"The Culture of Critique” on Revenge as a Jewish Motive

Re Tobias Lang don’s  current TOO article on the nature and origins of Wokism, I went through Chapter 3 of The Culture of Critique (the current state of the revision) using ‘revenge’ as a search term and copying and pasting the passages in which it appears. It leaves little doubt that the motives of the Jewish left had nothing to do with instituting a reign of equality.

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While Stalin favored the Georgians, Jews had their own ethnic scores to settle. It seems likely that at least some of the Bolshevik mass murder and terror was motivated by revenge against peoples that had historically been anti-Jewish. Several historians have suggested that Jews were motivated to join the security forces to get revenge for their treatment under the Czar (Rapoport 1990, 31; Baron 1975, 170). Similarly, Jews were placed in charge of security in Ukraine, which had a long history of anti-Semitism (Lindemann 1997, 443) and became a scene of mass murder in the 1930s.

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Shafarevich reviewed Jewish literary works during the Soviet and post-Soviet period indicating hatred toward Russia and its culture mixed with a powerful desire for revenge. Reflecting the cultural domination theme of anti-Semitism, Shafarevich claimed that Jews have had more influence on Russia than perhaps any other country, but that discussion of the role of Jews either in contemporary Russia or even in the theoretically more open United States results in intense hostility and reprisals. Indeed, in a comment that is quite similar to neoconservative claims that the interests of the U.S. and Israel dovetail completely (see Ch. 4), Shafarevich stated that any possibility that Jewish interests conflict with the interests of others cannot even be proposed as an hypothesis.

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My personal experience at the University of Wisconsin during the 1960s was that the student protest movement was originated and dominated by Jews and that a great many of them were “red diaper babies” whose parents had been radicals. The intellectual atmosphere of the movement closely resembled the atmosphere in the Polish communist movement described by Schatz (1991, 117; see below)—intensely verbal pilpul-like discussions in which one’s reputation as a leftist was related to one’s ability in Marxist intellectual analysis and familiarity with Marxist scholarship, both of which required a great deal of study. There was also a great deal of hostility to Western cultural institutions as politically and sexually oppressive combined with an ever-present sense of danger and imminent destruction by the forces of repression—an ingroup bunker mentality discussed in MacDonald (1994/2002, Ch.7) that I now believe is a fundamental characteristic of Jewish social forms. There was an attitude of moral and intellectual superiority and even contempt toward traditional American culture, particularly rural America and most particularly the South—attitudes that are hallmarks of several of the intellectual movements reviewed here (e.g., the attitudes of Polish-Jewish communists toward traditional Polish culture; see also Chs. 6 and 7 on Jewish attitudes toward populism). There was also a strong desire for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure viewed as having victimized not only Jews but non-elite gentiles as well—reflecting the revenge theme of many commenters on Jewish motivation.

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Antipathy toward the Gentile Social Order: Revenge, Displacement, and Domination. Again, there is the strong suggestion that social criticism and feelings of cultural estrangement among Jews have deep psychological roots that reach far beyond particular economic or political interests. As indicated in Chapter 1, a critical psychological component appears to involve a very deep antipathy to the entire gentile-dominated social order, which is viewed as anti-Semitic—the desire for “malignant vengeance” that Disraeli asserted made many Jews “odious and so hostile to mankind.” Recall Lipset’s (1988, 393) description of the many Jewish “families which around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.” These families clearly perceive themselves as separate from the wider culture of the United States; they also view conservative forces as attempting to maintain this malignant culture. As in the case of traditional Judaism vis-à-vis gentile society, the traditional culture of the United States—and particularly the political basis of cultural conservatism that has historically been associated with anti-Semitism—is perceived as a manifestation of a negatively evaluated outgroup—and as such it warrants a motive of revenge.

As noted above in the example of Jews in the communist security forces in post-World-War-II Poland, this antipathy toward gentile-dominated society was often accompanied by a powerful desire to avenge the evils of the old social order. Norman Cantor (1996. 364):

The Bolshevik Revolution and some of its aftermath represented, from one perspective, Jewish revenge. During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that — as 1930s anti-Semites claimed — Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It was a species of striking back.

Leading Jewish communists, like founder of the Mensheviks Yuli Martov, who became a close associate of Lenin and Trotsky, made a point of recalling his childhood experiences of Russian and Ukrainian anti-Semitism. The 1881 Odessa pogrom was his “first taste of primitive Russian anti-Semitism,” and Martov was “shaken to the depths of his being by the pogromist barbarity of Tsarist Russia.” The event left a “permanent mark on his impressionable mind,” and he later underlined the connection between this experience and his subsequent revolutionary career, posing the question: “Would I have become what I became if the Russian reality had not imprinted her coarse fingers on my plastic, youthful soul in that memorable night and carefully planted under the cover of that burning pity which she aroused in my childlike heart, the seeds of a redeeming hatred?” (Wistrich 1976, 178)—a hatred that justified the murder of millions.

Similarly, for many Jewish New Leftists, “the revolution promises to avenge the sufferings and to right the wrongs which have, for so long, been inflicted on Jews with the permission or encouragement, or even at the command of, the authorities in prerevolutionary societies” (Cohen 1980, 208). Interviews with New Left Jewish radicals revealed that many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors” (Cohen 1980, 208) combined with the belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a nonoppressive social order—findings that are reminiscent of the motivating role of revenge for anti-Semitism among the Jewish-dominated security forces in communist Poland discussed above. These findings are also entirely consistent with my experience among Jewish New Left activists at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s (see above) and with Mark Rudd’s (2005) “Why Were There So Many Jews in the SDS? (Or the Ordeal of Civility”:

But World War II and the holocaust were our fixed reference points. This was only twenty years after the end of the war. We often talked about the moral imperative to not be Good Germans. Many of my older comrades had mobilized for the civil rights movement; we were all anti-racists. We saw American racism as akin to German racism toward the Jews. As we learned more about the war, we discovered that killing Vietnamese en masse was of no moral consequence to American war planners. So we started describing the war as racist genocide, reflecting the genocide of the holocaust. American imperialist goals around the world were to us little different from the Nazi goal of global conquest. If you really didn’t like somebody—and we loathed President Lyndon B. Johnson—you might call him a fascist.

Ultimately, Jewish radicalism, whether in the post-1917 Soviet Union or the English faculty at Columbia, there is a strong element of a desire for displacement and domination. The displacement of what Rudd called “the air of genteel civility” at Columbia—and the institutional structure of the United States­—since the 1960s is largely complete. Recall the Jewish radicals who fled the shtetls of Eastern Europe and, instead of going to Ellis Island, became dominant elite in the USSR after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. These Jewish radicals were able to actually carry out in the USSR the fantasies the New Left Jewish radicals in the US—i.e., the “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors” mentioned above. Since the 2020 election we are seeing increasing calls for limiting speech, including calls for canceling mainstream conservative outlets like Fox News, and the Department of Homeland Security has declared that the most important threat facing America is “domestic extremism,” and in particular, “white supremacists” (Miroff, 2021).

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Jewish ethnic background was particularly important in recruiting for the internal security service [in post-World War II Poland]: The generation of Jewish communists realized that their power derived entirely from the Soviet Union and that they would have to resort to coercion in order to control a fundamentally hostile noncommunist society (Schatz 1991, 262). The core members of the security service came from the Jewish communists who had been communists before the establishment of the Polish communist government, but these were joined by other Jews sympathetic to the government and alienated from the wider society. This in turn reinforced the popular image of Jews as servants of foreign interests and enemies of ethnic Poles (225).

Jewish members of the internal security force often appear to have been motivated by personal rage and a desire for revenge related to their Jewish identity:

Their families had been murdered and the anti-Communist underground was, in their perception, a continuation of essentially the same anti-Semitic and anti-Communist tradition. They hated those who had collaborated with the Nazis and those who opposed the new order with almost the same intensity and knew that as Communists, or as both Communists and Jews, they were hated at least in the same way. In their eyes, the enemy was essentially the same. The old evil deeds had to be punished and new ones prevented and a merciless struggle was necessary before a better world could be built. (Schatz 1991, 226)

The utopian end thus justified the means, no matter how vicious.

TOO

THE CRUEL WAY Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939

 FOREWORD

By Jessa Crispin

When one goes about reintroducing a forgotten book to a contemporary audience, it can be hard to avoid that slight disorientation associated with all time travel. Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way belongs to a different world than ours. A world where Hitler was just getting started. A world where Afghanistan could be described as Maillart does as being “hardly altered by the West.” A world with fewer heavily guarded borders. There would be so much in our world to show the sharp-eyed woman who wrote The Cruel Way if she could be here now. Like smoothies. Smartphones. Designer yoga pants.

Of course great books are capable of transcending their eras, but books that have been in circulation since their debuts probably have an easier time of it. Anna Karenina and Isabel Archer have been invited to all the best parties for decades now. They know how to stay in style with the change of a frock and a new do, but their insides stay the same. Their reputations precede. They need no introduction.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Maillart in the States. And as a result there’s something a little bit . . . off about her. Oh, it’s not her fault. And at first glance you could hardly tell. After all, she’s written a book that could be distilled down to a tale of self-actualization against the backdrop of war. She should sit comfortably beside the hundreds of novels, some of which win very large awards, released every year, that also fit that description. You could also say it’s a memoir about a woman making an external journey alongside the more vital internal journey, learning about herself and the outer world along the way. She would have plenty of company in that particular bookstore shelf as well. She might even be picked for the Oprah book club. When she writes things like, “What I am trying to be? Unencumbered by possession, everywhere at home, intensely alive, without masters, unlimited by nationality,” you can almost picture her at a $5,000 Sedona yoga retreat, leading a guided inner meditation.

But look a little closer and she does not quite fit. She is not quite of our age. The displacement starts to show. That hat isn’t vintage inspired, it’s actually vintage. And her version of self-actualization, it is not our own.

On June 6, 1939, Ella Maillart left her home in Geneva, Switzerland, and drove with her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach to Afghanistan. Hitler was devouring Central Europe, France was spinning itself uselessly into one government quickly followed by another, and the leaders of the Soviet Union were letting their masks of egalitarianism slip a little bit to reveal the tyrants beneath. And yet one of the goals of this trip was for Maillart to show Schwarzenbach that the world in itself, as is, was a beautiful place. Violent, yes. Despairing and terrifying, sure. But also worth being present for.

And Maillart does delight in the world around her. She is able to draw on a wealth of historical knowledge, seeing the land they are moving through as it has been moved through, settled, invaded, and defended for centuries. She is perhaps the ideal travel companion: able to whisper secrets about this mosque or that river in your ear while also remaining personable and friendly. The Afghanistan she sees and portrays is not the Afghanistan of our newspaper headlines. The inevitable clash awaiting Afghanistan when it is forced to introduce itself to the rest of the world is only just barely beginning. That relative peace allows Maillart to see the layers of the place, in a way that you never can as you’re running along the surface, looking for cover.

To me, the real heart of the story, and the source of its timelessness, is the friendship at its center. Schwarzenbach was in the grips of an addiction that scares both of them, and she seemed reluctant to face the world directly at all, let alone with any fondness. Schwarzenbach, whom Maillart calls “Christina,” is often pictured with head bowed, flinching from a blow that never comes, anticipating rejection in such a way that could drive away even the most loyal of friends. She discarded her past as an heiress and as the descendant of German aristocracy, but had not yet found a suitable identity to replace it with. She flirted with androgyny, being repeatedly mistaken for male along the journey, and her sexuality is just as fluid. And so she drifted along, sometimes a writer, sometimes muse, sometimes archeologist. Sometimes boy, sometimes girl. Maillart makes it her mission to bring Christine in from this confusion. “Briefly stated,” she writes at the beginning of their journey, “my main aims were to acquire self-mastery and to save my friend from herself.”

One almost believes that she can do it, that her will is so strong she can put all wrongs right. If Maillart can evade angry customs officials, cope with Afghan soldiers who want to confirm her gender by putting their hands up her shirt, and coolly deal with having guns pointed at her, surely she can drag her friend from the edge of the abyss, no sweat. There is something so sturdy about Maillart, and it comes across in her prose and in her biography. She skied, she hiked, she sailed. Before she wrote The Cruel Way she competed in the Olympics, she walked across Turkistan, she spent seven months traveling from Peking to Kashmir over paths considered impassable. And even still she is dissatisfied with herself, somehow thinking she must “mend my ways, . . . take myself in hand.”

All of Maillart’s accomplishments simply mask that she is as afflicted with the same longing, the same awareness of an emptiness at the center of her life, as her traveling companion. Maillart spins out less dramatically, but all of the wandering, all of the striving is her way of coping with its presence. After all, as travel writer Andrzej Stasiuk has pointed out, travel is just another narcotic, another way of attaining an altered state. Reality is heightened during travel, your surroundings change from the mundane to the fantastical. What used to be a chore in your daily life—finding breakfast, getting across town—becomes an adventure. It is a less destructive—to your body, at least—but just as addictive as many other drugs. Once you go a-wandering, and get hooked on that surreal sensation, it can be hard to go home again. Maillart tries to help Christina/Annemarie swap out her drug of choice and continues reroute their journey away from cities where drugs are more easily attained.

That empty spot in life haunts us always. The dissatisfaction at the heart of us. Stepping up to the edge of it to struggle with it, to let it challenge us—that is what makes great character and great art. To constantly fling things into it, in the hopes that the chasm will eventually fill up somehow, makes for an emptier life. Maillart sees an entire world trying to fling objects into that chasm, whether it be psychotic political parties, drugs, or money. She knows that her restlessness is connected to the restlessness of the rest of the Western world, the world that thinks if it just invents a faster car, if it just gets rid of these people over here, if it just does this one thing, everything will be okay again.

As everyone who has watched a friend slip into addiction eventually must realize, you can never will your friend safe and clear. Either they make the choice to head for shore or they do not. And while Maillart longs for stillness and for peace, she does not back down from the challenge. After writing The Cruel Way she settled herself in India, long before the age of yoga cults and Westerner-filled ashrams. And her encounter with the East is where she deviates from our era, because what she approached as a philosophical system has been turned into a lifestyle for the modern American. It’s become a whole new category of stuff to throw into that gap. We’re so overstuffed with stories of blonde women finding spirituality in the East, as they blithely overlook poverty and patriarchy in these countries and return to America to open up a vegan bakery/chakra cleansing studio. Our Western world went to the East, bought everything it could at the bazaar, and wonders why it doesn’t feel any better. We’re still picking international fights, we’re still looking for enlightenment that can be purchased with a credit card, and we think because we know two dozen yoga poses that we understand Hinduism.

And that’s why it’s time to start inviting Maillart to the party. We need her to challenge what we think the story of two women traveling to the East can do. We need her to disrupt our detachment. “May the little that I have found help you to find what each of us has to find by himself,” she wrote, and what she has found is a world of beauty and hope, a world worth going out into, even in its darkest age.

Berlin, September 2012

A Textbook Case

 

Hartford, Connecticut, is a traffic-choked city today, but in the 1930s it was a sleepy town where kids could play in the streets for hours without having to move aside for a passing car. One day in 1934, an eight-year-old boy named Henry Gustav Molaison fell off his bike and struck his head. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, since it wouldn’t occur to anyone for another half century that children needed that kind of protection. Or maybe it happened a little differently: maybe he was on foot and another bike knocked him over. His parents didn’t remember which it was, when they thought about the incident years afterward.

Henry might have lost consciousness for a few minutes, or perhaps not. Concussions were considered a normal part of growing up back then, so nobody would have paid much attention. After the accident, whatever it was, he seemed perfectly normal. If you’d told Henry’s parents at the time that their only child would one day become the most celebrated neuroscience patient in history, and that his obituary would appear on the front page of the New York Times, Gus and Lizzie Molaison—he was an electrician, a Cajun who came originally from Thibodaux, Louisiana; she was a stay-at-home mother whose parents had emigrated from Northern Ireland—would have been convinced you’d lost your mind.

A couple of years after he hit his head, Henry began to have epileptic seizures, and his parents wondered if the bike accident might have been responsible. At first, they were mild, petit-mal seizures. Henry would go into what seemed like a trance for a couple of minutes, then return to normal. By the time he was in his mid-teens, however, he was having grand-mal seizures, in which he would fall to the floor, go into convulsions, foam at the mouth, and bite his tongue. These episodes were so disruptive and so embarrassing that he dropped out of one high school, waited several years, then started again at another school as a seventeen-year-old freshman. He didn’t take the college-prep track, choosing instead the school’s vocational course. After he graduated, at twenty-one, he got a job with a company that built electric motors, then moved on to work at an assembly line, making typewriters.

Throughout his early twenties, Henry’s epilepsy kept getting worse. By the time he was twenty-six, he was taking four powerful medications, any one of which by itself would have kept most patients’ seizures in check. He’d had a series of tests to rule out a brain tumor or some other physical abnormality. The most unpleasant of them, called a pneumoencephalogram, involved draining the cerebrospinal fluid, which normally cushions the brain, then forcing air into Henry’s skull to replace it, which allowed an X-ray to look for any unusual gaps in his brain tissue. That showed nothing. Neither did a much less invasive electroencephalogram, or EEG.

At a loss for how else to proceed, Henry’s doctor, an eminent neurosurgeon named William Beecher Scoville, suggested an operation as a last resort. Scientists understood by this time that neurons, the cells that process and store information in the brain, communicate with one another through tiny electrical signals. They also knew that seizures are caused when these signals go out of control, sending spasms of electrochemical energy bouncing chaotically through the brain. In some cases, the chaotic signals originated in areas that had been damaged by illness or injury. Henry’s parents were right to suspect that his bike accident might have been the cause of his epilepsy.

The tests found no such injuries, but epilepsy can also be caused by much subtler brain abnormalities, which are often genetic. Several relatives on Henry’s father’s side had had epilepsy as well, so maybe that was the explanation. No one knew where these abnormalities were located, but tests on both animals and humans had shown that deliberately stimulating the brain’s medial temporal lobes with mild jolts of electricity could trigger seizures. Scoville himself had removed medial temporal tissue from patients with schizophrenia, hoping to cure their psychosis. It didn’t work, but one patient who also had epileptic seizures saw significant improvement in that illness.

So Scoville proposed to remove large parts of Henry’s medial temporal lobes. “This frankly experimental operation was considered justifiable,” he would write several years afterward, “because the patient was totally incapacitated by his seizures and these had proven refractory to a medical approach.” Scoville made it clear to Henry and his parents that the operation was risky. He thought it was likely to relieve the epilepsy, but there might be side effects. But the seizures were so awful that the Molaisons decided it was worth the risk. Even if the surgery didn’t cure him, Henry said, in giving his consent, it might help others.

On August 25, 1953, orderlies wheeled Henry into an operating room at Hartford Hospital, his skull newly shaved, and the surgery began. Scoville drilled two large holes in Henry’s forehead, each about an inch and a half across, and reached in with an instrument called a brain spatula, which he used to lever the frontal lobes—one on each side—out of the way. This gave him access to the hippocampus. Then he worked the spatula in and down, and began to apply suction to the soft, spongy brain tissue. By the time he was done, Scoville had sucked out big chunks of Henry’s two hippocampi, one on each side of the brain. He’d also removed much of the neighboring amygdalae, which are involved in the processing of emotions. And he’d taken out tissues from the entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices, which border the hippocampi. He didn’t get all of the hippocampus out on either side, because the far ends curved away, out of reach of his straight, inflexible suction tube. The remaining chunks of hippocampus, however, were now largely disconnected from the rest of the brain. They might as well not exist.

Once Henry came out of the anesthesia, it quickly became clear that Scoville’s invasion of his brain had been largely successful in treating the epilepsy. Henry’s seizures weren’t eliminated completely, but they were dramatically reduced in both frequency and intensity. It was also clear, however, that something else had happened, something awful. Henry recognized his parents. His intelligence, which was above average according to presurgical testing done in the hospital, was intact. So was his personality. He’d been shy, friendly, and good-natured before the operation. He was the same afterward.

But Henry had no clue about who the doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff who came to his room were, even after seeing them repeatedly. He could remember new information for a minute or two—if you said, “Good morning, Henry, my name is John,” and then, right afterward, “What’s my name?” he had no problem giving the right answer. If you asked him again fifteen minutes later, however, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t navigate his way to the bathroom even after having been there several times. He didn’t know why he was in the hospital. An hour after he’d had lunch, he couldn’t remember eating. He’d eat a second lunch if you put it in front of him, and then a third. He couldn’t remember much of anything about his past—the condition known as retrograde amnesia. And he also had anterograde amnesia: he couldn’t convert his everyday experiences into new memories to be recalled in the future. Until his death fifty-five years later, he never would.

Scoville was appalled. The operation was, he would later acknowledge, a tragic mistake. He’d had no idea that this might happen. He didn’t know at the time that Wilder Penfield, in Montreal, had had a similar outcome with two other patients, known only by their initials, F.C. and P.B. Both men had epilepsy, like Henry (who himself would be known simply as H.M., to protect his privacy, until after he died). Penfield had operated on them in an attempt to cure it. He’d removed medial temporal lobe tissue, including the hippocampus, from one side of their brains only. Penfield had done the same surgery on many other patients; these two were the only ones who developed profound amnesia. It turned out that, unlike the others’, the mirror structures on the opposite sides of F.C.’s and P.B.’s brains weren’t normal. Both men had suffered injuries to those tissues long before Penfield performed his surgery—possibly as early as birth. Penfield’s other patients had backup. They could use the undamaged lobes on the other sides of their brains to take up the slack of memory formation and retrieval.

Scoville read about these two cases not long after he’d performed his surgery on Henry. He was naturally intrigued, and contacted Penfield, who suggested that a young colleague of his named Brenda Milner should come down from Montreal to test H.M., along with some of Scoville’s schizophrenia patients who had also had medial temporal lobe surgery. Milner, born in England and educated at Cambridge, had been a graduate student in the laboratory of Donald Hebb, a pioneer in the attempt to understand how the brain creates and maintains memory. When Penfield began his campaign to cure epilepsy through surgery, he had recruited Milner to help him test patients to see how the operations might have affected their cognitive abilities. She had helped him figure out why F.C.’s and P.B.’s memory functions had been so severely affected, and she was eager to see how this new patient down in Connecticut might fit into the story.

The testing took place in 1955. Milner showed rigorously what Scoville had understood only in general terms: Henry’s intelligence, language, and other higher mental functions were unaffected by the operation. His personality was essentially unchanged. He was described by the scientists who studied him as “gentle, goodhearted and altruistic.” But his memory had been profoundly damaged, in both the past and future direction.

Unlike Scoville’s schizophrenia patients, Henry wasn’t mentally ill before his operation, which would have made it more difficult to disentangle memory problems caused by the surgery from any memory problems that might have been caused by the schizophrenia instead. And unlike Penfield’s patients P.B. and F.C., who still had some function in the memory structures that had been damaged naturally rather than surgically, Henry had virtually none on either side of his brain. Milner and Scoville wrote up the results in a paper that appeared in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry. It’s no exaggeration to say that this article, which first established the crucial role of the medial temporal lobe in memory, changed the course of neuroscience.

As Milner and her colleagues found during later rounds of testing, Henry did retain some memories of his past, but they were almost invariably general, not specific. They were along the lines of “I remember that I went to X high school,” in contrast to “I remember that crazy time in French class when Jimmy let the hamster loose and Monsieur Picard screamed ‘sacre bleu!’ ” The former are what neuroscientists now call semantic memories; the latter are episodic memories, since they record specific episodes in our lives rather than generalities. Henry knew where he’d grown up and where he’d gone to high school. He knew that his mother and father used to take him on vacations along the Mohawk Trail, a scenic highway that cuts across the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. But he couldn’t remember a single specific event from one of those Mohawk Trail vacations, for example, or something unusual that happened in high school, or a gift he’d gotten on a particular birthday.

There were just two exceptions. In 1939, when Henry was thirteen, Gus and Lizzie bought him a ride in a small plane as a junior high school graduation present. This adventure was so profoundly exciting, it was as though it had burned itself into Henry’s memory too deeply for even surgery to cut it out. Decades after the operation, he could still recall and describe the flight—what it looked like, what it sounded like, how it felt—almost moment by moment, in detail. Henry also retained a vivid memory of the first time he ever smoked a cigarette, which happened when he was ten. Presumably, it was as unpleasant as the plane ride was thrilling.

Aside from these two events, the only memories he had were semantic. That applied not just to memories of his own life, but also to his general knowledge about the world, which is also part of semantic memory. You almost certainly know that Paris is located in France, but you probably don’t know when you first learned that fact. There’s no specific experience, no episode you can point to where the information first entered your head. Similarly, you probably also know where your parents grew up. You know what an orange tastes like. You know that the United States fought against Germany and Japan in World War II. But you probably don’t know exactly when or how you came by these bits of information.

Semantic and episodic memories are different, but they both share this feature: you can describe them in words. Other memories are impossible to articulate, since they don’t involve conscious thought. Riding a bicycle, hitting a tennis ball, driving a nail, and playing a musical instrument are all things you remember how to do after you’ve learned, but you can’t really explain what it feels like to do them. People sometimes call this sort of thing “muscle memory,” because it seems as though your muscles, not your brain, are doing the remembering.

Neuroscientists now call those two broad categories of memory declarative, which refers to things you can describe in words, and procedural or implicit, things you simply know or know how to do without being able to describe them (retrieving the words to construct a sentence is another example). Until Henry came along, nobody really knew whether procedural and declarative memories were formed or stored or retrieved from the same part of the brain, or different parts, or how the whole process worked.

Thanks to the purity of his memory loss, however, which was untainted by any accompanying mental illness or loss of other cognitive abilities—understanding speech, for example, or recognizing objects—H.M. became what Suzanne Corkin, the MIT neuroscientist who worked under Brenda Milner and went on to study Molaison for more than four decades, calls the “gold standard for the study of amnesia…the yardstick against which other amnesic patients were judged.” In the scientific literature, she writes, they were typically referred to as being “ ‘as bad as H.M.’ or ‘not as bad as H.M.’ ”

Over decades of careful study, Corkin, who died in the spring of 2016, either performed or directed hundreds of research studies to probe the tiniest nuances of Henry’s memory loss. Once a month or so, on average, starting in 1966 and continuing until the mid-2000s, Henry would be driven from Hartford up to MIT, where Corkin had settled after doing graduate work with Milner in Montreal. Corkin herself, one of her graduate students or postdocs, or one of dozens of independent scientists who worked with Henry over those decades would put him through a battery of tests. Many of the tests had been created just for him.

Over that time, Henry became more than just a subject. “He was a friend,” Corkin told me, sitting in her MIT office one afternoon. “And not just to me. He was a member of our lab family.” For the first few years after the operation, Henry continued to live with his parents—and then, when his father died, in 1966, with his mother. After she came down with dementia, he moved in with a relative and, finally, in 1980, into a nursing home near Hartford. After that, Corkin said, he had nobody to visit him or look after him. “We sort of filled in the gaps as best we could. We used to send him presents for Christmas and we’d send him pictures of our dogs and stuff like that.” When a health issue came up, Corkin had the nursing home call her. “I don’t do this with other patients,” she said. “If something happens with them, they go and see their doctor, but with Henry, I wanted to make sure that he was well taken care of and that his needs were met, medical and otherwise.” She meant this literally. The last time she visited Henry, in the fall of 2008, she asked his caregivers what he needed. White socks, they told her. So this eminent neuroscientist at one of the most prestigious universities in the world drove over to Costco, bought a pack of socks, and mailed them to Connecticut. She would never see Henry alive again.

The Perpetual Now

By Michael D. Lemonick

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