One knows that in the eastern countries now, as in the west, they have begun to campaign against the beggar and the tramp. It is as though the unrest of the factories and machines, the windiness of dwellers on the sixth floor, the deceptively settled ones in their here-today and gone-tomorrow instability, can no longer bear the thought of the honest, calm, unceasing movement of the good and aimless wanderers. Where are you going to? What are you going to do when you get there? Why did you take to the road? How do you come to lead a life of your own, when we can all endure a common life? Are you better? Are you different?
--Joseph Roth, Tarabas: A Guest on Earth, tr. Winifred Katzin
Welcome, creatures! In this edition, a couple book notes, and then a small thought about, why has this phrase come to torment us, “cozy culture.”
I finished Garth Greenwell’s novel, What Belongs to You. (It is more like three linked novellas, whatever, it’s not the size it’s the technique etc.) It fleshes out, so to speak, his recurring characters and his themes of power difference, ambivalent longing, and sexual shame, and I’m glad I read it because of the texture it adds to his other work, but if I’d read this one first I would not have gone on to Cleanness. It is a bit workshoppy and carefully poignant, without the searing power of Cleanness, which I still can’t recommend but which, if you’re a certain type of person, you might love badly.
Also almost finished with Tarabas: A Guest on Earth. This is a tale of a cruel man who becomes a kind of holy fool, for reasons only sidelong related to the pogrom which takes place at the center of the novel and is its most unforgettable passage. The description of the pogrom is so double-edged in its sympathies and imagery, so Jewish and Catholic and so lacerating toward both those ways of being (condemning the Catholic people, surrounding the Virgin in trusting lyricism, haunted by the possibility that Our Lady doesn’t condemn the evils done in her name), that it could really only be written by Joseph Roth.
Afterward the violent Tarabas becomes a tramp, in penance for his humiliation of a local Jew. Progressive discussions of wrongdoing and justice often draw a distinction between “consequences” and “punishment,” where the former is good but the latter is always bad, and I confess I’ve never found one of these distinctions coherent. Just say that punishment can be good! We need it! Sometimes, when our consciences have called us to account, we long for it. Anyway Tarabas’s tramping is an embodiment of the inevitable consequences of his cruelty: Cruelty separates us from others. It can raise us above them socially, it can succeed, it can exalt us, and this is one reason punishment involves humiliation; but even successful cruelty isolates. Nobody would have made Tarabas an exile. He would have gotten away with it. But he chooses to represent in his body the consequences of his sin. It is the choice that makes his exile penance. Maybe it is in the embodiment of spiritual consequences that these consequences become (just) punishment.
Time Is a Fat Circle
Via Mockingbird I find this substack about “cozy culture.” Points are made! Obviously anytime something becomes a “culture” it’s like becoming a discourse, it is always awful, but of course I too have noticed the proliferation of cocoa photos and mittens around mugs. And I agree with Kathryn Jezer-Morton that there are multiple conflicting impulses making *~*coziness*~* so appealing: a hunger for order and control in a world which feels precarious; a need to belong, or at least to feel “a sense of belonging.” (Eternally grateful to P-E Gobry for reminding me, in his comments on a draft of Gay and Catholic, of the difference between a thing and a sense of the thing.)
I know that I personally love all kinds of seasonal nonsense for these very reasons! But also for another one, which applies not only to spiced cider and flaming maple leaves but to all the other seasons and recurrences. I love Fourth of July fireworks and cherry blossoms and Mardi Gras beads and, like, avoiding round foods on the feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. (St. Peter offers John the Baptist an orange; his face falls. “Too soon?”) It is always good to light candles for the dead but I like doing it in November for reasons as emotional as religious. I love doing things at the time for those things.
I am grateful for reminders that there are ways in which time is cyclical. Good Friday is always followed by Easter. Persephone climbs up from the underworld, forsythia and crocuses blooming wherever her chilled fingers touch. You will get a second chance. Even an hour of summer sunbathing or winter coziness can make up, in some way, for the seasons the locusts have destroyed. The past will come back to you, to be cared for better than you cared for that time when you were living it.
icymi
“The Violence of Reason”: I reviewed an anthology about radical SF of the Cold War era, and also emoted violently about Samuel R. Delany and (less well-known to me) Philip Dick and J. Ballard.
Now Playing
Sandy Denny, “Late November.” Because I always play “Late November” in the second half of November.
Cozy Maximalism photo via Pixabay under a Creative Commons license.