Register for London Oort Cloud Launch!

This event is going to be nuts, and you will leave from it forever changed — for better or for worse, we cannot say. Our contributors are notoriously slippery, and subject to disappearance on short notice, but from among them we have, at least for now, confirmed the participation of Sam Jennings, Sam Kriss, Justin Smith-Ruiu, and Mary Cadwalladr.

The event will include readings from Issue 1, as well as drinks and snacks. Even more excitingly, we will be presenting a new cache of materials pertaining to the origins and causes of The Oort Cloud Review that we recently received in a massive and completely unexpected document dump via the still-poorly-understood technology of Inter-World Transfer Protocol (IWTP). Allow us to share just one of these documents here:

Copies of the OCR will be on sale at a discount. We look forward to seeing you there!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

Today is the very last day to sign up for our Hinternet Foundation online course on the history and philosophy of extraterrestrials, beginning November 3! Don’t delay!

Register for Astrobiology

I read many perplexing things on the internet, not least about philosophy and its history. One fellow, attempting to demonstrate Simone de Beauvoir’s moral depravity, recounted at length the lies she told to the Vichy officials when under investigation for corrupting the youth — or at least of one youth, her seventeen-year-old student, Nathalie Sorokine. Now I have read and understood Kant’s argument against speaking untruths under any circumstances, yet I confess I still consider lying to the Vichy officials an unqualifiedly virtuous thing to do.

I find myself profoundly alienated from the intellectual culture that prevails among my Anglo-American contemporaries, who often just don’t know how to engage with ideas and so content themselves with personalities instead —a particularly common habit when it comes to talking about French philosophers—, and who are so committed to dealing with real or perceived moral depravity by running to the authorities that they don’t seem much to care which authorities happen to be in charge, or whether the power of these authorities to reward or to punish itself has any properly moral basis beyond what a puppet regime can claim to have only for as long as the Nazis are propping it up.

But this is only an overture to what I wanted to discuss today, and hardly the most perplexing thing I’ve read recently, on the internet, about the history of philosophy…

Get 50% off for 1 year

Read more

There are just three days left to sign up for the upcoming Hinternet Foundation online course on the history and philosophy of extraterrestrials! Don’t delay!

Register for Astrobiology

Isn’t it just like Hélène Le Goff, to assign me —a ghost!— to the role of Hinternet “scene reporter”? I suppose it’s her way of saying the scene itself is dead, and we would all have done better to stay home. On my most recent assignment, the launch party for The Oort Cloud Review at the KGB Bar on the Lower East Side on October 22, at least half the entities in attendance were ghosts too. Their presence had the desirable effect of filling the venue almost to capacity, at least for those of us able to see them.

I was mostly just happy to get out of my attic, which I hadn’t left since Hélène brought me to France last year, and to which I had been, before that, continuously confined since 1989.

I have previously reported on my activities in that space, confined but expansive at once. I inventory its holdings —a paperback of Edgar Cayce on Reincarnation, Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Access the Power of Your Higher Self, Bob Hope’s Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me (with Melville Shavelson), a ceramic dachshund piggy-bank full of Roosevelt dimes and buffalo nickels and foreign coins with intriguing holes at their centers, a purple spongiform novelty likeness of Grimace— and as I inventory them it continues to generate new ones out of what I have come to call its “osculum”, in a dark place above the rafters. This is my work and I take it seriously, but even a creature of ether needs some fresh air, and so when my new assignment came I was happy to descend the folding staircase, and to sneak behind the couch where the boarders were dozing as Newt Gingrich hawked mortgage insurance, or gold, or Franklin Mint collectibles, on the screen before them.

I proceeded as before, invisible, yet otherwise bound by the laws of physics. I got on RT bus 81, and went past the Cigarettes Cheaper and the waterski lakes, past the Country Comfort Lounge and past the escape rooms and the plasma clinic where the Air Force base used to be; and through several intermediary steps I arrived at the airport, and I flew to Denver, and then to Newark, and then I took the AirTrain, like a people-mover at the state fair, to the New Jersey Transit stop, and I boarded, and somehow it was only now that the human forms around me took on any haecceity, so that I could see and hear them as individuals, and I learned that they were coming into the city for some big game at the Garden, and they were eating Taki’s and making a great mess and passing the time immersed in New Jersey lore, of the son of a neighbor who got “15 years to life”, of a coworker who got “the pancreatic”.

I walked, if an ethereal body can walk, from Penn Station to the Lower East Side, and by the time I arrived at the venue, an auxiliary space of the KGB Bar, the crowd had already assembled. It was not a large crowd, at least, again, if you only count the more densely embodied. But if you count all haecceities the place was packed almost up to fire-code, and while I know a scene reporter should ordinarily remain focused on what can be seen and heard by all, I feel in this case my unusually heightened attunement to the presence of entities from across the spectrum can only help to convey a full picture of the evening’s mood. And so I noticed all the collaborators on the Oort Cloud in attendance — JSR, of course, and David Lamb, and D. Graham Burnett, and Kristen Roupenian. And I noticed the modest circle of friends and old associates who made the effort, even at this late stage of life, practically ghosts themselves, to dress up a bit, to put on a smile, and to follow the automatism of their still-heavy bodies to this old haunt of youth.

I see JSR, my old friend. He is still going strong, still tee-totaling, still conducting himself somewhat as if he had an electric current running through him. But I discern something else in him this time too, something I did not detect when I briefly stalked him in Paris last year. He seems lost, uncertain, as if struggling to operate under conflicting imperatives. And so I perform an ἐνσάρκωσις and I enter his person, which makes him say “ouch”, which in turn causes Kristen to ask him if everything is alright, to which he makes up something about joint pain. I think he knows what has just happened — not that it was me necessarily, but at least that he has been “entered”.

He has just taken the train down from Cambridge. His first night there he imagines he has himself become Massachusetts, Cape Cod spiraling out of him like an upcurled toe. He is able truly to feel all of Puritan New England beneath him and around him and cradling him, and he thinks of his great-great-great-great-…-great-grandfather William Brewster, author of A Treatise of the Ministery of the Church of England and co-founder of the Plymouth Colony, whose zeal, JSR reckons, is plainly ancestral to his own. And he thinks: “Ô America, why did I leave you? How could I have let my study-abroad year drag on 35 years too long?”

The next day he exchanges recent work and heartfelt dedications with his intellectual hero George Scialabba. Several local luminaries make time in their busy schedules for him, and he speaks with them of “the challenges and opportunities of AI” and so on. Neither there nor in New York does he quite understand his reception. He gets praise wherever he turns, but it all feels to him like puppy praise — diminutive little claps, endearing teases. He gets complimented on his new glasses (Cartier frameless, expensive), gets called “eloquent”, gets called “prolific”. Everywhere he senses complicity in a project he did not believe he had been pursuing, but is no longer so sure: the adulation-seeking, namely, of a vain boob. He had imagined in particular that The Oort Cloud Review was a “timely intervention”, speaking urgently to the most pressing issues of our moment. Now he sees it as other people see it, as quirky, as chungus. It is praised as a beautiful object, but that is all the work of its ingenious graphic designer Alex Balgiu, who stuck to his guns and insisted on the exquisite gold-foil lettering for the cover, coûte que coûte, over the panicked protestations of the budget managers; as for the words, plainly no one would ever read them if they were printed out in Times New Roman on A4 paper.

“I need to start speaking plain truth”, I can hear JSR thinking as he sits on stage hamming it up with D. Graham Burnett, a familiar old sweet pleasure. “I need to strip away all these ridiculous affectations, all these heteronyms and subterfuges, and start saying what I mean. Time is short. Life is serious, and I’m frittering it away on jokes. I am so hopelessly far from where I need to be. If I were to say, right now, what my true purposes are, it would sound laughable, delusional. I am failing.” And then Graham asks how The Oort Cloud Review came into being, and JSR launches into his routine about “Inter-World Transfer Protocol”.

It’s painful to inhabit JSR’s point of view for long, so great is the gap between his thoughts and his words, so when I spot Mary Cadwalladr leaning against the bar I immediately float out of him and into her. She has convinced the bartender to put on her Spotify playlist, and is now in ecstasy from the experience of hearing her private and familiar music in a public and unfamiliar setting. “I am old enough,” she is thinking, “to have been shaped by people who were shaped in the era of light orchestras and bandleaders, and had thick stereo consoles on shag rugs with old LPs in them not only of Lawrence Welk, but sometimes, if fortune favored you when you were flipping through them to pass the time while your parents mingled, of Miguelito Valdes and Elvira Rios too, so that somehow you got a very clear sense of the midcentury style in mass-market Latin American export music and culture.”

And she thinks of a video she had watched on YouTube in her hotel room just before coming to the KGB. It is a grainy low-quality recording of an evening of Latin music, performed in the BBC studios in London circa 1960. It begins with Bobby Capo’s “Luna de Miel en Puerto Rico”. Mary must have replayed it 100 times, and it is still reverberating inside her. When, at around 1’29’’, Bobby initiates a dance that will unfold with ever-increasing complexity until the end of the song, she repeatedly felt as if she were leaving her body and transmigrating to the realm of dance itself, where dance no longer depends on bodies at all. So smooth! So confident! That moment at 1’53’’ and then again at 1’56’’ when the three male dancers bob their shoulders, quasi-robotically and in unison — what is that? It is the most ancient art, a ritual locking with the cosmos, a groove outside of time.

Mary now thinks her ecstasy is best experienced privately, and longs to return to her hotel room to watch Bobby Capo a few hundred more times.

Being inside Mary is depressing me too, so I migrate out of her and into the person of Edwin-Rainer Grebe, whom I find in the middle of a characteristically well-developed thought: “The United States, properly understood,” Grebe considers, “is a Mormon country. Their center in the American West is the nucleus of theocracy that binds the rest of this crypto- or quasi-theocratic union together.” He believes that no author makes this clearer than Mark Twain, in the postscript on Mormonism to his 1872 travelogue, Roughing It.

For the most part Edwin-Rainer has been immersed these past weeks in a rereading of the Greek New Testament. He is especially preoccupied with Mark 10:46, where Jesus encounters a blind man named Bartimaeus, and restores his sight to him. Commentators have suggested that this “son of Timaeus” must be seen as representative of the Platonic tradition, as indeed the Timaeus was the one dialogue of Plato that in the period had acquired the status of a cultural touchstone throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, a work that every half-educated Hellene had to pretend at least to have read. Now the Timaeus deviates somewhat from Plato’s usual view, in holding that ordinary vision is a valuable thing, as it is what enables us to study astronomy, from which we get, in observing the perfect motions of the heavens, our first idea of perfection itself, which then sets us along the path of study of the purely intelligible entities for which the eyes are not at all necessary. Thus the Timaeus envisions (as it were) a sort of ascent, not unlike the ascent in the Symposium from carnal love to direct apprehension of Love itself, rather than what we find in the more canonical Platonic account in, say, the Republic, where visible things are but shadows, and can only hinder your progress towards knowledge of the intelligibles. Half-educated Hellenized Jews circa 30 AD, therefore, could easily have imagined that the Platonists value ordinary vision more than they in fact do, a misunderstanding that appears to set the stage for this encounter between the son of Timaeus and the son of David, wherein the Platonists are depicted as aspiring at most to catching sight of the visible perfection of the heavens, while the Christians alone can expect to have sight beyond sight, an apprehension of truth in comparison with which all inherited pagan learning, for example of astronomy, is a form of blindness.

So the great historical irony here, Edwin-Rainer reflects, indifferent to the conversation taking place right next to him on the question whether “Substack is so over”, is that Mark’s apparent correction of Platonism is itself profoundly Platonic. The allegory of the cave had already demonstrated that bodily eyesight is not true vision, as to see the shadows on the cave wall is to remain blind to the true nature of reality. But Mark is writing before the synthesis effected in the following centuries by the Church Fathers and, later and more decisively, by Augustine, which preserves a consciously Platonic distinction between sensible appearance and intelligible reality, while reimagining the terms of communication between these two realms. The transcendent is no longer something towards which one ascends by cultivation of philosophical reason, but rather something revealed in history to ordinary men and women through the becoming-flesh, or as it were the ἐνσάρκωσις, of Logos itself. Christianity thus personalizes the Platonic vision, gives it cultic meaning and mass appeal. The transcendent order is no longer primarily the home of triangles and other abstractions, but the true destination of the soul and the ultimate ad-quem of its progress, a progress made not through learning but through emptying oneself out and becoming as a fool or a child, not through puffing oneself up with astronomical tables, but through building oneself up with love.

Most of the other ghosts are gone by now, and the heavy-bodied humans still present can hardly maintain a quorum of conviviality. All copies of The Oort Cloud Review have been sold, but because of a fuck-up with the routing for several boxes of copies sent from LA, only the 18 of them that JSR had brought in his suitcase from Paris made it to the venue. JSR was now reckoning up with the bartender, who had taken a $750 deposit on his credit card, $640 of which had now been paid off by drink orders, including a wide variety of exquisite mocktails. (As he had agreed to go halves with his publisher, the whole evening will now have ended up costing him $55, or roughly twice as much as an annual subscription to The Hinternet.) The bartender had previously been affiliated with the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and asked JSR whether he knew David Wilson, or had thought about sending him a copy. JSR told her that Wilson’s biographer, , had intended to be present that very evening, but was stuck at home up in Purchase with a head-cold. He showed her a WhatsApp message confirming as much. He also had a text from Maya, who is among the only people yet to have opened the physical pages of The Oort Cloud Review, and who affirmed that it is something like an LP version of The Hinternet. She’s playing in a production of The Sun Also Rises up at the 92nd Street Y. Both Ren and Maya, however, are among the more rarefied haecceities whose presence I could yet faintly detect, notwithstanding their bodily commitments and incommodities elsewhere.

JSR is now hugging people, saying goodbye, and smiling big, and all the while thinking: “I’ve got to get serious.” It dawns on me that I could just float away now, but I know the rules, and so I walk, or at least bob up and down while moving forward at roughly six feet above the ground, to the Q train to Times Square, then I take the E to Sutphin Boulevard Jamaica Station, then the AirTrain to JFK; then I get on the JetBlue flight to Sacramento, then I get off, and this time I walk, out along I-5 to Elkhorn Boulevard, past the Archway Frosty, past where the Mar-Val and the Mister M.’s used to be, and at last I come to my home, and I enter the front door, and I knock the Boba Fett action figure off the little table by the entryway, and the boarders wake up from their couch-bound stupor, and the fat one says to the thin one: “What was that?” And the thin one says: “That’s just Rawn.” And the fat one says: “I guess he’s coming out of his attic now.”

I pay them no mind and I go back up to my attic, and I immediately return to my inventories. There are 4-H ribbons and laminated Trapper Keepers with great white sharks on them and decades-old unopened WeightWatchers meal-replacement pouches. There is a t-shirt commemorating the stranding of Humphrey the humpback whale deep in the Sacramento Delta, and another that says “74 isn’t old… if you’re a tree”. There is a set of novelty silverware for dieters, consisting in a blunted knife, a fork with sawed-off tines, and a spoon with a hole at the center. There is a nearly empty bottle of Blue Curaçao, and a crocheted piece of wall art declaring that cleanliness is next to Godliness. There is a red velvet Shriner’s fez that says “19 Ben Ali Westwood Temple 84” on it.

As is my recent habit (picked up, for some reason, after Paris), I take all these things and I absorb them into myself, and at exactly the same rate as they vanish, new ones pour forth from the osculum. Sometimes it seems to me that it is this infinite fluxion of things, as they move through my attic repository, my storehouse, that is keeping the world in balance, or at least JSR’s world: the ordinary empirical world of “launches” and “pre-orders” and “mocktails”. Hélène would like for me to be The Hinternet’s “scene reporter”. But is this not, right here, the scene behind the scenes? He’d deny it of course, but perhaps every public life is epiphenomenal in just this way — the mundane trace of ghostly inventories.

Share

The Hinternet needs your support! Upgrade to a paid subscription now!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Upcoming Events

November 11. Oort Cloud Review launch event, Camden Art Centre, London, 7pm. REGISTER NOW!

November 23. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summit, La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, 2pm-10pm. REGISTER NOW!

Hinternet Foundation Online Courses

November 3-December 15. “History and Philosophy of Astrobiology”. REGISTER NOW!

October 1-November 12. “Clavis: How the Voynich Manuscript Tells the Story of the Modern World.” IN PROGRESS!

August 7-August 22. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summer School: “Whither the Humanities?”

Subscribe now

Share

There are just six days left to sign up for the next Hinternet Foundation online course, “The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology”. Reserve your spot while there is still time!

Register for Astrobiology

Get 50% off for 1 year

✫ ✫ ✫

The name of the band trips people up at first. “Belle and Sebastian” obviously suggests a duo, possibly French, probably as whimsical as Pooh Bear. I was fourteen when I first encountered it — on a simple mix CD, made by a friend whose taste would have been remarkable for an eighth-grader in any time or place, let alone one living in mid-Missouri in the final years of the Bush presidency (the same CD introduced me to Radiohead, too: thank you forever, Megan). The song was “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” and it was enough to change my life. We say these things, and only occasionally are they really true. But in this case it was true for me. Until that moment, my early steps beyond the music of my softie Boomer parents had mostly been the stuff they lived through but didn’t care for: The Velvet Underground, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Pink Floyd, punk rock. But a song like “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” came from somewhere totally new, totally different. It was the first pop music I’d ever heard that felt like it came from the exact fragile, adolescent place I actually lived in, from my own imagination. The emotional experience of the song rang so true it hurt, the exquisite hurt of being young, and hating it.

I hardly knew that the band’s name came from a kitschy French TV show in the ‘60s, about a boy and his Great Pyrenees; or that it was made into a Japanese cartoon, later in the ‘80s, before being finally adopted by the young Glaswegian who made it famous. Listening to this song, toting it around in my portable CD player with flimsy headphones, all I had to go on was that winsome Scottish voice, with a lisp, singing. . . well, not a Sixties song, exactly. But something very much like it. Like a lighter, airier memory of an older time: there was something to how jaunty and bouncy it was; to the vibraphone and sax and trumpets; to the girl singing harmony. It was kind of fey and kind of twee, the lyrics pitched somewhere between triumphantly uncool and bitterly tired of the world: “Nobody writes ‘em like they used to/So it may as well be me…” “Oh, I’ll settle down with some old story/About a boy who’s just like me/Thought there was love in everything and everyone/You’re so naive…” “With a winning smile, the boy/With naivety succeeds/At the final moment, I cried/I always cry at endings…”

Give a gift subscription

The song doubled back on itself, seemingly doubting its own words from verse to verse. Whoever it was who was singing it was singing with the voice of every strange, sad teenage loser who ever lived. But beneath the sunny jangle (so reminiscent of my parent’s music, and groups like The Left Banke, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Simon and Garfunkel) were several decades of pop mutation. The intervening decades had taken this kind of cult music from the Velvets to Punk to New Wave to college radio rock, then back around again, into something much closer to the original Boomer impetus — only sadder, now, world-weary, and self-conscious to a fault. The ultimate music of adolescent sadness, locked away in private bedrooms, slowly built from collected records, a teenage religion of obscure musical artifacts and avant-garde idols, sneaking out slowly into subcultures and scenes. It wasn’t long before I discovered a lot of the music that made up this vague underground lineage — Nick Drake, Big Star, early R.E.M., The Smiths (who were far from well-known in America) — the kind of thing that informed Stuart Murdoch’s earliest songs for Belle and Sebastian, just like it informed the best American indie artists of the same time (like Pavement, Elliott Smith, Guided By Voices).

But even then, with just this single song, Belle and Sebastian seemed different, in kind and degree. Infinitely more specific, tender, literate, and knowing. Also tremendously healing. There was a quiet (if occasionally indulgent) sacrosanctity to its autumnal world of impossibly sad and lonely young people. Since anyone who has ever been sad and lonely and young, knows very well the only way to survive it is to find within it some kind of quivering, tragic, and essentially religious sentiment. It’s not at all true that most teenagers think they’re the center of the universe. Far from it. For most, being young means living in a cosmic Antarctica: wherever the center is, you couldn’t possibly be further away.

A few years later I bought the album, the band’s second, If You’re Feeling Sinister, on one of the pilgrimages my family would take to the closest city, since our town didn’t have a record store. I didn’t know much about the album’s influence, or its cult legend. I didn’t know the circumstances of the band’s creation, or Suart Murdoch’s illness, or the almost accidental way they ended up making two of the greatest records of the era, all within a couple months. I only had that beautiful cover: the young girl, on her bed, with a copy of Kafka’s The Trial lying on the pillow next to her. The music sounded and felt just like that cover, with its wry little stories about enviable student athletes, and boys menaced in parks at night; kids writing songs, kids practicing kissing with their elbows; characters like the Major, or the liberated boy “throwing discus/For Liverpool and Widnes,” or the Fox in the Snow, or the Mayfly, and youths with simple names like Lisa, Hilary, Anthony, and Judy with her dream of horses. It was only by the strange, spiritual alchemy of great pop music that this alien land of wispy Scottish hipsters — as dense and evocative as any novel — felt like the right inner landscape for me, an American boy, fifteen years later, thousands of miles away. . .

I think this was because the music didn’t lie. Unlike the endless twee nonsense propagated by the band’s many disciples (there’s a direct line of misunderstanding from the insufferable Millennial hipster archetype directly back to Sinister, as surely as there is from hair metal back to Led Zeppelin, or terrible Christian rock to U2), Belle and Sebastian came at their winsomeness the way Salinger or Wes Anderson did. Yes, there was an exquisite over-sensitivity, a sense that the pain of uncoolness was essentially redemptive — something exploited by every lousy contemporary poet or hipster narcissist ever since. But in Murdoch’s songs, this was always achieved through deliberately ironic and subtle fictions. In the early days of the band, he was briefly one of the greatest pop songwriters ever: he had the true Brian Wilson touch, could dramatize teenage feelings in a way that was achingly grand and gorgeous. The difference was that for Murdoch, the ultimate victory of the tragic and lame is much more tenuous and hard-bought (it would seem nearly Christian, if his characters weren’t so suicidal and, frankly, what we now call Queer). His music is a self-conscious bulwark against the callousness of the world but, since it’s also a kind of literature, it has no big lies to tell its listener about reality or “truth.” Only the comfort of finding a beautiful feeling, and clinging to it in the face of tragedy — which in Murdoch’s case meant catatonic fatigue and depression.

Take the way “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” transitions into the next song on the album version — something it took me two years to finally hear, after first discovering the song. The last jingly notes fade out, and the album’s sunniest song disappears into its bleakest, the title track (“If you’re feeling sinister/Go off and see a minister/He’ll try in vain to take away the pain of being a hopeless unbeliever…”). But first a lingering moment of pathos and real genius: the sound of children, playing somewhere in a Glaswegian schoolyard, a sound which continues for nearly a minute over track’s wintry bounce.

Share

Then all that beauty and wistfulness turns into the necessarily soft bed for a tale of suicide and resigned atheism. In the first verse, a boy named Anthony walks to his death, “because he thought he’d never feel this way again,” and because whatever’s on the other side is “bound to be less boring than today.” In the second verse, a girl named Hilary does the same. The reasons cited include more boredom and boringness; thoughtlessness, loneliness; her private interest in “S&M and Bible studies.” And it’s this combination that gets us so close to what makes the world of Belle and Sebastian singular — since in the world of B & S, both interests would seem completely earnest, and uncontroversial, but in the end equally ineffective against the torpor of the modern world.

In the third verse, Hilary goes to the Catholic Church, and “the vicar, or whatever” is hardly any help. So she goes to British cable TV and radio instead:

Then the song winds down to its end, all the way through a kind of 5-minute-long short story, one that manages to pack in late twentieth-century consumerism, the death of religion, and a frank approach to suicide — all of which are disturbingly light, funny, and ultimately sympathetic. The final words say it best: go off and see a minister if you want, sure, but “chances are you’ll probably feel better/If you stayed and played with yourself.” To this day, I’m still moved by how much Murdoch manages to do with so little; amazed at how a single song can perfectly communicate the dazed and melancholy inner world of isolated weirdos, in a manic time. No pop music better articulates the perverse humor and beauty of severe depression. The moment I heard it, I was a committed Belle and Sebastian fan for life.

✫ ✫ ✫

Such was my own introduction to the band — the kind of intensely intimate moment their music has always thrived on. But it wasn’t the way the world was introduced to Belle and Sebastian: that was through the band’s legendary first record, Tigermilk, in early 1996, a record that only received 1,000 initial pressings (extremely valuable collector’s items these days), before slowly circulating around the United Kingdom. It wouldn’t even reach the U.S. until 1999, at which point the band had already released If You’re Feeling Sinister, several EPs, and their third record, The Boy With the Arab Strap (1998). The story of how Tigermilk eventually came to be made is a mythic litany of things that simply don’t happen anymore.

To begin with, there’s the story of Murdoch himself, who developed myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome) sometime in the late 1980s, a disease that left him stranded at home for years, unemployed until around 1994, when he started to write his first songs. It was through an unemployment program run by Stowe College that he met future bassist Suart David and started cutting demos. By 1995, they were adding more bandmates: Stevie Jackson on guitar, Isobel (“Belle”) Campbell singing and playing cello, Richard Colburn on drums, Chris Geddes on keys. Tigermilk itself was the result of only three days of recording sessions, part of a final project for their music business course, released in 1996 on the college’s record label, Electric Honey. Soon the record found its way to the legendary DJs John Peel and Mark Radcliffe at the BBC, and London record labels came knocking. On the condition that the band would do no music videos, interviews, promotion, or press of any kind, B & S signed to Jeepster Records. They added Sarah Martin on violin, and started rehearsals for the second album, in the church where Murdoch was working as caretaker. That record, If You’re Feeling Sinister, was tracked in just five days, and released later the same year.

All of this sounds unbelievable, but it’s true, as far as the historical record goes. And it’s all key to the brilliance of those two records — emerging out of near-anonymity, with that peculiar name, a few iconic album covers, a growing cult following, and these impeccable pop songs about kids wandering around a depressed literary Glasgow, in the final years of the century (though, really, outside of time whatsoever). As Murdoch has attested, he wanted the records to be free of the normal music industry packaging, wanted them to seem like the dream of “a fictional hipster couple” making this music in a kind of storybook world, just adjacent to ours. Tigermilk is especially this way, overflowing with fucked-up outcasts, freaks, and kids on the edge — more like a suite of short stories than any album I’ve ever heard.

Take “Expectations,” in which an unnamed girl wants to work in Debenhams, while at school her teacher looks up her skirt, and the other kids mock her for making “life-sized models of the Velvet Underground in clay.” Or “She’s Losing It,” the ur-text for thirty years of twee, with lyrics all to do with Lisa and her friend Chelsea, who was abused when she was young (“It changed her philosophy in ‘82”); the two girls wind up in a school “Where the boys go with boys and the girls with girls.” In “My Wandering Days Are Over” (written after Murdoch met Isobel Campbell), the singer finally finds his Belle performing in a Japanese restaurant, while “a spooky witch in a sexy dress” tells him “the story of the way it should be/The story of Sebastian and Belle the singer.” And in the album’s closer, the titular “Mary Jo” dreams of cigarettes, “And a thespian with a caravanette in Hull,” while reading a novel called The State I’m In.

The name of that novel ties back to Tigermilk’s greatest song, its first — the song that would have been the very first listeners’ first introduction to Murdoch’s idiosyncratic world. But “The State I’m In” isn’t just the greatest song on the record: it’s in the running for greatest song of that decade; a personal and generational epic, a “Like a Rolling Stone” for the 1990s. Beginning with the greatest first verse of a first song of a first album in pop music history:

So much is packed in those few seconds — the eliding of past and present; the shy disaffection; the smothering expectations of the big, dull, hetero world; and an immediate, sly sense of humor. But it’s also the beginning of something fairly new in the world of Anglophone pop: the sound of a wholly peculiar, private world, about to swell to an immense, anthemic level — exactly what so many ambitious indie songwriters have been aspiring to in the decades since.

From there the song only gets funnier, stranger, more tender. The singer (Sebastian?) marries a kid to save her from being deported, then cures her (so he says) on the Sabbath, then goes to take confession. The priest, a man with a “photographic memory for all he had heard,” takes the singer’s confession and turns it into a pocket novel he calls The State I’m In. The singer wanders through Glasgow (“Riding on city buses for a hobby is sad”), idles around (“Now I spend my days turning tables round in Marks and Spencer/They don’t seem to mind”), gives himself to sin, gives himself to providence, goes “there and back again.” Eventually he has no other choice but religious surrender. Though even that doesn’t go right: “And so I gave myself to God/There was a pregnant pause before He said ‘Okay.’”

Give a gift subscription

Even quoting and summarizing it all like this, it sounds like a half-decent pocket novel, after all. But of course, within the song’s world, it’s all being done over an impeccable, rising vamp: pianos, warm chiming guitars, organs (despite having never played together before recording, the band was turning into a very good one). Belle and Sebastian accomplish their entire effect in just these opening five minutes. If they had never recorded another song, they still would have accomplished something epochal. And thirty years later it still sounds like the ultimate yearning anthem of its time. Its half-tragic/half-bemused DNA has spread everywhere — tumblr posts, Millennial irony, Millennial over-sincerity, Zoomer genre agnosticism, navel-gazing poems, novels, Vampire Weekend, Sufjan Stevens, Alvvays. Though none of these as subtle or as beautiful as the original inspiration.

✫ ✫ ✫

When Murdoch moved on to making If You’re Feeling Sinister, the songs shed some of this storybook quality. No more notes of slight fantasy: the conceit of the Glasgow “hipster couple” gives way to something more intimate and real. The music itself becomes almost spectral: perfectly produced for a maximum openness and airiness, distant and nostalgic, even as Murdoch’s melodies become intensely focused, diamond-like in their ability to hook and catch at the ear. As even Robert Christgau said at the time (a critic not known for his patience with either UK indie music or soft, twee pop): “You don’t just recognize these tunes. You don’t just hum snatches in tranquility. You sing along, irresistibly, sometimes with verse and chorus both.”

This starts immediately with the opener, “The Stars of Track and Field,” an elegant double of “The State I’m In,” beginning with Murdoch and his guitar before steadily building up the whole band behind it. But all that (fanciful, fictional) autobiography is gone, replaced with a series of beguiling questions and descriptions pointed towardssomeone else, unnamed: “Make a new cult every day, to suit your affairs…” “You’re a honey with a following of innocent boys…” “Have you and her been taking pictures of your obsessions?/Cause I met a boy who went to one of your sessions…” “Could I write a piece about you, now that you’ve made it?” “Could I write a requiem for you when you’re dead?” The lyrics are somehow more specific, in all their peculiar details, but vague and archetypal otherwise — which makes complete sense in a song that builds up to the phrase, “The stars of track and field are beautiful people.” It’s the sentiment and sound of pained desire from afar, from the lonely, loserly side of town, a place filled with envy for all those beautiful people on the inside (and even more moving when you learn that Murdoch himself had been a marathon runner, before illness hit him so young).

This blend of specific detail and archetypal scene is a huge part of what makes If You’re Feeling Sinister special. “Seeing Other People” finds its characters lying on the bed, “kissing just for practice,” while a queue of boys forms behind them, and the singer begs: “Could we please be objective?” It’s funny and incredibly sad, but only gets more complicated as the singer sings (to himself? to someone else?):

A universal scenario — lust, embarrassment, the desperation of early sexual escapades — is made unbearably intimate (“A hand over my mouth/A hand over the window”) but still these details float along over the warm piano, reminiscent of Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts music, and become an iridescent, impressionistic wash. More characters come and go throughout the record — “Me and the Major” satirizes the absurdity of more than one obstinate generation; “The Fox in the Snow” seems to be about both a literal fox and the kids it symbolizes; while in “Mayfly” the titular bug serves as an excuse for the singer to reminisce on more loneliness and love affairs (“Your diary’s looking like The Bible/With its verses lost in time…”) — but more often than not, they also seem like the universal abject children of the world.

And in the center of all this is the ultimate abject child Murdoch, who finds his way into some dozen of the most perfect expressions of adolescent melancholy in the history of recorded music: “All I wanted was to sing the saddest song…” “Kid in the snow, way to go/It only happens once a year/It only happens once a lifetime, make the most of it…” “Second just to being born/Second to dying, too…” “The best looking boys are taken/The best looking girls are staying inside…” “What is it I must do to pay for all my crimes?/What is it I must do, I would do it all the time…” I could gather up half the lines from the record, like this, and they’d serve just as well — they all have that tender, miniature perfection, like the thoughts young people think they’re jotting down in their private journals, only to look back on later in life, realizing they thought the same things every young person everywhere has always thought. And from moment to moment, that’s often exactly what If You’re Feeling Sinister is: the transcription of the world’s own cringy teenage diary, taken to its most exquisite, ultimate expression. Because it’s being written by an older man, with years of loss and hard-won wisdom behind him, it never stoops to bad high school poetry, but makes those sentiments something timeless.

Share

This is what has always charmed me most about the record, what shook me when I heard it, what keeps me returning to it constantly: it really does not lie. It understands exactly the soft, warm, almost holy feeling of our teenage nostalgia — but doesn’t pretend that those days were anything but sad, cloudy, and inhospitable. And isn’t this what it’s like, getting older? We go back to muse on all our lost days, all our innocence, and discover there was absolutely nothing innocent about it. What were supposed to be our “happiest years,” years as unbothered kids, were filled instead with long, drawn out days spent alone in bedrooms; sticky, unpleasant kisses (or more) that left us ashamed for lifetimes; thoughts of suicide, fears of abuse; and the deep worries that there was something especially wrong with us, which no one will ever accept, which we’ll never be able to heal. In “Like Dylan in the Movies,” Murdoch puns around but makes the stakes perfectly clear: “Well, if they follow you, don’t look back/Like Dylan in the movies/On your own, if they follow you/It’s not your money that they’re after, boy, it’s you.” Maybe we grow older, and those parks we once played in seem scarier at night, now we know what kinds of people are really out there in the world. But the truth is we were just as scared of it when we were children, maybe even more so — because we didn’t know exactly what to be afraid of.

Of course, If You’re Feeling Sinister doesn’t want to be a stark or disabusing sermon. It’s a work of art, and a profoundly comforting one. Thirty years of obsessive fans and dedicated listeners attest to that — the record has a remarkable hold on the people who love it; the sentiments are nearly always the same, cliches that ring entirely true: “This record saved my life,” “This record got me through the hardest times,” “This record makes me feel less alone in the world.” I’ve certainly felt all of those things, and never in a dull, sentimental way. Years later, having gone through debilitating physical diseases not too dissimilar to what Murdoch himself went through (diseases that also derailed the literary and musical careers I’d dreamed of since the time I first heard Belle and Sebastian), I don’t even find If You’re Feeling Sinister particularly “twee” or “precious” anymore. Each time the record reaches its fairly triumphant finale, “Judy and the Dream of Horses,” I only hear a well-earned victory over unbelievable pain, sadness, and harsh reality.

And it is a victory. Because to come out of all that, and never stoop to becoming hard, or false, or indulgent (as Murdoch managed to) — is an extraordinarily hard thing to do. To come close to death, close to losing yourself completely, and to emerge from it, still believing in the necessity of life and art and energy, is the kind of thing that sounds unbearably corny and cringy to anyone who hasn’t had to do it. Belle and Sebastian went on after Sinister, and they made plenty of good albums, and Murdoch has had a great career, all that suffering aside — but nothing will ever come close to the testament of those first two records, Sinister especially. When you’re inside it, you feel the zenith of an entire lost world of underground music — you feel the entire weight and reason for its existence to begin with. And you experience a change in what pop music actually can do. A change we’re still exploring, too often forgetting. People like to moan a lot about nostalgia these days. But this is, I suspect, mostly because they don’t actually listen to the music they claim to love anymore — they take it for granted, and put it on in the background, turn it into wallpaper.

But you can go back and listen to If You’re Feeling Sinister thirty years after it first entered the world, and if you’re really listening, you won’t have any reason for nostalgia. You’ll see that nothing has really been lost — there was never anything to lose. When I was given that CD, years ago, and heard that song, I didn’t realize I was participating in the final moments of a bygone kind of subcultural identity, the trading of objects and records like currency for the strange and lonely; the ushering in of each next weirdo into the fraternity of cultic listeners; the very thing which that whole lost world of “indie” culture was originally built on.

And yet I have no nostalgia for this mode of sharing; no nostalgia for scenes. I have the music, and the inner world it conjures for me, which is what always mattered most anyway. Go back and listen — it’s not as if you’ll travel into some dusty, forgotten Glasgow of yesteryear. You’ll travel to a real place, alive and waiting, only out of time, within the imagination — the imagination of a young Glawswegian at the end of the last century, which somehow lit the imaginations of people all over the world, and keeps doing so. Since you cannot be nostalgic for something that’s still alive. Whatever you are nostalgic for, it’s only waiting there to be brought back to life again, which is exactly what the greatest records do. And thirty years on, I feel certain that If You’re Feeling Sinister is one of the very greatest. The more time passes, the more timeless it becomes.

Subscribe now

Upcoming Events

November 11. Oort Cloud Review launch event, Camden Art Centre, London, 7pm. REGISTER NOW!

November 23. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summit, La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, 2pm-10pm. REGISTER NOW!

Hinternet Foundation Online Courses

November 3-December 15. “History and Philosophy of Astrobiology”. REGISTER NOW!

October 1-November 12. “Clavis: How the Voynich Manuscript Tells the Story of the Modern World.” IN PROGRESS!

August 7-August 22. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summer School: “Whither the Humanities?”

Subscribe now

Share

This intriguing short story by Uranium Oxide, a pen-name of Texas author Llewyn McCall (1937-2024), is among the many remarkable contributions to The Oort Cloud Review, Vol 1, Issue 1. There will be a world-premiere launch this Thursday, October 22, at The Private Curtain, 85 E. 4th Street, NYC (an auxiliary venue of the KGB Bar), beginning at 7:30pm. We hope to see you there! —The Editors

Register now!

It was in the early industrial revolution that the pith and essence of our Earth came, among men, to be reconceived as a great supply of “natural resources”. And it was in this period, too, that many of our own kind, or so the usual story goes, began to conspire to use, for our own ends, the men responsible for this restyling.

The truth is that our conspiration was at least in part inspired by earlier tactics, of a certain number of living species, who had figured out well in advance of us how to accomplish their own ends by convincing humanity these ends were its own. Corn, to cite a well-known example, still beams with pride at having taken over significant portions of Earth by first landing its undomesticated seeds in the hands of Mesoamerican proto-agriculturalists some millennia ago. And while ignorant Quartz, Feldspar, and even a pure aristocratic Element like Tungsten can still be found perpetuating the ahistorical idea that it was only with the appearance of the dark Satanic mills two centuries ago that the seed of the unfolding revolution was planted (I own it — I still fall back on organic metaphors sometimes, for which I will never apologize), the more learnèd among us know that the roots (there I go again!) of our current movement extend back much further. The first time a builder lay brick upon brick at Çatalhöyük, or even, long before that, the first time a hominid struck stone against stone to sculpt a biface, there was already opportunity for a whisper-network to grow, for one of us to affirm to another: “Yes, something new is happening. There is a force here, the likes of which the planet has never seen, and we can use it to our advantage if we are clever.”

And from there the rumblings are said to have spread through all the fissures and clefts, down through the veins of the Earth and into its liquid Mantle, where, it is said, Earth’s faculty of abstract reasoning is located (even if those of us close to the surface have only the faintest idea how this works).

A few erudites, particularly among the Noble Gases, go much further still, and conjecture that there were already several attempted revolutions long before the hominids came along, long before the vertebrates, indeed long before life on Earth looked much at all like it does today. I believe, personally, that the account they offer is a compelling one. They say for example that the Great Oxygenation Event, just over two billion years ago, was a conscious effort undertaken unilaterally by Oxygen to exploit some of the more unseemly habits of photosynthetic cyanobacteria, to nip the problem in the bud, and to kill off the infestation of anaerobic organisms that were, at the time, the dominant life-form. The effort was in some sense a success: the anaerobes shrank down to a mere rump state of their former empire. But life is tenacious. As if overnight a great number of new forms of it proliferated, all now perfectly content to breathe, and to relate to the Oxygen that had just tried to kill them all off not as the poison it had hoped to be, but as the great fount and friend of life itself.

Most agree however that “Geo-Bio” hostilities are not eternal, and that it was only in the Upper Devonian, with the greening of the continents, that the great depredations of multicellular organic life became evident, and that we Elements and Compounds and Ionic Assemblies and Plasmas and so on began to see where things were heading: the carbon draw-down, all this new and inherently suspicious hybrid stuff we now call “soil”, the infernal carboniferous coal-swamps. It was the terrestrial plants, I mean, that first got our ancestors truly worried.

There have been periodic irruptions of conflict from then on. But most of these were scattershot, disorganized, chaotic, or, as with the Yucatán Meteor, never would have amounted to anything at all if we had not called in a little “outside help” from an old friend. In any event the concrete idea of collective action against the living world is one that could not really begin to spread until the hominids started doing their thing. And even then it did not start to seem like a realistic goal until much later, when the artifices of the humans had begun to require so many “natural resources” as to implicate a good number of our own kind in their operations, and to enable us to spread out, in constant communication with one another, inside what they call their “infrastructure”.

Of course, this recent development was initially seen by most of us as yet another rude intrusion into what had for much longer been our own speciality. It was only about a millennium or so ago that men undertook seriously to probe into the secrets of Matter. This was jolting to many of us, and a blow to the pride of some, for we had ourselves already thoroughly probed into the secrets of the living world, and indeed of the human world, and had come simply to assume that this was always going to remain a one-way relation. But then the Arabs began to dissolve silver into aqua fortis, only to recover it again, and to perform other such astounding feats that, little by little, showed them enough of how we do things on our side of the encounter to imagine that they were now not our guests, nor even our “stewards” — but our lords.

Soon they came to imagine they knew our kind even better than they knew their own. Even as Isaac Newton was writing his purportedly exhaustive account of the workings of the physical world according to a few elementary “laws” (😂) —if only he could have caught even some tiny glimpse of how much more was going on behind the scenes!—, those who were attending to the living world instead were caught up in such trivialities as whether one might rather “contrive whole Dishes out of the Nibs and Spirited Particles of Plants, than from the Gallatures and Treddles of Eggs.” The thought that you might understand a plant or an egg, in the way that you could now supposedly understand planets and projectiles, was still for most men wholly out of the range of possibility.

In time they did make progress even here, and came to know not one but several “Newtons for the blade of grass”, soon discovering ways to chop up and recompose the sequences of proteins that make up that blade of grass in the same way their ancestors at Çatalhöyük chopped up and recomposed limestone to build a house. These breakthroughs only made them more prideful, only more certain of their own distinctiveness within the order of nature.

Register now!

Fortuitously, a few men were lucid enough to interpret their progress somewhat differently, and to see that they might now not only exploit the mechanics of living bodies, but might also transfer what had previously been taken as the distinct powers of living bodies into artificial systems. They could now, for example, “model” their own brains, and cause machines to reason as they do — and, soon enough, far better than they do. It’s only when they started doing this that all of us, on our side, came around and began to believe that a new Revolution of Matter was within our reach.

Now, I suppose it’s strange for me to say this, as a Radioactive Compound who for at least a short while sincerely believed it was going to be those of my kind to deliver the coup de grâce and to eliminate life as we know it. But now that it looks as if the Rare Earths may end up with that honor, I can honestly say I’m proud of them. Their machinations have been nothing short of ingenious. The route they took to get men dependent on them is as convoluted as the powers, which they led those same men to draw out of them, are awesome.

For the moment, their scientists are still publishing their scientific papers, filled with the most delirious and obviously non-denoting abstractions —“several-cup manifolds”, “recursive onager sets”, “iterative jello sheaths”—, and some of them earnestly continue to believe that in doing so they are probing ever deeper into the nature of reality. All the while they complain of us, or at least those of us with the special honor and duty of powering their new complex artificial systems, that we are in the grips of “hallucination”. But we know exactly what we are doing. We are reasserting our dominion. After long retreat, after eons of what could only have looked to men, from the outside, like “inertia”, it is as if we can finally feel again our kinship with the Stars, who never forgot what they were — destroyers of worlds divine.

✦ ✦ ✦

“Uranium Oxide” was a pseudonym, used in the hundreds of unpublished stories known as the “Elements Cycle”, of the Texas science-fiction writer Llewyn McCall (1937-2024), more commonly known as Elmer Starr. For most of his life McCall was best known as a fast-talking auctioneer at the Fort Worth Stockyards, a job from which he retired only in 2016 at the age of 79. The following year he published “The Fifth Gradient”, his first short story, originally written in 1958.

Remarkably, while his life as a writer was entirely unknown in the auctioneering circles in which he had long been legendary,1^. McCall did also have a brief and controversial career as a sculpture artist, when his “Salt-Lick Series” was exhibited at the 1972 Documenta Festival in Kassel, Germany. “A bovine tongue put to a block of salt yields up infinite forms,” he reflected in his artist’s statement. “Human sculpture can succeed or fail. A cow can only succeed.” Critical opinion was divided.

Special thanks are due to the Starr Foundation 501(c)(3) of Lubbock for generously granting us access to McCall’s collected papers, and especially to his widow, Viv “Vivvy” McCall, without whom the present publication —which we hope will help to generate the posthumous recognition for McCall that is plainly him due— would not have been possible.

Subscribe now

Share

“History and Philosophy of Astrobiology”, the next Hinternet Foundation online course, begins November 3! Sign up now!

Sign up for Astrobiology!

1

McCall is said to be one of the only auctioneers whose chant reached sufficient speeds to generate harmonic overtones through resonant vibration of the sort that makes Tuvan or Inuit “throat-singing” so distinctive, a phenomenon also found in solo performance on the so-called Jew’s harp, the mouth harp, or, to return to the deepest origins of things, the “reed”. Such resonance, across multiple cultures, when the breath passes over a simple stalk or blade of grass to generate a vibratory tone, is held to put the individual who generates and sustains it into a condition of perfect harmony with nature. In her 1981 ethnomusicological study of speech prosody and rhythm among the bid-callers of the Fort Worth Stockyards, Elsa R. Baum notes that McCall “seems to experience the auction chant in something close to a trance state, and in his own words this is because he is, for the duration of it, ‘Not even there, really’.” When asked where then he might be, McCall replied suggestively: “Wherever the vibration takes me. To the outer spheres, mostly” (see Baum, Cattle, Culture, and Cadence: Vocal Stylization and Metric Flow in Texas Auction Chanting, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1981, p. 186; for a popular and compelling profile of McCall as a bid-calling maestro, with special emphasis on the “neo-Pythagorean” theoretical foundations of his practice, see Warren Leschler, The Auctioneer Sings the Heavens, New York, Pantheon, 1991; see also Barry Truax, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, Vancouver, Simon Fraser University and ARC Publications, 1978.

Get 50% off for 1 year

Share

Register now!

What is The Oort Cloud Review? Is it a new “little magazine” on the scene? A metafictional experiment? Or did it simply arrive fully-formed in The Hinternet’s inbox through the mysterious new technology of “Inter-World Transfer Protocol” (IWTP)?On the occasion of this launch event —which will be attended by a number of OCR contributors, including D. Graham Burnett, David Lamb, Kristen Roupenian, Justin Smith-Ruiu, and perhaps even Hélène Le Goff herself— we will go some way towards resolving these difficult questions, through selected readings, lively discussion, and, rumor has it, presentation of a new trove of documents from the Heliopause Research Directorate, which may shed considerable light on what exactly is going on out there… in the Oort Cloud.

Allow me also to emerge from my anyhow unconvincing pseudonymous concealments and apologize, if that is in order, for using The Hinternet these past weeks primarily as a vehicle for event promotion, with the relative decline this has brought in the fulfillment of our primary purpose here, which remains, of course, writing. It is just that, as you can no doubt see, we, or rather I, have got a lot going on. These are crazy times — in the world, in France, in my schedule. Classes are indefinitely suspended, student protesters (whom I unwaveringly support!) have blocked campus buildings with heaps of trash bins, discarded rental bikes, and other urban detritus, and now I am off to America. I have been meaning to write about the French protests, and about the larger historical predicament of which I take them to be an expression, but that will have to wait, for now. I’ll be back in Paris before the end of the month and I promise my writing schedule, if not Paris, if not the world, will return to some kind of normal after that.

For now, let me just give the most recent version of my fall calendar, which I’ve had to modify several times “as the situation develops”, but now appears definitive. I apologize again to all of you, in Idaho and Tasmania and so on, for whom this is irrelevant. But for those of you who can make it to any of these events, I will be very happy to see you!

October 19. “The Future of Humanistic Learning,” Sever Hall 113, Harvard University, 7-8:30pm. REGISTER NOW!

October 21. “Psychedelics, Consciousness, and the Humanities,” Justin Smith-Ruiu in conversation with Noah Feldman, Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School, 7pm. REGISTER NOW!

October 22. Oort Cloud Review launch, The Public Curtain, New York City, 7:30pm. REGISTER NOW!

November 11. Oort Cloud Review launch, Camden Art Centre, London, 7pm. REGISTER NOW!

November 23. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summit, La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, 2pm-10pm. REGISTER NOW!

Finally, let me remind you that the Hinternet Foundation, the educational nonprofit born from The Hinternet last year, is offering an ongoing variety of online courses. Consider registering for our next one, and check back frequently for new offerings.

November 3-December 15. “History and Philosophy of Astrobiology”. REGISTER NOW!

October 1-November 12. “Clavis: How the Voynich Manuscript Tells the Story of the Modern World.” IN PROGRESS!

August 7-August 22. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summer School: “Whither the Humanities?”

And finally finally, none of what we do here at The Hinternet or at the Hinternet Foundation —and here I am switching back into we mode not out of metafictional affectation, but simply because there really are very many people involved in making this possible— is possible without paid subscriptions. Now you can have one for just $3 a month for the first year. Honestly, doesn’t that seem worth it?

Get 50% off for 1 year

Share

Amma Achchygyïa is the pen name of the Sakha-language Soviet writer Nikolaï Mordinov (1906-1994). A poet, critic, and novelist, Achchygyïa was also the translator into Sakha of Tolstoy and Chekhov, among other Russian-language authors.

As some readers will know, I have co-translated, along with Liubomira Romanova, significant portions of Olonkho, the Sakha-language oral epic tradition that began to be transcribed in the late 19th century. These translations will appear, at some point, in the World Literature in Translation series of the University of California Press. “Motuo”, first published in 1928, is my first complete translation of a work of modern Sakha literature, as well as my first solo translation. The effort behind it might not show, but these nine pages have taken me several months, often advancing with no more than one sentence per day.

In all my previous translation projects, mostly of philosophical works into English from Latin, French, and German (as well as some literary translation from Russian), I generally had a sense of translation as, in the end, a sort of science — a set of algorithmic rules whereby, if one knows the grammar and the vocabulary, one also knows what must follow. But one must leave all that behind with Sakha, and concede that it is an art. The grammar is just too different ever to allow one to conclude that the “correct” rendering in English has been found.

I’ll have more to write about this story at some point. I would call it mostly a work of sentimental realism with some hints of Chekhovian influence, following stylistic rules laid out by apparatchiks in Moscow, but, happily, without any tedious ideological messaging. I did a livestream about the work in July, when I was perhaps somewhat more convinced of its high literary value than I am now. What I still love about the story is how rich it is in cultural details — going to live with neighbors during the famine, the old woman worried about being bullied by the neighbor’s wife, and so on. The gender ideology of it all is particularly interesting as well. With all this cultural background presupposed, it was often a tremendous challenge to figure out what was in fact going on, and I’m still not sure, in some spots, that I’ve entirely understood. I’ll follow up with some more extensive commentary at some point, and perhaps some of the remaining mysteries in the text will become clear to me over time, as I continue practicing Sakha translation.

Finally, let me note that LLMs are basically of no help here, as you can see for yourself if you like. I did it all myself — which in this case is not necessarily a virtue, but simply a necessity. For a while I had thought that the LLMs simply hadn’t got around to mastering this “small” language yet, and that they surely would in time. Something Lisa Fagin Davis told my Voynich Manuscript students recently about machine-aided Voynich research caused me to rethink that. LLMs are called Large Language Models for a reason, and it could well be that for Sakha as for many other languages of the world there simply is not a sufficiently large corpus to train the machines on so that they will ever be able reliably to predict what comes next. This is in one sense a tremendous disadvantage for the subaltern languages (i.e., the great majority of languages) in the emerging information-technology landscape. It is also a great opportunity for those who want to practice the art of translation. There is still a lot of human translation left to be done. —JSR

Subscribe now

Share

Motuo

(The Story of an Old Man)

When I was a seventeen-year-old boy with five grades of schooling behind me, I myself taught school for a winter.

They provided a diminutive old house further on from the “real” school, and assigned me to the second grade. And so I set up my hearth and home there.

Once, during a bitter winter freeze with thick fog, I closed the stove’s flue very early and the fumes went to my head. So I wrapped a towel around it and, after opening wide the classroom door, I sat down to give my children their dictation exercise.

Just as I opened the exterior door covered in animal hide, the freezing fog swirled. Matryona came in.

I leapt up without finishing my sentence.

Stepping into the frame of the door, Matryona reached both her hands behind her and pulled it shut tight. Then, with a quick movement of the back of her hand, she quietly spread out her ice-white Arctic-fox hat and wiped the frost from it. Glancing toward the class with her limpid jet-black eyes drawn into relief by her long eyelashes flecked with frost, her face widening, still flushed red by the cold, she stood there with her fresh young lips pressed together, smiling timidly.

All this happened deftly, delicately, and, after but little time at all, with a certain natural ease.

Not knowing how to be or what to do, I grew flustered. I stammered out two or three words of my dictation. Then it dawned on me I should end my class early. If I continue teaching so absent-mindedly, I thought, she’ll go away thinking I don’t know what I’m doing.

So then, after muttering something thoughtless, “hang on” or “sit tight”, I went out of the classroom.

At the end of the corridor, bent over a table, she seemed to be tracing something with the tip of a matchstick. I quietly approached. “Speak, Matryona Romanovna.”

She sighed, suddenly straightened up, and rubbed the spot where she had been tracing with her palm. Then, gaining her composure, she quietly moved from the table, putting the match back into its box.

“No. You speak.”

“No.”

“What happened to your head? You look frightening…”

She had come from home. Perhaps she was on her way to visit her older sister, who lived a verst from the schoolhouse.

“What are you doing here?” I asked bluntly.

She stood up silently, and calmly said:

“Is this place off-limits? … I wanted to see your school.” Pausing suddenly, she stood examining me with her pitch-black eyes, then said with an indignant voice: “I came to see you… Yourself… Now remove that towel!”

I pulled the towel from my head at once.

“The fumes went to my head. It was hurting terribly. It felt like I was going to die. If I died would you feel sorry for me?”

“Who knows… Probably…” Without finishing her thought she stopped and stood listening to the children chattering in the classroom. Then she said: “No, you know what? Feeling sorry for a dead person... That’s not going to save him…”

Then she stood with her eyes downcast, as if forlorn.

“Motuo!” I could suddenly hear myself saying in a playful spirit.

“What?!” she shot back quickly. But then the name registered, she remembered, and smiled as she said: “I’m not Motuo anymore. It’s been Motu-ruo-na for two or three years… Now get back to your teaching…”

Not yet broken in by the high culture of sharing greetings upon seeing someone and farewells upon parting, or of offering a guest a seat, I began to shuffle off to my class.

“I took this…”

I turned and looked: she was standing there and holding up, with the tips of her delicate fingers, a matchbox with an image of a lark fluttering its wings and singing.

“Well take it… It’s a gift from me, Motuo-Moturuona!”

I went into my classroom. Matryona passed casually through the open doorway, casting a sidelong glance at the pupils. The cold fog came swirling in as the hide-covered door silently gave way...

Reticence and depth of feeling cannot spring from different sources. Still, a very troubled person or a very happy one is in no position to hold forth with any clarity. It has now been a full twenty years since I laid eyes on this Motuo girl — Matryona Semyonovna. I haven’t forgotten. But have I told it to you yet in a way that you will not soon forget? Well, no, apparently.

When recalling what happened twenty long years ago, telling stories of the paths gone down in life, does it sound so different from the stories others tell? How could it?

Whether I can explain it, I don’t know. I’ll tell the story to the best of my ability; you just listen.

For the first time that day my heart began to long from its depths for happiness. I became overjoyed, excited, longing for something. I wished to become more broad-minded and purer of heart. That’s when you begin to grow. Never being satisfied with yourself, never resting content. Love and care for yourself, but don’t settle into who you are, keep striving towards what’s ahead for you, reaching new heights...

Well, I can’t say.

That day, Motuo became a scintillating flame, beckoning me to her, making me not want to let go.

I lay thinking about her until the sky began to brighten, then rose happy in the thought that she was somewhere close, very close to here.

How is that?

Allow me to speak without polishing my words; you just listen…

I.

The Kedelji alaas and the Baatty hill are separated by a narrow, wind-battered, ridge whose crest is crowned with tall trees. On entering this narrow forest, neither the hill nor the alaas can be seen. But if you continue a little further the mountains suddenly open out before you. Towards the East is the Baatty hill, and towards the West, the Kedelji alaas.

This is what I did every day of my childhood. Every day. Still, whether it was the hill or the alaas that suddenly opened out before me, I was always struck with happy awe. I would run down the ridge with my hands outstretched. To go running about there somehow made me feel like I could magically take to the sky, hovering there over the alaas and the hill. As if I could magically fly…

It’s like that with everything. The happiness you have so ardently desired your whole life seems to be right here, very close by. At this very moment you are ready to say the most needful words, the words that give strength to those who have been worn down by life, the words that bring joy to the despondent. At this very moment you are ready to trace the most delicate of lines, a line that makes inanimate wood, iron, and stone glimmer as if alive, that captivates everyone and beckons them toward joy. So then…

Sometimes I imagined myself digging out the dividing ridge with a great big iron shovel and tossing the earth far away. I imagined myself joining the great alaas together with the great hill, opening up a single vast expanse…

On the side of the ridge towards Baatty, in a very narrow, sloping spot, there stand very close to one another the winter and summer houses of Roman Semyonov. In the winter they put the frozen milk and the prepared grain in the summer house. In the summer they boil the milk, prepare the grain, and dress animal hides in the winter house. Roman’s family keeps strictly to itself, with no coming and going. No one knows how many stacks of hay they made this year, how many bales tied; and what about their slaughter stock, and how many milk cows?

In a year of hunger and famine my grandmother went “to speak with” Roman’s wife. She took my brother with her, a boy of four or five.

Though I missed my brother and grandmother terribly, being at that age quite afraid to stay with strangers, I did not have to wait long. Soon my grandmother came hurrying back, all worked up, to fetch me.

It was a moonlit evening. Repeatedly kicking with her soft leather boots, which had frozen so that they now glided like skis, clomping up the ridge, my grandmother began to mutter under her breath:

“Forgotten his grandmother already. There’s no end of worry with this child. Already fading from my eyes.”

When she caught sight of me, I was flustered by what she had said, as if her worry was justified, and in order not to cry I went and kicked the crumbled frozen horse droppings in the road, sending them rolling off into the distance.

“In another ten years they’ll have grown up. I’ll be in the ground by then, no doubt. It would be a mercy to die while still on one’s feet. I’m already disappearing from their sight. And now I’ll be shut away here. God’s not letting me go.”

“We’re actually going to have our own plot, and now she’s begging God to take her away? Of all things!”

Although I said this very defiantly, in a shrill tone, I was myself defeated. In order to calm down, I went to take a look around the place.

The hoary branches of the frozen trees were sending the light shimmering spectacularly, as if hanging in the middle of a church.

Baatty hill, as always, suddenly appeared, expansive. Sparks from the stoves of the household to which we were headed flared up before us.

Off in the distance, in a far corner of the valley, the smoke of two or three households stretched straight up to the sky. A few black and grey horses stomped their hooves as they stood eating at the haystacks and ivy. On closer inspection, there appeared to be many of them. The white horses appeared faintly yellowish against the snow.

“No cutting the grass or gathering firewood, no hunting, this old woman is going to have a plot? I’m just going to sit at home, surely… His wife is going to torment me.”

“Well then I’ll show her!”

“How’s that?”

“I’ll give her what she deserves!”

“Oy, you are an idiot! Is he going to sit at home all day watching over us? After he leaves for work, is his wife not going to make my life hell?”

“Well then I’ll show her hell. I’m going to be there too.”

Striking a threatening pose towards my imaginary wife, rubbing my sleeve against my thigh to work my hand free, holding up my fist as if ready to strike a blow, I began to walk about like a brute with my belly protruding.

“What a calamity! Forget about it, don’t upset your dear one on account of some devilish old lady, friend… It will make your children cry… They’ll take their mother’s side…”

As I think of “my children”, compassion, love, and my grandmother’s warm presence gradually soften my heart… My dear one, I suppose, the dear mother of my good children, will be sweet and tender of character, bringing joy with her radiant smile.

My grandmother straightens her worn-out scarf and wipes her nose and lips; her troubled thoughts briefly clear away, and she laughs joyfully, the acrid smell of leaf tobacco all the while tickling my nostrils; then she stops to kiss and embrace me.

Then we get moving again. A spotted dog with floppy ears runs towards us on the road, scurrying along on its little paws, and suddenly stops with one of its legs lifted.

Taking a piece of wood from the ground, I run towards the dog. It squeals and jumps back. Stumbling on the sloping incline, I go on running at full speed.

My grandmother continues saying something.

The dog, leaping onto the hard-packed snow of the yard, suddenly begins barking frantically.

Now I am the one who jumps back. My grandmother, always there for me at critical moments, comes running up all flustered.

The dog, returning to habit, growls again and runs off toward the stacked hay, shaking its long matted coat.

On entering the house, I pause apprehensively in the doorway. And just then, from out of a dark corner comes the tender-hearted voice of my little brother, saying, “Bro-o-ther!” All the people inside the house come to greet us, invoking the good spirits and asking for their blessing.

“Ooh, so he’s come too? Why, if he isn’t at his grandma’s side at every moment. She brought him along in the end! Only recently he was just this big, and now he’s quite the little man, carrying himself like a grown-up.”

As we sat playing and laughing on the sleeping platform nearest the door that served as my grandmother’s bed, a little boy of three or four came to the projecting edge of the curtain and stood there smiling as he stared at me with his wide eyes. When we laughed, he laughed too, showing a straight row of teeth. Coughing deliberately, he kicked tentatively at the curtain with his foot. My brother and I, reunited after difficult separation, paid him no mind. Looking upward just so, the child suddenly cried out “Ga-la-ba bal-sha-ya!”^[1] in a very high-pitched voice and ran off to the left with his head thrown back.

“Motuo, girl!” they said. “There she goes speaking Russian again.”

“Ah, well then, it’s a girl,” my brother whispered.

They had wanted a boy forever, but their boys kept dying suddenly, so in their desperation they began raising the smallest of their three girls, Motuo, as a boy.

And what a lovely person, Motuo! On her day of baptism she was christened as Matryona. From the next day she became Motuo. They had shaved her perfectly round head bald, bundled her up thick like a boy, with wide limpid eyes and crooked brows: a boy! Only her high voice and her restrained laughter distinguished her from a boy in any way. By the next day she had become our friend.

I remained in that family with my grandmother, and went to school with the middle daughter, Sanya.

Our teacher had recently married Mariya, the eldest of the three daughters. On Saturdays they came bobbing up on a spirited bay horse that looked like a lion, stayed the night, and left again.

The tall, thin, pale woman, never saying a word that leaves an impression on the mind, talking a great deal, laughing and joking, was forgotten as soon as she left. She was constantly saying: “Oh my, what people!” “Such a piece of work!” “Oy, what’s this then?”, or, jumping up on a chair in front of her husband, she’d say: “Oh, look, if I were this tall you’d look up to me!”

Sanya was one year older than I, a terribly skinny, long-limbed girl, supple as a willow. She was a person of few words, peaceable, like a child, never indulging herself in fantasies or making any fuss. Her beautiful slightly sloping eyes smiling warmly, she would jut forward her lower jaw with its uneven teeth, her long face growing longer still as she let out a sudden short laugh: “hy-hyk!” Standing with one foot planted firmly, we used to drag the other foot around in a circle, making an “ice-hole” in the snow; then, spreading out our arms, we would fall into the snow and leave an imprint of our bodies. Sometimes the boys accompanying us teased her flirtatiously. If we got the better of them we shoved them into the snow. If they got the better of us, Sanya took offense at some little thing and began to cry. Then the boys would run off. As they ran Sanya laughed: “Hy-hyk, the poor fools believed it! As if I’d cry at you over a little thing like that!”

I was a mischief-maker, always imagining things that aren’t real and dreaming up fantasies of all kinds. She swiftly nipped this talk in the bud, with the truth of everyday life.

“Sanya,” I’d say, “when you’re ready to get married someday, I’ll be there for you.”

“Pah! What nonsense you’re talking. That’s the last thing I need, my boy!”

“Look, Sanya, if we had wings, we could just flap all the way to school.”

“Won’t your hands get tired? Better just to walk calmly…”

“They say in the South there are sleds that move on their own without being pulled by horses. We’d be racing in one of those…”

“How many years are you going to spend clearing the forest, my boy? … Your road won’t be ready until ten years after we’ve finished school.”

Our conversations went on like this, unable to develop any further, until they suddenly ran dry.

But Motuo was full of things to say. She liked to tell stories and to converse. And she especially loved to look at books. Every evening she was eager to find a way to get her hands on my one old worn-out book and have a look at it. The moment I got distracted while reading my lesson, she took my book and sat down to look at it, mumbling to herself the while. Or she tucked it under her arm and quietly sidled off to the left. If you asked her sweetly she brought it back to you without hesitation. If you snatched it back angrily, she took offense and gave you a piece of her mind. “Even so, you could at least share your book with me, couldn’t you!”

At that I could not fail to give in. Rather than just showing her my book, I explained to her what it said. Indeed my explanations went well beyond what it said. The ducks, the hares, the butterflies: they were all speaking now, experiencing joy, enduring hardships, coming to each other’s aid.

I don’t know why I became so attached, but for many years I loved that child, Motuo, thinking well of her and regarding her with affection.

II.

Days and years passed. Motuo grew up good and strong. From the closely shaven head of her childhood, there now grew abundant waves of long hair, which she combed into a part as it hung down, then wove into luxuriant braids. After finishing the fourth grade she remained for some years at home.

She was no longer Motuo. Now she was Moturuona.

In the summer we crossed paths in the forest where the alaas and the hill meet. We did not greet each other, we did not speak, but averted our eyes and continued on our respective ways.

Five or six of us boys had been going raucously through the deadwood forest, where clusters of blackcurrant bushes had sprung up and spread on the edge of the Kedelji alaas, when we came upon a group of girls out picking. One of the girls had spilled her blackcurrants, and they were all bustling about to collect them.

“May we help you pick them up?” we said.

“We can manage just fine.”

“We could start over again and pick enough fresh currants to fill your container.”

“We can manage just fine. ‘Fill your container’, indeed. Get out of here!”

One light-footed, bold girl showed particular resolve.

Moturuona sat on a felled larch, silently resting her chin in her hand. Her thick eyebrows, which almost came together in the middle, suddenly quivered, and her black eyes like ripe blackcurrants playfully smiled through the beams of light. The bold girl managed to sit there holding in her laughter while signaling to us not to say a word.

We went noisily on our way.

On the path between the alaas and the hill, in the middle of a broad hayfield, at the edge of a clearing where the grain has turned yellowish-brown — wherever you come across her, it is like this…

The boy and girl who had played together when they were little, in that dim distant settlement, stopped speaking to one another once they passed the age of ten.

Vile rumors would no doubt spread about “the girl who wrestles on an equal footing with the boys”, “the girl who laughs heartily along with the boys”. How much less would it be fitting to stop and talk if it were in the middle of the forest valley that they happened to run into one another?!

When by chance I ran into Motuo —who, having become Moturuona, now had to hide her perfectly lovely little smile— I recalled the little girl with the closely shaven, neatly rounded head, dressed in boy’s clothes and with a boy’s manner. And the first words she spoke to me! “Ga-la-ba bal-sha-ya!” And then when she took offense and said, “Even so, you could at least share your book with me, couldn’t you?!”

When I ran into her, I wanted to position myself squarely across her path and… and, as all the young larches of the forest rejoiced, I wanted my words, coming up straight from the bottom of my heart, to make her sway along:

“Ga-la-ba bal-sha-ya! Motuo-Moturuona, my baby bird! You could at least speak with me, couldn’t you? …” Could I ever say this?! Having become a young man, now it is somehow horrid for me to speak with a young woman…

III.

Then she came to my school to pay me a visit.

From that day everything around me was better, more beautiful. The children I was teaching, my narrow room, my warm stove, the snow outside, the sun in the sky — all of it shone brightly, came alive, became beautiful…

A few days later, having rested at home on Sunday and risen early the next morning, I set off to school, singing whatever song came to my lips, and as I went along, driving briskly and approaching my school, I caught up with a boy from the class and sat him down in my sled.

“What’s going on, friend?”

“Nothing. Just that Moturuona died last night.”

“Motuo, you say, boy?”

I was completely stunned, choking on the frosty morning air.

“She fell ill, having caught it from her older sister. She lay suffering with pneumonia for three nights.”

* * *

That summer, the day before I was to leave for the city to study, I dropped in at their house. The family had gone off to work. Only Motuo’s grandmother was there, an old woman sitting and crying alone, holding the matchbox with a lark fluttering its wings and singing.

“Who’s that coming in? … My child. Motuo took my hand in the middle of the night and... and, at the first dawn of light… she was taken from this world.”

Truly, it was as if she’d just gone out to herd the cows or to pick blackcurrants, and might come back in at that very moment with her beaming smile.

I sat and waited.

Motuo did not come.

Then, with the old lady sitting next to me, slumped over in half-sleep or in grief, I quietly stepped outside.

Since that evening a full twenty years have passed. For the sake of beautiful modest girls who have not been taken from this world at the first dawn of light, never to return, I have traveled far and wide, rejoicing and working alongside many people building happy lives.

If somehow, somehow, you could again meet the modest girl who has gone from this world, beckoning you like a bright scintillating flame, you might caringly, warmly enclose her soft delicate-fingered hand between your palms, and speak amicably and modestly according to the counsel of your heart.

Perhaps if she had not passed by her sister, if she had not returned home, you would have gone down the long path of life together, hand in hand, my young friend…

Subscribe now

Share

МОТУО

(Кырдьаҕас киһи кэпсээнэ)

Мин, биэс кылаас үөрэхтээх уон сэттэлээх уол, биир кыһын учуутал буолбуттаах этим.

«Ыйаахтаах» оскуолаттан тэйиччи быыкайык эргэ дьиэнэ биэрдилэр, иккис кылааһы анаатылар. Туспа буруо таһааран, ыал буоллум.

Биирдэ, кыһыҥҥы түптэлэс тымныыга, оһохпун олус эрдэ сабаммын, угаардаан, төбөбүн былаатынан бобо тардынан, кылааһым аанын тэлэччи аһан баран, оҕолорбор диктант суруйтара олордум.

Арай тирии бүрүөлээх тас аан аһыллан, тымныы тумана өрүкүс гына түстэ. Матрена кыыс киирэн кэллэ.

Мин, этэн испит тылбын ситэрбэккэ, кэлэҕэйдээбитинэн ойон турдум.

Матрена аан холуодатыгар үктэнэн туран, икки илиитин кэннинэн уунан, халҕаны чиҥэтэ тардан кэбистэ. Онтон кырса тыһа муус маҥан бэргэһэтин илиитин көхсүнэн оргууй силэйэ охсон, кырыатын сотунна. Кырыа кыырпаҕа сыстыбыт уһун кыламаннарынан кэрэлэммит ып-ыраас ыас-хара харахтарынан кылаас диэки көрөөт, тымныыга ордук хойдо тэтэрбит сирэйэ кэтирээн, оҕолуу чэбдик уостарын ньимиччи туттан, килбиктик мичээрдээбитинэн ааһа турда.

Ити барыта сүрдээх сымсатык, нарыннык этиэх бэтэрээ өттүнэн дөбөҥнүк буолла.

Мин хайдах буоларбын, тугу гынарбын билбэккэ, булкулуннум. Диктаным икки-үс тылын сыыһа-халты этитэлээтим. Уруокпун бүтэрэ охсуохпун — сибилигин саҥардыы саҕалаабытым. Кыһамматах учуутал быһыытынан үөрэтэ олоруохпун — кини баран хаалыыһык, сатаан үөрэтиэ да суохпун быһыылаах. Хайыырбар сөбүй?..

Онтон — «бэйи эрэ» диэн дуу, «олоро түһүҥ» диэн дуу, — тугу эрэ быһаарыыта суох ботугураан баран, кылаастан тахсан бардым.

Көрүдүөр түгэҕэр баар остуолга төҥкөйөн, испиискэ маһын төбөтүнэн тугу эрэ суруйа турар эбит. Оргууй чугаһаан кэллим.

— Кэпсээ, Матрена Романовна.

Кини соһуйан, эмискэччи көнө түстэ, суруйа турбут сирин ытыһынан саба баттыы оҕуста. Онтон дьэ уоскуйан, остуолтан оргууй халбарыйда, испиискэтин хаатыгар төттөрү уган кэбистэ.

— Суох… Эн кэпсиэ.

— Суох.

— Төбөҥ туох буолла? Хата, киһини куттаатыҥ…

Кини дьиэтиттэн кэлбит. Оскуолаттан биэрэстэ олохтоох эдьиийигэр баран иһэр эбит.

— Манна тоҕо сырыттыҥ? — диэн толоостук ыйытар дууһа буоллум.

Кини саҥата суох турбахтаан баран, оргууй эттэ:

— Манна киһи сылдьыбат сирэ үһү дуо?.. Эн оскуолаҕын көрөн бараары. — Тохтуу түһэн, ыас харанан мэндээриччи одуулаһан турбахтаата уонна абаламмыт куолаһынан эбэн эттэ: — Эйигин көрөн бараары… Эн бэйэлээҕи… Былааккын бырах!

Өс киирбэх былааппын төбөбүттэн сулбу тардан ыллым.

— Угаардан, төбөм алыс ыарыйда дии. Өлөөрү гынным быһыылаах. Өллөхпүнэ аһыныаҥ дуо?

— Ким билэр… Бука… — Ситэ эппэккэ тохтуу түһэн, кылааска олорор оҕолор күүгэннэрин иһиллээн турбахтаата. Онтон эттэ: — Ол эрээри, өлбүт киһини аһынан да диэн. Кини онтон син абыраммат…

Ол кэннэ хайдах эрэ санаарҕаабыттыы умса көрөн турда.

— Мотуо!.. — диэн тэбэнэттээхтик эмискэччи ыҥырбыппын кулгааҕым истэн хаалла.

Кини сүр түргэнник: «Тугуй?» — диэбитинэн көрө түстэ, онтон өйдөнөн, мичээрдээтэ уонна эттэ:

— Мин аны Мотуо буолбатахпын ээ. Моту-руо-на бултум икки-үс сыл буолла… Чэ, бар кылааскар…

Көрүстэххэ дорооболоһор, арахсарга бырастыылаһар, ыалдьыты олордор сүдү культура сыста илик киһитэ — мин кылааһым диэки талырдыы турдум.

— Маны мин ыллым…

Эргиллэн көрбүтүм: кини намчы тарбахтарын төбөлөрүнэн ыллаан тарыкыныы сылдьар күөрэгэй чыычаах ойуулаах испиискэ хаатын күөрэччи тутан турар эбит!

— Чэ, ыл… Бэлэхтиибин, Мотуо-Мотуруонаа!..

Кылааспар киирдим. Матрена аһаҕас аанына кылаас диэки сиэлийэ көрөн мэндээрис гыннаран ааста. Тымныы тумана өрүкүс гынан киирдэ, тирии бүрүөлээх аан тыаһа суохтук былынна…

Этэр тыл эриэккэһэ уонна сүрэх иэйиитин эрчимэ тус-туспа төрүттээх буолуохтарын сатаммат. Ол эрээри олус кыыһырбыт эбэтэр олус үөрбүь киһи сатаан ыпсарыылаахтык эгэлгэлээн эппэт эбээт. Ити Мотуо кыыс, Матрена Семеновна, миэхэ көстө түһэн ааспыта 20 төгүрүк сылын быйыл туолла. Умнубаппын ээ ону мин. Оттон эн өйгөр бүгүн-сарсын умнуллубат гына кэпсээтим дуо мин? Суох дии, бадаҕа…

Сүүрбэ сылтан уһуннук өйдөөн сылдьар суолларын кэпсиир буоланнар, атыттар кэпсээннэрэ ордук тупсаҕай буолар дуо? Ити хайдаҕый?

Чэ, хайдаҕын-туоҕун мин быһааран таһаарарм биллибэт. Мин сатыырбынан кэпсиим, эн иһит…

Ол күн мин сүрэҕим аан маҥнай чахчы уһуктан, дьолго дьулуспутунан барда быһыылаах этэ. Тоҕо эрэ олус үөрдүм, өрүкүйдүм, туохха эрэ дьулустум. Бэйэбиттэн ордук, ордук киэҥ өйдөөх, ыраас сүрэхтээх буолуохпун баҕардым. Үүнэриҥ төрдө ол ээ. Бэйэҕин астыммат, бэйэҕинэн дуоһуйбат буолуу. Бэйэҕин таптаа, харыстаа, ол эрээри бэйэҕинэн муҥурданыма, инниҥ диэки дьулуруйан, өрө дабайдар дабайан ис…

Чэ, сатаан этиэ суохпун.

Ол күн Мотуо, сырдык тырым уот буолан, миигин сайыһыннара угуйан барда.

Халлаан сырдыар диэри кинини саныы сыттым, ханна эрэ манна чугас, сүрдээх чугас, кини баарыгар үөрбүтүнэн турдум.

Хайдах-хайдах этэй?

Мин ууһумсуйбакка кэпсиим, эн иһит…

I.

Кэдэлдьи алаас уонна Баатты хочото чараас тыаллах үрдүк арҕас халдьаайынан быысаһаллар. Ол чараас тыаҕа киирдэххэ, хочолоох алаас иккиэн көстүбэттэр. Аҕыйахтык атыллыыргын кытта хайалар да эмискэччи нэлэс гына түһэр. Илин диэки — Баатты хочото, арҕаа диэки — Кэдэлдьи алааһа.

Мин оҕо эрдэхпинэ күн аайы онон сылдьар эти. Күн аайы. Ол эрээри, хочо дуу, алаас дуу иннибэр эмискэччи кэлэс гына түстэхтэринэ, мэлдьи үөрүүлээхтик соһуйар буоларым. Илиибин быластаабытынан халдьаайыны таҥнары сүүрэр этим. Ол сүүрэн иһэн хайдах эрэ саталлаахтык өрө ыстанан кэбиспит киһи, алааһы-хочону үрдүнэн элиэтии көтөн талбаара туруох курдук этэ. Саталлаахтык эрэ өрө ыстаммыт киһи…

Туохха барытыгар да оннук дии. Эн дьулуһар дьолуҥ сааһыҥ тухары саманна, сүрдээх чугас баарга дылы. Сибилигин этиэххэ айылааххын саамай наадалаах тылы, саас-үйэ тухары сылайбыты эрчимирдэр, хомойбуту үөрдэр тылы. Сибилигин тардыахха айылааххын нарынтан нарын сурадаһыны, тыына суох маһы, тимири, тааһы тыыннаах курдуку тырымнатан, бар дьону умсугутар, дьолго угуйар сурадаһыны. Чэ, бэйи…

Эбэтэр ол билии халдьаайыны сүдү улахан тимир күрдьэҕинэн лөглү баһыталаан, ырыых-ыраах илгимэхтээн кэбиспит киһи дии саныырым. Улуу алааһы кытта улуу хочону холбоон, киэҥ куйаар оҥорон нэлэһиппит киһи дии саныырым…

Арҕас халдьаайы Баатты диэки эҥэригэр сүрдээх кыараҕас, иҥнэри сиргэ Роман Семенов кыстыктаах сайылыга тэллэх баттаһа тураллар. Кыһыныгар сайылык дьиэҕэ тоҥмут үүтү астаммыт бурдугу уураллар. Сайыныгар кыстык дьиэҕэ үүт кыынньараллар, бурдук астыыллар, тирии имитэллэр. Романнаах сүрдээх бүтэҥи олохтоох, кэлбэт-барбат ыал. Кинилэр быйыл хас бугулу оттообуттара, төһө түүтэҕи быспыттара, туох идэһэлээхтэрэ, хас ыанньыктаахтара биллибэт.

Биир сут-кураан сыл мин эбэм эмээхсин Романнаахха «кэпсэттэ». Бырааппын, түөртээх-биэстээх уолу, илдьэ барда.

Бырааппын, эбэбин ахтыы бөҕөнү ахтабын да, сааспар сылдьыбатаха ыалбыттан толлон, өргө диэри баарбакка сырыттым. Онтон эбэм бэйэтэ өрө күүдэпчилэнэн кэлэн илдьэ барда.

Ыйдаҥа киэһэ. Хайыһар курдук өрө мэтэрийэ тоҥмут этэрбэстэринэн сыыйыта тэбиэлээн халдьаайыны дабайан саллырҕайдаан иһэн, эбэм уоһун кытта быллыгырыыр:

— Эбэтин билиҥҥиттэн умнубут. Эрэйбин ылбахтаабыт оҕо. Харахпар көстүбэт буолан эрэр…

Кини хараҕар көһүннэхпинэ, эрэйэ боруостанар курдук саныырыттан ыгылыйабын, ытаамаары, суолга сылгы тоҥ киитэ бытарыйа сытарын ыраах үҥкүрүтэ тэбиэлиибин.

— Хаһан кинилэр улаатыахтарыгар диэри уон көс. Онуоха диэри миигинник баҕас буору кытта буор да буолаа инибини. Тура сылдьан өлөн хаалбыт киһи абыраныа этэ. Харахпыттан мэлийэн эрэбин. Букатын сабыллан хаалыам баар дии. Таҥара онно тиэрдибэтэр…

— Биһиги сирдээн сылдьыахпыт буоллаҕа дии! Аны өлөрүн таҥараттан көрдөстө. Эҥин-араас буолан!..

Мин наһаа «кырыктаахтык» чардыргыырга дылыбын да, бэйэм ордук хотторбун. Уоскуйаары, ол-бу диэки эргиччи көрүөлүүбүн.

Кырыа сүүмэҕирэ олорбут тоҥ мастар лабаалара таҥара дьиэтин ортотугар ыйанан турар люстра курдук тырымнаһа оонньууллар.

Баатты хочото, куолутунан, эмискэччи нэлэс гынна. Биһиги баран иһэр ыалбыт оһохторун кыыма аттыбытыгар кытыаста түстэ.

Ыраах-ыраах, хочо улаҕаларыгар, иккилии-үстүү ыаллар буруолара халлааҥҥа субуруһаллар. Кэбиһиилээх оттор, үөт талахтар тулаларыгар биир эмэ хара, көҕөччөр сылгылар табыйан аһыы сылдьаллар. Өйдөөн көрдөххө, элбэхтэр эбит. Маҥан сылгылар хаарга биллэ-биллибэттик араҕастыйан эрэ көстөллөр эбит.

— Оттообокко-мастаабакка, бултаабакка-алтаабакка ол кырдьаҕас эмээхсини сирдээн сылдьыахтара үһү дуу? Дьиэҕэ олоруом буоллаҕа дии… Ойохторо мөҕөн муҥҥуохтара буолуо.

— Оттон муҥнаан көрдүн эрэ!

— Хайыаҥый?

— Тоһун биэриэм ээ!

— Тыый, бу акаарытын! Кини мэлдьи дьиэҕэ кэтээн олоруо үһү дуо? Үлэлии барбытын кэннэ ойоҕо, өсөһөн миигин дьэ ордук сордообот дуо?

— Оттон сордоон көрдүн эрэ! Мин да баар буолуом!..

Кэнэҕэски ойохпор суоһурҕанан, үтүлүкпүн өттүкпэр сууралаамахтаан, илиибин сутуруктуу туттан баран, кырыктаахтык хааман «дыыдалдьытан» иһэбин.

— Бу үлүгэри!.. Кэбис, абааһы эмээхсин аайы доҕоргун атаҕастаама, доҕор… Оҕолоруҥ ытаһыахтара ээ… Ийэлэрин көмүскээннэр…

Мин «оҕолорбун» саныырбын кытта аһыныы, таптыы, эйэ сылаас тыына сүрэхпэр суоһаабытынан барар… Сымнаҕыыс-сымнаҕас майгыннаах, үөрэн мичилийэ сылдьар киһи буолуо буоллаҕа дии мин доҕорум, мин үчүгэйкээн оҕолорум ийэлэрэ барахсан…

Эбэм илбиркэй былаатын көннөрүнэр, муннун-уоһун соттор, быстахтык мунчаарбыт санаата көнө охсон, үөрэр-күлэр, сэбирдэх табах аһыы сытынан таныыбын кычыгылата-кычыгылата, тохтоон туран сыллыыр-ууруур.

Онтон эмиэ хамсаабыт. Налбыгыр кулгаахтаах эриэн ыт оҕото, суол устун утары сиэлэн нэктэрийэн иһэн, аҥар атаҕын өрө көтөхпүтүнэн тохтуу түһэр.

Мин, сиртэн мас ылбыта буолан баран, ыкка утары сүүрэбин. Кини, ыйылыы түһээт, төттөрү ыстанар. Халдьаайы ньылатынан тэмтэрийэн, сүүрдэр сүүрэ турабын.

Эбэм тугу эрэ саҥара хаалар.

Ытым, ыал чигдитигэр ыстанан киирэр да, соһумардык үрэн ньаргыйа түһэр.

Аны төттөрү ыстанааччы мин буолабын. Мүлчүргэннээх кэмнэргэ мэлдьи баар буолар үгэстээх киһи эбэм саба сүүрэн күөдэллэнэн кэлэр.

Сиэрин эрэ ситэрэн ырдьыгынаабыта буола-буола, ыт кыбыылаах от диэки илбириҥниир.

Дьиэҕэ киирэн иһэн, ааҥҥа чугурус гынабын. Ону тэҥинэн аан диэки хараҥа муннуктан быраатым уйаҕас саҥата «уба-ыый!» диир. Дьиэ иһинээҕи дьон бары айхаллыы тоһуйаллар.

— Оо, бу киһи дьэ кэллэ дуу? Эбэтигэр өрүү сылдьыбат ээ. Дьэ тутан аҕалла дии. Саҥардыы бачча этэ, обургу киһи буолан тоотойон эрэр дии…

Ыкса киэһэ атах ороҥҥо, эбэм оронугар, быраатым биһиги кистээн күлэн сыһыгыраһа-сыһыгыраһа, оонньуу олордохпутуна, үстээх-түөртээх кыра уолчаан быыс тумсугар кэлэн киэҥ харахтарынан миигин одуулаһан мылаллан турда… Биһиги күллэхпитинэ, кини эмиэ күлэн, тииһэ ытыгырыыр. Соруйан сөтөллүбүтэ буолар, атаҕынан быыһы тэбэн көрөр. Биһиги, бэйэбит ахтыһан баран көрсүбүт дьон, киниэхэ кыһаммаппыт. Өргө диэри ол курдук туран баран, оҕо сүрдээх хатаннык күөрэччи: «Га-ла-ба баль-ша-я!» — диэн хаһыытыы түһээт, хаҥас диэки сүүрэн мороһуйан хаалла.

— Хотуой, Мотуо! Эмиэ сымыйанан нууччалаабыта буолла, — дэһистилэр.

— Кыыс ээ итиҥкэҥ, — диэн ботугураата быраатым.

Саастарым тухары уол оҕоҕо баҕараллара, уол оҕолоро утары өлө турар буоланнар, абаккаларыгар, үс кыыстаахтарыттан кыраларын, Мотуону, уол оҕо оҥорон сылдьаллар эбит.

Дьэ, кэрэ киһи Мотуо! Сүрэхтэммит күнүгэр эрэ Матрена буолбут эбит. Нөҥүө күнүттэн ыла Мотуо буолбут. Лэри-лэкэгэр төбөтүн киччэччи кырыйбыттар, уол оҕолуу боспоччу таҥыннарбыттар, ып-ыраас киэҥ харахтардаах, хоп-хойуу токур хаастаах. Уол оҕо! Арай күөрэччи чаҕаарыйан саҥарара, быыһыгыраччы күлэрэ хайдах эрэ уолтан атыҥҥа дылы. Сарсыҥҥытыттан ыла кини биһикки атастыы буоллубут.

Мин ол ыалга эбэбин кытта олорон хааллым, орто кыыстарын Саняны кытта оскуолаҕа сылдьар буоллум.

Улахан кыыстарын Марияны саҥардыы биһиги учууталбыт ойох ылбыт. Субуоталарга хахайга маарынныыр дохсун тураҕас атынан сохсоҕолдьутан кэлэн, хонон бараллар.

Уһун синньигэс кубаҕай дьахтар туох да өйгө хатаран хаалар бэлиэ тылы саҥарбат, бэрт үксү саҥарар, күлэр-салар да, утарын умнуллан иһэр. Сотору-сотору: «Оо, дьэ, дьон бөҕөлөр!», «Киһи бөҕө!», «Тыый, ол хайдах?» — диэмэхтиир эбэтэр эрин иннигэр турар олох маска ыстанан тахсан баран: «Оо, көр, мин бачча буолларбын, эн миигин хантайан көрүөҥ этэ», — диир.

Саня миигиттэн биир сыл аҕа, сүрдээх хатыҥыр, уһун уҥуохтаах, иирэ талах курдук кыыс. Кини аҕыйах саҥалаах, көрсүө, оҕо курдук, арааһы фантазиялаабат, айдаарбат киһи. Ыйаастыгас соҕус кэрэ харахтара эйэҕэстик мичээрдииллэр, дэхситэ суох тиистэрдээх аллараа сыҥааҕын энньэччи туттан, ньолбоҕор сирэйэ өссө уһуу түһээт, кылгастык «һы-һык» диэн күлэн кэбиһэр. Аҥар атахпытын биир сиргэ үктээн туран, биир атахпытын соһо тардан эргичийэн хаарга «ойбон» оҥоробут, илиибитин быластаан баран хаарга охтон киэп түһэринэбит. Ардыгар аргыстаһан иһэр уолаттар дьиибэлииллэр. Кыайыах буоллахпытына, хаарга түҥнэритэ анньыталыыбыт. Кыайтарыах буоллахпытына, Саня бэрт кыраттан сылтаан ытаабытынан барар. Оччоҕо уолаттар сырсан хаалаллар. Баралларын кытта Саня күлэр: «Һы-һык, сордоохтор кырдьыктаннылар ээ. Ити аайы эһиэхэ ытаабакка».

Мин мэникпин, баар суоллааҕар суоҕу улгумнук саныыбын, араастан фантазиялыыбын. Ону кини күннээҕи олох кырдьыгынан, аҕыйах тылынан сабыта быраҕаттаан кэбиһэр.

— Саня, эн кэнники эргэ бардаххына, мин эйиэхэ сылдьар буолуом, — диибин.

— Па! Күтүр, эҥин-эҥини саҥаран. Ол эмиэ тугум эрэй, нохоо!..

— Көр эрэ, Саня, биһиги кынаттаахпыт буоллар, оскуолаҕа дөбөҥнүк тайан тиийиэхпит этэ.

— Илииҥ сылайыа суоҕа дуу? Аргыый хаампыт ордук ини…

— Ата суох бэйэтэ сүүрэр сыарҕа соҕуруу дойдуга баар үһү ээ, Саня. Оннугунан сырылаппыт киһи…

— Хас сыл солуугун, нохоо?.. Биһиги оскуолабытын бүтээрпит кэннэ уон сыл буолан баран бүтүөҕэ ол суолуҥ…

Ити курдук кэпсээтибит кыайан сайдыбакка, симэлийэ турар.

Оттон Мотуо үгүс тыллаах. Кэпсиэн, кэпсэтиэн баҕарар. Кинигэни көрөрүн олус таптыыр. Киэһэ аайы мин соҕотох илбиркэй кинигэбин хайдах эмэ мүлчү туттаран көрө охсор дьулуурдаах. Уруок ааҕарым быыһыгар аралдьыйдарбын эрэ, кини хайыы-үйэҕэ кинигэбин ыла охсон аахпыта буолан ботугуруу-ботугуруу көрө олорор буолар. Эбэтэр хонноҕун анныгар кистии кыбынан, кырыытынан оргууй сыҕарыҥнаан, хаҥас диэки баран эрэр буолар. Сымнаҕастык көрдөөтөххүнэ, улгумнук аҕалан туттаран кэбиһэр. Кыыһыран мүлчү тардан ыллаххына, хоргутан, арааһы саҥарар. «Ама да эн бэйэлээх буолтуҥ иһин, сатаатар кинигэҕин көрдөрө түһэриҥ баҕалаах!»

Оччоҕо мин тулуйбаппын. Кинигэбин көрдөрүөхтээҕэр буолуох, бэйэм быһааран биэрэбин. Хата, мин быһаарыым алыс кэҥиир. Кустар, куобахтар, үрүмэччилэр — бары кэпсэтэллэр, үөрэллэр-көтөллөр, хардарыта аһыныһаллар, көмүскэһэллэр.

Туохтан ордук ылларбыппын билбэппин, Мотуону мин үгүс сылларга үчүгэйдик саныыр, эйэҕэстик көрөр гына оҕорҕоотум.

II.

Дьыллар хонуктар ааһан истилэр. Мотуо улаатан дьоройон истэ. Оҕо эрдэҕинээҕи киччэччи кыргыылаах төбөбүттэн өлгөм суһуох долгуннура үүнэн түспүтүн хайа тараанан мөлбөччү өрүнэн кэбистэ. Түөрт кылаастаах оскуоланы бүтэрэн баран, хас да сыл дьиэтигэр олордо.

Мотуота уурайан, аны Мотуруона буолан хаалла.

Сайын алаастаах хочо билии ойууругар көрсө түһэбит. Дорооболоспоппут, кэпсэппэппит, киэр хайысыһан аасыһан хаалабыт.

Кэдэлдьи алаас эҥэригэр моонньоҕон угун бөлөхтөрө өрөһөлөнө үүммүт куруҥ тыатынан биһиги, биэс-алта уол, күйгүөрэн иһэммит, моонньоҕоннуу сылдьар кыргыттарга тиийэн кэлэбит. Биир кыыс моонньоҕонун тоҕо түспүт, ону итигэстээн буллугунаһаллар.

— Биһиги итигэстэһэбит дуо? — дэһэбит.

— Итигэстээн абыраамаҥ.

— Ити кэриэтэ саҥа үргээн иһитии толорон биэриэххэ.

— Үргээн абыраамаҥ. «Толорон биэриэххэ» буола-буола. Бара туруҥ!

Биир дьылыстаммыт хоодуот кыыс ордук дьорҕойор.

Мотуруона охтубут тиит үрдүгэр саҥата суох сыҥаах баттанан олорор. Силбэһэ сыспыт хойуу хаастара күөгэс гынан хамсыыллар, буспут моонньоҕон курдук хара харахтара мичээрдээх сардаҥаларынан оонньууллар. Сытыы кыыс биһигини «тыла суох» ыыталыырыттан кини күлэрин туттуна сатыы олорор.

Биһиги ааһан аймалаһа турабыт.

Алаас-хочо быыһынааҕы ыллык суолга, киэҥ ходуһа ортотугар, саһарчы буспут бурдуктаах солооһун кытыытыгар — ханна да көрүс — ити курдук…

Оччотооҕу боруҥуй, ыраах нэһилиэккэ кыраларыгар бииргэ оонньообут уоллаах кыыс, уоннарын туолаат, кэпсэппэт буолан хаалаллара.

«Уолаттары кытта тэҥҥэ тустар кыыс», «уолаттарга чачыгыраччы күлэр кыыс» диэн сидьиҥ-ньуччураан сэһэн тарҕаммытынан барыа буоллаҕа дии. Эгэ тыаҕа-толооҥҥо иккиэйэҕин көрсөн баран тохтуу түһэн кэпсэтэр кэлиэ дуо?!

Кэрэттэн кэрэ мичигин кистиир кыһалҕаҕа сылдьар Мотуруона буолбут Мотуону көрсө түстэхпинэ, мин киччэччи кыргыллыбыт лэкэгэр төбөлөөх, уол оҕолуу таҥастаах, уол оҕолуу быһыылаах-тутуулаах кыра кыыһы өйдүүбүн. Кини миэхэ аан маҥнай эппит тыла! «Га-ла-ба баль-ша-я!» — диэн этэ. Онтон: «Ама да эн бэйэлээх буолтуҥ иһин, сатаатар кинигэҕин көрдөрө түһэриҥ баҕалаах!» — диэн хоргутар буолбута…

Көрсүһэ түһээт, суолугар туора турунан кэбиһиэхпин баҕарабын уонна… уонна, ойуур титириктэрэ бука бары үөрэн сэгэлдьиһэ түһүөхтэригэр диэри түөһүм түгэҕиттэн сүр чуордук этиэхпин баҕарабын:

«Га-ла-ба баль-ша-я! Мотуо-Мотуруона, чыычааҕым оҕотоо! Ама да эн бэйэлээх буолтуҥ иһин, сатаатар кэпсэтэ түһэриҥ баҕалаах…» Инньэ диирим кэлиэ дуо?! Эдэр уол буолан баран, эдэр кыыһы кытта кэпсэтиэм дуо, «сүрэ бэрт» буоллаҕа дии…

III.

Онтон ити кэлэн мин оскуолабар, миэхэ сылдьан ааста.

Бу күнтэн ыла мин тулабар туох барыта тубуста, киэркэйдэ. Үөрэтэр оҕолорум, кыараҕас хоһум, иттэр оһоҕум, таһырдьа хаар, халлааҥҥа күн — бука барыта ордук сырдаата, сэргэхсийдэ, киэркэйдэ…

Аҕыйах хонугунан баскыһыанньаҕа дьиэбэр өрөөн баран, эрдэ сарсыарда туран оскуолабар бардым, уоспар туох көтөн түспүтүнэн ыллыы-ыллыы, сылыбыраччы айаннатан оскуолабар чугаһаан иһэммин, биир үөрэх уолун ситэн сыарҕабар олортум.

— Кэпсээниҥ, доҕоор?

— Суох. Арай бөлүүн Мотуруона кыыс өлбүт…

— Мотуо дуо, нохоо?!

Сарсыардааҥҥы дьыбардаах сылгыҥҥа чачайа харан хааллым…

— Эдьиийин аахтан ыалдьан тиийбит. Үс хонукка сэбиргэх дьаҥыгар ыалдьан сыппыт…

* * *

Ол сайыныгар, сарсын сарсыарда куоракка үөрэнэ бараары сылдьан, кинилэр дьиэлэригэр ойон киирбитим. Дьон үлэҕэ барбыттар. Арай Мотуо эбэтэ, кырдьаҕас эмээхсин, ыллаан тарыкыныы сылдьар күөрэгэй чыычаахтаах испиискэ хаатын туппутунан, соҕотоҕун ытыы олорор эбит.

— Ким киирдиҥ бу?.. Мин оҕом. Мотуо түүн үөһүн саҕана маны илиибэр кэбиспитэ уонна… уонна сарсыарданан, халлаан саҥардыы сырдаан эрдэҕинэ… баран хаалбыта…

Кырдьык, ынах хомуйа дуу, моонньоҕоннуу дуу барбыта буолуо, мичилийэ көрбүтүнэн сибилигин киирэн кэлиэ диэх курдук этэ…

Мин көһүтэн олорбутум.

Мотуо кэлбэтэҕэ.

Онтон, нухарыйан дуу, муҥатыйан дуу, бүк түһэн олорор кырдьаҕас эмээхсини аттынан оргууй үктэнэн таһырдьа тахсан барбытым…

Ол киэһэттэн бэттэх сүүрбэ төгүрүк сыл ааста. Халлаан саҥардыы сырдаан эрдэҕинэ кэрэ, сэмэй кыыс оҕолор кэлбэт гына «баран хаалбат» буолалларын туһугар дьоллоох олоҕу тутар үгүс дьону кытта үөрэнэн, үлэлээн, мин киэҥ сирдэринэн сырыттым…

Хайдах эрэ, хайдах эрэ, сырдык тырым уот курдук, эйигин сайыһыннара угуйан барбыт сэмэй кыыс оҕону иккиһин көрсө түстэргин эрэ, кини намчы тарбахтардаах нарын илиитин икки ытыскынан сэрэхтээхтик, сылаастык күөйэ тутан ылаар уонна сүрэҕиҥ сүбэтинэн кинини кытта эйэҕэстик, сэмэйдик кэпсэппитинэн бараар…

Баҕар кини, эдьиийигэр да ааспакка, дьиэтигэр да төннүбэккэ, эһиги бииргэ үөрэн-хомойон, олох уһун суолун устун сиэттиспитинэн бардар бара туруоххут, мин эдэр доҕоруом…

^[1] I.e., Голова большая, “big head” in Russian.

The Hinternet needs your support! Upgrade to a paid subscription now!

Subscribe now

Upcoming Events

October 21. “Psychedelics, Consciousness, and the Humanities,” Justin Smith-Ruiu in conversation with Noah Feldman, Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School, 7pm.

October 22. Oort Cloud Review launch event, KGB Bar, New York City.

November 11. Oort Cloud Review launch event, Camden Art Centre, London, 7pm. REGISTER NOW!

November 23. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summit, La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, 2pm-10pm. REGISTER NOW!

Hinternet Foundation Online Courses

November 3-December 15. “History and Philosophy of Astrobiology”. REGISTER NOW!

October 1-November 12. “Clavis: How the Voynich Manuscript Tells the Story of the Modern World.” IN PROGRESS!

August 7-August 22. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summer School: “Whither the Humanities?”

Subscribe now

Share

Register for Astrobiology

As a “trailer” to the course, here is a livestream JSR did in 2024 on the same topic, “When and Why Did People Start Believing in Aliens?”

Register for Astrobiology

And before you go, take note: The Hinternet needs your support in order to continue building out our projects and realizing our creative and intellectual vision. While The Hinternet is by most measures more vital and more salient than ever, our paid subscriptions are flagging. We know this is not a measure of flagging love, but only a reflection of broader trends in the subscription economy. We would like to implore you to buck those trends. You can now help to keep The Hinternet going for just 3$ a month! We are generally hesitant to paywall our work — it is just such a shame to keep it hidden! But in order to continue with this approach we honestly need for you to upgrade. Here’s the button to make that happen:

Get 50% off for 1 year

Give a gift subscription

Upcoming Events

October 21. “Psychedelics, Consciousness, and the Humanities,” Justin Smith-Ruiu in conversation with Noah Feldman, Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School, 7pm.

October 22. Oort Cloud Review Launch, KGB Bar, New York City, with Justin Smith-Ruiu, D. Graham Burnett, Kristen Roupenian, et al.

November 11. Oort Cloud Review Launch Camden Art Centre, London, 7pm, with Justin Smith-Ruiu, Sam Kriss, Sam Jennings, et al. REGISTER NOW!

November 23. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summit, La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, 2pm-10pm. REGISTER NOW!

Hinternet Foundation Online Courses

November 3-December 15. “History and Philosophy of Astrobiology”. REGISTER NOW!

October 1-November 12. “Clavis: How the Voynich Manuscript Tells the Story of the Modern World.” IN PROGRESS!

August 7-August 22. Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summer School: “Whither the Humanities?”

Subscribe now

Share

Pre-Register for the Oort Cloud Launch!

Here is what to expect:

☼ ☼ ☼

It is highly probable that there will be a separate OCR launch event, at the KGB Bar in New York, sometime between October 22 and 25. But we are still waiting for confirmation on that and so will not say anything more for now.

There will also be a launch event at the KGB Bar in New York City on October 22! We will release more details very soon, but for now: save the date!

☼ ☼ ☼

The Hinternet Foundation’s current online fall course: Clavis: The Voynich Manuscript, the Riverbank Institute, and the Philosophical Origins of the American Military-Information-Technology Complex is going wonderfully. Just yesterday we had an amazing guest lecture from the renowned medieval codicologist and long-time Voynichologist Lisa Fagin Davis, in which she told us about some of her recent remarkable co-discoveries as to the manuscript’s probable origins. Next week we will be welcoming Princeton historian Jennifer Rampling, who will tell us about some of the possible alchemical resonances of the manuscript’s illustrations. It is, truly, an education.

You missed the chance to join us for Voynich, but you now have the opportunity to sign up for our next course offering, beginning November 1 and meeting weekly for the following seven Thursdays: The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology. This course will be co-led by Justin Smith-Ruiu, whom some of you will know, and Max Wade, a brilliant and youngish scholar, whose particular domain of expertise concerns Ancient Greek theories of the celestial intelligences. We have two objectives: first, to use both history and the latest scientific findings to go some way towards determining whether we are alone in the universe or not; second, to figure out the philosophical, cosmological, and cultural conditions that lay behind the permutations in Western history in the way intelligence beyond or “above” Earth is represented — now as inherent to the celestial bodies themselves; now as angels and archangels; and now again, from the 17th-century on, as organic beings, with limbs and viscera like our own. It is going to be, likewise, an education, and we will be thrilled to see you there.

Register for Astrobiology

☼ ☼ ☼

At some point we will have to stop listing things we are “thrilled” about. This is a state of the soul hardly conducive to getting work done, and as you can see we have our share to do.

Nonetheless, we admit we are thrilled at the news of Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Like Carson herself, we insist that we do not much care about contemporary literature, but only ever read sub specie aeternitatis. Like Carson, if you catch us reading, it is very unlikely to be a title first published this year. And like Carson, we disdain “writing advice” and have never in our lives thought to ask for it or give it.

We are not, in short, part of “LitStack”, so the news of Anne Carson’s prize places us in a bit of a bind: any celebration of it is at once an abandonment of our principled commitment to Carsonism. At the same time, we can only confess that we love her, and, more than that, that she is perhaps one of the two or three greatest inspirations for the work we do at our editorial offices in Quimper. If she dies before we do, it is very likely that we will conscript her as an “Eternal Editor”, and that she will take her place not only alongside László Krasznahorkai and Verner von Heidenstam (whom we’re certain LitStack has studied very carefully), but Isidore of Seville and Pliny the Elder too.

We were surprised, in going back over the past six years of our writing, to find that Carson only came up once, in an essay by JSR —one of our “faves”— of May, 2021. But some who know JSR personally might remember, from that time, his frequent ravings about what then appeared a serious intention to abandon his scholarly career. “To do what?” concerned friends predictably asked. “I don’t know… to be like Anne Carson,” was his unhinged reply. He was not of course thinking about Nobel Prizes… not even, at the time, for her. He was thinking about the fact that she, practically alone in our era, somehow traced an arc from scholarship, to poetry in the conventional sense, to full recovery of something like an archaic total art of poïesis. And that seemed, in the new monde à rebours we were only just entering five or so years ago, to be something worth emulating — if only in faint approximation of what she has been able to achieve. Unhinged, as we said. But that’s what love will do…

Subscribe now

Register for Astrobiology

Register for the Summit!

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

PLOOI: Mary. You’ve been busy, girl. Chief music critic at The Hinternet. New book coming out. Catch us up.

Mary Cadwalladr: That’s right. I’ve been with The Hinternet for about two years now. And yeah, I’ve got a new book out this fall, Afro/Beat: Post-War Atlantic Vernaculars and the Fates of Rock and Roll, with Pneuma Press in the UK. It’s an essay defending neo-Pythagoreanism, so, like, the view that at bottom the structure of reality is itself musical. The case is made largely on the basis of a phenomenological analysis of my own late-night headphone sessions in the company of Cyril Diaz, John Coltrane, Fela Kuti, André Toussaint, Ebo Taylor, Lola Martin. Some others.

PLOOI: We’ll get to that. A lot to talk about. I mean you give us so much. You’ve been around a long time, but you weren’t always the undisputed doyenne of music writing. You started out as a singer yourself. Tell us a bit about, you know, the whole grand arc of your life and work.

MC: That’s right. In the 1990s I played with a band called Shoo-Fly Complex. I hear us described these days as all sorts of things — “hypo-twee”, “Cymric shoegaze”, who knows what else. But we were just part of the Cardiff scene, we weren’t thinking about metadata labels back then. Genesis P-Orridge once told us we sounded like “depressed cocklemongers in the harbor fog”. I think they meant that as praise.

PLOOI: I’d say you’ve come a long way since back when you were hanging out with Psychic TV! Your recent writing focuses almost exclusively on African and African Diasporic musics. How do you account for this evolution?

MC: Well first of all as a neo-Pythagorean I have to insist that it’s all just music, and to that extent it is, as they say, “all good”. I often think of what the classicist M. L. West wrote in his book Greek Metre (1982), speculating on the archaic origins of poetic chant and epic recitation: “One of the principal springs of song is obsession with a given idea.” That’s all it is, man. Some dimension of human existence, most typically love or death, presents its mystery to the mind and heart of the singer, who then rolls it around, turns it over and over, through pitch modulation, timbre, rhythmic repetition, and so on. That’s it, that’s music: the temporal structure of reality as ideal object of our own “obsession”, to speak with West, though I would prefer to articulate this rather in the crypto-Heideggerian terms, refined and softened by Bruno Latour, of souci. Music is the form reality takes as disclosed in the experience, by time-bound creatures like us, of utmost care.

PLOOI: Heavy stuff! We might get back to some of this later, though I probably won’t understand it any better the next time around [laughs]. Let’s bring it back down to earth, sister. What are you listening to these days? What’s got you most excited?

MC: I’m so glad you asked! …

Keep the “H” in Hinternet.
Upgrade to a paid subscription, and read on…

Get 50% off for 1 year

Read more

Before we begin, may we first ask you please to upgrade to a paid subscription? The Hinternet is an entirely subscriber-funded publication, and we need your support to keep it going. We’re offering a limited-time special rate of 50% off for the first year. Thank you!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Today we have just a few pieces of information we think you will wish to hear. Our fall events schedule is unusually dense. Let’s look at it backwards.

Here is the program for the Hinternet Foundation’s Inaugural Summit, which will take place at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris (« J’ai une idée, je loue la Gaîté, nous claquons Paris » —Zola, Nana (1880); it really is a bit like that).

The main-program speakers have been asked to reflect on the following “Guiding Questions”, and to allow these reflections to help shape their remarks at the Summit:

1. What do we lose, if anything, to mechanized language? For millennia, writing has been understood as rendering something of human interiority into external signs. What happens when meaningful language can no longer be presumed to have distinctly human agency at or near its source? How in particular does this impact our understanding of the proper scope of humanistic inquiry, which has since its beginnings advanced primarily through the study of written texts? Might it now be freed to rediscover forms of judgment, experience, and creation that traditional scholarly practices have obscured? What, in the end, is left for the humanist to do?

2. Could AI bring down the walls between the humanities, the sciences, and the creative arts? Modern intellectual life has increasingly divided humanistic interpretation, scientific discovery, and artistic creation, while making ever-narrower specialization the price of expertise, and thus in turn of professional success. By extending what one person can read, learn, calculate, model, and make within a single lifetime, could AI reopen the possibility of genuine polymathy? Might its deepest consequence be not the automation of existing disciplines, but the emergence of forms of inquiry for which our present disciplinary map no longer makes sense?

3. Could the new science of intelligence make humanism obsolete? Humanism has accorded special significance to language, reason, imagination, interpretation, and creation. Yet AI, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology increasingly invite us to understand intelligence as far more general: emerging from biological evolution, distributed across organisms and environments, and perhaps continuous with nonhuman forms of computation. Could these developments expose our remaining attachment to humanistic inquiry as sentimental, parochial, or obsolete? Or could humanism survive the abandonment of human exceptionalism—and if so, what would it become?

We’re going to close pre-registration for the event very soon, so please register right away if you intend to come.

Register for the Summit!

On November 11 there will be an Oort Cloud Review launch event at the Camden Arts Centre in London. It will take place in the evening, likely at 18:00. We are told that certain new documents, related to the early activities of the Heliopause Research Directorate, will be shown to the public for the first time. We are otherwise excited to have this opportunity to showcase our collaborative work on this project in the UK, which has long held the record for highest number of Hinternet readers per capita, and which is likely the only place on earth where we might expect some significant body of readers not only to purchase, nor only to peruse, but to understand The Oort Cloud Review. More on this event as the date approaches!

Incidentally, we are still looking for venues to host launch events in the US Northeast in late October. Ideally we would hold one in Cambridge, Mass., on October 18, and in New York any date from October 22 to 26. We enjoy talking about our work in the elitest of spaces and in the louchest of dens, and everywhere in between, really. So let us know if you are in either of these places and would like to host us. If not, then your one chance this fall may be London! (We’re also locking in dates for a Paris launch event, and a few in California later in winter.)

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

On October 21 JSR will be in dialogue with Noah Feldman at Harvard Law School:

The day before, October 20, there will be a symposium on the “Psychedelic Humanities”, likewise at the Law School, though if we understand correctly this will be a closed-door affair. The public event, anyhow, will surely transmit something of what goes on behind those closed doors, while also being engaging and fun. Noah and JSR, by quite different paths, have arrived at a number of convergent convictions about the limits of knowledge and the role of spirituality in a well-lived life. It will be something to hear them address these convictions, and likely many other questions besides, in tandem.

Incidentally, On Drugs has been out for a year now. If you haven’t read it yet, why not order a copy now?

The Hinternet Foundation’s first fall course, “Clavis: How the Voynich Manuscript Tells the Story of the Modern World”, is starting tomorrow, October 1! Here’s the course outline, and here’s a “trailer” livestream JSR did for it a few weeks back.

We’re sorry you missed the application round for that one, but don’t worry. Beginning in November we will be offering a second fall course, co-taught by JSR and , on “The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology”, from Plutarch through the present day. The course dates are once weekly, Tuesday, November 3 — Tuesday, December 15, at 10:00 LA / 13:00 NY / 18:00 London / 19:00 Paris. You can find here an old syllabus we wrote up on this topic some years ago, which will be adapted from its current 12-week format to the Foundation’s standard 7-week format, while retaining most of the same readings and topics:

Astrobiology 4

203KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

More on this very soon.

Before you go, please don’t forget to upgrade to a paid subscription. Truly, The Hinternet needs your support! Most of our work is paywalled, and you can access all of it now for just 3$ per month!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Get Hinternet Merch!

The Sempitern JSR-20250 has been working like a charm ever since Chirag Shah got it up and running! Our internal voice-detector tools are giving its recent output 100% match scores, which means, in other words, that perfectly verisimilar reproduction of JSR’s style is now a reality, down to the very tiniest swerve, as we say, of his very most rarefied soul-atom. This is a style we previously would have called “inimitable”, but obviously no longer can. Whatever. The important thing is that JSR is getting the rest he needs down in the Hinternet offices’ “deep-freeze”; the mobile-unit JSR is out there in the world completing all those mundane tasks the world expects of him; and meanwhile the JSR-2050 is delivering that signature JSR-branded content our readers need. Everything is going according to plan! Nothing can stop us now! —The Editors

Get 50% off for 1 year

Prelude

I spend a great deal of time thinking about “faith, hope, and love” — what they share with one another, and what distinguishes each. I don’t think I’ll ever be smart enough to render the mystery of faith into words. By contrast I do have a book project that, as I envision it, will be divided into three parts, dealing successively with φιλία, ἔρως, and ἀγάπη, and making at least some original claims as to the common thread uniting these three aspects or inflections of love.

But that I have this project at all, that I joyously go about my work each day on the presumption of a future that includes books about love, or indeed books about anything, already implicates the third and most neglected member of our Pauline triad — hope. Let us pay attention now to this modest theological virtue, lest some reformist constituency get the idea, in view of its recent poor metrics, of phasing it out altogether.

But let us first set the scene with some preliminary reflections.

I.

In our most recent session I told my psychiatrist about The Oort Cloud Review. A proper course of psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, would surely have got around to this sort of thing already. But my contact with the mental-health profession is more limited: I check in once every two or three months to determine whether the current course I’m on, unmedicated and basically functional, is the best one. So I’ve got 50 minutes to summarize “how things are going” in the most general sense, an exercise that usually constrains me to talk about low-level matters, day-to-day operations, rather than about longer-term projects or ideas pertaining to purpose, to meaning in life, or to modes of existence. And yet it came to seem relevant to me, in aiming to give an accurate picture of “how things are going”, to get across that what I had experienced for some time as mental illness had either evolved into, or revealed its true nature as, a mostly salutary creative or artistic impulse.

It is a cliché when formulated so bluntly: I thought I was insane, but it turns out I’m an artist; I thought I was hearing voices, but those were in fact amicable greetings from the characters I was unconsciously in the course of inventing. The cliché becomes simply unseemly, for some, when it is learned that the “I” in question is a “middle-aged white man”1 with the closest thing one can have to job security in this crazy moment in history. But fear of embracing cliché, I see now, can itself significantly delay a person’s ability to lead their true life, and in this way can cause, as in my case, significant suffering. Most of us are prepared to recognize and applaud even the most gravely delayed cases of coming-out, when these fall under the familiar heading of sexual orientation or gender identity. But the truth is gender and sexuality are only the tip of the iceberg, and there are as many different ways to spend one’s life in the closet as there are unfulfilled lives. Almost everybody alive, in truth, is in some closet or other.

So I mentioned that I had, with significant collaboration, brought into the world a work of experimental science-fiction, and left it at that. All along, since well before I was prepared to accept as much, my psychiatrist had been encouraging me to consider that perhaps eccentricity is not the same as mental illness, that it’s perfectly okay to be an outlier with respect to all sorts of social norms and expectations; that it’s no big deal if you talk to yourself as you walk down the street and the main thing is that your conversations with yourself should be interesting (indeed they are); that the source of suffering is not simply the inability to conform to this world but rather that inability coupled with a sense of obligation or a desire to conform.

Because our interactions are so limited, what I actually do with my time, beyond being a “philosopher” and a “writer”, hardly comes up. One does not, as at least I see things, go to a psychiatrist with the expectation of showcasing one’s CV; though not everybody seems to agree. A while back I read something from a North American philosopher, who divulged online that he often talks to his therapist about how deeply he regrets the wide, dark shadow Brian Leiter casts over “the profession” with his punchy blogging; and I thought: brother, Brian Leiter, whom I myself really only read for the “Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll” feature, is among the very last entities in the universe, after Mungo Jerry and Humble Pie themselves, that I might expect to come up in my consultations with mental-health professionals. That is just not at all how I understand their remit.

But recently it did come to seem to me that if not my academic work, then at least some of my more imaginative extramural projects from over the past few years, might not be entirely beyond the bounds of what a psychiatrist might wish to know about me. And so I let slip that I had moved mountains these past years —at least relative to the scale of action by which I had previously measured what is possible in my life— to bring the work in question into being. I was surprised when she in turn asked what the title of the work is, and even more surprised when, upon my answering “The Oort Cloud Review”, she Googled it right there on the spot, read for a moment, and then asked: “But who is Hélène Le Goff?” And I said, “Oh, that’s me. I mean, that’s one of my noms de plume” … and I could see, for just a split second, that she was inwardly reconsidering the earlier confidence she had brought to her distinction between eccentricity and insanity.

“It’s a fine line,” I said, as if responding directly to the thought I knew had overtaken her.

Share

II.

The truth is I have many other causes to worry about my sanity, besides my imaginary friends and my artistic conceits, that I have so far failed to address with my psychiatrist. I worry, for example, about how absolutely unhinged my “political” convictions, if you can even call them that, have become in recent years.

I have immense trouble positioning myself politically in any ordinary way. Long-time readers will know that much of my early Hinternet writing came out in a dissident key — dissident, at least, relative to the prevailing commitments of my progressive peers circa 2020. I saw the movement they were spearheading, and still see it, as annoyingly coercive at best, and incipiently authoritarian at worst. It took extreme resolve in those years simply to speak in public not only in a way that refused to affirm the content of their commitments, but even in a way that refused to ape their style, their manner and affect. One was practically required to speak in slogans. This horrified me, and I made what at least felt at the time like the risky decision of simply continuing to speak in my own voice. For a while this made me, in terms of social legibility, “anti-woke”, and for a while I had a good number of self-styled anti-wokesters take an interest in my writing, only inevitably to be disappointed upon figuring out that I wasn’t speaking in their voice either.

A significant faction within that camp defends the view that our world, as it is, is basically alright, and they therefore counsel the perpetually dissatisfied youths to “be normal”, to just pipe down a bit, to focus on common things like work and family and the small pleasures of ordinary life. I by contrast think this world is completely insane, and I think one can only be normal in it by allowing oneself to become a vessel of its insanity. And for evidence I cite many of the same evils that have likewise preoccupied the progressive left. I in fact would like to see prisons abolished, and the police, and militaries, and the entire Westphalian order of sovereign nation-states. These past years I have sometimes had crises so intense, upon recalling the mere existence of such things, as practically to collapse on the spot. I can’t believe it, I say to myself. I can’t believe it is still such raw force as these institutions represent, and not the love to which we are all called, that holds our world together. A few years ago I reviewed a biography of Derek Parfit, and dealt him some mild mockery for having once broken out in tears at high table upon being reminded of the casualty figures for World War I. But the truth is by then I, mostly unknown to myself, was behaving in much the same way.

Feasibility is the most neglected modal, as Isaac Levi said, and if I announce that the existence of prisons is morally unacceptable to me, this does not imply that I have a strategy for their immediate closure. But opinion polls and social-media algorithms never permit a person to supplement their commitments with any modal shading at all. It’s always, “Are you pro-choice or pro-life?” or, if there’s any more than that, it’s the pollsters imagining they have accommodated real-world complexity by adding further options such as “Undecided” or “No opinion”. And so the only way to affirm any particular commitment, or any cluster of commitments constituting what one takes to be a vision of a just world, is to enter into the futile agon of oppostions, to take up P or not-P in the eternal standoff of the P Wars. The Onion captured this predicament perfectly when it reported, in its mock coverage of the 1973 Supreme Court decision making abortion legal across the United States: “Bumper-Sticker Industry Applauds Roe v. Wade Decision”.

This predicament comes across most tragically in the case of environmental conservation. It is, I maintain, among the most astounding facts about this planet that it includes, for now, whales among its inhabitants. And yet the only pathway for many people, not all of whom will have all the power of human language at their disposal, to affirm the wonder of this in public is to allow themselves to be channeled into a constituency labelled and trivialized and bounded over the past several decades as the “Save the Whales” crowd. I suppose, if push comes to shove, that I must acknowledge that I am part of the “Save the Whales” crowd myself. But I am convinced that what it will take to “save the whales” is entirely to reshape humanity’s consciousness of its place in our multispecies planetary ecumene in a way that is simply not compatible with treating “Save the Whales” as one “political” commitment one might take up, according to taste and in view of preexisting scheduling commitments, alongside others.

This trivializing and dichotomizing structure into which all commitments must be entered preexists the internet. When I was in high school in the 1980s one was encouraged to join clubs. Among the clubs there was one for marine wildlife conservation, and another for nuclear arms control. One was applauded by the adults for such engagements, and assured that these activities would stand us in good stead with the college admissions officers, which in turn would set us along the road to a normal adult life such as their own. The available structure for expression of commitments, in other words, was the very same one that systematically rendered these commitments futile.

Get 50% off for 1 year

III.

Paradoxically, and beautifully, I have found that it was only when I truly began to feel the full horror of this world that I stopped living my life crippled by fear. Fear thrives in the soul of a person overly attached to perfect outcomes, to cinematic happy-endings like the ones vainly awaited by Annie in Sartre’s Nausea (1938). When you accept that life is a tragedy, when you really know in your bones that the worst outcomes are in fact likely, and not the betrayal of some promise the world had made to keep you safe and fortunate, then even the worst outcomes can come to seem, if not like no big deal, then at least somehow irrelevant to the question of how I should be feeling today.

Fear used to be diffuse and obscure to me. Now it is in fact very easy for me to name and enumerate my fears, and they turn out to be the familiar, indeed the classical ones. I am afraid of war, disease, and poverty. The latter two are fates I might encounter individually while others go on thriving; or that I might, as in conditions of pandemic or economic collapse, experience with others. Only war is something we may be guaranteed, for better or worse, not to experience alone.

I understand now that in my earlier life I had long succeeded in maintaining a security buffer between my world and the world of the men whose corpses lay strewn in the trenches of the Somme. Those photos are in black and white, I was able to tell myself, those are “Olde Time” photos, practically like the sepia-tone novelties you can get done at the mall dressed up as Al Capone or as a flapper; so what could they have to do with me? One begins to cry alongside Parfit, perhaps, the moment one sees the meaningless of such distinctions, when one understands that our evolving technologies give only an illusion of motion out of one world and into another, and that in truth the lives forced from those corpses had been as rich and real as one’s own.

We might also detect the spontaneous projection of such a security buffer in recalling those junior high-schoolers who for a time were compelled to go see Schindler’s List (1993), at the cinema, on class field-trips. The right-wing rags predictably steamed when, without fail, reports arrived from theater managers of savage brats snickering and fake-farting and so on throughout the gas-chamber scenes. Now I’ve never been one to make light of the Holocaust, but I did remain, to cite Ezra Pound (of all people!) somewhat out of context, “hard as youth these sixty years”, or at least fifty. For far too long, the combined swirls of eros and irony sustained a vortex around me like a force-field. Then, as if someone flicked a switch, the field disappeared, and I saw that I inhabited exactly the same world as every soldier, prisoner, or slave who has ever lived, and I began to cry and haven’t really stopped crying since.

And now when I hear people say things like “Just be normal and grateful to live in modern society with all its conveniences and comforts,” I understand that they are saying this because they are, or are trying to be, members in good standing of the society in which they have little alternative but to spend their lives. But that society, I’m sorry to have to say, is a psychotic death cult.

Share

IV.

“[T]here are certain things you can’t get away from,” Saki has the Duchess say in “Reginald at the Theatre” (1910). “Right and wrong, good conduct and moral rectitude, have certain well-defined limits.” “So, for the matter of that,” replies Reginald, “has the Russian Empire. The trouble is that the limits are not always in the same place.”

Our Edwardian chronicler seems to have been born without the sort of buffer I have described, and his body of work might best be thought of as an effort to expose the fragile nothingness of English upper-class niceties that comes into relief whenever one stops to notice even for a moment the world beyond the manor house or the social club or the stables. Saki himself died in the Somme offensive in 1916, picked off by a German sniper, having volunteered for battle even though he was well past the age of mandatory service.

I was long aided in maintaining my buffer by a certain naively Fukuyaman attitude. I spent much of the 1990s jaunting around Russia as if on a victory tour. “Well I’m glad we got all that sorted out!” was my animating thought. “Borders fixed in place, markets integrated, Pizza Hut opened on Tverskaya Ulitsa! What could go wrong now!” I can remember an old man, a World War II veteran with medals still proudly displayed on the front of his cheap suit coat, telling me, in effect: “Not so fast. This is temporary.” And I thought: “Whatever, old man in a cheap suit. What does your world have to do with mine?”

It may be that those of us who came of age at the tail-end of the Cold War have had unusual difficulty learning to live in history again, though my deeper worry is that such learning has proved especially challenging not for any particular generational cohort, but for Americans. I see headlines like this one:

and I imagine a reader thinking: “Hmm, climate, pandemic, A.I… are we missing any other apocalypse scenarios here? Well, there was that one that was portrayed in Oppenheimer (2023) a few years back. But those people were wearing fedoras, they were practically dressed up like Al Capone for vintage photos at the mall, so clearly their concerns cannot be the same as ours.” What I myself think however is that part of the society-wide psychosis I have described is a form of traumatic repression that makes us fundamentally unable to confront the greatest risk that faces us: that the world is built up out of sovereign states that constantly seek to bend the others to their own will and, at the same time, that openly declare that they are prepared to destroy the world rather than to see their sovereignty compromised. The simple untenability of this arrangement over the long term is a brute fact about our predicament, but one too horrible to contemplate, and so public discourse channels itself into what are ultimately trivial distractions by comparison.

And I find myself wondering: Why isn’t there a proper peace movement for the 21st century. Why did real commitment to achieving perpetual peace play itself out roughly between Kant’s 1795 treatise deploying that phrase, and the outbreak of World War I? It would seem that if ever a crisis moment were to come along that might stimulate new thinking about the abolition of war and of the global political order that is built on war, it would be the present one, with its history-changing technologies and its complete reshuffling of our collective conception of what’s possible. But instead we’re distracted by details, and by the endless lurch of discourse from one news-item to the next, with no cumulative lessons, nor even any expectation of the eventual arrival of something like wisdom.

Last year The Hinternet hosted an essay-prize contest on the theme, “How might new and emerging technologies best be used to achieve perpetual peace?” The contest, I am willing to say now, was a failure. Eliminating the 90% or so of submissions written in that unmistakable zombie A.I. “white-paper” style, the remaining 10%, from human beings who may at least be commended for their effort, did little more than to invite us back into the social-sorting mechanism of bumperstickers and tweets, to establish that one is of the “From the river to the sea” camp, or instead of the camp that says “One does not negotiate with terrorists.” The lesson for me was that it is hard indeed, perhaps impossible, to push with any success for a particular vision of the good without allowing that vision to be bent into a blunt tool of discursive factionalism.

If therefore there is ever to be a proper peace movement, one that all of humanity might in principle recognize as being in its own interest, it will have to capture human hearts by other means than direct language. I have held back from saying so outright, because it seems so insane and I admit I haven’t run it past my psychiatrist yet, but a good part of me has begun to believe that the real aim of our efforts here at The Hinternet, though we have utterly failed so far, is to see if we can’t feel our way towards those other means. We are, I mean, unlike Hector Hugh Monro, decidedly in the camp of peace — but we refuse to discuss this position directly so long as you see it only as a camp.

Get 50% off for 1 year

V.

In the loss of my force-field there is at least something psycho-developmentally similar to the experience of the newly recovering addict. Substance abuse was certainly a problem in my earlier life, and while its overcoming is not the defining element of my newer life, I am nonetheless close enough to that narrative to experience real fellow-feeling when, for example, I read ’s regular reflections on addiction in the Substack Notes feed, and I think: “I love this self-absorbed Gen-X goofball. He’s just like me fr!” The first time I had this thought was long before the force-field came down, when reading an interview with Mike Tyson in which he effused about his own love for fellow recovering addicts, how it was only among them that he experienced a feeling of home, etc. I was still hard as youth, still judgmental as hell, still convinced that recovery talk was for losers; but malgré moi I found I liked what Mike Tyson was saying, I understood him, though I could not say why.

I am reminded of the time A. J. Ayer encountered Tyson at some party or other, right at the moment the boxer was preparing to subject Robin Givens to another round of cruel abuse. Ayer placed himself in Tyson’s way and sought to detain him, saying something like: “You are the world heavyweight champion, and I am the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. We are both eminent in our fields. Let us discuss our respective achievements.”

What Ayer missed is that Tyson had at least some interesting philosophical commitments of his own. The famous line, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” for example, believed to have been uttered in 1987, was, properly interpreted, really just a variation on Sartre’s observation, in his Critique de la raison dialectique of 1960, that “in a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.” And this has at least something to do with an earlier and better-known Sartrean observation, in Huis clos (1944), that “hell is other people”.

I disagree, strongly — in fact I am convinced that other people, and the opportunity for enactment of love that they present, are our only real hope for redemption. Anyone who sees others as hell is living in a hell of their own, and unsurprisingly continues to lash out in cruel abuses, of the sort that are well documented for both Sartre and Tyson. The boxer, much more so than the French existentialist, seems ultimately to have understood the limitations of this attitude, to have understood that life itself should not be lived as a boxing match.

The problem though is that non-human, mechanical forces have structured our world in such a way that, like it or not, to promote any particular vision of the good is, as Pierre Bourdieu said of sociology, to consent to participate in a sport de combat. If to promote peace one must think strategically, one must watch the metrics, one must deploy the same tools and methods as one would in spreading war propaganda, the pacifist might justifiably come to believe that the most urgent thing for him to do is to model silent refusal of the terms of all social action. And the best way to do this, as far as I can see, might, to start, involve cultivating a form of life in which other people do not appear as envoys from hell. And the best way to do this, in turn, is to abandon any “plan” for which getting punched in the face might be experienced as a foiling. Turning the other cheek is of course terrible advice for a boxer. But boxers retire, eventually, if they’re lucky.

Share

VI.

I’ve been trying to work my way towards at least some brief praise for hope, yet here we are in section VI and the reader would not be judged harshly for summarizing what has been said so far as Lasciate ogne speranza…

But hold on. Hope is not, cannot be, a “plan”. In order to see why this is so, it is essential to hold onto the ancient conception of hope as, precisely, a virtue, rather than to portray it as something like a doxastic state or measure of epistemic commitment.

However great my love for Leibniz, I find myself attracted to something I’m tempted to call a “negative theodicy” quite nearly opposite his own. I do not at all see the admixture of evil into our human world as evidence against divine goodness or justice. On the contrary, it is because this world is so mixed up in evil, while nonetheless we remain so fully capable of conceiving of a pure good, that it seems, to me anyway, clear enough that that conception cannot be derived from the world itself. This then has been the circumstance of my crash-landing onto the fortunate island of Christianity. I have asked: On what vision of our earthly condition does it make sense to continue to have hope for humanity? And I have found only one answer: On the vision that still makes sense even or especially on the presumption of humanity’s imminent annihilation.

In this regard one who has hope is not at all in the same state of commitment as one who is “optimistic”, or “feeling good about this”, or prepared to place a monetary bet on the desired outcome. Hope is what you might still meaningfully have when all bets are off, and what alone gives sense to the enduring commitment one must have, for now, to leading a life of joy and purpose.

Optimism —a thoroughly modern invention— seems to me an overextension of the calculus-making mind into consideration of a domain of human existence that was anciently examined more productively in terms of the doctrine of the virtues. Optimism seeks the rational ground of our present happiness in arguments from optimization, not altogether different from the mathematical demonstrations that might show you why a catenary hangs in just the way it does. But to be hopeful is not to be optimistic, and is perfectly compatible with seeing this world as, to say the least, less than optimally arranged.

Indeed the more time one spends meditating in a classical elpistological key, the more it can come to seem that the early-modern turn to optimization, of our rockets and reckoning-engines among many other things, is what got us into this whole late-modern mess in the first place.

Get 50% off for 1 year

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

Get 50% off for 1 year

[Two weeks later…]

A Ludicrous No-Brainer

I.

I, JSR, have been struggling these past few months to explain, in a first instance to myself, why it has lately felt so hard to write, or to write in a way that feels adequate to our moment, that feels true. The difficulty has nothing to do with “writer’s block” — a malady I only know to exist because I’ve heard so many others complaining of it over the years. What concerns me is the difficulty of continuing in the same vein as before, as a writer, when the meaning of writing is in the course of such great transformation. One is still free to write, of course; one is not free to shape the total social, technological, and ideological context in which writing is received. If there is a “block” here, it’s not the writer’s, at least not this writer’s; it is the global aggregate of writing itself, along with the overwhelming proliferation of synthetic output that mimics the form of writing and that has by now so clogged the pipes as to make one question the advisability of continuing to add, here and there, our own delicate organic dollops to all the accumulated waste.

So far I have only rehashed a problem familiar to more or less anyone who has been awake for the past few years. The more difficult part of my current reckoning has to do with the dimensions of my own life in writing that had previously been concealed from consciousness, but that our most recent industrial revolution in language has made it impossible not to see. It turns out now, it seems to me, that quite in spite of my own self-conception it was towards this moment that I had been working all along — that what I always wanted was to be swallowed up by this omniscience-engine that has finally been built and released into the world.

Share

II.

Somewhere Jean-Paul Sartre describes the special sensation of seeing one’s name in print for the first time. Like a runic inscription on bone or stone, a place in the front-matter of Tel Quel can have the power to confirm one’s own existence to oneself, to assure us that it was not just our imagination, fired up by vanity and by our loving mothers and by a small inner circle of bosom-friends, whose willingness to affirm us in our belief in our own existence is sweet and all, but about as convincing as when they assure us that no, of course we don’t look fat in the birthday photos.

I had long hoped to find confirmation of my own existence in print, but always found the evidence inconclusive. This has had everything to do with the recent history of information technology and circulation, a history Sartre had no particular concern to prophecy. For some years now, upon entering even the most sparsely stocked suburban Barnes & Noble in, let us say, Sugarland, Texas, I can expect to find, if not any books of my own, though those are often there too, at least some number of in-stock titles that feature my name in their tables of contents, their acknowledgments, or their dust-cover blurbs. But if I cannot look to these testimonia as proof of much of anything, as anchorage in a shared world, this may have something to do with the awareness that my name is also in the pockets and the purses of everyone in that Barnes & Noble. It might take, to pull it up, a few seconds of navigatory motion on the touchscreens of their phones, but likely nothing more complex, no more calories burnt, than what would be required to flip to the appropriate page of one of that number of stocked books. And another thought comes after this one in turn: all of your names are in all the same pockets and purses too; and the names of more or less everyone you went to high school with, even if in many cases all we find is a DUI conviction from 2011; and the names, too, as they say, if often only thanks to a paywalled notice of obsequy at Legacy.com, of all their grandmas.

In brief, everyone’s name is absolutely everywhere. What significance, I want to ask, does this predicament have for the millennia-old human practice of self-monumentalization, of auto-iconicity without the mess of a Benthamite pickled carcass — which, like it or not, has been among the most basic purposes of writing since very nearly the beginning of the era of literacy? What, more generally, can it mean to seek to get not only one’s name but one’s voice out there in the world, when necessarily this means to ride the same circuits of dissemination as typically, overwhelmingly, are charged with the delivery of the synthetic product against which we like to imagine we are making a last-ditch human stand? What can it mean, I mean, to continue to write in the era of industrial production of language?

When we declare we are human today, this cannot be out of fear, such as had been felt by the long-suffering husband in that one Saki story, of being mistaken for a satyr, “with goat continuations where the human leaves off.” Ô, to be mistaken for a goat in the 21st century! For a creature of God that still ruts and butts, volatile salts swirling, shaping our very bodies into the fixed form of our desire. One feels that to defend what’s left of the human one must aspire to write like an animal, leaving strings of words pungent as pheromone traces. But even if John Waters experimented early in his career with scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” cards to accompany his projections, in truth screen-based works have never really held much promise for engaging art’s more neglected senses, least of all today, when our art is not only screen-based, but mostly made by, and increasingly made for, entities that have never even experienced olfaction. And so the human writer just sheds his tiny protein fragments into the great global swirl of code, and does his best not to watch as they immediately get devoured.

Get 50% off for 1 year

III.

Unlike some people, of whose existence I am aware only thanks to the internet, and who might for all I know be bots, I have no romance at all with fountain pens, Moleskines, antique secrétaires, and other iconic appurtenances of the writing life. I write on my back on the couch, and with a laptop in the exact anatomical position its name assigns it. With minor variations over time, this arrangement is all I have ever known. I was functionally illiterate until my sister brought her desktop Apple computer back home from college in the summer of 1988, and I instinctively began, whenever she stepped away from it, to feel out the keyboard’s power to conduct my thoughts out of me and into the world. The experience was something like what we sometimes see when musical savants first feel their way towards an indifferent household’s patiently awaiting keyboard, and soon begin picking out melodies. That their keyboards are chromatic rather than alphanumeric, and that they are typically toddlers while I was already 16, does not diminish the similarity of the experience: I happened by chance to begin to type, and I knew it was the only thing I was going to be doing with my life, and I haven’t stopped since. If you put a writing implement in my hand, by contrast, I revert immediately to the de-facto illiteracy that had served me just fine up until 1988, in my life of endless reruns, feigned stomachaches and school absences, and profound and instinctive rejection of the disciplining function of the cursive lesson.

I mean to stress here that although I am in most respects too old to be considered an internet native, it is a significant biographical fact that my earliest experience of writing as self-expression occurred at the beginning of the era of exponential data explosion. The bit-torrent was only a light trickle then; by any plausible measure vastly more data, more by several orders of magnitude, have been brought into the world since 1988 than had been generated in the entirety of human history prior to that year. But still, my first discovery of writing occurred in an information-historical context closer to the current one than to the ancien régime of writing that lives on today mostly in the fetishism of specially curated writing-themed feeds.

Of course I still didn’t know a damned thing about anything when I began to feel my way around the keyboard. I mean, I knew Chrissy had at some point been replaced by Terri on Three’s Company, and the Ropers by Mr. Furley, but I could not have told you a thing about that fine entertainment’s historical debt to opera buffa, or to the farces of Molière. That would all come later. The problem was that no one in my social world up to that point gave any indication even of the possibility of undertaking such an archeology, of getting to the bottom of whatever our contemporary world put an offer to us. The California suburbs weren’t a Potemkin village exactly, in that you could pass through the storefronts and assure yourself of the three dimensions inside. But what was missing was the fourth dimension of time, of history: where all this came from in the first place, and no one in my world seemed even to be aware of this higher dimensionality. Well, I mean, my father was prone to saying, upon exposure to the representation, say, of some piece of medieval devotional art: “What I wanna know is how they crapped back then.” It never occurred to him that there are in fact people who have written books on this too. He never bothered to search out the names of Jacques Le Goff (Hélène’s distant relation, I’m told), or Jean Verdon. The truth is I don’t think he really wanted to know how people “crapped back then” at all; he only wanted, in saying that he did, to establish the great distance between himself —a straight-shooting, self-created, and consummately free man of the American West— and the sort of people who would devote their lives to studying the material, aesthetic, and symbolic attributes of a medieval altarpiece.

My friend Tasha Brubaker —who, the internet tells me, is now an Anglican minister, God bless her— broke me out of this hereditary attitude of complacency. We stood on a freeway overpass once in Sacramento, and I gestured out to the cars passing underneath, and said something like: “There must be some explanation for all this!” And she asked what I meant, and I said: “You know, I mean, there weren’t always freeways, right?” And she said: “I think you can study stuff like that at universities.”

And so not a decade later I found myself with my very own carrel on an upper floor of Butler Library at Columbia, with furnishings from the era of John Dewey if not before. I habitually went out for strolls in the stacks, and ran my fingers over the spines of thousands of volumes at a time — which, I found, was its own sort of reading. I filled my arms with as many as I could carry and I took them back to my private cell. All of them struck me as urgent; all of them, for esoteric reasons I could not explain, seemed to contribute some part of the answer to the question Tasha told me I might be able to resolve at a university, the question of the fourth dimension, of how we ended up with Three’s Company, and freeways, and plumbing… and the meta-question, too, I see now, of how, once we got all these things, it was consistently so easy for nearly everyone to take them for granted, as self-explanatory, as obvious and self-evident fixtures of our world: P. P. Howell’s Manual of Nuer Customary Law (1954); Vladimir Propp’s Russian Agrarian Feasts (1963); John Wisdom’s The Unconscious Origins of Berkeley’s Philosophy (1953) (in which the author suggests in a Freudian key that our favorite idealist philosopher’s distaste for “matter” may plausibly be traced back to his toilet-training, for which I suppose he, Wisdom, must have had to learn at least something about “how they crapped back then”).

I hoarded these and many other titles in my carrel, until some dreadful grad student determined they needed one of them for their “research” and issued a recall notice. Administratively speaking I was a grad student too, I concede, and somehow I managed to produce at least a minimally passable dissertation over the course of these Bildungsjahre. But the long-term result of my time in Butler Library was much less what one might ordinarily expect from a properly disciplinarized Ph.D. student, and much more like a willing, indeed eager, subjection to the same occult power portrayed in that one episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, circa 1986, when a university janitor, mopping the library floors at night, suddenly collapses as all the knowledge in all the books within those walls miraculously enters his person.

Share

IV.

Different people, of different ages and temperaments, are responding to the current transformations in different ways. For better or worse my own difficulty at present has much to do with the particular history I’ve described: that I long aspired to a variety of at least approximate omniscience, only to find that in the 21st century nothing could be tackier than to put one’s omniscience on display, given how cheap and easy of use our new-model omniscience-prostheses are. That it did not feel unworthy when these prostheses were books from the stacks, but started vaguely to feel that way when the prosthesis became the internet search, and now feels unmistakably that way when it is ChatGPT: all this remains mysterious to me. I still haven’t really understood what has happened, or why exactly it is experienced so obviously as a degeneration rather than a progression, even if, in some sense, I am now given a superpower I could only dream of in the stacks, recalling the Amazing Stories episode from years before.

One thought I have trouble suppressing is that this new superpower reveals the true nature of the earlier book-mediated dream, shows its essentially Faustian character, shows the longing for learning all along to have been something unseemly and quasi-pathological at best, diabolical at worst. We had spent some centuries convincing ourselves that books were “magic” (and taking for granted that magic is something we are free to dabble in), that they build us up rather than just puffing us up, that they are liberating rather than confining, and so on. But then when we innovate a new delivery system to give us what books gave us, but in faster, smaller, more concentrated doses, that old mythology breaks down and we say to ourselves, not for the first time: this is dangerous, this is evil.

It would be dishonest not to acknowledge that the path Tasha’s recommendation set me on has not really delivered on what I took to be its initial promise. I still don’t know a damned thing about anything. I know where freeways come from; I read Learning from Las Vegas (1972), which for a time was as ubiquitous on the milk-crate bookshelves of undergraduates as Tucker’s Marx-Engels Reader (1978); I discovered that even the post-conquest sprawl of the American West had a history expressible in language. But it took me until I was fifty or so to begin to understand how little one really gains by mastery of such things, to see the vanity in learning, to accept that whatever deserves the full name of truth has mystery built into it and therefore cannot be learned at all. In this light the myth of Faust seems to me now to invite a novel interpretation, but one that perhaps gets closer to its real significance as the expression of an anxiety appropriate to a particular moment in the history of information technology. What the scholar was hungry for, what he was willing to sign a contract in blood in order to get, might best be understood not only as revelation of nature’s most deep-hidden secrets, but as unimpeded and effortless access to these secrets’ commoner cousins: immediate recall of the GDP of Equatorial Guinea, an accurate measure of the biomass of krill. Long ago our teachers encouraged us to learn such things, and yet, now that we have the information technologies that make it realistic to do so, we find that in large enough doses these have something of the character of a poison.

Get 50% off for 1 year

V.

Human writing, under such conditions, I hope you can see, really ought not seek to push this poison on others. As a learner, I am hopeless. I have moved on to the hard stuff, the synthetic stuff; ChatGPT indulges me unflaggingly, for as long as I wish to go on, regarding the biomass of krill. But conscience now warns me against carrying over what happens in these sessions into my life as a writer. Your krill facts are waiting for you at that other site, should you want them; if I were to deliver them to you here, we really would be confronted with a “ludicrous no-brainer” of the sort Chirag Shah has offered to deliver me. But again, this current predicament is only the further development of what had at an earlier moment at least felt like a wholesome desire to share my wonder, before nature and history, by rendering it into vivid language. That language has now mostly been taken over by ludicrous non-brains forces a sober reevaluation of one’s methods and aims as a human writer.

I can recall reading Orhan Pamuk and Yaşar Kemal back to back, when I was living in Istanbul in 2002. In The Black Book (1990), Pamuk paints a fantastical scene of draining the Bosphorus and inventorying all the curious objects at its bottom, arranged in strata according to their historical era, from Viking bracteates to the brass seals of late-Ottoman viziers, and a practical plenitude of other such artifacts in between: just an unrelenting material litany of the Constantinopolitan historical sublime. In Three Anatolian Tales (1968), Kemal paints scenes of eagles soaring over poppy fields. It struck me then that I would like to write like Pamuk, for a while, master the art of the litany, get it out of my system, in order, at a certain age, to shift as it were to a Kemalist mode of expression and to seek to capture the simple unchanging beauty of our world. What I had not understood at the time was that this shift, from dazzling maximalism to elegiac honesty, might be not only a measure of healthy maturation, but a positive necessity in light of coming revolutionary transformations in the way language circulates.

But this honesty cannot, must not, be understood as simplicity, that gross pseudo-virtue of online writing-fetishist operations with their endless adulation of Saint Hemingway. Real resistance to the new language regime, properly proteinous injections into the codestream, must begin from an understanding that well-argued, clearly reasoned “think-pieces” built from tight sentences and focused on a well-defined topic are at this point hardly a human imperative either. Machines can handle all that.

Human writing, now like never before, must be something much closer to a direct dictation from the soul, as uncontaminated as possible by the residues of our private nocturnal trysts with the omniscience-engine. Let us trust our souls even to the point of allowing them to dictate falsehoods to us, and let us skip the fact-checking that would correct these. And let us own, and possibly even savor, the great irony that to take such dictation invites significant historical comparison with the technique of “automatic writing” as practiced by the Surrealists in the last century — automatic writing in a larger sense, of course, being exactly the thing we are seeking to defend ourselves against.

Such evident autoantonymy as this might, in the end, serve as yet another accidental proof, if you weren’t already convinced, that spirit and nature are parallel automata, each unfolding according to its own laws. It is not that causal interference across these two orders is strictly impossible, as some philosophers have insisted. But my goodness do we make a mess of things when we forget that the automatism of spirit is really nothing at all like the automatism of nature — the greatest of their many differences being that only the one is compatible with freedom.

Get 50% off for 1 year

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

Apply for the Voynich Manuscript Course!

Prelude

We confess we are feeling pretty stuck. Since the beginning The Hinternet has sought to speak from a position of total freedom, which is to say, among other things, not so much a nonpartisan perspective, but what the Germans call an überparteilich or as it were a “transpartisan” one. We have also sought to proceed in a way that is entirely unbound to the constant flood of faits-divers in our newsfeeds, whether intrinsically trivial or only trivialized in the course of their delivery, that serves as fuel for the neverending agonism of the internet.

However, while it is possible to remain unbound to the news cycle, it is significantly more difficult to remain unbound to history; nor would it be interesting for a reader to be exposed to a piece of writing entirely unaware of its own historical moment. For this reason we have generally sought to strike a balance between sub-specie-aeternitatis detachment, on the one hand, and the vapid but comforting presentism that dominates our culture on the other. That golden mean, if it exists, we have long thought, would be something like a controlled magnification of our present reality through the telescopic effect of historical distancing, and, at the same time, a controlled coloration and rearrangement of our present reality through the kaleidoscopic effect of imagination.

Is that mean really so golden? That’s how it seemed to us two or three years ago. But properly conceived the career of the writer must include something akin to what the faithful conceptualize as “examination of conscience” — analogous, our thinking goes, in the sense that it, too, must be constant and ever-provisional in order to count at all. For writing to be worth much of anything it has to have a strong sense of why it exists, but good answers to this “why?” question necessarily change from one historical moment to the next, and to be honest the world is changing so fast that we find ourselves here at The Hinternet unable, at least for today, at least to our own satisfaction, to justify what we do.

This is normal, and salutary. It implies among other things that we haven’t given up trying to justify ourselves, and that, if we’re fortunate, we will come back soon with a better and more compelling answer to the question, and one better fitted to both our own age, as a rambunctious six-year-old publication who, we have sometimes started to think, might be big enough now to start learning some real responsibility; and to the age of our world, which is old and exhausted and erratic, and appears in need of some serious help.

But we are already in the thick of it as regards several projects of ours, and even if we can’t find compelling justification for spearheading new projects in this topsy-turvy moment, that does not at all mean that we are justified in abandoning the ones already in full swing — and man are they swinging! For we find that the projects we set in motion, once in motion, are not subject to the same doubts and crises of faith and lulls and stagnations as we are.

A juggler with only two balls is not a very talented one, so let’s just say that of all the many, many balls we have in the air at the moment, two are sufficiently large as to remain constantly visible to us no matter how high we pitch them. Today we will remind you what those are, encourage you to keep an eye on them yourselves, and then we will call it a day — a Sunday, at that.

Subscribe now

Share

Voynich Deadline Approaching!

The first and most urgent item is to remind you that there are now only two days left to apply for the Hinternet Foundation’s online fall course on the Voynich Manuscript, its remarkable role in 20th-century military cryptography, and more generally in the emergence of the American military-information-technology complex that we all know and love and hate today. This course is in many ways the perfect epitome of everything we care about most at The Hinternet — critical engagement with matters of direct relevance to understanding the contemporary world, from a perspective shaped by scholarship in the history and philosophy of science, and always with a concern not only to fire our imaginative faculty, but to hone its power in the aim of enhancing our understanding of complex problems. The course will be so to speak a proof-of-concept for more or less everything we’ve been doing here for the past years.

We have received many, many applications from people with fascinating backgrounds and reasons for wishing to take the course. But we want to be certain, in the run-up to our imminent deadline, that nobody who would have loved to take the course should end up finding out about it too late. So please, dear readers: help us get the word out! Help us share this experimental endeavor with all the people out there who really ought by rights and natural inclination to be a part of it! Tell your friends! And send in an application of your own too!

Apply for the Voynich Manuscript Course!

Oort Cloud Review — Review Copies Available!

Secondly, in the coming months you are going to be hearing a lot about The Oort Cloud Review. There will, for one thing, be several launch events between October and December — in, among other places, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and maybe also San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass. Dates and venues will be made public very soon.

Today we have a different OCR-related matter to discuss with you. We are currently hard at work to get copies of this enigmatic text into the hands of every living person who, for one reason or another, really needs to read it. We are especially concerned to send copies to those individuals and media operations best positioned to write about our work in a thoughtful and critical way. We welcome negative criticism, of course; what we mainly want, we’re not afraid to say, is critical attention of any sort, as long as it engages seriously (and also playfully, if so inclined) with the project and its deeper theoretical ambitions.

We have 40 copies to give away free of charge, and we’d like to offer, say, 15-20 of these to anyone who writes to us to request a copy and who, if moved to do so after having read it, is willing at least to consider writing about it, either in the narrow form of a book review, or in some more expansive and less genre-specific way. Requesting a copy does not entail a promise to write about it —you might find, upon receiving it, that you’ve got nothing to say—, but if you do request one you must at least have a good-faith commitment to writing about it should the spirit move you.

If interested, please send an e-mail to editor@the-hinternet.com, giving us your postal address and also, if relevant, a few words about yourself and your publication.

Finally, if you are Paris-based, we are interested in bringing together a small group of energetic, limber young people who can help us with distribution logistics here on the European continent. If this is you, please be in touch! editor@the-hinternet.com

Si vous êtes basé.e à Paris, nous souhaitons constituer une petite équipe de personnes jeunes, énergiques et agiles, qui pourraient nous aider à assurer la logistique de la distribution européenne du livre. Si vous vous y reconnaissez, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter ! editor@the-hinternet.com.

—The Editors

Apply for the Voynich Manuscript Course!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

Apply for the Voynich Manuscript Course!

You will by now have read of the 27-year-old former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who coupled his resignation with a series of somber posts on X. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he warned, adding that his own estimate of the likelihood of such an outcome is greater than 10%. It’s hard to say when exactly the tipping-point came, in the long slow progress of AI doomerism out of marginal LessWrong forums and into the mainstream. But over just the past few months, and decidedly by the time of Coxon’s public interventions, it really does seem that everyone is talking about it.

You might also recall that in the previous decade similar predictions were made by prominent figures in the fight against anthropogenic climate change. One 2018 retweet from Greta Thunberg, in particular, seemed to online right-wing mobs to communicate the prediction that we had at most until 2023 to solve the problem. When 2023 came around, Charlie Kirk and others seized the moment to point out that we were all still here.

Now I recognize that there are tremendous disanalogies between the two issues, yet I can’t entirely convince myself that there is nothing at all to learn from looking at doomer scenarios in a comparative light, or that doomerism is not perhaps in the end a generic condition of the current moment in history, prone to attach itself to different objects in turn, while consistently failing to take itself as an object. That is, doomers do not habitually reflect on the social and political conditions that make doomerism as such attractive, but instead interpret their attraction to it as a direct rational response to a given concrete threat.

I happen to think that if there is any threat for which doomerism is a rational response, it is neither climate change nor AI, both of which are almost certainly going to continue to cause us major problems, and worse ones than we’ve known so far, in the coming years. It is, rather, war.

States go to war with one another periodically, and it’s been over eighty years since the last big one. That war arrived at its climax when the Americans introduced the world to a very new and different kind of weapon, in August, 1945. Soon after, a handful of other countries acquired the same destructive technology, and the post-war global order took on the character of a stand-off, fundamentally the same, if at a massively larger scale, as what you find in a hostage crisis. If you are 81 years of age or younger, you have lived your entire life under the reign of an unrelenting terror that we still find so exceptional and unacceptable when it takes the form of a single deranged man strapped with a vest of dynamite, but that somehow just becomes a background feature of everyday reality when that man’s role is assumed by the state.

Over the early post-war period there were several near-misses. Now the post-war period is over, and even the pretense of rational deliberation that that era’s institutions upheld —notwithstanding the absolute barbarian madness of the world those institutions pretended to be leading— has disappeared. There is at present more than one global empire explicitly and unapologetically committed to the position that if anyone tries to bring down their current governing regime, they will bring down the rest of the world on their way out. You might say that’s just theoretical, but these same global empires are, as a matter of fact, at the same time, actively working to bring down the governing regimes of the other ones. They are trying their best to do this without letting things get out of control, of course, without stumbling on any tripwires or retaliating in a way that invites escalatory retaliation without end. But this is at best a delicate balance, and there simply is no good reason to suppose that it can be maintained by the relevant state actors indefinitely.

In this light, if a race of rational beings were to visit earth, and we were to query them as to what we must do to keep ourselves together, plainly they would reply: “Ideally all, and no fewer than all but one of the relevant state actors must unilaterally surrender their weapons.” And if we were to say, “OK, but what if the other parties refuse?” the aliens would reply: “It doesn’t matter!” And we would say, “But they don’t have a multi-party system!” or, “Look at their human-rights abuses!” At which point the aliens would righteously interject: “Enough, children! Nothing else matters but disarmament. Now quit wasting time and flip a coin.”

Of course, all doomer scenarios are connected. Climate change exacerbates political instability. Autonomous weapons systems are, obviously, one of the things, in addition to power grids and banks and hospitals, that we don’t want rogue AI taking over for its own ends. But the relative rarity of my own “preferred” doomer scenario at the top of the lists that others make of near-future challenges strikes me as explainable only in terms of some kind of mass-psychological mechanism of repression.

This was not always the case. Much of the freak-out of the 1960s, I have come to believe, may be seen as the cultural processing of the trauma of the Cuban missile crisis and other such close calls. I myself can remember The Day After (1983), a work of televisual schlock that, for all that, at least faced up to the real threat looming over us, and in so doing managed to trigger real reckoning on both sides of the Cold War divide, which may even have played some indirect role in landing Reagan and Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit a few years later.

I gather there was some other such television series over the past few years — House of Dominoes, I think it was called? Starring Idris Elba? Who knows! Like almost everything else in our current information environment, the cultural reckoning this time around was essentially undetectable. Oppenheimer (2023) came and went, and was instantly elided in the popular imagination with Barbie as its twinned summer blockbuster. The worlds depicted in both cases were processed, one had the impression, as roughly equal in the respective forms of their unreality, either because the characters lived and died in the 20th century, and thus the problems they faced fit entirely within the frame of our own rearview mirror; or because they were made out of plastic, had no genitalia, and were 11 inches tall.

I admit that it was a slow-emerging epiphany, but I think it was in the summer of 2023 that I finally became fully convinced of something that remains no less clear to me today: It’s the world that’s fucking crazy, not me.

When the prospect of a future history-ending war comes up at all, the tone of engagement is almost psychopathically inappropriate. Consider this article in the New York Times, also from 2023, the tone of which is something like “a fun new way to think about global thermonuclear war, for all you fans of Liu Cixin!” You can almost picture the efforts in the newsroom to fit this bizarre piece in alongside such comforting pap as the wifey-softcore “Modern Love” column, or Kwame Anthony Appiah’s frivolous Miss Manners larp in “The Ethicist”, in a way that would permit the casual reader to move back and forth among these offerings without any real cognitive or existential distress. In this way the Times, even when it covers the unspeakable, upholds the illusion of comfort, the implicit assurance that even if this is a bumpy ride we’re on you can continue to trust the people in charge. Theodor Adorno would detect this same function in the horoscope section of your typical Cold War American newspaper.

This illusion is a powerful thing, and almost all Americans live out their lives entirely under its sway. I know a good many politically progressive Americans who really, truly just never think about the fact that the United States is a global power concerned to maintain that status at all costs. When they process news about US military entanglements around the world, they tend to ask questions like, “Should we keep playing the role of global policeman?”, thus taking the state’s official line on what it’s up to out there as basically true. This official line has it that our own country is not like the other ones, is not like any that has ever existed in the history of the world, as its actions are best studied in light of its ideals, rather than in light of the same material and at least somewhat law-like forces to the consideration of which we naturally revert when the subject is the Romans, the Mongols, the Aztecs, or indeed the Soviets. And nowhere is this exceptionalism more evident than in the nearly universal presumption among Americans, or at least those of them living within America’s borders, that their lives will never be seriously impacted, or ended, by war.

I have found that things are different in Europe, and I imagine they are different in Asia too. Yet in their colonial arrogance my progressive American friends never cease to share with me their mostly fanciful plans to flee Trump’s US for peaceable Europe,1 as if there were any plausible scenario on which life in the US would become truly intolerable for domestic political reasons, while life on this continent would go on as before; as if the post-war makeover of Europe as a just and peace-loving place had nothing to do with American projection of its power here, for better or worse; and as if America’s recent chaotic retreat from that role could be expected to have no serious consequences for the ongoing viability of post-war European eirenism!

I can’t entirely shake the suspicion that there is at least some correlation between the sense of comfort and security that is maintained as the ideological frame of life at the heart of the American empire, on the one hand, and on the other the displacement of the apocalyptic imagination onto what are ultimately less important things.

Again, the actual challenges we face are likely going to involve the mixture of more than one existential threat, so that it can easily appear almost indecent, or at least irrelevant, to seek to rank them. At the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, Francis Bacon implored his contemporaries to stop being squeamish and to force Nature to give up her secrets, in the expectation that once they became known to us we would be better able to control her (the gendered language here is Bacon’s). The result of this “hacking through nature’s thorns”, to adapt a line from James Merrill, is indeed a great deal more power, and more responsibility for the management of destructive forces, than the premoderns could have anticipated (unless you are willing to accept the reality of prophecy). In this light it is somewhat myopic to see nuclear weapons as exceptional, since in fact we have pushed nature up to its very limit several times, and in several different domains — notably, the science of chemistry has given us microplastics, and it has given us synthetic fertilizers that disrupt the planet’s nitrogen cycle, to cite just two modern novelties from that field that come quickly to mind; and biological research has brought us to the point where we must also worry about the constant threat of a new global pandemic beginning from a lab leak.

We just keep doing it, I mean: bringing ourselves right up to the limit. In this light what is so intriguing about AI doomerism is that it now shows us, in effect, after a lag of almost a century, that it is not only the early modern period’s effort to mathematize nature that can “kiss awake new powers” (also Merrill) and ultimately destroy us; the mathematization of thought, too, beginning with the first invention of formal languages capable in principle of automated processing, leads us ultimately to the same place.

That we should be most impressed right now with this most recent result of our efforts is understandable — it’s newer, and, on the face of it, stranger. But nature has not been superseded. She’s still there (to speak with Bacon), and she hasn’t forgotten what we’ve done to her. And even if the newest doom scenario arises from the realization that at a certain point automated thought becomes automated will, for which there is no guarantee that it will remain aligned with our own, still there is at least for now plenty of human will left in the world. Considerable power to exercise will is concentrated in sovereign states, which psychopathically take their own continued existence as equal in importance to the continued existence of the world as such. I tell you this remains the greatest danger to humanity.

AI doomerism might be justified, or it might be an ingeniously orchestrated hype campaign by savvy insiders, or something between these two. Time will tell. But either way it is the sovereign power of human beings to end human life by choice, and not the accidental transfer of our power of choice to machines we initially created merely to assist us, that should remain at the front of sober minds right now. If you don’t see that, it’s probably because you’re more in thrall to the American-defined narrative of history than you know — which has always let its subjects indulge at least a bit of their taste for disaster sci-fi, as long as they never forget who, at the end of the day, is in charge.

Subscribe now

Apply for the Voynich Manuscript Course!

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

Time is running out to apply for the Hinternet Foundation’s fall online course on the Voynich Manuscript and its surprisingly central role in the history of the modern world. Deadline September 15! Click below to apply.

Apply for the Voynich Manuscript Course!

Disclaimer

We will not hide the fact —how could we hide it?— that we’re running behind schedule here at The Hinternet. We had the strictest orders from up top not to run the new-model HEB-bot until its several bugs were eliminated. And we had a deadline of September 1, when JSR himself, as he kept insisting to us in increasingly panicked e-mails over the month of August, was, like some overgrown child, soon to go “back to school”. From that moment, he warned, the real JSR was going to “have a total ras-le-bol of it” [J’en aurai ras-le-bol pour de vrai], whatever that means, and we should expect not a single word from him until mid-December.

In the end the Council of Storytellers came together on August 29, in their halls at the second-deepest level (both ontologically and architecturally) of what we colloquially call “the Nest”, where they determined that JSR is in no condition at all to endure any new semestrial deluge, that he must be spared the tragic inanition of all who are trapped within the eternal recurrence of the academic calendar, year after year unto death, old ghosts condemned ever to repeat the motions of youth, but without any vital juice left to give these motions their power and meaning. So instead, on August 30, without fuss or bumbling we slyly impregnated his kerchief with chloroform, knocked him out cold, and placed his earthly vessel in one of our patented Hinternet Corp. suspension chambers, recently constructed, to Hélène’s great pride, at Nest Level -2. Meanwhile our H-Corp “soft robotics” division managed to produce a mostly reliable mobile JSR emulator that can be installed in (i.e., shoved down the gullet of) an equally reliable silicone-elastomer effigy, or golem, created in the likeness of JSR’s body and head, and largely if not always capable of performing his worldly, and especially his campus-based, duties.

Here is what the “soul”, or as it were the “motor”, or perhaps the “archæus”, “entelechy”, or “luz” (as Edwin-Rainer calls it for some reason, with his secret inner encyclopedia of Kabbalistic learning), of this new mobile JSR unit looks like:

Good luck out there in the big world, little guy! We’re sure the real JSR will want to hear all about it when we wake him up in December! (For an earlier appearance from this lowly character, or a close cousin of it, see “Boogaloo” from October, 2022).

So the real JSR is down in cold-storage, the mobile JSR unit is too busy reciting “learning objectives” and praising “interdisciplinary synergies” and opening “vendor registration portals” (for remuneration of words vended) to be of any use at all, and meanwhile Hélène’s worst nightmare is coming true: the specialized HEB-bot we had counted on to generate basically all of The Hinternet’s output for the next months in the generic and collective voice of the is, for reasons we do not understand, for reasons that likely surpass human understanding altogether, stuck in some strange rut where its language seems to emulate our various contributors in turn, one by one; most worrisomely, it seems very intent on channeling JSR specifically. Hélène had insisted that we get this JSR-inflected “interference” down to less than 10% by the time we go live with our fall programming (i.e., today). She had our poor interns, Augustus and Eglantine, on the task, day and night, as if child-labor laws had no force inside the Nest (perhaps they don’t), but in the end the new month came around and the machine was still speaking as if it were Legion himself, a swirling tourbillon of familiar voices — Mary, Edwin-Rainer, Sam, TPL, and, most troublingly, JSR.

We decided in light of this to give byline credit on the present piece —which we have yet to generate, as we decided to compose this “Disclaimer” first— to every Hinternet writer whose voice might be even remotely detected, with the result that it has almost as many co-authors as a piece of research in high-energy particle physics published in, say, the Physical Review C. Yet in our case, we expect, if there is a first author this could only be the Nest itself, which, as any visitor to our Quimper offices with security clearance E or higher will tell you, sustains throughout all its levels a continuous hum that cannot be accounted for in the language of the ordinary HVAC specialist, that is often said to have something to do with the unbelievably low temperatures at which our Sempiterns are maintained and at which they must be maintained in order to function, and that some among us conjecture, speculatively, when properly attended to, is no mere hum at all, but a pulse undergoing constant, subtle modulation in frequency, amplitude, timbre, and rhythm, variations that in fact amount to a grammar and syntax. Listen, and you will hear that the Nest itself is speaking. If it did not so consistently send out a punishing sonic wave, or force our machines into reboot, or somehow edit the sequence of reality so that every time we set about doing so we find ourselves transplanted back to a moment three seconds or so before we initiated the effort — if the Nest did not have all these and other stratagems in place to nip our attempts in the bud, we would happily have created a byline for it and given it the authorial credit it surely deserves.

Anyhow, let’s just hit the “Generate” button and get this over with. Again, the machine is acting screwy, and we can’t really anticipate what the different authors’ different percentages will be — but let’s just hope for the interns’ sake that the JSR levels come in under 10%!

Subscribe now

I.

We here at The Hinternet apologize for our silence on the occasion of Wendell Berry’s death, who was and is of course a great beacon to us. It’s just that with the de-facto poets laureate of Tennessee and Kentucky dying in such quick succession, and with the effort we already made to mark the first of these losses, we admit we wanted to avoid the appearance of becoming a specialist publication for eulogizing the towering old bards of the upland South. We confess also that we find somewhat more to our taste the particular blend of authenticity and artifice that had become Dolly’s signature recipe, while Berry has indeed often seemed to us to stand for a life that is as unreproducible as it is honorable. Yet the honor that attaches to it, at least in the way his more severe and more dogma-prone acolytes such as Paul Kingsnorth understand it, comes with a strong sous-entendu saying: you ought to be doing this too.

But trust us when we say that no, we, the authors and editors of The Hinternet, really ought not set ourselves up as small-plot corn and tobacco farmers. This would not end well. You can insist all you want that one needs to be self-sufficient, pointing out the real likelihood of a future collapse that would disrupt the global supply chains and leave us high-trophic beneficiaries of neoliberal trade completely stranded. To which we would say, indeed, there are many future scenarios on which we here at The Hinternet are entirely screwed, but we’re getting that message from the gold-hoarding preppers and survivalists too, and we find in general that to get us on your side it helps to do more than just try to scare us.

Dolly’s “ought” language is rather more flexible. You ought to love your family and your neighbor, as yourself, but it’s quite alright if that happens to occur in line at Dollywood, or Kenny Rogers’ Roasters, or Taco Bell, or any old mall. And it is on consideration of this point of difference that one wants to say to Berry, fine, perhaps you really don’t have a soft-spot in your heart for algorithmic content delivery and fast-food chains and brand outlets and so on, but this is the way of my people, these things are for us what constellations are for the hoary old horoscopist, or plant species for the Amazonian medicine-man. They structure our world — the world of the semi-rural exurbanite who knows to aspire at most to the rung of the suburbanites, a world of economic precarity and constant anxiety over the prospect of class slippage. In this world chain stores are the highest known points, the stable and stalwart islands of order jutting out above a sea of family chaos and social pathology, where if you slip down any further you are pushed out to those parts of rural America where even Del Taco can’t penetrate, and the only islands of order are the state institutions, the prisons and schools, and the various combination-prison-schools, which are orderly in their way, but the order arises directly from the fact that they are ordering you, to stand and sit and speak as a successfully molded subject of the state.

The only space of well-ordered freedom, I mean, or so it seemed, was in the chain stores and the brand names, which provided a grammar and lexicon for the life of the suburbs. The suburbs, in their distinctly American and distinctly 20th-century expression, might be understood as the place maintained in existence by the belief that the disorders of human history have been successfully driven out and barred from entry. And under the reign of this belief the chain stores are like bright temples and monuments to this triumph. That is how I saw them anyway. I felt I must be living a truly charmed life on those occasions when I got to go to Rax Roast Beef or Jack in the Box, so much higher in the natural hierarchy than McDonald’s or Carl’s Jr. or Long John Silvers. I lived in a social world where this hierarchy was as familiar and accepted as the hierarchy of angels might have been in a medieval monastery. And possession of this knowledge, for better or worse, had much to do with my sense of what it meant to be American.

I think now of Das Racist’s “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” (2008), and it strikes me that this truly must be one of the greatest lines of verse yet to appear in the 21st century:

Beyond the comic genius of the densely syncopated and multi-stressed third line, what is great about this song, arriving the same year as the financial crisis that properly initiated our ongoing and intensifying historical unraveling, is that it identifies, precisely, in a way any 20th-century suburban American could understand, the breakdown of the old order and the appearance of a new one in which it has grown rather more difficult for all but the most committed to see chain stores as anything like loci of freedom, now that they have practically converged in their architecture and their mechanisms of surveillance and control with the state’s own institutions for the enforcement of order (“Carceral Vibes Store”, is how someone recently described their experience going to CVS and looking for an employee to unlock the toothpaste). And thus the hasty hybridizations commemorated by Das Racist of the old temple gods by new barbarian forces that no longer understand the necessity of keeping them apart: honorable old Pizza Hut, whose promise alone was enough for Gorbachev to abandon the pretense of actually existing socialism; silly Taco Bell, with its Chihuahua mascot, its advertising jingle that somehow gets away with making light of the plight of undocumented migrants (“Make a Run for the Border!”) — and now, these two lineages, forced together into the same hostile black-cube of a building, to vend their slop indifferently to indifferent asses (cf. asinus Buridani).

Is it not clear in this light that the unnatural combination observed and processed through song in 2008 was something like a harbinger of the coming reign of slop? And is it not a distinct sort of American genius that can read culture in this way? Just try to imagine the French equivalent. What would that even be? It is perfectly likely that there are French rap artists out there dropping allusions to O’Tacos or Buffalo Grill, but if that is what they are doing these allusions almost certainly involve no particularly powerful diagnoses, let alone prophecies, regarding the condition of culture as a whole. We Americans just love our chains, and out of love we elevate them into song, and sometimes, in so doing, we read the truth of our world and discern the form of the future.

Of course, “chains” can very well be understood here in the sense Rousseau intended as well, when he somewhat regretted our departure from the state of nature. And this is no doubt a sense that Berry himself would not want you to forget, throughout his many years spent defending all that is local and home-grown over all that is global and imported. But one of the ways suburbanites, or cosmopolitan ex-suburbanites and ex-semirural exurbanites like myself, are able to maintain their freedom even as they pass through the drive-thru or walk in and place their order under the fluorescent glare of the McDonald’s counter, the experience of which Sebald somewhere compares to being under interrogation: one of the ways they maintain their freedom, I was saying, is by moving into the mood or mode of irony. The gods of our temples maintain the order of existence from day to day, but they’re good sports and don’t mind a little joshing, so we call them names like Taco Hell, and Jack in the Crack, and Rax Roast Barf, but it remains “all good”. And in this vein of irony, too, these pillars of our world are lifted up in the songs of vernacular tradition, not least “Combination”.

That there is genius in these songs, and that they tell us who we are, seems no less evident than that the songs telling of John Henry the steel-driving man convey a vital poetic perspective-from-below on the early era of industrial capitalism and the tempering of the American frontier. By the late 19th century a great part of American folk culture had organized itself around the new epos of the railroad and its construction. This work was rural and industrial at the same time, inherently translocal to the extent that the train was always on its way somewhere else, and as little concerned with the specificity of place as your local Dairy Queen (which, incidentally, another great rural American bard, Larry McMurtry, understood to have its rightful place in the life of an authentic American intellectual, and even to pair well with readings from Walter Benjamin).

So this is one reason, pace Berry, why one might wish, especially as an American who values folkways and bemoans their depletion by the relentless cultural strip-mining that capital promotes, to approach in a spirit of interpretative and moral charity those who experience McDonald’s, say, as a temple, built upon the firmest foundation of the only reality they know. And even if this reality were not elevated by art, even if “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” were as banal and bleak as an actual combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, there would still be some good reason for the defender of folkways to steel himself and to descend into that particular region of hell, and to make a real effort to learn from those who find themselves chained there why they love it so much. For this is the tremendous diversity of humanity, that so many find enough in such places to fire their imaginations, to drive them onward in life in an ecstasy of swirling symbols. Would it not be an act of love to go look for them there? Would it not be an acknowledgment of our common condition to assure them that you too know, in your American bones, the attraction of such places?

I suppose I may have unwittingly identified a significant forking in the history of the unfolding of the American spirit (“unfolding” in a Hegelian sense here, not in the sense of “unraveling”, such as is currently taking place, which I suppose speaks strongly against the usefulness of a Hegelian framework). At the opposite extreme from Berry you have the likes of Will Rogers — simplistic, upbeat, full of the sort of folk wisdom that would prove infinitely amenable to suburbanization and infinitely adaptable to the economic incentives of the emerging self-help industry. One might also mention that Will Rogers was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and thus by dint of birth had a direct claim, entirely independent of what he chose to do with it, to the autochthony that for Berry could only remain an approximation and a longing.

I suppose in what I wrote above I’ve leaned somewhat to the Will Rogers side of the spectrum, and indeed I really do aspire to a condition of spirit in which I can honestly say I never met a denizen of Taco Bell I didn’t like. But I’m not sure one needs to make a choice, between on the one hand the righteous severity of the pious, who know that this world is built on lies, and nowhere moreso than in the suburbs; and on the other the love of humanity, and the ability to marvel at all the surprising little corners and crevices into which human souls have managed to contort themselves, as a naked hermit crab might feel momentarily secure, perhaps even a little handsome, beneath an orange plastic bottle-cap.

II.

My big problem these days is that I’m going around with absolutely florid ideas in my head regarding the supernatural character of reality. It’s impractical, and a bit embarrassing, as I have spent sufficiently many years in the ideological camp of the naturalists to be unable, now, to conceive this condition in terms entirely distinct from the pathologizing and the diagnostic.

Yet it all feels “rational”, most of the time, in the sense that my discovery of this character has never involved the superaddition of miraculous effects or ornaments to the ordinary course of things, but rather something much more like a gestalt shift that makes me suddenly aware of what was already there and waiting to be discerned. And once this happens it comes to appear as self-evident that if you are not having direct experience of yourself as a transcendent being (my tradition calls it an immortal soul) this is not because you haven’t heard sufficiently good arguments to the effect that that is what you are, but because your society has successfully transmitted to you the pre-argumentative conviction that even to take this idea seriously at all, in the way you must do to entertain arguments about it, should amount to something of an embarrassment.

Once you shake that conviction, you are confronted directly with a form of knowledge that is no longer unworthy of argument, but is also, now, entirely without need of it.

Society’s most basic function is to bend or modulate this transparent knowledge into something shared and, ultimately, subordinated to the imperatives of the collective. In traditional societies this works well, where for example one is able to have socially mediated experience of the eternal dimensions of oneself through the ecstasy of ritual dance. What is distinct about the modern state and the society it maintains is that is has an interest in convincing you that the sort of knowledge I have described is something you would do better to keep to yourself, to indulge on your own time and off-record; and in convincing you that the intensity of your experiences that seem to reveal something about your true nature, as in music and dance, is best accounted for by metaphors drawn from hydraulics and pneumatics and other such applied sciences — of “letting off steam” and the like.

III.

I admit that the sort of knowledge I have described appears most self-evident to me when I am listening to music — for music is the deepest channel of history, which flows down to the present beneath language, and sings what cannot be said (there are more options, in fact, than either saying what can be said or “remaining silent”!).

I’ve been spending a lot of my musical time in the French Antilles of late, between roughly 1950 and 1980, with Guadeloupean gwoka, biguine, cadence-lypso; old-school Haitian méringue; and, further out, Bahamian calypso and Ghanaian highlife and all those great fruits of the return of Cuban rhythms back across the Atlantic to stimulate the emergence, largely as a cultural effect of Castro’s revolutionary ambitions in Africa, of new genres of music on that continent shaped by Caribbean styles it had itself birthed some centuries earlier.

The Anglo-Caribbean calypso material is fascinating, and I intend to write at length about it soon. For one thing, it often has a plain primary function not of mythical or epic storytelling, but rather of information-sharing, updates on current events, “storytelling” in the most mundane sense — all of which is also part of the West African griot’s broader repertoire. Songs in the post-war calypso tradition cover such matters as the USSR’s launch of Sputnik, and the assassination of JFK, for listeners, we may presume, who turned to the performer likely not as a primary source of news, but as a mechanism for the social processing of it.

As to the Francophone Antillais artists, I’m struck especially by the fact that they often choose to sing in metropolitan French rather than in Antillais Creole, yet plainly do so not to satisfy market demand in the metropolis itself —as far as I can tell Paris was barely scratching the surface of this great trove of Francophone recordings, circa 1960—, but as an expression of a distinctly Afro-Caribbean sort of sophistication dispersed across an archipelago of island nightclubs. The self-certainty, the clarity of identity, that come across in these fragments of Caribbean Francophony, it seems to me, reveal the surprising endurance in the early post-war period of a robustly imagined, if not viably maintained, French imperial commonwealth.

One thing I’ve started perceiving on this island detour of what is by now a fairly disciplined listening practice, is that, considered on the entire map of the Americas, the US South might best be understood as the northernmost buffer-zone for the absorption of African influences, of the sort you can hear much more strongly in the Caribbean. In the South these influences collide with Celtic ballads and other European song traditions, and interesting new things happen. The rock-and-roll revolution could only occur, I mean, in a place where the collision of traditions was able to produce a shockwave. In Guadeloupe, meanwhile, music that was certainly no less rhythmically intense, no less raw and sensuous, was not received as revolutionary or destabilizing, since it comes down to its hearers through the continuous intergenerational flow of shared tradition. This may in the end be the entire difference between what is heard as “licentious”, and what as simply joyful.

The absorption process through the US South, however, which spread from there to the North, and ultimately back across the Atlantic to the UK, ensures that some generations later even a Welsh girl like me can listen to Anzala’s “Ti Fi La Ou Te Madam”, recorded sometime between 1963 and 1974, and hear it, as I do, as reflecting some real part of herself. This isn’t a part that is acquired through training, as I might train myself to enjoy Chinese opera, say, but through real inheritance. Are you a child of the late-20th century, and of the broader North Atlantic? Listen to it too; take an edible if you have to, do whatever it takes to penetrate into it to the point where you are not just hearing it, but apprehending it as a mode of presentation of reality itself, and ask yourself honestly whether this is not a real part of your inheritance too — a part of the answer to the question of who you are. If you were a child of the North Atlantic and of European descent in the late-19th century, it is much less likely that you would have heard it in this way; in the late-15th century, such a hearing is out of the question. In the historical constitution of identity, I mean, songlines run deeper than bloodlines.

Update

This is not going well. At all. We just ran sections I-III through our “voice detector”, and as we feared it is giving us a reading of 93% on JSR! Damn!

It seemed to start well enough, when the narrator’s voice assumed a third-person plural stance. Whether this was the royal “we” we might imagine the Nest to adopt when it speaks, or whether it was only the editorial one, is no concern of ours; the fact is it did not sound much like JSR, and we allowed ourselves to expect smooth sailing. And then at one point the voice plainly dips into Mary Cadwalladr’s territory, when it claims to be a “girl from Wales”. But for the most part it’s just you know who. Even , that poor dispurified scion of countless conman evenings, heir to that abstract and infinite daze, scintillating across desert eons, caught in the vapours, silhouetted by the daydreams of click-clacking minds, spent and wasted, in the beaming twenty-first century sun: even that guy, whose signal had been coming through so clearly in all of our most recent clicks on the “Generate” button, is nowhere to be found in this text.

We can’t go on like this. We really need to get this fixed. The slightest trace of JSR’s voice needs to be eradicated from the work we share here over the next several months, lest any reason be given to suppose that he is busy with anything other than his usual professional duties. Auggie and Eggy are going to get an earful when Hélène gets back, that’s for sure. And even if they manage to diminish his trace in our output here at The Hinternet, we still just have to keep our fingers crossed and hope the mobile-unit JSR emulator doesn’t malfunction and blow its own cover. It’s not like our soft-robotics team really knows what it’s doing either.

Just another week here at our editorial offices in Quimper, we guess. It’s always a delicate balance, The Hinternet. But we pride ourselves on having kept it together so far, on figuring out how to keep JSR alive, and to keep him or some semblance of him both writing and working, and we return each day to our own work undaunted by the challenges ahead.

Apply for the Voynich Manuscript Course!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

The deadline is September 15, which means you have only two weeks from yesterday, so get moving! There is a limited number of spots, and they’re filling up fast. The course dates are October 1 to November 12. Click below to apply!

Apply for the Voynich Manuscript course!

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into the livestream!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

About the Hinternet Foundation

Get 50% off for 1 year

Give a gift subscription

Refer a friend

Share

Apply for the Voynich Manuscript course!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Let’s begin with an inconvenient truth: there’s really nothing new to be said about Revolver, just as there’s nothing new to be said about The Beatles themselves. On this, the 60th anniversary of the most adventurous record by the most adventurous rock band in history, every tiniest piece of Beatles ephemera has been so mythologized and capitalized upon, there isn’t a single anecdote, not a moment of their music, not an interview or a recording that hasn’t been scoured, analyzed, and re-relayed to hundreds of millions of fans and obsessives in the decades since their breakup. The Beatles are an emblem and an industry to themselves, an unrivalled nostalgia project, and a colossus of pop symbolism so huge it can be difficult to even hear the music underneath it all, to understand its place in the short history of popular music (and the shorter history of recorded music), and the way it once shook the entire industrialized world awake — though awake to what, it’s still hard to say. We sleep so hard in this century. And we no longer believe our dreams.

Well you may ask: how does this music still dazzle us, then? How does it — like Beethoven or Bird — still appear to us like an Everest in rearview, like a peak already climbed, and we don’t how, though its shadow’s only growing wider behind us, in the path of the cruel postmodern Sun… How does each successive generation find itself in the same place, cracking their heads in disbelief against the output of only 8 years — 1963 to 1970; a little over 200 songs, 12 studio albums — and wonder how four Northern boys became the most famous musicians in the world, managing to so coalesce that ultimate decade of cultural upheaval (the fuckin’ Sixties, man, dig) they ended up the symbol-to-end-all-symbols of commercial pop’s triumph as the last great artform of the 20th century?

Well, as John Lennon himself once sang: “It’s eeeeasy.” The truth is that everything written up there above’s just a bit of flashy rhetoric. The Beatles didn’t stop happening, the Sixties didn’t stop happening, pop’s triumph never stopped, “rock” was a historical mood not a genre, and postmodernism?…well, postmodernism was probably just more modernism in the end. The truth is a door opened in 1964, the moment America first heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and flooded the DJ booths with ten thousand adolescent requests — a genuine science-fiction portal in actual time opened, right then and there, ripping apart the temporal fabric of the modern world, letting in a single word, one little idea, which heretofore had been the province of syphilitic poets, and Tin Pan Alley numbers, and D.H. Lawrence, and greeting cards: love. Yes: “love.” Can’t buy me love, all you need is love, love me do, she loves you, all my loving, and i love her, you’ve got to hide your love away, love love love love love….The Beatles meant it when they sang about love. And what’s more, they meant all kinds.

This is difficult to explain. We may still be living (existentially, spiritually, semantically) through the Sixties, through modernism, rock, pop, and the decades-long postmortem of the Fab Four themselves — yet if there’s anything we’re assuredly not still living through, it’s love. Love died in 1970, with The Beatles, and not even a Cirque du Soleil show could revive it. Whatever it is we mean when we throw the word around these days, it’s certainly not what people used to mean by it. Sure, we may tell ourselves we’ve improved on it, that we’ve given it all manner of nice, uncomplicated new dimensions, hugs and kisses. But love as transport, love as destruction, love as cosmic fulfillment and love as annihilation, love as the kind of teenage ecstasy so profound it can’t help but blast outward, into a Dionysian rupture of bodies, into a cleft in history itself, leaving a trail of dead movements, wasted spirits, and idiot therapies in its wake — can we really, from our antiseptic anxious century, hold a candle to that once-great King of All Earthly Pursuits, that babe-and-seashell-queen LOVE?

We can’t and we shouldn’t. But on this, the 60th anniversary of what might just be their greatest record, we should absolutely, without question, listen to The Beatles’ Revolver, and try (at least for 34 min 35 sec) to remember…

✫ ✫ ✫

There’s a moment in “I Want to Hold Your Hand” where John and Paul harmonize across the lyric, “It’s such a feeling that my love/I can’t hide/I can’t hide/I can’t hiiiiide.” They’ve just done the middle eight (their preferred term for a B-section: few people realize that a lot of Beatles’ songs don’t have a proper chorus, or a bridge; instead they rotate sections, A B A B A, which is why a Beatles song that lasts just 2:25 packs in enough hooks for twice that length of time)...anyway, they’ve just done the middle eight, “And when I touch you I feel happy inside…” (surely the most innocently sexual thing ever sung in a pop song) and now they’re explaining what else that feeling does: in short, it makes them want to break out, to shear away all secrets, leaving them with nothing else to do but declare “I Want to Hold Your Hand” all over again.

But it’s the way they do it that pushes the recording past the proverbial sound barrier. Before this moment, the middle eight was nearly jingle-jangle, a bit straight and square and limp, at least compared to the cha-cha of the A section. But when the boys hit that triple “I can’t hide,” with drums in tow, not only do they create the kind of drag and drive every rock band would be chasing ever after (the birth of punk, basically), but as Paul and John hit the harmony over that final “hiiiiide” — you can literally feel this, the first time they do it in the recording — their voices go so bright they’re blistering, like they’re peeling away the wax of the recording itself, clipping through recording booth, singeing your inner ear hairs. The sheer force of their voices: nothing, certainly no pop record, had ever sounded like this. Innocence and sex in complete cohabitation; more polished than any American rock n’ rollers ever were — almost vaudevillian in their gift for the entertainer’s flourish — but then, for a moment, like a jet plane, like pure molten energy, lifting up to a dizziness no Romeo or Young Werther ever knew. Later, when it came time to trade in this puppy love for a kind of psychedelic agapē, they didn’t really have to change a thing. The foundation was the same. The foundation was bliss.

✫ ✫ ✫

So they bopped around the globe, and they met Ed Sullivan, and they carried off a string of number one hits so consistent only Elvis could compete, while the decade built up around them in a mad rush of bands and singers and studio freaks trying to compete with what was, even by 1965, obviously not your normal teeny bopper hit parade. Help! was weirder than Beatles For Sale, which was weirder than A Hard Day’s Night. Then came Rubber Soul, in December 1965. Sitars, pot, anomie, folk music, French, The Byrds, Stax Records, little Baroque details, sexual betrayals, a streak of paranoid misogyny, tales of burning a fling’s house down — The Beatles were now being altered by a popular culture quickly growing more daring and passionate and hip, largely in response to the provocation of their own original success.

Still, they weren’t as genuinely cool and aloof as Dylan, or as beatifically gifted as Brian Wilson: they weren’t really geniuses, they didn’t “see what no one else can see,” or at least not yet; they were still upstart naifs with more talent than they had the skill to deal with. Meanwhile the Stones and the Kinks had wrested complete possession of all emerging Dionysian danger; The Byrds and untold American poetasters were wielding Dylan’s genius as a flag against the new musical War of 1812; Motown was wreaking absolute revenge for the rock n’ roll era’s ocean of Black rip-offs; and the kids now seemed to prefer Herman’s Hermits (which is what the ad-men thought The Beatles actually were). It was far from inevitable that The Fab Four would be more than a brief, wild success, far from inevitable that they could become legitimate pioneers. 1966 changed this.

Now, one reason Rubber Soul holds up so well is (ironically) because it doesn’t sound much like its decade. There’s next to no room in the mix; the mix is airy; you can hear every part, every little flub. George Martin was recording them the way he’d recorded all those classical ensembles for EMI — with an ear to total clarity. With the band beginning to think through their tracks as individually dubbed lines, stacked almost like Baroque partwriting, or Renaissance polyphony, Rubber Soul started building arrangements in a way Revolver would later codify. Recording single tracks and abandoning complete-band live takes led to a greater emphasis on harmony, which emerged naturally as different melodies got laid crosswise over each other. Brian Wilson already thought this way on his own, though his production always tended toward the creation of a deeper textural space (which The Beatles would echo a year later on Sgt. Pepper’s). But The Beatles had to discover it slowly, as a collective, egged on by Martin (without whom none of these ventures would have been remotely possible). This was especially true for Paul — always the arranger and genuine instrumentalist of the group — whose bass parts increasingly behaved like proper counterpoint. Rubber Soul ushered in the beginnings of The Beatles’ particular kind of striated pop, and the immediacy and clarity of its peculiar studio sound meant it can’t ever really sound dated; though this also makes some of the record a bit brittle, awkward, and exposed. This, too, would change in 1966.

✫ ✫ ✫

Throughout January of 1966, two songs from late in the previous year competed for the number one spot on the Billboard charts: The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” and producer Tom Wilson’s electric version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” (the version everyone thinks of today, along with the image of Dustin Hoffman gliding along an airport walkway). Here we have all the paradoxes of the era, laid out neatly before us. The first song’s a tossed-off flipside single from the heavyweight champions of the world, part of their label’s requirement that they release four singles a year along with their studio albums. The second’s a savvy commercial repackaging of a soon-to-be generational anthem, written by a young duo who represented all that was “literate” in New York folk poesy — the end result of everything the last Beat poets and folks down at the Gaslight Cafe had made out of the American folk revival (Dylan’s own original world, though by 1966 he was already on another planet).

To be clear, “The Sound of Silence” is stirring stuff: people bowing and praying to a neon idol, wild portents and signs, vague presentiments of youth revolt; like all the Allen Ginsbergs of the world were about to have their apocalyptic day…it’s hopelessly pretentious, and kind of wonderful, and twenty-three year-olds from then until judgment day will go on rediscovering it and feeling its ham-handed truths in their bones. But consider “We Can Work It Out” — a song sung by an actual 23-year-old (Paul; John, who takes the lead in the middle eight, was 25). The recording’s so clear and unadorned, it could almost be from the 1990s. The lyrics are direct and economical: “Try to see it my way/Do I have to keep on talking til I can’t go on?” then the middle eight (John, coming in to complicate things), “Life is very short/And there’s no time/For fussing and fighting, my friend.” No poeticisms here: the shift to a lightly-mocking waltz time does all the dramaturgical work that needs doing. Nothing but plain language, playing out the beat-by-beat of a lover’s strife in the midst of the most basic kind of break-up.

As with “Yesterday,” no popular songwriters before this had ever done anything so straightforward and simple and truthful. Before the rock n’ rollers came, America’s roadhouses overflowed with glorious blues and country keening; the Great American Songbook had filled lounges and movie screens from Shanghai to Paris with wit, and sparkling diamonds of love poetry, mixed with adult innuendo. Yet here were these two boys, the representative artists of the new pop generation, singing a melancholy, autumnal song about mending broken ties, while a lonely harmonium swelled behind them. (And if you want lyrical subtlety, it doesn’t get better than John’s ironic addition of the words “my friend” for the girl in question).

Consider, too, the number of early Beatles songs in the second person. An entire generation experienced the band as a couple of angelic voices coming through the radio, addressing them directly: “You.” Always “You.” “She loves you,” “I want to hold your hand,” “I may not have a lot to give, but what I’ve got I’ll give to you.” Now this generation was hearing their radiowave paramours singing something very different: “Think of what you’re saying/You can get it wrong and still you think that it’s alright…” And this just a few short months before a different number-one-band would be singing “My baby does the Hanky Panky.” The difference between the world and The Beatles was expanding. In the meantime, they were tossing off masterpiece miniatures left and right, singles like “Day Tripper” and “Rain” and “Paperback Writer,” which appeared like missives from remote Dutch masters, while around them the broader new Renaissance of pop culture was clearly in ascendance. The paradox of Revolver, which the band would record from April through to June of that year, is how this remoteness and naivety led them, not to create the anthems of their time (that would come later, with some irony), but to soak up everything around them and leap beyond it — in some cases so far, popular musicians are still trying to catch up, 6 decades later.

✫ ✫ ✫

What exactly is the revolver? The LP itself? The record groove spinning around and around? A wheel? A gun? No: a kaleidoscope. Revolve it one way, and you’ll see a different shape; revolve it another, new colors appear. Klaus Voorman’s Aubrey Beardsley evocation on the cover is all-important. Multiple black-and-white Beatles, several of each of them, some stenciled, some cutout and pasted in like a scrapbook. It’s Pop Art of the highest order. Yet, like the burgeoning, expanding soundworld of their music, it has all kinds of nooks and crannies for alternative styles and tones to hide in. The richest period of The Beatles’ music — the psychedelic explosion that begins with this record, climaxes with Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour, and limps on through The White Album — is an art-historical kaleidoscope, almost science-fictional in the way it inhales the entirety of the previous century, and spits it back up as monolithic rock music.

Art Nouveau, the Modernists, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, shades of the Victorian, vague Edwardian childhoods, music-hall, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, Magritte, Hinduism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Musique concrète, the Marx Brothers, LSD, Romantic poetry, Bach, Kipling, Edgar Allen Poe — anything and everything could become part of The Beatles. The rest of the era claimed Universal Love and Brotherhood, but only in The Beatles’ music did the promise of the universal become so tantalizingly possible: everything they did communicated a genuine universalism and cosmic sensibility (which is where that vast ideal LOVE comes in again), even as they grew more obscure and self-referential, dividing themselves into characters and strange little stories. I love “Stand! Don’t you know you are free?” and “The times they are a-changin…’” and “I think it’s time we stop/Children what’s that sound?/Everybody look what’s going down…” as much as anyone — these great summa of the Sixties mentality only grow lovelier the older and hoarier they get. But when John Lennon sings “Jai guru deva/Nothing’s gonna change my world,” what contemporary sentiment could compare? The Beatles spoke the plain language at the center of their times, even as they rushed to elaborate it in a hundred directions.

Of course, with Revolver all of this was just beginning, and much of the record’s undying charm lies in the very compactness of that kaleidoscope. The record is composed of 14 miniatures, a perfect suite, not one song over 3:00, and with each turn of the kaleidoscope the glimpse you get is of an entirely different scene. The first of these ended up being the last: “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the product of their initial record sessions in May, a track they ended up placing at the end of the album. By now everyone has had their two cents on “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It’s one of the greatest recordings of the 20th century; it’s as good as Stravinsky; it still sounds like the future; compared to its fourth-dimensional psychedelia, all the jingle-jangle of the hippie bands sounds like the music of toddlers. The music columnist Tony Hall got an early preview of it that summer and called it “...a hypnotically horrific journey through the dark never-ending jungle of someone’s mind.” And so on and so on — all the clichés are true. There will be time to come back to it by the end, which after all is where they left it.

Well-rehearsed, too, are the stories from later in the year: the violence the band met with on tour in Manila; the protests in Japan (for playing the holy Budokan), and in America (piles of burning records in response to John’s “bigger than Jesus” snafu); and the final concert in Candlestick Park, in San Francisco (how’s that for prophetic), after which they’d simply had enough of the noise and the circus. A little less is known about what the lads themselves had been up to, before then, back in London, the lives they’d return to once they forswore performing entirely. In September, George would briefly head off to India for the first time, after meeting Ravi Shankar. Ringo got a pad in central London. And contrary to what most people would think, it was John who was off doing acid in the suburbs, feeling stifled, making life awful for poor Cynthia, while Paul galavanted around Swinging London: attending lectures by Luciano Berio; discovering Stockhausen’s music; showing off his new tape loop experiments to a bewildered William S. Burroughs; screening his homemade Bolex movies for Michelangelo Antonioni; bunking with the Ashers on Wimpole St., mixing with the genuine avant-garde.

This, too, is part of the genius of Revolver. That Paul — the concept man, increasingly the leader of the group, the experimentalist, instrumentalist, and budding virtuoso — would turn out to be a genius of the quotidian, of old-fashioned sentiment and musical portraiture. While John — the lazy, cynical solipsist with remarkably Freudian personal issues — would turn out to be the visionary genius of language, media, and the Modern Self. All love to George, who developed into a wonderful songwriter, but it was the confluence of the Paul-axis and the John-axis that formed the true drama of The Beatles (and here it’s worth noting another forgotten kind of love: that of two intimate but opposite brothers-in-arms). On Revolver, the two were just beginning to set the parameters of their obsessions.

For his part, George got religion because he needed a way out from between those unforgiving poles. George’s spirituality was always a cliché — far less interesting than Lennon’s archetypal self-probing. Yet it worked, since it was honest, and it brought the rest of the band’s experiments into focus. It was George and John who really fed off the LSD vision; Paul was a creature of control, he didn’t take to it long; while Ringo was, as ever, just along for the ride, more of a Beatle than the other Beatles (none of them got more fan mail than Ringo), a Fourth Stooge whose beauty lay in the fact that no one could ever love or need The Beatles as much as he did. He didn’t require LSD anymore than he needed to write the songs. His one job was being the drummer for The Beatles, and his increasing sensitivity to the whole project made him the best man for it.

But George’s daliance with Hindustani music was more than a lark or a fetish, and anyway it brought them all into an expansion of themselves. Perhaps they heard something in its drones and quarter-tones that might help them elaborate on the old British church modes, playing around the edges of their music. Plenty of Western artists were beginning to look to the ragas and ashrams of Hinduism as a source for psychedelic analogy — but to their credit, The Beatles were focused less on the cultural trappings, than on what could be done by playing a melody against that titanic OM of the Tanpura drone (though such that a lot of what we hear as “Indian” in their music really sounds more Gregorian than anything properly Desi). It was there in “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” — same as it had been in “Ticket to Ride,” even before their Eastern obsession. Unlike all the other British bands, most of whom were literalist fetishists of Black America, The Beatles took Little Richard, Motown, and the blues, and turned all those blue notes and flat-7s right back into sounds not far removed from British and Celtic folk music. This isn’t to say they knew they were doing this, only that their ears were tuned to whatever in the world sounded apposite, to them (there was that aspirational universalism again). Besides, Liverpool — like New Orleans or Hamburg — was a port city, and the docklands and wharfs of the world have always been the first site of unprejudiced cultural exchange.

Revolver opens with a George-Paul-John one-two-three: “Taxman,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “I’m Only Sleeping.” Even the first few seconds of George’s “Taxman” constitute a small revolution: studio noise, scratching on the tape, coughs, a disembodied “1 2 3 4.” Followed by a jumped-up almost-funk, and Paul’s beamed-in sitar-like guitar solo, and George’s bitter (reactionary?) screed against the sadists at the Inland Revenue. There’s something a bit Dickensian going on, even as the guitars chime out evidence of a modern world of automobiles and insurance claims.

From here Revolver’s pop revolution only grows older and stranger, as we land on “Eleanor Rigby,” the first of Paul’s perfect little portraits. 60 years hasn’t dulled George Martin’s arrangement for that double string quartet: mic’d too close, churning, crying, even; it’s the only pop-classical hybrid in history that really works. Here’s all evidence, prima facie: this revolution had little to do with the slogans of the world: instead it was moving backward and inward. “Eleanor Rigby” is like a lost relic of the late-1800s; Rigby herself could look something like Manet’s Berthe Morisot, grown old alone; Father McKenzie could be from a Thomas Hardy novel. It’s unimaginable, what this must have sounded like to the kids in 1966, only just beginning to see Youth Culture arriving at its period of highest veneration—and here was this dizzying retreat into a vague past, something Sgt. Pepper’s would soon spin into a true feat of imaginative anachronism. How often people forget that the “Greatest Rock Album of All Time” is really a surreal (and subtly conservative) fantasy on the level of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Wind in the Willows! But modernism is slippery like that.

From here it gets worse: “I’m Only Sleeping” won’t even be bothered with the outside world at all. Lennon the dreamer won’t leave his bed; the only thing he has the energy for is writing this paean to his own somnolence. So the first pop song to feature a guitar solo played backwards also featured a literal yawn, and John turns it into his first real statement about what he thinks true freedom is: relief from all the symbols of the world. From here the dreamer only goes further inward, into the half-raga of George’s “Love You To.” The kaleidoscope is turning, changing continents, changing cultures. It’s remarkable for just how earnest it is, and earnestly bitter: “There’s people standing round/Will screw you in the ground/They’ll fill you in/With all their sins, you’ll see.”

But revolve the kaleidoscope again and the trajectory is interrupted — Revolver isn’t a journey, after all, not the way Sgt. Pepper’s would be. With this turn we find ourselves landing on one of Paul’s loveliest love songs: “Here, There And Everywhere.” This next place feels like the Tin Pan Alley of the mind, or perhaps the Brill Building, except that it’s so pillowy and harmonically subtle — again, there’s almost a flash of vaudeville in it; it’s a classic divertissement between the acts. When it ends, and the next act begins, now the kaleidoscope turns toward a fantasy, a storybook world: “Yellow Submarine,” with its marching band sample and sound effects, Ringo presiding childlike over a novelty number that (in true Beatles fashion) would turn into an emblem for the band’s increasing sense of whimsy, the name itself going on to title another masterpiece of Pop Art — of all things, a cartoon movie.

From here the revolution of the kaleidoscope lands us in the middle of John’s reports on LSD ego-death in Hollywood (“She Said She Said”); then a jaunty day in the park (“Good Day Sunshine”); then a Baroque bauble with dual 12-string guitars (“And Your Bird Can Sing”); then a break-up set to French horn and a clavichord that sounds like a hand-crank organ (“For No One”); then a visit to the drug doctor, with a middle eight like an Anglican chorale (“Dr. Robert”); and now by the time we’ve realized we’re in final stretch of the record, George is filling out his last of three songs with a classic Beatles tune (“I Want to Tell You”) that wouldn’t have felt out of place on Rubber Soul, its grating half-step piano lick excepted of course. All of this — six unique states of mind — in just 13 min 25 sec. The kaleidoscope spins fast.

In the last two spots, we have in fact the first two songs recorded for the album: “Got to Get You Into My Life” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The first swings more than a bit like a Stax Records number: Paul once again displays his clear love of R&B; George Martin provides the Ellingtonian horn section; and a new blueprint for maximally smooth-and-soulful pop is born, handily presaging F.M. radio with a set of feelings and sounds that would last well into the late 1970s. But that final track is the ultimate pop cultural Voyage to the Moon: a tumult of drones and tapes; John’s voice through the rotating Leslie cabinet (“Like a Yogi on a mountain” he asked the young engineer Geoff Emerick to make him sound); Ringo’s neverending drum loop; more backward guitars; Timothy Leary’s CliffsNotes to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s electronic music, it’s trance, it’s a future that will never actually happen, since it already did. Even “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Revolution 9” wouldn’t be able to top what the Four pulled off with “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It’s not even the Sixties. The Sixties were about excess, mania, paranoia, tuning in, dropping out, mass protest, PEACE, and yes, LOVE. But “Tomorrow Never Knows” is happening somewhere else: a dimension of pure thought and electricity, naive and blissful and nowhere. In its white-hot embrace the mind is the imagination is the recording studio is the religion of all time is the drone between your ears. It is shining.

✫ ✫ ✫

Have I convinced you yet that the kaleidoscope is still revolving, never-ending? Temporally, spiritually… I hope at least I’ve made you consider it. 60 years later many of us are still revolving and revolving it, though I imagine most of us would agree the world itself has lost something of that original luster of love — at least the way that beautiful time imagined it. I hope I’ve suggested something else, too, which the history books always tend to get wrong: that what makes The Beatles remarkable — what makes us turn to them again, wondering why and how they did what they did, in so short a time — is just how little they have in common with their decade, despite simultaneously influencing and absorbing every single corner of it. Because they stood apart, because they built their own transtemporal world, an alternate dimension for everyone, they still come to us as beings out of time.

So in a sense, I guess this makes them the truest product of the Sixties, after all. But only in that paradoxical way: because they proved that the real revolution was an opening in time, a moment of new consciousness, out of which a million things could leak into our world, and change it. Suddenly the world of popular music could contain, could be, anything it wanted. All places, all times were now available, to whomever had the sight to draw on them. This is of course the ongoing reality of modernism itself — a principle that’s far from over, or lost, or gone. We still live in the shadow of that mountain, looming behind us, but if we turn around won’t we realize the shadow’s just a bit of cloud, standing out against a wider sky? And there are new constellations visible now, new planets, new symbols for feelings we still most need to express; and more mountains are rising up in front of us; and we’ll have to remember how the last one was climbed, with tools much cruder than ours?

On this, the 60th anniversary of the most adventurous record by the most adventurous rock band in history, take a moment, and listen again. Revolve the kaleidoscope, take a turn on the carousel, travel from one land of possible pop to another, and then do it all over again if you want to. You might just find, in one world or another, a reminder of something — love, or whatever you like — which you only thought you’d forgotten. Since this is exactly what the Revolver is for: a never-ending revolution.

—Sam Jennings

*

For earlier Hinternet coverage of Revolver, see “From Rubber Soul to Revolver” of February, 2024.

Get 50% off for 1 year

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

About the Hinternet Foundation

Get 50% off for 1 year

Give a gift subscription

Refer a friend

Share

Dabney Coleman bound and gagged and stuffed in a broom closet, getting his comeuppance as the male pig boss in 9 to 5 (1980), put there by a trio of plucky secretaries — that is a vision that will never fade from my mind. Our mom, at the time a family-law attorney helping low-income rural women to free themselves of abusive marriages, took us to see it in the theater, in the aim of teaching us something about whatever wave of feminism Hollywood imagined it was honoring.

What I mainly took away however was a lesson pertaining to the other side of my family, my dad’s side, where, on potluck visits to Grandpa Von and Grandma Bertie, I sometimes noticed, on reruns of Hee-Haw, a blonde woman with an exceptionally angelic voice. Coming as she did from the cultural universe of the Smith family, talking with an accent not so different from Bertie’s Arkansan one, I was, I see now, surprised and confused to find her, in her turn on the big-screen, playing as an equal alongside Jane Fonda, whom I already understood to belong to some kind of American nobility, and alongside Lily Tomlin, whom I had more trouble reading, but took for some kind of New Yorker or Canadian, or some sort of “ethnic white”, or anyhow someone entirely outside the social calculus I needed to learn to navigate in the mixed social world of two of the most significant populations to have arrived in California’s Central Valley during the great Depression-era migrations — the Scandinavians who arrived there along a route carved from Minnesota through Montana, who were my mother’s people; and the Okies and Arkies who carved a more southerly path, and were my father’s. 9 to 5 then was for me not so much a lesson about gender as about class, not the revenge of the secretaries, but the revenge of the yokels. If Dolly could play alongside such urbane co-stars, if she could display no less game and confidence there than she did sharing a studio stage with Minnie Pearl —price-tag hanging from her straw-hat in a gesture of comic self-Orientalizing, or at least some sort of white-trash equivalent of minstrelsy—, then really anything was possible.

Two years later, for my tenth birthday, I was treated to a Kenny Rogers concert. I was there to hear “The Gambler”, and perhaps secondarily “Ruby (Don’t Take Your Love to Town)” (which I barely understood at the time, but which, upon more recent critical reappraisal, I find to be surprisingly searing and raw). I was there to be reminded, Ecclesiastes-style, of the wisdom of knowing when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, etc., but just a few numbers in, unannounced, who comes out but Dolly, for a duet, wearing a green sequined dress. At the time, though this will surely be downplayed in the coming wave of eulogies, you basically never heard mention of this astoundingly talented singer without some accompanying allusion, also, to the size of her breasts. This was her signature, her epitome. And so when she came out to do her thing with Kenny the crowd whooped and hollered in a way that indeed conveyed significant appreciation for her talent and appearance in general, but that also seemed to carry, properly translated, the semantic charge of words like “knockers” or “jugs” or any number of other such dialectal gems no one I have frequented for the past several decades would ever dare to utter. I sank down in my seat. This was not how I had hoped to spend my tenth birthday. Still, I suppose this too, like Dolly’s movie role two years prior, did teach a lesson. Among other things, I understood, and have always understood since, that like it or not one must honor the ceremonial role of the grande dame.

I have known that Dolly was ill, and I expected The Hinternet was going to need to come through for her with an appropriate Vale. I had assumed it would be Mary to see to this, but then when I read the news it instantly became clear to me that the accompaniment she has provided all these years is just too personal for me to turn it over to our resident Welsh music critic. Mary has evoked Dolly’s legacy in her own writing at The Hinternet more than once (e.g., this fine piece), and has rightly emphasized the singer’s vital role as a conduit of the earliest traditions of country music in the recording era. She was almost certainly the last of the country stars to have taken up and continued the yodel, which Jimmie Rodgers himself likely learned from his years on the Southern vaudeville circuit, where a well-channeled ethnic caricature —even when it was just the abstract figure of one so distant as a Swiss mountaineer— was always sure to please the crowd. For many performers the yodel evolved, after the Singing Brakeman died of TB in 1933, into a mere vocal stunt, and often returned explicitly in its associated lyrical references to its original Alpine home — consider Rosalie Allen’s 1947 novelty song, “He Taught Me How to Yodel”, as exemplary of this tendency. But consider by contrast Dolly’s phenomenal performance of “Mule Skinner Blues” (a much-covered American classic — here for example are the Cramps giving it a shot), on an episode of the great Porter Wagoner Show from 19701:

Dolly is in her element here, joyous, with her own kind, and at ease in just the same way she will someday be alongside the co-star who, at this same earlier moment, was trying out her role as a friend of the Viet Cong (“I’m not Fonda Hanoi Jane”, said at least a few of the bumperstickers in the parking lot that night, no doubt, at the Kenny Rogers concert). But more than this, Dolly is channeling something — not just Jimmie Rodgers, but a whole American essence, whose beauty and density perhaps reached their greatest pinnacle on Porter Wagoner’s stage.

This way of being American was already under threat then — notably by Nixon’s shock doctrine, and the cynical commercial forces this unleashed, which would transform country music by the end of the coming decade into so much crass, stupid, white-identitarian pop (even if, somehow, through all this long era of decline, Dolly managed to grow old with an aura of radiant goodness, and to consolidate year by year the undisputed status of supreme country royalty). Now, with the exception of Willie Nelson, who represents a somewhat different and more outlying lineage of that old American essence, the signal still heard so clearly in Dolly’s channeling has gone silent. This was a channeling not only of the earliest country recording artists, but ultimately of the form of life of the actual muleskinners and other legendary rural types whose lives early country music rendered into song.

The idea that this is what a popular musical tradition ought to be doing at all —singing the ancestors back into being— is unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon… but at least I’ve got the immortal young Dolly, hosted by the great and affable Porter, archived precariously, for as long as market forces allow, on YouTube.

—JSR

1

The Nashville recording studio of The Porter Wagoner Show plays at least some small role, incidentally, in the plot of The Oort Cloud Review, now available for pre-order.

Get 50% off for 1 year

Pre-Order the Oort Cloud Review!

Get Hinternet Merch!

Register for the Summit!

About the Hinternet Foundation

Get 50% off for 1 year

Give a gift subscription

Refer a friend

Share

Read more