Only to Land In

The suspension in this vehicle is suspect.  I’m in the back riding out to the airport at precisely same time I’d usually be on my bicycle, heading to the gym.  Off in the east you can almost pretend to see the dawn but staring straight ahead it is dark and murky.  The back of this car is warm and hot with my vest beneath me.  But outside it is cold and this morning, resting here at the cross section of Jingmi Road and Tianbei Road, it doesn’t smell very nice at all.

Finished off Carlyle’s “History of the French Revolution” yesterday.   In the past I suppose one had to have separate texts to look up the many different names and references he mentions and often puns with.  The Giodarnists are disposed of.  It’s the end of Sansculottesism, who was "Danton" once again whose name is so important at the end when the Jacobins destroy one another.  What is a Thermadorian coup and why is it reminding me of Trotsky?  The Eighteenth Brumaire?  I’ve heard this before somewhere, surely.  I must refresh myself on Proudhon from my Anarchist days . . .  These days internet is pretty damn fast: an physical extension of memory in a way a library never could be. 

And as the forward had warned it’s not an easy book to read lightly.  So, I took the time for the final fifty pages to have my laptop at the ready.  The histories available there on Wiki, for any of those names are dry, reading by comparison but it is certainly helpful to have a no-frills depiction of, say, Robespierre’s speech concerning the “Eternal Creator” and then return to Carlyle’s chapter on “Mumbo Jumbo.”  

 I had never really reckoned with Robespierre before Carlyle and generally dismissed him as an incendiary firebrand rather than a sympathetic harbinger of radical egalitarians to come.  His end and the end of the other Jacobin core were rather pathetic and gruesome.  When the building they are holding out in is finally stormed, they try to kill themselves and only maim themselves instead.  One gent leaps to his death only to land in the cesspit with a broken leg.  Robespierre’s attempt to kill himself leaves him with his jaw half blown off, unable to speak.  When he is finally brought to the guillotine and the bandage is removed from his neck his jaw falls and he screams aloud in pain, ifnot terror, until the blade finally silences him.  

A friend shared with me the demands of “Yellow Vests”, the Scottish brethren to the French protestors.  It is a long list of demands, all of which are wonderful things to demand but as such they are simply a wish-list without any mention of means.  It struck me that they are the logical decedents of Robespierre and one is fearful what it might mean to demand each of these things, regardless of just how one goes about securing them. 

Monday, 12/17/18