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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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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.

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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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The pure products of America
                   go crazy—
                         —William Carlos Williams

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Pocket symphony: a phrase popularized by an ad-man (Derek Taylor)—a press-man, anyway; journ…

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Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers, confidentially, sometimes a little hoarsely. Of course it is a kind of piping. Why not? Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. We certainly should not want to do without these performances. —Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”

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I.

A musicology professor once offered my class the only definition of jazz I’ve ever thought truly apt. He said: “Jazz is the music jazz musicians play.”

You are listening to a piece of music. You wonder: is it jazz? You have only to ask yourself: what kind of musician is making it? Is it a jazz musician, or several jazz musicians? Very well, you’re listening to jazz. If it isn’t? Then you’re probably listening to something else.

The circuity is the point. Since it’s an idiom, a tradition, a world mostly to itself, jazz should not really be defined (if that can be helped). And yet—we’re certain that there was, sometimes still is, something called jazz. It was already conscious of itself as different from other kinds of music, early on. There are many moments we could point to as evidence of this difference. So I’ll choose the best I know: that moment when, in 1926, Louis Armstrong dropped the lyrics from the lyric stand while cutting “Heebie Jeebies” with his Hot Seven band, and covered for the mistake with the first official scat-singing on record. So Louie became the first Jazz Singer, not only because he scatted but because as a singer, he understood his voice was no different from his horn—and what both were really meant to do, was to take up all the dim, repetitive variations he’d encountered in his life and spin them into a different plane altogether.

Other jazz musicians played perfectly well. Jelly Roll Morton played, Fletcher Henderson played, and King Oliver played. But Louie sang—with his horn and his own natural instrument alike. And his precise genius for a kind of magical reinterpolation gave every soloist who came after him their own signature difference, too. Not just to play the thing over, with enough variations to scrape by, keeping the attention of the dancers and booze drinkers in the joint, an audience always dangerously ready to get on to the next scene. But to root people to the spot, to show them, to tell them something—to make it about the music itself, music and not decoration. Where others heard “St. Louis Blues,” or “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” or “Stardust,” Louie heard a dozen other things: harmonies, alternate melodies, moods. Your normal popular performer—Al Jolson, for instance, whom Hollywood enshrined as the face of the new talking jazz age—might sing those melodies, embellish them a bit, lean into the words, and be a decent interpreter. But for Louie the words were a pretext, a way to get him into the real thing, which was spinning off from the center and establishing its own free ellipse in orbit around it. Louie made music essentially about music—the same way every great play is really about plays, and every great movie is really about movies.

This is what his singing was, too, with scatting at the abstract extreme. First the words: start the verse, let the meaning of the song come through, establish the center. Then roll outwards, in potentially infinite variations, streams of new melodic and harmonic ideas which in Louie’s hands were as full and complex as whatever original piece he’d picked up and toyed around with. For decades afterward jazz musicians would go on building an unbelievably rich scaffolding on top of these principles—expanding into denser arrangements, more sophisticated harmony, improvisations of dazzling virtuosity and invention. But the basic difference was the same: jazz was music that had somehow built a space, nested within the full tradition of American Song, where the point of the music was to build on music, in a kind of exegesis on its own workings: it was reinterpretation raised to a fine art; a moment of singular, incendiary reinterpretation. It would expand beyond mere genre, develop its own standards and classics, its own idiolect, its own rhythms, yes—but the point of it all would always lie in the way these things were used, to burst wide open the repetitions and limitations of the popular music of their day. To make a new world of music out of it.

For the great jazz singers, the jazz difference is a bit slipperier. And this is for one simple reason: The Great American Songbook, the thousand or so songs in the canon of primarily Jewish and Black songwriters, which emerged just as the new jazz language was becoming the substrate of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes, in the Thirties and Forties. Men like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and the Gershwins weren’t jazz musicians. But jazz informed the songs they were writing for the masses. And jazz musicians paid them back in turn for their material, taking those songs and transforming them into sandboxes, little zones of exploration, which would be transposed and re-done by musicians for decades afterwards as if there was no way to really exhaust their essence (since, frequently, there wasn’t).

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« J’aime tout ce qui coule », écrivait Henry Miller, avant de recourir à une métaphore graphique — et finalement misogyne — pour appuyer son propos. Parmi les choses qui coulent, il faut assurément c…

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1. Readying the tub

In Bulgaria, everyone knows Ivan Vazov (1850 –1921). The National Library in Sofia is named after him (Народна библиотека “Иван Вазов”), as is the National Theater (Народен театър “Иван Вазов”), along with countless parks, primary schools, streets, and squares. Statues of his likeness are scattered across the country, stern reminders of a man whose words shaped a nation.

Vazov is called the “patriarch of Bulgarian literature”, and his reputation bridges epochs: from the long twilight of Ottoman rule to the new dawn of post-liberation Bulgaria, when the country turned its gaze to Western and Central Europe. His writing provides an opportunity to think not just about this fascinating, ancient land, but about the construction of identity itself: about how we humans wrestle meaning and belonging from the sound and fury of history.

Bulgaria is a land of poets, and Vazov, though also a playwright and prolific prose writer, was most of all a poet. His fight (or at least his chosen subject) was freedom from the Ottomans. He was a comrade, at least ideologically, to more, shall we say, violent revolutionaries like Hristo Botev and Stefan Stambolov. His works rage against Turkish massacres and atrocities, and one of his most famous poems, the aptly titled “Аз съм Българче” (“I am Bulgarian”), helped usher in a new sense of Bulgarian identity: teaching children that they were born of a wondrous land [земя прекрасна], descended from a heroic people [юнашко племе]. He was, in short, the consummate 19th-century Balkan dude.

Yet, despite his power and importance, I must confess that I am not moved by his poetry. I did not grow up with his verses drilled into me, as Bulgarian schoolchildren did. My Bulgarian is good enough to follow the words but not his lyricism, his linguistic flourishes wasted on a mere novice. But Vazov is, however, quite interesting to me as a historical and philosophical figure, an entry point into the question of what it means to be Bulgarian, a way to inhabit what the philosopher Edmund Husserl called the Lebenswelt: the lived world before abstraction and conceptualization, the horizon of meaning that shapes our every action, thought, and perception.

Which is why I am not so much interested in Vazov’s verses as I am in what he did in the bathroom.

This may sound perverse, especially if, like me, you grew up in the United States, and even more so if you grew up in the austere climes of the Midwest: a world of bland casseroles (or, rather “hotdishes”), endless cheese, Christmas lights in November, Ford trucks (aka first on race day or, less flatteringly, fix or repair daily), and absolutely no communal nudity. At age eight, if you had asked me to name a poet, I would probably have said M.C. Hammer, having listened to Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em until the tape wore out. And if anyone had asked me about Hammer’s bathing habits, I’d have screamed “stranger danger”!

I didn’t visit a public bath until my late twenties, when my Bulgarian girlfriend, now wife, took me to the Russian and Turkish Baths in New York’s East Village. Even then, it took years before I fully understood what was happening in such places, before I could grasp public bathing not just as washing in a room full of other folks, but as a horizon of action, a way of being. That understanding only materialized once I began living in Bulgaria.

So, it matters, symbolically and philosophically, that Vazov wrote a short essay called “В топлите вълни (Бански наблюдения) [In the Warm Waves (Bathing Observations)]”.

The following essay consists in a series of reflections in response to Vazov’s, as well as on a recent and very excellent series of essays on Bulgaria and baths in the online journal Семинар_БГ [Seminar_BG].

The bath is drawn. It’s time to get wet.

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2. Baths, spirits, empires

The word banya is hard to translate. Americans prefer euphemism: we “use the bathroom”, “visit the restroom”, or “see a man about a horse”. These are nice(-ish) ways of avoiding the blunt and visceral facts of waste elimination (or, with Aristotle, the discharge of residues, perittōmata, which is, to me, a lovely way to think about waste: the leftover bits our bodies can’t use). But a Slavic banya has little in common with an American’s “bathroom”. It is not just a place of hygiene, but a liminal zone, that is, a threshold, a transitional place: a place for meeting, for ritual, for business, for gossip, sometimes even for encountering spirits or performing magic.

W. F. Ryan’s The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (1999) makes this clear in its examination of Russian folk culture. Here we find that bathhouse was a marginal structure, often built at the edge of the village, and spiritually liminal: a place between good and evil, life and death. The banya was said to house the Баник [Bannik], a fickle little spirit: a man with a huge head, wild hair, and a beard that could cover his entire body. These angry little dudes were frightening, all sharp teeth and claws, but could be placated with offerings of soap, water, or fir branches. To keep them happy, people left them their own corner of the bathhouse. A soft touch from one foretold good luck; claws meant the opposite (as claws usually do). Icons and crosses were forbidden inside, lest they offend the Bannik. Anger one, and they might harm children, suffocate bathers, or burn the bathhouse down.

What Ryan shows us is that the bathhouse was never just about washing. It was a threshold space: where cosmology and daily practice met, where danger and rebirth intertwined. To step into the steam was to risk transformation, to enter a world where impurity could be washed away and identity reshaped. This is where the Lebenswelt matters: the bathhouse is not an abstract concept but a lived world, a horizon in which spirits, bodies, and communities meet.

Bulgaria, and South Slavic cultures generally, don’t have banniki, but they do have various other spirits playing similar, liminal roles. For instance, the Домовник [Domovnik] or Стопан [Stopan], who are a kind household spirit, guardian of the home. While they are connected to hearth and prosperity, they are yet never fully assimilated into this household, instead inhabiting threshold zones just as the bannik did, hearth, barn, yard corners, places between inside and outside. They mediate prosperity and misfortune, embodying a house’s fragile and vague boundary with the wider world. More on topic, are Русалки [Rusalki], female water spirits linked with rivers and springs. These beings could heal or harm, especially around the feast of Rusalska Nedelya (in early summer). Thus they, like bannik, appear during liminal times such as this feast, which takes place in the “unclean days” after Pentecost, when the boundary between living and dead blurs, a typical mélange of Christian and Slavic folk religions. They dwell in rivers and springs, transitional zones between earth and water, and lure humans across that boundary (good work, if you can get it). Finally, there are the notorious Самодиви [Samodivi], wild forest maidens, often associated with streams and mountain springs. These feral beings are quite dangerous if offended, but, like the springs they protect, could also heal. These maidens inhabit an ultimate liminal zone, the border between nature and culture: beautiful women, who are yet nonhuman and perilous. Encounters with them often occur at dusk or dawn. They still haunt the wooded areas of the Bulgarian mountains, at least according to no less than two acquaintances of mine who claim to have had dangerous encounters with these creatures in the forest around nightfall; I remain skeptical.

What unites these scenes from the bathhouse as a site of peril and renewal, to Slavic spirits who haunt thresholds of house, water, and forest, are their shared emphasis on liminality. To cross into steam, into a river haunted by rusalki, or into a glade patrolled by samodivi is to risk the self, and in that risk, to renegotiate belonging. That is, these thresholds mark who is inside or outside, protected or exposed, kin or stranger: who belongs and how to identify them.

Bathing thus became a drama of identity as much as of cleansing, with roots reaching far before Slavic folklore, into the Roman world. Michal Zytka, in A Cultural History of Bathing in Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium (2019), argues that bathing became central to defining what it meant to be Roman. Garrett G. Fagan, in Bathing in Public in the Roman World (2002), similarly notes that Roman thermae functioned as community hubs. These evolved from Greek loutra and simpler Thracian bathing practices into the more elaborate Roman thermae. Where Thracian baths were small and functional, Roman thermae were complex, decorated buildings with extended bathing rituals that encouraged socializing. People met friends, held informal gatherings, and politicians used the baths to win support. Beyond bathing, thermae included libraries, reading spaces, brothels, areas for eating, and shopping. They were essentially a combination of library, art gallery, market, restaurant, gym, and spa. In many ways, bathing became the “wet wing” of Roman imperialism: its civilizing mission aqueous, flowing outward through conduits of stone and ritual, seeping into conquered lands until bathhouses stood as outposts of Roman order across Europe and North Africa. Water carried not only cleanliness but discipline, architecture, and hierarchy—a liquid architecture of empire spreading as surely as legions.

The point is comparative but crucial. In Rome, baths made you civilized, enrolling you into the order of empire. In Slavic folklore, baths and their thresholds drew you into a world alive with spirits (domovnik guarding hearths, rusalki haunting rivers, samodivi at springs and glades) where danger demanded ritual caution and respect. In both settings, bathing worked as a kind of Bildung: incarnate schooling in how to belong, teaching the small gestures and shared habits that mark identity, showing that you act as others do, and can you please pass the soap?

And it is this inheritance — part Roman, part Slavic — that Vazov drew upon when he turned to Sofia’s mineral springs.

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3. Vazov in the bathhouse

So, let’s return to Vazov, who, in “In the Warm Waves”, situates Sofia’s mineral baths in a lineage that runs from Rome through medieval Bulgaria, but never through the Ottoman Empire:

Historical annals say nothing about which Roman emperor first built the mineral bath in our capital, Sofia. Yet the truth is that this blessed water was known long ago, gathered into basins and crowned with vaulted arches even in the earliest days of Roman rule on the Balkan Peninsula. These pleasure-loving Roman conquerors, enchanted by the luxury of conquered Asia, were ardent devotees of the baths – a place for political intrigue, celebrations, and indulgent revelry, as Sienkiewicz recounts in his novel Quo Vadis? It is no less true that Sofia owes its very existence to these warm springs at the foot of Vitosha; at one point, they nearly tempted Constantine the Great to make it the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Perhaps it was these very precious waters that, in 805, drew Krum and his wild hordes, so that Sofia became among the first to fall beneath his blows. And when we sit by its fountain, letting the hot streams wash over our shoulders, we scarcely imagine that, eleven centuries ago, our fierce, great, and passionate tsar may have stood in the very same place, doing the same; that perhaps even his harem frolicked in these waves, sharing in the same pleasure and bliss that we feel today.1

This is not just description but also performance. Vazov invites us into the Lebenswelt of bathing: the reader is not just told about history, but asked to feel it, to imagine Krum’s harem frolicking in the same water that now washes over “our shoulders”. It is embodied history, an invitation to inhabit identity through sensation, through taking time to do the same thing Vazov did in this banya, a banya which every citizen of Sofia can still go and visit.

But it is also an act of forgetting. Ottoman hammams, with their centuries of architecture, medical traditions, and rituals, vanish into steamy air. The genealogy runs from Thrace to Rome to Byzantium to Bulgaria, as if the Ottoman centuries had never happened. Vazov’s waters cleanse not only the body but the past, leaving a purified line of descent that makes Bulgarians heirs of Rome. The absence of Ottoman hammam is itself a lesson in the politics of memory and the shaping of the lived world.2

The invocation of Rome is no accident. As Alain de Lille wrote centuries earlier: mille vie ducunt hominem per secula Romam: “a thousand roads carry man, through the ages, to Rome”. Vazov chooses one such road for Bulgaria and closes others. In this sense, the bathhouse becomes more than a place to soak: it becomes an archive of memory, a site where identity is curated, impurities rinsed away, and a nation emerges clean, steaming, and (somehow) Roman.

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4. Identity, continuity, forgetting

There is something striking, maybe even unsettling, about Vazov’s “In the Warm Waves”. For all the richness of his historical imagination, his essay flows too easily past centuries of Ottoman bathing traditions, as if their presence had simply evaporated in the steam. Instead, he gives us Rome, Constantine, Khan Krum, and the proud Christian, European Bulgaria of his own day. What is absent is just as telling as what is present.

This erasure makes sense in context. Vazov lived through the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), the struggle that finally pushed the Ottoman Empire from Bulgarian soil. He did not fight with rifle in hand, but his pen was no less a weapon: his works, especially Под игото [Under the Yoke], thunder against Ottoman rule, glorifying the agonies and triumphs of liberation. For a man who had made a career memorializing resistance, the hammam was too intimate, too ordinary a reminder of the empire he was writing against. Better, then, to wash it away, to soak instead in a genealogy that ran back to Rome and medieval tsars.

And yet Ottoman traces are everywhere, even when scrubbed from the page. One only has to look at the ubiquitous чешмата [cheshmata: fountains] scattered across the land. The very word comes from Ottoman Turkish çeşme, itself from Persian čashmeh, meaning “spring” or “source”. These fountains dot every village, mountain road, and city park, offering mineral waters whose sources predate nations and wars alike. To drink from them is to sip a layered past, whether one acknowledges it or not. Ever Bulgarian carries a few empty plastic bottles in the trunk of their car, just in case they find themselves near a treasured chesma that carries their favored natural “brand” of mineral water.

Two contemporary scholars, Ivo Strahilov and Slavka Karakusheva, remind us that baths and fountains are not just infrastructure but what they call “hydrosocial heritage”. In their study of the village of Banya (near Razlog), they show how the destruction and privatization of local baths tore holes in communal life. The pools were not merely places to wash or soak; they were woven into rituals of belonging. Villagers recalled, for example, how fathers would fetch warm mineral water each night to bathe newborns, a tradition said to be centuries old, a baptism not into a church but into place itself. As one woman, of about 65 years, mentioned in 2022:

Another tradition that is kept even to this day is that when a baby is born, it must be bathed every evening in mineral water. My God! Every evening the fathers… A tradition… They go, draw warm mineral water, and the babies are bathed in the bath with mineral water. This is a centuries-old tradition and will probably last for centuries more. Along those spouts in the evenings the fathers go and fill up water to bathe the babies.3

This memory, simple and concrete, does more than any theory to show what is at stake: to bathe a child in mineral water is to root them in place, to bind them to community and earth. The act is intimate and ordinary, yet also cosmic in its insistence that belonging is born in the waters themselves. Wet metaphysics, humid cosmography.

For me, as someone who did not grow up with these waters but has bathed in them for more than a decade, this layering is palpable. Bulgaria’s baths feel both deeply local and uncannily global. They carry myths from Thrace to Rome and centuries beyond, all condensed into the sensation of hot mineral water on skin. They are living palimpsests, but also fault lines, where the politics of remembering and forgetting are fought not only in books and laws but in the very names of the baths, in the cracks of their tiles, and in the stories told in clouded air.

In this sense, Vazov’s omission is not merely historical oversight but part of a long tradition of selective memory, for remembering is always to trim, to frame, to forget. Baths have always been places where impurities are washed away. For Vazov, those impurities included centuries of Ottoman influence. For modern developers, they include shabby socialist buildings. For villagers, the impurities may be the forgetfulness itself. Each era rinses the waters differently, but the act of bathing — of cleansing identity through immersion — remains the same.

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5. Socialist waters and scientific spas

If Vazov rinsed Ottoman hammams from the page to re-anchor Bulgaria in Rome, socialism baptized the waters in another register altogether: science. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, even before socialism proper, Bulgaria codified its mineral wealth into law. In 1891, the state issued legislation to protect mineral springs, a recognition that these waters were not just folklore but national resources.4 With the socialist era, this impulse crystallized into an entire institutional apparatus devoted to the therapeutic and ideological management of water.

By 1949, Bulgaria established the Scientific Institute of Balneology, Physiotherapy, and Rehabilitation [Научен институт по балнеология, физиотерапия и рехабилитация]: a name so long it sounds like it was designed to impress even before it cured. The mission was serious: establish, with laboratory precision, the ways in which mineral waters, muds (forget not the humble peloid!), and gases could be harnessed for public health. It was not enough that hot water felt good on aching joints; balneologists sought to measure its effects on blood, nerves, skin, stomach, and maybe even soul, properly interpreted materially, of course, or metaphorically as “the soul of the people”.

This was more than medicine. It was ideology in liquid form. Socialist balneology reframed the bathhouse not as liminal folklore or bourgeois leisure but as an arm of the state. Health was a collective good; the waters belonged to the people. To be a socialist citizen was to be well, and to be well was, sometimes, to spend three weeks soaking on doctor’s orders at a state-run sanatorium. The ritual of the bath thus became a ritual of socialism itself: equalizing, universal, rooted in nature, but directed by science.

And it worked, at least in part. Anyone who has spoken to older Bulgarians knows the nostalgia that still clings to those days when a prescription might send you not to the pharmacy but to Velingrad or Sandanski, there to take the waters under the watchful eye of both physician and Party. Balneology offered a kind of earthy utopia: natural resources transformed into public health, ancient waters repurposed for the future.

Yet, like Vazov’s selective memory, socialism had its own silences. The hydrosocial heritage of Roma communities, with their oft distinct bathing traditions, was sidelined. Folk rituals that smacked of superstition were ignored or rebranded in scientific language. Anything that did not fit the paradigm of measurable therapeutic benefit was, at best, tolerated; at worst, suppressed. What remained was a vision of water as resource: quantifiable, categorizable, state-owned.

Still, the system was nothing if not ambitious. Bulgaria is practically leaking mineral water, with somewhere between 520 and 700 identified springs, their temperatures ranging from a refreshing 10°C to a scalding 103°C, enough to boil an egg or a reckless bather (or, if the bather is hungry, both). Only Iceland rivals Bulgaria in sheer abundance in Europe (at least, according to some estimates; others have Hungary in second place). Socialism took this embarrassment of riches and mapped it to medical need: sulfurous waters for skin ailments, iron-rich for blood, mildly radioactive for nerves (don’t panic, you get more exposure on a flight from Sofia to London). If you had a bad stomach, aching joints, or mysterious rash, there was a Bulgarian spring ready for you, bubbling away patiently, a natural, socialist pharmacy in fluid form.

It is easy to poke fun at this project, perhaps, but there is something profoundly modern, even admirable, in the attempt to knit together geology and physiology, to put nature in service of collective health. In the age of antibiotics and CT scans, balneology might seem quaint, yet it spoke to a holistic vision of medicine that is increasingly relevant again. Long before “wellness tourism” became a capitalist catchphrase, socialist Bulgaria had made wellness an entitlement, a birthright secured by the state. And, as it happens, much of this balneal medicine has been shown to have real therapeutic effects, if often more modest than claimed by Socialist proponents.5

The irony, of course, is that this scientific baptism did not make the waters less mythic. If anything, the layering deepened: socialist sanatoriums merely pouring another story into an already overflowing pool. It is inescapable, and even today, to step into a Bulgarian mineral bath is to be immersed in this sedimented history, at once clinical and magical, national and personal, ideological and elemental.

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6. (Bottled) waters under capitalism

If socialism collectivized the baths, capitalism commodified them. Since the 1990s, the fate of Bulgaria’s mineral springs has been a story of privatization, neglect, and occasional rebirth in the glossy language of “spa tourism”. Many once-public pools have been fenced off, leased to private developers, or simply abandoned, their peeling paint and broken fountains testimony to what happens when ideology dries up and market logic seeps in.

The story Strahilov and Karakusheva tell is emblematic. In their study, the destruction of local baths is not just the loss of infrastructure but a rupture in communal life. The baths were a social commons, a space of gathering and tradition, where generations soaked in continuity. Their closure or privatization left more than empty pools; it left gaps in memory, belonging, and identity. As the authors note, these losses sting all the more in the Balkans, where “gangster capitalism” has often meant the appropriation of public goods for private gain under a thin veneer of legality.

Naming practices matter. Where villagers once spoke of the stara banya (“old bath”) or even the “Turkish bath”, new developers prefer “Roman bath”, with its connotations of grandeur, antiquity, and above all marketable Europeanness. The shift echoes Vazov’s own silences: just as he rinsed the Ottoman hammam from his essay, so too do contemporary entrepreneurs scrub away Ottoman associations to make the baths palatable to tourists. A Turkish bath can be too near, too recent, too Eastern; a Roman bath, by contrast, is exotic enough to attract visitors, but familiar enough to feel civilized. As Strahilov and Karakusheva argue, such renamings are not just marketing tricks but acts of memory and identity politics, shaping who belongs and who does not, what is honored and what is erased.

Yet older residents resist this erasure. Some still speak proudly of the “Turkish bath”, not as a mark of subjugation but as a memory of community life, of the way water once bound villagers together. Here, the politics of memory collide: for one group, Ottoman traces must be scrubbed; for another, they remain part of lived heritage. The bath thus becomes a contested archive, where every name — Turkish, Roman, Old — carries a politics of remembering and forgetting.

Capitalism has brought other distortions. Where forest spirits and ancient rituals promised access to mountain springs, now there are spa memberships and payment plans. Where socialist sanatoria promised near-free care for ailments, today’s spa resorts promise wellness, at a price. What was once a right of citizenship is now a luxury experience, packaged in glossy brochures with English slogans and five-star ratings. Mineral water, once the most democratic of substances, becomes stratified: bottled, branded, and sold in supermarkets; fenced, ticketed, and marketed to tourists in resorts.6

And yet, as with Vazov’s nationalism and the Communist Regime’s socialism, capitalism cannot completely capture the waters. People still find ways to soak in the commons: half-ruined pools that locals keep alive with buckets and concrete patches, piled stones and hard work, hidden spots in forests where mineral springs bubble out of the earth, improvised baths where thermal pipes meet the sea and where villagers gather despite official neglect. These improvised hydrosocial spaces resist commodification precisely because they are too small, too shabby, too ordinary to monetize.

The result is paradox. Capitalism both erases and preserves: it erases by renaming, privatizing, and excluding, but it preserves through neglect, by leaving spaces too marginal to be worth the effort of enclosure. In these overlooked corners, the stubborn traditions of hydrosocial heritage persist: fathers still fetching water for newborns, neighbors still meeting in the damp warmth.

If Vazov’s selective memory was a literary act, and socialism’s a scientific one, capitalism’s is a commercial one. Each in its own way “washes” the waters, rinsing some pasts and highlighting others. But the water itself keeps flowing, refusing to be contained by any single narrative. In the interplay of public and private, memory and forgetting, what remains is the lived fact of hot water: soothing joints, softening divisions, fogging glasses.

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7. Lived belonging in the bath

Amid all these grand narratives, from Vazov’s literary cleansing to socialism’s scientific baptisms, and of course capitalism’s glossy commodifications, what persists is the stubborn, sensuous fact of hot water. The mineral bath is not just a site of history; it is a site of belonging in a deep physical, sensuous sense. It is also a liminal zone, a threshold space where ordinary social boundaries and everyday identities are suspended, and participants exist in a state of transition—between work and leisure, private and public, self and community.

My own experiences in Bulgaria confirm this. As I mentioned above, I first encountered banya culture not in the Balkans but in Manhattan, in the Russian-Turkish Baths of the East Village. There, in dim dubiously cleaned pool rooms with their suspicious smelling miasmas, I found something resembling what I would later experience across Bulgaria: old men comparing aches and memories, young men bragging, massive Slavic masseuses offering to smack the hell out of you with birch branches (веник [venik]), everyone sweating and soaking together. Yet if New York’s baths felt like a seedy fly-by-night joint, Bulgaria’s are the full inheritance: centuries-deep, layered with Thracian myth, Roman ruin, Byzantine continuity, Slavic myth, Ottoman hammam, socialist sanatorium, capitalist spa.

Take Ogyanovo, near Leshten in Blagoevgrad oblast, my favorite of Bulgaria’s plethoric baths. A product of the socialist period, it was once a free outdoor pool, always full: pensioners easing joints by day, teenagers sneaking in bottles of rakia by night. When I first visited over a decade ago, the place was alive with chatter and the gurgle of flowing water, a crossroads of generations. A flood in the early 2020s damaged the pool, and the reconstruction that followed stripped some of its charm, not least because it was no longer free. Still, the waters remain superb: over 40°C, mineral-rich, soothing in ways physical and psychological.

The bath also carries its own mythology. Locals tell stories of St. Paul blessing these waters during his travels through the region, though the historical record suggests he never made it quite so far, staying instead in northern Greece around Philippi. More plausibly, the nearby city of Nikopolis ad Nestum, founded by Emperor Trajan in 106 CE, likely explains why this region hums with Roman echoes. Yet the myth matters as much as the archaeology: to bathe here is to bathe in stories, in layers of belief that span centuries.

And then there is the social alchemy that sometimes occurs in the banya. Ogyanovo is the only place in Bulgaria where I have personally seen Roma and Bulgarians share space with something like civility. This may sound like a small thing but given the virulence of anti-Roma prejudice in the country, it borders on miraculous. Perhaps a bath is uniquely suited to this kind of coexistence, the wisdom of Rome’s multiuse thermae renewed. In the humid air, stripped of clothing and social markers, bodies are softened, differences blurred. The mineral waters are indifferent to ethnicity, and that indifference makes possible moments of fragile community.

This, to me, is the real politics of bathing. Beyond literary cleansings and state-sanctioned protocols, beyond tourist brochures and capitalist enclosures, the bath persists as a place where people gather, grumble, gossip, and occasionally transcend their divisions. It is not utopia — prejudices don’t evaporate — but it is a suspension, a temporary reprieve. It is, in essence, a threshold between the pressures of daily life and the temporary community forged in heat and water.

To belong, then, is not always to wave a flag or recite a national poet. Sometimes it is simply to sit shoulder-to-shoulder in a vaporous pool, to close one’s eyes as sulfur rises in the nostrils, to feel muscles loosen and pores open, to be carried together by the same ancient waters. Belonging here is bodily, not abstract; lived, not theorized.

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8. Being

Bulgaria’s baths are not just about hygiene, nor even about health, though aching joints and mysterious rashes do find relief. They are about being in the most literal, embodied sense. They offer a Lebenswelt: the lived world before conceptualization and reflection, where meaning is not thought and analyzed, but soaked, not spoken, but inhaled. In the bath, one dwells in a liminal space, straddling work and leisure, local and foreign, past and present, dry and wet, where bodily experience shapes both perception and identity.

This is why Vazov matters. His “In the Warm Waves” is not just literary description but a performance of Lebenswelt. To let the streams wash over one’s shoulders is to feel history in the body, to experience belonging not as an idea but as a sensation. And this is also why his silences matter. By leaving out the Ottoman hammam, he performs another act of bathing: a national purification, a scrubbing of memory. In the bath, impurities are washed away. For Vazov, those impurities included centuries of Ottoman life.

Socialism, too, staged its own Lebenswelt: a world in which citizens immersed themselves in mineral waters under the guidance of doctors and the sanction of the state. Capitalism followed with its glossy spas and bottled waters, now rebranding Ottoman traces as Roman allure. Each era reshaped the waters to fit its horizon of meaning. But the bath itself — hot, mineral, insistent — continued to flow, refusing to be captured by any single ideology.

And then there are the lived moments that defy abstraction: teenagers passing a bottle of rakia under the stars in Ogyanovo; an old man sighing as he lowers himself into sulfurous warmth; Roma and Bulgarians, locals and foreigners, men and women, for a fleeting hour, sharing space. These are not theories of identity but practices of it. They are Bildungof another kind, an education in heat, sweat, water, bodies floating next to bodies.

To bathe, then, is to inhabit the Lebenswelt in its purest form: to feel continuity and rupture, forgetting and remembering, solitude and community, all at once. It is to step into a liquid archive where Thracians, Romans, Slavs, Byzantines, Ottomans, socialists, and capitalists have all left their traces. And it is to discover, in that archive, not only who Bulgarians have been but who they might yet be.

Perhaps this is how the baths endure. They remind us that identity is not only narrated in epics or legislated in institutes, but soaked into muscles and bones, shared in damp heat. Carried in water.

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And falling, as Erin Endrei shows in her first contribution to The Hinternet, is a variety of motion in space heavy with philosophical significance. Spinoza says somewhere that if a falling stone could contemplate its own plight, it would tell itself it was falling of its own free choice. Do the leaves have a similar thought, we wonder? Or do they recognize the necessity of their circumstances? And if their fall is in fact necessary, why does the word we use to describe it have such a complex historical and conceptual connection to contingency? In her elegant and surprising juxtaposition of Aesop’s fables and of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Erin helps us to go some way towards answering these impossible questions. —The Editors

0.

There are no primary sources for Aesop’s fables, if the emphasis here on the proper name is taken to imply that the name’s supposed referent wrote them down. If he existed, he almost certainly did not do so. Socrates knew the fables attributed to Aesop well enough to versify them in his last days, according to Plato in the Phaedo, but written compilations are not known to have been produced until the following century.1 Of modern editions, it is Ben Edwin Perry’s Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him Or Closely Connected With the Literary Tradition That Bears His Name, Collected and Critically Edited, In Part Translated From Oriental Languages, with a Commentary and Historical Essay (1952) that contains the sources closest to “primary” in this context, being a compilation of the earliest written versions of the fables in Greek and Latin.

Perry was not the first to exercise caution with respect to the fables associated with the subject of the popular ancient biography Vita Aesopi.2 His earlier monograph had devoted considerable scholarly attention to the Vita, presenting one of the earliest codices of it, the Vita G, in edited form.3 According to Lloyd W. Daly in Aesop Without Morals (1961), a work itself heavily indebted to Perry’s scholarship, it was not always assumed in the ancient world that all fables of the kind today called “Aesop’s” originated with the same person.4 They were termed Aesopic, as Perry also approves of calling them in the General Preface to Aesopica and in his earlier work on the subject.5 Both he and Daly avoid applying to them the possessive form of Aesop’s name. To do so without qualification, their scholarship suggests, is to run roughshod over the history of the fables’ formulation, variation, and supplementation down the centuries as tradition.

However we refer to the short tales by which that tradition is composed, most of us today have probably thought about them only rarely since our earliest school days, perhaps turning our attention to such apparently childish stories (or, as Daly puts it, “moralistic pap”) only on the odd occasion when we have witnessed, if not levelled or suffered, accusations involving the phrase “sour grapes”. The most special and important kindergartener of my acquaintance, for her part, has no favourites, as she does not yet abide any of them at all. On the last occasion of my trying to read “The Tortoise and the Hare” to her—quite a while ago indeed now—she was appalled by the ending, despite my attempts to explain its heartening moral. This was because she “wanted the hare to win”, a desire she justified in turn with the claim, entirely true in a sense, that it was he who “was supposed to win”. Neither did the next fable we tackled, “The Vain Jackdaw”, successfully “land”. For once one puts beautiful feathers upon oneself, then how can one fail to be beautiful? And the bird had put beautiful feathers upon herself. In what some may call didactic defeat, others gentle parenting, the volume has since remained in its place on the shelf.

One fable from Aesopic tradition that is less a favourite of mine than something that has burned itself in my memory, like Larkin’s jauntily tetrametric advice about having kids, is indexed 230 in Aesopica: “The Tortoise and the Eagle.” It may be read in several languages on the academic Laura Gibbs’ impressively detailed website, and in early twentieth-century English at Standard Ebooks in a translation by the little-known Cambridge classicist V. S. Vernon Jones. According to the Greek in Perry’s edition, a partial screenshot of a facsimile of which is provided below, the fable shows that “many human beings harm themselves in their rivalries”:

But another lesson appears to me quite clearly deducible: some things are bound to fall.

Beginning this essay with “The Tortoise and the Eagle” was not a purely arbitrary or self-referential choice, but an attempt to clear the way for the reader to see my point about something quite different, something indisputably a matter for adult and perhaps even scholarly consideration.

1.

The thing in question is the translation of the first line of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 under the title Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. As Wittgenstein died in 1951, the original text entered the public domain in 2021, and by 2025 three new English translations had appeared. For perspicuity and later reference, below is the first line in its original language, followed by various translations of it, mostly into Indo-European languages.

Wittgenstein:
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

English translations:
Ramsey-Ogden (1922): The world is everything that is the case.
Pears-McGuinness (1961): The world is all that is the case.
Beaney (2023): The world is everything that is the case.
Searls (2024): The world is everything there is.6
Booth (2025): The world is all that happens to be the case.

Other Indo-European translations:
Dutch: De wereld is alles, wat het geval is.
French: 1: Le monde est tout ce qui a lieu.; 2: Le monde est tout ce qui est le cas.; 3: Le monde est tout ce qui se produit là.; 4: Le monde est tout ce qui advient.; 5: Le monde est tout ce qui arrive.
Icelandic: Heimurinn er allt sem er.
Italian: 1: Il mondo è tutto ciò che accade.; 2: Il mondo è tutto ciò che si verifica.
Modern Greek: Ο κόσμος είναι όλα όσα συμβαίνουν.
Portuguese: O mundo é tudo o que ocorre.
Russian: 1: Мир — это все, чему случается быть.; 2: Мир есть всё то, что имеет место.
Spanish: 1: El mundo es todo lo que acaece.; 2: El mundo es todo lo que es el caso.

Non-Indo-European translations:
Hungarian: A világ mindaz, aminek esete fennáll.
Finnish: Maailmaa on kaikki, mikä on niin kuin se on.

It would be interesting to conduct a comparative investigation of the nuances of the various English and non-English renderings. Lacking the relevant expertise, I cannot attempt to do such a thing; the translations are intended to serve mostly as a reminder that there are many more renderings that might be considered than just the various English ones, even without leaving the comfort of our own language family.

That reminder is necessary, because it is the relation between the English and German versions to which I am admittedly concerned to devote my attention in this short essay. In particular, there is a claim concerning the difficulty of translating Wittgenstein’s sentence into English about which it is my aim to raise a question.

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I

If you spoke to the Sun, what would you say?

II

We’re forbidden, as children, from staring up at it. Its power lies beyond safe measure. It dominates our world: all our cultures, all our lives. Every second it generates billions of times more energy than our species uses in a year. We exist as a rounding error in its flow, a tiny after-effect. In that sense, the only concept the Sun resembles, philosophically, is God. And those artists, writers and theorists who’ve tried to deal with the Sun, even to speak back to it, seem haunted by the same sense of incommensurate scale – by the knowledge of their powerlessness and enthrallment to a higher power.

III

We hide from sunlight by making corners. In any city built on a grid, or at monuments from Abu Simbel to Stonehenge, the Sun will twice a year be perfectly framed. Thus, Le Corbusier, in Vers une architecture (1923): “Architecture is the learned, correct, and magnificent game of volumes assembled beneath the light.”

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It appears we have a proper poetry series going here at The Hinternet — and now my job grows difficult. JSR continues his pressure on me to hunt for interesting new voices, and I am forced to confron…

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With the recent success of The Hinternet’s first feature from an English-language poet, Maria Theresa, our founding editor reached out to me again to see if I might be able to furnish forth any other…

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