Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’ve started a page for reciprocal links, the first click on the main Links page (see top bar). If your blog or website has a permanent link to Via Negativa and you don’t find it on the list, let me know. So far, thirteen blogs have installed links to the new site, beginning with whiskey river five days ago. Thanks, y’all!

It may seem extravagant to list some blogs in three different places, but I’m anticipating eliminating the “Vaguely Compatible Blogs” category from the main page, preserving the sidebar for intra-site links. It makes no sense to spend as much time writing as I do and then let the vast bulk of my output molder unread in the archives. My hope is that having an annotated links page will actually bring more readers to those blogs than would a mere sidebar listing. Having an additional listing for reciprocal links helps assure readers that blogs in the main listing were chosen on their own merits, with no expectation of reciprocity. It satisfies peoples’ curiosity about who links here. And let’s face it, reciprocity is the next best thing to love. It’s only the bloodless angels who can remain apathetic toward the opinions of others. We are apes. We scratch each other’s backs.

Favored first prodigies, creation’s darlings,
mountain ranges, peaks, dawn-red ridges
of all genesis, – pollen of a flowering godhead,
links of light, corridors, stairs, thrones,
spaces of being, shields of rapture, torrents
of unchecked feeling and then suddenly, singly,
mirrors: scooping their outstreamed beauty
back into their peerless faces.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (Edward Snow, tr.)

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They are the leaves,
leaves destroyed because they wanted to live forever,
because they didn’t want to think for six moons about what makes a wasteland,
because they didn’t want to know why a drop of water insists on hitting a naked skull already nailed to bad weather.
- Rafael Alberti, Sobre los ángeles (Mark Strand, tr.)

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As for me, I prefer the trees. But many are those who long for more anthropomorphic channels between earth & sky, who nurse a wordless craving for some being of light to precipitate out of solution & stroke their head – good dog – & clothe them in garments as full of the atmosphere of another world as any spacesuit.

I prefer the complex currents of the human or animal face. Reflections seen in still water are both greater & lesser than what they reflect: greater because of the invisible life that swarms within them & the bubbles of methane, lesser because – well, you know…

Tree: the very sound of the word directs our thoughts to the topmost twigs. Limbs, trunk – the homology with the human body suggests either headlessness or inversion, unfinished business or a fall from grace. But at the end of a wind-thrown tree one sees only rocks & soil gathered in a clutch of roots: a losing hand. There was never any inversion; there was never a mirroring. Again & again we mistake the messenger for the message. (What message?)

As for me, I prefer the fruit. The blossom is so urgent, so full of future. Think of the crimes it has licensed with its wasp-thin song of love & death. Long after the clouds of scent have dissipated, the limbs bend alluringly under the weight of sugar.

Bark. Skin. Scales. Feathers. Chitin. Fur. Moss. Lichen. Grass. Heath. Forest. Tree. Bark.

As for me, I prefer fat. Skin, bone & muscle all have their acolytes, but if the body stays confined to its barracks, who will fight the endless war on supper? Go tell your guardians of perfection: We are what exceeds us.

In memory of Tom Fox
peace worker
blogger
American hero

“There are no words.”
- Tom Fox, last blog entry

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Thanks to everyone who took part in the discussion about love, sex and Brokeback Mountain in the comment thread to Monday’s post, which in many ways has turned out to be more interesting than the post that spawned it.

Now one of the participants, Zhoen, has fleshed out her thoughts about love and the body in a brief essay called, simply, Body. Hers is a very embodied kind of thinking, moving from story to story and avoiding didacticism – a model of the blogging art. Do stop by.

This morning was so clear, so blue. The bluebirds began singing long before the sun came up, when Venus was still ablaze over the eastern horizon. I sat watching her inch sideways through the trees, fading into the dawn sky.

I didn’t write anything substantial this morning, but I knew I could’ve – and sometimes just that knowledge, that feeling of the writing spirit close at hand, is sufficient. It was too hard to stay indoors. All the melancholy pictures that I’d taken yesterday afternoon, under a flat, gray sky, had to be taken over again! But before I did that, I’d need some fuel.

Going into the kitchen for breakfast, I felt an odd impulse to listen to a few songs by Ali Farka Toure while I ate. Sure, he’s one of my favorite musicians and singers, but I almost never listen to anything during breakfast – no radio, no music. I don’t want to derail my own train of thoughts. But this morning, I wanted to hear his evocation of the grass snake, “Sega,” on the one-string West African fiddle (njarka). The next song on the Talking Timbuktu CD, the Tuareg blues song Amandrai, also complemented my mood. But it was the conjuring sound of the njarka I had most wanted to hear.

Ali Farka Toure’s music has deep spiritual roots, born of a classic shamanic initiation type of crisis – this despite his Sunni Muslim beliefs. (Islam in Mali tends to be very tolerant and syncretic.) Years ago, when I was reading a translation of a French anthropological text on the Gimbala spirit possession cult of the bend of the Niger, I was surprised to find Ali Farka Toure included as an informant. In some album liner notes I just discovered online, he describes his entry into the world of spirits and music:

I knew the spirit who gave me the gift very well. And I remember that night in Niafunke [Toure's home village]. A night I’ll never forget. I was about thirteen years old. I was chatting with some friends. I had a monochord [single string guitar] in my hand. I was wandering playing ordinary songs, just like that. It was about 2.00 am. I got to a place where l saw three girls standing like steps of stairs, one higher than the other. I lifted my right foot. The left one wouldn’t move. I stood like that until 4.00 am. Next day l walked to the edge of the fields. I didn’t have my instrument with me. I saw a snake with a strange mark on its head. Only one snake. I still remember the colour. Black and white. No yellow, no other colour, just black and white. And it wrapped itself around my head. I brushed it off, it fell and went into a hole and I fled. Since then l started to have attacks.

I entered a new world. It’s different from when you’re in a normal state; you’re not the same person you know. You don’t feel anything anymore, whether it’s fire, water or if you are beaten. I was sent to the village of Hombori to be cured and I stayed there for a year. When l felt better, I returned home to my family. There I began playing again and I was very well received by the spirits. I have all the spirits. I possess all the spirits and I work with them. I was born among them and grew up among them.

Ali Farka Toure became adept at crossing between worlds, mastering many languages and translating traditional music into modern idioms. He adapted to the international concert scene with great ease. At the same time, however, he remained firmly rooted in his home ground, and considered himself first and foremost a farmer.

He pioneered the adaptation of Sonrhaí¯, Peuhl and Tamascheq styles to the guitar. Even today, few have followed his path. His charismatic person, his fine voice and intricate flowing guitar technique, his good looks and enigmatic character, have all contributed to give him prestige. He remains uncompromisingly wedded to his traditional music, refusing to “go commercial”. His songs celebrate love, friendship, peace, the land, the spirits, the river and Mali; all expressed in dense metaphors.

What was it that made me decide to listen to Ali Farka Toure this morning, on the very day of his death? Something in the air, perhaps, something in the sky. When my brother Steve emailed the news a few hours later, my other brother, Mark, replied with some amazement that Ali Farka’s name had come up in class the night before – a mere couple of hours after his death. “That sort of thing is always happening to me,” he said. Maybe this was a worldwide phenomenon: fans of the great Malian bluesman suddenly feeling odd compulsions to listen to his music as they breathed in the atoms from his dying breath, like particles of dust from the ever-shrinking Sahel blown high into the jet stream, encircling the globe, adding a faint blush to the dawn sky.

In the Bible, “forty” is a stereotypical way of measuring time: not sacred time, exactly, but the amount of time necessary for a complete revolution of some celestial wheel. David, Solomon, Jehuash and Joash are all said to have reigned for forty years, and the “judge” Eli died in the fortieth year of his leadership. Under Caleb’s younger brother Othniel, “the land had rest” – i.e. from war – “for forty years” (Judges 3:11). A little later (Judges 8:28), “The country was in quietness forty years in the days of Gideon.” This “peaceful forty” clearly differs from a sabbatical kind of rest, such as Leviticus prescribes for the land every seventh year and for the country as a whole in the Jubilee, or 50th year.

Forty can equally measure a time of peace or a time of pain and trial. Jewish tradition makes much of the fact that pregnancy among humans lasts approximately forty weeks; this was often cited to explain the importance accorded the number forty in the Bible. Under Mosaic law, the period of purification after birth is forty days. Moses fasted on the mountain for forty days, communing with God. Elijah survived for forty days on a single meal, traveling to Mount Horeb for his famous encounter with the “still, small voice,” and Jesus after him undertook a forty-day fast in the wilderness, wrestling with temptation. In the Noah story, the rain falls for forty days and nights to cleanse and reshape the world. A similarly harsh cleansing takes place during the forty years in the wilderness, when everyone with living memory of Egypt, except for the faithful Caleb and Joshua, must die, and a new generation, born in the desert, must come to maturity. In Judges 13:1, “the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years.”

Moses was forty years old at the time of his revelation on Sinai, according to the Christian Book of Acts. At the age of forty, Isaac married his cousin Rebecca; Esau married a Hittite woman named Judith; and Caleb was sent to spy on the inhabitants of Canaan – an adventure that lasted forty days. Saul was forty at the start of his ill-fated reign.

The Rabbis of the Talmud, like the ancient Greeks, believed that forty was the age of reason and maturity. Kabbalists traditionally felt that a man wouldn’t be ready to begin studying any esoteric teachings until the age of forty – or some say 42. Mohammed was forty years old when an angel first appeared to him and revealed his divine selection as the Messenger of God. Huike, the Second Patriarch of Chan (Zen) Buddhism – and thus the first East Asian Zen master – was forty when he received the transmission from Bodhidharma. Legend records that he had cut off his own arm in a desperate attempt to still the chaos in his mind during the crisis leading up to his enlightenment. He then went into hiding for forty years to escape an anti-Buddhist purge, and only began to teach at the age of eighty.

Judges in the Spanish Inquisition had to be at least forty years of age. Perhaps in reaction to this sobering fact, the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground rails against his attainment of the same age:

I am forty now, and, mind you, forty years is a whole lifetime. It is extreme old age. It is positively immoral, indecent, and vulgar to live longer than forty years. Who lives longer than forty? Answer that me that – sincerely and honestly. I’ll tell you who – fools and blackguards – they do! I don’t mind telling all old men to their face – all those worthy old men, all those silver-haired andambrosial old men! I’ll tell it to the whole world, damned if I won’t! I have a right to say so, for I shall live to the age of sixty myself. I’ll live to be seventy! I’ll live to be eighty!
(David Magarshack tr.)

I guess I don’t need to dwell on what it means to be forty in American popular culture. It symbolizes the end of youth and the prime age for the mid-life crisis, a rite of passage for American males. A movie called “Forty Year-Old Virgin” was one of this past year’s surprise hits. The general societal expectation is that one should be well on the road to success by the age of forty. By the time George W. Bush was forty, for example, he had earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale, an MBA from Harvard, and had run two independent oil companies into the ground. By contrast, his fellow Texans the Austin Lounge Lizards extoll the Gen-X slacker ideal:

She wants me to act like some middle-aged man
I used to think she knew me, but she can’t understand
That it’s hard to make a living doing watercolor and collage
That’s why I’m forty years old and I’m living in my Mom’s garage

So today I turned forty. Things should start getting interesting any moment now.

Nursing a head cold, I brood over books and email, unable to write. Outside the sky is overcast, but shortly after 8:00 a rift appears in the east and the sun pours through. I hurry outside with the camera, thinking to try and get a few landscape shots. But when I look at them later, they’re as blurry as the thoughts running through my head these past couple of days (see yesterday’s post).

Then I focus on the frenetically active birds, and my hands grow steadier. An American goldfinch in the wild apple tree, an eastern bluebird above it on the wire: they each pause. I pause. Two, tinny sneezes of the camera and the sun goes in. The clouds slowly lighten, the transformer box darkens, and soon they are the same dull white.

My one year-old niece refutes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein on a daily basis. What do I mean by “refute”? In the Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell famously describes how Johnson responded to the philosophical solipsism of George Berkeley:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”

Though generations of Western philosophy students have derided this “refutation” as obtuse (see here, for example), I think they are the ones who are guilty of obtuseness for failing to appreciate the Zen-like adroitness of Dr. Johnson’s swift kick. Like a koan, it is best appreciated not as an isolated, universal statement, but as a spur-of-the-moment response to the student’s (Boswell’s) state of mind. They had just come out of the church, whose central drama reenacts the mystery of incarnation, however the bishop may try to resolve the paradox of Word-made-flesh. In Christianity, as in Buddhism, pain and suffering are awarded a quasi-ontological significance. The difference, I think, is that if Dr. Johnson had been a Zen master, he would’ve kicked Boswell; Christian charity dictated his choice of a stone scapegoat.

Buddhist philosophy includes a very Berkeleyan school called Vijñaptimí¢tra, “Representation-Only.” It was popular for a while in Tang- and Song-Dynasty China, and the Record of Master Yunmen (Ummon in Japanese) describes several instances where students question this most formidable of Zen teachers about it. Here’s one of them, in Urs App’s peerless annotated translation (#77):

Someone asked: “What is it like when [one realizes that] the three realms are nothing but mind, and the myriad things are merely [produced by one's] cognition?”

The Master replied, “Hiding in one’s tongue.”

“And what is that like?”

The Master said, “Su-lu, su-lu.”

“This spell was among other things used for fending off evil spirits,” says App’s footnote to the last line. Thus can apparent nonsense be invested with a higher, non-symbolic sense.

My niece Elanor is what they call pre-verbal. But in fact she verbalizes constantly, and often quite loudly and insistently, accompanied by hand and head gestures. For example, last Friday afternoon she was sitting on her Grandpa’s lap while he read one of her favorite books to her. When he finished and closed the book, she turned it over, jabbed her right forefinger at the cover, looked him in the eye and let out a loud stream of syllables some ten seconds long, with falling intonation. We all laughed, and Grandpa read the book again.

I could relate many such incidents about her. A couple weeks ago, I did something to tease her – I forget just what. She got a stern look on her face and lectured me vociferously for a couple of minutes while everyone looked on. The gestural qualities of spoken language are evidently very appealing to her. Her mother gave her an old cell phone to play with, and she tells us that Elanor quite often holds it up to her ear and holds lengthy “conversations,” toddling back and forth from one end of their apartment to the other.

Her choice of syllables seems fairly arbitrary, though she gravitates toward some, such as dada and lalala, apparently because the sounds are agreeable to her ear. She has clearly grasped the link between speaking and self-assertion. At family gatherings, she often attempts to join in on supper-table conversations from where she sits like a potentate in her high chair. In her serenity and sovereignty, she brings to mind the Daodejing’s example of a (male) infant as the very embodiment of virtue or character (de). From the Ames and Hall translation, Chapter 55:

He screams through the entire day
And yet his voice does not get hoarse:
Such is height of harmony.

Though Elanor was never a screamer like that, I think it’s important to remember that her “pre-verbal” utterances and gestures are not an imperfect anticipation of “real,” systematic language. Rather, they constitute expressions of her state of mind closer to music or the songs of birds, which, though they rarely obey the laws of harmony, cannot fail to harmonize with the bird’s internal and external state, and thus sound pleasant to a third party.

In their commentary on Chapter 55, Ames and Hall make a point of some relevance to Johnson’s common sense-based “refutation” of representation-only:

The baby, unconsciously and without motivation, is the embodiment of harmony and equilibrium. Vitality, then, is sustaining this kind of balance in the rhythms of the day. Common sense – insight into the ordinary and everyday – is the relatively uncommon ability to maximize one’s quantum of life-energy by using it up in a measured way, remaining ever responsive to the cadence of one’s experience.

How does this refute Wittgenstein?

Wittgenstein, as you may recall, was anointed by Time magazine as the most important philosopher of the 20th century. He was a very serious man who liked to number his thoughts, and tried to give them an air of cohesion and importance by grouping some of them under a grand, Latin title – a practice which the author of this website heartily deplores. But it’s his later work, collected posthumously as Philosophical Investigations, that I want to call attention to here. As the Wikipedia article points out, this work permits a variety of interpretations. According to one of them, Wittgenstein maintained that “everyday language functions for the most part unproblematically and does not require correction by philosophers.”

Well and good! But it’s one of Wittgenstein’s subsidiary arguments – his famous digression about the possibility of a private language – that I think my niece’s behavior refutes. A private language is one in which “The words … are to refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate, private, sensations. So another cannot understand the language.”

This translation is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which goes on to explain that

This is not intended to cover (easily imaginable) cases of recording one’s experiences in a personal code, for such a code, however obscure in fact, could in principle be deciphered. What Wittgenstein had in mind is a language conceived as necessarily comprehensible only to its single originator because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others.

Immediately after introducing the idea, Wittgenstein goes on to argue that there cannot be such a language. The importance of drawing philosophers’ attention to a largely unheard-of notion and then arguing that it is unrealizable lies in the fact that an unformulated reliance on the possibility of a private language is arguably essential to mainstream epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics from Descartes to versions of the representational theory of mind which became prominent in late twentieth century cognitive science. [...]

[S]uch a so-called language would, necessarily, be unintelligible to its supposed originator too, for he would be unable to establish meanings for its putative signs.

You can click on the link and read about the debate Wittgenstein’s cryptic statements engendered if you wish. To me, the entire argument is flawed by the assumption that language is, at root, an intelligible system of signs – rather than, say, an endless flow of sounds and gestures, sense and nonsense, a river that constantly reshapes its bed. The earliest human language, like the languages of many non-human animals, has not yet become narrowed into the channel of representation-only, but floods and rushes wherever the questing mind wills. Its reach regularly exceeds its grasp, as the semiotically naive mind seeks intimate involvement in a world rich in numinous energy. Only at rare moments of great intensity in our adult lives are we reminded that what we call “meaning” was once pure gestalt.

The other thing I forgot to tell you about my niece is that she regularly interrupts whatever she is saying and doing to seek out physical contact with the nearest adult. A brief hug every five minutes or so seems to provide a kind of fuel for her explorations. And of course there’s no fooling a small child: any falsehood during such contacts would be detected almost immediately. It is on this template that the shared, “common sense” truth-assumptions of all social languages are built, I think. Soon enough, an escalating addiction to such physical/emotional response will lead to the standardization of her private language and its assimilation into the narrower but more powerful linguistic currents of her social milieu. Her favorite, all-purpose syllables dada will become less Dada and more Dad. Nonsense will become increasingly uncommon as she strives to make a commoner kind of sense. With time and luck, she may come to compete with her father or uncle for the title of fastest bullslinger in the West.