Sunday, June 26, 2022

'Down the Coast of Barbary' by Henry Bedford-Jones

If you follow this blog, you may know I'm interested in fictional tropes about eunuchs.

Here's one I just found:

The novelette "Down the Coast of Barbary" by H. Bedford-Jones was published in Argosy, October 21, 1922. pp. 500–537. Read it on PulpMags.org in the flipbook or download the PDF.

Chapter 1

A young Captain Patrick Spence is an American stranded penniless in Algiers after a shipwreck and resettled locally next-door to the Dey of Algiers by helpful Englishmen. The place is "a hotbed of intrigue. Spanish armies were holding Oran against the Moors and the land was in turmoil."

In 1730, Spence finds a Punic coin in his villa garden. He brings the Rev. Dr. Shaw, who is from Oxford, to have a look at it.

Spence says: "Shaw, something's happened! Here's one of the consulate negroes on the run!" Bedford-Jones clarifies: "He was a black man. His nearly naked skin glistened with sweat." He is "panting" and speaks "in a chatter of Arabic" that Shaw understands. Shaw leaves with the man.

Two more people arrive at Spence's villa: a thin old man with "a mustache and goatee of grayish black" and "black eyes that blazed like jewels [and] held weird fires in their depths," who is wearing the royal ornament of "the glorious collar of the Golden Fleece." A woman in a silk dress is traveling with him. They stop to say hello. He identifies them as Spaniards, and they tell him he may stay with them in Morocco anytime he likes.

Next, Mulai Ali the Idrisi, described as a Moor, stops by. The man asks Spence if he knows a man named Ripperda. He says he's spoken to the astrologer of Arzew and their fates are linked. He offers Spence money, power, and a wife. Spence says he doesn't want payment, but "if my help will avail you, I give it freely." The man asks: "Will you go to Morocco with me? Think well! The stars have promised me success." Spence shrugs and says yes. Mulai Ali gives him a box and an unsigned note from someone who identifies himself as a slave and says "I have woven a net to catch Ripperda." Mulai Ali warns Spence to beware of a man in a black burnoose.

Chapter 2

We're informed that the Moorish provincial government is at Arzew, “the ancient Arsenaria, twenty miles east of Oran.” It's under Hassan Bey, a Turk.

We also learn that William Lewis de Ripperda was "born a Roman Catholic baron of Holland," then changed religions opportunistically, becoming ruler of Spain and then Morocco. He seeks "to form a coalition of the Barbary States against Christendom." The consul warns Spence: "unless we destroy Ripperda, this Ripperda will destroy Spain and Christendom!" Mulai Ali says: "Ripperda commands the Moslem armies before Oran; the Dey dare not offend him."

Mulai Ali invites Spence and Shaw on this quest to defeat Ripperda "because you are true men. And through you I can make treaties with England..." They agree to join him, Spence just because he feels like it and Shaw because he expects it will be a voyage through lands of archaeological interest.

Before they leave, Spence sees a man in a black burnoose with “a twisted face that was marked by a purplish birthmark about the right eye.” Soon after, the man jumps him, but other men, including "the consulate negro" with his scimitar, chase him away.

Chapter 3

They ride west, beginning their quest. Spence has sewn the mysterious box in cloth and tied it to his saddle.

Mulai Ali's scheme is to grab the throne while Ripperda is away joining the army at Oran.

They stay at the citadel [kasbah] of Hassan Bey.

We learn that the man in the black burnoose is Gholam Mahmoud, a former Janissary who serves Ripperda. We also learn that the astrologer is an Englishman, captured by Hassan from an English ship and kept by him as a slave. Mulai Ali wants Spence to release the astrologer from Hassan's clutches. Mulai Ali himself will not do it, on the religious principle that he has accepted Hassan's hospitality, but he expects that "a Christian has no scruples."

In the kasbah courtyard, in a pomegranate grove, "a huge black eunuch, half asleep," armed with a scimitar, guards a stone tower. He recognizes Mulai Ali and lets them in the tower where the astrologer is held captive. Inside, Spence is astonished to learn that the astrologer is a beautiful young girl, Elizabeth Parks.

Elizabeth tells Mulai Ali that he is destined to live no more than ten years and die violently if he persists in his way of life. He says that's quite all right with him.

Spence understands that the girl “had seized one slim hope of escaping the harem; how she had worked upon the besotted and superstitious Hassan Bey until he feared her more than he desired her.” Mulai Ali tells Spence that this is the bride he'd promised, should Spence want her, and that the eunuch will help the girl escape with them because the eunuch has hope of improving his own position, perhaps becoming chief eunuch in a sultan's harem.

Spence is to depart with the astrologer that night, and everyone else — Mulai Ali, Dr. Shaw, and the eunuch — will leave the next morning. In part, this is so Mulai Ali can communicate with the eunuch. "I know no Arabic, and I fancy the eunuch has no Spanish," Spence explains.

Chapter 4

While Hassan Bey is debauching at a party, Spence slips away to rescue the astrologer. “...a dark shape arose before him, the starlight glittered on a naked blade, and he recognized the distorted shape of Yimnah, the eunuch,” who is named here for the first time. Spence tells the astrologer that they’ll ride to Tlemcem. There are five in their party, each on their own horse: Yimnah, Elizabeth, Captain Spence, and two Spahis assisting them.

A stranger on horseback shoots at Spence, but Spence shoots back and kills him. He takes a written note off the man's body. The Spahis are able to read it. It suggests that spies are aware of Mulai Ali's location and direction of travel, and they instruct Gholam Mahmoud to kill him.

They hear a Spanish man singing. “The eunuch, Yimnah, baring his scimitar, slipped from the saddle and glided forward to the masking trees. Then he was back, his thick lips chattering words of fear, his limbs trembling.” Elizabeth translates for Spence: “He says it is the ghost of Barbarossa.” Then they see the Spaniard: the large, red-headed Lazaro de Polan, who says he is sometimes called Barbarroja. He says he is a capable fighter, and he asks Spence to hire him for his quest. Spence agrees.

Chapter 5

Outside their inn in Tlemcen, Spence briefly sees Gholam Mahmoud hiding in the shadows. Spence angrily throttles the innkeeper, demanding that he find Gholam Mahmoud, but the innkeeper denies any knowledge of the man.

Spence and Yimnah share a room. Yimnah snores. Early the next morning, Yimnah hears the call from the minaret and rises for his morning prayers. Spence sees Gholam Mahmoud on the ground and he jumps out the window.

Spence is tied up, and Barbarroja negotiates with Gholam Mahmoud. Gholam Mahmoud's arms are bare, revealing a dolphin tattoo on the right arm. This reveals him as a Janissary in the Thirty-first Orta (cohort), a bodyguard to the sultan. Barbarroja tells him he knows where the little leather casket is, and suggests he might be willing to sell it to Ripperda. Gholam Mahmoud seems nervous that the sherif might know about its existence; Barbarroja says he does not. Gholam Mahmoud says he's on orders from Ripperda "to kill Mulai Ali before he reaches Udjde, and to regain the box of leeather." Barbarroja convinces Gholam Mahmoud that they both want to kill Mulai Ali, though for different motivations. He asks Gholam Mahmoud what he wants from their alliance, and Gholam Mahmoud asks for the girl, to which Barbarroja readily agrees.

Returning, Barbarroja trips over Spence's bound body. He cuts him loose. Spence asks if he's seen anyone with a twisted face. Barbarroja says the man left on a horse a half-hour earlier. The narrator indicates to us that Barbarroja is fooling Spence but will receive his comeuppance.

Chapter 6

Spence sends Barbarroja and "a Spahi" to meet Dr. Shaw, and in their absence, he flirts with Mistress Betty, asking her to draw up his horoscope. He tells her he knows that Gholam Mahmoud is near. She replies that if Mulai Ali comes to Morocco, he'll easily take the throne from the current sherif, who is "a mere tool in the hand of Ripperda.

Barbarroja tells Spence that Mulai Ali is waiting for him, so he and the girl ride out of Tlemcen, meeting up with Mulai Ali and Shaw at a rest stop for water and a smoke. Mulai Ali says he's willing to face Gholam Mahmoud alone, and counsels Spence, Shaw, Mistress Betty, "taking Barbarroja and two of the spahis," to seek safety in Udjde. He wants Spence to take the leather box, with its "copies of secret Spanish treaties," for safekeeping. Yimnah also comes to Udjde, "bringing up the rear."

On the way, Shaw asks Spence what he's decided to pay Barbarroja, since "you told him you would discuss wages with him at Tlemcen." Spence admits that he "forgot" to do so. Shaw makes a vague comment: "If the man were what he seemed — well, well, let be."

They stop briefly at a place called El Joube (The Cisterns). Here, Barbarroja threatens them, offering "peace or war." He tells them that they're about to be ambushed, but he can call them off if they hand over the girl. "Now, how much is she worth to you?" Dr. Shaw replies: "Villain!" and knocks Barbarroja unconscious. Barbarroja's hidden allies fire on the party with muskets, but they escape on their horses.

Chapter 7

One of the mounted Spahis grabs the halter of Betty's horse and races away with her. Another leaps into the saddle of Barbarroja's horse. Shaw slays one of his aggressors with a sword. Spence shoots two with a pistol.

“A wide blade flamed in the moonlight. The hoarse, inarticulate rage scream of Yimnah rent the night like a paean of horror. The monstrous figure of the eunuch, streaming blood from a dozen wounds, rushed through the assailants, striking to right and left in blind fury. They opened before him, fell back from Spence, shrieked that this was no man, but some jinni of the mountains. Yimnah leaped on them, struck and struck again, screaming.”

'Fools!' cracked out a voice in Spanish.

A musket flashed near the voice. There died Yimnah, the wide blade sweeping out from his hand and clashing on the stones.

The voice belonged to Gholam Mahmoud. The injured Barbarroja crawls back and argues with Mahmoud: ‘Now Spence is escaped and Mulai Ali not come. Pot-head that you are—only one eunuch bagged, and half our men down!’ He insisted: ‘I stay here to kill Mulai Ali when he comes.’ Gholam Mahmoud rides alone to Udjde.

Spence meets an Englishman who had been a cutpurse in Bristol, was conscripted into the navy, and was captured by “Algerines” and enslaved for 30 years. The man gives him directions to Udjde. After the man leaves, Spence spots Ripperda with his bodyguard, riding to Udjde.

All 13 chapters are available free online.

cover of Argosy magazine October 1921
Down the Coast of Barbary original line art

Here's my book.

The perceived connection between eunuchs and magic

According to Lewis Coser, eunuchs’ power operated “over women and children in the recesses of the harem and the court,” and eunuchs tended toward “magic and superstition in the court intrigues” which was “in contrast to the rationalism of the bureaucrats.” Eunuchs “practiced favoritism and particularism while the literati advocated universalistic standards.” That Coser said it does not mean it was necessarily always and everywhere true, nor even sometimes and somewhere. I cite him to describe this common perception. It is a binary perception of men as rational and eunuchs as irrational.
"The Political Functions of Eunuchism." Lewis A. Coser. American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 6 (Dec., 1964), pp. 880-885 (6 pages) https://doi.org/10.2307/2090872 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2090872 Quotation from p. 882.

Background information (Coser 1972 journal article)

“The alien as a servant of power: Court Jews and Christian renegades.” Lewis A. Coser. American Sociological Review 1972, Vol. 37 (October):574–481. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2093452

The Ottoman princes preferred to be served by foreigners, since “they are so far removed from him in the status order they can never threaten his rule.” (Coser 1972, p. 574).

“I showed in an earlier paper (1964, cf. also Hopkins, 1963) that political eunuchs can be seen as prototypical servants of power because they lacked roots in the social structure and hence depended on the oriental monarchs who used them. Being typically recruited from young children taken in war raids on the periphery of the Empire and then castrated, they had neither effective families of orientation nor of procreation. They could establish no ties in the community, and their loyalty was available to the monarch. There are, however, many cases where uncastrated members of alien communities served absolutist power. Such aliens, although sexually potent, were as politically impotent as the eunuchs.” (Coser 1972, p. 575) [The full citation for Hopkins: Hopkins, Keith. 1963. “Eunuchs in politics in the later Roman Empire.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 189 (New Series, No. 9):62–80.]

A court Jew, for example, served at the pleasure of the prince. “There was no security of tenure…nor could the Court Jew transmit the position to his descendants… Specific Court Jews served specific princes on a particularistic basis.” This made sense, according to “the economic historian David S. Landes (1960:205),” when “the credit of the state was weaker than that of the banker.” They became obsolete when banks modernized in the 19th century. (Coser 1972, p. 577) Court Jews resembled “political eunuchs of the Eastern world and celibate priests of the Catholic Church. Though they had families of their own, these families were as effectively cut off from the surrounding world of the gentiles as individual eunuchs or celibate priests were from the community and kinship that grow from sexual union.” (Coser 1972, p. 578)

“In its early stages, the Ottoman Empire was based on a relatively unstable balance between the Sultan’s forces and his civilian and military bureaucracy, and ‘feudal’ and aristocratic land owning strata. (Eisenstadt, 1960:288.) ...they fashioned a most peculiar civilian and military administration consisting almost entirely of non-native recruits unattached to the native Muslim population. * * * Between 1453 and 1623 only five of the forty-seven grand viziers were of Turkish origin.” (Coser 1972, p. 578) For Christian renegades, “no office was hereditary.” Generally, they had to retire before they could marry, and their sons were ineligible for a court job at all. (Coser 1972, p. 579) [The full citation for Eisenstadt: Eisenstadt, S. N. 1963. The Political Systems of Empires. New York: The Free Press.]

Whereas, for “the most intimate functions performed for the sultan” in his home, it wasn’t enough to be a foreigner; the sultan demanded that the servant also be castrated. (Coser 1972, p. 580 — he cites Lybyer, 1966:56ff and 123ff, but unfortunately the part of Coser's bibliography that would have the full Lybyer citation is cut off from the JStor scan.)

In China, “they represented the very antithesis of the principle of inheritance upon which any aristocratic status group necessarily rests. They were trustworthy since they could never covet hereditary power.” And consequently “their very position rested upon the rejection of aristocratic principles just as it made them consistent opponents of bureaucratic principles.” And so they were the emperor’s “instruments” when he “wished to escape the control of both gentry and bureaucracy.” (Coser 1964, pp. 883–884)

Coser (1964) points to Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (1963) and “History of Chinese Society (1949) with a footnote: “Wittfogel is the only writer I know of who interprets political eunuchism in roughly the same manner I do here…I…profited a great deal from his erudite and perceptive discussion [in Oriental Depotism].”

Coser — born Ludwig Cohen in Berlin, 1913 — died in 2003 at age 89. An obituary in the Brandeis Sociology Newsletter says he had been "the founding chair or our department in the early 1950's."

Friday, June 17, 2022

Fascist time

On fascists' resistance of modernity, Shane Burley writes in the anti-fascist essay collection Why We Fight:

"Modernity is the center of the neo-fascist project, an identity set forward by Julius Evola's rejection of the 'modern world.' Evola's Traditionalism, building on the work of Rene Cuenon, posited a 'divine truth' in all spiritual paths, not just in their gods, but in their hierarchies and tyrannies. Using the Vedic Cycle of Ages, he argued that we have long slipped from the Golden Age and are now in the fourth age, the Kali Yuga, the time of dark passions and decadence. The modern world had rejected the racial purity, hierarchy, and spiritual transcendence that had existed naturally in previous generations. This modern world needed 'men against time,' as Aryan mystic Savitri Devi called them, to resist this modernity as spiritual warriors. Modernity is defined by its state of decline, a false consciousness obscuring the underlying Tradition that puts things in their place through some type of natural law. Fascism is then a distinctly modern concept, something that can only exist in this age of decadence in an effort to return to a fabled place of purity. Jeffrey Herf terms this 'reactionary modernism' the state of technological advancement, and attempts to return to the past of memory."


"By supremacy I mean the spiritual alignment that some people matter, and others do not matter...And by fascism I mean a particular expression of supremacy: a popular political movement organized around an authoritarian cult of personality and privatization of the public good, mediated through an open and explicit reverence for violence as a redeeming force, and energized by a supremacist nationalist myth of purification." — A.R. Moxon, "Bully Tactics" (December 10, 2023)

If we perceive time as focused on past and future, we prioritize a power struggle over what can be made obsolete (e.g., "when faced with ideas we disagree with, we either assign them to the past or worry that they will assign our ideas to the past"), but if we perceive time as focused on what's happening right now, we prioritize coexistence. See: Where Have All the “Isms” Gone? or, Why We Don’t We Have Art Movements In The 21st Century, Mary Rose, Mar 6, 2024

Please also read "Why Fascists Target Gender Transition". It's a 3-minute read on Medium.

a woman wearing an old-fashioned style sundress

Which Lifestance: Choosing-Controlling or Accepting-Appreciating?

Todd May reviews David McPherson's The Virtues of Limits, Oxford University Press, 2022:

"At the outset of his seminal work The Feast of Fools, the theologian Harvey Cox distinguishes between 'world-changers' and 'life-celebrators.' World-changers see what is wrong with the world and hope to ameliorate it. The danger is that, having lost a sense of what is beautiful in the world, they can also lose a sense of the joy of being in the world and even a vision of what they would like the world to be. On the other hand, life-celebrators are in touch with the world’s joy and beauty, but risk forgetting that there is much suffering and oppression that needs to be addressed.

McPherson's book is about something similar, even though, "in contrast to Cox, McPherson’s form of celebration involves limits," not "joyous abandon."

Humility, Reverence, Contentment, Loyalty

May explains:

The distinction McPherson draws in the first chapter, 'Existential Limits,' and the founding distinction of the book, is between the 'choosing-controlling stance' and the 'accepting-appreciating stance.'

* * *

To embrace the 'accepting-appreciating stance,' McPherson recommends the development of four virtues: humility, reverence, contentment, and loyalty."


I learned about the review from Bob Lane's blog, Episyllogism.

You may also be interested in my essay on Medium, "Let's Make Hope."


Book cover for The Virtues of Limits

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

What language can we use for evil?


Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, Chapter 9:

"But how to be morally severe in the late twentieth century? How, when there is so much to be severe about; how, when we have a sense of evil but no longer the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil? Trying to comprehend ‘radical’ or ‘absolute’ evil, we search for adequate metaphors. But the modern disease metaphors are all cheap shots. The people who have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil. Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness. And the cancer metaphor is particularly crass."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Section 187:

"Quite apart from the value of such assertions as 'there exists in us a categorical imperative' one can still ask: what does such an assertion say of the man who asserts it? ...moralities too are only a sign-language of the emotions."

"They Get to Me." Jessica Love. The American Scholar. Spring 2010. p. 71. :

"German bilinguals consistently described the bridge with more feminine adjectives (elegant, beautiful), and Spanish bilinguals described it with more masculine adjectives (sturdy, dangerous). Here’s the kicker: instructions were given in English, descriptions were written in English, and the photograph of the bridge was just that—a photograph. This suggests that pronouns might be important, not just to how we use language, but to how we experience the objects in our world (although, as dear Steven Pinker points out, “Just because a German thinks a bridge is feminine, doesn’t mean he’s going to ask one out on a date”)."

In P. Glassen, "The Cognitivity of Moral Judgments," Mind 68 (1959), pp 57–72. and P. Geach "Assertion." See also C. Wellman, "Emotivism and Ethical Objectivity," American Philosophical Quarterly 5 (1968), pp. 90-9. Reprinted in Richard Joyce. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge University Press, 2001. p. 13. :

"Glassen's point is that if all the evidence suggests that we intend to use our moral language in an assertoric manner, then all the evidence suggests that our moral language is assertoric, for assertion is entirely a matter of our intentions. The evidence that Glassen assembles I would employ to a slightly different end: as confirmation that the linguistic conventions that govern moral discourse are those of assertions. Here is Glassen's list..."
1. They (moral utterances) are expressed in the indicative mood
2. They can be transformed into interrogative sentences
3. They appear embedded in propositional attitude contexts
4. They are considered true or false, correct or mistaken
5. They are considered to have an impersonal, objective character
6. The putative moral predicates can be transformed into abstract singular terms (e.g., "goodness"), suggesting they are intended to pick out properties
7. They are subject to debate which bears all the hallmarks of factual disagreement
We can add to this list the two related characteristics highlighted by Peter Geach.
8. They appear in logically complex contexts (e.g., as the antecedents of conditionals)
9. They appear as premises in arguments considered valid"

Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains

a caped Minion with vampire teeth
Image by InspiredImages from Pixabay

Tuesday, June 7, 2022

Manucher Khan, governor of Isfahan (1841)

How the traveling Englishman Henry Layard interacted with a Persian eunuch, Manucher Khan, the notorious governor of Isfahan, in 1841. (You may see his name as Manuchehr Khan Gorji Mo'tamad al-Dawle.) The story is in Chapters 3 and 4 of Jeff Pearce's book Winged Bull.

The Lur and Bakhtiari tribes wanted more power, but they were under Manucher Khan's boot.

Pearce explains:

"The governor was a larger-than-life sadist of almost cartoonish proportions. A Georgian eunuch with a high, shrill voice and flabby features, dressed in the finest cashmere tunic with a jewel-handled, curved dagger in the shawl wrapped around his waist, he enjoyed being creative in his cruelties. He’d ordered men to pull the teeth of a horse thief and then hammer them into the soles of the man’s feet like shoes for a horse. He ordered a tower built near Shiraz with 300 rebels stacked and mortared into a living wall.

When Layard met the governor, he didn’t hesitate to complain about Imaum Verdi Beg. Manucher Khan promised the official would be punished, and ‘he was good as his word.’ It was only after the wretched thug suffered the agonies of the bastinado that Layard felt any regret or pity.”

The British referred to the political situation as the 'Great Game':

"They had long feared the Russians might try to invade India, and so Cabinet ministers in Whitehall looked on with dread as their counterparts for the tsar orchestrated an alliance with Persia. Perhaps inevitably, Afghanistan became the site of the proxy war between the nineteenth-century superpowers. The British Empire soon found an excuse to send in an army of more than 20,000 men so that a pro-London puppet, in this case a governor of Herat and Peshawar named Shuja Shah Durrani, could proclaim himself ‘King of Afghanistan.’"

Britain suspended diplomacy with Persia.

Anyhow, "the loathsome governor...who rested his considerable bulk on his plush divans" got the idea to impose burdensome taxes on the Bakhtiari chieftain, Mehmet Taki Khan. The governor also told the shah that the chieftain was "conspiring with exiled princes in Baghdad." The Persian army would ride through the mountains once the snow melted and assault the Bakhtiari people. "There were reports that Manucher Khan had already started preparations..."

So, as an Englishman in Isfahan, “Layard now found himself smack in the middle of the chessboard for the Great Game." He was residing with the Bakhtiari when Manucher Khan came.

Mehmet Taki Khan told two of his sons to ride to greet Manucher Khan. They were lifted down "so that the odious eunuch could kiss them in greeting.”

"Now," Pearce writes, "would start a long cat-and-mouse game of negotiations that would last forty days.”

Mehmet Taki Khan gave Manucher Khan "five well-bred Arab horses, twelve mules, an expensive cashmere shawl, an allotment of cash, and presents for the governor's men." But it did not satisfy his "greed" and "cunning treachery." Mehmet Taki Khan “offered more hostages to prove his loyalty. It was a horrible mistake attempting to placate a sadist." Manucher Khan demanded his eldest son, Hussein Kuli. He got a second boy, too.

Layard wrote that Manucher Khan ‘could not conceal the smile of satisfaction and triumph which passed over his bloated and repulsive features when the children stood before him.’" Pearce adds: "Layard knew this monster would break his word. But first the beast wanted to play with his mice." He threatened to execute the two boys if Mehmet Taki Khan didn't surrender — so the father surrendered. Manucher Khan immediately accused him of rebellion and put him in chains.

Layard raced to inform the Bakhtiari what had happened to their chieftain. They sought to rescue their chieftain, but ultimately they would be defeated.

Manucher Khan escaped with his prisoner. Layard went to Shuster to negotiate with Manucher Khan. Layard was placed under house arrest, but he managed to flee. Much later, he was able to visit the Bakhtiari chieftain in chains. The chieftain was eventually released, dying in 1851, soon followed by his son.


You may also be interested in my earlier posts about an Assyrian obelisk that mentions Henry Layard or an earlier Persian eunuch, Aga Mohamed Khan, who had conquered Georgia a half-century before Manucher Khan's time.


Book cover of WINGED BULL by Jeff Pearce

Sunday, June 5, 2022

Passion, detachment, death-drive, ghosts, equilibrium, old-growth

Quotes I'd like to share with you. Sources at bottom.

From Living Alone and Loving It:

"Passionate interests have the potential to cross-pollinate. Years ago I met a woman who was fascinated by the history of bread. 'If you study bread,' she told me, 'eventually you learn everything about the society that made it; who tilled the fields, who harvested the grain, the artists who created the utensils and the art that adorns them, the status of women, farmers and merchants, even their economy.' It seems that if you pick up the thread of almost any interest and are eager to follow it, it can weave together the whole world!

From The Four-Dimensional Human:

“Bartleby, the copyist who refuses to copy...

* * *

The grotesquely static Bartleby, spending hours in trance-like states, embodies the petrifying qualities of authoritarian power structures that uphold corporate architecture. His employer tries to indulge Bartleby’s refusal, and encourages him to take ‘wholesome exercise in the open air. This, however, he did not do.’ ... Bartleby is ultimately arrested and removed for being a vagrant...His employer recognizes the lunacy of this charge: ‘It is because he will not be a vagrant, then, that you seek to count him as a vagrant.’ ... Bartleby, as the static-vagrant, is a monstrous impossibility. ... The clerk spends hours entranced by the view out of his window, which is the unchanging non-view of a wall, the essence of failed refreshment. ... caught in a cycle of reproducing that which already exists. Being absorbed into this strange form of static work, motion without progress..."

From “Pride Reimagined":

"In his 2005 book, In a Queer Time and Place, J. Jack Halberstam writes that queer cultures produce 'alternative temporalities,' or 'queer time,' by allowing us to imagine futures for ourselves outside birth, marriage, reproduction and death, those 'paradigmatic markers of life experience.'"

From Monster Portraits:

“‘A zone of incandescence.’ Aimé Césaire, from a 1943 essay in which he writes that in order to maintain poetry, one must ‘defend oneself from social concerns by creating a zone of incandescence.’ Quoted in A. James Arnold’s introduction to The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Wesleyan University Press, 2013, p. xvii.”

From Peripatet:

"It pulls apart the suicide and makes it personal, every feeling felt, every nuance placed simply before your eyes in enticing imagery that humanizes the experience and thus perhaps terrifies you. Intimate with suicide, this is the result. You become intimate with someone choosing death over life because you understand what might lead one to think this way. You understand the pills, the cabinets full of. You understand the arguments, the evenings full of. You understand the family’s concern, the life apparently full of nothing else. You feel nauseated with identification, perhaps. It’s a downer, a terrible thing, you’re a negative creep."

From "High Falls: A Human Chain":

"Problematically, suicide also works to backfill a biography so that every action in a person’s life seems pointed towards a tragic endpoint, which of course is grossly deterministic. 'Only the living seem incoherent,' continues Critchley, with irony. 'Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd.'"

From "The Light Moves and Changes Everything":

“The afterlife would be dreadful if we were aware of being forgotten, and most of us will inevitably be forgotten, as soon as within a couple generations. While alive, we are mostly surrounded by the recognition of others, even if that recognition consists of being avoided on a subway car or chased from a homeless encampment by a police officer. But profound oblivion awaits, much to the dismay of those who work tirelessly to impress themselves in the collective consciousness of the internet. The awareness of this irrelevance is what being a ghost is all about: understanding the self as dandruff, flyspeck, dryer lint, a single particulate of exhaust soot on a blade of drought-resistant grass along the median strip of an interstate. The body decays ignominiously, so we invent the spirit and glorify that instead, testifying to the mystic self as a wilful, independent force – but the spirit is as disposable as a wisdom tooth, and the presence or idea of ghosts reminds us of this.

Ghosts in their liminal fix also populate a formal panel rejecting the dichotomous valorisation or damnation of the Abrahamic human spirit: neither the perpetual orgasm of rapturous, heavenly bliss nor a hell of physical pain administered with close attention by demons – rather, an insular bureaucracy without meaningful interactions aside from the occasional grievance that can never be communicated adequately beyond a shriek, a stuck piano key, a slammed door, or a cracked mirror, more often driving away those propitiated or appealed to (the living occupants who still have faith in tidy endings) than resolving any intractable problem left over from the spectre’s ephemeral life.”

From "Finding Satisfaction, Knowing When to Stop":

The Old Master uses the sinograph “unhewn, primitive piece of wood” ( 樸) to represent the pristine wilderness and unadorned simplicity of nature, untouched by humans.

* * *

Like the Dào, is ubiquitous and ineffable. But as we evolved into bipedal creatures, we began to use our hands to shape into artifacts or tools ( 器)4. There is a zero sum game between and . For thousands of years, indigenous cultures managed to preserve an abundant , until they too were decimated along with the .

As we create more , more is destroyed forever. Once we have obliterated enough to tip the critical equilibrium, we have also brought our survival into question. I am afraid we may be at just such a junction, perhaps we have even exceeded it.

* * *

Civilization was able to maintain a reasonable amount of until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But since then, we have so thoroughly destroyed , we can no longer restore it. The best we can do is to stop our mindless destruction and let trees, billions of them, rescue us."

From The Sabbath:

"...it is the world of space which is rolling through the infinite expanse of time."


Sources

Barbara Feldon. Living Alone and Loving It: A Guide to Relishing the Single Life. New York: Fireside, 2003. p. 60.

Laurence Scott. The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. “Chapter 6: The Cabin in the Woods.”

Thomas Page McBee. "Pride Reimagined." New York Times. June 16, 2020.

“Notes.” Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar. Monster Portraits. Brookline, Mass.: Rose Metal Press, 2018.

Grant Maierhofer. Peripatet. Inside the Castle, 2019. p. 426 of PDF.

High Falls: A Human Chain.” Robert W. Fieseler. Delacorte Review. June 28, 2019. Accessed May 21, 2020.

"The Light Moves and Changes Everything; or, the Quantum Mechanics of Memory in the Afterlife." Teresa K. Miller and Gregory Giles. Berfrois. January 28, 2020. Accessed April 26, 2020.

"Finding Satisfaction, Knowing When to Stop." Yoo-Chong Wong. Sisyphus. February 2020.

Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath (1951). Prologue. Reprint: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Epilogue.


These passages remind me of the work I did for Ten Past Noon. If I'd known about them earlier, I would have worked them into my book.

forest in daytime
Forest by Valiphotos from Pixabay

Wednesday, June 1, 2022

May I speak to someone from France?

illustration of a romantic proposal - a man kneels before a woman, opening a ring box, outdoors under the stars
Illustration by Susan Cipriano from Pixabay

I've never liked self-referential blog posts — that is, internet articles about the craft and process of writing and sharing internet articles. I want to read articles that are about something, anything, else. I don't want to read articles that are about themselves.

Still less do I enjoy articles framed as "how-to"s in which the author shares their blog stats, and their own perceptions of their own success, on the purported premise that you are interested in copying their process but actually based on their hope that you'll give them some engagement ("likes," "follows," "comments").

Nor am I thrilled by direct solicitations for engagement ("Leave a comment...") in the absence of any real conversation topic proposed. I know why people do this: Comments excite algorithms. These authors are simply asking you to boost their circulation. They may have no time or interest at all for what you write to them in that comment box.

Given all that, I've never used this blog to self-referentially share its own "stats." This is a philosophy blog. I've only talked about philosophy, not about the "success rate" of talking about philosophy. The purpose of talking about philosophy, anyway, isn't to be numerically successful at doing so.

However, insofar as it may occasionally be instructive to reflect on the "business" of doing philosophy, at least once every couple decades, I am curious to find out and you may also be curious to know:

For its first 13 years, this blog had essentially no readers, but in the last year, readership has exploded. I have no explanation for this, as I haven't been doing anything differently, and no one has personally contacted me nor interacted with this blog in a way that I'm aware of.

Not for myself, but for the sake of readers, I'd like to know if I'm doing something "right" or "wrong." Do you, dear readers — and I believe you exist — appreciate this blog? Should I continue posting here, to Dead Men Blogging?

Number of posts

137 posts are still live today. (I may have posted a couple others that I later took down.)

As you see, I posted a few times in 2008, then resumed in 2014.

2022 (9)
2021 (5)
2020 (10)
2019 (9)
2018 (11)
2017 (9)
2016 (2)
2015 (21)
2014 (50)
2008 (11)

Views

All-time page views are 119,000. I don't know if these are humans or bots.

Two-thirds of this traffic occurred over the past year: late 2021 and early 2022.

I have exactly one follower through Blogger (a person known to me).

I also have four non-spam comments ever (plus my two replies, accounting for the "6" you see at the corner of this screenshot). Those comments were from a stranger in 2014; someone I knew from elsewhere online in 2017; a stranger in 2018; and my husband in 2019.

graph showing 119k page views over the years, spiking in late 2021

If it matters or means something to you: Nineteen percent of readers are using Linux or Unix operating systems.

Most popular posts

Of the 137 total posts, 14 have over 1,000 views. These most popular 10% of posts account for one-third of the blog's all-time views.

The least popular post has only averaged 1 view per year:

Hobbes: Bullshit artists make "nothing but words" May 25, 2008 — 14

How do people find this blog? Beats me

Ten percent find this blog through Google or another search engine, and a handful navigate through Blogger itself, perhaps when they've read one post on my blog and continue to another. As for the remaining ninety percent — I have no idea how they came here.

referrers: Google, Blogger, Other

Popular in France

I'm originally from the US, and I write in English, so I'm not surprised that one-fifth of readers are from the US and UK. I'm currently based in South America, but I wouldn't expect many views from this continent, given the language I write in.

What surprises me is that 53% of readers are from France. I don't read or write French, I've never visited France, and I haven't intentionally focused my blog posts on anything related to France. I did write Zen and the art of flying: Planes and bikes in Saint-Exupéry and Pirsig (60 views) and Pierre Darmon on impotence trials in pre-Revolutionary France (185 views), plus nine other articles that contain a reference to "France" or "French." That leaves 92% of articles on this blog that don't mention France — including all of my Top 14 articles that have at least 1,000 views each.

A quick internet search tells me that French people like blogs — or did, in 2006. Thanks, internet.

Perhaps this is a data illusion, and it is simply that many people's network connections appear to run through France. I don't know how to know. (Does it surprise you that a philosopher would say that?)

a list of countries from which this blog has been accessed

It's a question

If I understood my own blog's circulation, likely the information would be neither interesting nor useful to anyone but me, and thus I would not waste anyone's time running my mouth about it. However, I don't understand it. It is a mystery. And mysteries often fascinate everyone. Again, I have no obvious followers. Except for Denise. Hi, Denise.

I am asking for a little help understanding it, in part so I can serve you better. Are real humans reading this blog right now? Should I behave the same or differently? Should I do more or less of that thing, whatever the thing is?

Rather than typing the answer to my question into an internet search box, I thought I would ask you, dear readers:

Could you please leave a comment? Tell me whether you like or dislike this blog. Tell me how you found it. Or just tell me about yourself, your life, and how you are feeling today. I already know who I am. If you're reading this now, there's a better than even chance you're from France. Please tell me something about France. You don't need to tell me anything about this blog. This blog is a digital artifact and does not, ultimately, matter. What matters is what we make of our lives. That's why we do philosophy. If you don't want to leave a public comment on this blog, contact me privately through my website.

This might be a bad idea

Possibly, the magic of this blog is that I rarely refer to myself as a human being who is doing the writing and I never ask readers to interact.

Possibly, right now, by making myself visible and reaching out this way, I'm ruining the pleasure you take in this blog.

On the other hand, maybe my saying a proper hello enhances your pleasure. And maybe it's rude of me not to try. So, I'll try.

Hello. Who are you?


4 years and 10 months into my Medium membership (Nov 2023)

Only 3 articles earned over $100 each. More specifically, these top 3 collectively earned $540.

The next 7 articles earned another $500

The next 10 articles earned another $400

The next 10 articles earned another $245

The next 10 articles earned another $145

The next 10 articles earned another $110

The remaining 400 stories earned less than $10 each; many of these earned only pennies.