Going to Barnes and Noble
November 30, 2008
Going to the bookstore has become an enervating experience. There are lots of books, yippee.. but it is such a predictable lot that I rarely find anything I want to purchase. Some books that interest me do get shelf space at Barnes and Noble.. and I look for them.. but the element of intellectual surprise is not there for me any more. This much is indisputable: intellectual inquiry in the US proceeds independent of consumer oriented bookstores.
Walking into Barnes and Noble I was confronted with the central tables of stacked books. These are the "Oh my God I want that" books that customers are expected to grab:
As has been true of these large chain bookstores from the beginning, their bread and butter is steep discounts on best-sellers, and that is in evidence here at the lead table: 20% and 30% discount stickers stand out on each book. The books there in the front represent a range of popular genres: crime fiction (P.D. James), autobiography (Ted Turner), Science Fiction (Orson Scott Card), Thriller (Dean Koontz), and crime fiction (Iris Johansen).
Walking further back along the center aisle I found tables with more stacks of books. I lingered over the one with history books, and found these:
Evidently this biography of Andrew Jackson is positioned to be the founding fathers/early presidents biography of the holiday season. It seems every season shines the spotlight on one of our old presidents/leaders: John Adams, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton.. they all get their chance. In my view these works are interesting not so much for any new knowledge they establish, but because of their sociological value as evidence for our American fixation with origins. Somehow our present world can be understood if we just find the right old president in the right old crisis. Leave them be folks!!
To the right of the new Andrew Jackson biography is yet another book on Iraq, this one by a woman who was in the military working with the troops. It sounds like a colorful book stocked with details, but it's also a predictable addition to the book piles. How many books on Iraq are we going to get? These will keep coming at a steady pace for at least the next decade.
To the left of the Andrew Jackson biography is a book called The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. The book is described on Amazon:
Through Ferguson’s expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world’s first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer.
Books like this fall into the genre I like to call "globalization thrillers" (something I wrote about here). The goal in a book such as this is to trace the development of something (money, coffee, dictionaries) through a web of obscure international settings and to finally make it understandable in terms of the presence of colorful and eccentric personalities. The successful book of this sort makes the reader feel more at home in the globalized world.
And here is what I saw close by on the same table of history books:
Yet another book on the Titanic? Why does our knowledge and curiosity flow in such narrow channels? I know there's a level of symbolism in the Titanic tragedy that makes it a significant story.. but still, c'mon! And then the other book: American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century. This falls in with a series of books that trace the establishment of some enduring institution to a tabloid-worthy personal story. The cover of this book strikes me as reminiscent of another book:
The title for this earlier book (2003) works along a similar strategy: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. How is this not the same book as American Lightning? The city and the madness has changed, but really it's the same authorial endeavor. Without reading these two books mu guess is that they contribute more to a comforting sense of the value of the individual in history than to adding any real historical knowledge to our world.
This kind of analysis could go on forever. So I will stop here.
Borrowings of Maimonides
November 28, 2008
Maimonides by Joel Kraemer is a book worth purchasing and reading immediately. There are too few examples of engaging biographies of figures such as Maimonides who lived in the Middle East.. and Kraemer excels at placing Maimonides within successive historical contexts (Andalusia, Fatimid Cairo, Ayyubid Cairo).
It is always easier to think of a towering figure like Maimonides within the diachronic history of Judaism, and to neglect the synchronic and cross-tradition influences that played an equal role in producing his philosophy. Through two examples given by Kraemer in this biography it is possible to come to a clearer notion of how inter-religious borrowing works. Here is the first example:
The intensive study of the Bible on its own, apart from the Talmud and Midrash, in Moses ben Maimon's era was influenced by the emphasis Muslims placed on the Qur'an and by the special place Karaites accorded Scripture. Bible instruction was accompanied by study of Hebrew grammar and lexicography. [57]
A similar example comes up a bit later as Kraemer explains how Maimonides divided speech into five categories: obligatory, prohibited, reprehensible, meritorious, and permissible. He notes:
What Maimonides called categories of "our law" are actually from Islamic jurisprudence, which classified all human action according to these very same five categories. [185]
How do religious traditions influence one another? They do not adopt the overt doctrines and theology of the other tradition. Religious leaders are especially on the lookout for doctrinal borrowings that would dilute a tradition. The influence comes in the method of theological study.. and also through the borrowing of categories of thought. Methods and categories are often felt to be neutral, and thus do not seem to pose a threat to a tradition. But over time borrowed methods and categories will transform a tradition. The Judaism represented by Maimonides continues to be distinct and to emphasize its own sacred texts, but it becomes a Judaism that has been significantly Islamicized because of its new emphases and ways of thinking about problems.
Religious borrowing goes from majority culture to minority culture. Judaism at certain points in its history was highly influenced by Hellenism and by Islam. Christianity at one point adapted much from Greek philosophy.. and then where it is a minority culture (such as the Copts in Egypt) it borrows much in terms of tone (I'll never forget visiting a Coptic monastery and hearing the Bible chanted in a manner similar to the chanting of the Qur'an). In a similar manner both Judaism and Islam are being "Protestantized" by their sojourn in the United States. I don't mean they are losing any distinctiveness, just that the way the religion is expressed (youth groups, emphasis on outreach, popular religious books and media) is merging.
Thanksgiving Blog for Aurora
November 27, 2008
We have lots to be thankful for here. This is our first Thanksgiving in a new house. We are working and getting by even as many Americans are finding that harder to do. We live in a place where we feel safe. But there is nothing that compares to the thanks we give for our little girl.. who is growing up fast and running around like she owns the place. This week we had our first snow of the season, and I let Rory go out in the snow for a while.
One of the more curious aspects of her development is the way she looks to identify family members in all the videos we watch or books we read. She will find the appropriately elegant female character for Mommy.. she finds Baby.. and she finds Daddy in there too. Even if the show features a group of animals.. she decides that one of them is Mommy and another Daddy. I don't know how normal it is to be so concerned about relational patterns, but it is a big deal for her. The characters she identifies as me are not always flattering: Mater in Cars, Baloo in Jungle Book, and an odd dachshund in Clifford movies.
Handing Off Resistance
November 25, 2008
The connection between the secular nationalistic groups that began many anti-colonial wars and the religious fundamentalists who sometimes end up continuing those wars is vague. A good circumstantial case can be made for their connection: they use similar methods of resistance and their colonial enemy is identical. But looking closer there is a real break between these groups, such as the PLO and then Hamas in Palestine or the FLN and the later Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria. A telescoped version of this same conflict can be seen in Egypt with the hostility of Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser to the Muslim Brotherhood. An observer might have thought there could be a common cause between these two Egyptian factions, but in fact there was hostility. Looking through Frantz Fanon and Sayyid Qutb in succession I thought I could see a connection between secular anti-colonialism and Islamism, as represented by Qutb.
A few points in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon embraced violence as a legitimate form of resistance to the colonial powers that took away the history and sense of self of the colonized:
At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction. [74]
Having defeated the colonizers, those who were colonized would not return to the peaceful past.. or to settled tradition. That kind of return will be impossible after the revolution:
It follows that [violence] is closely involved in the liquidation of regionalism and of tribalism. Thus the national parties show no pity at all towards the caids and the customary chiefs. Their destruction is the preliminary to the unification of the people. [74]
That is a stiff forecast: everything about traditional life must go. Someone might be tempted to wonder what he was fighting for, but the answer would have to be: a nation. Much of this can be seen as an adaptation of Marxism to the colonial situation.
Sunni Islam is only with difficulty adapted to revolution.. and there are many historic examples of Sunni Muslims living under religiously questionable regimes. So we would appear to need an explanation as to why modern Islamist movements have been ready to use violence to seek to overthrow colonial or secular regimes. The at hand explanation would be a partial translation of doctrines such as those advocated by the (non-Muslim) Fanon into the language of Islam.
Sayyid Qutb begins Milestones with an explanation of the spiritual emptiness of political philosophies in the West and in the Eastern bloc. So he officially condemns Marxism, but we can see the traces of it in his outline of the development of an Islamist state. The first step is to move past traditional Islam, which is weighted down with falsehood:
It is necessary to revive that Muslim community which is buried under the debris of the man-made traditions of several generations, and which is crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings, and which, in spite of all this, calls itself the 'world of Islam.' [from introduction]
To have the opportunity to fashion an ideal version of Islam, true Muslims need to oppose the Jahiliya or forces of ignorance. Jihad (religious violence) is the proper response to these secular regimes. And if they are victorious there will not be a return to traditional life, but the fashioning of a new Islamic trans-national social group. So let's see: violence is exhorted, the past is left behind, and a new state is created. More parallels to varieties of Marxism could be discovered in Qutb's notions of a "vanguard" to carry out his mission or in the "Manichaean" worldview endorsed by him in dividing the Dar al-Islam from the Dar al-Harb.
These parallels I think are pretty clear, but in the conclusion of Milestones it's possible to see Qutb making a direct connection between these forms of thought.. and then urging an important frame shift in the way conflicts are perceived:
The enemies of the Believers may wish to change this struggle into an economic or political or racial struggle, so that the Believers become confused concerning the true nature of the struggle and the flame of belief in their hearts becomes extinguished. The Believers must not be deceived, and must understand that this is a trick. [from This is the Road]
That would appear to directly address Marxist interpretations of events such as the Algerian War. We could hear Qutb as saying: "You have heard that these wars are caused by class or racial struggles, but actually they are motivated by the age-old war of unbelief against belief." What we might not notice in that statement is that Qutb adopts the structure of the struggle as defined by others, he just switches the perceptual frame of the contest from one that sees the nation as the end to one that sees the Islamic community as the end. That is a frame-shift that manages to accept the terms and battle lines of an earlier struggle, but give all that different names.
In the Footsteps of Sherman
November 23, 2008
I don't care for Sherman's March (1986) by Ross McElwee. I surprise myself somewhat with that verdict since there is much I should like about the documentary. It's a successful first person narrative. It's about as close to a personal essay as a documentary is likely to get. It shows genuine interest in everyday life. It establishes a high level of transparency in the process of filmmaking. But something is missing for me. On reflection I think it's the difference between a personal essay of the sort that fills the annual "Best American Essays" and non-fiction essays that bring a critical or even academic eye to the world. The latter is what I most enjoy.. and is more in keeping with the Old Roads notion of interpretive essays (which I develop here).
McElwee starts out with the goal of following the path of Sherman's devastating march through the South and ends up inverting the whole idea into an intimate portrait of himself not conquering the women of the South, a great number of whom he meets and films along his journey. We see everything through the eyes of McElwee. There's a good deal of ethnographically interesting material in the 155 minutes of this documentary, but it's subordinated to a serious mining of the feelings and hang-ups of the narrator. The documentary has no ambition to look out at the world and understand it.
In the image used above I capture McElwee walking around a ruined church (courtesy of Sherman's march). The landscape is used as an ironic foil; its testimony to past tragedy stands in contrast to the romantic failures we are watching. I could add similar comments about the section set in Atlanta's Stone Mountain We see the generals set in stone and the kitschy surroundings, but I want to ask: so what is this all saying? What is this world we are making our way through?
An important comparison would be the work of Abbas Kiarostami in ABC Africa (see my review here).. where we get a similarly personal view of a place. But follow the movement of the camera! The camera movement betrays an intense curiosity about the outside world.. and has a knack for landing on significant details of everyday life. It is a personal film about getting to know another place. Sherman's March is not that.
Learning How to Perceive the World
November 23, 2008
In a blog for the New Yorker, George Packer recalls what he got out of reading A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul. Packer was living in Africa, and:
Somehow, Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River” fell into my hands... It appealed to me strongly on two levels. First, here was a picture of Africa as I was experiencing it at the very same time: the Africa of cults of personality, state-mandated campaigns of “authenticity,” frustrated secondary-school students with their heads full of half-understood concepts, village women living in an invisible universe, white expatriates whose ideals were slowly congealing into opportunism and loneliness relieved by sex. A great novelist had given my disorientation in this obscure place a form. Reading it made me think that my own experiences could have some value beyond their private importance for me, that they could be transposed into writing. (“The Village of Waiting,” which came out in 1988, owes more than a little to Naipaul.)
Novels and fiction writing of all kinds are gross simplifications of actual experience, but they nevertheless provide a frame for understanding that experience. Strictly speaking it is not the accuracy of fiction that matters so much as how compellingly it pushes us to understand experience in a certain light. This process of learning to see by the light of a work of fiction is unusually clear in the quotation above. Packer found himself in a bewildering situation and the fiction of V.S. Naipaul allowed for the sharpening of his perception.. or the creation of new categories for seeing the world around him. The confusion of lived experience became controlled and ordered by a fictional version of a similar experience. That is the deepest critical interest in fiction: the ways that it forms and shapes our habits of perception.
Religion, Culture, and Sacred Space
November 22, 2008
Some readers may have noticed the discrete header announcing the release of my book Religion, Culture, and Sacred Space (there on the top left). I delayed mentioning it because I wanted first to finish a web page marking the places mentioned in the book (see here). A Google Map is embedded within the page and I've used my own photographs to illustrate the sites. The page makes a helpful companion to the book.
As is perhaps evident from the way my personal photographs can be used to illustrate it, this book was a result of several years of intensive travel and thinking. I have always been drawn to places that turn up in books that I love.. from Walden to Jerusalem. As I traveled and read the narratives of past travelers, I kept asking myself about the principles that underlie the human response to place. I was convinced that although cultures express their relationship to landscapes and places in very different forms, those forms nonetheless are doing something quite similar: they are weaving narrative onto otherwise meaningless rocks, rivers, and mountains.
Let me expand a little on that last statement.. to make my larger argument crystal clear. Place in itself is meaningless. A landscape on Mars has no human associations or history to make it meaningful.. or to inspire a pilgrim to visit (even if they could). One thing that every culture does is give meaning to the landscapes that surround their common life. This is done by the simple process of telling stories. The bare elements of the landscape—its rocks and rivers—thus become the setting for these narratives. As some narratives acquire intense significance within a culture, the places associated with that narrative are given a similar significance.
Jerusalem is an easy example of this process. To our own day its streets and landscape features are associated with events surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus. Since identification with it promises eternal life, the narrative of Jesus became immensely important among people who understood themselves as Christians. That narrative of Jesus thus became the root of a particular religious identity. So what happens to the physical setting of that narrative? It gains immense meaning as it is carried in the coattails of the narrative. What is the attraction for Christians of a long journey to Jerusalem? In an important way they are able to "touch" identity in visiting the spots where an event relating to Jesus took place.
An aspect of my book that I should emphasize is that it refuses to draw a border around the experience of a "sacred" place. Religion is just one identity commitment among many. The same cultural dynamic is at work as we visit sites related to national identity or other identities. We could imagine a gay African-American Mormon who had an intense interest in visiting Stonewall Inn in New York City (where Gay Rights movement began), the sites related to the Civil Rights movement in the South, and also the Hill Cumorah where Joseph Smith received his revelations in the 1820s. Each of these places would likely stir something inside this person. Granted, this is an unlikely grouping of identities.. but not an impossible one! If we enquire into our emotional response to various historical sites, we discover that our intense connection to these places is a result of the identity commitments with which we approach the world (and the narratives underlying those identities).
Nietzsche on Living Life
November 20, 2008
I am trying to remember how old I was when I went through most everything by Nietzsche. I think I was 22 or 23.. out of college and thinking through my views on life. Still when I open up a book by Nietzsche I feel a small thrill.. as the other day when I was hunting for a passage and came across this section from Human, All Too Human:
Free-spirited people, living for knowledge alone, will soon find they have achieved their external goal in life, their ultimate position vis à vis society and the state, and gladly be satisfied, for example, with a minor position or a fortune that just meets their needs; for they will set themselves up to live in such a way that a great change in economic conditions, even a revolution in political structures, will not overturn their life with it. They expend as little energy as possible on all these things, so that they can plunge with all their assembled energy, as if taking a deep breath, into the element of knowledge. They can then hope to dive deep and get a look at the bottom. [§291]
These ideas have been important to me for some time. As usual with Nietzsche the language overshoots our preference for understatedness. It's hard now to claim to be "free-spirited" or one who seeks to "touch bottom" in the sea of knowledge. But with a little skewing in these areas, it is remarkably close to a philosophy of living that I can agree with. A limited position in life is the trade for keeping one's thoughts to oneself.. and honest. Anything else means participation in the systems of symbols from which social, political, and religious life is constituted. And the work of thinking is to critique those systems.. which is what Nietzsche means by "touching bottom."
Nietzsche continues in this same section:
He, too, knows the week-days of bondage, dependence, and service. But from time to time he must get a Sunday of freedom, or else he will not endure life. [§291]
Again, the language is skewed to a Romantic extreme.. and moments of vision and joy come exactly in those week-days of "dependence and service." But it is good to separate what one does to pay the bills from the moments of free-thinking that gives life its colors. The "Sunday of freedom" sounds quaint, but I recognize my Sunday of rest now in the minutes I get to work out a thought in this blog.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Human, All Too Human. Trans. Marion Faber. University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Thinking Palestine through Algeria
November 19, 2008
For the last three years I've shown The Battle of Algiers (1966) to my Islam class. It has proven to be a work I am grateful to view on an annual basis. The value of this film is that it displaces some key dynamics and questions into a conflict for which few students have any real emotional commitments (France and North Africa).. and therefore opens up discussion. The possible applications of the events in Algeria are clear with a little reflection: Israel and our own experience in Iraq.
Each year I come to class curious about what students will have to say after viewing the film, and so far unfailingly the students have sided with the Algerians in their fight to push out the French. I labor the point that by 1954 at the outbreak of the war the French have been in Algeria for 130 years.. and this year I found the statistic that 79% of the pied noirs had been born in Algeria. So there were settler children who knew nothing of any home other than Algeria.. and possibly whose grandparents had first immigrated. Plus there were about 1 million of these settlers in Algeria! But students each year appear to hold an ethical baseline that is hard to shake: this is Algerian land and the French are occupiers that should leave.
So what exactly happens when Algeria gets used as a lens for understanding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (which I consider a political conflict). First, the outcome of the war in Algeria is the dream of the more radical Palestinian factions. Just as 1 million French settlers and sympathizers up and left Algeria, so the 7 million or so Israelis could leave Palestine. A major difference is that no home country to which people can return exists.. and many of the home countries (particularly the Arab ones) would not be hospitable now. The heterogeneous Islamic world that supported significant religious minorities may be a thing of the past (not just with respect to the Jewish population, but also with dwindling Christian populations). So an attempt to read the outcome of the Algerian War on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is difficult from the get go.
A second question relates to the status of the Israeli occupation in comparison to that of the French. Here I find it harder to distinguish the two. Both French and Israeli settlement involved a large scale disinheriting of prior inhabitants.. and continued with policies that impoverished and brutalized those prior inhabitants. It's true that Jews maintain a longstanding connection to the land of Palestine.. as enshrined in the Hebrew Bible. And at the end of Passover the hope is always: "Next year in Jerusalem." But I can't think of any other case where the ancient habitation (2,000 years ago!) of an ethnic group allows for the displacement of contemporary residents. Imagine how quickly similar Native American or Celtic claims would be dismissed (answer: more quickly than you can bat an eye). Due to Jewish and Christian religious associations within the city of Jerusalem I can see an argument for making it an international city.. but the Jews fundamentally have no more right to Palestine than the French did to Algeria.
While that may be true.. and that is how I would reason if I were given a hypothetical description of the case.. Israel is now a done deal. So we are left with a question that the Algerian War never had to answer: how to deal with a situation in which the Palestinians have been wronged but in which there is no possibility of back tracking to a previous time. That brings us to a frustrating stop in the speculation.. as there is no real map for moving forward. Consideration of the Algerian War adds a level of ethical clarity to the fundamental situation.. and it also points to the possible non-ideal outcomes in which everyone pays a terrible price. The goal should not be separation.. whether by kicking out settlers or putting up a dividing wall (one could imagine this being tried in Algeria too). The goal must be integration, which is the only realistic way that Palestinians will attain equality in their own land.
[This is only a partial statement of my views on Israel and Palestine, and looking back over my blogging for the past few years I am surprised that I have not squarely addressed this issue.]
"Your Weekly Address"
November 17, 2008
I am only half paying attention to the presidential transition, but one thing that got my attention was the YouTube address from Barack Obama. The presidential radio address on Saturday has been a feature since Ronald Reagan, but it appears that Obama will not only release his talk on radio but also as a video on YouTube. The first effort in this direction is visible above with the image of the frontpage of Obama's transition website. The talk is labelled "Your Weekly Address" and it raises hopes that I will be able to favorite the presidential website and check once a week to see what my President has to say. This is a huge step forward in my comfort with government and it brings the possibility of a new level of transparency.
I would set this down as one of those moments in which a new media becomes the new mode. It's not the case that the Internet hasn't been used for political purposes. The Daily Kos website and plenty of individual blogs show the value of the Internet as an organizing forum. It feels different when these methods move into the White House. I'm sure that Obama's style and methods will be copied by everyone, but it has a hand-in-glove feel to it with Obama. The web doesn't just push his message, it complements that message. This will not be true for many who come afterwards.. I'm sure. Maybe this will be a case where the medium pushes politicians toward a certain kind of grass roots approach to politics.. one in which the politician understands that he or she is accountable to the people. One can always hope..
"change.gov" frontpage for November 17, 2008 [PDF here]
Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami
November 15, 2008
Close-Up by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is a film that left me nearly speechless. It has been a week and a half since I watched it, and I've been thinking since then about what to write. I can't let a film so moving and beautiful pass by without comment.. yet at the same time the depth of human understanding is strong here.. and difficult to approach.
The movie follows a story that on its face might seem absurd. A man is met on a bus by a wealthy woman and passes himself off as the Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He thus earns an invitation to visit the family of this woman and convinces them that he wants them to be the center of his next film (not a strange request when you think about the tendency of Iranian directors to use real people in their films). The family is fooled by the fake director and they go about planning for this film. Finally they come to suspect that this is not really the famous director and arrange for the impostor to be arrested.
The question arises as to why this man, Ali Sabzian, was playing the role of famous director? What was he hoping to get out of this fakery? Sabzian is arrested and charged with fraud and attempted fraud on the theory that he was looking to pull off a robbery of the wealthy family. But as he tells his story in the trial to the judge and the camera, it turns out that artistic and even spiritual ideals lie behind this fraud.. not money.
The story is already strange, but the method of telling it takes it all a step further and sets up some complex internal mirrors for the drama. We get actual footage of the criminal trial, in which Sabzian, the fraud, is closely questioned by the judge and the wealthy family. Kiarostami at the beginning of the trial explains carefully to Sabzian the camera set-up he is using, and encourages him to explain himself as best he can, one of a number of places where the presence of the director is pointed out.
After the trial was concluded, Kiarostami convinced the characters to act out what had happened for the camera. So we get the fraud Sabzian again in the house of the wealthy family, playing his role of famous director.. and the family acting as they had just a little while previous. The wealthy family had been fooled into believing this fraud in the first place because of their longing to be in a film.. and now they are evidently once again convinced to believe a director and open their house to his strange whims.
The film is at its most philosophical as we listen to the hopes of poor Sabzian during the trial. He is asked by the judge if he acknowledged the criminal charges, and responds:
I never intended to defraud anyone. Legally, it might be an appropriate charge, but morally it is not. All this arose from my love of the arts. As a child I often went to the cinema. With my friends I played at making films, but as I lacked the means I had to abandon my hopes. It became an obsession.
Sabzian goes on to mention the films by Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami that excited his admiration.. clearly revealing himself to be a devoted cinemaphile. A little later Sabzian describes the dynamic that led to the fraud:
I put forward a project to them for the film. If I'd had the money, I'd have made it. They seemed to want to get involved in a film project. I never thought it would turn out as it did.
So what we have here is a powerful urge toward creativity, but one that is stifled. The two parties wind up going through with a farce: fake director courted by a family eager to be featured in a film. The longing to create is evident on both sides (and comes through doubly in the cooperation of both parties in the reenactment). Kiarostami appears to look on with interest, and perhaps admiration, for the drive to create embodied in the fraud Sabzian. His creation is not an actual movie, but something approaching a movie since it is an elaborate preparation for a film that can never be made. (It is hard here not to think of Orson Welles' meditation on his career in Fake.)
The ending, though.. I can't not mention the ending! Sabzian is filmed actually meeting the director he impersonated, Makhmalbaf. It is unclear whether he knew he was being filmed at this point, but we see him from a distance and hear him break down crying:
It is a strangely moving few minutes, filled with forgiveness. Sabzian is taken by Makhmalbaf to the house of the same wealthy family.. and everyone is reconciled. But why is the ending so moving? It becomes a tribute to the audience. It is an implicit recognition of the creative status of the audience.. and an acknowledgment of their ability to imagine for themselves. This "fraud" perpetrated by Sabzian might easily be seen as empty or as a misfire, but in taking it seriously Kiarostami gives it his blessing. The work of the director is not so different than the movies that could be imagined by the audience.. and given the genuine poverty of Sabzian, the implication is that resources and opportunity might be the real division between creator and audience. Yet creators and "frauds" can be reconciled in the end.
I have never seen anything like this in a movie. Never. It is a film that reaches out and accepts.. and allows failures to cry on the shoulder of the director they would like to be. This is perhaps the best film I have ever seen.. the one that touches me most.
Architecture as Prophecy
November 13, 2008
I can't get Ezekiel chapters 40-48 out of my head. On the surface it's a pretty boring section of the Bible, since it consists of a description, down to the cubit, of the size and dimensions for a new temple in Jerusalem. It is also a plan that never made the jump to reality, and thus resembles a number of visionary architectural projects that remain only beautiful ideas (the closest analogue might be Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, pictured above).
Reading the description of the temple (and larger sacred precinct) is a dry undertaking.. I admit. But Ezekiel appears to believe it has a certain inherent power:
As for you, mortal, describe the temple to the house of Israel, and let them measure the pattern; and let them be ashamed of their iniquities. When they are ashamed of all that they have done, make known to them the plan of the temple, its arrangement, its exits and its entrances, and its whole form—all its ordinances and its entire plan and all its laws; and write it down in their sight, so that they may observe and follow the entire plan and all its ordinances. [43.10-12]
There seem to be two actions going on here. The beginning involves letting people "measure the pattern." Perhaps this points to a simple visual perusal of the external plan.. which Ezekiel feels will lead them to "be ashamed of their iniquities" (recalling the impurities of chapter 8). After this guilt is awakened, Ezekiel is to narrate the details of the plan and how various elements will be used. This can be understood as the act of renewal and recommitment on the part of the people. There's no doubt that rhetorical power is assumed to be present in the very plan of the temple.
A difficulty in reading this description of an imagined temple is the lack of interpretive aids. For example, the reader may come across 46.1-10 and its description of the position of the prince with respect to the sacrifices, but not get the important point: the prince (king) will not be making the sacrifices and is restricted in access to the central sections of the temple. There is a clear intent to push secular powers outside of the temple. Similarly it is easy to read past the redistribution of land that Ezekiel envisages and not think through the social statement that is being made: economic independence for temple workers (48.8-23). The fully described entrances to the outer and inner courts are a way of emphasizing the strict standard of ritual purity that will be observed in this version of the temple (40-42).
Much of what this imagined temple communicates exactly reflects the messages of earlier prophets. Issues of social justice and correct worship are addressed by the architecture itself. Visions of the renewal of nature as found in Isaiah 11 are now given a realistic setting as a stream flowing from the temple and emptying in the Dead Sea. That sea will now be filled with fish and there will be beautiful tree lined parks. This all reflects an intuitive sense that facts on the ground can carry ideas and messages. Messages can be conveyed through structure and the division of land.
We might recall that some dream projects actually get built. Fatimid Cairo is an example of an unlikely seeming theological project that was carried out.. and can be understood as symbolically meaningful in the same way as Ezekiel's temple. Sometimes we don't get blue-print descriptions, but actual places.. but we have to accustom ourselves to thinking of these buildings as speaking a message that can be read. If there was not such thing as Ezekiel, and all we had were ruined outlines of the walls and layout of a similar temple structure, would we be able to read it as confidently as we do Ezekiel's text?
Ezekiel on the Web
November 11, 2008
The Internet is great for some topics, but for the Bible it is a giant mess. Search for almost anything related to the Bible and the result is a ton of non-critical religious sites. Recently I've been coming around to the idea that there is nevertheless something fascinating about what is on the Internet: a host of personal obsessions and fantasias.
The image at the top of this post is of the temple of Jerusalem described by Ezekiel in chapters 40-48. Paul Jablonowski is the creator of the model, and here is what he has to say about the origin of this project:
In 1996, I began an in-depth study of Ezekiel chapters 40-48 which culminated in building a scale model of the temple shown to Ezekiel.
How does that happen? How does someone come across nine chapters of dense description for a building that has never existed and decide to begin an "in-depth study"? At the end of his web page he gives props to a fellow traveler in temple creation, a certain John W. Schmitt, pictured below:
Schmitt (also spelled Schmidt) is obviously standing next to his model of Ezekiel's temple. It is noted:
John has been studying and building models of Ezekiel's temple for over thirty years. These pictures, and more, can be found in his excellent book "Messiah's Coming Temple.
Woh! He has been studying the temple for thirty years?! That just knocks me out.. and the wonderful thing about the Internet is that these projects don't have to stay in someone's basement but can become a site that gets a fair number of hits.
After reading the vision of Ezekiel 1 I searched on YouTube to see if there might be someone who has illustrated it.. and sure enough, there's this clip:
It's an image that has zero critical value since it was created by someone altogether innocent of the visual world of the ancient Near East.. and Babylon in particular. There is no attention to the traditional images that would have been formed in the minds of listeners by these words. It is the vision as understood by someone familiar with the digital scenes that populate our movies and video games. But despite its failings, it also represents a good faith attempt to visualize what is being read on the page.. and in the visual terms that we currently know.
Above is another interesting version of Ezekiel, this time a series of pencil drawings to illustrate chapter 37 with the dry bones coming to life. A voice reads the text and the drawings illustrate the developing story. In the information on YouTube by the person who posted the video (LivingForTheFather) there is this hint about the way it might be used:
ATTN PASTORS AND CHURCHES: After receiving several requests to play the video in a church service, know that I am willing to send a copy for you to download for you to use in your church.
And that is a window into why the Internet is such a bad place for information about the Bible. There is too big of an audience out there of church-goers whose main concern is with the text as it gives light for today. Anyone who is interested in the text as a historical text and witness to a particular response to a particular situation is drowned out by the church-goers.
"The Millennial Temple" page by Paul Jablonowski. [PDF file here]
"Ezekiel Chapter 1..." posted by earteam. [MP4 file here]
"Ezekiel 37: The Valley of Dry Bones" posted by LivingfortheFather. [MP4 here]
Blogging for "That Solitary Individual"
November 9, 2008
I've read the reports about the astronomical number of blogs out there.. but anyone browsing for interesting blogs will find that a large number are defunct.. or hardly posting. I am even a contributor to this problem since the central assignment for my Intro to Religious Studies course is to keep a blog. Most—if not all—of those blogs end promptly with the term. Nicholas Carr comments on some figures published by Technorati:
...at least 94 percent of [blogs] have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent "state of the blogosphere" study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days. Now, as longtime blogger Tim Bray notes, 7.4 million and 1.5 million are still sizable numbers, but they're a whole lot lower than we've been led to believe. "I find those numbers shockingly low," writes Bray; "clearly, blogging isn’t as widespread as we thought."
That doesn't surprise me.. and to my way of thinking the number of individual bloggers will slowly converge on the number of journalers in the general population. One reason I've never found blogging onerous is that I've had periods where I wrote and wrote in journals (a closet stacked to my waist with old journals). Those who blog as a form of journalism will end up joining mainstream sites.. and get worked into the MSM. But it is the class of bloggers who write for themselves that I am most interested in.
"Writing for themselves" is an odd phrase in relation to blogging.. I realize. Technorati and its method of quantifying authority by number of links distorts what is valuable about individual blogs. The method gives priority to comments on popular topics and trends, as those are what will be searched for and linked to.
Soren Kierkegaard serves as a counter example of how writing can be valued and authority determined. Kierkegaard was obviously not a blogger since he died in 1855, but he was a compulsive writer and self-publisher. He dedicated Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing to "That Solitary Individual." He goes on to explain what he means:
...that solitary "individual" whom with joy and gratitude I call my reader; that solitary "individual" who reads willingly and slowly, who reads over and over again, and who reads aloud—for his own sake. If [this book] finds him, then in the distance of the separation the understanding is perfect. [27]
Needless to say there are not too many readers who qualify. The Internet is not really geared to produce such readers, but neither was the book publishing industry in Kierkegaard's time! Instead he laid down a personal standard by which his success could be measured.. and that was the connection that his book would make with a careful and ready reader. Other readers he could brush off.
This is not to say that blogging should be in hope of an audience far in the future (Kierkegaard is a truly unusual example of that feat), but it could be done with more of an emphasis on connecting with low numbers of people whose thoughts are congenial to one's own. The idea would be to develop blogging circles and not to worry about the quantification methods of sites like Technorati. The inevitable result of the Technorati approach is professionalization, since there's no way a hundred thousand daily hits will not be monetized. But think about it: a hundred thousand daily hits means writing about something that draws one hundred thousad people. Not my idea of fun! For bloggers who are interested in independent thoughts and development, that does not even count as a temptation.
Soren Kierkegaard. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. Harper & Row, 1948.
Nicholas Carr. "Who Killed the Blogosphere." roughtype.com [PDF file]
Standard Narrative Construction
by Errol Morris
November 8, 2008
The picture above is from the opening credits for Standard Operating Procedure (2008) directed by Errol Morris. Floating in the ether are a host of photographs, which over the course of the documentary will be explored in detail. These aren't just any photos: they are the notorious photos taken at Abu Ghraib in Iraq that document prisoner abuse by American soldiers. They have international significance and it is easy to imagine a filmmaker approaching this topic from different angles. We can easily imagine a broad political angle in which the filmmaker tries to connect the dots with respect to policies set by the administration. We might see images of Washington press conferences with Donald Rumsfeld. Then we can also imagine a filmmaker who tries to bring alive the youth and naivete of the soldiers.. and show how they landed in the midst of something that was beyond them. As it happens, Morris accomplishes both of these tasks.. or at least gestures toward them. But he comes to this important project with a surprisingly theoretical interest: how do images tell a story.. how do we extract that story.. and why do images often fail to tell a true story. The political and personal will take a back seat to those theoretical concerns.
Through an interview with a military investigator we learn how the photos were grouped together on a timeline and separated by the camera used to take it. This was accomplished by an examination of the metadata stored within the image file of each photo. With more painstaking work in regards to how much time elapsed between shots, the photos could be made to tell a story.. a story finally told to a jury and leading to convictions. The military investigator is remarkably confident in the story he constructed, saying "This scene is what sealed their fate" or "What the photograph depicts is what it is."
The interviews conducted by Morris, with the usual direct gaze into the camera, tend to call into question the confidence of the military investigator. The photos turn out to be complex and almost indecipherable without reference to the personal lives of those involved and details of the immediate context. It's possible to walk out of this film with a high level of skepticism about the ability of images to convey anything like a truthful narrative. For example there is the famous picture below:
What could be simpler than this image? But as Errol Morris proves, what could be more complex? Here's the participant's description of what happened:
I can understand. It does look really bad. Whenever I would get into a photo I would never know what to do with my hands. Any kind of photo I probably have my thumbs up because it's just something that automatically happens. It's like when you get into a photo you want to smile. It's just something I did.
This explanation, combined with her letters home while all this was going on, manage to make this humanly understandable. But what about the dead Iraqi? He was beaten to death in an interrogation by agents from "OGA" (Other Government Agency). So his death was a crime, but hardly that of this nervous young woman who looks up and smiles for the camera. [Morris goes into a lot more detail on this photo here on his New York Times blog.. well worth a read.].
The upshot of all this is a realization of the crucial place of human explanation.. or the ways that words must flow around images if we are to make sense of them. This is fitting since Morris puts so much emphasis on the interview in his work. The centerpiece is always the talking human being. Everything else can be understood as serving the same function as images in a music video—that is, they keep our eyes occupied while we listen. There's an immense creativity that Morris pours into finding ways to illustrate the spoken word. You might have thought that a documentary filmmaker would prefer to rely on images and actual things to make a point, but in fact Morris seems to have been led to be more suspicious of the tools of his trade.. perhaps because he is so conscious of how those images can be used to tell false narratives.
The Election on Our Lawns
November 6, 2008
The latest Old Roads video essay examines how the election looked in Appleton, Wisconsin from the standpoint of our front lawns and windows. The notion that lies behind this is that there are lots of intense moments in the election.. like when a candidate visits the area or a national debate. But what's more interesting are all the small ways that people introduce symbolic statements into their own public spaces. As it happens, I was surprised at the rarity of really individual expression with respect to the election. Four years ago in Atlanta I saw many more direct personal statements on lawns. My sense is that the Midwest is less comfortable with that kind of open political expression in public space.
President Obama
November 4, 2008
Blogging has been a bit lighter than usual here at Old Roads since my thoughts have seemed overshadowed by the election bearing down upon us. It's tough to concentrate when looking at the latest poll numbers! This is not a political website, and so we have been mostly content to watch events unfold. Unbelievably Obama has just won the election to become president of the United States.. and I have never been remotely as emotionally connected to a political candidate as I am to Obama. This is not to say that he is any kind of magician or savior.. he will be a politician and all that.. and I expect some frustration with his willingness to compromise instead of fight. But he is a new kind of president.. and someone who represents the America I know.
In his acceptance speech tonight there was an extraordinary section where he spoke to the world:
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.
This is where I hear something new that is brought to the table by Obama. This was not a shout out to fellow "freedom lovers" in Europe and Australia. This was a recognition of the fact that the poor of the world, those "huddled around radios," are part of our story too. Obama even goes so far as to recognize that these forgotten people of the world are part of our own national destiny.. they share in our story.
I'm not sure Americans really get what this means. About 230 years ago we rebelled against taxation without representation. Today some might hold that as being the first great rebellion over taxes, but it is deeper to understand it as a strike against the lack of representation in decisions that affected our lives. The rest of the world is, in effect, also taxed without representation. The decisions we make enrich and impoverish millions, and people outside our borders have no say in these matters. The burden of democracy is to include the voices of everyone.. to allow real stakeholders to have a real say in decisions. That does not mean that those people huddled around radios in odd corners of the world will get to vote in an American election; it means we must be creative in letting people know that their voices are heard and taken into account. Obama told the world tonight that he will listen.. and in so doing he spoke to our better angels. A side of America that has not often been addressed these past eight years.
Singing While I Read
November 1, 2008
An odd part of my experience of reading the Bible is the fact that I often come across lines I have sung or even memorized in the past. Reading the book of Lamentations I came to these soaring lines in chapter 3:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness. [3.22-23]
I hit the first words of those verses and I can close my eyes and hear the song. You can hear these words being sung in the following video:
Often I find myself surprised at the actual context of words I know well. The video above, with its images of natural grandeur and beauty, provides a context for the way these words are commonly heard in churches. Reading these lines in Lamentations, after the harrowing description of Jerusalem's total destruction in chapters one and two, the words seem to demand a different context: smoke and destruction.. and the imagination of hope when there is no reason for hope.
The fact that I recognize this and so many other lines from the Bible also makes me think about the advantages and disadvantages in studying one's own tradition. As I read Islamic texts I don't pick up these same echoes.. which you get when you are steeped in something from a young age. This is a level of inside knowledge which a scholar can hardly approach. At the same time scholarship should not be about studying the self, but about pushing outwards to understand someone else's world. That is, for me, where the excitement of academic work lies: the struggle to understand. I would find it boring and ultimately stifling to study the same world that I know intuitively.
Running across lines that I know from the past is also a reminder of one more reason that youth is a special time. It is the time when associations that last a lifetime are formed.. and those associations are often not chosen by us. Perhaps we also just have more time in youth and can listen to songs over and over again (thus my comfort with Beatles songs). Rote memorization is a dead end, but it is valuable to learn the words of a tradition.. and maybe there is a hunger in a young person to master a cultural tradition. I will always be grateful that I know words like these:
He has shown you, O man,
what is good and what the Lord requires of you.
But to act justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God. [Micah 6.8]
