Hummingbirds at Dusk; Henry James; Marx from Ashes

End of Summer Dispatch

Comrades:

I hope the end of summer finds you well. A bit of a stretch since the last Signal. Apologies. Ship in need of repairs but sailing on.

“Comrades” is a joke on several levels, but somebody should write about the strange usages of “Marx” prevalent in the United States. The political “right” decries “Marxism” as an evil spreading through the culture like a cancer. The “progressive” or sometimes “critical” faction still associates itself with the “left” and so the history of 19th century socialism. All of this strikes me as some combination of conventional, cynical, delusional, uneducated, or simply superficial, in descending order of virtue. If we are going to situate our ideologies by reference to social formations in France almost 250 years ago, it would be better to speak of peasants and clerics.

Meanwhile, and much more interestingly, a new and serious critique of contemporary capitalism seems to be emerging from an odd mixture of: techno-skepticism; the dematerialism and depersonalization of everyday life, and consequently the devaluation of individual labor, especially physical; intentionally reactionary feminism; antagonism to bureaucatic moralization, often essentially racist and invariably suspicious, demeaning; the twin insults of surveillance and the presumptive need for therapy; regret for lost autonomy to say nothing of communal meaning; and no doubt more. It adds up to a generalized dislike, even hatred (disenchantment is far too weak) of the lives we are asked to lead, or conversely, of the citizens we are presumed to be, unless we are very wealthy. Our worlds too often seem trashy, irksome, unworthy of much affection except for the fact that these are our homes, and we are not proud of our homes, and so not proud of ourselves. Who did this to us?

None of this is counting the horrors. In fairness, there are horrors in every age, but what we are watching is the articulation of profound discontent with this civilization, on its allegedly good days.

I doubt this range of discontents has been tied together, and may not be. Much of it sails under the flag of “vitalism,” which Mathew Crawford has been explicating, and it’s a phrase that might catch on. In today’s hall of mirrors, the mandarin class, my class, tends to call such criticism “right wing,” inaptly but that’s the language we have. It is true that one way to understand the emergent critique is as an articulation of some of the sentiments on which “populism” is based in ostentatiously “advanced” societies. In fact, however, the emergent critique shares much of the grammar of Marxism: a theory of history, based upon class domination and criticism of orthodox legitimations (woke bureaucracy promising liberation and inclusion) as essentially false consciousness serving the consolidation of power, resulting in what is traditionally called alienation. Alienation from what? From some better way of being human, just out of reach. Marx and even Foucault have been, in certain circles, flipped. So let us turn to our ancient authors, for out of old fields must come the new corn, indeed.

Since I was quite young, I’ve swum in, been informed by, such “big ideas.” There is no need to be unkind about the quality of most of my reading, the time I waste reading, or my often petulant obsession with the [bad] arguments offered by what might broadly be called colleagues, worldwide, arguments begging for correction. By me. Almost a sacred duty. Writing of the Partisan Review crowd that included himself, the wise William Barrett warned that sooner or later, the intellectual comes to know he has been wasting his time. Scary thought.

These images, with an obvious exception, were taken within about 45 minutes on a recent evening, with my phone’s camera. The light was fading, and the camera struggled with the light, with the speed of the birds, different focal lengths, and too often the motion of my hand.

Rufus hummingbirds (rear) are very aggressive, territorial. They often chase the larger, more common, broadtails (front), especially away from feeders.

Hummingbirds are jewels that want to be photographed in bright sunlight, and I often do. Also, I finally bought a decent amateurs camera, so pace, photographer friends. Someday I hope to finish a photo essay, “Irridescence.”

But I was drinking tea (!), watching the sun go down, texting family. The phone camera’s struggles with the light, the blur of motion, seemed right. The forms of the birds in flight seemed as important as their colors, and far more interesting than my musing on the paltry accomplishments and annoying sanctimony of my class or even the afterlives of Marxian sentiment.

A line I’ve known forever: “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” For years I wondered what the hell this could possibly mean. But lately, as I’m declining argument and photographing hummingbirds in the gloaming, I get it, mostly.

The line is from an essay by T.S. Eliot on Henry James, who also wrote: “James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence.” Although the path of my own thought has been different, the context of the quote might provide a clearer explanation. The venue was The Little Review, an influential forum for modernism. The year was 1918, the end of the Great War, which Ezra Pound, another contributor, frankly called Armageddon. The editor, Margaret Anderson, devoted “The Henry James Number” to the late master, who wrote better than anyone of the world in which she came up and which was being swept away. Why did James matter now, after he and millions others were dead? What could be salvaged from his work, from the genteel society which James delineated so intimately, and in which incubated the potential for industrialized slaughter? From the understanding of “America,” “England,” and “France” with which he was chiefly concerned, but also the Germany that had already remade US academic life? What fragments shored against [our] ruin, as Eliot would soon write?

Surely not “Ideas,” which had come to seem hollow, along with the men who held them, aping thought, summoning Eliot again. In the same volume, English politician and intellectual [how quaint] A.R. Orage starts with the subconscious to write of James’s ability to summon “ghosts” such as ourselves. (Freud said something similar in a different way.) And for Pound, James wrestled first and best with the mystery of national beings (jarringly today, but maybe helpfully, “races”) that could, somehow, turn what was then unironically lauded as Civilization — surely these people were civilized? — into antagonistic cults of death, both far beneath and beyond argument.

In the failure of argument, what seemed left for the humanist intellectual was to develop some sort of understanding of the human condition, with all its contradictions, tendencies, affections and affectations, as instantiated in some here and now, which might be a drawing room but could be elsewhere another time. The Little Review writers somewhat misleadingly called this faculty of understanding “criticism,” and James was the master acknowledged by masters. (James’s criticism in the ordinary sense of literary crticism, bookish evaluations of books, was nothing special.) Placed beside understanding such as James not only had but could write, mere Ideas could only seem crude, vulgar, to phrase a profound failing in terms of style.

Ideas and other forms of vulgarity have their charms, of course, and one cannot but allude to the body, especially for the youth, with time and beauty on their side. But humane understanding (one wistfully dreams of good politics) requires more than primitive conceptions. This is a real problem for the legal academy, which traffics in little else besides Ideas, and tends to delude itself about political possibility. At a certain point, most academics more or less consciously recognize futility. Many subside, resting on tenure. Others turn to administration. Some advocate, often happy to be doing the Lord’s work, and to tell the rest of us about it. “Critical” becomes a cruel joke. Some struggle on, either in the forms in which they have been trained, or . . .

With the subalpine night coming on, the hummingbirds grow almost frantic, trying to eat, chasing one another, fearless.

You can feel the wind and sometimes the brush of their wings on your hand, the distinctive buzzing of broadtails seemingly inside your ears, flinch as they fly too close to your eyes.

Happy Labor Day, and enjoy the end of summer, Pilgrims.

— David A. Westbrook