Some European Notes, or Truth Unveiled By Time

From Yascha Mounk’s article “Rebellion Against Pluralism”:

It is alarming that Breivik fed on ideas that are now fairly mainstream in Europe. Remarkably, he does not hail from the hard core of Scandinavia’s neo-Nazi movement. Even when he did post on Nordisk, a neo-Nazi internet forum run out of Sweden, he was careful to call himself a conservative nationalist.

Nor is Breivik, as media reports at first suggested, a religious fundamentalist. Though he at times donned the cloak of Christianity as an easy way to explain why Muslims should be driven out of Europe, he has also admitted to not being a very religious man.

Instead, Breivik’s extremismis rooted in the recent backlash against the supposed threat to Europe’s identity. He doesn’t want to turn Norway into a Christian theocracy. Nor does he long for the heroes of fascism. On the contrary, he simply hopes to roll back the changes that have taken place in Europe in recent decades to return to some imagined idyll of what secular, democratic, mono-ethnic Europe was like in the postwar era. Worryingly, that is an aspiration many Europeans share.

*

Unable to forget how much it still hurts, to be a brown girl in Europe. To still be stared at on the street like an exotic plant or animal.

How did I know I was in Rome on Friday morning? Because the first language I heard getting off the plane, the language I expected to hear everywhere, and did indeed hear everywhere, was Tagalog. I was handed a cup of supposedly famous gelato by a Filipino boy no older than my youngest brother. And just as sullen. Sullen not for lack of beauty but suspicion of beauty. Fatigue of beauty. Of that certain kind of beauty that makes a tourist ooh and ahh. Me, too. Have always been suspicious of that beauty, too. Everywhere another aristocrat’s treasure. And where are the maids to maintain it. The slaves to pay. The flesh inside some kinds of beauty, a flesh which is not marble-white.

The whole of eternal Rome is cared for by Filipina women. Like everywhere else, but Rome especially. One of the things you don’t get to forget. One of the things you don’t get to not know.

*

What did I once write, here at PANK, about Audrey Hepburn, Rome and Filipinos in Italy?

Audrey Hepburn as Princess Ann will always remember Rome. She got to be free in Rome. Learned how to use money, rode a scooter, wore a man’s pajamas, smoked cigarettes, fell in love.

Italy has the largest Filipino community in Europe and Rome is full of Filipina domestic workers. You can’t walk down a street without hearing a Filipino language. Or if you can, you’re not listening.

I read that “filippine” is slang for maid. It’s not limited to Italy; in Greece: “eho Filipineza,” I have a Filipina, I have a maid. In Hong Kong: “banmui,” Filipino girl, derogatory shorthand for maid, servant.

I moved to Europe but I will never feel free in Europe. I’ve learned how to use money. I rode a scooter, I wore a man’s pajamas, I smoked cigarettes. I fell in love. Like Princess Ann, the country I’m meant to return to remains unnamed. But unlike Princess Ann, I don’t go back. There isn’t a scene in which I look up with an expression of great dignity and wistfulness, already receding back into my customs. I have no customs; the unnamed country doesn’t exist, or doesn’t exist for me.

Maybe I’m actually Gregory Peck. Gregory Peck, who always looked a little bit Asian to my eyes. At the end of the movie I’m going back to an apartment I rent in a city that isn’t mine and if I ever start talking to the guys about buying a one-way ticket back to the States, they all know by now not to believe me.

*

John Urry, The Tourist Gaze:

“This is a book about pleasure, about holidays, tourism and travel, about how and why for short periods people leave their normal place of work and residence. It is about consuming goods and services which are in some sense unnecessary. They are consumed because they supposedly generate pleasurable experiences which are different from those typically encountered in everyday life. And yet at least a part of that experience is to gaze upon or view a set of different scenes, of landscapes or townscapes which are out of the ordinary. When we ‘go away’ we look at the environment with interest and curiosity. It speaks to us in ways we appreciate, or at least we anticipate that it will do so. In other words we gaze at what we encounter. And this gaze is socially organised and systematised as is the gaze of the medic…

“There is no single tourist gaze as such. It varies by society, by social group and by historical period. Such gazes are constructed through difference. By this I mean not merely that there is no univeresal experience that is true for all tourists at all times. Rather the gaze in any historical period is constructed in relationship to its opposite, to non-tourist forms of social experience and consciousness. What makes a particular tourist gaze depends upon what it is contrasted with; what the forms of non-tourist experience happen to be…”

“Romanticism, which… was involved in the early emergence of mass tourism, has become widespread and generalised, spreading out from the upper middle classes, although the notion of romantic nature is a fundamentally invented and variable pleasure… The romantic gaze is an important mechanism which is helping to spread tourism on a global scale, drawing almost every country into its ambit as the romantic seeks ever-new objects of that gaze, and minimising diversity through the extention of what Turner and Ash term the ‘pleasure periphery.'”

“It is important to note how holiday-making discourses are predominantly heterosexual, involving pictures of actual couples, with or without children, or potential couples. In brochures produced by tour operators there are three predominant images. These are the ‘family holiday’, that is a coule with two or three healthy school-age children; the ‘romantic holiday’, that is a heterosexual couple on their own gazing at the sunset (indeed the sunset is a signifier for romance); and the ‘fun holiday’, that is same-sex groups each looking for other-sex partners for ‘fun’…

“Another social category often excluded from conventional holiday-making are black Britons. The advertising material produced by holiday companies shows that tourists are white; there are few black faces among the holiday-makers. Indeed, if there are any non-white faces in the photographs it would be presumed that they are the ‘exotic natives’ being gazed upon. The same process would seem to occur in those areas in Britain that attract large numbers of foreign tourists. If black or Asian people are seen there it would be presumed that they were visitors from overseas, or perhaps service workers, but not British residents themselves on holiday. ”

*

“You go for me, you, who can, gaze at Rome.
If the gods could grant now that I were my book!
And because you’re a foreigner in a mighty city
don’t think you come as a stranger to the crowd.”

Ovid, Tristia.

*

“Europe is destroying us. It upsets us and we take everything seriously.”

Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo: Or Letters Not About Love.

*

Ovid’s Tristia. Or: Sorrow. Or: Lamentations. A book written during his exile from Rome, which lasted the rest of his life. Someone who died an unhappy emigrant, an unhappier immigrant. The “you” in that verse is his book, the body of which is permitted to enter Rome, while his own body is forever banned from it. A book can go where a body can’t. Shklovsky’s book, too, was also written while in exile in Berlin.

But what about people who live in Rome, yet are still exiled from Rome? People who live in and make Europe, and are exiled from where they live and what they make, and make possible, everyday. Race and class alone are exilic markers. So many Europes to be foreign in.

*

Mounk:

If the left is at a loss as to its own position, part of the reason lies in the continent-wide confusion about multiculturalism. At least since Angela Merkel and David Cameron loudly rejected multiculturalism in dueling speeches in the past year, the term has become a useful shorthand for everyting the populists don’t like: Islam and any kind of extra-European immigration, of course; but also the loss of cultural traditions, the EU’s encroachment on national sovereignty, and even certain forms of cultural relativism…

The threats to our ideals for a better world don’t just emanate from Yemen or Pakistan; they are also to be found in the Bundestag, the Assemblée Nationale, and the House of Commons. Even there, these threats do not only come from loud speeches on the right side of the house; sadly, they are also constituted by the even louder silence on the left.

A silence such that in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins can actually write, about the “hysterical British reaction” to the “meaningless and random acts of violence” in Norway:

The Norwegian tragedy is just that, a tragedy. It does not signify anything and should not be forced to do so. A man so insane he can see nothing wrong in shooting dead 68 young people in cold blood is so exceptional as to be of interest to criminology and brain science, but not to politics. We can sympathise with the bereaved, and with their country in its collective sense of loss. But the tragedy does not signify.

No, Anders Breivik does not tell us anything about Norway. No, he does not tell us anything about “the state of modern society”. He tells us nothing about terrorism or gun control or policing or political holiday camps. His avowal of fascism could as well have been of communism or Islamism or anarchism. The desperate, perhaps understandable, search to find meaning in such acts is dangerous. Breivik does not even measure up to the ideological coherence of the nazism he admired. He is plainly very sick.

“The tragedy does not signify.” This is the horror of the twentieth and twenty-first century, the horror of European civilization full-stop. Falling back on the ever-reliable pathological rhetoric of the Inexplicable and Unavoidable Tragedy. Fascism likes pathology, too.

And “tragedy” only tells us nothing when we are unwilling or rendered unable to really learn or know anything about the world we’ve made and profit from. I didn’t have to be a failed classicist to know that tragedy always signifies. That’s what Greek tragedy is about. A whole constellation of meaningfulness that becomes apparent too late. Also about: individuals and society, and the rise of the city-state, which was a baby during the time of the tragedians. About the fresh rupture of law and politics into human life. About the meaning of that rupture. A time when the human and the citizen have only just met. Don’t yet know what the other means, don’t yet know how to turn into each other, how to not be destroyed by each other. This was the tragic.

“As Walter Nestle correctly points out, tragedy is born when myth starts to be considered from the point of view of a citizen.”

Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece:

The true material of tragedy is the social thought peculiar to the city-state, in particular the legal thought that was then in the process of being evolved… The institution of these courts was sufficiently recent for the novelty of the values determining their establishment and governing their activity still to be fully appreciated. The tragic poets make use of this legal vocabulary, deliberately exploiting its ambiguities, its fluctuations, and its incompleteness. We find an imprecision in the terms used, shifts of meaning, incoherences and contradictions, all of which reveal the disagreements within legal thought and moral thought from which the law is already distinct but whose domains are still not clearly differentiated from its own…

The tragic turning point thus occurs when a gap develops at the heart of the social experience. It is wide enough for the oppositions between legal and political thought on the one hand and the mythical and heroic traditions on the other to stand out quite clearly. Yet it is narrow enough for the conflict in values still to be a painful one and for the clash to continue to take place. A similar situation obtains with regard to the problems of human responsibility that arise as a hesitant progress is made toward the establishment of law. The tragic consciousness of responsibility appears when the human and divine levels are sufficiently distinct for them to be opposed while still appearing to be inseparable. The tragic sense of responsibility emerges when human action becomes the object of reflection and debate while still not being regarded as sufficiently autonomous to be fully self-sufficient. The particular domain of tragedy lies in this border zone where human actions hinge on divine powers and where their true meaning, unsuspected by even those who initiated them and take responsibility for them, is only revealed when it becomes a part of an order that is beyond man and escapes him.

*

From Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb:

We understand that the media would rather be talking about Islam. They jumped on the first sign that the killer of dozens of Norwegian children might be a jihadi group, despite its lack of plausibility. They didn’t even wait for that sign – the assumptions were already embedded well before then. Long after the rumours had been disproven, and the culprit emerged as a white, right-wing Christian from Norway, many papers still wanted the conversation to be about Islam and ‘Al Qaeda’. We understand this, just as we understand the media’s discomfort at dealing with an outrage in which the very Islamophobia which they do most to propagate is implicated.

However, if you want to understand the attitude of the punditocracy to fascist terrorism, consider the query put by BBC News to the former Norwegian Prime Minister yesterday: “Do you think not enough attention was paid to those unhappy re immigration?” Or, consider this New York Times article blaming the failure of multiculturalism. Or, look at this Atlantic article, which describes such racist terrorism as a “mutation of jihad” – that is “the spread of the ‘jihad’ mentality to anti-immigrant and racist groups”. You begin to get the picture. The idea is to find some way in which all of this is still the fault of Muslim immigrants. The logic will be: the fascists express legitimate grievances, but go too far. Or worse, in their natural outrage, they have allowed themselves to become like them.

These memes are replicating across the right-wing blogosphere as well as the news media. By one means or another, what is being avoided here is that Anders Breivik’s politics were shaped not by the fact of immigration, nor by jihadism, nor by any actually existing Muslims, but by ideas beginning in the mainstream right and radiating out to the far right. The 1500 page manifesto he has written under the pseudonym Andrew Berwick comprises, alongside a set of instructions for little would-be fascist killers, a distillation of standard right-wing Islamophobic material from Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye’or, Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, as well as a regurgitation of just about every poisonous attack on multiculturalism from the gutter press and politicians.

*

“Hysterical” is always a gendered insult and dismissal, by the way. This is something else you don’t get to forget and don’t get to not know. Hysterikos, of the womb and its suffering. The insult: how you react to the world is just a product of your dysfunctional uterus, or your remarkable ability to seem like you have one. Like you suffer from one.

Jenkins has another article in the Guardian, about the Murdoch trial; the title: “The Murdoch story is not a Berlin Wall moment – just daft hysteria.”

Another pathologizing Jenkins title at the Guardian: “Gordon Brown now suffers that incurable syndrome: ex-PM.”

And even more “lack of meaning” in yet another Jenkins/Guardian title: “This royal wedding cannot bear the weight of meaning that’s being heaped on it. Dress, hair, coach and cake will tell us nothing about monarchy, class or modern Britain. Just relax and enjoy the fun.”

*

Meaningless and random acts of violence? You find more of them in language. Only they are not meaningless, or random.

*

“Cannot bear the weight of meaning.” I was wrong; this phrase is the twenty-first century horror.

From Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity:

“Capital travels hopefully, counting on brief profitable adventures and confident that there will be no shortage of them or of partners to share them with. Capital can travel fast and travel light and its lightness and mobility have turned into the paramount source of uncertainty for all the rest. This has become the present-day basis of domination and the principal factor of social divisions.”

*

Free to look and relax and consume and have fun. Not free to think and connect. To be in pain and know the reason for your pain. Not simply the diagnosis for it, or the most expedient answer to its most obvious symptoms. But: the network of causes that made it, still make it.

(That’s a metaphor that means something, to this lifelong immunocompromised girl. My sickness, like all sickness, is social, historical and political. It means something. Means something about, among other things: the history of the American medical industry in the Philippines and the prevailing influence of its practices, the global export of Filipina nurses who have internalized those practices, the psychology of poverty, the conflation of immunosuppression with healing, the conflation of bounty with nourishment.)

I really don’t need to hear another person tell me that something that means something, means nothing. That the “desperate” search for meaning is “dangerous.” In this sentence I hear every person of power who has ever ordered a poor person, a person of color, a woman, or someone perhaps not even considered a person at all, not to read.

*

In a store here in England, I saw a version of the famous British slogan KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. Only this one was for the store’s gift card, so they had changed the slogan to: KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON SHOPPING.

*

But what truly baffles me is that people, that Europeans, still need to learn why Europe-as-Europe is able to exist at all. Still need to learn the gospel of Frantz Fanon, as given in THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH:

“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.”

*

What was one of the most beautiful works of art in Rome? I’ve already revealed myself to be a bad person to pose these kinds of questions to. But if I must give an answer to a question which pains and irritates me, I can say there was one, in the Galleria Borghese. It was an unfinished Bernini sculpture. La Verità svelata dal Tempo. The Truth Unveiled by Time. There was supposed to be a figure of Time at the top of the sculpture, but Bernini never finished the work, which was begun for himself and not for sale. And so it remained like this:

A woman holding the sun, with the earth at her feet. Naked, head thrown back. An expression of endless orgasmic joy on her face. To me, it was more stunning even than the more famous Bernini sculpture of the orgasmic Teresa d’Avila in the Santa Maria della Vittoria, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

This wasn’t religious ecstasy. This was something starker and barer, something more ancient even than religion, more ancient than God. This was the ecstasy of truth. The cosmic joy of it, of existing inside—-delighting inside—-the fullness and splendor of the true. Verity. At a time when truth is so debased, or even unsexy, by virtue of its distance from, and threat to, power; when it is so often rejected in favor of obfuscation, guile, aporia (Murdoch’s many “I don’t remember”s and “I didn’t know”s during the hearing, the same response of every other person in power who has ever been asked for the truth)—-to then see something like this was a shock, a gift. The gift of someone else who knew, and then showed, how radical, erotic and transgressive it really is: the truth. The radical satisfaction of the truth.

Even the fold of stone fabric between her legs, presumably a nod to modesty, was no nod to modesty at all. Look at the shape of the sculpted fabric, there where it’s meant to conceal. Fabric in the shape of—-and thus creating, like a winking prosthetic—-an even more open, enlarged, proudly magnified cunt.

All of this went straight to my heart; went straight to the place inside me where my heart and my sex meet. Jouir, jouissance. Bliss of coming and bliss of the true, which has never failed to turn me on. The way Maggie Nelson in Bluets talks about the pulsing of the pussy as “a pulsing that communicates nothing less than the suckings and ejaculations of the heart.”

Even the color of the marble for this sculpture was different from the others; it was darker, tan, beige, even mauve as a bruise; like Michelangelo’s more famous Pietà, refined in some places (where a leg would shine) and unrefined in others (where a rock remained a rock). The whole of it was closer to flesh than stone. The rest of the sculptures in the room were white white white, the white of ghosts in European fairytales, the white of spirit photography. But not this one. Did Bernini know something else about truth; about its joy being embodied, being of a living tone? About the survival of truth in time not just kindred to, but dependent upon, the survival of flesh in time?

But then, what was both a greater and lesser shock (greater because of its insult, lesser because I wasn’t surprised by the insult) was that the sculpture itself was squirreled away in a corner of the not-especially large room where it was displayed. Near a window. Half in shadow. You couldn’t see the back of it. If you were bored or rushing, you might even miss it entirely.

This sculpture should have been at the center of the room. Instead, there was Bernini’s Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanias.

Is there a more patriarchal fucking sculpture—-or story—-on the planet? Aeneas is the Trojan hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, and the mythical progenitor of Rome. During the Greek sacking of Troy, he escaped the siege carrying his father on his shoulders, and holding his son at his feet.

The empire-founder and bad, treacherous lover, one of the first men of state to fuck over North Africa (then Carthage, now Tunisia; see: the story of Aeneas and Dido). Depicted here, as he is almost always depicted, in his most heroic moment: saving the patriarchal past and ensuring the patriarchal future.

I think the movie Troy even compounds the myth by having Eric Bana’s Hector give the young fleeing Aeneas the “sword of Troy” to ensure the future of the Trojan people.

What is this phallocratic fuckery of Hollywood scriptwriting? There is no “sword of Troy.” Hector does give a sword to somebody in the Iliad, but it’s his own sword, and it’s to the Greek warrior Ajax, after a worthy battle that ends with mutual admiration. After the war, Ajax kills himself with that very sword. But no one ever founds an empire from it. If anything, the most admired weapons in the Iliad are the bow, the helmet, the shield. There was no steel then. The swords were copper, bronze; soft, weak, quickly broken. The last weapon you resorted to. The last weapon Hector uses, before his death. His death by Achilles’ spear, not sword.

In any case, it was this sculpture which was the centerpiece of the room. It was a sculpture you could see from all sides, could circle and admire as long as you wanted, a sculpture that would could give endless revelation and pleasure, if such things gave you pleasure.

And what were the other two famous Bernini centerpiece sculptures one could see in this same museum? One of the rape of Daphne by Apollo. The other of the rape of Persephone by Hades.

So: rape, rape, patriarchy. European civilization, beauty, art.

All the while: cosmic, joyful, orgasmic, female truth and revelation and satisfaction lay half-obscured, half-forgotten in a corner. Too close to a window. As if it wanted to jump out; or as if the museum wouldn’t even mind all too much if it got knocked out.

It wouldn’t, though. The sculpture is huge, bigger than the Aeneas one. Its foundation is more stable; from not representing a founding myth, but for being foundational itself. Coming from the truth. Truth that can make you come.

That would be the origin myth for me, I think. When an origin myth could still be thought of as a radical thing, not fodder for nationalists and xenophobes. Where radical still meant: the roots, and people knew that tree roots go all over the earth. People forget that Europa is the name of an Asian girl (when Phoenicia—-like Carthage, which developed out of Phoenicia—-was still Asia). A Phoenician girl kidnapped and brought over to Greece by the king of the gods. And so an immigrant girl’s name was unfurled across a continent. Oh, Europeans. How can it still come as a surprise that the origin is always a foreign one?