Sweat and the Single Boy

 When I was a tiny tyke the barber would come to our house to cut hairs for all the males on the premises—nine of us when everyone was around. I hated to have my hairs cut—or rather, I hated to have someone handle my noggin in aid of cutting my hairs. So I would hide wherever I could. Once I hid under the barber's car. Fortunately, I guess, I was removed and shorn before he could run me over. I suspect I'd have preferred death. But there you go.

 

But it wasn’t only the noggin-touching of the barber that I disliked. When I was still a wee lad, and well into my adult life, any body to body contact, with sib, friend, or stranger, put me off almost entirely. Fortunately in my Marist Brothers school, where I was a studious little brat through the beginning of third grade, we were not physical educated. At some point one of the brothers did institute a set of basketball teams during recess, to be sure, but that was for fully clothed kids, required essentially no bodily contact, and so no real threat to my contact phobia.

 

But then we became exilic, and in that cauldron of bodies called the public schools, where—mirabule dictu!—there were people of the female persuasion cheek by jowl with boys, phys ed became a requirement. Again, we were all fully clothed, so very little infringement of the bodily contact exclusion. Except when we had sessions of square dancing. Ay me! Swing your partner and do-si-do indeed. A coincidence, to be sure: it was during one of those square dancing sessions that we all learned of JFK’s assassination.

 

And then came the move to junior high school. There we were obliged to change from regular clothes to phys ed gear. I didn’t mind the nudity in the locker room. In fact, it was interesting in its own way—the visible differences, the comparisons, the strutting and fretting. Still, the boys’ locker room gave onto the phys ed teachers’ office, with expansive, wall to wall windows overseeing the whole cadre of naked boys while the adults gazed on. That was a bit of a put off, particularly because the gentlemen kept their college frat paddles, which they used from time to time to warm some of those naked bottoms, adorning the top of the windows.

 

But there was worse to come.

 

In that junior high school we were instructed in the fine art of wrestling. We all know what wrestling entails. Bodies locked together in mortal—or what passes for mortal—combat. Limbs locked, fingers fumbling, torsos tortive. We kept our gym shorts on, praise be, but had to remove our shirts. And all of us in seas of sweat—this was Florida, after all—we grappled. Compared to wrestling, the square dancing of elementary school was anodyne. Shangri-la. Eden itself. After so much body against body, I welcomed the shower, even as the phys ed teachers gazed on.

 

Wrestling continued through the end of high school, and always the shower was more than welcome. College was a different story. We were required to have graded credits in phys ed back in those days, so phys ed was kismet.

 

My initial experience with the phys ed department was less than stellar. We had to prove that we could swim and float in the water, so we boys—in the days of sex segregation such exploits demanded separation—dutifully showed up at the indoor pool to perform our natation. I automatically took my swimming trunks because it seemed a gimme. A number of kids did not, however. And they learned that they would have to perform in the nude. I suspect that would not happen nowadays.

 

We also had to prove that we could run a certain distance, perhaps a mile?, in seven minutes or less. At the time I was a smoker. Of tobacco. As well. I went through two or three packs a day, and did so until I couldn’t afford the cost, when I started to roll my own cigarettes. I couldn’t keep track of my consumption then. At any rate, there was no way that I could possibly run for anything like a mile in seven minutes—or half an hour, for that matter. So I was obliged to take remedial phys ed for my first credit. Since all of us up for remediation were equally dead physical losses, we didn’t do much for that credit beyond show up and walk around the track that we were supposed to be running. Every now and then an instructor would crack a verbal whip. With no notable effect. One result of that experience was that my otherwise perfect 4.0 average for the year was marred by the C I got for the class. It was a gift.

 

Such demonstrations of prowess aside, we could choose what activity to experience. And I learned that I could game the system. I chose to take exhausting classes, like bait casting, which entailed us standing on one side of the gymnasium, elevating our school-provided rods and reels with a plumb weight at the end of the line, and aiming to hit a bull’s eye target on the other side of the gym. I did not sweat a great deal in that class. But I did get pretty good at the task, and ended up with an A, no less. The first and only A ever in a phys ed class for me. I got a little more adventurous and signed up for a class in fencing. That was fun, except that all of the instruction was for right-handed people. Oh well. And I took a class in ice skating, which was fun as well. I can still skate fairly well.

 

The point of all those choices was that they required absolutely, positively no body-to-body contact at all. Glorious! And yet square dancing came my way again. I chose to take a class in folk and square dancing—not to relive my elementary school nightmare, but rather because by that point in my life I’d learned to make exceptions in the bodily contact exclusion rule when it came to people of the female persuasion. I may not have known the young lady with whom I danced, but invariably she, a series of shes, seemed cheerful and attractive. A little hand-to-hand contact was OK, I thought, especially since the gym where we danced was nicely airconditioned, so sweat was minimal at worst.

 

But square dancing would rise up again for me, alas not in airconditioned comfort. One hot July night, for some unknown and possibly unknowable reason, the woman I loved, who not much later became my wife, decided that it would be neato keano if we went to a square-dancing venue out in rural Massachusetts, somewhere west of Boston, at any rate, and rural insofar as the dancing took place in a real live barn. Not airconditioned, to put it mildly, in the heat of that hot hot July evening.

 

I was prepared to dance and enjoy myself, not just because I had the college phys ed class under my belt, but also because I’d be dancing with my beloved, with whom bodily contact was absolutely not to be avoided in dance or in any aspect of life. What could go wrong? What my soon-to-be wife had not told me was that the rules of the dance required that no one partner the person they came with. Lordy lordy. The whole evening was a nightmarish mishmash of sweaty palms and a stream of sweat every time partners swung. But I endured. Ain’t love grand?

A Foreign Country

 

William T. Vollman's review of This Is Not Miami, by Fernanda Melchior—in the New York Times Book Review for 14 May 2023—juxtaposes two phrases that seem to me to require more than the mere pass through implied by the only conjunctive statement:  "And never mind."  First Vollman correctly says that Hernan Cortés is a "conqueror-torturer."  Then, on the other side of the "never mind," equally correctly, he says that the people whom Cortés conquered-tortured were "human-sacrificing Aztec overlords" (13).

What I think needs unpacking in those two phrases is the alienness of the past, which seems to be impossible for contemporary folks in the US to consider, accept, and contend with.  From the left side of the political spectrum, the past is always the subject of outraged moral judgments that make the behaviors of the past so reprehensible that they are perceived to be entirely alien to the present—so beyond the pale that the only possible response to the past is pure opprobrium.  From the right side of the political spectrum, the past is an anodyne story of greatness, when men were men and women weren't, and America—or, if going back far enough, Europe—was great.  The inevitable conclusion to that perspective seems much like Buck Turgidson's response to Soviet ambassador Alexi de Sadesky's description of the Doomsday Bomb:  "Gee I wish we had us one of those."

Maybe because I come to the question of the relation of past to present from the perspective of the left, it seems to me that the right side of the equation is simply nonsense.  Just one day of living in the past as it really was would make even the most rabid of the MAGA crowd think again.  Smallpox, anyone? Bubonic plague? How about the complete subordination of women to men, so that a woman could not own property under her own authority, or have her own bank account, or . . . fill in the blank for whatever right you value the most.  Want to return to the day when a Black man even glancing at a white woman led to a lynching? Or to a time when Native Americans who objected to their own exploitation were slaughtered and then their bodies dumped in an oil barrel?  If you see those behaviors as fine and dandy, then you're welcome to join the neo-nazis. But please stay out of the present.

From the perspective of the left, it's important to recognize the validity of L. P. Hartley's comment in The Go-Between, that "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." That truth just cannot be dismissed by the cursory "And never mind" of Vollman's review. Seeing things from the left, as I said, I know only too well that it's difficult to curb the impulse to judge the past by terms that are current in the present. But the past, in its different epochs and its different cultural milieus, has its own evaluative criteria.

Michel Foucault argues that history proceeds by discontinuities rather than by narratives of the same. And that's the grounds on which I see the connection between Cortés and the Aztec overlords. It is a necessary and uncontested aspect of Aztec ways of being, not only that humans should be sacrificed to the gods, without which practice the whole universe would be endangered, but that the struggles of the gods should be reenacted in the game of ulama, a "ball" game in which the heads of the losers of the game became the "ball" used in the game.

No doubt we in the present recoil at that practice, just as we recoil at the practices of the Spanish conquistadores, whose actions against the natives of the so-called New World are disgusting. And yet, just as the practices of the Aztecs were necessary for maintaining the universe, so too the practices of the conquistadores were essential to the expectations of their culture. I am not at all persuaded by the idea that Europeans came to the New World in order to spread the truth of Christianity and save the souls of the poor benighted "natives." Pelf and wealth seem to me the clear underlying motives, as is the case with Cortés, certainly, whose exploits converted him from mere soldier to the Marqués del Valle. But the way that the Spaniards approached the natives simply reflected the way that the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula took place, in the same way that the treatment of Native Americans by the English settlers of North America reflected the way that the "Plantation" of Ireland took place.

The underlying point is pretty simple: people do what people are supposed to do, and what they are supposed to do is given by the complex intersection of what Foucault calls discursive practices that form the grounds from which a culture springs. Our discursive practices arise from moments of disruption, again according to Foucault, which make the past the "foreign country" that Hartley describes. If Cortés or Montezuma had behaved as we do in 2023, they would have been housed in an insane asylum—of which, of course, there were none in 1520. Instead, they would have been treated by their respective priesthoods for possession. Conversely, if St. Joan of Arc were with us today, she would be in an insane asylum rather than in the panoply of Catholic saints.

The problem of a proper evaluation of the past becomes a serious problem, then, because it seems inevitably to lead to an ethical relativism that smacks of weak-kneed liberalism, in the older, mid-twentieth-century sense of liberalism as something that makes it impossible to make any judgments at all.

Perhaps that is true.

But I like to think of it differently. A solid consideration of the past requires very careful study of the past and its difference from the present. I think of Ta-Nehisi Coates's problematic response to Queen Nzinga, Queen of Ndongo and Matamba, in Between the World and Me as a case in point.  His initial response to her power is to admire her because, when the Dutch ambassador with whom she was negotiating tried to humiliate her, she showed "her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body" (45). In the ruthless power games of the 17th century, Nziga outperformed the Dutch man. She was for Coates, then, "a weapon" to wield against the equally ruthless power games of twentieth-century American race relations.

In his first response to the Queen, Coates was a bit like the MAGA crowd, seeing in the practices of the past a mirror to what the present ought to be.

And then Coates thought again—or rather, he took a class in which his professor, Linda Heywood, reframed Queen Nziga's behavior. When Heywood "told the story of Nziga," says Coates, "she told it without any fantastic gloss, and it hit me hard as a sucker punch." What hits him is that, in the realitiy of the present, he would not be Nziga's avatar, but rather he would be like her adviser, "broken down into a chair so that a queen, heir to everything she'd ever seen, could sit" (54). That idea runs so deeply counter to the practices of the modern world that it produces a response equivalent to my response to Cortés or Montezuma.  Revulsion.

I think, however, that neither the initial nor the secondary response is a full one. Yes Cortés and Montezuma and Nziga behave in reprehensible ways. But they behave in ways that are essential and necessary. If Cortés is going to perform as he is expected to perform; if Montezuma is going to act as his religion requires him to act; if Nziga is going to overwhelm her antagonist, then all three must, absolutely must behave as they do. My judgment that such behavior is simply unacceptable in the modern world is, ultimately, irrelevant to the historical moment of 1520 or 1640. I am not being a relativist, in other words, but a contextualist, fully aware of the evil of the past but also fully aware that such a judgment is couched in terms of the present.

Free Speech 2

All the BS talk about free speech in social media made me think of a sad but all too true matter of fact. My local newspaper, owned by a conglomerate that operates “local” newspapers throughout the southeast of Pennsylvania, has a strict policy that it will not accept nor publish letters that express any criticism of the management of the newspaper.

The stricture is very broad. I’ve had letters summarily rejected because I’ve pointed out the grammatical and logical solecisms that appear in the paper. Just today, for instance, a column headed “Today’s birthdays” begins with the following entry: “1547—England’s King Henry VIII died at age 55.” As errors go, that’s not in the range of a Mount Everest; but it is ridiculously stupid and as good as erases whatever seriousness the paper might lay claim to.

 

Still, I’ve never thought of the paper’s policy as being in restriction of free speech. It’s a private enterprise, after all, and its owners can choose to publish what they decide to publish and exclude what they decide to exclude. So too printing presses, magazines, journals, encyclopedias, radio stations, TV channels . . . all of them are guided by editorial principles that are congenial to the owners’ point of view.

 

When Zuckerberg or Musk make the argument that they will not allow fact checkers to vet the posting on their online versions of publications, I am therefore more than skeptical. It’s obvious that the rejection of fact checking is entirely partial. If I were famous enough to be followed by several million Twitter users, and if with such a following I were to ridicule Musk, I know that I would be banned. So much for free speech—except that it seems to me entirely within Musk’s right to censor his site. So too Zuckerberg and any other owner of a private publication of any sort.

 

The First Amendment is crystal clear: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The key term in the amendment is “Congress,” and because the power to make laws is explicitly the purview of Congress, the point extends to the government as a whole. In short, then, the government of the United States is constitutionally prohibited from abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

 

It's not Zuckerberg or Musk who are prohibited from silencing speech, in other words. It is the government. In light of that fact, therefore, the newly imposed restrictions on the speech of government agencies and employees strikes me as profoundly unconstitutional. There can be no reference in government documents to “woke,” as they call it, issues, like gay rights or the historical contributions of Black Americans or climate change, or anything that troubles the buzzing brains of the president’s MAGA acolytes.

 

Where does the right of the government to censor speech come from? Is that not simply an unconstitutional prohibition? And if we simply let that unconstitutional act slide by, what other unconstitutional act will we accept?

Tin Foil and Meaning

All the recent brouhaha about the flock of drones besieging New Jersey, and more generally the east coast, produces some real winners. It is an alien mother ship sending out scouting vessels. It is a foreign power whose mother ship is just off the Atlantic coast. It is a cabal of our own government and technology companies preparing us for a complete take over. It is . . . . Fill in your own blank to give it meaning beyond the probable truth, that some jokers in Jersey and other places on the coast are whooping it up over the trick they’ve pulled off.

Those “explanations” of the phenomenon are much like the “explanations” that come from all the tin-foil hat conspiracy theories. The commonplace, the everyday, the ordinary, the events that deserve no explanation because they are simply random accidents in the flux of experience—all of them become grist for the mill. Pennsylvania law does not allow counting of mail-in ballots before the polls close on election day—therefore the surge of votes that comes late on the day after election day must be an attempt to steal the vote. Area 51 is top secret because it’s where the armed forces develop their most advanced weapons system—but obviously the secrecy means that there are captured spaceships from alien cultures that are being reverse-engineered to produce those weapons system. Photographic evidence for Big Foot, for Nessie, for Chupacabras, for . . . is available and denying it is obviously the government denying truth. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say.

The phenomenon reminds me of a chapter, “Serpents and Skulls,” number 3.1.2 in Italo Calvino’s complex arrangement of experience in his Mr. Palomar, a book—novel? collection of stories? meditations?—that should be read repeatedly by every human. The numbers indicate that the chapter is meditative (3), but about sensory experience (1) in a social context (2).

Because Calvino invites it, I’ll be using terminology from Ferdinand de Saussure’s great invention of structural linguistics, and so I want to define four of the terms that Saussure deploys. The first is “signifier,” by which he means any sensory experience, whether aural, visual, or tactile. Saussure says that signifiers bind to “signifieds,” by which he means some conventional concept that denotes the sensory experience. So, he says, a visual image such as this

is bound to the concept “dog,” and we can speak of dogs without having recourse to the visual image and conversely when we hear or read “dog” we have the visual, olfactory, tactile, auditory experiences that the concept entails. The bound duality, sensory experience/concept, says Saussure, is a “sign.” Finally, Saussure posits that the meaning of signs depends entirely on the system of signification within which the sign appears. What that means is that the meaning of any sign is conditional on the system within which it appears. It doesn’t mean that the binding of the sensory experience to the concept is variable. The sign remains the same regardless of the system in which it appears. Rather the meaning of the sign is absolutely variable. So, for instance, in English a good buddy can be your “dog,” and no insult is understood. But in French, to call that same buddy a “chien,” the French word that denotes the sign, a dog, is definitely an insult. The meaning of the sign depends on the system in which it appears. So in what follows expect signifier, signified, sign, and system of signification.

“Serpents and Skulls” begins as Mr. Palomar visits a Toltec temple located in Mexico. He is guided by a learned friend through the collection of sculpted reliefs, sculpted columns, and chac-mools—free-standing statues—that constitute the decorations, if that is what they are, of the structure. They are the signifiers that Mr. Palomar and his friend encounter. The signifiers in the reliefs express a language that has been completely lost in the passage of time since the Toltecs disappeared. In effect, then, the signifiers are unattached to any signified. There is, therefore, no concept to which the signifier can be bound, and without the system of signification that is Toltec language and culture, there is no way that the meaning of the images can be deciphered. Nonetheless Palomar’s friend, “an impassioned and eloquent expert on pre-Columbian civilizations,” expresses what the images must be and what they mean.

 

The language that the learned friend uses indicates whence the explanations derive. He tells Mr. Palomar that the temple they’re visiting is “a step pyramid.” He notes that at the top of the temple stand four “caryatids,” and that those figures are known as “Atlases.” The narrative voice—one of the glories of Mr. Palomar, points out that “All this has to be taken of faith,” but the friend’s methodology is obvious: each Toltec visual experience becomes meaningful only as it is subsumed in a European category. Europe becomes the system of signification that the friend applies even though the linguistic and cultural vacuum in which those signifiers now exists makes the cognitive content as well as the meaning of each image entirely undetermined and undeterminable.

 

The problem is infinitely complex because, says the narrator, “In Mexican archeology every statue, every object, every detail of a bas-relief stands for something that stands for something else that stands, in turn, for yet another something.” From the perspective of the modern human, all of those visual experiences amount to nothing more than a series of accidental collocations of signifiers without any signified in sight. In practice, making one of the chac-mools a sign, i. e. binding the signifier to a specific signified is akin to seeing a tree, giving it a scientific name and then giving the sign a specific meaning by putting that scientific name into the pattern of Darwinian evolution. Or it’s like seeing a tree and saying that it denotes the nymph Dryope and then giving Dryope a specific meaning by placing her within the full the system of the Greek pantheon.

 

Mr. Palomar’s friend, then, does exactly what the tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorist do. He binds the signifiers, the visual experience, to a more or less arbitrary signified and then puts the thus newly created signs into a system that produces meaning.

 

While Mr. Palomar and his friend are wandering through the Toltec temple, another voice impinges on their awareness. The voice belongs to a schoolteacher who is taking his students, “stocky boys with the features of the Indios, descendants perhaps of the builders of these temples,” through the temple. As Mr. Palomar’s friend descants on the meaning of the visual experiences that surround them, the teacher points to the image and says, “Esto es un chac-mool. No se sabe lo que quiere decir.” Like the narrator, I’ll provide the translation from the Spanish, knowing full well that to translate is to assign meaning when, perhaps, meaning is undeterminable: “”This is a chac-mool. We don’t know what it means.” In Saussurean terms, the teacher says, “This is a signifier. It is bound to no signified. Meaning cannot be determined.”

 

Of course Mr. Palomar “is fascinated by his friend’s wealth of mythological references: the play of interpretation and allegorical reading has always seemed to him a supreme exercise of the mind.” The attribution of alien secrets to Area 51 indubitably fascinates. But at the same time, as he listens to the schoolteacher repeatedly assert, “No se sabe lo que quiere decir,” Mr. Palomar also thinks that “The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.”

 

As they pass by the most spectacular frieze in the temple, the teacher states what they are seeing—“This is the Wall of the Serpents. Each serpent has a skull in its mouth.” And then restates his conclusion, this time presented only in English—or in Italian in Calvino’s original: “We don’t know what they mean.”

 

Mr. Palomar’s friend blows up at this point, asserting that the frieze denotes “the continuity of life and death; the serpents are life, the skulls are death. Life is life because it bears death with it, and death is death because there is no life without death.” The friend’s statement is an exact representation of Saussure’s linguistics. The signifier, skull or serpent, is bound to a signified life and death, and the sign thus created is given meaning in a system of signification that expresses a not particularly unusual philosophical point of view.

 

Mr. Palomar meditates on his friend’s excursus into meaning. “He asks himself,” says the narrator, “What did death, life, continuity, passage mean for the ancient Toltecs? And what can they mean today for these boys? And for me?” In effect Mr. Palomar is granting the possibility that the visual experience, the signifiers that they’re all observing, is indeed bound to the signifieds that his friend asserts. Let’s assume that the friend’s association of signifier with a given signified is correct, that we now have signs—serpent/life, skull/death, and so on. But then, wonders Mr. Palomar, what do those signs mean in the system of signification in which the world came to have meaning for the Toltecs?

 

Here the insufficiency of translation, even from one known system, Spanish, to another known system, English (or Italian) seems to me a faint analogue to what Mr. Palomar contemplates. Yes, “No se sabe lo que quiere decir” means “We don’t know what it means.” But literally the signifiers of the Spanish expressly say, “We don’t know what it wishes to say.” In a more expansive sense, what exactly is it that the world of sensory experiences, the sensorium, wishes to say to us? Can we simply assume that the meaning we “discover,” or rather attribute to the sensorium is what it “wishes to say”?

 

The chapter ends with the supremely human touch that characterizes Mr. Palomar in every single chapter. As the narrator tells us, Mr. Palomar “yet . . . knows he could never suppress in himself the need to translate, to move from one language to another, from concrete figures to abstract words, to weave and reweave a network of analogies. Not to interpret is impossible, as refraining from thinking is impossible.” We simply cannot tolerate the absence of meaning. Inevitably, it seems, we humans provide a a system of signification to every signifier/signified, every sign, every sensory experience, even when there is no possible system within which we can put those signifiers.

 

Conspiracy theorists are just as human as is Mr. Palomar, his friend, and all the rest of us. Having no coherent system in which to put Area 51 or the post-election-day batch of votes from Pennsylvania or the shadow on the surface of the loch that surely must be Nessie—lacking a full context for the sensory experiences that they encounter, they create a system of signification out of whole cloth. Belief in the meaning thus produced is essential to avoid the vacuum of sense. The stronger the belief, the more solid and powerful the meaning. As Neil Gaiman says in American Gods, it’s not so much that Zeus doesn’t exist, but rather than no one believes in him any more.