Perfection of an Accident (Lord Carnarvon's Chauffeur)

1.  A curse is a species of prophecy – at the very least it aspires to a telos.  Both Plato and Aristotle, whose systems are grounded in teleology, believed nature was constantly moving towards perfection, its final cause.  Causality is not located in the past but in the future of events, circumstances, phenomena, form.  All the more with a curse.  What is the telos of a curse?  What is the striving for perfection of an accident, catastrophe, tragedy?  One assumes that perfectability is only true of positive ‘goods’ – alchemical thinkers saw the transmutations of matter as an expression of the natural tendency of matter to reach ever more perfect states.  Perfection though is not a moral value – it is rather the unfolding of a form already implicit in matter or in a ‘situation’.   Otherwise how would one ever recognize any degree of perfection?  In Simmel’s ‘sociological aesthetics’ based on his theory of types, beauty and ugliness depend on the closeness or distance from the type, the more typical, the more beautiful.  He refers to the example of the physician for whom certain cancers are beautiful when their appearance is in no way clouded by attributes extraneous to their type.  The type alone contains all the attributes of the individual - meaning it is an indefinite multiple almost in the sense Badiou uses ‘generic’.  A curse would be beautiful in the same way as a face – not due to ‘some immanent content of a thing but, rather, its correspondence to its type.’ (Simmel)

Christian thought implies perfection as the completion of a catastrophe – in this sense the Crucifixion is doubly perfect.  The cross is also a plus sign.  Christ’s appearance on earth called forth the ‘happy sin’ of Adam, but the real ‘cause’ of his appearance was his later Crucifixion and Resurrection.  Traditional hermeneutic interpretations of the apostolic and subapostolic literature imply a ‘futurist’ causality in which past biblical events ‘foreshadow’ or ‘prefigure’ the arrival of Christ.  In other words – that which is to be determines from a not yet existent future location and moment that which was.

But a curse has a more complicated relation to the future than mere foreshadowing.  One particular curse – that of the Tomb of Tutankhamun bears a striking resemblance to the structure of a psychoanalytic cure – not surprising given Freud’s love of archaeology and sensationalist tomb literature such as “She” by Henry Rider Haggard.  The curse resembles the situation of the cure because in both the ‘analysand’ is offered a painful opportunity during a certain time and space to encounter a truth, he leaves this meeting ‘armed or disarmed’. (see Alain Badiou, “Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable” in: Conditions, London, 2008, p. 133)  But this ‘truth’ is a suspended hypothesis – truth is never in the situation, it is its vanishing point, just as invisible as the origin of the curse or the event whose disappearance initiates the psychoanalytic cure.   

The mummy’s curse is a prohibition – anyone who violates the tomb will be harmed.  It seems to be a general formula – but one can assume that there is a very limited number of persons who would ever be likely to come so close to a Pharaoh’s tomb as to be endangered or threatened by the curse – especially if the location of the tomb and its existence are more or less unknown.  The curse is then ‘waiting’ for those chosen few even if it takes them hundreds of generations to arrive.
To ‘arrive’ though the object of the curse has not only to come to a certain prescribed known destination – he has to first find or invent the destination.  He undertakes a great work of discovery and exploration not unlike Freud’s category of “working through”, which Badiou following the mathematical concept of Paul Cohen, calls “forcing”.  “Forcing concerns the point at which, although incomplete, a truth authorizes anticipations of knowledge, not statements about what is, but about what will have been if the truth reaches completion.”(Badiou, op. cit., p. 138)  ‘What will have been’ for Lord Carnarvon, the alleged (hypothetical) prime victim of the ‘mummy’s curse’, was the completion of the search for the tomb - at the same time the necessary condition for the activation of the curse – the ‘forcing’ open of the door of the tomb.  

2.  If there is a ‘curse of the mummy’ then it embraced Lord Carnarvon before he ever set foot in Egypt.  Carnarvon was already a magnet for ill fortune and accidents.  The telos of such a curse seems passive – it cannot strive towards any final cause; if the prohibition is never violated no sacrifice will occur.  Unless, the curse is a vigorous potentiality, which can create the necessary conditions to induce a violation, attract the transgressor.

It began with a car accident in Germany in 1901 - in the heroic days of automobile travel.  Carnarvon was a car enthusiast, an ‘automobilist’, owning one of the first automobiles in England.  He toured France in a car.  The chauffeur was a close associate of the rich man in those days – his companion and ‘pilot’ in the pioneering world of automotive invention and other new technologies.  The banker Albert Kahn travelled extensively in Japan with his chauffeur, who first had to become proficient in the new techniques of autochrome colour photography.  Proust was most fond of his chauffeur Odilon, his wife Céleste became Proust’s live in maid and the intimate companion of his later years as a recluse.  Odilon was still more of a coachman, owning his own vehicle – but permanently (and round-the-clock) at Proust’s disposal for all his outings.  Proust was very close to the ‘revolution of the automobile’.  One of his best school friends from the lycée Condorcet was Jacques Bizet, son of the composer Georges Bizet.  Jacques Bizet was director of Taximètre Unic, a car-hire company created by Rothschild.  Odilon was one of their drivers – and he became Proust’s favourite “chauffeur de confiance”. (Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, Opera Mundi, Paris, 1973, p. 51)

Carnarvon was less fortunate in his choice of chauffeur.  Whilst racing with his chauffeur in Germany they crashed – the car landed on top of Carnarvon, crushing his jaw and puncturing his chest and lung.  His doctor then told him that his health was poor and he should seek a warmer climate.  He began to winter in Egypt.  That is how he was led into his grand Egyptian adventure, which would finally finish him off.  All his love of the modern was diverted into Egyptology and the love of tombs.

Lord Carnarvon came like the ‘analysand’ in a state of weakness to the cure/curse – he travelled to Egypt ‘for his health’ and unknowingly entered a field of ‘emergent truth’.  The truth according to Lacan – Badiou follows him in this assertion – is first of all weak.  The love of truth is also the love of its powerlessness – for Lacan (and Badiou) this is none other than the “love of castration”.  This love is obviously not openly declared – rather it is the love which the ‘truth veils’, only lovable in being unsaid or ‘half-said’ (Badiou).

The anticipatory direction of Lord Carnarvon’s time in Egypt is twofold – the anticipation of archaeological finds (tombs and treasures), the movement towards an unspecific ultimate end (the curse).  He began his archaeological prospecting in a desultory fashion – to pass the time in Egypt.  But he was soon possessed of a desire for better finds – he hired Howard Carter who fanned this desire till it became his obsession, his ‘objet petit a’.  He had exchanged a daredevil chauffeur for a learned man.  Their successes in finding tombs of minor nobles whetted their appetite for digging in the Valley of the Kings – with the hope of discovering royal tombs.

Then at the ‘last moment’, when Carnarvon’s interest in the hunt began to wane, due to mounting costs and no significant finds, Carter pleaded for one last season in the Valley of the Kings.  He acceded to Carter’s wish, like the analysand who agrees to continue paying his analyst for the cure.  The final train of events was set into motion.  Carter was finally successful – he discovered the Tomb of Tutankhamun.   Carnarvon ignored the dire warnings he had received from well known seers not to enter the tomb.  He was quoted as saying “I will challenge the psychic powers of the age”.  On November 26th 1922 the funerary chamber of the tomb was forced opened.  Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon were the first to enter the tomb.  Shortly thereafter while resting in the Aswan area Carnarvon was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. He accidentally shaved off the bite with his ‘cut-throat razor’ (‘love of castration’?) and poisoned his blood.  After treating the wound, at first he seemed to recover, but on April 5th 1923 he died from the effects of blood poisoning and pneumonia.  Strange coincidences were reliably reported to have occurred at the time of Carnarvon’s death.  The lights went out in all of Cairo.  His dog pining in Highclere, Carnarvon’s family seat, howled wildly and died.  When the mummy of Tutankhamun was unwrapped it was found to have a wound on the left cheek corresponding to the point on Lord Carnarvon’s cheek where he was fatally bitten by the mosquito.

The truth of the curse emerged gradually over the course of the years Carnarvon spent financing excavations in Egypt.  The truth moved from powerlessness to all powerfulness.  The unsaid took place.  The unnameable named.  The curse is what Badiou calls the ‘unnameable point’ of a truth – “one that cannot be forced without inducing disaster”. (Badiou, op. cit., p.131)

Perhaps Tutankhamun’s dynastic enemies, followers of the god Amun, were the authors of the curse.   They had relegated him to powerlessness, obliterating his name from statues and inscriptions.  He had been effaced from history until that moment.  That is why the discovery of his tomb had eluded all previous digs.  Carnarvon and Carter helped restore Tutankhamun to ‘power’ and reinstate him in history.  
“In the dimension of the future perfect, a truth’s power resides in the anticipation of its own existence (…)” (Badiou, op. cit., p. 139)

Would this power then be in Badiou’s phrase – ‘fidelity to the event’ of the future perfect?

Milk of Lime, Flowers of Sulphur

 

Coleridge records an example of futility.  Nine years of collecting all manner of documents on some phenomena of magnetism and automagnetism and he is not one step further, by his own admission, in his understanding than when he read a certain work on the subject.  Beware!!  Beckett seems to think that terror furthers reason (in the terrified) and Coleridge doubts if disease can ever be cured.  He would fit perfectly in Bad Gurzbach.  One dies of a dog bite, which happened twelve years ago.  Poison, which has gone in rarely or never, goes out again really.  Who also died of old wounds?  Oh yes. Unity Mitford, Rudi Dutschke, but who else?  Sulphuretted hydrogen.  H2S as a gas is colourless and evil smelling and poisonous if inhaled in large quantities.  But what if the body is already pumped full of minerals, iron and sulphates (sulphuric acid without the hydrogen, replaced by metals) then when breathing a ferrous air it should be able to produce the gas by itself, poisoning itself from within gradually?  (From my dream of the night I recall only the phrase “replace the gold” – after my “Iron” dream of the weekend, now the gold, the reverse succession of the Hesiodic ages, a hint of alchemy)

The spring waters and the champagne air of the spa interact in a deadly fashion, but only gradually over a period of many years.  Add to that the presence of sulphurettted hydrogen in volcanic areas such as the extinct volcanic formation somewhere in the forest behind Bad Gurzbach’s rural outskirts in Kirdorf, then the likelihood of autotoxification increases.  The same waters used to treat liver cirrhosis etc are broken down by some locally patented procedure into salt cake – the first stage in the manufacture of washing soda, one of the few industrial products extracted, processed and refined without leaving the county.  Most of it is also used on the spot.  The chemical industry is full of such symbioses and antibioses of the organic and inorganic.  It is nothing unusual.  A popular detergent contains a water softener used for the treatment of osteoporosis and a borate found in timber preservatives.  Still, external state inspectors have cautiously warned against the overuse of the Bad Gurzbach springs, but the locals persist in drinking their sulphurous water.  As the water doesn’t cost anything this is always a temptation.  Besides if they were to stop drinking, word would spread and the whole cure economy would collapse.  They sometimes salivate yellowish foam, probably flowers of sulphur, soluble in hot water, when engaging in particularly long chats.  Their saliva is carbonated. 

The Anglophile (Part II)

My chosen one, Saint Lyman, is for the rest of the English-speaking world a so-called ‘shit’.  Of course that suits me fine, I adhere to all forms of inversion, confusion, perversion and diversion – why shouldn’t I squander my affections on someone the world wants to discard.  They don’t treat him like a man who is already dead, but as one who had never been born.  I would have liked to write his apology like Plato for Socrates, but I knew nothing of him except what I read in the obviously biased accounts in the English newspapers.  Why they should hate him so much – brand him a ‘rotter’ – is a mystery.  He comes out of the same school as all the rest of them, thankfully though he is neither a pederast nor a paedophile, nor homoerotic, nor otherwise ‘kinky’, I think he is rather sexually indifferent, certainly no Bluebeard.  He seems to be a man of logic and I do so capitulate to logic.  He is a liar and a gentleman, QC, MP and SOB.  He is a knight errant who to no lesser degree than Amadis and the whole guild of chivalry made himself destitute for the ladies – to some of whom he was married and not even at the same time. 

Where in the hell did I read that Homer didn’t care much for Ulysses because he saw him as a compulsive liar?  The ancient Hellenic world did not believe in subterfuge – any victory gained by such means disqualified itself.  The Iliad ended ignominiously.  That’s why it was the first modern battle.  John Lyman, the classical rotter is a modern hero and a Faustian saint.  What was his terrible crime?  Those paltry sums which he pried from his ‘victims’ (and who can say that he did not earn those sums for cavalier services, I certainly would not begrudge him any nest eggs of my own and I plan to make that plain to him, I’m grateful to Stock-Krause for forcing my hand) – those womanly savings were the means to his own demise.  Not in the sense an otherwise astute typical English biographer might think – pride before the fall and all of that beloved English pantomime, not that – but because he wanted to be made to suffer, to demonstrate meekness.  What is more knightly than humbling oneself for a lady?  Although Lyman is as gregarious as any Englishman he has remained uncharacteristically silent, which is of course the ultimate proof of the gentleman.

I spent the whole morning thinking about my friend the heresiarch Saint Lyman held prisoner in the pits of the English Inquisition.  It was more work than I had done in years, piling up remorse, not my own.  I distinctly sensed him near me, looking over my shoulder much of the time, honing my mercilessness and communicating his prophecies to me via the central heating so similar in sound to the old bass fiddle he played while at Oxford.
Everything he intimates is in a slightly out of tune key of A but much of it is unfortunately drowned out by the unceasing babble of my Spanish tenants, the Angilos.  Discomfort always brings my thoughts to Lyman.  I would gladly be Sancho Panza for this sad English knight.  Why doesn’t he say anything in his own defence?  If he speaks then only to goad his punishers, fully aware which mock swagger of his will elicit their most revengeful zeal.  The only vice of which one could rightly accuse him is being a glutton for punishment.  Hot in the indulgence of this gluttony, he met up with her.  She was not the first, nor the fourth, but most probably the last stop so far on his knight errantry, offering damsels in distress fake Swiss bonds at high yield interest and for a while his inimitable self.

I wonder what they have been doing to the recalcitrant old tramp, have they been trying any of their ‘treatments’ on him.  Have they tried to spook his meanness out of him with the hair in the neck trick?  A trick worthy of being displayed in the Pitt-Rivers Museum, in a showcase on how to mortify one’s enemy.  A thread, thicker than hair but not as thick as a rope, is spliced with skin, a flap of skin is pulled out and sewn down onto the neck the way one would stitch up a stuffed Christmas turkey.  An infection naturally ensues attracting hidden unreachable deeper infections into its pus filled bed.  If he were to object to this therapy, they might decide to sew him on various places to his mattress.  Whilst lying there like a piece of rawhide other prisoners could come over him with whatever manner of implement they have managed to stash in their cells, such as spoons to ladle out parts of hands.

Lately I have been writing things down whose perishability has so accelerated; they are no longer on the page the next morning.  I learn to live with it, it is the converse of fading eyesight – not my eyesight fades but the object of my eyesight, in this case my handwriting.  There is nothing left to see so what good is my eyesight then?  Margarete the bakery sweep who doubles as lay nurse for some of my more derelict tenants is not all sweetness and light, but those sorts seldom are.  She is a preventer, not a destroyer like me, but someone who keeps things from happening.  Sometimes prevention is a good thing.  I have instructed Heribert to strew sand and salt on the icy pavements so that the elderly will not fall down and break a hip like that indestructible Englishman Jeffrey Bernard, who has more lives than a cat, about whose progress against hope I read from time to time for a treat.  Is he not supremely fit ‘to sweep the tavern doorstep with cheek and hair’?  I like reading about his escapades when I visit Georgie von Regenheim my legal counsel and business friend.  My first question when I come into his chambers and seat myself on the other side of the wide mahogany table, much like Churchill’s writing desk, is how is our Jeffrey doing?  (By tacit agreement we refuse to believe the malicious rumor that Jeffrey Bernard is really dead.  As far as we are concerned he is just slightly more unwell.)  Georgie pulls out an old magazine from behind some notary files.  I never fail to feel some titillation.  By saying Georgie is my business friend I am not in any way diminishing the importance of our friendship. All my relationships are business relationships but he is my only friend.  One has business enemies en masse.  Georgie was an Anglophile like me.  He had an American grandmother.  Georgie was a real landlord with a bulging portfolio of properties.  Whenever I visited him it is as if I had entered Walter Benjamin’s “cloudless kingdom of perfect investments upon which no money ever falls”.  Although the tenants in his buildings were forced to live with packed suitcases – Georgie was infamous for his sudden eviction notices.

I have been seriously considering recommending to Stock-Krause that she send Jeffrey Bernard a ticket to come and visit her as a goodwill gesture to a fellow amputee.  She has been looking so forlorn since she heard about my honourable friend Saint Lyman, indeed he is my second friend after Georgie.  There are many taverns down by the river, they are in the hands of the Greeks, and in one of them I am sure there is a bottle with Jeffrey Bernard’s name on it.  The best place to start is in Club El Alamein, the losers sit there and try to figure out not why but if they have lost.  No, that’s not quite true, they do know they lost the battle but are sure they have won the war.  The battle has been downgraded in the course of the years to a mere stability crisis.  Hans who also played the bass fiddle in the El Alamein Café Ensemble cultivated some nautical mannerisms à l’Anglaise.   He knew something about the different layers of the earth’s crust as well.  Jeffrey Bernard could talk to him about not going to sea.  One reason Hans gives for not going to sea is that ships sink so often.  He is not a coward only an amateur statistician.  He gave me a lecture about it one time in those days when I still came and went in public houses, in this case El Alamein. 
The town used to be full of fishermen.  Their coat of arms still shows a Petrus as the centrepiece of some mackerels in the shape of a cross – vaguely reminiscent of an Archimboldo.

I liked the river town because I thought that it looked so English.  As I imagined a small English town would look.  Dingy red brick facades, scorbutic dwarf trees bearing three grey curled leaves in spring and losing them by mid-summer.  Tiny rear gardens without sunlight.  You cannot buy fresh fish anywhere in town.  Greeks stick their poles in the brackish waters and are taunted by mangy looking local urchins and other Greeks come out of the taverns, down the steps, slide more than walk to the banks, frying pans in their upraised hands meant for the children who then run away shouting insults and curses over their shoulders.  One of them looks like the younger son of Angilo, my Spanish tenant. The child stunted its own growth by all of its creeping about and quickly disappearing around corners.  His older brother was the only one growing and he just got fatter.  Now the younger one runs with the pack.  They scramble back up the bank and jump over the train tracks.
Until now there has never been a train going past at the right moment.   

 

The Anglophile (Part I)

I must never let them know how I feel about them.  How well I know them.  It is my duty; it is the story of my life.  A famous general used to live in the neighborhood.  The old lady in the bakery who comes and visits the legless tenant on the fourth floor assured me she knew him well.  She could not tell me how it was and in what way she knew him well.  Would I ever challenge such a claim, hardly in the open.  She and I share her knowing of the general whether it is true or not.  I don’t mind keeping their little secrets.  They confide in me as they would put their pennies in a bank, every once in a while they want to see how much they have saved up.  I am their landlord, which means they can look down on me.  For of what bit of land is it of which I am the lord?  A forgotten corner in which humans have settled who are too old, too feeble of mind and spirit, too immobile, too poor, too stingy and too bowed by circumstances to move out of it.  I live among them upon occasion like lint between their toes and have no excuse like they do for still being here.

How surprised I was when I went to visit the legless tenant myself, Mrs Stock-Krause, she was telling me as usual of the time she lived in the “villa”, its photograph hung over her fake fire, some heaped up charcoal in a recess, some broken glass and a red light bulb.  She lights the fire even in the middle of summer (which it was at the time).  It made me hotter looking at it.  I think that having had two legs amputated has deadened her sense of climate.  She lived in the “villa” not with Mr Stock and not even with Mr Krause, but with a prosperous accountant who quite unusually went bankrupt.  One would imagine that an accountant would be immune to such calamities.  Stock-Krause sat on her red leather sofa, left over from the villa, a blanket over her stumps, looking like her legs were merely curled up under her, smoking away, although the legs had been amputated because they were ‘smoker’s legs’.  Now that they are gone she sees no reason to stop.  Her hair was covered by a turban made of flannel or felt, I think it was to cover baldness; I have never seen her without it or with another one.  We had not always been so friendly, in fact we were not on speaking terms for at least ten years.  I slammed down the receiver whenever I heard her husky voice at the other end, ordering her to “put it in writing”.  She kept insisting on repairs to her flat over and beyond her just deserts.  In these instances I have firm principles.  More or less out of the blue, for I can recall nothing in her previous remarks which could have prompted her to digress from her saga of the villa, I combed my memory, reproaching myself for having missed the turn in her soliloquy and resigned myself to assuming there had been none – only that she had hoped to hide her devious question amidst her usual tears and lamentations – suddenly she asked me if I were not a bit lonely myself.   I of course rebuffed her impertinent prying in a stern and casual voice, at the same time amazed that this piteous creature, who, if I were in the habit of feeling pity which I’m not, all pity in my view being false, my law knows no pity and my law is true, would certainly qualify as a candidate – had had the audacity to pity me.  This unnatural demonstration, this slap in the face of nature, kick in the teeth of decorum, this pinching till blue of plain good taste, spurred me to an invention which has changed my life.  “Why should I be lonely?”, I asked her in the most silvery of tones, “I am expecting the imminent arrival of my very distinguished friend, an Englishman, a parliamentarian, a QC, a scholar of English law and mores, in short a gentleman, a dandy, an amateur of rank and a man whose qualities would light up all the dirty windows of the block with a thousand fires.”  She started coughing until I was afraid she would suffocate and I was relieved that the old lady from the bakery chose that moment to visit, letting herself in, the door of the flat being perpetually unlocked.  I did not recognize her at first, because of the red smoky haze of the room and because she was wearing a very red dress, having been to a funeral and the limpness of her grey strands having been starched into an upright position at the beauty parlor.  She began telling Stock-Krause what they had served in the bakery after the funeral, egg sandwiches and cream cakes, she had made the sandwiches herself.  The boss had died and when she stood at his grave all lined in green mats, looking so comfortable, so like down quilts, she could have lain down with him.  I bowed myself out fearing that the necessary distance between myself and my tenants, forever being eroded by their lack of breeding, had dwindled to a dangerous low.

Who does not live in fear of being ordinary?  I do, I know.  Sometimes I feel guilty about my tenants.  Here they pay me rent and I use them for my amusement.  Should it not be the other way around?  Being ordinary and living in fear of the ordinary is one thing I do for them or rather they do to me.  Ordinariness is catching.  The very fear of being ordinary is so ordinary.  Being lonely is so ordinary and if I had not feared to appear ordinary before my tenants, who should not use me to pass their time in idle thoughts, then I would not have been tricked into my fake confession.  Keep the bastards at arm’s length, one might say.  Easier said than done.  For as the landlord of a property more likely as not to be eyed with derision, from which something as elusive as an ‘income’ could hardly be said to be forthcoming, when one is forced to be handyman, surveyor, assessor, rent collector, bookkeeper and social services – the tenants regard you as the equivalent of the dry rot behind their skirt boards.  To call my property private only reminds me that no one but me would want it and I do not want it either.  I just hope I might, exceeding hope, sell it all before the balconies come crashing down and I have to pay damages for loss of life and balconies.        

Schopenhauer is wrong – most people are phantoms for themselves.  Only the ‘Other’ is real.  Desperation is a mark of natural aristocracy.  I am in this respect a clean slate. 

I have another confession – reading Robert Walser awakens my inborn contrariness, the natural drive away from ordinariness, meaning I can eat chips every night if I wish and still be miles above the philistine who dines on scrambled eggs, smoked salmon and champagne.  Would consecrated bread still be holy even if it were mouldy?  Sheer contrariness drove me to make myself ordinary, to say something Stock-Krause would understand.  It was a ridiculous lie but it stuck in my head, Stock-Krause would not be likely to forget it either, seeing that she has nothing better to do when not mourning her alleged lost riches.  Still they look upon me as their capital – if something happens to me the roof over their head would be in jeopardy, their routine inquiries after my well-being have only this significance.  Without me this simulacrum of property would vanish altogether.