Greetings from the Peacock Room

I.

Recently I undertook a solo road trip to Washington, DC, one that I think aided my understanding of the country, of many things of deep importance to me, and, least importantly, of myself.

The trip to DC itself was interesting, as was the return drive, which took a different, more coastal route. Traveling often puts me in mind of the Japanese writers who perfected travel literature, as Occitan writers perfected lyric love poetry and English writers perfected the novel. Bashō Matsuo is the obvious (in certain circles) example, but we could also name Arii Shokyū, Jippensha Ikku, and Suzuki Bokushi, list just a few from the Edo period alone. I’ll describe part of the journey in a narrative mode that vaguely pastiches some of these writers:

I set off through New York down Interstate 88, through fields and hills speckled with hard snow, on a frigid evening after leaving work. Stopping at a Mirabito in the middle of nowhere for a chicken spiedie—not something I normally eat—and to fill up my gas tank, I played with the cruise control to get the mileage as economical as I could as I finished the first leg and entered Pennsylvania. I stopped for the night at a Fairfield Inn and Suites in Wilkes-Barre, in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The second day of travel, the bulk of which was in Pennsylvania, was perhaps the most interesting from a human-geographical perspective, in some ways more so than the time I spent at my final destination in the capital.

My main objectives for that day were to meet up with my friend Laurel, whom I do not see often, and to visit Centralia. Centralia, a town almost entirely abandoned because of an anthracite coal fire that has been burning underground since the 1960s, is well-known among connoisseurs of decaying, left-behind, and generally vanishing places. To the extent that the town still has life to it, that life is, touchingly, almost entirely religious; there is an active Catholic church (built on solid rock, not on burning coal) that now serves surrounding towns, and people are still being buried in Centralia’s Eastern Orthodox burying ground. (Also touching is the view from a still-active coal fire vent to a ridge on which a series of windmills stands; volvitur orbis!) The town smells about how one would expect, only the smell is so faint that it manifests as a mild headache and unpleasant aftertaste in the throat, rather than as anything that one recognizes as an odor. Before Centralia I tried and failed to get to confession at a church in Hazleton; after Centralia I proceeded to Ashland, a small town hard by where I made a spontaneous stop at a little restaurant for a fried haddock special, it having been a Lenten Friday. I had it with a strawberry milkshake; my diet that day was, in general, very bad.

Northeastern Pennsylvania is generally quite bleak, a region whose heart has been broken not only by deindustrialization but by policy choices that accompanied deinsdustrialization; there’s no iron law that technological unemployment has to end up like this, quite the contrary. It takes deliberate choices to let somewhere like this rot on the vine rather than building up new industries and new lines of work in the same general region. Reagan and Clinton both have much to answer for on this point. Also, like many other parts of my route, it’s full of overtly religious and patriotic appeals in advertising for businesses so disconnected from religion and patriotism that it gave the heebie jeebies to a New Englander like me. One small city has a “Christian Clothing” consignment store; another has a gutter cleaner whose logo has multiple separate American flags in it. It was a trip that many people from my part of the country, especially LGBT people, would have thought twice before taking. This is not to be wondered at; trans people in particular, which I’m going to define in an unfashionably objective and concrete way as “people who have a persistent discomfort or unease of some kind with the visceral aspects of what sex they are and would like at least in theory to do something about that,” are currently a political football in Middle America to a point that tends to raise real questions about one’s safety. I’ll return to this point later on in this essay.

After Centralia and Ashland, I met up with Laurel in the little town near Lancaster where she lives, no thanks to the exit I decided to take from Interstate 81. After spending about an hour with her, chatting and looking at a South-Central Pennsylvania chocolatier that she insists—correctly—is much better than Hershey’s, I got back on I-81 as quickly as possible and played a game with myself: I would drive so as to conserve gas and not need to refuel before crossing the Mason-Dixon Line into Maryland. I almost made it, but I did not want to risk getting stranded for a pride about which nobody else knew or cared; I pulled off in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, just before the Line, and refueled at a Sheetz whose pump, for some reason, did not stop automatically once the tank was full. I noticed that gas prices in the Mid-Atlantic are much higher than in New England and Upstate New York. The land was getting greener, spring rather than winter, and the sky was just turning from blue to evening-gold.

As much for the sake of it as to avoid the worst of Beltway rush hour Friday, in the gloaming I took a detour through Harpers Ferry, the first time I had ever been in the State of West Virginia. I was delighted to see that it had one of the best-preserved downtowns I have ever seen, from the standpoint of intact buildings from the period for which the town is famous. The landscape, where the Shenandoah River meets the Potomac, is craggy and dramatic even in near-dark; not for nothing is West Virginia the only state entirely covered in mountainous terrain, no matter how much Vermonters like me try to relativize the Lake Champlain basin. The John Brown Wax Museum, at least when driven past in the blue hour, looks as macabre as it should, and as inviting.

The last leg of the trip into DC—or technically into Northern Virginia, where Mary, the friend with whom I stayed for the second and third nights of the trip, lives—was not very interesting, although I did survive driving the Washington Beltway (so well-known from the phrase “Washington Beltway”), as indeed I would again the next day and the day after that.

II.

That Saturday was rainy in the morning and cloudy-to-sunny in the afternoon. This did not bother me overmuch; “rain in Northern Virginia” is an inside joke with some friends of mine, and it also meant that I was able to park in East Potomac Park without too much trouble and see the somewhat bedraggled, but still very pretty, Tidal Basin cherry blossoms without jostling enormous crowds. The last time I had been to the capital, in either 1999 or 2000—certainly before Bush took office—when I was a small child, had not been in the cherry blossom season, but I had a clear memory of the Tidal Basin and, of course, found it almost unchanged. So too with the National Mall. Some of the specific buildings and monuments that I passed were, of course, new, but nothing about the overall layout was; indeed, it had not been in 1999 or 2000 either.

This did not surprise me. DC is set up in a way that, were it an archaeological site in England, would get it called a ritual landscape without qualification or controversy. This is well-known to the point that there are conspiracy theories about it. The city is an interlocking series of gridlike, starlike, and triangular patterns, most of which are themselves relatively normal urban or suburban streets but which end up converging on the famous central features: the Washington Monument, the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and numerous other national and constitutional structures in and around the National Mall, Tidal Basin, and Ellipse. The general approach to changing anything about the setup is additive rather than substitutive; recent structures like the World War II and Martin Luther King Memorials have simply been incorporated into previously open areas of the existing layout. (The King Memorial has a distinctly Mosaic vibe, with a rock wall split in two over which artificial waterfalls course.)

One would think that this reflects an additive principle in American civic nationalism in general, and in some ways it does, but in other ways our general approach to history as a country has actually been getting thinner and poorer over time. With someone like Christopher Columbus (who distinctly lacks a memorial or monument in the capital’s ritual landscape, although Union Station has one), the current status of fodder for flame wars about wokeness is clearly a step down from the twentieth-century status of ecumenical national hero. That, too, however, was already a step down from the nineteenth century’s more complicated and realistic view of the man. When last winter I visited a preserved 1870s schoolroom at the Bennington Museum in Vermont, I found a poem called “The Discovery of America” by an author named John Townsend Trowbridge, which tells a pat, conventional, complacent version of the story until the last stanza, then cold-cocks the Gilded Age schoolchild with:

With wondering awe, the red men saw

The silken cross unfurled.

His task was done; for good or ill,

The fatal banners of Castile

Waved o’er the Western world.

This in an otherwise approving story told about American colonial history! In the twentieth century this sort of observation became a political third rail, and now in the twenty-first it has become a culture war flashpoint. In the late nineteenth it was uncontroversial enough for publishers of primary-school readers to allow it to be made to ten-year-olds. Clearly some of the texture of American history has been sanded down here, whereas the National Mall and Tidal Basin ritual landscape just keeps adding texture, as, frankly, it should.

Americans in the 1870s had quite a lot to say about other cultures as well as about our own, which brings me to the central reason why I wanted to visit Washington: a visit to the Peacock Room, an installation artwork by James Abbott McNeill Whistler that currently occupies part of the Freer Gallery at the National Museum of Asian Art. I became aware of the Peacock Room in the early 2010s during discussions about Orientalism in the Japanese language and literature major to which I have alluded twice already, and in divinity school a few years later I did a lengthy independent-study paper about Western receptions of Buddhism that touched on some aspects of its look and feel. Thus it came up in both my undergraduate and my graduate education, and, I think, reasonably so; the style and content are indeed Orientalist, and specifically japoniste, as all hell. The room is executed mostly in gold and a vivid peacock-y teal; there are gilt fighting peacocks on the wall at one end and a painting (famous in its own right) called “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain” over a fireplace at the other; multiple owners of the room have filled it with Asian ceramics to suit their tastes. Frederick Richards Leyland, the British shipping magnate who hired first the architect Thomas Jeckyll and then Whistler to design and execute the room, was unhappy with it both aesthetically and because of the enormous fee Whistler charged; the fighting peacocks represent Leyland and Whistler and are titled “Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room.”

This is one of a very few instances of this type of conflict in which I tend to side with the industrialist over the artist. Whistler did a dramatic installation in another person’s house without adequate involvement or consent either from the house’s owner or from the original artist from whom Whistler had taken on the job. This is not, to me, so much an issue of art versus money as one of hubris versus humility. But at least the Peacock Room looks astonishing. People who behave like Whistler do about artistic commissions nowadays more often than not come out with some kind of AI drivel or, at best, art that’s no better or worse, no more or less impressive, than what the commissioning party asked for in the first place.

After the Freer Gallery I parted ways with Mary for a few hours and went on a very long walk, much of it in the company of still another friend (I meet a lot of people online). I did briefly take a bus, to get from the area around the Mall to the area around Georgetown University, which is more leafy and dense-suburban and closer to a “normal” East Coast city of Washington’s rough size. The bus routes ostensibly take cash for the most part but after the COVID year 2020 there was a push to make some app the default, like for seemingly everything else these days; the driver’s machine had some problems with the cash and I couldn’t figure out how to work the app even once I had it downloaded, but the driver, kind man!, let me on anyway.

I enjoyed meeting up with this friend; we talked about things like fascism (agin’) and the architecture of the Washington National Cathedral (fer), to which we walked through Dumbarton Oaks Park and past the Naval Observatory and up Embassy Row. (I particularly liked seeing the Italian embassy, the Wiphala flying outside the Bolivian embassy, and the aggressive pro-Ukraine propaganda throughout the residential street immediately facing the Russian embassy.) After about two hours we parted ways, because I still had to get to confession—I had been trying and failing throughout the previous week, for a variety of reasons that I personally find hilarious with the long /aɪ/ in retrospect—and then to the MLK Memorial to meet up with Mary at five o’ clock. Since my phone was by this point dying, and then dead, and since I did not really have time to sit somewhere fiddling with its infernally finicky charger port, this turned into a long and almost completely uninterrupted shlep across Washington, orienting myself by a combination of street signage, the Washington Monument, and vibes.

I walked, in total, about eleven and a half miles that day, not counting however much walking I did inside the Freer Gallery. It was worth it. My right hip, both knees, and both calves hurt for days.

III.

Let me come back again to my observation about people from my part of the country, especially people who are “queer” in whatever sense I am. I refer here to what gets called gender dysphoria, which gives me a relationship with LGBT self-concept that is indeterminate in a way that pains me; I am on the side of the concrete and the legible whenever possible. A lot of people in my position would have avoided making parts of this trip. This probably includes the eleven-and-a-half-mile hauling-of-ass through the nation’s capital; this is an almost completely unfamiliar city to me, after all. Yet I went, I did all of this, and I’m glad I did. There’s a Sylvia Plath quote that I often think about:

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

My situation is unlike Plath’s in many, many ways, most of which give me more freedom when it comes to things like this than she had. I too wanted and still want to be able to do these kinds of things, and I, unlike Plath, am in a position where I actually get to make a choice about it. Or it’s better to say that I have to make a choice, maybe; as with all choices, to have this one looses in some ways and binds in others. This sort of thing is, simply put, in large part why I’ve set aside any realistic prospect of outwardly expressing my subjective sense of myself to the world. I suppose I have spent too much of my life too zonked-out on Japanese literature to find this as troubling as would many; who am I, that I would be mindful of myself?

Troubling or not, self-abnegating or not, this served me well when I was poking around Centralia, or ordering the “haddie” special at the restaurant in Ashland, or undertaking the hours-long trek across the District of Chaos. “You exist in the context,” as Kamala Harris (a resident of the Naval Observatory herself) says, “of all in which you live and what came before you.” This distinctively Californian spin on the Democratic Party’s more general “you didn’t build that ethos” seems, to me, relevant here. We are discussing queerness, closetedness, travel, and, on the other hand, the sense of having been passed by or passed over that animates a lot of the cultural and political tenseness in the fruited plain. These aren’t really matters of individual identity. They’re matters of what one can bear in order to relate to other people, and what one cannot.

The Freer Gallery currently has, in addition to the Peacock Room, another Whistler exhibit, and I think this exhibit might valuably be put into conversation, as they say, with this issue about “existing in the context.” The exhibit focuses on Whistler’s streetside scenes of storefronts and working-poor houses, many in neighborhoods of Paris or London that were about to be redeveloped. The interpretation of this material is some of the most critical I’ve ever seen in any museum, in the sense of calling attention to moral problems with the artist. If Sargent painted the élite in a way that deliberately bracketed out social and political tensions around their status (he did not, but this is the common stereotype about his work), Whistler painted the poor that way, reducing them to a closely cropped individual and thus subjective ego. The cropping, in many cases, is literal; the pictures are physically very small, unlike “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain,” which is much larger than I had realized. Divorcing the subject’s ego from his or her surroundings, from the political and economic situation appurtenant to a butcher or an ironmonger or a mud lark or a lady of the evening or whatever, leaves the élite client’s, patron’s, and audience’s egos out of it. Sargent is able to criticize his subjects on a personal and psychological level; “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” is the famous example, but I find his mother-daughter portrait of Gretchen and Rachel Warren, which is in the same room at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, at least as troubling, in a Sarah Waters sort of way. Whistler’s patrons are off the hook here because not only does he not depict them, at least not in this particular subset of his work, he doesn’t even depict the socioeconomic order that they built and that they maintain.

Whistler didn’t want to exist in the context, yet he did; I would not be able to be so critical of him otherwise. I hope if people end up as viciously critical of me and my decisions, about the world and about myself, a hundred and fifty years from now, it’ll be in connection with an achievement as impressive as the Peacock Room. I doubt it, though, and that’s okay too, because there’s no inherent virtue to either the chase after achievement or the chase after earthly memory.

IV.

After my “main” DC day I still had almost twenty-four hours before I absolutely had to start heading home. I ended up using, more or less, twenty-one of them.

A lot of what I did with that Saturday evening has to do with family history that I have around Annapolis and on the Eastern Shore. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this; I think of my family history, especially the positive parts, as having put certain deep structures at the roots of my personality that I do not now want to air out in detail. What I will say is that I had a very good and not-even-too-late dinner on Kent Island, a snapper (or bream, as some call it, such as in Sasameyuki) braised in some unidentifiable but very delicious sauce, on a bed of rice pilaf with steamed vegetables. I had all this with a glass of prosecco. It was windy and got dark faster than I would have expected, perhaps because it was so close to the spring equinox. The restaurant gave directly on the Chesapeake Bay and the lights of the Bay Bridge were insistent in the gloaming.

I also went to a Wawa in Annapolis; I did not know that there were Wawas in Annapolis. More on Wawa generally some other time.

The next morning was Palm Sunday. I took my leave of Mary—whom I did greatly enjoy spending time with; I have not talked much about my visits with the friends mentioned, or about my friends as people, but that is a matter of their privacy and not my level of interest—and went to Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral, near Dupont Circle. It is a remarkable building, even though it is not a purpose-built cathedral; the Romanesque Revival art suggests somewhere like Ravenna, and there is a chapel to Saint Anthony of Padua that has beautiful frescoes of early Franciscan history. I prayed in that chapel with the text of (most of) the Canticle of the Creatures carved below the frescoes to three sides of me, then sat down for Mass under a distinctly worried-looking Saint Mark the Evangelist.

The Archbishop of Washington, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, preached, mainly, about trees. The locus classicus here is The Dream of the Rood, although one finds everything from motets to terrible Christian children’s videos on the same theme. You can probably find the homily online; it’s a pretty good one. “Pretty good” is, as will probably not surprise anybody with a quantum more familiarity with Washington than I have, unfortunately not something that can at all be said of the traffic leaving this Mass. (Incidentally, on the way out I overheard two older women arguing about whether or not “vote early, vote often” is an LBJ quote. I think I recognized one of their voices from cable news.) In part because the weather was now fair—and how beautiful the cherry trees were when I drove along the Tidal Basin!—it took me an hour longer than I expected to get out of the District for a supposedly planned-ahead lunch with my editor at a Catholic website for which I write. The lunch was in a very suburban place, which I have to say I do not mind as much as I once did. The conversation and company were good, but of course had to be cut much shorter than would have been the case had I had a more reasonable way of coping with and arranging things around that traffic.

From there on home, an adventure itself and one not necessarily as pleasant or as edifying as the drive down through Pennsylvania. Several points stick out. Before entirely leaving the Washington area, I stocked up on Old Bay as requested and required by a Marylander colleague back home. In the Eastern Shore, I listened to gospel radio out of Baltimore until the station gave out; this was a mere couple of days before the bridge collapse in that city. (One standout was a partially spoken-word rendition of the story of the empty tomb; I’d love to find it again some day but I did not look for the title and the name of the choir in time.) From the Eastern Shore on Route 301 I crossed into the State of Delaware, where the constant smoke of some kind of horrible DuPont chemical plant rises up between the branches of flowering fruit trees and the struts of white bridges. The state has been a point of amusement for my housemate Veronica and me for years now; I stopped and bought her a two-and-a-half-dollar refrigerator magnet that reads “Delightful Delaware,” nothing more, against a simplistic gradient background.

From Delaware one crosses, of course, into New Jersey, a state which is full of places of my memory. I lived there between the ages of eight and fifteen and then on and off, because my parents were still there, till the age of twenty. I owe to my time there many of my tastes and habits, a few lasting friendships, and a certain feeling of push-pull with ugly or disreputable places; this last is a feeling of which I am very protective. Once when my friend Antonio told me that I could not invoke home-state immunity-from-criticism privileges for every state I had ever lived in, I chose to invoke it only for New Jersey from then on; “bold choice,” he said, “but I understand it strategically.”

I’ll elide this, for the same reason I elided some of the stuff about my family history around the Chesapeake Bay. I will say only that I returned home very late at night, after a sparkling snowstorm with an underlayer of power-line-downing ice.

The Princess with a Thousand Enemies

(This is (not) a music review.)

A new Taylor Swift album came out last month. This happens a lot, and people don’t shut up about it when it does. I am not going to shut up about it either.

The question isn’t whether the new album is good, exactly; that is never the point with these things, not when Swift is involved. She is a generational songwriting talent, and her musicianship is serviceable, but she is also prolific, with all that being prolific tends to imply for consistency. The Tortured Poets Department has a lot of pretty good songs on it (although they tend towards the “over-written”), a few standout ones, and one or two that are some of the most emotionally immature dreck you’ve ever heard in your life. The same, however, can be said about a lot of albums, by both Taylor Swift and other artists. What makes “TTPD” different? This question is more broadly social, cultural, and even economic and political in its way.

To understand Swift’s current cultural totipresence, we have to understand the tour. The Eras Tour, even in its attenuated movie form, is an almost premodernly ludic experience, a carnival in the original sense that included a sacral quality. I went to a showing of the movie last year in Saratoga Springs, a town I dislike for a lot of reasons, and at points it was like being at one of those Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showings, if Rocky Horror were monocultural rather than countercultural. I qualify it this way, and yet there is something oddly non-monocultural and non-mainstream about the serious Swift fandom. The showing I went to was full of teenaged girls yelling things like “FUCK SCOTT BORCHETTA” and “FUCK SCOTT SWIFT” and “FUCK SCOOTER BRAUN” and “FUCK KIM KARDASHIAN” and “FUCK JAKE GYLLENHAAL”—the Land of Swift has a princess with a thousand enemies—as well as an almost gematria-like occultic treatment of the numbers 5, 13, and, of course, 1,989. Almost everybody in the world has heard at least one or two Taylor Swift songs, and probably most Millennials and in particular most Millennial women have a decent generalized understanding of her career, but it is still distinctly specialized knowledge what the fuck half this stuff means. This sort of thing is why my housemate and I have an inside joke about a semi-near-future eternal recurrence of the rise of Constantine where the “sign” in which “Swiftie Constantine” conquers is a snake emoji, and instead of Arian Germanic tribes there’s a Canticle for Leibowitz-style Great Plains culture that thinks the house from “The Last Great American Dynasty” was in Rapid City.

Now there’s an extended Eras Tour movie on streaming, because Swift likes money, and also there’s the new album. A lot of the album is about Matty Healy, the extremely racist, sexist, and religiously bigoted front man of a shitty boy band whom Swift dated for about a month last year. “But, daddy, I love him!” Swift protests in one of the album’s set-piece songs—indeed, this is the title of said song—which is compelling in The Little Mermaid, where the line originates, but here seems almost intended to be a Trojan horse to make the old-school familialist understanding of marriage look good by comparison. Swift, like most people, has yet to learn the trick of keeping a gun by her brain’s pleasure receptors so that she can shoot them if they look at her funny.

Speaking of Swift’s neurology, the album release has unleashed not only the usual flood of strange sexism that is directed at her as a matter of course but also a dismaying variety of terrible attitudes about psychology, depression, madness. Basic moral and political observations about Swift—she is wealthy; she is hypocritical; her private jet use has caused a truly unconscionable amount of terrible Pollution—mushroom into a dogged insistence that she must not have real problems, that she must just be a whiner who is appropriating the aesthetic of real emotional and spiritual struggle. This is, of course, bullshit. Swift has publicly protested too much about her own sanity for at least a decade. The sorts of things that people have made fun of her for the most consistently over the years—mood swings; embarrassing self-reinventions; almost unbelievably short and intense relationships; an increasingly obvious inability to keep it in her pants—are themselves oftener than not warning signs of serious problems in someone’s inmost depths. Nobody accuses Lord Byron of having been a poser, even though the “lord” in his name does mean what it usually means and even though his behavior was at least as calculated to present a particular aesthetic as Swift’s is. I’m not sure I would call Byron a tortured poet, exactly, but that is because I am still not sure “tortured poet” is a real set phrase; were people saying this six months ago? It’s become difficult to remember.

Even with someone like, say, Charles Bukowski, the torture came at least much from ways in which he had it better than other people as from ways in which he had it worse; it’s impossible to honestly think about Bukowski’s virulent misogyny as something of which he was the real victim, although various dishonest defenders of his have certainly tried to. It’s possible that Taylor Swift’s problems are about as self-inflicted as Charles Bukowski’s were, or at least an argument to that effect can be made that isn’t transparently and cartoonishly sexist. Can an argument be made that her problems are more self-inflicted than his were? No, not really, and this argument cannot really be made about Byron or Dylan Thomas (name-dropped in a strange context in the album’s title track, which sounds like it might be about Phoebe Bridgers rather than Healy) or François Villon (a poet who was almost certainly literally tortured on more than one occasion) either.

Even Ursula K. Le Guin’s Gethen-cold writing on Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, which is so bad that it permanently altered my opinion of her even though I don’t like Hemingway either, does not go as far as some of the anti-Swiftian commentary on the princess’s supposed mental haleness does. In fairness, it cannot. “I’m not saying that Hemingway wasn’t really suicidally depressed; that he was is beyond denial. I’m just saying he was suicidally depressed because he was a bad person.” That at least is connected to the reality of suffering, which Le Guin, to her credit, never denied; denying that reality would have vitiated her artistic, intellectual, and moral project much more thoroughly than did any of the specific topics on which she tended towards hypocrisy or self-righteousness. Le Guin is better and more honest than, for example, “Taylor Swift will succumb to depression if not for her emotional support private jet,” a real remark that someone on the bird app made. (If he by some chance reads this and wants to be credited by name, or wants someone else quoted instead, he can feel free to email me—but if I were him I would, in this context, prefer to go nameless.)

So it’s not even that Taylor Swift is above criticism or necessarily a particularly admirable person. It’s that her releases, for whatever reason, have a way of attracting unhinged attacks and unduly savage criticism from people who have even worse understandings of what the world is really like than she has herself. Swift, like an Athenian philosopher or a “populist” political leader, is remarkably good at exposing holes in her detractors’ worldviews by existing. Sometimes she exposes holes in their moral standards too, as with the Le Guin-Hemingway comparison that I just made. Taylor Swift the gadfly is an important contributor to the public sphere in ways that hold good regardless of the output of Taylor Swift the singer-songwriter.

Public Figures with the Word “Courtney” in Their Names and Why They Are or Were Deep State Plants

• John Courtney Murray, theologian: Allegedly a Cold Warrior, in fact subordinated the Church to DEEP STATE THREE-LETTER-AGENCY WOKE COMMUNISM by doing (((religious liberty))) at Vatican II.

• Courtney Love, musician: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Hole is the Pontifical Gregorian University of kinderwhore grunge bands. Killed the revolutionary leaders Kurt Cobain and Kristen Pfaff and damaged US-Japan relations by creating the artistically questionable 2000s manga Princess Ai. But at least a lot of her actual music is very very good, which brings us to:

• Lou Courtney, musician: I have never really vibed with his particular kind of soul music, and he wrote for Chubby Checker, an obvious soft-power exercise if there ever was one.

• Courtney Eaton, actress: Was in Mad Max: Fury Road, which is feminazi propaganda against real American manhood. Stop the feminization of America!

• Kourtney Kardashian, Kardashian: Why does she spell it with a K? To make it seem like it’s a name in a language where /k/ is always spelled that way, OBVIOUSLY. This is a hyperforeignism to throw off suspicion. She’s a fed.

• Courtney Young, former President of the American Library Association: Was President of the American Library Association.

• Charles Courtney Curran, painter: No Impressionist could ever be a real MAGA patriot.

• Leonard Courtney, 1st Baron Courtney of Penwith: Victorian Liberal who supported Parliamentary reform and opposed the Empire. Need I say more?

Things That God Created to Train the Faithful: A Partial List

I write this from a more or less okay hotel lobby computer in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, dashed off in a slapdash fashion. It is my second Dune-inspired not-quite-essay, after the wildly successful (in some, extremely narrow, circles, which I suppose robs the expression “wildly successful” of most or all of its force) “Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?” The original saying, attributed by noted pro-life femcel Irulan Corrino to (who else?) Muad’dib, is, of course, “God created Arrakis to train the faithful.”

To Irulan’s immortalization of her husband’s observation, I add:

God created prestige TV, and its attendant practices around both viewing culture and narrative mode, to train the faithful. (Not to tip my hand about my current fandom participation overmuch, but…)

God created Florida to train the faithful.

God created Trustco Bank to train the faithful.

God created old-school anime fandom to train the faithful.

God created small talk to train the faithful.

God created dating to train the faithful.

God created Don DeLillo/Murakami Haruki-type swill about depoliticized consumerist realism, and the idea that this is “good” literature, to train the faithful.

God created hangnails to train the faithful.

God created car culture to train the faithful.

God created unseasonably warm weather to train the faithful.

God created sleep apnea to train the faithful.

God created the Republic of Ireland’s political system to train the faithful.

God created the funhouse-mirror version of the overgrown-high-school-mean-girl mindset, where you assume everyone else is an overgrown high school mean girl if they ever disagree with you on anything, to train the faithful.

God created some, but not all, of the Interstate Highway System to train the faithful.

God created both the phrase “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and its logical complement to train the faithful—but, since He also created the phrase “both sides do it” to train the faithful, it’s best not to stress this overmuch.

God created people who loudly complain about cold weather, and treat their preferences regarding this as objective fact with which everyone agrees, to train the faithful.

God created margarine to train the faithful.

An Autoflorilegium

The foregoing is a collection of my thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, over the past five or so years. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.

On Taylor Swift

As a Taylor Swift fan who cordially dislikes gridiron football (I think this combination of tastes is what in right-wing grievance lingo is called “cultural Marxism”), I hope the “synergy” in which she is for some reason to do with the NFL now loses its luster as soon as possible.

I haven’t been to any of the Eras Tour shows (I don't exactly make “Taylor Swift tickets” money as a museum archivist, and even if I did, I overstimulate easily), but I’ve seen a fair number of fan bootleg clips from them and it’s really an astounding spectacle. We’re talking a setlist that rivals your typical Springsteen concert, pyrotechnics that could seriously injure Swift if she gets sloppy with her choreography, lighting effects and stage design that seem precision-engineered to remind one at every moment that she is an overgrown theater kid with an unlimited budget and at least one unmedicated mood disorder—why be to do with football as well?

This is not apropos of the above (except in the ways that it is), but I have, as I’ve said, been spoiling to tell people off about this:

Substantively, strong-to-dispositive arguments can and should be made that Taylor Swift’s actual ouevre is a lot less monomaniacally obsessed with buttressing heteronormativity than her public image tends to suggest. This shows up in her choices of hypotexts, in her aesthetic and intellectual relationships with other artists, and in specific songs like (off the top of my head) “Wonderland,” “Seven,” and “Ivy.” This doesn’t mean that Taylor Swift the human person is gay or bisexual, but it’s at least a little bit likelier to mean that than it is to mean that Taylor Swift the cultural product (an ungainly generation-absorbing chimera better understood by drinking heavily while watching Millennium Actress than by experiencing or researching anything in the mind-independent physical world) is “queer.” She isn’t, and people aren’t really saying that she is. These are three separate Taylor Swifts. No one worth listening to is arguing that the one who’s to do with gridiron football now for some reason is gay.

What’s demoralizing about every time Gaylor (both in the narrow sense of speculation about Taylor Swift not being straight and in the broad sense of the LGBT side of Taylor Swift’s fandom) makes mainstream news is the hostility to which LGBT Swifties, especially lesbian Swifties, are subjected. It can get shockingly overt, to the point of making one wonder how much other homophobia is just barely repressed in our society rather than having actually been overcome, but it also shows up in coded forms. Foremost among these is the idea that Gaylor speculah (to use an old anime fandom word) is somehow more egregious and insulting than other kinds of invasive speculah about Taylor Swift’s affective life, an idea that only makes any sense at all if you do on some level think that saying that someone is gay or bisexual is derogatory. The bemusement with which LGBT people who like more-firmly-queer art and do not like Taylor Swift tend to react is a bit more understandable, but still depressing to see because of the no-true-Scotsman element and the apparent lack of awareness that millions of people like Taylor Swift and also like Jen Cloher and Rina Sawayama and Boygenius and Killing Eve and so on.

In conclusion, Gaylor is a land of contrasts.

On Sports

Speaking of football, but not of Taylor Swift, the legalization of sports gambling has made mainstream sports TV, ESPN and the like, damn near unwatchable for anyone who isn’t a gambler, and I know people with otherwise vigorously libertarian views on gambling and other (of what used to be called) “vice” issues who think it was a mistake from a sheer quality-of-life standpoint.

It seems like such a shame to see sports in terms of bets about outcomes anyway, and this fuels my aesthetic dislike for sabermetrics as well; obviously it “matters” who “wins,” but in other countries, Tunisia for instance, I have seen large celebrations of local soccer teams that did not even win, just because they played a good game—and I myself liked both the Red Sox and the Orioles better when they won less.

On the 2023 Writer’s Guild of America Strike

Not only does a television writers' strike not cause much harm, out-and-out automating cultural production does. Too, if human writers really can't produce anything better than whatever ChatGPT’s great-grandscion program spews out for Avengers Wars 69, then we’re already halfway down the road from Rossetti’s “Amor Mundi.”

The only current scripted American TV show that I’m actively following is Yellowjackets, which genuinely could not be written, at all, without human consideration. If subsequent seasons suck because of this then I’ll be upset, but not nearly as upset as I’ll be if the strike fails and in ten years nobody has anything to watch that’s better-written than a fin de millénaire car commercial.

Moreover there have by definition to be some things that aren’t automated in order for human society to not just be that one wojak comic of someone hooked into a Harry Potter-themed VR headset while on a morphine drip.

On the Remake of the Film Mean Girls and Its Discontents

For Regina George being on TikTok now, she doesn't default to saying “fucking kys” nearly as much as is realistic for a high school bully born in ~2006. I'm not sure I'd say this ruins the tone—Mean Girls isn't exactly Heathers or Jawbreaker to begin with—but the tone is noticeably different, especially given instances of outright bowdlerization when in the original they call people sluts or dykes. There’s also a failure to accurately reflect the huge differences between bullying twenty years ago and bullying today, even though everyone is on social media (i.e., again, Regina should always be telling people to kill themselves, probably from behind seven burner accounts). We're left with unnecessarily softened forms of bullying behaviors that were mostly extirpated from American schools over a decade ago, all being filmed for TikTok for some reason. Some of the songs are really fun, and there are interesting and considered acting choices being made, particularly by the women playing Regina and Janis. The woman playing Cady is a bit more questionable, but that's interesting in itself since it means that she comes off as genuinely offputting and difficult to understand from the perspective of the characters who have been socialized normally.

On Various Movies That I Watched in June 2019, Written at That Time and Largely Unedited

Tolkien (2019)

This is a paint-by-numbers biopic that at more than a few points actively bored me and that felt way longer than it actually was; I would not see it again, at least not in its entirety. It fudges the facts in ways that sometimes make its subject look worse rather than better than he actually was and its treatment of his religious background is perfunctory at best. However, it’s not completely fatuous, not compared to actively audience-insulting biopics like The Babe Ruth Story or that Lifetime movie about J.K. Rowling; it does dramatize some of the key moments of Tolkien’s early life pretty well, its lead actors (Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien and Lily Collins as his eventual wife Edith) more or less know what they’re doing, and the production designs are pretty. A few early scenes with Tolkien’s mother Mabel, who is often overlooked when people discuss his early influences, were especially welcome to me; I particularly liked one where she puts on a magic lantern show for him and his brother.

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

With this Studio Ghibli movie we have a “save the historic building” plotline wedded with surprising grace to what in other hands would probably have been a shockingly melodramatic emotional arc involving the female protagonist’s male love interest finding out his true parentage. It’s set in Japan in the early 1960s and when I watched it with my mother a lot of the material culture and even some of the songs felt familiar from her 1960s American childhood. These moments of recognition and nostalgia are common with Ghibli movies and I felt them too even though I was born in 1993. People say that Japan is a socially conservative country, and they’re right to say it, not because of “hot-button issues” but because much of the country looks basically as it does in this movie even now. The cute, fun-but-contemplative, jazzy soundtrack is a particular standout.

Suspiria (1977)

Midnight-movie stalwart Jessica Harper and her friend Stefania Casini go up against an evil coven at her posh European ballet school in this gore-soaked Italian horror classic directed by Anthony Bourdain’s father-in-law. A female friend of mine says that this movie looks the way a heavy period feels; its chief strength is its lurid cinematography, and Harper’s mega-ingenue balsa-wood acting style would go on to serve her well in the lesser-known Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel Shock Treatment. Harper is in her late twenties in this but looks maybe nineteen after wardrobe and makeup; her character is an interesting missing link between classic Gothic heroines like Mina Harker from Dracula and The Turn of the Screw’s nameless governess and more proactive but also more morally and (sometimes) sexually innocent “final girls” like the girl from Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Field of Dreams (1989)

It surprises me that there’s never been any kind of fad for this movie in Millennial social media circles. In so many ways it’s tailor-made for “Tumblr”-ish aesthetic tastes—it’s pervaded with American Gothic imagery with its unexplained disembodied voices and time-traveling baseball ghosts manifesting out of cornfields, Kevin Costner’s character is defined by proto-Chris Evans nonthreatening flannel-and-dad-jeans masculinity, it has an unsympathetic character being called a Nazi in public, it’s an unintentional eighties period piece in a way that people were all over two or three years ago, and on top of all this it’s a well-written and visually beautiful movie. It’s possible that the sports-driven premise and the fact that the movie is a Father’s Day staple and lots of people have awful relationships with their fathers put the social media scene off of it, but if so, I think that’s a shame.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is both a prequel and a sequel to the original Mamma Mia!, and that fact, which sounds at first like a gimmick, is in fact exactly what makes this otherwise insubstantial movie work and resonate at a surprisingly deep level. It would be ridiculous to say that this is a religious movie in the sense that The Song of Bernadette and Kundun are religious movies. What it is, however, is a movie that is at least occasionally able to look beyond its own boundaries to imagine an eternal world of total significance and utter joy. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a rigidly-enforced no-irony zone in which past, present, and future; sea, sand, sun, and sky; art and nature; “and we ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” are fused into a bright blue eternity whose beginning is in its end, through a riot of unselfconscious musical joy, in saecula saeculorum.

On the Battle of the Sexes

People who get set off by every little thing have always been with us. Thinking of it as a recent phenomenon specially linked to women or to feminism strikes me as confirmation bias.

On Bob Katter, Australian Politician

Every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a moose in Northern New England.

On Jim Jordan, US Congressman

A few ideas for unconventional Speaker candidates, given the GOP's demonstrated preference for abusive sports coaches:

Jerry Sandusky
Joe Paterno’s ghost
That Jim Foster guy from Northwestern’s baseball team
John Kreese from The Karate Kid
Ben Scott from Yellowjackets
Rex from Napoleon Dynamite
Eteri Tutberidze
Tonya Harding’s ex-husband
My high school gym teacher, from what I can remember

On Elena Ferrante

There’s apparently serious controversy among meridionalists about whether Ferrante is sufficiently critical of her namesake protagonist’s attitude at the end of L’amica geniale (the first book in the series that, in Italian, has the same title). As of this writing I have not finished the series and so I am keeping an open mind; I think how angry I am at Lenù right now is intentional on Ferrante’s part, but we’ll see how things evolve from here.

Galling, either way, that someone would make an active choice to ignore a real class conflict happening in real time in the same room as her in favor of listening to some guy bloviate about his trick of writing magazine articles about class conflict by regurgitating other articles and ISTAT papers. Plebs this, plebs that; Lila deserves better, especially since Lenù’s thoughts and feelings about Lila herself—we all have some idea what I mean by this; “dissolving margins”; “I had made a place for her in me”—are also so vague and self-evading, things she just won’t look straight at no matter how much mental drudgery she has to put into looking at other things instead.

Not that that is entirely her fault. Every time I think the teachers in L'amica geniale can’t get more classist, they come out with some horrifying shit like “Lila’s mental beauty all went to her tits and ass,” said directly to another teenage girl. It’s not even classism in the economic sense, since Lila is one of the wealthiest characters at this point, but that makes it all the more pernicious since, especially if you are the Smarted Gifted Kid Who’s Good at School, it’s more difficult to recognize it as classism rather than as a sound appraisal of the value of an education. It is to be mourned that Lenù eventually loses the ability to see through it.

I know that Ferrante is doing this for a reason and I know what that reason is, but every time Lenù’s narration refers derisively to the Neapolitan language as “dialect” my skin crawls. And that starts early on.

Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: the 1990s Children’s Book Series Animorphs; the 2006 Anime Simoun; the Locked Tomb Books; the Band Boygenius and Its Discontents; Most Matters Directly Involving Religion; Preservation; Touch-Aversion; the Egotism of the Summer People

An Exercise on Gifts

I got assigned an interesting penance at confession a few days ago, and I was not able to make it to Mass for Epiphany due to a snowstorm, so I did the penance as a bit of spiritual writing instead. Running this publicly is meant to inspire anyone who would like to do the same reflection.

My penance was to reflect on three gifts that God has given to me and three gifts that I, like the “Wizard Kings” (in some Romance languages; los Reyes Magos, i Re Magi) of the Epiphany, can give back to God. I found the first part of the question a bit more difficult, not because I’m trying to be ungrateful but because writing about “gifts of God” or “gifts of the Holy Ghost” can be so abstract. Eventually I decided to list diligence about intellectual work, relative material comfort, and genuine interest in sacred things as three aspects of my character and circumstances for which I feel grateful to Him.

The gifts that I can give back to God are were a bit easier: First, I do both fiction and nonfiction writing that’s made many people who read it significantly more open to the sacred, including people with good reason to fear or resent “religion” as it’s structured in their societies—gay people, people who have had traumatizing experiences in the past, members of minority groups where there’s some religious component to the go-to excuses for how they’re treated. Secondly, as a matter of instinct I’m materially generous to poor people, panhandlers and so forth; I know people who are much more so than I am, but also people who are much, much less so. Finally, I tend to be on the punctilious side about things like prayer and Mass attendance.

The reader may notice that the three gifts that I can give back to God correspond, so to speak, to the three gifts that God gives to me. This ought to tell us something, perhaps.

The Last True Conservatives

The very-online extreme right, in addition to its many other faults and failings, tends to have a crass, self-conscious masculinity to it. Either in the “pure” form of jacked douchebags who like yelling slurs or in the “inverted” form of resentful Shiraha-from-Konbini-ningen-type evolutionary-psychology-obsessed incels, an enormous proportion of the online rightosphere consists of people with heavily masculinity-inflected beliefs and concerns. I have not experienced this for myself because I only date women, but I’m told that in some quarters the synthesis of “masculinity in crisis” and far-right channer politics is so advanced that women who are interested in men date seemingly normal people whom they realize only later get their views on the great issues of the day from people with handles like “Bronze Age Pervert” posting screeds in the already-unfortunate “Twitter thread” format all day long. It goes without saying, at least among those in the know, that there is usually something homoerotic about this as well; witness the fixation on the deceased Japanese novelist, bodybuilder, and right-wing political commentator Mishima Yukio (whose output of novels and short stories, if nothing else, deserves better than being associated with these people), or the tendency to idolize early periods of Western cultural development in which many or most literate men were either so misogynistic they wrapped round to being gay or so gay they wrapped round to being misogynists. A recent article in The Atlantic about Bronze Age Pervert—a real person or, to make a distinction that Mishima himself would readily understand, at least a real persona, not just a name I made up as a stick to beat an ideal-type with—addresses this directly and at some length. According to Richard Spencer, the infamous former neo-Nazi leader who these days is happy to go on the record for essays in liberal newsmagazines, Bronze Age Pervert is obviously gay; the article’s author describes Spencer himself as a “homoerotic fascist” as well. But what if there were a distaff counterpart of sorts to all of this, a fringey rightist current heavily laden with lesbian cultural signifiers and preoccupied with the idea that femininity, rather than masculinity, is in crisis in weak, enervated, effete, androgynized modernity? I am not happy, but not not happy, to report that such a current does or did exist, and that it has or had surprising links to several other people, places, and things about which I have written before.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I do not write about this current, which in its classic form was named Aristasianism and called Web 1.0 chat groups and certain clubs in 1990s London home, from a place of ideological sympathy. I will be presenting it as a tacitly racist, avowedly elitist and class-snobbish movement that escapes being a form of fascism only through its commitment to pre-fascist ideas about subjects like culture, sexuality, authority, punishment, and the state. Much of what I have to say about Aristasianism may sound sympathetic and perhaps even approving, but the truth is much simpler: I think Aristasianism is funny, in a way that is not true of Bronze Age Pervert, the so-called manosphere, masculinity-obsessed fascist pseudointellectuals like Julius Evola, or frankly even Mishima outside a few specific stock jokes about him and deliberate instances of humor in his novels. Part of this is simply because a bunch of lesbian poshos, no matter how conservative they are, just do not have the pull within “real politics” that right-wing men tend to; part of it, however, is because of the uniquely complicated and surreal underpinnings of Aristasian political philosophy. Aristasian thought involves multiple layers of reality, a cosmic shift to degeneration and decay that happens to coincide with the culture shocks of the 1960s, and, most characteristically, a posited parallel world in some way “realer” than the immediately apparent world in which men do not exist and there are two feminine sexes, blondes and brunettes.

All of this comes from a quintessentially English-eccentric mishmash of 1. ideas taken from Dharmic religions (either 1a. directly or 1b. through motivated and often politicized interpretations in the writings of Western scholars like Mircea Eliade and René Guénon) and 2. classic prejudices of the British upper and upper-middle classes. Like many such trends and currents, it seems to have begun at Oxford. “A History of Aristasia-in-Telluria” by someone going by Miss Anthea Rosetti, a document on a website called aristasia.net which as of this writing must be accessed via Wayback Machine but is probably the closest thing extant to an official internal history of the movement, is my source for much of this, although I’ll discuss some other, more hostile witnesses later on. By Rosetti’s account, “at Lady Margaret Hall [one of Oxford University’s constituent colleges] in the early 1970s[, a] group of Sapphically inclined female students who sensibly disliked the modern world and admired the philsophical (sic) works of René Guenon (sic) found each other.” To the extent that I do have any unironic ideological sympathy for Aristasia, it is probably situated here; a political and philosophical framework for right-wing or traditionalist-conservative lesbians that is not just copying and pasting mainstream rightist politics into an incidentally-lesbian mind like Cynthia from Dykes to Watch Out for is something that probably needs to exist. History is full of examples of gay people whose orientation did not lead them to the broadly left-liberal value set that we associate with the LGBT community today, and in this respect these “Sapphically inclined” early-70s Oxonians were engaging with and advancing a worthy intellectual tradition. It isn’t even completely novel or outré that they were unhappy with the cultural changes of the preceding decade; gay writers like Mary Renault and Noël Coward were at best ambivalent about them as well, and memoirs of Hollywood actresses of the period often remark that their roles got worse in the first few years after the Hays Code fell. Indeed, I would argue that this first cohort of proto-Aristasians have a sincerity and courage of their convictions to them that one sees precisely in their not having had as much to gain from turning back the clock as many people who were not lesbians would have.

The early-stage Aristasians did not use that term yet; they went by a number of names that, according to Rosetti and other sources, included Lux Madriana (“Light of the Mother,” in an early phase that emphasized the religious dimensions of the movement, a form of monotheistic goddess-worship), Romantians, and the Silver Sisterhood. By the time of the Silver Sisterhood name, in the 1980s, they had moved to a compound in County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland, which they ran in a way supposedly styled after a Victorian girls’ boarding school. This is the point at which some of the more hostile witnesses come in and at which another characteristic Aristasian preoccupation—physical discipline of a type that they (implausibly, in my opinion) insisted was not sexual in motivation—becomes prominent. Of the at least seven or eight meanings of the euphemism “the English vice,” sadomasochistic sexual practices in general and flogging in particular are among the most common, and the latter was a facet of Britain’s traditional educational culture that “St. Bride’s School” seems to have adopted with verve. There continued to be a strong religious and mystical element derived in large measure from Guénon’s “Perennial Philosophy” interpretations of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, as was the case at every stage of the Aristasian subculture, but the surface-level aesthetics of the 1980s iteration were those of a posh girls’ school in the Home Counties, or perhaps in the Bombay Presidency, around a hundred years before. They kept casting about for pre-“Eclipse” (their term for the shocks of the 1960s) societies and ways of life to emulate, the consistent animating conviction seeming to have been that, wherever the society or culture that they wanted lay, it has to have been somewhere in the past—or in another world, since this was also probably around when the concept of “Aristasia Pura, the Feminine Empire,” with its blonde-brunette sexual binary, was introduced.

The disciplinarian penchant, the promiscuous borrowing from past ways of life, and an involvement in early video game culture unfortunately aroused the attention of overtly fascist movements like the British National Party and its leader, John Tyndall, who corresponded with St. Bride’s/Silver Sisterhood leaders in the 1980s. Accounts of the nature of this correspondence and of the proto-Aristasians’ reasons for engaging in it vary. Rosetti, an Aristasian or former Aristasian who is interested in a positive assessment of the movement and its legacy, insist that the subjects discussed were “boring stuff about Guenonian (sic) metaphysics” and that Aristasia was never a racist movement, but I recently found a thread on the British internet forum Mumsnet that was not so sure. According to the Mumsnet thread there was a certain amount of local news coverage in the northwest of Ireland at the time that suggested, among other things, the presence of a large amount of antisemitic literature in the community. I unfortunately don’t find this difficult to believe of people who came primarily from the traditionally very antisemitic upper echelons of British and Irish society and who corresponded with the leader of the BNP. It should be noted, however, that Mumsnet is not a solid investigate source and that, in keeping with the forum’s reputation for strident transphobia, many of the people making these claims seemed primarily interested in establishing whether or not the Aristasian leaders of this time were gender essentialists because they were trans. I am not interested in “transvestigating” these people and I consider the idea that this is relevant insulting, so all I will say for now is that, while Rosetti’s view that Aristasia was consistently non-racist is probably straightforwardly wrong, it doesn’t seem to have been motivated by racism or antisemitism in the same way that Evola, Bronze Age Pervert, et al are.

I know someone who, in my opinion aptly, described the pre-fascist racism of the British Empire as “the 1910s equivalent of ‘white people drive like this and black people drive like this,’ only backed up by the armed machinery of the State.” Any movement that tries to replicate British imperial aesthetics and lifeways, even in a radically different context (like, for example, one in which lesbianism is normative and men are at best peripheral), is going to take up at least some of this through osmosis, in addition to, as I’ve stressed, whatever prejudices these women had before they were Aristasians. I have no difficulty believing that this school-cum-compound-cum-vacation-destination (yes, really, for a while it was, further calling the insistence that the flogging wasn’t meant to be erotic into doubt) was happy to communicate with racist politicians and had at least some members who read a lot of antisemitic screeds in their spare time, and one does not actually have to conceive of the movement as predicated specifically on racism—I believe Rosetti that it was and is not—in order for this to make sense. This should inspire some soul-searching on the part of people who are not motivated by racism themselves but who have ideas that are amenable to racist impulses. Mary Renault, whom I mentioned earlier, left England in part because of the widespread homophobia of the time and settled in, of all places, apartheid South Africa; what does that tell us?

In any case, the association with Tyndall was short-lived mostly because the sojourn in Ireland was itself short-lived and, whatever the relationship between Aristasia and the BNP may have been, the former do not appear to have left the latter any forwarding address. In spite of this the next stage, comprising the 1990s and early 2000s and focused in the London area, was probably Aristasia’s period of greatest public presence and political involvement, not that this is saying much for a group of radical traditionalist kinky lesbian separatist Perennialist mystics that probably never numbered more than a few dozen committed members.

I have not named any individual Aristasian leaders so far because of the community’s Potemkin village quality; prominent Aristasians cycled through personae and pseudonyms over the years and occasionally used more than one at a time, depending on the situation. Rosetti says that Hester St. Clare, the name used by the earliest of the Lux Madriana leaders at Oxford around 1970, was “probably not her real name.” Donegal-era community leaders included someone going by Sister Angelina (the figure “transvestigated” by the people on Mumsnet) and someone going by Miss Martindale. Martindale is a particularly bizarre and multivalent figure who may have retained far-right political associations, ended up with an assault conviction in 1993 in connection with the flogging and disciplinary practices (which she strongly advocated and, again, insisted were not sexually motivated), and made numbers of media appearances as a sort of sideshow in the 1990s British press. The period of her prominence, and perhaps dominance, within the movement is what Rosetti and others depict as what we might call “classic” Aristasia. The axis mundi here is London, the historical references of choice tend towards interwar rather than Victorian, the “Feminine Empire” aspect of the movement with its posited or theorized or longed-for all-female blonde-brunette world is especially emphasized, and the disciplinary practices are, despite or perhaps because of Miss Martindale’s run-in with the law, kept in the foreground as well. Documentary crews film the insides of Aristasian homes—not many of which exist, of course, but there are a few—as human-interest curiosities, women associated with the movement participate in various low-stakes culturally conservative causes such as opposing metrication, and the group expands onto the early internet. As far back as the Donegal phase the Aristasians had a somewhat hypocritical attitude towards computers; because they thought that they improved focus and concentration (which admittedly may have been true of 1980s computing technology but is certainly not true now), they treated them as exceptions to the general eschewal of post-1914 (in Donegal) or post-1965 (in London) technological forms. Thence came the involvement in the early PC game industry and thence also the very-online quality of the current remnants of the Aristasian movement, which mostly go by different names and lack or have deemphasized things like discipline, fringey rightist politics, and the stark blonde-brunette gender binary. (“What about redheads?” is one of the first questions most people ask about “Aristasia Pura.” The answer, admittedly a cogent and even thoughtful one, is that redheads in Aristasia have a hormonal or chromosomal ambiguity a bit like intersex people in our world. Relatedly, most Aristasians are “straight” in the sense that blondes go for brunettes and brunettes for blondes. Readers familiar with lesbian cultural history might find this reminiscent of butch-femme roles, but in fact the blonde-brunette binary is much more consciously tied conceptually to heterosexuality than the butch-femme binary ever was, even though it is more distinct aesthetically.)

The increasing preoccupation with online, virtual, constructed, and imagined worlds is, in my interpretation, what ultimately led to the movement’s current moribund state. In 2005 or 2006 a few newer and mostly internet-based community leaders announced something called “Operation Bridgehead,” in which they claimed to have received orders from Aristasia Pura that the this-worldly sector of the movement was to absent itself from participation in affairs of the world. For a group that thrived online and as a media curiosity in the infamously sensationalist and gawking-oriented British press, this would have been a serious blow no matter what. In Operation Bridgehead’s case the problem was compounded by a somewhat prudish new-look policy of stripping Aristasia of its overtly lesbian and quasi-sadomasochistic aspects. What was left therefore lost much of its unique appeal; Operation Bridgehead left a group of internet-dwelling fantasists who were most comfortable around other women and liked Perennialism, vague knee-jerk conservatism, and, increasingly, anime and Japanese pop culture more generally. I should stress that I do not mean most of this pejoratively. I know and like many people of whom some or most of these things are true. The problem is that there are tons of women like this in the world and one really does not need to subscribe to an idiosyncratic lesbian separatist interpretation of the Perennial Philosophy in order to be one.

In its own way, Aristasia ended up with the same problem that the “disappearing center” has in the developed West’s mainstream religious culture. If there aren’t many people retaining a set of cultural forms anyway, there is not much reason for one to retain them oneself absent a strong motivating drive to find something in them of substance that one cannot find anywhere else. You don’t go to an Episcopalian church on the Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time unless you strongly believe in God and in moderate-to-progressive Anglican theology, because there is no longer much social infrastructure around doing so, especially for younger people; you no longer style yourself an Aristasian and treat it as a moral and political imperative to dress like Greer Garson unless you have a strong belief in a system of behavior that not even the remnants of the organized Aristasian community advance any more. Even if you do, you are left basically to do it on your own. I first found out about Aristasianism years after its collapse via the YouTube comments on a video of a scene from a mid-2000s anime, probably not in any objective sense the best way to find out about it. I’m writing about it now mostly because not many other people are, although it does show up in an academic book or two about Perennialism and, of course, in the Mumsnet thread.

❦

What is one to make of a culture, or subculture, or movement, with this kind of limited and constrained and, it’s difficult to avoid concluding, ultimately failed history? “Learning from failed experiments” is a pat and somewhat insulting concept here; former Aristasians have not necessarily abandoned all the value and importance they placed on their ideals. These days some of the old Aristasian leadership is based in Southern California and is involved in goddess spirituality and (more conventional) LGBT activism there. Are the radically conservative political or quasipolitical or historiographical tendencies still there? I am not sure; I don’t know these people. But even if they are not, it is instructive to think on the fact that they were. In other words, the goddess spirituality and the strident lesbian activism did and thus could coexist with some deeply strange and even dangerous rightist or rightist-tending ideas. It is again tempting at this point to talk about “internal contradictions” or the Aristasian ideology falling apart under its own weight because it contained elements that could not practically exist alongside each other, but this too strikes me as too easy, somewhat along the lines of Adorno’s dubious “right-wing authoritarian personality” concept in which authoritarianism was constructed as 1. self-evidently a personality trait rather than something else and 2. concentrated exclusively among people who disagreed with Adorno politically. It is easy to write off Aristasia as incoherent and doomed to fail if one starts from the premise that Aristasia was incoherent and doomed to fail and then simply begs the question.

It might have been a matter of attracting or pursuing the wrong allies. Orwell points out in his excellent essay on Rudyard Kipling that “Kipling’s outlook is pre-fascist (sic; Orwell usually, but not always capitalizes these kinds of terms),” a term I have used for Aristasia before. People claiming to be conservatives at the time that Orwell was writing this were always in fact, he said, “either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists.” If we take Orwell at his word—it is not self-evident of course that we ought to, but I think that he has a solid point here—we see that even a generation before Aristasia was a twinkle in Hester St. Clare’s eye the pristine pre-Eclipse world, and ideologies predicated on it, were no longer anywhere to be found. No doubt someone writing a generation before Orwell could have said the same, and so on, and so on, like the ancient writers on Sparta who always situated the golden age of Spartiate equality at some point in the past, relative to themselves. Confucianism and Taoism, similarly, project their ideal pasts arbitrarily far back; the Tao Te Ching seems to long for something pre-agricultural, whereas Confucius—more “progressive” than Laozi in that his cutoff point is right after neolithic river delta state consolidation rather than right before—pinpoints the days of Yu the Great, who invented flood control. This seems like a pat progressive argument (in the historiographical sense) but I think something equally damning can be said of people who are always looking to a more and more more distant, yet somehow always-any-minute-now, future for a world without devastation and woe. Once upon a time petroleum was the one neat trick that would fix the world’s conservation problems, because it spared the whales. This sounds utterly deranged to us today—we have by and large saved the whales and yet the whole biosphere is in peril in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1860 when the first commercial petroleum exploration was getting underway—but the documents, the editorials and political cartoons and policy papers and correspondence, are right there to consult. “Atoms for Peace” were meant to save us all too, once.

It should go without saying that the present sucks as well, particularly since it doesn’t exist; only the past has any demonstrable existence, and the present is a mere moving front between that demonstrable past and the undemonstrable future. So an attitude towards time is never going to be a cogent basis for political action. An attitude towards history might be, but at that point we are in the realm that cannot support something fantastical along the lines of Aristasia. So the invested Aristasian looking for kindred spirits outside her clique is left casting around for the next best thing, and the next best thing, unfortunately, is in most cases fascists—which makes the Aristasians the accomplices of fascists whereof Orwell spoke, perhaps.

Yet lack of care with the company they kept was not, actually, what did Aristasia in. It was, in my opinion, lack of care about venue and context and situation-in-life. Rosetti quotes one woman’s admission that Aristasians tended to be “‘somewhat overbalanced’ on the side of imagination, intellect and the fantastical”—hence the nonsexual component of the reasons for the violent discipline. These were people who need to, to us the parlance of our times, touch grass, and in Donegal and earlier at Oxford they did. The urban setting of London and the penchant for the early internet probably were not good for keeping them grounded—and one does need to be kept grounded even if one truly believes that one’s true home, heaven or Aristasia Pura or the Western Paradise or whatever else, is a great Somewhere Else, because until then we still must live in this world, unremitting Benjaminian shitshow though it is. I cannot blame people for not wanting to accept this, but the wages of not accepting that one must function in the world is, put simply, not being able to function in the world. I wish I could decide I was no longer interested in functioning in the world and let the chips fall where they may. I do not think that I actually can, and if I could I think that I would be obliged to choose otherwise.

Could a version of Aristasia that chose otherwise have had some staying power? Ought it to have had any?

Some Aphorisms

Massachusetts politics from the beginning has drunk deep of the belief that an objective moral law exists and that Massachusetts voters, perhaps only Massachusetts voters, can be trusted consistently to know what it is. It is only the contents of that moral law that, to the minds of the state’s body politic, have changed.

The problem with the open society is that you can’t get dirt on anybody.

If there’s one thing that I know boomers love, it’s free ziti.

Traditionalism is to tradition what a decapitated body is to a star athlete.

One should love God’s moral law in the way that one loves one’s most boring relative.

Just as the sun sets in the west, so the moral sets into the political.

In languages that have no gnomic aspect one cannot understand religion.

While I’m not sure whether or not I’m willing to fully subscribe to it, there is a robust public health and consumer safety argument for suplexing TikTok and similar algorithmed-to-hell-and-back short-form-video-oriented platforms into the fires of Orodruin whence they came, an argument that has nothing to do with what foreign dictatorships they do or don’t have servers in.

The Victorians were the last civilization to understand that human life is not actually very secure as a matter of course, which covers a multitude of their many other sins.

The modern tendency is to stress marriage’s exclusivity more than, and sometimes over against, its permanence. It is socially destabilizing and still morally imperfect, but not necessarily morally worse. What were once abuse victims’ (mostly women’s) problems become the community’s problems. Strong arguments can be made for that.

Moreover any situation that one is “allowed” to leave is going to look similar to this.

At least on the level of cultivating personal virtue, casual sex might actually be less immoral than plenty of what passes for normal heterosexual relationship behavior in the secular world. Casual sex is, whatever else can be said about it, at least a straightforward way of addressing a very common type of physical desire and frustration to which most (not all, but most) people can relate. With practices like hanging on in vague situationships with people one neither likes nor respects because of the perceived social censure that comes with singleness, or rebuilding one’s entire social circle from scratch every time one starts or ends a romantic relationship, other areas of life are implicated and it becomes very difficult to avoid the conclusion that an idol is being made of sexual practice itself, as long as that practice is dully heterosexual in character—and yet irreligious heterosexual people are at least as likely to behave this way as religious ones, to the point that I have known people who have left their childhood religions for the sectors of secular society that behave in this way! Received-wisdom heterosexual relationship behavior takes an axe to almost all the virtues, not despite but because of how socially normative it is.

The thing about Jesus the “moral philosopher” (Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?) is that he’s really not unique and he’s certainly not uniquely admirable. The “historical Jesus” is a self-aggrandizing and occasionally even violent apocalypticist who swings back and forth between preaching what was actually within the mainstream of Pharisee moral theology at the time and demanding that people abandon their families and economic obligations to follow him around listening to more of this. The “Christ of faith” is the only Jesus Who’s still a convincing moral exemplar once you dispense with the presupposition that you have to like the guy.

Even the southwestern tip of Connecticut really is New England at heart—its deep history, landscape, and lieux de memoire are all pure New England. It has not so much sold its birthright as had that birthright bought out by rich people who have thrown up tacky mansions all along the shoreline and raise their children to root for New York sports teams. One need only visit an old burying ground in Greenwich or Darien to understand this.

The American right from Reagan onwards, arguably from Goldwater onwards, has had one important point of similarity with fascism wisely expounded: it is not so much any form of “conservatism” as a Revolutionary Right ideology, which seeks not to preserve an existing or even restore a former social structure but to create a new type of society entirely. This society keeps nothing of substance from the past and owes nothing to the past other than as a wellspring and storehouse for its aesthetic imaginary. In the recent vicissitudes of the American right under its Tea Party, alt-right, and MAGA guises, we see this in the promiscuous cribbing of aesthetic signposts that in the past pointed to very different and often mutually hostile sectors of American society, not all of them reactionary at the time: Southern Redeemers and Neo-Confederates, “Main Street” small businessmen in the Northeast and Midwest, anti-authoritarian frontiersmen, many-relationed immigrant Catholics and religious Jews, blue-collar tough guys whose fathers or even whose younger selves were the “Resistance libs” of the Reagan years. The resulting historiography, or fantasia on themes from American historiography, is starkly nationalistic, but eclectic enough to have a certain crossover appeal to people disillusioned by or unwelcome in previous American nationalist spasms.

In the end, all non-absolute moral theories are the friend-enemy distinction in drag.

Added November 19, 2023: When one is parched beyond belief in a bone-dry airplane cabin and the drinks cart is ever-so-slowly inching closer, closer, closer—this too is a manifestation of the unsatisfactoriness of things. I have heard that in previous days it was not like this—but, then, almost nobody could afford it back then.

Must Art Be Good?

For much of the Early Modern period the French were, to most tastes, not at good at playwrighting as the English. This was not because France lacked talented people in its theaters and its literary culture; there were Racine, Molière, and Corneille, to name just a few. The problem was, rather, one of standards being set at the cultural level, especially at the level of the elite culture; French playwrights were still expected to adhere to certain “unities” that artificially constrained things like time and setting, whereas in English theater Shakespeare and most playwrights after him, as well as some before him, had exuberantly dispensed with the unities and with the absolutist, prescriptive attitude towards “good” narrative that they represented. Some playwrights, especially Molière, occasionally mocked the unities, but the fact that they had to be responded to in the first place constrained the dramatic tradition in the French language for well over a hundred years, even as the language and the Parisian literary class that spoke it exploded with creativity in other genres.

Today we can look back on the unities, laugh, and mourn what could have been in terms of French theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is easy, however, to get complacent about this. The truth is that current artistic production, too, has rules for good art, especially good narrative art, that seem objective to us most of the time but are in fact just as culture-bound as were the unities. It is not at all obvious across all times and places that The Lord of the Rings having non-naturalistic dialogue and character writing that progressively reveals static personalities to the reader are objective problems with the text. It has these “flaws” insofar as current readers often dislike books that are written this way. Tolkien's audience first and foremost was himself, and the fact that a large audience of other people like his writing as well was, for him, a happy accident. This is without even getting into more expressly political or ideological aspects of artistic taste like the idea that a story should seek to “represent” the experiences of an abstract intended reader. I asked my mother once what she thought of representation as a priority in narrative art and she said that, when she was growing up, she wanted to read about practically anyone other than lower-middle-class white Catholic girls from suburban New England, an experience of the world that she already knew more about than she cared to by virtue of her self-awareness. In that sense my mother was more “represented by” the characters in books by authors like Kipling and Hardy than by those in, for instance, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because her priorities as a reader were being represented and it isn't self-evident that every reader's priorities will include self-recognition. This is without even reaching the cases of those who might learn new things about themselves by encountering the apparent other in fiction, like religious converts, transgender people, and people inspired to learn a new language after reading or watching something in translation.

Some of these newer norms for “good art” are religious or religion-related in character. Yellowjackets, my favorite current television show and one that I think has the potential to be the most interesting mainstream American television show of the 2020s, is a survival horror story that treats the question of supernatural agency within the plot with a light (or, in less well-considered moments, muddied) touch. The effect is somewhat akin to that achieved in classic folk horror movies like The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. Are the characters having the severe psychological problems that they are because of literal, external supernatural agency, or is the darkness entirely located within them? We don’t know for sure, although there are suggestions that something genuinely spiritual or paranormal is occurring, but this does not stop certain viewers of the show from arguing for the sake of “realism” that the supernatural must be absent—as if people who believe in the supernatural never have psychological problems in real life. The effect of this is to imply that what someone who has supernatural or religious beliefs sees in her own experiences of the world is deficient and can never rise to the same significance as what someone with no such beliefs sees in the experiences of her “believer” peer; the idea that Yellowjackets is a show where the supernatural events aren’t actually occurring isn’t itself a prescriptive or exclusionary one, but the idea that it “should” be that type of show for “realism’s” sake certainly is. Never mind that in many other societies in the past it would be seen as unusual for this kind of story not to include supernatural forces. As Doris Bargen points out in A Woman’s Weapon, the well-known episode in Genji monogatari in which Lady Rokujō possesses Lady Aoi and causes her to die in childbirth reflects Genji’s origin in a society where attempting to possess people one disliked was simply what one did as a woman in certain types of social situations.

Sometimes the implied preference for secularity as a precondition for artistic merit affects entire genres. Most of us take it for granted that, put frankly, Christian contemporary music, especially of the sort that burgeoned in Evangelical and some Catholic spaces in the 1990s, sucks. Why? Is it because it is religiously motivated? So is half of Bach. Is it because the artists are mostly right-wing? So was Ian Curtis. Is it because they tend to have bad taste in other media? So do tons of secular pop stars. Is it because it prioritizes achieving effects other than maximum artistic and technical ambitiousness? In the age of poptimism, that usually does not matter. I think the issue is less any of this and more that this music has the “vibes” of being for a narrow religious interest—which, to be fair, it is; the genre, especially today, pillarizes itself from outside culture in a way that gives the impression that most Christian contemporary artists would rather not be considered “good” by secular critics. If there were a Natalie Merchant song from the same time period as Rebecca St. James’s rendition of “Be Thou My Vision,” even if it was a cover of a hymn (and there are Natalie Merchant songs that are!), where halfway through the track the lyrics cut out and a combination of reverb effects and hi-hat cymbals and helicopter sound effects from a bad Vietnam War movie started eating the melody alive, the secular music press would take that song dead seriously. St. James, however, probably does not want the secular music press to take her “Be Thou My Vision” dead seriously, because the foolishness of God is wiser than Pitchfork.

Readers will have noted a generally author-focused approach in this essay so far; this is because I think that the pop reception of Roland Barthes and the “death of the author” harms attempts to assess art as a process of communication between a creator, or creative community, and an audience. The pop-Barthesian reader is solipsistic and is unable to assess what she thinks makes art good or bad because she is unable to assess the social and cultural pressures on the creator or creative community. This is once again relevant to Yellowjackets, a show whose fandom tends to misattribute its flaws to the screenwriters even though most of them are demonstrably the fault of other people, such as network and production executives. It is also relevant to essentially anything that is read or watched in translation, because pop-Barthesianism puts forward John Dryden’s attempt in his translation of the Georgics “to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age” as the only kind of good or even conceptually apprehensible translation, for what amount to  ideological reasons.[1] A translator cannot, instead, with Friedrich Schleiermacher, seek to build a conversation between two people, the (abstract structure of the) author and the (abstract structure of the) reader, unless she is willing to try to make the reader have a conversation with a corpse. Certainly it looks a bit morbid for a translator who takes the death of the author seriously to attempt to lead the reader towards the original author rather than vice versa, as was Schleiermacher’s own preference. Pop-Barthesianism’s extremely low understanding of “authorship” overthrows the tyranny of the author at the expense of imposing a tyranny of the reader that takes on overtones of cultural supremacism whenever the reader’s values are closer than the author’s to those values that are culturally dominant. (Barthes as a critic of the “dead white men” canon may or may not have believed that this was possible, but it obviously is.) Combine this with straightforward misunderstanding of what the artistic production process actually involves, as in the Yellowjackets example, and one gets the basic conditions for the infamously entitled reading style of modern media fandoms.

I do not mean to suggest that criticizing the quality of a piece of art or writing is always ungenerous or entitled on the part of an audience, only that it should be undertaken with some humility about what “quality” means, and what aspects of a work might come across as quasi-objectively good or bad to some generations of readers, or fans, but not others. I often see younger people recommending older anime series like Haibane-Renmei and the original Trigun with caveats about the sketchy art styles and choppy animation; I, conversely, can’t watch many newer anime series because they are so smooth and high-definition that they make me feel like I am swimming in a vat of motor oil. I can practically hear the rank-and-file animators breaking out into “The Red Flag” in my head. Arguing that a piece of art or writing or music “just isn’t good,” or for that matter that it “just is good,” is never as simple as one thinks it will be when the argument begins.

❦

[1] Dryden had, as we say nowadays, bad takes on the unities as well. In An Essay on Dramatick Poesie he accuses Shakespeare’s history plays of seeking “not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and receive her Images not onely much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life.” It’s not impossible to imagine him having the same problem with the supernatural elements of Yellowjackets, the dialogue in The Lord of the Rings, or the didacticism of Christian rock “if he had been born in America, and in this present Age.”

One Thesis on a Morality of Art

A principle that occurs to me when it comes to “separating art from the artist,” a concept and verbal formula that I think is stupid, misleading, and mendacious to begin with, is that on top of everything else it frankly depends upon the quality of the art. If we are going to use flippant aesthetic terminology in order to have half-baked discussions of morals, it ought to be used in reference to aesthetic and moral ideas that are themselves at least vaguely proportional in terms of scale.

Let’s take music as an example. Claudio Monteverdi was a favorite of the hilariously corrupt Pope Paul V, but this relationship gave the world some of the best religious music ever composed. Richard Wagner was so obviously antisemitic that not even the Bayreuth Festival people bother any longer to deny it, but he gave us the drone note at the beginning of Das Rheingold. Artie Shaw physically abused Ava Gardner for reading Forever Amber, then divorced her and married the author of Forever Amber, but his clarinet work has yet to be surpassed and he gave us one of the most influential recordings of the sublime “Begin the Beguine.” Roger Waters is a godawful tankie, but “Wish You Were Here” is almost as sublime as “Begin the Beguine.” Billy Corgan did…something to Emilie Autumn while they were dating in the early 2000s that is not my place to speculate about, but he gave us “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” Compare all that to someone like, say, the insufferable edgelord nepo baby Matty Healy, who has been in the entertainment news a lot of late. Part of why we ought to be less tolerant of Matty Healy than of Roger Waters is that Healy, simply, does not produce anything whose aesthetic qualities come as close to offsetting his moral problems as “Wish You Were Here” comes to offsetting Waters’s. Healy has the personal habits and worldview of an edgy bro with a crappy boy band, and the music that that crappy boy band produces reflects this, whereas much of Pink Floyd’s output sounds “as if” it could have been written and performed by someone who does not engage in Putin apologia or “blood and soil but woke” anti-Zionism.

Speaking more generally, aesthetic qualities as a rule cannot offset lack of moral qualities because morality is more important than aesthetics. Almost everything that people value artistically, or politically or interpersonally for that matter, can, should, and must be sacrificed if that is what needs to be done to avoid serious moral lapses. On that note it is also much easier to read or look at or listen to older art without enabling these people by giving them one’s money. Monteverdi, Wagner, and Shaw are all long-dead; Pink Floyd and the Smashing Pumpkins both have discographies that are very easy to find on CD or vinyl in secondhand stores (younger people might have to buy CD players or turntables on which to play these hard copies, but that is not too difficult a task for anyone who is not an insufferably presentist, Whiggery-addled ghoul). I’m sure Matty Healy’s oeuvre is remarkably easy to pirate, and I wish his fans joy of it. But after a certain point aesthetic judgments do need to be made in order for moral questions to be approached in a way that feels truthful and compelling.

Unkillable Grief Monsters

Of late I have been getting very into the television show Yellowjackets, and also into the Locked Tomb books by Tamsyn Muir. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have been into the books for a while and have only recently discovered the program, but that I am currently getting similar things out of them. Both of these are series that assess grief very openly and in great emotional and narrative detail. The overtly fantastical setting of The Locked Tomb is built, cosmologically, on grief (for loved ones, for the natural world, for human societies), and in the superficially more normal but still demon-haunted world of Yellowjackets grief is the only thing that gives the relationships between some of the characters their longevity and meaning.

I’ve long been partial to what I call “unkillable grief monster” characters in art and literature. It could be argued that in the West this sort of character goes all the way back to Achilles, if we interpret the μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος that the Iliad depicts as a form of grief. Key touchstones in non-Western, or at least non-Greco-Roman-derived, literary traditions might include the voice of the 137th Psalm (“by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept and remembered Zion”), and even Prince Kaoru from Genji monogatari, who has what Dostoyevsky called “civic grief” rather than grief for a particular person or place. Miss Havisham’s permanent, moratorial state of jiltedness in Great Expectations is not quite the same thing, but it is similar; she too inhabits a permanent snapshot of a past blow to her heart. Dickens is not especially generous to Miss Havisham, but this has not, traditionally, prevented readers from finding her situation touching.

Fundamentally this is a type of character who is a tomb for someone or something else. The Locked Tomb and Yellowjackets both dramatize this in an unusually externalized way since both narratives contain cannibalism; think of Achilles eating Patroclus’ corpse in his μῆνιν or Prince Kaoru attempting to physically ingest the Japanese body politic and you will start to understand some of these more recent works’ themes even if you have not read or watched either of them yourself. The bodies of some characters in these narratives physically become permanent mortuary sites for loved ones whom they simply cannot or will not put to rest.

All of this is horrifying to most people, including most people who have felt grief that intense in the past, but I think there is also an element of wish fulfillment to it. Entering a permanent state of grieving, becoming grief oneself in this very body, can be a power fantasy of sorts. These characters are people who try to eternalize their loss as a way of expressing its importance against the idea that they ought to “get over it” or “move on.” People who were not “over” the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995 within an arbitrary two-week timetable were pathologized as depressed; one of my least favorite public figures in the world, the notoriously abusive Russian figure skating coach Eteri Tutberdize, was in Oklahoma City for an ice show at the time of the bombing, and ever since I learned this about her it has been difficult not to surmise that she was treated with the coldness then with which she treats others now. Even the more generous and humane mourning period of Victorian Britain’s middle class tapered off after a year or two. The Locked Tomb has characters in it who have been in mourning for ten thousand years; Yellowjackets has characters who might very well end up being in mourning into eternity. This grief impels them to do horrible things, but another way of putting this might be that the grief allows them to do horrible things. In these narratives, people who have undergone tremendous loss and heartbreak are not made to conform to other people’s standards, are not made to settle for less sorrow.

One Only Has to Use One’s Head

「少し頭を働かしなさいや」

―谷崎潤一郎　『細雪』

A few years ago I remember hearing about a movement in the publishing industry, particularly concerning books for younger readers, called “Own Voices.” Own Voices was based on the idea that writing that involves representational concerns—a term that here means concerns about how historically disadvantaged types of people are represented in the text—should, either generally exclusively, be by people who belong to the groups in question. Thus an LGBT author should be writing about LGBT characters, a black author about black characters, and so forth. Own Voices was roundly criticized, partly for forcing closeted authors of LGBT literature to come out or incur serious reputational harms, and is no longer in vogue. (Personally my criticism of Own Voices was somewhat different: it makes internally diverse ensemble casts of characters impossible. A thoroughly Own Voices literary scene would be one in which most books published in the West are still about straight white people and most that are not are set in homogeneous, pillarized communities. Even among socially aware stories of yore, you can’t have a Deep River that’s Own Voices for Indian people as well as for a religious minority in a country other than India, or an Across the Barricades that’s Own Voices for both Protestants and Catholics. I don’t read a lot of “issues novels,” and someone who does could probably come up with better examples.)

            But what about the actual literary and artistic merit of the kinds of books Own Voices was supposed to produce, and those against which it was supposed to be a reaction? That might be a different question than its effects on the industry or the culture. Indeed, I think it almost indisputably is; there is an awful lot of bad art and fiction out there written about disadvantaged or marginal populations by writers from privileged and mainstream ones. We could name minstrelsy, Old Mother Riley, and most depictions of women in pornographic literature written by and for straight men, just to name a few of the most infamous examples. I do not think, however, that this needs to be the case; rather it represents an abdication of imaginative faculties by writers writing characters about whom they have prejudiced or stereotyped ideas. The fact that this is not necessarily intentional—Moby-Dick is genuinely not supposed to seem as hostile to Polynesian people as it does, nor Heart of Darkness to Congolese people—goes some way towards explaining the appeal that a blunt-force solution like Own Voices had.

            Lately I’ve been getting deeply into a book series called Otherside Picnic, by a male Japanese author called Miyazawa Iori. (Miyazawa has alluded to some degree of gender dysphoria in at least one interview, but I am just about the last person to look too closely at something like this if the person in question does not want to emphasize it.) Otherside Picnic, a series in the “yuri” tradition of Japanese writing about women, begins as a loose adaptation of the 1970s Soviet science fiction novel Roadside Picnic before developing its own identity. This identity consists, in large part, in an intricate portrayal of the lives of two college-aged women, Sorawo and Toriko, as they explore a dangerous parallel universe and gradually fall in love. The series is good to the point that I almost hesitate to gush about it for fear of implausibility. Sorawo and Toriko are astonishing creations, both as individual characters and as a budding relationship. They have traumatic backgrounds that do not feel prurient and flaws that do not feel calculated for maximum relatability; Sorawo in particular is such an accomplished binge drinker that she is developing cirrhosis in her early twenties. The Otherside—dangerous, terrifying, and inhabited by folkloric monsters that it generates by actively reading Sorawo’s mind—nevertheless exerts a bizarre pull on the characters, a pull that the reader comes to feel as well and that works as a semi-allegorical commentary on several different aspects of LGBT life.

            Miyazawa has spoken several times at events in Japan about the writing process for Otherside Picnic. His comments on this are in some cases deeply bizarre, even when the subject matter is not. An extended and fairly conventional Eliotic point about objective correlatives, for example, might include phrases like “yuri of absence” and end with Miyazawa expressing an “Ash Wednesday”-esque desire to become a pile of bleached bones scattered in the desert. He has attained notoriety for this in some online spaces that are only peripherally aware of the series itself. If one reads the interviews in full, however, what emerges is someone very concerned with representational issues and committed to doing right by the types of people (i.e. gay people and in particular gay women) about whom he is writing. He lists off common pitfalls and outdated presentations, muses on the differences between Japanese and American gay fiction, and cites the 2010s NBC Hannibal series as an inspiration for deciding to write gay fiction himself. The quality of the series is clearly due to consideration, not happenstance.

            One point of frustration that I have with Otherside Picnic is that, as the title of this essay implies, much of what makes it such an astonishing achievement on the representational level consists in employing writing techniques that should be obvious but are not. Miyazawa’s stated principles for male writers approaching lesbian subjects, such as accounting for the fact that the characters have sexual desires and avoiding the temptation to insert oneself as a voyeuristic third party, should be defaults when it comes to romance writing, not accomplishments. Otherside Picnic would still be an extraordinarily good series for many other reasons in a world in which all the usual pitfalls were widely acknowledged. It would still work with genre in interesting and considered ways—the series is a romance, a science fiction story, a horror story, a comedy, and at points a campus novel or a technological thriller. The Otherside as a setting would still be a better extended metaphor for LGBT realization and LGBT community than any other I have seen in years (one is reminded at points of Fingersmith’s Briar Court). Sorawo and Toriko’s relationship would still be a touching exploration of how to build bonds with others after early experiences seeing people mostly as potential threats. Yet there is no good reason why the state of literature should be such that it impresses us when the leads in a love story openly want to have sex with each other, when a piece of fiction lacks an obvious preoccupation with the author’s own erotic tastes, or when these types of protagonists are old enough to drink. Otherside Picnic doing these things so well says wonderful things about Miyazawa Iori, but a fortiori says very bad things about many other writers.

            I think this can be extended to other representational questions too, not just ones relating to sexuality. Miss Saigon is not as jarringly racist a musical as it is because there’s some secret knowledge about Southeast Asian people that is missing; it is jarringly racist because basic principles of human psychology and social relationships aren’t being applied to the Southeast Asian characters. The 1950s Disney Peter Pan is not racist against Native Americans insofar as it does not provide an intimate portrait of real Blackfoot life; it is racist insofar as it presents the Blackfoot characters as grotesques whose skin color is the result of constant blushing and who only learn things by asking the white man “how?” To be sure, little is being done in lesbian fiction (or even in the yuri genre, which isn’t necessarily the same thing, although Otherside Picnic is both) that is anywhere near as offensive as these two examples. Even works of the past that were aggressively bad representationally, like 1950s pulp in the US or certain early-2000s anime and manga series in Japan, have their semi-ironic defenders. But that should not exculpate the other examples; indeed, the fact that more people take genuine offense to Miss Saigon and Peter Pan makes those cases even more galling.

The Lesser Beauty

When I was studying Japanese in the languages, literatures, and cultures department at UMass Amherst in the early 2010s, I became enamored of a now-obscure school of medieval Japanese Buddhism called Ji-shū, the Time School. Ji Buddhism was in most respects within the mainstream of Pure Land Buddhist thought, whose characteristic features include the belief that final enlightenment in the present world is no longer possible and the best course of action is to pray to a cosmic buddha called Amida for a rebirth in his Pure Land, a universe in which practicing the dharma is easier. Pure Land is the most widespread and popular type of Buddhism in Japan but has historically not been appealing to Western converts. Where Ji and its founding figure, an itinerant monk called Ippen Shōnin, parted company with mainstream Pure Land was in the belief that by invoking Amida’s name, a practice called the nenbutsu in Japanese, one effected a sort of spiritual time travel back to Amida’s own enlightenment, in which one then partook. The school’s name derives both from this belief and from the related practice of chanting the nenbutsu at particular times of day, somewhat similar to the set times for prayer in Islam.

I attempted to induce something similar to this recently, for secular reasons and involving my own past. On the way back from a road trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from my apartment in Upstate New York, my housemate and I passed through Bordentown, the New Jersey river town where I spent most of my adolescence after my mother and I relocated from rural Vermont. I have not lived in Bordentown for a decade and had not even been there for almost eight years; I had little idea of what to expect from returning, but I did expect—and want—for it to involve a powerful emotional and even numinous reaction. I went out of my way to elicit this reaction by putting on Riot!, a Paramore album from 2007 (an extremely influential year in my life), while approaching the Delaware River from the west on Interstate 276. It worked. The two hours or so that my housemate and I spent in Bordentown overawed me so much that now, two weeks later, I have found myself waking up and lying in bed for half an hour thinking about it, remembering.

I remember the routine I developed in that great year of 2007, when I was old enough to be a latchkey kid and my mother worked full-time at a legal services firm in Trenton. I would get off the bus after school, go into my house, drop off my backpack, then leave the house again and go to Boyd’s Drugstore. Turn right out the front door, northwest on Second; turn left, southwest on Railroad; kitty-corner across the intersection of Railroad and Farnsworth, a quick glance over my left shoulder at the new war memorial (the old war memorial being a statue of an eagle perched on a cannon in front of the post office at Prince and Walnut), and into Boyd’s. Buy a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice—the bottling plant was in Bordentown at that time, across from a retirement home for Divine Word Missionaries that now houses Bordentown’s city hall—and oftentimes also a small bag of sour Skittles and some pretzels. (I don’t like that this memory involves specific brands rather than generalizations like “sour candy,” but it does.) Then out of the drugstore, either across to the war memorial where I would sit for a few minutes eating my snacks or back home to sit around reading, posting on LiveJournal, or watching Avatar: The Last Airbender reruns until my mother got home two or three hours later. I only had this routine for about a year and a half but it made me feel, frankly, more normal than almost anything else I have ever done. More normal and yet more conservative; almost nobody has this kind of picture-perfect after-school bumming-around experience nowadays. All I was missing was friends who lived in walking distance, since I went to a private day school with an enormous catchment area.

From Boyd’s one could proceed to the northwestern end of Farnsworth, near which there was a beautiful old redbrick house with a gate into a garden that was always absolutely wild with wisteria. There would be a white cat sitting on the stoop; I wonder when the cat ever moved or went inside to eat or sleep or use the litter box. Now the wisteria is gone and the house seems to be abandoned; the upstairs windows are boarded up. I don’t know why, or what happened to the cat. At that end of town one could also descend from the bluffs to a wetland area with walking paths and somewhat dubious, murky creek water that I always wanted to try going swimming in but never did.

Or from my front door I could walk southwestward in an almost Euclidean straight line—or segment, rather—down Church Street, and end up at Christ Episcopal Church, a conservative Anglo-Catholic parish that I went to on Christmas Eve mostly for the aesthetics. Christmas Eve 2007 was when I suddenly started believing in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a belief that I developed before I developed a firm belief in God. Christ Church has a leafy, mossy graveyard like something out of This England; still to this day it does. I was an enormous Anglophile in those days and still have a distaste for the performative hatred of people and things English that characterizes a lot of what currently passes for American leftist rhetoric.

The subject of foreign cultures with which I became enamored during this period of my life brings us to the subject of the Jade Island, also known as the U-Turn Route 130 Chinese Restaurant—a New Jerseyite touch if there ever was one. The Jade Island served sushi too; it, along with a downtown Bordentown Japanese restaurant called Tsukasa, was where I fell in love with Japanese food, and the anime and manga fandom culture of those days was where I fell in love with Japanese writing. The first girl I sort-of-dated was heavily into that scene, and got me into it. The Jade Island is still there but has switched to an all-takeout model now—regrettably, since the interior used to be and still is gorgeous. When I went there with my housemate I sat reading a Japanese pulp sci-fi novel for old time’s sake while we waited for our order. It wasn’t quite the same, and not only because Otherside Picnic is a very different kind of story from Azumanga Daioh, or for that matter whatever Takahashi series my quasi-girlfriend had recommended in a particular week.

Old downtown business that are gone: App’s Hardware, which is understandable because I think there was some kind of sex scandal. Jester’s Café, which is understandable because of the pandemic but still must have been an axe blow very near Bordentown’s roots (the same roots that push up the crazy-paving brickways that will probably never change). Tsukasa, moved to a larger location outside of town and then closed there too, probably also because of the pandemic. The Beanwood Café, where I would sometimes go see live music with my best friend when she would visit me on our respective breaks from college. What’s still there? Under the Moon, for one, which I think is an Argentinian restaurant. Marcello’s. The Old Bookshop. Probably Thompson Street Halloweens. Possibly my childhood cat Pando’s drifting spirit, within that little white nineteenth-century house with its Doors-of-Durin ornamental living room pillars. Edna St. Vincent Millay would not have been resigned to all this; Christina Rossetti probably would have.

Am I? Perhaps. It depends on what the meaning of “resigned” is. In a way there’s nothing to which to be resigned to; the attempt to induce a Ji Buddhism-esque original enlightenment succeeded in the sense that I did feel catapulted back in time even though the current state of Bordentown has changed. Time, from a Christian theological or even theoretical-physical perspective, is less an arrow or a cycle than a particular entity, in its own way as concrete as objects in space, a dimension that from God’s perspective is just as firm and all-knowable as any of the three spatial dimensions but through which God, for reasons best known to Himself, only suffers us to move in one direction. St. Bonaventure and other medieval scholastics added to time and eternity the aevum, eviternity populated by eviternal beings like angels, demons, the saints, and the damned. This borderland or interstice between the temporal and the eternal, changeable in some ways and unchangeable in others—was I catapulted here by a Paramore album, the way we talk about high explosives blowing one to kingdom come? I don’t care. I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful that I believe it exists. In it is Bordentown the Eviternal City, always in my heart.

Divine Right of the Girlboss Downline

When I was growing up in the late 2000s as what people call a “transfeminine” person, an identity that I would later start, and then stop, publicly claiming for reasons that I do not care to discuss, I watched an awful lot of bad anime. I watched plenty of good anime too, and as I wrote in my essay “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” I think a strong argument can be made that the medium, and especially its fandom, were better and healthier fifteen years ago than they are now. Even so, plenty of crap was being put out in the 2000s, some of which was uninteresting, stagey, quasipornographic schlock. There was plenty of stagey, quasipornographic schlock that was interesting, too—I still wholeheartedly enjoy Black Lagoon, and I’m told even Elfen Lied holds up if you watch it in the right frame of mind—but that is not what I want to discuss right now. What I want to discuss is a deliberately sedate, very conservative series, one that is shockingly long for how little happens in it and was shockingly popular for how niche one would expect its appeal to be. I speak of Maria-sama ga miteru, usually translated Maria Watches over Us, a hypnotically slow-paced and minute series about not-quite-lesbian not-quite-Catholic students at a posh girls’ high school. It aired in four seasons between 2004 and 2009, it adapted the first two-thirds or so of a serialized novel series with the same title that came out between 1998 and 2012, and I find little to say in its favor except that it commits to its offputting premise wholeheartedly and understands the characters and relationships that result exceptionally well.

            Maria-sama tells the story of Fukuzawa Yumi, a scholarship student at Lillian Girls’ Academy, a Catholic high school in a leafy suburb of Tokyo. Lillian has what is called the “sœur system,” an institutionalized mentorship organized into linear chains that take on romantic overtones sort of like the chain marriages in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. An older girl will offer a rosary necklace to an underclasswoman, and if the underclasswoman accepts she will become the older girl’s petite sœur (French for little sister). The maximum number of active members in a sœur lineage at any time is three, the number of years in the Japanese high school curriculum, but many alumnae maintain close friendships, and in a few cases more, with their former sœurs for their entire lives. The system has been going on for about a century—the school was founded in 1905 and the series appears to take place around or a hair before Y2K—and has implications for how Lillian is run since three sœur lines monopolize the Yamayurikai, a student government that appears to regulate most aspects of extracurricular life. In the first season of the show—the first few novels in the series—Yumi becomes the petite sœur of the beautiful, aloof, aristocratic, short-tempered Ogasawara Sachiko, who inducts her into the Yamayurikai. The series then develops Sachiko’s grande sœur (the phlegmatic Mizuno Yōko) and the members and associates of the other two Yamayurikai lineages. The overall structure is a bildungsroman in which Yumi learns to confidently wield social power within this system despite her relative humble class status and initially poor self-image.

            I generally take it on faith that other people find some or most elements of this premise offputting. I don’t, because it is a pitch-perfect throwback to a body of pop literature and ephemera that I have studied extensively and about which I am enthusiastic academically and professionally. This is the Japanese women’s and teen girls’ magazine and serialized novel literature of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, from roughly 1900 to 1960. Key figures in this milieu would include the artists Takehisa Yumeji and Nakahara Jun’ichi, the translator Muraoka Hanako (famous for her efforts to translate Anne of Green Gables into Japanese despite the wartime government’s denomination of it as “enemy literature”), and above all the writer Yoshiya Nobuko. Yoshiya, a more-or-less-out lesbian herself but one who attained wealth and fame by not shocking the establishment overmuch, specialized in writing about what in the West was called romantic friendship; much of her fiction about the subject is almost identical to Maria-sama in narrative focus, theme, and tone. (Stylistically Yoshiya was a bit bolder; she wrote in an excited way full of exclamation marks, Western loanwords, and nonstandard use of onomatopoeia and phonetic glossing, a style that most literary critics in Japan despised then and despise now. I have translated Yoshiya’s prose and she does not make it easy.)

            Anyone who has read George Orwell’s excellent essay “Boys’ Weeklies” should be able to imagine what this body of literature was like in a roughly accurate way. It had memorable but not particularly complex characters, an aesthetic and semiotic repertoire stressing stability and comfort, a preference for very sedate and low-stakes storytelling, and a tendency to provoke moral panic among the parents and grandparents of its readership whenever its messages seemed insufficiently oriented to social control. Part of what the Maria-sama series is interested in paying homage to is, thus, a defunct understanding of the world in which, as the Orwell essay puts it, “Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.” A quick overview of the main characters, and what their storylines seem to be intended to tell the audience, makes this clear.

            Each of the three Yamayurikai families gets a somewhat different set of plot emphases, although all of them ultimately support and comment on Yumi’s journey to maturity in one way or another. Yumi and Sachiko’s lineage, the Rosa chinensis lineage, gets plotlines dealing mostly with emotional self-regulation and, to an extent, class distinctions. The Rosa gigantea lineage, consisting of Satō Sei, Tōdō Shimako, and later in the series Nijō Noriko, is generally angstier and gets most of the storylines that deal with religion per se; the only point in the series at which Lillian’s Catholic identity is stressed over against other religions present in Japan is an episode that has Shimako and Noriko get outed as sharing an interest in Buddhism. (Shimako is from a Buddhist priestly family; Noriko has an autistic-seeming special interest in Buddhist statuary, an art form with which suburban and small-town Japan is positively teeming.) The Rosa foetida lineage, consisting of Torii Eriko, Hasekura Rei, and Shimazu Yoshino, live in a psychic universe somewhat closer to what most people probably think of as normal high school experience; they are concerned with sports, health problems, and learning how to delineate their sœur system commitments from other types of relationships. That the series treats all this as ultimately secondary compared to Yumi and Sachiko’s generally more refined and genteel worries is traditional for the genre and part of its generally conservative worldview.

            This brings us to one facet of Maria-sama ga miteru of which I took special note when I rewatched it with my roommate over the past year, which is the show’s peculiar political stance. It is—I am not going to mince words here—thoroughly extreme-right, but it represents the extreme right in a hypothetical world in which the center is the radical feminist commune from “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” This is reflected in its infamous (in some circles) paucity of actual lesbian relationships, although as I will discuss further on in this essay there are multiple major characters who do actually seem to be lesbians in the normal sense as well as in the sense of partaking in Lillian’s institutionalized situational sexuality. The fact that the situational sexuality is institutionalized is the main way in which the series touches on politics. It is not interested in usual Japanese rightist gripes like World War II apologia and support for the sexual double standard—quite the contrary; the narrative implicitly but quite strongly disfavors men, once they start actually showing up in the Maria-sama universe, which takes some time—but it is intensely interested in questions of political legitimacy. Its stance on those questions is close to unreconstructed divine-right royalism; the linear passage of membership in the Yamayurikai through the sœur system, which in this context operates much like the early Roman Emperors’ practice of adopting their intended successors, is presented as right, stable, morally and culturally appropriate, and more important than the wishes of the individual characters. Two plotlines have characters outside the three ruling sœur lines run for the Yamayurikai and get crushed; both characters are sympathetic but they are presented as having personal dysfunctions that impel them to run against the Leviathan’s chosen avatars. Shimako, the “insider” candidate in the first of these two plotlines, does not even want the position, but it is not up to her; she heads the body politic whether she likes it or not, and if she does not like it, she should not have accepted Sei’s rosary in the first place. All of which is to say that, in the show’s moral imagination, Lillian Girls’ Academy succeeds where the ancien régime failed, because it is small enough to enforce the succession through interpersonal relationships and because France had the misfortune of being ruled by people with cooties.

II.

One way in which Maria-sama “liberalizes” relative to its early-twentieth-century foremothers is in its diminished degree of interest in shunting its characters into adult heterosexual relationships. This is, to many tastes, damning with faint praise; I have close lesbian friends who find the series infuriating since it is indisputably beyond coy about the relationships between girls that it depicts. Even so, whereas quite a few of the stories in, for instance, the early Yoshiya anthology Hana monogatari end with girls getting up and “graduating” to heterosexuality (Yoshiya did not, of course, do this herself), or even focus to begin with on married adult women reminiscing on their girlhood loves, Maria-sama depicts those loves while they are happening and ends with most of them intact. To a somewhat lesser extent this is true even of the books, which cover more time and thus transition more of the characters into adult life but still show little interest in rushing to pair them up at the end. Yoshiya might have felt the need—or, to be fairer to her, might have been made to feel the need—to have Yumi meet a nice man and settle down at the end of the series, or in some kind of epilogue. Konno Oyuki, the woman who wrote the Maria-sama novels, does not do this.

            In fact, in one episode of the show’s fourth and final season, “The Sigh of the Red Rose,” Yumi has a remarkable conversation with Sachiko’s arranged fiancé Suguru, a gay man who does not love her. (The novels establish that Suguru is bisexual and simply happens not to love Sachiko in particular, but in the show he does seem to be gay.) The conversation is elliptical, and words like “gay” or “lesbian” are never used for Yumi herself, but Suguru makes it clear that he sees a commonality between Yumi and himself, a disposition towards love that they share and that many of the other characters seem on the surface to share but in fact do not. When she asks him what, ultimately, he is to her, he says that he is her dōshi, a word that means “comrade” in senses like brother in arms, kindred spirit, or extended family member. It does not take a quick spin through Psychopathia Sexualis to figure out what is happening here—although, conversely, the fact that the conversation is still allusive and euphemistic raises ultimately unanswered questions about how comfortable the series is with its own subject matter.

            The other example of overt homosexuality in this otherwise classically pseudo-gay series is better-known, comes earlier in the show, and raises that question even more dramatically and in a way that leaves even more unresolved because it is further removed from the core Yumi-Sachiko relationship. Sei, a major character in the first season who spends most of her time preparing for college and aggressively flirting with Yumi before becoming more peripheral once she graduates in the second season, gets called to the principal’s office for allegedly having written a pulpy novel called The Forest of Thorns. The Forest of Thorns is about a doomed lesbian affair at an all-girls’ Catholic high school that is obviously based on Lillian and writes in fervent, sometimes angry terms of the effect that one partner’s over-the-top piety had on the other when the former broke off the relationship. The teachers and principal suspect that Sei wrote this because the plot is very similar to an open-secret relationship that she had with a student named Shiori before meeting her eventual petite sœur Shimako. (Shiori is a common name for this type of character, for some reason; Revolutionary Girl Utena also has someone with that name who is dealing with internalized homophobia in a flaky, selfish, and destructive way.)

            It turns out that the actual author of The Forest of Thorns is someone else—an adult (indeed aging), very successful novelist who went to Lillian forty or fifty years prior and is still working through an experience there that was almost beat-for-the-beat the same as Sei’s experience with Shiori. This, again, raises questions about the sœur system and whether it masks significantly more dysfunctional homophobia-inflected dynamics between the girls at Lillian. The series, again, does not answer these questions. Instead the main effect of this storyline is to establish that Sei isn’t just a comedic slacker or a flippant sex pest but someone with actual reasons for her closeness to the much more sedate and thoughtful Shimako. They share an outsider status, Sei because she is gay in a more substantive sense than her schoolmates and Shimako because her father is a Buddhist priest and she knows little about Catholicism despite being interested in the religion. Sympathetic viewers might note that this is an affirming framing both of homosexuality and of interreligious contact, because Sei and Shimako are framed more approvingly than are the people who are suppressing or hassling them. Unsympathetic viewers, conversely, might note that representing Sei as a tragic eternal outsider is a treatment to which Shimako is not subjected; she is integrated into the Lillian community on mutually agreeable terms after a storyline in the second season dealing with her and Noriko’s shared Buddhist connections.

            What to make, then, of Maria-sama ga miteru’s enthusiastic reception at the time among audiences interested in lesbian anime, both in Japan and in the West? The simplest answer, at least as far as the West is concerned, is that lesbian anime of the 1990s and 2000s did not appeal to the same sorts of audiences as most other lesbian media; the anime fandom writ large already selected for weird, reticent, mildly asocial people who were often unlucky in love (I touch on this in “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” but it is not a primary concern of that essay), and people in that fandom who were interested in series with gay themes were no exception. As far as Japan is concerned, I think the throwback element goes some way towards explaining the appeal. An American TV series that deliberately aped the lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s would probably find a loyal audience pretty quickly as well.

III.

The Rosa foetida line—Eriko, Rei, and Yoshino—have storylines with perhaps a bit more distance from Maria-sama ga miteru’s political or sociosexual motifs. This is not because they are uninteresting characters, and indeed there is one exception to this: Eriko is the show’s only expressly heterosexual main character, who has a crush on an older man that is revealed early in the second season. (He handles it in a commendably age-appropriate way, especially for Japan, a country that has still not had a full-fledged #MeToo moment regarding adult-adolescent relationships.) She sees the sœur system in what is probably a significantly more “normal” way than the other Yamayurikai oligarchs do; to her it is a stylized and spiritualized mentorship system that is a fun part of her school’s culture but probably not one that will have much influence on her decisions as an adult. Other than this, the Rosa foetida mindset mostly revolves around less ideologized and less “sexy” but still very important subjects: Rei and Yoshino, who are cousins as well as sœurs, must learn to navigate and define different types of relationships, and Yoshino has health problems that for much of her life have given her peers an inaccurate understanding of her personality because they limit her physical activity level.

            The episodes early on that establish Yoshino and her issues are some of the funniest in the show. A strong argument can be made that, uniquely for Maria-sama episodes, they would be among the funnier episodes in plenty of higher-energy anime as well. Yoshino, apparently a shrinking violet who relies on the strong and sturdy kendo player Rei to protect her from the mean old world, is actually a violent or violent-adjacent spitfire who loves historical novels and gung-ho motivational proverbs. The only reason she does not publicly behave in ways that comport with this is that she has a heart condition, which turns out to be easily fixed via surgery. (I have a close family member who has been to the hospital in Japan; although it does not have health care that is comprehensively free at the point of use the way Britain does, it still isn’t expensive or difficult to navigate, and even if it were, almost all of these characters except for Yumi are filthy rich.) The other characters find out about this because the school newspaper, the Lillian Ledger, runs a series of personality quizzes and everyone assumes that Rei’s and Yoshino’s answers got flipped by mistake. The Lillian Ledger in Japanese is the Lillian Kawaraban, a name that implies that it is a rag but an old-school rag, since kawaraban is a term normally reserved for the fly-by-night block-printed broadsheets of the Edo period. Comedy gold on all counts. I know people who hate the series in general but still chuckle at these episodes.

            There’s some good intentional humor with Eriko too, in the episode that establishes that she is interested in men and has a crush on an older science teacher (at another school, not Lillian). She is an animal lover who often goes to the zoo to look at charismatic megafauna such as elephants, which is where she meets the man on whom she develops the crush. They fall to talking about the charismatic megafauna par excellence of Earth’s prehistory—dinosaurs, of course—and he compares her to Hypsilophodon, a comparison to which she responds with the immortal line “I have never been compared to a dinosaur before! I am very pleased!” This isn’t for the obvious reasons, such as Hypsilophodon being known for ferociousness or being “badass.” To the contrary, although older interpretations about the taxon have it as armored in much the same way as the Ankyolsaurus, Stegosaurus, or Triceratops, by the time that the Maria-sama books were being written newer studies had shown it to be a small, beaked, grazing, relatively docile biped. Someone like Yoshino would be flattered for the usual reasons by being compared to an Ankylosaur or a Stegosaur. Eriko is simply happy to see her interests shared and validated. It is cute and would be downright adorable were not the line itself, even in context, so silly-sounding.

            The Rosa foetida line, despite having plenty happening that is worth discussing, nevertheless interests me a little bit less than the other two Yamayurikai lineages. In part this is because the abbreviated third season, which consists of five direct-to-video episodes that are themselves longer than the other seasons’ thirteen half-hour television episodes apiece, is the show at its most narratively dynamic (relatively speaking) and has less focus on them than usual. Then again, the third season is itself less distinctive and less characteristic of this particular series, for the same reason. Things like a hectic school sports festival or a class trip to Italy (on which Shimako reconnects with the girl who ran against her in the first of the two political-legitimacy storylines, who is studying to be an opera singer) happen in plenty of other school-life anime. So I am, I will admit, giving the Rosa foetida girls short shrift because they happen to be out of focus when the series is at its most conventional. This is not their fault and I would want to have more to say about them if not for the circumstances in which I am writing this essay—right before Christmas, and with a great deal of other writing to get done.

            This essay is going to end up a good bit shorter than “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” was. This is both for the reasons that I just gave and because that essay attempted a series of personal reflections, and even some amount of materialist historical analysis, of an entire medium and its fan culture, whereas this one is about a particular, very atypical, and now relatively obscure series within that medium. I don’t think I would recommend Maria-sama to most people. I rewatched it with my housemate, someone who is uniquely predisposed towards it demographically (as a Catholic lesbian) and temperamentally (as a civil servant with that profession’s attendant tolerance for “boring” experiences), and even she and I could only take so much of it at a time and took about a year to get through the whole thing. Yet being able to “recommend” it is not, I think, really the point. Orwell would probably not have “recommended” most of the material he discusses in “Boys’ Weeklies” either (he quotes some of it within the essay itself and it is truly terrible, far worse stylistically than anything in Maria-sama or for that matter in the girls’ magazine culture contemporary to Orwell), but he still presents it as worth cultural and genre discussion. Maria-sama isn’t necessarily bad, just written in a deliberately dated-to-hyperconservative way; as Orwell might put it, it is the Magnet to schlockier late-2000s anime’s Wizard. Nothing in Maria-sama suggests sadism, direct appeal to viewers’ prurient tastes, or reactionary political concerns in the nationalistic way that is unfortunately so common in other anime. Lillian Girls’ Academy is the Chalet School of anime, minus the shilling for upper-middle-class heterosexual domesticity, and I for one think that one could do a lot worse than rule by the sœur system downline. Nec pluribus impar!

“Anxious Not to Appear Unhappy”; or, Why Mansfield Park Is the Austen Novel One Never Knew One Needed

So-called “classic” art and literature comes into and goes out of fashion just as do popular culture trends. For most of the twentieth century Edward Elgar was considered a fundamentally unserious composer; today he has reentered the classical concert repertoire. Johann Sebastian Bach, unbelievably, went through the same rehabilitation in the early nineteenth century. Renaissance castigation of High Medieval art has gradually over the past several centuries given way to appreciation of that art’s numinous aspects. Post-World War II horror at Victorian architecture and interior design, as seen for instance in Shirley Jackson’s novels, seems itself quaint and dated today. In literature, too, we see such long-term trends. To the end of understanding why certain books spend decades or centuries in or out of favor, I recently read the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park. For many years Mansfield Park was considered a contender for Austen’s best novel; today it is widely seen as her worst.

            A great deal about Mansfield Park makes it immediately obvious why it is currently unfashionable. It is a didactic, relatively unfunny novel, whose passive and extremely introverted heroine, Fanny Price, comes across quite frankly as a personality-free drip to current sensibilities. Fanny drifts from one abusive situation (with her parents and siblings; her sisters sleep with knives in hand on account of her father’s drunk and handsy Royal Navy friends) to another (with her rich slaver uncle Sir Thomas Bertram, who is absent for much of the novel and whose wife and children treat her as a glorified domestic servant). She falls in with the witty and urbane Crawford siblings, Mary and Henry, then breaks from them after getting relentlessly hammered for chapter after chapter to compromise her strict Protestant morals for the sake of their social circles. Finally, she marries her cousin Edmund, an aspiring Church of England priest who is the only character to consistently treat her like a person (albeit still not one whom he seems to like very much). The book’s treatment of where the Bertram family’s wealth comes from is mostly off-page, with one exception: Fanny asks her uncle to his face at dinner what he thinks of the slave trade, only to be met with “dead silence” that she takes as her cousins being bored of discussing politics. Edward Said infamously interpreted the novel as tacitly pro-slavery due to the extremely limited explicit treatment of the subject; although, as I will argue, the novel is swarming with implicit condemnation of slavery, not spelling it out in extremely clear terms goes against current tastes in political art.

            All of this being the case, I actually liked Mansfield Park very much and am glad I read it. The lurking implications and intimations of deep evil within the novel attracted me to its moral imagination despite its over-the-top sermonizing about less serious subjects like live theatre. Indeed the way the book relegates deeper moral and social pathologies to subtext strikes me as a level of irony more characteristic of Austen than most of today’s readers seem to think. Sense and Sensibility does the same thing, has a resolution to its marriage plot that is at least as unsettling as Fanny’s marriage to Edmund, and probably only escapes being excoriated for the same reasons as Mansfield Park because it is funnier.

            It is my belief that the book becomes much harder to understand if one refuses to situate it biographically. I’m not particularly interested in set phrases like “separating art from the artist” or “death of the author.” I think it’s common sense that at least some aspects of an artist’s personality will show up in her art, at least some aspects of a work of art will reflect the artist’s or artists’ personal circumstances, and the pertinent questions are what aspects and how the reader or viewer or listener feels about them (“deciding to ignore them” is a perfectly valid answer to this). With Mansfield Park a great deal is going on that reminds one of Jane Austen’s own life and family; she was a Tory who admired anti-slavery Tory thinkers like Burke and Johnson, she had intimate family connections both to right-wing politics and to the Royal Navy, and some of these family connections would themselves eventually become anti-slavery in nature. Admiral Sir Francis Austen would, decades after his younger sister’s death, spend four years responsible for the Navy’s efforts to intercept slave ships as Commander-in-Chief of the North America and West Indies Station.

            This odd dynamic of “Toryism” (in the broadest sense) opposing itself to something far worse than Toryism is, as I keep saying, currently unfashionable. It is, however, familiar to me, both from other British literature and from the heavily Austen-influenced Japanese novel Sasameyuki. The World War II-era ultranationalist regime in Japan interdicted Sasameyuki’s publication due to the book’s antiwar and antifascist content, yet this antiwar and antifascist content takes the form mostly of depicting militarism as a modern aberration distracting the Japanese people from their real traditions, such as midsummer firefly hunts and collecting very specific types of dolls. Similarly, much of Mansfield Park’s moral criticism of the wealthy slavers in Fanny’s life takes the form of intimating that they are un-English: Mary Crawford plays the harp (seen at the time as a very Continental instrument); the theatricals are an affront to English Protestant moral piety; characters make constant reference to Mansfield’s park’s “air,” and the Earl of Mansfield’s anti-slavery opinion in the 1772 King’s Bench case Somerset v Stewart had used “English air” as a metonym for freedom.

            Mary Crawford brings us to the subject of sexuality in the book. (In fact the heroine’s name brings us to this subject, but part of what makes the name “Fanny Price” so funny is that nobody in the book remarks upon it, so I’m not going to remark upon it at any great length either.) I tend to resist reading same-sex desire into books like Mansfield Park, not because I have a bias against such readings but because I have a bias towards them and have a habit of overcorrecting for this bias when doing serious analysis of this type of novel. With Mansfield Park, however, I genuinely think that much of the deviant or proscribed sexuality hinted at in the book is being hinted at on purpose. Mary Crawford, raised in a circle of perverted admirals, makes what is either an anal sex joke or a BDSM joke in mixed company in Chapter VI; Fanny overtly says that she is physically attracted to Mary in Chapter VII (almost immediately before the narration describes Edmund’s own interest in Mary as “a line of admiration of Miss Crawford, which might lead him where Fanny could not follow”—wording that has hints of apophasis) and muses on her fascination with her in Chapter XXIII:

Fanny went to her every two or three days: it seemed a kind of fascination: she could not be easy without going, and yet it was without loving her, without ever thinking like her, without any sense of obligation for being sought after now when nobody else was to be had; and deriving no higher pleasure from her conversation than occasional amusement, and that often at the expense of her judgment, when it was raised by pleasantry on people or subjects which she wished to be respected. She went, however….

Attempts to analyze and address this attraction between Fanny and Mary in adaptations and fanfiction usually present the more brazen and transgressive Mary as the sexual or romantic pursuer, but this isn’t what we see in Mansfield Park itself. Instead it’s the pious killjoy Fanny who seems to respond to Mary in a way that she does not to anyone else in the book, including her eventual husband Edmund. Austen disposes of Fanny and Edmund’s wedding in an oddly perfunctory and unenthusiastic way, vaguely referring to it as “a hopeful undertaking” and “quite natural.” In a novel advocating values as conservative as those advocated in this one, this is not the clear damnation with faint praise that it would be in a romance novel written today, but it still raises the question of how appealing exactly this marriage actually is to Fanny, or to Edmund for that matter.

            With a book that is didactic in the very strange and archaic way that Mansfield Park is—slavery is bad, adultery is bad, flirting is bad, live theatre is bad, and all four things are the province of the same basic types of hedonistic rich people—one cannot really claim anything related to sex as “representation” in a positive or affirming sense. In terms of what’s depicted in the novel, though, whether Austen approves of it or not, the way these characters relate to and experience sexuality treats very little as beyond the pale. Here is my reading of the sexual aspects of the story, all of which I am able to cite from the text, with a focus on Mary Crawford and her problems:

            Fanny and Mary are both raised in deeply dangerous circles of depraved Navy men. Both are traumatized in ways that the reader isn’t wholly privy to, Mary probably worse than Fanny. Fanny reacts by becoming withdrawn, submissive, and morally irreproachable; Mary reacts by becoming a charismatic social butterfly who thinks life is about taking other people for the proverbial ride at all costs. They meet and get along at first; Fanny especially is taken with Mary, who sparks confusing feelings in her. Mary makes sex jokes in public and wholeheartedly embraces the Bertram family’s raunchy (for 1814) lifestyle; Fanny, pressured relentlessly to compromise her puritanical values by just about every other character, hangs on until her slaver uncle (himself probably up to no good) comes home and has a My Immortal-esque “what the hell are you doing, you motherfuckers?” reaction that takes the heat off her. When Maria Rushworth cheats on her husband with Mary’s brother later on, Mary’s antinomian reaction alienates Edmund and burns all remaining bridges with Fanny, who, Mansfield Park after all being a deeply conservative novel, drifts into a path-of-least-resistance marriage to the only male character who is as moralistic as she is. Mary, meanwhile, implicitly shakes off the psychic influence of the perverted admirals eventually, but not for a long time.

            This was the only Austen novel that Vladimir Nabokov held in high regard, and it isn’t difficult to see why once one looks at it through the “sex is tyranny is sex is tyranny is sex” lens that Nabokov perfected in Lolita. Mansfield Park might not be as interested in slavery in particular as critics like Edward Said have wished it to be, but it is very interested in abuse of power in general. The “air” references are, in this reading, part of a semantic field that also includes repeated use of lemmas like “oppress” (which occurs seven times by my count, mostly with Fanny as the person being oppressed), “tyrant” (which occurs three times, two of them referring to the slaver Sir Thomas and his family), “abuse” or “ill-use” (four times), “cruel” (twelve times), and “wicked” (four times). The book uses its vision of human evil as a hammer rather than a scalpel, and although it’s still funny and often even sweet it is not difficult to see why people who find Pride and Prejudice and Emma comforting and consoling reads might disfavor it.

            Mansfield Park’s vision of evil and tyranny is, like it or not—and I don’t like it very much myself—inseparable from its preachy Protestant piousness, something that I think derails many modern readers and makes them less able to notice or realize that the book does contain social critique. Protestantism is unlike Catholicism, the Destiel of religions, partly in that it tends to be either epicurean or censorious; even the Social Gospel progressives of the early twentieth century had tendencies towards the no-fun positions on attempted social reforms like Prohibition and, more regrettably, eugenics. The antislavery movement in Britain had strong Methodist and Evangelical contingents and included figures who were, as mentioned above, staunchly conservative even for the time on other issues. It thus should not surprise the theologically knowledgeable reader that the Austen heroine who attempts to grill her uncle about the slave trade at dinner is also the one who stubbornly insists that it is immoral to act in a play alongside her own extended family.

            People should read Mansfield Park. People who have already read Mansfield Park and disliked what they thought it had to say should read it again. The book has a fundamental stance and vision that seems alien at first but has a bracing moral clarity to it once one digs into the depths of the text. It is good and salutary to subject oneself to unfashionable classics; indeed, I would say that doing so is at least as good and salutary as is reading fashionable classics. Certainly Fanny Price herself would think so, and she would know; she is a bootlicking scold.

Polemic on the Rectification of Names

It is said that when Confucius was asked what he would do if he were appointed a governor, he said that he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. This (to English-speaking ears) unusual expression, written 正名 and pronounced zhèngmíng in Chinese and seimei in Japanese, is important in Confucianism and other East Asian philosophy and provides for some interesting harmonies and counterpoints with concepts in Western thought as well, such as direction of fit and disputes concerning linguistic prescriptivism. Unfortunately, the main setting in which one sees the term employed in non-specialist English is the so-called “intellectual dark web” and related far-right online environments—a milieu in which “rectification of names” is used both insufficiently and inaccurately.

            The late sociologist Peter L. Berger appears to have been one of the first to (mis)use the term in online political commentary, in the January 2015 article “New Atheism and the Rectification of Names.” The article mounts a series of (in my opinion mostly well-founded) criticisms of atheist polemicists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, with most of which people familiar with current Anglophone public life will already be at least vaguely familiar: they make false dichotomies between faith and reason, aren’t in fact saying anything “new” but rather relitigating Enlightenment- or Victorian-era disputes, and so on. Berger attempts to ground these criticisms in the rectification of names, which he describes thus:

Confucius and other Chinese philosophers who followed him thought that much social disorder comes from the wrong names being used to describe groups of people. This mistake was supposed to be most dangerous if it was applied to the proper hierarchy on which social order must rest. For example, if people in the lower classes give themselves, or are given by others, names that properly belong to the higher classes, this will result in rebellion and social disorder. Confucian sages had the task of educating the populace in knowing and accepting the proper names of things, and government had the task of enforcing this vocabulary.[1]

Berger concedes that “our views on hierarchy differ somewhat from imperial China, or seem to differ,” but it is still easy to see the appeal of the idea, framed this way, to people on the authoritarian right. It provides a cogent philosophical basis both for cheerfully inegalitarian views on the order of society and for opposition to “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” and efforts to control or limit speech, especially online. In recent years I’ve seen everyone from Twitter-based Catholic pseudotheologians to crankish followers of the computer programmer-turned-rightist cultural critic Curtis Yarvin use “rectification of names” to argue for everything from insistently referring to gay people as sodomites to claiming that capitalism is a meaningless concept (and therefore cannot be intelligibly criticized). Berger, for his part, makes a valiant attempt at evenhandedness by identifying both “enhanced interrogation techniques” for “torture” and “gender” for (in some contexts) “sex” as unacceptably euphemistic in ways that run afoul of his Confucian terminological buzzsaw. However, Berger has the misfortune to be writing just at the beginning of the current especially nasty campaign in the cultural forever war, and I am not aware of anybody else using the term who has been so gracious, certainly not Yarvin and his ilk.

            One problem with this use of the concept is that if one only wants to claim that much, or most, contemporary political language is euphemistic for malign reasons, one only needs to cite George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”[2] There is no need to bring Confucius into it, given that Orwell is more accessible to English-speakers and thus invocations of him are easier for readers to check for themselves. Indeed, Berger’s example of “enhanced interrogation techniques” reminds me very much of Orwell’s observation that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” The Bush administration’s use of the term to obscure the fact that it had a probably-illegal torture program fits perfectly into Orwell’s own list of cases in point. “Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended,” Orwell writes, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.”

            Leaving aside anything to do with Orwell, the second, and much more serious, problem with the current political use of the “rectification of names” concept is that it both reduces and misunderstands Confucian thought. Confucianism is, first of all, concerned about dysphemism as well as euphemism; harsh, cruel, and intemperate language runs clearly afoul of the core virtue of benevolence. Moreover, zhèngmíng as a concept has a great deal more active, positive political and moral content than merely “calling ‘em like one sees ‘em,” “telling it like it is,” or refusing to be “PC” or “woke” in the way one speaks. “It’s time to call you what you are: ORANGE MAN DONALD TRUMP #OrangeManDonaldTrump,” reads an infamous Twitter reply by the anti-Trump social media personality Ed Krassenstein. Certainly this rectifies the names in the sense that Donald Trump is indeed orange-hued and Ed Krassenstein presumably had not directly said so before. However, an equally important question is whether “Orange Man Donald Trump” is the sort of name that needs to be rectified. This is a question that Berger does not answer and that Yarvin and Krassenstein are probably constitutionally unable to answer, but Confucius sees its importance and it is a key consideration in his, and later Mencius’s, treatment of political and social legitimacy. Let’s look at what Confucius himself says in the Analects about the rectification of names:

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.[3]

One is not only morally responsible for the content of one’s speech; one is also morally responsible for correctly carrying out the types of actions that the content of one’s speech implies. An example of this principle might be a person who says “I love my wife” and yet disregards the wife’s opinions and values, cheats on her, is unkind to her, undermines her in the presence of others, and so forth. As extended to affairs of state, it would include a king who does not behave according to qualities that are, according to Confucian theories of social relationships, implied by the title “king,” such as magnanimousness. Thus we have Mencius’s remark, discussing the overthrow of the tyrannical and incompetent King Zhou of Shang, that “I have indeed heard of the punishment of the ‘outcast Zhou,’ but I have not heard of any regicide.”[4] The implied principle here is that Zhou effectively abdicated by failing to use his royal authority in ways consistent with kingly virtues. Since being a tyrant is morally wrong and being orange is morally neutral, making the distinction between “outcast Zhou” and “King Zhou” is thus a morally and politically significant case of rectifying the names in a way that is not true for, say, “President Donald Trump” and “Orange Man Donald Trump.”[5]

            The lack of any account of this important point even in the writing of the normally much subtler Peter Berger is, in my opinion, probably due to the aversion to prescriptivist accounts of language in modern Western academic thought, which when applied to political questions involves rejecting the idea that different political and social concepts and terms have implied moral content regardless of how they are used. The Yarvinite use of “rectification of names” is unsystematic about this, because it is unsystematic about just about everything; “rectify your names” coming from an extremely-online far-rightist is a call to accept certain moral implications that such people think proper language use involves, but very rarely implies any perceived need to change behavior, especially not that of the person insisting on it.[6]

            Mental thoughts or words or intentions both influencing and being influenced by actions and behaviors in the external world, such that either can be “correct” or “incorrect” relative to the other, might be understood, in Western philosophical terms, through the concept of “direction of fit.” This is the idea, or principle, that just as it is possible for one’s psychology to conform or fail to conform to the mind-independent world, it is also possible for the world to conform or fail to conform to some psychological states. The classic treatment of this is in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention. In Intention Anscombe gives the example of a shopping list.[7] If I, for example, shlep to the Hannaford across the road from my apartment in search of pita, but there is no pita to be had because it is sold out or because of supply chain problems, the problem is not with my intention to buy pita; my shopping list that had pita on it was not attempting to faithfully represent the real world, in which the store turned out not to have any pita (in other words, it was not an inventory). Rather it expressed my desire and my will to buy certain items, and the unavailability of one of those items was a failure on reality’s part to conform to my desire and my will. This is not a moral failure on reality’s part, because reality does not “owe” me pita any more than it “owes” anything else to anybody else. Even so, the nature of the divorce between mind and world in situations involving intention or desire is, according to Anscombe’s analysis of action and the direction of fit concept, entirely reversed from the nature of that divorce in situations involving description or assessment. In the latter case, the incorrectness is mine; in the former case, the incorrectness, if it can be called incorrectness, is the supermarket’s. The way to rectify the situation would be for a shipment of pita to come in, not for me to strike pita off my shopping list or stop expecting the store to have it.

            The fact that nobody could seriously believe that a supermarket is morally in the wrong for not having pita in time for a particular shopping trip is the main thing that distinguishes the rectification of names from the rectification, or vindication, of my shopping list. In large part the difference is that the mind-independent aspect in the rectification of names concept is the person’s own social behavior. There are implications of kingly behavior to the title “king,” implications of conjugal behavior to the title “husband” or “wife” or “spouse,” and so forth. Although it requires some creativity, it is possible to conceive of situations in which events outside of someone’s own control could lead to a rupture between words and reality when it comes to their social behavior; however, such situations, such as natural disasters leading to a rupture between “king” and kingliness, were in historical East Asian thought often interpreted as externalized portents of some kind of inward dysfunction.[8]

            Similarly, for Anscombe, there is the possibility of an error in judgment in my supply chain example. Her own example presupposes that the only thing the shopper does wrong is simply forgetting to or choosing not to buy something that is on the shopping list.[9] This, then, is what rectification of names might actually look like when looked at through a Western philosophical lens, although we are still missing the fact that with the rectification of names the implications of the names are seen as objective or at least matters of a social and political consensus rather than freely chosen in the sense that Anscombe’s shopper (or, in a corollary example, the shopper’s wife) freely chooses to put butter rather than margarine on the shopping list. This idea that the names that one must rectify are not, ultimately, up to one is one of the things that makes Confucianism come across as an inherently conservative and authoritarian philosophy to many commentators. Even so, I think most people can think of examples of everyday situations in which a milder version of the concept motivates normal behavior—if you don’t rectify the name of “spouse” or “partner” by being unfaithful or abusive, you will (or should) suffer social odium, and if you don’t rectify the name of “employee” by going to work, you will (regardless of whether or not you should) get fired. Confucianism simply extends this to a more general theory of obligation as preceding choice when it comes to structuring relationships and society.

            The link between correct language use and correct behavior is unfashionable in the contemporary West except in niche political arguments, and its association with those arguments if anything makes it even more unfashionable in other contexts. As I write this, off the top of my head I can think of people who insist on “person-first language” to refer to disabled people instead of actually advocating for disabled people, right-wing theologians who insist on dysphemisms like “same-sex attracted” to refer to homosexuality instead of actually defending the rationales for traditional religious teachings on the subject, and, of course, participants in the unending argument regarding third-person singular pronouns and how they relate to gender identity. Such people’s ideas do show some vague family resemblance to the morally substantive parts of zhèngmíng, but in an inverted and weakened form that probably owes more to the mostly-discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis than to any notion that choice of political language actually imposes moral obligations on the societies that use it to describe themselves.

            So what is the basis for the rectification of names, if it is not a mere call for clarity in language and if a Sapir-Whorfian account of language choice affecting available thought processes misses, or does not entirely encapsulate, the point? In fact, I would argue that in order to really understand the concept, one must be willing to look at cosmological and metaphysical issues, not just disputes in the area of political theory or linguistics. For Confucius and his intellectual descendants, who include not only “Confucians” in the narrow sense but also many East Asian Buddhists, Taoists, irreligious people, and even Christians,[10] “the truth of things” and “affairs” relate conceptually to both human practices and broader natural realities. This is not meant to imply that there is a sacred language in the sense that Muslims hold Quranic Arabic to be sacred, or a language of truth in the sense that one occasionally encounters in science fiction or fantasy novels. Nevertheless, words can be used in ways and with implications that have either greater or lesser connections to understandings that will keep human affairs rooted in reality.

            In some areas of East Asian thought this set of ideas and principles can get downright mystical. Japanese has the concept of 言霊kotodama, “word spirits,” an extension of the animist sensibility widespread in Japanese culture to include a spiritual dimension to words and names. This idea, while in my opinion aesthetically beautiful, is morally ambivalent. Much like Confucianism, it can easily be extended in authoritarian directions; one pair of Japanese authors even argues that freedom of speech will never gain wide acceptance as a Japanese value unless kotodama goes.[11]

            However, the belief nevertheless imposes certain limits on the reasonable use of language by the rulers as well as by the ruled. A completely relative view of language in which all words are equally made-up no matter how long they have been in use for or how much consensus exists (or used to exist) about how to use them, is at least as liable to be put to authoritarian ends. Powerful people can just redefine criticisms out of existence. Berger, to his credit, understands this; just as in wartime Japan anybody who seriously discussed the possibility of defeat fell under suspicion due to the kotodama-derived idea that discussing defeat made it likelier,[12] in the 2000s US criticisms of the Bush administration’s war aims and war tactics could be defused by resort to euphemism and evasion.[13] As is so often the case, excessive realism and excessive relativism are thus both best avoided when it comes to political language. Instead of either, we should find a way of discussing public affairs and social life that implies some basic set of agreed-upon values without assenting to cosmological or metaphysical claims about different terms’ supposed innate and precultural significance.

            So, then, we might say that the rectification of names in fact has important parallels to the tradition in Western philosophy concerning direction of fit, and that it is in conversation with concepts of desire, volition, and imperative that we can best understand it. It is not simply a matter of calling ‘em like one sees ‘em and telling it like it is, although rectifying names in that sense is probably a necessary precondition to rectifying them in the sense of behaving the way one’s purported social position or values dictate that one should. The concept also has to do with unchosen obligation, not necessarily in an authoritarian sense (although Confucius’s own development and use of it was certainly in the service of policies that were authoritarian) but in the sense that none of us always and in all places get to decide how we want to relate to the people, places, and things around us. If the concept is going to be invoked in political and social controversies in the modern West, it should be with a greater degree of respect for or at least awareness of its full meaning and rich texture of connections to other philosophical and spiritual ideas.

❦

[1] Peter L. Berger, “New Atheism and the Rectification of Names,” The American Interest, January 7, 2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/01/07/new-atheism-and-the-rectification-of-names/.

[2] George Orwell, "Politics and the Enlgish Language," Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946): 252-265.

[3] Confucius, transl. James Legge, Confucian Analects (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 263-264. My emphasis.

[4] Quoted in Wm. Theodore de Bary, “Introduction,” in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 8.

[5] Then again, since part of the problem with King Zhou was traditionally held to be that he indulged in crude, off-rhythm music, perhaps Trump’s reasons for tanning himself into orangeness are unaesthetic enough that Mencius would have seen it as relevant after all.

[6] I hesitate to cite specific social media accounts for this due to both the ephemerality of the medium and the fact that doing so blurs the line between criticizing socially relevant public thought and criticizing the opinions of private citizens, but searching the Tumblr tag for “rectification of names” gives a wealth of examples of the far-right usage, and very few examples of any other usage.

[7] G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, Second Edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 56.

[8] This was a belief common in the West for many hundreds of years as well, hence practices like augury and the various “-mancy” disciplines by which Western religious and protoscientific leaders attempted to glean information from the natural world about how to correct or not to correct human affairs. I would argue that the search for meaning in seemingly random natural forces is still with us and probably always will be in one form or another. It is to some extent answered in teachings such as those of Averroes or John Henry Newman concerning “spiritual intelligences,” but the search for greater understandability of that meaning or greater ability to plan and take action based on it is left unanswered by those teachings and must be pursued through other means, such as, in our own time when many other options are widely seen as discredited, alternative medicine or astrology.

[9] Op. cit., Anscombe.

[10] For over three hundred years there was an on-and-off dispute within the Catholic Church over whether or not Chinese Catholics could licitly continue Confucian ceremonial practices. Eventually in 1939 Pope Pius XII ruled that they could, within certain limits.

[11] Yamamoto Shichihei and Komuro Naoki, 日本教の社会学Nihon-kyō no shakaigaku (Tokyo: Gakken, 1981), 58. (In Japanese.)

[12] Ibid.

[13] Op. cit., Berger; the previous citation of Berger’s essay includes the passage mentioning the “enhanced interrogation techniques” euphemism. At one point in the Bush administration the comedian Jon Stewart responded to an admission that the US was not winning the Iraq War “in the present tense” by speculating that the US was instead winning in the pluperfect subjunctive, a tense and aspect used to discuss things that might, could, or should have happened in the past.

Repent at Leisure

With neither joy nor penitence

In these lethargic times, the one

And only laugh that still makes sense

Comes from a grinning skeleton.

—Paul Verlaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro

❦

Taylor Swift released an album last month, Midnights, her tenth (not counting the two rerecorded versions of earlier albums that she has made as part of an intellectual property battle). Taylor Swift album releases are major events in popular culture and have become major events in my own life as well, since I’m only liking her work more and more as she, like me, slowly passes out of early adulthood. The 2020 Folklore/Evermore diptych solidified me as a superfan for life—which can’t be said for everyone who loved those albums, because they hadn’t necessarily liked her earlier albums too, whereas I had—and I was excited about Midnights because I heard it was going to be in a confessional register and confession, penitence, regret, and admission are concepts that I think about a great deal. Sure enough, the album is packed full of lyrics dealing in shockingly overt terms with things Swift, or Swift’s narratorial voice, has done wrong in her life, ranging from emotionally manipulating her listening public, to infidelity in an intimate relationship, to liking money. (Strict theology would reverse the order of the first two in an ascending ranking of severity, although all three would be very bad.) Much of the album’s sound exists mostly as a distracting smokescreen to disguise the jaw-dropping candidness of what she is actually saying, as do some of the specific lyrical flourishes; at one point she cops to what I suspect is a dead-serious Baudelairean conviction that she is going to hell when she dies, but she frames it as part of a tongue-in-cheek du Maurier-esque narrative about an imaginary inheritance dispute.

This brief essay isn’t intended as an essay about Taylor Swift, although I could write about her for several pages at a time if I wanted to—as, I suspect, could most competent living writers who follow popular music. It’s intended as an essay about the public aspect of penitence, the part of a process of making amends where we actually tell other people what we did wrong. Sometimes this isn’t necessary—nobody needs to know about that one time you masturbated to dodgy early-2000s hentai, other than arguably a confessor or spiritual director, and even then the details are probably a bit too much. Oftentimes, however, a public and communal dimension to penitence should or even must exist, either because the immoral acts harmed a community or because the penitent needs some kind of green light from other people before accepting that the moral crisis that she precipitated has been resolved. I’ve often thought that the medieval Church’s transition from Mediterranean-style large public airings of grievances to Celtic-style private confessions was at best a mixed blessing. Part of the reason for this is probably cultural (as a product of a mixed Italian-American and American Jewish family background myself, I recognize my extended family very readily in Seinfeld’s famous Festivus episode), but I think there is a serious sociological and theological argument to be made for confession as a more public and collective act as well. God judges nations as well as people; surely the intermediate formations of human life—the parish, the town, the diocese, the county—should have some means of putting wrongs aright as well.

Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to know the difference between publicly admitting wrongdoing and oversharing about things in which nobody is interested. This can be true even when it comes to wrongdoing that did hurt other people in obvious and publicly noticeable ways. As an example I’ll share something about myself that does not make me look very good, just as “scheming….to make them love me” does not make Taylor Swift very good and running a company that “stinks” because he is someone who “couldn’t smooth a silk sheet if [he] had a hot date with a babe” did not make George Costanza’s boss look very good. I, in my teens and into my early twenties, had an exceptionally poor understanding of conversational boundaries, especially around subjects like sexual desire. While this at no point went beyond words, my struggles with verbal boundaries and understanding when I was testing them cost me several close friendships over the years. I finally realized and amended my behavior when this had happened enough unrelated times that it was no longer reasonable to deny that I was the person at fault. (“I’m the problem! It’s me!” Swift sings in one of the songs on the new album.) The reason I’m bringing this up is, again, by way of example—it’s been several years, thankfully, since this problem arose in my life, and I’ve either managed to repair or accepted the loss of my relationships with the friends with whom I had it in the past. That being the case, is my bringing it up out of nowhere in an essay like this an admirable spontaneous admission of wrongdoing and desire to reform, or is it unsettling oversharing and dredging up old news to fish for sympathy and attention? At least in my mind it’s clearly the former, which is why I am writing about it, but the reader does not have access to my innermost thoughts and thus can only take my word for that.

A higher-stakes public example might be the French Catholic prelate Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who earlier this month came forward as a sexual abuser without anybody having publicly accused him. Did Ricard have a genuine case of conscience, or was he trying to position himself as having a perverse sort of moral authority? Not even all of Ricard’s colleagues within the Catholic hierarchy seem confident that they can tell the difference, and Catholic bishops are not generally credited with a habit of second-guessing other Catholic bishops’ morals. At the very least Ricard’s approach leaves a somewhat better taste in my mouth than the retired Bishop of Albany Howard Hubbard asking to be laicized as a general application of a rule despite vociferously denying the allegations against him, even though Hubbard is probably setting a better precedent for the Catholic Church. Then again, might this itself be because I used to admire Hubbard very much and thus feel more betrayed and disillusioned by the strong possibility that he’s a sex criminal? It often happens that our motives for how we receive an attempt to atone for wrongdoing are as mysterious to ourselves as our motives for attempting to atone in the first place are to our fellows.

I don’t think that going back to collectively and communally “acknowledging and bewailing our manifold sins and wickednesses,” in the words of Thomas Cranmer, himself someone who did many horrible things in his life and had many horrible things done to him in turn, would actually solve those mysteries. It might diffuse them somewhat and make them easier to bear, in the same way that I am able to think about Cardinal Ricard and Bishop Hubbard more or less at my leisure but would feel much more call to dwell on and perseverate on equivalent conversations if people were having them with me in private. Even so, taking the process of working through wrongdoing and making it the public’s or the community’s business is not something to do or to advocate lightly. For long years rural areas in several Western European countries had a custom called rough music or charivari, in which people guilty of crimes against social and familial order, such as adultery or domestic violence, were shamed in loud public processions rather than being turned over to the courts. (The title of this essay comes from a proverb about bad marriages.) Even though the aesthetic of this practice appeals to me and even though there is a lot to recommend public shaming over against (say) sending people to prison for years, rough music was a form of lynch law at its core.

Yet not every public confession of wrongdoing or public airing of grievances must involve as stark and extreme an intervention in someone’s life as charivari. If a society does make penitence and atonement everybody’s business, it provides paths to actual reintegration in a web of moral actors that simply letting guilt gnaw at individuals in private does not. It is worth applying a renewed emphasis to this at least in liturgical penitential contexts, and I would argue in secular contexts as well. For that renewed emphasis to be workable in secular settings the practice of whipping up ideologized online hate mobs would probably need to have a stake driven through its heart first, but that is itself what people used to call a win-win.

This is where I would like to, by way of a pithy and topical envoi, say “if you’ve never told anyone to commit suicide for disagreeing with you about what fictional characters should have sex with each other, you’ve nothing to fear.” Unfortunately, this isn’t true—there is always a great deal to fear in this world, and especially a great deal to fear when it comes to confiding and being vulnerable around other people in their multitudes. I would submit, however, that letting that fear rule us, letting it induce constant defensiveness to the point of privatization of sin, has led us places that are even worse by far.

Patriots in Control

A specter is haunting the American left, the specter of “America Bad” thinking—not “America Bad” in the sense that America is flawed and most Americans are not willing enough to recognize those flaws, but “America Bad” in the sense that we are both the villain and the main character of current world history, a sort of Walter White or Patrick Bateman of the international arena. This is the tendency that Jeane Kirkpatrick attributed to the “blame America first crowd”—unhelpfully, because Jeane Kirkpatrick did not actually know who was and wasn’t in the “blame America first crowd,” or, if she did, she pretended not to for the sake of the cheap seats.

The “blame America first crowd” that actually exists makes two basic mistakes. The first is in thinking in the first place that the United States is a uniquely malign influence in the world. It isn’t; indeed, America is an unusually benign global hegemon in most ways, although given the direly low bar set by previous hegemons, this is not much of an accomplishment. Ideally the recent practices of some of America’s so-called near peers like China’s treatment of its religious minorities or Russia’s high-on-its-own-supply ideology-poisoned unprovoked invasion of Ukraine would have disabused people of the idea that America is a uniquely abusive world power, and in many cases it has, but unfortunately, there are still plenty of people on the left who have had exactly the opposite reaction. One’s modus potens is another’s modus tollens, and some people are in fact so committed to “America Bad” thinking that they conclude that anything bad-seeming that America’s rivals are doing must be either misreported or not actually bad at all. One can sometimes see Pope Francis obviously and publicly struggling to suppress this line of thinking when he comments on the plight of Ukraine; “NATO is barking at Russia’s door” is an assumption about the situation that it is understandable for a Latin American Catholic prelate to make, given that region’s own history, and in the grand scheme of things the Pope is probably to be commended for resisting the temptation to go all the way down that rabbit hole. I can’t say the same for figures who are American, like Noam Chomsky and the ever-embarrassing Glenn Greenwald, suddenly adopting a naïve pacifism about Russia or even, as Chomsky did at one point, claiming that Donald Trump is “the one Western statesman” who actually wants peace. These people have completely reversed axiom and application, going from “my country is violating its own declared principles” to “violating one’s own declared principles is that which my country does, and if a country opposed to mine appears to be doing that, it must actually not be.”

The second mistake of the anti-American American left is to assume that a country—one’s own country—is reducible to the worst instincts of its political classes and the most broken aspects of its political institutions. American imperialism doesn’t make America bad for the same reason that your cousin from the poor side of town getting busted for drug dealing doesn’t make her bad; people aren’t reducible to the worst decision they’ve ever made and countries aren’t reducible to the worst features of their political cultures or military histories. Some might respond to this by pointing out that the United States’ domestic culture has obvious and universally known pathologies as well—the consumerism, the horrible diets, the hyperdivisive sociocultural politics, the obsession with large and terrifying cars and the built environment that caters to them, the increasing relegation of serious interest in religion and the divine to certain right-wing subcultures that most other Americans reasonably despise. Again, however, if most of us saw a family member or friend mishandling their household affairs in analogous ways, our natural reaction would be to pity them, not to hate them. (I say “our natural reaction,” not necessarily the reaction that we think is in keeping with our political commitments; plenty of American leftists today do also have a problem with jumping awfully quickly to interpersonal shunning of those with messy lives or bad ideas.)

A country is just its people, as a group of individuals and as a collective; this includes the abstractions that emerge out of any mass of people, such as social emotions and cultural practices. America is me, my family, and most (but not all) of my close friends; it is Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and the lion’s share of the people who love and hate them most; it is art forms like jazz and comic strips, holiday traditions like unedifying political arguments on Thanksgiving and presents (or Chinese food) on Christmas, and time-honored aspects of workingmen’s and workingwomen’s culture like filling out March Madness brackets at random, stealing small items from one’s workplace, and dying of black lung around the age of sixty. For a leftist to hate America yet claim to fight for the liberation of humanity is for a priest to love God and hate his parishioners, or for a “male feminist ally” to exploit and berate his own mother.

It is imperative, then, that a left-wing patriotism reemerge in the United States, both as a civic value—those who control American public life will always either be or make others perceive them to be those who love America best—and as a moral value—exaggerated contempt for something that is flawed, but is ours, is a flaw of character and virtue on our own part. Left-wing American patriotism should honor—but not revere; reverence for mere mortal men is something that American patriotism in general absolutely does have in excess—left-wing partisan or sectional figures such as Jones, Debs, and Guthrie. Perhaps in our more trollish, bullet-biting, or yes-chad moments we might even add in more ambivalent characters like Jimmy Hoffa. At the same time we should not abandon ecumenical American patriotic figures like Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts. Rather than rocketing back and forth between denigrating our national heroes as the lowest of the low and unduly praising them to the stars, we should seek to interpret their lives and actions in ways as compatible as possible both with our political and moral values and with historical facts. Whether or not the country deserves our love is not the issue. We deserve to let, or make, ourselves love it.

A Prose Poem Every Word of Which Is True

It's the witching hour on a July night, or morning. You're lying naked in bed with some type of splinter in your foot because you and your roommate both had a terrible day and nobody swept the kitchen floor. You had a terrible day because you had to authorize three thousand dollars for a car fix that might not even work; the mechanic is having a hard time explaining why not in terms that you can understand. The three thousand dollars are mostly your parents’ money, which is to say, your late grandparents’ money. They were with an oil supermajor and are thus also partly responsible for the fact that it is a muggy night even for July, yet still the least muggy night in days and days—and people still deny something is amiss here, because anecdotal evidence counts when it's cold out but not when it's hot out. You try to say a prayer for your grandparents in purgatory but for some reason what comes out is “Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam hatov v’ha’meitiv,” which is true but not helpful in the moment. You feel fat, and a bout of the gender dysphoria is setting in. A singer you like a lot did a theme song for a movie you were going to see, but now you don't think you'll bother because it turns out the author of the book on which it is based is wanted in connection with a murder case in the Republic of Zambia and has been for some time. Eventually at some point that you might or might not live to see history will consummate its triumph over time and we will, as they say, all look back on this and laugh. Do you know where your soul is? I do, saith the Lord.

Trahison des Mémoires

In my master’s thesis, which was written in late 2016 into early 2017 and was in the field of theology, I coined an expression called trahison des mémoires, “treason of memories.” It was a snowclone of trahison des clercs, the concept of disloyalty to the principles of serious thought by a society’s intellectual or cultured classes. With trahison des mémoires, my idea is that memory, especially publicly-held memory like the institutional memory of a country or a religion, can be twisted and weaponized in ways that do great harm to the people holding onto the memory. I was not so much interested in political or sociological harm—looking at cultural memory through that framework is old hat—as in emotional and interpersonal harm. In the thesis I introduced this concept as part of a discussion of (and I am both dating myself and outing myself as an irremediable dweeb here) the 2001 anime Noir, one of whose main characters is trying to piece together the circumstances of her parents’ murders.  When she finally does remember—or, in point of fact, when she finally is provided with other people’s memories concerning—the killings, she wishes she hadn’t.

            I was interested in looking at how early, or transgenerational, memories of cultural and religious practices can lead to mental states about as bad as those associated with watching one’s parents get whacked. I’m not convinced in retrospect that I had a ton to say about this; my thesis ended up much less systematic, more meandering, and frankly more postmodern than I went into it hoping it would. Even so, that is what I used the term to mean and, if I am allowed to toot my own horn on this, I do think that “treason of memories” captures certain things about this experience that more common terms like generational trauma or cultural baggage do not. It often really does feel very much like being betrayed, stabbed in the back, attacked in the dark, by something about one’s family or one’s culture that ought to be a font of strength and comfort.

            My family came to North America in the first decade or two of the twentieth century, mostly from either the Italian Mezzogiorno or an area of Eastern Europe that has variously been under Lithuanian, Polish, Austrian, Russian, or Nazi German sovereignty over its long and violent history. Some of the Eastern Europeans were Jews, others Gentiles; the exact genealogical admixture has never struck me as particularly important, mostly since it’s no longer possible to reconstruct. Neither, for that matter, has the question of whether the Gentiles were ethnically Polish or Lithuanian or Russian or Belarusian or whatever else; there is an anecdote from a pre-World War I British diplomat related in Bini Adamczak’s Relational Revolutions in which the diplomat, speaking to ordinary inhabitants of the part of Europe in question, runs through several wordings of a question about ethnic and national identity before finally being told that “all governments are a plague on the earth and it would be for the best if the Christian peasantry were left to attend to their affairs in peace.” Remove the word “Christian,” or add the phrase “or Jewish” after it, and you get the attitude towards nationalism that I’ve long assumed almost all of my ancestors on that side of my family held.

            Looking at my family history this way insulates me from the current treason of memories happening on an operatic scale in Ukraine and Russia. There are other treasons, however, with which it helps much less. There is a story that I often tell about my great-grandfather, a story that I heard myself from my elderly aunt. My great-grandfather’s name was either Paweł Turówski, Павел Туровский, פאולוס טוראָווסקי‎, or Paul Turowsky, depending on your thoughts on various Eastern European nationalisms. He spent most of his life in the Springfield, Massachusetts area following a short stint in the Canadian nickel mines after his flight from Europe. Pogroms had been involved, probably, given the timeline, those that followed the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. When my aunts, who are much older than my mother, were growing up just after World War II, they would visit their grandfather each Sunday after Mass and he would give them a nickel and a cup of chicken soup apiece—but he would always answer the door with a butcher knife in hand, before seeing to his satisfaction that it was just his granddaughters, and not the Cossacks come for him again.

            That butcher knife feels aimed through the dark at my own back whenever I try to take a sympathetic look at the sufferings of the Cossacks themselves, and, for that matter, whenever I try to think with compassion about the antisemitic views that my grandfather developed over the course of his own life. It is possible that these views were developed in opposition to his father, but also that his father instructed him in them himself as part of some twisted ploy at assimilating. In any case it made it easier for him to marry my grandmother, the descendant of long lines of Campanian peasantry and guttersnipes who passed down curiously bright copper-colored hair, difficulty moderating food intake, and a strong tendency to develop serious neuralgias in early adulthood. Once or twice I’ve pictured my grandfather and great-grandfather going at each other like Arthur and Mordred in the Rackham illustration of the Battle of Camlann, but then, there can’t have been too much resentment at the time of that wedding, because there were several bridesmaids from my grandfather’s side, that is the Eastern European side, of the family.

            I have a friend with whom I once had a serious fight over her observation that my grandfather “betrayed the Jewish people” by marrying my grandmother. I know enough about American Judaism and the difficulties it has had withstanding intermarriage and assimilation that I was not surprised by this opinion of hers, but I still objected to her saying it. I did not only object for the obvious moral reason that one simply does not say that sort of thing about a friend’s dead grandfather, but also for the factual reason that in reality the betrayal of the Jewish people had happened at least a generation earlier, maybe longer.

            (Lots of people seem to think that Judaism and Christianity, or even specifically Judaism and Catholicism, are either naturally allied and sister religions, or naturally inimical and opposed. People argue over which is true. Both are silly and wrong. The fact that many antisemitic ideas are theological nonsense even in very conservative Christian thought has not stopped them from influencing countless Christians, even Popes, even otherwise good Popes. Neither has persecution of Judaism by Christian governments always and in all places stopped Christians from being good neighbors to Jews, and learning from them. There would have been ways for my grandparents to have built a life together that did not involve this self-enmity and self-rejection on my grandfather’s part, and yet those paths were not taken.)

 ❦

Some of the most detailed stories I’ve ever heard about these people came in a specific conversation with my aunts and uncle three or four years ago when my mother and I visited them on Cape Cod. It was the most freewheeling conversation either I or my mother had ever had with some of the other people involved, in particular with my mother’s oldest sister. I learned that evening as the sun set pinkly behind Follins Pond about everything from the dubious paternity of my grandfather’s oldest sister— Paweł/ Павел/ פאולוס /Paul’s wife having, most likely, abruptly married him after being abandoned by the man who got her pregnant—to the crime family that used to and possibly still does control the Town of Agawam.

            What’s remarkable, looking back on this conversation, is that no point in it did I think holy shit, why is she telling us this? or anything of the kind. These conversations happen sometimes; people open up. It does not always feel like getting stabbed. There are similar reminiscing conversations that I have had with members of my family that did feel like getting stabbed; one such example is a conversation that I had with my mother years after the fact about a visit to a Buddhist temple on a trip to Japan in 2013. It was a visit that made a profound impression on me and that I have been meaning to write something cogent, insightful, and vital about ever since; my previous attempts to do so embarrassed me and I am not going to try to rectify that now in service to this particular point. (The very first thing I wrote about it, a long, typed-up diary entry headed “The Distance between the Devoted and the Devout,” has the advantages of freshness and of a title of which I’m still very proud.)

            The temple is Bōdai-ji, on top of a mountain whose name my best friend loosely translates Mount Doom, and the festival, which happens in the high summer, is called the Inako Taisai. At this festival blind spirit mediums or necromancers called itako set up booths in front of the temple in which they, actually or purportedly, contact the souls of the recently deceased, including miscarried or aborted fetuses. The practice is in probably-terminal decline due to diminished need for and interest in this sort of specialized life path for the blind. Supposedly the decline is also in part due to skepticism both from the Buddhist religious establishment—which of course has its own set of funerary practices, including, again, after miscarriage or abortion—and from secular Japanese people, but in 2013 it still seemed pretty packed.

            My reminiscing with my mother involved, among other things, her reminding me that our visit to the Inako Taisai, which I remember positively for a lot of reasons, also involved me getting overwhelmed by the crowds, or the summer heat, or both, and running off and irritating someone my mother was talking to, someone who had been looking forward to going to an Inako Taisai all her life. Me being who I am, I reacted to this conversation with a sense of deep shame, embarrassment, and even guilt—had I ruined something that this other woman had been looking forward to for decades? Probably not, especially since most older Japanese people tend to expect Westerners to behave in bizarre and jarring ways to begin with. Even so, it was apparently enough to give my mother herself mixed feelings about the excursion, which made my own very positive memories feel a little inappropriate, selfish, misguided. That sort of perseveration is elevated and exacerbated, I think, by the fact that the Inako Taisai is a well-known—in some circles—and well-attended event. Feeling as if I may have somehow damaged, in however minor a way, an established corpus of social, cultural, and religious memory, gives me the feeling of being betrayer as well as betrayed.

            Something feels melodramatic about looking at these kinds of memories as if they are knives in the dark, so let’s put them to bed as something more moderate, calmer, more contained. Homeopathic dilutions, maybe, of the kinds of violent memories that my grandparents and great-grandparents contended over with themselves and with one another. These memories have an undertone of violence to them only because they affected members of my family about whom I care deeply, or else because for an autistic person there is always an undertone of violence to any faux pas that one might conceivably be punished socially for having made. Add to that the guilt, for any morally reasonable person, of thinking of oneself as a victim in a low-stakes situation, and the Inako Taisai memory falls into place and becomes understandable at least to myself.

            So much for the 2013 Inako Taisai, which in spite of this qualm I do still think very well of as a ceremony and as a moment in my life. So much also for the family that ran my relatives’ childhood liquor store—note the wording—and latterly the Agawam School Board. What about working on these memories in a reparative way the way one can do a reparative reading of an old and, as they say, “problematic” book? I have already touched on this idea and want to make a more extended case for it.

            There are particular events in my childhood that I and other relatives remember different versions of, like the Agawam stories and the Inako Taisai story, but also remember in uniformly benign or positive ways, unlike the Inako Taisai story, of which memories are mixed, and the Agawam stories, which all concerned are just glad to have survived in more or less one piece. For example, I remember going to see the Lord of the Rings movies as a child with my mother and in one case my aunt when they were coming out; I remember the same about the Harry Potter movies. Both sets of memories are excellent; in my very early childhood I disliked both movie theaters and fantasy stories, but after a few years of the 2000s fantasy-action-adventure-blockbuster milieu I loved both. (The monocultural MCU juggernaut has ruined a lot of this sort of thing for me now, of course—another knife, another dark night, another spot on my back.) My mother also remembers both sets of movies very positively. Yet her Harry Potter-related memories are more salient and vivid for her than are her Lord of the Rings-related memories, whereas for me it’s the other way around. Part of the difference might be that several of the Harry Potter movies were released in theaters around her birthday, in late November.

            Remembering the salience of these movie watches differently from how my mother does is, of course, no kind of betrayal at all. I bring it up more to point out that the reparative potential in “misremembering” isn’t entirely disconnected from the way reminiscing already works for most people anyway. Who among us has not had many rounds of good-natured banter with friends and family about things like this? “No, no, it really happened like this.” Then someone else says “No, it happened like that; remember?” Then a third person says “Well that isn’t how I remember it.” These kinds of arguments actually reinforce our memories and reinforce our relationships. Just recently, in connection with getting my mother’s permission to write about the Inako Taisai episode, I had a conversation much like this with her. We agreed on the point I made above, that nobody going to something like this after wanting to for many years is going to let their time at it be ruined by an autistic foreign stranger having a meltdown because it’s hot out. So clearly the reparative quality of reminiscence can take the sting even out of the Dickinsonian “goblin bee” of trahison des mémoires. This actually does happen in Noir; the character I coined the term to describe is never happy about the fact that her parents were whacked, but she is able to engage in some sort of repair and atonement through having it out with the scumbag who ordered the hits and the brainwashed victim-perpetrator who executed them.

 ❦

Another memory of a debate over memories with my older relatives—a memory that might eventually come back and stab me itself, for all I know!—also comes to mind here. This is another utterly benign one, even benevolent in the sense that I look back on both the debate itself and the memory about which we had it fondly. My aunt and uncle and I discussed my very earliest memory, in which my uncle picks me up in his arms in his living room in a midcentury ranch house in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and spins me around while an old record player plays a big band tune. For some reason we all agreed that it was one of those record players that only plays one prerecorded song or program of music, and yet none of us agreed on what the song in the memory actually was. I remember it as “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the Benny Goodman piece that is probably a plurality of people’s first point of reference for big band music. My aunt remembers it as “Begin the Beguine,” a Cole Porter song, probably, in this kind of anecdote, being played by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. My uncle remembers it as “the Russian boat song,” by which he means a wartime Glenn Miller arrangement of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”

            Other memories like this might be relatively easy to resolve, but in this case my aunt, my uncle, and I all have good reason to have remembered best what song it was! My uncle owned the record player; my aunt, who is a little younger than my uncle, has the clearest memories of that period of time, 1995 or so, in general; I have the strongest emotions about the memory, since it is my earliest.

            Because we all had occasion to remember this memory the best, and yet all remembered it differently, the conversation actually shored up the bonds between us and reinforced, I believe, our importance to one another. In this way trahison des mémoires can be reversed so that the memory that is seemingly betraying one can in fact be a deep cover agent on one’s behalf. A public memory involving a national or intergenerational harm, like my great-grandfather’s memories of the pogroms, might be more difficult, or even impossible, to reverse in this way, and yet even in those cases I think that future generations can look back on their—on our—ancestors with a view to resolving and redeeming their experiences. Sometimes the best way to deal with betrayal is to meet it with a refusal to betray. “Trust, but verify,” as Ronald Reagan said, quoting, allegedly, a Russian proverb. Verifying, by implication, should not damage the trust overmuch. We can see that we have been stabbed and yet meet that violence with a decision to accept our memories and the purity of our feelings about them nonetheless. A knife that enters one’s back and stabs one through the heart can also, in different hands, be a tool that keeps a whole family or a whole society fed, safe, and warm.

Postscript

A few other, very specific knives thrown at my back in recent days, all of which had, in some way, a medicinal and consoling function: Florence and the Machine’s new album Dance Fever, which is named after early modern “dancing plagues,” which are in turn written about in similar terms to the nerve disease of which most of my female-line ancestors died. The too-pale lights of this year’s fireflies in unmowed grass in mid-June dusk. The Memory Alpha page for John Masefield. A whole cache of old yearbooks dredged up in my closet, showing the most 2000s fashion and graphic design choices imaginable, people I have not thought about in decades, and high school crushes of whom, in some cases, I still think as beautiful. A photograph of me as a child, in a Baltimore Orioles cap, draping myself over a railing with a smile on my face and the skyline of Manhattan in the near distance, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center jutting out over it all; the photograph is dated June 30, 2000.