’re weak,” Carlson says. “They’ve decided, ‘The other side is ascended.  The Left is winning.  I’m not gonna push any buttons that might infuriate them.’  They’re not lion-hearted.”

Tellingly, he adds, “The only ones who will do it are women.”

Tucker Carlson does an excellent job of telling us all about the foolish and destructive things being done by leftists in power. (I think most people would surely agree that sexualizing and mutilating children tops the list.) Where he has been less successful is telling us why they are allowed to get away with it and how we can stop them. Destroying men, fathers, and masculinity is more than a tangential reason, and he surely realizes this or he would not drop so many hints about it.

Carlson stands at a threshold. If he can summon the courage to answer his own question with the depth he applies to say, the joys of rural life, he will have earned the gratitude of not only Americans, but the world. If not, it may be time for us to find another journalist in shining plaids.

https://substack.com/redirect/d8584b66-8b06-4afc-a766-4cee5cdae79a?j=eyJ1IjoiMXBvcTY0In0.bpX_Ri4UrVVzEcwn2tPJZmntoRqzSx0aLRc9mOX6Iw8

Mark Collett Starmer’s Guide to Rioting – Two Tier Policing Explained

[In this video Mark Collett, leader of the pro-White British nationalist movement, Patriotic Alternative, says:

“Britain’s system of two-tier policing has now been exposed to the world – but what are the rules? How can you get away with rioting and destroying public property? Who gets a ‘free pass’ and which rioters does Starmer and his cabinet cheer on? Find out all this and much, much more…”

– KATANA]

TRANSCRIPT
(Words: 1,922 – 12:03 mins)

So, let’s take ten minutes or so to just go through exactly how the UK’s two-tier justice system works when it comes to the rights of protestors, or if those involved are White “rioters”.

And that’s a nice place to kick this off, with the issue of race and ethnicity – because let’s face it, how you are treated largely depends upon your ethnic background.

If you are black, if you are a Muslim, or if you are from a minority background, you’re getting an immediate pass. You will always be referred to as a “protester”, any acts of violence or disorder that you are involved in will be down played or completely ignored by the State and the media, and the police will treat you with kid gloves. You won’t be faced down with riot police, instead you will likely be greeted by police officers in regular uniform who will back off and retreat rather than confronting you.

What’s more, if you’re of Afro-Caribbean heritage and you’re rioting over the death of a black career criminal, the police will get down on their knees and grovel in front of you, begging for your approval!

The media and the government will then go to great lengths to explain to the wider public the apparently completely understandable and totally legitimate reasoning behind any acts of disorder. Politicians and leading police officers will then call for dialogue with community leaders and confusing phrases like “policing with consent” will be thrown around to reassure any unruly mobs that they can do as they wish, whilst simultaneously attempting to explain to the public why no one got arrested. Because apparently, when an ethnic minority group is involved, members of that group have to give their “consent” in order to be policed, or something to that effect.

Often, leading politicians and even future Prime Ministers, will then get behind the rioters and their cause, releasing statements that support both those involved and their ideological goals. This happened in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots when both Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner took the knee and made heartfelt pleas to the black community, reassuring them that they were totally on board with all of what happened and that they firmly believed that every act of violence was carried out for the “right reasons!”

When dealing with ethnic minorities, there will also be other interesting uses of language and seemingly bizarre political framing. For example, if large groups of heavily armed Muslims gather together wearing balaclavas and then blockade roads, attack motorists and threaten those they perceive to be outsiders, the media will play this down and politicians will jump to their defence. The public will then be reassured that these Muslims are just defending their community and that they were scared of “racists” coming in from out of town.

The police will not intervene, the police will not attempt to confiscate their weapons and the city’s police chief will then quickly book an appointment with the local Imam and spend an afternoon sat at a Mosque in order to be “educated” so that he can better understand why this was all a legitimate course of action.

Sometimes however, the media will be unable to retain any credibility if they continue to use the term “protest”, especially when a major city is literally in flames and people are being publicly beaten in the streets.

In these cases, the government and the media will resort to Plan B: Painting the rioters as “social justice warriors” who only behaved in such a manner because of decades of systemic oppression that was callously ignored by the establishment and fuelled by White people’s racist attitudes! This is literally what happened after the 2011 riots that took place in London.

Finally, when the rioting and violence has ended, the judiciary will ensure that anyone who was arrested will get the most lenient sentences possible. The media and the press will agree with these sentences, going to great lengths to paint those found guilty as good boys who “dindu nuffin” and who were just swept up in an unfortunate moment. The media will then announce that these “good boys” needed lighter sentences, as otherwise they could have been prevented from going on to become rocket scientists, brain surgeons and entrepreneurs – the very citizens who will enrich modern Britain in ways that White people simply couldn’t!

Modern day historians will then lovingly look back on these riots as defining moments in the struggle for social justice, with the riots as defining moments in the struggle for social justice, with the rioters themselves being painted as urban folk heroes who risked everything for freedom and equality! These are the “heroes” who will one day replace the likes of Sir Admiral Nelson in our children’s school books!

So, what happens if you are White and involved in disorder?

Well, that depends on what the disorder was connected to. So, for example, if a White person was being an “ally” to a person of colour, then that White person may also be given a pass. Take for example groups like Antifa or the White individuals and Left-wing groups who supported the BLM riots in 2020. If a White person is caught committing acts of criminal damage, like say, destroying a historic statue and dumping it into a river, those people will be praised by the media and politicians and let off by the courts. What’s more, the local police will stand idly by clapping and cheering as the criminality takes place.

So yes, you can be White and get away with violence and disorder, but only if you’re fighting for an anti-White cause!

But what happens if you’re White and you are out protesting because of an injustice suffered by the White the community? Well, then you’re in for a very different ride, …

The first thing you must understand is that the government, the media and the police will NEVER even acknowledge White communities exist, let alone that those communities may have grievances or may have suffered some form of injustice. Those who do suggest that there are White communities and that those White communities deserve to be heard, will immediately be branded as “racists”. But if, in very rare circumstances, the media do hint at there being White communities, you can be reassured that it will always be in the context that those particular communities are boring, stale and in need of a dose of diversity.

Even before any protest has actually taken place, the media will warn of possible violence and predict all manner of wrong doings, with the protestors being referred to in negative terms – either as thugs, hooligans or as “far-Right”. Far-Right being the new pejorative term for White working folk who are willing to stand up for their own interests. Once White protestors do take to the street, they will not be met by smiling officers dressed in their beat uniform. Quite the opposite. White protestors will be met by riot police, mounted police or face off with snarling dogs whilst being kettled and intimidated. And you can bet your bottom dollar that officers won’t be going down on one knee when policing White people.

Once the media coverage of a White protest begins to emerge, the protesters will always be painted in the worst way imaginable. The pictures in the papers and the clips shown on television will always be carefully cherry picked in order to paint White protestors as violent, feckless, drunk, and, in short, as the kind of people you would

expect to see on the Jeremy Kyle show. This is done in order to prevent other White people from identifying with the protestors or wanting to join them.

And if violence or disorder does break out, you can guarantee it will be dealt with both swiftly and in the harshest manner possible. The police will not begin quietly retreating, there will be no polite calls for calm and policing by consent will never, ever, be mentioned! Then the head cracking will begin – and that policy will extend to the young and old and male and female alike. You won’t have policemen in White shirts on their knees pleading for calm, you will have old ladies carrying placards slammed face down on the pavement, arms up their backs, being hand cuffed and hurled in the back of a van by militarised officers that look like extras from a futuristic dystopian science fiction fantasy!

The press and the media will then immediately brand the protest as a “riot”, and the pejorative terms will be ramped up to maximum. The media will also publish the faces of protestors demanding more information on them and looking to name and shame those involved. The following day, politicians and police chiefs will appear at press conferences to demand the harshest possible sentences, endorse draconian crackdowns and to issue calls for tough new legislation.

Never once will any of the underlying reasons for the protest be addressed and politicians certainly won’t be delivering any fawning addresses about “victims rights” or “social justice”. It doesn’t matter if the protest was over the fact that hundreds of thousands of White girls were groomed by migrant gangs or if it was called because White children were murdered by a knife wielding Rwandan. According to the establishment; there’s no justification what-so-ever for Whites to act in this manner – there will be no White George Floyd, and Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner will not be standing in solidarity with Whites who have just been told that three little girls were butchered by a man that the press are describing as a “choirboy”.

In fact, anyone who does speak out in solidarity with the protestors will be attacked and threatened. Whites who are angry over the underlying causes of the disorder and who attempt to articulate their concerns online will be accused of fanning the flames of violence, and then it will be time for police officers to begin kicking in the doors of people who said the wrong thing on social media.

Finally, as the dust begins to settle on the protests, the newspapers will enthusiastically praise the judges who have handed out multi-year sentences to dads, business owners and those with previously clean criminal records – as after all, a message has to be sent! To White people!

And that message is crystal clear: DON’T YOU EVER, EVER, ADVOCATE FOR YOUR OWN RIGHTS or IN THE INTERESTS OF YOUR ETHNIC GROUP!

This is modern Britain, this is what the press, the media, the police, the judiciary, the politicians and of course, what Keir Starmer, our Prime Minster, call “justice”. And all of these people will then have the bare faced cheek to tell you, that they believe in equality.

Katana →

The man who will lightly sacrifice a long-formed mental habit is exceptional

You said that, in your view, the incident of the burning of the let-ters was the act of an unstable mind. To this I replied that nothing is done in the world, either good or bad, without passion; and I said that ‘mental stability’, too often, is simply lack of passion. As it happens, I was reading yesterday one of Huxley’s earlier books of essays (Proper Studies, 1927) and I came across a passage that discusses this very point. Perhaps it will make my own statement clearer. Here it is:

The man who will lightly sacrifice a long-formed mental habit is exceptional. The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar.
Trotter, in his admirable Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, has called them the ‘stable-minded,’ and has set over against them a minority of ‘unstable-minded people,’ fond of innovation for its own sake…. The tendency of the stable-minded man… will always be to find that ‘whatever is, is right.’ Less subject to the habits of thought formed in youth, the unstable-minded naturally take pleasure in all that is new and revolutionary . It is to the unstable-minded that we owe progress in all its forms, as well as all forms of destructive revolution. The stable-minded, by their reluctance to accept change, give to the social structure its durable solidity . There are many more stable- than unstable-minded people in the world (if the proportions were changed we should live in a chaos); and at all but very exceptional moments they possess power and wealth more than proportionate to their numbers. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted and always derided as fools and madmen. A heretic, according to the admirable definition of Bossuet, is one who ‘emits a singular opinion’—that is to say, an opinion of his own, as opposed to one that has been sanctified by general acceptance. That he is a scoundrel goes without saying. He is also an imbecile—a ‘dog’ and a ‘devil,’ in the words of St. Paul, who utters ‘profane and vain babblings.’ No heretic (and the orthodoxy from which he departs need not necessarily be a religious orthodoxy; it may be philosophic, ethical, artistic, economic), no emitter of singular opinions, is ever reasonable in the eyes of the stable-minded majority . For the reasonable is the familiar, is that which the stable-minded are in the habit of thinking at the moment when the heretic utters his singular opinion. To use the intelligence in any other than the habitual way is not to use the intelligence; it is to be irrational, to rave like a madman.(pp.71-2)

Amongst people of Buddhist countries it is, I think, not properly understood (quite naturally) that, generally speaking, Europeans who become Buddhists belong necessarily to the ‘unstable-minded’ and not to the ‘stable-minded’. The Buddha’s Teaching is quite alien to the European tradition, and a European who adopts it is a rebel. A ‘stable-minded’ European is a Christian (or at least he accepts the Christian tradition: religion for him—whether he accepts it or not—, means Christianity; and a Buddhist European is not even ‘religious’—he is simply a lunatic).

But in a Buddhist country, naturally, to be a Buddhist is to be ‘stable-minded’, since one is, as it were, ‘born a Buddhist’. And ‘born-Buddhists’ find it difficult to understand the unstable-minded European Buddhist, who treats the Buddha’s Teaching as a wonderful new discovery and then proposes, seriously, to practise it.* The stable-minded traditional Buddhist cannot make out what the unstable-minded European Buddhist is making such a fuss about. I am not, naturally, speaking in praise of odd behaviour for its own sake (the Buddha always took into account the prejudices and superstitions of the mass of laymen, and legislated as far as possible to avoid scandal), but I do say that it is wrong to regard odd behaviour as bad simply because it is odd. I myself am in a very ambiguous situation: here, in Buddhist Ceylon, I find that I am regarded as a most respectable person—complete strangers show me deference, and uncover their head as they pass—; but my relatives in England, and no doubt most of my former friends too, think that I am a freak and a case for the psychiatrist, and if they were to take off their hat when they saw me that could only be to humour my madness. Actually, however respectable and stable-minded I may appear (if we choose to ignore a deplorable tendency to suicide), I do not feel in the least respectable (I don’t care tuppence for the durable solidity of the social structure) and I certainly count myself amongst the ‘unstable-minded’ (which does not mean, of course, that I am mentally fickle). But although the passage from Huxley is quite good, I really mean something rather more subtle than the mere expression of unorthodox opinions.

* It often happens, of course, that he has got it upside-down and inside-out; but at least he has enthusiasm (at any rate to begin with).

Nanavira Thera 

My depression points to my not knowing how to lose ...

For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic-it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.

Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?
The wound I have just suffered, some setback or other in my love life or my profession, some  sorrow or bereavement affecting my relationship with close relatives-such are often the easily spotted triggers of my despair. A betrayal, a fatal illness, some accident or handicap that abruptly wrests me away from what seemed to me the norrnal category of normal people or else falls on a  loved one with the same radical effect, or yet . . . What more could I mention? An infinite number of misfortunes weigh us down every day ... All this suddenly gives me another life. A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair , scorching at times, then wan and empty. In short, a devitalized existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong is ready at any moment for a plunge into death. An avenging death or a liberating death, it is henceforth the inner threshold of my despondency, the impossible meaning of a life whose burden constantly seems unbearable, save for those moments when I pull myself together and face up to the disaster. I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow ... Absent from other people's rneaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and beings.

My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister. In the same way, Montaigne's statement "To philosophize is to learn how to die" is inconceivable without the melancholy combination of sorrow and hatred-which came to a head in Heidegger's care and the disclosure of our "being-for-death." Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.

Nevertheless, the power of the events that create my depression is often out of proportion to the disaster that suddenly overwhelms me. What is more, the disenchantment that I experience here and now, cruel as it may be, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echoes of old traumas, to which realize l have never been able to resign myself. I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, or grief over someone or something that once loved. The disappearance of that essential being continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; live it as a wound or deprivation, discovering just the same that my grief is but the deferment of the hatred or desire for ascendency that I nurture with respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned rne. Depression points to my not knowing how to lose-I have perhaps been unable to find a valid cornpensation for the loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being-and of Being itself. The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

from the book Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia by  Julia Kristeva

In Sporting Endeavors

 

(in which we wonder whether Philippides would have used public transport after the Battle of Marathon if given the opportunity)

Like anthropology and journalism, sport provides fertile ground for those wishing to describe places they haven’t been to. If numerous sports take place in enclosed arenas and therefore aren’t directly concerned, a substantial number of risky practices like mountaineering, sailing or motor races, aeronautical escapades or hunting in faraway countries1 necessarily lead their devotees to ask themselves whether it is worth throwing themselves into a dangerous, exhausting venture if they can instead limit their efforts to the essential and concentrate on the story.

It is well within their interests to develop skills that will allow them to speak with accuracy about a sporting performance they have refrained from making and produce a convincing line about it that includes plenty of descriptions of the places they have been to, in order to remove all doubts from those suspecting that they may have taken a shortcut or stayed at home.

In 1980, a woman by the name of Rosie Ruiz, a young American of Cuban origin, twenty-six years old, entered the annals of athletic history for two different reasons. The first one, purely sports related, was that she won the women’s division in an important athletic challenge, the Boston Marathon, also setting the third-fastest time for a woman in any marathon.2

This event is one of the oldest distance races and one of the most famous in the world. It usually takes place on the third Monday in April. It has the characteristic of not being open to all candidates but only to preselected runners who have achieved a minimum qualifying time in another official marathon, ensuring an exceptional sporting standard.

It is still easy today to peruse the images that have survived of this historical course and the triumphant arrival of Rosie Ruiz. We discover a young woman in a yellow shirt, wearing the number W50, running the last few meters of the race with a stumbling stride before collapsing into the arms of spectators who help her, half-fainting, across the line. After this, two policemen take over and support her under her arms to prevent her from collapsing entirely.

Next we see her answering a journalist’s questions. Carrying the laurel wreath that right until 1986 was the only reward given to winners of this race and holding a silver cup, Rosie Ruiz, clearly in a state of euphoria, struggles to catch her breath and only briefly responds to the questions. Asked whether anyone helped her, she replied that she trained alone and was her own coach.

Rosie Ruiz’s sporting performance was remarkable in any case because she ran the marathon in two hours, thirty-one minutes and fifty-six seconds, which was the best female time ever recorded at the Boston event and the third best time ever run by a woman in an official marathon. This fact alone made her an instant celebrity, something she was to remain.

However, it wasn’t Rosie Ruiz’s exceptional time that brought her so much fame. She mainly went down in history for having lost her title again so quickly, after being accused of not actually having run the full course.

One of the things that attracted the organizers’ attention was the exceptional time Rosie Ruiz made compared to her previous performance at the New York City Marathon. An even more revelatory indication in their eyes was the fact that the young woman recovered so rapidly after having crossed the finish line and could give no other explanation for her stunning physical condition than that she’d got up that morning brimming with energy.

Worse still, the officials sitting at various points around the race could not remember seeing the young woman pass by and wondered what mysterious, unknown path she had taken to be able to cover the distance between the start and the finish in record time.

The scandal reached greater proportions when the officials, looking into the New York Marathon—which had enabled Ruiz to qualify for the Boston event—became convinced, with witnesses to support it, that the young woman had covered part of the course by metro.

Accused of having cheated, Rosie Ruiz was disqualified from the Boston Marathon and the runner up, Jacqueline Gareau, was awarded the title. But Ruiz never admitted the fraud and continued to calmly affirm, despite all the evidence, that she had completed the legendary marathon in first place.

I personally have difficulty understanding the reasons that lead the organizers to strip Rosie Ruiz of her title. As someone who is rather insensitive to sporting disciplines and remains perplexed by the idea of anyone spending part of their life trying to run a certain distance in a minimum amount of time, it isn’t easy to understand the reproaches made to this young woman.

In terms of history, in any case, she doesn’t seem to have lacked respect for the spirit of the marathon, which consisted of finding the best way of getting from one place to another in a limited amount of time. When Philippides ran from Marathon to Athens to tell the Areopagus that the Persian army had been defeated, he chose the only method that was available to him, but it is obvious that he would have chosen a faster way if he’d had the opportunity.

In terms of sporting logic, aside from the fact that I doubt that using public transport is expressly forbidden in the marathon’s rules, it would be naive to suppose that Rosie Ruiz was an isolated case. Other similar cases have been identified—suggesting that the number of frauds is actually quite high.3 One only needs to leaf through the abundance of literature dedicated to exploits in inaccessible places with something of a critical mind to guess that some of these texts, like those of Marco Polo and Chateaubriand, were written at a fireside, and that the writers should be judged for their literary performance, not their sporting prowess.

The strangest thing about this story is that Rosie Ruiz was primarily reproached for her lack of imagination. The organizers considered it to her detriment that she was incapable of accurately describing certain parts of the route, in particular a girls’ college that all the competitors should have passed—Wellesley College—whose students traditionally cheer with rapturous enthusiasm.

It is somewhat paradoxical that part of the charge against her was Rosie Ruiz’s inability to describe the route, as if to criticize her refusal to resort to the particular kind of fiction—artistically fertile but unacceptable in sports—that is literary truth. The argument can easily be turned around because it would be just as easy to think that, if she’d really wanted to cheat, Rosie Ruiz would have gone to the trouble of gathering information on the route.

As for myself, I would have no trouble, if asked, recounting the time I took part in the Boston Marathon some years ago.

For example, I have clear memories of the start of the race in the small town of Hopkinton, the gentle descent toward Ashland and going past the clock tower, then the train depot at Framingham, before skirting Lake Cochituate on our left and hearing, around the twenty-kilometer mark, the screams of the Wellesley students in the distance, carried by the wind.

How would it be possible to forget those groups of enthusiastic female students, frantically brandishing placards bearing inscriptions as encouraging as “I love you!” or “Marry me!” in front of the magnificent campus lost amid squirrel-filled trees. I can even give you a detailed description of the young blond woman wearing a blue suit and a red scarf who took it upon herself to run alongside me for several meters, spraying my face with a bottle of water.

And I can still remember, after we’d passed the park with the kangaroos, the hills before Newton, in particular the most difficult to climb, Heartbreak Hill, which precedes the prestigious Boston College, whose gothic tower spiked with four spires irresistibly reminds all Parisian competitors of the slender silhouette of the Saint-Jacques Tower.

Finally, I remember the route’s gentle decline toward Boston after that last climb that heralds the Charles River, and how, although exhausted, my companions and I were transported by an increasing mass of spectators who were more and more enthusiastic the closer we got to the finish line, where we were taken into the care of an army of volunteers who carried us off to rest and regain our strength.

Despite appearances, Rosie Ruiz’s fraud, if ever proven; the fantastical filter Marco Polo used to describe China to his beloved; and Margaret Mead reinventing the Samoan Islands with her playful young friends have more than one thing in common.

The first thing they have in common is the fact that we are talking about what I earlier called an imaginary realm, even if in one example a city is concerned. Undoubtedly we find ourselves faced with a different scenario than that of China or the Samoan Islands since a proliferation of concrete details is set against an abstract representation of loci here, reduced to a cord stretched across a finish line. But what the experiences do have in common is the rewriting of space, or, if one prefers, its reconfiguration, allowing the subjects to find themselves in a new place, more fulfilling in terms of fantasy.

The imaginary realm invented by Rosie Ruiz, where, like Peter Pan, she is capable of overcoming the laws of nature and achieving improbable sporting exploits, is modeled on that of childhood, whose privileges she rediscovers for a while. It is a realm where everything is possible: there are no barriers, no limits; dreams can rapidly become reality. It is a place where it is conceivable, for example, to transport oneself, without difficulty and seemingly without time, from one place to another in a city that has become a purely psychological space.

It is this experience of infantile omnipotence that Rosie Ruiz acts out in an imaginary place, completely constructed around the instant she triumphantly crosses the finish line to a cheering public, experiencing a jubilation that presumably resonates with the most distant of her experiences. There is neither distance nor time between desire and its realization in this fantasy space with its dreamlike construction where the pleasure principle overrides the reality principle.

In both cases, this rewriting has an identical goal: to highlight the subject in a state of absolute pleasure. The amorous scenes with Chinese women dreamed up by Marco Polo and the multiple sexual encounters Margaret Mead imagines taking place over the entire Samoan Islands, transformed into a kind of primitive “general scene,” are condensed in this moment of unique self-celebration, its intensity multiplied by the prism of the media, in absolute narcissistic happiness.

So the example set by Rosie Ruiz shows how talk of imaginary realms cannot be understood without introducing a third notion corresponding to the unconscious life of the subject, that of the inner landscape.

Freud used this expression for a while to describe what was repressed in the mind, though finally it wasn’t retained by psychoanalytic theory. “Repression,” he wrote in his Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1933), “is for me an inner foreign country (inneres Ausland), just as reality, if you will allow me to use an unusual expression, is an outer foreign country (äusseres Ausland).”4Thus he evoked the image of an inner country or landscape and other related images like those of regions and provinces5 in his search for tropes that would allow him to describe unconscious reality and the words best suited to showing it and thinking about it. It is an image that is a continuation of the propositions he often used to represent the interior of the psyche as a spatial form.

If the notion of an inner landscape is fitting, it is because it expresses how the interior of the psyche is certainly of a topological order, as Freud imagined and as Lacan further intuited with his idea of topology. It can also be thought of in geographical terms, with its landscapes, its elevations, its pits and even its inhabitants, which could include those parts of ourselves that seem to lead their own lives and, at times, be ready to seize autonomy at our expense.6And it is to this fantasy image of an inner landscape that we refer to more or less consciously when we represent the insides of our minds like a region, a country or a city, open or fortified but separated from the others by frontiers that are more or less easy to cross and that assure our protection from the external world, even if we sometimes let down our barriers to certain privileged people.

The inner landscape, which might be another name for the unconscious, has both a collective and an unconscious dimension and is not isolated from the real world. On the contrary, it is behind the transformations to which we subject our representations of reality. And it is when the subject does not find peace there that he undertakes to substitute an imaginary world for the real one, whose geography is influenced by that of the inner landscape, becoming a place where he invents a realm that suits his needs.

If it isn’t possible to know Rosie Ruiz’s inner landscape with any accuracy—that is to say, her unconscious life with its spaces and its inhabitants—we can still try to gain an idea from the traces left in her transformation of the real landscape of Boston into an imaginary realm, reduced in its totalitarian fiction to a space contracted around herself and her virtual exploit.

It is an inner realm that she would have complete mastery of and where she would also have control over space and time, as each of us secretly dreams. It is a place where she would rule without sharing, adored by subjects overwhelmed by admiration, retransmitting to her in a kind of infinite refraction that glorious image that certain self-obsessed rulers have others build for them in the form of statues in all the public spaces in their countries so as to have the pleasure, when walking, of being reflected back at themselves continually.

As we can see, the reproach made to Rosie Ruiz of being incapable of accurately describing the route of the Boston Marathon can be understood in two different ways. First of all, it can be understood in the traditional way as a reproach for having tried to appropriate a title for herself that she had no right to.

But, according to a different kind of logic, it can also be understood as a reproach for not having been enough of a writer and not managing, by attaining that particular kind of truth that literature aims at, to reconfigure space in a sufficiently convincing manner for her readers and listeners to be able to accept it as their own and attempt to inhabit it in their minds.

1.    See the example the eponymous Tartarin de Tarascon sets in Alphonse Daudet’s novel.

2.    VP+

3.    One celebrated case is that of the 1906 Tour de France, in which four cyclists were disqualified for taking the train from Nancy to Dijon.

4.    Sigmund Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenburg Verlag, 1981), 50. Unfortunately, the recent Presses Universitaires de France translation has used the expressions “territoire extérieur interne” and “territoire extérieur externe.”

5.    “Superego, ego and id, these are the three empires, regions (Gebiete), provinces (Provinzen), between which we share the psychic apparatus of the individual, and now we are going to focus on their interrelationships.” Ibid., 62.

6.    Later in the text of Neue Folge, Freud constructs a complete allegory around the inner country and its different regions: “I imagine therefore a country whose terrain presents a varied configuration: there are hills, plains and lakes. The population is composed of Germans, Magyars and Slovaks performing various activities. Let us suppose the Germans, cattle-breeders, live on the hills, the Magyars, farmers and winegrowers, live on the plains, and the Slovaks, fishers and weavers, on the edge of the lakes. If this distribution was tidy and absolute, a Wilson would be delighted; geography would be easy to teach. But it is likely that when visiting the region, you would find less order and more confusion. Germans, Magyars and Slovaks sometimes live all mixed up, it is possible to have arable land on the hills and cattle on the plains.” Ibid., 63.

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been 

Pierre Bayard