The Fastness of the Idea of Property

I'm going to have to admit that I never really understood the phrase "to play fast and loose". I mean I understood it as a phrase and not in its parts. It means to be deceitful, primarily, or unreliable. But I simply thought one played "fast" in a manner akin to "fast cars and loose..." well, you know (hey, what do you want from a guy who thought ELO sang about "space magic" rather than "strange magic").

Anyway to the point, more from Melville! Chapter 89, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, is a disquisition on the law of property, to wit:

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

Seems simple, straight-forward...makes sense even! However,

But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

And then Ishmael goes on to comment, not really volumes, be enough to be exemplary of the issue: property as an idea has you fast!

...these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two props to stand on.

Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish?

***

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

By Their Very Fear (Update)

The community is inhuman, and less than human. It becomes at last the most dangerous because bloodless and insentient tyrant. for a long time, even a democracy like the American or the Swiss will answer to the call of a hero, who is somewhat of a true aristocrat: like Lincoln: so strong is the aristocratic instinct in man. But he willingness to give the response to the heroic, the true aristocratic call, gets weaker and weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. All history proves it. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power of mediocrity: which is evil. Hence the success of painfully inferior and even base politicians...

So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bring the evil into being.

This is the Christian community today, in its perpetual mean thou-shalt-not. This is how Christian doctrine has worked out in practice.

There is no doubt that Lawrence is troubling...that his deep insights into the mind of man and the mind of the collective (not woman per se, though woman is lost in the collective) will often spill over into some very distasteful thinking. But baby/bathwater; wheat/chaff.

There is a clear understanding here of the weakness of humans in general. We fear for our very existence (we are small and soft as predators go) and so we have created systems for protection from the natural world and from each other.

Lawrence believes in the strong, brave aristocrat--where strength shepherds the weak--and believes that the religion of the masses, which is Revelation (as he propounds) and not that of Jesus, exists only to destroy all worldly power with the only "good" being the power yielded by the elect in another world (yet to come, but never arriving). Apocalypse is the theology of those who are already "left behind".

And those who feel this deep sense of denigration in their very soul have a singular desire to "equalize" through violence, to be "tough" in their fear.

UPDATE: Digby details some Tea Party plans regarding budgets, teachers, churches and armed employees of the state.

The Shallows or the Depths?

Perhaps this is why I return to certain books over and over and have given up on many others.

Now a book lives as long as it's unfathomed. Once it is fathomed it dies at once...once it is known, and its meaning fixed or established it is dead. A book only lives while it has power to move us, and move us differently; so long as we find it different every time we read it. Owing to the flood of shallow books which really are exhausted in one reading, the modern mind tends to think every book is the same, finished in one reading. The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning...It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books. Because if a certain book can call you to read it six times, it will be a deeper and deeper experience each time, and will enrich the whole soul, emotional and mental. Whereas six books read once only are merely an accumulation of superficial interest, the burdensome accumulation of modern days, quantity without real value.

Note here that it's required that you find it different when rereading a book. Or you might say, it finds you different. I have a few favorites that I return to occasionally but only for comfort and when I read them I am the same reader and it is the same book fulfilling an emotional need. But it is not revealing a deeper sounding...rather, allowing me to stay at one level, at my ease, as a kind of pacification (something akin to eating for comfort).

My first experience like this came with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It was intentionally opaque and perhaps that's cheating, but while its action in the jungle and on the river remained the same, the lines, the words, the telling of it, would slip away in different directions and then sneak back in bearing a cloak of allusion.

I think that writers when deeply read, in any field, use all their experiences as readers when they write. You know the saying "you are what you eat", well this seems applicable to books as well. They are the culmination of the writer's reading history, what he/she has eaten. This doesn't mean breadth of reading...it means reading deeply, repeatedly, being in thrall to the words and meanings and finding them internalized within you and then filtered through you back out into the world through your mouth or pen.

What books keep you sounding, diving and surfacing with fresh depths in your maw?

Lawrence's Apocalypse

Shouting About the Things They Are Not

Apparently I have been channeling D. H. Lawrence (could be worse, I guess).

...Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning. they revel in subterfuge. They prefer their truth safely swaddled in an ark of bulrushes, and deposited among he reeds until some friendly Egyptian princess comes to rescue the babe...

Now listen to me, don't listen to him. He'll tell you the lie you expect. Which is partly your fault for expecting it.

He didn't come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who wanted freedom, and so stopped at home and fought for it. And got it. Freedom of worship? Read the history of New England during the first century of its existence.

Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free ? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.

******

Those Pilgrim Fathers and their successors never came here for freedom of worship. What did they set up when they got here? Freedom, would you call it?

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless, of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.

Studies in Classic American Literature