Panegyric

With sovereign neglect, knowing the time for action is already passed – or that it must be given to others to act, to follow his example, Debord, the old revolutionary sets the following quotation at the beginning of his book:

Why ask me of my lineage? Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the season of spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of humankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away.

That from the Iliad, book VI. And above it, from a dictionary:

Panegyric expresses more than eulogy. Eulogy no doubt includes praise of the person, but it does not exclude a certain criticism, a certain blame. Panegyric entails neither blame nor criticism.

So Panegyric, the book. With what sovereign neglect is it written! How close to death, pressed up against it! A serene book – a neglectful one, sovereignly seizing upon this or that detail to let speak the whole. Why that detail, that episode? Why write of that? But with it the whole shines forward. As though the book were riding forward and we readers looked out ahead over the open sea. Open: a book that looks back as it looks forward. From volume 2, part 2, this unattributed quotation:

All revolutions run into history, yet history is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers of revolution come, thither they return again.

But I should say, reading both volumes, that there are barely even episodes, barely details – only a general telling, a great swelling of the narrative voice, even if what is told is done so briefly, swiftly, as in an ancient epic.

Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk a lot more. I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.

I would like to quote the whole of this famous chapter, but it will suffice to note here that it was perhaps drinking that carried Debord forward, that held him out ahead of the others, over the open sea. The drinker becomes interplanetary, writes Duras somewhere. Drink until neglect claims you, and you are a God. Drink until you sovereignly stand ahead of your time, at its prow. Doesn’t Debord say elsewhere that his ideas did not have to catch up with time, but that time had to catch up with them? In Panegyric, he is ahead of us still. Ahead – but also at the head of all waters, there where revolution gathers itself, regathers itself.