The Present System of Things
"Everything you can imagine is real" – Pablo Picasso
The blood in any person is, in reality, the person himself. It contains all the peculiarities of the individual from whence it comes. This includes hereditary taints, disease susceptibilities, poisons due to personal living, eating and drinking habits. Transfusing blood, then, may amount to transfusing tainted personality traits. The poisons that produce the impulse to commit suicide, murder, or steal are in the blood. – Watchtower, 15 September, 1961.
In 1973, near the end of his National Guard enlistment, George W. Bush had a haemorrhoid.
The year before – and barely a week before Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation – Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford released the results of his medical examination. The report disclosed, among other findings, that Ford occasionally experienced haemorrhoids linked to constipation or “exertional” activities, with superficial bleeding visible on stool and toilet tissue.
In 1974, six weeks after resigning from office, Richard Nixon underwent treatment for haemorrhoids.
Coincidence? You tell me.
Picasso was only partially correct, everything you can imagine is real, but nothing you can imagine is also real, and everything you can’t imagine is real, as is everything real you can or can’t imagine. Many American presidents, including Ford, Carter, and Bush, have expressed scepticism about such abstractions. The present iteration once said, “I’ve always felt that a lot of modern art is a con.” This indicates a preference for practical, concrete ideas over more imaginative concepts. As Henry James, his favourite 19th-century American writer once put it: “The imagination, that boundless faculty, so often extolled as the wellspring of human creativity, may, when left ungoverned, become a perilous indulgence – a labyrinth in which the mind loses itself amidst shadows of its own making. It is a realm where anxieties are conjured with an almost diabolical precision, each spectre more vivid than the last, and where the delicate boundary between the real and the imagined dissolves into a mist of ambiguity. Such unchecked flights of fancy distort reality, rendering decisions fraught with the weight of illusions and expectations that bear no correspondence to the world as it is. Yet beyond its dangers lies its wastefulness: a prodigal squandering of mental energies on scenarios that may never come to pass, on fears that paralyse rather than propel, and on abstractions so distant from the tangible that they sap the vigour needed for meaningful action. The imagination, unchecked, may distract from the present moment’s concrete demands, leaving one adrift in a sea of unmoored possibilities. It is a faculty at once sublime and treacherous, deserving of reverence but requiring restraint lest it obscure life’s clearer truths and simpler joys.”
The more closely you look at something, in other words, the more distantly it looks back. The same is true of words themselves. Haemorrhoids cost Napoleon the Battle of Waterloo. He could not mount his horse. Two days before the battle, his doctors lost the leeches used to alleviate his pain and overdosed him with laudanum. He was reeling. A half-century before, in 1755, during the French and Indian War, while serving as an aide to British General Edward Braddock en route to attack Fort Duquesne, George Washington suffered from dysentery and painful haemorrhoids, leaving him bedridden. Doctors bled him daily to draw out his ill humors. After two weeks of this treatment, still unable to stand, he was assisted onto his saddle, on which three plumped cushions had been placed, and from this perch, led a contingent of troops into the disastrous fray at Monongahela, where the British forces, surprised by the “unusual hallooing and hooting of the enemy”, were “so disconcerted and confused… they fell into irretrievable disorder” and began shooting blindly, leading to heavy casualties. Braddock was mortally wounded, a thousand of his men were dead or dying, the remaining officers faltered, their terrified troops fled in disarray, but the 23-year-old Washington remained steadfast:
“Though he must have been exhausted, he kept going from sheer willpower and performed magnificently amid the horror. Because of his height, he presented a gigantic target on horseback, but again he displayed unblinking courage and a miraculous immunity in battle. When two horses were shot from under him, he dusted himself off and mounted the horses of dead riders. One account claimed that he was so spent from his recent illness that he had to be lifted onto his second charger. By the end, despite four bullets having torn through his hat and uniform, he managed to emerge unscathed.” – Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life, 2010
After 12 hours on horseback under fire, still suffering from prolapsed and painful piles, still recovering from dysentery, still lacking the blood let from his veins by leeches, he rode 40 miles through the night to secure reinforcements.
Jimmy Carter was notably open about his struggles with haemorrhoids. Bill Clinton, during his time in office, let it be known that he had haemorrhoids and suffered from rectal bleeding, for which he underwent a colonoscopy.
Throughout his presidency, Richard Nixon countered insomnia with long-distance telephone calls and sedatives. Starting in 1968, he took an anti-epileptic drug, Dilantin, without a prescription. This was responsible for his furious eye blinking and ataxia. During the Cambodian invasion, he over-imbibed. This vitalised his truculence. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, he put American military forces on DEFCON 3 alert. Well into Watergate, he told a group of lawmakers in the Oval Office: “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone and in 25 minutes, 70 million people will be dead.”
The short-fingered vulgarian, however, finds “health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject”. A plague on him then, and a pox on his ass. This rear-endering curse appears first in Deuteronomy (” The Lord will smite thee with the botch and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed”). It is also in Psalms (“And He smote His enemies in the hinder parts”) and Samuels (” The hand of God was very heavy there. And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods; and the cry of the city went up to heaven.”)
I have a Japanese friend who is familiar with such rear-endering misfortunes. Her great-grandfather was a follower of Jiun, a piles-driven sake merchant from Ebo who one day surprised his wife and children by renouncing the world, taking the tonsure, and becoming a Nicherin monk. Chanting nam-myoho-renge-kyo day and night did little to lessen his suffering. After seven years, he died “still writhing in terrible agony,” but not before – according to the great Religionswissenschaft scholar Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa – “announcing his determination to become a god and save others who might suffer the same ailment.” His personal striving to be transformed from a man with thrombosed haemorrhoids into a curative source of beneficial powers was so focused and inspiring that within days of his death, his already considerable legion of followers appended “Reijin” to his name, meaning that he had been elevated to the status of a minor deity (this is common in Japan). These same followers then enshrined his spirit (Kitagawa: “departing soul”) in a special chamber of the Honshoji Temple in Tokyo. Reports of miraculous cures began to spread. By the end of Tokugawa period, his cult had attracted thousands of petitioners. The 1844 edition of Nippon zekoku goriyaku gaido (All- Japan Guide to Practical Benefits) lists 26 Buddhist temples in which the spirit of Jiun Reijin was enshrined, including six in Kyoto and five in Osaka. However, by Commodore Perry’s arrival, the cult had all but died out. His reijin-hi (stone monument) still stands in a courtyard of the Koshoji temple in the Fukushima ward, and the healing capacities of Honshoji are mentioned in contemporary guidebooks. Most Japanese, however, like their Western counterparts, have replaced pilgrimage to divine sources of practical benefits with over-the-counter creams and suppositories.
2.
“Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, bar-room, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity – everywhere, the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe – everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignoned, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceased, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or lack of manners, (considering the advantages enjoyed) probably the meanest to be seen in the world.” – Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas” Sunderland Times, 21 May 1872.
Jimmy Carter was the most chronic haemorrhoid sufferer to occupy the Oval Office, a condition he endured, according to his press secretary, Jody Powell, “virtually from the time he was in college”. In early August 1974, shortly after Richard Nixon’s resignation, he underwent an elastic-band ligation. A tiny rubber band was looped around the affected area, cutting off blood flow to the haemorrhoid, which, much like the state in classical Marxism, was meant to then wither away. It didn’t. The intervention resulted in local thrombosis and worse pain. Four years later, during the winter of 1978, the pain became so intolerable he had to give up jogging and cancel a quail shoot. By the Christmas season, he was forced to cancel all appointments and spend entire days in bed in the White House. According to TIME, he was treated with rest and “routine pain medication.” His discomfort, both private and public, soon abated. “The man is receiving adequate medical treatment,” Powell told the Washington Post. “He’s been hurting for three days, but he ain’t going to die.”
No American president has ever died of haemorrhoids. However, FDR came close in May 1941, when he developed severe iron deficiency anaemia due to bleeding piles and lost almost two-thirds of all the haemoglobin in his body. The anaemia responded to ferrous sulfate.
Herbert Hoover died from massive internal haemorrhaging of the upper gastrointestinal tract. Chester Arthur died from a cerebral haemorrhage. Andrew Jackson died from tubercular haemorrhaging. James Polk died of diarrhoea.
Blood loss contributed to the deaths of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John Kennedy. Ronald Reagan nearly died from blood loss following the attempt on his life in 1981. The bullet, fired by John Hinckley Jr., entered Reagan’s chest and caused a thumb-sized hole in his lung, tearing blood vessels and leading to significant internal bleeding. The president lost over half of his blood volume, and his systolic blood pressure dropped to a dangerously low 60.
Less than three months after his resignation, Nixon lay in critical condition because of internal bleeding after emergency surgery for blood clots in his left leg and lower abdomen. The anticoagulant drugs he had been taking caused prolonged bleeding, and he went into shock. His family held vigil around his bed in Long Beach Memorial Hospital Medical Center. He recovered.
In Gerald Ford’s systems review mentioned above, the attending physician of the US Congress, Doctor R.J. Pearson, M.D., F.A.C.P., F.A.C.C., reported that though Ford could feel the accumulation of the postnasal dripping, which is a rather frequent cause for clearing the throat and coughing, he never coughed up any blood.
“He is also able to swim vigorously 10 minutes, twice daily, without any cardiovascular symptoms… He has a good appetite, is able to eat everything except sourkraut (sic), which causes him to have diarrhoea…. He has nocturia regularly, 1 time per night, occasionally twice if he has had a lot to drink. Occasionally, under stressful circumstances, he has hesitancy in starting his stream, but he has no bleeding, burning, frequency, dribbling, etc.”
Of Jack Kennedy’s many illnesses, we shall cite but one: in April 1961, immediately before and after the Bay of Pigs, he had “constant” and “acute diarrhoea” and a urinary tract infection. His treatment included increased anti-spasmodic medication, a puree diet and penicillin. He also had a sigmoidoscopy – an examination of the sigmoid colon using a flexible tube inserted through the asshole.
3.
[W]hen the boys are no more christened after the same but christened after tyrants and traitors instead . . . . when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted and laws for informers and bloodmoney are sweet to the taste of the people . . . and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves. . . . and when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night and surveys its experience and has much extasy over the word and deed… – Walt Whitman, “Preface”, Leaves of Grass, 1855
A celebrated handful of Nicherin monks later “became Buddha with this body” (Kono mi de hotoke to natta) by running up and down the mountain upon which Nichiren encountered the Dragon Goddess in 1277 – Mount Shichimen – for one thousand days straight while eating nothing but peanuts until every impurity and ounce of fat had been cleansed from their bodies and burned away. They then lotus sat in a sealed cave deep inside the mountain surrounded by candles until their skin became parchment dry. Some drank lacquer through a bamboo straw, turning their guts into solid glass.
The Theravāda Scriptures contain a story about old monks gathered in a bamboo grove, five hundred strong but thin and weak, entangled in lingering rectal pain and suffering, extremely vexed and irritated day and night. One of them, Ananda, elected to seek counsel from the Buddha, prostrated and touched the Buddha’s soles with the top of his head in respect and said, “Our physical bodies are thin and weak and entangled in lingering rectal pain and suffering, and we are extremely vexed and irritated day and night. How can we cure ourselves?”
The Buddha told Ananda, “You should listen to this Sutra that cures (cikitsana) haemorrhoids, and then maintain its repetition so that it is well memorised in mind that you cannot forget it. In addition, you should widely proclaim and explain it to others. Thus all these haemorrhoid diseases would be eradicated, such as wind haemorrhoids (vayv-anamaka), heat haemorrhoids (ushmanamaka), depression haemorrhoids, trinity haemorrhoids (trayanamaka), blood haemorrhoids (rakto’ namaka), abdominal haemorrhoids, nasal haemorrhoids (ghrananamaka), dental haemorrhoids (dantanamaka), tongue haemorrhoids (jihvanamaka), eye haemorrhoids (cakshuranamaka), ear haemorrhoids (shrautanamaka), head haemorrhoids (shiranamaka), limb haemorrhoids (anganamaka), back haemorrhoids, anus haemorrhoids (gudanamaka), and haemorrhoids that grow on joints all over the body, all such haemorrhoid tumours would dry up, fall off, perish, and undoubtedly be cured.”
Then he said: “To the north from here, there is a snow-covered mountain, and on it, there is a tree with three types of flowers: those that are budding, those in full bloom and those that have withered. Just as those flowers fall as they wither, the haemorrhoids inflicting my monks will fall and wither – no more bleeding and no more pus, forever free from pain and suffering.”
The Buddha then uttered the spell:
Om tushita shama shama sheshana shama nihsheshana svaha.
Translation: Om tushita peace, peace, elimination peace, complete elimination svaha.
In Sanskrit, tushita refers to a celestial realm in Buddhist cosmology associated with contentment or joy. Shama can mean peace, tranquility or appeasement. Nihsheshana suggests complete elimination or eradication. Svaha is an exclamation often used at the end of mantras to signify an offering or invocation of blessings.
The mantra focuses on themes of peace and the complete removal of obstacles or suffering.
4.
A knot’s complexity often belies its true nature. Beneath the tangled facade, a loop may reveal itself as but a phantom of complexity – essentially, the unknot. Like stern arbiters, the invariants expose the pretender, laying bare the distinction between the merely ostensible and the essentially trivial. Here, a knot ceases to be – is, to wit, not a knot, and, therefore, nought – when it succumbs to the simplicity of the circular ideal, a fate that mirrors our own human condition, where life’s entanglements are often undone by circumstance, lacking the dignity of the closed loop’s deeper, spiritual reckoning. – Henry James, ‘The Unknot”, The Shadows of Belgrave Square, 1904.
St. Fiacre was an Irish anchorite skilled with herbs. He is the Jiun Reijin of the Christian tradition. He was also the patron saint of gardeners, taxi drivers, venereal disease sufferers, barrenness, box makers, florists, hosiers, pewterers, tile makers and ploughboys. There is a stone next to his tomb in Meaux Cathedral which, if sat upon, is said to cure piles and fistulas. The stone itself is pocked from the saint’s haemorrhoids.
Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, one of the greatest warrior-kings in English history, tried to steal the saint’s pocked stone, his saintly body, and his relics. His horses refused to leave the garden gates.
Guess what killed Henry V, and on St. Fiacre Eve?
On St. Fiacre’s Eve, with a warrior’s pride,
Henry the Fifth met his mortal tide.
Not on the field, with sword in hand,
But struck by fate, far from his land.
A king so bold, who’d conquered the French,
Now doubled over on a fevered bench.
With gardens in bloom and saints to grieve,
He bled his last on St. Fiacre’s Eve.
From Agincourt’s glory to Vincennes’ gloom,
His crown gave way to an untimely tomb.
No foe could fell him, no knight could best,
But twere the shits that laid him to rest.
So let us recall, with a wry little laugh,
The haemorrhoid's saint and the king’s epitaph:
For all his might and royal reprieve,
He died of his arse on St. Fiacre’s Eve.
– Sydney Phillip, 1563So many people live in their moment, focussed on the immediate. A man dropped a gold ring at my feet this morning. He pretended that it was there already, gleaming on the sidewalk. He offered it to me. I refused it.
Genetically speaking, my mother was a bad mother. I have, have had or will have haemorrhoids, bad teeth, varicose veins, glaucoma, gallstones, a fatty liver, rosacea and high cholesterol. Many of these have been part of who and what I am for 40 years or more. All are inherited.
Memories are not enough, they must be transformed into substance, into blood and bone.
5.
I detest the masses and, even more, the Others!… I am exhausting an art form in a quick spasm and am so panic-stricken that I am haunted by a panorama of slaughter and blinded by ravaged lights. I almost wish for a monstrous war in which to flee amid the shock of a crazed and red Europe… I don’t know what blood is speaking in me or what wolf of olden times yawns in my boredom, but I feel it there… Does this barbarian surprise you?… Ah! how much night there is! To grasp it! To brood it… and to laugh at holding it captive – a Star! It is difficult. Well then! Blood! – Paul Valéry, 1891
On Christmas Eve, as Vietnam launched a major offensive against the Khmer Rouge and two million anti-Shah protesters filled the streets of Teheran, Anwar Sadat announced that his good friend Jimmy had haemorrhoids.
“He asked all Egyptians – Muslims and Christians – to pray on this holy day that I would be cured, because ‘I was a good man and searching for peace.’ The day after Christmas, for the first time in weeks, all the pain and discomfort went away. I was tempted to make a public announcement thanking people of all faiths for their prayers but decided that we’d had enough publicity about my ailment. In any case, I’ve never received a better Christmas gift or felt more grateful for personal benefits that resulted from a nation at prayer.” – Jimmy Carter, Christmas in Plains, 2001
In 1993, when NSD-77, which is still classified, was the only procedurable and Richard Clarke, National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-Terrorism, made the first proposal to use it, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler explained how it would violate international law, and the two argued back and forth. Clinton did what he always did – climbed onto his high chair and kept score — “Lloyd says, but Dick says” – until Al Gore, just back from Europe, jet-lagged and suppurating pus from his chronic piles, said, “It’s a no-brainer, Bill. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”
That was 32 years ago. How many asses have been grabbed since? And yet we still sit on the rim of this new century – will it remain America’s, flushed, full? Or is it time to get off the pot?
Jack Kennedy was always sick. Scarlet fever, bronchitis, jaundice, rubella, colitis, osteoporosis, presbyopia, prostatitis, urinary tract infection and Addison disease. I would not wish these afflictions on anyone. I do wish ill of many, however. Ted Kaczynski made some good points. “The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialised that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin.” This from a guy who sent bombs in the mail.
“The problem is not so much what we do as how we do it.” Nixon used to tell us this. And: “Only be angry when the anger has passed.” But was he right? Being angry, lashing out, takes enormous stores of energy, an internal combustion engine of prodigious girth and power. But so does sex. So does the triple jump. So does taking a crap with suppurating piles and a prostate the size of a bocce ball. Nevertheless, bottling things up is worse. Unlike Gerald Ford, the small-handed vulgarian has no hesitancy in starting his stream. But stopping it is another matter. He dominates his minions but has no control over his sphincter. He has pooped his pants in front of countless world leaders and obsequious flunkeys alike.
He wears diapers. So what? So do one in ten American adults. And not just old fucks like him. Teenagers. CEOs. Professional footballers.
But he walks on the toes of his shoes, his mouth open and his tongue lolled out, like a lifeless man dangling from a noose. His steps are dainty. His buckled teeth are scrunched forward and bared. His bulging trouser fronts are stained with driplets of urine and Diet Coke. His trunk trembles and his arms twitch as if overloaded with electric current. His hands and buttocks clench, paroxysmal spasms seize his bulk with each stiff-legged mincing step as a spike of searing pain shoots from his sphincter to the base stem of his brain. I feel for him, and this surprises me. He reminds me of my math teacher, Mrs Chivas, who suffered a stroke in October of my eighth grade and died, alone, halfway through the school year. The same sweet, piss-acrid smells, medicinal syrup, wet fur, faeces, overripe fruit, dandruff powder, skin cream and tanning spray.
Did you know that a whale’s blowhole is a sphincter? And that the human body contains over fifty varieties of sphincters? One controls the eyelid, another the iris, millions more the flow of blood in and out of the capillaries. The brain, too, positively riddled, a billion puckering boreholes collectively controlling the flow and ebb of each thought, dream, word and belief.
Mark Twain: “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”
6.
See on those canals / Those vessels asleep, /Whose mood is wandering; / It is to fulfill
Your slightest desire / That they come from the ends of the world. / – The setting suns
Clothe the fields, / The canals, the entire town, / With hyacinth and gold; / The world falls asleep / In a warm light. / There, all is order and beauty, / Luxury, calm, and voluptuousness. – Charles Baudelaire, “L’Invitation au Voyage”, Les Fleurs du mal, 1857.
Nietzsche’s overheated brain often kept him from the writing desk and piano stool. It caused him terrible migraines. “No devilish torture is lacking in this dreadful pandemonium of sickness,” wrote Stefan Zweig. “Headaches, deafening, hammering headaches, which knock out the reeling Nietzsche for days and prostrate him on sofa and bed, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, weariness, haemorrhoids, constipation, chills, night sweat — a gruesome circle. In addition, there are his ‘three-quarters blind eyes,’ which, at the least exertion, begin immediately to swell and fill with tears and grant the intellectual worker only ‘an hour and a half of vision a day.’ But Nietzsche despises this hygiene of his body and works at his desk for ten hours, and for this excess his overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches and a nervous overcharge; at night, when the body has long become weary, it does not permit itself to be turned off suddenly, but continues to burrow in visions and ideas until it is forcibly knocked out by opiates. But ever greater quantities are needed (in two months Nietzsche uses up fifty grams of chloral hydrate to purchase this handful of sleep); then the stomach refuses to pay so high a price and rebels. And now-vicious circles: spasmodic vomiting, new headaches which require new medicines, an inexorable, insatiable, passionate conflict of the infuriated organs, which throw the thorny ball of suffering to each other as in a mad game. Never a point of rest in this up and down, never an even stretch of contentment or a short month full of comfort and self-forgetfulness.” – Stefan Zweig, Nietzsche, 1925.
The past is here, alright, layers of pasts. Today I sat at a bar next to a pencil-thin young man from Bordentown, a mere weed, no brain to speak of, no mind of his own. Bordentown is where Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, lived in splendiferous exile for some 20 years. The exiled King of Naples, Sicily, Spain and the Indies, shacked up with an American wife and two Jersey Shore daughters. It is just up the road a pace from Camden, the final resting place of America’s greatest bard, and Patterson, home of Sam Goldwyn and William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg and Allen’s father before him. Had this mere weed, whose father runs a Tesla dealership, heard of these great Americans? No. Does that sadden me? Does that make me worry for the future? A little. Optimism depends upon internal organic conditions – self-confidence, a cheery and ceaselessly extensible view of the semi-permanent, an inner belief in continued being and future success. Yet, many of us can barely muster the long-term view that a haircut requires, or the purchase of a pair of socks. I’ve stated this elsewhere, but it bears repeating: redemption depends on the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe – so said Walter Benjamin, ex lax post facto, but he was never constipated a day in his life.
Things lose their blessing if they are desecrated. If you were given a rosary or bought it at cost, it would not have to be re-blessed; but if you paid more for it than the seller did, you would have to take it to a priest. In the present system of things, the same is also true. William Cullen Bryant, December 8, 1868: “My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea, to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral, among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men and ribs and masts of foundered barks laden with wedges of gold never to be coined. Through these watery solitudes, among the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man.”
