William Cook's Herbal

With the end of net neutrality imminent, the fate of the internet hangs in the balance.  Whether it is sooner or later digital information is going to lost recklessly and potentially rapidly.  Digital information highly ephemeral, and it is mostly all going to be lost as the age of cheap energy grinds to a halt.

It is easy to make many lists detailing how the internet is bad and wrong, and I think that these lists have some merit.  To a large degree it is true, "the medium is the message," and one can make the point that the internet is, to some tastes, a crummy medium.  It really encourages less critical thinking for the most part, and a much more superficial way of surveying information.

We forget at our peril the beautiful aspect of the internet. It is a 24/7 open library of Alexandria. It is filled with old and rare books that don't have copyrights.  Some of these books are still in print, and easy enough to buy.  In my library sit Nicholas Culpeper's The English Physician Enlarged (1652), Maude Grieve's A Modern Herbal (1931), and Finely Ellingwood's The American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy (1919).

All three of these volumes are excellent.  All three I have sat over, poured over, copying out huge amounts of text, over and over again, filling notebooks, trying to memorize passages by heart.  

And luckily, all three of these wonderful books are still in print.  Or at least it's easy to go to amazon.com and buy them, no problem.  With them you have a choice; you can read them as a book or you could read them online for free. If you wanted to you could print out parts you liked, or copy the entire book from the screen.  Or you can buy it from amazon.com and put it on your shelf.

But amazon.com doesn't have everything.  In fact, it's hard to find many old herbal that are out of print as books on amazon.  What if you want to read William Salmons 1710 Botanologia or William Cook's 1869 Physiomedicalist Dispensatory?  Well, if you want to read those you don't have a choice to read them as books already printed by someone who isn't you unless you are willing to spend a pretty penny on the rare book market.  Fortunately, however, these herbals are still online.

We are in grave danger of losing this information.  If we were in a parallel reality I may have spent my many hours coping Salmon and Cook rather than Culpeper and Ellingwood.  As it stands I have very little familiarity with either of their masterpieces.  That disturbs me.  It disturbs me how easy it is to imagine this priceless knowledge disappearing into the ethers, lost forever. 

I'm planning on printing out Cook's entire book and figuring out how to bind it on acid free paper.  I've made zines before and watched some videos on how monks made medieval manuscripts. A printer would just make that way easier and go way faster, right?

Seriously though, I don't know what I'm doing, but do know that I can't just sit on my hands and do nothing.

As a treat an excerpt from The Physiomedicalist Dispensatory:

"LIRIODENDRON TULIPIFERA TULIP TREE, YELLOW POPLAR, WHITE WOOD Description: Natural Order, Magnoliaceae. This tree is one of the noblest in America, growing with a perfectly straight trunk of from eighty to one hundred and fifty feet, old trees without a branch till within twenty feet of the top, young trees low-branched and of a conical outline. The wood, under the name of poplar, is extensively used in the Western States as a substitute for pine. Leaves three to five inches long, and two-thirds as broad; the sides lobed much in the form of great ears, and the end abruptly cut off about two inches beyond the apex of the side lobes; smooth, somewhat leathery, on long petioles, margins entire; sheathed with membranous stipules, which soon fall off. Flowers very large, somewhat bell-shaped, solitary, erect; sepals three, colored like the petals, reflexed, caducous; petals six, erect, greenish yellow without, orange within, smaller and less brilliant than the tulip of the gardens, but of much the same general form. Fruit a series of imbricated capsules, forming a short cone, each one to two seeded. Blooming in May and June. The inner bark of the trunk, and also that of the root, is medicinal. It is pale yellowish, sparingly tinted reddish, light, a little fibrous, and of a pleasant aromatic, somewhat spicy camphorous odor. It imparts its virtues readily to water and diluted alcohol, but is easily injured by heat. Its taste is mildly bitter and somewhat aromatic. Properties and Uses: Many physicians, and most writers, confound this bark with populus tremuloides, and others of that genus, because of the similarity of the common name, poplar; but the two articles bear no resemblance to each other, either in botanical or medical properties. The bark of the liriodendron is one of the mildest and least bitter of the tonics, chiefly relaxant and only moderately stimulant, but with no astringency whatever. While it improves the appetite and digestion to a fair extent, and for this purpose is unsurpassed in convalescence, its most valuable action is upon the nervous system and uterus. In nervousness, nervous irritability, hysteria, and chronic pains through the womb, it is an agent of the greatest efficacy–both soothing and sustaining. The menses are not influenced by it; but it proves valuable in chronic dysmenorrhea as well as in leucorrhea, prolapsus of a mild grade, and the uterine suffering incident to pregnancy. By its influence on the nervous system it sometimes promotes the flow of urine; and it favors greater freedom of the bowels, without being in any sense cathartic. If combined with spikenard, boneset, or other agents influencing the lungs, its virtues will be directed largely to these organs; and then is of peculiar service in old coughs and pulmonary weakness. The mildness of its action sometimes suggests inertness, but this is quite an error; for its gentleness increases its value as a peculiar nervine tonic, and makes it very acceptable to the stomach; though it is not an agent fitted to languid or sluggish conditions, or states of depression. It is rarely used in powder, but a scruple or more may be used as a dose. If infused, half an ounce may be digested for an hour, in a covered vessel, with a pint of water not above a blood warmth; of which a fluid ounce may be given every six or four hours. It is variously compounded with hydrastis, sabbatia, or calumba, with orange peel, for a stronger tonic influence; and with caulophyllum, leonurus, viburnum, or senecio, when the uterine organs are particularly to be impressed. Some value it for worms, and others apply the leaves on ulcers"

The only way to save this and other priceless books is take responsibility for their continued survival.  Are you with me!

Performance and Perversity

Imagine for a moment Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor.  Imagine that for some reason you are only faintly aware of the ghastly experiments he performed on living humans, and indeed you are very dear friends.  One day you have him over for tea, and he says “Ahh!  What a fine day!  You know the happiest days of my life were when I was a Nazi doctor and had the pleasure of furthering the breadth and depth of science.  Indeed the greatest, most profound point in my life is when I got to do medical experiments on human twins.”

You are naturally shocked, and barely respond with a horrified “but! How could you?”

He smiles at you knowingly, and says “well my friend, you too are an artist”

“What do you mean by that?” you stammer.

“Well, you go out with your pencils and your watercolors several times a week don’t you, and you spend several hours a day drawing your birds and your flowers, and you have gotten rather good as late.  And I ask you; when you return from your time making beautiful art do you not feel excellent? ”

“It is true that I enjoy making my art, but what does that the least have to do with anything?  Honestly Joe, I’m shocked.  I hadn’t the faintest idea! You only mentioned to me how sweet you were to the children.  How you gave them better housing and more food and even sweets!  How can you so calmly and benignly at such ease with yourself compare the evil things you confess having done to my harmless activity”

“Well my friend, how do I say this politely? Perhaps there is no way: I was a better surgeon than you are an artist.  Some, such as yourself, for now at least, are an amateur.  Therein lies the difference; you squeeze your paintings into the few hours between work and sleep, in the evening and weekends. I, on the other hand, was professional.  This means because of my skill recognition, and popularity I was paid to pursue my hobby.  It would be as if you got to make your paintings full time on a good salary.”

Incredulous, you cry: “but I paint watercolors!  You killed children!  How can you in anyway compare the impact of what you did to what I did? What you did is evil!  That is a meaningful difference.”

Mengele chuckles warm heartedly; “now, now, let’s not get all up in arms about this!  First I wasn’t killing Aryans, only untermnschen.  We were perhaps a little misguided back then as a nation, but my hand was forced; there were orders.  Most importantly I was pursuing the beautiful understanding of science.  Lord Francis Bacon himself acknowledged that it is only though torturing nature, like a witch, that she will confess her secrets unto us.  Well, there are some secrets which nature keeps which can only be tortured out of her by having access to a pair of identical twins that you are in a position to experiment on and indeed vivisect.  Now, now don’t give me that look: you’ve said to me on many, many occasions, and to my immense delight, that you value science highly”

You splutter hardly able to respond; “what’s that the least bit got to do wi….”

“Everything,” he interrupts, suddenly serious about making his point.  “My contributions to science are the reason what I did was ethical in the ultimatesense.  Sure my hand was in many ways forced, and I cannot take full responsibility for my actions, even then what I did was in everyway right.  But I will confide something with you my friend, something that I do not share with many others, something that I hope will clarify my position…” he pauses reflectively for a moment, pondering the next word.  He continues: “look at it this way; you and I have many long conversations about the ideas of Neitzsche.  And you know he is one of my favorite philosophers.  Well, he said it beautifully didn’t he? What is morality but inherited prejudice that is propped up with bad logic? Well…it is true is it not? I will not lie to you; I am personally proud of my many and varied contributions to medical science.  But more than that…I am a surgeon.  My hand traces a finer line than a draughtsman of equal training.   My medium is no mere canvas and paint, no my medium is human flesh.  Like any artist I had a muse, I was not led by reason but inspiration, which came from a place more deep and substantial than the usual little me that occupies my consciousness, this was much more profound.  I can not say then that I am wholly responsible for my work; it often, especially in the better moments, it flowed through me, this joyous exploration.  My experiments came from the sacred fount of my aesthetic longings.  People forget that science is an artform, with its own technique and canon.  And within that canon I am an unrecognized master of the first order.  Indeed, like all artists there is more than a bit of the outlaw to me; my law is not your law, my law is my enjoyment and my pleasure.  My muse sits as my judge and finds my performance unparalleled.  This is what has allowed for my greatness and your mediocrity.”

There is a long and strained hostile silence between the two.  After a minute or two he straightens himself out, shrugs his shoulders, and smiles “have you tried the oatmeal raisin cookie my wife made? They really are something else”

***

The imagined dialogue is an attempt let the voice of egregious and superlative perversity make its best case.  What I find the most striking how bad the case is, how utterly disgusting and despicable.  How stupidly nihilistic, shoddy, poorly assembled and obvious.  And how little it matters; just because his arguments are bad doesn’t mean they’re easy to refute it on logical grounds, or that the task is even possible at all.  And furthermore, the ethics are in a crucially important way a moot point: Dr. Mengele was in a position where he could do as he pleased, and his work was obviously pleasing and delightful to him.  He carefully dances around the ethical underpinning of his argument without being crass enough to spell it out, as I will do: might makes right.

The line of questioning ramifies: what is the meaningful difference between the craftsmen who made exquisite stained glass windows and the craftsmen who constructed the elegant, imaginative, well designed torture implements that the Jesuits used during the Inquisition?  Why does the final intent matter if the object is beautiful and pleasing to the eye? 

From a certain perspective can it be denied that the Grand Inquisitor was, in the mastery of his craft no less a genius than Velazquez? Both were unparalleled students of human nature.  They both relied on fine well wrought tools they had painstakingly mastered to achieve the dazzling results that they consistently and repeatedly.  They were masters of their craft. It is a well known fact that when you get enough humans together and give them unaccountable power over prisoners or slaves that many prove themselves to be highly capable amateur sadists.  Some people develop taste, refinement and sophistication in their applications of cruelty and dehumanization.  Of course few attain the sort of legendary levels of Mengele, but then again there are relatively few enough legendary artists in any genre.

At the primal core of a human, and indeed every animal, is a blind will to survive.  This aspect of self sees things instrumentally, pragmatically.  There is hardly narrative consciousness in this state.  The conscious that takes over here is one of muscle memory; it is reproductive in the full range implied. This reproductive intelligence gives rise to utilitarianism, pragmatism and intellect.  The survival instincts endowed with its reproductive genius anticipates a mechanistic worldview, in fact guarantees it.

However in most people, outside of times of wars, famines, and more mundane states of possession, are constantly in a state of performance.  Ethics and aesthetics are what drives and guides performances.  These muddled and confused illogical drives are symmetrical and opposed. They are faint lights that are all we have to see by, as like the old story of the drunkard the streetlamp. 

Aesthetics is the guiding force of beauty and ethics the guiding force of morality, or rightness.  Both ethic and aesthetic are clearly upon examination utterly and hopelessly irrational.  There is no accounting for taste!  And Nietzsche is in every way by defining morals as ipso facto inherited prejudices propped by bad logic.

It seems foolish to ascribe humans higher capacities and agency than they clearly have; we are hardly free agents, but actors locked into endless performance.  Of course we have intellectual faculties which act as a calculator and indeed, people can live lives that are defined by dry calculations.  At richer levels of involvement, our intellectual capacities characterize ethics and aesthetics. 

Of course someone who lives through calculation without robust ethics and aesthetics is at least somewhat sick and mutilated, like a kept predator which cannot hunt.  Even the man endowed with intense reproductive genius must make his performance on the grounds of aesthetics and ethics. Performance is a natural part of animal and even more so social primate nature.  What is performance?  Performance is a set of actions defined by props and affectations and scenery and costumes and scripts. It does not matter if one is a mother, soldier, priest, thief or bohemian.  Here are your props, here are your affectations, these are the costumes and the scripts.  We flatter ourselves when we claim some original genius and fail to apprehend the degree to which we are over determined on every front.

Performances are done with a mixture of ethical and aesthetic considerations.  Reproduction shatters the fourth wall as it were.  Just as it is to mutilate a man by destroying his ethics and unleashing him as nothing but a calculating, willful animal, so it is a mutilation to excise aesthetic considerations.  It is indeed a grave thing to deprive someone of the capacity to apprehend beauty.

Are ethics aesthetic and aesthetics ethical?  Serious contemplation of this reveals that this is not the case; one is not presented with a feeling of beauty when confronted with an ethical question.  It is instead a feeling of duty.  And one feels not the dread sense of duty when apprehending beauty; indeed neither feeling could be more distant from the other.  And we are suspended and stretched between these two points, the narrow vistas of our consciousness, who we mean when we say “I” is framed by the light cast by aesthetic and ethic .  Indeed therein lies the difference; one needs no sense of self to be possessed by reproductive intelligence, but one sees that the conscious sense of self rests entirely on ethics and aesthetic.  Again there is the Intellectual calculator, but this is hardly meaty enough to yield a truly satisfying sense of personhood.

My formulations are very similar and owe much to Eric Berne’s ‘structural analysis’ in his classic Games People Play.  In his system he splits people into different aspects of self.  There is the Parent, Child and Adult.  The Parent has two forms, the direct and indirect.  The direct response is when the individual in question imitates what the parent did.  The indirect response is then when they conform to what the parents said.  Without going into undue detail within this analysis there is essentially a tape recording of one’s parents’ actions and words that composes the Parent.  Berne defines the parent’s role and function as “First, it enables the individual to act effectively as the parent of actual children...  Secondly, it makes many responses automatic, which conserves a great deal of time and energy.”

The Child also has two facets, which Eric Berne labelled “the adapted Child and the natural Child.” The adapted Child is able to modify its behavior under the influence of the Parent.  The natural Child, to contrast, “is a spontaneous expression: rebellion or creativity, for example.”  Berne further mentions: “In the Child reside intuition, creativity and spontaneous drive and enjoyment.”

The Adult is lastly defined as, more or less, the rational computer like aspect.  It is basically a counting machine, a calculator.  It derives enjoyment from correctly doing correct computations, such as sailing or math.  Besides being of very important survival value, the Adult is also tasked “to regulate the activities of the Parent and the Child, and to mediate objectively between them.”

With this inner mapping, Berne then goes on to describe Games, in which there are transactions between the various aspects of self.  There are two categories of transactions: Complementary Transactions and Crossed Transactions.  Some example of the first category objective conversation about math which is an Adult-Adult transaction, my Parent may tell your Child to wash his dishes, or two jam band members can be having a complementary transaction between their natural Children.

Complementary transactions are straight and above board.  Crossed transactions are below board.  Here there is the pretense of an Adult-Adult transaction but instead it is the Parent and Child of the respective individuals in the helm.

The Transactional Analysis then is used to root out disordered states between the various aspects of self.  The model that I’m using divides people differently, but indeed what I’m calling perverse is fairly analogous to crossed transactions, although within my system disorder is regarded as a natural state of affairs.  To understand this more deeply we can make a metaphor, there is the sea of aesthetic and land of ethics. There is a point that they meet; a long complex shoreline where what is duty and what is beauty is hopelessly mixed.  The drives are mixed; they lack certainty of inward form.  The sand is wet and each wave is at its end is mostly sand.

We can look at the shoreline of perversity and see how much life abounds there; there is always something distinctly perverse about creativity, and inspiration.  They are muddled bundles of aesthetic and ethical drive.  Both are contained within it.  And it must be noted, just like the actual seashore, in the inner shore there is a powerful stench of death and decay. 

With this understanding we can map out a little the topography of the shoreline, and perhaps appreciate its geological history.  We can play paleontologist and comb the beaches looking for the shells and treasures and trash that have washed up.  Indeed the entire shoreline has been washed up from the depths. 

There are infinite ways to demarcate the boundary between land and sea, and frankly it is utterly arbitrary to choose one survey line as the ultimate truth.  There are different tides, the shore is itself endless crenelated and it is constantly being moved by the forces of the waves.  It is in a state of constant subtle flux.  There is something disingenuous about excessively crisp categories.  We are describing something alive and messy, not dead and orderly.

Performances of course vary in execution; they can be convincing, uninspired, too self-conscious.  Their can be flaws in costume, scenery or dialogue. Some people embody their parts.  Most people are excellent at a few and poor in others, and this leads to the sort of lopsided existence we enjoy and the sort of lopsided sense of self that most people form.  What are our bodies in time but the habits we inhabit?

Humans are a zoological phenomenon, as Desmond Morris details in his work.  We are social primates and as such we can only exist in and through families and communities.  We think in stories the same way use our hands to make tools.  We cannot help but imitate; we are mimetic creatures. Monkey see monkey do is a statement of fact.

There is a certain danger that such a simplified model of binary reduction could flatten out the actual inward reality of people into something too idealized, too stilted up on elegant concepts.  Let us be very real and circumspect about it: our natures are utterly composite.  Hermann Hesse explores this artistically in Steppenwolf.  People are not one soul or two, no, we are a teeming multitude.  I believe that this multitude clearly reflects the different parts we perform in the context of different relationships, of course external relationships, but also indeed inner ones, relationships between an individual’s inner and subjective faculties.

People perform different parts and roles in the context of different relationships: one person can simultaneously exist as: daughter, sister, cousin, niece, aunt, mother, wife, grandmother,, seamstress, coworker, colleague, old friend, new friend, viola in the amateur string quartet, student of Nietzsche, devout churchgoer etc.  There are all different social roles with different relationships, dynamics, places of meeting, and topics of conversation.  There are literally different theatrical parts, stages, sets, scenery costumes and scripts.

We all know how profoundly discomfiting it can be to encounter someone “out of character.”  It is also clear that Western philosophical traditions, or at least the vernacular philosophy people regularly use to make sense of their lives, are profoundly unsuited to models that have more than a binary arrangement.

A serious fault with this worldview is that experientially, our souls are myriad, scattered through the habits we cut into space and time.  Our soul isn’t confined to some corner of our heart, no, indeed, it is what we exist in and through.  Habits cannot effectively be taken from their context, indeed we are simply the habits that we inhabit and so the soul is scattered through space and time, locked into many points of potential within the vast field of changing circumstances and contexts.

Our souls are then mutable, dynamic, and both subject and object. They may act, but they are also acted upon.  Westerners, with our simplistic and incorrect understanding of our inner world are violently hung up on this point.  We cannot accept the disorderliness of our inner states, their impurity and lack of boundariedness.  How contextual, mutable and intersectional and messy we are at the core.  We struggle to rectify our models with our reality; we have not the simple pleasure of constantly shifting between different games.  No, we think that each game wholly defines us.  We believe fervently that each performance can be used as an ultimate testimony to our soul.  As such there is an inevitable bad faith that clings to all of our performances since none of them adequately are but a small part of myriad nature.  This is a massive part of the obsessional quality to Westerners, our insane ambitions, and piercing eyes that Jung made note that other cultures find terrifying:

“I was able, on my many journeys, to establish sufficiently close relationships with non-Europeans to see the European through their eyes. The white man is nervous, restless, hurried, unstable, and (in the eyes of non-Europeans ) possessed by the craziest ideas, in spite of his energy and gifts which give him the feeling of being infinitely superior. The crimes he has committed against the coloured races are legion... . Primitives dread the sharply focused stare in the eye of the European, which seems to them like the evil eye. A Pueblo chieftain once confided to me that he thought all Americans (the only white men he knew) were crazy, and the reasons he gave for this view sounded exactly like a description of people who were possessed. (“After the Catastrophe,” 1945)

***

It is important that I emphasize that I’m not attempting to create a moralizing polemic about how perversity is bad and wrong, or that people are bad and wrong and evil.  Indeed, the evidence speaks for itself.  My interest is that perversity is a pervasive, universal experience of disorder and mess between the aesthetic and ethical faculties of man. I imagine few people are as strikingly original as Dr. Mengele when it comes to the masterful technique of performance.

There is a place where the ethic intersects with the aesthetic.  Both are self-contained and do not directly relate to the other.  One of the great Western contributions to thought, according to John Michael Greer, is that a human life consists of many spheres that intersect in the individual. Where the ethical and aesthetic spheres meet complex tides form and in them you find disorder and chaos between the realms.  That disordered chaos is perversity. The metaphor can be extended to great lengths without breaking: there is a solar perversity of the day and a dark perversity of the night.  There are climatic events which increase perversity and those which diminish it.  There are complex tides and different complex dynamics on different parts of the shore. Indeed there are differences of type within perversity that could be extensively and tediously catalogued; the perversity of the water taking the land in tsunami is very different than when the land takes the water through drought.  It is different when Mengele pursued his vocation to when the Wehrmacht drafted teenagers to die on the front.  One has aesthetic overpower ethic the other ethic overpowers aesthetic.

Another example may help to illustrate:  It is wrong for a jealous man to kill his wife in a fit of mad passion, it is perverse for him to make a lamp shade out of her skin and a chair from her bones afterwards.  It is more disgusting and wrong and hideous because it is informed by an aesthetic.  The Muse isn’t the Arbiter of Justice and the Arbiter of Justice isn’t a Muse.  This confusion is perverse, however, what difference does it make to his wife?

Let’s avoid taking the easy way out of this and turn its focus on gratuitous examples of perversity.  Perversity is utterly mundane and universal.  It must be noted that under some circumstances perversity may be wildly understood to be noble and heroic.  The man sacrificing himself to save a child on a railroad track may be motivated much more by aesthetic than ethic.  It may not be an issue of right or wrong, but instead one of beauty and exploration. If that were the case, would not even this noble and heroic deed would have a profoundly unsavory taint.  Imagine had that same man just finished writing a suicide note and was on the way to kill himself anyways and just happened to have bumbled his way into being a hero on the way out.  Imagine being the one who feels somehow obligated to be truthful in the recounting of events, telling the kid “the man who saved your life had a crazy deathwish and only saved you so he could die real fast and look good doing it.”

Perversity is ubiquitous and universal.  Everyone has a degree of inward disorder which leads mixed motivations and incompatible ethical and aesthetic drives.  I believe that in large part people revile the perversity in others because they cannot reconcile their own impure longings with either their aesthetic or ethic.  I imagine other cultures have a similar relationship to ambition or the striving for personal recognition.

Whenever I visit the ocean I am overwhelmed by the smell of death; of rotting seaweed, the week old bodies of dead fish and rotting seagulls.  This shoreline between ethics and aesthetics is the same way.  Whether the coast is stagnant and still or tempestuous and filled with spray, there is the same smell of corruption.

BEAUTY IS PERSONAL

De gustibus non est disputandum.  You may like Rembrant, Da Vinci, and Raphael.  I might favor Japanese ukiyo-e block prints.  We can go on and on about why we favor the genres that we do.  I could say “I love the simplicity of the colors, the excellent and delightful compositions, and the mastery of the power of the line”

To which you may reply; “I prefer the great Renaissance masters.  I’m in awe of their portraiture, the distillation of character.  The superb use of light and shadow and the realism of likeness”

If we were then feeling rude and contentious that day we could even argue why we don’t like the other’s preferred genre.  

I could start; “oil painting tend to give me vertigo.  They are usually depressing.” 

You then would rejoin something like “well, the figures in ukiyo-e are more like showroom dummies advertising brocade patterns for kimonos than actual human beings as they actual exist”

“Fine.  But I just don’t get why anyone would want to deeply contemplate all of those crucifixion scenes”

“Well why should I care about stylized courtesans looking at the moon? I think it gets old real fast.”

Point being neither of us could ever win this argument.  And even more interestingly we could continue it until we were both blue in the faces and never discover the other or ourselves being unethical for it.  Aesthetics are subjective, even when shared.  They are contained in the impressions of a perceiving subject.  Truly, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.  Meaning is exactly the same. Meaning is personal, since meaning is derived much more from aesthetics than ethics.  Meaning too is in the eyes of the beholder.  Ethics yield little more than a dry satisfaction.

ETHICS ARE INSTITUTIONAL:

As the imaginary conversation with Mengele reveals, it seems utterly false to claim that ethics are arbitrary and mutable.  Morality is encoded into the law.  There may be other contributing factors to the body of law, but morality plays no small part. We have ethics in a society in the exact same way that we have laws; they are institutions.  Within the political mainstream there may be hostile dispute to implement the prevailing ethical system in legal proceedings and the apparatus of the state, but discussion can only happen in a meaningful way to the degree to which core values are shared and acknowledged in the opponent.  Otherwise you can only ever have people talking past one another.

AN EXPLORATION

The reproductive intelligence mentioned earlier, is bound up in sex, both in the sense of intercourse and sexual dimorphism.  Most people who have dated a childless woman approaching thirty know the reproductive intelligence maddening her to reproduce.  It is an experience quite outside of either ethics or aesthetics.  Countless similar examples provided from males could be given as well. Gender is the roles that are assigned by society and tradition.  They are fashions. As Ivan Illich points out in his book Gender there are countless ways that cultures through time have allocated the fashions of gender, it is clearly not fixed or universal.  This is of course backed up with ethical appraisal.

If perversity is understood as making a choice concerning ethics on the basis of aesthetics then the construction of gender is it is inherently perverse, as it claims something that is aesthetic is ethical on the merits of the aesthetic.  It is unclear if the Muse or the Arbiter of Justice is in the helm at any given moment.  Gendered roles may very well be necessary for the functioning of society, but what may that prove besides the horrific fact that we may need perversity?

In a gendered system on one column you have the masculine and the other the feminine. These categories concern aesthetics on its deepest level; not only the shape of bodies but also the outline of interactions, the clothing, the lilt of the voice and the activities that fill ones time. All of these are aesthetic; masculinity is an aesthetic and femininity is an aesthetic and even androgyny or “queerness” is an aesthetic. The prevailing notion is that the body you have determines your aesthetic. It is basically a wardrobe of outfits and a range of employment, roles within relationships, and certain mannerisms and appropriate haircuts. In this schema, adhering to the sexed gender performance is an important ethical metric.

This is where transgenderism passionately charges into the fold. The trans schema is if you adhere to the aesthetics of the other sex than you change your body to conform correctly. Therefore, hormones and surgery are very significantly the correct ethical choice. Genderqueer then tries to deconstruct these categories a la the mode of postmodernism. Regardless of which point on the spectrum you land it is treated as something an idealized and numinous identity. Be it man, woman or other. The sacred core of the individual, what I would call the Soul, is considered secondary to the numinous Platonic ideal of the gender. This transcendental identity then defines the fashions of the gendered performance, which are in themselves simply various fashions for living. Within this, gender performance of an individual is in large part a metric of ethical standing.

This is of course utterly perverse. Gender is a set of fashions that people perform. It is rules that allow people to perform different parts in relation. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it is simply not, in of itself, the means of constructing an ethical system, at least an ethical system that is at home within the nominally prevailing ideal of: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

That said, clearly, social games are extremely important, and gender is an important aspect part of it. However, if someone performs “wrongly” they may be eccentric, awkward, unpopular, an outlier, statistically unusual, or what have you, but have they harmed anyone or anything? That strikes me as doubtful, even with honest and sincere respect for religions and traditions that make a big deal out of these sorts of games. I respect and accept people don’t agree with me on this, and have no interest in winning an argument about values when values aren’t shared to begin with. That being said, I don’t believe that someone’s hang-up is in final analysis a good metric for harm. Indeed, more generally it isn’t fair or truthful to claim that someone’s ethical behavior is at the same level as their popularity.

For fairness’s sake I should note too this behavior exists with queer people. I distinctly remember the looks people gave me when I’d act too male or wear clothing that wasn’t girly enough. They gave me the look of mild disgust, reproach and scorn. This was the exact same glance given to someone singing loudly out of key. Indeed, these were the same very looks I got when I was perceived as a drag queen.  We all know that when our performances are judged and found lacking this is the best treatment we can expect.  Child rapists have to be housed separately or else their fellow inmates will murder them.  I’ve heard from personal, first hand reports that gender non-conforming folks are housed with the pedophiles or kept in solitary confinement.

But what is inherently wrong with performing a gender? What is inherently unethical about a man being big and muscular and wearing flannel and taking up a lot of space some of the time? Nothing. There is nothing inherently unethical about it whatsoever. To my best appraisal, it appears that people are just offended by the aesthetic. Likewise there is absolutely nothing wrong if he grew his hair out and put on a dress. It doesn’t hurt anyone more than any other sort of outfit, even if many people may find it eccentric, offbeat, odd or disgusting. These choices don’t have ethical bearing, defined as the ethics presented in the Declaration of Independence.  Nonetheless there is enough of similarity in the aesthetic impress that prison officials would tend to house with or in the same manner as the very worst offenders.

This perverse use of an aesthetic metric to make an ethical evaluation is the reason you see dysfunctional gender performances all over the bimodally distributed spectrum. The degree to which a male is performing emasculation is the degree that he is performing a certain aesthetic that is somewhat fashionable today. There are other fashionable masculinities and femininities and not so fashionable ones. Sometime people drop the pretense of performing anything and are genuinely themselves, while competently playing social games. Personally this strikes me as the ideal point of balance in an individual’s gendered performance.

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

Gender is a useful prism to study both performance and perversity, but it is only one of countless others.  I like it because of its broadness; it allows one to see more the medium than the content. One could instead look at class, race, substance use, or what have you and find ample examples of performance and perversity. I could go into how at one point my friends and house-mates got into heroin while reading William S. Burroughs Junky or I could go into a long bit examining Thomas Chatterton Williams Losing My Cool brilliant anatomizes how hip hop culture creates a perversely violent, stunted and infantile aesthetic.  There are other lenses that could be used, but as I began to write them I found that there was no way I could keep the material from becoming formulaic and repetitive because performance and perversity are formulaic and repetitive.  That is the point; they are both utterly pervasive and inescapable parts of the human condition.  Indeed, they are structural, and exist independently of extenuating circumstances.

There is a point of balance, of inner knowing, that makes a peace between the waves of aesthetic, the land of ethic and even the chthonic power of reproductive.  While it is doubtful that one can easily have conscious control over the land or the seas of the inner world, one can become conscious of the uncertainty and disorder that happen when the two meet.  And thus one can learn to not fall victim to one’s perversity.  Similarly; one can be aware of performances and consciously choose to play or modify them.  He can act on the theater, script and stage rather than having them act on him.  That is the ideal; not to transcend performance but to do it well, and then not to destroy perversity but to recognize it for what it is, a long stretch of disorder that exists to varying degrees where incompatibilities meet.