Why I Like Religious Studies
May 29, 2009
Today was tailored to make me think about why I like teaching religious studies. I got up this morning and went to my intro class where I was supposed to teach about the Bahai but got sidetracked by a discussion of Scientology. Then in the afternoon I taught Radical Reform by Tariq Ramadan, a book that sketches out a framework for interpreting the Quran. Then skip forward a couple of hours and I am at our small religious studies symposium listening to student presentations on Mormonism, the problem of evil in Christianity, Theosophy and Gandhi, Palestinian representations of the land, the psychology of terrorism, and a close reading of a Buddhist poem. I guess that's enough for one day.
What I like about these topics is that nowhere is there any sense of deciding on what is true or correct. Our fascination is always in clarifying the frames through which different people and religious groups are perceiving their world. In other words, everybody's crazy, and we like it that way. Our particularly human craziness is the deep need to find coherence and significance in life, and this leads our minds to connect the dots of life into fascinating patterns. Philosophers have to worry about truth claims and all that, as religious scholars we get to watch human beings spinning their webs of significance.
My intro class got off track when I showed this video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology:
The video has its comic-relief value in watching Tom Cruise go on with a high level of intensity about his experience of life.. but the video also makes you think about the nature of religion. At 4:05 Cruise says: "If you're a Scientologist you see things the way they are. In all its glory, in all its complexity."
But of course Cruise is not really seeing "things the way they are." He's experiencing the world through a distorting lens. Just listen to him talk in and you'll hear the Scientology lingo: KSW, out-ethics, criminon, SP. It's obvious how completely mediated his experience of the world is. That is what religions do: they get people to believe that they are seeing the world for what it is. Other people are "blind" or "arrogant".. they somehow choose not to see what is obvious. But the believer knows he or she sees the world for what it is.
It makes me wonder what the mind of a religious studies scholar should be like. Obviously the claim to see the world as it is will be problematic. Rather there we should strive for a consciousness of our own lens and apply constant effort to understand the lenses through which others see the world.
There is no such thing as arriving at a pure view of the world. Wallace Stevens has perhaps the best treatment of this:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man creplied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
Religion is, of course, what is being played upon the blue guitar: "A tune beyond us, yet ourselves."
Burn After Reading
May 25, 2009
Burn After Reading is admittedly a minor effort by the Coen Brothers, but it's a near perfect example of the moral universe they tend to create. At the end of Blood Simple, the first film by the Coen Brothers, one feels sorry for the impossible task of some investigator who will need to connect the dots between motives and actions. That's an impossible task because the characters are all acting on the basis of misunderstandings. Although it's a dark comedy, Burn After Reading works in a similar way: it piles up bodies and actions based on misunderstandings. By the end there's simply no way the story could be pieced back together.. and I wonder if that is not part of the pleasure of watching it. The sequence of events has to be experienced as it occurs, and not recollected or pieced together.
At the center of the absurdity in Burn After Reading is the character played by Frances McDormand, who just wants plastic surgery so that she can improve her dating life. She needs money and so she bumbles into a plot to blackmail a former CIA agent and when that falls through shows up at the Russian embassy. A Coen Brothers film is effective because we are trained to look for evil.. but all we get here is a vain woman who wants to improve her flabby arms. This banal view of morality is perhaps the Coen Brothers' ultimate take-away from screwball comedies.. whose relentless confusion and turns are now applied to human moral choices. The moral world of Burn After Reading is more typical of the Coen Brothers than a film like No Country for Old Men in which evil is personified as a relentless force.
As a footnote I should mention that Burn After Reading represents the incorporation of another strong regional setting, Washington DC. Several scenes take place on the mall with the Washington Monument rising in the background. The use of such settings I have explored elsewhere, but it's a tendency that continues here.
Memorial Day Parade
May 25, 2009
Today Aurora got to see her first parade. She was hoping for balloons, but we got lots of flags instead. By the end she could point out "American" flags. We waved at soldiers and firemen. One interesting point for me to see is the way a child is basically imprinted with good feelings about soldiers and the military. I sometimes worry about the way she has to see the Disney logo a thousand times.. whenever we begin a film. But similarly these parades are an introduction to the respect and valuation of force in our lives. We all like parades because they are parades.. but they are also teaching our national system of symbols.
Turtles, Aurora, and My New Camera
May 24, 2009
For the last three and a half years I have been carrying around my Canon G6, but now in anticipation of my summer travel to Egypt I have updated my camera to the G10. So far I love it. This new camera takes photos at 14.7 megapixels, while my old camera was "only" 7.1 megapixels. That's not a bad update after only a little over three years. I am hoping that this new camera will let me start posting photos of everyday life.. which is something I once did more often (here and here).
Today we took Aurora to the Bubolz Nature Preserve just outside Appleton. I had anticipated walking on the trails and pointing out birds to Aurora, but I did not count on the turtle sighting and her unwillingness to move too far past the pond and its rickety wooden piers. We saw two turtles swimming near the pier.. and others sunning themselves on fallen branches.
OK, OK. I know the main exhibit in a post like this will be Aurora. Here she is standing next to one of two overturned boats near the turtle pond. She needed to climb on them and try to pull them.. and knock on them to find out if anyone is inside.
Bin Laden and the Cave
May 23, 2009
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright is well worth a read for its ability to connect the dots for the career of Bin Laden and his partners in jihad. Wright also writes about the personal life of bin Laden with sensitivity. What was it like to be married to bin Laden? What about growing up as a child in his camps in Afghanistan? It is surprising how much we can know about his daily personal life, even as many of the operational issues remain opaque.
The chapter "Hijira" is an example of Wright's ability to plausibly interpret the inner world of bin Laden. In 1996 he was expelled from Sudan and reached a low point in his career. His followers were mostly scattered and his fortune was gone. He found himself back in Afghanistan, his old stomping grounds.. but the situation was now changed entirely. It was no longer a field ripe for glory in battling the Soviets. What was a would-be global terrorist to do? The key point is that bin Laden was able to locate himself in myth.. drawing from parallels in the life of the prophet Muhammad.
The hijra was the "migration" of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina, where Muhammad was granted authority. The hijra begins the Muslim calendar and is a fulcrum that divides the Quran itself into Meccan and Medinan chapters. But a hijra is not an exodus. The exodus marked a retreat from a place of persecution to a promised land where the past is left behind. The hijra is a retreat from persecution, but it marks the beginning of a flow back to conquer the place from which one has fled. Eight years after he left Mecca, Muhammad entered Mecca as conqueror. The hijra brings with it this implied continuation of the fight.
As I have argued elsewhere (here), one powerful strategy for individuals and groups to make sense of their present situation is the metaphoric mapping of a past mythic event onto the present situation. The hijra is a strong metaphoric template that is available to anyone who knows Islamic history. A template has its own guiding power since it often imposes an ending and a point of view on a present situation that by its nature has far less clarity.
Wright rightly recognizes the semiotics of bin Laden's retreat to Afghanistan. Bin Laden understood this as his own hijra, or flight from persecution. Then he exploited to the full the symbolism of his life in Afghanistan:
The key symbol of bin Laden's hijira, however, was the cave. The Prophet first encountered the angel Gabriel... in a cave in Mecca. Again, in Medina, when Mohammed's enemies pursued him, he hid in a cave that was magically concealed by a spiderweb. islamic art is replete with images of stalactites, which reference both the sanctuary and the encounter with the divine that caves provided the Prophet. For bin Laden, the cave was the last pure place. Only by retreating from society—and from time, history, modernity, corruption, the smothering West—could he presume to speak for the true religion. It was a product of bin Laden's public-relations genius that he chose to exploit the presence of the ammunition caves of Tora Bora as a way of identifying himself with the Prophet in the minds of many Muslims who longed to purify Islamic society... [233]
Wright points out the irony that the very caves that bin Laden excavated at great expense and with modern earth moving equipment.. and then fitted out with advanced communications equipment.. could become symbols for primitive Islam. Along with this there is his rugged, bedouin-like lifestyle and weapons symbolism that communicates a connection to an idealized early Islam. And then there is that calm and gentle manner. Put these things together and bin Laden can be easily read as a modern day Muhammad. His appeal has always been on the symbolic plane.. and that is what bin Laden has a genius for manipulating. (If Wright's portrayal of bin Laden is correct, the man himself stood in a curiously passive position atop al-Qaeda.. with perhaps limited involvement in what was actually happening.)
Bin Laden obviously wants to map Muhammad's story onto his own.. but the important move for any critical approach to bin Laden will be to see the massive gulf between himself and the ideal story.. and then when we see that gulf we will finally be amazed at the creative self-fashioning that allowed this man to stand out as a symbol of an ideal past.
Together Through Life - Bob Dylan
May 21, 2009
The picture on the back of Bob Dylan's new album Together Through Life tells us quite a bit about the album. The photo is by European photographer Josef Koudelka, and for an American it evokes a surreal sense of being out of place. The musicians in the background are clearly from another decade.. and their instruments connected to some other form of popular music. The mysterious and impeccably dressed black man looking back at us could be a blues musician. At any rate, we get a first look here at where we should place the music of this new album.
In his interview with Bill Flanagan, currently posted in full on Dylan's website, we find Dylan responding to a question about the source for the sound of this album:
Q: A lot of this album feels like a Chess record from the fifties. Did you have that sound in your head going in or did it come up as you played?
Dylan: Well some of the things do have that feel. It’s mostly in the way the instruments were played.
And this confirms what is obvious on a first listen to this album: much of it is influenced by the urban blues that we associate with Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf. The song "My Wife's Hometown" borrows from a song by Willie Dixon, another Chicago blues great. The use of the accordion on songs such as "I Feel a Change Comin' On" would seem to gesture toward the no less urban sound of immigrant communities. The album gains an unexpected richness through this mixing of urban sounds.. the kinds you might have heard walking through the Chicago of the late 1950s.
This marks a substantial change from Dylan's last three albums, which assume a timeless American folk background. The songs are often borrowed from old folk standards (Nettie Moore from the 19th century) or make explicit reference to a rural southern landscape ("All the rest of them rebel rivers.."). These three albums also end with an epic and meandering song that crowns the album. On Together Through Life we are listening to Dylan from a new place. We wander through America's cities and listen to lyrics that would not be out of place in the mouth of a blues great:
Well you're coming down High Street walking in the sun
You make a dead man rise and holler she's the one
Jolene, Jolene
Baby I am the king and you're the queen
That's from "Jolene".. and it's typical of the album as a whole. The lyrics are more grounded and immediate.. and less prone to the metaphysical speculation that shadows songs from the last three albums ("Not Dark Yet" or "Beyond the Horizon"). This paring away is what makes this such a different collaboration than his work on Desire with Jacques Levy, which tended toward the expansive and mystical. In this case Dylan has gotten plainer.
One way to view Dylan's career is as a tour through American musical styles. Beginning with the folk tradition exemplified by Woody Guthrie, Dylan proceeds to work through country, roots, Christian/Gospel, blues, and contemporary styles (Oh Mercy). You can throw in occasional experiments in other genres such as jazz. What has been unique about Dylan is that he throws himself into these styles with unparalleled fervency. He really converts to Christianity! He really moves to the country.. he fabricates his own Woody Guthrie-like biography. Dylan has been unusual in the extent to which he has not just explored genres, but lived those genres. Much of that has been tempered by Dylan over the last decade, but he still seems to really believe in the sounds he is trying to capture:
I like the mood of those records - the intensity. The sound is uncluttered. There’s power and suspense. The whole vibration feels like it could be coming from inside your mind. It’s alive. It’s right there. Kind of sticks in your head like a toothache. [from same Flanagan interview linked to above]
We've got other artists who move effortlessly from genre to genre.. what we lack, though, are ones that believe in these music styles. I was looking back at Dylan's liner notes to World Gone Wrong, and found that somebody had left the following comment:
the liner notes are, in my opinion, a Bible in itself. Words to live by. Not banter. I beleive Bob beleived what he wrote.
Now I'm not one to think I can get inside Bob's head, but he is extraordinarily good at making us think that he believes. He is not just performing a certain style, but expressing it as someone who knows the music from the inside. Together Through Life is another album that could be thought of as a concept album if we weren't so convinced that to Dylan there is nothing "concepty" about it. It's just him.
Time May Change Us
May 20, 2009
Above is a playlist of Aurora running around the small park close to our house. (A playlist being YouTube's way of letting us string together videos into a series.) It was a beautiful spring day.. two weeks ago I guess. The weather was breezy and fine, no reason at all to head home, Aurora was energetic.. if I could have stopped time I would have. I found myself thinking: I'm not sure if I could ever feel more content. When I feel like this I become conscious of every moment ticking past.. and there's nothing I can do.. it's soon over and done.
I now have one of the small Flip Video camcorders, and since it seemed like such a perfect day I brought it with me. It was about time to catch Aurora running and climbing on the equipment here. I should be using this small flip camcorder a lot in the near future.. as a tool to catch local scenes. Instead of editing a lot, I am planning on using the playlist to link short scenes in and around Appleton.
Back to Aurora. For quite a while she has loved to watch videos of herself on YouTube. It occurs to me that she is growing up with a quite different relationship to the small screen than I had growing up. My experience was based squarely on television and its programmed schedule. I can even remember the point in the 80s when everyone began to buy VHS players.. and how that in itself revolutionized or viewing choices. But that is nothing compared to what Aurora already takes for granted. She thinks of the screen as an interactive surface and points to the video she wants to see.
Something similar is true when it comes to Aurora's other favorite Web channel, SesameStreet.org. Since Sesame Street episodes are themselves broken up into short clips, the show transfers easily to a Web environment. The site offers a wealth of preset "playlists" that we can watch, mixing videos and games together. Aurora points to the video or character she wants to see. SesameStreet.org also offers the ability to make custom playlists and save them.. although we don't yet do this. I like to sit back and marvel at how personalized Aurora's experience of the media is becoming. I don't at all think this is bad.. or creating a generation of narcissists. I can't say exactly what the results will be of this new relation to the screen, but it seems to me that it builds a much more active relationship with the media.
How a Prophet Sees the World
May 19, 2009
I have a predilection for Neoplatonic interpretive fireworks. This interpretive system is based on connections between the rational and sensible world. That is to say, there is an invisible world of forms and a sensible world of perceptible things, and they are connected. As the Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali (1058-1111 AD) works out his interpretation of the famous light verse in the Quran (24.35), he first establishes this connection between the rational and sensible world:
The sensory world is a ladder to the rational world, for, if there were no connection and relationship between the two, the way of climbing to the rational world would be blocked. If climbing were impossible, travel to the presence of lordship and nearness to God would also be impossible. [26]
Yes, we'd truly be fucked if we could not climb to the rational world! Part of living in the modern world is getting used to having no place to climb to. But this older view of the world underwrites some expansive and imaginative interpretations of scripture. Any sensible thing that is mentioned in scripture can be taken as pointing us to a higher reality.
Al-Ghazali admits that there are too many "similitudes" in the Qur'an to possibly cover them all, but he gives a few examples of how interpretation should work. The most humorous is the interpretation of this hadith against dogs: "The angels do not enter a house in which there is a dog." Al-Ghazali argues that this has an obvious literal meaning, but also a spiritualized/psychologized one: "...what is meant is removing the dog of anger from the house of the heart, because it prevents the entrance of knowledge, which derives from the lights of angels, since anger is the ghoul of the rational faculty" (33). So casting out the dog is really about casting out anger. The reference to a dog in the sensible world is connected to some higher value in the rational world. Anything in scripture must be approached with this in mind.
The prophet who transmits scripture is thus a person particularly gifted at connecting sensible things to the rational world. You might wonder what it would be like to be such a person.. and to have such vision. Here al-Ghazali gets wonderfully specific:
This lets you know how the prophets see forms and how they witness the meanings behind the forms. In most cases, the meaning is prior to the inward witnessing. Then the meaning radiates from the witnessing upon the imaginal spirit, whereupon the imagination becomes imprinted with a form that parallels the meaning and resembles it. [35]
I take this to mean that if you are a prophet, then the higher meaning occurs to you first, and then that meaning is deflected into the imagination, which is a storehouse of sensible perceptions. The meaning gets matched to a corresponding sensible image, and this is the actual content of the revelation. There is a particularly direct connection between the rational world and the mind of the prophet.
The resulting revelation that comes from the prophet will then present itself to readers as a series of images that must be deciphered to arrive back at the "meaning" that first came to the prophet. The tools in doing this will be the general order of similitudes. There are things in the sensible world that have a proper reference in the higher rational world. Al-Ghazali compares this process to the interpretation of dreams.. and just as there are manuals for interpreting the things that commonly turn up in dreams, we could imagine a manual for understanding prophetic scripture. And that's the place of The Niche of Lights; it is an interpretive manual for the Qur'an and hadith.
Al-Ghazali. The Niche of Lights. Trans. David Buchman. Brigham Young UP, 1998.
Men of the Pit
May 17, 2009
As I begin to read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, a book that traces the radicalization of a group of men that eventually carried out the attacks of 9/11, I was reminded of how torture is not a new theme in this story. Wright begins by following the life of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamic thinker who worked out the broad definition of jahiliyya (time of ignorance) that justifies violent attacks against modern Muslim governments and the West.
Stories about Sayyid Qutb's suffering in prison have formed a kind of Passion play for Islamic fundamentalists. it is said that Qutb had a high fever when he was arrested; nonetheless, the state-security officers handcuffed him and forced him to walk to prison. He fainted several times along the way. For hours he was held in a cell with vicious dogs, and then, during long periods of interrogation, he was beaten. "The principles of the revolution have indeed been applied to us," he said, as he raised his shirt to show the court the marks of torture. [28]
And if we follow the story just a little further to Ayman Zawahiri, who would eventually be second in command in al-Qaeda, we again find torture showing up. The video clip above shows Zawahiri calling out to Western journalists. He was among those accused of having some connection to the assassination of Sadat in 1981. The video clip above shows the beginning of his speech, but this ending is missing:
[In the dirty cells] they kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables, they shocked us with electricity! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs! And they used the wild dogs! And they hung us over the edges of doors"—here he bends forward to demonstrate—"with our hands tied at the back! They arrested the wives, the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, the sons!" [55]
I would not claim that someone like Zawahiri was no threat before the torture, but torture is an experience that in its personal degradation allows for radicalization on a new scale.. and an erosion of the self.
We should also beware of the moral power we give to these ideologues when they undergo torture. In his commentary on the Quran, Qutb arrives at Sura 85, which begins with an obscure reference to pre-Islamic believers who were put to death in a fire. Qutb sketches the event like this:
The immediate theme of the surah is the pit incident, when a community of believers who lived before the advent of Islam... were faced by ruthless and tyrannic enemies who sought to force them away from their faith. The believers refused. The tyrants then lit up a great fire in a pit they dug, and threw them into it. The believers were thus burnt to death in front of big crowds which were gathered to witness this ghastly act of extermination.
Then Qutb points to the moral purity that comes from this experience:
[The sura] includes a reference to the greatness of faith which exalted itself over the atrocious cruelty of men and triumphed over the fire, attaining a level of sublimity which is an honour to all the generations of mankind. It also refers to the heinousness of the crime and the evil and injustice it involves in comparison with the sublimity, innocence and purity of the believers.
Since torture is inscribed into the story of Sayyid Qutb, and has already become one of the expectations for a radical who attempts to establish an Islamic order, the use of Guantanamo as a kind of law-free black hole for detaining and torturing terrorists played into their hands. For a long time our actions did nothing but reinforce the extremist narrative.
Far too many radicals know what torture is.. and I fear that is at least part of what drives them.
Marcus Garvey and Rastafari
May 15, 2009
Marcus Garvey is considered a prophet by the Rastafari.. and a forerunner of their movement. On its face that's a curious adoption since little in the message of Garvey is religious in nature. Garvey was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) that experienced its peak of influence in 1920 with its International Convention that met in New York. During this convention the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World was written, and this sets out a political program for Blacks all over the world. Number one in the "declaration of rights" section of that document reads:
Be it known to all men that whereas, all men are created equal and entitled to the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and because of this we, the duly elected representatives of the Negro peoples of the world, invoking the aid of the just and Almighty God do declare all men, women and children of our blood throughout the world free citizens, and do claim them as free citizens of Africa, the Motherland of all Negroes.
The language is obviously influenced by the Declaration of Independence, which is indicative of the political nature of Garvey's hopes. At this point the UNIA proclaimed Garvey president of Africa, came up with a flag, and even sent out ambassadors. What lies underneath these actions is a conception of every person of African descent as belonging to a single identity group. All Blacks are claimed as "free citizens of Africa." This group can now take on the trappings of a political body.. and the UNIA stood ready to supply political symbols.
From what I can see traces of this Pan-African view were present before Garvey arrived on the scene. But Garvey seems to have pushed the notion to its logical conclusion and worked to raise the consciousness of Blacks everywhere that they were by nature united and part of one community. It would seem logical that once Garvey arrived at the view that Blacks the world over formed a single nation, he would then need to look around for a homeland. And Africa—a continent with unparalleled cultural diversity—became his choice for this unified nation.
So how did the Rastafari make use of this earlier work? It turns out to be a fairly straightforward translation of political goals into religious goals. Bob Marley's song "They Got So Much Things to Say" can be understood as an essay on this transformation. The song begins with some ambiguous lines:
They got so much things to say right now;
They got so much things to say.
These lines will be repeated numerous times in the song, and a central question in the song is how to understand them. Are "they" saying positive things, or are "they" filling up the air with useless chatter? At the opening of the song the meaning of the lines is unclear.
With the introduction of the first stanza this question is mostly answered:
Eh! But I'll never forget no way: they crucified Jesus Christ;
I'll never forget no way: they stole Marcus Garvey for rights.
I'll never forget no way: they turned their back on Paul Bogle.
So don't you forget no way your youth,
Who you are and where you stand in the struggle.
"They" returns as the persecutors of three prophets: Jesus Christ, Marcus Garvey, and Paul Bogle. The chorus "They got so much things to say" is now seen to stand in contrast to the call to not forget certain men from the past. The listeners are also urged to not forget the truth about who they are and the struggle in which they are engaged. Evidently all that useless chatter in the air could tempt a person to forget these things.
The song goes on shortly to call attention to the spiritual nature of the battle:
I'n'I nah come to fight flesh and blood,
But spiritual wickedness in high and low places.
So while they fight you down,
Stand firm and give Jah thanks and praises.
"I and I" is a Rasta-speak stand in for "we" here. Marley codes his struggle with a reference to Ephesians 6.12: "For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness." In Marley's hands this becomes a proclamation of the spiritual nature of resistance against white oppression. And here we see Marley and the Rastafari tradition subtly critiquing the legacy of Marcus Garvey, who was above all a fighter and dreamer of things concerned with flesh and blood.
If we look at the conceptual system set in place by Garvey we can see how ripe it was for plucking and incorporating into a religious frame. Garvey believed Africans to be a nation in exile who need to return to the homeland from which they were violently and wrongfully taken. Once that basic narrative was established, it was a short jump to see it in terms of the story of the Israelites and their exile and return to a homeland. That sets up the African diaspora as parallel to the Israelites. The actual claims of the Ethiopians to be the rightful inheritors of Israel only strengthened that parallel.. made it a little more real. These metaphoric transfers took a genuine leap of the imagination.. but by the end of that process the political vision of Garvey had been made over into a spiritual battle. And it is this spiritual battle that Marley points up in "They Got So Much Things to Say."
Did Wallace Stevens Read Clarel?
May 13, 2009
I have no proof that Wallace Stevens was a careful reader of Clarel. I will need to check his letters and also see if there is anything out there concerning his reading. But in Clarel I came across numerous passages that echo lines from Stevens.
"Of Mere Being" is a late poem by Wallace Stevens that expands on a curious image of a palm tree:
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
That gold-feathered bird in the second stanza reminds me of Yeats' Byzantium.. and the bird seems to burn out in the distance with some greater than human intensity. The image of the palm looks back to Melville. In the Mar Saba section of Clarel there are a series of poetic reflections on the palm tree that stood at the ancient monastery:
The taciturn Swede Mortmain in Clarel imagines a vision of the palm to come when he lays dying:
Yet hear me in appeal to thee:
When the last light shall fade from me,
If, groping round, no hand I meet;
Thee I'll recall—invoke thee, Palm:
comfort me then, thou Paraclete!
[3.28.86-90]
This truly is a palm that lies at the end of the mind; it is the Paraclete in the hour of death. Stevens takes this image and makes it abstract (as it must be) and thereby decontextualizes it from any specific setting.. but the palm still carries the same symbolic meaning.
The connection between the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Clarel gets clearer when we look to "Sunday Morning." This poem is one of the great treatments of religion in the 20th century. It consists of the reveries of a woman taking her ease on a Sunday morning and casting off the claims of Palestine, "dominion of the blood and sepulchre."
In a canto entitled "Tomb and Fountain" Melville begins by imagining Clarel and a Jewish girl free to roam in the new world:
Clarel and Ruth—might it but be
That range they could green uplands free
By gala orchards, when they fling
Their bridal favors, buds of Spring...
And youth and nature's fond accord
Wins Eden back, that tales abstruse
Of Christ, the crucified, Pain's Lord,
Seem foreign—forged—incongruous.
[1.28.1-4, 8-11]
Melville develops in these lines a metaphoric division between the natural and free life in America and the religion-haunted world of Palestine. Freedom is here the dream while the seriousness of the ancient landscape constrains any happiness. The drama of "Sunday Morning" is similar, only it starts in America amid "complacencies of the peignoir".. and then the encroachment of the ancient landscape has to be pushed away.
The first stanza of "Sunday Morning" includes a twilight scene in which the woman begins to dream "As a calm darkens among water-lights." Then she sees something like a procession of the dead "winding across wide water." Melville paints a scene that combines growing darkness and the Tomb:
These, loitering hard by the Tomb,
Alone, and when the day's declined—
So that the shadow from the stone
Whereon the angel sat is thrown
To distance more, and sigh or sound
Echoes from the place of Mary's moan...
[1.3.143-8]
As the shadows grow longer, the imagination begins to take over:
Imagination, earnest ever,
Recalls the Friday far away,
Re-lives the crucifixion day...
[1.3.182-4]
This is the dark imagination that must be interrogated and subjected to reason in the course of "Sunday Morning." In the second stanza the narrator asks: "Why should she give her bounty to the dead?" And the question in turn prompts a line of internal reasoning that shuts down this dark path.
One of the major temptations sketched by "Sunday Morning" is the hope for "imperishable bliss".. and Stevens spends two stanzas working through the impossibility of this hope. I have always been most captivated by the opening of the second stanza:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky?
All that we associate with bounty and a perfect summer day is a result of growth and decay.. and finally dependent on death. Ripe fruit that could never fall would not be ripe fruit.. it would be some pasty waxy thing.
Melville works through similar thematic territory in his canto "The Recoil".. mostly a reflection on celibacy. He recalls how heaven is marked by love, but asks what kind of love could it be if unmarked by earthly desire?
...Can Eve be riven
From sex, and disengaged retain
Its charm? Think this—then may ye feign
The perfumed rose shall keep its bloom,
Cut off from sustenance of loam.
[3.31.38-42]
"Sunday Morning" should be thought of as an attempt to think through the questions that are stirred in one by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.. only it is all done from the comfort of a sunny chair.
Herman Melville. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Northwestern UP, 2008.
Wallace Stevens. Collected Poetry and Prose. The Library of America, 1997.
Wisdom from Pierre Hadot
May 11, 2009
I learned much about ancient philosophy from Pierre Hadot's collection of essays Philosophy as a Way of Life, along with his books on Plotinus and Marcus So I jumped at this new book that is a collection of interviews with him. Seeing his concerns laid out so plainly, without the distraction of a regular topic, is refreshing.. and I could not recommend a book more highly.
Hadot sketches the ways of life connected to the different philosophical schools. It could almost make a good Facebook quiz: "which ancient school of philosophy would you be a part of?" Personally, I identify with the Peripatetics:
In the Aristotelian tradition, one might say that the way of life—and this is also characteristic—is finally the life of the scholar, a life devoted to studies, not only of the natural sciences but of mathematics, astronomy, history, and geography as well... this is a mode of life that, to use the Aristotelian term, can be called theoretics, the mode of life in which one "contemplates" things. [99]
Alright, so maybe I hedge a little on the natural sciences.. but still the goal of seeing and understanding is appealing. In Hadot's hands this effort is not about the collection of knowledge, but a way of transcending the self. It takes hard work to cultivate a keen and unfalsifying perception of things outside the self. "To study a text or microbes or the stars, one must undo oneself from one's subjectivity" (66). Hadot acknowledges contemporary challenges to this notion of scholarly objectivity, and recognizes that its perfection may be impossible, but nevertheless holds it up as an ideal.
But here is where it gets interesting: Hadot is not simply arguing for objectivity in academic work, but pointing out the roots of this practice in certain notions of the soul and its relation to the world. Why, then, should we do academic work? Finally it is to "...undo oneself from the partiality of the individual and impassioned self in order to elevate oneself to the universality of the rational self" (67). This is not Yeats' image of "respectable bald heads" annotating lines. It is more starry eyes looking out on the manic world.
In another departure from expected academic discussion of scholarship, Hadot speaks of the "nourishment" that we can draw from ancient texts:
But as Aristotle said about pleasure, there is always added to the effort of objectivity a supplement, a surplus, which is the possibility of finding our spiritual nourishment in it. This time, we are in a certain sense implicated in the interpretation. If one tries to understand a text properly, I believe that afterward one can be brought, almost spontaneously, to discover its human meaning, that is, to situate it in relation to the general problem of humanity... [68]
So there is first the movement of understanding a text for what it is.. without anachronism. Then after that mental purification, we are privileged to perceive something meaningful for ourselves.. something spiritual. I know I would have no interest in scholarship if there wasn't exactly that "surplus"..
Pierre Hadot. The Present Alone is Our Happiness. Trans. Marc Djaballah. Stanford UP, 2009.
Generating Meaning
May 7, 2009
Religions are prolific generators of meaning. Because of religion individual and group acts are felt to have significance and resonance that they would not otherwise have. One simple way to think about this production of meaning is by considering those old WWJD bracelets (standing for What Would Jesus Do?). The wearer is prodded to ask himself or herself how Jesus would act in a parallel situation. Would Jesus get mad at that guy? Would Jesus make out with that girl? These questions can be thought of as a process of mapping a script from one domain onto the developing story of an individual's current life. The individual gains a deeper view of the importance of his or her acts because of this parallel.
Social groups produce shared meanings by way of a similar process of mapping. A student of mine is working on a project about the Mormon use of the story of the migration to Salt Lake City. Quickly this migration was understood as a latter day version of the biblical Exodus. The utility of such a view is easy to see. A scary venture of nation founding is given deeper significance and at the same time a happy end becomes more assured as the end of the Exodus gets mapped onto the new situation. Since we as human beings want our actions to be meaningful, we expend much mental energy in locating parallels.. thereby generating meaning.
The best way to visualize this creation of meaning is to follow the idea of blending as developed in cognitive science. The following is a diagram provided in an essay by Gilles Fauconnier:
The above diagram illustrates the mental mapping that takes place as a boat journey from Boston to San Francisco in 1853 and 1993 are compared in a newspaper article. Our minds easily and automatically blend these two domains. Fauconnier goes further than just finding the process of "mapping", and argues for the actual creation of a third "blended" space:
In this blended space the important points of comparison are made to coexist in one mental space. This blended space can be understood as a central way that human beings create meaning. By an act of the imagination one domain is made to exist with another very different domain. The speed of boats going from Boston to San Francisco in different eras is not important to many people, but when we come to a cultural touchstone such as the Exodus the blended space creates a powerful sense of significance through its alignment with a modern event.
This modern event now equals that event from the past. Without any coaxing or conscious effort our minds locate the parallels: someone has to be Moses? Where is the Promised Land? Who are the Egyptians? What is the Red Sea? And we are living in a myth or sacred history.. sort of. It's all in our minds.
Golf and Animal Sacrifices
May 6, 2009
I've never thought much about the origin of the golf course and its fairways, sand-traps, and greens. Those elements seem kind of random.. and definitely artificial. But upon reading the recent New Yorker essay by David Owen about an antique golf course in the Scottish Islands, it all made sense. Golf originated in Scotland and the elements of the golf course are natural features of the Scottish landscape. The Appleton golf course I often walk past is indeed artificial, with its fake hills and out of place sand pits, but this is just a third or fourth hand transliteration of a Scottish landscape into America.
David Owen explains how "links" is a geologic term that comes from the Old English word hlinc.. meaning "rising ground."
Linksland arose at the end of the most recent ice age, when the retreat of the northern glacial sheet, accompanied by changes in sea level, exposed sandy deposits and what had once been coastal shelves. Wind pushed the sand into dunes and rippling plains; ocean storms added more sand; and coarse grasses covered everything.
Just add animal grazing to keep the grass cut back, and most elements of the ideal golf course are right there. Nobody ever invented the golf course, they just invented a game to play on this otherwise good-for-nothing landscape.
This transliteration from an original occurrence to a distant target is common for cultural forms. But it doesn't have to be this way: why not a translation? When golf became so popular that people wanted to build courses elsewhere, why did they not find "dynamic equivalents" in the new geographic setting? Scotland has sand traps, but maybe another landscape has an equivalent barrier? But this is not the way such transfers work.. they occur on a strikingly literal level.
Lots of the things that make up our world had their origin in one setting and then got re-applied into a secondary setting. The model for this kind of cultural change would run something like this: 1) as material culture changes, new niches for creative work open up; 2) the works that fill those niches come to be markers of social status and prestige; 3) as individuals from this culture migrate into new environments they import the markers of social status but lose the material culture niches that gave rise to them. The result of this process is a world of displaced cultural products. In fact, that could be seen as a key element of globalization.. at least on the level of creative works.
My current reading of The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David Anthony provides another example of this process. Anthony delineates the spread of Indo-European languages, combining archeology with historical linguistics (see my post here). Along the way he answers one of my personal unanswered questions: where did the widespread archaic religious culture of sacrifice and calling on the Gods come from? Begin reading the Iliad and it is right there in book I. This religious world has the appearance of being something like a natural response to the world.. the received religion. But through an examination of the Indo-Europeans it becomes evident that this religious culture was a result of the livestock-dependent and nomadic cultures that developed on the steppe north of the Caspian Sea.. and then migrated into Europe, Persia, and even India.
Anthony gives some characteristics of this steppe culture:
...steppe societies had created an elaborate political theater around their funerals, and perhaps on more cheerful public occasions as well. Proto-Indo-European contained a vocabulary related to gift giving and gift taking that is interpreted as referring to potlatch-like feasts meant to build prestige and display wealth. The public performance of praise poetry, animal sacrifices, and the distribution of meat and mead were central elements of the show... Praise poems proclaimed the generosity of a patron and enumerated his gifts. [343]
So while it may seem odd to find archaic Greeks expressing themselves in ways that would make more sense on the steppe, what we have here is just another example of the tendency to transliterate cultural forms. It is similar to the case of Scottish golf courses getting reproduced in different landscapes.. like Augusta, Georgia! The Greeks lived in a different world than their Indo-European progenitors, but they kept (and built upon) a set of religious forms that made perfect sense in that distant landscape. Once a cultural form has become a marker for status it will tend to reproduce itself in a direct and literal way.
I have said this before, but it would be nice if there were a vocabulary to talk about common cultural interchanges.
Make a New Plan Stan
May 4, 2009
I remember listening to Paul Simon when I was younger. Some songs I loved, but they seemed, frustratingly, to wander off the expected romantic track. "You're Kind" from Still Crazy is an example. It begins as an homage to a woman who came along at just the right time:
You’re kind
You’re so kind
You rescued me when I was blind
And you put me on your pillow
When I was on the wall
You’re kind
Things go on in this vein until the very end of the song:
So goodbye, goodbye
I’m gonna leave you now
And here’s the reason why
I like to sleep with the window open
And you keep the window closed
So goodbye
Huh? That's not right. This smooth transit between love and leaving occurs often in Simon's music. His more recent album You're the One has the song "Darling Lorraine." It is a lengthy tale, but comes down to the same quick goodbye:
Anyway Lorraine and I got married
And the usual marriage stuff
Then one day she says to me
From out of the blue
Frank, I’ve had enough
Romance is a heartbreaker
I’m not meant to be a homemaker
And I’m tired of being darling Lorraine
Then comes the incredulous response:
What - You don’t love me anymore?
What - You’re walking out the door?
What - You don’t like the way I chew?
This song wasn't around yet when I was young, but it would have perplexed me too. So that is what happens? Where is the big fight or the screaming?
From the beginning the end of relationships.. divorce.. has been a recurring subject. On his first eponymous solo album, after calling attention to the couples waiting in line in the courtrooms, he sings:
Love is not a game
Love is not a toy
Love's no romance
Love will do you in
And love will wash you out
And needless to say
You won't stand a chance, you won't stand a chance
Those first three lines have often come into my head over the years.. and have formed my understanding of love.
Even a classic Paul Simon song like "Graceland"—if you listen to the lyrics—is about the loss of a relationship.. and then seeking for grace and acceptance in the dread aftermath.
On a song from You're the One Simon sets out with total clarity the logic of human relationships:
Nature gives us shapeless shapes
Clouds and waves and flame
But human expectation
Is that love remains the same
And when it doesn’t
We point our fingers
And blame blame blame
Nature throws up shapes that evolve; Simon names three: clouds, waves, and flame. Each shifts constantly.. and that's what we expect from the natural world. But when we turn to the human world everything changes.. what perhaps we should see as a cloud we take for some concrete monument.. some beautiful eternal thing.
Healthy-Mindedness in Clarel
May 2, 2009
Herman Melville's epic poem Clarel is far too difficult for use in the classroom, and because of that his contributions to the theory of religion are largely unknown. Another problem is that Melville delivers thoughts on religion through the voices of different personalities on pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Suffice it to say it takes careful reading to extract a theory of religion from Clarel.. but it can be done.
One place where Melville's usefulness is especially clear is his description of what William James would call the "religion of healthy-mindedness." Among persons for whom "happiness is congenital and irreclaimable" on account of temperament, religion takes a sunny form; they resist delving into the darker regions of experience. James ties this "healthy-minded" religion to a specific group:
The advance of liberalism, so-called,in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related. [91]
It is crucial to see that what makes James' theory important is not that he points out the lighter cast of liberal Christianity when compared to Puritan or Calvinistic strains.. rather that he links these religious viewpoints to individual temperament. Some people are congenitally happy, and they will find their way to a religion in which they feel at home.
James published his Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, but 25 years earlier, in 1876, Melville's Clarel worked out a similar position. The character to watch in this regard is Derwent, an Anglican priest who embodies the liberal viewpoint of Christianity. Melville has little sympathy for liberal Christianity, because Derwent is shown by various encounters to lack the ability to engage with deeper questions.
In book 3 of Clarel the section "Derwent" contains an effective showcase for that character's thought. When challenged with a question about God and evil by Mortmain (the classic "sick soul" in James' book) Derwent can only turn aside the question:
..."Woe is me!
These controversies. Oft I've said
That never, never would I be led
Into their maze of vanity.
Behead me—rid me of pride's part
And let me live but by the heart!"
[3.6]
"Living by the heart" is a classic trope of liberal Christianity.. and appears to legitimate non-engagement with difficult questions.
Derwent finally gets around to presenting his view of Jesus:
"I do avow He still doth seem
Pontiff of optimists supreme!"
[3.6]
His stunned interlocutor accuses him of trying to "cheerfulize Christ's moan." Clarel is ultimately a book of doubt and desolation, but the easy doubt of a fine liberal Christian does not prove helpful.
The most damning passage on Derwent comes in his discussion with the student Clarel in Mar Saba. Derwent turns aside actual questions about faith.. and finds them old-fashioned. That kind of romantic storminess has long gone out of fashion! Finally Clarel turns a demand on Derwent:
"Own, own with me, and spare to feign,
Doubt bleeds, nor faith is free from pain!" [3.21]
But Derwent will not meet this basic challenge and acknowledge the depths of religious feeling. He responds:
..."Alas, too deep you dive.
But hear me yet for a little space:
This shaft you sink shall strike no bloom:
The surface, ah, heaven keeps that green;
Green, sunny: nature's active scene,
For man appointed, man's true home." [3.21]
Melville does not deliver an authoritative judgment on Derwent, but by the responses to Derwent on the part of the other characters we can see that he lacks something. The philosophical position of Derwent is matched by his sunny personal temperament; he takes and explains away everything that comes before him.
Had William James read Clarel he could have mined these sections on Derwent for examples of a healthy-minded believer. Other characters in Clarel would likewise fit well in his other categories, from "divided-self" to "mystic." Melville much earlier than James saw religious stances as governed by temperament.. stemming ultimately from personality.
William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Penguin, 1982.
Herman Melville. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Northwestern UP, 2008.
