Life Sentences (30 page)

The Germans had failed to drown women in the Pripet Marshes and had neglected that form of murder almost altogether, but now, as if wishing to fulfill every possibility, regional leader for Hamburg Karl Kaufmann loaded ten thousand leftovers onto three ships tied up in Lübeck. These vessels were by happenstance bombed by British planes, and most of the prisoners, crowded into holds like slaves, drowned when the ships exploded, rolled over, and sank.

When the Red Army reached Auschwitz it found many corpses, but the SS had left seven thousand prisoners in some stage of life, and they had not destroyed every evidence of the camp’s activity.
“Russian soldiers painstakingly catalogued 837,000 women’s coats and dresses, 44,000 pairs of shoes and 7.7 tons of human hair.” Finally, the Germans had acquired enough coats.

The Nazis were down for the count, but the count was only at nine when Allied warplanes kicked dozens of towns nearly out of existence (Dresden, most infamously), and the Red Army arrived to repopulate the ruins by raping the women who remained. They brought with them destruction, pillage, theft, rape, murder, and savage revenge. Death, it seems, was also an Allied deity.

Evans, after his usual sober and responsible account of how the end came for Hitler and Goebbels, writes: “The deaths in the bunker and the burned-out streets were only the crest of a vast wave of suicides without precedent in modern history.” This penultimate killing was sometimes done out of an ancestral sense of honor, or from the shame and indignity of a trial that would brand them as criminals, or to avoid the mistreatment of their displayed corpse, or out of despair for Germany and the failure of their enterprises; but not often because they were wrong, not because they were guilty, not because they were moral monsters and could no longer bear the creatures of evil they had become.

Afterward, death would add still more to its roster with trials and hangings. Not just the guilty paid its price. In what was perhaps the final irony, many survivors of the camps would kill themselves because they were alive.

I want to begin by imagining what may be an imaginary world already: the animistic environment of the early Greeks, a world given to us by Henri Frankfort, F. M. Cornford, Bruno Snell, and E. R. Dodds, among others, and one which Gaston Bachelard cited as the first stage in his theory of Western scientific and philosophical development. How many have made the early Greeks say what they wished them to, because what they have said to us is mainly in bits and pieces, in a language we don’t know how to pronounce, and in words that refer to a world we have lost, if we ever possessed it, a world we have filled with our own feelings, like those of a childhood we want to think was happy and promising beyond all expectation. Our own awe built those temples and we were the ones who worshiped there. Even when, almost with relief, we decide that the glorious Greeks were really just as mean and murderous as we are; sometimes as stupid as their sheep; still worse, that they watered their wine; our revisions are but patina on the columns of the temples where the great statues stood, where Socrates discovered the immateriality of the soul, and, in the plays, Agamemnon died.

If we think of it now as primitive, and a phase of human growth that’s been happily left behind—the childhood of our civilization—it nevertheless served as a bed of extraordinary seeds, for it was in fact
a fruitful way of feeling if not thinking about life, one that’s been admired and sought and celebrated by poets of every type, tongue, and time. Bachelard himself, at first interested only in the tendency of the scientific spirit to shed previous theories like snakes their out-of-season skins, and to move on to ever more abstract and arcane conceptions (“Nature must be made to go as far as the mind goes,” was his famous phrase), later in life saw the importance for the arts in following a contrary path back to instinctive or elementary ways of perceiving, basic forms of feeling, immediate modes of thought, and the methods used by those who have nothing but their thumbs to solve their problems.

Bachelard treated concepts, and the words that represented them, like patients in analysis; that is, they were made of dynamic, interwoven, often antagonistic layers. As an idea struggled through history it bore some of its past along with it, just as enduring institutions do, so that the new was like paint applied over old coats. Moreover, past meanings were constantly reinforcing, interfering, rendering vague or ambiguous, theories that contemporary thinkers sometimes employed in ignorance of their historic complexity. An idea may have grown up to be stoic, studious, and severe, but it has preserved some inward space where the child it once was can still wail, an imp misbehave, and a lazybones lie in a hammock to have a snooze. A concept like
cleave
could even find itself in contradiction to its own beginnings, and etymological paths were often as tangled as twigs.

In that same wonderful work on the nature of science that Bachelard called
The Philosophy of No
(1968), he suggests that for each key scientific term, like
mass
, for instance, an epistemological profile be drawn up which would indicate how much of its current use was really as advanced as the science of its time, and how much of it was still made up of the meanings it had acquired during earlier stages. The first of these periods, the subject of the present inquiry, was that of animism, the richest, most poetic era of all, which Bachelard, in his scientific hurry, passes over as swiftly as a shadow. When I
try to clear a tree from the land I am attempting to farm, it will resist me, exert its will, order its roots to grip the earth more firmly, stiffen its bark against my saw, fall, if it must, upon my ox and plow. Here energy and mass are sibling rivals—my energy, its mass; my insistence, its resistance. In phase two—one of realism, though of a naive sort—I shall judge anything to be heavy that makes me work to move it or simply looks big. Mass will be a permanent property of things, while energy will express itself through my sweat, grunts, and curses. In animism, to be brief, things are as heavy as they want to be; in realism, they are as heavy as their color and size suggest (the darker the denser, the bigger the beefier), or as heavy as they are difficult to lift. No one will be surprised if the same stone has more than one weight. If we ask why things have any weight at all, the answer will be the same as Aristotle’s concerning gravity: because it’s their nature.

In an animistic world there are no integrated selves—the individual has yet to be imagined—and anyone’s response to some event will involve a mix of desire, emotion, and thought in a stew that confounds distinctions, because whatever confronts the hunter is an equally unstructured aggregate of powers and properties. Nietzsche called life at this level Dionysian. Like an animal in a herd, one is immersed in an ocean of incident. The herd flees as leaves are blown, in the breath of one alarm. Of course, we do not
know
this; we infer it from what is absent from their recorded vocabulary. Conjecture is the uneven ground we tread.

The third stage, which Bachelard calls positivism, introduces quantitative measures in every case it can. Instruments objectify and standardize what were formerly relative and subjective qualities. It is no longer as cold as the frozen pond, as cold as the woolly caterpillars predicted, or as cold as it feels to the cheek; but it is as cold as the mercury registers. What was heavy to me and light to you, because you were muscled and I was not, is now a phenomenon reduced to units, numbers, and their measurement while they sit on the sensitive tray of the scale. When a well-known philosopher
with whom I went to graduate school was asked how his new baby was faring, he replied, holding his hands wide in the way we do for fish, “It is seventeen and one-half inches long.” His answer was one of pure positivism, the tongue of quantitative measure, including especially the
it
.

The transition from realism to positivism can be observed in the earliest methods of measurement, when uniformities in the movement of the heavenly bodies were used to understand phases of more disorderly change. One traveled “many moons,” or at least movie Indians did. Often, however, more modest regularities were employed. An eighteenth-century missionary reports that in the tribe whose souls he was saving, “They would indicate the size of a herd of horses by stating how much space the horses occupied when standing next to one another.” A farmer saw the size of his land in terms of the time needed to plow it; a day’s work was his oxen’s “yoke”; another unit was made of as much wood as a man could chop before dark. The human body was a veritable bureau of standards: feet divided the stride, horses stood hands high, arms held out wide created a fathom, and when those closed in a hug, what one could hold of cut wheat was a sheaf. The farmer even put his carts, baskets, staffs, and buckets to work within this method of metaphorical measuring. A barrel was called a tun when full of grain, and a tun of land was as much as could be planted with the seed from such a container. Spelled with an o instead of a u “it became a measure of salt, coal, and the cargo capacity of a vessel,” all this according to Henri Frankfort in his book
Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man
.

There were no meter bars in Paris or little weights to place upon the grocer’s scale, so a kernel of corn might be chosen to make the comparison (hence
carat
) or the pit of a date. Time was similarly divvied up. Forenoon, in Sanskrit, was
samgava
, “the time when the cows are driven together.” In the evening, quitting time for the Greeks was the moment when one unharnessed the oxen. The Russian peasant, always hungry, saw the day as made of stretches of work “between meals,” and the Anglo-Saxon
undorn
carries a similar
significance. “Let’s try to get this done before happy hour,” we still say, and “let’s have lunch” still designates a time free of work’s routines.

The positivist period, sometimes characterized as one of pure empiricism, is paradoxically a time of wariness concerning the senses. By this time philosophers and scientists have become so skeptical about human testimony and the reliability of experience that they begin to replace our fragile faculties with machines, devices that will not be swayed by urges or conniptions, except when the scales are made to lie by cheating merchandisers. Man is no longer the measure when man is measured.

In Bachelard’s scheme, when positivism has lost its scientific popularity and become passé, it is supplanted by rationalism, a phase dominated by the figures of Newton and Kant and abetted by the calculus; but the mind is a restless and fickle lover, so this simple rationalism is subsequently replaced by its complex or complete version as shaped by Einstein, only to unseat itself (as these overthrows go) to become discursive rationalism, a development that is dominated by quantum mechanics and all its statistical companions. String theory inhabits the most recent realm, sometimes called surrationalism by people who like puns.

The old ways are never entirely abandoned. We still find measurement and standardization essential to our lives: how can we confidently buy bolts, do our nails, run tabs, gamble, broker, bank? And we are often more emotionally comfortable with a world that’s alive even when it happens to be kicking. Animal magnetism is a date drug, good looks are everything, and diamonds are forever. But we need calendars and clocks so all of us will get to work on time and keep the company of men a company. There is around us, as there once were gods, legions of invisibles with rules and regulations that it isn’t wise to flout. Seas rise and suns explode; viruses lurk and whales talk. A billion messages trouble the atmosphere and no one reads the urgent ones. Once we were a will within a world of wills; now we are a weed in a wall of indifference.

Rationalism is as suspicious of reason as empiricism is of perception.
The empiricist, in front of any evidence, will say, “Let’s see that again,” and insist on the purity, as well as the repeatability, of laboratory circumstances; while rationalists set limits to reason and establish physical principles, like Galileo’s laws of motion, that could never exist in the real world, only in perfect vacuums and unrealizable circumstances that are nevertheless ideal for perpetual-motion machines or squared circles. Instead of letting us puzzle our inadequate heads, the rationalist devises a calculator, and dreams, as Leibniz did, of a perfectly logical language whose grammar would forbid error. Despite their vigilance, rationalists allowed a lot of animism and other such stuff to slip forward unobserved. Ontogeny does recapitulate phylogeny, as Ernst Haeckel famously said. The idea of inertia, for instance, scarcely inert itself, would pop up again in Spinoza and Hobbes as the law of self-preservation (all things act to preserve the state in which they find themselves, Spinoza said), and even reappear in Freud, who insisted that the human body always acted to reduce its stimulation to a minimum, either by fleeing it or feeding it, whatever worked. What it really wanted was to remain inert. Romanticists called this “the return to the womb,” or “the death wish,” and shivered. At that time it was believed that the womb put a perfect pocket of silence about its infant. No one realized then that Mozart’s music had been issued a pass. Nor did it forbid the cultural calamities of boxed wine or secondhand smoke.

Laws and principles are sometimes developed simply to save hypotheses from further embarrassment, and these are usually furnished with mysterious ideas like ether, wavicles, or phlogiston; others simply do not advance at the same rate as their fellow notions and become, in Bachelard’s terms, “obstacle concepts.” Not all ideas are meant to help the mind; some are there to hinder it. Nor are all ancient beliefs false. That man is a part of nature appears to be more valid a vagueness today than the view that human beings are special and apart, a belief that functions only as a dismal and desperate blockage of our mental arteries.

Although science may use
cause
, philosophy
substance
, or theology
soul
in a distinctive way, individuals living and thinking and coping on a day-to-day basis may actually have a profile that reflects their own particular personality and intellectual character. Some of us will feel persecuted by a lengthy red light; others will clock it and prepare to mail a complaint; a few of us may even admire the wisdom of such a simple system of permission and restraint. In any case, there will be concepts (or more vaguely, words) which will have special significance for each of us, terms that will usually provoke an obstinate opposition, a boil of ire, or a benevolent feeling of approval whenever they appear—totemic words, talismanic or irritating. In my case, this is certainly true. I have taken the opportunity these lectures perhaps did not intend, to investigate the backgrounds of three of my “hot Homeric buttons,” proceeding as if they had been appointed to the cabinet or nominated for the court: a favorite,
form
—an enemy,
mimesis
or
imitation
—and an old drinking buddy,
metaphor
.