Interpreting the Bismillah
March 31, 2009
At the beginning of the Qur'an comes "bism illah al-Rahman al-Rahim".. conventionally translated "in the name of God the Most Merciful and Mercy Giving." Then at the beginning of every Sura of the Qur'an except one the phrase is repeated. In effect it is a sort of benediction at the start of every division of the Qur'an.
In Christianity there has existed a belief that the Bible is the Word of God, but this is usually tempered by a recognition that revelation came through a human being and was in some way transformed by its human and contextual expression. The scripture writer, except perhaps in a couple of occasions where it is explicitly noted, was not working by dictation. Within Islam there is a much more explicit tendency to see revelation as being more along the lines of a dictation. The first word revealed to Muhammad was "Recite!" The word Qur'an could be translated "recitations".. that is, the recitations of God's revelation.
Reading Hamid Algar's brief commentary on the Surat al-Fatiha I was reminded of the natural result of maximizing the doctrine of revelation. He comments on the bismillah, those opening words of the Qur'an and notes that one oddity in this opening is that the letter alif is left out of the word for name (ism). When the prepositional prefix bi is added to the word ism, the alif is elided and disappears. Instead of seeing in Arabic the letters "I-S-M" all you see is "B-S-M." (This is visible in the first word on the right of the Arabic line above.)
OK, so the alif is left out, so what? Algar is ready to run with an interpretation. Since the alif has the numerical value of 1, he sees it as a symbolic representation for God. But then why is it precisely the alif that disappears in the bismillah?
...perhaps, it has been suggested, because the Divine Unity has a hidden presence throughout the multiplicity of His creation; it is there and it is not there. It is not there in immediately visible form and it is there beneath the all-pervasive appearance of multiplicity. And this simultaneous presence and absence is indicated in the view of some [commentators] by the "concealment" of the letter alif in bismillah. [14-15]
I love this kind of grammar allegory.. but how can it be defended? The elision of the alif is a function of grammatical and orthographic rules. It is what should happen when these words are written.. so it is not as if this is an exception of a grammatical rule that calls for explanation.
Algar evidently feels the need to defend his mining of meaning from this grammatical point. He writes:
And in fact if we believe, as we do believe, that the Qur'an is the word of Allah, then there is significance in every aspect of it, not simply in meanings that we extract from the words, but in each word and each letter. There is nothing accidental about any part of the Qur'an and if the alif is omitted in the orthography this must be for good reason. [16]
So here we see the very high notion of revelation coming back to encourage an elaborate and detail-driven interpretation of the text of the Qur'an. Everything is in there for a purpose and can be made to speak and signify by a gifted commentator. Now since the Qur'an was oral and only later committed to writing (according to Islamic tradition), I don't understand how the actual writing of the Qur'an gets included as being perfect and divinely revealed. But be that as it may, this is a textual strategy that depends on the highest possible notion of revelation.
Breaking Financial Culture
March 30, 2009
The Atlantic this month carries an essay by Simon Johnson on our economic situation ("The Quiet Coup" May 2009). It is required reading for the sharp comparison of the US recession to IMF intercessions in smaller countries. Small countries in tough economic straits have no choice but to re-structure their financial system and topple oligarchs. The US, being much larger, is under no such compulsion to obey a body like the IMF.. and the real danger is that the financial sector will be allowed to limp forward and act as if nothing really happened.
The essay goes further and points to the development of a culture of finance in the US. Why can't we bring ourselves to radically shake up the financial sector? Because we believe in the financial sector:
...the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.
Why would "what was good for Wall Street" ever be considered good for the country? Think about 401Ks and university endowments. Much of what we look forward to or love in our country became dependent on a growing stock market and abstruse financial calculations of risk. It is hard finally to question what lies at the center of a cultural system.. and has even colonized our language. This might be what lends a certain blindness to media discussions about the recession: the systemic problems that might seem obvious to someone like Simon Johnson are never spoken about clearly or allowed to challenge our inherited narratives.
Johnson notes the permeable nature of financial and political power. Highly respected political figures got their start in Wall Street firms and people who began in politics often fall back onto the boards of financial operations. If we looked back and saw this happening 100 years ago.. seeing that politicians and industrial giants were intermingled to this degree and shared so many interests.. we would see it as a form of corruption. But when it happens right in front of us with the financial market, we don't see it as corruption at all. It is just the way things are.
Johnson offers a dramatic piece of advice:
The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.
His idea of how to do this centers on splitting up the banks into manageable pieces.. and I'm all for that. But the deeper question is how to break through to transform our culture of finance. And what would that mean? It would mean refusing to allow policies and public needs to be judged by the unofficial referendum of Wall Street. It would mean cutting loose a whole crew of people whose influence has gone back and forth between finances and politics. It would ultimately mean new ways of talking about our world.
Borobudur and UNESCO
March 27, 2009
Above is an image of Borobudur in Java. The image is from an old photo book entitled Pictorial History of Civilization in Java by W.F. Stutterheim. The book is filled with old photos like this of the antiquities of Java. (I am still looking for an image of what the temple was like early in the 19th century before it was restored.) This old photo book with its photos of the antiquities of Java made me think more about the cultural distance between them and modern Indonesia. The population is now overwhelmingly Muslim and many of these temples and objects were obviously crafted by Buddhists. Java is also now part of the nation of Indonesia.. and a temple like this has now become part of the modern nation state.. the reach of which would surely have stunned medieval Javanese.
I located Borobudur on the website for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). Its best known initiative is the list of "World Heritage Sites." These can be browsed by nation:
The first site listed under Indonesia is Borobudur. The yellow diamond signifies its designation as a cultural site. It is natural that UNESCO should distribute sites according to host nation since it is an arm of the United Nations. And if the goal is to protect and preserve the non-movable cultural heritage of our world, then it's a necessity to work through nation states, who happen to control about every inch of dry ground on our planet.
While it may be a necessity to work through nation states, it is still inherently odd that Borobodur is claimed by the nation of Indonesia. One writer who understands well this oddness is philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah who a few years back had an article in the New York Review of Books on the topic of nations and cultural heritage ("Whose Culture Is It?" February 9, 2006):
...a great deal of what people wish to protect as "cultural patrimony" was made before the modern system of nations came into being, by members of societies that no longer exist. People die when their bodies die. Cultures, by contrast, can die without physical extinction. So there's no reason to think that the Nok have no descendants. But if Nok civilization came to an end and its people became something else, why should they have a special claim on those objects, buried in the forest and forgotten for so long? And even if they do have a special claim, what has that got to do with Nigeria, where, let us suppose, most of those descendants now live?
This is a question that could be applied directly to a site like Borobudur in Indonesia, although Appiah under plays the tendency for a culture to maintain itself even as religious structures come in and out of use. But the point is still true that Borobudur was a magnificent monument that stood completely neglected by the people who lived around it.. and it is questionable to what extent this can be thought of as "theirs."
Appiah would have us think about history in a more complex way. Buildings and objects come down to our own time after passing through numerous cultural configurations. There's no point in identifying "Nigerian" or "Indonesian" art.. at least as soon as one moves backwards a century or more. Then Appiah proposes a broader identity category by which a structure such as Borobudur could be appreciated: our identity as human beings.
One connection—the one neglected in talk of cultural patrimony—is the
connection not through identity but despite difference. We can respond to art that is not ours; indeed, we can only fully respond to "our" art if we move beyond thinking of it as ours and start to respond to it as art. But equally important is the human connection. My people—human beings— made the Great Wall of China, the Sistine Chapel, the Chrysler Building: these things were made by creatures like me, through the exercise of skill and imagination.
Appiah is arguing directly against the UNESCO concept of "cultural patrimony".. which is the basis for World Heritage Sites and their breakdown into nations. I, sitting here in Wisconsin, should be able to respond to Borobudur and these other examples of Indonesian art as creations of fellow human beings. This material "belongs" as much to me as to any Indonesian.
I had read this article before, but looking at it now I am struck by the closing emphasis on the importance of the imagination:
The connection through a local identity is as imaginary as the connection through humanity. The Nigerian's link to the Benin bronze, like mine, is a connection made in the imagination; but to say this isn't to pronounce either of them unreal. They are surely among the realest connections we have.
In other words, sure, this connection to another culture through a common humanity is imagined. It is the biggest "imagined community" possible! But the nation-state is also an imagined community and its connection to the past equally tenuous. The philosophy of culture being worked out by Appiah is the perfect philosophy for the kind of imagined travel that I am trying to work out in these posts. It is philosophy that can function as our gate.
Socialism, Marxism, Tyranny...
March 27, 2009
I have trouble understanding how the anti-Obama rhetoric from the Right can get so heated. I understand differences of opinion, but to throw around words like "Marxism" and "tyranny" and then to call for a revolution.. it is just stunning. Steve Benen gets right on the danger of this loose language:
My fear, at this point, is that lunacy from deranged politicians and their media allies is going to end up getting someone hurt. Republican officials believe they should emulate the insurgency tactics of the Taliban. They see themselves as "freedom fighters" taking on the "slide toward socialism." They want a "revolution" because Americans "can't let" Democrats succeed in taking away "our very freedom."
This is obviously madness, not from some right-wing blog, but from elected federal officials. But I worry it's more than that. Incendiary rhetoric like this leads strange people to do strange things.
Republicans, it's time to lower the temperature. In the midst of multiple crises, America deserves more than hollow, partisan rage.
I don't have any particular insight as to why this kind of talk is allowed to take place on mainstream media outlets.. but it's happening.
Maybe that extra 3% tax increase really riles up the super wealthy? Here's to hoping there are more increases coming your way..
How Some of Us Grew Up
March 25, 2009
Not so long ago a careful fan website would have been the place to begin looking for information about an artist's career. Those who follow the Smiths/Morrissey are lucky to have the standout website Passions Just Like Mine. Commonly a website like this has a discography and links to pages that carry some news about the artist. The usefulness of these fan websites has been eroded by the convergence of this information on Wikipedia. Much of the energy that would once have gone into building and maintaining a fan website has now morphed into Wikipedia page creation. The Wikipedia page for Morrissey's new album Years of Refusal already contains the track listing, links to reviews and interviews, and information about when and where the tracks were cut. This is one of the secrets of the success of Wikipedia: it gives fan work a respectable format and collaboration among fans given a chance to flower. (I do mourn the loss of small ungainly websites that never saw the light of day.)
The new album contains a song that had previously been a single, "That's How People Grow Up." Each of its three stanzas describe a coming of age scenario:
I was wasting my time
looking for love
someone must look at me and see their sunlit dream
I was wasting my time
praying for love
for a love that never comes
from someone who does not exist.
Following that comes the chorus: "And that's how people grow up."
The "I" of these stanzas could lead a listener to assume there is a single narrator. But since each stanza is unrelated, it's better to understand these stanzas as three character sketches told in the first person. The chorus "..that's how people grow up" is actually a commentary on these character sketches. So in the above example we find someone pining for love until the truth hits him/her that the dream lover does not exist.
The sketch is particularly interesting in the third stanza:
I was wasting my life
always thinking about myself
someone on their death-bed said:
"there are other sorrows, too."
I was driving my car
I crashed and broke my spine
so, yes, there are things worse in life
than never being someone's sweetie.
And then comes the chorus: "That's how people grow up." Each stanza represents a realization of some kind.. and that realization is growing up. Coming to realize the futility of love or the pettiness of one's hopes in comparison with real loss is what it means to become an adult.
These character sketches will sound familiar to anyone who enjoys the lyrics of Morrissey. The car wreck is famously invoked in "There Is a Light That never Goes Out":
and if a ten ton truck
kills the both of us
to die by your side
well, the pleasure and the privilege is mine
A death bed scene is held up for our perusal in "Girlfriend in a Coma." And the dashed dreams of ideal love is a theme everywhere present in Morrissey's lyrics.
So "That's How People Grow Up" can be understood as three embedded Morrissey songs. The choral comment is Morrissey's way of pointing out the value of his songs: it's through understanding the scenes I describe in my songs that people learn to grow up and deal with the world.
I have long thought this the best lens for understanding Morrissey: he is not and never has been about wallowing in "misery".. his lyrical sketches are designed to make you look at others from the outside and move on. Even when you listen to a notorious early song like this:
I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour
but heaven knows I'm miserable now
I was looking for a job, and then I found a job
and heavens knows I'm miserable now
In my life
why do I give valuable time
to people who don't care if I live or I die
It's a song that epitomizes for some the cloying self-pity of Morrissey, but you aren't actually tempted to give in to self-pity. Read the lines.. you are observing self-pity and taking away some lessons: life is not easy, jobs are not fun, most people wouldn't care if you disappeared from the face of the earth. You are being prodded to grow up.
This interpretation of "That's How People Grow Up" makes watching the video (see here) quite moving. It interweaves footage from at least three concerts.. but it does not track the performance of the song (except at the very beginning) but rather concentrates on fans running on stage to hug or kiss Morrissey. Here are four scenes from the video:
This could be taken as an example of Morrissey's fixation on himself. (He does have a song on the new album entitled "All You Need Is Me.") But I prefer to see this as a hat tip to those who have grown up listening to his music. All these people reaching out to him or actually making a run onto the stage represent people who owe something of their growing up to this man. His are the bitter stories that make you grow up.
Virtual Pilgrimage to Borobudur
March 24, 2009
Borobudur is a Buddhist monument in the middle of the island of Java. It was constructed in about 800 AD. It's much larger than one might guess from looking at a few photographs. It is not a Buddhist temple, but a stupa or pilgrimage site. Pilgrims would approach this stone pyramid-like structure and ascend by circling its nine platforms. Borobudur can be thought of as a great stone mandala representing through its nine platforms the stages of Buddhist cosmology. To circle these platforms and reach the top will mean walking 5 kilometers.. and on the way you'll pass 1,460 sculptured panels.
When Borobudur was discovered by Europeans early in the 19th century it was abandoned and covered with vegetation. The images show trees growing out of the monument.. and the whole structure covered with vegetation. I will try to locate some of those early images. The lush landscape in which this monument sits can be glimpsed in the photo below. (The location for this photo can be easily seen from the Google Maps aerial image: the photographer is to the right of Borobudur looking down the curving row of trees.)
What would detain me longest here are the relief sculptures. These strike me as little time capsules from a world that is now long gone. Many times when I visit a site I find myself with more questions than answers; I resolve to find a book to learn more about what I have seen. This virtual visit works in the same way for me.. one more way that virtual travel has the same dynamic as actual travel. Many of these relief sculptures have been posted by a generous Flickr user, and I will give one example and then post a slide show of here images from Borobudur:
I've been to some pretty great sites in my life, but sometimes I ask myself what I actually remember from those sites? I get to say I've been here or there, and that impresses people. I have general impressions of these sites, but the details are largely gone from memory.. and I would need to look at photographs to refresh my memory. I am not sure what I would get in a lasting way from an actual trip to Borobudur that I don't put together here in this virtual tour.
Here's a YouTube video that gives a sense of the common tourist experience of Borobudur. After a description of breakfast in the hotel it walks us through the site of Borobudur. We even get to see a tour guide at work.. although unfortunately he is inaudible.
Considerably more difficult to imagine is the experience of Javanese Buddhist pilgrims from the 9th century AD. Naturally there are no YouTube videos that help recreate his experience ascending the nine platforms. All those sculptures would have been intuitively understandable to him; they consisted of generic scenes drawn from his environment. Even the symbolism of the monument itself would have conformed to deeply held ideas about the mind and the world. To understand this Buddhist pilgrim it is best to spend time in a library. That is more a work of the imaginative scholar than of a modern day tourist.
picture #1 from Google Maps.
picture #2 (Merapi from Borobudur temple) by Flickr user Marc-André Jung used by Creative Commons License.
picture #3 (Borobudur wall relief # 141) by Flickr user Gabisa Motonia, used by Creative Commons License.
A United States Documentary Film
March 22, 2009
In the midst of the Great Depression Pare Lorentz made two classic documentaries, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938). (For all the current talk of economic stimulus, it's a shame that artistic endeavors such as these are not on the table.) These two 30-minute films point toward a style of documentary that is place-based. As the prologue to The Plow that Broke the Plains states:
Contemporary documentaries center on a personality. The exceptions are History Channel or National Geographic specials.. but these don't have any real artistic ambition. Here in the midst of the Great Depression is a wonderful model for works that take as a focus a region or geographic feature: The Plow that Broke the Plains is about the great plains; The River is about the Mississippi basin).
While both of these films stand up well, they have certain stylistic annoyances. The serious and dramatic voice-over can be hard to take. The best example of successful documentary narration today might be Werner Herzog, but his is a more personal and limited narrative voice. The voice of these documentaries is above question and always serious. It's a teller that we hear.. the representative of truth.
There is a willingness on the part of the narrator to be poetic in diction and word choice. The script for The River was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry.. if you can believe it. Here is the opening:
From as far West as Idaho,
Down from the glacier peaks of the Rockies,
From as far East as New York,
Down from the turnkey ridges of the Alleghenies,
Down from Minnesota, twenty-five hundred miles,
The Mississippi River runs to the Gulf.
Carrying every drop of water that flows down two thirds the continent,
Carrying every brook and rill, rivulet and creek
Carrying all the rivers that run down two thirds the continent,
The Mississippi runs to the Gulf of Mexico.
These lines do not fully communicate the poetry since so much repetition is used. The names of the rivers come tripping off the narrator's tongue as if he were reading a catalogue poem by Walt Whitman. I can't think of a recent documentary that adopts this straight out use of poetry—another sign of a fall from serious ambition.
Many of the images in The Plow that Broke the Plains are reminiscent of things you have seen before. The scenes of Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl and landing in tent camps out West could come right out of Grapes of Wrath. The occasional close up of people and the stuff they left behind might make you think of Walker Evans and James Agee collaborating on another poetic project we know as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But both of those works are actually later (at least released later) than these documentaries. These documentaries might thus be seen as shapers of an aesthetic that has become well known to us from other works.
There are more things to mention.. such as the fact that Virgil Thomson does the score. But I will just end by noting how thrilling it was to see at the end of The River the words "A United States Documentary Film." That category no longer exists.. but they make good models for my Old Roads efforts.
Tribes and My Place in This World
March 20, 2009
Growing up in a tribal culture would have had its nice points. Imagine growing up and having no doubt where you personally would fit in. Tribal culture is built around subsistence and everyone has a job to do. Individuals might rise or fall in terms of tribal respect, but there is no question as to whether a person will be an active member of the community. There's not a lot of specialization within a tribe, so a person does pretty much the same as his or her peers.
Playing an active role in our modern society has always felt to me a dicey proposition. Our society does not give a lot of overt signs to any individual that he or she is necessary. Society is like a train hurtling past and we make desperate dives to secure a spot somewhere.. and when we do find a place we know that someone else is eager to do just what we do, if given a chance. Watching the current recession it is terrible to see so many of life-places disappearing.. and I can only imagine the sinking feeling that must well up inside as a person recognizes they have a skill set for which there is no longer a place.
In the conclusion to The Malay Archipelago Alfred Russel Wallace defines the major racial division within his area of study. He finds there the Malay and the Papuan, along with some intermediate groups. He has a distaste for the character of the Malays, but has this to say about the Papuans:
He is impulsive and demonstrative in speech and action. His emotions and passions express themselves in shouts and laughter, in yells and frantic leapings. Women and children take their share in every discussion, and seem little alarmed at the sight of strangers and Europeans. [448]
These Papuans are also perpetually making elaborate carvings, proving themselves to be natural artists with a sense of beauty.
This contrasts with the Malays, who are reserved and externally easy-going. As with many 19th century works, the only word Wallace has to talk about these differences is the rather clumsy one "race," which implies innate differences lodged somehow in the bodies of people. It's clear now that "culture" is a much more powerful way of understanding human difference. Yes, the Malays and Papuans vary dramatically, but that's a result of the group dynamics that induct individuals into a cultural system and shape their cognitive outlook.
An important shaper of culture is the form of social system. The details that Wallace uses to describe the Papuans are similar to those used by others for tribal groups such as Native Americans or Bedouin. Meanwhile Malay culture was shaped within small agricultural states. With its connection to Islam and Hinduism, Malay culture is locked into a civilization. This difference is implicit in Wallace's discussion of the different futures of the Malay and the Papuans:
...the more numerous Malay race seems well adapted to survive as the cultivator of the soil, even when his country and government have passed into the hands of Europeans. If the tide of colonization should be turned to New Guinea, there can be little doubt of the early extinction of the Papuan race. A warlike and energetic people who will not submit to national slavery or to domestic servitude must disappear before the white man as surely as do the wolf and the tiger. [453]
First, that's a breathtaking admission of the complete disaster that colonialism brings. That this can be countenanced without some extreme protest is troubling. More important for our present argument is the recognition that the social organization of the Malays is adaptable to European ways, while the Papuan way of life is not. Wallace is deeply invested in race as an explainer for this, but on second look it's simply a case of social structures being able—or not able—to mesh.
Wallace in the final two pages delivers a critique of how civilization is often bettered by "savages." Within tribal societies
There are none of those wide distinctions, of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the product of our civilization; there is none of that wide-spread division of labour, which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests; there is none of that severe competition and struggle for existence... [454]
This lack in civilization can be rectified with a certain education of our moral faculties, Wallace believes. But he is dead wrong. We can never be like the Papuans—no matter how much we would like that—because it's a way of life and character matched to a specific social situation. We will never grow up knowing our place and feeling right and wrong in the way that a Papuan could.. and we will always inhabit a system that does not really need us.
It is, then, no accident that many contemporary religious messages focus on assuring people that they have a place in society. Take this Christian song that was popular among some crowds when I was in college:
If we can imagine a tribal society hearing and understanding this, we can only imagine them as being perplexed. The last thing they worry about is "a place in this world." Wouldn't that be nice?
picture #1 ("postmodernism papua") is by Flickr user Kiko turtelini and used by Creative Commons License.
Sayyid Qutb and Lolita
March 17, 2009
Sayyid Qutb, as the premier architect of radical Islamist thought, will gain a place as one of the central thinkers of the 20th century. And I do mean that as a compliment. He is uncommonly lucid in writings such as Milestones and his commentary on the Quran. He achieved the imposition of a powerful conceptual frame that guides the perceptions of thousands, if not millions, of people today. Something of that frame is evident in the YouTube clip above, which is an example of the "tribute" video.
A piece of writing for which Qutb will not be long remembered is his description of America after his stay in America from 1948-50. He lived for most of that time in Greeley, Colorado, where he attended what is now the University of Northern Colorado. It was a time and place that would strike us as the ultimate "classic" American experience—small town, the West, churches, music on the radio. If we were to see Greeley, Colorado in 1948 portrayed in a film it would be bathed in that nostalgic black and white that we use for the 50s and our American innocence. But Qutb saw nothing innocent here.
His description of America comes in an article now available under the title "The America I have Seen" (text here). Its charges against Americans will immediately strike an American as unfair.. and possibly based on misunderstandings:
I once entered the house of an American women who was helping me with my English during the first period of my stay in America. So I found there one of her female friends, and they were having a conversation that I caught the end of. This friend said, "I was lucky because I had taken out life insurance on his life. Even his treatment cost very little because I had insured him with Blue Cross," and she smiled.
This is judged by Qutb to be the height of callousness because the woman shows no signs of distress about her husband's death. It is also a situation that has abundant angles for misinterpretation, beginning with the fact that Qutb is learning English! The woman might well be hiding her grief from a foreign student whom she is getting paid to teach. And why would it be so wrong to talk about practical matters relating to death? Qutb appears at his worst here, with a distinctly hostile reading of the social situations around him.
In other sections of this article, such as "A Hot Night at the Church" in which he bemoans mixed gender dancing and "Primitiveness in Athletics" in which he has some choice words about the bestiality of American football, he betrays a similarly ungenerous spirit. Yet here and there he has a grudging appreciation for America:
The beauty that is manifested in the landscape, in the faces and physiques of its people is spellbinding. America conjures up pleasures that acknowledge no limit or moral restraint, dreams that are capable of taking corporeal shape in the realm of time and space.
So there is something vital and alive here. He senses that. But at the same time he believes it is hollow. The West is technical accomplishment without internal spirit. This point is further developed in the introduction to Milestones, and I wonder whether this is not a case of the influence of Gandhi, who saw as India's calling the addition of spirit to the technical prowess of the West.
Along with this expansive view of the United States comes a parallel view of the inherent danger in a young American girl:
The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she knows this and does not hide it. She knows it lies in clothes: in bright colors that awaken primal sensations, and in designs that reveal the temptations of her body—and in American girls these are sometimes live, screaming temptations! Then she adds to all this the fetching laugh, the naked looks, and the bold moves, and she does not ignore this for one moment or forget it!
Quite a passage! But I think it would be a mistake to read this solely as a peculiarly fundamentalist response to American girlhood. The passage in its entirety could easily find its parallel on many pages of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Remember that Nabokov also combines a vision of the expansiveness of the US (those cheap motels) with a sprite and frank description of the sexuality of the girl who accompanies him. Humbert Humbert is from the old world and is moved to grasp the audacious sexuality of the new world.
Sayyid Qutb is Humbert Humbert, but with the self control to resist the outlandish American girl. But this is not just a case of sexual repression, it is also a case of learning to write and talk about America. Nabokov and Qutb converged somehow on a quite similar way of talking about America.
Following Wallace in Java
March 16, 2009
If I were to arrive in Jakarta, this is probably the kind of room I would get. It could pretty much be any hotel room anywhere in the world. If I turned on that TV I could undoubtedly find the international versions of BBC or CNN. I would feel right at home. As I picked up The Malay Archipelago (1869) by Alfred Russel Wallace, the great naturalist, I was curious to learn about his experience traveling through Java, the island on which Jakarta is located. Wallace gives a decent portrait:
The Hôtel des Indes was very comfortable, each visitor having a sitting-room and bedroom opening on a verandah, where he can take his morning coffee and afternoon tea. In the centre of the quadrangle is a building containing a number of marble baths always ready for use; and there is an excellent table d'hôte breakfast at ten, and dinner at six, for all which there is a moderate charge per day. [84]
His hotel was far smaller than the hotel palaces of our time, but it just as surely offered an expected set of comforts. Those emphatically British comforts have been supplanted by the international comforts of a modern hotel.
Wallace is primarily concerned with the natural environment of the Malay Archipelago, which is largely defined by the modern nation of Indonesia.. with a lesser portion being now Malaysia. Wallace is at pains to explain that these islands are quite large. He presents the island of Borneo (today's Kalimantan) with the British Isles superimposed upon it:
Wallace writes: "... in one of them, Borneo, the whole of the British Isles might be set down, and would be surrounded by a sea of forests" (2). That's a lovely image of all Britain being swallowed up by Borneo. He also explains that the island of Java is about the size of Ireland, although being long and thin it is of quite different shape. Point taken: these are not minor islands but something like a Europe of the seas.
Wallace singles out Java for special praise: "...Java is probably the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world" (76). He acknowledges the deep history of Java, but to do this he cites previous sources. It's not his area of expertise. Wallace's real interest is in the natural environment of Java, which is marked by 45 volcanoes, active and inactive. Jakarta is a modern megacity, but further out in Java there are stunning natural scenes such as the picture below:
This is a photograph of Bromo, an active volcano in the midst of a much larger caldera. Wallace does not draw much in the way of landscapes. He illustrates instead some of the small creatures that he discovers:
This butterfly has an interesting story connected to it:
One day a boy brought me a butterfly between his fingers, perfectly unhurt. He had caught it as it was sitting with wings erect sucking up the liquid from a muddy spot by the roadside... It proved to be the rare and curious Charaxes kadenii, remarkable for having on each hind wing two curved tails like a pair of callipers. It was the only specimen I ever saw, and is still the only representative of its kind in English collections. [87]
I love that image of a butterfly sucking at a muddy spot beside the road.. and then caught by a boy. It's a perfect image of beauty distracted by the daily mud.
Butterflies play a leading role in this official tourism video for Indonesia:
Watching this video you can feel the transition between Wallace as a discoverer of natural rarities.. and the commodification of those rarities as a tourist draw. This is not completely out of Wallace's ken since he looks forward to a time when the wonders of Java will be more widely known:
I believe, therefore, that Java may fairly claim to be the finest tropical island in the world, and equally interesting to the tourist seeking after new and beautiful scenes; to the naturalist who desires to examine the variety and beauty of tropical nature... [76]
The tourists will come.. and his butterflies will become an ad for the island!
There is something degrading about the tourist's relationship to the place visited. The more tourists, the more a culture begins to parody itself to attract hard currency. One advantage of virtual travel is that I can learn about the world but not enter as a tourist.. and never have to pay money to stay in a palace hotel with its international comforts.
Alfred Russel Wallace. The Malay Archipelago. 1869.
Picture #1 (My room at Parklane Hotel, Jakarta) is by Flickr user irwandy, used by Crative Commons License.
Picture #2 (Mount Bromo, Java) is by Flickr user batigolix, used by Creative Commons License.
India as an Area of Darkness
March 14, 2009
The first thing to realize about An Area of Darkness by V.S. Naipaul is that it was first published in 1964—several years before the popularization of India as a place of enlightenment by the Beatles. And his book reads as a preemptive strike on that idea of India as a source of spiritual light. Naipaul prefers to dwell on dirtiness and public defecation.
The metaphor of darkness comes up several times, and I am not always sure what he means by it:
To me as a child the India that had produced so many of the persons and things around me was featureless, and I thought of the time when the transference was made as a period of darkness, darkness which also extended to the land, as darkness surrounds a hut at evening, though for a little way around the hut there is still light. The light was the area of my experience, in time and place. [24]
Naipaul grew up in Trinidad surrounded by an environment that had received its form from India, even as actual memories of India were lost. Later in the book there is an interesting passage in which he mentions his familiarity of the Himalayas from "brightly colored religious pictures in my grandmother's house" (178). He had no memories or stories passed on to him of a concrete place that was India, just vague abstractions.. spiritual postcards. Thus India was for him an "area of darkness" out of which arrived complete the world he knew as a child. Now what to do with the metaphor of a hut at evening, with light extending only a short ways out from the hut? Perhaps this emphasizes the islanded and limited nature of his upbringing in Trinidad.. surrounded by elements that give evidence of coming from from somewhere deep in time and space.. but whose origin he could never imagine.
Near the end of the book he makes another go at the "area of darkness" concept. Having spent a full year in India he admits his failure:
India had not worked its magic on me. It remained the land of my childhood, an area of darkness; like the Himalayan passes, it was closing up again, as fast as I withdrew from it, into a land of myth; it seemed to exist in just the timelessness which I had imagined as a child, into which, for all that I walked on Indian earth, I knew I could not penetrate. [274]
In this passage note how "land of my childhood" and "area of darkness" are directly aligned. This land of darkness is not just an unknown land to which Naipaul had no connection, but a formative part of his past.. the part just out there beyond what he can remember. Naipaul makes forays into this dark world that was his progenitor, but he can never really grasp or define it. That at least is what he says, but the book itself is concrete and detailed when it comes to setting down events and persons. No matter how he personally feels about India getting swallowed up in his imagination and being in the end unknowable, the reader does not have that sense upon putting down the book.. which is a plus!
As you can tell from the above discussion, this book has the feel of being a very personal project for Naipaul. It is this personal aspect that makes the book something more than a travel narrative. Naipaul makes use of the fact that his own identity as a part of the Indian diaspora makes his response to India a point of broad interest. Thus he gets away with things in this travel narrative that another writer never could. He can be rude and judgmental toward what he observes, but it does not come out as mean spirited because these personal responses are part of the interest of the book.
The opening chapter of the book is an excellent example of what I mean by this excusable harshness. He stops in Egypt on his way by boat to India, and gets to Cairo:
Cairo revealed the meaning of the bazaar: narrow streets encrusted with filth, stinking even on this winter's day; tiny shops full of shoddy goods; crowds; the din, already barely supportable, made worse by the steady blaring of motor-car horns; medieval buildings partly collapsed... [4]
You get the idea that he is not an enthusiast for Cairo! He even announces that he took a bus back to Alexandria two days early and retreated onto his ship. Really? So Cairo held nothing interesting for him? It was just a dirty bother? I have trouble imagining anywhere in the world, let alone a great cultural capital, that I would dismiss so easily. If I were to write about any place in the world in this same harsh manner I would be marked as a boor. But in Naipaul it is OK because his response to the East is a part of the inner drama he is working to narrate.
V.S. Naipaul. An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India. Vintage, 1981.
Old Islamic Roads
March 12, 2009
It's hard not to empathize with Tariq Ramadan after watching several YouTube videos in which he bats away hostile questions. The hostility stems in part from his pedigree: grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Somehow, many assume, behind this Western looking and acting Muslim theologian there must lurk a double-speaking radical. I also sense a secret fear among commentators that Islam may be perfectly able to articulate itself in non-radical and non-threatening ways. That is Ramadan's specialty. And then where would we find another civilization-threatening Other?
Radical Reform is his recently published study of how Islam should be reformed. He does not think reform should be along a trajectory mirroring that of Christianity, but along its own internally defined one. And yes, he states, Islam must continue to develop; it cannot stay frozen in time. The Quran and the Hadith are universal revelations, but the social context into which the principles of the Quran and Hadith are applied is always changing.. and so Muslims must constantly work to discern how Islam can be realized and lived in a new situation. In the shock and awe of colonialism and the transformations of globalization Muslims have stepped back from that effort to re-apply the faith and too often settled for easy answers.
The easiest answer of all, for Muslims, is the desire to re-create the 7th century world of the prophet and his immediate followers. The duty of every Muslim would then be to dress, act, and think as if living in another time and place. This is the central position of Salafist Islam. Ramadan is especially sharp when arguing against this easy answer:
To confuse eternal principles and historical models is simplistic and, most of all, particularly serious: idealizing something in a moment of history (in this instance, the city of Medina) leads to the thoughtless and guilty denial of that history and reduces the universality of Islam's principles to the dream of an impossible return to the past, to an irresponsible "nostalgia of origins." [19]
This is a direct criticism of a popular strand of conservative Islam. Ramadan reads it out of court in no uncertain terms.
At the same time Ramadan is not interested in jettisoning the Islamic past for a liberal future. A frustration I feel toward conservative versions of Islam is that they are a simplification and abridgement of the historical breadth of Islam. Islamic thought in the past has often gone outside the boundaries of what is today orthodoxy. The way forward for Islam is to re-engage with its past and discover the novel points of view that could once again be live options.. if they only received consideration.
Ramadan signals in Radical Reform that he is a student of this wide Islamic past, and will let this past influence the way he thinks about current issues: "Becoming reconciled to that rich past is the best way of devising new paths toward the future" (27). Ramadan approaches the past not with a hope of finding a perfect world to be mimicked, but instead views study of the past as an opportunity to think through the decision making process that led to particular applications of Islam to particular places. It is the discipline of sound decision making that is ultimately what we can gain from the past. That is to say, the past can furnish us with a decision-making framework by which we can apply Islam to a radically new context.
Needless to say, this embrace of the past, while pushing away any slavish following of it, is deeply harmonious with the philosophy being worked out little by little here at Old Roads. I was thrilled to read a passage like this:
If modernity, progress in any era, means "breaking away from tradition," then such modernity may very well be the euphemistic expression of a state of being that has no landmarks, no history, no principles, no vision. A modernity that rejoices in its situation without really knowing what it is. That is madness, alienation. [27]
As Ramadan critiques status-quo versions of Islam, he at the same time establishes what we might call a prophetic voice for Islam. It is an Islam that will not be accommodated to the present, but that will challenge and reconfigure any social context into which it comes. The vision of modernity as rootless and alienated from itself owes something to Karl Marx and his analysis of the human price of constant social transformation brought by capitalism. "All that is solid melts into the air"—that turns out to be a call for both a radical re-fashioning of Islam and a radical challenge to the modern world.
Tariq Ramadan. Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation. Oxford UP, 2009.
Rolfe's Thoughts
March 10, 2009
Rolfe is described by the narrator of Clarel as a trapper or pioneer.. "Or one who might his business ply/ On waters under tropic sky" (96). With that it's hard not to recall that the writer of this book is best known for his sailing accounts.. and to begin to suspect that Rolfe is a stand-in for Melville himself. We are a long way from the tropics here in Jerusalem, and the from the island and ocean scenery of Typee (1846) and Moby Dick (1851), but there is still something of the sea in this character.. it's even in his eyes:
Intense he spake, his eyes of blue
Altering, and to eerie hue,
Like Tyrrhene seas when overcast;
The which Vine noted, nor in joy,
Inferring thence an ocean-waste
Of earnestness without a buoy... [101]
It could be the ancient mariner passing through Jerusalem.. compelled to speak out. His new acquaintance Vine thinks he sees a vast stretching emptiness inside him. There is a splendor to his thought, but it is a splendor that appears to float free of every intellectual buoy and into a kind of wildness.
What Melville means with this description is clear as Rolfe sets out a comparison of Christ to Osiris. Rolfe has a mind that does not stop to recognize dogmas or formal divisions, but insists on mixing figures and pointing out how Christ replaces Osiris. He offers this as vague fulfillment of the passage in Hosea: "Out of Egypt have I called my son." It is the kind of ready mixing of layers of time and place that I have already mentioned as a characteristic of this long poem.
Oddly, this line of thought concerning Christ and Osiris is not offered as a counter to faith, but as an example of its continuity:
Yea, long as children feel afright
In darkness, men shall fear a God;
And long as daisies yield delight
Shall see His footprints in the sod. [100]
Melville is working out a theory of comparative religion that allows for constant cross-over in religious reference. Since religion is stirred up by universal human responses to the world, it will repeat itself in different cultural contexts.
To explain the expansiveness of Rolfe's thought, Melville puts to use an oriental image that he must have found in a book:
...when ye, meeting, scan
In waste the Baghdad caravan,
And solitude puts on the stir,
Clamor, dust, din of Ninevah,
As horsemen, camels, footmen all,
Soldier and merchant, free and thrall,
Pour by in tide processional;
So to the novice streamed along
Rolfe's filing thoughts, a wilderness throng. [103]
Something similar is communicated by Dylan with the line "I need a dumptruck baby to unload my head." Melville works out a more elaborate metaphor that consists of a big loud procession moving through his head. He is a mess of ideas, he seems to be saying.. and these ideas are at odds with each other.
It is common to understand Rolfe as a representation of Melville, but Rolfe also has the type of mind that would have to stand behind a work like Clarel.. which finds no resolution or buoy of faith, even though it works around these ideas for about 500 pages. It is a clamor of characters, places, and memories. Melville seems to be giving us a hint that the book as a whole is a faithful representation of his own teeming mind.. filled with speculations, stories, and memories.
It is this teeming quality that has always drawn me to Melville. I remember ages ago—like in high school—coming across Melville writing that not two weeks goes by in which he has not turned over on himself inside. That struck me at the time as an apt description of how I felt. Now as I continue to read Melville I find that I also admire his allowance of multitudes.. indeed an oriental procession marching straight through the brain.
Herman Melville. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Northwestern UP, 2008.
Old Dutch Jakarta
March 8, 2009
Kota is the name for the old colonial section of Jakarta, where the Dutch built Batavia in 1620. The picture above is of the old town hall, now converted into the Jakarta History Museum. Some of the larger buildings have been renovated and converted into museums.. while others have been left to crumble. Kota is close to the water and at one time this would have been the city center. The Dutch even had canals dug in an attempt to re-create their own familiar urban landscape. Funny how wherever we go in the world we end up re-creating what we already know.
This area is tiny in comparison with the sprawl of Jakarta:
I marked in red the area where the Dutch established Batavia. Seen now colonial foundations such as this seem inconsequential, but the experience of colonialism is much larger than the area would make it seem. Merdeka Square, the center of modern independent Jakarta, should be understood as a counter statement to this earlier center. That is the legacy of colonialism: the need to always compare and counter a perceived past. (The best photo tour of Kota is available from The Great Mirror website maintained by cultural geographer Bret Wallach.)
I would spend part of a day seeing the colonial city, but that does not mean Kota would be on every itinerary. Most tourists and visitors will see only a limited amount of Jakarta.. just as most readers will know only one or two of the best known works by any given author. Getting to know Jakarta will mean getting a sense of the Jakarta that most people who visit carry around in their heads. What follows are a couple of resources I have discovered to help with this.
This is a delightful video tour of Jakarta by YouTube user KittyKattyKoo. Kitty has a host of video blogs in which she talks about her life, but this one is most helpful in showing what the city means to her personally. She names seven "wonders":
1. Sunda Kelapa harbor
2. Museum Bahari
3. National Museum
4. Istiqlal
5. Museum Wayang
6. National Monument
7. Dunia Fantasi
Representing Kota are 1, 2, and 5. While 3, 4, and 6 are located at Merdeka Square (see my last Indonesia post). Only the seventh is left, and that is an amusement park. The tour is put together from Kitty's own photos, which often feature her in the standard tourist pose in front of a building or pretending to hold a background monument in her hand.
This YouTube video has gotten about 4500 views since it was posted in August 2008. The comments to the video make it clear that this is functioning as an unofficial guide for some who are coming to Indonesia. Zerobio comments: "Thank you for posting this! I am planning a trip to Jakarta (from Canada) to meet a special indonesian girl and this was very helpful." To which Kitty replies: "Hi zerobio! I hope you will have a great time with your special indonesian girl! ^_^."
A second resource for getting to know Jakarta is a slideshow of a collection of photos posted on Flickr by user der Willy. The slideshow covers more than just Kota. It has the feel of someone who is snapping photos of whatever is encountered. So in effect this is a repository of the visual world that was felt to be remarkable by a foreign tourist. These images range from tall buildings to sunsets to crowded streets to Turkish dancers in a modern mall. Flickr allows this group of photos to be embedded as a slideshow:
If I were to visit Jakarta for 36 hours it is unlikely that I would take photos that are too much different than this. If I were to stay there for part of a year and really get to know the city, that would be something else.. and you could expect more real discrimination to creep into the photos. But with just 36 hours most of us would be struck by about the same things.. which is why imagined travel is as good as a common tourist visit to a site.
Photo #1 (Stadhuis Batavia, Jakarta) is from Wikipedia Commons, used by Creative Commons License.
Darwin's Nightmare:
A Documentary of Globalization
March 7, 2009
Africa is hard to represent. Glaring poverty is present, but an emphasis on images of poverty downplays the vibrancy of local cultures. On the other hand a celebration of Africa tempts one to ignore the real problems. Darwin's Nightmare (2004) by Hubert Sauper does not thread that needle gracefully. He looks around the city Mwanza in Tanzania and sees misery and economic unfairness. You could gloss this film with a simple "Africans are living wretched lives because they are being taken advantage of by Europeans." I am sympathetic to the broad complaint, but still feel that the people of Africa don't get a fair representation.. nor does the complexity of the economic situation receive full explanation.
To get a sense of how differently Africa can be portrayed it is useful to watch Kiarostami's ABC Africa (my comments here). Kiarostami made his film in Uganda, north of Lake Victoria. If you watch both you will immediately note the difference in palette and tone. Kiarostami does not leave the viewer with the impression that Africa is a hell hole.. and he is obviously searching for a way to understand how life continues even amidst economic hardship. It is a searching film.. while Darwin's Nightmare is a telling film.
Despite its faults, Darwin's Nightmare is an important example of the documentary of globalization. It's a genre that shines light on the workings of our global economy. Often the results are somewhat horrifying, such as when in Manufactured Landscapes (my comments here) the viewer is confronted with images of poor Chinese people sifting by hand through the broken remains of computers and other electronica. The goal is to make an easily overlooked point: our Western lifestyle has consequences for people outside our immediate frame of reference. Perhaps the whole system would not work if there were not incredibly poor and insecure people laboring at the global margins. This is the message of Darwin's Nightmare when we watch airplanes loaded with fish fillets leaving Tanzania even as the country is threatened by famine.
But what about those fish fillets? Sauper wants us to feel the vast injustice of tons and tons of good fish leaving a country with starving people. He shows us a group of local Indians who manage this fish business. He interviews the Russians who fly the airplanes that land at Mwanza. But he also gives snippets of visiting Europeans who give conferences and sound serious about economic matters. The implication is that the real systematic violence is coming from the European system that is plundering Africa.. and even—it is implied—importing weapons for use in various regional conflicts.
One worry about this kind of presentation is that it is a logic that if widely adopted could lead to the kind of purification that made Zimbabwe an economic disaster. The Indian managers of the fish factory look ridiculous.. but they are running a successful business and employing locals. Given their own seemingly modest offices it did not appear that local hardship could be pinned on them. We never really hear their voices or learn about their lives.. at least not in comparison with a book like A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (obviously sympathetic to the Indian diaspora in Africa).
I try at times to imagine a path besides globalization for a local economy like that of Mwanza. It might seem easy just to keep the fish fillets and feed all the hungry Tanzanians, but it's not like there are lots of other reasons to keep those airplanes landing. Keeping the fish would mean a reversion to a local economy. People would have better fish to eat.. but in dollar terms they would be still poorer. Any move past a subsistence economy must entail the location of items in demand in the West.. and then the export of those items. In this part of Tanzania the fish from Lake Victoria fit the bill. Could this integration into the global economy realistically be resisted? I don't know.. But I agree that it leads to at least the appearance of real injustice.
Icelandic Follies
March 6, 2009
Iceland became one of the major casualties in the global recession. It became the first Western nation since 1976 to receive funds from the IMF. From our vantage point in the US it might be easy to think: those Scandinavians and their socialism! But the New Yorker article "Lost" by Ian Parker (link here, but full text only for subscribers) goes some way toward demonstrating that a familiar conservative economic philosophy lies behind their collapse. It turns out to be story that involves massive privatization, deregulation of the banking industry, and the lowering of corporate taxes. A leader in this movement was a professor named Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson.
"Our dreams were of a free Iceland with a lot of opportunities for the common man to become rich," Gissurarson said. Starting in 1991, Iceland "liberalized the economy," he recalled. We lowered the corporate tax rate from forty-five percent to eighteen percent, and the marginal tax rate from forty-seven per cent to thirty-six. We really created a very business-friendly tax environment."
Gissurarson also published a book entitle How Can Iceland Become the Richest Country in the World (2001). And to top it all off he can recount a visit to the White House in 2004, where he joined in singing "Happy Birthday" to George W. Bush.
I won't go through the details of Iceland's unleveraged rise in the world of high finance.. and its undoing. But it sure sounds familiar. It's the story of a few people taking advantage of the system to rake in astounding profits but ultimately leaving their country holding the bag as the system crashed down. And what is amazing is the way these guys who are responsible for the overreach just won't take responsibility. At the close of the article Parker notes the response of Gissurarson:
He also said, as if the thought were occurring to him for the first time, that it may be that "some of us are to blame indirectly, because we created a climate in which the entrepreneur was applauded. The businessman, the guy who takes over companies, asset-stripping—he was a hero in Icelandic folklore that was created by some of us who strongly supported the free market." He went on, "Indirectly, I take some blame for it, but, if you think about it, It's not my fault. It's the fault of the left-wing intellectuals, who should have been giving a counter-view!" He added, "You can't blame people for their successes—you have to blame those who fail. We were too successful with the free-market philosophy."
It is just breath-taking the amount of delusion tucked into that paragraph. And no matter what let's pin the blame on left-wing intellectuals! Surely we are starting to see a familiar set of "fingerprints" in the global recession, and they are the prints of privatizing low-tax ideologues.
At some point.. and I don't think we are there yet.. this economic philosophy will be recognized as a moral mirage for profit grabbing. Under the slogans of freedom and openness a group of well-connected people stole our wealth and our resources. It was a distortion of our heritage: freedom was transformed into another word for gaming the system. Government regulations (to keep our food safe, to limit certain financial transactions) became tantamount to a form of tyranny. Limitation was bad, and the smart people would find a way around those limitations and finally cash in.
It is possible now to feel the anger here in the US. Even in Iceland they are protesting! But the real pitched battle now is in how to direct that anger. By all rights it should be directed at the purveyors of this economic philosophy of privatization, deregulation, and lower taxes for corporations. But whether those people will get the blame they deserve—at least in the short term—is an open question. The efforts to brand Obama as a socialist are an example of a powerful push to direct popular anger toward the "left wing intellectuals" who are working to bring about a fairer economic system. I am not always sure that their efforts will fail.
Between the Covers
March 5, 2009
A cover is a magical thing. You can place a series of randomly selected photographs on a series of pages, but then wrap around them a nice cover and even the most sophisticated reader will search for and likely identify common themes and patterns. A cover can even be thought of as a mental cue to locate some form of consistency.
The Bible is the supreme example of a book created by the addition of a cover. It includes books written centuries apart in conditions totally dissimilar.. and yet, there it is: a book wrapped in a leather cover. Readers through the centuries have been encouraged to locate and explain any patterns arising from this grouping of works. A common exegetical rule is to "interpret the Bible by the Bible", which in practice means that difficult passages are assimilated to easy passages. What we finally have is a case of the book triumphing over the individual works that comprise it.
I have often wondered about an experiment in which a group of people were brought together for a few months, not having known each other previously. They would be given a book made up of random pages turned up from Google Books searches. Give this book to the group and call it something like "Eagle Wisdom." The group would have no other book, and, as people tend to bond and form a unit with people who share a common purpose, I bet the book would be scoured to locate a meaning or purpose. Passages that we never could have foreseen would be located in the random book and used to identify the values and ideals of the group. A sense of presumed unity would slowly settle on the book and people would be pretty sure they could see why it was put together in the way it was.
Covers don't have to be literal book covers. Anything that imposes a beginning and an ending represents a cover. A concert is a kind of invisible fold in time that encloses a group of songs. A class at a university functions as a cover since it defines a group of books to be read together. This term I'm teaching Freshman Studies and it is fascinating to watch how a group of works that no one else has ever thought of reading together come to gain a currency in the class.. and are used to cross-reference and support each other in discussions. That's the power of the cover and the psychological trick it plays on us.
A web page that lists a group of links is something of a cover too.. although a tricky aspect of the web is the way a cover is so hard to impose on the information. A web page may have a list of links, but as soon as you click on one you find yourself on another web page that is itself a new cover. I wonder if this is part of the difficulty of reading online: there never seems to be a cover that tricks us into reflection and pattern discovery. Rich reading demands the application of the imagination to the material at hand.. so that it becomes something else in our minds.
It occurs to me now that a text is essentially defined by the presence of a cover. As with so many critics I understand "text" quite expansively to mean any unit of creation. A poem on a loose leaf of paper is a text because it is bounded by the paper itself.. which functions as a cover. A group of poems by various authors and bound into a pleasant anthology would be another text, the work pointing to an implied editor. A text is a work of the imagination that is bounded by a cover.
No, I take that back.. that part about a text as "a work of the imagination." Because actually it's the cover that creates the illusion of imagination. The poems in an anthology could be randomly selected, but if they are bound together we would treat it like a purposeful collection. Likewise words on a page could be randomly generated.. but we go on looking for a meaning.
God and Macroeconomics
March 3, 2009
The debate on Obama's stimulus plan was marked by a disconnect in metaphors. Conservatives constantly refer to the microeconomics of the home: "just as families all across our nation are tightening their belts, so we as a nation need to cut back spending to meet lower revenues." The idea here is that macroeconomic decisions should mostly mirror microeconomic considerations; the nation ought to be run like our homes. This is a compelling argument for many people.. as nothing is easier than a transport of values from one level of analysis to another. The liberal argument in favor of the stimulus rests on a break between microeconomic values and macroeconomic policies.
The notion that different levels of experience should be analyzed in different ways can be seen in traditional theological constructions about the nature of God. An obvious problem arises if one believes in the God presented in the Bible: how to explain God's actions such as hardening the heart of Pharaoh (Exodus 4.21) or his use of agents such as Satan (Job)? Or what about instances of God actually taking the life of someone like Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5.1-6)? These passages are easy if one places God on a higher moral level and essentially says that it's OK for God to do things no human could do. I would certainly not feel comfortable striking down someone who lied about the amount of money gained by selling a property, but God has no problem doing that (see YouTube dramatization below).
Calvin necessarily works through this issue as he writes about the nature of God in his Institutes:
...where God is said to bend or draw Satan himself and all the wicked to his will, there emerges a more difficult question. For carnal sense can hardly comprehend how in acting through them he does not contract some defilement from their transgression, and even in a common undertaking can be free of all blame, and indeed can justly condemn his ministers. [228-9]
And it is difficult to understand how God gets away with running the world in the way he supposedly does. According to theologians an all-knowing and all-powerful God is able to act decisively in ways that humans cannot. Human morality will always be based on fundamental limitations: we do not know the heart of another person and often act with incomplete knowledge. Our human morality is a product of fallibility to a large extent. Since God knows exactly what is in the heart of Ananias and Sapphira, or taking place in the cities of the Canaanites, he is able to take life and act outside human moral boundaries.
I don't buy such theological reasoning, but it shows that care has to be taken when comparing different levels. In the economy there is a similarly stark division between the rules of the home and the possibilities of national monetary policy. To begin with, the Fed prints the money! It also sets the rules by which we all play when it comes to interest rates and bankruptcy laws. The nation resembles God in traditional theological terms: it is not playing within limited rules.. it creates its own income and writes the rule book. Households, though, live in the midst of limitation and must adjust spending to income. They must also adapt to the rule book.
To understand
the nation and its fiscal policy as a mirror of a household is as foolish as trying to imagine God playing by the ten commandments. It doesn't work. But the metaphor of nation as family has its uses: it is a readily graspable excuse not to do anything to help the people who obviously need help.. and which could be helped by sane fiscal policy. Thus we find Republican governors actually contemplating a refusal of extended unemployment benefits.
John Calvin. Institutes of the Christan Religion, volume 1. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. The Westminster Press, 1960.
Symbolic Center of Jakarta
March 1, 2009
The first thing to do in a new city is view its symbolic center.. that is, where the city self-consciously presents itself to visitors. Jakarta is a sprawling city, but here around Merdeka Square are three important sites: the National Monument, the National Musum,and the Istiqlal Mosque ("Independence Mosque"). Each is related to the idea of Indonesia a nation. I anticipate that one complex aspect of recent Indonesian history will be the way this eternally diverse archipelago of islands—with over 300 distinct ethnic groups—has been made to cohere as a nation.
The National Monument (Monas) is a column topped by a gilded flame. It was begun under Sukarno (the first post-independence leader) and completed by Suharto (who overthrew Sukarno in 1967).
The monument to independence is a standard item in post colonial nations. The trick for a monument like this appears to be the use of a modernist style that marks the monument as a participant in international currents while at the same time adding hints of a local flavor.
As is evident from the aerial view, this monument stands in the midst of a large square. Like the mall in Washington DC, a number of important institutions stand on the edge of this Merdeka Square. One is the National Museum, which is partially housed in a building that goes back to Dutch colonial days. The museum's website gives a decent introduction to the range of its collections. The collections are heavily slanted to classical Indonesian art, consisting mainly of Hindu and Buddhist art. A second emphasis is the rich multiethnic and tribal heritage of Indonesia. I am sure there are elements of Islamic art and history mixed in there, but the museum's website heavily concentrates on non-Islamic artifacts. Judging by their photographs, visitors are also most interested in the non-Islamic heritage (see this collection).
The National Museum comments on the above statue of Bhairava the Tantric-Buddhist god:
The whole iconography of statue is a very good example of syncretism, the mixture of different religious beliefs, predominant at that time. Bhairava is the frightening appearance of shiva (Hinduism) and shows a Buddha in his hair bun (Buddhism). He wears a belt with a representation of Kala on it (Hinduism); the bells hanging from the belt are symbols of Tantrism.
This heavy syncretism will be fun to explore in these posts, but it also might be a clue as to why the Islamic material is missing from the museum: Islam's official narrative will contrast with the religious mixing that characterizes material like this statue. Also, let's not forget that the National Museum is putting forward a tourist-friendly face of Indonesia.
The third important building on Merdeka Square is the Mosque Istiqlal, or Mosque of Independence. As its name suggests, this mosque was constructed after independence (by Sukarno).
Again note the strategy of adopting a style that is clearly influenced by modernist forms, but adding hints of native Indonesian elements. This kind of national mosque stands beside other extravagant examples such as the Hassan II Mosque near Casablanca in Morocco. It is a statement of nationalism every bit as much as the nearby National Monument.
This, by the way, is a truly large mosque. What it is like to visit this mosque on an Islamic festival day is beautifully clear in the YouTube video below. The video is a faithful record of walking into the mosque:
About two-thirds of the way through there is a look out of the mosque toward an old Catholic Church.. and we get a sense of how this mosque, set in the midst of what was once the European city, is a statement of national independence.. awesomely overshadowing colonial religious structures.
National Monument photo by Flickr user datasage, used by Creative Commons License.
National Museum photo (statue) by Flickr user glenaa.
Mosque Istiqlal photo by Flickr user HKmPUA, used by Creative Commons License.
PDF file of Flickr series of photos on National Museum in Jakarta.
PDF file of National Museum (Indonesia) homepage.
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