Homer’s new poem, The Odyssey, has caused a stir throughout the Hellenic cities. It has been boycotted by the hoi-polloi, and has been lampooned by those sharp and incisive cultural warriors, our poetry critics.

One such review has been much-circulated: it was written by Μωρόν, a leading conservative judge from Athens. While Μωρόν has never seen battle, due to the peaceful nature of our times, and in part due to his physical condition of weightiness derived from an aesthete’s love of meats and pies (he benefits from a new invention, the chair-wheel, where his large frame can be mobilized via cart and donkey), and while he has been mocked for his calls for greater fertility with the accusation that he lacks children of his own, he nevertheless has been a stalwart defender of War, the guarantor of our peace, and has been a patriotic voice in his advocacy for the establishment of vast standing armies and expansionist invasions, which will no doubt serve his city-state well in centuries to come.

Here is his review, printed in full, unmolested by lamb-like censors:

With his last poem, the so-called Iliad, we have already heard this blind beggar Homer mouth off about our great ancestor Agamemnon, claiming that he had “done dishonor” to Chryses priest of Apollo, a deed which led to a dispute that provoked the “wrath” of Achilles, which in turn brought “countless sorrows upon the Achaeans.” The cause of their dispute? According to this songster, Agamemnon took Achilles’ concubine in place of that priest’s daughter, whom he abducted and was forced to give back. As if the lord of men, or the king of the Myrmidons, had only one sex slave and not 100! I myself have none, just one wife, but this only goes to show how far our masculine culture has fallen, because of wicked poets like Homer. He has besmirched the characters of too many of our noble Hellenic heroes already for me to stomach another drawl.

I therefore will protest listening to his pitiful new poem, The Odyssey. I have heard that in it and elsewhere he has painted Odysseus as a war objector, fabricating that this dutiful founding father of the Polities pretended to be mad to avoid conscription by seeding his crops with salt when the Hellenes arrived on his shores, until his act was revealed to be a sham by Palamedes, who placed Odysseus’ son in his path, causing him to stop in his tracks. What revolting notions. A hero who treasures his son above bloodshed and spoils. A hero who does not want above all things to feed the State more bodies of worthless Trojans.

Does this poet not realize that his freedom to spew his inaccurate and ahistorical verses, backed up by the pernicious rhapsodic industry, is derived from the brave pillaging of glamorous cities, and the valiant slaughter of wailing babes? And to think his song has come about in such a time as this, when our leaders are plotting a grand war against Persia, with the indispensable intel supplied by our Phoenician allies?

This Homer will be forgotten, and our epoch of cringing songs of sympathy and “weighing all sides” will end. Idiotes, with his powerful epic, To the Bountiful Brawn of Our Splendid Rapists, and Amathes-Bous, with his ode, Our Nations Will Be Preserved Through Persistent Squandering of Treasure and Sons, will stand the test of time.

America began with the King James Bible before it spoke of a pursuit of happiness, and by the time it stumbled upon that pursuit it was speaking a foreign language. Happiness by that time had been redefined as a flourishing of the Person, primarily derived from the removal of various checks on the Person’s aims. The ego was in need of Liberation. Liberalism’s initial, now-forgotten promise was that the unrepressed ego would inevitably practice a life of virtue, because reason, as it was alleged, is capable of establishing a science of virtue if unmolested by foolish dogmas and the criminal character that abuse from arbitrary authority kneads into the heart of man.

Rue Bennet of Euphoria is born into an America that is roughly 230 years down this path, which she made clear in her opening monologue, spoken under planes crashing into the Twin Towers: to her, the young generation is not morally culpable for its drug abuse, violence, and sexual degradation—these things were foisted upon it through psychiatry and bad parenting. Yet this inculpability is the exact enemy that Ali excoriates in the show’s concluding monologue, which centers around the reality of Good and Evil and the singularly evil nature of the drug trade. This, painfully for the young fan, ultimately indicts Fez and Rue as people marked by lives of evil, from an objective standpoint—that one can sympathize with the paths that led them to that business is acknowledged but firmly discredited by Ali’s words, which reserve no place for ‘systemic’ or, as he puts it, “empathetic” reads on behavior.

In Ali’s newfound understanding of morality, an action is to be morally judged by its effect (in this case, contributing to “the poisoning”), not on the doer’s life story; and the doer of the act is to be seen as the culpable agent of the act, not some influence on their life. His bitterness toward the insufficiency of drug counseling takes its fury out on the whole of the international order, from third world governments which turn blind eyes toward drug production, to the underground distribution process handled by the working poor, and to the mainstream American politicians, judges, and, most shockingly, “nonprofits” who abet it all through the relativistic moral logic at the heart of amelioratory social liberalism. This is not a message that can be embraced by Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass at the 2028 DNC.

Ali’s moral evolution leads inexorably toward taking up arms and exacting violence on the perpetrators of the drug trade. The drug dealer, as the merchant of an objectively ignorant interpretation of happiness’s pursuit (see Alamo’s monologue just before his death, in which the macho pimp regrets the whole of his life’s work and attributes it to an incorrect view of the hierarchy of power and “pussy,” casting himself as a slave and wishing instead for a “Norman Rockwell” life, just before getting brought down by his most trusted henchman), is the Gray Eminence behind the entire cast’s tragic livelihoods, even though none are directly taking drugs in the third season. Their sexual exploitation, barbaric torturing, and alienation from friends and family are all epiphenomena of the misguided longing for euphoric sensation at the heart of the Narcotic Society—which in hindsight was always going to be the destination of liberalism, with its mechanic-sensualist cosmology and its utilitarian social policy. The drugs, in turn, are epiphenomena of this fundamental sense of lack; feelings of personal inadequacy drive these characters to their destructions; the ultimate death blows were already struck the moment Cassie wanted Instagram to behold her $50,000 wedding flowers or Nate needed to be seen as a successful young entrepreneur at any price.

Everyone in the show wants a family, including Faye and the Nazi, but no one ends up having one. The only people who have children are they who ‘shut up and do,’ the Christian family in Texas. Liberalism cannot help but view children metaphysically as a disturbance of its discourse—here are these beings who would put a check on the ego, but they cannot be written off as oppressive authorities like church or king or Culture; in fact they are helpless, more oppressed than the ‘minority’ groups we champion, but they enforce a social conservatism through their need to be adequately protected and cared for each day, so it is more convenient to simply write them off as not worth having. Yet liberalism does not feel satisfied by this answer, because it knows it undermines itself as a social ideology if it cannot account for the future. In her final conversation with Jules, Rue voices her desire for kids precisely because they could free her from overbearing subjectivity, and Jules does not disagree, but merely tells her she has not yet hit the baseline maturity required for such sacrifice.

The Texan family, while almost viscerally “white” and “conservative,” are not encumbered by ideology—they are pursuing a traditional life for its own sake, viewing virtue as its own reward, without rhetoric. They treat obviously suspicious strangers with kindness as they help them on their way, and their children do not brag about their father’s handiness or money, as is increasingly common among the new rich blue collar, but view even the birth of a calf from their cow as a miracle of graceful intervention. We can even grant what the show seems to want us to think, that this family has barely even heard of Trump, who if I am not mistaken is only mentioned once in the series by a news anchor mumbling in the background of the last episode.

It’s with the Texan family that Ali chooses to end the story. In his special episode he already trashed revolutionary leftism of the Black Panther variety as a faded hope captured by Nike, so a call to vote or protest could not have been his next turn, and even his stoicized Islam had been chipped away by the insulting stupidity and slithering spinelessness of his post-rehab milieu. Ali, physically sickened by the rigmarole of relativism and its excuses—which he insightfully places at the feet of the well-worn “I’ve gotta feed my family” line of bullshit—snaps back to what he was likely raised with, and where American logic began, a Puritan understanding of the Bible, but now combined with a modernized and wild-westernized sense of political order, the radical anarchism of the Individual and their gun. It is his shotgun which ends the terror, not the futile DEA.

Yet these revelations would all have been inaccessible to the characters without Desire’s perpetual lusting for objects of ecstasy, whether in vices or in love for individual persons. The trade-off for this embrace of desire is that, occasionally, people like Rue will die. It is not so much the corporeal ego, the me, but the hypothesized Subject and its image as beheld through the eyes of a subversive Other, that the show critiques. Like the tale of “Cupid and Psyche,” the method of knowledge acquisition in this “Puritanism” is erotic rather than ascetic. Passionless repetition of articles of belief cannot contend with moral conclusions reached through worldly interaction: “And when praying do not babble repetitious phrases as the gentiles do; for they imagine that they will be listened to by virtue of their prolixity. So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:7-8).

Sam Levinson’s Euphoria is therefore an extension of what David Lynch was building in Twin Peaks: The Return, a radical refusal of Liberalism’s logic not from the perspective of Old World dress-up games (whether Medieval European or Ancient European or Aztec or Islamic or Chinese or African or Hindoo) but from within the modern American experience. Levinson is tired of liberalism, but does not trouble with an outside and superimposed solution, whether from intellectual incuriosity or an informed commitment to authenticity. I am not interested in hailing Euphoria as a work of genius and giving its creator too much credit. To take it too seriously as a religious work would be absurd. The show overindulges in its low-hanging fruit (sex, drugs, lazy theatrical tropes) past the point of artistic device and into the realm of outright glorification, and fundamentally the show is designed as a marketable commodity to a particular in-crowd (mainly young, coastal, female, diverse) who will in all likelihood ignore its final message. But what it is as a product does not limit what it means as an event.

What Levinson puts together is like a shotgun of theology: a hastily assembled collection of the show’s scattered religious imagery, fired like grapeshot at social ugliness.

“Religion” is reached in the story through an acceleration of the sins of egos. Levinson’s literary influence, Artuad, and his Theater of Cruelty, is invoked in his amplification of the viscerality of our contemporary porn and crime, which the social media and tabloid peanut gallery predictably cannot stomach, for the mirror is too much to bear. And at the end of this nerve-thrashing exercise in which our faces are shoved in a circus of scum, saying, “this is what you, we, all are, what we have become,” it does not end with some fancy baroque theology but a blunt and almost peasant-like groping for the Bible. Its characters consume the Bible in the way it is more likely consumed by contemporary people: not studied in Hebrew or Greek or in a wholesome wheatfield but played on audiobook in a beat-up car or read in the form of the copy your dead friend left at your apartment.

Levinson, from within the artistic process, and Levinson taken as “Hollywood” at large, discovers The Bible is the only other place besides Liberalism for which the American writer can turn if they have any fidelity to the unwritten rules of drama. We cannot hope to turn to any of our particular ethnic paganisms or some esoteric quasi-Atheistic philosophy and achieve the same unifying ethical cultural ground. And no Christian denomination is chosen nor could possibly serve as a vessel to the world-aware, fresh articulation of morality the times call for. Whatever a culture sets out with, it must conclude with; but its departure from its center in pursuit of the extremity means its return will modify its center in light of what its venturing has discovered.

Levinson did not achieve, let alone exhaust, this articulation—like the actor of Ali, Colman Domingo, says in the concluding Behind the Scenes footage, poetry is this thing you cannot touch. It is this beautiful sheen life gives certain moments, which we often fail but still keep struggling to capture. This Bible is Cruel, compared to the maudlin commercialized Christianity of Instagram, but it is also almost absurdly tolerant and indulgent compared to 1.0 Puritanism, as it has been trained by Hollywood’s muses of art. And as the American flag waves at the end of the show, we must understand it is flying over the corpse of its main character, savagely murdered by fentanyl, a drug which stands in symbolic excess of the logic of the drug deal: “Why would we kill our own customers?” Consciously or semi-consciously, Hollywood’s most hip show of the moment has ended with a savage attack on Liberalism—that its worst vices are incoherent according to market logic, only interpretable as ritualized evil. And the farthest avant-garde of popular art has docked its ship in the harbor of Ithaca: Ali shooting Alamo with a shotgun, Christ tying millstones around those who hurt children and tossing them into the sea.

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This is the third in a series of posts for paid subscribers in which I share my notes on the notion of the “end of art”—the theory that art is a thing of the past and that we have arrived at a cultural dead-end.

11/15/2025-12/8/2025. On Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, with quotes from Ritter, ETA Hoffmann, and Diderot; Joyce and Eliot; Nietzsche and Heidegger; the relationship between the Halcyon tone and Stimmung; Hermann Broch.

***

The whole struggle between Nietzsche and Heidegger for me amounts to this: that Nietzsche has the correct themes and concerns, but they falter because of his ontological foundations, which result in the total cessation of the ego through the conception of organic activity as purely hydraulic, functional, as will without thought, or thought lagging far behind the alleged biological drives of the body, as one porous packet of blind conflicting forces interacting with others against an infinite electromagnetic field. Heidegger’s thought is not an anti-biological thought, but rather seeks to perform First Philosophy from immediacy, ‘rooted’ experience, from the way that reality unfolds for a particular organism, ‘prior’ to our scientific understanding of ourselves as a biological organism. Because he chooses Dasein, who possesses the ‘immortal’ faculty of Language, this allows his ontological foundation to have a transcendental flavor, without any recourse to supernatural categories. This is a far stronger basis on which to pursue the themes of Nietzsche, because it safeguards them from collapsing into a pantheism that knows no real limits. The lack of limits is dangerous because it threatens to overwhelm any evaluation with omnidirectional interrogation as soon as it is laid down, because if the entire field of being is infused with a divinity there can be found a “reason” for any occurrence, for any behavior at all, and thus everything becomes equally justified, and thus the foundations for preferring one type over another collapses. With Heidegger, in spite of his early protestations to the neutral status of his term “authentic,” we in fact get a non-transcendent source for evaluation-preference in the form of modes-of-revealing that are closer or further away from the question of Being. Stimmung (Mood) and Dasein’s task of revealing being is the proper way begin the presentation of the halcyon, rather than the will to power.

‘substance’ monist will to power : Technology :: mode-of-revealing Care : Ereignis

***

From The Wandering Rocks:

[Frank Budgen: Stephen Dedalus stands before a jeweller’s and watchmaker’s shop]:

“Old Russel with a smeared shammy rag, burnished again his gem, turned it and held it at the point of his Moses beard. Grandfather ape gloating on a stolen hoard.

And you who wrest old images from the burial earth! The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting.

Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny trudged through Irishtown along London bridge road, one with a sanded umbrella, one with a midwife’s bag in which eleven cockles rolled.”

[FB: The two old midwives, Stephen’s beach companions, have just left Sandymount shore. Stephen is half an hour’s walk away in the centre of town.]

If, as T.S. Eliot argued in his review for The Dial, Joyce’s Ulysses is a “classical” work, it is classical in the sense that no matter how far away the Proper Nouns carry our thoughts it always restrains our focus to the city of Dublin, Dublin as the center-ing factor of the work. Eliot claims it is the myth of Odysseus that provides order, but Joyce’s remarks on the book and the text itself show that this is done by Place first, and by myth as a distant second. This is most clearly seen in The Wandering Rocks, the chapter with the widest scope of attention, in which the city relentlessly pulls the mind back to present particularity. The narrative sweeps over the points of departure found within the concerns of the consciousnesses but never strays too far from the concerns of the plot: the principal characters and their interactions with the city. Eliot in his review defined classicism not in contrast to ‘romanticism’ but as “a goal toward which all good literature strives, so far as it is good, according to the possibilities of its place and time.” He said one can do this either as a mummifier, dealing with dead themes and subject matter, or “by doing the best one can with the material at hand,” namely the material facts of contemporary existence, “material which you must simply accept.” The artist is not morally responsible for the existence of the material, he is merely giving light to it either as a lax artist or as a classic one; this is how he defended Joyce against accusations that he was the unleasher of half-baked Dadaism. “The next generation is responsible for its own soul; a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio-full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs.”

In the ‘mythic’ era of mental development, Vico shows that language is fundamentally poetic, in the sense that it personifies the natural world and makes sense of things through intuition and metaphor, rather than analysis and empirical-mechanical causality. In this, language is more like music than what we refer to with the word “language” in late modern ages. This is where we shall find the relation between the Nietzschean Halcyon tone and the Heideggerian Stimmung. For Eliot, Ulysses ditches the novel-narrative form, which was finished by Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, in favor of the myth, in Joyce’s case The Odyssey:

Read more

I wrote an essay on it for The Hedgehog Review, which you may read below:

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/father-why-hast-thou-forsaken-me

The advent of the will to power as the will to will opens up the possibility for the unlimited exploitation of everything. This occurs through the universal establishment of everything not merely as objects but as pure instrumentalities (Bestände) and through the subordination of all subjectivity and freedom to the overarching necessities of the will implicit in technology. Man is organized on a global scale by political, social, and economic agencies for production and consumption, and the earth itself becomes nothing but a reserve of energy and raw materials that are brought forth and directed by a technology that aims only at its own continuation and growth. The absolute technical state itself serves only to guide the total mobilization of human and natural resources for the unlimited exploitation and consumption of the earth. Politics along with all other institutions thus becomes an appendage of technology. In this “planetary imperialism” of technical organization subjectivity and modernity reach their end.

With the advent of world technology freedom is extinguished. The general conception of technology as a tool in the hands of a self-determining humanity is in Heidegger’s view a fundamental misunderstanding, for technology has a logic and necessity of its own that passes beyond human control. All men are governed by economic and technical necessities: the competition for the unlimited exploitation of the earth requires the objectification and subordination not just of some men to others but of all men to the world task. Man thus becomes human to the extent that he constitutes himself as a raw material that has no determinate characteristics, or as a pure instrumentality that can be used as momentary necessity dictates. Man becomes an interchangeable part.

In the midst of this technological frenzy of production and consumption, of subordination and exploitation, man fails to recognize, according to Heidegger, that it is the very subjectivity and freedom he regards as the essence of his humanity that uproots him and casts him into uncertainty, insecurity, and alienation. Hence he does not recognize that all his striving only more completely obliterates his place in the world and his true humanity. Indeed, man and the world are thereby so transformed that the very possibility of a place, of an ethos, and hence of an authentic ethics and politics is extinguished. Man who had a home in the world in the context of the polis and traditional life is at home in the modern world everywhere and nowhere: as a pure instrumentality man can adapt himself to anything. As homo faber man becomes mass man.

—Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History1

i. The Journeying

Heidegger’s exposition on the unhomeliness of humanity over the course of the Second and Third Parts of the Ister lecture is grounded in four quotations from Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’s so-called Ode to Man from Antigone. I shall present them and then proceed to run through a synopsis of the two Parts.

From the first strophe,

“Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing / more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being” [in other words, “nothing is more uncanny than man”]

From the second strophe,

“Everywhere venturing forth underway, experienceless without any way out / he comes to nothing”

From the second antistrophe,

“Towering high above the site, forfeiting the site / is he for whom non-beings always are / for the sake of risk”

And, immediately following those lines,

“Such shall not be entrusted to my hearth, / nor share their delusion with my knowing, / who put such a thing to work.”2

Hölderlin’s term “das Unheimlichste,” “the most uncanny,” is a translation of the Greek “τò δεινότατον,” a modification of the word “δεινόν” (neuter of δεινός). In English, this word is usually translated to something like “terrible,” “fearful,” or “powerful,” as it has connotations of danger. But it also has connotations of “strange,” “wondrous,” or “marvelous.” Sophocles’s “Ode” understands man to be an aberration in the animal kingdom, a creature who possesses immense technical inventiveness which has enabled him to master its environment and harness nature toward his advantage, able to overpower all limits—except mortality. Hölderlin’s translation, by capturing both the “fearful” and the “strange” connotations of the word, renders palpable the implied aberrant status of man. First, Heidegger points to the resonance between “das Unheimlichste” and “unheimisch,” or “unhomely.”3 For Heidegger, the unhomely process, the process of tearing ourselves out of the flow of nature, forgetting our home and venturing out, is History, the essence or meaningful pattern of history since the inception of metaphysics, with its calamitous culmination being globalized technological civilization. The decisive role the Ister played in transmitting metaphysics from the Greeks to the Germanic peoples, and the ways rivers in general determine the historic destiny of human beings, is at least one of the elements at play in Hölderlin’s Ister hymn. Heidegger adds that, if bringing out the ways that rivers determine humans in their essential historicity—and thus in their Being, for Time is the horizon of being—was Hölderlin’s early attempt at poetizing beyond representation, then such post-representational poetizing must necessarily poetize upon the Journeying or Venturing, ὁ πόρος, the metaphysical homelessness that man as the uncanniest of creatures experiences as an extension.4 Because if Hölderlin’s poetizing is a poetizing on the essence of rivers, and rivers in their essentiality are “locality” (a river is always a particular river, indelibly idiosyncratic, wrapping around an unreplicable series of earthen features, shaping them in turn, a place where humans build homes, the source of our homeliness, making arable our abode) as well as “journeying” (both the natural history of this river and the world-historical status of man’s relations to it, seen in the hymn’s references to Pindar’s lines about “Hercules” traveling it as mythic summary of the spirit of philosophy transiting from the “Indus” in India to Greece’s “Alpheus” to the Germanic peoples), then to really circle in on the essence of the river the poet must open up its temporal activity by weaving the story of the events to which it has been essential.

Humans draw meaning from rivers themselves, in a more fundamental way than how we draw meaning from the study of history (“historiography”). At its most essential layer, the poetizing on the river as becoming homely is far more than the drawing of “meaning” from a mere reflection on history. Rather, the historical reflecting Hölderlin, and Heidegger, undertake is a reflection on the “History of Being.” This is not the history of mere facts and dates; this is the history of how Being has been grasped within philosophy and poetry over the centuries, and how this grasping has determined the exterior being of the earth, informing our modes of revealing, meditating on all its metamorphoses (from polytheism to monotheism to the flight of the gods) in an attempt to arrive at its so-called Ground (the gods’ return). The river has been essential to the unfolding of human history—especially the Ister, which for Hölderlin (in Heidegger’s reading) is the site of the transmission specifically of the question of the meaning of Being from the Greek pre-Socratics to the German philosophers of what we can call the advent of nihilism—but more importantly, because it determines human history, it therefore might serve as a porthole to view its underlying process or strategy.

That the history of Being is decisively driven by the rivers means that the rivers must also be decisive in the question concerning Being, and only by heeding them as they are rather than contorting them into a puppet for our preconceived theories can we receive it. In a beautiful summation of all this—this being the content of some 125 pages—Heidegger at the end of the lecture decides that poets and rivers share the same ground. They are both “demigods.”5 They are demigods in the sense that they mediate between the gods (or “the heavenly,” or simply “the holy,” as in holy-ness), and man, the mortals. They do this by making an “Open” which faces the direction of the holy, which allows for a moment of appropriation, of receiving and sending: locality and journeying are a unity that cannot be made sense of using the spatio-temporal logic we are accustomed to; rather they can only be rendered sensible with the clearing Ereignis, a prominent word in late Heidegger that is typically translated as “event of appropriation.”6 It is difficult to translate Ereignis into a single word that conveys the various senses Heidegger means to get across, but, according to a careful elaboration by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, it should be thought of as inowning, as a ““going all the way into and through” without possessing,” neither an event within time-space or an appropriation in the sense of taking but a property-less and unappropriating owning of being.7 In terms of human praxis, Ereignis understood as inowning is like the term gelassenheit [releasement of self-will] that Heidegger borrows from Meister Eckhart with the added sense that it is not pure resignation but a positive and world-focused rather than God-focused action, an active gelassenheit.

Proper historicality is only commenced when we stand “in the realm of the essential,” when we “are able to wait for what is destined to be of one’s own [die Zu-schickung des Eigenen—the resonance between Eigenen and Ereignis is intentional].”8 But ‘one’s own’ and its essence “is so mysterious [geheimnisvoll]” that the unfolding of “its ownmost essential wealth” can only proceed from a “supremely thoughtful” meditation on the “foreign,”9 i.e., the journeying away from home, like Hercules the foreigner’s visit to the “shady springs of Ister” to persuade “the Hyperborean people, Apollo’s servants,” along with “Zeus himself” to bestow unto him the olive tree, a plant he could bring back to the Hellenes and with which he could “provide shade for men to share” and create “crowns for deeds of excellence.”10 The “passage through the foreign” is that by which we are enabled to “return home into one’s own, and thereby that which is one’s own itself”’11; in other words, only by becoming enmeshed in what is not our home can we understand what is home, and through this understanding provide “shade and crowns,” glorify and find gratitude, and “establish the holy judging” as Hercules did.12 Indeed, in Hölderlin’s telling, Hercules was “invited” by the “distantly gleaming” Ister river itself; and he had to “come up from the sultry Isthmus” of Greece and “look for shadows” because “full of courage they were / in that place [Greece], but, because of the spirits, / there’s need of coolness too. That is why that hero / Preferred to come here to the well-springs and yellow banks, / Highly fragrant on top, and black / With fir woods.”13 Let us, with Giambattista Vico, understand Hercules as an amalgam of various pre-historic founders who slayed the beasts of the pre-civilized earth and cleared the ground for cities to grow.14 If one of the Greek’s founding fathers, apparently, traveled beyond the north wind—to those men unreachable “by ship or by foot” whom Apollo feasts with for three months each year because he “finds greatest delight” in “their banquets and praises”15—in order to establish one of Greece’s holiest cults, the Olympic Games—the sanctification of the athletic feats of nobles, a “leisurely” activity enabled by their emancipation from toiling labor through the combined efforts of techne and slavery—then at the tail-end of technology-enabled leisure the modern western technician must, as shall see, travel back to Greece to retrieve the answer to world technology: the theurgic abilities of the ancient Poet.

Homecoming is inaugural theme of post-representation. Only by experiencing nihilism and the despair of the Technical nullifying of human life and culture can we experience what is not nihilism, not unhomeliness. In the Isterlecture, Heidegger says Being is synonymous with Hestia, the Hearth, via Hölderlin’s translations of Antigone: Heidegger connects the third Sophoclean passage above with the fourth: “the site” that Sophocles says man “towers above,” Heidegger claims, is not “the polis,” the turning-pole which pulls the beings of the regime into the civil order, but the more primordial “Hearth” mentioned a few lines later. And this “hearth” bears an immediate relation to the goddess Hestia, who, according to Plato’s Phaedrus, “alone always remains steadfastly behind in the homestead of the gods.” Heidegger takes this to mean that Hestia “is the middle of all steadfast constancy and presence—that which essentially prevails in being, that which the Greeks experience in the sense of constant presence.”16 The Ister river, by revealing both the locality (the homely) and the journeying (the unhomely) at once, is not a symbol for but is the “demigod” window into the God—without the use of metaphysics, onto-theology. As the mouthpieces of this mediatory ground, the poets and the rivers are Others; poets Otherize themselves to be able to lose the essential-lack-of-essence in humanity, to lose a bit of their uncanniness, and thus become able to grasp Being.17

In the Ister hymn, Hölderlin says “a sign [Zeichen] is needed” “so that / Sun and moon it may bear in mind, inseparable, / And go away, day and night no less, and / The Heavenly feel warm one beside the other.”18 Where he got this notion is not known, but the ancient Norse poem Völuspá, collected into the “Poetica Edda,” tells of how the Aesir gods gave names to “noon and twilight, / Morning they named, and the waning moon, / night and evening, the years to number” (stanza 6), how the Norns carved runes into wood and thereby set the laws of men and the fate of their lives (20), and how, after the battling breaks out between the Aesir and the Vanir over the breaking of “words and bonds” (26), the process of Ragnarok commences: “The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea, / The hot stars down from heaven are whirled; / Fierce grows the steam and the life-feeding flame, / Till fire leaps high about heaven itself” (57). After most of the gods die, the few remaining “call to mind” “the mighty past” “and the ancient runes of the Ruler of Gods” (60) and thenceafter rebuild the world, to be ruled over by “a mighty lord,” and “happiness ever there shall they have” (64-65).19 There is also, of course, the God of Genesis speaking the world into being, and Saint John’s identification of Jesus Christ with the Logos. The notion that the world is sustained by language is an old tradition, but what is perhaps new with Hölderlin is that this is the task of man, not of gods: as he writes in the “Patmos” hymn, “but what the Father / Who reigns over all loves most / Is that the solid letter / Be given scrupulous care, and the existing / Be well interpreted. This German song observes.”20

Heidegger takes “the sign” to be the poet himself, rather than a symbol, because Hölderlin says this “sign” can bear things in “mind,” implying it has a mind.21 To become the sign, rather than making the river a “sign of” something, is what is meant by the poet’s becoming Other.22 The river too is the sign, as the river and the poet, given what they do, are exchangeable. Heidegger then reiterates that rivers cannot be said to be “signs of” something else because they are themselves signs, themselves this something else23—and, to disagree with Heidegger here (who, at the very end of the lecture, bizarrely changes his previous reading of the poem’s last line, “No one knows,” claiming without evidence that the poem broke off there and that Hölderlin was about to start connecting what he was saying to the Rhine24—I will return to this later), this is precisely why Hölderlin can say “no one knows” what the rivers do, because no mortal can grasp this, only the demigods, and them only barely. The poet nevertheless bears the heavenly in mind for us and distributes this share of the heavenly to us, sharing the Holy without fragmenting it or enframing it.25 But, to again depart from Heidegger, the claim that the poet is the sign because a sign lacks a mind is a bit tenuous, and the identification of the poet with a demigod would be too hubristic for Hölderlin. It is easier to argue, as Hölderlin suggests in the Patmos lines quoted above, that the poem is the sign, that language is mind and that language bears or houses Being (“Hestia”), as Heidegger will say elsewhere.26

Regardless, the poet avoids enframing by naming, giving the poetic word to things; the sign (“the besouler”) “bears everything originarily in mind,” makes them appear: the sign lets the heavenly show themselves—otherwise they would face oblivion, as they do under planetary technology, whose mode of revealing is Ge-stell, enframing.27

Quoting from Hölderlin’s hymn “The Rhine,” Heidegger notes that the heavenly “feel nothing” on their own, cannot comport toward beings; they need a relation to “the holy beyond them” which is shown to them by the Others who are the signs (river, poet or poem, demigod) and who in turn fence in and mark them for mortals to see.28 The poet’s task is in one sense a “showing,” a revealing, just as “truth” for Heidegger has a phenomenological character rather than a propositional one, as with the Greek aletheia, “unconcealment.” Through the sign/rivers, the heavenly unite with this world, which makes possible their relation to mortals, their descent to them, opening up the joy of relating to “sons of earth.” Heidegger describes the poets’ act of making a descent for the divine possible as “building of a staircase” for the gods to come down on, which simultaneously makes a “dwelling place” for humans: both are established poetically through a grounding in Being.29 The rivers, as signs, point out or show what is essential, “make arable” the land (“poiēsis” as “making”): ““Poetically” they ground the dwelling of human beings upon this earth.”30 This is not even figurative: places are farmed and thus their soil and waterways are tended to when humans decide to dwell there (as in the Ister hymn: “But here we wish to build. / For rivers make arable / the land”), and this decision is reciprocally decided by the quality of land contributed to by the length and the size of the rivers, both as fertilizing entities and as routes of transportation for goods and travelers. And with cultivation comes cults for the divine.

But, given the gulf between humans and their homeless groundlessness, the loss of their essence, and the homely steadfast staying in Essence that is Hestia the hearth goddess, we can assume that poets have, since the death of God, abdicated this task or have been unable to perform it. Inessential poetry has meant that Hestia has been obscured by the Symbol just as the philosophical practitioners of ontotheology obscure her with the Idea. The only way this can be overcome is if a poet departs from mere aesthetic, metaphysical versifying and reaches a more essential poetizing that can find in the earth’s rivers their steadfast nature without a need for technē, and thereby relate us to the hearth. This would be the occurrence of truth in the work of art, its presence rather than re-presence, whereby beauty would come to be understood as the appearance of the truth of Being rather than an idea in-itself. Poets of Hölderlin’s caliber are in a secret pact with the Norns and with History: they have been entrusted with the construction of a passage through which the fled divine will return. This staircase is the “sign” that Hölderlin refers to in the Ister hymn, after he states that “a sign is needed” for the “rivers to be to language” and keep the heavenly bodies in sight.31 The signage that poets and rivers do cannot be comprehended scientifically-metaphysically, but only phenomenologically-poetically. The “meaning” of this kind of sign is not a logical proposition but a caring nourishment—not unlike how Christians speak of Christ as “the truth.” Finally, on the last page of the lecture, Heidegger interprets Hölderlin’s line from the In Lovely Blueness… fragment, “Is there a measure on earth? There is none,” as a protest against forceful, “stealthy” scientific observation and systematicity, but for all that it is not a complete denial of measure in favor of mindlessness. Measure can only come from a place not-earthly. And this can only spring upon us by surprise—a thought which Heidegger takes from Hölderlin’s “The Journey”:

A dream it becomes for him who would

Approach it by stealth, and punishes him

Who would equal it with force.

Often it surprises one

Who indeed has scarcely thought it.32

The “demigod” can find the measure, for he alone is egoless enough and has given himself over to the gift and the hearth enough to be able to face the Holy.

ii. Technology and the Saving Power

Let us return to the poets’ abdication of their task. How can it be that this “Sign” to “bear the heavenly in mind” has not yet “surprised” a poet with its presence? If poetry is the domain in which we shall find the solution to our diremption from the home and find the means by which we will dethrone the reign of world technology, why has it not yet appeared, when plenty of people claim to practice poetry and have claimed to practice it since the death of God? To understand this, we must understand what the essence of technology is, which is to say we must discover what exactly is blocking the essential poetizing Heidegger has in mind.

In QCT, Heidegger puts forward the claim that the essence of (modern) technology is nothing technological; that it has, as he termed it elsewhere, an underlying “world picture” (Weltbild) which it imposes on the world. This Heidegger terms “Gestell,” an ordinary German word used for things like a “bookrack” or a “skeleton” that he says he chose precisely to use in an “eerie” way, as Plato did when he “daringly” used the Greek word εἶδος, which was previously used for outward visible aspects, for the underlying reality in things.33 Gestell is translated by William Lovitt as “enframing.” The thought here is that technological instruments themselves are not the source of the trouble, but the intellectual interface that representational thinking, which undergirds the modern scientific worldview required for the invention of modern technological instruments, establishes in us. Heidegger in QCT defines “enframing” as “the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve.” Enframing tells us that nature is a set of objects awaiting exploitation by subjects. The river is nothing more than a potential power source for a hydroelectric dam. Elsewhere he noted that the sense of “to set or posit” is present in the common understanding of “stellen” (to frame), as can be seen the word Ge-Setz (similar to the English word “statute,” from the Latin “statuere,” to set),34 which is believed to come from the same root. Heidegger insists that enframing is not just one posited “worldview” among many, which could be corrected by adjusting our opinions on social-political “positions,” but is that predecessor positing which enables all worldviews, since the notion of a world-“view” is already something framed.35 Enframing is a “way of revealing” that “holds sway” in modern technology, a phenomenological model preceding all modern perspectives, something that we are not conscious of having adopted.36 No one alive is outside of it: since enframing challenges man forth, man unavoidably “stands within the essential realm of enframing.” The general trajectory of its unfolding is also predetermined by its inner logic: Gestell once adopted automatically starts “man upon a way of revealing, destining [Geschick]. It is from this destining that the essence of all history [Geschichte] is determined.”37 Its inner logic can be said to be the will-to-power, which in the final analysis is nothing more than the will-to-will, “empowering to power,” an infinitely regressive tautological exploitation of beings without end.38

Heidegger contends that the “final delusion” imputed by enframing, stemming from both technological man’s view that everything he encounters is his construct and from his self-conception as “lord of the earth,” is that “man everywhere and always encounters only himself.” This is delusional because Gestell, as an alien essence that follows its own logic, cannot be controlled by man, and so what man is encountering is not himself but Gestell; it is a false self-confrontation: “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e. his essence.” Man as challenged-forth cannot be encountering himself when he encounters his products, natural things represented as mere objects, and the world itself as “standing reserve”—instead, he is encountering always only technology and, typically, is ignorant even of that: “Man stands so decisively in subservience to the challenging-forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to.”39 As we saw, man’s forgetting of his essence and his subsequent homeless wandering is the central theme of the Second Part of the Ister lecture. This is because modern technology and man’s unhomely uncanniness share as a common root the decision that was made in distant antiquity when the question of Being presented itself: the advent of metaphysics and the substitution of Being for beings, whether as material objects or as ideas.

About five paragraphs down from these remarks, Heidegger tempers this world-historical tension with a quote from Hölderlin’s hymn “Patmos”: “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.” Patmos, an island in the Aegean Sea, was used by the Romans as a prison colony for exiles, among them being John, who according to tradition was the same man who wrote the eponymous Gospel and the Epistles. It was on Patmos that he claimed to have received a vision of the end times and which he copied down as a text known as the Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse of John.40 This hymn of Hölderlin’s is fittingly chiliastic and, like many of his other poems, attempts to unite Christ and the gods of pagan Greece together into one heavenly council presiding over the same cosmos. The “saving power” is literal: for Hölderlin, the gods fled the world and are withholding their grace, but in an age to come they shall return, a prophesy he also wrote about in Bread and Wine and The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism.41 Heidegger first introduces the “saving power” lines from “Patmos” by way of contrasting “the actual threat” of technology with the “potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology.” The latter are a threat, but are not the primary threat that technology poses to man; that, the former, “has already afflicted man in his essence.” Specifically, the “rule” of enframing, the place where “there is danger in the highest sense,” is not merely the threat of being killed off by technology such as in a nuclear war; the rule of enframing is dangerous even if technology does not threaten us existentially. Enframing’s danger is essential; it “threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.” In a different essay, Heidegger spelled out the danger clearly:

But even supposing that the modern doctor, beneficiary of the progress of medicine, not only escapes death for a while but also recovers her health, even then the art of medicine has only better supported and guided φύσις. Τέχνη can merely cooperate with φύσις, can more or less expedite the cure; but as τέχνη it can never replace φύσις and in its stead become the ἀρχή of health as such. This could happen only if life as such were to become a “technically” producible artifact. However, at that very moment there would also no longer be such a thing as health, any more than there would be birth and death. Sometimes it seems as if modern humanity is rushing headlong toward this goal of producing itself technologically. If humanity achieves this, it will have exploded itself, i.e. its essence qua subjectivity, into thin air, into a region where the absolutely meaningless is valued as the one and only “meaning” and where preserving this value appears as the human “domination” of the globe. “Subjectivity” is not overcome in this way but merely “tranquilized” in the “eternal progress” of a Chinese-like “constancy” [“Konstanz”]. This is the most extreme nonessence [Unwesen] in relation to φύσις-οὐσία.42

On the other hand, the abasement of metaphysics to (or, more accurately, its final self-revealing as) the nihilist will-to-will could serve as a moment of “cleaning house,” a sweeping away of the confused verbiage of tradition that would illumine the path to a more original revealing, that of ποίησις (“poiēsis,” a production, creation, fabrication, poem; from ποιέω, “I make”), a mode that the Greeks originally understood τέχνη to participate in before it broke off into the instrumental logic of subordinating objects toward the undefined ends of subjectivity. In “The Principle of Identity,” Heidegger puts it succinctly: “In Gestell we catch sight of a belonging-together of Man and Being, wherein causative belonging alone determines the kind of togetherness and its unity.”43 While enframing “challenges forth,” poiēsis more gently “brings forth.” While enframing “blocks poiēsis” because of its characteristic “destining,” at the same time it promises to show the way back to poiēsis, because poiēsis’s “bringing-forth” is the origin of the frame’s challenging-forth.44 The problem, though, is that enframing “banishes man into the kind of revealing that is an ordering” and “drives out every other possibility of revealing.” Poets struggle to reach back into poiēsis because its very identity is blocked. Enframing “above all” conceals the revealing-mode known as poiēsis which “lets presence comes forth into appearance,” as opposed to challenging it forth and “thrust[ing] man into a relation to whatever is that is at once antithetical and rigorously ordered.”45 Enframing, besides covering over its own historical roots, most of all covers poiēsis.46

The reason it is even possible for man to be saved is because the relationship between enframing and poiēsis, ‘technology’ and ‘poetry,’ is not of a dualistic nature; they are related to each other, entwined: “the rule of enframing cannot exhaust itself solely in blocking all lighting-up of every revealing, all appearing of truth. Rather, precisely the essence of technology must harbor in itself the growth of the saving power.”47 The only way back to poiēsis is through the analysis of Gestell, whose contours were first made known to us by the investigation into the errors of metaphysics and the absence of a ground of the sciences, as Heidegger argues in “The Essence of Truth.” Before questioning into the essence of technology, man “does not grasp enframing as a claim;” in questioning it, he discovers the alien essence of his previous thinking. Once he discovers enframing as a distinct mode, he is then able to uncover the implication that it is not of his essence, and that there must be ‘alternatives.’ “We look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power.”48 By thinking the nature of technology as a particular way of revealing, which had a start date, we come to discover through philosophical genealogy that technē once encompassed a broader meaning: in ancient Greek, technē meant instrumental tools, but it also meant the fine arts, understood not as mere aesthetic objects but as that “revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearance.” Technē was “a single, manifold revealing.” Rather than “a sector of cultural activity” where works were to be “enjoyed aesthetically,” art in this epoch was understood to have what we may call theurgic powers, abilities to call the divine to presence, making it just as epistemologically supreme and as revealing of ultimate reality as science and technology are thought to be in our era of planetary technology. Since Technē “brought forth and made present,” it “therefore belonged within poiēsis.”49 Because enframing is not itself something technological, the only way to effectively reflect upon technology and have a “decisive confrontation” with it would not be to destroy it physically but to minimize its power through “a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.”50 This realizing of the saving power is not immediate, we cannot “lay hold of the saving power immediately and without preparation,” because in our haste we would attempt to do it with the tools we are used to, namely representational thinking; we’d merely make a new system of challenging-forth, a new metaphysics. Or, with representational art, we would make a polemic in the guise of art with a so-that-we-can- conclusion, ensnaring us back into the logic of the will-to-will. Instead, we must “foster” the saving power “in its increase” “here and now and in little things,” which requires “holding always before our eyes the extreme danger.”51 The poet of the other-beginning must begin to attempt to practice active gelassenheit, purposeful releasement from will and an abiding concern with locality, remaining critical toward the social forces that try to pull us into unquenchable, pointless willing and fretting.

iii. Only a god

After quoting the “Patmos” lines about the danger and the saving power, Heidegger says: “What does it mean to “save”? Usually we think that it means only to seize hold of a thing threatened by ruin in order to secure it in its former continuance. But the verb “to save” says more. “To save” is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its proper appearing.”52 But how can something “fetch” itself? Would man not have to be fetched by something else? Otherwise man, having not been saved i.e., fetched home into his essence, will continue to encounter everywhere only Gestell even if he has questioned into it and become aware of it. In a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel that was not published until after his death (at his request), Heidegger famously pronounced that “Only a god can save us.”53 There is much one can say about this statement in the context of his other works (not least the chapter “The Last God” in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) or (from Enowning)) also published posthumously), but I would like to examine one passage in particular. It is from his essay “What Are Poets For?” which takes its title from a line in Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” elegy: “and what are poets for in a destitute time?” The destitute time Hölderlin refers to there is interpreted by Heidegger as the “era to which we ourselves still belong,” the era where the gods have fled, and “the evening of the world’s age has been declining toward its night.” Similar to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the Death of God, Hölderlin’s “flight of the gods” reads secular modernity as a period not of optimistic enlightened maturity in the bliss of reason but rather as a period of fundamental abandonment, where the divine has departed from human affairs and we are left to grope in the dark, awaiting the gods’ return. This “default of God” means that the ground which grounds the world is discovered to be absent. In its place is only the abyss [Abgrund]: the complete absence of ground in which our world now hangs.54 It is after saying this that Heidegger says the following:

Assuming that a turn still remains open for this destitute time at all, it can come some day only if the world turns about fundamentally—and that now means, unequivocally: if it turns away from the abyss. In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss.

The turning of the age does not take place by some new god, or the old one renewed, bursting into the world from ambush at some time or other. Where would he turn on his return if men had not first prepared an abode for him? How could there ever be for the god an abode fit for a god, if a divine radiance did not first begin to shine in everything that is?

The gods who “were once there,” “return” only at the “right time”—that is, when there has been a turn among men in the right place, in the right way. […] But there is a turn with mortals when these find the way to their own nature. That nature lies in this, that mortals reach into the abyss sooner than the heavenly powers. […] He among mortals who must, sooner than other mortals and otherwise than they, reach into the abyss, comes to know the marks that the abyss remarks. For the poet, these are the traces of the fugitive gods. […] Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. The ether, however, in which alone the gods are gods, is their godhead. The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy. The element of the ether for the coming of the fugitive gods, the holy, is the track of the fugitive gods. But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track? Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy. This is why, in Hölderlin’s language, the world’s night is the holy night.55

Yes, it is where the danger of world technology grows that saving power also grows, but more than that, it grows in the most dangerous or “uncanny being,” who according to Sophocles is man, who precisely because of his dangerousness can both chance upon Gestell and grow the saving power. The gods are too holy to reach into the abyss. Yet mere man is also so dangerous, in the sense of being so ignorant of his essential nature, that he cannot find the marks of the fugitive gods left behind in the abyss. It is the artist who, by otherizing himself into the maker of the mediations between man and god, can find the track of the fugitive ones, which is the Holy itself, and thereby begin to build a dwelling for a god to return down and abide in. This propitiation is especially the task of the poet, for his art creates with that which is “the house of Being”—language:

Being, as itself, spans its own province, which is marked off (temnein, tempus) by Being’s being present in the world. Language is the precinct (templum), that is, the house of Being. The nature of language does not exhaust itself in signifying, nor is it merely something that has the character of sign or cipher. It is because language is the house of Being, that we reach what is by constantly going through this house. When we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word “well,” through the word “woods,” even if we do not speak the words and do not think of anything relating to language. […] All beings—objects of consciousness and things of the heart, men who impose themselves and men who are more daring—all beings, each in its own way, are qua beings in the precinct of language. This is why the return from the realm of objects and their representation into the innermost region of the heart’s space can be accomplished, if anywhere, only in this precinct.56

If language is the house of being and can therefore call Being back to its home, then language (or rather our abuse of it) is equally responsible for the forgetting of being that occurred in the inception of metaphysics. For Heidegger, language (as logos), Truth (as aletheia), and Being (as physis) are all of one interplay: to Unconceal Physis is to poetically Say (art = truth for Heidegger, truth = unconcealment) Physis, which is the ‘ground’ or enabling factor of language and truth.

But this of course is far from easy, for as Heraclitus said, “Physis loves to hide.”57 Much akin to Parmenides’s saying that Being and Thinking are one,58 Heidegger dispenses with the ‘humanistic’ notion that thinking is either a “theoretical representation of Being and of man” or a set of “directives that can be readily applied to our active lives.” Rather, fundamental thinking, thinking that ponders the truth of Being,

is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes to pass before this distinction. Such thinking is, insofar as it is, recollection of being and nothing else. Belonging to Being, because thrown by Being into the preservation of its truth and claimed for such preservation, it thinks Being. Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is. But it is by saying its matter. Historically, only one saying [Sage] belongs to the matter of thinking, the one that is in each case appropriate to its matter. Its material relevance is essentially higher than the validity of the sciences, because it is freer. For it lets Being—Be.

Thinking builds upon the house of Being, the house in which the jointure of Being fatefully enjoins the essence of man to dwell in the truth of Being. This dwelling is the essence of “being-in-the-world.” The reference in Being and Time to “being-in” as “dwelling” is no etymological game. The same reference in the 1936 essay on Hölderlin’s verse, “Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth,” is no adornment of a thinking that rescues itself from science by means of poetry. The talk about the house of Being is no transfer of the image “house” to Being. But one day we will, by thinking the essence of Being in a way appropriate to its matter, more readily be able to think what “house” and “to dwell” are.59

Nothing said here is intended to be metaphorical. The claim at the heart of our study in this essay, that there can be a poetry that is not symbolic or representational, would have to be as unmetaphorical as Heidegger’s conviction that language houses being, in the least figurative sense imaginable, and that within language we can and must think Being itself rather than represent beings in subjective fashion; just so—in fact, it is only through a poetry that verbally brings Being forth rather than sensuously representing beings-as-Ideas through symbols that this can be understood, for language used in the technic sense—such as in an academic essay—can only approximate the sense of this experience of Being, but cannot utter it. It is not just that there “can” be such a poetry and such a thinking, but that there must be if Being has been thought in the first place. For man to be saved from the technological plague infecting language, he must return language to its own homeland, the poetic, as Vico described in the most vivid way:

Of such natures must have been the first founders of gentile humanity when at last the sky fearfully rolled with thunder and flashed with lightning […] [they] were frightened and astonished by the great effect whose cause they did not know, and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky. And because in such a case the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect and because in that state their nature was that of men all robust bodily strength, who expressed their very violent passions by shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove, the first god of the so-called greater gentes, who meant to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and the clap of his thunder. And thus they began to exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of knowledge, and which, opening the mind of man, gives birth to wonder.60

Compare this also to Hölderlin’s ode “The Gods”: “But you [gods] alone can feed with your deathless youth, / In those that truly love you, the childlike mind, / And never, when they stray or suffer, / Wholly let sadness becloud their genius.”61 Something like this is what Heidegger means by ‘shepherding’ being in the statement, “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.”62 Being can be sidelined by universalist technical how-reasoning, or it can be lit up by particularist poetic that-reasoning. Gestell forgets about the question of being and investigates beings instead, because Being is pesky, it cannot be pointed to, it can only be brought up in speech. Poetry and thought are its domain. Being is housed in language; man himself also dwells in language, and it is he who speaks it (or rather, language itself speaks, and hopefully mortals listen); so, like a shepherd, it is his lot to tend to Being and the “preservation of Being’s truth,” its manifestation or emergence; given man’s immense powers, as the most uncanny being who wields destructive technological instruments, man must see to it within his own philosophical cosmology that Being does not “sink” to the oblivion of “forgottenness”63:

Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. […] Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech.64

To put it crudely, the way that we speak greatly affects the way that we think, and the way that we think greatly affects the way that we interact with the world—and humanity, and thus human speech, has become so powerful that it possesses the power to literally destroy the earth and bring us to extinction. To retract the danger caused by the technological worldview, we must plunge into language—not language made “into one more object” by using it as a tool of “relat[ing] to beings in terms of representation and production,” but language as a “saying that really engages in saying” that which “by nature belongs to the province of language,” namely “particular beings as a whole.”65 Language, poetically sculpted rather than technically used, will begin to attune humanity’s eyes to see, in neither in a wholly nostalgic “old” nor a groundlessly “new” way, the holy shimmering of particular things and locales and the essential dwelling of mankind, rather than universalist doctrines or “worldviews.” Language will call the god down, but it is the god’s coming down that enables this new seeing.

This novel way of seeing is what Mark Wrathall and Morganna Lambeth call “polydivinistic.” They developed the term in an essay on the previously mentioned “Last God,” a name which appears in both Heidegger’s Contributions and in The History of Beyng. To state from the very beginning, Wrathall and Lambeth do not think Heidegger conceived of the last god as a supernatural being. It is not a deity in the traditional sense. The last god is “something that’s already present but disguised by our technological projection of being.” In Contributions, Heidegger says the last god is “The totally other over against gods who have been, especially over against the Christian God.” He speaks of the last god’s “passing by,” not a lingering upon an absolute throne as the being of beings. He also speaks of the last god having its “essential swaying” within “the hint,” which he defines as “the onset and staying-away of the arrival as well as the flight of the gods who have been.” In other words, the essence of the last god lies in the history of philosophy and the history of religion—history is itself the hint.66 “Hint” appears to be yet another word borrowed from Hölderlin, who in his ode “Rousseau” says, “For the yearning man / The hint [Der Wink] sufficed, because in hints from / Time immemorial the gods have spoken.”67 Still more crucially, Heidegger says “The last god is not the end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history,” because it “stands outside those calculating determinations meant by titles such as “mono-theism,” “pan-theism,” and “a-theism.” “Monotheism” and all types of “theism” exist only since Judaeo-Christian “apologetics,” which has metaphysics as its intellectual presupposition. With the death of this god, all theisms collapse.” The destiny of the world hinges on the last god, because “Preparation for the appearing of the last god is the utmost venture of the truth of be-ing, by virtue of which alone man succeeds in restoring beings,” and man plays a decisive if ‘passive’ role in its appearing because its “greatest nearness” is “enowned when enowning [Ereignis] as hesitating self-refusal increases in not-granting.” This is also the moment of the “innermost distress of abandonment by being.”68

Wrathall and Lambeth understand the last god as that which “will allow us to move beyond the age of metaphysics,” our era, which in The History of Beyng Heidegger terms Machenschaft, “and into the new era of Ereignis.”69 Machenschaft, “machination,” formed out of the domination of the prior and primordial epoch, Aufgang or “whoosing up” [Dreyfus and Kelly’s translation, “Aufgang” itself being Heidegger’s transposition of phusis into German] which saw the cosmos as unstable and unpredictable, a realm where entities whooshed into existence and flittered away; humans felt themselves at the mercy of the gods and lived in an eternal present without any hope of predicting or controlling future events. During Aufgang, man prayed to the gods for mercy and miraculous intercession: their grace was a kind of primitive technology. Machenschaft arose precisely because humans sought more control over nature, so that their lives could become less unpredictable. This paradigm shift occurred gradually alongside the many technical discoveries, naturalist inquiries, and scientific studies that commenced in the pre-Socratic age of the Greeks, such as on the island of Samos under the reign of the tyrant Polycrates. Wrathall and Lambeth theorize that Ereignis will also come about as such a paradigm shift, something dramatically different from Machenschaft’s “world picture.” But this time we would be departing not the wilderness of nature but the nihilism of scientific materialism, not least from an exasperation with the incessant predictability and nullifying experiential sameness that is Gestell.70 I add that it is not so much the predictability of life, routine as such, but the predictability of how we think the world, its origins, and its future that we are tired of. What we are looking for is not a return to the powerlessness of Aufgang, however, but a world of technics that is not consumed by their essence, a world where instrumentalization exists but is not domineering—a “free relationship” to technological instruments outside the Gestell revealing mode.

Wrathall notes that Heidegger repeatedly stressed how the word “Ereignis” was not to be taken in its dictionary sense as “event or occurrence,” but instead should have its meaning drawn from the verb “eignen,” meaning “to be suitable or fitted or apt for some purpose.” Hence Wrathall controversially translates “Ereignis” as “adaptation.” He understands adaptation as ‘beyng’ [seyn],71 defined as “whatever individuates and makes entities salient as things which can figure in our comportment to the world” counterposed against ‘being’ which is a “stable structure for determining the constitutive features” in a way that is “universal” and “uniform.”72 In the epoch of Ereignis, brought on by the “passing by of the last god,” there will no longer be an “overarching intelligibility with which everything must comply or cohere,” but instead meaning will emerge “as the particular elements of a situation develop relationships in a “dance” of mutual adaptation.”73 In this sense, we will no longer conceptualize “entities” as parts of a “universal, uniform and stable conception of being.” We, adaptive and no longer machinistic, “will listen and allow particularities to guide into the salient relationships,” allowing the situation and its “sacred features” to impose demands on us. These particularities Heidegger called “the divinities,” and thus Wrathall calls the age of Ereignis “polydivinistic.” The divine within Ereignis will not be thought of as a miraculous intercession, good luck charms, as they were in Aufgang. The sacred particularities that will have emerged from the ruins of ‘objects’ are “beckoning messenger of the last god,” always reminding us to be “responsive to the situation around us,” and yet our response will only be a getting “pulled into a transient and local sense of the sacred.”74 We can think of particularities as opposed to universals or individuals, the other two factors of Hegel’s logical syllogism. In Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the social realization of the Particular is in the institutions of civil society, such as nonprofits, charities, churches, unions, and administrative bureaucracies, but for Hölderlin the most obvious particular would be certain places, locales endowed with historical consciousness.

Warthall and Lambeth’s gloss on Ereignis is somewhat clarifying but also confused by the same latent pragmatism in the thinking of Warthall’s teacher Hubert Dreyfus. Another way of getting at the same thing is to read Kurt Leidecker’s handling of it in his translation of Heidegger’s “The Principle of Identity” (1957). Leidecker translates Ereignis as “concern,” harkening back to the term Sorge (“Care”) in Being and Time (1927). He translates a passage where Heidegger explains the term’s connection to seeing:

The word Ereignis (concern) has been lifted from organically developing language. Er-eignen (to con-cern) means, originally, to distinguish or discern with one’s eyes, see, and in seeing calling to oneself, ap-propriate. The word con-cern we shall now harness as a theme word in the service of thought, keeping in mind what has just been explained. As a theme word thus understood it may be translated with as little success as the Greek theme word logos and the Chinese Tao. In the present context the word concern no longer signifies what we otherwise call an affair or happening. We now use the word singulare tantum, in the singular merely. What it designates takes place only in the singular, nay, not even any longer numerically speaking, but uniquely. What we learn by way of the modern world of technology in the frame-work [Gestell] as a pattern of Being and Man, is merely prelude to what we call con-cern. Con-cern, however, does not necessarily persevere in its prelude. For in con-cern we are persuaded of the possibility of developing the mere sway of the frame-work into a more primitive solicitude. Such a development of the frame-work from concern to solicitude would bring about the eventful reduction (never initiated by Man himself alone) of the world of technology from lordship to servitude within the realm in which man more properly involves himself in con-cern. […]

Con-cern is the internally oscillating realm through which Man and Being touch each other in their essence and attain their essential nature by divesting themselves of these determinations which metaphysics imputed to them.

To think of concern as con-cern means constructively cooperating in this internally oscillating realm. The building material for this self-supporting structure is derived by thought from speech. For, speech is the most delicate, but also the most fitful all-suppressive vibration in the floating structure of concern. In so far as our being has alienated itself in speech, concern will be our dwelling place.75

Ereignis is diametrically opposed to enframing’s challenging-forth, because present within it is not only the active Gelassenheit of inowning, but also the active and linguistic con-cern for things as they are in their essence rather than objects for subjective purposes, thises for thats, means for more means. As was said, the Turning (kehre) required to direct ourselves to this new mode of interfacing with things, the “saving,” was said to only be possible through the action of a god. For Wrathall and Lambeth, the reason why Heidegger says the last god “passes by” rather than “arrives” or “flees”—is neither present nor absent—is because, unlike previous gods who “would attune everyone to a certain sense of what is important,” the last god shall actively “refuse” to lay out a System of Values with a “singular notion of being.”76 The last god is “last” because it “will counter us in such a way that we are no longer open to world-grounding beings,” it will permanently “jolt” us out of the ontotheological tradition, beyond ‘ideologies,’ beyond world-views and re-presentations, and hence “will pull us out of metaphysics” and “our technological age.”77 In this way, the last god will not be a ‘deity’ in the sense of a “supernatural entity,” a being that starts a new order, but “something that’s already present but disguised by our technological projection of being,” namely the “experience of resistance and refusal,”78 a process or movement of “countering” that exposes the vacuity of technology’s demand to turn the world into a mere standing-reserve and makes us attend instead. The last god is like a pure force of authenticity, that authenticates us regardless of our subjective ‘will,’ that forces us to become a being-toward-death, and commences the age of Ereignis as con-cern.

The temporalistically-bound rather than idea-bound poets, the Hölderlins of the future, will poetize on these sacred particulars in order to prepare our seeing for the “final” act of “the last god.” As Hölderlin writes in “Patmos”:

and here is the wand

Of song, signaling downward,

For nothing is common. The dead

He reawakens whom coarseness has not

Made captive yet. But many timid eyes

Are waiting to see the light.79

iv. Technified Verse

It is the post-representational poet who can find our way back to the gods, but finding this way is not as simple as composing what passes for a “poem” today. It would require first a prolonged meditation in the midst of the destitute time, inwardly imbibing the destitution, and letting it seep onto the nature of poetry itself; these poets “must especially gather in poetry the nature of poetry.” The poet in poetizing on the essence of the river also simultaneously poetizes on the essence of man (the unhomely or “journeying” one) and on the essence of poets themselves, because every essential poetizing of something is also a poetizing on the essence of poetry. Through this meditation on unhomely man and homely-making rivers, poetry finds hints of its goal, because it is through defamiliarizing or “making strange” existence that poetic speech makes visible this hidden relationship between man and Being. More fundamentally, essential poets earn their title if they do not expediently grab for some already-existing theism or ideology but instead face squarely the flight of the gods, the nihilism of the situation, for, as Michael Gillespie puts it,

Heidegger believes that only on the basis of a real revelation or disclosure of the essence of nihilism, i.e., of the relationship of Being and nothing, is a true ethics and politics possible. Nihilism thus cannot be overcome by merely rejecting modernity in favor of antiquity but necessarily depends upon overcoming both modernity and antiquity and that means overcoming metaphysics and the west itself.80

The readers of the poets, who “are on the way to the destiny of the world’s age,” must learn to listen to these poets’ sayings without “reckoning time merely in terms of that which is by dissecting that which is”81 and thereby deceiving themselves about the identity of this destitute time, but instead by grasping this time or age as the manifestation of an overpowering mode of revelation that must be destroyed.

In the essays “The Age of the World Picture” and QCT, Heidegger performs sketches of the history of Western metaphysics highly similar to the one we saw in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” but in these his aim is to attribute the modern scientific outlook, “Gestell,” to the Idea/matter metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, and the medieval scholastics. There is an intrinsic connection between modern art and technology for Heidegger, and both have historical connections to metaphysics and therefore to Hegel’s dialectic. As we now see, for Heidegger “aesthetics,” Gestell, and Hegel are in a sense all one. And likewise, if Hegel is the beginning of the end of metaphysics, and modern technology is Western metaphysics’ final form, then post-representational poetics are the solution to the problem of world technology. The poets who can properly be said to be practicing poiēsis, revealing a free relationship with technology, cannot be the subject-object symbol-material artists the Platonist West has known since its beginning. The poet, that Other, who will lift us out of the stupor of ontotheological representation and prepare an abode for the heavenly, must be both an essence poet, one who poetizes on the essences of particular things, and an “avant-gardist” who eschews the metaphysical poetic tradition. For while the essence of things can only appear with “signs from the tradition,” at the same time “nothing passed down [“tradition” from the Latin word “trāditiō” meaning “handing over,” “handing down”] to us can directly bestow what is essential.”82 This is why, despite the hundreds of thousands of “poets” active since the advent of scholasticism, none of them have been able to call down the “Last God” and fetch us back into our essence. This is exactly why Heidegger, at the very end of QCT, warns that art and the “fine arts” will only play the role of the saving power “if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth”83 by middling in the domain of self-expression, which is just the modern iteration of Platonic expression. And hence, the Turn destroys the Hegelian end of art thesis.

If “our sheer aesthetic-mindedness” has been the cause behind our “no longer guard[ing] and preserv[ing] the essential unfolding of art,”84 then the poetry of the aesthetic-minded, insofar as it has been symbolic, has been entirely technological. Representationalist art taken in an essential sense is technology. Insofar as a piece of literature, or any artwork for that matter, or any aesthetic doctrine, conceives of art as the implementation of an idea in sensuous form, it is technological. Technified verse and aesthetics think society, nature, and man as objects, and think the artist as a subject who, in their Genius, correctly interprets the objects with an Idea by which the artist attempts to master, “solve,” or “cure” the ‘human condition’ according to the same logic which scientific rationality follows in developing technological devices for use in the pursuit of the conquest of nature. Gestell cannot be halted by an aesthetic-minded poem that advances an Idea or thesis about “society” or “nature” and is received as a “human achievement”85 “cultural achievement”86 within the humanist canon, a front for the publishing industry since the Renaissance and for the bourgeois secularist-academic understanding of the humanities at large, any more than Gestell can be substantively challenged by a political order in an age where politics has receded under the confines of the administrative technocracy that manages the planetary imperialism of subjectivity. In other words, “Nihilism, as Heidegger understands it, cannot be overcome by the replacement of God by reason, progress, or an economic socialism that establishes mere democracy but necessarily depends upon a transformation of the essence of man himself.”87 Aesthetics is the handmaid of such pseudo-politics, both being thin disguises of technological nihilism. As Heidegger says in “Ister” after a discussion of “aesthetics” as psycho-sentimental subjectivity: “The immeasurable superficiality of modern human beings here forgets only to ponder the fact that modern human beings nowhere have an originary “lived experience” of artworks anymore—granted that we could have a lived experience of artworks at all—but only of the machine and its destructive essence.”88

Our sheer aesthetic-mindedness, despite the fact that it never stops rambling on about art and artists, neglects to regard the essential unfolding of art. “Yet,” Heidegger adds at the very end of QCT, “the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.”89 The more we contemplate and meditate on the nature of the danger—the journeying of man around the earth, his flight from the Hearth and the gods’ flight from the world, his essence’s imminent destruction in the face of the looming threat of his being made into a technically-producible artifact—the more we begin to espy the alternative. Focusing on the silhouette of enframing will prevent “the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering” which enframing threatens. While “human activity can never directly counter this danger,” “human reflection can ponder the fact that all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it.”90 And so, by ending “The Ister”with the lines “But what that one does, the Ister / No one knows,” Hölderlin was protecting the river from metaphysics and therefore also from technology. Essential poetry works to dispel “technology’s” hegemony over everyday life, but this can only be accomplished by repudiating the fundamental claims to totalizing knowledge made by enframing, in favor of a more fundamental mysteriousness.

But as I mentioned before, Heidegger’s perplexing change of mind at the end of the Third Part of the Ister lecture runs against this reading, which would fit perfectly with the rest of his philosophy. In fact, much of the Third Part degenerates from what is said in the First, and strays into a symbolic interpretation of the hymn’s lines. He throws away his chance to connect the “No one knows” line to his concept of being “open to the mystery”91 by arguing without evidence that Hölderlin, in the last lines of the Ister hymn, was talking about the Rhine River (I will quote nearly in full due to the passage’s odd nature preventing any selection):

The Ister is deprived of that superior freedom bestowed upon the origin and source of the Rhine. […] The Ister, by contrast, is not so freely or so highly born as to spring forth from favorable heights, that is, to plunge downward and from out of the force of such a plunge to be able at once to hasten away like the Rhine. In keeping with its lofty origin, the Rhine’s kingly soul drove this river “impatiently” (third strophe) toward the East. […] There is the other, the Rhine, quite other in its essence, which is poetized in the Rhine hymn […] What the vocation of the Ister is, and what it does as a son of the mother, it well knows, for without its mysterious whiling and dwelling near the origin […] there could in the future be nothing poetic for the Germans, and without this there could never be a historical dwelling in what is their ownmost, “near the hearth of the house.” By contrast, what that river, the Rhine “does” no one knows […] For the relations of the individual hymns among one another follow a law that is as yet concealed from us. Only if we can intimate this law will the Germans be capable of knowing which law of their history has been poetized for them and how their dwelling has already been poetically grounded. Kept in the right perspective, the Ister hymn provides us with essential points. Yet this very hymn is in many respects a draft and breaks off—just as though the essence of this poetry, whose poet is a sign, had to be attested to the extreme. The sign shows—and in showing, it makes manifest, yet in such a way that it simultaneously conceals. So mysteriously does Hölderlin say in the Ister hymn that he is “the” poet and knows what is fitting for his poetry, in his being “saddened” and only with difficulty finding the language he has almost lost so as, in saying to the word, to be the sign[.]92

So now the Rhine’s essence is concealed? And the Ister’s essence is well known? What happened to the “concealed essence of rivers” plural that Hölderlin was poetizing upon? We know the river, but we do not have language? I thought it was our house, and it was beings we did not really know? And now the poet knows? So the poet is no one? Even in the most charitable possible reading of Heidegger, it would be nearly impossible not to think that these contradictions mount up here because he was driven to swerve toward some strange nationalistic appeal, and one that is scarcely intelligible at that. A political reading of the conclusion of this lecture is not hackneyed but unavoidable, given the continuous references to Germany (and we know he was not shy about inserting nationalistic ideas into this volume, given sections §10-13 of Part Two). It appears that the cohesion of his inquiry was spoiled by political concerns and motives. It does not even say what it seems to intend to say, but veers toward saying nothing. This mistake, so egregious when put up against the whole-and-complete argument he could have made, which would have tied up all the loose ends of his thought, ultimately signifies we must, in order to tie these ends, depart from the letter of Heidegger, and find the rest of the thread in another thinker and poet of the essential, as we shall see in the next part.

The mystery above all is the thing. Coming to understand that the meaning of Being is a mystery to us is at once the radiantly beautiful disclosing of it and the shepherding of it which protects it from the annihilating nihilism of representational epistemology and therefore the will-to-will. The post-Idea poetizing on rivers’ concealed essences, as was said above (section I.ii), reorients Dasein’s comportment away from seeing Being as beings or objects and itself as a subject who manipulates according to will, and toward a revealing of Being as a timebound experience of finitude which Dasein participates in by linguistically safeguarding it from the nihilistic abyss which it threatens in its forgetfulness of its essence by reminding it of its essence through a reflection on the essence of things. And for Dasein to be fetched into its essence is for Dasein to be saved. But only “a god” can do this fetching.

“The blessed unity, Being, in the unique sense of the word, has been lost for us, and it was necessary that we should lose it for us to be able to aspire and to conquer it by main force. We detach ourselves from the peaceful ἐν καὶ πᾶν of the world, in order to re-establish it by ourselves. We are divided from nature, and that which, as we can believe, was otherwise united, enters now into conflict, domination and subservience alternately changing sides. Often it seems to us that it is as if the world were everything and we nothing, often also as if we were everything and the world nothing. To finish with this eternal struggle between our self and the world, to restore the peace of all peace that is higher than all reason, to re-unite ourselves with nature in an infinite whole, that is the goal of all our efforts, whether we realize it or not ... This Being, in the unique sense of the word, is already there—as Beauty; to speak with Hyperion, a new kingdom awaits us where beauty is queen.”

— Hölderlin, first draft of the preface to Hyperion¹

In his 1942 lecture course Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Heidegger claimed that Hölderlin’s hymnal poetry “is not concerned with symbolic images at all,” that the rivers Hölderlin mentioned in hymns like “The Ister” and “The Rhine” are not to be interpreted as symbols that express or represent some higher idea through a sensuous image. Instead, for Heidegger, Hölderlin’s “poetic word” unveils the “concealed essence” of the rivers themselves: Hölderlin was “poetizing” the Ister2 itself, on that particular river and its inner meaning.3 This claim is not immediately comprehensible, but before we attempt to give it any elaboration its greater significance should be brought into focus. For Heidegger also argues in the text that “symbols” in the widest sense are the artistic rendition of “Platonic,” representationalist, idea/matter metaphysics: the expression of an Idea in sensuous form—and that this has been the standard understanding of artworks in the West since Plato (an argument informed by Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics4). Thus, on these terms, if Hölderlin’s poetry truly does go beyond representation, it must be said to not only stand “outside of the essential realm of Western art” but also “stand entirely outside of metaphysics,” standing in defiance to Hegel’s “end of art” thesis.5 This turns Heidegger’s claim into an epochal one: for it directly challenges the post-Hegelian model of art history and would mean that Hölderlin was not a ‘nineteenth century poet’ writing from within ‘Western civilization’ but the first artist—in a completely different sense of the word—of the ‘other beginning.’

This essay will advance two claims: that Heidegger’s notion of post-representational poetry in his Ister lecture is the scarcely acknowledged solution to what he identified as the crisis posed by world technology, and that in order to make good on this world-historical promise such a post-representational poetry must have a future and must be able to be practiced by future humanity no matter what less-than-idyllic environments they find themselves in. We cannot, if we want it to succeed and leave the realm of mere melancholic romanticizing, restrict this essential poetizing to the shattered pre-twentieth century arcadia of Hölderlin and his contemporary surroundings. Both these claims will converge to make a final claim, that such a poetry, in making us realize what the rivers do for us—enable civilization and life—while denying us any ultimate knowledge about reality, will instill a meditative thinking in us that would reorient ourselves to Being and heal our comportment toward things. This produces in us a sense of gratitude for the givenness of Being and the love implied in this gift from the Last God, as opposed to technologically abusing beings ungratefully in the mind of post-historical nihilism. If it is true that “Artists constantly glorify,” as Nietzsche said at the happiest point of his oeuvre,6 then it could be said that post-symbolic poetry glorifies the fundamental.

As for the first claim, I hope to demonstrate the importance of Heidegger’s notion and by extension the Ister lecture by connecting it to his “Question Concerning Technology” lecture (hereafter QCT), showing that a post-“metaphysical” poetry would be the very thing Heidegger thinks can save us from man’s highest and nearing danger: the total nihilism that awaits us should man gain the ability to remake himself using technology.78 As for the second claim, I will examine the poet Wallace Stevens, who was concerned with a very similar poetics. Stevens, I will argue, continues Hölderlin’s project of a post-representational poetry by bringing it beyond lauded, sacred ancient rivers to everything else, to any other thing or place. If this is the case, the study of Stevens would help break open a path to an art with which we can be “saved” by “a god” and gain the “free relationship to modern technology”9 Heidegger spoke of, regardless of ‘where’ humans find themselves in the world. And since, by Heidegger’s own admission in the lecture, the human as an unhomely being is more often than not journeying (πόρος) around the earth in search of an unobtainable fulfillment, this would be of great importance, and Stevens’ poetry would be the crucial next step for post-representational art—which is nothing less than the very act of making it possible for art, religion, and philosophy to have a future at all beyond nihilism.

I. Explication of Heidegger’s Claim

i. Its Relation to Hegel’s Aesthetics

First, we must get a clear understanding of what Heidegger meant by a poetry beyond “symbolism” or representation and what it implies. In the Ister lecture course, Heidegger made clear the grander philosophical intentions of his reading: the attempt to “heed” what exactly Hölderlin was doing when he “poetized rivers” will bring about the opportunity to “test a form of representation that for centuries has secured itself a validity in poetry,” and not only in poetry but in the philosophical-aesthetical interpretation of poetry and “in the way poetizing in general is determined.”10 What he had in mind there was first and foremost Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics and in a broader sense the Platonic conception of art. This is obvious enough: in the opening pages of the Ister lecture, Heidegger presented a quotation from Hegel’s Aesthetics as a way to illustrate the meaning of the ‘symbolic’: “What is sensuous in the work of art is meant to have existence only insofar as it exists for the human spirit, and not insofar as it itself exists for itself as something sensuous.”11 Heidegger then elaborated on behalf of Hegel that a piece of material painted over with many colors is not a painting by Rembrandt, and neither is a Rembrandt painting merely colors coated over a material thing, but rather “this material thing is sublated into the painting and now is what it is only through the latter.” For Hegel, there is a “metaphysical essence” to art, to all artworks.12

Heidegger said elsewhere that Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics are “the most comprehensive reflection on the nature of art that the West possesses” because they “stem from metaphysics.”13 Hegel understood art to be the representation of an idea in sensuous form: art “sets truth before our minds in the mode of sensuous configuration, a sensuous configuration which in this its appearance has itself a loftier, deeper sense and meaning.”14 But it must be grasped that art for him was not merely a vehicle for explaining the concepts of religion and philosophy; rather, art, like philosophy and religion (and those three practices alone), is a mode of the absolute. They each draw from the same well of the Idea, but art has its own unique “way of apprehending and representing the absolute.”15 As we shall see, this is also why Hegel thought art had reached its developmental end, because according to his dialectical system philosophy and religion had as well in so far as Geist had fully rendered the Absolute Idea or “Ideal” sensible for worldly understanding. So, art shares the “same ground” as religion and philosophy, they are the “three realms of absolute spirit,”16 and as such art is equally capable of positing theses about Being, of “representing” these eternal ideas, giving “the nation a definite idea of the behaviour, life, and effectiveness of the Divine” and a “correspondence with the content of truth.”17 For the poets of the pagan past—say, the ancient Greeks—art served as a way to create gods: “what fermented in these poets they could work out only in the form of art and poetry.”18 After the dissolution of the gods, art moves out of the realm of myth and into the realm of communicating human freedom and self-governance. In a word, this “ground” that art, religion, and philosophy share is the ability to “bring home to consciousness their object, the Absolute.” Art differs from the others only in the form with which it unites the objective with the subjective: the sensuous, rather than the spiritual or the rational-speculative.19

Art taken in this “metaphysical” sense is therefore what Heidegger signifies by “the symbolic.” Accordingly, within the discourse of “Aesthetics,” or the Platonic-Hegelian “metaphysical interpretation” of art, “all art has to do with symbolic images.” Heidegger’s etymological analysis of the words “allegory” and “symbol” bear this out: he takes ἄλλο-αγορεύειν to mean “a proclamation of something else by way of something, namely, by way of something familiar that can be experienced sensuously;” and he finds the meaning of “σύμβολον” in its root word “σῠμβάλλειν”: “to bring together, to hold the halves of a ring against one another and to test whether they fit and belong to one another so that one can then recognize that the possessors of the pieces of the ring themselves belong to one another.”20 Furthermore, Heidegger includes “metaphor” under the umbrella of symbolism, glossing “μεταφορά” as “transference.”21 A metaphor says that one thing is another thing to communicate an idea about the first thing: the metaphorical images in an artwork “present not only themselves, but also a nonsensuous meaning. They “mean” something.”22 On the one hand there is the image, that which “can be perceived sensuously in general, as can sound”; on the other, there is the symbol’s “sense” which is “the nonsensuous” or “the supersensuous,” namely “the spiritual” or ideal content that is communicated through Spirit’s use of, employment of, the image. The nonsensuous is the same thing that has been “understood and given meaning and has been determined in manifold ways in the course of metaphysics,” and hence art grounded in such a sensuous-nonsensuous duality necessarily “stands or falls in accordance with the essence and truth of metaphysics.”23 What lies deeper than any of these symbolic techniques is this duality or distinction that undergirds all symbolic thinking, that “distinction that is made between a sensuous and a nonsensuous realm” which saw its “decisive drawing” “unfolding” and “structuring” in Plato’s thought, which became “normative for the Western world.”24

Heidegger, in relating this to Platonism, brings out the innate connection between representation in art and in philosophy, between allegory and metaphysics: Ideas, eidos, both in terms of form and aspect, are for Plato what really is—Idea is Being, “the nonsensuous, the realm of the soul and of the spiritual, is the true actuality.” Appearances, mere appearances, are less real, further from truth than ideas are; not only is “the sensuous a preliminary and subordinate stage”25 but it “encomaps[es] the μὴ ὄν; this is usually translated as “non-beings.””26 But appearances can be used to materially embody ideas: souls can transit through the “physical” realm and move above into the “metaphysical” realm, and likewise art in Platonic and many subsequent Western conceptions “does not exist just for itself” but “for the nonsensuous and suprasensuous, for that which is also named the spiritual or spirit.”27

For Platonism, anything a human makes is understood as the combination of “idea” and matter, the conjoining of an immaterial form with sensual stuff—but art additionally communicates ‘spiritual’ or moral content, the Idea proper, in its programming of appearances. This is the concept of mimesis, which appears in The Republic (Book X) as well as Aristotle’s Poetics. For both Socratic thinkers, art was a matter of re-presenting—once removed (or even twice removed, if we consider material reality already a representation of the Ideal world) from what is “real.” It is not the Real thing, but depicts it through a pale copy. It accepts that it can only merely depict, because at the same time the artist has the fortunate opportunity to convey an Idea through a creatively-arranged object for the soul to perceive and contemplate. The sensuous is the symbolic image [Sinn-Bild], and the supersensuous is the “primary image” [Vor-Bild]— παράδειγμα.”28 But because there is a metaphysical dimension to mimesis, for Plato this also means that there is simultaneously a moral dimension, a dimension which should inform phronesis and thereby praxis: a lengthy discussion of this occurs in Republic Book III, 396a-402b, where Socrates describes the effects music and the dramatic arts can have on the behavior of the citizenry. This denotes a kind of didactic quality to all art within the metaphysical interpretation, where representations both in their content and their form effectively become episodes of learning and teaching even if the artist was not consciously moralizing.

In this schema, all artworks are ultimately morality plays. Instead of getting to know the nature of the things themselves, we instead abstract all things into higher principles, phases of the dialectic, and those principles are brought down to human praxis as beckoning virtues. All artistic presentation becomes registered in metaphysical morality, even if the recommended action is ‘immoral’: each representationalist work of art is simultaneously a lesson in its particular thesis and in the general premise of Platonism. This recalls Nietzsche’s characterization of Euripides in Birth of Tragedy as a Socratic, but is equally present in society novels with their diagnoses of cultural ills. Even when such an “idea” or “thesis” is not present in a work of art—and, to be sure, there were many over the last two millennia not conceived of according to this schema!—people born into this traditional metaphysical interpretation are trained to look for one and fish it out.

But, crucially, Hegel’s Aesthetics does not simply argue that art teaches miscellaneous moral lessons. He understands art, along with the other realms of absolute spirit and human history itself, to have been involved in the dialectical pursuit of a final, ultimate Absolute Knowing, the endpoint and result of the labor of all human thought that, he infamously argued, already had been attained in his time. This is what has come to be referred to as the “end of art” thesis. In the epilogue to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger quotes three “propositions” from Hegel to clarify this notion: the first is that art “no longer counts for us as the highest manner in which truths obtains existence for itself,” the second is that while we may hope “art will continue to advance and perfect itself” it has nevertheless ceased to be the highest need of Spirit, and third that art “on the side of its highest vocation” is and remains for us “something past.”29

Putting these seemingly arbitrary proclamations in their context illuminates the substantive arguments behind them: if, as Hegel says when he introduces the topic, art shares the same ground as religion and philosophy, namely the absolute (“philosophy has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theology and, as the servant of truth, a continual divine service”30), and differ only in its mode of apprehension, then art will necessarily develop toward a logical conclusion just as philosophy and religion do in Hegel’s historical system. But for Hegel, the Absolute is nothing other the social: the Absolute is apprehended when the formula for the cohesion of the individual and the collective through their mediating institutions is apprehended, as is detailed in the Elements of the Philosophy of Rightand at the end of The Phenomenology of Spirit. At the point when the administrative civil society was unveiled in Prussia, collecting the gains of the French revolution and English capitalism into a state capable of regulating their respective fallouts, Thought had reached its destination and its didactic domains were permanently quenched. While artworks can still be made, religious services can still be attended, and dialectic can still be practiced (as will have to be the case, to teach ourselves the path of Spirit over and over again), no new conclusions will be produced. As we noted above, art’s early childhood saw the ancient poets working out their problems in sensuous form; but after sufficiently using this form to apprehend the absolute it reaches its “limit” and “passes over into higher forms of consciousness,” namely (protestant) religion and (German idealist) philosophy. In its beginning, art was “mysterious” because its creations had not yet “completely set forth their full content,” had not made “perfect content” become “perfectly revealed in artistic shapes.” Once this process reached its end, however, “the more far-seeing spirit rejects this objective manifestation and turns back into its inner self.”31

It is common for scholars to overcorrect popular exaggerations of the end of art thesis. But Hegel was evidently so confident in his theory of the end of art that he was perfectly comfortable uttering fatalistic and definitive statements about the future of art and its possibilities, such as saying, “The perfection of painting in these great masters [referring to Italian renaissance painters] is a peak of art which can be ascended only once by one people in the course of history’s development.”32 Hegel also spoke of the contemporary age’s relegation of art to an inferior position: “No matter how excellent we find the statues of the Greek gods, no matter how we see God the Father, Christ, and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is no help; we bow the knee no longer [before these artistic portrayals].”33 The reverence gone and the seduction cooled, art becomes merely art history on the one side and technical play on the other, neither of which hold a candle to art’s once theophanic importance. Contemporary postmodern art, conceptualist through and through, seems only to confirm this thesis, that the rational-moral process going on behind art all along—our religious awe now submerged beneath the secular recalibration of the moral idea, the categorical imperative—has now come up for air in the bone-dry intellectualism discussing provocative societal ‘claims’ art makes: the plaque means more than the thing. As Arthur Danto famously said about Warhol’s Brillo box, “It is theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is.”34

Heidegger actually defends Hegel’s “end of art” thesis, but in a qualified way. Just as he elsewhere called Hegel the necessary completion of Western metaphysics,35 Heidegger in “Origin” finds that Hegel’s claim has inner logical consistency if given the premises of “aesthetics,” namely the “philosophy of art” within the domain of western metaphysics as it has been thought since metaphysical thinking about art first began. If we ascribe to the propositional or correspondence of theory of truth where the true is equated to the correct, then art history is revealed as a series of evermore correct representations of the absolute idea in sensuous form. Put differently, if the story of the Phenomenology is the story of Spirit coming to know itself as Spirit, then Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics present the same story but with art as one pedagogical method by which Spirit comes to know itself (the boy skips the stone in the river to see himself reflected in World leading all the way to Romanticist self-deification and postmodern conceptualism). Heidegger notes that aesthetics (from the Greek “aisthesis,” perception from the senses) etymologically implies the taking of a work of art as an object for sensuous apprehension, which we now term “experience.” Experience, Heidegger says, is also what we cite as the source for artistic creation in modern times: “everything” becomes experience in this era—“yet perhaps experience is the element in which art dies.”36

If “everything” is just about personal experience, and if “the beautiful” now exists “merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object,”37 then how could art ever again be a mode of making truth “happen” in a way that is “decisive for our historical existence?”38 Art is instead relegated to a hobby or an interest, compartmentalized into one section of touristic attraction in our world cities, unable to call on us and send us into a new way of being. Heidegger rebuffs the cheap reply that there have been many artworks and art movements since Hegel’s time. Such a counterargument does not negate Hegel’s theory, which in fact allowed for such a thing. Despite the fact that art “will continue to advance and perfect itself,” this does not mean that new art movements have had divine, “essential and necessary” importance in the way that art did in the ancient, medieval, and even early modern epochs. We hear echoes of Hegel in “Origin” when Heidegger says:

Well, then, the works themselves stand and hang in collections and exhibitions. But are they here in themselves as the works they themselves are, or are they not rather here as objects of the art industry? […] However high their quality and power of impression, however good their state of preservation, however certain their interpretation, placing them in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world.39

If art were to ever become historically decisive again, we would have to recover and create once more from out of art’s “origin”—the primordial understanding of art which saw it as the setting of the truth of Being into work, thereby making truth “appear,” such “appearance” being synonymous with “beauty.” But such a recovery cannot be a mere “return,” for as we will later discuss the “homely” can only be seen from the vantage point of the “unhomely” one. A return to the origin of art as we know it would simply set into motion again the process that resulted in bourgeois modernity. Art in the most general sense, as we know it, as the entire metaphysical tradition takes it to be, is already at odds with the originary understanding of art. That understanding has been covered over by the mimetic tradition of tying “the beautiful” to “Eidos” in the sense of “Form,” which is the entire ground of Hegel’s Aesthetics: “the beautiful does lie in form,” Heidegger says, “but only because the forma once took its light from Being as the isness of what is.” This occurred with Plato, in “that time” when Being “made its advent as eidos,”40 when “Ἀλήθεια comes under the yoke of the ἰδέα,”41 and “truth” became propositional, the correspondence between an observed copy and the relevant Form it is participating in.42 From eidos it then “fits itself into the morphe,” morphe unites with hule to become “sunolon,” namely the “ergon” which exists “in the manner of energeia;” energeia then “becomes the actualitas of the ens actu,” which then becomes “reality,” which then becomes “objectivity” and its correlated subjective “experience.” Heidegger sketched a genealogical account of metaphysics’ history and paralleled it with art’s development here to show that he in essence agrees with Hegel’s idea that “the history of the nature of Western art corresponds to the change of the nature of truth,”43 but with a caveat. He, unlike Hegel, is not convinced that there is not a future for truth and for Being: “The truth of Hegel’s judgment has not yet been decided […] Decision upon the judgment will be made, when it is made, from and about this truth of what is.”44 This is the “other-beginning” of philosophy inaugurated with Being and Time and its attempt to destruct metaphysics wholesale. Insofar as we understand art aesthetically, which is to say subjectively, then art is indeed at its end because the metaphysics of subjectivity has consummated itself. But if we were to uncover a more originary understanding of art, non-subjectivist and non-metaphysical, art too could have an ‘other-beginning.’ As Alberto L. Siani put it,

[For Heidegger] the end of art thesis holds its validity as long as truth and art belong to different domains. It may be revoked if we gain access to a different, more original, and non-objectifying conception of truth, of which poetry (and most exemplarily Hölderlin’s poetry) is an eminent form. Heidegger’s interpretation of poetry declaredly sets itself the task of philosophically preparing the possibility of this transition. […] Heidegger’s confrontation with poetry and with the end of art thesis can be read as an attempt to restore the highest, original, truth-bearing function of art, not against Hegel as such, but rather by deconstructing the ‘modern’ conception of truth underlying the Hegelian thesis. […] Heidegger envisages the possibility of abandoning the fundamental orientation of modernity and hence of revoking the validity of Hegel’s judgment on the pastness of art.45

As we shall see, to abandon the fundamental orientation of modernity is to abandon the epistemological subjective ground that is the aesthetic experience of objects which constitutes representational art in favor of an ontologically-grounded attunement to the Being of beings. This is what Heidegger understands to have been accomplished—or at least commenced—by Hölderlin.

Jacques Taminiaux, in the epilogue to Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, said that Heidegger’s “Origin” essay “confirms the Hegelian completion of the metaphysical concept of art, while the essay moves away from this concept at the same time”46 in a double-movement that exemplifies the same double-movement that Heidegger performs on the whole question of metaphysics and its products of modern science and technology: it is internally consistent but merely one way of revealing. He underlines this point by quoting from Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics: “Hegel and his friend Hölderlin were both under the great and fruitful spell of Heraclitus, but with the difference that Hegel looked backward and drew a line under the past while Hölderlin looked forward and opened up the way to the future.”47

For Heidegger, art as aesthetics, the sensuous parallel to the representationalist theory of epistemology, is indeed at an end and something past only because he agreed that representationalist metaphysics had reached an end; but this is not the final word. In between Hegel and Heidegger is Nietzsche and the death of God. Heidegger interprets the madman’s parable about “God’s” death to be about the death of metaphysics.48 In the same sense that God’s “death” implies He was once alive, by calling Hegel’s system the “completion” of metaphysics Heidegger was also saying it was once “true” but is not any longer. Heidegger takes on Nietzsche’s sweeping rejection of Platonist metaphysics. Hegel was the beginning of the completion of metaphysics, while Nietzsche was its “overturning” into “its own inessentiality and disarray.”49 Nietzsche’s overturning allows for there to be a future of thinking after metaphysics, despite Heidegger’s insistence that Nietzsche failed to escape metaphysics: Nietzsche was only “the most extreme completion of metaphysics.”50 Or as Heidegger put it in the Ister lecture: “Nietzsche designates his own philosophy as inverted Platonism. Because Platonism is metaphysics, so too is Nietzsche’s philosophy metaphysics.”51 Nevertheless, as extreme completion, inversion, and overturning, Nietzsche’s thought decisively obliterated Hegel’s monopoly over philosophy and the future.

The inclusion of Nietzsche into the discourse helps us get to the claim at hand: Hegel was completely correct about the history of metaphysics and its end, but its end is not a sober millenarian utopia but a terrible death in the nihilism of the last man and the fall of high culture. Heidegger takes from Nietzsche his pathologization of the history of metaphysics and applies it to Hegel’s Philosophy of History. The end of metaphysics was not the end, not the end of “thinking,” but rather the end of one kind of thinking, ontotheology (metaphysics).With the finale of metaphysics in the form of the will to power simultaneously comes the death of the metaphysical doctrine of art, but this being only one way of thinking art implicitly guarantees a future for art. Symbolic or representationalist art is no longer fecund and now what can plainly and expediently be named a post-representationalist way of art steps forward. For Hegel an artwork was a finely-wrought object for subjects to sensuously contemplate, it is a ‘correct’ representation or depiction of an idea or form; for Heidegger, as we shall see, art is a revealing, a direct and immediate revelation, an act of Being unconcealing itself and coming to presence, just as “truth” as aletheia is the unconcealment or clearing of Being.

It is no mistake then that Heidegger in the Ister lecture noted that Hölderlin wrote his hymns in the same years that Hegel wrote Phenomenology of Spirit. At the same time, Heidegger claimed that the time period Hölderlin wrote in was accidental to the real content of his work, his work being entirely untimely.52 In light of the above, we can see Heidegger’s struggle to place Hölderlin beyond Hegel, metaphysics, and representation as a covert way to jumpstart “art” and give it a new future. But, by definition, the future art will not and cannot be the same thing as aesthetic art, because all art made under the representationalist paradigm is over before it gets published. In a sense, post-representational art will not even be “art,” at least not in any familiar or customary sense of the term. A new way is not a variant of the old way, nor is it the reversal of the old way, nor does it neatly proceed from the previous generation and take on the term “contemporary” before passing the baton onto the next movement. It must be a clean break, an epochal shift. To be truly new and thus escape from the End of Art thesis, it must—while getting its bearings from the way before it and trying to get to the same destination (Truth)—be utterly unfamiliar, almost alien, assured in its intrepid disruption, as mystifying as the new arts of statuary and drama must have been for the pre-Platonic Greeks.

ii. The Claim: Post-Representation as Poetizing the Concealed Essence

Frustratingly, and perhaps predictably, Heidegger gives little elaboration on the concept of post-representational poetry and gives even less aid in helping us connect it to the major themes of his thought. We will have to do it ourselves. This failure can be attributed to the nature of the Ister text as lecture notes, but it is also probable that Heidegger himself did not grasp the full importance of what he was claiming for his ‘system’ of thinking and for his general project of moving beyond metaphysics and the nihilism of the will-to-will, as he did not develop it into a major topic of his later works. Either way, the account I will endeavor to give in regard to the philosophical weight of post-representational poetry, defined by Heidegger as poetizing the “concealed essence” of things, and how it can be expanded to link up with the other strands of his thinking, will be highly speculative and, as it would seem, with scant precedent in scholarly literature, although I will be making use of Taminiaux’s writing on similar issues which thankfully shed some light.

First, we must establish what post-representation is. As we saw, while Nietzsche in his sheer “ruthlessness”53 did not earn the title of thinking outside of metaphysics in Heidegger’s eyes, he does give this to Hölderlin:

[Hölderlin’s hymnal poetry] is not metaphysical. To the extent that, according to the strict Western conception of art, art exists only as metaphysical art, Hölderlin’s poetry, if it is no longer metaphysical, is no longer “art” either. The essence of art and of metaphysics are not sufficient to lend this poetry the essential space appropriate to it. If it is not metaphysical, however, then this poetry is not “philosophy” either; for since Plato, all thinking that has been called “philosophy” is metaphysics.54

Why is this the case? Because, insofar as Hölderlin’s hymnal poetry “is not concerned with symbolic images,” it manages to escape re-presentation and hence the entire domain of Hegelian aesthetics. For Heidegger, Hölderlin was not conveying an idea through the river, he was not using rivers as “symbols of a higher level, or of “deeper,” “religious” content.”55 In the terminology of academic poetics, the Ister river in “Ister” hymn is not a ‘vehicle’ to figuratively describe a ‘tenor.’ There is no tenor, and thus there is no vehicle. Hölderlin was not using the river as a figure to get across a thesis about human life, or to embody an idea about “Nature,” or allegorize a virtue for the soul’s education: Hölderlin was concerned with the Ister itself. Yet we immediately notice upon reading the “Ister” hymn that Hölderlin does not merely describe what the river looks like and leaves it at that. By “the Ister itself,” Heidegger does not mean to imply that Hölderlin was merely writing a landscape painting in words; after all, such a thing would be a depiction, a representation, even if it would lack a thesis. This would be literalism, or naturalism, which could be called ‘pre-symbolic’ or ‘pre-representational.’56 The fixation on the so-called ‘literal’ quickly shows itself to be within the paradigm of metaphysics; as Heidegger puts it,

even in the most extreme naturalism the first and sole matter of concern is not to depict an actual, individual thing, but rather to depict precisely actuality as it is. The actuality of the actual, of a landscape, for example, is not something that comes to the fore within the landscape, like the individual trees or the individual stone or the individual wisp of cloud; rather, the actuality of the actual is itself something nonsensuous. Even where the Platonic “devaluation” of the sensuous does not take place, there still is Platonism, there still is metaphysics.57

Hölderlin also does not merely tell us what the river “actually is” according to science: he does not tell us its “coordinates,” nor its function according to a = f(b), nor how many gallons of water flow through it, and so on.58 For Heidegger, scientific knowledge is “especially” grounded in metaphysics.59 Neither “geography”60 nor physics’ spatio-temporal “facts” about the river will bring us closer to it itself.61 What Hölderlin poetizes, Heidegger says, is the essence of the river. Nevertheless, despite all the wandering and wending Hölderlin undergoes through the poem’s five stanzas as he seeks out the Ister and its mysteries identity, naming what the river does for us humans on earth (makes arable the land, bears the heavenly in mind) and what it has done historically (Hercules’s journey there as attested by Pindar in “Olympian III”), he concludes by saying that we cannot know it, nor can any “one,” any mortal:

Was aber jener thuet der Strom,

Weis niemand.

[Yet what that one does, that river,

No one knows.]

The “actual river,” the Ister or Danube, is then not what “knowledge,” namely “geography,” tells us it is in terms of its “precise information.”62 What the Ister “truly is” or does is a mystery to all. Heidegger thus calls the river’s essence that Hölderlin poetizes concealed: “The concealed essence of the river.” While no one knows what the river does, nevertheless the poet knows we do not know it, unlike the hubristic men of science: “the poet knows of this concealment” in the sense that he knows that its truth is blocked, for “How else could he tell us that no one knows what this river does?”63 The true is not the scientifically accurate, is not the correspondence between a proposition and empirical observation of mechanical interactions. The poet, however, can still “call attention to this river”—what is concealed about it is the “flow” of the river, “an activity that takes its own time,” and as well shall see this mysterious activity or destiny of the river is bound up with human destiny. The poet “unveils” the fact that beneath the brute facticity of the river is a more truthful activity which is concealed, and it is this “unveiling” that is the “poetic.”64 His grasping that the river has an inner essence that we cannot know acknowledges the river as essentially “distinct,” which is “what is decided in this flowing.”65 It is something that Man cannot master or fully probe. Heidegger labels this an “enigma,”66 Rätsel, borrowing the word from Hölderlin’s hymn “The Rhine,” and claims that every enigma is “a holy enigma”; Rätsel , Heidegger claims, properly means that to which giving counsel [Raten] belongs, and counsel [Rat] in its deeper sense “means as much as “care” [Sorge].67 The true river is neither the “actual river” of scientific representation nor the river as “relegated” to a symbol as in aesthetic interpretation—the true river is rather something to attend to and to take into care, to “ground our belonging to it.”68 This is “the poetic river.”69

This is how Hölderlin escapes both pre-symbolism and symbolism, both literal actuality and aesthetic idealism. Specifically, Heidegger will say that Hölderlin names the rivers rather than depicts them. “Naming” here does not mean “mentioning,” but rather: “to call to its essence that which is named in the word of poetizing, and to ground this essence as poetic word.”70 In the Ister hymn, it seems we are being told, Hölderlin endeavors to call the Ister river to its essence, and make this essence grounded in poetry, and thereby ground the speaker of poetry, Dasein, in its historical destiny. Naming is “poetic telling.” It is “something higher” than science, but something more essential than a symbol:

If Hölderlin’s hymnal poetry is a naming, and if naming first elevates and poetizes what is named into its essence, then the river poems cannot be poems “about” rivers, in which the rivers are already familiar in their essence and are taken as images or emblems signifying something else. This is why we are claiming that Hölderlin’s river poetry, indeed his hymnal poetry as a whole, is not concerned with symbolic images.71

To use rivers as a symbol for a higher idea would imply a level of human familiarity with them, but for Hölderlin “no one knows” what the rivers do (and, thus, what they truly are). He cannot possibly be talking “about” rivers, using rivers as a launchpad to enter into a universalist discourse, for we have not even begun to understand their significance. Hölderlin’s hymn is rather a hypnotic unveiling of the veil, slowly reminding us that we do not actually understand them and our ancestral historical relation to them in any essential sense. Who was ‘Hercules’ really, and why was this Greek invited as a guest to these Germanic waters? What did Pindar know? Who first settled these lands and what really happened in the furthest reaches of the primordial mind, our historical origins? All he can do is speak about what we humans do with them. One of the first things Hölderlin says about rivers in “The Ister,” after calling on the sun of the new day and fondly thinking of the gloried rivers of India and Greece, Indus and Alpheus, from where “we” have come from “singing,” a long journey seeking “what is fitting,” is: “Here, however, we wish to build.” One can imagine prehistoric settlers coming across the right place, after traversing so much land and perhaps mistreating much, and deciding to set up their home there. The river, as Heidegger understands it here, “determines the dwelling place of human beings upon the earth.”72 This is because, as the poem continues, “Rivers make arable / The land. For when herbs are growing / And to the same in summer / The animals go to drink, / There too will human kind go.”73 Heidegger differentiates two levels of dwelling: the “practical or technical” sense which is mere “housing,” and the “essence” of dwelling whose ground is the “abode and is an abiding in an abode,” a “whiling.” The human abode “needs a while,” a while in which “human beings find rest.” This rest is not “the cessation of activity or the halting of disruption” but a “grounded repose in the steadfastness of one’s own essence” where “the human essence is preserved in its inviolability.” And this inviolability Heidegger calls the “holiness” of a “locale,” in the Greek “ή ᾰ̓́σῡλοςια” or as Hölderlin has it, “asylums,” the “resting sites” of human beings “where the activity and life of nature is “concentrated,” where “something intimative” gathers around human beings.”74

In the human’s turning the river into something “local” by building there, its “locality bestows rest upon the abode”75—it turns it from alien undifferentiated matter into meaningful history, homeliness, maybe something to die for and certainly somewhere to weave stories about. It transforms it from a resource into a Place. Unlike thesis-claiming metaphysical art and the probing constructs of ontotheology, we do not profess to know what the river does; we know we gather around it and build resting sites beside its banks on the lands it has made arable, but the river just flows without the input of human willing or technical know-how.

In the epilogue to his book, Taminiaux refered to the thesis-claiming way of approaching beings as “Promethean.” According to Taminiaux, the period in which Heidegger was most in the throes of excitement over National Socialism and the self-assertion of things German was marked by “Promethean” language. He further claimed that, unlike its previous drafts which contained language about the “will” of a historical Dasein and its “Self,” the 1936 final version of “The Origin of the Work of Art” sees Heidegger dispensing with any resonance of Promethean impulses and carefully honing a vocabulary of “un-closedness,” “receiving,” and “incorporating.” What is “essential” about a work of art for the 1936 text, taken as a “created thing,” is no longer its ability to allow a people to launch themselves through a willing into an ideal according to a measure (Mass) that it also sets up (language which smacks of Heidegger’s critical dismissal of Nietzsche’s will to power). Instead, “much more modestly,” the artwork’s essence is that it is at all rather than is not, that it “offers as a gift its very emergence into Being.”76 Why is the artwork a gift? Because in its emerging it calls together all other beings to stand forth and give us a radiating glimpse of the integratedness of Being—and that is Beauty. To illustrate this further, Taminiaux ingeniously selected the following passage from a commentary Heidegger wrote on Heraclitus:

The Being of beings is the supreme radiance, i.e. the greatest beauty, that which is most permanent in itself. For the Greek on and kalon meant the same thing (presence was pure radiance). The aesthetic view is very different; it is as old as logic. For aesthetics, art is representation of the beautiful in the sense of pleasing, the pleasant. But art is disclosure of the Being of beings. […] The Greeks called art in the true sense and the work of art techne, because art is what most immediately brings Being (i.e., the appearing that stands there in itself) to stand, stabilizes it in something present (the work). The work of art is a work not primarily because it is wrought, made, but because it brings about Being in a being; it brings about the phenomenon in which the emerging power, phusis, comes to shine. It is through the work of art as being that everything else that appears and is to be found is first confirmed and made accessible, explicable, and understandable as being or not-being.77

In this brief paragraph, Heidegger succinctly explained what usually took reams of pages: from the Greek experience of beauty down to its relation to techne and how we may, by returning to the Greek experience and at the same time surpassing it (due to our heightened awareness of the crisis of Being’s forgottenness over its history), find a way to answer the question of the meaning of Being. By why does the artwork bring Being to presence? James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, notices nearly the same thing about the term claritas, being one of Aquinas’s three requirements for beauty along with wholeness, integritas, and harmony, consonantia:

—The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritasis the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalisation which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing [integritas] and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing [consonantia] you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.78

The “radiance” here spoken of in both cases is a translation of to ekphanestaton, a phrase used by Plato in the Phaedrus, alternatively translated as “that which shines forth most purely” by Heidegger in QCT where he described it as the luster or splendor into which truth is brought by “the poetical” that “holds sway in all art, in all disclosure of the essence through beauty.”79 Hölderlin, by poetically motioning toward the Being of the river’s being, its “concealed essence,” lets the river reciprocally “bring human beings into their own and maintain them in what is their own,” our “own” being that to which we must belong. This preserving, usually blocked by our everyday enframed conception of the river, is accomplished by the river’s “holiness”—namely the enigmatic nature of its essence—and through this newfound belonging we become “homely” [heimisch], and “fulfill whatever is destined” to us, “whatever is fitting” as “our specific way of being.”80 In naming the Ister and its doings, Hölderlin’s poetizing commences a way of making art that would bring to presence this essential aspect of the river, healing our comportment toward beings and reminding us of our own essence which we have forgotten.

The fundamental way that Dasein comports itself toward the world and attunes itself to its beings is mood [Stimmung] for Heidegger in Being and Time.81 Mood is that which our resoluteness to un-conceal, understood as a knowledge, relies on according to Taminiaux.82 In order to be attuned to the beingness of the river, the post-representational poet must cultivate a mood not based on any qualia—look, shape, taste, form, color, etc.—nor on any idea—symbol, allegory, concept—but on something that precedes both, precedes sense-based empiricism and yet is still an outward-facing faculty that pulls in information from the world. It would need to be a faculty that picks up on the beingness itself of beings. This faculty, one could argue, is the very thing which launched Heidegger’s philosophical writings and made him an original thinker in the pantheon of philosophy. It was Husserl’s categorial intuition, separate from any sensuous apprehension, that Heidegger magnified immensely, beyond what Husserl intended, and allowed him to embark on the ontological phenomenology of Being and Time. Heidegger, according to Taminiaux, found in Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigation the invitation to “conceive of Being as beyond beings, yet manifesting itself in an understanding of Being which permeates all our comportment” and to take Dasein, the ‘subject’ that experiences phenomena, as the ground from which the various converging sources of the meaning of Being are investigated. Specifically, Taminiaux writes, it was Husserl’s teaching that “perception is animated not only by the prior and a priori understanding (thanks to ideations and categorial intuitions) of what is the reality or thing-ness (Realitat) of the perceived entity, but also by the prior understanding of the Being of this being”83—namely that there are a priori elements to intentionality (perception) beyond sensory data and included among them is the register of Being(ness) itself. While Husserl agreed with Kant that Being is not a real predicate, he disagreed that we cannot have an intuition of a category. Heidegger’s interpretation of the categorial intuition, and specifically Husserl’s decision to claim that the concept of Being is sourced to “the fulfillments of judgments themselves” and “not in reflection upon judgments” is described by Simon Critchley as “an irreducible Selbstgegebenheit of being, or possible intuitiveness of the categorial, which means, crucially for Heidegger, that the question of the meaning of Being can be raised.”84 This derives neatly, indeed self-givenly, from the investigation of categorial intuition that precedes data and synthesis—in a word, precedes metaphysics and its onticological assumptions. This investigation and with it the realized self-givenness of being are the “formal-methodological condition of possibility” for raising the question of Being and transforming “Seinsverstandnis” into a “fundamental ontology.”85 Much later in his philosophical development, long after he abandoned the project of a ‘fundamental ontology,’ Heidegger reduced both Time and Being to the gift, es gibt: Being is a “matter” but “not a being,” Time is “a matter” but “nothing temporal […] To think Being explicitly requires us to relinquish Being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment, that is, in favor of the It gives. As the gift of this It gives, Being belongs to giving.”86 For Heidegger, unconcealment is not something static but rather a movement:

[it] is a rising from unconcealment—though not generally but in such a way that presence is the entry into a duration of unconcealment. The Greeks experience such duration as a luminous appearance in the sense of illumined, radiant self-manifestation. Continuance is the coming-to-the-fore that is at rest, has come to rest before the unconcealedness of what lies before us. Rest in duration is not, however, the absence of movement. Rest, in the presence of what is present, is a gathering.87

Philosopher Jean-Luc Marion suggests a reading of Being as “gift” or as charitas, connecting it to the Christian theological virtue and hence to Love. For Marion, the collapse of metaphysics into givenness, the charitable agápē as a God-preceding-being, marks the transformation of philosophy from the love of wisdom into the wisdom of love: “The ruin of philosophy sets forth, on the contrary, the enigma within itself of philosophy.”88

The resonance between Marion’s reading of the given as Love and Heidegger’s connecting the enigma of the river to Counsel and Counsel to Care sheds light on what is going on when we say that Hölderlin poetizes on the beingness itself of the Ister and brings it to our caring attention. In so doing, Holderlin’s poetry cultivates a stimmung solely out of the intuition of beingness—prior to sense or idea—and directs it to a historically rich and thus meaningful body of water so that man may orient himself to the strange mystique of his worldly destiny. That this is opaque is expected: the Norse word for fate is the root word for ‘weird,’ wyrd. So, by intuiting first the givenness or is-ness of the river by poetizing it not symbolically but essentially and in its being, and furthermore poetizing it fully from the rooted moods of Dasein and its relationship to it historically (Hölderlin hymns at length the history of the Ister), Hölderlin exits the metaphysical reception and expression of “Man’s” relationship to “Nature” and instead enters into the horizon of historical temporality through which the Being of beings unveils itself to Dasein. Through the same instinct to derive the question of being through the self-fulfillment of the categorial judgments, Hölderlin meditates on the givenness of the river rather than imposing any metaphysical idea on the river just as Heidegger probes the meaning of Being rather than of beings or ideas. In this way Hölderlin achieves the evental ‘other-beginning’ from within art. This is to say that by making Being stabilize and stand via the river’s radiance (and not the false radiance of the Idea) as a consequence of this essentializing intuitional treatment, the poem experiences the Event of the unveiling of Being from the groundedness of Dasein without any metaphysics, literally enabling the Event of appropriation that is supposed to bring about the ‘other beginning.’ Hölderlin, like Orpheus leading with his lantern, unconceals for Dasein the path through a non-ideational mood that allows it to intuit its primordial relationship with the earth, at once reminding Dasein of its place in nature and its long and profoundly meaningful history during which it has been led around the world in a journeying poros but is now coming home into its own, to become not the Lord who claims absolute knowledge of being and power over beings but to become the shepherd of Being who guards it with caring Word despite never comprehending it in its totality. This is the station that Dasein was always destined for. By ending the poem with “What that one does, that river, / No one knows,” Hölderlin was trying to protect the Ister from being miscomprehended by technological metaphysics and thereby allow it to emerge in an ancient way. After all, in this hymn Hölderlin chose to call the Danube by its ancient name, the “Ister” (Istros), as Pindar did.

For the pre-Platonic ancient Greeks, the muses spoke through the poet when they composed verse, it was not their own doing, their own means or machination to achieve some interested goal or profit. As Rojcewicz wrote, in the modern aesthetic or humanistic understanding of art humanity is “made the measure of art, i.e., art arises out of human creativity and exists to elevate human experience.” For aesthetics, humans “are thus the beginning and end of art.” Conversely, the “ontological” understanding of art “sees Being, the gods, at work in art”; the Greeks did not “experience” artworks subjectively but were lifted out of their subjective experience into a higher revelation.89 To return to Joyce:

You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.90

Despite being loose with terminology, Joyce was communicating the same primordial Greek definition of art that Heidegger was. By contrast, the subjectivist understanding of art is kinetic: it spurs our will not to contemplate the revelation of a god but to will more willing, and, as we shall see, is fundamentally related to the essence of modern technology.

But it is here, in this paragraph of the fifth section of Part One, that the rest of the lecture’s argument finds its point of departure from the topic of symbolism. From this point on, Heidegger’s chief concern is the troublesome reality that humanity’s essence and orientation are not currently being nourished by the rivers, and cannot be, for it is our destiny to be searching for essentiality in a flight from our homeliness into meaninglessness. For it is “often” that human beings “abandon” “that which is their own” without having “appropriated it”91—or, I will add, we have covered-over our essence and the essence of our places by continuously turning them into symbol-ideas—because “it is what most threatens to overwhelm” us.92 Thus, not only these essences but humanity’s destiny has been forgotten. We have become unhomely, because we were overwhelmed by the “home.” This homelessness takes shape as the venturing forth in all directions (πόρος), the inessential nihilism of modern technological and globalized life.93 Man’s forgetting his own essence is the highest danger of all according to Heidegger in QCT as well as in his essay on Aristotle’s Physics B1 collected in Pathmarks—for if man completely negates his own nature he will confuse himself as the groundless Lord of all being, at which point utter and complete destruction is probable.9495 However, as Heidegger in QCT also contends, it is only when we are closest to being within the grips of the danger that we will be able to surmount it; or, in his words in the Ister lecture, “to dwell in what is one’s own is what comes last and is seldom successful and always remains what is most difficult.”96 This unhomeliness always awaited us, and the danger that it poses is part of our destined lot. We must become unhomely in order to become homely (not least because, as Heidegger repeats throughout the lecture, the only way we could recognize what exactly homeliness looks like is if we became “unhomely” at some point). This is the “journeying,” the central topic of the rest of the book, especially Part Two which finds its bearings in an analysis of Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles’ Antigone, particularly its “Ode to Man.” The full scope of Heidegger’s meditation on journeying is not of primary concern for this essay, but a brief summary is needed to show why post-representational poetry is Heidegger’s answer to the problem of world-technology…

Read Part II

When Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, I was in Ireland. Just before that era began, which launched me irrevocably into the present, I undertook two trips which sent me all the way back to the Oldest Old. If the previous summer was a didactic ritual that imparted the great despising, cloaked as a surface-celebration of youth, this summer, which appeared to be a retreat into ancient times, was really a preparatory foraging, an expedition to shore up supplies for future judgments.

It began with me arranging for flowers to be sent to Elizabeth with a note containing a quote from Ovid: “while we’re young, we have the right / to live and love like gods.” Then I took off with my grandfather, not the one I was living with, the other one, my father’s father, Patsy O’Donnell. He picked me up and we drove off to Newark Airport for a flight to Dublin.

Now, I have recovered a series of letters I wrote to Elizabeth while I was there. They are quite long, so I have significantly abridged them. I have also excised all parts where I wax sentimental for her; I have no need to embarrass myself more than strictly necessary.

Thursday, May 21^st, 2015

It’s 6 o’clock in the morning and I am sitting in bed looking out my window. All I can hear are the bleatings of sheep that occasionally sound against the chirping of birds. It’s gray, a slight white sky but parts of it are turning blue over the valley of homes I see from up on this cliff in Kilpheak, Donegal. If you could only see this house, Elizabeth. It’s a place from one of your books.—I kissed you goodbye five days ago, had my last class four days ago, drove to the Newark Airport three days ago: there on the side of the parkway I pulled over to fix a flat tire, me elevating the car with a lever while my 85-year-old grandpa twisted the bolts off with a tire iron, screaming “it’s fine we’ll fix it in no time” in his thick Irish brogue. We made it down there ok and the TSA ladies allowed grandpa to pass through without taking off his belt and shoes and let him keep his Subway sandwich and lemonade that was stashed away in his luggage. He made a few jokes about being in with the airport women as we ate the sandwich in an area void of food. We found our gate, not before grandpa went searching for a bottle of whiskey in an “organic” Japanese convenience store playing J-Pop which I watched hysterically laughing from the outside.

…He would polish that entire bottle over the course of the flight. He’s not even a big drinker, just afraid of flying. When I awoke he was giddy, bottle empty,—the whole back of the plane looking at him like he was mad the night before as he demanded his bottle from the flight attendants who had seized it, him declaring he had purchased it fair and square, and that bringing us two extra bottles of wine would be the least they could do since they had rebooked us to the far back row because of space constraints. Ah I loved it. It reminded me of this story where grandpa put all his tools in a garbage bin and wheeled it through the airport. He needed to bring a bunch of power tools and things to build his new house in Ireland—when I was eight he bought a plot of land in the village he grew up in to enjoy a homecoming, and the finished product is the house I’m going to now—so rather than spend hundreds of dollars of luggage he threw it all in a giant garbage pail. My aunt who was guiding him was embarrassed, but my dad remarked that it was genius. Patsy is unperturbed by social awkwardness, in fact he invites it, like another time when he needed to ask a question in a hardware store so he went up to the young guy and started swinging his fists near his face like a boxer for a good minute before asking his question, leaving the clerk stunned and himself howling with laughter.

…We landed safely and grandpa, bottle in hand, stood up and kissed the flight attendant on the cheek telling her how happy he was. Passing the cockpit he told them they were “a handsome crew” and that they did a “good-excellent job.”…

…Over the course of our trek, from car to plane to bus to car, he told me a great deal, tales of interfamilial feuds, the stuff of old country legend. He told me about how he was a worker for Public Service Gas & Electric his whole life, a specialist I should say, which came up when he had to brag against his bragging brother who would brag about serving in the army and being in the bus drivers’ union; Patsy learned the accordion just to compete with his harmonica playing. Then he told me about growing up in Ireland, and how his “vulgar uncle” came to Donegal and tried to lay claim to his father’s land, and how the daughter of the uncle—his older cousin—used a razor on his sister’s coats in school, splitting them in half, which his mother saw when they got home and told my grandpa, “Patsy, make sure this girl can’t cut no more jackets” (clothes were so expensive in those days, and the mothers had to make them all from scratch, there not being any easy-access corporate stores with commodities manufactured in Vietnam). So one day, when the girl was walking home from school, Patsy jumped out of a hiding spot screaming, frightening her to pieces, and said, “if you cut those jackets ever again I’ll butcher you so bad no one will ever know your corpse!”

Her and her brothers never walked with them again—but then they excluded Patsy and his sisters from something at school, some game or some treat they were giving out to the class, so Patsy caught her on her way home again and pushed her into a ditch on the side of the road and jumped in after her, saying “stop picking on my damn sisters!” and a whole lot more nasty comments. He was rewarded with praise by his mother, who knitted him a nice big sweater as a prize.

But one terrible day, when he was about ten years old, his mother died in childbirth. He described a haunting scene of him being sent by his family to find the doctor and bring him back to their farm on a blustering stormwrecked evening. They climbed up the stairs to the house only to find his mother “drawing her last breath. What a miserable time of life.” He looked with severe pain out the window. “My sisters had to quit school to take over her housework. And a mother’s duties were back then—you didn’t have all the machines you’ve got now. And my brothers and me, we quit school too, to help my father with the farm, because he was getting old.”

But he moved on.

And when he was 23 years old, and his younger brothers were old enough to help his father on the farm, he set off for America, taking a boat from Cork to Manhattan. Looking at the huge buildings of New York through the porthole in his cramped lodging—having never left his village—he thought, “ah well, my uncle won’t find me and I’ll be here for a week before they swallow me and spit me back in the water.” He couldn’t see any bridges leaving the peninsula, and thought he’d be marooned in the urban sprawl. But fortunately there were bridges, and his uncle found him and drove him back to Ridgefield, New Jersey where he stayed above his uncle’s pub on Broad Ave. That’s of course the town and road I deliver food on every week. Then he mailed his father $10 every two weeks for several years until his father expressed desire to come live in America with him. His father lived out the remainder of his life as a grave digger at the Englewood cemetery, digging big holes as he’d done his whole life, until he was placed in one of them.

…The view of the country as we drove by was beautiful, almost covered in cows and sheep, surprisingly big farmhouses dotting the endless green and hills. I read the Gospel of Luke and talked some more about the IRA and Irish politics with Patsy. A real mick experience right there. He didn’t have any bombs in his duffle bag beneath the bus though.

…My cousin Niamh found us at the bus stop. She had a great big grocery cart full of food. Then Donna, grandpa’s second cousin’s daughter and next-door neighbor, came to pick us up on her lunch break. She has a nice BMW that was ruined by the English way of putting the steering wheel on the right side. And the oncoming lane is on the right side as well. But that didn’t matter once we left the center of town because all the roads in the countryside are a car and a half wide, indistinguishable from one-ways. She let us off at the house and drove off.

… Grandpa took me outside. “Finn,” he said, pointing off the cliff. “D’ya see that there, followin’ the posts with your eyes, right above that juttin-out black post there being a square of evergreen trees?” “Yes, I do.” “That’s where Nell was born.” He put his hand down and walked away. “Grandma was born right there?” “Yes.” “Did you know each other before coming to America?” He stopped walking, turned around, facing those trees again. “Yes. We met at a dance as teenagers. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. And I kept asking her for dances and her brothers must’ve known what was going on but I prayed they didn’t. And I asked if she wanted to go outside and she did and we stayed out there a little but we went back in, afraid her brothers might come out. Then after that night I saw her here and there and everywhere until she went off to Belfast for medical school, to become a nurse. I guess I could’ve thought to look up her phone or something but I didn’t. I thought of her all of the time. When I went to America and after my brother Niall arrived there too, Nell’s sister wrote to Niall saying, “Eh, your brother Patrick ought to write to my sister Ellen in Scotland and you better write to me!” And so I did. And we wrote back and forth for years until she finally decided on comin’ over the sea to meet me. It finally did work out and we married but damn was that a tough battle! A damn tough battle that was!” I stood staring at the group of trees across the glen. “Now let’s have a look at this water pump…” he said. And off we went, back to work.

We turned off the water to the kitchen and went up to the attic. We found the water heater filled to the brim with grime and sludge and cleaned it out with an empty plastic bottle. He dumped all of it right out the window. Then we had our dinner and felt full. Niamh and I decided to go for a walk and it turned out to be a great long walk all around the farms and pens of sheep and cattle spread all throughout the neighbors’ land.

…Now it’s the end of the same day as I began this letter, near midnight… After I wrote the above, I got up and had an electric-heated shower and ate pancakes. I made a fire in his nice fireplace. The living room is painted salmon-pink because it was the cheapest color they had, and the only way to turn on the lights is by turning on the fan because that was cheaper than a light fixture—Patsy was free to commit aesthetic sins because grandma has never been here. He has so many energy credits stored up because he’s only here once a year and doesn’t even use the gas heat when he is, to the point where all the neighbors are envious and want to siphon some off.

We looked through old pictures while grandpa showered and ate his pancakes… And as we were out of milk because of the pancakes we had an excuse to go down to the market. On our way back we stopped at Old Brian’s. Brian is an O’Donnell but I’m not sure how we are related. His son Sean greeted us halfway up the driveway wondering who the hell we were, but when he found out he gave us a big glad welcome. He gave me a handshake and only after told me there was cowshit all over his hand. “Hope you don’t mind. You’ll have to get used ta that here.”

We went inside the kitchen and found Old Brian and his wife Bree, both well into their 80s. I couldn’t understand a damn word they were saying on account of their thick brogues but they were very considerate about whether my thirst for tea was quenched. There was a funny story about another American relative meeting them, a young girl who remarked how nice it was to hear “Irish” being spoken aloud—thinking they were speaking a different language! Sean was filling out paperwork. “Oh, maybe we should move into the living room, we’re being too loud for Sean here,” grandpa said. “Oh stop it, I don’t need any quiet. I’m writin’ lies, Patsy!” he said and gave a wink. Sean had been fined by Brussels Trading for not giving them all the information they wanted on his cattle, so he had to rewrite the reports in order to get his money back and continue to sell in the future.

We found out that the water we had drank at the house was dirty, contaminated by chemicals from the weed exterminator, so we had to take some of theirs, pouring it in big bottles and loading them into the car.

We drove off and paid a visit to Donna. We met her husband Brian O’Donnell, “Young Brian,” and her three young boys, Shane being the name of the oldest, only about eight years old, and the youngest being “Wee Brian.” They were handsome funny little men, just back home from their “maths” exams. Young Brian was out of work on account of his finger, which was hurt while constructing roads for the government, and it had swelled up to the size of a golfball with infection…

… We saw so many things: grandma’s brothers’ farms, that being the Gallagher brothers; New Mills, a water mill which used to power the houses; Patsy’s little school house where he was beaten by Master Moriarty’s “shillelagh,” a prickly oak staff; then finally the small road which led up to grandpa’s childhood home, nothing left of it but a torn up barn and some cement foundation.

So many stories were told. My favorite was how grandpa got back at his teacher. He quit school in the third grade after his mother died, so this had to have been when he was quite young. He was so sick of getting beaten and watching others get beaten by Master Moriarity’s shillelagh, every time they got an answer wrong or when the Moriarity simply felt like it, that one day when the teacher went out of the room Patsy took the staff and threw it as hard as he could out the back door, the whole class watching as it fell into some bushes in the woods. Moriarity came back and made them all look for it. The teacher’s pet went straight to where it landed and brought it back. But in the majestic irony of life he was the next to get a beating!

Again grandpa told about his uncle and how he tried to take his father’s land and all the feuding that ensued… The only time his “vulgar uncle” ever spoke to him in his life was to thank him for returning his horse one morning when it got away.

…Seeing the ruins of grandpa’s first house… Thinking about the scene he drew of his mother dying… How life ever after that was miserably hard… I expected the Irish to be angry like grandpa, as I always associated his temper with his being “Irish,” but I found that the Irish were relatively calm and cheerful… I began to wonder if this anger, which was passed down to my father and to me, all came from this tragedy, that Patsy’s mother’s death was such a terrible thing that it reverberated down through the generations, like the kidnapping of Helen, and finally it was coming to an end with my own slowly stabilizing emotions, hard won after all my anger in my childhood and adolescence... I felt pity for my father, who bore all of his father’s anger… how Patsy, this cruel old world farmer, would lash out at him and call him stupid when he was just a nine-year-old boy helping him install boilers in the cold, how a boiler fell down and crushed my dad’s finger and he didn’t even whimper because he would’ve caught a beating for showing weakness… my dad’s rash and prideful undercutting of matrimony, his anger at his young life “stolen” from him by an accidental pregnancy (yes, me), how the priests told them not to have an abortion, how much of a disgrace it probably was in the militantly Catholic family, … and how he felt forced into life with my mother, his beautiful girlfriend but someone he barely knew.. how my mother felt forced into life with him, a handsome young man but incredibly angry and strange, like his father… am I sure I should be pitying him? … nevertheless, in staring into the ruins of my forefathers’ farm, perhaps out of naivete, I found room to pity even this man who regretted my existence.

There was a big circular clearing right beyond the edge of Patsy’s old property, marked by a river. He told us that this clearing was a Danish creation, an invention used by the Vikings to spot enemies (the clearing allowed them to see through the trees and down into the glens. Ireland used to be heavily wooded—its deforestation was accelerated over the last five hundred years or so. Interestingly, when America was dolling out Marshall Plan funds, Ireland received some despite not having any war damages, so they used them to plant fir trees everywhere, which explains the artificial square grove we saw near grandma’s and elsewhere). Patsy said there was a very good chance we are part Viking, as Donegal was the first place they landed during their raids on Ireland. He also said there is a suggestion we are part French, descended from coach drivers who worked for English landowners, selling and caring for their horses on their farms in Donegal; they had left France three or four hundred years ago. He seemed pretty certain about this too.

…Patsy sang a little song about a man in a fort and referred to it as a poem. So much hit me at once. Poetry has such an innate relationship with man. It is music, it is song… poetry without musical quality is nonsense; true poetry, the poetry which unites man with the world, is song, is music. And the question dawned on me if the verse I had been writing, which I intended to sound musical, might have come from this source, from blood Irish or Scandinavian or French or what, the blood of songmakers long ago, the spirit which provided European farmers with this Meaning-through-tune for centuries… that would be something. Patsy pointed outward and said, “that there’s Letterkenny, where we were before. When I was young you could hear the church bells ringing all the way back here. Every day at evening… imagine that.” Imagine. Vespers, ringing throughout the land, sprinkling the fields with meaning every day at dusk. Blankets of Value placed on the endless fields of ploughshares and sheep. This semitic monotheism choking good Celtic land… it is as disgusting as it is beautiful.

We drove back to the house but first stopped at the small Catholic chapel they were rebuilding. This was the parish where grandpa was christened. We met a man who used to work at the convenience store (the one we were at earlier) but was now volunteering at the chapel. He showed us around: the nice marble floor, the painted wood depictions of Christ, the statue of Saint Francis and a baby lamb in his arm, the altar and the cross. Very nice looking inside. And we saw the meagre room the priest would be staying in. Gold panels at the altar, good chandeliers all around. It had cost 300,000 Euro to get this far and it’d take another 300,000 to finish. Lot of money that Church has, my father would say. But the priest was living in a cubbyhole!

…Well we had a dinner of grilled chicken, sweet potatoes, and rice, cooked by Niamh as grandpa and I did more housework and started a fire. Then we had some tea and went to Annie’s, an old O’Donnell, a cute little woman living with her old husband. Annie is grandpa’s cousin. In fact, her mother was the one who took in grandpa’s baby sister—the child grandpa’s mother perished in giving birth to. His father couldn’t take care of her, so they took her to the aunt to raise.

Annie had her younger son visiting and he was talking to his father about the referendum election. It was on gay marriage. I had seen posters of it all around the country, lining telephone poles and highway signs: “VOTE NO – don’t redefine marriage,” “VOTE YES – Equality for everybody!” Things like that. I asked the son what he was going to vote for. “A big fat No!” he said. His father said he wasn’t even going to bother: “I guess this shows we really don’t have any other concerns at the moment.” “Slow times are these,” grandpa chimed in, and then went on: “They shouldn’t be allowed, they’re fairies. That’s their problem, not ours. There’s too damn many of ‘em now in America. More and more every year.” “Aye,” the son said.

Friday, May 22^nd

…We climbed a steep road to see St. Eunan’s, the grand stone cathedral resting in the center of Letterkenny, the church where grandpa received his Confirmation. Beside it were two churches for “Orangemen” (Protestants—a dirty word around here. The fact they have two churches shows they can’t agree on much!). Grandpa pointed out that the protestants who live up on a huge hill have to wake up and see this Catholic Church every morning. We paid a visit to a nice old man named John McGeever and his quaint wife: poor woman, she had just come back from the hospital after four weeks of being treated for internal bleeding. Their children had emigrated to Australia long ago to find work, who now have children and grandchildren of their own.

….We got back home. It was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon, nice blue sky capturing the little bobs of white cloud in its fullness, and the sun lit up the whole wide countryside, something I wasn’t able to see the other days concealed as it was by gray—Niamh jokes that in Ireland it is the month of March all the time. By that’s a fib, because the late spring and summer bring truly gorgeous days like this.

The other two went inside so I went for a walk down the road. I had a real moment there, tears even came to my eyes as I wondered if all my internal anguish was the result of being in the New Jersey suburbs, away from working on farms like the meaning of my blood required. What need for philosophy and literature if existence in the day-to-day, tending to cattle and ploughing oats and chasing sheep, provided me the full spiritual nourishment? Suppose that was true, suppose Patrick O’Donnell only left for America so that he could beat out the midcentury Irish poverty and then have his kin return to be the keepers of the home soil for eternity forward? My nerves have no place in New Jersey. I honestly can’t stand it. I despise it with all my might. It’s disgusting. I want the world to return to peasants working wooden mills. The machination, and democracy, and the licentiousness, and the “protestant work ethic” (i.e. the technological disgust at all things cultural, communal, meaningful, or sacred that has corrupted this earth to hell and used every individual to heat its great machines) are gut wrenching, anger inducing… maybe there is nothing to be done and I am just young and angry and wrong. Ah well, something’s awry but I don’t know what.

**

Had dinner. Then we went to go visit my grandmother’s sister-in-law after, a cute uppity lady who now lives alone. She lives at the top of a golden hill with cows grazing on the grass. She brought us tea with milk and pastries—everyone in Ireland immediately brings a tray of tea and snacks when you walk through the door. I watched this fat bull lie obediently in the sun with no fence to bind him to the front field. Crazy creature right there. I guess there is no need to run away from your owners if you enjoy an existence like that. She said I didn’t sound one bit American and but rather like an Irishman. Although she was quite old..

Then we paid another visit to Majella O’Donnell. Stephen was home and Gavin was off DJing. I guess this English electronic music fad has really caught on. Eunan came home and I started drinking beer with him. Then their friend Tommy, a near toothless Anglo with a big gut and a balding head, wrapped at the windows as he passed the house and came through the back door. He started shooting the shit like mad. A funny guy but a bit arrogant. Majella remarked that the way Stephen pronounced “food” as “fud” is how English sounded in Shakespeare’s time. Then Tommy referred to Shakespeare as “Willy Shakes” and called him overrated, but I pressed him on that and he didn’t seem to know what the hell he was talking about. Grandpa hated him on sight, probably because he was English.

Patsy had told me at some point about how he was detained by two English guards at a train station near Belfast in his youth, and explained there was a big news story from back in the ‘80s where two “black and tans”—paramilitary soldiers the English amassed by dumping their prisons out to deal with the IRA—got angry when a young boy accidentally hit them with a soccer ball and so they shot a bullet and it went through the window and killed his mother.

Eunan works at a BMW dealership in Letterkenny. I remarked how surprising it was to see the rural people in such nice vehicles and living in such large and modern houses. Grandpa laughed and said it was all a debt bubble, that they’d end up like we did in ’08 if not worse. He shook his head in a way that said “they’ve gotten too big for their britches.” As always, when we walked up the road to his house he pointed to these big yellow weeds growing on his cliff and sarcastically exclaimed, “Ah, that there’s my flowur garten!”

Saturday, May 23^rd

Grandpa woke me at 7 to get at the radiator behind my bed. The heat hasn’t been on in my room since we got here. Sean O’Donnell suggested that the radiator was filled with mud and that that was the reason the box in the attic was filled with sludgy water. He was right. We just carried off the radiator and placed it in the driveway and watched as all the mud came seeping out.

***

But back in the day there were no radiators and the mud was valuable. In Ireland, when there weren’t enough trees, the peasants used to harvest tracts of a substance called “peat,” mud-looking stuff from these big bogs, let it harden, and use the material to heat their fireplaces and stoves. He wanted to show us the stuff and how they cut it. He was speeding up a hill and nearly massacred a flock of sheep in the middle of the road. We spotted Sean O’Donnell leading them from behind into his newly-built house—“The Kilpheak House”—being trailed by Old Brian O’Donnell in his green Volkswagen. Sean had a grimace on but gave us a wave.

We proceeded down hills and up hills for a long time, past the “forestry” as they call it, a big, thick pack of fir trees. Past that, we arrived at the moors: great, wide fields of dreary dead grass and wet holes of mud, dried out ribcages of lambs dotting the ridges around the road, long rows of turf and tarp ready to be collected by workers. We climbed up on the expanse and as we were walking my foot plunged into the mud, up to my thigh. My shoe was destroyed. Grandpa yawped, “Ya got bogged!”

The weather arrived and blotted the wonderful day ahead; everything became gray again. We got back in the car and headed for the home of Searle O’Boyle. Niamh said the first few times she heard his name she thought it was “Sir Boyle” and that he was some famed nobleman. We turned right off the road to a hidden driveway, a steep uphill climb with trees covering the shoulders, a set of moss-covered cobble stairs that appeared and then disappeared, then at the top it opens up to reveal the quaintest little house you can imagine: a small white cottage, red windows and doors and a nice black roof, all the walls old stone. Flowers all around, kittens prowling the scene, and from the backyard, which is raised and leads up another hill where sheep frolic, comes Searle. Walking-stick in hand, he greets us and leads us into the house, and there’s his wife Noreen eating a chicken with her hands and already making us tea. They are going to Belfast tonight to see their grandchildren and deal with a solicitor who’s appeared on account of their dead daughter and son-in-law’s empty house. But for now they’re handing us chocolate and deafly talking over everything Patsy has to say. Noreen did however hear grandpa say I got bogged. “Oh, ya got bogged, did ye? Ah heh heh heh!” We were seated in their cool living room, covered in brass trinkets and tapestries, entirely lit by sunlight through a four-pane glass window peering into the backyard. Last night Majella told us a fantastic story about these two: Noreen was sixteen and sledding when she saw a strapping boy with curly red hair—“Who is THAT!” she said, louder than she meant to. He was 23 at the time. Her mother sent her away to a convent after that incident. “I got him the week after,” she said. Then Eunan added in, “and of course after she was done telling that Searle said, “I should have escaped when I had the chance!”” Majella said Searle is very well-read in history; I would have loved to hear him lecture but we were out the door pretty quickly, grandpa a little disappointed with their deafness and the struggle to talk to them.

Sunday, May 24^th

…I woke up to grandpa ripping the space heater out of the wall and telling me we had to rush to church because we were late. If that isn’t the fullest portrait of my grandfather. We just came back from mass. Donna did a reading, the priest talked negatively about gay marriage (he literally said “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” but in a solemn voice, like he received it as an aphorism from a book, divorced from its probable source as an American boomer Facebook comment) for a minute and then read from the Gospel of John. Nothing went on last night, beside a man named Ryan coming over. He was raised on the same street as my father in Oradell but moved back to Ireland and bought a farm near where his father grew up. It’s an 11 acre farm, huge piece of land, and he was talking about draining a swampy part of it. He stayed until 9 p.m. watching TV with us.

Tuesday, May 26^th

It’s the middle of the night. Just got home from Majella’s. It gets so dark out here in the country that even though it’s only 10 I wrote “middle of the night.” Pitch black and you can see every star.

Today we got on a tour bus piloted by a local farmer. First we went to Donegal the town; outside the tiny downtown area there was a castle on a big pond, something straight out of Arthurian Legend, with a statue of the warrior-leader Hugh Roe O’Donnell, born into the O’Donnell clan in what was then the kingdom of Tyrconnell. In his short life, he was kidnapped and imprisoned in Dublin, led a confederacy of northern Irish lords against England, conducted raids against English landowners, and died in Spain as he was negotiating for reinforcements with King Philip II (it sounds to me like he was poisoned—by the damn British, who went on to create our infernal modernity!). The castle was closed until summer so we kept going, off to the fishing town of Killybegs, where I had a lunch of fish and chips with some Smitthicks to wash it down. Killybegs was an important port for many centuries, helping the Donegal economy.

Then we took the coastal roads to Slieve League, one of the tallest sea cliffs in Europe. It’s like a Himalayan mountain range plopped right on the shore of the Atlantic, green and gray and brown with sheep hopping all over it. It was terrifying to imagine falling off. There was nothing to catch you, nothing to prevent you from falling down to your death if you made the wrong move. But I was stunned by the absolute perfection of these scenes, by the finality of cosmic excellence that these earthy manifestations embody, how the whole of the universe comes down to express itself here in these formations, made out of stars exploding and coalescing into planets until you had this one, in its supreme genius contorting itself to produce this… the green in the void, the chalice in the dust, planet Earth.

..One thing of note was that there were small fortresses, not bigger than a beacon, made in Napoleonic times by the British Empire to keep watch in case Napoleon were to make a sneak attack on England. I found this hilarious. All the way up here in the most remote terrain of Europe, on this cliff looking off into the abyss, there were English soldiers shivering, waiting, watching for big bad Napoleon…. Who probably didn’t know this area existed…

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Wednesday, May 27^th

We toured Glenveagh Castle today. A beautiful place with an ugly past. It was created in 1870 by some Scotch-Irish businessman to serve as his phony “Lord’s estate.” There was a story about him evicting 244 of his workers (“tenets”) in order to save money—it would be more profitable for him to fill the land with sheep than it was to house all those families. Another version of the story says there was no monetary gain involved, he just thought it’d be more aesthetically pleasing to be free of the tenets. Because of the evictions, the families were all split up and disintegrated, and many of the young men, 18-25 year olds, were forced to emigrate to Australia to find work. The story took a brighter turn when in the 20^th century an American named Henry Plumer McIlhenny purchased the castle. He was the grandson of a man who patented a gas meter, and so had a hefty inheritance which he used to fund his life as an art director at the Museum of Philadelphia until moving to Donegal. He hosted dinners and parties at Glenveagh, dotting the gardens with oriental and Grecco-Roman sculptures to impress the guests (who would then be further impressed with his libraries if they weren’t too drunk on whiskey). The theme was deer hunting and about 100 deer paintings and designs could be found in the house. (Majella told us “Kilpheak” means “wooded deer”).

Very sublime views of mountains and lakes around the castle, especially off on a path through the woods.

[insertion: I took it alone, strolling with my hands in my pockets, following as it weaved along statues of red deer, until I finally came upon a sculpture of a winged cherub, a curly-haired blue angel holding in one hand a cluster of grapes above his head and in another a cup, a chalice, underneath them, ready to soak up the vintage. I decided at once it must be Dionysus.

But the statue was old: the stone was faded, there was a hole in his arm, and his cup had been broken off. Words from the poet Friedrich Hölderlin came back to me, words about the flight of the gods and how our grief will serve us well in the end: “when the wealth is there, and no less than a god in / Person tends him with gifts, blind he remains, unaware. / First he must suffer; but now he names his most treasured possession, / Now for it words like flowers leaping alive he must find.” In ancient times we were too spoiled by their presence. To win them back, we must find the right words.

I had been reading Hölderlin in the spring because of Heidegger’s Holzwege (“Off the Beaten Track”), and its essay “Why Poets?” Hölderlin was a fantastic romantic like William Blake except with his fascination set on Greece rather than Jerusalem. One poem in particular, the elegy called “Bread and Wine,” served as a seed for Heidegger’s essay. It begins with a scene of villagers closing their shops and going home for the night, but off in the woods music is playing; the music transports the narrator into an excursus on the goddess Night and the nature of the divine, leading him to the image of Greece, the home of all the holies, that place to which “the god who’s to come” points. Ominous and tantalizing. Who is this god? Has he visited earth before? …

Hölderlin alternates between praising the beauty of that distant land and lamenting how all its temples have been emptied—the night of the world is upon us, our science has alienated us from those heavenly ones. It is in that spirit he asks the question which translates to, “and what use are poets in desolate times?” which becomes the title of Heidegger’s essay. He answers his own question: in these dark and woebegone ages, replete with tool-wielding brutes, the poet alone can act as savior, by preparing us to become strong enough to receive again the manna of the gods.

He focuses on two, the gods of art: Apollo, god of sun, and Dionysus, god of wine. In this poem, Dionysus is called “the thundering one.” In myth Zeus threw a lightning bolt at the Titans for ripping apart the body of Dionysus his son; from that bolt, Dionysus’s corpse was reassembled and resurrected. Hölderlin makes much out of the analogue of Dionysus with Christ, and says bread, raised by the sun, and wine, made from the grape of the god, remind even us atheists of the sacred. The fled gods will return when the time is right, and the hymns of the poets to the wine-god are therefore not composed in vain. Until we recover the divine, our civilization will be doomed to sin and failure. When we recover it, our Father the Aether will father us again.

All this was rustling in the chilly air as I stared at the statue and the castle and the lake in the distance. The whole of the trip was converging on this moment, from Patsy’s poem at the fort, to Donegal castle and Slieve League, to this avatar of the old gods of European song. I felt like I was receiving the Cumaean words, when the seven-hundred-year-old Sibyl tells Aeneas he must gather the golden bough and bestow it to the Spring goddess:

In the Neighb'ring Grove

There stands a Tree; the Queen of Stygian Jove

Claims it her own; thick Woods, and gloomy Night,

Conceal the happy Plant from Human sight.

One Bough it bears; but, wond'rous to behold;

The ductile Rind, and Leaves, of Radiant Gold:

This, from the vulgar Branches must be torn

And to fair Proserpine, the Present born

To give Proserpina the golden bough was to gain entry to the Underworld, seeing first the punished souls of Tartarus and then the green fields of Elysium, where the shade of Aeneas’s father Anchises would reveal to him the destiny of High Rome in panoramic fashion, paraded before his eyes like a diorama: the formation of the Roman race, the kingdom of Alba, Romulus and Remus, the Roman kings and the republic, the civil wars and the accession of Julius Caesar, and the consolidation of the empire by Augustus. These things “Anchises to his Son had shown, / And fir'd his Mind to mount the promis'd Throne.”

This is what Hölderlin’s elegy offered me: a vision of the future—the return of the holy—and a firing up of my mind to reach it. But the reaching of it was where all the troubled lived, for after Aeneas was shown the vision in Book Six we get six more books of war. If Patsy’s poems and stories were the bough, which “liquored” me up to receive the poetry of the world, and the blue angel at Glenveagh was the vision, the formation of Rome still had to be worked out somehow out of a heap of “wrong words.”]

…The bus took us further north and stopped in some shore towns of little white cottages with red doors. I had a glass of Guinness with cold, briny air stuck to my face. When I walked into the bar three old men looked up and stared at me, said nothing, and continued to stare at me the whole time.

Thursday, May 29th, 12:25 a.m.

And so we went to New Mills. New Mills is a mill on Glenswilly, the river that runs into Letterkenny. It handles both “corn” and flax, and has been in operation for at least 200 years. Only now it has been made into a tourist attraction, complete with a walking guide hosted by our very own Gavin McBride. While on the tour, grandpa told us that he worked for an entire year harvesting enough grain (which he had purchased himself) to send it to this mill to make oatmeal. He afforded the grain with the prizemoney he won from a contest: a retired man had Patsy and two other farmboys compete to see who could harvest the most flax off his property, giving them a cut of the proceeds. This oatmeal sale allowed him to afford his boat ticket to America.

Not only that, but both the O’Donnells and the Gallaghers—my grandmother’s family—owned the mill at different times, selling it back and forth to each other. The O’Donnells owned it during the potato famine… Majella this evening told us a story, that there were people from an Irish town south of Donegal who, starving from the blight, took a boat to Killybegs looking for New Mills—this was their only chance of finding food. But on their walk to Kirkneedy (Irish for “little church”), a storm found them, and they were discovered dead in a ditch the next morning. While most of the peasant population of Ireland had no food, the O’Donnells and the Gallaghers were exporting their surplus food for profit. I wondered if the fact I am alive and well means my ancestors “won.” These mills were perhaps instrumental to my existence.

We were wealthy families back then, Majella says. She also confirmed the O’Donnells’ ancestral connection to horses, but could not say for sure if we were descendants of the French.

After visiting the mills we had Sean Gallagher over. He is the son of Nancy, who’s the wife of grandma’s brother. He brought his wife and two young girls. Sean has one eye: formerly a bouncer, he lost the other to a drunken man stabbing his face with a glass as revenge for kicking him out. (Gavin did warn me not to go to Letterkenny at night, saying there’s nothing to see there except a bunch of lunatics beating each other bloody like that.) However, that bar is also where he met his wife. His wife’s first husband was blown off a roof to his death. She went back to school and had just graduated with a law degree. Their two girls are enrolled in Gaelic elementary school where they are taught every subject in Irish, with English as its own course, treated as a second language. They stood up in front of the fire and sang us a song about Letterkenny and a man returning after 20 years to greet his mother and home. Then they ran in our yard picking bluebells and telling us stories about their pets. One is 8 and the other 5, Alicia and Seershan, both blondies and lovers of dance.

Sean and them took off. I started a fire which is still burning now. We ate a “chicken dinner” as grandpa says. Majella, Eunan, Stephen, and Gavin came over for dessert. They have fine conversation and hearty humor. I love them. I hated saying goodbye.

***

Before Niamh and I left for Kilarney, grandpa recited a poem he learned at school. While gazing into the fireplace with the whole of Kilpheak shimmering behind him, he spoke:

There glows an Irish hearth of peat,

There is a subtle spell,

The faint blue smoke

The gentle heat

And the moorland owners tell

Of long roads running through

A red untamed, unfurrowed land

Where kerloos scream overhead

And streams on either hand:

Black turf banks crown with whispering sedge

And black bog pools below

Where dry stone walls

With ragged heads

Lead on to meet the glow

From cottage door that lures us in

From rainy western skies,

To seek the gentle warmth within.

Connacht dwells them yet;

Hearth coals a thousand years

And many a time stood past

Your pride, your truth, your dauntless Will

Burn on from age to age.

[I looked it up later and found the version he probably read. It came from a collection by a guy named Thomas William Rolleston, who went around rural Ireland transcribing countryfolks’ poems, allegedly word-for-word. But I greatly prefer Patsy’s. The official version, while it does make more sense out of certain spots, has all these extra stanzas about the glory of Celtic myth and patriotism for Ireland that heavily date it to the Celtic Twilight movement and all the 19^thcentury stuff that the modernists overthrew. Grandpa’s is free verse and gloriously opaque as to what century it could be from, and the absence of all nationalist trappings makes it feel even more Irish. Patsy’s probably came from the blood and wine of those bards I sensed while standing by his old barn, looking at the Danish fort and the spires of Letterkenny…]

***

That’s where the letters end. I’ll briefly reconstruct what happened next. I spent the following week touring the southwest of Ireland, staying in Killarney in a hostel made to look like a Hobbit Hole. There I met this lawyer dude who asked me what I was reading. It was Petronius’s Satyricon. He loved that book, he said. I told him it was shocking to see how close it was to our time. Not in technology of course, but in the way its characters are so flippant and ironic toward vaunted things and toward consciousness itself. And of course, there is the rampant dissolution of morals for which the book is famous. But Petronius is not a one-sided debauch, nor a one-sided condemnation. He covers it all, from the precise way in which the nouveau riche Trimalchio is vulgar (it’s not that he rejects culture, but pompously references the poets while misquoting them), to the reactionary hypocrite Eumolpus who harps on about the decline of the arts while doing nothing but chasing teenage boys. Recalling Patsy’s comments about the fairies—is our world really so different?

The lawyer agreed with all this, that ours is such a time. But it didn’t bother him, he said; it made things more interesting: he was happy to make good money while enjoying the show. He said going into law would be a good next step after getting my literature degree, something I heard many times throughout college. “And you can always keep reading,” he said, pointing to his book. “What’s that?” “John Cheever. Short stories about guys getting drunk and showing up at their ex-wives’ houses. Stuff like that.”

The lawyer guy stood out in my mind for some reason—the fact that he knew Petronius and could have a conversation about Latin literature while living what seemed to be this financially successful and care-free existence. The former student-now-chill polo shirt rich guy lifestyle did sound enticing, but there was something missing in it too.

Petronius became my staple reference for what the hangover of culture looked like, the long precipitous downward slide, the Satyricon as piece of undeniable proof that the “postmodernity” we are living through, our very memes, brainrot, and fourth-wall-breaking commercials, is not some hitherto unimagined self-awareness and freedom of will but rather the same old rotten lecherous song of sodomites, pimps, and Sprite merchants who were all on earth before buggering in each other in streets of Rome. But then there was also the blue angel’s golden bough, which every now and then intervened to remind me what the founding of culture looked like, the beginning of a long ascent into optimistic moods.

…I took a road trip through the Ring of Kerry, a long road with breathtaking views of the Atlantic coast. At parts it looks like a tropical island only with northern temperatures; at others it looks like a fog-sunken dream out of a medieval saga. At one point I got out and climbed this mountain overlooking the sea. At the top there was a crew of goats, chewing grass and bah’ing at all the little people on the road below, with their cottages and cars. It reminded me of what some black metal musician long ago, I forget which, had to say about the goat as a symbol of independence: headstrong animals that buck at men who try to catch them unlike the obedient sheep. How unfairly they had been maligned by Christian myth, casting them as the animal of the devil. If there is a God, they are one of his creatures too. I took out my notebook and wrote a poem to them:

Upon the cliffs of Kerry

With rockward spraying tides,

The cabins snugly cling.

They know not what they do;

They think with knee on pew.

Yet, upon the ridges,

High and above the toiling will of man,

Goats crown the heights.

Nestled by boulder, kept by weeds,

They smoke the fear of the crowd

And lead themselves by their horns.

Solemnly, but freely, they draw breath;

Solemnly in strength does Life gush

From their gaze.

These hyperboreans,

Keepers of the Ring,

Gather in their bands,

A torrent in nature abounding,

A call for the superman.

***

Several days later I was in Dublin walking along the road between St. Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square. I was feeling pretty good, as I had spent the last few days looking at Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, visiting the James Joyce house, gazing at the Book of Kels, and eating shepherd’s pie. I was confused as I waded through the packed crowds of Africans, Latinos, and Muslims who looked and sounded like they were copied from the Bronx and pasted into this land that had been European for all history, but they were confined to maybe three blocks in the center of the city. I wrote it off as an after-effect of the country opening itself up to capitalism by becoming a tax haven—a relative had joked that these Irish are quite clever, “as clever as the Jews,” by figuring out how to entice companies like Google to build headquarters there: they lowered their corporate tax rate to beat other EU countries while still reaping handsome Google cash. Anyways, I was happy, thinking about all the relatives up in Donegal and all their warmth and humor. All of a sudden this disheveled guy carrying a computer, a Dell tower, stopped and asked me: “How do I stop being depressed?”

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

“I’m depressed, man. I can’t get out of it. What should I do?”

I asked him to elaborate, to see if he was pulling a prank or something. He began to pour his entire soul out to me, detailing all these terrible thoughts. I told him to read books and spend time with his family. “What books?” I looked around; we were hemmed in by statues of his nation’s poets.

***

On the plane ride back, I thought that, in the end, I was glad my grandfather moved to America and had my dad and his siblings there. The Irish I met were good and kind, but the process of being ripped from the cradle and sent into the vast Uncertainty of American life is an evolutionary force. The creative juices of mankind depend on the unstable, the inchoate, the decline and the fall and the rising again. Without bold sail-setting, perhaps even without terrible evictions and famines, there is no growth.

***

For the rest of that summer I worked at The Corps, no days off. I was listening to the King James Bible to make all those hours productive beyond the $7/hr wage. I wouldn’t have any time to read its 2,000 pages during the school year, and all my classes were grounded in it in some way. The old stories of the cubits of wood and the shekels of silver and the goats on the slaughter benches and the legions of Mesopotamian warriors clashed with the ‘80s apartment towers reeking of weed and the relentless tide of traffic quaking in merciless heat. Or I was reading the voluminous Mixed Maxims and Opinions and The Wanderer and His Shadow in the backroom of the deli in between slicing tomatoes and shredding heads of lettuce, smothering my clothes and dilapidated shoes in the smell of onions and the crumbs of Italian bread.

I was arguing with Elizabeth almost daily. She was going off to college and readying herself to become a liberal State Department intern, I was reading right-wing Facebook posts and solidifying my anti-leftist views. I had gone with her for her campus tour; she was appalled by the cringe millennial lib guide, who broke the ice by asking everyone which dinosaur was their favorite (furious, she hid behind me and he skipped over her). But she was willing to look past that and retain her hopes. My patience with my college professors had worn down to nothing, and the Ireland trip had strengthened me for the final heave in throwing off belief in democracy. But there was no escape into anything non-modern, and I drove around delivering food to stoners in the trapped rat race of North Bergen, from the ‘80s monstrosity that was the Galaxy Towers in Gutenberg to the brand new monstrosity that was The Modern in Fort Lee, while a perpetual quarrel between the ancients and The Modern occurred in my head.

***

For a week in late July I was in Québec once again with Alexandre. Elizabeth stayed home; we couldn’t patch things over. It seemed finished. We were staying at his family’s estate in a region called Gaspésie, a temperate bastion for camping and fishing nestled along the Saint Lawrence River. His father’s family hailed from there. The estate was a small wooden house with two bedrooms, a small bathroom, a kitchen and a living room all on top of each other, about twenty feet from the ocean at high tide. Sylvie had gotten sick from eating bad lobster, but finally after two days of exploring the area without her—visiting a mine shaft where French and Irish had been worked to death—she was rejuvenated. It was the most perfect day, the sunniest day we had seen yet. We had tabs of LSD with us, one each; we were planning to take them as soon as possible. At noon, when Sylvie was regathering her spirits, she texted us she was feeling ready.

About half an hour into the trip I went outside and left the other three behind me. I walked to the edge of the sandless shore and perched upon a jagged rock that was lapping saltwater at its base. A tremendous fog had covered the scenery. No more rays of sunshine and veiling clouds; I couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of me. Everything seemed bigger, more profound. I gazed into the ocean, imagining what it was like to live as an ancient ….. how clear becomes the origin of myth when one is in a place like this. The gods are real out here… As Thales said, “the gods are common.”

I went back to the porch, got my notebook and began writing:

Out here, in the north of Gaspésie, you can feel the gods as they once were to men before our times… Terrifying… immense epics of storm and fire, inspiring the change all around us: it occurs from the hands of these giants. Them, the brave immortal ones who bend our fates against the waves of eternity, molding our stories against wind and sea . . .

Nature is sublime out here – Almost not a sight of life around, save grass, trees and the few odd animals… bugs snipping and biting on dead branches left from millennia of washing. There are roads, and on them pass few men, who are kept by churches which dot the coast. But outside, it is known. The birds and all the beasts of nature pull to the divine epithet – eternal recurrence, this pulsating beast which lies beneath all things, all bugs, all birds, chaffing and pumping the instinct of Life, and of Power.

It calls to man: raise yourselves. End your petty weaknesses, your songs to the end, your technics and your industry which only hide you from the intensity of nature, from life, from this great mistake of matter – which is, although not with purpose, not a mistake at all, just the ever-forcing will of the self-same beast you all are, the self-same will you all represent.

The birds all sing and know this thing, the trees all sway in circles to say: the eternity of becoming, the greater glory of the instincts, the instinct against pity . . . . .

I down put my notebook and went back inside. Alexandre and Sylvie were stoned on the couch, still unable to move. They were listening to final crescendo of Beethoven’s Fantasie Chorale.

Alexandre had three revelations that day. The first was that all music comes from the human animal’s wish to keep time, and it began when the first caveman knocked a rock on the ground to measure out the seconds as they passed. That same knock flowed all the way up to Mozart’s concertos. Keeping time was the way in which man mastered it, rather than letting it master him. This was made all the more powerful by the effects of the drug, in which one feels their control of things slipping away along with the strong desire for some intervening boon to swoop in and recapture one’s composure. I wonder if it’s not a hallucination at all but rather LSD’s ability to make one more sensitive to certain existentiall receptors that operate in the background of everyday life—that Mozart, as an extremely sensitive individual, felt this urge to gather and order time out of the same heart-palpitating urge.

The second revelation was closely related to this talk of sensitivity. Alexandre asked, “Why did Beethoven hate us so much?” as the Choral Fantasy exploded with its fury. “Imagine these people like Beethoven,” I replied. “What was their problem?” Music’s power to impart emotions is universally known, but seldomly is it appreciated in such a visceral way as Alexandre did there: by making such intense vibrations, Beethoven expressed a hatred for the nervous system of others. LSD in general makes you more delicate, sensitive to sounds; for that reason it has a classicizing effect.

We switched it to Mozart’s serenades. I sat down and picked up Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, flipping to the brilliant section on Heraclitus. I began to read aloud. After about a minute I was interrupted by the laptop’s changing of Mozart to Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta.” It had been left on shuffle. Heraclitus, hopefully as he would have wanted, was evaporated into laughter, like flame to a page.

Grecian laurels began to grow on the walls. Everything sang the tune of spring. Perfection, clean and simple, visited us those days: in the rural Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, with meals of the finest seafood, reading from the finest books, hiking high mountains, drinking martinis and lighting fires on the beach; no one around to bother us, no worries at all, laughing like careless gods.

***

A few days later we were sitting outside a restaurant after spending all day hiking and then swimming in a stupendous lake. We had been turned away from the famed Sea Shack bar because it was full—I made much of the pun “She Sack,” Alexandre cackling uncontrollably.

I was scribbling on some loose-leaf sheets of paper. I had decided I wasn’t making my play “Greek” enough: there must be choruses to achieve the Dionysian melting of the ego. I wrote about the Bagglioni, a family in Perugia who seized the city and instituted ‘pagan’ rule:

… the schools laid to waste their old peace

And chose swords over books and steel plates over fleece.

They continued to squander their lives as we spend

Until Ares declared the Oddi had to bend

To the powerful fists of the great Baglione

Who took Christ off his seat and placed Life on his throne

And the crows stuffed with blood were of much freer sorts

As they perched on the churches that now served as forts

In a city that changed to a war hungry clan

That left Vatican diplomats wounded and wan.

I versified the event that was allegedly immortalized by Raphael in his “Saint George and the Dragon” and other works. Glorious Burckhardt suggests the young armored figure swinging a mace atop a galloping steed in the Expulsion of Heliodorus wasn’t taken from the imagination but from real life: from Raphael at twelve-years-old witnesses a young member of the Baglioni family resisting a surprise attack, taking in the violence first-hand as it erupted in the middle of the city:

Then the exiles too couldn’t break their decree

Though they tried when they raided to highest degree

The interior forum with hundreds of men;

Simonetto the son was depending on ten

– Just a boy of eighteen with a fiery gut –

Yet he slaughtered the hordes with a blazing-quick cut

‘Til with twenty-two wounds he was forced then to share

With his brother Astorre who charged with a mare

And he shocked all the watchers who saw him as Mars

Resurrecting from Rome to raise glory to stars

For the people of Italy dying for bliss

Who were longing to taste the concealed pagan kiss

That would rock the whole world with fine dancing and war

And let men become kids on Elysium’s shore . . .

As if signaling clear the whole Renaissance fate

These so bold Baglione conjured envy and hate

From deceivers who pounced at a wedding so grand

By destroying the brothers with bravi at hand.

I built the choruses mainly through passages from Burckhardt, but also from passages in Machiavelli’s letter on Cesare Borgia as well, directed to both by Nietzsche’s Antichrist. I had read all these in a quick fury and had created a ‘curriculum’ out of them. And so, in between his showing me Napoleon’s Memoirs of St. Helena, the memoirs of Cardinal des Retz, and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Alexandre read from a French translation of Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, learning of the fearsome despots, the superhuman architects, the festivals and the polymathic embrace of all dimensions of existence.

And so the third revelation of Alexandre’s was that something tremendous happened in that era. Some months after I left, he found himself gazing into Raphael’s School of Athens. “Eye realized dhat dhese guys, dhese men of dhe Renaissance, espied something in their depictions of mankind. Dhe philosophers assembled in dhat fresco, dhey are but men, dhere are no gods and no God in dhe painting, minus dhose statues. In dhe universe we find man and man alone. But trew his thoughts, man finds dhe measure of dhe world. Protagoras annunciated dhe profoundest blow when he said “Man is dhe measure of all dhings.” Never before and never after was dhis message heard so loudly and so intimately as in dhe Renaissance. I felt, in looking at dhis picture just moments ago, dhat dhese men knew how utterly hopless mankind’s situation was, on a meteor in dhe void; and dhat, somehow from dhis absolute abyssal realization, dhey also at dhe same type found dhe Herculean strengfh to pull out of eet and produce dhe highest works of dhe mind. It is an affirmation not of God or laife even but nihilism eetself.”

The Renaissance was allegedly a more “atheistic” or anti-Christian time, and ours a less, according to Nietzsche. But the Renaissance, despite its humanism, was replete with this godly sense of ingenuity, whereas even the most religious among us now drink Sprite and dwell in vinyl-sided buildings. “I look out at dhis time,” Alexandre had said, motioning to the Sea Shack and a mob of houses and stores, “and I fhink we are een a dark age, dhe darkest mankynd has seen yet.” Even though we were drunk off the anti-Christian version of the Renaissance, worshipping their brutality as Ezra Pound worshipped Malatesta, we could not help but buy the decidedly Catholic argument that our secularism had made us indelibly cursed. The Renaissance had no gods (at least, according to our ‘sources’ at the time), but still turned nihilism into an object of reverence. Conversely, our civilization’s “optimism,” with its vacuum of spirit, led not to the triumph of Cesare Borgias but to the transformation of human existence into the concrete form of global herd-capitalism—The Sprite Life as the altogether most godless godlessness.

But our world is old: the cultural production we experience operates under the metaphysics of liberal parliamentarianism, and the feeling that there is a discrepancy between what culture should be, and what we find practiced in our bourgeois world, has been in the air since that state-form came into existence.

Typically, the critic leveling this notion has been German or inspired by German thinkers, and the idealized alternative culture has been ancient Greece. Although this is not always the case, the exceptions are usually quick and cheap variants of the rule. The charge is that our culture is an inferior one because it is fragmented, commercialized, or otherwise discordant, and that Greece’s was an ideal one for different reasons depending on the theorist. It can more or less be summarized with this sentence from Robert Pippin’s Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy: ‘“We moderns” do not have a culture; our culture is not a living thing, it is just the ingestion without digestion of our own past. We are “walking encyclopedias,” not participants in a cultural enterprise.”

This notion can be found in the works of the most powerful cultural forces of the last 200 years, including but not limited to: Hegel, Hölderlin, Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Spengler, Lukacs, Heidegger, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the artwork which synthesizes all artforms and provides a basis for national culture, has had plenty of modern iterations—from the hippie revolution to Walt Disney’s Epcot to Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. These should be understood as attempts to achieve this de-fragmentation. Communism itself was an attempt to answer this, albeit in political rather than aesthetic form, as was Hitler’s Third Reich and Mussolini’s Corporatism. The pageantry and anthemic propaganda of Stalinism was classed by Boris Groys as “Total Art,” an extension of 19^th century romanticism in which the whole of society becomes a work of art. By contrast, everything after the fall of the Berlin Wall could be seen as a pessimistic rejection of its possibility, which would nevertheless place our cynicism in a reciprocal relationship with it.

Dear ichthyoid-attentionspan’d reader! You better keep reading, because whatever entertainment to which you are planning to click away is itself a product of this discordance, and no amount of it will satisfy you!

Gasda’s play reminded me of something from a year-long course I took in 2022 on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit taught by Jay Bernstein of the famed Bernstein Tapes (also Pippin’s college roommate). Somewhere in the second half of the book, Hegel goes from a discussion of the French Revolution, modern science, and the Enlightenment to… Ancient Greece. To explain why he did that, Bernstein pointed out that all German philosophy also did this at that same chronological point in cultural history. And to explain that, he pointed to a single text which influenced everything that came after—Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, specifically its Sixth Letter.

Schiller wasn’t the first German to laud Greece—that was started by Winckelmann with his History of Art, followed by Lessing’s Laocoon essay. But he, Bernstein argued, was the first to make clear the case for its radically imminent importance by explicitly connecting it to all the other philosophical conversations going on about Rousseauiste republicanism, Kantian critical philosophy, and Sturm und Drang theatre. Schiller’s proposal was that modernity is characterized by a series of diremptions—between church and state, civilization and the natural world, subject and object, classical and romantic, religion and science, capitalist and worker, profit and passion-project—and that all these oppositions, which contribute to our alienation, stem from a disunity of man’s two permanent registers: sensuosity and rationality. On the other hand, the theory goes, Hellenic man experienced a harmony of these things inside his soul, and thus his culture was united, beautiful, and free. To speak of a fragmented culture is to speak nonsense. Culture is unity, unity of the faculties of man and unity of men within a polis; a culture that lacks cosmic, civic, and moral unity is not a culture at all.

The core proposal of the book is that, if returned to its true station, Art would be capable of uniting the sensuous and rational components of man’s being, and would ameliorate all the diremptions that plague the modern state. The goal of all humanistic endeavor, then, should be directed toward the harboring and practice of a new high art comparable to the kind practiced in Ancient Greece.

Art attains a cosmic register because it does not shy away from incorporating all experiential material—in fact, it ought to. Art’s Content aims to be absolutely universal. At the same time, the execution of art depends upon brevity, sharpness, chiaroscuro, wit, pleasurability, and the like; that is, it follows laws of Form that are tightly narrow. In this way, it combines the broad brush of sensuous data with the fine-stenciling of rational organization. Art is the combination of sense and science. All other forms of perception divide man, since they operate only on his sensuous or intellectual sides, but “only the perception of the Beautiful makes something whole of him, because both his natures must accord with it.”

In the first five letters, Schiller wagers that art and art alone can obtain the complete freedom that the French Revolution promised but failed to deliver. In his day, he tells us, the lower classes had become uninhibited “savages” while the upper classes had become effete and indolent “barbarians”—the former had no taste for art at all, and were thus at odds with the passions of Nature, while the latter had become so domineering of nature that they ended up as the slaves of its machines, the totally useless civilized man. The free man, on the other hand, doesn’t suppress the multiplicity of Sensuosity he has in his feelings with the uniting moral law of Reason, he only prunes Nature so that it doesn’t overpower Reason.

All of us are trying to reattain this unity every day, but we seem to think it must be accomplished through forms of power: political activism and religion, the state and the church. For Schiller, the proper mode for thinking freedom is not political philosophy or theology but poetry. Unlike Rousseau again, Schiller thinks it is a change in taste that can heal the divided world, not a change in the laws. A cultural revolution will presage a political revolution, or rather will make it redundant, by sufficiently edifying the personality to make it able to bear freedom, to prevent the new regime from sliding into terror or reaction. Art prepares the soul of man for the kind of sovereign and creative existence of the true republic. To visualize political freedom, we must be familiar already with true Olympian freedom (he compares the cultured man to the life of the gods more than once). The political state curbs nature, the ethical state subjects individuals to the general will, but the aesthetic state carries out the will of the whole through the individual: “Beauty alone can confer on him a social character.”

Art is a social experience because, unlike the partial good that is consumption (which can only benefit an individual at their baser level and always implies exclusion), art is an absolute good because it confers a feeling of limitlessness by making the actually limitless brilliance of ordered infinity universal. Art is the sensuous recreation of the intellect.

In the Sixth Letter, he raises what he expects is the reader’s objection—that it was always like this, that civilization was always divided and capitalistic. He answers to look to the Greeks, whose culture “united all the attractions of art and all the dignity of wisdom, without, however, becoming the victim of them as does our own.” In Greece, sense and mind were at one, because public and private existence were at one and there was a low level of specialization. The Polis was not hampered by our partitions or compartmentalizations. All Greeks worshipped the gods, all Greeks protected their city, the city in turn held festivals and ceremonies to celebrate valiant defense, and the festivals contained works of art about the gods. It was a complete cultural eco-system unto itself.

No matter what the endeavor—poetry or philosophy or politics—all of them had as their one goal the “honoring of truth.” The truth was that which was won when the clearly-defined and human-looking Olympian gods conquered the world of the Titans—an irrational world of monsters and elemental powers, without justice and self-denial. For Schiller, then, and for the Greeks if we are to believe him, Reason was not any closer to the Truth than emotion was. They were ruled by “all-uniting Nature,” while we are ruled by “all-dividing Intellect.” This makes our science pedantic and our art verbose. (While we don’t have the problem of sugary-sweet romanticism, we can see this excess in the irony-soaked clownery of high art today, or in the kitsch of middle art and vulgarity of low art.)

In first millennium B.C. city states along the Aegean Sea, mankind pulled itself out of the barbarism of the sense-based actual by noting the formal qualities of what the senses saw, leading them into the realm of the beautiful. But then we went too far by divorcing the form from content, leading us into pure abstraction. Greece had to be surpassed, so that we could learn more about the universe; but now we are in need of a work of art or a genre of art that would allow us to step back into that previous phase, that would take our sprawling knowledge of the cosmic and tie it in with that same harmonious and above all simple play of forms.

In the back of his mind is clearly Rousseau’s First Discourse, which argued brazenly that the arts and sciences do not enlighten but in fact degrade man’s character, and that we’d be better off replacing “culture” with the rigorous cultivation of Virtue (the example Rousseau gives that I always remember is the Persian prince who was left out in the cold for years in order to free him of the desire for luxury). Man was formerly “free,” but in a savage way; he then traded this anarchy for civilization, which made him safe but not fully human; and now he is awaiting some third thing. Schiller innovates upon Rousseau by keeping his historical schema but refusing to let go of the arts, instead making “the Aesthetic” the key to man’s total teleological fulfilment.

Works of art differ widely along lines of taste but the Aesthetic is that way in which all genuine works of art are alike. The Aesthetic for Schiller is a state of being. It doesn’t add anything or posit anything on top of what is here: it is nothing other than the experience of the equal and simultaneous fulfilment of our physical (sensuous), logical (rational), and moral faculties as well as the harmonization of our finite (mortal and bodily) and infinite (universal and imaginational) aspects. Culture, then, is the spread of this metaphysical experience throughout a given people and their shared civic life.

The Aesthetic deals with the multiple—collects everything in experience (nothing can be off limit for its subject matter)—yet ceaselessly points to how it all interplays in the rationalizing universal law, through the power of Form (beginning, middle, end—of a story, of a musical piece, of a marble body). Thus it introduces the full infinity, that which is felt by Life in its most outstretched and complete moments, into the determined and material, the finite. Schiller likens beauty to the work of free contemplation, which enters the realm of ideas or forms without leaving the world of sense. And he likens aesthetic play with the superfluous actions of animals: “it is assuredly not the cry of desire which we hear in the melodious warbling of the song-bird.”

It is bewildering to read Schiller’s Aesthetic Education after one has read Hegel’s texts on art. You realize just how much of Hegel—the trunk of his theory, no less, not just some petals or branches—is lifted from this essay. But Hegel deviates from Schiller in that he thought Man’s passage from savage nature through [Greek] Beauty to abstract Truth was well and good, and that we do not need, as Schiller insisted, to pass back from Truth to Beauty. Hegel, a true philosopher, thought Art was just a pretty face to attract the subject to the contemplation of ideal abstract forms of thought; not “words alone are certain good” as with Yeats, but thoughts alone.

But Schiller holds to appearance as the highest point of the logical triad. At the very end of the book, Schiller distinguishes between three things: mere actuality, appearance, and truth, with “appearance” signifying this combination of the actual and truth, or sensuosity and law. Appearance, which is the mode Art is created under, is an idealized reality that is to be sharply distinguished from the savagery of senses like touch. The savage is pleased by senses like touch and taste; the egghead rationalist is pleased only by the logical law lying “behind” reality; but the cultured man, Man at his highest point, is able to derive pleasure from sight and sound. “As soon as he begins to enjoy with the eye, and seeing acquires an absolute value for him, he is already aesthetically free also, and the play impulse has developed.” He doesn’t eat the painting or chew on the poem: he enjoys them by theoretically consuming them and tripping out on them. Indifference toward mere “reality” and interest in “absolute appearance” are “evidence of an internal freedom, since they reveal to us a force which sets itself in motion of its own accord, independently of any outward material, and possesses sufficient energy to repel the pressure of matter.”

This term “absolute appearance” is crucially significant—especially by the fact that it is contrasted with reality or actuality. Appearance is immanent and worldly, yet it also transcends the genericity of items considered as entities. He compares it to feminine beauty, which ceases to be absolute appearance when we begin to desire it more than painted beauty; once it leaves the realm of pure aesthetic feeling it becomes “only” appearance. This, however, implies we can find that absolute appearance in living things.

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Now I am going to introduce a series of topics that I plan to flesh out in later essays. They can all be thought of as responses to Schiller’s notions of the cultural diremption that has occurred since the Greeks and a future aesthetic unification human society.

The example many of the Germans used to encapsulate Greek cultural unity was Greek Theatre—the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, where the whole of society gathered together for dramatizations of their social problems and watched them get ‘unified’ before their eyes. But I am partial to the argument that the nagging wordiness of Greek Democracy and the philosophical dialectic brought on the downfall of the classical unity, and lately I have been wondering if theatre was on the way to this. The true source of Greek culture, then, would have to be found prior to it, in its archaic religion.

But the world Homer describes is too wild for us to get a picture of Greek civic worship, while the theology of the later Platonists is too far removed from the life of the aristocratic city-state to give us an authentic picture. If the theory can be proved at all, it will be proved in the poetry of Pindar.

This is for multiple reasons. For one, Pindar was writing in the 500s-400s B.C., but his cultural conservatism allows us to peer into the beliefs of the aristocratic period, ostensibly when Greek culture was the least discordant, prior to the Persian Wars and the democratic reforms. Pindar was also poetizing on people in his society, and often referenced events in their shared cultural life as he weaved their stories into the broader background of Greek cosmology. He wrote paeans to Apollo, dithyrambs to Dionysus, dancing hymns (hyporchemata), hymns for approaching a god’s shrine (prosodia), songs of lament (threnoi), praises of men at banquets (encomia), but besides fragments we only have his odes celebrating victors in the athletic games (epinicia). Rather than a purely myth-making poet writing about the gods, or a purely “gnomic” poet writing maxims, the social nature of Pindar’s epinicia incidentally means that they comprehensively describe that cultural unity of Greek society Schiller wrote of.

The athletes were sons of aristocratic families. Their participation in the games was a symbol of their life of leisure (if a Greek noble worked an hour in his life he was permanently disgraced), as well as a sublimation of their militarism, the source of their livelihoods, during peace time. Pindar was a traveling poet; Greek poetry was musical as it was literary, so we can picture Pindar as a combination of writer and composer, hired by nobles to arrange songs for their celebrations. Pindar’s victory odes often begin by congratulating the winner, naming his parents and his region, and then using those as a springboard to connect his lineage and home to a classic myth, or several, before bridging back down from Olympus to the athlete again in conclusion. The effect is that the occasion of the day is linked with the eternal and immortal—and in fact Pindar’s whole view was that athletic victors were engraced by the immortals for a day, enabling their feats:

At Megara you hold the prize

And in the plain of Marathon; and with three victories you

Mastered Hera’s local contest, O Aristomenes, by your effort.

And upon four bodies you fell from above

With hostile intent,

For whom no homecoming as happy as yours

Was decided at the Pythian festival,

Nor upon returning to their mothers did sweet laughter

Arouse joy all around; but staying clear of their enemies

They shrink down alleyways, bitten by failure.

But he who has been allotted a new success

Is inspired by hope at his great splendor

And takes flight

On the wings of manly deeds, having

Aspirations superior to wealth. In a short time the delight

Of mortals burgeons, but so too does it fall to the ground

When shaken by a hostile purpose.

Creatures of a day! What is someone? What is no one?

A dream of a shadow is man.

But whenever Zeus-given brightness comes,

A shining light rests upon men, and a gentle life.

Dear mother Aegina, on its voyage of freedom

Safeguard this city, together with Zeus and King Aeacus,

Peleus and noble Telamon, and with Achilles.

I am increasingly led to believe that the figure who made the best attempt at a response to Schiller’s provocation was Friedrich Hölderlin. Schiller championed Hölderlin for a number of years, becoming his patron, setting him up with a tutoring position, and publishing a fragment of his novel Hyperion. Schiller’s influence on Hölderlin’s theories and his early poetry is obvious, but over the years Hölderlin’s poetry increasingly fell under the influence of Pindar. It seems that it came somewhat as a response to Hölderlin’s recoiling at what he discovered in writing his tragedy on Empedocles. The pre-Socratic was his hero, and he identified the doctrine of pantheism with him, the desire to disburse one’s self into the cosmic All (by throwing oneself into a volcano, as Empedocles did). But in writing the play, and turning Empedocles into a detached dramatic object facing an oppositional interlocutor, Hölderlin came to feel that the death of Empedocles was punishment from the gods for hubris. His letters and notes at this time reflect an ongoing quarrel inside of himself between “pure generality” and “egoism,” between “whole” and “individual part.”

He decided both his pantheism and his excessively subjective lyrics were in the wrong. His interests then went from Sophoclean tragedy to religiously ecstatic lyrics. The great Hölderlin scholar Michael Hamburger viewed “the poetry of his prophetic phase” as becoming “more and more physical, more and more sensuous, more and more concrete,” and exceedingly Pindaric. Pindar was always reminding mortals to know their place in the celestial hierarchy: “What lies beyond neither wise men / nor fools can tread. I will not pursue it; I would be foolish.” Pindar was the most idiosyncratic of lyric poets according to ancient scholars, and in the odes we have he was always dealing with specific cities, specific families, specific and esoteric myths. Hamburger says Hölderlin’s late odes and hymns anticipated the Symbolist, Imagist, and Surrealist late 19^th-early 20^th century movements and had to wait for a modernist readership to get appreciation, and yet at the same time they are very similar to Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar’s fragments. Hamburger writes, “If both his own poems and his Pindar versions strike us as ‘modern,’ it is because they rely not on argument but on particulars charged with the most concentrated significance, on the mere naming of a person or thing or their invocation by signs, where less daring poets of Hölderlin’s time or any other would have presented a sequence of arguments and metaphors.” We can understand the grasping toward particularity as the poetic counterpart of the ethical stance of anti-hubris, as it avoids both pure universality and de-worlded I-subject solipsism.

Particularity synthesizes universality and individuality, and invoking the signs of the divine while dealing with particulars constitutes absolute appearance, leading us into the Schillerian Aesthetic.

Heidegger made the point that Hölderlin’s Ister hymn does not aim to use the Ister (Danube) River as a metaphor for something else, but rather is a meditation on the absolutely singular essence of that particular body of water and the historical relationship it has had with the Germanic and Mediterranean peoples. He then says this is a poetic technique that is capable of putting up a fight against the metaphysics of world technology. I have a book-length close-reading of this argument that I will start uploading part-by-part to Substack soon. But here I want to look at a different example, Hölderlin’s hymn Patmos.

Patmos is a Greek island where St. John experienced a vision of the Apocalypse and wrote the Book of Revelation. The poem is bewildering and traverses an immense amount of ground, including his synthesis of paganism and Christianity, but I want to focus on its beginning and end. After lamenting the flight of the divine from our world, and calling for more observance of what is holy, the last lines read:

But what the Father

Who reigns over all loves most

Is that the solid letter

Be given scrupulous care, and the existing

Be well interpreted. This German song remembers.

While the first lines of the poem read:

Near is

And difficult to reach, the god.

But where the danger threatens

That which saves from it also grows.

The thought here seems to be that the path out of the death of the gods is almost too obvious to detect; it is ‘right in front of our noses.’ While we have been neglecting our “sacrifices” to “the Heavenly,” and therefore “the honour of the Heavenly has been invisible” “for too long now,” German “song” is on the right path because it carefully attends to Logos.

I think a “linguistic turn” is necessary within Hölderlin interpretation. I think Hölderlin wrote poems like Patmos to claim that ancient Greek religion, Christianity, and modern humanism are part of one fluid tradition through the Greek language. “Christianity” was an event within the Greek language, as the New Testament was written in Koine Greek, as well as an event within Greek philosophy, a development of the idea of theos as logos, cosmos as intellect and form—gods with human attributes become God with a son of human form who is also at the same time logos itself. The Greeks invented grammar; Greek grammar fashioned Greek Philosophy; the West’s reception of Greek Philosophy created modern technics and science; ‘Germanic’ scholarship of the Greeks will reattain the temporal-shining-forth of the Greek experience of Being within the scope of natural science. The way we speak about the world and about Being determines the face of Being, because of humanity’s powers (representational thought causes ecological destruction, for example). With the German poets and especially with Heidegger, the formulation boils down to, “Language is the house of being,” the dwelling place of that which enables all empirical beings to be. A different metaphor is dealt with in the Ister lecture, taking up Hölderlin’s phrasing that poetic language builds a bridge upon which the gods can come back down to earth. Poetry must act like the new Vatican, with science under its thumb, preventing it from destroying us. The poets will be the wardens of the technicians.

W.F. Otto suggested that the Olympian religion occupied a perfect midway point between chthonic paganism and abstract monotheism. The Homeric gods were forces of “pure being,” akin to Nature, and wholly concerned with life and the living, whereas the Titans were like the polytheist pantheons found in most indigenous cultures: elemental, primordial building blocks of nature, passionate and furious, concerned with death. There is a sense of progression from the confusing and composite religion of the pre-Homeric world to the world of Homer where the gods are closer to philosophical notions. The presence of the goddess Athena is felt by Achilles in the first book of the Iliad: it persuades him to keep his dagger sheathed rather than kill Agamemnon with it. She passes by and bestows a whiff of rationality to Achilles’ mind. The subtext is that we must believe things like Truth are alive and sentient, and that they care about what we do, in order for them to have real claim to our behavior. The turn from Kant and Schiller to Hölderlin and Heidegger is that the rational mind cannot be its own lawgiver; we cannot be accountable to ourselves, we need something else that is bigger than us.

This reminds of how Heidegger describes the appearance of the question of Being as the “first beginning” of western philosophy. Greek religion progressed out of the animalistic, to the humanistic divine, and became ever purer until it reached the ‘concept’ of Being itself. This occurs in the work of Parmenides: in his poem “On Nature,” the goddess Truth teaches the philosopher how to approach Being. But then Plato makes things too abstract by turning Truth into a series of universal concepts. While Hegel tells this story in a progressive tone, Heidegger adopts Nietzsche’s casting of the history of philosophy in a pathological light without, like him, abandoning the hope that there is such a certainty as Truth.

In the introduction to his Parmenides lecture, Heidegger makes the point that “the goddess truth” in Parmenides’ poem is not the goddess of truth, like how the hunt is part of Artemis’ domain, but that she is truth. The thought here is that there’s something important going on where the word Truth is made alive, like how Otto’s gods are alive, and that it’s not yet the dead abstraction that it is in Plato. “The gods are living”—what that’s saying is that there is a trace of life in language, since the gods can only be spoken of, never seen in their full form. If the “other beginning” of philosophy on the horizon, the one Heidegger spoke of in his Contributions to Philosophy, is to be inaugurated by a phenomenological approach, what does this mean? In Greek, Phenomen-ology would mean “shining-word” or man lighting up the field of being, the clearing in which Being can be seen. Absolute appearance. We look around and find only beings; it is only through language that we can bring the notion of Being forth and ask the question of what it is. The asking of this question is the path back to the Heavenly, in the same way that Schiller’s Aesthetic unites the infinite and the finite. That’s exactly what Hölderlin means by saying that God is near and difficult to grasp: Truth is suffering because it’s all about the way that we structure her language. “Neopaganism” treats “the gods” like action heroes in the sky. But for Hölderlin, “the god” is right in front of us: if only we were to use language carefully, properly, the holy would return to the world. Instead, we casually tarnish language, and so it’s all obscure to us. We instead exist in a mode where truth is just a theory, justice is just a theory, goodness is just a theory—they cannot compel us. This is the case with modern science, with the equally careless misinterpretation that is “Christian theology,” and even with the too-mythic mythology that was practiced by the Greeks themselves.

Hölderlin’s answer to Schiller’s Sixth Letter is a puritanical attendance to language.

I couldn’t fall asleep. I got up slowly to avoid waking Elizabeth; I found my jacket in the dark and went out onto the balcony.

We were on the top floor of a tower overlooking the sea. It was January so the beaches were quiet and cold. The weekend was spent moseying around town, seeing what shops were open, warming up to each other after too much time spent apart—time taken away from us by school, work, and the ever-growing highway traffic that made the distances longer.

I lit a cigarette and opened my book, but couldn’t focus. I closed and tossed it onto the other chair.

The ocean could be heard exhaling and inhaling, but not seen; a lone car slid down the boulevard, its headlights sweeping through dead brush and patches of sand.

Despite sitting still and in isolation, my heart was pumping in my eyes and quick spirits drew sharp breaths in my chest.

I could feel the liberalism leaving my body as my relationship began to deepen. I didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. I slowly began to demote my previous experiences and hopes—the stories of the road trip, a future of living under a bridge and writing the cosmos—replacing them with new ones, like writing the cosmos in a house.

It's funny that when atheists secularize Christianity, it’s always the secularization of its communitarian aspects—getting others to pity you and give you things. Why is it never the secularization of the seven deadly sins, something that places demands on your character? That is what a secular monogamous relationship is—the secularization of the theory of temptation.

To become monogamous is to depart from the metaphysics of liberalism. That liberalism has a metaphysics is hard for liberals, whether single, polyamorist, or cheater, to understand, because they haven’t made the leap out of desire—we even slide back into liberalism within relationships when we find ourselves desiring with our eyes. “But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Concupiscence of the eye.

What is liberalism? The political counterpart of promiscuity, or licentiousness. Licentiousness is the ethical conclusion to the privileging of experiences (enjoyable experiences, whether sexual or not) over Truth. The liberal understands life as the chance to consume experiences. They exist in a state of experience-consumption, or, what’s more, of the desire to consume more experiences. Being alone with someone means you might be missing out on something else. There’s always a better party around the corner—the one you are at is lame. The fear of missing out spawns carnal democracy, which becomes Empire: a class of competing desirers overwhelms the bounds of virtue until whole swaths of the world are enslaved to industry, powered through atomized individuals craving spices and textiles.

So with an anti-liberal turn in metaphysics comes not only a reorientation of value but a reorientation of the Out-There, of the things that concern the polis, politics. Your criteria for what makes a good economy is no longer that which facilitates a greater number of restaurants to try and women to fuck, but what will enable you to buy a house and put kids through school. The difference between a person immersed in “hook up culture,” the reigning social disposition, and a person in a monogamous relationship is greater than the difference between different species of mamal. In fact, monogamy is the wrong word—non-monogamous animals still aim to procreate, while the hook-up ape doesn’t do that, it just wants the experiences. One is mammalian, the other is an alien.

The leftist, and even the liberal, is not defined by non-monogamy (plenty don’t get any), but by opposition to the values that necessarily arise from a monogamous existence. They are defined by desire, the affirmation of desire—desires satisfied or, more often, thwarted and longing. A reactionary, insofar as they are not a hypocrite, is defined not by the desire for the Many and the New but its opposite—static attachment to the Few and the Same, and their guardianship.

There cannot be a shared culture between desirers and reactionaries. There can be political coalitions and other fake things—reactionary conservatives and desiring conservatives, reactionary leftists and desiring leftists—but the fault line is clear when it comes to literature, the art of knitting human relationships into speech—relations to other humans, to self, to God, to the ends of life.

The dividing line through desire and guardianship would come to define the next several years of my life. Perhaps this is the choice posed to everyone in every age when they leave adolescence. But I think the divide was intensified by my time.

The shift from the left to the right side of the line was keeping me awake. The events of the last several months paraded before me in carnivalesque. One day in particular came back to me. It was a Tuesday in November around which all those loose ends coalesced.

All the girls were applauding Lady Macbeth. It was early in the morning in a classroom on 11^th street where we met twice a week for Shakespeare seminars taught by this elderly literary critic who once complained, to no protests or even raised eyebrows, that man-boy love had been outlawed in the west: “what a great tradition it was, and to see it smothered through prejudice and bigotry…” The cardinal fear among the students at The New School was to appear gauche, so if you didn’t have to have a moralizing episode you were better off. So no one said anything. But you could improve your social capital if you had moralizing episodes about the right things, as many of the girls in class did about various male characters—Hamlet’s misogyny, Polonius’, Shylock’s, probably Puck’s misogyny… Each fictional man was gathered into the communal arms, held up by his armpits, plugged to the plank by rusty nails hammered through his veins and muscles, stuffed and gutted by the grizzliest mock, and slashed up and down his loins by thicket and blade for owning a servant, say, or giving orders to soldiers, or having-less-than idolizing feelings for his spouse, or being connected, no matter if he was from medieval Denmark, to slavery in the Americas, a popular refrain and common meeting ground for all classroom monologues looking to safely wander home after a ramble to the outer rim of sense. But the female characters: what angels! What ingenious tacticians! Sweeter than honey, smarter than mommy, more wronged than my three historical references!

“But, this character is not supposed to be intelligent.. they are possessed by a self-destructive greed…” the professor would say. They would weather these hits like an NFL tackle and emerge with renewed determination to uncritically uphold all the actions of their gender, simply because it was theirs, a war for which they had been practicing ever since singing “boys going to Jupiter to get more stupider” on the playground—and in just a few short years they would be deemed mature enough to staff the top magazines, publishing houses, and news outlets of Manhattan. Their few male counterparts, who were not gay, were shunted off to work in Amazon warehouses or die in some shithole country on the orders of the warhungry First Female President.

But that fate was avoided. Just as much as these gals were on their way to becoming the crème of feminist narrative production, so had 4chan become the rhetoric provider for the shitposter reaction. The New School alumni and adjuncts were writing op-eds that would get noticed by Buzzfeed clickbait writers and churned into listicles for the girls at state schools and community colleges to consume—girls I went to high school with and who were now clogging up the Facebook feed by sharing these all day long, girls who were apolitical half a year ago and were now posting about how Christopher Columbus was a terrorist. Meanwhile, the aimless trollish energy of Anonymous was now being rerouted to undermine this psychosexual coup-d’état. CLT’s pleb/patrician dichotomy, the snobbish criteria of musical analysis which subordinated popularity and technicality to experimentation and atmosphere, had seeped through the whole of 4chan. What this meant was everything was now subjected to the strange new doctrine of “objective taste.” There were now better and worse ways to be ripped according to /fit/: hitting PRs weren’t the goal but rather the ‘aesthetics’ of Zyzz, which were upheld over powerlifters. Movies, video games, and anime were subjected to the harshest scrutiny, with former gullible fans castigating 90 percent of the media they grew up with and choosing instead to play or watch obscure avant-garde work. The rest was branded Reddit-tier ZOGfeed plebtrash for Walshart Americlaps (Americans were accused of clapping at everything, including safely-landed planes and credit reels at movie theaters; Americans responded simply by calling them “Europoors”). Guns, cars, software, coding languages, operating systems, computers, phones, porn, celebrities, camping sites, breakfast cereals, suicide methods—whatever 4chan discussed, the pleb/patrician ranking system was invoked to analyze it, sometimes with tongue-in-cheek and sometimes with deadly seriousness.

The pleb/patrician dichotomy’s takeover of 4chan was of serious import. 4chan’s main boards were responsible back then for crafting the memes that would spread to rest of the internet’s websites—shit like iFunny, 9gag, Reddit, forums for hunters or campers or car mechanics or whatever—and those in turn disbursed the memes to the Facebook pages, which reached the masses. So it was only a matter of time for this penchant for grading to encompass political discourse—the art of governing human beings—and with it the evaluation of human types: races, classes, regimes. It was an easy transference, anyway, because a whole generation of guys raised on first-person shooters, WWE, and nu-metal weren’t going to convert to effeminate critique of the concept of rank. Through both the memes and their contact with the new gender politics, the Facebook admins were becoming vocally right-wing, and were converting their pages into avowedly political outlets that now posted about their former hobbies only as secondary concerns. The /mu/ dichotomy was reprised to ‘defend the west’ against the fat and queer “trigglypuff” people—it was politicized, but also remained aestheticized. The high estimation of “the West,” on the one hand, synonymized with images of competence, technological progress, and a loose gesturing toward high art, clashed with a denigration of leftism as fat, ugly, anti-hierarchical, the last they/thems. This was the real source of the “right-authoritarian/populist turn” in the second half of the 2010s journalists talk about. The demographic statistics, white working-class backlash, and nationalistic ethos only came in later as post-hoc justifications. It began as sensual will to power, and later explained itself, hungover, in the language of preservation. Man prefers wine over bread.

This dichotomy ripped up the millennial feel-good consensus—everyone being happily average, everyone “having a normal one,” everyone having the same politics and everyone being just a little gay—across the whole of American society. That consensus could have lasted longer, maybe decades longer, becoming the new American ethos to replace the one that had remained since the ‘60s, if the genderqueer people hadn’t gone on the offensive and teamed up with the race-conscious civil rights establishment in doing so. The academic and civil rights groups had had all these “woke” ideas about white supremacy and patriarchy for decades—they were as old as the tuna sandwiches left rotting in the fridges of the old Trotskyist meeting halls and overpopulation think tanks housed up and down the Appalachian corridor, with satellite pop-ups in northern California and in Nicaragua where they met their Sandinista wives. (We met up with this exact person, Elizabeth’s uncle, for a meeting of his aging socialists somewhere in Central Jersey during this time; the ride back home was one of the main memories I have of arguing with Elizabeth about politics, but it’s only a faint trace.) The only new addition was the relatively nascent notions of “non-binary” and “gender performance,” as well as the vast new post-Obama and post-Colbert-and-Stewart audiences ready to consume them.

The left had its own 4chan: it was Tumblr, which collected grad school dropouts and posters too mentally ill to get sinecures at nonprofits alongside teenage girls who wanted to share “deep” quotes and pictures of people making out in the rain. The former focused their plentiful amount of free time on radicalizing the latter. It was from this stew that the whole GamerGate thing likely started—I mean the political conversion of the people they attacked, the ones who attacked the video game industry for misogynistic and inegalitarian themes. I don’t know much about what transpired with that whole thing, but I remember my friend Mark Prochazka showing me videos of some guy called e-Duke meticulously “owning” some asexual bald lady wielding a baseball bat and telling white men to check their privilege in 2012 or 2013. It was Mark who also showed me ScragglyBeard and his “TechnoBillionExplosion” comedy group, who were already satirizing all of this stuff back then. While Tumblr didn’t pursue a snobbish rhetoric of pleb/patrician hierarchy, it did introduce a communistic equivalent, a slave moralistic inversion of the douchebag gamers’ murderous master morality, a distinction between good activists and the evil privileged rather than the gamers’ superior and inferior players. Social justice activism was transformed into the pejorative “social justice warrior” (SJW) before becoming supplanted in popularity by the term “woke,” et cetera, and the privileged were more or less rebranded, simply, as “white.” The passage from gender issues to racial ones is evident in this linguistic shift, although the gender discourse came back with a passion in 2020 as a way for white leftists to also have a radical platform in the midst of the supercharged post-Floyd woke-squared inquisition.

But all of this energy in the backrooms of the internet first burst into the mainstream in the fall and winter of 2014 and the spring of 2015. You had those girls I went to school with sharing reheated Tumblr shit on the one hand and guys I went to school with sharing watered down /pol/ memes on the other. Many people were just totally checked out of politics in general, going to festivals and taking rave drugs, but this isn’t where the cultural energy was—those kids were manifestly not driving the trends in advertising and college politics, nor the identity of the generation; they were rather frozen in the pre-2010 end of history celebration. I liked some of these Facebook pages, which were ironically being shared by Richardson on Facebook, their unknown godfather, to taunt his liberal D.C. friends like Tom; but all of them were Christian chauvinists, and my Nietzschean Grecco-Roman taste clashed against this. It was not this iteration that won my full embrace of this new strange movement.

Spending too much time following internet culture war would make me feel guilt. I would shut the computer and go pick up a book. At that time I was writing my Gesualdo play with speed: it was to be entirely in verse. I was practicing by reading the odes of Anacreon and Keats. After revisiting Aristotle’s Poetics at the suggestion of Racine, I decided I agreed with Voltaire that Shakespeare was “a great barbarian” for mixing prose with verse and violating the dramatic unities of one place, one time, one plot. But I agreed with Henri that Racine was too arid compared to the lengthy, bizarre metaphors of Shakespeare.

While professors were locked in arguments with students about the sexism of De Anima or the privilege of Hemingway’s amputee veteran characters, I would count out the measures to lines like the following:

D. Carafa:

And what of Carlo?

Maria:

And of him what? That

Imp has not even once possessed my heart.

D. Carafa:

But don’t you love his music? Surely songs

Of death and God enchant the ears of dawn,

The easy aural joys of early morn?

Maria:

I hate it; stiff and ugly, just like him,

The one who makes it.

D. Carafa:

My dearest lady!

The bothered way you speak of him recalls

The mood’s regard of work. Does he not please?

Maria:

In least! in least enjoyment, least intent,

In least arousal; least in everything.

D. Carafa:

Then come my dear and drink:

There is a boy nearby

Who has a host of loves

That dance and sing and call

To those who wander by;

And we do wander by,

And from their grove-like hall

That’s sealed with blackened doves

A path appears hereby.

Unlit unseen are they:

The path is not for dead –

The doves unlock for Life;

Alive alike the boy,

To him the weak annoy,

To talk he plays a fife

And rings you off your bed

To swallow from his bay.

Do you agree to swallow from his bay?

Maria:

I will, I’ll deeply drink from lounging shore

And in so drinking will I drop the ring

That anchors me to pious Carlo pale

And join your wild burning love instead.

Then swell our thawing lives shall be, then swells

The bay of Bacchus for our thirsting tongues.

We’ll glumly bear the feast to which we’ll go

And strike the evening of his hunting trip.

We’ll change the locks to this apartment door

And pay his servants’ eyes to look away.

The austere beauty of the Biblical style emanating from Gesualdo would crash against the lascivious decadence of his wife and her lover, until the sublimity of Renaissance paganism found in his student singers would awaken a lust for vengeance in Carlo and lead to the “crucifixion” of anti-patriarchal (i.e. Christian) betrayers. Gesualdo, beset with guilt, would then leave the audience off on a strand of forlorn purgatory neither Christian nor pagan but atheistic:

I’ve fed my jealous belly well; the cracks

From boards above are letting fluids, red

And mixed with seed unsound, deflower through

Their innocence – same my purity loosed

The cracks of dirt to fall beneath, so I

Will writhe in pain before an angered God

From here ‘til death, beseeching a resolve.

A Papal blessing couldn’t ease my soul,

As well an angel’s touch would terrify;

The winds of storm could rage the self-same tune

My music makes – that faded link to what

Is honored, high in clouds above – and still

My yells would freely float unmuffled. Sing

I must, for onwards I can only cleanse,

So sob will I like on a cross in hope

To call on purgatorial vultures

And pray my sounds don’t ring as overtures

To destined meaningless eternity.

It was a concatenation of the various contradictions within Nietzsche, tugged at until they’d lead to some beautiful collapse. It was also covert auto-therapy for my feelings about divorce and adultery, themes that were rife in the recession-induced financial meltdown I was living through. It would be a stylistic synthesis of discussions between my British literary background with Alexandre’s French, a system that would, as I wrote at the time, “keep the ornamented fanfare and sublimity of culture’s zenith—the 1600s mediterranean—but hollow out the nihilism and nothingness by adding the flowing bottle-hugging Roman song in place of Christian asceticism. Picture Monteverdi’s Vespers singing about life and Zarathustra, or picture Zarathustra in constrained iambic pentameter, free of discourse, weightless magisterial splendor taking its place. This art would be excessive yet shapely, life-promoting, smile-and-laughter-inducing: the most perfect art, mankind push to its potential, a vaccine for weariness.. imagine architecture going through this change!” … Yes, an innovation that meant absolutely nothing to the literary culture I was actually living in, the one that thought Arthur Miller was ancient theater and defined poetry as prose sentences chopped up with line breaks. I submitted some Gesualdo passages and some poems like “Ad Astra Beatrice,” the one I wrote in Québec, to the school’s undergrad literary journal. They were all rejected. I looked at the poems published: all plain prose, all cheap takes on loss of innocence by picking up smoking or something. Am I in the wrong? Should I write “depressed / I want to be / happy / but too much mascara / has made me / miss / them” to get published?

But how could I get angry? It only soothed my sense of superiority and further fueled my views about general decline. I came to understand the Godard quote that I had initially debated Pablo about, “all art is political.” I met Pablo in October; we were in the same French class, which ended around 8 PM. On the elevator ride down I struck up a conversation with him about the Baudelaire book he was holding and we took a walk over to Alabaster Books as our conversation became more familiar. “If all art is political then everything is political. What is political about autumn?” “Well, I don’t know… well, for farmers it means harvest, for people who can afford college it means start of the school year—it has a class dimension.” Pablo was born in the Philippines and raised in a working-class area of Houston; he had a particularly passionate anti-wealth verve to his views, despite also indulging in French cinema, modern literature, and other haute-couture media. By the glow of the yellow lamp in the musty wooden bookstore, he showed me Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.

Why couldn’t I get credits for this instead of my essay composition class, whose teacher had taken us on a “privilege walk” at the park where we were instructed to take one step forward for “yes” and one step back for “no” in response to a series of questions about what our parents did and what our education was like? I ended up halfway, which I already knew from talking to kids in class. The only point of exercises like this, besides being an act of infantilizing humiliation, was to let the rich kids feel like martyrs and the poor kids feel like underdog liberationists, fomenting ambivalent hatred in everyone by reminding the poor of their disadvantages while letting the wealthy leftists practice ways to logically disassociate from (while getting to keep) their “privilege” in the future. And anyways, who gives a shit, I thought, thinking back to Alexandre’s rants in the desert: why should people feel bad about the ambition of their parents and grandparents? If it was from a politics of privilege that made “baroque” possible, so be it; my art is political and not the kind they want!

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Mostly, I was beginning to feel unhappy having to spend time around such lame, angry people; my expectations for what college would be were dashed and I was struggling to remain hopeful. Even if one thinks literature is politics, one is nevertheless forced to see how all political digressions distract from the study of meter, plot, devices, the divine… So it was that day, the day of the Lady Macbeth praise, when I wanted to keep reading Shakespeare and writing Gesualdobut instead had to attend an economics lecture which didn’t teach anything at all about wealth but just lathered resentments together in non sequitur fashion. The teacher was a short, bespectacled, angry Brazilian Gen Xer who constantly took shots at the United States, which he had probably scarcely traveled through. “You know, when I first moved to America it was so strange to me to see how common a practice it was to hang American flags outside your house. What is the point of this? As if you are somehow more American than me because you wave a flag of the country we both live in?” The breakout sessions with the TAs were more informative, but of course they were constrained due to the professor stealing all the time; we all failed the quizzes and they had to redo the syllabus to inflate the grades.

I had a meeting at the school financial aid office in an hour. To kill time I sat in the library, procrastinating an Ancient Philosophy paper on Aristotle’s Ethics by watching a documentary from Roger Scruton on the iconoclastic nature of postmodern art and the traditional neoplatonic notion of Beauty. More erroneous Christianism, but I viewed it as a respite from the other trash. I clicked over to Facebook; I had added a bunch of people from college, who upped the ante on the leftist content on the feed. “The only solution to racism is for all white people to race mix themselves out of existence,” said edgy Gen X chef with mainstream cable television show Anthony Bourdain in a video clip that had received 100,000 likes and 50,000 shares. I closed my laptop—a cheap piece of shit Dell that weighed 30 pounds—and dragged my alienated self through the streets to go learn about how much money I owed for the privilege of attending this freak show.

The financial aid meeting was terrible; I can’t remember what happened but some money that was promised or proposed didn’t come through, and I couldn’t sign my mother up to take loans out for me in her name, even though I’d be paying her back in full, due to some accounting fluke or other. I would have to pay $5,000 out of pocket. Not only was she losing the house, but she had nowhere to move because she couldn’t afford basic rent. My dad got out of having to make alimony and child support payments to her because he successfully made her pity him by threatening to kill himself; he “had no money,” his eternal mantra, but now he really didn’t because he was at the end of the line, an alcoholic working as a car salesman, fired from his job for a reason he wouldn’t disclose. I imagine he was drinking all day with his new wife and not showing up to work or something. Curiously, my stepmother also got fired and sued the boss. They were in a multi-valent legal storm: they were wrapping up the domestic battery lawsuit the stepmother filed against him because he pinned her to the floor telling her to “stop” after she punched him for two hours straight, both of them extremely drunk; they were going through the process of getting married and paying off the expensive wedding—well, having her trust fund pay it off; she was suing her former employer; and my dad was dodging payments to my mother so she wouldn’t engage in the extravagantly avaricious practice of sheltering their daughter. My dad clearly didn’t think that was his responsibility—neither did he think it was his responsibility to continue raising us if it got in the way of his “happiness,” meaning his ability to fuck women 12 years his junior, ten years my senior—and so he was letting my mother’s finances crater. My mom’s mother got her in contact with a realtor friend of hers, who, in hindsight, must have swindled my mom because allegedly they couldn’t find any buyers and so she forced my mom to sell it to her son on a discount. Despite all this, and despite the fact that my father never once paid for anything of mine since I was 14, I asked him for money that night anyway, in the financial aid office, saying he could meet Pop halfway (of course by emailing his secret email address he had because his wife didn’t want him communicating with his old family too much and would monitor his text messages), and I received a wall of angry text back about how his wife was right to call me a piece of shit and that Pop was a piece of shit too for good measure and was a hypocrite because his sons didn’t go to college. A portrait of Gen X maturity.

Pop had initially promised that he could get me into NYU on a full ride because he had a friend on the board. Just like with the meeting that never occurred in Los Angeles with his filmmaker friend, this fell through, to put it lightly. I was always thankful that he would try. Pop had a whole lot of friends, a lot of whom were not as close as he said or not powerful enough to move the mountains he wanted moved, and even if they were, it was no longer ‘80s capitalism where you could get a bag of cash on the corner from a “shylock” with no strings attached and open a new store with it—the rules could not be bent as much as he liked to think. But it brought him happiness to imagine he could do these favors for his grandchildren. So he promised he could pay for my loans for The New School. But by the time I signed up for them, he admitted he no longer had the money, and probably never would. He sold his initial business for millions but had quietly spent through all the proceeds and was now living on borrowed cash. Out of fear, as well as hatred for my teachers, I said I’d quit school and work at The Corps full-time—I could just read books on the side, and maybe come to manage a host of stores when they franchised. He insisted I obtain a degree, and that we’d figure something out. Even then I was doubtful. It was all over; in such a short amount of time, I went from a debtless 18-year-old with omnidirectional opportunity to a rube who had been had, geared up for a lifetime working in the system I swore I’d find any way to oppose.

I left the office hungry, tired, into the dark streets lit up by consumer stores and packed with people off from work pushing and shoving. What a future to look forward to. I felt sick; I went into the nurse’s office and asked if I could get a doctor’s note to skip class and was denied; if I missed a class three times I would get kicked out and have all my credits taken away but would still have to pay for them. And it wasn’t clear if I’d be able to transfer credits to a different, cheaper, less political school, since mine had an unorthodox course catalog. I went back into the street and felt deliriously angry. I was thinking about how I could no longer afford contacts and had to wear these cheap glasses; my shoes were falling apart and the bus and subway fees were taking up all that I earned from The Corps. The shitty NJ Transit buses were always so packed at night and there was barely enough room to stand, never enough to sit; it was beginning to rain and I foresaw how the ceiling would leak cold water onto my head again like what happened last week. But I wasn’t there yet, I still had to get from 14^th street to 42^nd street bus terminal and wait there for half an hour, so I entered the station to see a fat homeless guy sprawled out on the platform floor with vomit all over his chest, packed myself into a subway car in which some annoying fucker harassed the silent crowd to give him money, and exited into another maze: up three flights of stairs into the foot tunnel that connected Penn Station to Port Authority. There was this bizarre series of words printed onto mosaic tiles overhead telling people on their morning and evening commutes that life wasn’t worth it and that they should give up. “What’s the point…” “just go home…,” they read.

“If I go on a killing spree and kill myself, I will blame Shakespeare in my suicide note: Shakespeare is the true nihilist, not Nietzsche, and reading him is making me comfortable with the idea of mass violence.”

Even though I wanted to focus solely on the study literature and remain apolitical, the heightening poverty of the situation was going to make both impossible.

Several hours later, parked on a dark street under a white lamp, I laid in the backseat with Elizabeth in my arms. I let the anxiety roll off me and fell asleep.

***

It wasn’t me who went on a shooting spree but cops and blacks in Missouri, rampaging through the streets of Ferguson. The killing happened in August, but the innocent verdict for the cop had just come out. In response, riots were popping off all over the place, culminating in the murder of two Brooklyn cops five days before Christmas.

I left school as the protests were roaring on every corner. I watched them go by with signs as I descended the steps into the 14^th Street station, taking the Q uptown. I got off at Port Authority and boarded the 156, the awful local bus that took forever because it made stops all the time, back to Jersey.

I walked across town as the sun was setting, sneaking past The Corps so my uncle wouldn’t see me and ask me to make a delivery. I entered the house through the back door, packed my bags, and took off.

I drove up to Québec City that night, picking up Elizabeth along the way. The way was dark and it was snowing; it was dangerous on the slick highway roads.

Alexandre was happy to see me but a bit distant too. He wanted to move down to New York and pick up a job in a restaurant, drop out of college and focus on poetry; his mom still wanted him to be an engineer, like his stepfather—she got the idea in her head that he could counsel him or whatever. He felt stressed and was doing poorly because he was barely showing up to class at CEGEP, which is like two years of community college before university that all Québecois kids have to do. But he had met a girl at school: he saw her reading de Beauvoir in a bar and immediately had to introduce himself. They were dating now. She was over when we arrived. She came out with him and introduced herself in the flurries of the early morning. Her name was Sylvie; she was everything he wanted, a pretty blonde with a love for 17^th and 19^th century French literature. I was happy for him, watching them cook together, sharing in domestic pleasures and attending to one another: “are you warm enough Cherie?” “Do you want more biere, mon cher?”

We went on the back porch to have a cigarette, in the freezing Québec air; Sylvie and Elizabeth stayed inside. Sylvie’s father was a doctor and scared her into swearing off tobacco. I told him it would be cool if him and Sylvie moved down to New York, or even just visited: we could have fun as two young couples in the city. He smiled at this, but stood silently, smoking: there was a hint, a faint trace of evidence, that Alexandre didn’t want anything to do with that picture, and that while he loved Sylvie with passion he also wanted me to tell him, “let us throw everything aside and go be homeless in Marrakesh, never work another day in our lives and kill ourselves at 29 when we’ve written all our poems.” When he later produced a truncated version of this offer, I said, man, let’s see how college goes first; it might all pan out and we could do both.

I also told him Mark had started working full-time for ScragglyBeard’s YouTube channel, which was awesome except Mark had to get on foodstamps because he didn’t pay him enough. I added that Mark informed me in semi-secret that Scraggly was a committed White Nationalist, and that Mark had long debates with him that ended with Mark becoming sympathetic to the argument. “Whyte Nationaaleest? Like fucking Waco or some shiet?” “The way I understand it, it’s more just that they want a white-only or white-majority citizenry; sort of like how you in Québec want to preserve your French demographics and language.” “Yeas, but Québec ees a small country, and Ameericah ees built on de idea anyone can immigrate to eet and build a lyfe, ees eet not?” “Weell… they would say that’s the narrative of America as told by Jews who profit off of it…” I laughed, he did not return it; “Daym, mayn, dat is fucked up..” He went inside to wheeze at World Star Hip Hop videos.

What happened to the cavalier racist? When shit started to get serious, he backed up. Only two months ago I was fucking with him by saying I went by “he/him” pronouns and that he should check his privilege for believing in the gender binary. “Mayn, your school has turned you into a leebral!” He was still hyperventilating after I told him I was joking. And he had denounced Henri for being a communist, explaining that he met up with him a few times after he returned home but they had a falling out over his disgust with Henri’s “gay” politics: he had joined a student activist group and occupied the school administrator’s office, with reporters showing up to interview them before the police arrived.

But reactionary tendencies toward those matters were easier to stomach for him than this kind of racial nationalist rhetoric: he said those views were so deeply equated with lack of education in his society, with poor people, and general tastelessness that he could never get behind it, even if it was true. “Eet’s better to just promote dhe west,” he said, “dhe canon, and so on, even doh’ dhe canon is a stupeed concept.” He would share edgy memes from a fascist Facebook page like Mark, Richardson, and me, but the most right-wing solution he would promote was a form of Catholic monarchism, a longing for France’s glory days. For him, it was going to be just aristocratism.

“Mayn, you should read Heidegger.” I told him I had been reading him, his volume on poetry and language. His concept that the earth, sky, divinities, and mortals must be invoked to open a true poem inspired me to write the following:

I broke it off there, but then later connected it to some verse I wrote inspired by Anacreon—and Elizabeth:

We also discussed Kant and other things we were reading in those early collegiate days. Sylvie had gotten him Demonsfor an early Christmas present, which he read over the course of a few hours in one setting. “Dher is dhis great scene where dhe narrator says, “she ordered just one glass of pure vodka, as dhe women do.” Fuckeeng Russians, mayn. Let’s go get some vodka.” We trudged through the streets to Nelligan’s. “Dhere is something Nieeetzschean about Québec winters; if you can handle dhis, you are a true Hyperborean,” he laughed. It was so cold it felt like your face was melting off—20 below zero with windchill.

I had just read Novalis’ bildungsroman Henry von Ofterdingen; it was Alexandre’s favorite novel, as well as his father’s. It followed the protagonist through a fantasized version of medieval Germany as he rebels against his father’s money-obsessed wish for him to become a merchant and pursues instead the art of the troubadours and a beautiful girl; these excursions culminate in a metaphysical discussion of a blue flower, whose representational powers transport him into a realm of allegorized spirits, a new age Neoplatonism. Our discussion of this converged with discussions of Chateaubriand’s René and Byron’s Manfred—for some reason our reading was very romanticist that year, maybe to shield against the unrelenting ugliness of what other college students were promoting, of leftist, materialist reality. Alexandre said something about being done with reading: “ai’ve read enough, eet ees tyme to wryte. I am going to wryte a novella or two, a verse drama, and publish dhe poetry I haev; I will submit dhem to contests, maybe win some prizes here and dhere—wouldn’t be dhe first—dhen eet will be time to do nothing but dreenk, and dhen keel myself before I hit twenty-fyve.” He smiled—Sylvie slapped him. “Do not say dat, Cherie!” He turned to me. “Or maybe, who knows, I will become a Christian.”

This comment disgusted me; it made me think he would turn out to be my Wagner. While he had flung around so much radical rhetoric, it clearly wasn’t binding, while I was slowly collecting all the Nietzscheanisms into a dogma stowed away in the core of my being, turning his anti-Christianism into my new Koran. I had built quite the Achilles shield. On the one hand, everything terrible imaginable in existence could be reduced to ash because nothing really mattered, all of it was just shadows cast by atomic nonsense. At the very same time, from that ash could arise the phoenix of my own resolve: whatever made me feel full-of-health (not merely “good,” in case the hedonists misidentify) mattered, because my feeling of health was now the locus of meaning, and its enemy was the demiurge of sickness which offered up the notion of terribleness in the first place. Life was without transcendent law, yet I had an iron-clad purpose to keep going. The only trouble was that I had become a perfect nihilist; and while this circumlocution kept me going on a more unconscious level, at a more conscious one I could not withstand the obvious contradictions nor voice an articulate response except a violence to many of the most basic questions of politics and human morality. But in a way all this was good, because it prepared me for the spiritual chaos to come.

…that’s where my trail of thoughts ended on the balcony above the crashing waves and the lonesome cars that night. However dim was the way, my feelings about all those other avenues convinced me I was on the right one. I went back inside. I had been fighting with Elizabeth all day about our plans—what will we do when she goes to college? Would we stay together? But tonight, she was before me, sleeping in bed, at peace.

Novel writing is hard. To write 100,000 words takes endurance enough. To ask for believable characters, general coherence, and entertainment value is to ask someone to spend months of unpaid time on a pursuit that from the start is, as we are always told, doomed to have dismal returns. Now set this story in real life in a real tone rather than in some easy genre fiction fairy world or the comfortable realm of super-ironic satire and it is a miracle you did not break the person under psychological pressure. For it is to grapple with your own intelligence and taste, your confidence in your perceptions and self-awareness, until something takes shape which you think, in a bold stare-down with the possibility of delusion, is ready to be released to the world.

Now add in the fact that literature has been dominated by a clique of hysterical, hostile losers for twenty years, who have decided that “white males” and their perspective-as-such has been exhausted, which you, in this hypothetical, happen to be and have… It would be difficult not to celebrate a book that specifically derides such people in a way that is not half bad. It would be hard not to enjoy a mockery of the gatekeepers of literary culture, a mockery so smart that it does not mock them in their areas of comfortability—in the classroom or on the pages of the major outlets—but in their lofts and in their “sour” body odorous intimacy as the book puts it... The Sleepers is welcomed simply for coming into existence.

All the more impressive is the way , its author, is able to write about Wokeness in a way that does not indict himself as a cringe campus conservative or what have you. I decided to pick this book up because I heard one of the protagonists, Dan, was supposed to be a professor at The New School, a liberal arts college in New York City I attended. As the novel I am currently writing involves New School professors, I wanted to see how this was handled. It turns out Gasda is great at placing millennial protagonists under a magnifying glass and sizzling them until you almost start to feel bad for them—the same people you, as the Zoomer white male reader, struggled against.

The bird’s eye view of New York is also itself an aesthetic pleasure, such as when the pathetic and hapless Dan rides home to his aged girlfriend from his hook-up with a nubile student, an event that shocked even him, in an Uber that he directs to go over the Brooklyn Bridge so he can enjoy the sun as it rises over the horizon. And, in scarce moments, the book goes cosmic: “Billions of people watched as billions of other people gradually disappeared and the whole thing unfolded without anyone’s protest: that was life.” There are also many observations on contemporary life—from social media use, to porn, to dating, to inauthenticity at large—that deserve serious discussion.

I assume the title is not only a reference to Whitman’s poem, nor just a comment on the death wish seen in each of the characters, but a play on words: the “woke” are really “sleepers”… Something clever the Dimes Square scene realized was that the Politically Incorrect movement could run to Wokeness’s left by becoming more sexualized than them. While Wokeness was superperverted, it was at the same time underfucked, and Dimes Square rhetoric exploited this by taunting them: nothing makes the aging leftist millennial more insecure than the notion that their sexual deviancy is in name only, and that in reality they live boring, mundane, isolated, geriatric lives while the Problematic Fascists are fucking young girls and the young girls want to get fucked by Problematic Fascists, and there’s nothing they can do it about it.

This novel shows how to handle the “Woke”: by humanizing them. This both neutralizes their claims to transcendence—they are animals beset by natural needs and are continuously unhappy because their worldview runs opposed to natural needs—and it prevents handwringing conservative blithering about their supernaturally evil or omnipotent status. Basically, the clever move here, or at least the one promised, is to just present them as they are, and let that serve as critique.

All this said, Gasda’s first novel is certainly a first attempt. There is “room for improvement.” This largely concerns style, taste, and structure within the novel format.

There’s a strange under-written quality to the book, a sub-perfection that is somewhat relieving because of it—Gasda is much more concerned with communication than style. However, at times it is simply undercooked. He tells rather than shows in too many places. Having the narrator say “they represented” (145) out loud is just terrible writing. The heaping-up of overly-explicit points is nauseating, and ultimately weakens the efficacy of the points. It’s like the narrator feels a stress of economy: he wants to make sure all labor-time spent coming up with “points” is exchanged for value rather than allowing the points to potentially be lost on the reader by embedding them into the action.

There are also plain textual errors. On page 25, we are told that Suzanne “ran hot and cold, which was addicting about her [sic].” On page 145, it says Dan texted Akari that the key was under the mat, but earlier we were told he wrote that on a note. On page 243, Mariko is mistakenly referred to as Akari, giving the accidental effect that she randomly morphed into her sister (who is not present in the scene). There are lots of semicolons where there should be colons, and lazy modifiers like “really isolated” are used with too much ease. Having the narrator say “really” as an adverb dozens of times doesn’t land; let the stupid millennial characters say that, don’t let the narrator become the monster it is fighting.

I wonder if Gasda is being too sane here to properly capture this era. Much of the book feels like Tao Lin doing an impression of Christopher Lasch. The horrifying metaphysical undertow is not sufficiently captured by the bland portraiture.

I suppose that is my major critique: the book lacks style. At the same time as one can detect the playwright’s joy with having been freed from the straitjacket of pure dialogue, eager to abuse the overarching narration device at whim, for all that the new novelist does not make use of the freedom from speech to stylize his prose with any poetry. We occasionally get a pretty adjective or a good turn of phrase, but beyond that, it’s mechanical.

Bizarrely, Gasda in novel form is both too constrained—he doesn’t permit himself to poetize or to go super-speculative in the analysis of the material—and too obvious, where the few asides are spent explaining the characters’ emotions. The ascetic prose doesn’t produce an iceberg effect, because the whole iceberg is visible—and the whole iceberg being visible doesn’t pulverize, because he is cautious about over-indulging in social commentary. There is no need for a novelist to be constrained in speculation, because he is not a social scientist working within the academic bounds of falsifiability. In fact, excessive philosophizing is what justifies the presence of social commentary in a novel.

What the publication of The Sleepers represents is too important to let Gasda come away from it thinking he has done all that can be done. We are at a critical moment. The art of literature could be stolen away from the poverty it has languished in. It is on us to become more poetic, and less “astute” and “poignant,” as the typical politico reviewer loves to say.

A new manifesto has been written. It blasts many things. I would like to put it on blast.

They name many names. and have good taste—these names are great names.

But what have we learned by heaping them together like this? I feel they have only been cheapened. I don’t know anything more about the names for their having been named.

Harold Bloom named lots of names. He loved to make lists of names, create personages from the names, have them do war with each other. But I’ve gotten tired of Bloom.

I’ve gotten tired of this practice of naming, naming, naming. I blame it on the Humanist Renaissance.

It introduced the notion of literary celebrity, where literature is reduced to “self-expression” and historical writers are placed in a pantheon so their statues can be equalized under the banner of a meek freedom or willing.

The pantheon as “canon” is assembled to lend credence to the notion of literature as self-expression. But all poets of worth have only ever been conduits for something else.

The names and lives of poets matter less than Language, which speaks by itself; they just relay the message.

Language creates a bridge for the gods to come down on and builds a home for them to shelter in while they are here.

Language presents a mood that makes us feel stunningly Other than we do in everyday life, than how we feel when we are blabbing about ourselves to ourselves. Yet it makes us recall something intimately known to us too: something from the older, purer, more hinterland parts of ourselves. It keeps a record of past worldviews through the family tree that is etymology.

When we have to invoke the past, we ought to make it as strange as the future. “Making strange” is the skill all great novelists possess; making familiar is for advertisers.

To pretend to this level of familiarity with the past, to force so many figures into a carnival, can at best produce a Joycean nonsense reel and at worst result in a vulgar desecration and democratization. “Blast 2” is somewhere in the middle. But its purpose, to improve and promote literature, is undermined by its form: by engaging in this name-dropping style it works in tandem with the forces that want to destroy literature. It brings Julian of Norwich, Saint Francis, Bruno, and Vico down to the consumable, ephemeral present.

Shouldn’t a manifesto announce something utterly new? Why is this manifesto titled after a previous manifesto from 100 years ago, and written in the same style!

I am putting the entire notion of manifestos on blast, along with “speaking freely,” newness, and originality.

I am calling for a reset on the whole of the written word.

We must journey to the most archaic words. I want what is strange, alien, and hidden, and therefore what will be as fresh as the most distant avant-garde.

A voyage to art’s origin is a voyage to the Steppe.

Rather than gather all the writers into a reference sheet, we must disperse them to regions totally unknown to common sense. The way to do this is not by huffing and puffing, not criticizing by turns learnedness or unlearnedness when vanity is threatened and self-flattery demands it, not by employing surnames like spells, but by going over the oldest texts and tracking words to their oldest roots to find the wellsprings of all the fetid muck we swim in now…

We must refashion the whole story of modern people and literatures. We must come to see the whole of modernity as the mere by-product of the Humanist Renaissance and its runaway merchantry; the Renaissance should in turn be seen as a heretical offshoot of Medieval Theology; Medieval Theology should be seen as plebeian version of Greek Philosophy; Greek Philosophy must be seen as a misinterpretation of Greek Religion, and Greek Religion must be unmasked as an allegorization of an unspeakable horror and joy that happened prior to it, the fall of paradise: the collapse of Golden Age Troy.

In the fires, earthquakes, famines, sea invasions, raids, wars, and collapses during the Greek Dark Ages, Man espied something tremulously vibrant. Words could be arranged, not only to record laws and stories, but to speak on the worth of human life, and on different forms-of-life. And that is where the most dangerous power lies. This was “Homer,” the birth of poetry proper.

To reconstruct the source out of which all art sprang, a source they were unconscious of, perhaps the Proto-Indo-European worship of the Sky Himself and to measure all things human against that immaculate canvas… To practice this dogged genealogical search for the Truth is to be as original as possible—not in the modernist sense of originality, not conceptually muddying and self-positing and “perennialist” and egoistic, but to dwell close to the origin, closer than even the Greeks. Original in the sense of never having been thought prior!

This Truth would obliterate all politics, all religions, all bibliographies on philosophies and theories that fester in the darkness of misinterpretation and hearsay, in the sunless caves of sedentary, literary, atomized humanity.

Not “message transmission,” not “bubonic with invention,” not “ur freedom,” but the merciless destruction of everything familiar until the unwritten unproduced alienating hidden liturgy sings through our mouths and we are brought close to the promised and final god.

We are told that AI will bring about “post-scarcity”—that computerized superintelligence and robotics will find countless new avenues of growth and deliver us utopia. Let’s ignore all possible alternatives for a moment and think through what would happen.

For one, there would be no point to possessing something for clout. If we are truly post-scarce, everyone could get a Lamborghini—‘infinitely’ many. The logic of status would change: no longer would we derive it from accumulation of private property but from arrangement and action. (And status would also change for the intellectuals: all knowledge and skills would be immediately learnable for all.) Society would change from Minecraft Survival Mode, where resources are hard won and require skills to further assemble, to Creative Mode where you can spawn anything you want and as much of it as you want. According to the logic of Creative Mode, it is not impressive to have thousands of golds bars but it is impressive to create a 1-1 replica of the Eiffel Tower with them.

Some think, even in a “creative mode” context, existential dread would inevitably set in. Pop-futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who thinks these technologies will eradicate “war, famine, and plague” by the third millennium, forces out the sentence, “what are we going to do with ourselves?” in his book Homo Deus. With “all that power” gained from “biotechnology and information technology,” what will “demand our attention and ingenuity?” His answer is essentially whatever pleases us, whatever we feel like—and he thinks the existences of the ancient Greek gods are an apt comparison.

It is telling that the technological advancement he chose to place at the very opening of his book was in-vitro fertilization (IVF), which in his mind represents man “mastering creation.” His idea of true power, the transcendence of wealth, is the technological production of human beings. Combined with artificial selection at the genetic level, the very form of the human being would be subject to preference and, in essence, to philosophy. Man would become as divine as his highest ideals.

Regarding that same prospect, Heidegger took away the exact opposite conclusion. The ability to engineer human beings—to demonstrate in actual fact that the creation of human subjectivity is a part of techne and no longer a part of phusis, that human life is a technically producible artifact—would guarantee the destruction of the human being on an ontological level:

At that very moment there would also no longer be such a thing as health, any more than there would be birth and death. Sometimes it seems as if modern humanity is rushing headlong toward this goal of producing itself technologically. If humanity achieves this, it will have exploded itself, i.e. its essence qua subjectivity, into thin air, into a region where the absolutely meaningless is valued as the one and only “meaning” where preserving this value appears as the human “domination” of the globe. “Subjectivity” is not overcome in this way but merely “tranquilized” in the “eternal progress” of a Chinese-like “constancy” [“Konstanz”]. This is the most extreme nonessence [Unwesen] in relation to phusis-ousia.1

We can infer that, for Heidegger, the rise of post-scarcity would not bring about a paradise of creativity but the immediate obliteration of the relevance of art. Art can only have relevance in its relation to human essence, i.e. the fact that we are hemmed in by limits to our power and experience life as a being who is a part of phusis rather than its total master.

Another way this can be articulated is through Heidegger’s fear that the complete removal of conditions upon the human Will would cause universal teleological displacement. Should our technology ‘progress’ to a point where nature gets converted into a “standing reserve,” providing “an unlimited supply of options for the pursuit of self-realization,” and even past that point to where “the provision of options becomes an end in itself,” the meaningfulness of experiences—and thus Value as such—would no longer be accessible. A pair of Heidegger scholars summarize his view as follows:

But despite [unlimited options], Heidegger maintains that our age has a uniform, stable, all-encompassing understanding of what entities as such are […] We challenge everything to fit into our projects, become a resource for our uses and serve as a link in a chain of production without any goal other than an ever-increasing provision of options for the satisfaction of whims. […] Religious experiences are offered as options to be consumed, and if one way of worshipping no longer serves one’s needs, one can always abandon that way for another […] We have lost the experience of something sacred—of something capable of making demands on us, of calling us to act for ends higher than the satisfaction of our passing whims. And that, Heidegger suggests, frustrates our ability to reach our highest dignity as human beings. […] The problem is that, paradoxically, the liberty to enjoy the options technology affords us comes only if we thoroughly embrace the tastes and dispositions and attitudes of technological consumers, thus submitting to the most thoroughgoing subjection to the most all-encompassing a world order the world has seen.2

By removing all limits, erasing any semblance of finitude from the human equation (even mortality), we would also thereby remove everything that made human experience significant according to previous systems of value—even the creative arrangement of objects and the presentation, through them, of human experiences. Every human work or story ever judged to be meaningful has been defended because it occurred within the context of finitude—human power running up against its boundaries and failing or just making it over. Dramas, whether religious or secular, by nature are concerned with struggle, which can only make sense within scarcity.

A startup called Monumental Labs is currently creating 3D printers and robotic arms that can produce neoclassical sculpture and architecture out of marble and stone. It has already achieved the ability to make statues. Their goal is to eventually tackle edifices, arches, and buildings. One of their ads I saw said something along the lines of “bringing Athens and Florence to every city in the world.” According to the optimistic view of post-scarcity, not only will everybody gain the ability to create high art, but human existence will be based around the production of “high art” all the way down.

But wouldn’t this obliterate the meaning of high art? When Polykleitos, Praxiteles, Alberti, and Cellini are as common as dirt, where would the pathos of distance lie? We might come to value statues only insofar as there was real struggle behind them, the sweat and strain of human authors—which would then no longer be an aesthetic appreciation but one of craft and morality.

And what would the point of all those palaces in the sky be if we, through such total power over nature, kill all the gods at once? A statue, according to the ancients who invented sculpture, is an ἄγαλμα, a votive offering to an entity deserving of veneration. What would post-scare society make statues of? What would be higher than our all-consuming power—that power which we no longer have a purpose for? Right when we develop the technology to create infinite art, the purpose of art will have receded completely; just like how, when we arrived at the ability to harness endless amounts of drinking water, it became full of microplastics, rendering it poisonous again.

The proper response to this fate would be to embrace degrowth, or at least luddism. Some form of resignation from all advancement, and a grasping toward the authentic.

……But what if all these predictions are impossible? What if, as soon as we were to overcome the scarcity that by and large justifies the liberal peace of the contemporary world order, strife would return on a grand scale?

When people like Harari say we will become “gods” with AI technology—do they not realize the gods were constantly fighting?

Heidegger spent a long time trying to think beyond the big three ideologies—liberalism, communism, fascism. To do away with them is to take up political and civilizational asceticism: his highest virtue was gelassenheit, releasement from willing, and from “fighting.” But what if one were to embrace and amplify the ideologies? One might, on Heideggerian terms, rediscover will to power thereby.

There is an inflection point in which all three converge. Sophism, an ancient Greek moral philosophical system that flourished before Socrates, claimed to be able to make humans virtuous—which, in the Greek sense, meant “excellent.” At root, sophism is the belief that the human being can be reared and produced in a better way. The technocapitalism of liberalism, the eugenics of fascism, and the full automation of communism all seem to be invoked by the fantasies of AI prophets, and all converge on the idea of refocusing the locus of discourse on a progressive future for the species as such.

Mao Zedong was a forerunner of this thought. He effectively transformed communism from an economic theory to a spiritual one, where the revolution had to be waged within “culture” and within the Party. Not only did he forcibly send bureaucrats to the fields and encourage students to ‘bombard’ the Party’s headquarters in the spirit of anti-corruption, but he envisioned that communism itself, once achieved, would have dramatic qualitative shifts rather than incremental developments. The species would keep evolving and enhancing in sharp, violent contradictions.

Mao was very comfortable with the notion of overcoming man. On this subject he was more Nietzschean than Hegelian or Marxist: communism will not solve the human equation, but supplant the human with new, more complicated equations. Hear him in 1964, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution:

The life of dialectics is the continuous movement towards opposites. Mankind will also finally meet its doom. When the theologians talk about doomsday, they are pessimistic and terrify people. We say the end of mankind is something which will produce something more advanced than mankind. Mankind is still in its infancy.

And not only mankind. Mao laughed at the notion of defining man once and for all as the thinking or tool-making animal, saying it was “only after undergoing a million years of evolution that man developed a large brain and a pair of hands.” So it will be with animals:

I don’t believe that men alone are capable of having two hands. Can’t horses, cows, sheep evolve? Can only monkeys evolve? And can it be, moreover, that of all the monkeys only one species can evolve, and all the others are incapable of evolving? In a million years, ten million years, will horses, cows and sheep still be the same as those today? I think they will continue to change. Horses, cows, sheep and insects will all change.

It was this attitude of aloofness from the year-to-year, or even the centur-to-century, that enabled Mao, despite being responsible for one of the largest countries on earth, to unflinchingly stare back at the very real possibility of nuclear war:

The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9,600,000 square kilometers. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.

While at times he seemed energetic for war, saying things like “All is chaos under heaven—the situation is excellent,” “Revolutionary war is an antitoxin which not only eliminates the enemy’s poison but also purges us of our own filth,” and “Only with guns can the whole world be transformed,” there are plenty of passages where he expressed typical socialist-pacifist ideals: “war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.” Yet it is this latter type of thinking that deserves scrutiny at this moment.

Peace is necessary under the assumption that life is hard. Peace even makes sense within the notion of full automation, because the endless flow of goods would not mean that death and destruction were no longer threats. But with the idea of true post-scarcity—where nothing is finite and human reproductivity is fully integrated with techne—I cannot see how we would not, through the sheer need for strife and limits, decide to create terrible new problems. The excess power would have to be squandered in some fashion, for fun—that is how life moves.

Not only that, but it would mean evolution would be back on the table. When we have “solved” the problems of civilization, man will progress back into an organic animal. That would be progress in a real sense. No longer tentative and hesitating, kept safe by tools and social systems. No longer would we have to act inorganically—thinking as problem solvers and constructing a God-like POV to manage a machinic universe—in order to carefully preserve our genetics against all that threatens it. With the abundance of means to reproduce ourselves and the limitless wealth to support it, we would act on instincts and affective impulses once more and selection would return in a tremendous way.

We would become intimately familiar with the true nature of the gods according to the most ancient poems: everything is up for squandering, every whim is seized, and non-totalitarian orders emerge naturally from this bellum omnium contra omnes.

And, for the record, this is exactly what Hegel said would happen after civilization reached its end point of development. This is the side of Hegel the Hegelians don’t want you to know about. At the end of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, he says the sovereigns of the administrative states will have the eternal right to invoke contingency and wage war with each other as they deem fit.3

War will become inevitable over more peaceful means, e.g. chess, because nothing is at stake in chess. The clashing desires of the most ambitious superhumans will inevitably ratchet up tensions and lead to lethal exchanges. Humans spawned through IVF+CRISPR technologies will be conscripted just as much as robots. And we will love this, because the oblivion of limitless options for self-satisfaction would crush us.

Heraclitus said “war is the father of all and king of all,” “war is common to all and strife is justice ... all things come into being and pass away through strife,” and “the cosmos is a harmony of tensions, like lyre and bow.” He also mocked popular religion—commonly practiced by phallic processions and animal sacrifice, worshipping the gods as if they were totems. He understood that the true practice of religion was to engage in massive dramas with other mortals as a spectacle for the gods’ delight. “The Cosmos is child's play: a child playing chess as King.”

And, let us say it—war is the greatest form of art. Caesar and Napoleon were symphonists. Without Paris’ judgment, and the thousand ships launched by Helen’s beauty, there would be no western literature.

And with a single stroke, the distinction between life and art will have been abolished.

The only two real activities would be acting in the world, strife or ἀγών, and recalling what has transpired—memory or μνημοσύνη. Μνημοσύνη—the muse invoked by Homer who grants the ability to recall knowledge without aid of writing or Google glasses—will never go away, especially if we retell what is recorded in an artful way, like the ancient traveling bards who recited the Iliad.

…This is all, of course, assuming the predictions about post-scarcity are true. I will continue acting as if they aren’t, by reproducing naturally and opposing the war industry for my children’s sake.

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Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Summer was over, college was starting soon, and my mother’s house was getting sold. It was time to move—into my grandparents’ house in Cliffside Park. The ancestors of my maternal grandparents were from Calabria, though they often say our family came from Naples. They arrived in the late 1800s as did many other Italian American families out of a need to escape economic hardships—but this is merely the “official” version of the story. I have heard such hardships were the aftereffects of a social emergency caused by the liberal unification of Italy. The real story goes, insofar as what I heard was true, that when the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies or the ancien regime southern Bourbon monarchy was abolished, the north confiscated its wealth and centralized it, first in Turin and then eventually in Rome, the new national capital. This severely impoverished the south and uprooted tens of thousands of its bloodlines that had been there since prehistoric times, filling them with an eternal nostalgia for their homeland, a pugnacious commitment to obtain wealth in the lands they fled to, and a reactionary hatred—by now unconscious but still potent—of what we may call centralizing modern civic enterprises, or “governments.” While they as peasants were steadfastly loyal to the crown, full of pride for Mother Church and veneration for the old feudal order, today one typically finds an anti-state attitude among them, whether it’s the libertarian conservatism in the case of men like my grandfather, the mafioso strain in the case of men like his dead cousin, or even the nostalgia for antebellum America found among current residents of Napoli: I have seen Confederate flags flying out of their apartment windows, brandishing their common allegiance with that other Old South!

Their Cliffside house, a three-story Tudor on the Hudson, was likewise reminiscent of a Faulknerian manor. A Manhattan apartment for me was out of the question; the school dorms were $20,000 a year on interest loans; and I was too lazy to find five roommates for a semi-illegal apartment in Brooklyn. Anyway, it was all fine—I had a romantic vision for my lodgings: they would be in the basement, cold stone floor and back door access, perhaps even in the closet with the pull-string lightbulb and the boiler humming; it would be like Joyce’s stay at Martello Tower, ascetic and writerly, sparse with nothing but a desk and a pen, like I wasn’t even at my grandparents’ but in some forgotten hole just a river away from New York. No no, I insist, I will take the basement!... I don’t want to bother you!... but it turned out that my Uncle Joe, who lived down the shore, would be staying down there for a month (—he’s still living with them to this day). So instead I was directed to take one of the bedrooms upstairs, overlooking not the skyline but the neighbor’s brick wall; I still found cause enough to celebrate, realizing that I could go through the east-facing sitting room to smoke cigarettes on the balcony.

To make up the money spent on the road trip, and to pay my grandfather back for the wire, I offered to pick up a shift at their deli in town—a military-themed sandwich shop called “The Corps” started by my other uncle, Ralph, and his veteran friend. Their first iteration was in Jersey City; it had gone bankrupt, so they moved all the supplies up to Cliffside and got my grandfather, “Pop,” and my Uncle Joe in on the venture. That was why Joe was temporarily moving in, to man the store until it got big, so they could franchise it and revive the same business model that originally made Pop wealthy…

By dressing sandwiches and then delivering them in the Mercedes—which was now stalling regularly in the middle of the road, the transmission just locking up when I’d go from a stop to a slow drive, to the roaring horns of pissed off Spanish people behind me, them speeding around in their leased SUVs they couldn’t afford—I was able to slowly mend my finances through a minimum wage and tips. After the first couple weeks’ worth of work, I was able to take those earnings and combine them with money I made by selling some spare items on eBay and pay Pop back in full, as well as buy a bus pass for $160 a month.

It was while working my first shifts at The Corps that I began to text regularly with Elizabeth. That week, she was vacationing on Nantucket Island, her childhood vacation spot; her middle-class family, when her parents were still together, would rent a small beach house and enjoy the best of the Bush years in one of the prettiest places in America. Like Pop, they had had glory days that were now tumbling into a long-awaited depression. Her father had strategically begun dating a deceased cop’s well-comp’d widow turned amateur slumlord, who was able to pay for the trip, but Elizabeth didn’t get along with her. The girlfriend had changed the locks on her house and told her siblings, still in middle school, that they had to make appointments to be allowed in, along with several other evil stepmotherly crimes. She wanted nothing to do with the island that week because of her, but also because, as she informed me later, she wanted to be in the city to challenge my reticent affection. And so, when she got back, she met me in Manhattan one day in between my orientation sessions.

That morning I had sat through antics from various hicklib alumni and faculty as they attempted comedy mixed with mawkish odes to **Neew Yoork** (the people I grew up around simply called it “The City,” with a streak of contempt fused with familial pride), this wonderful magical fairy land we were to embark on… “when you try to go to a favorite coffee shop or bodega and find that it has been transformed into a laundromat or a bagel place, that’s when you’ve become a true New Yorker” … One recent graduate tried to humble us or something by highlighting the school’s high acceptance rate: “congratulations—just kidding, they let anyone in here.” The matriculating student body was not looking forward to that topic becoming stand-up material: they groaned silently, thinking about the massive private school tuition they just signed up for, now planning exit strategies. My partial scholarship still wasn’t enough to withstand the remark, but I pressed on anyway, hoping the Lena Dunham rip-off was a fluke.

It turned out that she was relatively tame, and that the professors would be far, far worse. But I was ignorant of that, and hopeful, ready to begin studying, remembering the words of the literature department director during my visit to the school: “We read everything from Virgil to Virginia Woolf… the path of a humanities education will not be easy—you will not exchange your degree for a guaranteed salary, like you would with, say, computer science—but it will teach you how to craft a living out of critical thought, by reconfiguring how you see the economy. This has always been the case: you have to figure out how to use the liberal arts to suit the needs of your time; that, in essence, is your contribution to the field.” He was right, in the end—but not, of course, in the way he intended.

After that talent show I left the 12^th street auditorium and headed for 23^rd street. Checked my phone and saw that Elizabeth had texted me she was at a Thai place, finishing up lunch with her cousin. I passed chainsmoking grad students gathered around an old professor; a pandhandler holding out a Big Gulp cup with coins rattling around in it; then, further up, out-of-town mothers and daughters checking their maps to figure out where they were going; more students talking with a resident New School theater director about their upcoming auditions. On and on and on in the city streets, the blur of people, all interchangeable, all …

Then, suddenly, I was there; I froze. Elizabeth of the imperious gaze that adds ten layers of maturity to you, forces you up into a sobering state of realization and honesty. It comes flooding out of her, like a Biblical shower of austere and arresting light. I have seen all its effects: I have seen it act as a magnifying glass on some men, terrifying their cretinous natures; and I have seen it act as a maternal embrace for others, fostering childlike clinging; I have seen it revolt some women as it forcefully confronts them with their laze-born inadequacies; and I have seen it act as a beacon, deemed worthy of imitation by lost girls looking to escape the Limbo that is our era. People think her gaze is a judging one—it is sometimes—but mostly she is just listening with her singularly plying, splaying intensity. Your response to it is on you. A noble face, an edified chin, gentle eyes with a tinge of wilderness, and a body like an actress from Hollywood’s Golden Age. And the best, the worst is Her Laughter. A great teacher of mine, in reference to Abraham’s wife Sarah, said the most powerful weapon a woman can develop, lacking physical might, is their laughter. It was her laughter that I met on the corner of 23^rd , in the noon light; I don’t know what she was laughing at, but I knew somehow it was at me, and I could do nothing but laugh along as I guided her into the subway to take her back to where I had been.

It was out of desire for her that I choked down any display of eagerness. I had seen how little she liked that approach, whether she knew that or not. There might never be a third chance. So without romance or even teasing I asked her about her trip, and she responded in an equally friendly tone, with the faintest forlornness, by asking about college. I slid an arm between the closing doors; she stepped gracefully into the train car.

I brought her to 63 5^th Avenue, the big silver building with the beehive-like hexagonal glass exposing the staircase; we walked up and down, to the art library and to the big auditorium; I tried to be edgy by complaining about liberal Jewish trust fund kids blathering on in my orientation sessions; she eyed around the halls and weakly said she noticed a different demographic. I later learned the abundance of Asian students were paying full price out of pocket since they were foreign citizens. The easy availability of cash injections from fashion aspirants’ parents caused the school to bend over backwards to accommodate them, giving Parsons tons of resources while gutting entire humanities departments like Latin and the critical theorist intellectual tradition the school was known for, all so they could pay off extravagant purchases like the building we were walking through.

At that point Elizabeth was solidly liberal, without even necessarily knowing it. A remark like that wouldn’t have made her mad, but she would scrutinize it in Socratic fashion. She was more of the type that wanted to spend her life serving in the Peace Corps so she could be the next Ghandi on the textbook cover than the type to vocally support Democratic politicians in American elections. In fact, I don’t think I had ever heard her talk favorably about a politician: that sort of politics was to her mind as quaint and ceremonial as the changing of the seasons or the rotation of the stars, because she viewed all that through the eyes of her grandparents, Granny and Poppop, 90-year-old gardeners of Dutch, German, and English descent who read the newspaper every day out of an unwavering fondness for their country and its goings-on; they were Republicans, who disliked Obama and liked Fox News personalities, but they never got worked up. Granny thought people who disagreed with her point of view were “just a bit silly” despite meaning well, whereas Poppop liked to curtly foretell the doom awaiting our nation before breaking into a smile, imagining how fun that would be.

Elizabeth was raised partially in Granny and Poppop’s greenhouses, working with them or with her father in the dirt among the flower patches, and partially by her babysitter who taught her how to sit still and read long books. It was the books I believe that made her a humanitarian: she had exhausted every series of children’s literature by age eight and asked the teacher for something more challenging. She was given a stack of biographies on great Americans written for middle schoolers. It was in those that she learned about the suffragettes and the abolitionists, the unionists and the civil rights activists; she wrote a play at nine about a Jewish immigrant family coming to America in search of freedom, having no experience of anything Jewish but a lot of experience watching Leonard Bernstein musicals.

One must understand that for liberal women at this time, before the Great Awokening, their leftism didn’t come from a pernicious place: it derived from a lukewarm feeling of leftover medieval chivalry. These biographies were read in Nantucket and against the background of the American flag and her fourth-grade teachers, of the northeast, of Protestantism, of old portraits and clear consciences. It flowed forth from a feeling of shining magnanimity that was as beautiful and clean of spirit as the wooden furniture and light sweaters and white painted houses of her social imaginary. She came to feel, in her precocious and rambunctiously declarative tenth year, that the kind of life worth pursuing, the kind of noble work that would get the president to answer her letters—like the one she wrote to Bush about her cat—was the work of an activist, championing whichever struggle that would entail when she was of age. And when in her fifteenth year she began work at Kathleen’s, an Irish pub in town, and learned of the plight of an old Honduran food runner there, a cultured man who would during down time would read classic Spanish novels on his Kindle but was stuck working countless shifts at this bar and grill, just to send all the money to his family back home, she decided the noble work of our time would be helping the people of Latin America in the process of immigrating to the United States.

One night, a few days after our city meet-up, I sat with her on a bench looking out at the big wide pond near her house, pressing her on these beliefs. “But why do you think it’s so important, to help the families of the workers at Kathleen’s come to America? So they can participate in this?” I asked, gesturing to the large suburban houses across the dark water, appealing to our shared counter-cultural dislike for suburbia at the time. “Well, it’s not the life I want, but the one they want because they’ve never had it; they’ve only known poverty. Since I and so many of us here don’t want it, I don’t see what’s so bad in helping them gain it.” I searched for a different approach; I was just as unfamiliar with my new beliefs as she, and I was working them out as I would speak. “I view it like a car—that kind of work, it’s maintaining the car, it’s doing work on it, moving parts around, maybe getting a different kind of oil or gas… but where is the car going? Its purpose is to bring the driver somewhere. What is the destination of civilization? Surely not just to buy and sell suburban houses and shuffle groups of immigrants around?”

She smiled. “I don’t know Finn. These are big questions.” She let her smile die as she saw I wasn’t going to give in. “You remind me of this Billy Joel song, “The Angry Young Man.” He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl, / And he's always at home with his back to the wall!” “I’m not angry,” I laughed. “Anyway, that song’s about a socialist, so if anything you’re the angry young woman,” I laughed again, but Elizabeth only grinned. “I was only joking,” she said. “So was I. Whenever I hear Billy Joel’s name now I think about this meme, where the composer Handel has fallen on hard times and he’s stuck playing at a bar and this drunk boomer is yelling “play some fuckin’ Billy Joel!” at him without knowing who he is.” She laughed and rolled her eyes. “You are crazy… you and your internet jokes.” “Yes, it’s all jokes, it’s all fine. I say these things without rancor, I just wonder how much more interesting human life could become,” I said, standing up and grabbing my bag. “Well, you certainly keep my attention,” she said, “maybe come visit me tomorrow?”

The cat and mouse game proceeded just like that, over the following days and weeks. The clever man knows how to disguise his interest, but the clever woman knows how to draw him into the light of day. I said goodbye to her and didn’t answer her texts until later; I attended more orientation sessions the next day and then walked with a girl named Serena down to Washington Square Park and hung out with her on a picnic blanket. This made Elizabeth stew, so she drew up plans and told me the next day she was hanging out with her guy friends Tom and Jacob from Orville. “Oh that’s cool.” No big deal. “Oh you called me? Missed it,” I say several hours later. I try to call back—and she, also, “misses” it. Everything is coool. Another bus ride, another too-early morning in the city, and I’m wolfing down a breakfast with coffee as we text each other rapidly, giving into ourselves. After the third back-forth-stalemate like this, we finally make a second plan: lunch near Orville, in the larger town of Oakmont, with a lot more restaurants. That goes well. She laughs as a giant piece of fried chicken is served to me, which I had mistakenly ordered thinking it was a sandwich; it said “Cajun” and I missed New Orleans. I laughed at her for still being in high school, feeling all stressed about the summer ending and how she’d have to see everyone again in a few days. “What, like it’s fifth grade? The stakes with these 100 kids I’ll never see again are so high! I’ll see ya, gotta go back to my College in the City.” She shoves me, I pay, we leave, we make out, I drop her off.

And again, more plans, these made a bit faster than those, but still with brake-checked nonchalance. She would come over my old Orville house, watch a movie; its furniture was being torn out and a realtor was managing it but I could still use my room to crash in when I was in town. Bambrick was over; originally a guy’s night, we have Monty Python on and she rolls her eyes; she crawls in bed with me; we lay there; we stir; half-way through the movie Bambrick, getting the picture, leaves. We hear him slam the door downstairs; we turn the TV off; I drop her beneath me; I drop her off a few hours later—more passion this time, but just hugging, kissing.

And another plan. A movie but in Cliffside. They would be at the store. I let her choose. She wants to watch Casablanca. I pull it up on my laptop and sit it there between us. Like an inchworm she leans closer over the course of a half hour. I lean, but not so much. I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t. I don’t do it even when it becomes ridiculous not to do it, because I know how much she will enjoy it if I don’t. I was right: she was furious. Finally, she pauses it. I close the screen and look at her.

And then we are walking out. It’s a late August night and the air is full of cooled humidity. We are smoking Camel Crushes—she likes the menthol, I like the Camel—we are heading toward the corrupt mayor’s mansion, because his street has a perfect view of the city. It’s late; a cop always shows up when they see people on the cameras but we climb over a stone wall and head down, out of sight; it’s very dark, on the cliffs now; we lay in the brush; we tumble over, and roll right into it.

***

While her gaze was overwhelming, I couldn’t stand its absence; absence is the highest form of presence, as a lascivious poet once said; I could no longer bear the meager shoulder-shrugging of average worlds, which only now were revealing themselves as such. Less and less could I bear other women, now that I knew how much consciousness could be present even in the slightest look, the lightest talk. She had no need of philosophy—it would hinder the purity of her way; she poured ice over my head through pure speech and facial expressions, the total sheerness of what is without recourse to signs. Out of concerns that I was regressing, settling for what was known, given to me by an unsupportive friend, I tried to make things work with other girls, ones at school, in the big city where I was supposed to meet so many interesting people—Serena here, Holly there. None even approximated what she could do to me. It had nothing to do with us being from the same town, I began to realize as college added a sampling size of four million females. She would text, or call, or we’d meet for a date, and I would lose all attention for anything else, dial completely into her relentless gaze, get fever-broken by the cold spill of her words mixing with the warm arousal of her touch, pulsations like drugs fireworks and batteries hammering at my veins on the way home as I would contemplate what had transpired and what was lurking in her mind. “She is the one; I hear the chime of fate, as true as the quiet certainty of midnight. I love her.”

***

I’m sitting in a classroom that was built in the 40s but had just undergone a new paint job, chrome as a spaceship. The smartboard was new and the projector was new but they were both off; twenty of us freshman were seated around a rectangular table, staring at the professor who was peering back through glue-colored glasses. She had a buzz cut dyed purple and was skinny as a heron; she looked like one too, but was dressed in overalls with splotches, like a little boy who was working as a painter’s apprentice. She was positively vibrating with nervous energy, infuriated to the brim by books—little harmless bricks of paper and glue, written by the defenseless dead.

“Who decides what is canonical? A male upper class? And is it a coincidence the authors paraded around by traditional universities, in traditional literature classes, are all men?! And, is it not apparent that they are Western men? So what we end up with is a canon of western men, chosen by western men, because they reinforce the western, male perspective!” This was day one of college, for people who explicitly signed up to read literature; these were not kids attending community college out of apathy for any subject, looking to clock in hours to get a degree so they could move on with their lives—these were readers, looking to read books and discuss them. “I implore you to name an author, who, objectively speaking, deserves to be “canonized,” who deserves, as this ridiculous practice does, to be cited for all time, read for all time, and esteemed as objectively better than other voices!”

The deafening silence of the room was too much for me, and my Voice was pulled forward. “Homer,” I offered. She stared at me flatly. She looked more confused than anything else. “What?” she asked. “Homer? Like the Odyssey.” Pause again, I don’t flinch and allow the awkwardness to collect in the room. “And why do you think Homer is worthy of this?” “I don’t know, he’s pretty good. Have you read him recently?” When she pressed me on why, I said something about psychology, pacing, and maturity.

She took this, accepted it, but then used it to make some point about how it’s not Homer but what he does that’s good and anyone can do it, blah blah blah. Before letting us go, she added one last complaint about how her first volume of poems performed so badly that she had to pay the publishing house back for printing them, saying the same thing would happen to all of us.

I scribbled in my notebook:

Aestheticism. Those who attack the canon, who desire to see the total destruction of culture, are of the same origin as those who are barbarians to life: lotus eaters, nihilists. To claim that e.g. Shakespeare’s position is unfounded is to wish all poets, all art, were of equal merit—it is a wish to destroy value. They defend themselves by saying they are giving art the absolute freedom it needs. What they are actually doing is smuggling extra-aesthetic ideas into art and canon formation, just as life-deniers bring in meta-narratives (spooks) to devalue life. Canon denial is the slave revolt within aesthetic values. Also fuck the bullshit modernist notion of “manifestos.”

I left the classroom and headed toward SoHo to shop for clothes. It was my dad’s wedding that night and I needed to buy a shirt last minute. Waiting for the streetlights to change color, I started texting Elizabeth my thoughts, saying Shakespeare must be defended. She mocked me, saying, “wow never knew you were such an advocate for reading, you sure you’re against John Green?” The other night I was shitting on Green for his cringe YouTube history lectures, where he says Persia was tolerant while Greece was evil and fascist. She had read John Green’s Looking for Alaska and liked it; I asked her, agitator I was, don’t you see the difference between that and Jane Eyre, which you also love? She defended it for a little and eventually conceded, the corny lines resurfacing in her head. But now she had the chance to stick it to me.

In arguing with her, I came up with new things I hadn’t previously thought. I wrote down several in the Notes app:

-poetry makes life richer and improves its quality

-affirming moods shall be found throughout my writings

-beauty is the point of art

-beauty is found both in praising life and in tragedy

-in both tragedy and comedy I will be affirmative

Near NYU this old man stands up and shouts, “Join the Marxist Student Alliance!” I look over and there's an old crone and an obese kid standing behind a rack holding what looks like 100 to 200 pop-Marxist pamphlets. I wrote down one more thing: Marxism is incompatible with anything beautiful.

I crossed MacDougal where I saw the hookah bar I went to with Jess a few weeks back. She reached out at a certain point to see what I was doing; we took the train from Orville to the city together. I didn’t have much fun. The difference between Jess and Elizabeth, besides Jess’s spirit being an insane gargoyle and Elizabeth’s being a Olympian immortal, was that Jess would never see what was wrong with John Green nor care that I made fun of him, thinking it was just some silly thing I had to say, while Elizabeth, despite reading Green, knew better and would argue with real attention to the points made and the conclusions inferred.

A few blocks later and on a massive billboard is “CALVIN KLEIN – Discover your perfect fit” with Miranda Kerr in black and white posing like a cat. You can almost see her tits, her underwear curving her waistfat ever so slightly making her appear like she has some weight on her but in a womanly way, which makes her skinny stomach and arms stand out even more. But a few months later this would be replaced by an obese black woman and spark the first culture war related to “fat positivity” I can remember. A strange campaign, acting as if we lived during the time of heroin chic. In much smaller billboards, the words barely readable next to CALVIN KLEIN:

IS THIS THE NEW FACE OF CANCER RESEARCH?

With a fucking ferret or some shit covered in water

IS CLIMATE CHANGE IRREVERSIBLE?

glacier crushing some ice and big waves coming from it

WHO WILL HELP SUDAN FIND PEACE?

Hellscape

THAILAND ON THE BRINK - WHO WILL UNITE THE PEOPLE OF THAILAND

I stare blankly at a shot of some Asian people getting rammed by riot shields before looking at my iPhone's map so it can tell me where Zara is. I cross the street while looking at the screen. I walk down Broadway past Forever 21, then past H&M, then past Banana Republic. Finally I find it.

After buying and changing I get on the subway and head up to Riverside Church, an old “interdenominational” in Gothic style across the street from Grant’s Tomb; they had to get married Protestant because the Catholic Church didn’t marry divorcees. I had just finished Glamorama and started A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I got the idea to synthesize the two and started quickly scribbling some of the passages written just above in a notebook. But then text messages from my dad started rolling in about where I had to be, who was taking what where, where I might sleep if I was lucky, and various other logistics. I didn’t want to go, didn’t even support it, but went and kept a smile on out of filial duty.

The reception was in an old chateau in central Jersey. I barely knew anyone there, besides my relatives who as always were weird and were made even weirder out of the awkwardness of my dad getting remarried and them not knowing how to talk to me about it. After several speeches elapsed, it was my uncle’s turn to give a toast, my dad’s older brother who he chose as his best man. I hadn’t been mentioned the entire time—more than half the room had no idea up to this point that my dad even had a child, let alone two. I didn’t care but I did notice it. My uncle cut right to it and made the whole room “give it up” for me. A ballsy move, considering how angry my father got when things didn’t follow his unspoken set of rules and how doubly angry his now-wife got at any mention of his past life.

After all that was over I went outside and found a quiet patio next to a garden shed. I sat on the ground with my back against it, smoking and texting Elizabeth about all my family bullshit. Then she started telling me about how she had always wanted a red ’95 Cherokee, how the exact make and model was in her driveway when she got home from school that day, and how when she went up to her dad with tears in her eyes to thank him he grimaced and told her it was his girlfriend’s—who knew Elizabeth wanted it, and got it to spite her. And just the other night, when Elizabeth came out to Cliffside, her mother called the police on her because of some convoluted tit-for-tat related to their already-established plan that she would borrow the car. These were sick people, the X generation, and we couldn’t wait for it to end, for us to be independent finally and live our own lives. A generation of parents who didn’t want kids, losers who “just wanted to head bang in front of their bedroom posters forever” as Elizabeth put it, and a generation of unwanted children: you felt unwanted at the core of your being. Yet they needed you there, they wanted you to exist on the occasions where you could show face to impress their second or third spouses. Seeking to make our parents happy in their new relationships, they never became happy. “If they’ve never found happiness in all their days, what makes us think we will?” we thought. But they could never find it precisely because the mating ritual was mistaken in their minds to be the end, rather than the means, of life; so they could never fall in love, for falling in love meant missing out on the headbanging. Nihilism as the lack of Love.

***

It was November. I saw somewhere that it was the 75^th anniversary of Gone with the Wind, Elizabeth’s favorite book, and that the movie theater nearby was screening it.

Elizabeth was great at one liners in these days. “You’re wearing a cross…?” I asked her as I leaned over her in bed, expecting some religious admission. “’Cause it’s made of diamonds,” she said and smiled big. At a different point, I mentioned something about the genius of the 17^th century, and she said, “uh, 1600s? Terrible fashion,” writing off the entire thing with hilarious flippancy. She was like Scarlett O’Hara—a coquette, gratefully ignorant about things she didn’t care about, too quick a learner for that to matter, a wit and a bitch, making others “pea green with envy” and enjoying it, stubborn and merciless, but fearsomely hardworking and treu in the Germanic sense of faithful to what matters most—like Scarlett’s “I will never be poor again” line as she pounds at the dirt of her deserted family estate Tara. Ultimately she had a soul of the noblest mold, loyal despite all the Gen X madness, to her Granny and Poppop’s simple way of life, their family religion, which was essentially a form of ancestor worship combined with a deist Protestantism that expressed itself in growing plants, just as Scarlett was loyal to Tara and above all things endeavored to build it back up when the war had brought down the whole of the south.

Elizabeth needed to submit a yearbook quote. I told her to do Rhett’s line, when asked if he supports the Confederate cause: “I believe in Rhett Butler, he’s the only cause I know.” But the cause, the cause! clamored the men in the drawing room of Twelve Oaks, giddy for war, thinking they’d take those wimpy northern yanks down no problem. Rhett pointed out the north had superior matériel and firepower; they lashed out at him like church fathers excoriating a pagan.

The cause for my time had been the suburbs, the west, family, religion, capitalism, anglospheric liberal values, things I didn’t care for when they were bold and loud and dumb with bellicose arrogance in my youth, during Empire, or as I render it under the signifier “Z100.” But now that it was all beginning to fall, now with my reactionary turn to “Culture” through depression and then music and then Nietzsche, and against my potaddled friends who were weakening themselves, and against the tide of leftists turning up at school and on the Facebook feed, and with my newfound and unpredicted commitment to a monogamous lifestyle, I was beginning to turn sympathetic to the “old cause,” just as Rhett did when he, galloping away from safety and toward the burning Atlanta, said to Scarlett: “Maybe it's because I've always had a weakness for lost causes, once they're really lost.”

The reactionary strain was unconscious in the mind of this northern protestant girl whose family had arrived on the Dutch Mayflower, but it was present, and despite her liberal trappings she implicitly felt the wealth of her father going under. Like the peasants who stood by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies even as it was crashing, who never saw common allegiance with the Piedmontese and the Garibaldini despite going along with it, Elizabeth was feeling the pull toward her ancien regime, that of the Nordic north, the protestant work ethic, quiet wealth and Massachusetts Bay aesthetics.

We weren’t cognizant of the pull we were feeling toward the Old Regimes, but we knew at least that we were unhappy with the surface-level manifestations of our class’s decline: incessant annoying texts from our parents. We put our phones on silent and ignored them. I drove around after the movie as she sang songs by the delightful reactionary Lana del Rey to me.

***

It was a cold night in NYC and I was having drinks with Elizabeth, Samantha, and Foz one night at that Thai place in Chelsea. We were still putting on our coats as Foz hailed a cab. We got to his friend David’s apartment: it was expensive but dirty and reeked of weed; he was watching Netflix while ripping a bong in gym shorts. His father made $200 million a year managing strip malls in the tri-state area. He was dumping money on his son to attend The New School for music, paying full tuition out of pocket as well as his $6,000 a month rent. Although Samantha and I were at odds for a while, we had resolved our differences and were having a good night.

Several months later, Samantha, Foz, and David all failed out of school. David didn’t bother to show up, just smoked pot in his apartment every day; his father found out, ended the lease and cut him off. Foz quit music, broke up with Samantha, and became a shut-in. Samantha got a job at a mall and started dating 40-year-old alcoholics. Everything around us that looked stable or promising, wealthy or enduring, was falling; Elizabeth and I just grabbed each other more tightly as we watched the regime slide into the same graveyard as the Old South and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

We were withered and strown. After a few hours’ rest we drove on. Before long we stopped at an outpost somewhere in the desert, staring dumbly at magazines with dead animals on the covers and jagged k-bars in display cases. The buildings were caked with sand and the people were roughened by the culture of frontier life—and energy drinks. We ate some breakfast—eggs, sausage, and toast—and took stock of how much money we had left. It was a luxury to sit down for food, taking a break from sandwiches made from loose cold cuts I bought back in Wisconsin. While we were saving a lot by avoiding hotels and restaurants, the gas and oil charges were racking up. After breakfast I paid for a tank of gas—nearly $60—and a quart of oil, another $8. “You paying for gas next?” “Yees, yees, I’ll pay eeet all. I won’t haev anodher deposit till Monday doe.” Bastard. At some point he had also lost his license, so I would not be getting any reprieve from driving either.

Some four hours later I was careening around mountains in Utah, roads so steep there were warning signs every 50 yards. “Mayn, you’re shiet at turns,” Alexandre scoffed. “You’re fyne odherwise but shiet, you brake too much round dhose corners.” “Dude, you don’t even know how to use mirrors. And you can’t even drive now. Fuckin’ passenger princess.”

He put down Céline. “Almost done with dhis. He ees so good, he mixes vulgar French wit de lattermost eloquence, but mayn he ees depressing as fuuuck. I’m at dhis part where he’s back in Frohnce, witnessing an abortion of dhis girl who ees bleedin’ out. He’s merciless and filled wit haete. But you know, dese vulgarisms are quite cohmmon. You guys een English call eet “cul-de-sac.” Een French, dhis means “ass of bag.””

He plugged his tablet in and turned it all the way up. “Dhis is Beh-to-fan’s Chorale Fantasie. Eet’s better dhan his ninf,” he said while jamming his pointer finger and thumb in the air like he was penning it down. The piece was indeed glorious, and swelled a completion over the previous days. It played as we were passing through Salt Lake City, eyeing the Mormon temples and vaulting Christs without stopping.

We took a break at a nature reserve. Utah has some of the best natural landscapes in the country, and it is the cleanest state I’ve seen—Mormonism aside. We said little to each other and walked separate ways.

I began to wonder about the nature of our journey. Was it just entertainment? Just an exercise in debauchery, as Mark Prochazka and my mother insinuated? No—we could have spent a week in Vegas or Miami like the guys in the well-to-do, professional class, swinging from financial responsibility to desiccation at a green light. Was it to “travel,” to “see the world”? No still, for we avoided all attractions, preferring what was on the outskirts or what was vain. Vanity—to a degree. But this vanity was not for ourselves, but for our Notion. What was the notion? Not knowing it, we were adventuring in search of it. We were searching for some confirmation, a pilgrimage. And while its appearance in the Nevada desert out of the riverrunning of word that had been fed by the streamlets of each previous place showed only in a flash out of the corner of the eye—in the way I’ve learned all revelations do, “from elsewhere”—it’s now frozen still in my memory, fixed in place for verbal excavation.

We returned to the car; Alexandre was immediately back on point with a rambling sonata on the miseries of Hegel—going from silence or sleep to spontaneous eloquence as was his brilliantly autistic wont. I listened to the barbs he threw, with grace, at the sleepers or lotus-eaters who cast aspersions at the active life, insisting we have progressed into a state outside the terrors of history, things-figured-out. “Dhey want finality because dhey long for dhe tomb.” I complemented this by issuing back on the “Anglosphere,” how in American public schools—or at least in mine, north east, middle class, where the whole budget was geared around STEM besides the money blown on sports—one is instilled with this unspoken prejudicial faith in progress of a similar sort, but with a slight difference. Its progressivism praised not the socialist welfare system of the present but the past and future capitalist mechanic busybodyism: through the fonts of the hagiography of Martin Luther, general praise but soft regulatory critiques of the industrial revolution, and faith in Baconian science, one is baptized in a TED Talk ideology that gives one’s ambitions over to a life in climate activism or the peace corps or engineering gadgets for our surveillance and enslavement if idols are not sounded out with hammer. “You know, in early high school I told my Irish farmer grandfather I wanted to be a physicist—I was proud of my choice, thinking it sounded great; I thought he would’ve asked me what that would entail. No, he knew, and in fact saw right through it. He said, with a wry smile, “Ah, you’ll be making the big bombs, then” in in his thick brogue.” We laughed.

Not very far from Trinity, we passed a truck overturned on the side of the road, rotting, tires torn off. In the distance, we could see the windmills of a small farm tilting wearily in the orange haze. “Ah but you know, I just remembered something: in early elementary school, teachers had us do a project where we had to pick someone we’d want to be like when we grew up. I said I wanted to be like George Lucas, but me and this kid Kyle discussed how cool Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were, solely for being billionaires… The anglo or capitalist system at least has this one aspect, that it preserves a shred of hierarchy, against the pure herd of egalitarianism.” “Indeed,” Alexandre said, shifting his leather shoes one foot over the other. “At least dhis rabble world has dhat.”

We had stayed at that nature reserve for a long time, as it was already growing to be night: stars were rotating up to replace the light. We drove through the desert and grasslands, passing through a string of unincorporated towns: Burmester, Skull Valley, Delle, as well as some strange locales like the Aragonite Hazardous Waste Incinerator. Three years later, a man armed with gun and knife threatened to blow up the site’s propane tanks and was shot to death by police officers. He seemed to have had no motive; maybe the desert made him mad, or maybe it was the modern tech world that had been placed over his land. But for us this stretch was eerily quiet, and our conversation gradually slouched into the feedback of my cassette tape and the winding western clouds.

I passed across the Nevada border in the early hours of the morning. Alexandre was asleep; no one was outside. I drove well into the state until the tank was empty. As the gas hummed into the car I noticed an InfoWars bumper sticker plastered onto the pump. I stared at it, and then at the green glow of the station under the first flecks of dawn coming over the mountain range in the distance, feeling like I was on an alien planet… I got tired, and pulled into a little quarry off the side of the road. My worries that it was private property, or that some wolf on the fold would come down and attack us, could not oppose my weariness. The sun was so hot overhead that it threw my eyes open just a few hours later. I started the car and rolled it through the dust right back onto the road, like nothing had happened.

We had been driving through the flat plains and vast desert for days, no showers, sober. “Throw dirt over these eyes, they’ve seen all the light of this world,” I had said with mock-weariness after the Wyoming debacle. Alexandre turned it into a meme, repeating it now at every lull.

Despite the strain, our youth bestowed infinite energy. We had Red Bull for breakfast. When we saw a colossal mountain in the distance, we decided we’d climb it. So we parked the car in a dirt patch and set off, not a bottle of water between us. There was some barbed wire blocking the way; the mountain was probably privately owned; —“fuck dhis shiet”—; we just vaulted over and kept walking.

“You know, I was thinking …” I said, pebbles crunching under my shoes, “so, if, as we were saying, nihilism is not the true picture of reality, but a pale cast of thought over raw facts, produced by the sick… if the craving for scientific truth is, in fact, a sickly impulse… that would mean that nihilism is not just a neutral position … but a conspiracy by the weak of will to poison life, to poison others… a conspiracy against nature by the weakest parts of nature.”

“Yees, indeed. Oh shit, yes, dhis is good. Go on.”

“Well, if Nietzsche is not self-help, and your point stands that men have different levels of … health and sickness… this would negate the understanding of nihilism as …. a state of mind, psychological, solved through therapy… something one can succumb to through logic…. Rather it’s organic and part of the struggle of life forms… Either they have been overpowered by their sicker parts, by their melancholic “black bile,” or they have been infected from outside, by others. In either case it is an evolutionary phenomenon… it could be studied medically, akin to a disease that grows to undermine higher life… the weak weeding themselves out, or the weak cleverly disguising their poison as neutral science, for use as weapon… Now the others have just as much will to power as anyone else… they are motivated by power… the role of nihilism and its spread here would be for the weak to hold the strong down, to sway them into an inert and depressive slumber, since they cannot best them by other means…”

We let this simmer for a bit as we trudged along through ragged bushes and crumbling rock. The floor of the desert was graybeige, a dried-out sea, the only signs of human life being desolate farms with pools of toxicgleaming neonblue water for their machinations. We realized the distance was much longer than it had appeared, but kept going.

On the incline now, we had covered a good amount of ground. Alexandre cleared his throat.

“What you expressed is dhe t’esis of dhe genealogy of moralzz.. I have not read dhat in some tyme, and must reread….. Dhe infection of liberahleesm spreads eetself on ever-greater wings, seductive wings becauhse dhey promise a respite from dhe harshness of will… fhink of Jacobson’s gay friend Tom, or dhat bitch Laurianne, or Henri’s bullshieet… dhey are addicted to dhe sloughing off of dhe .. burdens of mankind, greatness, and… dheir fake pity in dhis endeavor fills dhem wit moral satisfaction….”

“Yes…” I said, with heightening energy, expelling breath, finding my footing.

“Take dhat Samoan guy at New Orleans. Dhis guy is passionately arguing dhat you people, you Americans, didn’t build your own country; he wants us all to admire a bunch of loafers who haven’t done shiet, and emulate dhat…. What does dhat teach? Dhat if you strive, if you will, you will be stricken out of history by dhe angry, stupid, uncultured mob… if you sit around and watch TV leik poor peepal—who have so much fuckin’ time on dheir hands… then you will be redeemed. Liberahleesm, sociahleesm, is Christianeesm, which teaches nodhing but surrendering … to dhe desert, dhe Jersualem of death... consider Christ’s many parables taking place in dhe desert… where dhe desert ees laife.. and man has to walk across eet… a negation of worldly laife and an affirmation of post-mortem laife… guiding oneself wit… ascetic ideals… leading to God at dhe end of said laife… dhus into eternal love, dhus into His glory, dhus into nothingness…”

The sun pierced at us from its lonesome vantage, its visage naked in its glory. Pale tumbleweeds rustled in rare bits of wind. Slowly our disclosure was focusing, and sending waves up my skin.

“That nihilism was not of me, but was foisted on me… from the influence of people like Sokrates through the ages… you know, Plato said, “nothing that is human is worthy of great seriousness.” …. This urge to devalue the Human out of this hatred for life, brewed by an ancient gang of plebs—for we must hear, as I said, …. the physiological origin.. that Nietzsche wants to ascribe to nihilism—was buttressed by modern astronomical scientific discoveries… in the remotest galaxies, these invalids found what they were looking for… a weapon to deliver the priest’s poisonous wish… the insignificance of human action…. To prevent the rise of Caesars… beasts of prey…”

Some time passed. The caw of a crow or some carrion bird rang out over the long drags of sand behind; I thought I could see, in the distance, a whipping fury of clouds unearthing some manifestation, like a joyful Angel of Death spreading his wings on the blast. The sparse vegetation reverberated the shock. We were climbing over boulders now, enormous ramparts that encircled the mountain top like a citadel.

Breathlessly we continued. “And so … wat ought to be done?”

“Art,” I struggled, lunging my leg. “It… is the.. counter weapon.. of the strong… it celebrates.. the triumph of… active forces….”

“Yees,” Alexandre heaved. “Eet is … pure excess… eet’s de fuckin augmentation… of laife... dhe… banquet of passions…”

We gazed back at our trail. The car was a miniscule fragment, the whole arena of vast desert sands now unveiled.

“Like in your Orphic hymns,” I said, breathing deeply, catching breath, “most of mankind is.. longing for sleep, they want to fall off… but there are exceptions… “sailors” or “animals”… what if these animal men were not endangered, but overpopulated… a society so overfull with their… disposition, leeched of all… bad blood… that life took on a pleasant hue…. The weapons of nihilism, of “liberalism,” blunted,… no possible effect… what you said in Québec was right… life is about arranging.. a glorious existence for the beautiful… but I am right too….. that we must be serious… about this… we must be dedicated to achieving and … maintaining this… a rigorous effort, through art and… power… a defense for the strong spirited … against the plegic of will.”

“Mayn, write dhat shiet down,” Alexandre said, panting. “I am beginning to fhink… dhat dhis penchant scholars haev of warning… against connecting Nietzsche’s philosophy … to his political views… aristocratism, anti-feminism… is a prejudice…” he said. “I fhink dhere is something deeper to eet…”

A pool of chemically treated water beckoned to us from the valley; the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Alexandre went a little further ahead; I stood behind on top of a large rock, jutting out into the crater of the earth. He took a picture; I was only visible by my blue shirt, a blue dot somewhere in the sands of the desert.

***

We pulled into Reno at dusk. There was a sign for a sleazy pawn shop; a pavilion outside a warped casino, its art deco awning many years unbathed; a small arena for concert venues, with some washed up boomer act playing; cheesy erotica stores with XXX posters in the window, burning in vapid neon; staggering gamblers holding supersized sodas making their way from bar to slot; a big, rusted, theme park-like sign out of BioShock which read, ‘RENO: The Biggest Little City in the World.’ “More liek dhe gayest little city in the world,” said Alexandre. We ate from a street cart, looked around a bit longer, and took off.

Our simplistic affirmation of life had been surmounted by a despising scorn for the present, out of a deep love for what life could become. A glimpse of it would be seen in California. Now it was time. We were finally reaching the other shore. It began with a mountain cruise through the Tahoe National Forest: downwards we slid, chasing the curves of the road. The sky darkened; the streetlights came on; birds took flight from the tall pines; the phone lines swayed in the moistening breeze; from Route 80 the state opens like a quite grove, a series of ever-lowering ridges lined with bushes, bramble, camp grounds, lakes; one town after the next flew by—Mystic, Boca, Truckee, Soda Springs, Troy, Big Bend, Cisco Grove, Crystal Lake, Emigrant Gap—lowering into the west of wests, easing into terra pacificus—Baxter, Dutch Flat, Gold Run, Secret Town, Colfax, Meadow Vista, Auburn, Loomis, Citrus Heights—now we were in Sacramento, capital, and home of Death Grips; the drums of “DNA” rolled as we westward, downward coasted, “should we get out?” “Nah, keep goin’!” faster and faster, flowing, Davis, Sucro, Dixon, Leisure Town, Clima, Cordellia… the forests gave way to yellow tufts of grass, American flags waving, the red white and blue Route 80 signs proudly shining—that road which had traveled us this long way. We shot through Great Adventure, the limegreen tracks of the Medusa’s wild hair visible against the blueblack sky; we passed over the Alfred Zampa Bridge, crossing San Pablo Bay. Twenty more towns we passed, and we loaded onto, not the Golden Gate, but the colossal San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, called into being by “Emperor” Joshua Abraham Norton during the Gold Rush, an eccentric English Afrikaner who declared himself ruler of the west out of vexation with the incompetence of Washington, a benign tyrant rumored to have banned the word “Frisco” from use and issuing a fine of twenty-five dollars for anyone who disobeyed.

After a slight tussle with a bum at a gas station who cleaned my windshield without asking and then demanded payment, we rode to the other edge of the city, parking just a few blocks away from Ocean Beach along the tree-lined edges of Golden Gate Park. We noticed a great Dutch Windmill, harkening back to the old city; a few quiet gas outposts; the bluffs and breakers up the way. What a place to live! We crawled onto the beach—empty, dark, serene; the Pacific Ocean, final destination, a sumptuous blue maiden bigger than any god of old, cresting its slight tranquil wavelets onto the perfect sands.

Wading in the water, we talked of the place as if it were Elysium, even if the night air was as cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. I still think of that place as paradise; hopefully it still is today; you had to worry about the street sweepers, but otherwise you could park your car and sleep anywhere as we noticed some hippies were already doing in a nearby RV. I’ve always thought that if I ever decided to start living Diogenes of Sinope, the great homeless Cynic, that’s where I would go. The homeless knew this well as we later saw: the park was full of them, junkies lying in sleeping bags. But we found solitude on the beach and we sat up on a sand dune, smoked some pot we bought somewhere on the trip and slowly fell asleep beneath a sky under which neither of our ancestors had ever been.

***

I must have been tired, for not even scorching sun burn up my leg was able to wake me. “Motherfucker!” I shouted, touching it, seeing the white dots quickly get encircled again by angry red. “Haha, get rekt bitch,” said the semi-Native next to me, who nevertheless seldom wore anything but long pants. We went back to the car, glad to see it wasn’t towed, and I threw some jeans on. Hungry, we drove somewhere downtown, parking between Union Square and the Yerba Buena Gardens. The chafing of my pants killed me; I sipped the last of the rum to distract the pain. There were about seven junkies around as we got out, one lady well on her way through an argument with an invisible man, cursing him with abandon. “You think it’s okay to park here?” “Yah mayn, it’ll be fyne.” Jonesing for booze, Alexandre went into a Japanese bar while I hung out on the sidewalks, looking in the store windows, smoking Camels. He came out 15 minutes later, telling me the life story of the bartender, a second-generation Japanese woman who lamented the politicians and drug addicts ruining her city. “Fuhcking libeerals, mayn…” We bought some sandwiches and walked around, talking about the Japanese bartender and the perniciousness of the “liberal” type—this word wasn’t in my vocabulary much previously; when I was in high school after my Alex Jones conspiracy phase in middle school I briefly got behind political liberalism, seeing it as an alternative to evangelical stupidity, but when I began to realize a commitment to it would lead to a life of protesting and holding lame signs among the damned I lost all interest. I could see what Alexandre was doing with it, muttering things like “fuck barbed wire… fuck Birmingham… fuckeen’ leeberals.” The most disparate things could be understood as “liberal.” Taken as a universal category rather than a pure reduction to American electoral politics, “liberalism” could absorb everything that was decadent, complaining, “gay,” vegetarian, sclerotic, rule-following, illiterate, scientistic, and fat about our world—and coming from a person like Alexandre rather than Sean Hannity it didn’t ring in opposition to young earth creationism but the poetic and true life, which wishes to die a wonderful fiery death rather than expire on a hospital bed. “Mayn, my mom told me of her modher’s death, where her and my aunt gadhered roun’ her at dhe hospital, watched her die under dhose florescent laights, and dhe sisters looked at each odher and sighed deeply, a deep dreadful sigh, one of dhose moments where you realize how wretched dhis existence ees.”

From this we got to talking about how to write of contemporary life, walking through the corridors that, unbeknownst to us, would come to define it—as well as that liberalism we had just casually trashed. I have motioned to this prior, but one of the main forces of discordance within Alexandre’s artist-soul was his urge to uphold the highest classical standards on the one hand and his terrorizing belief in needing to conform to the zeitgeist on the other. So he’d praise Mozart and Palestrina and denigrate all other music, and then in the next breath he’d say he needs to write like Bret Easton Ellis. “Mayn, I don’t know. I aym constantly torn batween dhese two fhings, what I know ees da best, verse drama on dhe level of Corneille, and what’s goin’ on raight now.” We looked around us: there were people working on laptops with complicated coffees; a guy throwing a frisbee with his dog; a security guard gently pacing back and forth in front of a bank. Suddenly a black hipster girl came up and felt Alexandre’s hair. “Ooh wow, it’s so nice and soft,” she said, “sorry, I just had to.” “What dhe fuck, you don’t even ask?” He glared at her but with a smile. She laughed with her friend and walked off. “Dhe fuck is wrong with peepal. I don’t know how we shall write about shiet like dat, all I know ees we have to write. Let’s get some beer.”

We ended up smoking the rest of the weed instead, aimlessly strolling the city blocks baking in the sun. Alexandre asked for a picture in front of this homeless guy laying belly-up on the sidewalk, because it looked funny with the wall art behind him: a mural depicting a six-set jazz band, a dirge for the old passed-out bum. He put it on Instagram. “Wow, fucking edgelord,” replied some anon on /mu/ to the picture days later when some other anon had posted it, in a thread of CLT and randoms discussing our trip.

Some time passed; we turned a corner and the Mercedes reappeared, with the same homeless crowd and the woman still having the same argument with the invisible man. We drove around till we got lost in some dockyard district, poking around warehouses and spools and great abandoned trucks. I put the car in reverse as a guard was yelling. Then we turned back into town off a side street, beautiful and undulating with dramatic hills and expensive apartments; I told Alexandre about how my Italian grandfather wanted us to meet up with his friend in Los Angeles, a movie producer; we imagined pitching him a script and becoming famous.

We took the car back to Ocean Beach, passing a casualty of the sun—a guy high out of his mind with his entire body burnt to a red crisp, still with his shirt off walking in the sunlight like he didn’t even feel it, just grinning widely with sunglasses on. “Jesus Christ,” I mumbled, “how contemporary.” Before we parked for the night, Alexandre asked for Burger King; I granted his wish, and he grabbed the aux to show me Delius. “This is his Florida Suite. Shiet is phenomenal. So it’s dhis late romantic composer, raight, he was given a plantation by his fadher to watch over in Florida; but he didn’t want to work, so he just composed dhis beautiful piece—I play eet during sex, eet goes great wit a coke bender.” Heaving up over the Gulf came this solar melody, sounding like the pages of Die fröliche Wissenschaft reverberating in thin air. “Yees, yees you’re right, Le Gai Savoir!!!” “So he’s late romantic but not Wagnerian?” “Yees—pure Nietzschean, pure ineffable lightness but wit dhese big orchestras and colossal sounds. In fact, he has a fhing called De Mass of Life, wit text taken from Zaratustra.” We ate our Whopper meals listening to it; I lit up a cigarette and my mood heightened as the piece grew into a dancing song. It was dark; the trees formed great canopies swaying in the cool breeze; I drove us through streets glowing blue, packed with the promises of hidden futures as the halcyonic concert boomed. The main drag was full of life, people chatting on patios, hippies playing guitar and smoking weed in bushes. We stepped onto the beach and watched the waves crash, talking and talking, discussing Delius and movies and a thousand different things.

We spent the next few days doing this, reading in the car, hiking through the park, sitting on the beach, doing nothing at all. One night, passing on the boardwalk, I got to thinking about fame again; and the sameness of the scenery was weighing on me. I moseyed up to the car and suggested we go check out LA. Alexandre looked up from the passenger seat, Faust II in hand, ashing his cigarette on the road. “Yah, let’s do eet.”

Early the next morning we rode out of town and gunned it down the interstate—either we didn’t know about the scenic route or we didn’t care to go down it. At a gas station on the way I heard MGMT on the loudspeakers. Let’s make some music, make some money, find some models for wives … I watched the dollars go up on the machine, felt the upsurging loneliness over lack of girls … what else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute? I lapped it up, letting the satire go over my head. The desert revelation had insulated my mind from all weary questioning, and the Delius piece had left me crazed; we listened to it again that morning drive, I couldn’t get enough of its festive celebration of Helios. “Man, if you could only see what I picture when I hear this…” I learned over and hit Alexandre with cigarette in hand, “imagine, a new era, where after civil wars rock the earth a new coterie of Caesars seize power, and reinstate a kind of pagan religion… parades with war-spoils and wild animals through our cities, arenas far surpassing the Colosseum. We would build shit like Hadrian’s villa and the Palace of Versailles again, unconstrained by funds or laws or quotas or welfare, our world with its current technology but completely divorced from liberalism… gardens at villas, declamations of new verse by the best poets, like Goethe in the groves of Weimar or Horace and Ovid chilling with Maecenas..” “Yees! Fuck yees! Dat’s all in dhe music! I hear it too! And much more!”

I swerved around some roadkill, raised the music, and took an exit. I was going off road signs—we hadn’t used the GPS in weeks. “Mayn, all we’ve got ees our writing. Consider dhe lobster. Trew poetry, we can sway dhe masses.” “You don’t think you’ve also got music?” “Nah, I mean, let’s face eet, poetry is what I’ve got, dhe music is secondaree… we must write some fucking poetry..”

We were coming up on LA; I took the signs to Sunset Boulevard. I thought about playing “LA Woman,” then thought better of it. “Imagine how many people have entered LA playing LA Woman.” “Too manee.” We put on Death Grips and rode up a hill bringing us to a red light. Gigantic Lexuses descended from steep driveways, guarded by stone walls, iron gates and bronze lions adorning them. Mercedes and Audis sped by us. Farther up, stylish people sat outside drinking iced lattes in Ray-Bans. And there we were, two dirty skinny teenagers in a dingy car leaking oil on the pristine street.

One of Alexandre’s swings to the contemporary occurred here. No longer was “everyfhing so disgusteeng and plebeian” ; the landscape plunged him into a rage at the academics for being so obtuse in the face of the unlearned pleasures of the mindless young and rich. While he tried, in his stories, to elevate the youth culture of Québec to this “stature,” here he was in the land of Less Than Zero, as close to the epicenter of chic nihilism as he’d ever been: he was really shivering, like a pious old woman visiting the Vatican for the first time.

I didn’t care much for this line of thought. Through my stepmother I had seen enough of what the American mind dominated by cheap romantic dramas about Xers with pill addictions looked like to know it was really as worthless as Walmart boomerism. My discordance, which tethered between a refusal of religion and the feeling that a terrible new holiness must be born, won out in the end. But we’ll get there in due time.

After cruising past hip cafes and architected rainforests, he came down with a sort of fever and begged me to find a bathroom. Perhaps it was Stendhal syndrome? As luxurious Eden faded into the jungle of abrasive strip-mallery, all still on Sunset, I found a McDonald’s and flat-handedly rolled the wheel into the lot. He jumped out and ran inside; still holding onto this quaint belief that you had to ask the patrons of an establishment to use their restroom, even if it was a corporate chain, he waited in line for ten minutes, shaking his legs, calling for God, banging his striped sleeves against his white slacks amid fat people in shorts and fannypacks. He finally gave up and ran to the back. I went to the car and smoked a few boges, checked social media. Elizabeth had liked my pictures of our trip, as had many others from back home, but I didn’t care about them. I looked up at the noon-scorched horizon. Was she thinking about me? Then Alexandre climbed back in the car; he said he had had the worst shits, and some strange discharge from his dick; that his doctor had previously told him he didn’t have much longer to live, that he was suffering from some form of liver damage due to his excessive drinking. He felt better now. “Leet’s go to dhe beach.”

Venice beach was like Seaside Heights but with weed legalized—a rare thing in 2014. Drawings of marijuana leaves against black plastic backgrounds attached by bars to the shops hovered over the throngs of beach goers, shabby and raucous. Barely any outdoor gyms left over from the days of Arnold; no Manzareks or Morrisons discussing Birth of Tragedy to be seen; no Lords of Dogtown skaters turning pools into half pipes; no Baywatch beauties in red swimsuits. The idols are broke in the temple of Baal. We found ourselves buying a bottle of rum and downing it on empty stomachs. We took some drugs and started roaming the LA night.

We fell asleep in the car and woke up to an angry Mexican guy yelling at us through the window. On closer inspection he was a landscaper trying to park outside the first house on his list. I wiped my eyes and started the car, already hot as fuck, and drove off, Alexandre still confused. I sped down some streets; these were suburbs just off Venice; cramped and crowded, one car was jutting out into the road and my car swiped it as I sped past. “Daym, you literally just slightly scratched dat Corolla,” Alexandre said. We had been listening to Yeezus nonstop, along with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; Kanye was the soundtrack of this whole second half of the trip, spiritually if not always literally; the scenes painted in “Lost in the World,” “Blood On the Leaves,” “Hell Of a Life,” “Hold My Liquor”—like the granular debris of crushed up pills coursing through Tronlike streets beaming with white lights—those were our scenes, youth and excess, despair and godliness, sin and hope, Mike Dean’s guitar synths as the aural embodiment of ‘breaking out of this plastic life, running from the lights and the night,” lab drums and electric female choirs, a burgeoning new oligarchy out of the ashes of ’08 and the false promises of Obama, the dissolving of the moral glue of things, resignation toward the end of the world in climate death with limitless bliss for the carefree few who would survive beyond it, in penthouse suites and Armani suits.

I can’t remember what we did that day outside the realm of phantastic delusions beside drive around the eerily empty skyscrapers but I know that around evening we started to get annoyed with our low batteries and lack of easy access to alcohol, as every second proprietor would call the cops on our fake. We scanned Google for a place to sleep and found a cheap hostel in Inglewood called “Traveler’s Paradise.” We bought two keys for one night’s stay; that turned into five, but they never checked. We found our room: essentially barracks, it contained several iron bunkbeds with thin tarps for mattresses. We threw our stuff there and went over to the tiki bar, which immediately served us cocktails no questions asked. “Now dhis, dhis ees what I’ve been looking for; fuck hikeeng, fuck campeeng.” I gazed around: we were in an outdoor pavilion, hemmed in on all sides by lodgings for the travelers; palm trees, many real, some inflatable, all covered in Christmas lights; pink flamingos standing in mulch; in one direction was the office building and entrance, another had a parking lot, where we put the Mercedes, and another had a wide lawn along which Mexicans toiled away on a new building project. An inflatable bald eagle wearing Uncle Sam’s hat and an inflatable Donkey, presumably the Democratic Party’s rep, adorned the path to other rooms, private unlike ours; “PARADISE” written across a parade-like banner hung over them, and dead in the center of all this was a large chlorine-filled pool, surrounded by lawnchairs and tanning whites. An allegory of these States as they were at that time.

The bartender, a 30-year-old woman with a pixie cut wearing fairy wings from Party City, began to ask us questions. “We are writers,” Alexandre informed her. “Yeah? Is your writing any good?” “Mine’s gold—dhis guy’s,” he did the semi motion with his hand, “is silvur.” “Ayyy, I’m gold. This guy writes love poems about Rebecca Black!” “Nah mayn. Siluvr. Aldough I ain’t too good at deciphering English verse.” The bartender skipped over our bullshit. “And how old are you guys?” “22,” I answered. “Never been to LA before. Where should we go?” “Eh, it’s alright, you could check out Santa Monica, I guess.” “Don’t go to Houllywuud, we were zhere last night and-dit was just hohme-less crackheds!” I turned my head: two mid-twenties Russian guys were looking over, total bums. “Yah, we were staying zhere and partied on a zhe roof, you could zee ze Hollywood sign, although zhat’s not wort zeeing eider.”

Just then two girls passed by, catching my attention: one was a pretty blonde, the other a buxom redhead; they walked along the side of the pool, clacking their flip-flops, and sat down next to a husky blonde woman, presumably the first one’s mother. They took off their tops, revealing thin bikinis, and laid themselves out across long striped towels, shades on, butts out.

Then all of a sudden this big douchebag in a wifebeater sat down at the bar and barked “the usual” to the fairy. He introduced himself: a 26-year-old bouncer from the Jersey shore, on vacation; he called over a girl who had a narrow platinum rattail for hair; she was a Dutch student traveling for “holiday.” They had found each other here, in Paradise, and were looking for a ride to Vegas. “We could give you dat,” Alexandre offered without discussion. I sighed, thinking about listening to this doofus on a four-hour car ride. “Duuaude, that’s sweeet mannn, yah I’ll definitely gives you guyz da hook-up there, I’ve got maad friends who gamble for a living out there, shit will be Ace man, fuckin’ ACE!” He did this strange cough-snort, coke addict, and slumped out of his chair. “Goin’ back to the room, baby-face; gonna take a val and lay down.” He kissed rattail and sauntered away, fistpumping to the LMFAO song cringing through the weak speakers.

All these introductions over with, we ordered some burgers, along with a dozen cosmos and piña coladas; now was not the time to have manly drinks, now was the time to have “gay-ass shiet dat tastes good as fuck” in Alexandre’s elegant parlance. After the meal, we ran out of cigarettes and went to fetch some across the street, a wonderful 24/7 convenience store with a stageplay of locals bugging out every half hour. We watched a fight erupt as we sipped from solo cups and smoked Camels. “Mayn, dhis playce is greaat.”

Paradise had another bar, in-doors, which served dinner. We went over there when it was getting late and sat down at a bar coiffured with brown leather arm cushions and green velvet foot-pads, dark and smoky from a Los Angeles gone by. Perhaps this cigar-saloon is where it all started, and Paradise evolved around it, adding more and more wings as the entertainment world grew. An old lady, a few stools down from us, sidled herself closer and began a conversation. She told us, unprompted by any biographical detail of our own, that she was a writer, and that she had been trying to get her best story published for years, to no avail. She talked slowly and woozily, a little touched. “It goes like this,” she drawled, a southerner. “A little girl, from a poor family—an orphan, in fact—she goes up to a rich man, a millionaire [the story was not adjusted for inflation], and says, “hey mister millionaire, my name is Poor Little Sue; I don’t gots any money for new shoes. Say, could you lend me a few, so I can buy me a pair of neat new blue shoes? All I need’s is change for a penny.” We looked at her expectantly. “That’s it; she keeps repeating it like that, “I need change for a penny.” That’s the title too, Change for a Penny.” We stared blankly. “Wow,” I said. “that’s… interesting.” “Mmm,” Alexandre said in a high tone as he sipped his whiskey, “Alraight. I like it.” Then she started in on her family, and how they were no good to her; we asked her where she lived. “Next door. Been here for a few years. I come to this bar for company.” We felt bad for her, but then she started getting weirder and weirder with her oversharing of personal information. After we paid our check, we told her to have a good night.

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We went for a swim. The pool was lit up now; it was almost a tropical resort if you could ignore the sounds of traffic and the parking lot and the smog. The blonde and the redhead jumped in and started talking to us. “How old are y’all?” “Eighteen,” I said, then shot an alcoholic glance over at the bar; fairy had gone in for the night, changing of the guard with a statelier matron. “You?” “I’m seventeen, she’s sixteen,” the more confident Redhead said. They explained that they came here with the blonde’s mom last summer and liked it so much they booked it for two weeks; I gathered they weren’t very wealthy, not exactly trailer trash but not far off; they were from Washington State, I think. After flirting for some time with them and saying goodbye, early the next morning they and their mother found me sitting by the pool and asked for a ride to McDonald’s—they were craving a McDonald’s breakfast and they had no car, they had taken a bus all the way from Seattle to stay right here in this concrete lot. We went through the drive thru, they got their egg McMuffins and hashbrowns. I indulged as well. I came strolling back into the place with them, McDonald’s bags in hands, to an Alexandre gazing confusedly at the bar. “What ees.. goin on here?” he asked in genuine wonder. I just laughed, didn’t even explain, reveling in the absurdity.

The weirdness just kept increasing. We noticed this disheveled guy in a gray tracksuit just stalking around the perimeter of the place; the fairy bartender told us he had been staying here for weeks, just gazing around like that, and scurrying back into his lair. Then, on another cigarette run, we ran into this older black gentleman in a three-piece suit and wide brimmed hat, who, as cars roared behind him on the freeway, told us that the CIA had been spying on him for decades because of important information he was withholding. He was straightfaced, and talked low, but with a nimble gladness. Alexandre wasn’t having it. “Mayn, you know the words to dhis song?” he pointed to the stereo at the bar playing “Hotel California.” “Eeet’s about a hotel you check into that you can never leave… dat’s where we are raight now, mayn, I’m not fuckeeng keeding.”

Some time later we were chilling on this patio and got to talking to this flamboyant Brazilian guy who worked as a stagehand for Axl Rose and other bands. He said part of his job was gathering drugs for the bands to do at after parties. We asked if he had any; indeed he did, but it was prescription Vyvanse for himself—he had extra and was willing to sell it. We had done Vyvanse back in Orville one night with one of my friends—we snorted it to increase the effect. We agreed and bought it; with our conversation’s drift into literary things he slinked away. Discussing the “gold versus silver” remark before, Alexandre asked me to read that poem I wrote in Québec. After I finished, and Alexandre commended, he began to shout suggestions as I read through it a second time. We began to feverishly edit it, passing my phone between our hands, jittering now because of the speed. Each line prompted winding digressions. Alexandre told me about the intricacies of the French Pléiade poets and the verse of Villon. I explained by turns the different passages’ debts to Shakespeare, John Ashbery, and Dante, as well as Animal Collective’s mournful “For Reverend Green” and “Fireworks” off Strawberry Jam that make me think of my breakup with Jess, filling me with the depression wrapped up in the memories of the orange streetlights and the barren roads of winter every time. The poem was mangled by the end; I reverted all changes except his word “needn’t”—he had a penchant for contractions, a French preference—I removed all his Celinean archaisms, though I liked the idea. Chainsmoking like fiends, we blazed through both packs before the sun began to peek over the horizon. We stumbled off to the gas station to buy more, wickedly castigating various canonical writers, oblivious to the armypotente junkies harassing us outside the store. As the sun came up Alexandre started telling me about Ellis’s Glamorama, likening the sun’s rays to the confetti in the book. He said Ellis, in the later parts of the novel, begins to blur reality, where the main character, a thoughtless male model yclept Victor Ward who gets inducted into a terrorist cell, begins to notice a camera crew trailing him as if he is on the set of a movie. He can’t tell if the terrorist attacks he’s committing are real and they are blackmailing him, or if it’s all fake and he’s being cast in an acting role, or if they’re even there. Confetti starts to appear everywhere, in clumps on the ground and falling from the ceiling; eventually a plane explodes and confetti falls out of the sky. “Eet’s so fucking good, he handles postmoderneesm with grace, bringing eet into dhe plot without sacrifaicing dhe pleasurable readabilitee.”

Out came the Brazilian, who was shocked we took all of it. A while later this black kid came out with a backpack and sat down to join us. He was a student from Nigeria studying in America; he had left his home country due to violence that erupts every time there’s an election. He was talking about his biology class and how he had trouble passing it, and eventually divulged that he didn’t believe in evolution. “How does de change happon? I don’t see how it is posseeble. I am a Creeschin, of course, but scienteefically, eet makes no sense.” He went on a long defense talking about the immutability of thermodynamic laws and something or other about genetic copying. Alexandre, the Brazilian, and I roused ourselves, rallied the forces of modern western reason against his chain-of-being colonial Protestantism; we tried natural selection first, to no avail—“but how, how are dare changees? What mechaneesm changed de initial cells?” I scrounged the back of brain; I remember something about how exposure to sunlight can alter genes, how the sun’s rays manipulated the primordial cells and caused mutations, which were then preserved based on survivability. Alexandre was able to pick this up and run it home, descrying the name of the process. “Mayn, I have no idea where I pulled dhat shiet from,” he said, “I’m surprised it’s still een dhere somewhere.” He rolled off his seat. “I need a bludy mary…”

***

All the talk of writing still buzzing in our minds, Alexandre and I sat down at the bar to work. He was scribbling out a screed on paper towels concerning abortion, which switched over into a rhapsody in Glamorama style of his hallucinations of golden metallic thread everywhere. “And dhen, when I tought dhe vision was over, a janitor began sweeping up threads into his dustpan…” I began writing down the most recent stories of our trip in a small notebook. I will share the fragment here, to show what things changed, what things I highlighted instead, how I wrote about that time at the time. I apologize for repetitions; treat it as a ricorso, or an opera to the preceding overture:

It was hot in Nevada and I think the heat is what caused the madness. Three hours to climb a mountain with no water, the lightheadedness made raw by the pathetic lights of Reno, the emptiness and desolation, the humidity-less heat that burned more than humidity; not many hours before we were coasting down slopes in darkness in the middle of Wyoming with an empty tank taking wrong exit to twenty-five-population Arlington with NO SERVICES pointing in either direction scaring the children within us, safely making it down into Utah to cross its western border into immediate casinos in the arid night – all this must have worn our minds. Perhaps it was the hobos blasted away on ketamine in the streets of San Francisco, fifteen of them passed-out in a line against a wall downtown smelling like piss, telling off invisible people through daylight without changing location, and how, as we stepped out of the car for the first time in Frisco, we had fine gentlemen dressed in jeans and snapbacks with intent to sell, and the light of the sun burning our pot-addled heads while discussing VY Canis Majoris and the forgotten fourth major moon of Jupiter (Io, Ganymede, Europa, and…?), receiving neutral eyebrow raises from the stoned locals; or it was Venice beach with crowds of dregs wearing consciously-clichéd t-shirts and unconsciously barreling without blinking, smelling like Axe body spray and cooled, dead aspiration; wherever whence it came, madness we were living ere entering Los Angeles and it only ascended as we climbed the off ramp for Sunset Boulevard listening to Kanye come out of my thirty-years-old Mercedes’ speakers, watching the one-year-old Mercedes pass us by, one after the other, sitting dirty and sweaty taking in Beverly Hills for the first time. Alexandre, a postmodern dandy, Québécois, uninhibited and in style, was next to me saying “Mayn you feel bad being poor in a place liek dis”—those cars, those homes, those palm trees stretching up at the clouds in wealthy relaxation taunted our madness and our hoping and wishing for fame and respect and pleasure, but this went unnoticed because now was an intermediate stage to that as “everyding es fyne and everyding will always and has always been fyne.”

After hanging around Venice for some days, we drove back up into Los Angeles and rented one night but overstayed several in the cheapest beds at Traveler’s Paradise, the cheapest hostel we could find off Google. Fucking inflatable donkeys with Uncle Sam hats holding American flags surrounding the pool with swimming sixteen-year-old girls calling us handsome and following us around, all around the place twenty Mexicans working their asses off all day and night to serve these privileged Americans, Canadians, and liberal-traveling-Eurotrash who lay like walruses in lounge chairs drinking American beer, “zeis taste liek wah-tur,” while we drank infinite martinis illegally served—it was a “paradise,” it really was, but the insanity of the place began to gnaw at our minds and the so absurd people and places we had seen in this diseased and wasted land called California caused some serious cases of noidedness.

There was something suspicious about this motel: none of the travelers were leaving; they were working around the place for beds but for weeks on end, like they couldn’t leave; this Australian guy lurking in gray sweatpants and sweater with white New Balance sneakers—you know the exact kind of sketchy fucker I’m talking about—would just pace around and steal cookies from the “free cookies” stand and run to the pool, swimming with his clothes on; you say “hi” to him and he’d just stare at you in disgust and keep walking; a Danish traveler told me that he had been there for six fucking weeks and added maybe he wasn’t always like this. One Italian bartender was walking around in butterfly wings, this chick had never left, like she got stuck here serving Bud Lite to fat dads, some shit out of R.L. Stine. This suspicious twenty-six-year-old guy from New Jersey claimed he could find molly but then said the "spic ran off with it" (sure he did). We promised this same twenty-six-year-old to bring him with us to Las Vegas since he would give us a free bed in his friend’s hotel. As soon as we offered him the ride he turns around and says “you just got a ride to Vegas!” to some ugly Dutch girl with three strands of hair coming off her skull, so she cancels her bus fare counting on us to bring her “obnoxious undereducateed ass” along. The next day, the New Jersey guy said the Dutch girl stole his wallet and ran off. But he was still looking for a ride. That night, the last, Alexandre and I popped a considerable amount of Vyvanse purchased from this gay Brazilian guy who had worked for Axl Rose’s recent parties, so from midnight til the morning we edited about ten lines of a poem and discussed incessantly, shaking with intensity, smoking two packs of cigarettes and beating our fists when we reached a conclusion—the Brazilian saw us like this at 7:00 AM and dropped his jaw when we told him we took all of it, which should have warned me that Alexandre would be so insane the next day, hallucinating explosions of gold thread, alarming to the point that I abandoned him to his madness for a few hours and joined a twenty-three-year-old Nigerian, a fellow Paradise Traveler, in visiting a public library down the street that contained no Shakespeare but Simone de Beauvoir and RACISM: A Short History. Othneil the Nigerian had just got his passport stolen at the motel and was seriously pissed as his embassy was in D.C. and he didn’t have any money to go there, the only reason for his being here was to escape the violent elections in his hometown. On the way back to the hostel, through the ghetto-ass Inglewood, a barrio with used car lots and a trillion lanes of Hispanics in Hondas beeping at each other, Othneil told me he was studying Computer Science but also wanted to study Communications, “for business?” “Well, for business, and to talk to girls.” He was twenty-three and asking me if he would ever get a girlfriend, surprised by the fact that I had once asked the same, which then surprised me: “yes you will man, it all comes together” though I knew nothing about sexual charisma but, well, maybe it would—I met up with Alexandre who commanded we go to a nearby Jack-in-the-Box where we discussed our conspiracy theory about the New Jerseyian and his plot to mug us and we got so worked up that we sped right into LA freeway traffic without telling anyone except those young girls I would never see again, fucking over the New Jerseyian who was going to kick the shit out of us in his friend’s hotel anyways.

The last part was added after the fact at a hostel in Vegas. Between those two points, we could be seen tearing out of Los Angeles until we hit an absurd amount of road-work traffic in the Mojave Desert, crawling along I-15, passing all the spots mentioned by Hunter S. like Barstow but with far less drugs—but with the foreign-looking attorney in my passenger all the same. Chugging along in stop-and-go traffic like a beaten-up cargo train, rattling into station, ready to be decommissioned, man is this how the trip ends? Running out of gas in the middle of the desert no water no electricity just fucking watching the cars pass us as we wither and die with a bunch of dirty clothes and a shitty tablet playing Vivaldi’s “Summer” over and over? Just then a guy pulled out of the traffic—oh shit, jailbreak, he’s making a move. We watched him turn 90 degrees and just roll down the hill into the opposite lane. “Ah he’s just a fuckeeng spic,” Alexandre chuckled. “He probably doesn’t even know you’re not supposed to do dat.” All of a sudden the PowerPoint I made for a criminal justice elective class on illegal immigration came back to me, I thought of those photographs of Latin Americans hopping the border… a smile cracked over my face, I took a drag of my Virginian-made Camels like some conspiring tobacco CEO: is this our new advocate of American empire?... But just then he launched into a tirade against America’s corporate vacuity, and the omnipresent liberalism of the current state. “Fuck Birmingham, fuck barbed wire…”

Downtown Vegas was too rich for us, so we drove into Old Vegas, seeing that ancient, seedy “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign from the days of the mob lit up as we followed the GPS to a dilapidated hostel, in far worse condition than Paradise. The room was larger, way more bunkbeds, a bunch of creepy slobs getting ready for their big night out on a city they couldn’t afford. Alexandre was acting very strange; he was shaking while I talked to the front desk lady, he could barely utter a coherent sentence so I had to speak for him. I handed him his key which he took like a dementia patient, shambling around the room; he had regressed into both his childhood self and a weary old man, jovially flicking at his tablet in the corner. I went out to get things from the car, and on my way back I saw him taking off, stumbling up the road, muttering to himself. By the time I came back out he was completely gone.

I started walking down the sidewalk aimlessly. At a stop light there stood an Indian woman, maybe in her thirties, cute in a cocktail dress. I struck up a conversation with her; in an American accent she explained that she had just gone through a divorce and was partying with friends there. I asked her where she was going; to her room; she asked if I wanted to drink with her but before I could answer, mocked herself for being old and said I probably wanted nothing to do with her. I regretted for a long time not following her up, but the paranoia over the story of Mike the Jersey shore guy getting robbed and Alexandre’s previous mockery of me with Katnis pulled me back, sent me mute in fact, and I watched the lady walk up the road into the dark.

Dragging my feet in glum solitude, I watched as men and women partied around casino pools and open-window bars, in nice unwrinkled shirts, able to buy alcohol without being carded and without becoming bankrupt. I had only a few hundred dollars left, and knew there wasn’t a chance my ID would get into any of those places. After circling the strip I went back to the hostel and just sat outside, smoking; along the way I passed a group of black people sitting around a stoop, who tried to get my attention but I just ignored them. Alexandre showed up later and said he had been stopped by that same stoop and bought molly and coke off them; he said he’d save it for later. Before that, he apparently went to Circus Circus, “eet was liek a giant amusement park on dhe inside, wit a giant clown on de outside. I met an Arab guy in dhere, he could barely speak any Eenglish, dhe man was gambling away his life’s saveengs. Fuckeeng madness. As Thompson said, dhis is what de bourgeoisie would do, if dhe Nazis won da war!!”

That morning, in a blistering inferno of humidity that likely came from the sin of the place rather than meteorological phenomena, we hauled our money together for a tank of gas and drove off. Later, at a fast-food place somewhere in cool Colorado, I rapidly wrote out the following in the last pages of my now-tattered notebook:

Alexandre was speaking strange, walking around drunk-like during gas stops. Someone in passing politely said “you remind me of Jim Morrison,” to which he responded by spending half an hour laying in the backseat assuring himself that he was original. We, mostly he, must’ve been going through amphetamine withdrawal or damage, one of the two: watching him dart his eyes around the Vegas motel lobby holding his book manuscript on several long paper towel sheets crumpled up into a ball, speaking in short bursts that made the young girl behind the counter glare at him, then at me dropping twenty dollar bills and motel forms all over the floor, rocking slowly from side to side, delivering commands to Alexandre such as “sign that” and “she said twenty-four.” After a night separated in Vegas, I found out that he bought cocaine and MDMA off a guy the next morning and, still running from the terrible fear of nothingness that had chased him out of California, told me that we had to go, and not an hour later he was blowing lines off his iPad while I drove through the 120 degree desert blasting Mozart’s clarinet concerto, “dis is better dan Bee-to-fan’s ninffh too!” “yes it is” I nodded in agreement looking at this French-Canadian bastard next to me, coke around his nostrils and a big scab forming on his nose from scratching an itch like a madman hopped up on amphetamines two nights before, his Ray-Bans crooked and tangled in his greasy hair, hadn’t slept in thirty hours at least—here I understood why a black woman had called him a “crack-ass nigga” earlier at a gas station outside of Paradise since he was humming “Hold My Liquor,” not wearing shoes with his shirt unbuttoned and wet: “you spendin’ all yo money on craaack and dats why,” pointing to his pack of boges, “yo so goddamn poor!”

***

Our wages, gone! Flittered away! Our funds Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord! We were in rural Indiana and had no money left for gas. End of the line. I distinctly remember having enough money to order McDonald’s, but not enough to order off the menu at A&W, where Alexandre went. He brought me into the McDonald’s first: “dhere, order off dhe dollar menu, poor ass bietch; you can geet a bunch of mcdoubles for cheap, I used to do eet when maiy parents cut me off in high school.” I did not know what to do; he had no money left either, it would be another two days before his dad would send him any. I called my Italian grandfather. He said I could use a Western Union machine in town, to which he’d wire $500; I’d pay him back when I could. He sighed and said I should’ve planned my cross-country trip the way he did, when he a rich businessman in the 80s and rented a limousine with a television set for the kids to watch, when that was a rare commodity. I just told him how right he was, taking it on the chin.

We got the money and began spending it on gas and quarts of oil, burning through it fast as we tracked across the country at record speed. On the border of Pennsylvania we stopped again, this time at a Domino’s. The lady behind the counter observed us counting out coins to pay for the food; she went in the back and came out with a box of random leftovers they were planning on throwing out anyways. “Thank you so much,” I said to her, and gorged on the tray. After that I jotted down concluding lines to my fragment, covering the commotion we had left behind in Kansas:

“We needed to leave the west though / everyone was batshit in the streets, ppl were coming up to me warning me about the CIA looking for them, nothing felt right, we had to go, and now we're all the way in Ohio 2 days later” I messaged Henri on Facebook, who was now bumming around in warehouses of hipsters in Vancouver, but what I didn’t tell him out of some abstract fear that the cops would hear me on the internet was that in middle of nowhere Kansas I saw red and blue lights coming from a sheriff whom I had sped past doing ninety in a seventy—he was undercover. “Fuck, shiet, fuck,” Alexandre said, and stashed his gram of MDMA somewhere. We pulled over, waited, and were ordered to stand on the side of the highway for twenty minutes. I steeled myself, emptying my mind, focusing on the grass swaying in the breeze. Alexandre was trembling with fear—I remember him clutching his copy of Faust II, pretending to read it to get his mind off the situation. I was already in the process of coming to terms with serving time in a Kansas prison. But finally, after rifling through the back seat and the trunk, he didn’t find it: the cop came up to us and told us to get lost, and stop driving so fast. I asked Alexandre where the MDMA was: he had tucked it inside a pack of cigarettes that was sitting on the center console in plain view. “Eet ees just like Poe’s Dhe Purloined Letter. Dhe cops will search all trough dhe house for dhe incriminating note and not realize eet was right dhere, sitting open on dhe dining room table. Huh huh! Fuckeeng genius.” We went over to my trunk and popped it open. All our stuff was strewn everywhere, but Alexandre’s copy of King Lear was front and center. “Ha, he was probably like, dese kids are reading Shakespeare, I guess dhey don’t got drugs.” We were so terrified by the sight of cops afterward that we threw the pack of cigarettes in a QuikTrip trashcan and as I got back into the car I heard a voice inside me, a yawp hysterically laughing, gotta get home; I said it aloud while turning the car around, Alexandre staring at me bewilderedly, and kept driving, driving 2,500 miles in two and a half days, the golden orb from Québec rolling back and forth on the floor, twenty-two hours in one night, gotta get home repeating, repeating . . .

***

I swung around an exit ramp in rural somewhere and the sun blinded me, sending us into a tailspin that nearly killed us. Totally decomposed, I recovered myself after initial shock. “Imagine having gone through all that shit just to die a couple hundred miles from home?” “I don wahnt to imagine eet,” Alexandre grumbled from his leaned-back seat.

A couple hours later I received a phone call—from Elizabeth. She asked about how our trip was going and when we’d be back. A Cheshire cat smile crawled across my face as we talked; Alexandre was guffawing at me, mocking the coolness with which I spoke. I told her we’d be back tonight, late; we weren’t out of Pennsylvania yet and Jersey would be another few hours.

That last stretch dragged on, the sky got ever darker, but at least there were streetlights now. The signs for 7-11 gas stations gladdened me; a name I hadn’t seen in some time. I took an exit for one and briskly got back on the road. Alexandre was asleep, I wanted to sleep but of course couldn’t; the fucker’s lost driver’s license was going to cause some problems, but that’d be a worry for the next day.

It was one or two in the morning when we got into Orville. I found with amazement that the same road my house was on connected to New Orleans, to Racine County, all the way to the mountain in Nevada and to the Traveler’s Paradise. The whole country was just one big circuit: the humming call of the 18-wheelers out in Wyoming can always be heard faintly on the pavement of any American street. But not tonight; we were happy to be off the road, in a meadow beside the roaring waterfall of the Hackensack River where we waited for Hoff and Shamrock to come have a boge with us. Just as they were approaching, we heard voices in the opposite direction. We turned around and saw Elizabeth and Samantha coming up from a hangout spot near the town pool. They enjoyed a few stories and then we were all invited to Shamrock’s for a fire the next night.

***

It was hot and dark and we were gathered around the blazing fire drinking and smoking, and forty people were there, recent graduates saying outrageous things and sharing stories and making plans to meet up in college. In the corner Alexandre was sitting on a lawnchair and Elizabeth was sitting at the foot of it; I could hear him saying “Machiavelli” and “Napoleon,” and then a little while later heard him telling the story of the demon who visits in the night and tells of the eternal recurrence. Elizabeth was smiling cutely, awed yet reserved, taking it all in. A bit later, Alexandre was standing up and mentioned Hoff’s name and mine; it caught our attention and we turned to join the conversation. “Like dhese guys, perfect example, dey have attempted to lord dheir intellectual powers over you, but it’s all false because you see dhey are really just doing eet because dhey are in love wit you.” Hoff shot back, but I just casually demurred. “Nah, it's not like that; not anymore, we’re just friends,” and I smiled at her; at the time I meant it, more so because I thought the prospect was an impossibility. But that statement of a foreclosed love apparently taunted Elizabeth, as I would learn later on, planting a seed of curious competition in her that would grow to full form in the coming days. It was not my cloying attention that won her over, but my matured disinterest and newly perceptible aura that I was setting off on the wide world to do great things.

A week went by, a week of struggle to get Alexandre back home. His passport had also been stolen, so he wouldn’t be able to travel into Canada. We learned this the hard way by driving all the way to Manhattan to visit the Canadian embassy, a basement labyrinth of opaque horror, made all the more horrible by the clerk telling him there was nothing he could do except produce a copy of his birth certificate. At this point he actually felt bad because he would now be entering week two of lounging around my mother’s house, eating our food and demanding rides to the liquor store (at one point, when my mother criticized him for making a girl pay for his vandalism fine back home, he had called her a “faggot”); he quickly messaged Armand on Facebook and asked him to break into his room, as his parents were both out of the country, and mail him his birth certificate.

On one of those nights Bambrick came over and I wrote the conclusion to a novella I will never publish, a parody of Don Giovanni with a female protagonist, Donna Gianna, who after rivaling Giovanni for body count was brought to hell by a commendatore just like him. Alexandre helped me edit the concluding hellscape while drunk to high heavens:

Foreveragain, the Commendatore seized her and brought her away from the light. They approached a door in the deep going-down. […] Up here hell was cold. Unpraised walked in the dark arboretums […] whereupon smokestacks further thickened the air with their fog, collecting into heavy stormclouds that violently shook, shook their ash, stirred smokes of burnt man; the wind spun itself an oak-cleaving whisper […] Before they could summon the monster whose weapon was gaze, a tritone-crying bell whence sprang twisted Ave Marias downward sang; and nine hundred dozen souls poured o’er the walls and out the now-opened gate, wild heat trailing the escape […] we rest upon temporal dirt that will fade into the great recess, decomposing all it holds; the currents of your case admire against that midnight hour, you in separate sail for a private weighing…

On and on that ghastly rigmarole went. I decided to abandon it because while the idea had some promise the execution was bad, a theme that haunted many of my writings, but it had some nice lines here and there. It grew distasteful to me by the time I finished it, unlike the road fragments—those remained unpublished because I had no way to connect to them to anything; I consigned them to the bottom of my chest of notes until just the other day.

Bambrick and him then discussed the French Revolution and Chinese history, and the night ended with Alexandre mercilessly mocking Victor Hugo’s La Légende des siècles, “dhe most bombastick pieece of shiet ever written, he wriites in dhe most flowery fuckin’ way about all of historee and all of humanitee with dhis awful leebral humaneesm, shiet ees so horrendously bourgeois, ahahahah… my moddher said “what ees wrong wit you” as I mocked dhis to her, ahhahhah…”

The next night we got tremendously hammered at a house party of this beautiful girl from town and we were basically thrown out because I threw up and passed out and Alexandre asked the one black kid where he could find drugs and was accused of racially profiling. That night, I awoke to him ravenously screaming, shaking a rum bottle over my head and threatening to kill me with it. In this moment a great calmness overcame me; I simply disarmed him verbally, told him to stop talking and go to sleep. He gave up when he realized he wouldn’t get a rise out of me. I was certain he was losing his goddamn mind.

His birth certificate finally arrived in the mail. That would be enough to get him over the border. We packed up his things and formed a gang with Bambrick and Elizabeth to drive him to Port Authority in the city. I got lost several times trying to get there, missing the Henry Hudson Parkway exit and ending up on the Triborough Bridge several times as I got stuck in Queens and then on Randall Island. Elizabeth paid the toll to get back into Manhattan out of pity for my dumb ass while Alexandre railed at me for going down a one-way into oncoming traffic—it was good we left early or I wouldn’t have been able to get rid of the cunt. But it was “all fyne” as I said, giving it back to him; we made it there with minutes to spare and he hurriedly grabbed his bag from my trunk, shook my hand, then Bambrick’s, then hugged Elizabeth and kissed her with French gusto. Cigarette lit and cloaking his nerves, he trudged off with his tall camping bag on his shoulders and his duffel bags at his sides into the crowds of Manhattan.

***

In a flurry of spontaneity Elizabeth decided to call me the next night when she got off work to ask what I was doing. I was planning to hang out at Poco’s; I brought her there and we watched the recent Hollywood adaptation of On the Road, still obsessively enmeshed as I was with the vast American landscape. During the movie she sidled closer until she was laying on my side; Poco was looking over with autistically obvious eyebrow raises. She asked for a ride home and, idling in front of her house as she interviewed me about my college schedule, she suddenly kissed me and then went inside. Previously my rejector, which in some way launched me through the whole trajectory that was coming to a close, I was now put in the position of choosing whether or not to accept her. As she later said, “I couldn’t bear to see you get away.”

Next Chapter

The beats get a lot of hate, which is somewhat fair… There’s a lot to critique in them. On a purely literary level, they usually fall short of the mark: the stand-out novels and poems are not so whole and grand to warrant anything approaching the label of masterpiece. During more progressive times, like the previous decade, they were hated for being unkind: to women, to racial minorities, and so on. Or they were simply mocked for being too boyish, “male,” aggravating in what uncharitable readers saw as their penchant to shallowly namedrop, brag, or pseudo-pontificate. Among the new reactionary right, I have heard them denigrated as “degenerate,” blasphemous, irresponsible—or responsible, for our downfall—and generally at odds with morality. This charge is somewhat true—the conclusions of Jack and Neal’s lives bear it out, Burroughs’ rap sheet was endless, and Ginsberg’s opinions on pedophilia were so revolting that they lead me to agree with Andrea Dworkin on one point.

But I think the beat movement as a literary movement is ultimately defensible. In fact I’ll say their works are responsible for some of the better ideas in fiction over the last half century, Kerouac’s On the Road chief among them.

I think the easiest defense I’d make to a natural-born hater of the beats is that they provide a singularly useful, important service to us in having meticulously detailed the America of the 1940s with a painter’s eye. So much from this period is obscured by the fairy tale of contemporaneous advertisements, Hollywood movies, and posthumous biographies that we never quite get to see what America looked like in its private moments and obscure corners. With the beats we see how similar the Americans of the 40s were to us Americans now, raucousness and all, but also how different, and how surveilled and domesticated we have become.

But a stronger defense can be made on literary merit alone. On the Road flows in a pleasant, exciting way that few books do. Through a combination of charisma and prose technique, it pushes away what is burdensome in storytelling and amplifies what brings joy. Life is made crisper by it. It achieves something more than a story: it renders America as this one big multitudinous ecosystem of organisms and allows the reader to exist within the zoo of motion; because they are freed from the cramped dollhouse-style narration of old novels, they may make their own observations.

At the same time it is not just empirical. While on the one hand the endless descriptions of people and madness in On the Road and in Howl could be accused as all externality, no interiority, this is really not the case, as the countless wanderers of the American expanse are doused in the stream of consciousness of the speaker: we never get a plain landscape, it’s always the landscape as filtered through the manic-ecstatic persona of the viewer, who is accommodating you, stooping down to you in your encumbered cant, lending a hand so you can climb out of it and enjoy the hidden poetry of our present world.

What ever happened to stream of consciousness? One of the holy grails of the high modernist movement was to eschew representation by achieving the presentation of human facticity. It was this feature that lifted the ban on Ulysses in the United States, with the judge deciding that the noble task of revealing conscious experience required a frankness that could not be accused of being merely pornographic. I would say On the Road carried on this tradition, one that was largely interrupted by the silencing of the conscious state by the algorithmic mass culture industry, the same mainstream the beats opposed. With the cessation of consciousness came the subsequent exile of literature to the land of sociological analysis, with the postmodern author as doctor-like character who diagnoses and prescribes a treatment to the period, or the uninspired droll of contemporary “literary fiction” which thinks being true-to-life means being stiff, bitchy, smart, boring.

The beats had no power, no money, no connections, no access to VIP areas. All they had was their group of friends, whom they lauded into high heavens. Their literature works because each respected the other, and they all put in the time to read and to have fascinating experiences worth writing about. See how they present their friend Alan Ansen, renamed “Rollo Greb”:

We found the wild, ecstatic Rollo Greb and spent a night at his house on Long Island. Rollo lives in a nice house with his aunt; when she dies the house is all his. Meanwhile she refuses to comply with any of his wishes and hates his friends. He brought this ragged gang of Dean, Marylou, Ed, and me, and began a roaring party. The woman prowled upstairs; she threatened to call the police. "Oh, shut up, you old bag!" yelled Greb. I wondered how he could live with her like this. He had more books than I've ever seen in all my life—two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls, and such books as the Apocryphal Something-or-Other in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn't give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life. Dean stood before him with head bowed, repeating over and over again, "Yes . . . Yes . . . Yes." He took me into a corner. "That Rollo Greb is the greatest, most wonderful of all. That's what I was trying to tell you—that's what I want to be. I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it."

"Get what?"

"IT! IT! I'll tell you—now no time, we have no time now." Dean rushed back to watch Rollo Greb some more.

Or the legendary introduction of William Burroughs, named “Old Bull Lee”:

It would take all night to tell about Old Bull Lee; let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned not only out of necessity but because he wanted to. He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa in his time, only to see what was going on; he married a White Russian countess in Yugoslavia to get her away from the Nazis in the thirties; there are pictures of him with the international cocaine set of the thirties-gangs with wild hair, leaning on one another; there are other pictures of him in a Panama hat, surveying the streets of Algiers; he never saw the White Russian countess again. He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at cafe tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In English hotels he read Spengler and the Marquis de Sade. In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just for two minutes too long for a drink, and wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it. He did all these things merely for the experience. Now the final study was the drug habit. He was now in New Orleans, slipping along the streets with shady characters and haunting connection bars. […] He had a set of chains in his room that he said he used with his psychoanalyst; they were experimenting with narcoanalysis and found that Old Bull had seven separate personalities, each growing worse and worse on the way down, till finally he was a raving idiot and had to be restrained with chains. The top personality was an English lord, the bottom the idiot. Halfway he was an old Negro who stood in line, waiting with everyone else, and said, "Some's bastards, some's ain't, that's the score.”

Bull had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinese smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops. He spent all his time talking and teaching others. Jane sat at his feet; so did I; so did Dean; and so had Carlo Marx. We'd all learned from him. He was a gray, nondescript-looking fellow you wouldn't notice on the street, unless you looked closer and saw his mad, bony skull with its strange youthfulness—a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries. He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life's work, which was the study of things themselves: in the streets of life and the night.

It would be a mistake to take their boasts at face value: they had plenty of misery and boredom, but they took it as their mission to deliver energy and enthusiasm as much as we take ours to be outraged or snide. In the face of poverty and the brute facts of modern existence, the beats maintained this earnestness and intense joy at the simplest things—so far from the irony and colossal conceits of contemporary writers. This earnestness is not lame because it is not careful or polite: it is rude and spastic, somewhat criminal, and virile. Take this passage:

"Now this is the first time we've been alone and in a position to talk for years," said Dean. And he talked all night. As in a dream, we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother's door at eight A.M. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed. He was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms. You remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!" He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. "And not only that but we both understand that I couldn't have time to explain why I know and you know God exists." At one point I moaned about life's troubles—how poor my family was, how much I wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter. "Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up. My head rings!" he cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes—that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails. "Since Denver, Sal, a lot of things— Oh, the things—I've thought and thought. I used to be in reform school all the time, I was a young punk, asserting myself-stealing cars a psychological expression of my position, hincty to show. All my jail-problems are pretty straight now. As far as I know I shall never be in jail again. The rest is not my fault." We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road.

"Think of it," said Dean. "One day he'll put a stone through a man's windshield and the man will crash and die-all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way I am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us—that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel" (I hated to drive and drove carefully)—"the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side." There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear.

They were also courageous, ready to sleep anywhere and work any job so long as it continued to bring them their vaunted freedom. On the Road is closer and truer to ancient literature than much of what is produced by students of the classics. While classicists worship at the feet of literary “artifacts,” draping those “texts” in stately auras and pious tears, beat literature does the unthinkable by enacting their vagabond vitality—it goes to the museum display and lifts the relic out of the glass. The moralist grovels before his heroes of old like they were angels, but this is posthumous whitewashing. Cassady and Kerouac’s reckless abandon shares something in common with the semi-outlaw conquerors who wade like Goya’s Colossus through the epics of Homer and the histories of Romans. If the results are less heroic, it is the fault of human rights law and the atom bomb, not a handful of young men dropped into the pacified world of FDR and the United Nations.

They made the literature wherever they went. They did not need an explosive plot, they provided one themselves by saying “Yes!” to every suggestion and forcing each night to its apex. Such writing could easily turn out poor if done by a lazy author who relies on shock and celebrity, or endless self-aggrandizement, but Kerouac always surprises with his strong writing and creative vocabulary, his natural instinct for the poetic gesture of word. Like this description of the Mississippi River:

On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls——bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa-vales and every cundrum clear to Three Forks where the secret began in ice. Smoky New Orleans receded on one side; old sleepy Algiers with its warped woodsides bumped us on the other.

Or this:

We had to make Frisco. The golden goal loomed ahead. Neal Louanne and I leaned forward in the front, all alone again, and zoomed. It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late after­noon of time. “There she blows!” yelled Neal.

It is a literature that is both rich poetically and monstrously simple, and can be practiced anywhere, in any age. If one’s issue is that they are too sophomoric, or too overfocused on mysticism or jazz or poverty or any dimension in particular, that is fine; the genre welcomes the injection of new material and tastes. But see to it that you do not kill the enthusiasm with your learning, and eradicate the simple, gentle, universal humanity with your niche culture, erudite or ethnic, because the reason this literature works is that it bypasses impersonality and gets to the heart of the poem despite faults—like Whitman, the beats know that the real poetry lies in the excitement of the breaking of routine thoughts, at the outset of adventure, of tender moments shared between humans, of the equal and shared ignorance we have toward to destination of all things.

Kerouac evades his own stereotype in a second way, in that he pokes fun at himself and his traveling companions for their delusions and shortcomings:

She knew Neal had something to be ashamed of, and me too, by virtue of my being with Neal, and Neal and I accepted this sadly. My mother once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness. This is true. All over the world, in the jungles of Mexico, in backstreets of Shanghai, in New York cocktail bars, hus­bands are getting drunk while the women stay home with the babies of the everdarkening future. If these men stop the machine and come home—and get on their knees—and ask for forgiveness—and the women bless them—peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse. But Neal knew this, he’d mentioned it many times.

But he always remains confident and honest, never descending into self-effacement.

On the topic of modernism—like Joyce, there is an Aristotelian quality to Kerouac’s writing. “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot,” Stephen Dedalus says at the opening of Proteus, declaring himself an artist of the real, a cataloger of the actual. The beat novelist uses his eyes to read the world, and parses the lines already there inscribed; he is a naturalist, not a magi, and attunes his senses to the quiet music that’s already here.

Stephen continues: “Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured.” There are signs, sure—it is not just Epicurean chaos, metastasizing cancerous matter—but he does not get caried away into Platonic allegory and spectral bickering. The most high-flung verbiage is only a referent to living, breathing, decaying bodies—"I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth!” I’ve read that when traveling as a Merchant Marine, Kerouac wept at the sight of Ireland, thinking of his hero James, and endeavored to treat Lowell as he treated Dublin and learn Italian like him. He considered On the Road a Ulysses: “On the Road is inspired in its entirety…. I can tell now as I look back on the flood of language. It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity.”

Perhaps it falls short of Ulysses (many things do), but the point is On the Road could have been written a million different ways, as social documentary, as memoir, coming of age, crime novel, drug literature… and while it does contain all that, the primary characteristic is a Ulysses-like collection of all the disparate ends of experience into one complete artwork: a bulging purple and red river, a heaving bevy of wine and music and vulgarity that breathes life into life when it grows stale and weary; it is inspired without being scholastic or geometrical, true without orthodoxy, transgressive without being evil… it remains one of the best literary achievements of our present world, still dominated as we are by their highways and cars and popular music. I see no path forward for writers of our day that does not include reading and re-reading the beats in search of fun and ammunition.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

—Tennyson, “Ulysses”

[This is part of a serialized novel called The Strands. Click here for chapter one]

I passed a cop car idling, lights off and unmarked, sleeping in the grassy median of Route 80 somewhere in Mississippi while flying northward at dusk. My foot settled the car down into a trot, my tingling nerves racing, half empty liquor bottles rolling on the passenger floor. “Ah well, it’s been fun.” But when the cop began to ride us, bearing his tinted windows and all-black exterior, he didn’t flash his lights. He gradually let himself be enveloped by the traffic and the dark-blue fog. We thought we were fine. Then he came speeding up the left lane, flooring past us, riding 100 yards ahead and then braking. Now we were riding him; after a minute of this he just blinkered off, let us pass him, and jumped behind us again. He’s just fucking with us now: I raised from 55 up to 68, remaining within the range of acceptability but going fast enough to get rid of the fucker. Gradually, like a bored bear, he drove off.

Maybe 10 hours later I was starting the car after pulling off a Missouri highway. Sometime after midnight we had pulled into Memphis, a mere shell of what it had been. Mostly everything was closed on the main strip and the rest of it was big installations that bore none of its blues roots. Perhaps we had gotten there too late, but either way the parties evidently end early. Six African-American gentlemen surrounded the Mercedes as we emerged from it and immediately offered us various drugs. We declined and walked along the pier slowly, gazing into the Mississippi, discussing the fall of blues and the rise of Kanye, wondering where we should go next. “St. Louis is cool,” I said. “I have cousins there.” I checked the time. “Well, it’s 2:00 AM now; I’ll call them when they wake up.” So now it was 5:00 AM and I hadn’t stopped; I had pulled over to take a picture of the sunrise, which poured itself like lava over a cornfield somewhere in the Ozarks.

Then it was about 7:00 AM and I was repeatedly dozing off, swerving, and then sharply pulling myself awake as I heard the divots in the median rumble. My cousin Windom answered the phone: “Hullo?” I doubted he still had my number; I had to get his from Facebook, scrolling on his info section as I was cutting in between cars. “Winny, it’s Finn. I’m about hour from St. Louis, on a road trip, was wondering if you’re around.” There was a pause, then he started laughing. “You crazy mothurfuckur. Yeah, I’m aroun’. I mean, I’m workin’, but I’ll be off for lunch ‘round twelve. You can stop by mah apartment. Wayne’s there, he ain’t workin’, lazy bum!”

Windom and Wayne were the perfect picture of older and younger brother: Windom always setting the trends, deciding what activity they’d take up—video games, skateboarding, snowboarding, playing instruments, building vast social lives—but Wayne always besting him, rivaling his elder with the ferocity of a rebel. But Windom found somewhere Wayne couldn’t follow him when he threw aside all his pop culture in favor of hard work. He began by mowing lawns of ballfields for a summer, found more work through his boss, and slowly started adopting the traits of his crews: first the accent and the clothes and the music, and then the blue-collar skill. He was midway through his twenties now and had decently submerged himself in the west to the point where his Jersey roots were soundly buried, almost untraceable except for his Italian dark eyebrows on his otherwise red head.

I called Wayne, who indeed was still asleep, but by the time we got to their condo—one unit of a dozen all connected as one building, and there were five of these vinyl-sided buildings with parking lots running parallel—Windom had gotten Wayne up and he was there yelling to us from the third story balcony, with a joint in one hand a bowl of cereal in the other. We parked right under Wayne’s waving arm in the visitor spot and climbed the staircase to meet him.

An AR-15 casually sat on the countertop, along with grinders and little specks of weed littering the white faux-marble. On the coffee table were handguns and bullets strewn haphazardly, right beneath flowerpots their mom bought as housewarming gifts. “Yah, what can you do, Winny’s ridiculous,” Wayne said. “Thinks he’s all country now. Poser.” Wayne started coming up with things to do, like hit the skatepark or daydrink at his friend’s apartment in St. Louis, but all I could think about were roadsigns, which flooded at me as I rested on his couch and slid into sleep.

When I awoke, Windom was home and I joined him on the balcony. Alexandre and Wayne, also waking up from naps, followed. “So how’d you guys meet?” he asked us. I began to give the long version, but Alexandre cut it short: “We started talkin’ on 4chan, popped some molly een Québec, and now we’re here.” They laughed. “Fuckin’ love it!”

Wayne put on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. We watched it in a trance-like state, an ode to our trip and a portent of what was to come. Windom brought out more of his guns; I picked one up, swinging it to my sight as Alexandre happened to pass by. “Ay wat de fuck! You could’ve kill mee!” Wayne got a text from one of his old skater friends who was now a farmer, inviting us to his bonfire for some hot dogs and beers. Wayne drove us in his truck through old country roads, listening to midwestern screamo, reminiscing about when we went to Warped Tour together in middle school. “Remember Windom’s friend Leo?” I asked, “That guy was funny. Alexandre, he was this tall lanky hippie Venezuelan guy, looking like Geroge Harrison with his mane, super spaced out as if he was always on acid, always cracking jokes, who hung out with us for like a week and a half when my family visited them back in like 2006.” I thought about his dozens of stories of hooking up with girls, wearing his studded belt and skinny jeans, blood on himself from jumping fences and fighting in brawls at parties, getting into trouble every day. Wayne brought up the time they pretended the cops were after them and had us hide at 3 o’clock in the morning. “Whatever happened to him?” “I think he’s in rehab now. He got hooked on coke, now he’s all born again because his mom’s all about that shit.” I remembered how he had shown me LA Woman for the first time, along with M.I.A. and 3OH!3, and how my dad and him bonded over Grateful Dead’s American Beauty. Leo, Windom, and Wayne were the first people I met who had Facebooks; I remember how they and their friends would have parties, always at each other’s mcmansions in the St. Louis suburbs, and upload 100s of pictures each time. Somehow they always seemed to learn of trends faster than we on the east coast did: South Park, Halo, iPods, Lil Wayne, YouTube, MySpace. But maybe it made sense—as the St. Louis Arch was the gateway to the west, it was also the passageway of Hollywood to the staid and conservative east.

There was something wholly different about life out here, unlike the sports-dominated hierarchies back home and the ubiquitous fear toward male fashion, especially metalcore fashion; although kids in the older grades wore it, and I did, and received ridicule from “friends” for it. There was less stiltedness here. Or maybe there was just the same amount, and kids like Windom and Leo would just choose to start fights over it. But then again, I did that too, and it didn’t end up in my favor; only when I reconciled with their beer-chugging, shorts-wearing, salesmen-futures did I fit in, for that short time at the end of middle school and early high school, before I threw all that away to read books about the big bang and our origins as apes, in order to argue with my peers better about atheism, until I learned how to win arguments and then, in my solitude, sent myself fully reeling into the abyss of terror that was planted in me like a seed ever since my dad told me about the death of God when I was eight. All this I talked to Alexandre about as we waited for Wayne to pick up a 12-pack halfway to his friend’s house. He listened attentively and with concern, noting it, interjecting only to ask pertinent questions, bookmarking the discussion for when we’d have more time as we watched Wayne walk across the parking lot toward the truck.

It was a decent-sized crowd when we got there and as we ate the crowd thinned to just a handful of stragglers, only the close friends. By that time it was dark and the fire was a giant engulfing circle, just absolutely blazing with so much cardboard and wood and random debris. We were seated around this beast and surrounding us, about 10 yards back, were rows of corn stretching in every direction. Directly behind us was a dirt path that snaked up a hill to their house which rested under a bunch of big trees, tire swings under them and pickup trucks parked all over the grass. For hours we talked about life and the universe, Alexandre and I entertaining them with stories and theories, by turns cracking them up and leaving them silent. I cannot remember what was discussed, only that it covered everything, from pop music and celebrity news to the theory of infinite universes and the big crunch.

They liked us enough that the next day they invited us, without Wayne, who had a job interview, to come explore a cave they had found in the woods. They picked us up early in the morning. Practicing hair of the dog, we worked our way through a 12-pack on the ride over. With buzz cuts, sunglasses, and cowboy boots they went paratrooping down a chasm with a rope tied to a tree and around their waists.

We followed them in and immediately discovered the shell of a dead turtle and another two still alive. “Dude holy shit, we gotta save these guys,” one of them said. “On our way back out I’m taking them with us.” After passing through the narrow passageway the ceiling opened up into a massive cavern, sounds of bats chirping, dark as night; one of them lit a flashlight to reveal stalactites dripping into pools on smooth stone floor.

We climbed all the way down into one ravine, went into another passageway, and army crawled until it got too sketchy: the ceiling and the floor were about to sandwich us in. “Ay, fuck dhis shiet! I’m not getting stuck, dat’s fuckeeng terrifaiying,” Alexandre yelled, his accent reverberating off the cave walls. “Yooo, this guy’s hilarrriuus, nah but I agree whichu mahnn, we ain’t goin’ no farther.” We climbed back the other way and went around a spiral staircase formed by the earth mother herself, which led to a nook-spire in the uppermost corner. With the flashlight we could see scrawlings on the walls; the typical “billybob was here,” or two initials with hearts, but some had dates: ’91, ’82, ’74, ’59… we kept reading until we discovered a few dated to the Civil War. “Holy fucking shitttt, that’s fucking aweeesome bro.” Soldiers camped out, maybe on scouting missions, holed up in here with their rifles, carving with bayonet or bowie knife… or maybe it was teenagers messing with people, but I prefer to believe. The prose of the notes was too stately.

The spelunkers, turtles in hand, dropped us at the condo. We could already hear the music from outside. Wayne’s band Joseph Biden and the Robinettes were practicing their psychedelic jams, shaking the walls. “What’s up guys! Sorry can’t hear you!” Wayne took a long hit of a bong and continued to drag his hands Iommi-like on his guitar. “And just when you think you’re out of town, Miser-ree pulls you back in….” The kids there refer to Missouri as “Mis-er-y;” Wayne had previously told us about his plan to move to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the last refuge of all millennial stupor. I tried to talk him out of it. In between sets he informed us he was accepted at his interview for a pizza delivery position. Just then I recognized that LEO was playing the drums. “Dude, what’s up man! How have you been!” “Duuuude… Fiiiinn… I feel like I’m time travelin’ right now, mannnn.” Wayne whispered that he occasionally gets let out of rehab, and the other guys had brought him along—but that Windom and him weren’t on good terms. Just then Windom pulled in the driveway, at 4 P.M. sharp, after a long day of posting Instagram videos of his job site. “What da fuck’s goin on in ‘ere?!” he yelled up the stairs. Wayne shot back: “Windom, I tol you, band practice is on every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and sometimes Mondays and Tuesdays!” “Get da fuck outta here… is that Leo? You goddam—” All of a sudden they started wrestling, drumsticks and measuring tapes flying everywhere. Wayne broke it up and then started fighting with Windom himself. We jumped in, stopping the killing of Abel, and when a momentary calm came over as Leo and the Robinettes drove off in a gaseous plume we decided we’d say our goodbyes.

***

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The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. Alexandre asked if any /mu/tants wanted to meet up in Chicago and received a single reply: “get the fuck out of my state.” “Mayn, fuck dese guys,” he said. “Done with dhis website.” He put his tablet down. “So, Finn, you were sayeeng, about atheeism. I was tdhinkin about eet and… waell, Neech, or as you say, and properly, Neecha, said eet best. Yes, as I’ve said, I’ve been reading heem again, dhe ones you recommended—” he reached for a book “—'Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply?’ … Let me skip some shiet… ‘Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths’ … skippeeng all dat… ‘Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.’ ... ‘But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?’” In relation to what you were sayeeng, I was thinking dhis “abyss” you mention, ees but dhe aftereffect of all dhese logical errors we still maek when we consider nature even scientifically… our atheeism ess a Christianeesm, as I’ve always sed, and we haven’t become atheistic enough.”

“Yes, yes, this is classic Nietzsche. But the question is our response to this epiphany… Nietzsche wants the response to be one of enthusiasm, because he believes that all the world-weariness of cosmic pessimism is due to the undestroyed scaffolding of the afterlife… which if exploded would release us from the weight of the question mark that there could be something other than life, and life would them be revealed as the elixir of energy a thousandfold, infinite-fold.”

“Indeed.”

“But, Nietzsche himself did not escape the trap of constantly talking about this realization… insofar as we are still talking about metaphysics and the overcoming of metaphysics, we have not overcome metaphysics… We have to move forward into a discourse that leaves these topics utterly behind us, and embark on the great works… the rearing of the overman—in art, in a new empire.”

“Yees, I agree, but dhis ‘overman’ I cannot help but feel ees.. just a lore, an “extraneous piety” as you say, and ees eetself another fragment of dhe transcendent. For everyone knows dhat all we really haev is pleassur.” He turned to me in a look of satisfaction.

“But I cannot escape the notion that “pleasure” is a clever illusion, “designed” by natural selection to fool us into caring about the goings-on of petty mankind to reproduce the genes. What work is there to be done on top of these pathetic goings-on, the rigmarole of passions and societal mating? … What is the Beethovian or Shakespearean excess and how do we commit ourselves fully to it, removing from it the dependence on scripture and gods?”

“Explain a little more after dhis.” We pulled into a rest stop, a liquor store on the edge of Chicago, the city twinkling below us in softest midnight. “Give me de largest, cheapest quantitie of rum you haev.” The two Indians behind the counter just stared at Alexandre in confusion. I started cracking up. They resolved the impasse by pointing to a large bottle of Captain Morgan behind them. We bought another carton’s worth of Camel Royals at a Walgreens nearby and kept going.

“I feel that “nihilism” is objectively true,” I began. “The emotions are erroneous, and only serve to trick one back into living, which only brings on more pain.” I went on more about my history with atheism, my dad telling me about it, my comment to him in a lobby of a mall movie theater at 10 years old about how I chose to stick with Christianity since all countries that are successful are Christian; how he nodded with deepest respect at me drawing my own conclusion; how I experienced a panic attack during Spiderman 3 and he rushed me out and, as I stared at the reels of the film spinning behind the projector, I told him about my rushing thoughts, me thinking it was just the effect of the loudness of the movie. Later, in middle school, YouTube debates on atheism captivated me, and had me testing them out on my mom and peers, leading me to need to figure out details on the big bang and evolution in order to fire back against their retorts; this sent me down the path of science; my dad’s view that humans are but apes fighting over bananas coloring how I saw kids fighting over a ball at gym, everything in human life a façade for the evolutionary process, pointlessly repeating in a runaway chemical reaction; the only noble life being the scientific one, as all the popular atheists loved to instill: at the bottom of science is the worship of great scientists, a mere prejudice; my failure to improve at math in time—and my lagging interest in the actual procedure of science in favor of the metaphysical questions—led to art, first as an anesthetic in the mode of music and then as a great boon in the form of the great philosophers and poets of the modern crisis like Kafka, Joyce, and Nietzsche. Alexandre received all this with great interest, and asked me to elaborate again on my picture of nihilism.

I continued, the car getting closer and closer to the downtown of Chicago:

“All of human civilization rests on agriculture, which allows for the division of labor, but that only arose 12,000 years ago, which is at most a tenth of the time Homo Sapiens have walked upon the earth; and that 200,000-year span of time is a speck against the two million years of existence that manlike organisms have been around. Everything we know about “culture,” “society,” “pleasure,” this is but a 12,000-year-long oddity, an aberration or momentary game, farming solely the result of the earth’s global temperature matching favorably to the biology of Homo Sapiens and nothing more; and this temperature, like all things, will fade back into the 3.7 billion year wave of life’s continuous playful but aimless push forward. The earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, and is fated to be incinerated by the sun’s expansion after it converts all of its hydrogen into helium in another 5 billion, making the earth as we now know her a middle-aged mother glumly veering her vision toward death. If the sun’s expansion into a red giant doesn’t swallow the earth in flames, then the heat from its expanded form will dry the earth and the remnants of life—if it has not yet succumbed to atmospheric terrors like those of Venus with its 600-mph hurricanes and 900-degree temperatures—will burn off into space. All that we know and see in our world, all the events of history, the triumphs of art and science, the progress of man, all the orders and tasks in our daily employment, all the bursts of happiness, of sorrow and of passion, the seasons and mountains themselves occurred in the obscure outskirts of a galaxy 100,000 light-years—9.4 quintillion kilometers—across. One hundred billion stars dangle against the black hole in the center, a swirl of dancers in crushing silence.”

We could see the Sears Tower now, peering over the glow of the lesser stars.

“Mankind will have occupied a blip, our religious fictions a yelp into the void, “God—a shout in the street,” unremembered and unimportant. Our plans and aspirations seem comically worthless beside these truths; the drive to go on therefore weakens considerably. Our grand concepts of design and fate, of God and order, of religion and purpose are mere by-products of human logical categories and nothing more, and all of these things, not existing unfathomably above us, will sink eternally backwards, into the history of existence, buried with our quickly eroding bones.”

And now the exit signs showing streets instead of towns.

“This universe, entirely the result of a subatomic reaction 13.7 billion years ago, a quantum fluctuation in a vacuum, propelled only by further reactions to this disturbance—earthly existence just a ripple gently undulating upon a reverberating current—shall be consumed by entropy and the accelerating expansion of galaxies away from galaxies, and stars away from stars, and finally particles away from particles. Once more, after a few trillion years, the universe will be so rapidly expanding away from itself that all will become again the void it came out of.”

“…I tdhink I know de perfect way to answer dhis. Pleasurr was dhe wrong word. My father puts it well, as he calls eet, ‘Nietzsche in one sentence’: Nature produces forms, and man interprets dhe forms according to his nature, whether life-affirming or decadent. Now, one ees a manifold, as Nietzsche never tires of saying.”

“…So, there are parts of us that are life-affirming, and parts of us that are decadent.”

“Yees. And what is decadent wants to interpret dhe world as decadent. It takes scientific fact and casts a negative glow over it, deciding to add qualifiers dhat sully dhe whole.”

“Like when nihilists say, just atoms. Whence this “just”?”

“ExACHTly. As you say, he who ees ugly sees dhe world as ugly, incomplete, erroneous. Dhis also applies to so-called scientific fact.”

Like a lightning flash, I thought of all humanity as levels of high viscous fluid, of all different kinds, the two main trends being those which drag us down to muck and lotus-eating, and those which push upwards into genius and the energetic. Scientism, low-brow atheism, Wagnerism, “liberalism” as Alexandre was wont to call it, on the one hand, and perspectivism, paganism, Homer, Raphael, Mozart on the other. With thunder rumbling through my soul, we walked through the streets of Chicago at 5 A.M., lit by the tangerine shimmering of streetlights under the metro tracks.

We came upon a statue of Demeter, with fall harvest at her side, and a McDonald’s sign on the other…

… And then upon a red postmodern monstrosity proudly looping itself over itself, shooting to the sky then falling to the earth…

Greek columns stretching to the sky, supertall skyscrapers beaming their confident splendor like the visors of medieval knights…

We drank in these epiphanies in awe, chainsmoking Camels, passing brownbaggers numb to their mumbling.

As the sun rose, we got tired, so we drove the Mercedes to a vacant lot and got some sleep. Before midday we awoke and set out again.

One of the first things we saw was an advertisement for a show, Too Hot to Handel, a jazz-inspired rendition of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah oratorio, showing a portly jazzman belting in a velvet suit. “Holy shiet, dhat’s so fucking stupid,” Alexandre said, snapping a picture with his tablet. “God, dhat’s so fucking dumb. Too hot to handel, hahaha.”

Surging with energy still, I didn’t think much of this, and began to rant about the greatness of Alexander, Caesar, Louis XIV: how this age was too meagre to lend it credence, and how Alexandre shouldn’t mix his wish to be “contemporary” or timely with succumbing to it; instead we should will so much that we ourselves become the standard of what is timely, forcing the age to adjust to us. Time is not our friend, I said, and we must batter against this world, the world of Too Hot to Handel, with a superhuman will, kicking over what is already teetering; this is what I admire in the Norse, I explained, that they relentlessly attacked the medieval Christian world from the outside, until they remade it in their image, with Norman France and England. We ought to view ourselves as outsiders, not climbers looking to become insiders. This gusto was uncharacteristic after my prior long night of the soul, but as Delmore Schwartz said, as quoted in Lou Reed’s recent review of Yeezus, “manic depressiveness is like brown hair.”

The Chicago Library looked magisterial in the zenithine light, reflecting hot off its glass mosaic above us. “What I’m saying, is that the only world I can live in is one in which chaos breaks out from all sides, and we lead armies upon the power-centers of the world, and establish an aristocracy in the wake of its vanquishment in which music like Locatelli’s L'arte del violino is patroned, and pool parties at palaces that look like the Getty villa are endless.” “You are speaking dhe fuckeeng Logos right now.”

Blood in the streets of the town of Chicago / Blood will be born in the birth of a nation. As I listened to Alexandre, having received my vision well, rant tirelessly against liberalism, we came across a gigantic fountain right beside the waters of Lake Michigan. He swerved his monologue into it: “Wow, look at dat… fountains are a gigantic fuck you to Africa.” He took a picture. “There ees an anti-liberAlness suffused within such edifiices! Eet expends energy, and reSources, without a care to dhe toils of muttering rabbles. Fountains are Nietzschean.”

We left Chicago in mild disappointment, the churning lights and sirens of Yeezus blasting—I am a God / Hurry up with my damn massage / Hurry up with my damn ménage / Get the Porsche out the damn garage—searching for campgrounds to avoid motel fees. One appeared on the screen called “Cliffside Park,” just like my grandparents’ town, where I’d live for my college years. To add a layer, it was in “Racine” County, the best poet in French by Alexandre’s estimation. Good omens. The sun was hastening into the earth as we rolled across the border into Wisconsin, the concrete arterial splaying of Chicago giving way to hopeful green stuff woven.

It was late when we arrived; no one was in the ticket window at the front gate, there was just a small sign saying you should put $20 into a box in order to get a site. Instead we drove through and found an empty one; “as President Truman said, we must cut down on the cost of living.”

After eating some dinner, we got to discussing Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence by way of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. “Mayn, you’ve got to see dhis film,” Alexandre said with emphasis. “Eet’s metafiction dhat erupts between his films, he has to make his next film and he doesn’t know what to make eet on so he makes eet about himself, his lusts for dhe women of his life, until in a dream dhey all come to him on a beach, real maternal like… and dhen, with dhe big budget set of his next film, some sci-fi movie, laid out in a big field, all dhe cast comes out and forms a big ring of dancing, and dhey run in dhis ring at dhe demise of all woes and all constraints, eet’s dhe fucking reeng of recurrence, mayn, eet’s pure Nietzsche.”

We went for a stroll down a path in the wood; it opened up to a vast panorama of Lake Michigan. I recalled something about Nietzsche’s stays at Sils Maria, where he wrote many of his later works: a lake in Switzerland, gorgeous and heroic like a Norse god’s domain. He would hike three hours each morning and it was there that he espied the “pyramidal stone,” a pointed boulder on the shore of the lake, which for some reason immediately impressed onto him the notion, and truth, of the eternal recurrence, the infinite repetition of each human life.

“Heidegger says somewhere dhat eet ees true as a psychological test, to measure your ability to affirm Being, but dhat eet’s a disaster as a physical doctrine. But we know Nietzsche meant it dat way,” Alexandre said. “It’s of no use just as a psychological test,” I answered. “ ‘Life Affirmation’ as a way-of-life, a form of mindfulness, I’m beginning to realize, is just cheap paperback self-help at Barnes & Noble. That’s not Nietzsche. We must follow what he says about politics and moreso about science: we must accept that he thought philosophy was entirely conditioned by biology, or physiology… Nihilism for him is a pathology.. he essentially pathologizes the history of philosophy. The eternal recurrence, rendered cosmological and physical, is life, and noble natures approve of this, its deepest truth, just as they affirm its slightest surface appearances, while the diseased want off the ride as soon as possible, and would be crushed under the weight of the infinitely conditioned, an eternity of their self-same life, themselves just a piece or shard of fate.”

As we walked along its shore I took up some Whitman: “The smoke of my own breath; Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine… A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. … I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world …. I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun; I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. … I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love; If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.” Then I switched to Howl: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the poet! Holy the asshole!” We had a discussion of whether we should turn back now or keep going. “The car’s fine now,” I said. “Let’s go to California.” “Yees, yess!” Alexandre bellowed. “Maybe we’ll stop in Denver,” I said, “and then make our way through the desert.” “Where will dat bring us?” “San Francisco.”

***

Driving through Wisconsin the next day and the whole state smelled like cow shit. We stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch and to charge phones, but we decided against spending money on Big Macs and to have some of the MREs Red left in the trunk instead. We sat on a grassy hill on the outer rim of the parking lot, complaining of the modern American fast-food landscape. Alexandre railed against America as global exporter of garbage in the mode of Montherlant or Céline. “But it isn’t the fault of America,” I said, “you can’t blame it on America, it’s not of the culture, it’s solely from modernity.” “Eet may not be America at eet’s best, but eet ees purely an American invention,” Alexandre answered. “No one else could’ve come up with dis shiet.”

Several hours later we got to Des Moines… “Jack Kerouac said dhe prettiest girls in dhe world live in Des Moines, but eet looks like shiet to me.” We saw nothing but a sports stadium, parking lots, fast-food stores, and nobody, not a soul, outside. It was clear that the America of the ‘40s described in On the Road, an open, jovial terrain of people hitchhiking, popping out kids, eating at cheap diners, wandering into any city and picking up odd jobs to get by, had been replaced with a cold, closed, repressive corporate state where workplaces were hard to come by and tried to trap you in place once you got one, taxed and insuranced and mortgaged up the wazoo, creating an atmosphere of fear and dismay, not just in the cloistered suburbs but even out here in the wide open plains where jalopies full of roughs once cruised. No longer eateries of beans and pie, now just Subways and Hardee’s; no longer picking cotton and selling pressure cookers door to door, or using your GI bill to buy a house and raise some kids, but payrolled and taxed employees working for Walmart and Walgreens, unable even to obtain the land they walked on, eternally homeless and begging for respite. At one gas station a guy in his mid-30s rolled up in a rickety work van; he observed us and asked where we were from, where we were going. “You guys are bad ass,” he said, “like a traveling band.” “You can do it too,” I said to him. “Nah man, I’m stuck with this,” he pointed to his vehicle, “and a shitty job to go with it. I’ve made some mistakes and have ended up stuck. I accept it, but man I envy y’all’s youth and get up and go.”

We stopped at a lot nearby to cook cans of soup on the engine of the car, placing them directly on top and letting the heat work through it. There’s a free stove in every car, no need for hotels. A few minutes later, a cop pulled up to question us. “What are you boys up to?” “Just eating some food,” I said, both of us with cans in hand spooning out some chicken noodle soup. “Oh yeah? Any reason you’re here? Where are you heading to?” “May I just ask,” Alexandre spoke up, “for what reason are you stopping us?” “Got a call of suspicious activity.” We looked around: no one in view, just us on this lunar crag of a hill, treeless and sunless, nothing except a broken-down gas station at the far end of the pavement. “Alright, well, we’ll be on our way, just going to finish eating.” He grimaced, sidled back into his car and slowly drove off. “What de fuck ees with dhis shiet, is eet now illegal to leave your house? I thought dhis was de land of de free?”

The sound of Vivaldi’s La Follia chattered the car windows as we shot across the pitch-black highways in the voidswelling night.

***

I’m driving somewhere in Nebraska, it’s one in the morning and everything is black around me except for the ten feet of headlights in front and the occasional tractor-trailer that chugs by like a whale in the deep; Alexandre is asleep as usual and there are Red Bull cans all around his feet as well as French and German novels, clothes strewn around, the golden ornament from Québec rolling back as I brake before hitting 100. I notice fog in the distance, a heavy fog of beige: it takes me a few seconds to realize that it’s a singular object, moving, connected to the winds that have been blowing on the car for some time—a tornado. I freak out in silence. I’ve no way to tell if I’m driving away from it or into it but by the fact that there’s no one in my lanes and frequent pick-up trucks speeding in the opposite direction I assume I’m fucked, or almost fucked if I end up parallel to it. But the parallel idea is obliterated when the road curves left, leading straight for the swirling mass whose details are now flashing themselves against lightning’s brightness. I’m pressed-up against the wheel, sweating, shaking my free leg, mumbling shit, fuck, shit as I open the window all the way and throw my cigarette out, listening to the rattling underneath, the winds cracking, rain falling down faster and heavier, my wipers rubbing,… I see a RAMADA advert on a highway sign and take the exit, parking the car without turning it off.

***

We stopped at a gas station in Ovid, Colorado, early in the morning. We had slept in the parking lot of the hotel, only for a few hours. There were cacti and the store looked like an old saloon; men on Harley Davidsons, their wives on back, pulled into the station. One of the ladies gave me thumbs up, saying, “All the way from Jersey?!” We ate some breakfast and got back on the road, making our way to Denver.

Alexandre has this ornery aspect about him where he sometimes immediately rejects whatever you throw at him. “You know when you were askeeng, what did dhose computer gaymer autist kids, talking about de son of de lottery lady at Floyd’s, do before de internet?” Alexandre asked. “Dhis is what dey fuckeeng did,” he said, holding up his copy of Joyce’s Ulysse, French translation. We laughed. “Yeah, but there’s something soft and lyrical, and stately, stately plump but stately, about Joyce,” I said, leading him to agree but slightly losing him. “But Finnegans Wake… sometimes I feel like he was straight up being lame with some of the jokes in that book. I mean it’s like Too Hot to Handel.” “Wat do you mean?” “Like the excessive and corny puns. Y’know?” “No. I haev no idea what yuor talking about,” he laughed to himself. “Like I’m saying sometimes he goes too much on it. He’s more than permitted to have humor, all the layers of humor he could want, but instead he spoils it for this low-hanging fruit that, like you said about Too Hot to Handel, is just dumb.” “Wat does some stupid ass shit liek saying “Too hot to Handel” haev to do wit a maesterwurk about Vico and Bruno like FinnAgan’s waek?” “I told you about the Vico and Bruno aspect to the Wake… you’re just quoting myself back to me.” “Am I? I don’t remembur.” These episodes were torturous. I said something I didn’t even agree with, just to charitably save the flow of the conversation—granted, an error. So I accepted the ragging. And yet he knew exactly what I was talking about, and was simply choosing to trip me over into it, the opposite of saving face. He would do this to anyone, any time he felt sadistic, his patience wearing thin with the heat of the day, as we saw plenty of times with Henri and as I’d see many times in the future. It was this discordance of personality, sometimes so exuberant and sometimes making you regret even engaging with the snot, that made it impossible to ever feel at ease around him. And this unease made it so that, more often than not, I found myself being preemptively rude to him, which would damage our time together and would sacrifice time we could have spent working on the Great Work, the literature of the centuries. But over time, I learned how to harness this power, unleashing him on people I deemed to be enemies, and loved every moment of watching their previously impenetrable citadels of sanctimoniousness get smashed down by the psychic torment of the enfant terrible.

***

Denver, another disappointment—we didn’t explore too much, but what we saw was the same as elsewhere, parking lots and stadiums. It would have been better if we could go to bars, but it certainly wouldn’t have been beat pool halls. What I liked about Colorado was the variety of climate: at one point, cruising up in the winding ways of a mountain, the car’s thermometer read below freezing—and just a few hours later we were back in the desert.

Alexandre told me about his childhood. His mother had him reading Baudelaire and Poe by age five. He would bring the books with him to school and the teachers sent concerned notes to the principal about such material being indecent for a young child. He would act up incessantly and was banished to the special education classes. “I was with de speds reading Baudelaire in dhe back of dhe room.” He continued to act up—he got into fights with other students; he was kicked out of a private school, and then another private school, forcing his parents to send him to the only school left, a rough public one in the inner city.

When he expressed interest in philosophy at 14, his father brought him three books: Spinoza’s Ethica, Lacan’s Écrits, and a third I’ve forgotten, and told him to read those and let him know when he finished.

He was a normal kid who played MW2 in middle school, but in high school he picked up his study of classical music again—his parents had him take lessons in violin and piano as a child—and from there he began getting interested in high culture. Henri had previously told me that Alexandre, when he knew him at the second private school, was just a regular 14-year-old kid who smoked pot and listened to Nirvana. When they reconnected some two years later, he was dressing like Alfred de Musset. Alexandre went into detail about this, describing the punk kids he was friends with at the public school, how they’d sit under overpasses smoking pot, until his parents pushed him away from them. He wrote an original composition and got it performed by a chamber orchestra when he was 15. He had taught himself English by playing Runescape and then by using 4chan, which he began to use more when he found out about /mu/ and /lit/. “I thought, perhaps, something of worth could be found dhere; and I was right. I’m so glad we are friends, mayn,” he said, and motioned out to the window, “Dis is de fuckeeng greatest thing.”

He also told me of a girl who broke up with him at 16; it shattered his heart. “I cheated on her so many teimes, and eventually she found out and left me. I tried to apologize countless nights, I wrote her letters and professed myself to be a worfless wretch unworthy of her love, but she didn’t even grant me dat, she just wanted to remain friends, and never considered me again.”

***

After eating some burgers at a truck stop we took off into Wyoming, not the Wyoming of snowcapped mountains and verdant fields but the southern Wyoming of the brutal desert. The signs proudly brandished an “80 MPH” speed limit as the tractor trailers whooshed past us, bearing those Wyoming license plates with the cowboy silhouette on a bucking horse waving his hat. We chased the trucks and made record time. Turning on The Doors’ self-titled, we listened as the eerie organ and down-tuned ghostly guitar crackled through the speakers. Take the highway to the end of the night: end of the night, end of the night…

I asked Alexandre to give me some French lessons. “Okay, we weel start by conjugating a basic verb, être.”

“Etre? Like Being?”

“ehhrhtre. Rapeat after me. J’suis?”

“J’suis.”

“Tu es?”

“Tu es.”

“Il est?”

“Il est.”

“Nous sommes?”

“Nous sommes.”

“Vous êtes?”

“Vous êtes.”

“Ils sont?”

“Ils sont.”

“Okay, now from the top.”

“J’suis, tu es, il est, nous… nous sui?” “Nous sommes.” “Nous sommes, vous.. vous etes.. Il ont.”

We carried on like this through several verbs, losing track of the time and our surroundings. On the threshold of total blackness—there are no lights on Wyoming highways—we noticed the tank was less than a quarter full. “Ah shit, we gotta get gas. We’ll stop at the next station,” I said.

Take a journey to the, bright, midnight: end of the night, end of the night…

Twenty minutes passed and there was nothing. We were looking for signs, any signs, and there was nothing but the quiet desolate walls of rock in this valley of sandy stone. I pulled into the town of Arlington, with a population of twenty-five; at the intersection we saw a small rusty sign reading “NO SERVICES” with arrows pointing in both directions. To the right, there was a barbed wire fence, behind which we could see a field of blinking red lights, like some Area 51 military base.

We drove back onto the main highway in silence, the children within us frightened, watching a sole truck fly past us roaring into the dark. “Dhis is de End of de Night,” Alexandre said.

Reeaaalms of bliss, reeeaaalms of liiight…

“Mayn, you should put it in neutral to save gas.” I knocked it out of drive during the descent of a steep slope, letting the car roll down into the bottom of a valley, and then using the momentum to climb the next peak.

Some are booorn to sweeet deliiight.

One hill was so large that I quickly slid back into drive and gunned the gas to make the ridge. Beyond the precipice there was a long, empty road, winding into a fleckless purity.

Some are born to the endless night. End of the NIIIIGHTTT...

Rolling up and down the hills of the west on our last fumes, hungry and exhausted, we wondered if our fortune had finally been drained. I had no cell service, and was doubtful trucks going 80 would even be able to stop for us, let alone not kill us if we got stuck on the side of the road. The absence of streetlights seemed to guarantee this.

Like an oasis of oil, we saw a golden-red sea shell peek out of the black sea. We whipped into the parking lot. No attendants; the store was shut down in these early hours, but luckily the pump—there was only one—was still running.

We took off with a full tank, seeing the clock read 2 A.M., and I drove a bit before peeling off to a truck stop. Twenty tractor trailers all sat with their lights off, like dinosaurs slumbering. I pulled in some yards behind them and went to fish my knife out the trunk in case anyone fucked with us. “Uhh… what are you doing wit dat?” Alexandre asked timidly. I looked at him, not even making the connection at first, then seeing it from his perspective: ‘I’m in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country, the friend I brought with me has left, and now this guy I met on 4chan is pulling a knife out with no witnesses around. Is this how I die?’ Concern flashed over my face before softening to sympathy. “Ah man, just making sure we’re safe. Don’t worry about it.” I flipped my seat back, put my jacket under my head—knife underneath—and went to sleep.

Next Chapter

When in the course of human events, it becomes evident that men can no longer be considered equal; that, because of the dissolving of a mysterious quality of grace, a species of one-time gentlemen trifurcates into a tier of tyrants, a tier of those clinging to what’s left of the middle class, and a lowly band of rabble, we find ourselves asking, out of a need to stop these people from bothering us, where they all came from.

Who are the rabble? Are the rabble simply the poor? The word has this connotation. And yet, as experience loves to remind us, there is plenty of rabblement going on among those with wads of cash. In our world today, it’s rabble on top, rabble on the bottom, rabble all the way down.

You know who they are. They never stop rabbling. It’s unmistakable. They make rude comments without provocation and get mad if you get mad. They fake tremendous incompetence as a weapon against responsibility. They forget to pay you back and then produce an itemized receipt of what you owe them on Venmo like they’re a CPA. They spend several years philandering and then ask for your salary. They do not return their grocery carts. They nearly kill children at crosswalks as they speed around cars to get to a red light first. They use Klarna to finance their burritos and trigger a widespread economic collapse by defaulting. They cough on you and get you sick, and get mad if you cough near them. They cite the ethereal bonds of “friendship” like they are Sir Galahad to explain why you cannot get rid of them. The rabble is a demonic hermaphrodite, both toxically masculine and toxically feminine: brutishly offensive and prone to hysterical fits of indignation if their behavior is dished back to them. They are all around us, and ceaselessly prevent my brilliant readers from enjoying their profound thoughts in peace!

Hegel knew all about the rabble (in his language, Pöbel), and provided a scientific account of their origins in a section of his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel thought populations become “rabble” not by lack of wealth alone but by the humiliating lack of an esteemed station in society, which leads them to shirk basic decency. “Rabble” is a category for those who do not feel they have a spot in the archetypes of a Fisher-Price neighborhood mat. At the outset of this section he issued a warning about the consequences of poverty:

It is not just starvation which is at stake here; the wider viewpoint is the need to prevent a rabble from emerging (§ 240)

Hegel then noted that ancient Athens required its citizens to give an account of the way they support themselves. Despite modern states’ tendency to view this as a private matter, Hegel insisted that societies maintain the right to guard against the destruction of individual and family livelihoods, often caused by their “extravagance,” because the prospect of a rabble threatens the very structure of society itself. Society in fact has a duty to prevent this from happening.

The formation of a rabble does not occur solely in the reduction of a segment of society to a state of poverty, but rather in the stripping away of the feeling of dignity from that segment, specifically the “feeling of right, integrity [Rechtlichkeit], and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity and work” (§ 244).

In so many words, the rabble feel that they do not have a role, and, in this state of deprivation of ethereal justification, they seek revenge on society by “acting out,” parodying it in various ways: crime, pointless rebellion, vulgarity, and the iconoclastic carnivalesque. Like the “lazzaroni of Naples,” a rabble which is dependent on social welfare can acquire a disposition of frivolity and laziness, which begets an “evil” character of insufficient honor derived from the inability to work yet with an accompanying demand that they be given a livelihood. While lacking the means for subsistence in the state of nature cannot be redeemed for a protest, in society it is an altogether different manner, as a class can assert some kind of injustice has been inflicted on them. And they are not altogether wrong.

When an economy is unregulated, it will inexorably seek to “expand its population and industry,” one by funneling a vast association of laborers and consumers into a single general market and two by greatly multiplying the “means of satisfying these needs.” This “twofold universality” leads to an increase in the accumulation of wealth, which is after all the purpose of economy, and yet this process incurs a “specialization and limitation of particular work” and with that the “dependence and want of the class which is tied to such work.” This vast general proletariat, unmoored from the anchors of traditional professions and regional culture, is thrown into a state of numbness toward civil society because they are no longer able to enjoy its spiritual advantages and its wider freedoms have been restricted to the propertied class (§ 243). These “contingent physical factors and circumstances based on external conditions” result in poverty (§ 241). In the condition of poverty, a class will see the dissolution of “the bond of the family” as well as the deprivation of “the ability to acquire skills and education in general, as well as of the administration of justice, health care, and often even of the consolation of religion” (§ 241).

Hegel granted that men will naturally rise to unequal stations in society, becoming sorted into various Estates—today we call them “industries”—based on their “skills, resources, and even intellectual and moral education” (§ 200). The Estates are important, second only to the family, because even private individuals need to associate with others in particular institutions to link their individual claims to the universal (§ 201). Here is a prime example of his U-P-I syllogism, which powers the whole of his dialectic of politics: if a regime permits the Universal freedom of abstract basic rights, and the Individual freedom of morality, but not the Particular freedom found in the culturing institutions of civil society, it is an incomplete regime and will experience instability until all three are met (same goes with any other combination; the world of Antigone, for example, has the Universal and Particular but no Individuality). While he resisted the notion that inequality could ever be fully eradicated, he thought Spirit’s “right of particularity” should be guaranteed to society’s inhabitants (§ 200). Everyone deserves access to an honor-bestowing station.

Despite the fact that the main problem of the rabble is an emotional one, society cannot hope to alleviate their condition through morality and encouragement, because these are contingent actions and, above all, do not get at the source of the individuals’ plight. Instead, Hegel called for direct government action in the form of administrative programs to right these wrongs (§ 242). In this capacity, the government or “universal authority” essentially takes over the role of the family and attacks not only the objective deficiencies but also “the disposition of laziness, viciousness, and the other vices” which they have been infected with (§ 241).

But if it comes about that the wealthy class, which has formed its position through the dissolution of the middle class, finds itself wholly paying for the needs of the rabble (through “hospitals, foundations, or monasteries”) to maintain their standard of living without subjecting them to work, that regime now stands in contradiction with the “principle of civil society” which necessitates the “feeling of self-sufficiency and honour among its individual members” (§ 245). It can no longer be considered a commonwealth, but only a system of spoils and bribery, with a rabble below and a rabble above. Consider the case of the Roman Empire:

In this realm, [the process of] differentiation comes to an end with the infinite diremption of ethical life into the extremes of personal or private self-consciousness and abstract universality. This opposition, which begins with a collision between the substantial intuition of an aristocracy and the principle of free personality in democratic form, develops into superstition and the assertion of cold and acquisitive power on the one hand, and into a corrupt rabble on the other. The dissolution of the whole ends in universal misfortune and the demise of ethical life, in which the individualities of nations perish in the unity of a pantheon, and all individuals sink to the level of private persons with an equal status and with formal rights, who are accordingly held together only by an abstract and arbitrary will of increasingly monstrous proportions (§ 357).

While Hegel insisted the problem of the rabble could not be solved with welfare payments alone, the notion of work alone buying their and the regime’s way back into the status of civil society is also erroneous, because total employment would lead to “overproduction and the lack of a proportionate number of consumers who are themselves productive.” (In some ways, “the rabble” is the core concept of Hegel’s political philosophy, because it is the rub that explains why history won’t quite end. Overproduction becomes for Marx and Engels the explanation for economic depressions, when too many goods are created without adequate consumption and companies are forced to lay off a workforce that is able and willing to work.) And this is precisely where the “evil” of the system that begets rabbles lies; using the dynamics of free economy as solutions merely exacerbates the problem that is already present (§ 245).

The bare-bones, concrete solution to the problem (i.e. the subpar one already in practice) is colonization and globalization: “the inner dialectic of society drives it—or in the first instance this specific society—to go beyond its own confines and look for consumers, and hence the means it requires for subsistence, in other nations which lack those means of which it has a surplus or which generally lag behind it in creativity, et cetera” (§ 246). The perfect example of the domestic side of this equation is 19^th century England, where pure deterritorialization—the liquidation not only of the corporations and guilds but also of welfare nets and the notions of “shame and honor”—forced the rabble to “beg from the public” as a way to circumvent their “laziness and extravagances” (§ 245).

But Hegel also imagined an ideal solution to the problem: a wealthier, future society that could hold together a happy state of affairs where everyone would have the right of particularity, participation in dignity, without it sliding routinely into overconsumption and ‘rabbilization’—capitalism without the boom-and-bust cycle. “Despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough—i.e. its own distinct resources are not sufficient—to prevent an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble” (§ 245).

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James Joyce had a different vision. Instead of seeing the dissolution of civil society as a problem in need of utopian correction, he thought these dynamics of modernity were unchangeable. Downfalls and heroic flaws (ἁμαρτία) are endemic to human life. He therefore reasoned that the title of “rabble” does not belong to the downwardly-mobile but to the censors of art, particularly those that try to prevent the daring artist from pulling off the mask of present existence. This unmasking is painful, but is the only way to re-attain the kind of dignified relation to the world that the ancients and medievals had.

For Joyce, the rabble mind thus had to be cured by literature at once realist and mythic, where through a clever refashioning of honored antiquity and a placing of it in the stream of consciousness of contemporary life we would wrest dignity out of the clutches of Mount Olympus and diffuse it through the human population. As he said to his brother Stanislaus:

Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying ... to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own ... for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.1

One of Joyce’s first forays into public recognition occurred in 1901. In an essay titled “The Day of the Rabblement,” the 19-year-old upstart condemned the whole Irish literary establishment and in particular the Irish Literary Theatre. But it signifies for our purposes an alternative definition of “rabble,” conjuring up not the lazzaroni but politicized art critics with bad taste, and with that an alternative cure.

He didn’t start out as the Theatre’s enemy. Run by W.B. Yeats, the playhouse had previously staged Yeats’ The Countess Cathleen, which had been called “heretical” by a Catholic cardinal and had been booed by students for perceived “anti-Irish” elements. Joyce, defying the protests, had “clapped vigorously” as the curtains closed.2 Now, the Theatre announced its intentions to produce plays from the continent, which piqued Joyce’s interest. He set to work preparing his translations of Hauptmann’s Michael Kraemer for performance. But when he learned that they had instead decided to perform an Irish-language play by Douglas Hyde, and another by Yeats and George Moore drawn from what Joyce called “the broken lights of Irish myth,” he grew contemptuous. In response, he penned the short essay accusing the literary celebrities of succumbing to the demands of the mob.

It boldly opened: “No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.” He did not deign to inform the reader who “the Nolan” was; he said the “laymen should be encouraged to think” and thought they might track down the reference and read Giordano Bruno’s work. Instead, they speculated it was either an ancient Irish chieftain, Nolan the porter at the Cecilia Street medical school, or Joyce himself. The students turned “said the Nolan” into a catchphrase, and his friends John Skeffington and Hannah Sheehy used the essay’s other lines as butts of jokes. Joyce “wrote [their] dialogue down in an epiphany, perhaps to suggest how in Ireland all things are cheapened.”3

But Joyce’s relationship with Irish culture was complex and by no means reducible to a simple hatred. It is on partial display in the essay: while he calls the Irish “the most belated race in Europe” and says the Irish Literary Theatre had become the “property of [its] rabblement,” his endeavor in the piece was to protect Ireland from this pernicious influence. It is not patriotic to cheer the self-imposed paralysis (his word for what Dubliners captured) of your country any more than it would be right to protect the heroin addiction of a family member. To lift a race’s conscience out of the stupor of delusion and into the light of day, as playwrights ought to do with their characters, is a torturous but necessary advance. To secure the right to do this would be to gain for Ireland the ability to furnish Europe with great artists. This was all the more pressing given the age, the foggy transition between Victorianism and revolutionary modernism, which he described as “a time of crisis” where “the highest form of art has been just preserved by desperate sacrifices.”

This form began with Henrik Ibsen in a “note of protest” and continued in several “heroic” battles by the “stubborn conviction” of artists in several countries “against the hosts of prejudice and misinterpretation and ridicule.” The belligerents were “progress” on the one hand and “commercialism and vulgarity” on the other, with the “popular devil” of commerce having more strength than the vulgar as it has “bulk and lungs” and gilded speech.

While Ibsen, with his stark and uncomfortable realism, advised writers to challenge the pedestrian sensibility of the “trolls,” the Irish Literary Theatre had instead ingratiated itself with it. The effect was an enfeebling of the Irish literary ability to the point that no artist had emerged of equal stature with any of the good Europeans, whether first-rate ones like Ibsen, Tolstoy, or Gerhart Hauptmann, or those of the second rank like Hermann Sudermann, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, or Giovanni Giacosa—plays from whom could have been performed by the Theatre if they did not renege on their original plan.

To Joyce’s further baffled indignation, there was not even a threat of serious censorship in Ireland. There was therefore no need for battle but only a “calm” confrontation with the “forces that dictate public judgement.” The “placid and intensely moral” rabblement viewed writers like José Echegaray and Maurice Maeterlinck as “improper” because the former might involve “morbid” themes or the latter might show a woman “letting down her hair,” ignoring the forest for the trees. Performing these foreign writers was an “absolutely necessary” project because “a nation which never advanced so far as a miracle-play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad.”

Having relegated propaganda and pornography beneath the status of art in A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man, it is not likely Joyce thought the mere presence of morbidity and nudity made for good art. The “progressive” element he detected in these works was rather the way they presented life in the intimate way we know it, fully making use of the deterritorialization of modernity while mocking the rabble mind, so we could come to understand ourselves—so a parcel of dignity could be had rather than kept away in the cold moral allegories of the censor.

Yeats, though showing signs of genius, had too “floating of a will” and attached himself too readily to new and inferior fads. Moore, while at one point a worthy challenger to the English novelists, failed to adapt to the changing currents of the modern novel from Flaubert to D’Annunzio (this mention of D’Annunzio’s Il Fuoco, which Joyce considered at the time to be “the highest achievement of the novel to date,” was on the Vatican’s index of banned books and therefore caused the essay to be rejected by St. Stephen’s magazine; Joyce had to self-publish it).

The effect was to Joyce’s desires: he was denounced by an anonymous author in the pages of St. Stephen’s for irreligion, reasoning that the multitude he detested was Catholic, and that, for them, religion would always be more important than artworks which interfered with it. And the author noted that Joyce did not join in on the protests against The Countess Cathleen, also produced by the Irish Literary Theatre, making him no friend of its enemies either.

It is natural to seek peers; but the pioneering spirits who do so are often wounded in the attempt, for they find only beggars of the ideal. Joyce was loyal neither to established artists nor to the mob, neither to the alleged progressives nor the alleged conservatives, but only to art. He concluded the essay:

Until he has freed himself from the mean influences about him—sodden enthusiasm and clever insinuation and every flattering influence of vanity and low ambition—no man is an artist at all. But his true servitude is that he inherits a will broken by doubt and a soul that yields up all its hate to a caress; and the most seeming-independent are those who are the first to reassume their bonds. But Truth deals largely with us.

Unlike Hegel, who saw the rabble as insufficiently socialized, for Joyce both the “cultivated” and “uncultivated” rabble were precisely those who demand the artist conform to society: oversocialized hacks who want artistic productions to contribute to ideological justification through “fetichism and deliberate self-deception” of a culture’s shortcomings. But what is the alternative?

The literary device of metalepsis works as a skeleton key to Joyce’s work. Metalepsis takes up a phrase or expression from a previous work of literature and employs it in a new context. When applied to ancient literature, metalepsis puts frozen canonical characters back into play, like the satires of Lucian or the epics of Milton. It allows a modern author to become ‘younger’ than his vaunted predecessors, borrowing their early innocence and transuming it. This can be done by revealing what is familiar in the ancient, as historical TV dramas do, or showing what is “ancient” about today through parallels. Ulysses performs the latter, but it does not sully antiquity by associating it to the modern because it is written with the highest-caliber lyricism, and its characters are true, even if humorous. It is not Mel Brooks or Monty Python—nothing wrong with them, but they are parodists, and Ulysses is not parody. The book really cannot be described; it can only be understood through experiencing its narration, wherein we witness the unmasking of an absolute beauty behind Dublin without any invocation of what is not authentic to it—no false gods, no LARPing politicisms.

Rather than having the tradition of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living, making us feel exiled from the true life, metalepsis de-LARPs us, making us see that we live in our own “antiquity,” spreading the honor of the past and salving our alienation like a Pentecost. It brings them down to us and us up to them, just as Saint Francis of Assisi discovered he could teach illiterate, urban laborers theology by visually presenting the story of Christ with unprecedented humanity: not the unreachable God with halo but a bleeding, suffering man.

Borrowing concepts from Vico’s New Science, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake locates the dynamics that produce “rabbles” not in insufficient economic systems but in the very fabric of civilization itself, woven into the natural lifespan of a language and its mythological world. Joyce came to view rabbilization as the fall of the archetypal everyman Finnegan from his ladder, and the reparative work of de-rabbilization through new folklore and faith as his resurrection through spilt whiskey (Irish Gaelic uisce beatha, “water of life”). The fall of a civilization sends us back to the infantile state of ignorance that knows nothing but onomatopoeic murmuring, ready to begin once more the search for the rational knowledge that lies at the end of Spirit’s trajectory (“the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes”), erasing all progress yet allowing for the rebirth of the mythy mind that can cast a laughing dignity on all once more (“Phall if you but will, but rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish”). U-P-I keeps coming together and bursting apart once more. All this is wrapped into a comic vision, joking in every line, as if to show that nothing in all world history is so heavy as to resist the jig:

And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.

To see these light, foolish, pretty, lively little sprites flit about—that moves Zarathustra to tears and songs.

Joyce’s conception thus permits the end of the end of history. In Finnegans Wake, the whole of Vico’s cycle of the ages (Theocratic, Aristocratic, Democratic, and Chaotic) occur simultaneously, within every line, because Joyce believed the reader of it would by virtue of reading the book ascend above the dynamics of rabblement and gain access to a permanent source of ‘uplift.’ While Hegel bemoaned the appearance of what he called the “rabble,” that hole in the script where those who do not fit into late-stage civil society overturn it into its opposite, Joyce celebrated it as the banana peel on which all corrupt civilization slips and falls back into the godly.

Now the characteristics that Hegel identifies as rabble are also held in abhorrence by Joyce: see Ulysses’ villain Blazes Boylan, or his foe The Citizen, who have no inner monologue “as if coarseness had no consciousness.” But Joyce does not hold the rift in the philosophy of history as the culprit; instead it is the forces of “horsepower and brutality,” which are opposed by the virtues of “brainpower and decency.”4 His hero Leopold Bloom is not a member of the rabble, but an ordinary man who “differs from lesser Dubliners in that his internal poetry is continual, even in the most unpromising situations.”5 Or as Bloom’s friend Lenehan in “The Wandering Rocks” episode says: “He's a cultured allroundman. He's not one of your common or garden... you know... There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom.”

When his friend Jacques Mercanton noticed Bloom’s artistic nature, Joyce gladdened. “You’re one of the first to say that,” he replied. “Most people have looked down on Bloom. It is like the women who say to me about Marian Bloom, “Yes, that’s the way those women are.” Upon which I stare at a corner of the ceiling.”6

Ricocheting out of New Orleans came a car five strong, speeding under weeping willows drooping out from marshes and chrome-colored rivers. Seated in the middle of the back, Maurice untangled clumps of tobacco and rolled them into fine tips like an old Plains Indian. Laurianne became documentarian and narrated the history of the destination, Lafayette, an old encampment teetering on the banks of a bayou deep in the jungle, west of the Mississippi River. Founded by the French, it was the refuge of their Acadian brethren when they were expelled from Canada and Maine by the British Crown after Montcalm lost his battle to Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham. Here was the other half of that field in which I sat with Natacha: the result of the intermingling of Acadians with local Americans—Cajun culture. Laurianne said we might run into some old stragglers who still speak French.

I sailed down a long dirt road with great oaks forming columns on either side of us, the orange summer sun sinking through the interstices of leaves. Children swung at baseballs in the sand, squirrels leapt after one another and up and down trunks. Lafayette was more familial, more rustic than New Orleans, the other Louisiana, but just as proud and lazily sprawled under the wide southern heat.

After I stomped on the emergency—the brakes no longer trustworthy—I discovered

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This is the second in a series of posts for paid subscribers in which I share my research on the notion of the “end of art”—the theory that art is a thing of the past and that we have arrived at a cultural dead-end. These notes are the result of thorough reading and interpretation, and contain quotes from obscure sources that are invaluable for anyone who wants to understand the crisis of nihilism, the cultural history of the west, Hegel’s “End of Art” thesis, and the possible future of art.

From the Nachlass, 4/3/25-4/23/25. Thoughts on Joyce, Adorno, Barnett Newman, Richard Diebenkorn, Heidegger, Hölderlin, Agamben, Vico, etc.

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Joyce named the second poem in Pomes Penyeach “Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba.” San Sabba is a building on the Adriatic coast in the city of Trieste, where Joyce lived for several years in self-imposed exile, teaching English and music to make ends meet. Initially created to be a rice-husking facility—what Joyce knew it as—San Sabba was later converted into a detention center by the Nazis, a transit hub through which Jews would be cataloged and deported to concentration camps. Its gas chambers were installed by Erwin Lambert, an SS official who, as part of the Action T4 euthanasia program, was tasked with building chambers in Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar, and later, during Operation Reinhard, with the wholesale assemblage of the Sobibor and Treblinka death camps. Due to his “prowess” at designing large gas chambers, Lambert was known as the “traveling construction boss.” Holocaust survivor Jankiel Wiernik said Lambert struck him as “good-hearted,” “humane and likeable,” a man who merely wanted to focus on his “engineering work”; when the Jewish workers, whom he treated very well, showed him all the piles of bodies that had been exterminated by gas, he became pale and frightened, and turned his pained face away from the area “so as not to see what was going on.”12

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Jay Bernstein, in his essay “The death of sensuous particulars: Adorno and abstract expressionism,” takes on the problem of the foreclosure of the aesthetic experience by instrumental rationality, a major strain in Adorno’s work on art. He endeavors to show that abstract expressionist painting is an antidote to the destruction of art brought on by the commodified world we find ourselves in, where all traditional human signifiers of meaning are sold back to us at the cost of our freedom—in the form of kitsch art.

Bernstein claims that abstract expressionist art works, “at their best,” provide a sensuous particular that matters “in itself,” opposing the universal “for us” of instrumental society. His argument runs as follows: by pulling away from “genre, representation and symbol, but also from ‘memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth’—the ‘devices’, as Barnett Newman called them, ‘of Western European painting,’” these works defy all forms of identifying mechanisms (the kinds that AI seizes upon to churn out their mimed impressions of human meaning) besides their sheer presence. As such, they combat the destruction of “societal abstraction,” or the fragmentation of society caused by the instruments that have turned on us and turned us into their slaves. While the capitalistic, scientistic enlightenment promised to appropriate the world for the sake of human ends (“happiness, freedom from fear, equality and liberty”), its means “slipped from the noose of the ends and bec[a]me universals themselves, vanquishing their ends.” We became the materials to heat the great machines, machinating without end, as Nietzsche said in Human, All Too Human.

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“i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said about its flagship product, ChatGPT. Over the last few years this AI software has spread virus-like across the globe, swallowing up inane tasks like writing student essays and helping corporate workers with operations and strategy. But its long-term promise is that it will refashion the arts from the ground up.

Altman had previously said that AI will enable “anyone” to create “amazing art,” which will be a “downside for most individual artists” but will unleash “totally new kinds of art.” “The skill that will matter will be imagination,” Altman said triumphantly. On a different occasion, he lauded Chat’s ability to write fiction: “we trained a new model that is good at creative writing […] this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right.” He recently exalted its ability to spit out a pseudo-Cartesian philosophical blurb.

And, ever the obedient freelance marketers, the streamers and commentator-parrots have already rung the death knell of the artist in the face of these alleged achievements. “If you are an artist, this has been a really bad week for you… I wanna promise you that it’s going to get worse... go be a plumber or something,” the wise Asmongold said the other week in response to an AI’s Ghibli-style rendition of The Lord of the Rings.

I would like to submit a counterargument. I will not quibble about the “quality” of AI art, neither in its current state nor in its likely far-advanced future. I will go for the kill: my contention is that human art is in its essence something wholly other than the essence of AI “art,” and that the two things are categorically different—in fact opposite—no matter how similar they may end up looking. I have written out the argument in an analytic fashion, a “Tractatus Technico-Aestheticus,” curated to the taste of the technocrat. It contains no “arguments” as such, but only declarative statements, which aim to draw a limit to the scope of art within language. Its intention is not to provide an original conception of art, but to hone in on what we mean by “art” through analysis—it thus includes no sources, although it draws in part from some famous philosophers and art critics whose names have been suppressed to avoid appealing to authority. Its meaning can be summed up somewhat as follows: art has an origin which machines cannot understand, and thus the creative products of artificial intelligence cannot be called art.

1. The beautiful is that which, when apprehended, pleases.

1.1 The beautiful can by definition include what is commonly called ugly if it is arranged in a pleasurable way.

1.11 Thus “pleasure” here cannot be taken solely in a positive way, denoting gain or possession.

1.12 Beauty can invoke deprivation—the negative—in the tragic and fearful.

1.121 Beauty can also invoke possession in a manner that is not nobly edifying but playfully humiliating; this is called humor.

1.13 Whatever the work of art is in its essence, it must at least include the intentional arrangement of sensible or intelligible matter toward beautiful ends.

1.131 Thus the mark of whether a product is “a work of art” cannot lie in whether it presents one type of content or sensuous data, but in the status of its arrangement: whether the arrangement is proper, or not.

1.2 To “please,” to enact a moment of beauty in a work, is to arrange sensible or intelligible materials toward a proper formation with the intent to uplift, purge, or result in splendor.

1.21 “Proper” comes from the Latin propius, meaning that which is natural to one, according to their nature; that which belongs to one, that which is one’s own, with linguistic connotations of “concrete” and “specific.”

1.3 We can give a rough and general overview of what constitutes a “proper arrangement” by dividing the analytical reception of it into three dimensions. The beautiful occurs in the bringing out of the integritas, consonantia, and claritas of a person, place, thing, or action.

1.31 Integritas means wholeness. In the context of art, it is the first stage of perception, where we behold the isolated thing, one and whole, apart from the noise. It is distinction, focus, the taking up, raising up, of the material; the natural tendency to single out what is significant, what is being presented as significant by the other.

1.32 Consonantia means harmony, the proportion that is due—when the isolated thing is examined and its multifarious parts prove to converge in ways that are fit with each other and with the whole. It is the knowledge of when to stop: no more, no less. It is the natural point of completion.

1.33 Claritas is the idiosyncratic essence of a singular thing. While integritas is the one, and consonantia the many, claritas is the particular, the synthesis of one and many into a specific thing. The specificity is registered by the mind as a radiant quiditas, whatness, the aura that makes it that thing and no thing else, its original peculiarity, the nature of its nature.

1.4 Because these dimensions analyze what is proper to a being, the source of these dimensions is in the very beingness or essence of a being, not in anything extraneous or ontical, nor in anything empirical or ideal.

2. The being that is to apprehend what is proper, having truck with these dimensions, is the human being, because they can verbally raise the question of what is proper and grasp claims concerning what is proper.

2.1 The human being is therefore that being that can apprehend the beautiful.

2.11 These dimensions of apprehension cannot be taught, but proceed from the human ability to detect essential being prior to sensible or ideal categorization.

2.11 A non-human entity, e.g. a machine, can only be programmed with the categories of judgment and made to reflect on things already discovered and excavated by humanity; it cannot learn them anymore than it can have an instinct outside the scope of the recitation of factual knowledge.

2.12 The human being therefore has a pre-categorial intuition that can detect beings and recognize their integrity, harmony, and luminosity (corresponding to the understanding’s perception, recognition, and satisfaction).

2.121 The human being is able to interface with these dimensions insofar as they have experience with the contemplation of what is proper.

2.13 That activity which is proper to a thing can be called its authentic behavior. [The relationship between these notions in German is made more clear: eigentlichkeit (n.), authenticity; eigentlich (adv.), actual, proper; eigen (adj.), own, not shared, characteristic, specific; and das eigene, one’s own.]

2.131 Something is authentic, has come into its own, if it is attuned to its essential standing (cf. 1.21 and 1.4).

2.132 The fundamental way that the human being grasps the world, and the way the human reveals itself to itself, is through mood-attunement (in German this is one word, stimmung).

2.1321 For the human being, to take notice of the proper or improper status of an activity or an arrangement is to be attuned to and to be aware of its mood.

2.133 Mood is a variation of Being that is disclosed prior to all forms of cognition and encompasses a range of disclosure that exceeds them. We have moods before we wonder about the source or reasons behind them. Our first-person embodied reality is prior to all scientific knowledge and metaphysical reasoning.

2.134 Mood is therefore not a transcendental—like the True, Good, and Beautiful—but an “existentiale.” It is rooted in our being there in a place, in everyday reality, not in a conceptual schema like the forms and the categories.

2.1341 Mood is an existential instinct; entities that do not possess being-there cannot lay claim to it. An existentiale is a fundament of the human’s toolset for analyzing being. It occurs before we enter into any kind of rationalization or categorization; mood-attunement discloses what matters to us.

2.1342 Existentiales cannot be experienced by a machine, but transcendentals can, because they are Ideas reached through a logical unfolding along a dialectical method, which begins with the analysis of words and ends with a prognostic defining of value based on established parameters. Transcendentals are the end-points of logical circuits, but existentiales are the very mental blood of beings that live and die.

2.14 The apprehension of the authenticity of a thing must not be conducted through concepts (cf. 1.4) but through mood-attunement, which drills down into the sense for the proper, informed by its proximity to the question of Being.

2.15 The verbalization of mood-attunement is the raising of the question of Being; through it, the essential standing of all things can be revealed.

2.151 The question of Being is the task of defining it. But Being resists all transcendental or universalist modes of definition (“Being is…” won’t do because it is tautological). The question of Being can only be answered—and asked—with existential analytic. The being capable of analyzing existentiales is the human being.

2.1511 The human being, as a being that will die, has its essential standing in the apprehension of its own mortality.

2.15111 The memento mori is the essential standing of the human being, and when the human being is fully cognizant of the fact that they will die they are able to speak authentically.

2.151111 All matters of authenticity are conditioned by the fact of death.

2.152 If the human being can ask the question of Being solely because they are capable of cognizing their own finitude, which is a matter of temporality, then the question of being is asked through the horizon of time.

2.2 The artwork is the human being putting its essential standing into the open; in this way it is a moment of Truth, which the Greeks properly termed ἀλήθεια, unconcealment. In doing this, the human being undergoes an ecstasy (ek-stasis), standing out of themselves and witnessing their own essential standing, which as finite beings invariably occurs in time.

2.21 The analysis and the execution of the dimensions of the proper arrangement of sensible or intelligible matter (art) can only be carried out while keeping the fact of death in view, by an entity that will die and that knows and accepts it will die.

2.3 The authentic realization of the fact of death (finitude), as a matter of temporality, means that artworks and their qualitative dimensions are inherently bound up with the notion of Time, not as measurable duration but as lived moments as they pass, leading towards oblivion, by the human being who is aware of this fact.

2.4 Aesthetics and art are not the same.

2.41 Aesthetics and art differ along ontological lines.

2.42 Aesthetics, from αἴσθησῐς meaning sense perception, considers art from the point of view of the subjective spectator rather than the creative artist.

2.421 As a metaphysical doctrine, Aesthetics holds that the work of art is the representation or instantiation of an Idea, sometimes with numinous connotations, in sensuous form.

2.4211 Empiricism is a form of idealism because it analyzes from a posited idealist subject. The ideal subject represents universals using particulars to communicate what it perceives to be absolute knowledge.

2.42111 Aesthetics as sensory subjective experience is idealist.

2.422 The nature of an Idea is to inform action: this-for-that, in-order-to. It is instrumental in that it aims to operate the behavior of humans toward certain valued ends, usually identified as beneficial for society or some other goal by the artist or philosopher.

2.423 The arrangement of sensible or intelligible matter toward such ends is properly called technical mimesis: we see the grasping of concept, a universal signifier, and the craftsman encoding it in a device that depicts the idea or houses it in a metaphoric vehicle.

2.4231 Allegory is idealistic analysis, it is not existential. It is not timeless and it is not ecstatic (cf. 2.2 and 2.3).

2.424 By contrast, the existential nature of a thing, its explicitness, obtrusively shows up when it breaks down, when it becomes inoperative and ruins the flow of this-for-that.

2.4241 An existentiale can be thought of as a primordial mode of apprehension that reminds us of place and our conscious presence (cf. 2.1341 and 2.2). As such, the work of an existential being is an in-itself, rather than a this-for-that.

2.43 As opposed to aesthetics, art in its proper home or origin, and not in any strange practice to which its name has been dragged. considers the work from its proximity to the site of the disclosure of essential existentiality, i.e. Truth (cf. 2.2).

2.431 Artworks created by humans are encoded with awareness of essence; even if a human uses AI to create “art,” the alien essence of technology will take over and the product will be devoid of this. (Think of Titian’s brushstrokes, the presence of Beethoven’s deafness in his late works, the agony of Michelangelo’s body hanging from the ceiling as he painted the Sistine Chapel, or the autobiographical material upon which all great authors draw.)

2.432 Truth, as an unmasking, is always a dialogue with the ultimate unmasking of life, i.e. death.

2.4321 An artwork, as opposed to an aesthetic object, is a meditation by a human being for human beings on the fact of death; and it is beautiful if it pleases, if it accepts the conditions of the finite (corresponding to the dimensional formality of integritas, consonantia, and claritas). On the other hand, an aesthetic object is an argument for an action of social, organizational, etc. improvement.

2.43211 While the human being has there-being, the machine has it-being.

2.4322 Since the locus of difference is in time, the major difference in effect is the absence of memories, the inexperience with personal time, meaningful time (history), “quality time,” and the preoccupation with mortality. The machine is spiritually immortal.

2.5 In terms of motion, art arrests us, fixes us, while aesthetics drags us to desire or loathe something.

2.51 The archetypal modes of aesthetics then are propaganda, pornography, and advertisements.

2.6 Since artificial intelligence lacks access to the pre-categorial existentiales (the question of the meaning of being rather than an endless series of computational “hows”), its sensuous designs cannot be called artworks, but aesthetic objects.

2.61 An aesthetic object’s ontological activity is to de-essentialize the world by enframing it through logic and offering “solutions” within it according to principles. An artwork’s activity is to draw out the inner essences of things into language and orientate the human animal to them, and thus orientate it to Being—the fact of its mortality.

2.62 The aesthetic object corresponds to hubris; the artwork corresponds to humility, gratitude, or worship.

2.7 An aesthetic object, grasped in its temporal content, is oriented entirely toward the past; it is nostalgic, like kitsch. It derives devices and tropes from past human art and fetishizes them or mobilizes them toward its designatory end.

2.71 AI art therefore is aesthetical troping devoid of existential content. But such content is the very marrow of art.

2.8 The artwork holds open the past, present, and future, allowing them to flow into each other while standing back in a fourth realm of the open. We call this ἐποχή.

2.81 The artwork both bears witness to Timelessness and to the perpetual flow of human becoming (history) (cf. 2.2 and 2.3).

2.9 The aesthetic object, because it is not existential, does not know Time, and thus cannot reflect on death, and thus cannot accept death.

2.91 The inability to accept death is nihilism.

2.911 The triumph of nihilism would remove all conditions.

2.92 The desire to remove all conditions and unleash boundless caprice inexorably tends toward malevolency; this desire is evil.

2.93 The conscious spreading of nihilism is evil.

3. AI is definitionally incapable of creating art.

3.1 AI can only create aesthetic objects, mobilizing transcendentals, universal signifiers, to build arguments in a this-for-that fashion. As technology, it is instrumentalist in its essence.

3.11 Technology developers and capitalistic chief executive officers who insist otherwise only reveal their alienation from the human as such.

3.12 This is evident in their self-admitted refusal to accept the mortal status of the human animal and their fascination with the supersession of the human species by “superintelligent” technology.

3.13 But, by definition, their inventions cannot supersede human intelligence because they only have access to enframed computation, and do not have access to the full range of existential sensitivity.

3.14 The aesthetic object, shorn of grounding particulars and mortality-reminding meditations, is nihilistic, and those who wish to replace the human being and its time-stopping-and-comprehending artwork with the supercomputer’s infinite regress of mimetic propositions—solely capable of responding to the world with a will that wills will whose only answer can be an in-order-to, is a wish to inflict nihilism on the species, and are thus evil.

Quod erat demonstrandum.