Triggers

Sometimes it can be fun to detect some of the triggers currently at the disposal of the crazies in our culture.

‘Visigothic Spain’ is an anachronism, just like ‘Iron Age Scotland’. It’s perfectly normal and I would argue, legit, for historians to use modern labels for geographical zones so that their readers know what areas they are referring to. (One ought not need to remind everyone that culturally and politically a good deal has undoubtedly changed.)

Today I was I was reading about the early Jōmon culture in the far East (from c14,500 BC) and the book in question liberally makes use of terms like Japan and Korea. No need for anyone to spontaneously combust over that...right?

Yet it seems that when it comes to Spain, any attempt to use this designation to refer to the pre-modern situation breaks open a hornets’ nest of haters.

Some of the trolling that I have been treated to on Threads lately appears to reveal that Visigothic Spain now enjoys a similar status to the pre-twentieth century Jewish presence in the Middle East e.g. it’s something that the Islamists would rather you didn’t know about.

In this way, Al Andalus, or the Moorish period on the peninsula, can either be taken as Edenic and indigenous (like 'Palestine') or as a kind of gallant anti-colonial reaction to the Romans, rather than say, an imperialist project (a Caliphate no less) which duly made second class citizens of Christian and Jew alike.

‘Spain’ in this worldview is thus that tiny territorial remnant in the north which then came and stole the lands below from Allah. That cities like Toledo, Segovia, Cordoba and Mérida had a monotheistic history going back several centuries before Arabic became the official language, is seemingly a major inconvenience for the Jihadist narrative today. 

 

The trouble with ceasefires...

 

Several of the more high profile conflicts in today’s world appear far more medieval than the ones we grew up with, which tended to be driven by supposedly more modern phenomena: ideologies, nationalisms, imperialisms and so on. 

This quote comes from a book about the 1380s when England and France were already locked into what would become known as the Hundred Years War, (which actually lasted a bit longer than that). 

At the time the country rather clearly needed peace in order to avoid the financial burden and all round distraction of permanent international strife, but there didn’t seem to be a way to achieve it without giving up what was seen as a fundamental principle, sovereignty: e.g. England did not want to hold its remaining territories on the continent in ‘fealty’ to the French King, it wanted Aquitaine and Calais for example, to remain part of England. 

And because they could not make peace in any way that would be satisfactory, this war became a long drawn out game of temporary ceasefires. In such an environment, negotiations tend to bog down with all sides acutely aware during this process that the best form of defence is almost always attack. 

The English also had to crane their necks to look behind them, so to speak. In 1385 the truce between them and the Scots was due to expire on July 15. As this date approached, a massive army was assembled at York, because the French were simultaneously preparing to join forces with the Scots at the moment the ceasefire was due to expire in order to attack from the north. 

Faced with this combined threat, 20,000 Englishmen marched behind their King and all his great lords into Scotland. For reasons not entirely military, this campaign collapsed fairly quickly and the English had retreated back to Newcastle as the French and the Scots poured over the border into Cumbria. 

This invasion in turn fizzled out because these perhaps unlikely allies discovered a few of their basic incompatibilities: the French knights were apparently appalled by the uncouth habits of the Scots coupled with the horrendous absence of wine, while the latter found siege warfare utterly boring, convinced that their home territory favoured faster-paced ‘guerrilla’ attacks. 

Anyway, medieval truces were respected, for what they were, which was not peace, but rather constantly re-scheduled interruptions to the on-going fighting. 

Compare the violent competition between states here in ancient Mesoamerica, which was also stop-start, but according to fixed calendrical milestones, so a bit more like the way European football leagues are currently organised.

Experts are part of the problem…

"If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past" > Spinoza

Seems like a good idea, doesn't it? Yet most historians of the phlegmatic variety will tend to admit that by the time the parallels are so obvious that they need to be called, it is often too late. 

When looking to avoid a recurrence of proto-fascist tendancies in our own times, we are generally quick to pinpoint certain streams of cranky and potentially hazardous thinking which took hold in say, early twentieth century Germany. 

This exercise fits with our sense that right now we are witnessing a widening gulf between 'populist' chatter and the discourse we associate with experts and the more technocratic sort of administrator. 

Yet one of the things that has struck me about Richard J. Evans's exposition of the situation The Coming of the Third Reich, is that beyond the antisemitism and other forms of extremist babble bubbling up in German political life at the start of the twentieth century, there was another problem emerging from an entirely different and perhaps less avoidable source — what Evans refers to as a "widespread medicalization of society".  

German scientific successes, especially in the field of medicine, had given one particular group of accredited experts an almost untouchable form of prestige in the society, and a consequence of this was the way "the concept of hygiene began to spread from medicine to other areas of life, including not only ‘social hygiene’ but also, crucially, ‘racial hygiene’." 

I take this to indicate that the interplay between the elite culture and the strange, mutating pathologies further down the chain may have been crucial in the formation of the truly 'diseased' politics which would emerge under the Nazis. 

When I came across these passages it prompted me to think about how the recent global pandemic may be informing political attitudes in 2025. 

And low and behold, today this article pops up...

Incertidumbre

 

There’s something going on in this novel which bears comparison to the conceit of the Apple TV series Severance: a world of innies and a world of outies, with formally separate memory streams and a narrative process by which the two are potentially ‘re-integrated’ even as it becomes perhaps a little less clear which of the two is the actual ‘underworld’.   

Modern long form TV seems above-averagely fascinated with journeys to and from an isolated, relatively constricted alternative reality or inframundo: Lost played with this scenario and a host of related motifs for six seasons, before finally settling on what was probably the most banal of available symbolic resolutions.

The ancients were of course fascinated with these transitions into mythological realities which abruptly coalesce for dramatic purposes with our own. There’s Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Cretan labyrinth of course, and over here we have the central narrative of the sacred book of the Quiché Maya — Popul Vuh — recounting the away games of Mesoamerican ball played by the hero Twins against the Lords of Xibalba.

I am fairly certain this isn’t Murakami’s best novel, but it strikes me as undoubtedly his most profound that I have read to date. 

However, it may well end up being hard for many to appreciate just how interesting and original it is, because it is long and packed with passages of workaday language (especially in the English translation).

Yet beneath the verbiage, Murakami’s city with its uncertain walls has a range of qualities which set it apart from other hidden worlds one might stumble across in modern literature....

1) It’s an imagined place — a story with a back-story — which sometimes assumes the properties of a real place

2) It is a hard-working multi-layered metaphor: at its simplest, for human consciousness and its processes for interfacing with the unconscious. 

And in this sense the latter assumes the role of the underworld’s own underworld, with dreamland forming something like an interstitial space between the mundane world and the wobbly-walled city. 

Murakami is noted for his blend of east and west — or perhaps for the western cultural patina he lays upon eastern intuitions — and here we can see how European ideas, like those of the psychoanalysts, are made to connect with native Japanese notions, such as those which emerge out of Shintoism. (The English translation, not the Spanish, works the title of Miyazagi’s film Spirited Away, into one passage, in italics.) 

3) The city is seemingly subjectively-constructed, for two (apparently) distinct individuals can perceive it differently from both within and without.

Something similar is intimated — though never explicitly — in Dante’s Inferno and other western tales of descent into worlds caught between literal and figurative existence. These tend to have been rather obviously customised to the cultural perspective of the poet/author, in Dante’s case that of late medieval Florence. 

Murakami also hints at a kind of Chinese Whispers effect here, whereby an individual can experience the structure and content of the city according to the misremembered or re-constructed version of another.

4) A representation of what a world might be like if somehow tailored for people who have refrained from engaging with the actual world. 

5) It is a place where time happens but has no meaning and remains somehow 'anchored', compared here to turning the pages in a book and finding that the number never changes.

6) And lastly, it functions as a kind of laboratory for testing Murakami's notions of self-hood and perennial anxieties such as incipient transparency and/or the existential version of imposter syndrome.

I may be projecting a little here, but I detect that Murakami understands the self as variations on a theme, at least two, if not more, and not all of which may be present within the sheet music book to hand at any one moment.

Each individuality is always a multiplicity and some of our multiples may right now be away getting by in another world. 

At the very least every person is a packaged duality, yet not precisely in the way Descartes saw it. Murakami himself seems a little uncertain at what he is getting at here, and the novel is better for it. 

People and places have shadows, which sometimes rebut each other and on other occasions align and merge. This phenomenon is loosely mapped onto the interplay of the subjective and the objective, and this leads to a discernment according approximately with one of my own: the possibility that we might somehow, sometimes be able to project the uncanny into the world around us. 

As Anaïs Nin said Nous ne voyons pas les choses comme elles sont. Nous les voyons comme nous sommes, though I don't think that's quite what she meant.

Only one of the basic pair can cross over between realities. There is a sense here that for some people the distinction could be more demarcated, but for others the barrier between them is far more permeable to the extent that at any one time a sentient human cannot be sure it is him or herself leading this life or whether the shadow is filling in while the ‘real’ person goes off for a metaphysical wander.

Yet these essentially fused beings are sometimes also able to share knowledge and sentiment when apart. 

Many years ago as an undergraduate I attended a fascinating series of lectures on popular beliefs in early medieval England. Inhabitants of small rural communities tended to imagine that objective reality started to blur at the physical edges of their village. They understood that certain members of their community always had one foot in this supernatural shadow reality: those whose job it was to wander, like hunters, but also some who hardly ever left home, like children. Dogs too could pick and choose which world to perceive. These ideas have been very sticky and often form the basis of Horror genre treatments in contemporary films, and in this novel Murakami also suggests that certain individuals have privileged access to existential ambiguity (though he'll swap dogs for cats). Yet the personages of this age old 'superstition' have been seemingly placed within an inherently more vague yet sophisticated cosmological geography, where the netherworld is neither simply down below us or out in the woods somewhere.

In the Afterword Murakami explains how important these fancies have always been to him. Indeed, this big book started long ago as one of his earliest short stories which appeared in the literary magazine Bunguku-kai c1980, and then, once established as a writer, he approached it five years later, from a parallel perspective, appropriately enough, in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a novel I am yet to tackle. 

Now he has returned to what he sees as the core conceit because he suspects he has never quite nailed it, perhaps because underlying it there is a shimmery set of convictions which one can only catch sharper glimpses of by changing perspective. The substantial and its shadow are sometimes hard to tell apart.

Used Car Salesmen

There's some history to this 'leaders doing automobile advertisements' ritual...

Anyway, as I mentioned in a post the other day, one of the dangers of mining '1930s Germany' for gotcha parallels is that most of the really unpleasant trends in that society had established themselves quite visibly some 35 years before the Nazis came to power. And we need to factor that understanding into any comparisons we now choose to make.

At the beginning of the twentieth century fringe groups and parties in Germany — particularly those suffering from antisemitic paranoia — had, according to Richard J. Evans "introduced a new rabble-rousing demagogic style of politics that had freed itself of the customary restraints of political decorum".

The Third Reich's most noted contemporary historian in English goes on to say that it had thus "become possible to utter in Parliamentary sessions and electoral meetings hatreds and prejudices that in the mid-nineteenth century would have been deemed utterly inappropriate in public discourse."

And as a consequence of the way German political system was set up, these fringe ideas and the alarming improprieties which attended them percolated upwards into the mainstream.

Between 1900 and WWI it might have been possible to suggest that European Jews had it far worse in say France or Russia, but in Germany antisemitism was mutating in ways that augured very badly.

Early in his career Wagner had been a 'cultural antisemite', an attitude which compares somewhat to the speech crime we now refer to as Islamophobia. He took issue with Jewish culture and thought the problem would go away if Jews were properly assimilated.

But following his marriage to Liszt's daughter Cosima he seemingly shifted towards a more overtly racist conception of the situation, as did many other bigots in Germany, who could no longer keep up the cultural or religious disguise for their biases quite so effectively in the midst of rapid Jewish acculturation, conversion and intermarriage. It seems that Wagner came to believe that instead of assimilation, the only way forward for Germany would be to exclude Jews entirely from national life.

When it comes to lamentable British interactions with the Nazis one name often springs to mind: Chamberlain. Yet it was another individual of that name whose contribution was arguably even worse than our dithering late 30s PM.

This shift to racist antisemitism needed just one more component to make it truly toxic and this was, regrettably, provided by an English writer called Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married one of Wagner's daughters and whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1900, was the first to explicitly combine antisemitism with Social Darwinism, retaining the old religious notion of the cosmic threat posed by a specific religious minority and adding to it the concept of a deadly ongoing struggle in the name of species improvement.

Another one of this Chamberlain's key obsessions was the denial of Jesus' Jewishness and the claiming of Christian culture and values for the Germanic peoples.

Ahoy Mateys

I suppose you have to hope that this isn’t a front for a Royal Navy base…or perhaps worse, some sort of ghastly egalitarian commune where you spend your days sowing sails and scratching at barnacles. 

The anarchist thinker David Graeber did indeed uncover some interesting goings on at a late seventeenth century pirate democracy called Libertalia on Madagascar.

In his last book before an untimely death — Pirate Utopia — Graeber describes how a kind of proto-Sugar Daddy culture on the island set off a significant socioeconomic feedback loop, which ought to be an eye opener for all those tropical, anti-colonial soapbox orators.

These boatloads of wealthy and exotic strangers unmistakably represented a significant catch for Malagasy women, presenting them with a striking opportunity for the kind of sexual and socioeconomic freedom that had previously eluded them.

The pirates came and settled with their portable wealth and their unusual political values, but had very limited local social capital and grasp of the language, which led them to cede a lot of control and autonomy to their native wives, often trusting them to manage all of their pieces of eight.

The rather surprising end result of this arrangement was the development of an independent female merchant class whose children would be established as a new and powerful aristocracy on Madagascar — not perhaps what one might have anticipated from a project whose origins lay in the decentralised ways of salty sea dogs (which derived in part from the fact that before embarking on this somewhat syndicalist seafaring lifestyle, these plunderers had mostly all grown up under a multiplicity of different forms of government, some even former slaves).

Libertalia went from Popular/Leveler Democracy to Complacent Aristocracy via Merchant Capitalism, which is not quite how Marx plotted out the Dead Man’s Tale of human history.

Uncovered Well

“Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.”

That snippet from the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible (‘Translators to the Reader’) will serve as an introduction to this post in which I attempt to demonstrate to any bilingual readers out there, why I think Haruki Murakami manifests as a more interesting and stylistically adept writer, en Castellano rather than in the somewhat bland renderings of his prose in English.

It even features a rather appropriate mention of a well  — of signification —  something the Japanese author is known to have a bit of an obsession with.

In the English translation there is sometimes an apparent intent to simplify, though not being able to read the original Japanese, I can’t be sure if the more elaborate language in the Spanish is Murakami’s own.

And one might even attempt to argue that the latter language is the more inherently symbolically laden of the two here.  

Some relevant examples from The City and its Uncertain Walls...

 

ENGLISH: Time, no matter what, ticked away, ceaselessly.

SPANISH: El tiempo no se detiene, continúa tallando y desmenuzando la realidad sin descanso.

ENGLISH: A part of my heart remained still not fully known to me. A realm that even time cannot reach.

SPANISH: Dentro de mi propio alma, aún había numerosos territorios que desconocía por completo, territorios en los que ni siquiera en tiempo podía entrometerse.

ENGLISH: Or maybe I was just tired of being alone and wanted someone I could have a pleasant conversation with. But that wasn’t all there was to it. Intuition told me that.

SPANISH: Pero tal vez las cosas fueran, en realidad, mucho más prosaicas y solo me moviera el deseo de traicionar la indolente soledad diaria y de tener alguien a mi lado con quien conversar durante una de las muchas noches que pasaba en silencio.

ENGLISH: To take it a step further, I’d have to say that at this point I was bereft of any intentions or plans.

SPANISH: Yo mismo encajaba a la perfección en la categoría de quien apenas actúa bajo la luz de propósitos nítidos y definidos

ENGLISH: He insatiably crammed in knowledge, but it never was enough, since the world overflowed with an outrageous amount of information. Even with his special abilities, of course, there had to be a limit to one individual’s capacity. It was like scooping up ocean water with a bucket—though there might be differences in the size of the bucket.

SPANISH: La información surge sin descanso, como de un pozo sin fondo, y no importa cuán dotado esté uno para registrarla: su capacidad siempre se verá superada, sobrepasada por el caudal informativo. Es como querer achicar el agua del océano con una cubeta; no importa que la cubeta de una persona sea más grande que la de otra porque la limitación es obvia y similar para ambos.

(Notice how we even lost a Murakami well there?)

 

 

 

 

Thirsty Ghosts

 

Perhaps one of the lasting appeals of leading a normative life in a modern, developed nation, is the shield this usually provides from the naggings of Nothingness. 

The Ballad of a Small Player is ‘sung’ by Freddy, ‘Lord Doyle’, a partially fugitive larcenist attached to the baccarat tables of Macau, who has wound up outside this bubble, and like many who find themselves in this position, exchanges active or unconscious avoidance with dependant engagement, (almost) literally going out each night to ask Nothingness for a dance.

As with Osborne’s also much enjoyed later novel The Glass Kingdom, the basic premise is the situation of an amoral white person with a hoard of loot which doesn’t really belong to them, isolated within a modern, yet dangerously abstruse section of Asia. Yet here the author also rather pleasingly locates his protagonist within the local mythology of the Hungry Ghost — and more generally those Chinese conceptions of the supernatural along with their superstitions surrounding the operations of chance.

I was long keen to acquire this book, perhaps appropriately watching as its Amazon price fluctuated alarmingly up and down rather like the shares of Nvidia, seemingly never quite sure when the right moment “to get in’ would finally arrive.

Then later reading it as I simultaneously started to get into Severance, I realised that one does not have to have experienced these precise situations in order to find them existentially creepy, thanks to an anxiety-inducing latent familiarity.

Hereabouts, us ‘hybrids’ sometimes ponder whether we are ex-pats or immigrants: innies or outies, if you like. The answer comes in part from our relationship with the everyday flimsiness of life in the partially modern environment, and those naggings of Nothingness. Whilst there are known examples of actual fugitives in this milieu, along with some partials, collectively the whole group seems to exhibit some lingering concerns regarding where they stand in regard to dematerialisation.

Second Reich: misfits into the mainstream

The 1930s in Germany are very much back in fashion again, so I thought I would take the oft repeated advice of the tankies and educate myself...even if I have long been possessed by the prejudice that the vast majority of all those Hitler books are not really intended for serious historians. 

This, the first volume in the acclaimed Evans trilogy, does however cast its eye back into the slightly deeper history, the so-called Second Reich established by Bismarck — and thus provides some very interesting insights into how the bizarre scapegoating of the Jewish population hypertrophied, having first flourished as a rogue and opportunistic response to forces buffeting Germany from outside, thereafter creeping into the mainstream.

​In the period between unification and WWI, there were approximately 600,000 Jews in Germany —  just 1% of the total population —  heavily concentrated in the larger cities, with a quarter of the total in Berlin. 

They had long been excluded from landholding and discrimination continued to deny them positions in the establishment (army, civil service, universities etc.) but, beyond finance, they were well represented in medicine, law, science, teaching, journalism and the arts in general. New forms of retailing, like department stores, were an area of economic specialisation and politically they tended to cluster around the centre and the left, with a pronounced devotion towards German nationalism, as the Jewish minority had strongly favoured the formation of a unified nation state.

Explicitly antisemitic political platforms started to emerge at the end of the century. These agitators had responded to a rather nasty global recession caused by American capitalist excess, as usual (failed US railway investments in the main on this occasion), which led to widespread bankruptcies and business failures in Europe.

They found it particularly easy to stir up resentment of the Jews in areas where there were almost none, deploying the age-old trope of accusing a distant and somewhat obscure religious minority of conspiracies against both the nation and the economic wellbeing of 'traditional' farming communities. 

In this way Jews became an emblem for everything a specific, pretty unsuccessful demographic in Germany had come to detest about their changing world, particularly its most modern and progressive trends in the cultural, social and financial spheres. 

The German Conservative party soon started to see this motley crew of antisemitic demagogues as a significant electoral threat to their hegemony in the countryside and thus developed their own copycat programme, which demanded an end to the 'widely obtruding and decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life'.

A clear example of how misfits, amoral reprobates, crazies and all round losers — nearly always held back by their own internal conflicts — somehow manage to pollute the political mainstream, even if that ultimately spells doom for their own relevance.

The Positives...

There are some notable pluses from the Oval Office debacle.

— European unity and, who knows, maybe even the prospect of concerted, collective European action?

— The extortion attempt failed.

 

Zelensky, with his firmer grasp on facts, history and reality had clearly made up his mind that he could not sign up for partial resource colonisation unless he could anticipate some substance to any deal done later by Trump with Russia.

Prior to this meeting and during it, he must have read the signals as Trump consistently echoed Putin’s ‘talking points’, and the pretence of fair mediation and western strength in the face of Russian intimidation and posturing crumbled.

Ukraine, like Israel, has learned to its cost that ceasefires are no match for formal peace — not even in amuse-bouche form — of the kind where sovereignty is firmly recognised and protected.

Zelensky has been very clear about this and Trump and his sidekick were foolish to imagine that this resistance could easily be overcome by a burst of verbal bullying and public humiliation.

Most peoples engaged in existential conflict long for peace, but almost never lose sight of the need to protect their basic requirement to exist on their own terms.

— Russia is not in the position of relative strength that the White House needed to project in order to help itself to those minerals.

Ukraine has been brutalised, but is not on the verge of disintegration. Any celebrations (and gloating) by Moscow may well be premature. This was less of a missed opportunity for Zelensky than the other parties, present two days ago in the Oval Office, or in spirit.

— Each time Trump tries to impose his own narrative — in this instance, arguably not even HIS, or the USA’s — he says or does something which undermines it, usually characterised by ignorance or pettiness, and this was no exception.

— Zelensky didn’t just sit back and take it. There had been visible green shoots with both Macron’s and Starmer’s responses in the same venue in the days before. Perhaps others will now unfurl a bit more too. 

Overall, many things were damaged, perhaps irreparably on Friday, but it is now certain that Trump will never be able to credibly assume this ‘all the cards’ position and/or adopt these distorted rhetorical positions again, and that has to be a good thing for the democratic world.