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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%!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Naturally, these reflections are for paid subscribers only. Upgrade now to enjoy a significant discount!

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Also, before we get into it in earnest, let me say that I’m very excited to be involved in the course being offered by the Hinternet Foundation this fall, beginning October 1, on “The Voynich Manuscript, Riverbank Laboratories, and the Deep Philosophical Origins of the American Military-Information-Technology Complex”. I believe the model we’re working out for our courses, in which participation includes co-authorship on a work of hybrid creative scholarship published under the Hinternet Foundation imprint, is going to be both greatly satisfying for all involved and an exciting new approach, fit for our era, to collaborative para-academic work. The deadline to apply is September 15. Get on it!

Apply to the Voynich Manuscript course!

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The Hinternet Foundation’s inaugural online summer school, “Whither the Humanities?” is drawing to a close. This course has been offered free of charge, thanks to generous donors, and has served double duty as a meta-reflection on what the truest purposes and aims of the Foundation’s key para-academic initiatives will be in the coming years.

In October we will be launching our first “ordinary” course offering — ordinary both in the sense that it will not be “meta”, but rather hyper-focused on a particular topic, and in the sense that it will be supported by tuition revenues. We have chosen, as an almost too-perfect epitome of the Foundation’s central concerns and of its spirit —drawing lessons from the history of philosophy, science, and technology so as better to understand the present moment, while always delighting in those rivulets of history that truly are stranger than fiction— to do a “deep dive” (we deplore that expression) on the Voynich Manuscript, the Riverbank Institute, and the deep philosophical origins of the American military-information-technology complex we all know and love and hate today.

Final work for the course is optional, and may be written in either a scholarly or a creative key (or a hybrid of both). To gain some familiarity with this hybrid approach, see our own JSR’s partial “translations” of pages from the Voynich Manuscript here, here, and here. See also his further Voynich “world-building” (another expression we deplore), engaging with the life and work of William F. Friedman, Ethel Voynich (née Boole), and other players major and minor in this remarkable true comic epic, see here, here, and here.

In addition to the optional sole-authored course projects, we will subsequently be publishing, under the Hinternet Foundation’s imprint, a collaborative work of creative scholarship based on our class discussions in which all participants will be invited to participate as co-authors.

There will soon be a proper registration page up at the Hinternet Foundation’s website. In the meantime, we wanted to give the eagerest early birds among you a head start. To apply for the course, please send us a two-page application, consisting in (1) a one-page statement of interest, explaining why the course is of interest to you; and (2) a one-page biographical statement, explaining who you are and how you came to be who you are. There are no prerequisites for the course, other than that one must be interesting and thoughtful.

Applications may be sent to info@hinternetfoundation.org.

Application deadline September 15!

Once the registration page is set up, accepted participants will be invited to pay the $250 registration fee. Please act fast, as space is very limited — we expect to admit no more than 12-15 people.

Below you will find a provisional syllabus. We look forward to seeing you there!

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A Hinternet Foundation Online Course
Led by Justin Smith-Ruiu (plus guest speakers)
October 1 — November 12, 2026

CLAVIS: The Voynich Manuscript, the Riverbank Institute, and the
Philosophical Origins of the American Military-Information-Technology Complex

Summary This course explores one of the most improbable episodes in modern intellectual history. At its center stands the Riverbank Institute, the private research laboratory in the suburbs of Chicago, founded in 1909 by the industrialist George Fabyan, where Renaissance cryptography, experimental acoustics and agronomy, and military intelligence converged. Its most enduring intellectual obsession, however, was the Voynich Manuscript, the world’s most famous undeciphered text, which drew to Riverbank some of the greatest cryptanalytic minds of the 20^th century. From this unlikely setting emerged the power-couple William and Elizebeth Friedman, pioneers of modern American cryptanalysis, whose careers permanently reshaped the study of codes and ciphers. Following the intertwined histories of Riverbank and the Voynich Manuscript, the course examines an unmistakably American epistemology: the interplay of eccentric private initiative, scientific rigor, technological innovation, and state power in the pursuit of hidden knowledge. What began as an effort to discover secret messages in Shakespeare ultimately helped establish the principles of modern cryptography, whose influence extends from the First World War to the age of artificial intelligence.

This is a seven-week online course open to all participants, with no prerequisites. The registration fee is US$250. Each week consists of a recorded lecture accompanied by suggested readings and primary sources. Participants will have the opportunity to submit a final project, either in the form of a scholarly research essay or a creative and imaginative work inspired by the course. All submissions will receive individual feedback, and particularly promising work will receive suggestions for further development and, where appropriate, possible avenues toward publication.

All sessions will take place at 10:00 LA / 13:00 NY / 18:00 London / 19:00 Paris

Week 1 — Thursday, October 1: George Fabyan and Riverbank. George Fabyan (1867–1936) and the fortunes of the American Gilded Age — The founding of Riverbank Laboratories (1909) — Experimental biology, genetics, architecture, acoustics, and cryptography under one roof — Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1848–1934) and the Shakespeare authorship controversy — Why a private laboratory outside Chicago became the birthplace of American military cryptography.

Week 2 — Thursday, October, 8: Baconian Ciphers and the History of Secret Writing Secret writing from antiquity to the Renaissance — Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615), Blaise de Vigenère (1523–1596), and Francis Bacon (1561–1626) — Bacon’s biliteral cipher — The Baconian movement in Britain and America during the nineteenth century — Shakespeare, cryptography, and the search for hidden authorship — Why the refutation of the Baconian theory proved more consequential than its defence.

Week 3 — Thursday, October 15: Before Voynich: The Early History of the Manuscript The making of the manuscript (c. 1404–1438) — Script, imagery, codicology, and material evidence — Rudolf II, Jacobus de Tepenec, Georg Baresch, Johannes Marcus Marci, and Athanasius Kircher: the manuscript’s early owners and custodians — Kircher, the Society of Jesus, and the Republic of Letters — Jesuit scholarship, Egyptology, and the origins of modern conspiracy theories — Roger Bacon (c. 1219/20–1292), John Dee (1527–1608/9), Edward Kelley (1555–1597), and other candidates for authorship.

Week 4 — Thursday, October 22: Meet the Voyniches Wilfrid Voynich (1865–1930): revolutionary, exile, and antiquarian bookseller — George Boole (1815–1864) — Ethel Lilian Voynich, née Boole (1864–1960), The Gadfly (1897), and its extraordinary reception in the Soviet Union — The European rare-book trade at the turn of the twentieth century — The discovery of the Voynich Manuscript at the Villa Mondragone (1912) — Scientific investigation from the Friedmans to radiocarbon dating (2009) — The establishment of the manuscript as a fifteenth-century Northern Italian work.

Week 5 — Thursday, October 29: Meet the Friedmans William F. Friedman (1891–1969) and Elizebeth Smith Friedman (1892–1980) at Riverbank during the First World War (1917–1918) — Elizabeth Wells Gallup’s Baconian cipher enterprise — Experiments on lunar influence and crop growth — Scientific agriculture, pseudoscience, and comparisons with Soviet Lysenkoism (1930s–1960s) — The birth of modern American cryptanalysis — The Friedmans’ lifelong engagement with the Voynich Manuscript, culminating in The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (1957).

Week 6 — From Riverbank to Silicon Valley Riverbank Laboratories as the institutional cradle of modern American cryptanalysis — The Friedmans after Riverbank: military intelligence, codebreaking, and the professionalization of cryptology — From Baconian acrostics to Japanese diplomatic codes: the expanding ambitions of American cryptanalysis — The institutional legacy of Riverbank in the Signal Intelligence Service, the National Security Agency (1952), and the culture of secrecy — DARPA (1958), Silicon Valley, and the continuing American model of privately funded innovation in the service of national security.

Week 7 — Thursday, November 12: Secret Knowledge and Creative License Why does the Voynich Manuscript attract such weirdos? — The manuscript in esoteric and conspiracy-theoretical context — Conspiracy theories and the social epistemology of mysterious objects — Artificial intelligence and the future of decipherment — Literary and artistic responses to the Voynich Manuscript — Fictional translation of the manuscript — Where does interpretation end and invention begin?

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Selected Bibliography

Cipher Manuscript, aka “the Voynich Manuscript” (c. 1401-1599?), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 408 1. Available online: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002046

Craig P. Bauer, Secret History: The Story of Cryptology, Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013.

Ronald W. Clark, The Man Who Broke Purple: The Life of Colonel William F. Friedman, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.

M. E. D’Imperio, The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma, Washington, DC: National Security Agency, 1978.

Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies, New York: Dey Street Books, 2017.

William F. Friedman and Elizebeth S. Friedman. The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957.

Elizabeth Wells Gallup, The Bi-Literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon, Detroit: Howard Publishing Co., 1899.

David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet. Rev. ed. New York: Scribner, 1996 [1967].

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There is a silence these past 24 hours that must surely be explained by the power of shame. Nearly everyone who until early yesterday had delighted in the feeding frenzy on Jason Arday, triggered when Nathan Cofnas pricked first blood, has gone mum. I hope shame is what explains the silence, anyhow. It is the appropriate human reaction to this obscene display of inhumanity, which had as its direct result the death, evidently by suicide, of a blazing and beautiful soul.

May his memory be blessed. And in the wake of this whole grotesque display of all that is worst in humanity may real room be made in our institutions, or may new institutions be made that are able to make real room, for the fabulous — which I mean in both senses, designating those who style themselves larger than life, who set themselves apart with their exquisite locks and threads and general self-display from the ordinary run of little nerds who dominate in academic life; and designating those whose primary mode of knowledge transmission, like Arday’s, is not data-mongering, but storytelling.

I suppose now is the appropriate moment to run through the expected reassurances. No, I don’t condone plagiarism or fabrication of data. And neither do I share, at all, the institutional priorities that got Arday hired in the first place. His dissertation looks like a hot mess — a simulacrum of a contribution to a slapdash field that itself, in my view, should have no place in any institution bearing the name of a university. But who gives a shit? The integrity of our institutions —obviously, unquestionably— is not worth a single human life.

It is likewise obvious to me, even from my relative distance (I have crossed paths with Cofnas in my professional life, about which more below), that Arday only ended up writing this fake dissertation in this fake field because doing so was the only way for him to fulfill a perverse expectation — to distort his nature, which again is the nature of a storyteller, in order to fit himself to the mold of the 21st-century university.

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I used to write regularly for the marvelous and utterly sui-generis Cabinet Magazine, and have very fond memories of that time. It was in writing for Cabinet that I began to find my voice as a non-fiction essayist, and to break free of the oppressive norm of enforced flatness that I had learned in graduate school. I was consistently satisfied with the work I was able to do at Cabinet, and can honestly say that my experience being edited by Sina Najafi and Jeff Kastner was the only case in my writing career when I came out feeling that the work was made better by the meticulously close readings of my editors. I doubt by contrast that I will ever bother to compile a similar archive of the far less substantial work I published with n+1 during roughly the same period, which always left me feeling alienated from the finished product, denatured and deformed as it was by an editorial crew that did not, to say the least, share my sensibility or my aims.

I have not reread most of this material in preparation for sharing it here, and I cannot say that I would be as satisfied with it now as I was at the time of its publication. But I have no doubt it bears some significant genetic relation to the work I’ve been doing here at The Hinternet these six years past.

I have shared the pdf version of my pieces wherever I have been able to find it, though that is not the case for nearly as many of them as I had expected when I first got the idea to create this little archive. Perhaps more pdf’s will resurface over time, and I will add them as they become available.

Thank you for reading The Hinternet. Please upgrade to a paid subscription to show your support, and to gain access to our entire archive, dating back to 2020, as well as to our extensive, and growing, archive of podcasts and livestreams. Upgrade now for a significant 50% discount.

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• “On the Market,” Cabinet Magazine, February 25, 2020. On my much-delayed first forays into investing (online only).

• “The Non-Boundary,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 66 — Skin (Spring, 2018). On Jacques Derrida on Jean-Luc Nancy’s meatus, etc.

• “Onfim the Artist,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 64 — The Nose (Summer, 2017). On medieval Novgorod birchbark letters, and on a noteworthy adolescent doodler.

• “Astronymy,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 59 — The North (Fall, 2016). On having an asteroid named after me, and on my father’s death. “ASTRONYMY is really and truly great.” —Jamaica Kincaid

• “Between the Mine and the Stream,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 61 — Calendars (Summer, 2016). On Herbert Hoover, Johann Agricola, The Compleat Angler, etc.

• “The Internet of Snails,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 58 — Theft (Summer, 2016). On Jules Allix and the Pasilalinic-Sympathetic Compass.

  

  The Internet of Snails

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• “Cactus Life,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 55 — Love (Fall, 2015). On Soviet defectology, Helen Keller, Maxim Gorky, etc.

• “Wonders Taken for Signs: An Interview with Michael Witmore,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 54 — The Accident (Summer, 2014).

Wonders Taken for Signs

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• “It’s All Dark,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 50 — Money (Summer, 2013). On Johannes Kepler, Pink Floyd, the Soviet space program, etc.

• “Louis Riel: Dissertation on Monads” (translation of Mémoire sur les Monades),” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 49 — Death (Spring, 2013).

Louis Riel, “Dissertation on Monads” (1885)

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• “Montana Monadology: Louis Riel in Exile,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 49 — Death (Spring, 2013). On Louis Riel, Métis resistance, oddball Leibnizianism, etc.

• “Who Better to Punish than the Innocent?” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 46 — Punishment (Summer, 2012). On Mesoamerican rubber-ball games, etc.

• “Just Deserts: An Interview with ,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 46 — Punishment (Summer, 2012).

• “The Politics of Curiosity,” in Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine (2012).

• “The Ethics of Rubbernecking,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 42 — Forgetting (Summer, 2011). On Plato’s Leontius, car accidents, etc.

• “Pattern Baldness,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 40 — Hair (Winter, 2010-2011). On my hairline (which worried me more then than it does now).

  

  Pattern Baldness

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• “The Raw and the Cooked: An Interview with Cătălin Avramescu,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 39 — Learning (Fall, 2010). On An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton University Press, 2009, translated by ).

• “The Soul Is a Trapped Gas,“ Cabinet Magazine, Issue 37 — Bubbles (Spring, 2010). On Pynchon, Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, flatulence, fermentation, etc.

The Soul Is a Trapped Gas

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• .“Leibniz’s Syrup of Ipecac,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 36 — Dust (Fall, 2009). On you know who.

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A transcript of today’s session is also available, below the paywall.

Be sure to upgrade to a paid subscription to join us for the remaining sessions. See you next week!

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In the Library

I’ve always loved letting my eyes wander over the spines of books, whether lined up on the shelves of a bookshop or of a library. What I love most, I think, is that array of titles from which the eye may trace a peculiar sequence, as though composing rebuses, or long twisted verses never before written.

For although the books in a library are arranged according to a system, they are almost never arranged by title, so that the juxtaposition of their names owes nothing to their meanings. Back when the urge to write still gnawed at me, I had imagined composing texts out of titles gathered at random from several libraries. When I mentioned the idea to Odile Travy, she warned me against it: exercises of that sort —formal experiments, or “constraint-based writing,” as she called them— were unlikely, in the case of an amateur like me, to amount to much.

It was therefore a stroke of luck that, on my way back to my room, I opened the wrong door. The room beyond was large and imposing, its walls lined from floor to ceiling with books —three entire walls, with the fourth occupied by a broad window— and despite the hour I felt an irresistible urge to let my eyes play over the shelves. A deep-green art-deco lamp had been left glowing on a small table, its halo holding a portion of the titles back from the surrounding gloom. The impulse to indulge, here, in a little linguistic gleaning after such long abstinence made me forget the following day’s tasks. Just a few minutes, I told myself, piqued by the curiosity of discovering what the Sangres brothers read — a way of sounding out their tastes and loyalties, and so, perhaps, of being a little better prepared for their company.

Literature took hold of me late. At fifteen I was reading nothing apart from one or two magazines that obsessed me; at twenty, still nothing beyond the required books, and the texts on my mobile phone — more of the latter than the former, truth be told; at twenty-five, not much more.

It was only at thirty-three that I began reading novels, and I remember this because it coincided with Arthur’s death. My upheaval was then so complete, so shattering, so alien to everything I thought I knew about my self, that all the things to which I ordinarily devoted myself whenever the murderous storms of melancholy and morbid rumination raged within me, my escapes and my rituals, those activities I pursued with such relish —dancing, listening, cooking, swimming, playing, humming...—, and which, through steady repetition, had come to have the power to soothe me, were suddenly closed off to me. I no longer had the slightest taste for anything, nada, nyet, and if a person is sustained by desires and attractions, then that should have been the end of me. Overnight, everything familiar became repellent, reeking of staleness and futility. Whenever I forced myself, as I tried to do at first, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had reached the end.

One day someone handed me a novel, or perhaps I found it. Yes, that’s right: I found it in a café I used to drift into now and then, utterly spent, my gaze fixed on the ground in front of me, maimed by loss. As decoration, shelves of books had been hung along the café walls, lending some life to an otherwise rather dreary room. All I had to do was turn in my chair and stretch out a hand for the first volume within reach, simply because I needed something to occupy myself. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the other customers were staring at me because I was carrying my grief so indecently in public. Sooner or later, one of them would ask me to leave.

So I began reading novels to keep up appearances, the way one reaches for a cigarette or a drink. It was my eyes that needed occupying, because they wandered everywhere, over everyone seated around me. They wandered like dogs following the scent of a happiness whose very smell would have disgusted me, dogs desperate for a caress that would have delivered them from nothing, least of all from being a dog. So I read. The book I read was called Le Grand Cahier.1 From the very first pages, although it too was a story of catastrophe, I felt myself carried away even as I had the sensation of finally regaining my footing. Those sentences let me breathe again, let a current of air pass through me once more. A zephyr. I gulped down that magic potion, and when I reached the final full stop, I wept. Never before had I read like that. Until then, literature had meant punishment, or else an obsolete pastime, something for old people , a way for the stiff and the tedious to live by proxy, hidden away in some cramped corner, shut in rather than riding along on the wave of the real. In two days I finished all three volumes. From that moment on, I never stopped reading novels.

It is easy to understand, then, why, finding myself in that magnificent library, I felt almost dizzy, astonished by such an immense reserve of promise. I couldn’t resist. I let my eyes loose upon the rows of spines as one might turn a spirited horse loose to gallop across that vast plain of titles.

After a few erratic turns, they caught on a midnight-blue volume striped with fine lines of gold. It was not a novel. Diderot, Œuvres. It took me a few minutes to realize that I might actually have a chance to understand the power Diderot attributed to eggs. But the volume ran to 1,372 pages, and it seemed most unlikely that I would be able to find the passage Jacob had quoted as an epigraph. Hadn’t the reference been to the Entretien entre D’Alembert et Diderot? I turned the pages one by one, then more quickly, skipping ahead in small batches, trying to follow a kind of intuition. And then, by sheer, unimaginable, improbable, utterly implausible luck —and I am not exaggerating— it was there. The very section. The very sentence…

Gradually I see matter coming alive. For Diderot there is only one substance, only one sensibility. He is determined to describe the chick’s gestation as a gradual process: first the emergence of a form, then of distinct parts, then of movement. The chick is not already there inside the egg, fully cooked, if I may put it that way. The philosopher declares that it arises through development, a formation by stages that stands opposed to the spontaneous generation to which academic orthodoxy had until then adhered. This is epigenetic emergence, as Ondré explained to me. What I take away is that the power Diderot attributes to the egg is its power of revelation. What the examination of the egg, aided by ever more sophisticated instruments, was to disclose about the origin of living beings had ensured the defeat of theology — that defender, through the idea of divinity, of an unconditional coherence. Until then, nature was thought to produce beings that owed no heredity to matter itself: although certain traits of their progenitors impressed themselves upon them during gestation, they nevertheless remained unique beings, born from a multitude of possible combinations made conceivable by the still nonexistent concepts of species and of life itself.

What is this egg? It is dynamism… disguised as inertia.3

At the creak of the floorboards I nearly dropped the volume, which lay open, balanced in one hand. Ondré stood motionless in the doorway. I could barely make out his features, and I had no way of telling whether finding me in a room he considered his own was about to earn me a reprimand. At once, the feeling that I was in the wrong compelled me to speak.

It’s full as an egg in here!

I couldn’t believe I had just said it. The words had burst out like a hiccup, and yet they filled me with a certain happiness: my father had not left me. When I explained to Ondré that it had been one of my father’s favorite expressions[1] , he shook his head with all the fervor of his rationalism.

But an egg isn’t full.

Of course it is. I’ve seen for myself.

His iceberg-stare stopped me.

A full egg would be unviable. It has to contain an air pocket so that the chick can breathe during the final twenty-four hours before hatching; otherwise it would suffocate. In fact, if it happens to end up with its head at the wrong end, it suffocates before it’s even born. Which, put that way, I admit, sounds rather paradoxical. Haven’t you ever peeled a hard-boiled egg? You notice it immediately.

I don’t like hard-boiled eggs.

Then you should at least know that this was one of the great questions modern embryology succeeded in answering. On the twenty-first day of gestation, the shell, which until then has been protective, can become a prison. The symmetry of the embryo during its first thirty-five hours is broken by the appearance of the heart, which determines the orientation of the head. As for how the cells of the mesoderm distinguish left from right so as to activate on the correct side, that...

Ondré searched my face for a reflection of his own wonder, then took the book from my hands.

— Diderot. An excellent choice. Did you know that for those trying to understand Nature’s unpredictability, it became crucial to understand the egg just as Galileo and Bruno had sought to understand the stars? In fact, from the sixteenth century onward, understanding the egg became one of science’s great preoccupations. Omnia ex ovo: all things come from an egg. That famous phrase, with its prophetic ring, is attributed to the English physician William Harvey, who between 1600 and 1603 studied under the Italian anatomist Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente, whose earliest work on chicken eggs sought to observe the chick before it came out of the shell. The dissection of those eggs laid the foundations of modern embryology, and by the end of the seventeenth century no one any longer disputed that to be female was above all to bear eggs. But contrary to what those two eminent scholars, Harvey and Fabrici d’Acquapendente, then supposed, the egg turned out not to contain a tiny preformed specimen. By Diderot’s time, the living being no longer possessed a permanent blueprint, an immutable constitution; it had become transformation itself, exposed to the contingencies of its own growth. Whenever I look at a hen’s egg, I am brought back to the emergence of life, to an extraordinary form of transmission, an entelechy that cuts through the potentialities surrounding it. Though anyone hoping to catch life in the act within the egg can only fail...4

Ondré, something has just occurred to me. I’d like to keep the grass.

He frowned, but he already knew what I meant.

Keep the grass... between the stones? It’ll be awful.

Not necessarily.

He rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers.

The grass will ruin everything.

Not necessarily.

I repeated it, though I knew those two meager words had little chance of reassuring a man as methodical as he was. The idea was new to me, and I had not yet worked out how to defend it. It would be a good way to keep the fresco from becoming fixed.

Ondré stared at me.

Keep the fresco from becoming fixed? Keep the fresco from becoming fixed? You’re talking nonsense. It’s a fresco!

He sighed, more than once, and I fought the temptation to tell him I’d forget the whole idea.

In no time at all, you won’t be able to see anything anymore. It’ll be awful.

No. You’ll cut the grass. It will be a way of... bringing the fresco back to life. Or perhaps not. There may be times when you would rather leave it hidden.

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Egg and Individuality (1)

Jakob von Uexküll was a champion of worlds—those worlds that every living being weaves through its perceptual and active relations with what surrounds it. In doing so, the German biologist became one of the forerunners of modern ethology, convinced that animals should be understood not as mechanical assemblages of reflexes, but as subjects, capable of exercising volition within an environment5 peculiar and proper to each of them.

Ondré looked up from the pages in his hands. His questioning gaze rose over the rims of his glasses until it met mine. I smiled to encourage him to go on, aware that he was sharing with me an article he was proud of. I wrote it back when I was still teaching, he had explained, and since I seemed to have taken an interest in chickens, he thought these reflections might broaden the scope of my inquiries. Most of all I think he quite enjoyed having an audience, an attentive listener.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was von Uexküll who made the transformation of the egg into the hen the exemplary instance of those invisible forces that shape and fashion our states of being: a force that escapes materiality —call it power, energy, or principle—, a thrust that passes unfailingly from one generation to the next, continuing through time without boundaries, beyond the reach of our instruments of measurement, yet by which life gains... something that, unfolding from the egg to the hen, gradually extends its ordered structure without interruption, [and] constitutes a chain of objects without itself becoming an object. The egg, for its part, continued to furnish proof of the existence of individuals— not yet actual, perhaps, but at least potential. In the 1850s, the British biologist Thomas Huxley, an ardent defender of Darwin’s theory of evolution, defined the individual as that which unfolds ab ovo ad ovum— from egg to egg.

A century and a half later, the work of the microbiologist Lynn Margulis called into question the very notion of the individual— as defined by embryology, but also by anatomy, genetics, immunology, and physiology—through her investigation of a phenomenon that biologists had until then largely neglected: symbiosis. The significance of Margulis’s work has never been universally acknowledged, perhaps because, and perhaps precisely insofar as, it unsettles several fundamental dogmas.

Ondré interrupted his reading and glanced at me once again. Something tells me you’re wondering why an old researcher like me should have become interested in so revolutionary a theory. Needless to say, I was in no position to wonder any such thing, so I merely smiled. Then listen to the rest. Once reconsidered and brought to light in this way, symbiosis proved to be a phenomenon potentially constitutive of reproduction, development, and immunity. It thus became more difficult to regard each individual as a unity if it turned out that it was, first and foremost, a component of a holobiont. For example, in many organisms,6 the development of certain organs depends upon chemical signals emitted by the symbionts they harbor— or perhaps one should say with which they associate.

In mammals, microbial symbionts are acquired at birth, during passage through the birth canal, and then through mucosal contact between mother and offspring. Contrary to what was long taught, the genetic inheritance transmitted from one generation to the next is not confined to the DNA contained within eukaryotic cells: the genomes of the symbionts are transmitted as well. In that sense they too contribute to the development and functioning of the host’s offspring!

From an immunological point of view, microbial symbionts are an organism’s external guards and sentinels, but they also mediate that organism’s relations with the wider community of living beings. Thus, according to Margulis, there exists, biologically speaking,7 no autonomous, self-contained entity that could serve a priori as the bearer of an autonomous self. The subject is dynamic and context-dependent, relying on alliances with other species that, by incorporating themselves into it, alter its very substance. The egg opens the question of individuality and its limits. To inquire into the egg is to inquire into the contradictions inherent in every existence conceived as one’s own— untouchable and untouched. For the egg is both inclusion and alterity— inclusion within a lineage, alterity born of heredity. It is the indispensable condition of life: immersion within another body that is not quite other— the egg and the hen thus standing in a relation of temporary endosymbiosis... I had never heard the term endosymbiosis, and I found it difficult to think of the hen as anything other than a complete individual.

It’s true that a hen carrying an egg is still a hen, and its egg, before it is laid, is still the hen, though after it has been laid it is mostly no longer the hen, though in a sense it still is, a little bit.

Exactly! We come back to Diderot and his great question about the transition from contiguity to continuity. You must have studied that at university... But it’s getting late.

Ondré stood up and, with a ceremonious gesture, invited me to leave the library ahead of him.

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A Miracle of Nature

I was about to head back upstairs to my room when I remembered the portrait in the red drawing room that had caught my attention upon arrival. I recalled that it hung in the last room on the right before the staircase. The moment I found myself standing before the painting again, I saw it. It must somehow have escaped me the first time, though I cannot explain how such an oversight could have been possible. There it was, almost dead center, bursting through the canvas the way a star commands the screen: a breast. A round, naked breast emerging from the neckline of an ochre tunic. It was exquisitely rendered, its coloring giving it the texture of living flesh, the nipple encircled by a dark areola just brushing the lips of the newborn cradled in the woman’s arms.

How could I have failed to notice it right away? It was the painting’s visual focal point, an erotic provocation around which the entire composition revolved. Yet before long an impression of strangeness, perhaps even deception, began to mount until, at last, the anomaly struck me: the woman possessed only a single breast.

Even examined closely, there was no trace of another— not beneath the folds of the fabric, not so much as a bulge or a shadow. One solitary breast had been painted squarely in the middle of the chest, improbably close to the base of the throat, pressed against the neckline of the garment: a single, centrally placed breast set unusually high. Once I had made this discovery, my gaze shifted, and I was able to perceive the second oddity. What I had taken for the woman’s hair was in fact a beard. Hanging between breast and chin, it appeared like a kind of misty hollow, an incongruous excess. There the colors of the portrait dissolved into an almost absolute black. Once recognized, the beard suggested that I was looking at a man, all the more so because the head showed the first signs of baldness—a supposition that seemed, nevertheless, to be contradicted by the insistent presence, just below, of the breast.

Was I looking at a nursing man, or at a woman with an extravagant beard? The redistribution of gender has become one of the defining concerns of the twenty-first century, but four hundred years ago, when, I assumed, this painting had been made, would such a conjunction of divergent sexual attributes not have been scandalous? Unless it was meant to depict a masculine maternity, the kind indirectly claimed over the world by the Catholic Church.8

The painting possessed the power of the monstrous, of something that, rendered with realism, sheds the air of fable in order to unsettle the boundaries of the real. Fascinated, I suddenly felt an intense desire to touch the breast, and I stepped even closer to the canvas. Only then did I notice, emerging from the painting’s dark background, two carved stones bearing a Latin inscription whose opening words were: En magnum naturae miraculum. I tried to commit the phrase to memory as I made my way back upstairs.

Although the window was shut, I could hear, every so often, the shrill, indignant hooting of an owl somewhere nearby. I pictured it perched on a branch at the edge of the woods, quarreling with another owl over a morsel of field mouse. I was wearing nothing but a T-shirt, and the touch of the cool sheet against my buttocks stirred the beginnings of arousal. My hand caressed and explored my pubis, searching for the budding tip of my clitoris, setting it gently rocking with all the deftness its awakening required. Orgasm came quickly, with explosive force. It hurled me outside myself before gathering me back into the smallest possible point.

My onanism did not bring sleep. What exactly had the inscription said? En magnum naturae miraculum. I did not need to turn on the light to find my phone by touch on the bedside table. Behold, a great miracle of nature. Did miracle refer to the newborn, to the bearded woman, or to the man with the breast? Unless the expression miracle of nature itself was misleading. After all, a miracle is supposed to be an extraordinary event, often brought about by divine intervention, provoking astonishment precisely because it occurs outside the normal, natural course of things. What, then, could a miracle of nature be? Nature acting against itself? Ondré had used the expression against nature...

Which led me to wonder whether unity might include divergence. If I am one, then my dead nature must differ from my living one. Is it possible, then, that still-life and against nature coincide? What lies beyond my control is generally taken to constitute my nature, whose immutability is established by the fact that I cannot change it. A contrario, whatever I do succeed in changing no longer belongs to it. If I deliberately force my voice lower or higher, people who know me will say that I am not speaking naturally. And yet the natural sound of my voice has itself been shaped by influences, even early ones —it is not impossible that I imitate certain cadences that once sent a shiver through me— and I would be wrong to claim that it was given to me once and for all, since it continues to modulate according to factors intrinsic to my experience— to that I which is nothing more than the name of the one who, at every moment, assumes responsibility.

Damn it, I have to quiet this swarm of thoughts, at any cost! I switch on the bedside lamp, get up, have a drink, piss, and only when I lie down again do I notice it. On the lower shelf of the bedside table, to my astonishment, there is a copy of Hystérectomia. That the very book which had shaken me so profoundly should be lying there, its double, struck me as absurd, and I could not resist rereading a few passages as sleep gradually overtook me.

Now I find myself leaning against a balustrade. The ocean stretches out on every side, its surface streaked with splinters of reflected light, the swell invincible and replete. We are under way; the ship, broad and swift, bears us into a gentler season than exists anywhere else. It is always her scent that announces her first. She walks across the deck, or rather seems to float across it. It hurts to find her still so beautiful. Her dress is the violet of heliotrope blossoms, embroidered with pale arabesques. I realize it too late: my shoes are too large, and, as always, I am about to meet her gaze without finding what I am looking for there. The hand I raise to my face in an effort to steady myself has the opposite effect. What horror! I can feel the first growth of a beard upon my face. My beard. I do not dare touch myself elsewhere to discover what I have become.

After that it is always the same, ever the same. She measures me with her gaze, then lavishes me with affection, smiling and teasing, only to withdraw again as soon as I regain my confidence. The hairs on my face seem not to frighten her. Desire swells through me from head to foot, and I think I can feel a sex, my own, growing. But already she is wary whenever I dare brush the boundary of her refusal. I must abide by her rules, remain her well-behaved admirer. Before long we will come ashore, and a carriage will take us to Caprarola. Perhaps the splendor of the palace will overcome her reluctance.

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Dans la bibliothèque

J’ai toujours aimé laisser courir mes yeux sur le dos des livres, qu’ils soient disposés sur les rayons d’une librairie ou d’une bibliothèque. J’aime surtout, je crois, cette panoplie de titres à partir de laquelle le regard trace un enchaînement original ainsi que s’il composait des rébus ou de longs vers inédits et tarabiscotés.

Car si le classement des livres d’une bibliothèque est organisé, il ne l’est jamais, ou très rarement, en fonction de leurs titres dont la juxtaposition ne doit rien à leur sens. À l’époque où l’envie d’écrire me taraudait encore, j’avais imaginé rédiger des textes à partir de titres piochés de façon aléatoire dans plusieurs bibliothèques. Lorsque j’en avais parlé à Odile Travy, celle-ci m’avait mise en garde : ce genre d’exercices formels, de “productions à contrainte” ainsi qu’elle les nommait, était peu susceptible de porter ses fruits dans le cas d’une amatrice telle que moi.

Ce fut donc une aubaine que d’ouvrir la mauvaise porte en retournant vers ma chambre. La pièce était grande, imposante, tapissée de bouquins du sol au plafond, trois murs entiers, le quatrième occupé par une large fenêtre, sur lesquels j’eus envie de laisser pianoter mes yeux malgré l’heure. Une lampe très verte de style Art déco était restée allumée sur un guéridon et son halo maintenait hors de la pénombre une partie des titres. L’envie de tenter, ici, une petite cueillette linguistique après m’en être abstenue longtemps me rendit oublieuse des impératifs du lendemain ; quelques minutes, me dis-je, titillée par la curiosité de découvrir ce que les frères Sangres lisaient, une façon de sonder un peu leurs penchants et leurs fidélités, et d’être ainsi, peut-être, davantage préparée à leur commerce.

La littérature m’a prise tard. À quinze ans, je ne lisais rien sauf un ou deux magazines dont j’étais fan ; à vingt ans, non plus, sauf les ouvrages obligatoires et les messages sur mon téléphone portable, davantage les seconds que les premiers d’ailleurs ; à vingt-cinq, toujours pas grand-chose.

Ce n’est qu’à trente-trois ans que j’ai commencé à lire des romans, et si je m’en souviens c’est que cette tentative a coïncidé avec la mort d’Arthur. À ce moment, mon trouble fut si intégral, si renversant, si étranger à ce que je croyais savoir de moi que tout ce à quoi j’avais l’habitude de me vouer pour m’en sortir quand au-dedans, rageait la tempête des mélancolies assassines et des ruminations mortifères, mes échappatoires et mes rituels, ces activités que je menais avec entrain – danser, écouter, cuisiner, nager, jouer, chantonner… – et qui, à force d’être menées de façon assidue, gagnaient un pouvoir d’apaisement, me furent alors interdites. Je n’eus plus goût à rien, nada, niet, et si l’on considère qu’un individu s’entretient par ses désirs et ses attirances, alors ce devait en être fini de moi. Du jour au lendemain, l’habituel devint repoussant, puant le rance et le vain. À chaque fois que je me forçais, ainsi que j’avais tenté de le faire d’abord, j’étais submergée par l’impression d’être arrivée au bout.

Un jour, quelqu’un me fila un roman, ou je le trouvai. Oui c’est cela, je le trouvai dans un café où j’entrais de temps à autre, à bout de forces, le regard au ras du monde, amputée par le manque. Sur les murs du café, en guise de déco, on avait accroché des étagères remplies de bouquins dans une salle par ailleurs plutôt morne. J’eus seulement à pivoter sur mon siège, à tendre la main pour prendre le premier volume venu parce qu’il fallait bien que je m’occupe tant j’avais la sensation que les clients du café me dévisageaient parce que je portais mon deuil de façon indécente. À force, l’un d’entre eux finirait par me demander de quitter l’endroit.

J’ai donc commencé à lire des romans pour garder contenance comme l’on prend une clope ou un verre ; dans ce cas, c’étaient mes yeux qu’il fallait occuper car ils erraient partout, sur tous les gens attablés autour. Ils erraient comme des chiens sur les traces d’un bonheur dont l’odeur même me dégoûterait pourtant, des chiens avides d’une caresse qui ne les délivrerait de rien, surtout pas de leur condition de chien. Alors je lus. Ce que je lus s’intitulait Le Grand Cahier. Dès les premières pages, alors qu’il s’agissait aussi d’une histoire de catastrophe, je me suis sentie enlevée tout en ayant l’impression de reprendre un peu pied, enfin. Ces phrases me permettaient de respirer mieux, d’être à nouveau traversée par un souffle. Un zéphyr. Je lapais à grosses gorgées cette potion magique et, parvenue au point final, je pleurai. Jamais, je n’avais lu de cette façon, la littérature jusqu’alors cantonnée à une punition ou à une activité d’autrefois, un truc de vieux, un subterfuge qu’employaient les raides et les raseurs pour vivre par procuration, planqués dans leur recoin étriqué, enfermés plutôt que filant dans le sillage du réel. En deux jours, je finis les trois tomes ; à partir de là, je n’ai plus quitté les romans.

On comprend dès lors pourquoi, me retrouvant au milieu de cette belle pièce bibliothèque, j’ai éprouvé un étourdissement, ébahie par cette immense réserve de promesses. Et je n’ai pu résister. J’ai lancé mes yeux à l’assaut des tranches ainsi que j’aurais laissé un cheval fougueux galoper à travers cette vaste étendue de titres.

Après quelques embardées, voilà qu’il reste accroché à une couverture bleu nuit aux fines rayures d’or qui n’est pas un roman. Diderot, Œuvres. Il me faut quelques instants pour réaliser que je tiens là une chance de comprendre la puissance que le philosophe attribuait aux œufs ! Mais l’ouvrage compte 1 372 pages et il est peu probable que je sois capable d’y retrouver la citation mise en exergue par Jacob… La référence indiquée n’était-elle pas Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot ? Je tourne les pages, une à une puis plus vite, en saute plusieurs petits paquets, essayant de suivre une sorte d’intuition. Et là, coup de bol, impensable, improbable, invraisemblable, et je ne mens pas, elle est là ! La partie concernée, la phrase même…

Progressivement, je vois s’animer la matière quand il n’existe qu’une seule substance, une seule sensibilité pour Diderot qui choisit de décrire progressivement la gestation du poussin : l’émergence d’une forme puis de parties distinctes puis d’un mouvement. Dans l’œuf, le poussin n’est pas tout prêt tout cuit si j’ose dire. Le philosophe annonce son développement, une formation par étapes qui s’oppose à la génération spontanée à laquelle a adhéré l’académisme jusqu’alors. C’est l’émergence de l’épigenèse, comme me l’a expliqué Ondré. Ce que je comprends, c’est que le pouvoir que Diderot attribue à l’œuf est celui d’un révélateur : ce que l’examen de l’œuf par des outils de plus en plus sophistiqués donnera à voir sur l’origine des vivants assurera la défaite de la théologie – elle qui, au travers de la divinité, défend une cohérence inconditionnelle. Jusqu’alors, la nature engendre des êtres qui ne doivent à la matière, aucune hérédité : si certains traits de leurs géniteurs s’imposent à eux au cours de la gestation, ils n’en sont pas moins des êtres uniques, issus d’une multitude de combinaisons possibles que permet encore, aux yeux des hommes, l’inexistence des concepts d’espèce ou de vivant.

Qu’est-ce que cet œuf ? C’est une dynamique… à l’apparence d’inertie.1

Au grincement du parquet, j’ai manqué de lâcher le volume qui tenait, ouvert, en équilibre sur ma main. Du visage d’Ondré figé sur le seuil, je distingue mal les traits et je ne peux deviner si la découverte de ma présence dans une pièce qu’il juge sienne va me valoir ses réprimandes. Immédiatement me force à parler le sentiment d’être en faute.

C’est plein comme un œuf là-dedans !

Je ne peux croire que je viens de le dire… La phrase a jailli tel un hoquet et cependant, j’en éprouve un certain bonheur : mon père ne m’a pas quittée. Lorsque j’explique à Ondré qu’il s’agissait d’une de ses expressions favorites, celui-ci secoue la tête avec toute la ferveur de sa rationalité.

Mais un œuf n’est pas plein !

Bien sûr que si, j’en ai fait l’expérience…

Le regard iceberg m’arrête.

Un œuf plein serait invivable. Il doit comporter une poche d’air pour permettre au poussin de respirer pendant les dernières vingt-quatre heures avant son éclosion ; sans cela, il mourrait étouffé… De fait, si jamais il se retrouve la tête du mauvais côté, il étouffe avant d’être né. Ce qui, dit ainsi, ressemble, je le crains, à un paradoxe. Vous n’avez jamais écalé un œuf dur ? On s’en rend compte tout de suite.

Je n’aime pas les œufs durs.

Alors, sachez au moins qu’il s’agit d’une des grandes questions qu’a permis de résoudre l’embryologie moderne. Au vingt et unième jour de gestation, la coquille qui, jusqu’alors a été protectrice, peut se faire geôle. La symétrie qui est celle de l’embryon au cours de ses trente-cinq premières heures se brise avec l’apparition du cœur, qui déterminera l’orientation de la tête. Quant à savoir comment les cellules du mésoderme font la différence entre leur gauche et leur droite pour s’activer du bon côté, ça…

Ondré cherche sur mon visage le reflet de son propre émerveillement puis il me prend le livre des mains.

Diderot, excellente lecture… saviez-vous que pour ceux qui questionnaient l’imprévisibilité de la Nature, comprendre l’œuf, ainsi que Galilée ou Bruno tentèrent de comprendre les astres, fut indispensable : de fait, comprendre l’œuf devient l’un des grands enjeux qui occupèrent la science à partir du XVIᵉ siècle. Omnia ex ovo, car tous naissent d’un œuf. La célèbre formule, aux accents de prophétie, est attribuée au médecin anglais William Harvey qui, entre 1600 et 1603, étudia auprès de l’anatomiste italien, Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente dont les premiers travaux sur des œufs de poulet visaient à tenter d’y voir apparaître le poussin qui allait en naître. La dissection de ces œufs fonderait les bases de l’embryologie moderne et, à la fin du XVIIᵉ, plus personne ne contesterait qu’être femelle, c’était d’abord porter des œufs. Mais contrairement à ce que les deux respectables savants, Harvey et Fabrici d’Acquapendente, présumaient alors, il allait s’avérer que l’œuf ne renfermait point un spécimen minuscule et préformé. À l’époque de Diderot, l’être n’a déjà plus de patron permanent, d’immuabilité de constitution ; il est transformation, exposé aux aléas de sa propre croissance. Lorsque je regarde un œuf de poule, c’est au surgissement de la vie que je suis renvoyé, à une forme de transmission phénoménale, une entéléchie qui barre les potentialités dont elle s’entoure. Même si à vouloir surprendre la vie dans l’œuf, on ne peut qu’échouer…2

Ondré, je viens d’y songer : je voudrais garder l’herbe.

Il fronce les sourcils mais déjà, il a compris ce dont je parle.

Garder l’herbe… entre les cailloux, ce sera affreux.

Pas nécessairement.

Du bout des doigts, il se frotte le front.

L’herbe, cela va tout gâcher.

Pas nécessairement.

Je le répète même si je sais que ces deux maigres mots ont peu de chance de rassurer un homme aussi prévoyant. Mon idée est neuve et je n’ai pas peaufiné mon argumentaire. Ce sera un bon moyen de ne pas figer la fresque.

Ondré me dévisage.

Ne pas figer la fresque, ne pas figer la fresque, vous dites n’importe quoi… c’est une fresque !

Il soupire, plusieurs fois même, et je lutte contre la tentation de lui dire que je laisse tomber.

En un rien de temps, on ne verra absolument plus rien, ce sera affreux !

Non, vous couperez l’herbe, ce sera comme une façon de faire… renaître la fresque. Ou pas d’ailleurs. Peut-être qu’à certains moments, vous aurez envie de la maintenir cachée.

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Œuf et individualité (1)

“Jakob von Uexküll était un défenseur de mondes, de ces mondes que chaque être vivant tisse au travers de ses liens perceptifs et actantiels avec l’extérieur. Ce faisant, le biologiste allemand devint l’un des précurseurs de l’éthologie contemporaine, convaincu qu’il fallait concevoir les animaux, non comme assemblage mécanique de réflexes mais comme sujets, susceptibles d’exercer une volition au sein d’un milieu3 qui serait propre et particulier à chacun d’entre eux.”

Ondré a levé les yeux des feuilles de papier. Son regard interrogatif franchit la barre supérieure de ses lunettes pour arriver jusqu’à moi. Je souris pour l’inciter à poursuivre, consciente qu’il me livre là un article dont il est fier. Je l’ai rédigé quand j’enseignais encore, avait-il précisé, et comme il lui semblait que je m’intéressais aux poules, ses réflexions étaient susceptibles d’élargir mon champ d’investigation. Surtout, je crois qu’il ne lui déplaisait pas d’avoir un public, une auditrice attentive.

Au début du XXᵉ siècle, c’est von Uexküll qui fit de la transformation de l’œuf en poule l’exemple par excellence d’une de ces invisibles qui travaillent et façonnent nos états, une force échappant à la matérialité – appelez-la puissance, énergie ou principe –, une poussée qui, d’une génération à l’autre, se poursuit dans le temps sans faillir mais sans périmètres, soustraite à nos appareils de mesure, mais grâce à laquelle la vie gagne… une chose qui, se déployant de l’œuf jusqu’à la poule, étend, avec le temps, sa structure ordonnée sans aucune lacune, [et] constitue une chaîne d’objets, sans que cette chose devienne objet. L’œuf, pour sa part, continue de constituer la preuve de l’existence, si non advenue du moins potentielle, des individus. Dans les années 1850, le biologiste britannique Thomas Huxley, fervent défenseur de la théorie de l’évolution de Darwin, définit l’individu comme ce qui se déploie de l’ovum à l’ovum, de l’œuf à l’œuf.

Cent cinquante ans plus tard, les recherches de la microbiologiste Lynn Margulis remettent en cause la notion d’individu – telle que définie sous l’angle de l’embryologie mais aussi de l’anatomie, de la génétique, de l’immunologie et de la physiologie – au travers de l’exploration d’un phénomène qui, jusqu’alors, avait été plutôt négligé par les biologistes : la symbiose. La valeur des travaux de Margulis n’est pas reconnue unanimement bien que, et peut-être parce que, ils chamboulent plusieurs dogmes fondamentaux.

Ondré a interrompu sa lecture, me jetant à nouveau un coup d’œil. Quelque chose me dit que vous vous demandez pourquoi un vieux chercheur comme moi s’est intéressé à une théorie si révolutionnaire ? Il est évident que je ne suis pas en mesure de me demander cela et je me contente de sourire. Écoutez donc la suite alors : “Ainsi repensée et mise en évidence, la symbiose s’est révélée un phénomène possiblement consubstantiel de la reproduction, du développement et de l’immunité. Dès lors, il devint plus problématique de considérer chaque individu comme une unité s’il s’avérait qu’il était d’abord et avant tout le composant d’un holobionte. Chez nombre d’organismes par exemple,4 le développement de certains organes dépend de signaux chimiques émis par les symbiotes que ces organismes accueillent – ou faudrait-il dire, auxquels ils s’associent.

Chez les mammifères, les symbiotes d’origine microbienne sont acquis au moment de la naissance, lors du passage par le vagin, puis par contact des muqueuses entre mère et petit. Contrairement à ce qui s’est longtemps enseigné, le patrimoine génétique contenu dans l’ADN des cellules eucaryotes n’est pas le seul à être transmis de génération en génération : le génome des symbiotes l’est aussi. De sorte qu’il intervient encore dans le développement et le fonctionnement des petits de l’hôte !

D’un point de vue immunitaire, les symbiotes microbiens sont les gardes et vigies externes d’un organisme mais ils servent aussi de médiateurs aux réactions de cette entité avec une communauté organique. De fait, selon Margulis, il n’existe, d’un point de vue biologique,5 aucune entité autonome, circonscrite, qui pourrait a priori servir de support à un self (soi) autonome. Le sujet est dynamique et dépend du contexte⁴⁰, d’alliances à d’autres espèces qui, s’incorporant à lui, en modifie la substance même. L’œuf amorce la question de l’individualité et de ses limites. Interroger l’œuf, c’est interroger les contradictions inhérentes à toute existence pensée comme propre – intouchable et intouchée… Car l’œuf est inclusion et altérité – inclusion dans une lignée et altérité issue d’une hérédité. C’est la condition indispensable à la vie : l’immersion dans un corps autre qui ne le soit pas tout à fait – l’œuf et la poule entretenant un rapport d’endosymbiose temporaire…”

Ce terme, endosymbiose, je ne l’ai jamais entendu et j’ai du mal à concevoir la poule autrement que comme un individu à part entière.

Il est vrai qu’une poule portant un œuf est encore une poule et son œuf, avant la ponte, est la poule mais ne le sera presque plus bien qu’encore un peu après avoir été pondu.

Exactement ! On en revient à Diderot et à sa grande interrogation sur le passage entre contiguïté et continuité, vous avez dû étudier cela à la fac… mais il se fait tard.

Ondré s’est levé et, d’un geste cérémonieux, il m’invite à passer devant lui pour quitter la bibliothèque.

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Un miracle de la nature

J’allais remonter vers ma chambre quand j’ai repensé au portrait du salon rouge qui, à mon arrivée, avait attiré mon attention. Je me souvenais que la pièce était la dernière sur la droite avant l’escalier. Dès que je me suis retrouvée devant le tableau, je l’ai vu. Il avait dû m’échapper la première fois sans que je m’explique comment une telle occultation avait été possible. Car il se trouvait pratiquement en plein milieu, crevant la toile ainsi qu’une star crève l’écran, ce sein. Un sein rond, nu, qui émergeait de l’échancrure de la tunique ocre. Un sein parfaitement bien dessiné, dont la teinte créait un effet de chair soyeuse, son téton cerclé d’une aréole brune venant effleurer la bouche du nouveau né que la femme portait entre ses bras.

Comment pouvais-je ne pas l’avoir vu du premier coup ? Il était un point de convergence visuel, une provocation érotique au centre du tableau dont l’entière composition gravitait autour de lui cependant qu’assez vite montait une impression de bizarrerie, de tromperie peut-être, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin, l’anomalie frappe : la femme ne possédait qu’un seul sein.

Même à y regarder de près, aucun autre n’apparaissait, pas même sous les plis du tissu, pas une boursouflure ou une ombre. Un seul sein bombé avait été peint en pleine poitrine, trop proche du bas de la gorge, jouxtant le col du vêtement, un sein médian, haut perché. Cette découverte a changé l’orientation de mon regard et j’ai été alors en mesure de repérer la seconde bizarrerie : ce que j’avais pris pour la chevelure de la femme était une barbe. Suspendue entre sein et menton, elle apparaissait comme une sorte de cavité vaporeuse, un surplus incongru. À cet endroit, les couleurs composant le portrait s’évanouissaient dans un noir presque absolu. La barbe, dès lors qu’identifiée, incitait à penser qu’on avait affaire à un homme, d’autant que la tête était marquée par un début de calvitie, supposition que semblait contredire toutefois la présence insistante, juste en dessous, du sein.

Avait-on affaire à un homme qui allaitait ou à une femme à la pilosité invasive ? La redistribution des genres est devenue la grande affaire du XXIᵉ siècle mais il y a quatre cents ans, période à laquelle je supposais qu’avait été peint le tableau, cette association d’attributs sexuels divergents n’était-elle pas scandaleuse ? À moins qu’il s’agisse de représenter une maternité masculine, celle revendiquée indirectement sur le monde par l’Église catholique.

Ce tableau portait la puissance du monstrueux, de ce qui, peint avec réalisme, perd son air de fabulation pour troubler les limites du réel. Fascinée, j’éprouvai soudain un désir vif de toucher ce sein et me rapprochai encore de la toile ; je vis alors qu’émergeant de l’arrière-plan ténébreux du tableau se trouvaient deux pierres taillées sur lesquelles était gravé un texte en latin qui débutait par cette phrase : En magnum natura miraculum. Je m’efforçai de retenir la phrase tandis que je remontais vers ma chambre.

Bien que la fenêtre soit close, je peux entendre, par moments, le hululement strident et vindicatif d’une chouette toute proche. Je l’imagine posée sur une branche à l’orée du bois, se disputant un morceau de mulot avec une congénère. Je n’ai enfilé qu’un t-shirt et l’effleurement du drap frais sur mes fesses suscite un début d’excitation. Ma main flatte et tâte mon pubis, cherche l’amorce du clitoris qu’elle fait tanguer avec toute la dextérité que requiert son éclosion. La jouissance vient vite, fulgurante, elle me projette hors de moi avant de me ramasser à l’extrême.

[184] Mon onanisme ne m’a pas conduite au sommeil pourtant. Quelle était l’inscription du tableau ? En magnum natura miraculum. Je n’ai pas besoin d’allumer pour trouver, à tâtons, mon téléphone sur la table de nuit. Un grand miracle de la nature. Miracle désignait-il le nouveau-né ou la femme à barbe ou l’homme au sein ? À moins que l’expression miracle de la nature ne soit trompeuse. Puisqu’un miracle est censé être un fait extraordinaire, souvent causé par une intervention divine, qui suscite la surprise puisqu’il se produit hors du déroulement normal, naturel, des choses. Que pouvait être un miracle de la nature dans ce cas ? La nature allant à son encontre ? Ondré avait employé l’expression contre nature…

Ce qui m’amena à me demander si l’unité pouvait inclure la divergence. Si je suis une, ma nature morte doit différer de la vivante. Est-il possible dès lors que nature morte et contre nature coïncident ? Ce sur quoi je n’ai aucune influence constitue ma nature, considère-t-on, l’immuabilité de cette nature étant établie par le fait que je ne peux la changer…. A contrario, ce que je parviens à changer ne lui appartient plus. Si je force ma voix vers les graves ou les aigus, les gens qui me connaissent trouveront que je ne parle pas de façon naturelle. Et cependant, la sonorité naturelle de ma voix a subi des influences même précoces – il n’est pas exclu que j’imite certaines prosodies qui m’ont fait frissonner – et j’aurais tort d’affirmer que celle-ci m’a été donnée une bonne fois pour toutes puisqu’elle se module au gré de facteurs inhérents à mon expérience – à ce je qui n’est que le nom de celle qui, à chaque instant, prend responsabilité.

Bon sang, je dois calmer le fourmillement de ces pensées, à tout prix ! J’allume la lampe de chevet, me lève, vais boire et pisser, et ce n’est qu’en revenant m’allonger que je l’aperçois. Sur le rayon inférieur de la table de nuit, j’en reste stupéfaite, un exemplaire d’Hystérectomia. Que ce livre qui m’a tant bouleversée se trouve là, en double, me paraît aberrant et je ne résiste pas à l’envie d’en relire quelques passages cependant que le sommeil me gagne.

Me voilà accoudée à une balustrade. Autour se déploie l’océan. Sa surface est lamée d’échardes spéculaires, la houle invincible et rassasiée. Nous voguons ; le navire, large et véloce, nous emporte dans un temps plus clément que nulle autre part. D’abord, c’est toujours son parfum qui l’annonce. Elle avance sur le pont, elle y flotte en quelque sorte. Il est douloureux de la trouver toujours aussi belle. Sa robe est d’un violet d’héliotrope, brodée d’arabesques claires. Je m’en aperçois trop tard, mes souliers sont trop grands et comme toujours, je vais croiser son regard et ne pas trouver ce que j’y cherche. La main que je passe sur mon visage pour me calmer a l’effet inverse. Quel effroi ! Je sens qu’y a poussé le début d’une barbe. Ma barbe. Je n’ose pas me palper ailleurs pour vérifier qui je suis devenu(e).

Après, c’est encore pareil, toujours pareil, elle me toise puis me choie, souriante et taquine, fuyante lorsque je reprends force. Les poils sur mon visage ne semblent pas l’effrayer. De haut en bas, le désir s’engorge et je crois sentir grandir un sexe, le mien. Mais déjà, elle se fait craintive quand j’ose frôler le périmètre de son refus. Je dois me conformer à sa règle, rester son admirateur sage. Sous peu, nous arriverons à quai et une voiture nous conduira à Caprarola. La splendeur du palais aura peut-être raison de sa réticence.

Commandez La Dynamique de l’œuf

5

Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, Alfred Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” The Quarterly Review of Biology, 87/4 (December, 2012): 325-341, p. 333.

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We will be discussing Émile Zola’s remarkable 1880 novel, Nana, with special attention to its depiction of the Bohemian life, of thespians, courtesans, journalists, and other marginals, in Third Republic Paris; to the double duty played, as both qualitative social science and literature, by the 19th-century French novel, with Balzac and Zola as the most outstanding representatives of this dual function; and to the innovation of quasi-cinematic techniques, avant la lettre, in Zola’s prose style (as well as Flaubert’s).

Beneath the fold you will find, in French and in English, an excerpt from the novel that will hold our attention for a good part of the session. You are also invited to watch, in preparation, the podcast that Agnes Callard and JSR did in 2023 on Zola’s Au bonheur des dames (1882) — likewise below the fold.

Here is a complete schedule of our Livestream Literature Salons. Other than for the third session, which we lost due to a technical glitch, all the others are now archived here, available to paid subscribers.

• Wednesday 1 July — Introduction: Reflections on the Philosophy of Translation [DONE!] Recording here.

• Wednesday 8 July — The most beautiful short story ever written: Anton Chekhov’s “A Day in the Country” (1886) [DONE!] Recording here.

• Wednesday 15 July — Pan-Soviet Chekhovism: Amma Achchygyïa’s “Motuo” (1927) [DONE!]

• Wednesday 22 July — Before À la recherche: Madame de Sévigné, Saint-Simon, and the Non-Fiction Sources of Proust’s Masterpiece [DONE!] Recording here.

• Wednesday 29 July — “Theater Kids”: On Zola’s Nana (1880).

Upgrade your subscription now in order to join us for tomorrow’s session, or to join us for next month’s four-week course on the philosophy of Leibniz, beginning Monday, August 3. If you upgrade before the end of the month you will benefit from a 50% discount for one year. Do it now and join us!

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We are, we hate to have to acknowledge, on something like a reduced summer writing schedule. Our Founding Editor is traveling, and our other regular contributors are currently either missing, or in the “deep-freeze” (to use the common parlance of our editorial offices here in Quimper), or indeed, in one of their cases, dead.

That’s alright. We don’t have much to say anyhow, at least not much that we might reasonably expect to fit with the rhythms of the present moment. We acknowledge that we do love the Odyssey, very much. But we rush to add that whatever good reason there might be to discuss it now was no less good, say, three years ago, when the rhythms of the moment required one to concern oneself with what was then called Barbenheimer. We sat that one out too.

We might also add that if you are interested in the “Homer” who first wrote down the Greek text of the Odyssey, you have every reason to be equally interested in the “Homer” who precedes him by at least a few centuries, and who, singly or collectively, stands at the beginning of the oral-epic tradition in which the Odyssey was long sung unaccompanied, uncrutched as it were, by any text.

As JSR explains, writing in The Happy Reader in 2023:

We generally take the prose novel to be the most paradigmatic expression of the literary arts, even if we grant poetry a special place alongside prose, in part in view of its seniority. Poetry came before prose, but how long before? We have the great works of Homer from the eighth century BCE and not many surviving traces before that. But what if the works of Homer are themselves just the late-arriving transcriptions of a tradition that existed already for centuries as a strictly oral art-form? But if poems were oral traditions before they were written down, how would we know?

There are tremendous differences from one culture to another, and exceptions to every generalisation, yet nonetheless we may say on the whole that cultures without written literature place a higher value on memorisation than literate or textual cultures. What is sometimes controversially called ‘oral literature’ — the vast bodies of epic poetry that various cultures around the world have transmitted across the generations without ever writing them down, without ever ‘recording’ them anywhere but in the minds and on the tongues of their children — includes numerous features that only make sense if you understand them as part of the technical apparatus of constructing a vast mental corpus with no textual counterpart. Notably, heavy reliance on alliteration and epithets — oft-repeated short phrases that express a characteristic feature of the person or thing in question — is a common feature of oral epic traditions throughout the world.

Such epics were not in the first place composed with any intention of seeing them translated into textual form. And so, often, when they finally are written down they continue to bear the marks of their earlier life as an oral art-form. We have witnessed this process of textualisation of many oral epic traditions in the modern period. The Sundiata epic of the Malinke people, describing heavily mythologised historical events that took place in the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century, was transcribed first into Arabic, and then, by the end of the nineteenth century, was published in French editions compiled by colonial administrators. The Olonkho tradition of the Sakha or Yakut people of north-eastern Siberia only began to be recorded in the early twentieth century, when Polish and Russian ethnologists, and a good number of penal colonists turned ethnologist as a way to bide their time, began to notice the extraordinary feats of memory and recitative endurance of which a certain class of Sakha bards, the olonkhosuttar, were capable. And around the same time a similar tradition in the Balkans was beginning to attract the same sort of outside interest: that of the so-called guslari, or Bosniak bards, who sing epic tales while playing on the single-stringed gusle. Though in this case the most significant researcher of the tradition was not a colonial administrator or a penal colonist, but one Milman Parry — the same man we have already observed bidding farewell to his family — a Harvard classicist turned ethnomusicologist, travelling on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Although oral narrative traditions have many traits in common wherever they are found, circumstance brought Parry to the Balkans, and not to Siberia, or West Africa, or anywhere else human beings have held society and the generations together by telling epic tales — which is to say, more or less everywhere.

The guslari and the olonkhosuttar, and their counterparts throughout the world, are, in terms of social hierarchy, rather lowly characters — typically elderly, toothless, with wispy silver hair and ragged clothing; just looking at pictures of them one senses one can smell their breath. They often do not have particularly beautiful voices. There is little in their performance that seems, on the face of it, to be held in common with the lofty and high-status epic-poetic traditions that have been passed down to us in written form from classical Greek and Roman antiquity. And yet, if you look at your transcription closely, you might notice that the features of today’s Bosniak or Sakha or Malinke epic share at least certain elementary formulae with those most monumental contributions to the history of Western literature – The Odyssey and The Iliad of Homer.

The author, or authors, of these latter texts is surely lost forever in the dark abyss of time. We cannot know who Homer was, or who the many generations of Homers were whom we collectively call by that name. But if we want to get some idea of what it may have been like to be there at ‘Western’ literature’s genesis, we could probably do no better than to visit a Balkan bard and listen to his hours-long wedding song. This was Milman Parry’s central insight.

Born in 1902, Parry received his first degrees at Berkeley. In 1924 he moved from there to study in the philology faculty at the Sorbonne, where four years later he completed a doctoral dissertation entitled L’épithète traditionnelle dans Homère. Here he began to articulate what would come to be known as the ‘Oral Formulaic Hypothesis’, a then-controversial theory of the oral origins of Homeric epic. Before Parry, it was generally supposed that there was a single historical figure, a man named Homer, who was a great poet, and who composed The Odyssey and The Iliad more or less in the form we have them today. But Parry’s theory suggests that the familiar epithets so many of us know — ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, ‘many-counselled Odysseus’, ‘the wine-dark sea’, the last of which would be satirised by James Joyce as ‘the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea’ — can only make sense if we understand them as part of the scaffolding of a vast art of memory – and, not just of memory, but, as we’ll see soon, an art of creativity as well. The epithets are there not just to ornament, but to help the bard who must master the formal elements required for the marathons of recitation that are his life’s calling. And if Homer’s works were originally bodies of oral poetry that were transmitted among bards through a complicated arsenal of mnemonic techniques, this almost certainly compels us to suppose that the written work we know today came into existence considerably later than the oral tradition from which the written work derives.

Little in Parry’s French classical education under the direction of the great linguist Antoine Meillet, himself a student of the structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, could have helped us to predict how his career would develop from there. Once back in the United States, Parry obtained a post in the classics department at Harvard, and became acquainted there with the Slavic Studies scholar Albert Lord (1912–91). A decade Parry’s junior, Lord was already far along in his research on the oral poetic tradition of the Balkan guslari, who into the twentieth century were spinning out poems with many thousands of lines telling the epic history of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, and of the great showdown at that site between the Ottoman Sultan Murad I and the Serbian Prince Lazar. From 1933 to 1935 Lord and Parry spent the greater part of two years travelling through Serbia and Montenegro, to the remotest rural locations they could find, where epic tradition still survived largely uncorrupted. Their greatest discovery was of a humble guslar by the name of Avdo Međedović (1875–1955), a Slavicised Albanian Muslim whose recitation of a 12,000-line poem entitled The Wedding of Smailagić Meho would come to serve as the centrepiece of their collection.

Parry and Lord were pioneers in the use of phonographic recording devices in the field, thus paving the way for subsequent generations of ethnomusicologists such as Mieczyslaw Kolinski in Poland, and Alan Lomax and Charles Seeger (father of Pete) in the United States. Lomax and Seeger in particular were interested in folk-musical traditions as the lifeblood of culture passed down across the generations through techniques deeper than language. They saw the study of these traditions as a key part of the project of bringing to light the true parity of all human cultures, as against the hierarchised ladder of relatively more and less advanced cultures that had predominated since the Enlightenment. But Parry is largely unique in seeking to establish the equality of literary forms, textual and oral, ‘high’ and ‘low’, in a long-sweeping historical perspective that includes the canonical works of the ‘Western’ canon alongside the living traditions of oral recitation.

In these living traditions, it is not quite correct to see works as fixed sequences of lines that are memorised word for word. Rather, although the story is known in advance, as are the formal constraints on how it may be told, nonetheless the singular works are to a certain extent ‘spontaneously generated’ each time a bard sets about reciting them — much like the ‘freedom within constraints’ that is often invoked to characterise improvisation in both the jazz and the Indian raga traditions. The formulae in the Oral Formulaic Hypothesis are therefore not so much scaffold as building blocks, adjustable pieces that can be rearranged and built upon each time anew. Transcription or phonographic recording freezes one such version in time, and typically turns it into the canonical and ‘correct’ version, but when it gets frozen, and in which particular arrangement, is a highly contingent matter. As Lord would later put it, ‘[A]n oral poem is not composed for but in performance’; and this must have been the case as much for Homer as for the living, breathing bards whose art the pair of researchers were busy laying down on wax. As Parry wrote excitedly after hearing one of Međedović’s recitations: ‘[One] has the overwhelming sense that he is, in some way, hearing Homer.’

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In other news, we remind you that the fourth of our Summer Hinternet Livestream Literature Salons will be taking place tomorrow evening, Wednesday, July 22, at 20:00 Paris / 19:00 London / 14:00 NY / 11:00 SF. It is for paid subscribers only. We encourage you to subscribe now to get 50% off the subscription price for one year.

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Tomorrow’s salon will focus on Madame de Sévigné’s correspondence, Saint-Simon’s diaries, and perhaps other ancien-régime non-fiction influences on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. We will also explore some dimensions of Madame’s sensibility in light of Norbert Elias’s famous argument in The Civilizing Process (1939) regarding modernity’s sublimation of barbarism into what we now easily recognize as aristocratic manners.

One letter in particular, to Philippe-Emmanuel de Coulanges (1633–1716), will be the focus of extensive discussion. We will share JSR’s English translation here, followed by the French original:

Paris, Monday, 15 December [1670].

I am about to tell you the most astonishing thing, the most surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous, the most triumphant, the most staggering, the most unheard-of, the most singular, the most extraordinary, the most unbelievable, the most unforeseen, the greatest, the smallest, the rarest, the commonest, the most dazzling, up until now the most closely guarded, the most brilliant, the most worthy of envy; in short, a thing of which only a single example is to be found in ages past, and even that example is not quite to the point; a thing that we could never believe in Paris (how could anyone believe it in Lyon?); a thing that makes the whole world cry for mercy; a thing that fills Mme de Rohan and Mme de Hauterive with joy; a thing, finally, that is to take place on Sunday, at the sight of which those who witness it will think they are seeing things; a thing that is to happen on Sunday, and that perhaps will no longer be true by Monday. I cannot bring myself to tell you. Guess it; I’ll give you three tries. Have you thrown your tongue to the dogs? Very well! Then I must tell you: M. de Lauzun is to be married on Sunday at the Louvre – guess to whom? I’ll give you four tries, I’ll give you ten, I’ll give you a hundred. Mme de Coulanges says: “Now that is very difficult to guess; it is Mlle de La Vallière.” “Not at all, Madame.” “Then it is Mlle de Retz?” “Not at all; you are quite the provincial.” “Really, we are complete fools,” you say, “is it Mlle Colbert?” “Still less.” “It is surely Mlle de Créquy?” “You’re nowhere near it. Well then, I must finally tell you: he is marrying, on Sunday, at the Louvre, with the King’s permission, Mademoiselle… Mademoiselle de... Mademoiselle... guess the name: he is marrying Mademoiselle, upon my word! Upon my faith! Upon my solemn oath! Mademoiselle, la Grande Mademoiselle; Mademoiselle, daughter of the late Monsieur; Mademoiselle, granddaughter of Henri IV; Mademoiselle d’Eu; Mademoiselle de Dombes; Mademoiselle de Montpensier; Mademoiselle d’Orléans; Mademoiselle, the King’s first cousin; Mademoiselle destined for the throne; Mademoiselle, the only match in France worthy of Monsieur. There is a fine subject for discussion. If you cry out, if you are beside yourself, if you say that we have lied, that it is false, that someone is making a fool of you, that this is a great jest, that it is altogether too absurd to imagine; if, finally, you heap insults upon us, we shall think you perfectly right; we did exactly the same ourselves.

Farewell; the [other] letters carried by this post will show you whether we are telling the truth or not.

À Paris, lundi 15 décembre [1670].

Je m’en vais vous mander la chose la plus étonnante, la plus surprenante, la plus merveilleuse, la plus miraculeuse, la plus triomphante, la plus étourdissante, la plus inouïe, la plus singulière, la plus extraordinaire, la plus incroyable, la plus imprévue, la plus grande, la plus petite, la plus rare, la plus commune, la plus éclatante, la plus secrète jusqu’aujourd’hui, la plus brillante, la plus digne d’envie; enfin une chose dont on ne trouve qu’un exemple dans les siècles passés, encore cet exemple n’est-il pas juste; une chose que nous ne saurions croire à Paris (comment la pourrait-on croire à Lyon?); une chose qui fait crier miséricorde à tout le monde; une chose qui comble de joie Mme de Rohan et Mme de Hauterive; une chose enfin qui se fera dimanche, où ceux qui la verront croiront avoir la berlue; une chose qui se fera dimanche, et qui ne sera peut-être pas faite lundi. Je ne puis me résoudre à la dire. Devinez-la; je vous le donne en trois. Jetez-vous votre langue aux chiens? Eh bien! il faut donc vous la dire: M. de Lauzun épouse dimanche au Louvre, devinez qui? Je vous le donne en quatre, je vous le donne en dix; je vous le donne en cent. Mme de Coulanges dit: Voilà qui est bien difficile à deviner; c’est Mlle de La Vallière. — Point du tout, Madame. — C’est donc Mlle de Retz? — Point du tout, vous êtes bien provinciale. — Vraiment nous sommes bien bêtes, dites-vous, <c’est Mlle Colbert? — Encore moins. —> C’est assurément Mlle de Créquy? — Vous n’y êtes pas. Il faut donc à la fin vous le dire: il épouse, <dimanche, au Louvre,> avec la permission du Roi, Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle de... Mademoiselle... devinez le nom: il épouse Mademoiselle, ma foi! par ma foi! ma foi jurée! Mademoiselle, la Grande Mademoiselle; Mademoiselle, fille de feu Monsieur; Mademoiselle, petite-fille de Henri IV; mademoiselle d’Eu, mademoiselle de Dombes, mademoiselle de Montpensier, mademoiselle d’Orléans; Mademoiselle, cousine germaine du Roi; Mademoiselle, destinée au trône; Mademoiselle, le seul parti de France qui fût digne de Monsieur. Voilà un beau sujet de discourir. Si vous criez, si vous êtes hors de vous-même, si vous dites que nous avons menti, que cela est faux, qu’on se moque de vous, que voilà une belle raillerie, que cela est bien fade à imaginer; si enfin vous nous dites des injures, nous trouverons que vous avez raison; nous en avons fait autant que vous.

Adieu; les lettres qui seront portées par cet ordinaire vous feront voir si nous disons vrai ou non.

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I’m certainly not going to say “no one reads anymore,” a phrase that has by now degenerated into one of those non-thoughts that do so much to drive discourse while doing nothing at all to solve the problem it pretends to bemoan. It would be an insult to my many very close readers, you might say my Hinternet Talmudists, who plainly do read very carefully, and can cite back to me years later the most minor arcana of the Hinternet cosmos. God bless them!

What I will say is that Substack is no longer principally for writers. It is, rather, for whatever works. It aspires to be the universal platform, in an emerging global information environment that Agnes Callard has helpfully identified as the “uni-context”. I prefer to think of it as the social-technological equivalent of a cloaca, of the sort we observe in a number of species of Antipodean monotremes — in the future, which is to say now, there is to be a single passage through which everything flows. By “everything” I mean not just text, image, and video —which is what is usually understood in talk of the ideal universal platform. I mean work, leisure, social ties, creativity, banking, music, governance — all of these, like it or not, are going to be passing through the same metaphorical hole.

History gives us reason to predict that those who don’t like this transformation will protest for a while, and eventually either get in line or get sidelined. It’s an old story. Just read Zola’s Au bonheur des dames (1883) (about which, incidentally, Agnes and I had a nice discussion a few years ago), a fictionalized version of the story of Aristide Boucicaut and the foundation of Le Bon Marché, the first department store in the world, and of the impact that had on the Paris artisans still taking five years each to sculpt the figure of an elephant’s head into a single umbrella handle with a pocket knife. The world changes — it’s tough, and it’s exhilarating.

Uni-contextualization is what makes a French satirical magazine with a history of anticlericalism the target of global jihad, and it is what subordinates directors and musicians to the tyranny of their fandoms. It is what has brought what remains of the. classroom experience to the point where students are using their phones to dispute their professors, in real time, on points of fact, by now entirely unaware that the purpose of the such encounters had in any case never really been fact-delivery at all — at least not for us humanists. Uni-contextualization is also what slots what I am doing at this very moment ambiguously between leisure, creative practice, public outreach in my capacity as an institutionally based philosopher, and illicit moonlighting. Who can even say at this point? One solution is simply to go with “” and call it all, indiscriminately, “the Work”. The Work is all that’s left, and any hope that it can be separated out into lowercase “work” on the one hand, and other finer-grained categories on the other, is at this point nothing more than desperate clinging to a lost world.

The signs of this transition are too numerous to summarize. I can remember shortly after September 11, 2001, reading that on that momentous day Stephen King briefly glanced at the television, muttered something like “What a shame”, and then took his headphones, put on Beethoven’s 9th, and got back to writing. In the 2010s I can remember Walter Kirn mocking Gary Shteyngart for doing some over-the-top early-online-video stunt intended to promote some of his new work. What about now? Can you imagine any two writers more fully cloacalized than King and Kirn? They are showing up for “the Work” every day; they are feeding the feeds! I do everything I can not to see them, but it’s a hopeless effort.

In sundry ways, writers are learning that if they don’t show up —and, more than that, if they don’t show their faces, their bodies, their weaknesses and worries— they will be left behind. The aspiration to a universal platform creates, in this regard, a parallel expectation of universal self-branding. One must open the doors to one’s salon; one must host.

This cloacalized, uni-contextualized Work brings with it another upshot that, for at least some of us, makes the current rapid disappearance of any real venue for a certain kind of writer to practice their vocation somewhat easier to bear. Ten years ago I would have felt deeply ashamed if an academic colleague of mine were to learn that I was out there doing extracurricular online lectures on the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment and topics like that (which I in fact did, during the first lockdown, which in truth did a great deal to bear me through that trying time). Now, when I do it, I feel like I am part of the vanguard of what is in any case going to turn out, in the next few years, to be a near total transition of humanities instruction into para-academic spontaneous clusterings, many of which will happen online.

What I mean in part is that I find myself at a curious juncture. I’ve been a philosophy professor for 26 years. Between 2020 and 2025 I was able to turn to Substack to cultivate a very different side of my intellectual and creative self, to leave the credentials at the door, and to be, at least in my own view of my work here, everything but a philosophy professor. Now I find that the acceleration of the cloacalizing process has effectively made it impossible for anyone to keep any of the strands of their lives separate at all. So I’m like: ok, then, if that’s how the world is shaping up, if that’s what this latest iteration of Boucicaut’s universal store1 compels of us, then I might as well ride the wave of history, and not only show my face here in the medium of the livestream, but also start doing some version here of what I have anyhow spent a good part of the last quarter-century doing — for example, hosting livestream courses introducing interested readers-listeners-viewers to questions in the history of philosophy on which I have a certain amount of specialist expertise.

The advent of the uni-context, I hope I’m making clear, is, like everything in history, both destructive and generative. I have had conversations these past months with more than one American friend, all in elite institutions, who tell much the same story. Ten years ago they had to do their quirky creative public stuff on the down-low, hoping all the while it would not generate too much press. Now their deans are holding them up as shining examples of how to adapt to a rapidly changing world, and as models of what a scholar-thinker-intellectual in the 21st century might yet be. France, as always —or at least at any time since roughly the end of the 1900 Paris World Expo, though definitely not at the time of Boucicaut— will take another decade or so to come up from behind. But that’s alright. As I’ve previously acknowledged my primary concern is with the country from which I find myself in quasi-exile, and whose civic potentials I’m most concerned to help to awaken and to foster. I mean, I remain a cosmopolitan and a committed enemy of the entire Westphalian order, but that doesn’t mean I’m not an American, synchronized for life with that country’s tempo whether I wish to be or not. And at present that country, as global tech vanguard, is pushing us all into the cloaca.

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We are already running a very enjoyable literary salon at The Hinternet this month, on Wednesday evenings (CET). There are two sessions left:

Hinternet Summer Livestream Literature Salons

Wednesdays at 20:00 Paris / 19:00 London / 14:00 NY / 11:00 LA

• Wednesday 1 July — Introduction: Reflections on the Philosophy of Translation [DONE!] Recording here.

• Wednesday 8 July — The most beautiful short story ever written: Anton Chekhov’s “A Day in the Country” (1886) [DONE!] Recording here.

• Wednesday 15 July — Pan-Soviet Chekhovism: Amma Achchygyïa’s “Motuo” (1927) [DONE!]

• Wednesday 22 July — Before À la recherche: Madame de Sévigné, Saint-Simon, and the Non-Fiction Sources of Proust’s Masterpiece

• Wednesday 29 July — Zola’s Nana (1880) and the French Proto-Cinematic Imagination

Beginning in August, we will be running a crash course on the philosophy of this one guy I’ve been getting into recently. It will look something like this:

Please join us if the topic interests you (which it must, given that you are a rational being like everyone else). There’s no “enrollment cap” or anything like that; this is the internet!

The course will be open to paid subscribers to The Hinternet, and materials will be shared in Substack Chat, which is likewise open to paid subscribers.

Through the end of July we’re offering a 50% discount to new subscribers so be sure to upgrade your subscription now if you want to join the final two literature salons, or the Leibniz livestreams next month.

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1

Interestingly, the Russian word for a department store (likely other languages too that aren’t on my mind at the moment), is универсальный магазин, a “universal magazine”. The term “magazine” in this context, which is borrowed from French (though in French a lexical distinction evolved between magasin and magazine), ultimately stems from an Arabic word meaning “storehouse” or “storage space”. It thus shares the same etymology as the name for the place in a gun where the ammunition goes, and in this respect there really is more continuity between Boucicaut’s Bon Marché and the social-media companies that aspire to become the universal platform than the simple fact that both are “disruptive”. Both are quite literally doing the same thing, even if the older one did it with merchandise and the newer one is doing it with “content”.

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