The Last True Conservatives

The very-online extreme right, in addition to its many other faults and failings, tends to have a crass, self-conscious masculinity to it. Either in the “pure” form of jacked douchebags who like yelling slurs or in the “inverted” form of resentful Shiraha-from-Konbini-ningen-type evolutionary-psychology-obsessed incels, an enormous proportion of the online rightosphere consists of people with heavily masculinity-inflected beliefs and concerns. I have not experienced this for myself because I only date women, but I’m told that in some quarters the synthesis of “masculinity in crisis” and far-right channer politics is so advanced that women who are interested in men date seemingly normal people whom they realize only later get their views on the great issues of the day from people with handles like “Bronze Age Pervert” posting screeds in the already-unfortunate “Twitter thread” format all day long. It goes without saying, at least among those in the know, that there is usually something homoerotic about this as well; witness the fixation on the deceased Japanese novelist, bodybuilder, and right-wing political commentator Mishima Yukio (whose output of novels and short stories, if nothing else, deserves better than being associated with these people), or the tendency to idolize early periods of Western cultural development in which many or most literate men were either so misogynistic they wrapped round to being gay or so gay they wrapped round to being misogynists. A recent article in The Atlantic about Bronze Age Pervert—a real person or, to make a distinction that Mishima himself would readily understand, at least a real persona, not just a name I made up as a stick to beat an ideal-type with—addresses this directly and at some length. According to Richard Spencer, the infamous former neo-Nazi leader who these days is happy to go on the record for essays in liberal newsmagazines, Bronze Age Pervert is obviously gay; the article’s author describes Spencer himself as a “homoerotic fascist” as well. But what if there were a distaff counterpart of sorts to all of this, a fringey rightist current heavily laden with lesbian cultural signifiers and preoccupied with the idea that femininity, rather than masculinity, is in crisis in weak, enervated, effete, androgynized modernity? I am not happy, but not not happy, to report that such a current does or did exist, and that it has or had surprising links to several other people, places, and things about which I have written before.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I do not write about this current, which in its classic form was named Aristasianism and called Web 1.0 chat groups and certain clubs in 1990s London home, from a place of ideological sympathy. I will be presenting it as a tacitly racist, avowedly elitist and class-snobbish movement that escapes being a form of fascism only through its commitment to pre-fascist ideas about subjects like culture, sexuality, authority, punishment, and the state. Much of what I have to say about Aristasianism may sound sympathetic and perhaps even approving, but the truth is much simpler: I think Aristasianism is funny, in a way that is not true of Bronze Age Pervert, the so-called manosphere, masculinity-obsessed fascist pseudointellectuals like Julius Evola, or frankly even Mishima outside a few specific stock jokes about him and deliberate instances of humor in his novels. Part of this is simply because a bunch of lesbian poshos, no matter how conservative they are, just do not have the pull within “real politics” that right-wing men tend to; part of it, however, is because of the uniquely complicated and surreal underpinnings of Aristasian political philosophy. Aristasian thought involves multiple layers of reality, a cosmic shift to degeneration and decay that happens to coincide with the culture shocks of the 1960s, and, most characteristically, a posited parallel world in some way “realer” than the immediately apparent world in which men do not exist and there are two feminine sexes, blondes and brunettes.

All of this comes from a quintessentially English-eccentric mishmash of 1. ideas taken from Dharmic religions (either 1a. directly or 1b. through motivated and often politicized interpretations in the writings of Western scholars like Mircea Eliade and René Guénon) and 2. classic prejudices of the British upper and upper-middle classes. Like many such trends and currents, it seems to have begun at Oxford. “A History of Aristasia-in-Telluria” by someone going by Miss Anthea Rosetti, a document on a website called aristasia.net which as of this writing must be accessed via Wayback Machine but is probably the closest thing extant to an official internal history of the movement, is my source for much of this, although I’ll discuss some other, more hostile witnesses later on. By Rosetti’s account, “at Lady Margaret Hall [one of Oxford University’s constituent colleges] in the early 1970s[, a] group of Sapphically inclined female students who sensibly disliked the modern world and admired the philsophical (sic) works of René Guenon (sic) found each other.” To the extent that I do have any unironic ideological sympathy for Aristasia, it is probably situated here; a political and philosophical framework for right-wing or traditionalist-conservative lesbians that is not just copying and pasting mainstream rightist politics into an incidentally-lesbian mind like Cynthia from Dykes to Watch Out for is something that probably needs to exist. History is full of examples of gay people whose orientation did not lead them to the broadly left-liberal value set that we associate with the LGBT community today, and in this respect these “Sapphically inclined” early-70s Oxonians were engaging with and advancing a worthy intellectual tradition. It isn’t even completely novel or outré that they were unhappy with the cultural changes of the preceding decade; gay writers like Mary Renault and Noël Coward were at best ambivalent about them as well, and memoirs of Hollywood actresses of the period often remark that their roles got worse in the first few years after the Hays Code fell. Indeed, I would argue that this first cohort of proto-Aristasians have a sincerity and courage of their convictions to them that one sees precisely in their not having had as much to gain from turning back the clock as many people who were not lesbians would have.

The early-stage Aristasians did not use that term yet; they went by a number of names that, according to Rosetti and other sources, included Lux Madriana (“Light of the Mother,” in an early phase that emphasized the religious dimensions of the movement, a form of monotheistic goddess-worship), Romantians, and the Silver Sisterhood. By the time of the Silver Sisterhood name, in the 1980s, they had moved to a compound in County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland, which they ran in a way supposedly styled after a Victorian girls’ boarding school. This is the point at which some of the more hostile witnesses come in and at which another characteristic Aristasian preoccupation—physical discipline of a type that they (implausibly, in my opinion) insisted was not sexual in motivation—becomes prominent. Of the at least seven or eight meanings of the euphemism “the English vice,” sadomasochistic sexual practices in general and flogging in particular are among the most common, and the latter was a facet of Britain’s traditional educational culture that “St. Bride’s School” seems to have adopted with verve. There continued to be a strong religious and mystical element derived in large measure from Guénon’s “Perennial Philosophy” interpretations of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, as was the case at every stage of the Aristasian subculture, but the surface-level aesthetics of the 1980s iteration were those of a posh girls’ school in the Home Counties, or perhaps in the Bombay Presidency, around a hundred years before. They kept casting about for pre-“Eclipse” (their term for the shocks of the 1960s) societies and ways of life to emulate, the consistent animating conviction seeming to have been that, wherever the society or culture that they wanted lay, it has to have been somewhere in the past—or in another world, since this was also probably around when the concept of “Aristasia Pura, the Feminine Empire,” with its blonde-brunette sexual binary, was introduced.

The disciplinarian penchant, the promiscuous borrowing from past ways of life, and an involvement in early video game culture unfortunately aroused the attention of overtly fascist movements like the British National Party and its leader, John Tyndall, who corresponded with St. Bride’s/Silver Sisterhood leaders in the 1980s. Accounts of the nature of this correspondence and of the proto-Aristasians’ reasons for engaging in it vary. Rosetti, an Aristasian or former Aristasian who is interested in a positive assessment of the movement and its legacy, insist that the subjects discussed were “boring stuff about Guenonian (sic) metaphysics” and that Aristasia was never a racist movement, but I recently found a thread on the British internet forum Mumsnet that was not so sure. According to the Mumsnet thread there was a certain amount of local news coverage in the northwest of Ireland at the time that suggested, among other things, the presence of a large amount of antisemitic literature in the community. I unfortunately don’t find this difficult to believe of people who came primarily from the traditionally very antisemitic upper echelons of British and Irish society and who corresponded with the leader of the BNP. It should be noted, however, that Mumsnet is not a solid investigate source and that, in keeping with the forum’s reputation for strident transphobia, many of the people making these claims seemed primarily interested in establishing whether or not the Aristasian leaders of this time were gender essentialists because they were trans. I am not interested in “transvestigating” these people and I consider the idea that this is relevant insulting, so all I will say for now is that, while Rosetti’s view that Aristasia was consistently non-racist is probably straightforwardly wrong, it doesn’t seem to have been motivated by racism or antisemitism in the same way that Evola, Bronze Age Pervert, et al are.

I know someone who, in my opinion aptly, described the pre-fascist racism of the British Empire as “the 1910s equivalent of ‘white people drive like this and black people drive like this,’ only backed up by the armed machinery of the State.” Any movement that tries to replicate British imperial aesthetics and lifeways, even in a radically different context (like, for example, one in which lesbianism is normative and men are at best peripheral), is going to take up at least some of this through osmosis, in addition to, as I’ve stressed, whatever prejudices these women had before they were Aristasians. I have no difficulty believing that this school-cum-compound-cum-vacation-destination (yes, really, for a while it was, further calling the insistence that the flogging wasn’t meant to be erotic into doubt) was happy to communicate with racist politicians and had at least some members who read a lot of antisemitic screeds in their spare time, and one does not actually have to conceive of the movement as predicated specifically on racism—I believe Rosetti that it was and is not—in order for this to make sense. This should inspire some soul-searching on the part of people who are not motivated by racism themselves but who have ideas that are amenable to racist impulses. Mary Renault, whom I mentioned earlier, left England in part because of the widespread homophobia of the time and settled in, of all places, apartheid South Africa; what does that tell us?

In any case, the association with Tyndall was short-lived mostly because the sojourn in Ireland was itself short-lived and, whatever the relationship between Aristasia and the BNP may have been, the former do not appear to have left the latter any forwarding address. In spite of this the next stage, comprising the 1990s and early 2000s and focused in the London area, was probably Aristasia’s period of greatest public presence and political involvement, not that this is saying much for a group of radical traditionalist kinky lesbian separatist Perennialist mystics that probably never numbered more than a few dozen committed members.

I have not named any individual Aristasian leaders so far because of the community’s Potemkin village quality; prominent Aristasians cycled through personae and pseudonyms over the years and occasionally used more than one at a time, depending on the situation. Rosetti says that Hester St. Clare, the name used by the earliest of the Lux Madriana leaders at Oxford around 1970, was “probably not her real name.” Donegal-era community leaders included someone going by Sister Angelina (the figure “transvestigated” by the people on Mumsnet) and someone going by Miss Martindale. Martindale is a particularly bizarre and multivalent figure who may have retained far-right political associations, ended up with an assault conviction in 1993 in connection with the flogging and disciplinary practices (which she strongly advocated and, again, insisted were not sexually motivated), and made numbers of media appearances as a sort of sideshow in the 1990s British press. The period of her prominence, and perhaps dominance, within the movement is what Rosetti and others depict as what we might call “classic” Aristasia. The axis mundi here is London, the historical references of choice tend towards interwar rather than Victorian, the “Feminine Empire” aspect of the movement with its posited or theorized or longed-for all-female blonde-brunette world is especially emphasized, and the disciplinary practices are, despite or perhaps because of Miss Martindale’s run-in with the law, kept in the foreground as well. Documentary crews film the insides of Aristasian homes—not many of which exist, of course, but there are a few—as human-interest curiosities, women associated with the movement participate in various low-stakes culturally conservative causes such as opposing metrication, and the group expands onto the early internet. As far back as the Donegal phase the Aristasians had a somewhat hypocritical attitude towards computers; because they thought that they improved focus and concentration (which admittedly may have been true of 1980s computing technology but is certainly not true now), they treated them as exceptions to the general eschewal of post-1914 (in Donegal) or post-1965 (in London) technological forms. Thence came the involvement in the early PC game industry and thence also the very-online quality of the current remnants of the Aristasian movement, which mostly go by different names and lack or have deemphasized things like discipline, fringey rightist politics, and the stark blonde-brunette gender binary. (“What about redheads?” is one of the first questions most people ask about “Aristasia Pura.” The answer, admittedly a cogent and even thoughtful one, is that redheads in Aristasia have a hormonal or chromosomal ambiguity a bit like intersex people in our world. Relatedly, most Aristasians are “straight” in the sense that blondes go for brunettes and brunettes for blondes. Readers familiar with lesbian cultural history might find this reminiscent of butch-femme roles, but in fact the blonde-brunette binary is much more consciously tied conceptually to heterosexuality than the butch-femme binary ever was, even though it is more distinct aesthetically.)

The increasing preoccupation with online, virtual, constructed, and imagined worlds is, in my interpretation, what ultimately led to the movement’s current moribund state. In 2005 or 2006 a few newer and mostly internet-based community leaders announced something called “Operation Bridgehead,” in which they claimed to have received orders from Aristasia Pura that the this-worldly sector of the movement was to absent itself from participation in affairs of the world. For a group that thrived online and as a media curiosity in the infamously sensationalist and gawking-oriented British press, this would have been a serious blow no matter what. In Operation Bridgehead’s case the problem was compounded by a somewhat prudish new-look policy of stripping Aristasia of its overtly lesbian and quasi-sadomasochistic aspects. What was left therefore lost much of its unique appeal; Operation Bridgehead left a group of internet-dwelling fantasists who were most comfortable around other women and liked Perennialism, vague knee-jerk conservatism, and, increasingly, anime and Japanese pop culture more generally. I should stress that I do not mean most of this pejoratively. I know and like many people of whom some or most of these things are true. The problem is that there are tons of women like this in the world and one really does not need to subscribe to an idiosyncratic lesbian separatist interpretation of the Perennial Philosophy in order to be one.

In its own way, Aristasia ended up with the same problem that the “disappearing center” has in the developed West’s mainstream religious culture. If there aren’t many people retaining a set of cultural forms anyway, there is not much reason for one to retain them oneself absent a strong motivating drive to find something in them of substance that one cannot find anywhere else. You don’t go to an Episcopalian church on the Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time unless you strongly believe in God and in moderate-to-progressive Anglican theology, because there is no longer much social infrastructure around doing so, especially for younger people; you no longer style yourself an Aristasian and treat it as a moral and political imperative to dress like Greer Garson unless you have a strong belief in a system of behavior that not even the remnants of the organized Aristasian community advance any more. Even if you do, you are left basically to do it on your own. I first found out about Aristasianism years after its collapse via the YouTube comments on a video of a scene from a mid-2000s anime, probably not in any objective sense the best way to find out about it. I’m writing about it now mostly because not many other people are, although it does show up in an academic book or two about Perennialism and, of course, in the Mumsnet thread.

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What is one to make of a culture, or subculture, or movement, with this kind of limited and constrained and, it’s difficult to avoid concluding, ultimately failed history? “Learning from failed experiments” is a pat and somewhat insulting concept here; former Aristasians have not necessarily abandoned all the value and importance they placed on their ideals. These days some of the old Aristasian leadership is based in Southern California and is involved in goddess spirituality and (more conventional) LGBT activism there. Are the radically conservative political or quasipolitical or historiographical tendencies still there? I am not sure; I don’t know these people. But even if they are not, it is instructive to think on the fact that they were. In other words, the goddess spirituality and the strident lesbian activism did and thus could coexist with some deeply strange and even dangerous rightist or rightist-tending ideas. It is again tempting at this point to talk about “internal contradictions” or the Aristasian ideology falling apart under its own weight because it contained elements that could not practically exist alongside each other, but this too strikes me as too easy, somewhat along the lines of Adorno’s dubious “right-wing authoritarian personality” concept in which authoritarianism was constructed as 1. self-evidently a personality trait rather than something else and 2. concentrated exclusively among people who disagreed with Adorno politically. It is easy to write off Aristasia as incoherent and doomed to fail if one starts from the premise that Aristasia was incoherent and doomed to fail and then simply begs the question.

It might have been a matter of attracting or pursuing the wrong allies. Orwell points out in his excellent essay on Rudyard Kipling that “Kipling’s outlook is pre-fascist (sic; Orwell usually, but not always capitalizes these kinds of terms),” a term I have used for Aristasia before. People claiming to be conservatives at the time that Orwell was writing this were always in fact, he said, “either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists.” If we take Orwell at his word—it is not self-evident of course that we ought to, but I think that he has a solid point here—we see that even a generation before Aristasia was a twinkle in Hester St. Clare’s eye the pristine pre-Eclipse world, and ideologies predicated on it, were no longer anywhere to be found. No doubt someone writing a generation before Orwell could have said the same, and so on, and so on, like the ancient writers on Sparta who always situated the golden age of Spartiate equality at some point in the past, relative to themselves. Confucianism and Taoism, similarly, project their ideal pasts arbitrarily far back; the Tao Te Ching seems to long for something pre-agricultural, whereas Confucius—more “progressive” than Laozi in that his cutoff point is right after neolithic river delta state consolidation rather than right before—pinpoints the days of Yu the Great, who invented flood control. This seems like a pat progressive argument (in the historiographical sense) but I think something equally damning can be said of people who are always looking to a more and more more distant, yet somehow always-any-minute-now, future for a world without devastation and woe. Once upon a time petroleum was the one neat trick that would fix the world’s conservation problems, because it spared the whales. This sounds utterly deranged to us today—we have by and large saved the whales and yet the whole biosphere is in peril in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1860 when the first commercial petroleum exploration was getting underway—but the documents, the editorials and political cartoons and policy papers and correspondence, are right there to consult. “Atoms for Peace” were meant to save us all too, once.

It should go without saying that the present sucks as well, particularly since it doesn’t exist; only the past has any demonstrable existence, and the present is a mere moving front between that demonstrable past and the undemonstrable future. So an attitude towards time is never going to be a cogent basis for political action. An attitude towards history might be, but at that point we are in the realm that cannot support something fantastical along the lines of Aristasia. So the invested Aristasian looking for kindred spirits outside her clique is left casting around for the next best thing, and the next best thing, unfortunately, is in most cases fascists—which makes the Aristasians the accomplices of fascists whereof Orwell spoke, perhaps.

Yet lack of care with the company they kept was not, actually, what did Aristasia in. It was, in my opinion, lack of care about venue and context and situation-in-life. Rosetti quotes one woman’s admission that Aristasians tended to be “‘somewhat overbalanced’ on the side of imagination, intellect and the fantastical”—hence the nonsexual component of the reasons for the violent discipline. These were people who need to, to us the parlance of our times, touch grass, and in Donegal and earlier at Oxford they did. The urban setting of London and the penchant for the early internet probably were not good for keeping them grounded—and one does need to be kept grounded even if one truly believes that one’s true home, heaven or Aristasia Pura or the Western Paradise or whatever else, is a great Somewhere Else, because until then we still must live in this world, unremitting Benjaminian shitshow though it is. I cannot blame people for not wanting to accept this, but the wages of not accepting that one must function in the world is, put simply, not being able to function in the world. I wish I could decide I was no longer interested in functioning in the world and let the chips fall where they may. I do not think that I actually can, and if I could I think that I would be obliged to choose otherwise.

Could a version of Aristasia that chose otherwise have had some staying power? Ought it to have had any?

The Lesser Beauty

When I was studying Japanese in the languages, literatures, and cultures department at UMass Amherst in the early 2010s, I became enamored of a now-obscure school of medieval Japanese Buddhism called Ji-shū, the Time School. Ji Buddhism was in most respects within the mainstream of Pure Land Buddhist thought, whose characteristic features include the belief that final enlightenment in the present world is no longer possible and the best course of action is to pray to a cosmic buddha called Amida for a rebirth in his Pure Land, a universe in which practicing the dharma is easier. Pure Land is the most widespread and popular type of Buddhism in Japan but has historically not been appealing to Western converts. Where Ji and its founding figure, an itinerant monk called Ippen Shōnin, parted company with mainstream Pure Land was in the belief that by invoking Amida’s name, a practice called the nenbutsu in Japanese, one effected a sort of spiritual time travel back to Amida’s own enlightenment, in which one then partook. The school’s name derives both from this belief and from the related practice of chanting the nenbutsu at particular times of day, somewhat similar to the set times for prayer in Islam.

I attempted to induce something similar to this recently, for secular reasons and involving my own past. On the way back from a road trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from my apartment in Upstate New York, my housemate and I passed through Bordentown, the New Jersey river town where I spent most of my adolescence after my mother and I relocated from rural Vermont. I have not lived in Bordentown for a decade and had not even been there for almost eight years; I had little idea of what to expect from returning, but I did expect—and want—for it to involve a powerful emotional and even numinous reaction. I went out of my way to elicit this reaction by putting on Riot!, a Paramore album from 2007 (an extremely influential year in my life), while approaching the Delaware River from the west on Interstate 276. It worked. The two hours or so that my housemate and I spent in Bordentown overawed me so much that now, two weeks later, I have found myself waking up and lying in bed for half an hour thinking about it, remembering.

I remember the routine I developed in that great year of 2007, when I was old enough to be a latchkey kid and my mother worked full-time at a legal services firm in Trenton. I would get off the bus after school, go into my house, drop off my backpack, then leave the house again and go to Boyd’s Drugstore. Turn right out the front door, northwest on Second; turn left, southwest on Railroad; kitty-corner across the intersection of Railroad and Farnsworth, a quick glance over my left shoulder at the new war memorial (the old war memorial being a statue of an eagle perched on a cannon in front of the post office at Prince and Walnut), and into Boyd’s. Buy a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice—the bottling plant was in Bordentown at that time, across from a retirement home for Divine Word Missionaries that now houses Bordentown’s city hall—and oftentimes also a small bag of sour Skittles and some pretzels. (I don’t like that this memory involves specific brands rather than generalizations like “sour candy,” but it does.) Then out of the drugstore, either across to the war memorial where I would sit for a few minutes eating my snacks or back home to sit around reading, posting on LiveJournal, or watching Avatar: The Last Airbender reruns until my mother got home two or three hours later. I only had this routine for about a year and a half but it made me feel, frankly, more normal than almost anything else I have ever done. More normal and yet more conservative; almost nobody has this kind of picture-perfect after-school bumming-around experience nowadays. All I was missing was friends who lived in walking distance, since I went to a private day school with an enormous catchment area.

From Boyd’s one could proceed to the northwestern end of Farnsworth, near which there was a beautiful old redbrick house with a gate into a garden that was always absolutely wild with wisteria. There would be a white cat sitting on the stoop; I wonder when the cat ever moved or went inside to eat or sleep or use the litter box. Now the wisteria is gone and the house seems to be abandoned; the upstairs windows are boarded up. I don’t know why, or what happened to the cat. At that end of town one could also descend from the bluffs to a wetland area with walking paths and somewhat dubious, murky creek water that I always wanted to try going swimming in but never did.

Or from my front door I could walk southwestward in an almost Euclidean straight line—or segment, rather—down Church Street, and end up at Christ Episcopal Church, a conservative Anglo-Catholic parish that I went to on Christmas Eve mostly for the aesthetics. Christmas Eve 2007 was when I suddenly started believing in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a belief that I developed before I developed a firm belief in God. Christ Church has a leafy, mossy graveyard like something out of This England; still to this day it does. I was an enormous Anglophile in those days and still have a distaste for the performative hatred of people and things English that characterizes a lot of what currently passes for American leftist rhetoric.

The subject of foreign cultures with which I became enamored during this period of my life brings us to the subject of the Jade Island, also known as the U-Turn Route 130 Chinese Restaurant—a New Jerseyite touch if there ever was one. The Jade Island served sushi too; it, along with a downtown Bordentown Japanese restaurant called Tsukasa, was where I fell in love with Japanese food, and the anime and manga fandom culture of those days was where I fell in love with Japanese writing. The first girl I sort-of-dated was heavily into that scene, and got me into it. The Jade Island is still there but has switched to an all-takeout model now—regrettably, since the interior used to be and still is gorgeous. When I went there with my housemate I sat reading a Japanese pulp sci-fi novel for old time’s sake while we waited for our order. It wasn’t quite the same, and not only because Otherside Picnic is a very different kind of story from Azumanga Daioh, or for that matter whatever Takahashi series my quasi-girlfriend had recommended in a particular week.

Old downtown business that are gone: App’s Hardware, which is understandable because I think there was some kind of sex scandal. Jester’s Café, which is understandable because of the pandemic but still must have been an axe blow very near Bordentown’s roots (the same roots that push up the crazy-paving brickways that will probably never change). Tsukasa, moved to a larger location outside of town and then closed there too, probably also because of the pandemic. The Beanwood Café, where I would sometimes go see live music with my best friend when she would visit me on our respective breaks from college. What’s still there? Under the Moon, for one, which I think is an Argentinian restaurant. Marcello’s. The Old Bookshop. Probably Thompson Street Halloweens. Possibly my childhood cat Pando’s drifting spirit, within that little white nineteenth-century house with its Doors-of-Durin ornamental living room pillars. Edna St. Vincent Millay would not have been resigned to all this; Christina Rossetti probably would have.

Am I? Perhaps. It depends on what the meaning of “resigned” is. In a way there’s nothing to which to be resigned to; the attempt to induce a Ji Buddhism-esque original enlightenment succeeded in the sense that I did feel catapulted back in time even though the current state of Bordentown has changed. Time, from a Christian theological or even theoretical-physical perspective, is less an arrow or a cycle than a particular entity, in its own way as concrete as objects in space, a dimension that from God’s perspective is just as firm and all-knowable as any of the three spatial dimensions but through which God, for reasons best known to Himself, only suffers us to move in one direction. St. Bonaventure and other medieval scholastics added to time and eternity the aevum, eviternity populated by eviternal beings like angels, demons, the saints, and the damned. This borderland or interstice between the temporal and the eternal, changeable in some ways and unchangeable in others—was I catapulted here by a Paramore album, the way we talk about high explosives blowing one to kingdom come? I don’t care. I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful that I believe it exists. In it is Bordentown the Eviternal City, always in my heart.

Polemic on the Rectification of Names

It is said that when Confucius was asked what he would do if he were appointed a governor, he said that he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. This (to English-speaking ears) unusual expression, written 正名 and pronounced zhèngmíng in Chinese and seimei in Japanese, is important in Confucianism and other East Asian philosophy and provides for some interesting harmonies and counterpoints with concepts in Western thought as well, such as direction of fit and disputes concerning linguistic prescriptivism. Unfortunately, the main setting in which one sees the term employed in non-specialist English is the so-called “intellectual dark web” and related far-right online environments—a milieu in which “rectification of names” is used both insufficiently and inaccurately.

            The late sociologist Peter L. Berger appears to have been one of the first to (mis)use the term in online political commentary, in the January 2015 article “New Atheism and the Rectification of Names.” The article mounts a series of (in my opinion mostly well-founded) criticisms of atheist polemicists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, with most of which people familiar with current Anglophone public life will already be at least vaguely familiar: they make false dichotomies between faith and reason, aren’t in fact saying anything “new” but rather relitigating Enlightenment- or Victorian-era disputes, and so on. Berger attempts to ground these criticisms in the rectification of names, which he describes thus:

Confucius and other Chinese philosophers who followed him thought that much social disorder comes from the wrong names being used to describe groups of people. This mistake was supposed to be most dangerous if it was applied to the proper hierarchy on which social order must rest. For example, if people in the lower classes give themselves, or are given by others, names that properly belong to the higher classes, this will result in rebellion and social disorder. Confucian sages had the task of educating the populace in knowing and accepting the proper names of things, and government had the task of enforcing this vocabulary.[1]

Berger concedes that “our views on hierarchy differ somewhat from imperial China, or seem to differ,” but it is still easy to see the appeal of the idea, framed this way, to people on the authoritarian right. It provides a cogent philosophical basis both for cheerfully inegalitarian views on the order of society and for opposition to “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” and efforts to control or limit speech, especially online. In recent years I’ve seen everyone from Twitter-based Catholic pseudotheologians to crankish followers of the computer programmer-turned-rightist cultural critic Curtis Yarvin use “rectification of names” to argue for everything from insistently referring to gay people as sodomites to claiming that capitalism is a meaningless concept (and therefore cannot be intelligibly criticized). Berger, for his part, makes a valiant attempt at evenhandedness by identifying both “enhanced interrogation techniques” for “torture” and “gender” for (in some contexts) “sex” as unacceptably euphemistic in ways that run afoul of his Confucian terminological buzzsaw. However, Berger has the misfortune to be writing just at the beginning of the current especially nasty campaign in the cultural forever war, and I am not aware of anybody else using the term who has been so gracious, certainly not Yarvin and his ilk.

            One problem with this use of the concept is that if one only wants to claim that much, or most, contemporary political language is euphemistic for malign reasons, one only needs to cite George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”[2] There is no need to bring Confucius into it, given that Orwell is more accessible to English-speakers and thus invocations of him are easier for readers to check for themselves. Indeed, Berger’s example of “enhanced interrogation techniques” reminds me very much of Orwell’s observation that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” The Bush administration’s use of the term to obscure the fact that it had a probably-illegal torture program fits perfectly into Orwell’s own list of cases in point. “Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended,” Orwell writes, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.”

            Leaving aside anything to do with Orwell, the second, and much more serious, problem with the current political use of the “rectification of names” concept is that it both reduces and misunderstands Confucian thought. Confucianism is, first of all, concerned about dysphemism as well as euphemism; harsh, cruel, and intemperate language runs clearly afoul of the core virtue of benevolence. Moreover, zhèngmíng as a concept has a great deal more active, positive political and moral content than merely “calling ‘em like one sees ‘em,” “telling it like it is,” or refusing to be “PC” or “woke” in the way one speaks. “It’s time to call you what you are: ORANGE MAN DONALD TRUMP #OrangeManDonaldTrump,” reads an infamous Twitter reply by the anti-Trump social media personality Ed Krassenstein. Certainly this rectifies the names in the sense that Donald Trump is indeed orange-hued and Ed Krassenstein presumably had not directly said so before. However, an equally important question is whether “Orange Man Donald Trump” is the sort of name that needs to be rectified. This is a question that Berger does not answer and that Yarvin and Krassenstein are probably constitutionally unable to answer, but Confucius sees its importance and it is a key consideration in his, and later Mencius’s, treatment of political and social legitimacy. Let’s look at what Confucius himself says in the Analects about the rectification of names:

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.[3]

One is not only morally responsible for the content of one’s speech; one is also morally responsible for correctly carrying out the types of actions that the content of one’s speech implies. An example of this principle might be a person who says “I love my wife” and yet disregards the wife’s opinions and values, cheats on her, is unkind to her, undermines her in the presence of others, and so forth. As extended to affairs of state, it would include a king who does not behave according to qualities that are, according to Confucian theories of social relationships, implied by the title “king,” such as magnanimousness. Thus we have Mencius’s remark, discussing the overthrow of the tyrannical and incompetent King Zhou of Shang, that “I have indeed heard of the punishment of the ‘outcast Zhou,’ but I have not heard of any regicide.”[4] The implied principle here is that Zhou effectively abdicated by failing to use his royal authority in ways consistent with kingly virtues. Since being a tyrant is morally wrong and being orange is morally neutral, making the distinction between “outcast Zhou” and “King Zhou” is thus a morally and politically significant case of rectifying the names in a way that is not true for, say, “President Donald Trump” and “Orange Man Donald Trump.”[5]

            The lack of any account of this important point even in the writing of the normally much subtler Peter Berger is, in my opinion, probably due to the aversion to prescriptivist accounts of language in modern Western academic thought, which when applied to political questions involves rejecting the idea that different political and social concepts and terms have implied moral content regardless of how they are used. The Yarvinite use of “rectification of names” is unsystematic about this, because it is unsystematic about just about everything; “rectify your names” coming from an extremely-online far-rightist is a call to accept certain moral implications that such people think proper language use involves, but very rarely implies any perceived need to change behavior, especially not that of the person insisting on it.[6]

            Mental thoughts or words or intentions both influencing and being influenced by actions and behaviors in the external world, such that either can be “correct” or “incorrect” relative to the other, might be understood, in Western philosophical terms, through the concept of “direction of fit.” This is the idea, or principle, that just as it is possible for one’s psychology to conform or fail to conform to the mind-independent world, it is also possible for the world to conform or fail to conform to some psychological states. The classic treatment of this is in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention. In Intention Anscombe gives the example of a shopping list.[7] If I, for example, shlep to the Hannaford across the road from my apartment in search of pita, but there is no pita to be had because it is sold out or because of supply chain problems, the problem is not with my intention to buy pita; my shopping list that had pita on it was not attempting to faithfully represent the real world, in which the store turned out not to have any pita (in other words, it was not an inventory). Rather it expressed my desire and my will to buy certain items, and the unavailability of one of those items was a failure on reality’s part to conform to my desire and my will. This is not a moral failure on reality’s part, because reality does not “owe” me pita any more than it “owes” anything else to anybody else. Even so, the nature of the divorce between mind and world in situations involving intention or desire is, according to Anscombe’s analysis of action and the direction of fit concept, entirely reversed from the nature of that divorce in situations involving description or assessment. In the latter case, the incorrectness is mine; in the former case, the incorrectness, if it can be called incorrectness, is the supermarket’s. The way to rectify the situation would be for a shipment of pita to come in, not for me to strike pita off my shopping list or stop expecting the store to have it.

            The fact that nobody could seriously believe that a supermarket is morally in the wrong for not having pita in time for a particular shopping trip is the main thing that distinguishes the rectification of names from the rectification, or vindication, of my shopping list. In large part the difference is that the mind-independent aspect in the rectification of names concept is the person’s own social behavior. There are implications of kingly behavior to the title “king,” implications of conjugal behavior to the title “husband” or “wife” or “spouse,” and so forth. Although it requires some creativity, it is possible to conceive of situations in which events outside of someone’s own control could lead to a rupture between words and reality when it comes to their social behavior; however, such situations, such as natural disasters leading to a rupture between “king” and kingliness, were in historical East Asian thought often interpreted as externalized portents of some kind of inward dysfunction.[8]

            Similarly, for Anscombe, there is the possibility of an error in judgment in my supply chain example. Her own example presupposes that the only thing the shopper does wrong is simply forgetting to or choosing not to buy something that is on the shopping list.[9] This, then, is what rectification of names might actually look like when looked at through a Western philosophical lens, although we are still missing the fact that with the rectification of names the implications of the names are seen as objective or at least matters of a social and political consensus rather than freely chosen in the sense that Anscombe’s shopper (or, in a corollary example, the shopper’s wife) freely chooses to put butter rather than margarine on the shopping list. This idea that the names that one must rectify are not, ultimately, up to one is one of the things that makes Confucianism come across as an inherently conservative and authoritarian philosophy to many commentators. Even so, I think most people can think of examples of everyday situations in which a milder version of the concept motivates normal behavior—if you don’t rectify the name of “spouse” or “partner” by being unfaithful or abusive, you will (or should) suffer social odium, and if you don’t rectify the name of “employee” by going to work, you will (regardless of whether or not you should) get fired. Confucianism simply extends this to a more general theory of obligation as preceding choice when it comes to structuring relationships and society.

            The link between correct language use and correct behavior is unfashionable in the contemporary West except in niche political arguments, and its association with those arguments if anything makes it even more unfashionable in other contexts. As I write this, off the top of my head I can think of people who insist on “person-first language” to refer to disabled people instead of actually advocating for disabled people, right-wing theologians who insist on dysphemisms like “same-sex attracted” to refer to homosexuality instead of actually defending the rationales for traditional religious teachings on the subject, and, of course, participants in the unending argument regarding third-person singular pronouns and how they relate to gender identity. Such people’s ideas do show some vague family resemblance to the morally substantive parts of zhèngmíng, but in an inverted and weakened form that probably owes more to the mostly-discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis than to any notion that choice of political language actually imposes moral obligations on the societies that use it to describe themselves.

            So what is the basis for the rectification of names, if it is not a mere call for clarity in language and if a Sapir-Whorfian account of language choice affecting available thought processes misses, or does not entirely encapsulate, the point? In fact, I would argue that in order to really understand the concept, one must be willing to look at cosmological and metaphysical issues, not just disputes in the area of political theory or linguistics. For Confucius and his intellectual descendants, who include not only “Confucians” in the narrow sense but also many East Asian Buddhists, Taoists, irreligious people, and even Christians,[10] “the truth of things” and “affairs” relate conceptually to both human practices and broader natural realities. This is not meant to imply that there is a sacred language in the sense that Muslims hold Quranic Arabic to be sacred, or a language of truth in the sense that one occasionally encounters in science fiction or fantasy novels. Nevertheless, words can be used in ways and with implications that have either greater or lesser connections to understandings that will keep human affairs rooted in reality.

            In some areas of East Asian thought this set of ideas and principles can get downright mystical. Japanese has the concept of 言霊kotodama, “word spirits,” an extension of the animist sensibility widespread in Japanese culture to include a spiritual dimension to words and names. This idea, while in my opinion aesthetically beautiful, is morally ambivalent. Much like Confucianism, it can easily be extended in authoritarian directions; one pair of Japanese authors even argues that freedom of speech will never gain wide acceptance as a Japanese value unless kotodama goes.[11]

            However, the belief nevertheless imposes certain limits on the reasonable use of language by the rulers as well as by the ruled. A completely relative view of language in which all words are equally made-up no matter how long they have been in use for or how much consensus exists (or used to exist) about how to use them, is at least as liable to be put to authoritarian ends. Powerful people can just redefine criticisms out of existence. Berger, to his credit, understands this; just as in wartime Japan anybody who seriously discussed the possibility of defeat fell under suspicion due to the kotodama-derived idea that discussing defeat made it likelier,[12] in the 2000s US criticisms of the Bush administration’s war aims and war tactics could be defused by resort to euphemism and evasion.[13] As is so often the case, excessive realism and excessive relativism are thus both best avoided when it comes to political language. Instead of either, we should find a way of discussing public affairs and social life that implies some basic set of agreed-upon values without assenting to cosmological or metaphysical claims about different terms’ supposed innate and precultural significance.

            So, then, we might say that the rectification of names in fact has important parallels to the tradition in Western philosophy concerning direction of fit, and that it is in conversation with concepts of desire, volition, and imperative that we can best understand it. It is not simply a matter of calling ‘em like one sees ‘em and telling it like it is, although rectifying names in that sense is probably a necessary precondition to rectifying them in the sense of behaving the way one’s purported social position or values dictate that one should. The concept also has to do with unchosen obligation, not necessarily in an authoritarian sense (although Confucius’s own development and use of it was certainly in the service of policies that were authoritarian) but in the sense that none of us always and in all places get to decide how we want to relate to the people, places, and things around us. If the concept is going to be invoked in political and social controversies in the modern West, it should be with a greater degree of respect for or at least awareness of its full meaning and rich texture of connections to other philosophical and spiritual ideas.

❦

[1] Peter L. Berger, “New Atheism and the Rectification of Names,” The American Interest, January 7, 2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/01/07/new-atheism-and-the-rectification-of-names/.

[2] George Orwell, "Politics and the Enlgish Language," Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946): 252-265.

[3] Confucius, transl. James Legge, Confucian Analects (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 263-264. My emphasis.

[4] Quoted in Wm. Theodore de Bary, “Introduction,” in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 8.

[5] Then again, since part of the problem with King Zhou was traditionally held to be that he indulged in crude, off-rhythm music, perhaps Trump’s reasons for tanning himself into orangeness are unaesthetic enough that Mencius would have seen it as relevant after all.

[6] I hesitate to cite specific social media accounts for this due to both the ephemerality of the medium and the fact that doing so blurs the line between criticizing socially relevant public thought and criticizing the opinions of private citizens, but searching the Tumblr tag for “rectification of names” gives a wealth of examples of the far-right usage, and very few examples of any other usage.

[7] G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, Second Edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 56.

[8] This was a belief common in the West for many hundreds of years as well, hence practices like augury and the various “-mancy” disciplines by which Western religious and protoscientific leaders attempted to glean information from the natural world about how to correct or not to correct human affairs. I would argue that the search for meaning in seemingly random natural forces is still with us and probably always will be in one form or another. It is to some extent answered in teachings such as those of Averroes or John Henry Newman concerning “spiritual intelligences,” but the search for greater understandability of that meaning or greater ability to plan and take action based on it is left unanswered by those teachings and must be pursued through other means, such as, in our own time when many other options are widely seen as discredited, alternative medicine or astrology.

[9] Op. cit., Anscombe.

[10] For over three hundred years there was an on-and-off dispute within the Catholic Church over whether or not Chinese Catholics could licitly continue Confucian ceremonial practices. Eventually in 1939 Pope Pius XII ruled that they could, within certain limits.

[11] Yamamoto Shichihei and Komuro Naoki, 日本教の社会学Nihon-kyō no shakaigaku (Tokyo: Gakken, 1981), 58. (In Japanese.)

[12] Ibid.

[13] Op. cit., Berger; the previous citation of Berger’s essay includes the passage mentioning the “enhanced interrogation techniques” euphemism. At one point in the Bush administration the comedian Jon Stewart responded to an admission that the US was not winning the Iraq War “in the present tense” by speculating that the US was instead winning in the pluperfect subjunctive, a tense and aspect used to discuss things that might, could, or should have happened in the past.

Trahison des Mémoires

In my master’s thesis, which was written in late 2016 into early 2017 and was in the field of theology, I coined an expression called trahison des mémoires, “treason of memories.” It was a snowclone of trahison des clercs, the concept of disloyalty to the principles of serious thought by a society’s intellectual or cultured classes. With trahison des mémoires, my idea is that memory, especially publicly-held memory like the institutional memory of a country or a religion, can be twisted and weaponized in ways that do great harm to the people holding onto the memory. I was not so much interested in political or sociological harm—looking at cultural memory through that framework is old hat—as in emotional and interpersonal harm. In the thesis I introduced this concept as part of a discussion of (and I am both dating myself and outing myself as an irremediable dweeb here) the 2001 anime Noir, one of whose main characters is trying to piece together the circumstances of her parents’ murders.  When she finally does remember—or, in point of fact, when she finally is provided with other people’s memories concerning—the killings, she wishes she hadn’t.

            I was interested in looking at how early, or transgenerational, memories of cultural and religious practices can lead to mental states about as bad as those associated with watching one’s parents get whacked. I’m not convinced in retrospect that I had a ton to say about this; my thesis ended up much less systematic, more meandering, and frankly more postmodern than I went into it hoping it would. Even so, that is what I used the term to mean and, if I am allowed to toot my own horn on this, I do think that “treason of memories” captures certain things about this experience that more common terms like generational trauma or cultural baggage do not. It often really does feel very much like being betrayed, stabbed in the back, attacked in the dark, by something about one’s family or one’s culture that ought to be a font of strength and comfort.

            My family came to North America in the first decade or two of the twentieth century, mostly from either the Italian Mezzogiorno or an area of Eastern Europe that has variously been under Lithuanian, Polish, Austrian, Russian, or Nazi German sovereignty over its long and violent history. Some of the Eastern Europeans were Jews, others Gentiles; the exact genealogical admixture has never struck me as particularly important, mostly since it’s no longer possible to reconstruct. Neither, for that matter, has the question of whether the Gentiles were ethnically Polish or Lithuanian or Russian or Belarusian or whatever else; there is an anecdote from a pre-World War I British diplomat related in Bini Adamczak’s Relational Revolutions in which the diplomat, speaking to ordinary inhabitants of the part of Europe in question, runs through several wordings of a question about ethnic and national identity before finally being told that “all governments are a plague on the earth and it would be for the best if the Christian peasantry were left to attend to their affairs in peace.” Remove the word “Christian,” or add the phrase “or Jewish” after it, and you get the attitude towards nationalism that I’ve long assumed almost all of my ancestors on that side of my family held.

            Looking at my family history this way insulates me from the current treason of memories happening on an operatic scale in Ukraine and Russia. There are other treasons, however, with which it helps much less. There is a story that I often tell about my great-grandfather, a story that I heard myself from my elderly aunt. My great-grandfather’s name was either Paweł Turówski, Павел Туровский, פאולוס טוראָווסקי‎, or Paul Turowsky, depending on your thoughts on various Eastern European nationalisms. He spent most of his life in the Springfield, Massachusetts area following a short stint in the Canadian nickel mines after his flight from Europe. Pogroms had been involved, probably, given the timeline, those that followed the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. When my aunts, who are much older than my mother, were growing up just after World War II, they would visit their grandfather each Sunday after Mass and he would give them a nickel and a cup of chicken soup apiece—but he would always answer the door with a butcher knife in hand, before seeing to his satisfaction that it was just his granddaughters, and not the Cossacks come for him again.

            That butcher knife feels aimed through the dark at my own back whenever I try to take a sympathetic look at the sufferings of the Cossacks themselves, and, for that matter, whenever I try to think with compassion about the antisemitic views that my grandfather developed over the course of his own life. It is possible that these views were developed in opposition to his father, but also that his father instructed him in them himself as part of some twisted ploy at assimilating. In any case it made it easier for him to marry my grandmother, the descendant of long lines of Campanian peasantry and guttersnipes who passed down curiously bright copper-colored hair, difficulty moderating food intake, and a strong tendency to develop serious neuralgias in early adulthood. Once or twice I’ve pictured my grandfather and great-grandfather going at each other like Arthur and Mordred in the Rackham illustration of the Battle of Camlann, but then, there can’t have been too much resentment at the time of that wedding, because there were several bridesmaids from my grandfather’s side, that is the Eastern European side, of the family.

            I have a friend with whom I once had a serious fight over her observation that my grandfather “betrayed the Jewish people” by marrying my grandmother. I know enough about American Judaism and the difficulties it has had withstanding intermarriage and assimilation that I was not surprised by this opinion of hers, but I still objected to her saying it. I did not only object for the obvious moral reason that one simply does not say that sort of thing about a friend’s dead grandfather, but also for the factual reason that in reality the betrayal of the Jewish people had happened at least a generation earlier, maybe longer.

            (Lots of people seem to think that Judaism and Christianity, or even specifically Judaism and Catholicism, are either naturally allied and sister religions, or naturally inimical and opposed. People argue over which is true. Both are silly and wrong. The fact that many antisemitic ideas are theological nonsense even in very conservative Christian thought has not stopped them from influencing countless Christians, even Popes, even otherwise good Popes. Neither has persecution of Judaism by Christian governments always and in all places stopped Christians from being good neighbors to Jews, and learning from them. There would have been ways for my grandparents to have built a life together that did not involve this self-enmity and self-rejection on my grandfather’s part, and yet those paths were not taken.)

 ❦

Some of the most detailed stories I’ve ever heard about these people came in a specific conversation with my aunts and uncle three or four years ago when my mother and I visited them on Cape Cod. It was the most freewheeling conversation either I or my mother had ever had with some of the other people involved, in particular with my mother’s oldest sister. I learned that evening as the sun set pinkly behind Follins Pond about everything from the dubious paternity of my grandfather’s oldest sister— Paweł/ Павел/ פאולוס /Paul’s wife having, most likely, abruptly married him after being abandoned by the man who got her pregnant—to the crime family that used to and possibly still does control the Town of Agawam.

            What’s remarkable, looking back on this conversation, is that no point in it did I think holy shit, why is she telling us this? or anything of the kind. These conversations happen sometimes; people open up. It does not always feel like getting stabbed. There are similar reminiscing conversations that I have had with members of my family that did feel like getting stabbed; one such example is a conversation that I had with my mother years after the fact about a visit to a Buddhist temple on a trip to Japan in 2013. It was a visit that made a profound impression on me and that I have been meaning to write something cogent, insightful, and vital about ever since; my previous attempts to do so embarrassed me and I am not going to try to rectify that now in service to this particular point. (The very first thing I wrote about it, a long, typed-up diary entry headed “The Distance between the Devoted and the Devout,” has the advantages of freshness and of a title of which I’m still very proud.)

            The temple is Bōdai-ji, on top of a mountain whose name my best friend loosely translates Mount Doom, and the festival, which happens in the high summer, is called the Inako Taisai. At this festival blind spirit mediums or necromancers called itako set up booths in front of the temple in which they, actually or purportedly, contact the souls of the recently deceased, including miscarried or aborted fetuses. The practice is in probably-terminal decline due to diminished need for and interest in this sort of specialized life path for the blind. Supposedly the decline is also in part due to skepticism both from the Buddhist religious establishment—which of course has its own set of funerary practices, including, again, after miscarriage or abortion—and from secular Japanese people, but in 2013 it still seemed pretty packed.

            My reminiscing with my mother involved, among other things, her reminding me that our visit to the Inako Taisai, which I remember positively for a lot of reasons, also involved me getting overwhelmed by the crowds, or the summer heat, or both, and running off and irritating someone my mother was talking to, someone who had been looking forward to going to an Inako Taisai all her life. Me being who I am, I reacted to this conversation with a sense of deep shame, embarrassment, and even guilt—had I ruined something that this other woman had been looking forward to for decades? Probably not, especially since most older Japanese people tend to expect Westerners to behave in bizarre and jarring ways to begin with. Even so, it was apparently enough to give my mother herself mixed feelings about the excursion, which made my own very positive memories feel a little inappropriate, selfish, misguided. That sort of perseveration is elevated and exacerbated, I think, by the fact that the Inako Taisai is a well-known—in some circles—and well-attended event. Feeling as if I may have somehow damaged, in however minor a way, an established corpus of social, cultural, and religious memory, gives me the feeling of being betrayer as well as betrayed.

            Something feels melodramatic about looking at these kinds of memories as if they are knives in the dark, so let’s put them to bed as something more moderate, calmer, more contained. Homeopathic dilutions, maybe, of the kinds of violent memories that my grandparents and great-grandparents contended over with themselves and with one another. These memories have an undertone of violence to them only because they affected members of my family about whom I care deeply, or else because for an autistic person there is always an undertone of violence to any faux pas that one might conceivably be punished socially for having made. Add to that the guilt, for any morally reasonable person, of thinking of oneself as a victim in a low-stakes situation, and the Inako Taisai memory falls into place and becomes understandable at least to myself.

            So much for the 2013 Inako Taisai, which in spite of this qualm I do still think very well of as a ceremony and as a moment in my life. So much also for the family that ran my relatives’ childhood liquor store—note the wording—and latterly the Agawam School Board. What about working on these memories in a reparative way the way one can do a reparative reading of an old and, as they say, “problematic” book? I have already touched on this idea and want to make a more extended case for it.

            There are particular events in my childhood that I and other relatives remember different versions of, like the Agawam stories and the Inako Taisai story, but also remember in uniformly benign or positive ways, unlike the Inako Taisai story, of which memories are mixed, and the Agawam stories, which all concerned are just glad to have survived in more or less one piece. For example, I remember going to see the Lord of the Rings movies as a child with my mother and in one case my aunt when they were coming out; I remember the same about the Harry Potter movies. Both sets of memories are excellent; in my very early childhood I disliked both movie theaters and fantasy stories, but after a few years of the 2000s fantasy-action-adventure-blockbuster milieu I loved both. (The monocultural MCU juggernaut has ruined a lot of this sort of thing for me now, of course—another knife, another dark night, another spot on my back.) My mother also remembers both sets of movies very positively. Yet her Harry Potter-related memories are more salient and vivid for her than are her Lord of the Rings-related memories, whereas for me it’s the other way around. Part of the difference might be that several of the Harry Potter movies were released in theaters around her birthday, in late November.

            Remembering the salience of these movie watches differently from how my mother does is, of course, no kind of betrayal at all. I bring it up more to point out that the reparative potential in “misremembering” isn’t entirely disconnected from the way reminiscing already works for most people anyway. Who among us has not had many rounds of good-natured banter with friends and family about things like this? “No, no, it really happened like this.” Then someone else says “No, it happened like that; remember?” Then a third person says “Well that isn’t how I remember it.” These kinds of arguments actually reinforce our memories and reinforce our relationships. Just recently, in connection with getting my mother’s permission to write about the Inako Taisai episode, I had a conversation much like this with her. We agreed on the point I made above, that nobody going to something like this after wanting to for many years is going to let their time at it be ruined by an autistic foreign stranger having a meltdown because it’s hot out. So clearly the reparative quality of reminiscence can take the sting even out of the Dickinsonian “goblin bee” of trahison des mémoires. This actually does happen in Noir; the character I coined the term to describe is never happy about the fact that her parents were whacked, but she is able to engage in some sort of repair and atonement through having it out with the scumbag who ordered the hits and the brainwashed victim-perpetrator who executed them.

 ❦

Another memory of a debate over memories with my older relatives—a memory that might eventually come back and stab me itself, for all I know!—also comes to mind here. This is another utterly benign one, even benevolent in the sense that I look back on both the debate itself and the memory about which we had it fondly. My aunt and uncle and I discussed my very earliest memory, in which my uncle picks me up in his arms in his living room in a midcentury ranch house in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and spins me around while an old record player plays a big band tune. For some reason we all agreed that it was one of those record players that only plays one prerecorded song or program of music, and yet none of us agreed on what the song in the memory actually was. I remember it as “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the Benny Goodman piece that is probably a plurality of people’s first point of reference for big band music. My aunt remembers it as “Begin the Beguine,” a Cole Porter song, probably, in this kind of anecdote, being played by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. My uncle remembers it as “the Russian boat song,” by which he means a wartime Glenn Miller arrangement of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”

            Other memories like this might be relatively easy to resolve, but in this case my aunt, my uncle, and I all have good reason to have remembered best what song it was! My uncle owned the record player; my aunt, who is a little younger than my uncle, has the clearest memories of that period of time, 1995 or so, in general; I have the strongest emotions about the memory, since it is my earliest.

            Because we all had occasion to remember this memory the best, and yet all remembered it differently, the conversation actually shored up the bonds between us and reinforced, I believe, our importance to one another. In this way trahison des mémoires can be reversed so that the memory that is seemingly betraying one can in fact be a deep cover agent on one’s behalf. A public memory involving a national or intergenerational harm, like my great-grandfather’s memories of the pogroms, might be more difficult, or even impossible, to reverse in this way, and yet even in those cases I think that future generations can look back on their—on our—ancestors with a view to resolving and redeeming their experiences. Sometimes the best way to deal with betrayal is to meet it with a refusal to betray. “Trust, but verify,” as Ronald Reagan said, quoting, allegedly, a Russian proverb. Verifying, by implication, should not damage the trust overmuch. We can see that we have been stabbed and yet meet that violence with a decision to accept our memories and the purity of our feelings about them nonetheless. A knife that enters one’s back and stabs one through the heart can also, in different hands, be a tool that keeps a whole family or a whole society fed, safe, and warm.

Postscript

A few other, very specific knives thrown at my back in recent days, all of which had, in some way, a medicinal and consoling function: Florence and the Machine’s new album Dance Fever, which is named after early modern “dancing plagues,” which are in turn written about in similar terms to the nerve disease of which most of my female-line ancestors died. The too-pale lights of this year’s fireflies in unmowed grass in mid-June dusk. The Memory Alpha page for John Masefield. A whole cache of old yearbooks dredged up in my closet, showing the most 2000s fashion and graphic design choices imaginable, people I have not thought about in decades, and high school crushes of whom, in some cases, I still think as beautiful. A photograph of me as a child, in a Baltimore Orioles cap, draping myself over a railing with a smile on my face and the skyline of Manhattan in the near distance, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center jutting out over it all; the photograph is dated June 30, 2000.