Category: Philosophy/Religion

B.S. alert. If you’ve come for enlightenment, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Laundry

There’s getting to be a serious backlog of thoughts and observations around here. Is there such a thing as mental retentiveness?

*

Last Tuesday, in Penn State’s main library, I’m browsing the new books shelf in the Arts and Humanities section when a peculiar sense of deja vu washes over me. I have been coming here for over 30 years, and the library has gone through quite a few changes during that time. But suddenly I am remembering how I used to think as a kid whenever I browsed the spines of abstruse academic books: Professors know all this cool stuff! I will never be that knowledgeable. I’ll never even be able to grasp simple things like how income tax works.

It makes me sort of sad, now, to realize that in fact very few professors know much of anything outside the boundaries of their disciplines. It further occurs to me that one of the rare exceptions to this rule may be my own brother Steve – not yet a professor, but a PhD and master of many foreign languages and diverse areas of expertise, from entomology to physics to economics to British and American horror fiction. And even for people like him, I have a very good idea of the pivotal role that intellectual confidence and the fluent use of big words play in shaping other people’s perceptions of unlimited expertise.

It’s not at all a comforting thought, the realization that, fundamentally, humanity knows nothing. I’d much rather be that naive little kid again. (And in fact, I never have figured out the federal tax structure. But neither has anyone else, I don’t believe.)

*

All last week I was looking at faces and seeing the skull beneath the skin. In one or two cases, I had to look away to avoid imagining earthworms tumbling out of eye sockets. Where the hell did this come from? I am rapidly losing interest in the kind of speculative writing (and reading) that has formed much of the content of this weblog. I didn’t start out to be a “blogger of place,” but now I think I could happily abandon everything else and just focus on the daily news: I mean the real news, the minutiae of otherwise unchronicled events that don’t directly involve human beings thinking up new reasons to slaughter each other.

*

The most original idea I had last week (well, original to me, anyway) was this: Via Negativa ought to have its own blog, a place to put housekeeping notes, maintain searchable categories of archives, report on new incoming links, post complementary and critical e-mails, and blogroll all sites that link to V.N. I could include occasional reflections on how well or poorly different writing experiments at V.N. seem to turn out, and even post ideas for alternate posts that never made the cut.

I know there’s such a thing as metablogging, which means simply blogging about blogging in general. (My favorite metablog is Mandarin Design.) What I have in mind is something even more reflexive: a hyperblog, perhaps?

I’m not sure I can handle the upkeep for another blog, though I did play around a bit with title ideas – Penumbra, Caveat, Via Parasita – and mottoes: Made in the shade. Vanity of vanities. My blog has fleas.

*

Yard signs, garden signifies, I decide a week after the election.

*

Late Thursday morning, I went for a brief ramble around the field, entranced by the shape and color of the goldenrod seed heads. The weak sunlight gives an air of mystery to the puffy, gray-white heads of tall goldenrod (Solidago canadensis), making them appear to glow from within. The 40-acre field is dominated by goldenrod, but tall goldenrod is just one of four or five different species, and one of only two to go to seed in such an impressive manner. It’s Veterans Day, and I can’t help seeing platoons of soldiers standing stiffly at attention.

All the leaves on all the goldenrods turned black and shriveled with the first frost, which makes it much easier to see the ground around their stalks. Since the field hasn’t been tilled in at least 33 years, a thick carpet of moss has grown up in many areas. I can pick out three distinct species of moss without hardly trying; I am sure there are many more than that. British soldiers’ and reindeer lichens can be found in the drier areas. Ebony spleenwort ferns, still green, show up quite easily now, sprouting here and there among the moss. I am surprised to find a cutleaf grape fern (Botrychium dissectum), though. This is a species we didn’t used to see that much of, but now, every year we find more of it. It’s difficult to decide whether that’s because it is truly on the increase, or simply because, until we first identified it some five or six years ago, we didn’t know what we were seeing. It’s not an especially rare species. Maybe it’s been here all along.

True to its name, this cutleaf grape fern’s triply pinnate leaf has turned a deep wine red. In pausing to admire it, I knock against the six-inch-tall sporangiophore with the toe of my boot, and it releases a little brown puff of sporangia. Holy smoke! I tap it some more, like a lazy Johnny Fernseed. Billyuns and billyuns, I think. Meanwhile, the clouds overhead have thinned, and now the sun begins shining strongly enough to cast shadows. The tall goldenrod seems to shrink a bit. Now it’s just another hayfield gone to seed.

*

Yesterday was cloudless and very, very quiet from mid-morning on, when our weekend visitors departed. I felt rather disoriented all weekend because of the disruption of my early morning rituals: these were people who get up as early as I do. I still sat outside both mornings with my coffee, but my cherished communion with the darkness was destroyed. About all I could do was enjoy the way the two bright pin-pricks of Venus and Jupiter were enough to give the entire rest of the sky a depth and purity it otherwise would have lacked.

Hospitality is as close to a sacred duty as any I know. One can’t very well ask one’s guests to please sit in the dark for twenty minutes just so one’s own, hidebound rituals won’t be altered for a day or two. Nor were these the kind of people I could’ve invited to join me out there. With the temperature around 25 degrees on Saturday morning, my uncle made it clear he thought I was crazy – just like the black guys in his north Jersey neighborhood who stand around outside shooting the bull in all kinds of weather. (To his credit, he didn’t imply that they were all drug dealers, merely that they were incomprehensibly Other.)

I throw in a load of laundry right after they leave, and hang it outside. My usual hiking buddy has other commitments today, so I decide reluctantly to spend the rest of the morning on a long-overdue redesign of the blog. This eats up half the afternoon, as well. When I go out to take the clothes down around 3:00, I hear what sounds at first like a large waterfall or distant applause coming from the other side of Sapsucker Ridge, toward the west. High-pitched overtones like rusty door hinges reveal its true origin: a mammoth flock of red-winged blackbirds. After a few minutes, the flock takes wing, which is impressive both aurally and visually. A moment of silence gives way to the sound of wings, like a thousand decks of cards being shuffled at once. Just as the flock comes into view over the ridge, it performs a complex roll-and-split maneuver, a kind of mitosis. Within this enormous cloud of birds, some individuals begin flying in unison toward the southeast, over the field, while an equal number begin flying equally in unison toward the northeast, along the ridge. How is this decided?

The southeast-bound section of the flock heads out over Laurel Ridge toward Sinking Valley, then swings around northwestward and rejoins the other half of the flock in less than a minute. They all settle in the trees just beyond the corner of the field and resume the rusty waterfall impersonation. But after only a few seconds another hush, another card-shuffle of wings. This time, with the low sun full on them and the blue sky above, the effect is spectacular. I stand open-mouthed as the flock spirals, rising like a cobra from a snakecharmer’s basket, splits in the middle, rejoins, undulates like a flag in the breeze. As they wheel about, thousands of red wing patches simultaneously catch the sun.

Then I realize that One of These Things is Not Like the Other, as we used to sing back in grade school. A small hawk, probably a Coopers, is making tight circles in the middle of the flock. Suddenly I can see what this whole aerial ballet is all about. I’m reminded of the way certain Java applets respond to the slightest motion of the cursor as the flock swirls and curls around its would-be predator. After about a minute the hawk gives up, turns and glides off down the ridge, heading south for the winter. The blackbirds fly west, and in a few seconds things are absolutely quiet once again.

*

A little while later I’m sitting out on the porch, enjoying the stillness and the play of random thoughts swirling around in my head. One that I write down concerns the phrase “too much information.” I guess what strikes me is the way that the very concept of “information” – still basically alien to me, despite having been all my life the son of a librarian – includes connotations of too-muchness. Information can be catalogued, it can be communicated, but can it ever really be absorbed in the way that (say) knowledge or understanding can? Information evokes sleek and sexless modernity, pure quantity without affect.

Quite apart from what is usually meant by economic considerations, how you attain something, I’m thinking, determines its real value. How you get somewhere shapes your ability to perceive, to absorb and assimilate. The cliche that says that life is a journey is too vague, it seems to me, because life is really more like a pilgrimage, even for people who are not especially religious. “Journey” implies a mere change in position of an essentially static subject, whereas “pilgrimage” recognizes and celebrates the reality that the perceiver changes along with the perceived, that road and traveler make and unmake each other in an intricate pas de deux. Trying to describe such motions using calculus would involve an unpredictable number of returns to the starting point to change the terms of the original equation. I remember my high school calculus teacher Mr. Bloom, and how he used to sometimes “solve” an impossibly difficult equation in just this manner. I wonder now if his habit of talking out loud to God as he went along was always as facetious as I had assumed at the time.

While I’ve been sitting here taking notes on myself, the sun has slid off my pant legs, across the yard and up into the woods. Yes, this is all a distraction from what’s really important. Yes, it’s time to go for a walk.

Up on Laurel Ridge Trail I stop to admire the messed-up bark of a chestnut oak tree that must have some kind of disease or genetic mutation. Deeply furrowed like all chestnut oaks, this one’s bark forms collars or rings every six inches or so. The result is a highly complex micro-topography. So often in nature, it’s the disease, the predator, the apparently tragic error that produces the most spectacular effects.

*

If I didn’t write it down, I write in my pocket notebook, would any of it matter? In other words, is meaning something I discover through writing – or something I merely invent? And is this discovery/invention mainly an unveiling, or does it more closely resemble embroidery, even weaving? If the latter, how do we describe the results? With a dip in the dye vat, a veil for a bride can become a widow’s weed . . .

Enough of this. I have to go up and take the bread out of the oven now. I’m making Swedish rye this morning, with orange juice, mashed potatoes and anise seed. Temperamental stuff – I don’t think it rose nearly as well as it did the last time I made it. I could stick with the tried-and-true whole wheat-multigrain recipe, but what would be the fun in that? Fresh rye bread with garlic butter and a bowl of cabbage soup: the search for meaning seems trivial by comparison.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

From the sublime to the ridiculous in three easy steps

Seek and ye shall find, the saying goes. But whether found and sought are one, who knows? Yesterday, between the covers peeking, in three different books I found (though hardly seeking) lines as sweet to me as an unplanned tryst with a lost love I never knew I’d missed.

So far from linear, this ocean we think of as time! The waves are never the same, though they often rhyme. Things unsought reward unconscious seeking. All creation dwells at last beyond critiquing.

Here are the three, in order as I found them:

Everything has its mouth to manifestation; and this is the language of nature, whence everything speaks out of its property, and continually manifests, declares, and sets forth itself for what it is good or profitable; for each thing manifests its mother, which thus gives the essence and the will to form.

– Jacob Boehme, De Signatura Rerum (translator unknown)

That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant. But even they must concede the fact, indeed the inevitability, of the judiciously spaced, but nonetheless certain, interruptions in the flow of their high art to interject the word of their sponsor, the divinity that controls remotely but diligently the transactions of the marketplace that is their world.

– Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savanna

When the bear thinks,
It does not think of us.

– Paul Zimmer, “Lessons From the History of Bears”

*

Odd, I thought, that the day selected to go up to State College would be the same day on which I made the trip six years ago, according to the Butternut Chronicle. (The fact that the days of the week match up is spooky enough – possible because this was a leap year, giving us an extra day.)

At the coffee shop where I went for lunch (my own packed sandwich, plus their coffee), all the tables were taken, so I sat at a counter two stools down from a young woman typing away on her laptop. I had grabbed a copy of Jon Stewart’s America: The Book from a stack in the new books display to read while I ate. I took off my knit hat with some misgiving, conscious of the fact that my hair would stick out in all directions. But from the moment I cracked the cover of America I began giggling and chortling uncontrollably. Not having TV, I’d never come in contact with this guy’s brand of humor before. Damn, he’s good!

After a while, I noticed that the woman I was sharing the counter with kept glancing in my direction. Soon, I noticed she opened a new window on her screen, and I recognized the tell-tale Blogger “dashboard.” (I have very good peripheral vision.) She typed a few lines, looked my way, typed a few more lines.

What could she be blogging about, I wonder? “OMG, I believe I have just spotted the famous local gadfly and blogger Dave Bonta! He’s even better looking in person than in that photo on his webpage!!!” Or, more likely: “Boy, this place sure fills up with weirdoes over lunch. It’s bad enough that there are a couple of demented-sounding locals talking loudly at one of the tables. But you wouldn’t believe the guy who just sat down next to me. He has just about the worst case of hat-head I’ve ever seen, he’s wearing some kind of dirty old flannel shirt, jeans that look like they could stand up by themselves, and I can’t even begin to describe what he’s wearing on his feet. And he’s sitting there giggling to himself! His pack is on the stool between us. It is definitely large enough to hide a knife. I’m going to publish this now so there will be some record of my last moments on earth…”

On the other hand, maybe she just had a crick in her neck.

*

My big accomplishment of the day was to spend 84 cents on a new pocket notebook. I like to think of it as a low-tech laptop. Reading Jon Stewart followed immediately by Paul Zimmer – a consummate wordsmith – did strange things to my mental equilibrium. As I stood outside the library waiting for my ride, I compiled

A Short List of Silly Words for Strange and Ridiculous People

Omphaloskeptic. Someone who isn’t convinced of the value of belly-baring fashions in women’s apparel.

Pedantophile. Someone who admires the writing of George Will.

Iraqnophobic. Someone who doesn’t fear the consequences of invading Iraq.

Unbornicator. A politician who uses abortion as a wedge issue, screwing over the electorate.

Fear Mongrel. The offspring of a terrorist and a coward.

Factotempolecat. A skunk surrounded by status-conscious yes-men. George W. Bush.

Cucaranchero. Karl Rove.

Loremipsumizer. A blogger.

Bloglodyte. A Blogspot blogger.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The anatomy of perception (conclusion)

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Anatomy of Perception

6.

We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting. (Pascal)

But we are all fish
out of water,
giddy with oxygen.
Who can tell
the smell of ozone –
electric & wet – from
the taste of
their own fear
when the storm comes?

     the commercial fisherman:

     we entered the sound on a rough sea
     in pea-soup fog
     cut the motor & listened
     for the buoy clang

     the captain swears he can feel
     the change in the swells
     but that too could be
     a kind of listening

     men don’t talk about
     their instincts much
     we’re supposed to be impervious
     to gauge to ogle

     but looking makes everything
     smaller than it is
     the world
     recedes

     & if something can kill you
     you need to find it
     magnify it
     keep it close

     every pore in my body listened
     for that buoy its dull echo
     sweeter than a church bell
     over the hiss of the waves

Who has ears to hear, let him hear.
I crave immersion in the medium of grace.

I think of whale song more alluring
than any Lorelei, seals & walruses

whose ancestors heard the surf
pounding in their temples. Otters,

already so much more playful than
their bloodthirsty cousins on dry land.

I think perhaps our destiny is not
to be sucked out among the stars – vacuum

without sound – but back in the water,
sonorous & shining. Like Jesus

inscribed in the cursive alpha:
shoal. Implausible feast.

The storm approaches.
As pressure drops,
the ears fill
& pop & the heart
works harder.
Just like
when kisses land
lightly as
a fisherman’s fly
on the skin – creek
or lover –
& the trout in
the bloodstream
rises,
takes the hook.

7.

The least movement affects all nature; the entire sea changes because of a rock. . . . Impenetrability is a quality of bodies. (Pascal)

Yesterday morning, from the trees
up on the ridge, a cacophony of rusty hinges.
Startled by something, it stills, turns
into an immense rustle of wings.
A thousand blackbirds lift, pivot,
drift high across the field like
a cloud of smoke.

This morning, walking through the fog
on top of the same ridge, I am stopped
by a yellow sugar maple leaf
dangling from an invisible strand of silk
six feet off the ground.
The slight breeze is enough to make it
flip, flop, fly. The forest drips.

These are not metaphors for anything.
Science says, a body at rest,
a body in motion. But only
such abstract bodies really make sense.
Ah, unreal body, home to an unreal sense!
Move one finger and the universe shifts: try it.
Let the small hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The anatomy of perception (5)

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Anatomy of Perception

Our senses perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too great distance or proximity hinders our view. . . . We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold. Excessive qualities are prejudicial to us and not perceptible by the senses; we do not feel but suffer them. . . . Extreme youth and extreme age hinder the mind, as also too much and too little education. In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, and we them. (Pascal)

In his late eighties, my grandfather’s neck bone sprouted a spur that pressed against his throat.

Imagine it, to be slowly choked to death by your own spine!

It got to where he could barely swallow & all his meals had to be pureed – “like baby food,” he groused.

He had already lost almost all sense of taste; only very sweet and very salty foods had any appeal.

Eating now became onerous, with only the promise of mealtime sociability with the other residents of the old folks’ home to hold his interest.

He grew light as a bird.

Even so, a portion of every mouthful – a drop or two, perhaps – blocked by the bony growth, trickled down his windpipe.

And as Pascal observed, “a drop of water suffices to kill a man.”

He contracted pneumonia.

Starved for oxygen, his brain fed him lies.

Fear found expression in hatred.

The coma was a mercy.

Children and grandchildren filled the small hospital room to overflowing.

He lay with eyes shut & mouth agape below the beak of a nose, one tube in his left arm & another in his urethra, his skeletal frame naked under the bed sheet.

As the night wore on, the gaps between the slight movements of his chest grew longer and longer.

Finally, when several minutes had elapsed, someone felt for a pulse: no hint of motion.

Then a great sigh that caught in a dozen throats, a gasping sob.

As vision blurred we embraced & embraced, baffled to find each other so unfamiliar, ourselves so strange.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The anatomy of perception (4)

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Anatomy of Perception

Barometric pressure was a novel idea in 1647 when the 24-year-old Blaise Pascal published his Nouvelles expériences sur le vide. Toricelli had invented the barometer only four years earlier. Pascal described how he climbed first a tower in Paris and then a mountain in the Auvergne carrying this new instrument, and watched as the column of quicksilver slowly dropped. He deduced that a vacuum must exist above the atmosphere – and thus, in a sense, became the discoverer of outer space.

Pascal recognized – and struggled against – the inadequacy of knowledge to ever encompass the universe. Though the logic of infinity could not be denied, he thought, its existence depressed him. This more than anything testifies to his greatness as a thinker: he was brave enough admit the existence of truths that caused him profound discomfort. While, on the one hand, “It is the heart that perceives God and not the reason,” reason still exerts a critical check on human pride: “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

Late in life, battling illness, Pascal made a study of the cycloid, a curve traced by a point on the circumference of a hoop traveling along a straight line. Using the “method of indivisibles” pioneered by Cavalieri, Pascal managed to solve a series of problems that had defeated Galileo and Descartes. In the process, he came within a hair’s breadth of discovering the infinitesimal calculus, decades before Leibnitz and Newton. Unable to sleep for pain, he stared up into the darkness and saw the solutions unfold.

Blaise Pascal was a slight man with a booming voice, and people found him pugnacious, even overbearing. Ill health and crushing headaches were his constant companions since childhood. He died of a malignant growth in his stomach that spread to his other organs. A post-mortem examination also revealed an ugly lesion on the brain – the source of his migraines. Apparently, as an infant his fontanelle had failed to close properly, and the bones in his skull had slipped and ground against each other like the tectonic plates that make up the surface of the earth. He died in great agony and convulsions on August 19, 1662, at the age of 39.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The anatomy of perception (3)

Another blogger to respond to Susan’s question about the senses – “Which do you think is the most important?” – was Siona, of Nomen est Numen. She opted for touch. In a subsequent post, she expanded on the theme.

I should make it clear that these poems in the “expected voices” of others are entirely acts of my own imagination. If you want to know what Siona – or Dale, or Susan – really think, read their blogs (all highly recommended, by the way). I hope it’s obvious that what I am trying to do here is extract details from various narratives that advance my own argument (such as it is). This very process of selection means that the “I” of these poems is really more me than anyone else.

Once again, the epigraph is from Pascal. (Tomorrow’s section should make it clear why I am using his writing in this context.)

3.

We think we are playing on ordinary organs when playing upon man. Men are organs, it is true, but odd, changeable, variable, with pipes not arranged in proper order. Those who know how to play on ordinary organs will not produce harmonies on these.

I am
all mem-
brane
it’s true

the brain itself
is an open
wound
folded
into a fist

skinny? but
skin’s at
a minimum on
someone
as thin
as me

bony, yes –
except this
skeleton has been
so brutal
bruising
my starved
flesh

back when I was
my own
demon lover
when I wanted
to feel
nothing-
ness

but recovery has
turned me out-
side in
a Möbius strip

I can shut
my eyes
& read the
world’s Braille
from within
the world

run your fingers
down along
my spine

do you feel how
my whole
body
blinks?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The anatomy of perception (2)

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Anatomy of Perception

For this section, I borrowed a story from Dale, who was responding in turn to Susan’s question about the senses. Once again, the epigraph is from Pascal, and the subject, as in Dale’s story, is the late critic Cleanth Brooks.

UPDATE: Lines 5-8 of second stanza rewritten (10/31) in response to an objection from Dale (see comments).

2.

Having assurance only because we see with our whole sight, it puts us into surprise and suspense when another with his whole sight sees the opposite . . . For we must prefer our own lights to those of so many others, and that is bold and difficult.

When the scholar’s eyesight fades,
what good are his books?
His library turns as unreadable
as Lascaux: scriptless drama of shapes
on the walls of a cave, the artifice
unglossed within the viscera
where the quarry – tissue
of allusions – still bristles
with bookmarks. That flux of the world
of becoming: to capture is
to kill it. Decipherment leads to loss.
The dance must be primary, he wrote.

I acted briefly as amanuensis,
lent him my eyes for a paper he had to give.
Bending to my task, I felt
of little use, a cheap fiction.
My West Coast accent flattened
the words he loved, robbed them
of shadows – like trading embossed
leather covers for a paperback spine.
Perhaps he sensed, even then, the germ
I carried on my youthful breath,
insidious as any misty paraphrase,
corrosive as hope.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The anatomy of perception (1)

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Anatomy of Perception

This begins a brief series on the anatomy and phenomenology of perception, using quotes from Blaise Pascal, Pensées: Thoughts on Religion and other subjects, translated by William Finlayson Trotter. The original suggestion to discuss the senses (which I refuse to try and enumerate, by the way) came from a post at Susan’s blog, so it seems only appropriate that I begin there, with all due apologies for this attempt to speak in her voice. (Susan has shown herself to be a quite competent poet in her own right.)

I expect the series to last the rest of the week. The final sections are at present still in a very rough state.

1.

Let us imagine a body full of thinking members.

The uterus knew what I
& the doctor did not.
It threatened mutiny.

The mind is more than brain,
I’d say, the body’s
a net of nerves,

which makes the womb a net
within a net. Mine wasn’t
about to let its catch be killed

when the baby still sat
ass-downward & they talked
about turning it. Something,

everything said NO.
I chose the Caesarian.
When they went in, they found me

so deformed, they took
pictures. The baby had sat
the only way she could fit

& turning her would’ve killed her,
ruptured the uterus. Call it
instinct, sixth sense.

I opted for mild sedation,
& if they’d let me
I would’ve watched. I was

that detached. Only
the thought of the turning
made my insides flip.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ignorant

The more we think we know, the deeper our ignorance. An ignorant person is someone who mistakes his or her habitual views for reality and reacts defensively to new perspectives and ideas. Ignorance partakes of that proverbial contempt – for others, for oneself – bred by a long and uncurious familiarity. I am ignorant when I think this hillside full of rock oaks and mountain laurel has little more to teach me. I only have to go two steps off the trail to remind myself of the limits of my usual perspective.

Intellectuals are among the most ignorant of people, because we tend to have the most highly developed and strenuously defended views. And needless to say, such ignorance becomes deadly when it shapes corporate decision-making and government policy.

Knowing that we know nothing, on the other hand, is the beginning of true awareness. That’s why most dogs seem wiser than their masters, and so many truths can be found among the songs and sayings of the so-called common people.

In local parlance, here in central Pennsylvania, ignorant means uncouth, rude, offensive. That’s not entirely separate from the kind of ignorance I’m talking about here, as the following example of usage shows.

Some time back in the mid 80s my brother was dating a woman from South Africa of multiracial (“colored”) ethnicity. When he took her to meet a few of his friends in Altoona, they were curious about her background, never having heard much about South Africa. My brother explained a little bit about the apartheid system, and one of the women reacted with great indignation: “That’s so ignorant!”

Now, I suppose that better-educated folks would say that anyone back in the 80s who didn’t already know about apartheid must have been deeply ignorant. But in fact, the woman in question was, my brother said, very curious and open-minded – quite opposite from the learned architects of – and public apologists for – the apartheid system.

You might call such a woman backward, but again you’d be at variance with local usage. Around here, backward means shy – and it isn’t such a bad thing to be. It’s far better than having a swelled head.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The golden guess

The golden guess
Is morning-star to the full round of truth.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Columbus”

*

It was on his brief, Third Voyage that the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the Christ-Bearer Colón, discovered paradise. We know it as South America.

Bartolomé de las Casas – defender of the Indians and redactor of the Journals of Columbus – paraphrases the Admiral’s more sober version of his new geographical theory:

[On August 13, 1498,] the Admiral seems to have gone about 30 or 40 leagues at most since leaving the Boca del Dragon [off Trinidad] . . . He observed that the land stretched out wider and appeared flatter and more beautiful down toward the west. . . . He therefore came to the conclusion that so great a land was not an island but a continent; and, as if addressing the Sovereigns, he speaks thus: “I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent which was hitherto unknown. I am greatly supported in this view by reason of this great river [the Orinoco] and by this sea which is very fresh. . . . And if this is a continent it is a wonderful thing and will be so regarded by all men of learning.”
Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. and tr., Heritage, 1963

Las Casas, for all his railing against conquistadors – “men of blood,” he called them, and “Moorish barbarians” – idolized Columbus. He chose to overlook the frustrated, almost absent-minded recourse to brutality that often marked the Admiral’s interactions with the Indians. On March 24, 1495, for example, he led a force of two hundred armored foot soldiers, twenty cavalry and twenty trained mastiffs against a force of some ten thousand Taino Indians, whom he had earlier praised for their gentleness, believing them to exist in a state of grace (“in Dios,” hence – according to one theory – Indians). The Tainos were mowed down with volleys from point-blank range, ripped apart by the dogs, sliced and skewered like the cattle that the Castilians had already introduced to ravage the land. (Yes, boys and girls, the conquest was led by cowboys.)

At Columbus’s direction, a Taino leader named Caonabó was tricked into shackling himself. These polished handcuffs and leg irons are the ornaments of all, true Christian rulers, they informed this ignorant foreigner who had the impunity to dream of freely occupying an island already named for its mother country: Española (i.e. Hispaniola, now split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Once they had him shackled, of course, they dragged him off, clapped him in jail, then transferred him to a ship and sent him to Spain for proper punishment. He died on the way, wrote the chronicler Peter Martyr, “in anguish of mind.”

The tragic fate of this exiled Taino shaman – as we may confidently imagine him to have been – prefigures the Admiral’s own treatment, two years later, when he found himself “arrested and cast into a ship with my two brothers, shackled with chains and naked in body, and treated very badly, without being brought to trial or convicted.” (Morison, op.cit.) And in a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela reporting the “discoveries” of his bizarre Third Voyage, the Admiral hints at his own “anguish of mind,” as reflected in his perennially unstable mental condition:

I weighed anchor forthwith, for I was hastened by my anxiety to save the provisions which were becoming spoiled, and which I had procured and preserved with so much care and trouble, as well as to attend to my own health, which had been affected by long watching; and although on my former voyage, when I discovered terra firma, I passed thirty-three days without natural rest (sin concebir sueño), and was all that time deprived of sight, yet never were my eyes so much affected or so painful as at this period.
Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, With other Documents Relating to His Four Voyages to the New World, R. H. Major, ed. and tr., Hakluyt Society, 1847

Thirty-three days without sleep! (I went one time for a mere five days without sleeping and became seriously delusional, suffering a mental breakdown of sorts.) On this voyage, however, Columbus says only his eyesight was affected. I’m not so sure.

You remember learning in school, no doubt, that Columbus died convinced he had merely sailed to Asia – unaware that he had in fact “discovered” new continents. Ha ha, silly admiral! On the other hand, in the popular imagination Columbus is a misunderstood genius, ahead of his time in believing steadfastly that the earth was round. Both bits of received wisdom are erroneous.

We have already seen how the Admiral recognized the novelty of the South American landmass. The belief that the earth is shaped like a ball was in fact widely held by educated Europeans of the period – and it is a belief that Columbus himself came to repudiate on his fateful Third Voyage. Here’s another passage from his letter to Their Majesties:

I have come to another conclusion respecting the earth, namely that it is not round as they describe, but of the form of a pear, which is very round except where the stalk (pezón) grows, at which part it is prominent; or like a round ball, upon one part of which is a prominence like a woman’s nipple (teta de muger), this protrusion being the highest and nearest the sky.

Not that the Admiral himself ever drank the milk of paradise, as it were. Such an ascent would have been impossible, he believed.

I have no doubt, that if I could pass below the equinoctial line, after reaching the highest point of which I have spoken, I should find a much milder temperature, and a variation in the stars and in the water; not that I suppose that elevated point to be navigable, nor even that there is water there; indeed, I believe it is impossible to ascend thither, because I am convinced that it is the spot of the earthly paradise, whither no one can go but by God’s permission; but this land which your Highnesses have now sent me to explore, is very extensive, and I think there are many other countries in the south, of which the world has never had any knowledge.

So while Columbus may have died believing he had found a new route to the Indies, he was hardly unaware of the novelty or potential enormity of the lands whose existence he was among the first Europeans to verify. One hesitates to use the word “discovery” here not merely out of respect for the original inhabitants, but in recognition of the fact that the existence of lands in the western ocean had been known in some form, or at least guessed at, for hundreds of years. Prior to Columbus’s first voyage, says Kirkpatrick Sale in his flawed, revisionist history The Conquest of Paradise (Penguin, 1990), the Admiral “knew of – indeed, it seems from his readings that he carefully studied – the current stories about the fabled rich islands in the western Ocean (Antilla, Brasil, Ymana, St. Brendan’s Isle, Ventura, Satanazes, and on and on).” The extent to which Columbus and the conquistadors who followed were on a quest for an earthly paradise cannot be overemphasized.

The problem with postulating an entirely new landmass in 1498 is that it would have contradicted all his previously advertised claims that the Caribbean islands were located in the South China Sea and that Cuba was a peninsular extension of the Asian mainland. So Columbus fell back on a 15th-century version of New Ageism that seemed to suggest a natural connection between this new continent and the Holy Land – and incidentally provided for the plunder of gold as part of a millenarian mission:

Gold is the most precious of all commodities; gold constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in the world, as also the means of rescuing souls from purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of paradise. They say that when one of the nobles of Veragua dies, they bury all the gold he possessed with his body. There were brought to Solomon at one journey six hundred and sixty-six quintals of gold, besides what the merchants and sailors brought, and that which was paid in Arabia. . . . This is related by Josephus in his Chronicle de “Antiquitatibus”; mention is also made of it in the Chronicles and in the Book of Kings. Josephus thinks that this gold was found in the Aurea; if it were so, I contend that these mines of the Aurea are identical with those of Veragua, which, as I have said before, extends westward twenty days’ journey, at an equal distance from the Pole and the Line. Solomon bought all of it, – gold, precious stones, and silver, – but your Majesties need only send to seek them to have them at your pleasure. David, in his will, left three thousand quintals of Indian gold to Solomon, to assist in building the Temple; and, according to Josephus, it came from these lands. Jerusalem and Mount Sion are to be rebuilt by the hands of Christians, as God has declared by the mouth of his prophet in the fourteenth Psalm. The Abbé Joaquim has said that he who should do this was to come from Spain . . .

. . . a prophesy Columbus repeated more than once in the course of this strange, public hallucination of a letter. For in that patriotic fantasy, at least, he knew he could find a receptive audience in the king and queen of Spain, for whom Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula, culminating in the forced conversion or expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492, merged with the ideology of the crusades and the popular mythology of the knight errant. Christian Spain seemed divinely ordained to hasten the return of Christ in glory – to end history.

For untold millions of people living in the path of conquest, stubborn in their insistence that Antilla, Brasil, El Dorado, or the Fountain of Youth lay elsewhere, history indeed came to a sudden end. Columbus’s own end, in a rented room in Valladolid, beset as ever by his personal demons, was scarcely less traumatic. Walt Whitman, in “Prayer of Columbus,” imagined the Admiral’s dying delerium, a sad mix of misgiving and ecstasy:

. . . Is it the prophet’s thought I speak, or am I raving?
What do I know of life? what of myself?
I know not even my own work past or present,
Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
Mocking, perplexing me.

And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal’d my eyes,
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.

__________

For a Native view on Columbus Day, see this editorial in Indian Country Today.