What Didier Did or Didn't

 

 

 

Alexis Didier (1826-1886) in his mature years

 

 

            Last week I wrote about a German novelist who claimed to have been able under medical hypnosis to reconstruct from memory the lengthy unique manuscript of a novel that had been confiscated from him by his captors years earlier.  This topic came fortuitously into my life at a time when I was already mulling over the mysterious relationships between sleep and heightened consciousness.  This week it is a nineteenth-century French youth, Alexis Didier, said to be the most remarkable clairvoyant to emerge from the great century of celebrity mediums, table rapping, ectoplasm, spirit photography, trance writing, Spiritualism, and the heyday of the Society for Psychical Research..

 

            I depend on my son Luke, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Montreal for all sorts of intellectual tips.  He is big on French intellectuals, supplying me many great recommendations, and occasionally one that is a little out there.  That is how I would characterize Bertrand Méheust, a French expert on the history of parapsychology and (according to his Wikipedia page) an ufologue—a wonderful word meaning, one presumes, an expert on UFOs.  He is also an expert on Alexis Didier, to whom I shall come presently.  His book about Didier is raggedly written, though a piece of cake compared with his Mad Professor English-language lecture on the same subject.*  But I must not bite the hand that feeds me.  There are not a lot of Didier experts.

 

            Of several individual seances discussed by Méheust, one invigilated with suspicion by the famous illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin in May of 1847 can perhaps serve as well as any to exemplify at once the mystery, the questionability, and the eventual practical banality of the young man’s powers.   Didier was twenty-one, and his fame was growing.  Robert-Houdin, in his early forties, was already established as the most famous illusionist and prestidigitator in Europe.  That is, he was a theatrical performer whose claims to achieve actual “magic”  were generally understood by everybody to be rhetorical adornments of unfathomable tricks of skill rather than physical miracles.  But since nobody knew how he did it, the difference between the two might often seem moot.  Didier on the other hand, not a  conspicuous showman, presented himself as a psychic, a person possessed of extraordinary, inexplicable mental powers rather than a baffling thespian genius.  To have Robert-Houdin investigate Didier was as much as to say it takes a thief to catch a thief.  At this séance a blindfolded Didier, in addition to other “blind” perceptions (1) correctly identified by suit and value many specific playing cards that he had not seen and could not have seen; (2) described in convincing detail the eccentric decoration of a distant room he had never seen and never could have seen; (3) was partially successful in reading phrases from specifically identified pages of a book unknown to him; (4) was able to identify by name the writer of a letter—a person wholly unknown to him--when touching its unseen paper sheets to his forehead.    Robert-Houdin was very far from catching a thief.  Convinced that he was a witness to the paranormal, he signed a testimonial that it was impossible to classify Didier’s feats “among those that are the object of my own art and labors,” meaning of course theatrical magic.

 

            Didier was a somnambulist, meaning not that he was a sleepwalker, but a sleepseer—somnus being roughly a Latin equivalent of Greek hypnos, words meaning both sleep and the trance or mental alteration of sleep, somnambulism or hypnotism.  Some version of this indeterminate state, perhaps that of which Saint Paul writes:--“whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows”—was required for Heinrich Gerlach to recover the lost memories of his novel about Stalingrad and for the psychic Didier to read from the pages of tightly closed books.  This led me to my question in the last essay: Do we know things when we are asleep that we cannot know when we are awake?

 

                                                             D. D. Home raising the roof

 

            Perhaps the first scholarly article I published was inadvertently about ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception).  It is a linguistic essay about Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue of 1864, “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” a barely disguised attack on Daniel Dunglas Home, an American spiritualist, psychic medium, and levitator, who conned his way through high-society seances on two continents.  Browning  heaped contempt upon this fraudster.  (The oblique point of my own essay was not about ESP; it concerned Browning’s attempts to capture distinctive Americanisms in Sludge’s English speech.)  More than forty years later, animated by very different interests, I published a book called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, in which I did deal a little more directly with the history of the “paranormal” quest.  That the quest was a serious project of Enlightenment is itself telling.  The theory of  “animal magnetism” of the German physician F. A. Mesmer (1734-1815), embraced by an army of progressive “magnetizers” (hypnotists), is now regarded as one of the exotic mental aberrations of history, something akin to alchemy, also an Enlightenment enthusiasm.  But Mesmerism beat at the doors of the Temple of Science for decades  and came surprisingly near to gaining admission.  The only actual distinction between alchemy and chemistry is that one retained its Arabic article.  And as the alchemists developed laboratory techniques and procedures that greatly advanced the chemists, so also is there a line of reluctantly acknowledged filiation from Mesmer to Freud and Jung, to all ideas of subconscious or unconscious mind in its relationship to curated sleep, hypnosis.

 

            Méheust is particularly good on one point.  Most psychics, including Didier, failed more often than they even appeared to succeed.  A large number were exposed as active frauds, often of a cruel and mercenary sort, and we are right to harbor suspicions of many others.  But only by an illegitimate extrapolation can a thousand exposed frauds be thought to disprove even one evidentiary claim made on behalf of Didier or dozens of others.  One of Chaucer’s subtlest stories, that of the Canon’s Yeoman, presents us with an alchemist who practices fraud not because he does not believe in the power of the Great Art but because he does believe.  All he needs are the resources to finance one more experiment, and, yes, one more….What did the mathematician Blaise Pascal mean when he said “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of…”?  The same thing, I think, as Jesus when he said “Man does not live by bread alone.”  The French Academy in the nineteenth century became so irritated and embarrassed by the erudite madness in which certain topics floundered and drowned that they actually cancelled the topics, forbidding their discussion in their august lecture halls and publications.  One such topic was the origin of human language, another the hypnotic trance of animal magnetism.

 

tabling the motion

 

*B. Méheust, Un voyant prodigieux: Alexis Didier 1826-1886.  (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003); for the lecture: https://vimeo.com/37790155

 

 

 

Breakout, Breakthrough, or Breakdown?

 

     

For an aging Red-state Episcopalian who tries to limit his principal reading to works written before 1600, I have ended up knowing, conversing with, and learning from a pretty large number of very with-it postmodern intellectuals.  One of these guys, whom I have never actually met in corporeal form, is a googlable Finno-Swedish journalist, rock poet, and afficionado of modern European history named Dennis Renfors, multi-talented and multi-lingual of course.  The intermediary of our liaison was Jan Valtin, in whom we share an interest.  Dennis put me onto a very remarkable novel that has much occupied me during the last week.  The book (in its English translation) is Heinrich Gerlach’s Breakout at Stalingrad (Durchbach bei Stalingrad in the German), a searing fictional treatment of that famous battle by someone who knew a lot about it.  This novel has a complicated history that even without my own erratic tendencies would be likely to invite a strange essay.

 

            I claim little expertise concerning modern military history, but I do know more about Stalingrad than other World War II battles.  It really was the turning point of the European war.  We like to think “we” won the war against Hitler, but it was really the Red Army, apparently infinite in number and prepared to take infinite casualties.  Among post-War Communists in Western Europe the idea was widespread that the Russian victory could be attributed to their soldiers’ love of socialism, whereas the actual explanation is to be found in more brutal material and military realities.  Arthur Koestler called the propagandist point of view “the Stalingrad syndrome,” and I touched upon it in my Anti-Communist Manifestoes.  To that end I studied the great history of the battle by Sir Antony Beevor (1998).  A few years ago he and I were both speakers at an academic conference, and I seized the opportunity of an informal seminar over lunch.  But back to Heinrich Gerlach.

 

            Gerlach was a highly capable German intelligence officer—a Latin teacher in civilian life—who was present at all phases of the herculean battle.  When General Paulus’s decimated, demoralized, frozen but still numerous survivors surrendered in February of 1943, the Soviet authorities, at this point novices at capturing Germans, gave special treatment to certain officers whom they hoped to re-educate and “turn” into tacit or actual allies.  Gerlach was in a prison camp until the end of the war,  and treated reasonably well, though endlessly interrogated, debriefed, and propagandized.  During those two years he had what seemed the extraordinary luxury of writing a long, beautifully crafted, panoramic fiction about Stalingrad on the basis of his own experiences and those related by fellow prisoners.  In this regard it has certain similarities to Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night (1941), which Valtin, however, tried to pass off as pure autobiography.  Much could be said to praise Gerlach’s book from the point of view of literary criticism, but other matters must occupy my attention.

 

            The campaign of political reformation, and even some recruitment efforts, did yield a small harvest in the prison camps, but came to little in practical terms.  And few German prisoners were quickly returned to the Fatherland at the War’s end.  Gerlach would face five more years of detention in Russia.  More to the point of this story, the Russians confiscated the manuscript of his novel when they moved him from the camp.  When he finally got back to Germany in 1950, he was in a pretty traumatized state of mind.  He had fancied, rashly, that he would be able to reconstruct his novel from memory.  He would later claim he had done so.  But had he?

 

                                        Gerlach and Schmitz in hypnotic pursuit

 

            So-called “recovered memory” has now become so controversial in the medico-legal world that it has been classified as a syndrome, the charge being that the “recovered” memories often have actually been instilled in the subjects by the therapeutic techniques (leading questions, psychotropic drugs) used by the analysts.  Just this week, in the closely watched Ghislaine Maxwell trial in Manhattan a credentialled  academic memory expert testified that “she had conducted hundreds of experiments on memory and determined that exposure to falsehoods can cause people to form false memories that they regard as real.”  In 1951 Gerlach had been led through a magazine article to approach a Munich physician, Karl Schmitz, who appeared to be having great success recovering memories through hypnosis.  Working together, Gerlach and Schmitz claimed to have reconstructed most of the novel in more or less exact form, and recovered suppressed memories that allowed Gerlach to reformulate the rest.  “It all came back to me…” he said.  So he published it, and watched in amazement as it become an instant best-seller.  But the divided Germany of 1952 was very far from what it had been in 1942.  Its eastern parts were now a Communist satellite state.  In the West, the denazification efforts were intense, involving strenuous psychological efforts by many to maintain some distinction between a comparatively small cohort of fanatical Nazi leaders and the much larger population of “ordinary” Germans whom they had duped or coerced.  Millions of living war veterans and relatives of dead soldiers had to ponder—or resist pondering--the extent to which they and their amazing Wehrmacht might have been complicit in the crimes of Hitler, Goebbels, or Eichmann.   Gerlach thought it best to rechristen his reborn book in a direction of German victimhood.  It was now called The Forsaken Army (Der verratene Armee)—forsaken and betrayed by the arch-criminal Adolf Hitler!

 

            Heinrich Gerlach died in 1991, his death coinciding almost precisely with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Among so many other aftershocks of that political earthquake was one small literary miracle.    In 2012 an industrious German literary scholar, Carsten Gansel, sniffing about in Soviet military archives previously  unavailable, discovered the complete original manuscript of Durchbach bei Stalingrad seized from Gerlach in 1945!  Swiftly published under its original title, this Second Coming of a modern masterpiece was greeted with mixed elation and discomfort.  Consider for a moment the two works with the different titles as separate books.  In many respects the text seized in the prison camp (DbS) and that later resurrected or recreated under clinical hypnotism (VA) were amazingly similar in narrative, structure, dramatis personae, and even at times paragraph sequence and word-for-word sentences.  But the prison camp original returned again and again to a theme largely muted in its hypnotic restoration: the theme of the moral guilt of Germany and the Germans.  This theme is principally articulated through the thoughts of its central character, the German officer who is obviously a fictionalized reflex of the author, Heinrich Gerlach.  It is precisely this theme that for many readers would make DbS a significantly different work from the blood, guts, and camaraderie “war story” of VA.

 

            Yet where did this theme come from?  From the humanistic soul of a student of the classics?  Unfortunately, another suggestion is likewise inevitable: from the relentless NKVD re-education apparatus in Gerlach’s prison camp.  Anyone familiar with the judicial practices of the NKVD in Purge time knows their penchant for forcing suspects to write out autobiographical, casuistical essays of political self-examination and self-accusation.  Could Gerlach’s original manuscript show the remarkable influence of that strange literary genre?  One German scholar goes so far as to speak of “the repressed Soviet origins” of the novel!*  How extraordinary it would be if the supposed “recoveries” of the hypnotic writing process were actually procedures of literary revision, suppression and cleansings—a recoup of the “war story” novel he had wanted to write.   Do we know things when we are asleep that we cannot know when we are awake?  That is a question I hope to pursue in a very different venue next week.

*Jochen Hellbeck, “Breakthrough at Stalingrad: The Repressed Soviet Origins of a Bestselling West German War Tale,” Contemporary European History 22 (2013): 1-32.

 

 

Gladlylerne sends warmest Christmas greetings to all its readers.

 

Amazon or Adamastor?

 

 

            We have been discovering various silver linings around the dark clouds of the Pandemic, such as the apparent fact that it’s not really necessary to go to the office to do office work, so to speak.  Who knew?  (Negative findings are also appreciated.  You really do have to go to school to go to school.  I knew.)  One silver lining involves household detritus.  The single-stream recycling system in force in our area allows, in fact seems to encourage you to throw all recyclable materials promiscuously into the same bin.  One result of this, at least in my neighborhood, has been a certain amount of rain-sodden, catsup-stained newspaper advertisements blowing around the streets after windy, wet recycling days. In my opinion the best way of minimizing the potential mess is to enclose the paper materials in a cardboard box sealed without tape by the “organic” spiraled flap technique.  My system works very well indeed, but of course it does depend upon the availability of suitably sized cardboard boxes.  That has proved to be no problem at all since I became a regular Amazon customer. 

            But I am more than an Amazon customer.  I am an Amazon fan, and that is a second-degree felony in the awokening circles in which I travel.  Or used to—traveling having been abolished for the same reason that I became an Amazon customer.  Though one must be impressed by entrepreneurial daring and success on such a vast scale, I have no particular admiration for Mr. Bezos; and I do believe there is often truth in the phrase “filthy rich”.  Our current gilded age seems not much of an improvement, in terms of its ethical tone, over the one in the late nineteenth century.   I do not like trusts, cartels, or de facto monopolies.  On the other hand I do not hold it against Bezos—as many of my more politically alert neighbors seem to do—that he offers employment to a million and a half of our fellow citizens who need and want productive work in a segment of the labor market not universally characterized by decent wages or working conditions.  A telling evidence that some prominent politicians in one of our major political parties might be losing the “ordinary working Americans” plot could be detected about two years ago in the olympian tone with which they put the kibosh on an Amazon “mega-center” proposed for the borough of Queens in New York City.  I also have to note the dramatic contrasts, so far as speed, efficiency, and competence are concerned, between my dealings with Amazon and those involving any branch of federal, state, or local government.

            I keep reading about the damage I am doing to “Main Street” and to “Mom and Pop stores” by heavy dependence upon the behemoth of Amazon.  I know all about Mom and Pop stores.  For a long time I lived way out in the country where the nearest store—though not very near—was the Shady Grove Gas and Gro.  (Gro would have been “Grocery” had there been more space on the sign.)  There one could find (in addition to most forms of junk food known to man) an inadequate selection of some staples at elevated prices, with the rip-off softened by the rustic bonhomie of Mom or Pop and their clientele of soda-swilling regulars who hung out there during most opening hours.  The same was true of the mini-mart “alimentaries” in little places in France and Italy that I have loved and frequented in years gone by.  Like the romantic medievalists of the nineteenth century, like Minever Cheevey, like any self-respecting reactionary, I can yearn for the Mass-and-Maypole world of a gentler, simpler time.  The truth is, however, just at the moment the Mom and Pop I am most worried about are a couple of less than athletic octogenarians admonished by authority figures from Dr. Fauci to their juvenile grandchildren to stay at home, avoid all venues of normal social life, indeed avoid if possible all human contact and probably that of cats and dogs just to be extra safe. Amazon has done wonders for this couple, which is to say for us.

 

            I am not an entirely satisfied customer.  I do wish that Amazon had another name.  Presumably you know that the possibly folk etymology of “Amazon” is “with one boob amputated”—such a body modification being helpful for purposes of martial archery.  Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that Amazons were female and they were bellicose.  Neither of these Amazonian characteristics is of particular relevance to Amazon.com, whereas gigantism is.  When it was operating out of Bezos’s garage as a bookstore, “Amazon” was actually pretty cheeky and aspirational.  But what it has become is certainly an epic enterprise, and all epic enterprises require  monsters and giants.  Homer had his Harpies and his Cyclops, Vergil his Cerberus and his Cacus.  Dante, harvesting his gleanings from the tradition of both poets, became probably the most prolific recycler and inventor of monsters and giants in all of our literature.

            But the greatest of all literary monster/giants, in my view, is Adamastor, even though one less familiar to readers than he might be.  He was one of the Titans, a god-giant from the dawn of time.  In my view, Amazon.com should by rights be called Adamastor.com.  As a poetic personification Adamastor is the sixteenth-century brain-child of Luis de Camões in his great mytho-historical treatment of the eastern navigation undertaken by Vasco da Gama in 1497, his epic poem the Lusiads.  The meaning of “Lusiads” is something like “the feats of the heirs of Lusus (i.e., the Portuguese)”.   To get to India from Portugal Vasco da Gama had to sail south along the vast length of the whole of the western coasts of Africa, round the southern Cape, and then turn northeast through the channel between the African mainland and Madagascar into the Indian Ocean and toward the southwestern tip of the Subcontinent and Calicut (Calcutta).  The storm-tossed seas off the Cape of Good Hope were the most ferocious the mariners had to face.

 

            It requires only a bit of poetic imagination to see in the cartographic tips of both southern Africa and southern India a huge human head with a pointed beard.  The crews on the endangered Portuguese ships are terrified by the sight of a furious giant rising out of the sea.  This Adamastor is the gigantic and threatening anthropomorphic manifestation of the Cape’s geography and meteorology.  “I am that vast cape,” the monster bellows in his tremendous voice,  “locked in secrecy, that Cape of Hurricanes your people call…I round out Africa’s extremity in my hid headland, where the shore lines fall away, toward the Antarctic Pole prolonged, which your audacity has deeply wronged.”*  The actual name Adamastor could be based in philological error or it could be pseudo-Greek for “uncontrollable.”  The goal of the Portuguese mariners in the Lusiads is the establishment of commercial trade on a previously unimaginable scale.  It would be difficult to come up with an industrial mascot more fitting for an international commercial empire so voracious, ruthless, and terrifying.  For I fully admit that Amazon.com is “problematical,” to invoke a journalistic term of art useful when one wants to complain without being exactly clear what he is complaining about.  One of the big problems it causes me is the surfeit of cardboard boxes.

 

*V, 50, translation by Leonard Bacon, The Lusiads (N.Y.: Hispanic Society of America, 1950), p. 187.

 

Impressive

 

 

             

 

 

 991

                                 .918

 

 

 

Two vaguely similar numbers—991 and .918—coalesced in my mind this week when we achieved an unprecedented head-start on preparing our annual Christmas greetings cards in what ought to be good time even for our increasingly sluggish postal service.  The date 991 is famous in my little sphere for a battle in which a brave band of English warriors met in a bloody fray with marauding Viking Marines.  This event is memorialized in an important Old English poem, “The Battle of Maldon.”  When making their heroic speeches, military heroes in Old English poems have a tendency to go through the drill of presenting arms.  Having no sabers to rattle they instead brandished spear and shield in menacing fashion as they uttered their alliterative threats, boasts, encouragements,  and philosophical observations.  A famous spear-shaking speech appears in the “Battle of Maldon”.  The spear-shaking orator is an old warrior named Byrhtwold.  Things are not going well for the home team, who experience serious attrition.   As his comrades fall all around him Byrhtwold delivers a memorable pep talk: “Our courage must be all the greater,” he declaims, “our hearts the keener, our spirits more intense, as our strength diminishes.”

 

            Well, I too am a geezer—so I translate eald geneat--and though I face no Vikings,  companions are falling all about me and I face my own personal version of Byrhtwold’s problem of diminishing strength.  My response involves neither  targe nor javelin.  I simply do about a quarter of what I used to do, and spend about three times as long on each task.  The tasks recently completed—setting the type for and then printing a very modest Christmas greetings card—took me pretty well two full days.  Tidying up will probably take another full day.  The paradox is that I am about two weeks ahead of my normal schedule.  When the “last minute” ceases to be a possibility, you tend to do it way before that.

 

            As to the fraction nine hundred and eighteen one thousandths (.918), it relates to my role as an amateur letterpress printer.  That is the height (in inches) of a piece of movable type.  You probably know that “letterpress” refers to the printing technique associated with the name of Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the fifteenth century.  In letterpress, the raised faces of cast metal types precisely arranged and secured in a strong frame are first inked and then pressed against paper or some other suitable material by mechanical force, resulting in a printed sheet.  Printing was a huge American industry in the nineteenth century.  Every page of every book, every copy of a daily newspaper, was put together by the human hands of compositors (type-setters) working in large shops.  In addition there were thousands of “job printers” working from their own homes or small shops producing letterheads, commercial advertisements, business forms, calling cards, and so on.  The amounts of heavy metal type used in the industry were staggering.  The joke used to be that the only thing keeping Manhattan Island from blowing away in a storm was the weight of a thousand print shops.  There was constant innovation, as for example with stereotypes.  The fevered and protracted race to invent an efficient type-setting machine was won by the Mergenthaler Linotype, one of the most brilliant inventions in the history of printing, which was in significant use by about 1890.

 

            But though the equipment and procedures of letterpress printing were greatly improved over more than three centuries, its basic principle—a raised and inked type face pressing against paper--remained in operation well into the twentieth century.   Then the process called offset lithography challenged and largely replaced it.  Lithography (“stone writing”) exploits the fact that oil and water do not mix.  This allows a properly prepared text or design on a plane surface to be transferred or “offset” to a flat rubber blanket and thence to the desired printing surface.   The techniques of offset were especially effective for printing huge numbers of copies of magazines or other materials making lavish use of photographs and pictorial design.  The undisputed reign of offset lithography, however, was much shorter than that of letterpress.  As with so many other industrial processes, computer technology is revolutionizing practically all aspects of the printing industry.  In fifteen minutes you can compose on your MacBook to be printed on your wireless Brother a page as beautiful as one produced by Manutius Aldus in Venice in 1500.  Or almost as beautiful.   You will be hard pressed (so to speak) to find a stock of hand-laid rag paper, and you will never be able to feel the bite of the types as you run your fingertips (clean, please) very lightly over a few lines of the printed text.

 

            Letterpress “Print Shop” was still common as one of the vocational options in many high schools, including mine, in the early 1950s.  But by the 1960s and 70s, commercial letterpress was in rapid, near total collapse.  How I developed an interest in printing might be an engaging story, but it is for another essay.  Suffice it to say I got my first press as a birthday present from my wife about 1970.  It is a beautiful old Vandercook Proving Machine found in an intimidating printing junkyard in Camden.  The fouled makeready on its large, cylindrical drum was still in place, recording forever its last macabre act: NOVEMBER, MONTH OF THE HOLY SOULS.  ENROLL YOUR DECEASED NOW.  I used to go to weekend auctions in New York where they were selling tons of type at scrap metal prices and you could buy a Heidelberg press for two hundred dollars.  Of course you then had to move it.  Sometimes an entire shop would be sold for scrap.   Over a few years I put together a fine if eccentric letterpress shop for about a thousand dollars.  In one sale California job cases in bulk were a dime apiece.  Then Manhattan interior designers discovered their potential for the mural display of  tchotchkes.  Now a single type case may go for fifty dollars on Ebay.  Naturally I have spent a certain amount of time cursing myself for not snapping up this, that, or the other when I could have done.  Then, again, divorce is a high price to pay for a few hundredweight of Caslon.  There has been a renaissance in craft printing and with it a lightning transition from burdensome junk to expensive antique.

 

            Hand-set letterpress printing is enormous fun, but quite hard work.  You need a strong back (lots of standing), excellent eyesight, and nimble fingers.  The requirements are vaguely similar to those for the Anglo-Saxon army, though the work itself is fortunately less dangerous.  Byrhtwold’s answer to the diminishing strength of his cohort was to fight more fiercely, but that worked only for a short while.  Mine is to moderate expectations, choose achievable projects, go slow, take a lot of time, talk to myself a lot, have a magnifying glass always close at hand, and make frequent recourse to large mugs of tea.

 

           

 

Bibliomancy

 

                                                             Benozzo Gozzoli, "Tolle, Lege"
 

 

            Today’s effort will be devoted to bibliomancy, a word so recondite as to have been overlooked in the tenth edition of the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.  But bibliomancy is a perfectly good word, and used to be a real thing.  It means the use of books in divination.  Such a topic, naturally, requires this blog’s customary meandering treatment, as it has risen in my consciousness in a rather erratic fashion.  (Remember that erratic derives from Latin erro, meaning “to wander or stray about”).

            A couple of days ago, I was interviewed by a television producer concerning occultism in the Enlightenment, and its possible practice among the founders of our nation.  The topic of bibliomancy came up.   Just before that, in putting together last week’s blog I experienced a personal little bibliomantic tweak I now feel I should mention, along with a much more forceful one on Sunday, associated with seasonal change.

            The book most frequently used for its supposed predictive powers has naturally been, for the last fifteen centuries or so, the Bible, and I shall return to the Bible presently.  But in Antiquity the epics of Homer, and especially Vergil, were commonly used.  We have especially good evidence for the widespread use of the sors Vergiliana (the “Vergilian lottery”) in which randomly selected lines from the Æneid were searched out for their predictive potential with regard to particular persons and circumstances.  This was quite a craze among the Roman imperial élite.   In the Christian Middle Ages Vergil was known not merely as a very great poet but also as a wizard or magician.  Not too many famous poets have alternate spellings for their name, but Vergil is often Virgil.  That may be because the Latin words virga and virgula (a tree branch or twig) were used of a magician’s wand or the divining rod of a water witch.  I suppose that in a pinch any famous book of sufficient gravitas could serve for purposes of bibliomancy.  Many years ago we had a great family vacation in the beautiful Northwest, roughly in the latitudes between Portland and the Canadian border.  Somewhere in the Washington State boonies we spent a night at a hostelry called the Moby Dick Hotel.  In supplying the metaphysical needs of their guests the literate and possibly eccentric proprietors of this place had supplanted the once standard Gideon’s Bibles in favor of copies of Moby Dick.  There was one in every room, including the public jakes. 

            The world’s Christians, beleaguered as we are, are still fairly numerous, so that some hundreds of millions of people have just observed, or at least been vaguely aware of, the beginning of a new year in the religious calendar, namely the first Sunday of Advent.  The season of Advent is the brief preparatory and penitential season anticipating Christmas, the legendary date of the birth of Jesus being December 25, according to the Western calendar.  There is some really great Advent music, and an Advent calendar can whet the interest and anticipation of the young.

            Loyal readers of my blog, and there are some, may recall my nut obsession, most recently exemplified in a post about gathering hickory nuts.  Well, the fun (gathering) phase is essentially over, and I now face the daunting task of getting a sufficient amount of actual nut meats out of the shells to justify the effort.  I have had it quite definitely in my mind that I want enough for one really great, rich nut cake.  My specific and challenging goal as prefixed in my mind: one pound of nuts.  (For one cake?)  Well, for last week’s blog I was thinking not about nuts but the American criminal justice system.  In choosing courtroom scenes famous in literature, I invoked the most powerful I knew, that in The Brothers Karamazov, a novel I would have claimed to know very well.  Yet I had completely forgotten that the third chapter of the “trial book” is called “The Medical Experts and a Pound of Nuts.”  This chapter of the book is of great psychological and theological importance, and doubtless one of the passages that made Freud believe that Karamazov was the most brilliant novel ever written.  It has to do with the testimony of a kindly old German doctor, Herzenstube, concerning an experience he had had twenty-five years earlier when the defendant, Dmitri Karamazov, now accused of parricide, was a sadly neglected child.  He had shown the boy a trivial kindness apparently unique in the lad’s bleak life.  He had given him a pound of, of…and here Herzenstube, though fluent in Russian, lost the word he needed.  It had to be teased out of him: “Apples?”  No.  “Nuts?”  Yes!  “I bought him a pound of nuts.”  Unconscious bibliomancy.

            One mode of proceeding for the bibliomancist was to open the book randomly (Æneid, Bible, whatever), stick a finger on one of its leaves, and then apply the specific text touched upon to the question at hand.  Successful application often required considerable ingenuity.  But in societies in which the distinction between the aural and the written was not so marked as today, the fortuitous hearing of a text could also be oracular.  Both hearing and reading are relevant to the most consequential instance of bibliomancy in western cultural history, and both are highly relevant to one of the set readings for the first Sunday in Advent (Romans 13:11-14,) crucial parts of which are the following: ...it is now the hour for us to rise from sleep…The night is past and the day is at hand.  Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness…In this exhortation to spiritual wokeness Paul anticipates, somewhat prematurely as it has turned out, the second advent of Christ.  That is why it is the inevitable Advent text.

            The historical personage this text most famously woke up was Augustine of Hippo, whose conversion to orthodox Christianity had large consequences for the intellectual history of Europe.  On the verge of his dramatic moment of final submission he already knew in his heart he wanted to be a committed Christian, but his attachments to sexual pleasure and neo-Platonism still stood in his way.  This is a dilemma every reader will be able at least to half understand.  (Who among us hasn’t suffered the itch of neo-Platonism?)  In a paroxysm of nervous indecision, a copy of the Pauline epistles in his tunic pocket, he stepped out of the house into the garden and sat down beneath a fig tree.  From beyond the garden walls he heard the sing-song voices of children playing some game.  Their words were “Pick it up and read it, pick it up and read it…”  So he did.  He took out his book and opened it at random.  The first words his eyes fell upon were it is now the hour for us to rise from sleep.  The rest is history.

            I have recounted this story rather breezily, but the eighth book of Augustine’s Confessions, where it is related, is a masterpiece of subtle and complex literary construction.  By Augustine’s day random lectionary readings had already played a major role in the legendary sacred history that was forming around heroic asceticism.  Fortuitous episodes of bibliomancy could be highly consequential.  You might just happen to hear a lectionary reading that would change your life immediately and forever.  One of the most consequential passages you could stumble upon would be the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.  I think of it as the all-star chapter of the whole New Testament.  Along with a whole lot of other great stuff (self-made eunuchs being among my favorites) we get Jesus’s answer to a really Big Question: “What good thing shall I do that I may have life everlasting?”  The answer includes a clause that turns out to be a deal-breaker for the earnest young man who asked the question: “Sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to poor people.”  But many others, including Anthony of the Desert and Francis of Assisi, were able to sign up for the whole program.  It is alarming that the “voices of the page,” whether read silently by oneself or heard read by another, could have such dramatic or lurid results.  When we talk about “the power of books” these days we can hardly have such instantaneous, life-altering consequences in mind.  Perhaps one should be cautious in asking any questions inviting possible answers that one does not want to hear.   Still, I have half a mind to offer Herman Melville a role in determining my dinner menu just as soon as I finish writing this.

 

 

 

 

Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night

 

 

            One of the world’s greatest possible book titles was pre-empted by the humanist poet Francis Petrarch in the 1360s when he published his little treatise entitled Concerning His Own and Lots of Other People’s Ignorance (De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia).  The crisis in our endangered American democracy  is everywhere in the news these days, and its root causes identified with varying degrees of plausibility: too much polarization in politics, too much money in politics, too little talent among politicians, gerrymandering, voter registration, voter suppression, voter fraud, voter apathy.  Perhaps we ought also to include Petrarch’s suggestion among the dangers.

 

            At both federal and state levels there are three branches of American constitutional government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.  For many years now a journalistic quiz conducted among eligible voters--the Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey—has tried to get a rough idea of what Americans actually know about the most basic rules and procedures by which we are governed.  In recent years,  with only slight percentage variations, only one third of Americans have been able to identify the three branches of the government.  That closely approximates the percentage of college graduates in the country, but there is less overlap than you might think. 

 

            Events of the past week suggest that many of us would benefit from a crash civics course.  Two of the branches were on conspicuous if controversial display: the legislature in the House of Representatives in Washington and the judicial in a courtroom in Wisconsin.  The wonder of it all is that despite powerful distractions, partisan passions, and much unbalanced and even erroneous commentary from major news sources,  they actually worked.  What I mean by this is that lawfully elected political representatives and a duly empaneled jury of our peers came to reasonable conclusions within the framework of our consensual social contract.  This does not mean that spending a huge amount of money we do not actually have is now an idea beyond cavil or that Kyle Rittenhouse is a “hero” rather than a dangerously undisciplined youth.  But it does mean that although nearly drowned out by all the clunky noises, our democratic processes actually were functioning.

 

            Though the passage of the “infrastructure bill” was in my opinion the more significant event of the week, it seems to have been the criminal trial that has most ominously inflamed passions and most clearly vindicated Petrarch’s title.  Ignorance of the law may be no excuse for criminal perpetrators, but it was nearly the default position of some eminent journalists who wrote about this case with passion, disseminating as they did so inflammatory untruths.  I would say “on both sides” if that phrase did not so basely betray the ideal of impartiality allegorized in Justice’s blindfold.  Fiction can indeed illuminate the inadequacy of our apparatuses of human justice, but it should do so honestly as fiction, not under the false flag of “reporting.”  All literature professors have to be Aristotelians if we want to keep bread on the table.  In his famous defense of the moral utility of fiction against radical Platonists who gave poetry the ethical status of a reflection in a mud puddle, Aristotle pointed to fiction’s moral clarity.  You can have all the messiness and ambiguity of reality, but without the occluding tedium and irrelevance.  Imagine facing Jardyce and Jarndyce from Bleak House as lived reality!

 

            As I look back at the past week, several novels dealing with adversarial legal proceedings come to my mind, including the only novel that many American high school graduates seem to have heard of, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Literary "courtroom drama" is pretty common, and a few great writers have created it with genius.  Of them few have been more interested in the ambiguities of justice, especially in the disparity, or rather the unbridgeable chasm between a Providential order and the imperfections of the human legal system,  than was Dostoyevsky.  Crime and Punishment was published only five years after the reforming Czar Alexander II, the “Liberator,” introduced the innovation of the “English” trial by jury into the Russian legal system in 1864.  Historians tell us that part of the contemporary impact of the trial scene in The Brothers Karamazov (1879) for its first Russian readers grew out of its still comparative novelty.  The twelfth book of Karamazov is certainly one of the greatest courtroom scenes in literary history, and like most of the others, it is rather disconcerting.  There’s a clue in the book‘s title: “A Judicial Error”.  Forty years later the whole “bourgeois” system would be overthrown by “revolutionary justice”, in which “individual rights” played no role.  Justice was what the Party defined as justice as, like a meandering stream, it moved through history to the dictates of dialectical necessity.  This, indeed, put an official end to judicial errors, as Solzhenitsyn underscores in the sardonic title to one of his short novels: We Do Not Make Mistakes.  Democracy is said to be the worst possible system of political organization except for all the others.  Something analogous could be said about our imperfect system of trial by jury.

 

            For our justice system is full of mistakes.  How can it fail to be?  It must necessarily wade through the morass our own and many others’ ignorance.  What is necessary but also necessarily imperfect demands ethical delicacy.  In Dostoyevky’s novel the famous big city defense lawyer Fetyukovich—the Johnnie Cochrane of Saint Petersburg, so to speak--passionately invokes in its secular form an ancient theological maxim: sins of commission are more serious than sins of omission.  In our legal tradition this appears as “Blackstone’s ratio”—referring to William Blackstone, author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England.  Blackstone writes: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.  I hope that might be something close to the actual traffic of our criminal courts even if it necessarily means that many, many felons walk free.  Yet how frequently do we find this spirit among zealous prosecutors, or the zealous commentaries of journalists?  The frequent fallibility of sanctioned police forces and established courts is paradoxically outstripped by the vigilantism that lawlessness ostensibly justifies.  I’m not a regular reader of Westerns, but I am a supporter of the Library of America, and not too long ago I got their anthology simply entitled The Western.  All the novels it brings together are good reads, but one of them deserves a permanent place in that rare category Virginia Woolf called “novels for adults”: The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940).   In addition to being what is usually called a gripping story, it cocoons a work of political theory at least as challenging as the treatises of John Locke and rather easier to understand.  It is set in the nineteenth century, of course; but it is as fresh as this week’s news.  Good guys with guns.  Defund the police. The Helping Hand Strikes Again.

 

            The week’s events set me searching my shelves for one last novel.  I couldn’t find it, but  Joan turned it up immediately.  It is a golden oldie, A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes (1929).*  Our particular copy is a particularly precious oldie, a Modern Library hardback in its dust jacket with a printed price of 95¢! (Pennies long since being meaningless, the “cent mark” has disappeared from the computer keyboard.  You now have to seek it out among “Advanced Symbols”.)  If you have not read this book you will want to do so.  I will be a little coy about describing it and say it is a story about the unspeakable guilt of innocence.  In only slightly less cryptic terms, those of an excellent introduction by Isabel Patterson, it is “an account of the melancholy fate of a crew of well-meaning pirates who fell into the clutches of half a dozen children.”

 

            Perhaps the novel is not the ideal mode for the advancement of serious political discussion, but it sure beats Twitter.  Not a great deal that is profound can be reduced to 140 graphic characters, but in an age before “social media” Robert Goheen, a great president of my university, once did it in fifty.  I was then much younger, and much more certain about things than I am now.  After I had generously shared with him one of my certainties, Goheen paused, then replied gently, “John, never be sure that you are more than about 80% right.” This perhaps complicates matters.  As I read the reactions to this week’s news I conclude that the worst aspect of my and other people’s ignorance might be the part that thinks it knows too much.

 

*published in England under the title The Innocent Voyage