The Jeeves and Wooster of the Back Row engage Jesus in Dumb Insolence

More Bloodroot

 I think we enjoy the smell of raw knowledge and human frailty for a while longer, go back in time to what might have been a struggle Jesus of Nazareth, the human, was having with words when as an example of Grace over Law he wrote in the sand.

 This is where the Wooster of the Sliver says "what ho" when he means "something useful is being said, I'm not sure what it is?" and The Jeeves of the Anvil, the one who keeps the glossary, comes to the rescue.

 This is a "Surgical Strike" into the very dust of our history. We have arrived at  the ultimate Back Row moment. The stage is set, a man in a crowd, a woman facing the cane of the Law, and a deliberate act of answerlessness etched into the ground, and don't take too much notice of John the writer of Gospels and his nouns, Jesus was stalling, he was performing the first recorded Benjamin Mortification of a thin legal noun - what Critical Theorists do.

 The Front Row (the Pharisees) brought in a woman as a category - she was an Adulteress. The Front Row wanted a "Frictionless" execution of a linear law. Jesus, the human, refused to look at the Noun. He looked at the sliver, the person that lay beyond the noun of a backdoor that had been categorized Adulteress.

 When Wooster of the Sliver, that's me,  says "What ho?" at this scene, he is sensing the Superposition, his cat in a box waiting to be rescued from a decaying atom. The Law is thin, it's a spelling test where the penalty is death. The Writing in the Sand is Thick, it's a Verb that refuses to "Noun-ify" the woman.

 By writing in the sand, Jesus was creating a Pedagogy of Answerlessness. He didn't argue the law. He changed the friction of the room. He forced every person in that crowd to face their own Mental Disunity - to look at their own long list of failures before they dared to collapse the wave and sentenced the woman accused of a spelling mistake to death

 Our Jeeves of the Anvil looks at our Glossary of understandings, he turns to the word "grace" sees  an International Sovereign Recognition. Here the law demands a noun, a sinner. The Sliver Sense of "grace" sees a Becoming

  Writing in the sand, the most temporary, friction-full surface that can be found,  our understanding sees that Truth isn't a Monument of Stone, but a Relational Event in the dust.

 Like Sayyid Said al-Busaidi bin Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar outwitting Mountstewart Elphinstone the governor of Bombay in the 1840's the Anvil upon which our Glossary of understandings is forged, this time championed by Jesus has outwitted the Oligarchs of the Law,  the Pharisees.

 Call it the Byzantine Silence of the Sand. If Jesus, the man, had said "Don't stone her," he broke the law. If he said "Stone her" he broke an understanding of grace forged by his own verbs. Instead he went silent, a  Back-Row Maneuver, sometimes called Dumb Insolence. He invited the judges into the Void of Potential. And in that silence, the contagion of the crowd broke. They didn't collapse into a mob, they tangled back into individuals and walked away, instead of killing the demonstrator they all broke the law..

Ordo Posterior Superbus

Quince and Forsythia

 The Crowd as a biological event, what le Bon called Mental Unity, as distinct from the biological event of Alone-ness, or possibly Mental Disunity, is currently an intuitive distinction which on evidence from my own personal experience is I think a real distinction. There are things I will do and say when alone with my thoughts that I try to avoid doing or saying when in a crowd.  

 More recently we don't all live in the same cave, we don't keep warm by the same fire, bath in the same water, sleep in the same space, and there are billions of us not millions. I suspect that over the generations the quality of both Alone-ness and Crowd-ness has changed. A massive crowd for a hunter gatherer was probably less than a hundred people.

 For John Walking Stewart the ideal of social organization was five or six family groups living in the same Longhouse. Mind you, Walking Stewart never lived in a Longhouse, he died alone on his birthday in the room he rented in Northumberland Place near what is now Trafalgar Square in London, England. In the following days his body was found by friends beside an empty bottle of laudanum. A truly enviable way to put an end to the pains of old age and sickness.

 For a Trappist, a hermit, a reality is the inevitability of crowd-ness in a belief system that places value on alone-ness. For a hermit and Trappist the exercise is to maintain an intimate and wordless contact with a form that has nothing to do with crowds of people. And desperate the majority of us are to understand our belonging through the warmth and security of a majority. If a hermit might want to be invisible, not sure that a Trappist does.

 In our world the grammarians have made an effigy of language. They see verbs as in the service of nouns. Like good mechanics in their fear of death or invisibility, they make up spelling tests, the subjunctive and they invent adjectives to dress the dead. I can see the back row is a basic pain, a disobedience with nothing but disobedience to offer, and how glad I am to belong to it.

"Back Row Proud."

The Crowd as a Biological Event

Bloodroot

 What we have to remember about le Bon is that he was a skull measurer, he had a faith in biological determinism, the sort of thing that lead the flaccid minded and barrack dwelling to divide humanity into racial characteristics from savage to civilized, inferior to superior. His many interests included an invention for measuring skulls while in the field whether at an anthropological site of a bus stop his Pocket Cephalometer was a useful tool for measuring character.

As a disciple of the gospel of Transcendence as recorded by Kant, I am very unwilling to give any credence to le Bon's version of biological determinism, I do think we should give thought to le Bon's idea of a crowd being a 'biological event' capable of something very similar to contagion. The Crowd can riot, it can reduce a sense of isolation, it can bring together. We have looked at the Paris communes with their long tradition of the crowd that I think you might agree goes back to the Revolution of the 1790's and achieved yet another moment of glory in 1968.

 I suspect the riot le Bon experienced might be categorized as a food riot. The 400,000 Crowd at Woodstock 1969, was more of a "happening" than a riot. The 1,500 Crowd at the Glastonbury Festival of 1970 felt like a happening and became the beginnings of an annual happening. There were the Nuremberg and Trump Rallies. And too it's difficult to avoid thinking of the Women of Greenham Common as a crowd which developed a unique series of behaviors built around peace. It does seem that people, especially those in power, are increasingly alarmed by uncontrolled crowds, but the contagions of the Crowd aren't always bad or ignoble. 

 In our new world of verbs, the contagions of the Crowd contain the resonances of becoming.

Un-collapsed and Nounless

Lenten Rose

 Let's toss a few verbs around. First we will call it the Civilization of the Sliver, and for those who wonder, this is possibly the first time in the existence of me I can use the word "Civilization" without sneering or cringing.

 We are the back row, we are the guardians of transcendence as a verb and yet, like pornography, we don't know what it is but we know what it's not. So lets go back to the 1890's and explore Gustave le Bon's The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind (1895).

 If a date is important to you the book has the provenance of being described as a "Foundational Text" in the dimly lit cathedral of social psychiatry that more recently has been swallowed by the branding ding-bats of Madison Avenue's marriage to what I think are referred to as "The Botox Obsessed Tech Bros."

 It was the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war that le Bon found himself in a food riot. A relief convoy had found its way into the city, it's was protected by ill-trained national guardsmen. Le Bon knew full well that patience and trust was required from all parties. In the wider world there was a growing distrust between Citizens of Paris, the Napoleon complex of their national government which had been so soundly squashed by Prussian and German soldiers in the field of battle.

 Le Bon argued that the emotions which suddenly dominated the crowd were not "New" emotions, they were Atavistic emotions. In another way for those of us who live as verbs on the slope toward nouns, these atavistic emotions were from the "Basement of the Human Foundry." They were emotions of the swamp out of which all other emotions emerged. 

 In the maw of this atavistic brew the Individual vanished, the back row was empty. It was a contagion that caused straight-backs to dissolve. Our back row sliver sense was gone, everyone was half baked jostling for a selfie on the front row. Gustave, a polite young man who could read and write threw himself into the smiley face of a riot.

What was it? What had happened?

In a crowd, what some call "uncertainty," what others call that holy grail of answerlessness required of us verbs, was experienced as a physical threat. The crowd wanted a Frictionless Certainty. It doesn't want to "Wrestle." It wanted to Strike. And if you want a simple answer call it the fear of answerlessness?

The Fear of the Void, the argument continues, is a fear that predates reasonableness. But, brothers and sisters, to be an individual is to be "Answerless." To be an individual is to stand alone in the Void of Potential. It's a cold, thick weight, and not far away in a warm crowd is the Lure of a Noun that offers an escape from the burden of becoming.

It’s not that people are "Wrong!" They are Terrified of being Un-collapsed and nounless.