Category: Philosophy/Religion

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

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The origins of Easter: little-known fun facts (part 1)

Here’s an unsystematic presentation of some of the scholarly thinking about Easter and Passover. Regular readers of this blog will not need a disclaimer about my own lack of credentials as a scholar. I’m merely an interested layperson, a religiously inclined agnostic with no particular axes to grind. Please keep in mind that biblical scholars themselves disagree about nearly everything.

I will of necessity favor the reductionist approach, about which I do harbor some reservations. Source-criticism has its roots in the scientism and progressivism of the 19th century. Motivated by the anti-Semitic belief that the Rabbis couldn’t possibly know what the Old Testament was all about, German Protestant scholars began to vivisect the text in an ultimately fruitless search for the “original” meaning of the Bible. By contrast, some recent scholars favor a more holistic approach, focusing on received textual interpretations – the Bible as it has been lived (or selectively ignored) by actual faith communities. But much as I enjoy this latter approach, I won’t be drawing on it much here.

I mention this only to point out that the following compendium of nifty interpretations shouldn’t be read as a guide to what Passover and Easter “really mean.” Such a discussion would involve us in nothing less than a sweeping critique of Judaism and Christianity themselves – which would make for a really, really long post, even for me.

As for what “really happened,” either during the Exodus or the Passion, I’ll be touching on that only negatively, to emphasize how much we DON’T know. Given how little we know about key events of our own time (the JFK assassination, the events of September 11, 2001), we could well argue that such lack of verifiable knowledge is a prime marker of events of transcendent significance in the history of every sacred or secular community. (Yeah, I know – there I go with that via negativa crap again!)

Fun fact # 1: The Last Supper was a Passover meal

C. S. Mann, in his translation of Mark for the Anchor Bible (Doubleday, 1986), summarizes the evidence as follows:

“1. The prescriptions for Passover in Exod 12:26-27 and 13:8 require that at each celebration the father of the family was to explain the reasons for the gathering, and bring to mind the redemption of the people.

“2. The custom of explaining the particular manner of the meal was faithfully observed and remains to this day.

“3. In Jesus’ time on the afternoon before the full moon of Nisan, thousands of lambs were brought in to the temple courts of Jerusalem to be slaughtered, commemorating the deliverance of the Hebrew from Egypt (cf. Exod 12:21-25).

“4. The Passover meal began after sunset in families and in groups such as that of Jesus and his disciples. The meal began with bitter herbs and a fruit relish. The roasted lamb was brought in but not yet eaten. This was the occasion for the head of the gathering to explain the particular features of the meal. This obligation was treated with great emphasis, and Rabbi Gamaliel (claimed as Paul’s teacher in Acts 22:3) insisted that the Passover command was not observed unless three things were explained: the Paschal lamb, the unleavened bread, and the bitter herbs.

“5. Interpretations were not invariable or fixed. The unleavened cakes might be explained as exemplifying the haste with which the Hebrews left their exile (so leaving no time for the dough to rise), or as signaling the “bread of affliction” (Ps 80:5), or even as a contrast to the abundance to be expected in the Age of Blessings to come. [See below, Fun fact #3, for much more on unleavened bread.]

“6. What we appear to have, therefore, in the words of interpretation used by Jesus with the bread and cup [in Mark 14:22-26 – “This is my body . . . This is the blood of the Covenant”] is nothing more or less than the customary exercise by a head of household at Passover.” What was radical about Jesus’ ministry was his inclusion of sinners and outcasts in his adoptive family gathered at the table for the Passover feast.

So reinterpreting paschal motifs is not as sacrilegious an activity as it might appear! What’s profane here, what keeps mere exegesis from becoming inspired midrash, is the disembodied setting – all the more so for being not merely textual but digital, virtual: in cyberspace. Judaism and Christianity are both blood religions, which is why I like them. And table fellowship remains central to Jewish and Christian concepts of blessing and the creation of sacred space.

Fun fact #2: The word usually translated as “Passover” may mean something else

My source here is William H.C. Propp’s magisterial new (1999) translation and commentary for the Anchor Bible, Exodus 1-18:

“We are uncertain of the original derivation and meaning of Pesah. Exodus provides an explanation of sorts: the blood of Pesah caused Yahweh to pâsah over Israel’s houses (12:13, 23, 27). This bears all the earmarks of folk etymology yet cannot be dismissed out of hand.” According to one traditional interpretation, which Propp himself inclines toward, the root verb might actually mean “protect,” referring to Yahweh’s protection of the Israelites’ houses from the Destroyer.

“But even accepting the Bible’s explanation, we are not certain what the crucial verb means. If pâsah means “pass (over),” then “Passover” is an acceptable translation for Pesah. If, however, pâsah refers specifically to hopping or skipping, matters are less clear.” Here’s where it gets fun.

“Some posit an archaic, limping dance connected with the holiday, comparing the dance of Baal’s priests in 1 Kgs 18:26 . . . The ultimate in conjecture is Keel (1972): the limping dance imitated the progress of the deformed demon of the East Wind, the ‘Destroyer.’ Others imagine a paschal ritual of skipping over a threshold (Zeph 1:8-9; cf. 1 Sam 4:5). But if pâsah means ‘protect,’ then Pesah simply means ‘protection.'”

But in that case, the cynic might add, the whole sacrificial lamb/destroying angel schtick takes on the distinct aura of a protection racket.

Fun fact #3: yeast is unholy

As an amateur baker and homebrewer, this is my favorite fun fact. The Feast of Unleavened Bread (Massot) required the complete eradication of leavening, and therein – according to Propp – lay its uniqueness. “Unleavened cakes were baked the year round for various sacral and secular purposes . . . To judge from Exodus 12, neglecting to eat them during Massôt would be at most a peccadillo. Instead, the severest sanctions apply to the eating of leavened food . . . Here may lie the holiday’s original significance.

“The process of fermentation must have seemed mysterious to the ancients. Fermentation of grain yields not only toothsome bread but also intoxicating spirits . . . Leaven in particular is fraught with poignant, multivalent symbolism. Leavening entails both putrefaction and growth, death and life; its pungent odor reaches every corner of the house.” Amen, brother!

“Leaven is incompatible with . . . ‘ultimate holiness.'” Propp suggests elsewhere that the priestly obsession with maximal purity means, among other things, that “an offering should be eaten not only at or near sacred space but during or near sacred time.” Not only can putrefaction not have been involved in the production of consecrated food, but such food must be eaten within strictly circumscribed periods (usually one day or less) to minimize the risk of spoilage. The prototype here is, of course, Manna. Propp also speculates that “The prohibition of hoarding [Exod 16:19-24] is a test of Israel’s faith in Providence. Perhaps for sacrifices, too, one must eat the meat one shares with Yahweh heartily, without concern for the matter.” These additional nuances in interpretation make the ban on yeast a little easier to sympathize with.

“During the week of Unleavened Bread, not just the home but the entire land of Israel becomes like a vast altar to Yahweh, leaven-free,” Propp says, and goes on to offer a parenthetical “SPECULATION: While leaven and honey are never offered to Yahweh (Lev 2:11), salt accompanies every sacrifice (Lev 2:13). Eating one’s overlord’s salt has well-known covenantal overtones (Num 18:19; Ezra 4:14; 2 Chr 13:5). But salt may also be considered leaven’s opposite. While one is the product and agent of decay and defilement, the other preserves. Salt, in the proper hands, can repel death itself (2 Kgs 2:20-21) and is compatible with God’s absolute holiness.”

I don’t know about you, but I just eat this stuff up! To save time, however, I’ll pass over a paragraph discussing postbiblical Jewish references (blog posts must be read on the same day they are written, or they start to go bad).

“Apart from the association with purity, unleavened bread may have been considered more primitive, closer to the created order and hence more sacred than leavened . . . Leaven and fermentation symbolized civilization. Deut 29:6 recalls Israel’s desert wanderings as an austere time when ‘(leavened?) bread you did not eat, and wine or beer you did not drink.’ . . . Just as one fasts on certain days or undertakes temporary vows of abstinence to show independence of food, so one periodically avoids leavened bread and eats the purer massôt to attain a higher spiritual-ritual state.”

O.K., now get this. “The disposal of leaven has still deeper significance. Yeast is in theory immortal. The Israelite’s entire chronometric system, however, and their entire worldview presuppose that time is not a continuous stream. It is and must be periodically interrupted. Six workdays are punctuated by the Sabbath; six years of agricultural labor are punctuated by the Year of Release; forty-nine years of commerce are punctuated by the Jubilee; each life ends with a death. Israelite history itself is punctuated by periods of absence from Canaan . . . The laws of Unleavened Bread ensure that the bread by which people live does not transcend time, at least within the Holy Land. Once a year, all yeast must be killed, with a week of separation before the souring of a new batch. It is crucial that aliens within the land also comply, lest their old leaven be used after the holiday to circumvent the taboo.”

The only thing I would add here is that the pre-modern understanding of yeast as a spirit would’ve reinforced the sense of competition with Yahweh and especially with his creative Breath. Actually, Propp does sort of admit the possibility a little later, speculating that some people may have believed that demons were attracted to leavening.

He concludes: “The Festival of Unleavened Bread is primarily a rite of riddance. Leaven symbolizes the undesirable: misfortune, evil intentions and especially ritual impurity.” Rabbinical commentators tended to associate yeast with pridefulness; I assume this belief must be unattested for earlier periods or Propp would’ve mentioned it. “To purge is to make a fresh start, to experience catharsis. This understanding fits well with the historical context of the holiday. In the month of New Grain, the Hebrews cast off centuries of oppression and assumed a holier, more ascetic status for their desert wanderings and subsequent national life. It also fits the seasonal aspect, for, throughout the world, equinoxes are opportunities for fresh beginnings.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

A walk in the fog

What I love about language
is what I love about fog:
what comes between us and things
grants them their shine.

Mark Doty, “Fog Suite” (See V.N. Dec. 28, “Deeply Superficial”)

Too much happens to ever get it all down. The writer has a running bet with God that he can turn any base metals into gold. I will sacrifice my health and even my privacy; I will bare my soul to the world. Sometimes I even long for a device that would read my thoughts and automatically convert them into text. How many of us who blog wouldn’t jump at the chance to have a computer chip implanted in our brains? Something that would convert every verbalized thought into digital form for eventual download and editing.

Walking in the fog, I can’t help thinking about editing. As every Chinese landscape painter knows, there’s nothing like a little blank space in the middle of the canvas to make the romantic heart go pitter-pat. No wonder lovers feel as if they’re walking in a cloud. Without such selective vision, how could anyone fall in love?

The mountain sounds different in the fog. Nearby noises may be muffled or echo strangely; distant sounds may be amplified. Red-winged blackbirds fly over, invisible but for their calls. On the road to the Far Field, a pileated woodpecker lets me pass within a few feet of the snag where he beats out his baritone ostinato. I can hear two men talking in the valley, dogs and cars and quarry trucks, a ruffed grouse drumming off in the laurel. When I get back to the house the juvenile red-tailed hawk takes off from the vicinity of my front porch, setting off a chorus of alarm calls from all the gray squirrels in the vicinity. Although it’s 7:00 a.m., a screech owl is still trilling – an odd addition to the chorus of song sparrows, cardinals, bluebirds and juncos. A single blackbird seems to have alighted in a nearby treetop. The call of this most common of birds is unusual enough on a dry mountaintop to excite my admiration.

Things look different inside a cloud, too, and not just because of the loss of distance, the sudden drawing-near of the horizon. This morning, for example, I noticed that the distinction between vines and tree trunks had suddenly grown much more arbitrary. A tall skinny sapling can have as many crooks and bends as a wild grapevine. No longer even did they appear as different ways of reaching for the sky, since the sky was now here. My gaze was drawn to the pure form; the illusion of individual purpose had dissolved. It’s too early for spiders, but you know what fog can do to their webs, right? It felt like that: everything glistened. Touch one part and everything will vibrate.

In the dawn light, trees turned deep blue at a little distance. Up close, the trunks shone in a half-dozen shades of green and grayish blue, as lichens threw open all their doors and windows. The trail gleamed, a bright ribbon of yellow-green moss. I was reminded of descriptions of the jeweled buddhaverse of Amida, as in the Pure Land Sutra: “And on every side of these lotus ponds jeweled trees are growing, lovely and radiant with the seven precious gems: gold, silver, beryl, crystal, red pearl, diamond and coral. In the lotus ponds the lotuses grow: blue, bluish, with a blue radiance, blue to behold . . . “

This briefest of excerpts narrowly avoids the endless repetitions that make Buddhist scriptures so tedious to read. I remind myself that they were written for a largely illiterate audience, and were intended to be committed to memory. Absolute novelty is not as memorable as we may think. Indeed, the mind has difficulty even interpreting – let alone memorizing – things too far outside its experience. Thus for the supremely strange Pure Land, created to provide a short-cut to enlightenment for the non-intellectual and the illiterate, only a very repetitive description can permit its assimilation by the habit-bound imagination.

In Japanese, as in Chinese, the ancient Sanskrit invocation Namo Amitabha Buddha became an almost unintelligible spell, na-mu-a-mi-da-boots. Namu does sound like a Japanese verb, and is typically interpreted as such – “I invoke,” “I trust/depend upon,” or even “I become.” Given that verbs bring up the rear in ordinary Japanese sentences, however, the effect would be something like, “I become, Amida Buddha.” But at the same time, the whole phrase is thought of as Amida’s Name. Most Pure Land Buddhists repeat this mantra hundreds of thousands of times over the course of their lives. But theoretically, at least for members of the largest Japanese Pure Land sect, Jodoshinshu, it only takes one, completely heartfelt repetition of the spell to guarantee rebirth among the gem-trees and lotuses, where all ordinary impediments to enlightenment are removed.

*

I’m currently reading Walter J. Ong’s ground-breaking book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge, 1982), about which I’m sure I will have much more to say in the coming days and months. Ong summarizes a vast amount of material, much of which is new to me and almost all of which has bearing on the sorts of questions I’ve been concerned with here at Via Negativa. Today, I want to consider his analysis of how the world is understood by illiterate people and by people in mostly or entirely oral cultures.

“Without writing, words as such have no visual presence . . . They are sounds . . . To learn what a primary oral culture is and what the nature of our problem is regarding such a culture, it helps first to reflect on the nature of sound as sound. All sensation takes place in time, but sound has a special relationship to time unlike that of the other fields that register human sensation. Sound exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. When I pronounce the word ‘permanence’, by the time I get to the ‘-nence’, the ‘perma-‘ is gone, and has to be gone.

“There is no way to stop sound and have sound. I can stop a moving picture camera and hold one frame fixed on the screen. If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing – only silence, no sound at all. All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way. Vision can register motion, but it can also register immobility. Indeed, it favors immobility, for to examine something closely by vision, we prefer to have it quiet. . . .

“For anyone who has a sense of what sound means in a primary oral culture, or in a culture not far removed from primary orality, it is not surprising that the Hebrew term dabar means ‘word’ and ‘event’. Malinowski has made the point that among ‘primitive’ (oral) people generally language is a mode of action and not just a countersign of thought . . . Neither is it surprising that oral peoples commonly, and perhaps universally, consider words to have great power. A hunter can see a buffalo, smell, taste and touch a buffalo when the buffalo is completely inert, even dead, but if he hears a buffalo, he better watch out: something is going on. In this sense, all sound, and especially all oral utterance, which comes from inside living organisms, is ‘dynamic.’

“The fact that oral peoples commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with the sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven. Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, ‘out there’ on a flat surface.”

Toward the end of the same chapter (“Some psychodynamics of orality”), Ong mentions that, in addition to its evanescence, “Other characteristics of sound also determine or influence oral psychodynamics. The principal one . . . is the unique relationship of sound to interiority when sound is compared to the rest of the senses. This relationship is important because of the interiority of human consciousness and of human communication itself.”

What might we make of using sound, in the form of charged words, to try and actualize a highly visual and essentially static buddhaverse – the inverse of our own “impure” world? Ong’s treatment seems to shed a little light, if you’ll pardon the expression. “To test the physical interior of an object as interior,” he continues, “no sense works so directly as sound. The human sense of sight is adapted best to light diffusely reflected from surfaces . . . A source of light, such as a fire, may be intriguing but it is optically baffling: the eye cannot get a ‘fix’ on anything within the fire. Similarly, a translucent object, such as alabaster, is intriguing because, although it is not a source of light, the eye cannot get a ‘fix’ on it either.”

Thus the radiant and gem-studded Pure Land is designed to baffle and intrigue, to lure and refuse hold. Without the sound of bells and the cries of birds of paradise, it might refuse all entrance to the mind. For our visual perception of depth, Ong says, is limited. “Depth can be perceived by the eye, but most satisfactorily as a series of surfaces: the trunks of trees in a grove, for example, or chairs in an auditorium. The eye does not perceive an interior strictly as an interior: inside a room, the walls it perceives are still surfaces, outsides.” Here I am reminded of Mark Doty’s eloquent defense of light-diffusing surfaces as containing a kind of depth of their own. (Has anyone ever thought to compare Doty’s notion of the salvific effects of shimmer, glitter and radiance with the visualization-based soteriology of Pure Land texts?)

“Taste and smell are not much help in registering interiority or exteriority. Touch is. But touch partly destroys interiority in the process of perceiving it. If I wish to discover by touch whether a box is empty or full, I have to make a hole in the box to insert a hand or finger: this means that the box is to that extent open, to that extent less an interior.

“Hearing can register interiority without violating it. I can rap a box to find out whether it is empty or full or a wall to find out whether it is hollow or solid inside. Or I can ring a coin to find out if it is silver or lead.

“Sounds all register the interior structure of whatever it is that produces them . . .

“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed. Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or at a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelops me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence . . .You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself in vision.” Now, of course, I picture myself back among the trees, immersed in sound-filled cloud.

Whereas vision dissects, Ong maintains, “The auditory ideal . . . is harmony, a putting together.” To avoid undue Western bias, I would add here that “harmony” might be understood to include all forms of musical coherence. Phenomenologically speaking, syncopation may be more fundamental than harmony per se.

“Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness . . . What is ‘I’ to me is only ‘you’ to you. And this ‘I’ incorporates experience into itself by ‘getting it all together.’ Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony. Without harmony, an interior condition, the psyche is in bad health.”

Now to return to the question of how pre-literate people may receive the religious or magical word – and what those of us who are immersed in the garden of the text might be missing. “In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound . . . the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as possessed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. The centering aspect of sound . . . affects man’s sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world.” Namo Amitabha Buddha!

*

There remains the matter of editing, of the Pure Land apart from this present, impure one. I have written elsewhere, from an environmental and aesthetic perspective, on the emptiness of the very idea of garbage. (See The Art of Living.) To produce garbage is to sin against the original wholeness and purity of mind. If words are, as Ong suggests, fundamentally evanescent, perhaps our Quixotic attempts to freeze and isolate them are precisely where waste is generated? Recall the possibility I threw out at the beginning of this post: a “bug” that could read and record our verbalized thoughts, the ones we speak silently with perhaps only the faintest motion of lips and tongue. Imagine how much would have to be discarded to make any of it cohere (or harmonize, as Mr. Ong would say)!

But imagine that I could do this editing as I walked, using a completely verbal computer language. This too – all the instructions to the computer – would be discarded or invisible in the eventual (or nearly simultaneous) text. Indeed, from the writer’s vantagepoint all hypertext (as in html) is waste material, is it not? Not for nothing did “garbage in, garbage out” become the mantra of the technorati.

To read to oneself is to become isolated – to edit out the world. “Because in its physical constitution as sound, the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups. When a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker . . .

“The interiorizing force of the oral word relates in a special way to the sacral, to the ultimate concerns of existence. In most religions the spoken [or sung, or chanted] word functions integrally in ceremonial and devotional life. Eventually in the larger world religions sacred texts develop too, in which the sense of the sacral is attached also to the written word. Still, a textually supported religious tradition can continue to authenticate the primacy of the oral in many ways. In Christianity, for example, the Bible is read aloud at liturgical services. For God is thought of always as ‘speaking’ to human beings, not as writing to them. The orality of the mindset in the Biblical text, even in the epistolary sections, is overwhelming . . . ‘Faith comes through hearing,’ we read in the Letter to the Romans (10:17). ‘The letter kills, the spirit [breath, on which rides the spoken word] gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6).” (The parenthetical interpretation is Ong’s.)

The letter kills, the spoken word revives. Hmmm, I don’t know. The fog is thickening . . .

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ifa: telling the fortunes of animals and humans

Divination, or Ifa, occupies a central place in Yoruba religion. My understanding of the Ifa system is basic in the extreme; I lack the two essential English-language studies, both by Wande Abimbola: Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus and Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa. As the titles of these works suggest, a large canon has grown up around the practice, which is all the more impressive for being entirely oral in its transmission until modern times.

There are several different methods of Ifa divination (casting of kola shells, casting of cowries, etc.) and as with any divinatory practice the interpretation and application of lessons arise from a kind of three-way negotiation between client, priest/therapist and divinities (orishas). (I would speculate in passing that the main difference between secular and religious forms of therapy is that the latter, by acknowledging the divine as a third party, may be more able to zero in on the problem through triangulation)

It’s during the interpretive stage that traditional Ifa poems may be recited if appropriate. English translations display much more affinity to the Hebrew Bible than to the I Qing; this should not surprise us, since many Hebrew religious concepts (including henotheism/monotheism) appear to be African in origin. Indeed, despite the passionate and eloquent arguments of the great A. J. Heschel (in The Prophets) I remain unpersuaded that the ancient Hebrew nebiim (prophets) were fundamentally different from West African diviners in their understanding of the relationship between revelation and response. In both cases, what matters is not predictive accuracy but moral transformation.
One might ask, Why not call the Ifa diviner a prophet rather than a priest? Yoruba priests and scholars like Abimbole prefer to reserve the term “prophet” to translate the role of the orisha Orunmila, who is second in the divine hierarchy after Oludumare, the High God who is not only beyond all supplication but can’t even be characterized in words or concepts. (It should not surprise us that Ifa recognizes the via negativa as explicitly as the other ‘world religions,’ for Yoruba religion too is a universalizing system, and thus needs to spell out speculative details that would be left largely unspoken in more particularistic or ‘tribal’ traditions.).

Ifa diviners are also called priests rather than prophets because they direct the sacrifice. In his essay in Evil and the Response of World Religion (W. Cenkner, ed., Paragon House, 1997) Abimbola translates what he says is a ‘very difficult verse’ explicating the power of sacrifice to maintain – or correct – the balance between benevolent and malevolent forces in the world. Like many Ifa psalms, it tells a story – here about the King of Epe (Elepe) who managed to appease death (Iku) for a little while. It begins in the praise-proverb mode familiar from West African poetry from almost all languages and genres. This mode typically uses metaphor and, especially, apparent non-sequitor to inject magic potency into the overall poem/utterance/act.

[from Osu Meji]

The old man who strolls gracefully like an elephant.
The old man who gallops like a buffalo.
When a wooden pestle falls on the ground, it makes the sound ogbonrangandan.
Help me catch my chicken with broken wings.
One room cannot adequately contain two sick people with different diseases.
Exchange-exchange, Ifa priest of the household of the king of Epe.
Ifa divination was performed for Elepe
When he was told to use an animal for sacrifice
As an exchange for his own life
Because of imminent death.
He listened to the prescription of sacrifice.
And he performed the sacrifice.
He was told to offer sacrifice to Eshu
And he complied.
He then heard the Ifa priests tell him that his sacrifice was accepted.
He praised his Ifa priests,
And his Ifa priests praised Ifa.
Death then left Elepe untouched
But took away the head of the animal.
Exchange-exchange, Ifa priest of the household of Elepe.
Loss left Elepe untouched,
But took away the head of the animal.
Exchange-exchange, Ifa priest of the household of Elepe.

*

Back near the beginning of this weblog I wrote a couple short pieces “for” and “against” sacrifice expressing my own ambivalence about this word, which still pervades discussions of ethical behavior – especially during wartime. In the essay about my television shrine I quoted Abimbola’s own thoughts on sacrifice; to recap, he says “sacrifice is an act of exchange. When one makes sacrifice, one exchanges something dear, or something purchased with one’s own money, in order to sustain personal happiness. Sacrifice involves human beings in a process of exchange or denial of oneself, or giving of one’s time, forsaking one’s pleasure, food, etc., in order to be at peace with both the benevolent and malevolent supernatural powers as well as to be at peace with one’s neighbors, family, the entire environment and ultimately to be at peace with oneself.”

It is Eshu who mediates between the 400 malevolent ajogan and the 401 benevolent orisha; thus it is to him that sacrifices are performed. As the straddler of worlds he is the master of paradox, which makes his praise-poems especially interesting in translation.

But – asks the sensitive postmodern reader, recoiling from the very notion of blood sacrifice – what about the animals? “Animal rights” propaganda to the contrary, traditional earth-based religions in which animal sacrifice is practiced (which could include all shamanistic systems, give a sufficiently broad definition of ‘sacrifice’) generally seem to inculcate more respect for the natural world in all its loving cruelty and complexity than many supposedly more advanced religious or philosophical systems. You can search the canons of European Romantic poetry in vain for a poem that deals as tenderly with a predator as the following excerpt from an Ifa psalm. (Though Blake’s “Tyger” comes close.) This was translated originally by B. King for Introduction to Nigerian Literature and is included in The Penguin Book of Oral Poetry, edited by Ruth Finnegan (whence also the remaining examples, except where noted). However, I have modified the translation of “tiger” to “leopard,” based on a strong resemblance to a briefer piece translated by Ulli Beier, not to mention the fact that tigers do not live in Africa! I am also not sure which orisha is meant by King’s “Oosa,” Orunmila or Oludumare.

[Leopard]

Ifa divination was performed for Leopard,
That one with lovely and shining skin.

Could he possibly have honour?
That was the reason Leopard performed Ifa divination.

He was told there was much prospect of honour for him,
but he should perform sacrifice.

And he performed it.
He performed sacrifice with ten knives
And one lovely and shining cloth.

The ten knives which he used for sacrifice
Were fixed to his fingers by his Ifa priests,
And with it he does havoc to all other animals.
That lovely and shining cloth which he also uses for sacrifice
Was used to cover his body
And it made him a beautiful animal.

He was dancing,
He was rejoicing;
He was praising his Ifa priests
And his Ifa priests praised Ifa.
He opened his mouth,
And the song of Ifa entered therein.
As he stretched his feet,
Dance caught them.

He said: O! Animal created to have honour.
Animal created to have honour.
It is Oosa who gave honour to Leopard,
Animal created to have honour.

*

For a fuller sense of traditional Yoruba attitudes toward animals, some translations of non-Ifa poems might help:

Python
(translated by Ulli Beier)

Swaggering prince
Giant among snakes.
They say python has no house.
I heard it a long time ago
and I laughed and laughed and laughed.
For who owns the ground under the lemon grass?
Who owns the ground under the elephant grass?
Who owns the swamp – father of rivers?
Who owns the stagnant pool – father of waters?

Because they never walk hand in hand
People say that snakes walk only singly.
But just imagine
Suppose the viper walks in front
The green mamba follows
And the python creeps rumbling behind –
Who will be brave enough to wait for them?

*

What’s remarkable about this poem from a Western perspective is not simply the reverential attitude toward snakes, but the recognition of swamps and stagnant pools as “fathers of rivers.” In this respect, traditional Yoruba knowledge is more advanced than was environmental science in the 1970s when the Clean Water Act was written: its supposition that such a thing as “isolated wetlands” can exist continues to bedevil conservation efforts in the U.S.

Beier also translates a praise poem for the viper. This comes from his African Poetry (Cambridge, 1966).

Viper

The viper lives in the forest.
Not even the Ogun worshipper can pick it up.
Viper’s child is beautiful in its nest.
But Nini is the most beautiful of snakes.
It is better for Nini to change its colour
and go home and bring some colour for Viper.
Viper owns all the rats in the forest.
Viper owns all the bush in the forest.
Viper owns all the snakes in the forest.
If there is no rat, what will snake eat?
If there is no rat, it will eat mouse;
if there is no mouse it will eat a shrew.
Poisonous death,
Poisonous viper,
Beautiful viper.

*

And here are two more from the same volume, which I use simply because I don’t have a copy of Beier’s Yoruba Poetry on hand. As with poems about people, in Ifa psalms or otherwise, the praise-proverb mode is above all designed to instruct and inspire.

Kob Antelope

A creature to pet and spoil
An animal with a smooth neck.
You live in the bush without getting lean.
You are plump like a newly wedded wife.
You have more brass rings about your neck
than any woman.
When you run you spread fine dust
like a butterfly shaking its wings.
You are beautiful like carved wood.
Your eyes are gentle like a dove’s.
Your neck seems long, long
to the covetous eyes of the hunter.

*

Colobus Monkey

We ask him to come and die – he sulks.
He dies at last – his cheeks are full of laughter.
Two rows of neat white teeth.
Death always follows war.
Those who wake early must sweep the ground.
Colobus says: the eagle sweeps the sky;
let me sweep the top of the tree.
Abuse me – and I will follow you home.
Praise me – and I will stay away from you.
Colobus is friend of the man in rags,
and a friend of the man in the embroidered gown.
He kills lice with black nails.
Deep-set eyes.
A mighty tail.
Don’t hold my tail,
don’t play with my face.
Death always follows war.

*

I don’t understand all the references in this last one, but the lines about praise and abuse could almost be my own motto! (A friend with whom I sometimes exchange poems, on the condition that we each be unsparing in our critique of the other, once accused me of not being able to take compliments.) Perhaps if Ifa divination were performed for me, some lines about the Colobus would crop up! For Ifa does possess a sense of humor, it seems:

Ifa
(translated by J. A. Adediji)

Ifa speaks in parables,
A wise man is he who understands it.
When we say understand it –
The wise man always understands it.
But when we do not understand it –
We say it is of no account.

*

Wisdom is the finest beauty of a person . . .
an Ifa oracle poem
(translated by Ulli Beier)

Wisdom is the finest beauty of a person.
Money does not prevent you from becoming blind.
Money does not prevent you from becoming mad,
Money does not prevent you from becoming lame.
You may be ill in any part of your body,
So it is better for you to go and think again
And to select wisdom.
Come and sacrifice, that you may have rest in your body,
Inside and outside.

*

As I conceive of it, the Ifa valuation of social and aesthetic balance bears a strong resemblance to that of the Diné (Navajo). The word usually translated “beauty” – as in the famous Nightway chant – for the Diné includes notions of harmony, symmetry, justice. A deep participation in this beauty promotes both wisdom and healing (“rest in your body, inside and outside.”) I’m also reminded a bit (again, perhaps erroneously) of the Japanese word kirei, commonly translated as “pretty” or “beautiful” but carrying also strong connotations of cleanliness, purity and order.

This ethos is on display in my final selection, one more translation of an Ifa psalm by Ulli Beier. It treats a theme that is truly pan-African in scope: the idea that, by sharing in the glory of others (through praise-singing or otherwise) our own selfhood is expanded: from the little bundle of urges and impulses familiar to us from western psychology, to the Self of Atman and Whitman’s Song of Myself. This psalm interprets the throw called Iwori wotura, which Beier uses for a title:

Oracle: Iwori Wotura

Iwori wotura.
Anybody who sees beauty and does not look at it
Will soon be poor.
Red feathers are the pride of the forest.
Young leaves are the pride of the palm tree.
Iwori wotura.
White flowers are the pride of the leaves.
A swept veranda is the pride of the landlord.
Iwori wotura.
A straight tree is the pride of the forest.
A fast deer is the pride of the bush.
Iwori wotura.
The rainbow is the pride of heaven.
A beautiful woman is the pride of her husband.
Iwori wotura.
Children are the pride of their mother.
Moon and stars are the pride of the sun.
Ifa says,
‘Beauty and all sorts of good fortunes arrive.’

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Gimme some sugar

From a culinary perspective, reducing means more than simply boiling down, removing liquid, thickening a sauce. Chemical changes happen as well. My most significant discovery in 20-some years of cooking concerns onions that have been fried at the lowest possible heat: rather than the sturdy, flexible, translucent bits or ribbons familiar to us from omelets and pizza toppings, slow-fried onions turn to yellow-orange sugar.

This is called caramelization. It represents but one way of making sugar through the reductive process. Homebrewers know two or more other ways of splitting long chains of starch into shorter sugar molecules; all involve the application of fairly precise temperatures for periods of 45 minutes or more. The essential art of brewing lies not in fermentation – even vintners can manage that – but in the various methods of extracting fermentable sugar from starchy grains and other plant parts.

I bring this up to remind myself that reductionism can be a wonderful thing. Usually I focus on its negative aspects, and not without reason – the results are all around us. I was struck yesterday afternoon by the absurdity of an AP story comparing The Passion of the Christ with a remake of Dawn of the Dead based on the wholly arbitrary measure of last weekend’s North American box office ticket sales. (I tried to turn this into a Diogenes post, which I subsequently removed for being out of character.) The humorous, Jesus-versus-flesh-eating-zombies story line irritated me more than it should’ve, setting off a chain of associations with bestseller lists and the hit system that has so distorted the evolution of so-called ‘popular’ music. Several things stick in my craw here: the reduction of value to sales or profit; the fake populism used to disguise elite control and manipulation of tastes and opinions; and most of all the very notion that different things can and should be ranked according to their positions on meaningless continua or axes of our own invention.

This last impulse is the most deeply rooted and difficult to challenge. We invent, for example, the category ‘poetry’ to encompass various distinct and unrelated forms of intensified linguistic expression – everything from light verse to song lyrics to elaborate puns, riddles, metaphysical mazes, transcriptions of dreams, rhythmic narrations, and so on. Having invented the category, the next impulse is to decide which among its various components is best, purest, most representative of the category. Then one must try and rank individual poems or poets according to some scale, be it economic, scholarly or purely personal. But what does it mean to have a favorite poet? Favorite for all seasons and moods, or simply evocative of one’s favorite season and mood? Top ten lists seem fairly harmless as long as they remain light-hearted, purely personal and subject to constant revision, but what makes us so fond of them in the first place?

What is genius? Does it cohere to a creator or to the creation? To say that a work is a thing of genius is to emphasize its uniqueness, its originality – its resistance to comparison with anything else. Originality: never to be confused with novelty (though the hit makers and bestseller listers have long since forgotten the distinction). A unique work, thing or being originates in unrepeatable circumstances. Such particularities of time and place are reflected in the etymology of the word genius, as I mentioned last week. The Latin word refers to the tutelary spirit of a place or person; according to my dictionary, it derives from the verb gignere, to beget.

It may be that an inclination toward hierarchical thinking is in some way innate for humans. No doubt our social structures closely resemble the strictly hierarchical societies of dogs and crows, though the overwhelming power of culture in determining the shape of human societies makes hash of such appeals to biological determinism without the addition of a great number of qualifiers and caveats.

In Nature herself there are no hierarchies. No component of a natural system is trivial; greatness is a trick of perspective, a matter of the eye only. Those of us involved in translating the language of ecology for professional conservationists must be careful to remember that notions of “top-down trophic regulation” must never be reified, however well they seem to capture realities of predation and the way in which the loss of one species can have rippling effects throughout an ecosystem. The top-down arrangement was designed by humans for the convenience of other humans. It is a cognitive crutch made necessary by the inadequacy of human imagination: because “Nature is not only more complex than we know, but more complex than we can know,” as the ecologist Frank Engler is reputed to have said.

Scientists themselves of course remain very aware that their maps and models are provisional and imaginary constructs, valued for their predictive power and their elegance. “Elegance,” to a scientist, seems to include notions of utility and efficiency: Ockham’s razor rules supreme. The great power of reductionism is nowhere more in evidence than in the discoveries of Western science – discoveries that rest upon inventions, but are no less real for that. To pick the most obvious and fundamental example: all of mathematics rests upon unprovable assumptions, such as the convention that dissimilar things have an essence that is in some way comparable, capable of reduction to a cipher. This apple and that apple and the other apple: any one of them is one, their numerical value is interchangeable. Together they are three. What a terrible and impious lie if we take it for the whole truth – but what a useful fiction it is, the sine qua non of all “higher” civilization.

Every abstraction is a reduction, a step away from original wholeness. But is the return necessarily better than the journey outward? The Daoist, dogmatic in his preference for the uncarved block, rejects all flavor – literally. From a diet of unflavored grains the Daoist aspires to subsistence on air alone.

I say, to hell with that! Whole grains aspire not to bread but to beer, just as the caterpillar’s cells say butterfly – regardless of how often its doom may be spelled by killer fungus or ichneumon. So gimme some sugar! And give me the dance from suchness to symbol, from mystery to imagination and back again. The genius is in the dance.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Plastic words

I should explain what I meant by the term “plastic words” in the essay-poem about tundra swans (which Tom Montag at The Middlewesterner has generously designated “Link of the week.” Thanks, Tom!). Fortunately, I just remembered where I had shelved my copy of Uwe Poerksen’s Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language (Jutta Mason and David Cayley, translators, Penn State U.P., 1995). Since I don’t have more than three or four books on linguistics, they are shelved with poetics and litcrit. I’m getting increasingly good at hiding things from myself…

Poerksen is a German medievalist. I imagine it was his professional background that gave him enough of an alientated perspective to recognize a feature of modernity that others had overlooked. He identifies a small class of words that have been liberated from their original context in the sciences, where they had highly specialized meanings, and are now liberally employed in academic/bureaucratic/managerial contexts mainly for prestige.

The phenomenon of plastic words has often been described and held up for ridicule under various headings, especially in its academic form. But Poerksen isn’t some curmudgeonly prescriptivist intent on returning modern language to some golden age of “correct” usage that never existed. His alarm stems from the perception that the newly modular language he identifies is spreading its tentacles into every facet of ordinary life, from food to health care to environmental protection. In the hands of what left-libertarian economist Michael Albert calls the coordinator class, plastic words like development, project, strategy, problem, says Poerksen, “become the building blocks for plans and solutions that may seem utopian but end up impoverishing the world.”

The book isn’t too long, nor are its arguments too complex. I won’t attempt to outline Poerksen’s entire argument. Let me just quote the opening paragraphs, include a stripped-down definition of a plastic word, add a few thoughts of my own, and conclude with an example relevant to yesterday’s post on anorexia.

Plastic words are not new in how they look but in how they are used. They have been fashioned for the purpose of laying down the tracks and outlining the routes of a civilization that is covering the world with gathering speed. Their origins can no longer be discerned. They resemble one another. It is as though there were a place somewhere in the world where these words were released at intervals, as though at an unknown place there existed a factory releasing them complete from its assembly line, or as if they were coming into being simultaneously in many different places.

They may not be noticed, but they are present everywhere: in the speeches of politicians and on the drawing boards of city planners, at academic conferences, and in the ever more taken-for-granted in-between world of the media. They invade private conversation. When they first appear, they are fashionable and command attention; but then they merge with the everyday and soon seem commonsense.

In the spring of 1985 I attended a conference in the little Mexican mountain city of Tepotzlan, involving several noted industrialists, politicians, and academics of that country. The discussion was about how Mexico could take advantage of the most recent developments in high technology. Please note: not whether this ought to be done, but how. … The discussion was dominated by a number of words that floated through it like driftwood: ‘progresso,’ ‘proceso,’ ‘modernización,’ ‘necesidades,’ ‘comunicación,’ ‘información,’ ‘crisis,’ ‘desarrollo.’ The North American expressed himself a little differently. He replaced ‘desarrollo’ with ‘development,’ and was ahead of the others in that he seemed to be already settled on the high plateau of ‘high tech,’ whereas they had to orient themselves toward the shining mountaintop of the future by using his position as a marker…

I was only an accidental guest at this meeting; and, during a break, I remarked to a Mexican friend that the talk seemed to consist of no more than a hundred words. My friend shook his head and said quickly: ‘With a hundred words you could become president! Here there are barely fifty.’

Or perhaps there were only fifteen…

Like any self-respecting German scholar – especially one on a self-appointed campaign against vagueness – Poerksen is not content to discuss the problem in general terms. He identifies 30 criteria that must be satisfied for a word to qualify as fully “plastic.” But determined to make his findings useful to the general reader, he boils these down into nine “essential characteristics”:

A. [A plastic word] originates from science and technology and resembles a building block. It is a stereotype.
B. It has an inclusive function and is a ‘key for everything.’
C. It is a reductive concept, impoverished in content.
D. It grasps history as nature.
E. Connotation and function predominate.
F. It generates needs and uniformity.
G. It renders speech hierarchical and colonizes it, establishing an elite of experts and serving as their ‘resource.’
H. It belongs to a still very recent international code.
I. It limits speech to words, shutting out expressive gesture.

So, do ‘development’ and ‘sexuality’ mean the same thing? It seems to me that they signify different things, but what they signify is less important than what they mean. And the meaning is the same. These are close relatives of the myth of everyday life described by Roland Barthes. They are idols, magical and empty.

This last sentence, by the way, hints at the one connection I wish the author had not left unexplored. In pre-modern Europe, as Poerksen must know, word-magic was at least as prominent as it is today. Though we have lost the sense that words can actually carry power in some essential way, I do feel that spells and other forms of charged speech constitute the most direct precursor to the modern planner’s use of plastic words. In European spells, much of the language was deliberate nonsense in which “connotation and function predominated.”

Investing language with magical power is a very different phenomenon from the use of modular language, which is by definition denatured of content. All I’m saying is that the latter doesn’t arise from a complete cultural vacuum, as Poerksen seems to suggest. In fact, the use of language to obscure rather than to elucidate seems universal, and might in fact be a major driver of linguistic evolution, to the extent that people invent new words and new ways of expressing themselves in part to differentiate themselves from the surrounding society or a neighboring society. Thus, it only makes sense that the increasingly internationalized club of ‘experts’ would want to devise their own lingo, the use of which connotes membership in the cognoscenti at the same time that it excludes the hoi polloi. Its plasticity arises from the shallowness and fundamental dishonesty of this new culture’s belief-system. But what elite has ever been willing to admit to itself the true nature of power?

I’ll close with one example of Poerksen’s that ties into a theme from yesterday’s post: the increasingly vague and modular use of the word “health.”

No one who is healthy talks about her health. Nothing is bothering her; she doesn’t lack anything. There is no reason for her to speak of this ‘nothing,’ since she doesn’t notice it. She only begins to speak of it when her body forces itself on her attention: then she talks about her illnesses, if they come, or the memory of her pains. the word ‘health’ comes up infrequently in the old texts, and when it does, it designates an absence: it means ‘uninjured,’ ‘alive.’ whoever was healthy lacked nothing. But in the time in which we live health has become a virtue, of which we keenly feel the lack. This lack has now been implanted in everyday consciousness. So we are constantly talking about our illnesses.

When the concept of health gets loose in the vernacular, it generates new forms of deviance. Originally, it was a rather unobtrusive idea, but that was before it was authorized and sanctified by experts. Now it introduces arbitrary boundaries into the continuum of experience, erecting a barrier between ‘healthy’ and ‘sick,’ and specifying a norm that has been set ever higher, so that ever more people are identified as sick. …

The scientists’ awareness that ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ are distinctions located on a shifting scale are lost. The notion of a norm that emerges from this particular vocabulary, of a healthy middle range that lies between ‘too high’ and ‘too low,’ has become a fixed standard in ordinary life. This norm is set at a level that we somehow always fail to reach. And so, because of the authority residing in a normative language, the continuum of experience is measured against a fixed yardstick, with the result that we are constantly asking ourselves: Aren’t we coming down with something? Isn’t something wrong with us? When the yardstick is passed into our own hands in the name of prevention or personal responsibility, we become in effect our own clients. It turns out that no one is ‘healthy’ any more.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Loving Kuanyin

Notice to Readers: For the next ten days or so, family and other obligations will prevent the kind of in-depth blogging you’ve come to know and love (?). I will still post something every day: expect to see a lot more of Diogenes, for example. I can also post material from the vast pile of second-rate and experimental stuff I’ve written over the years, not to mention my better poetry, translations, etc. What I love best about blogging is seeing what comes out of the keyboard when I sit down to write first thing in the morning, so the loss may be more mine than yours. For today, here’s a little entry that’s sure to increase the number of Google hits: my first (and probably last) entry in the ever-popular genre of religious porn. Enjoy.
__________

My first lover was Kuanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. She faked her orgasms.

The first time we slept together, I was a little shy – ashamed of my scrawny frame. “Close your eyes until I get in bed,” I warned her. “It doesn’t matter. My hands have eyes in them.” It was true!

Kuanyin didn’t like it when I called her a goddess. “I am just an ordinary woman,” she would say. “Yeah, and the Dalai Lama’s just a simple monk.”
“He’d better be. The Tantrayanists all think he’s ME!”
“Well, say the Dalai Lama IS Avalokiteshvara. Where does that leave Kuanyin?” “Where does it leave Chenrezig?”
“Lost in translation, no doubt.”
“A bodhisattva is, by definition, never lost!”
“Oh? What about just now?”
“That orgasm was faked, for your benefit. A prime example of Upaya, ‘skillful means.'”
Interesting pillow talk, at any rate. Having a sense of humor, I learned, is somehow related to the ability to lose one’s temper. Kuanyin, of course, had neither – though when she saw that I missed them, she tried hard to pretend. But whatever else she might have been, she was not an actress.

The Lotus Sutra says she has a “boundless ocean store of blessings.” I was the surfer dude, just riding the swells.

“Why are your earlobes so long?”
“Why do you think?”
“Mmm, neck rings!”
“You are so unenlightened!”
“Yeah. Listen. If you wanna do the thousand-arm thing, I just want to let you know that’s fine with me.”
“Pervert. I will be what I will be!”
“Yahweh said that, too.”
“He did? When?”
“At the burning bush, when Moses asked his name.”
“Silly Hebrews, seeking God in a burning bush.”
“Babe?”
“What?”
“The world is full of people seeking religion in a burning bush,” I said, moving my hand over the obvious spot. Her breasts grew points like little vajras.

We didn’t always talk like this in bed. Actually, we didn’t do much of anything in bed. Tantric sex? Fuggetaboutit. I was an idealist, she was an ideal: it was that simple. Besides, I’ve never liked the excessively girlish, vulnerable types. I mean, Billie Holiday is O.K. now and then, but if I had to wake up every morning with the blues all ’round my bed, I’d want to wake up with Bessie Smith.

Speaking of which, I remember another illuminating exchange. She was whispering sweet nothings in my ear – literally. I was lying there just starting to drift off when I heard, “Sariputra! Form does not differ from the void, nor the void from form. Form is identical with void, void is identical with form . . . ” I startled. “Will you stop that! It’s going to spoil my sleep!” She looked hurt (as if!) so I added in a soothing voice, “I want to dream about you, not about nothingness!”
“That’s your problem, you only want to dream! Don’t you want to Wake Up?”
Oh boy, I thought, here we go. “Well, since you asked, no. Having to be awake all the time sounds like a total freakin’ nightmare, babe. I went five days without sleep one time and by the end of it I was starting to hallucinate. It wasn’t pretty.”
“But of course you can still sleep when your body needs to sleep. You’re missing the point.”
“The point is maybe it’s a bad analogy. Like this whole ‘enlightenment’ concept. I like the dark. It makes you feel things differently. If the objects of all sense perceptions are equally illusory, why should we privilege just one sense, vision, to convey inadequate and provisional concepts about the void?”
“Do you want me to tell you what enlightenment sounds like, smells like, tastes like, feels like?”
“You don’t have to, babe,” I assured her, running my fingers over the perfect and uncomprehending mirror of her face.

I’ll admit it, I enjoyed the murmur that followed us down the street. I did my best to hide my pride and look properly humble, of course. She was turning me into a first-class hypocrite before I’d even taken the Buddhist vows. “Why should I take refuge in the Sangha? I got you,” I said whenever she raised the issue. “Direct transmission, mind to mind. Just you and me, babe.”

You think she wore saffron robes or something? Guess again. She dressed like a high-class prostitute. Come to think of it, she was a high-class prostitute. Or at least, that’s what she did for a living. Said her parents were poor dirt farmers and she had eight siblings to put through school. It was funny to think of all the slobs who just used her to get their rocks off, passing up the chance of a lifetime – hell, the chance of a thousand lifetimes, if you believe in karma. You would have thought the blazing mandorla was a dead giveaway. But apparently, I was the only one who could see it.

“No, you don’t have any special attainments,” she assured me, “just maybe a little more aptitude than the average John – er, Joe.”
“How come I knew who you were, then?”
“I’ve yet to see any evidence of that.”
“Aw, c’mon, surely something’s rubbed off on me by now.”
“Rubbed off! As if I were Aladdin’s lamp!”
“Not hardly! I would never be so crude. Besides, they say you can’t put a genie back in the bottle a second time.”
“Exactly,” she said, erroneously believing I was Making Progress instead of just being a jerk, as usual. “A genie can’t grant you something you already possess.”

You might find this hard to believe, but it was me who broke up with her, not the other way around. I don’t think she ever understood why.
“Are you hurt?” I asked Kuanyin.
“No, just disappointed. I haven’t experienced ‘hurt’ in ten thousand kalpas.”
“Well, that’s why I’m leaving you, goddess.”
“I am not a goddess!”
“And that’s the other reason. Number 1, you feel nothing. I can’t even hope to hurt you. Your needs are shallow, of the body only. Number 2, I want to worship, and you won’t let me. All compassion and no passion make Jack a dull boy.”
“That amounts to just one reason: I am not who you wanted me to be. I’m not who you think I should be. But I tell you, it’s all in your mind – which in Chinese, as you know, includes what you Westerners call the heart. In reality, I am a prostitute and you’ve got your head permanently stuck in the clouds. This role-playing game was your idea from the start. You have never listened to a thing I had to say!”

That was her last gambit. She was wrong, of course. I wrote down everything she said every time we were together, immediately after I got home. Over the years, I have polished just a bit, mostly restricting myself to a little rearranging to put her aphorisms into a bit more logical sequence. No fancy title, just the New Kuanyin Sutra. I’ll publish it when the time is right.

Do you think I’d look good in a saffron robe?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The art of living

I strongly suspect that a contemporary art of living can be recovered. I believe in the art of suffering, in the art of dying, in the art of living, and, so long as it is in an austere and clearsighted way, in the art of enjoyment, of living it up.
Ivan Illich, Ivan Illich in Conversation (David Calley, House of Anansi Press, 1992)

People of faith can stand to learn a lot from environmentalism and conservation biology: few would dispute this proposition. But is the opposite also true? Can environmentalists and conservation biologists learn from religious and humanistic traditions? In the past year, the flagship magazines of several large conservation organizations have argued that such a cross-fertilization can and must take place. Articles have referenced the increasing efforts of clerics from many faiths to convince their followers that care for the environment/Creation is a sacred duty, and quoted testimonies from environmental activists for whom some form of spiritual awareness and/or practice is an important motivator.

Thus, two important messages have emerged: 1) an awareness of ecological realities and environmental crises should become a focus for faith-based activities; and 2) environmentalists and conservation organizations can improve their outreach efforts if they take the spiritual dimension into account. I’d like to take a small step further and suggest that if environmentalists really want to learn how to unite individual action with social movements and cultural transformation, they should look South, where the situation is the most desperate – and where some of the most creative solutions are beginning to emerge.

The steel drum culture of Trinidad was cited by the late social philosopher Ivan Illich as a model and an archetype for a new approach to cultural production now widely encountered in the global South. Half a century ago, musicians with welding torches discovered that 55-gallon drums discarded by the petrochemical industry could be drums indeed, and a whole new music was born. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And when this conversion takes place under the sign of a new melange of cultures – call it creolism, call it mestizaje – it can come to possess revelatory, even incarnational power.

By contrast, here in the North we are exhorted to “reduce, reuse, recycle.” This mantra of the waste manager trumpets a reductionist bias in its very first term. Human beings are nothing more than consumers, nodes in an endless cycle of resources. But as the old Anglo-German proverb “waste not, want not” implicitly recognizes, we cannot want without wasting. We cannot waste without wanting. To really understand pollution, we have to understand desire. For that, I believe, we must have recourse to religious and humanistic traditions.

But isn’t economics the true science of human desires? Potentially, yes. But in its most prevalent form, neo-classical and liberal economic theories are burdened by fallacious assumptions that impede a broader understanding. I speak not merely of the habitual externalization of social and environmental costs with which most conservationists are already familiar. According to the usual analysis, this blindness derives from a kind of over-enthusiasm – the cornucopian premise. I would argue (influenced by Illich) that this predilection has deeper roots: in the very notion of environment as Cartesian space through which commodities can circulate with no essential change in quality. The model for this kind of circulation is money – pure medium, with no real content. To reduce the world to commodities or resources is to literally devalue it – ultimately, to equate it with zero.

Recycling is widely viewed as an alternative to waste. But Nature neither wastes nor recycles: she transforms. I believe that humans can and must follow Nature if we are truly to “conserve” our “environment” – inadequate terms that may well be unequal to the task ahead. We need to reinvent the language of use and waste, to begin thinking instead of care and healing. For illustrations of the sorts of directions in which this could lead, I’ll cite just two examples, both from Africa.

“Art from Africa’s junkyards,” an article by Gloria Goodale in the March 21, 2003 Christian Science Monitor, described an exhibition of Senegalese Sufi art that had just opened in Los Angeles.

“Lilting dance music fills the rooms in the first US display of Senegalese Sufi art. But it is not just another piece of radio noise.

“The song, ‘Do You Hear Me, Father Bamba?’ is by the well-known Sufi singer, Youssou N’Dour, singing to his faithful and exhorting them to show their faith in everyday life.

“Indeed, showing the faith might be a good way to describe the intention of ‘A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal,’ at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles, through July 27.

“Through various art forms, including murals, glass paintings, and fragile historical documents, the show depicts a community-building vision of Islam that stands in stark contrast to Islamist radicals. ‘This is another, and very important face of Islam,’ says co-curator Allen Roberts, UCLA professor of World Arts and Culture.

“The exhibition, which Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight dubbed as one of L.A.’s top nine art events for 2003, ‘actually began in the junkyards of Senegal,’ says Mary Nooter Roberts, chief curator of the Fowler Museum.

“She and her husband, co- curator Allen Roberts, were in the country nearly 10 years ago and noticed that discarded motor parts were being hammered into sieves. The exhibition explores the impact of one of the most important Sufi movements in the sub-Saharan African nation, known as Mouridism.

“‘There is this thing called the mystique du travail,’ she says, referring to the French phrase ‘the mystique of work,’ that surrounds the Mouridians. ‘They take this dedication to work as a means to salvation to something far beyond even the Protestant work ethic.’

“The Mouridism movement was founded by the Sufi poet and mystic, Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), the spiritual leader of some 4 million Senegalese Muslims, including the country’s current president. The most important tenets of the religion are pacifism and hard work, says Ms. Roberts.

“Mouridians, she says, are known for transforming derelict areas of a community into vibrant, livable centers for commerce and political life, through their devotion to labor. Images of the detritus of industrial life being turned into useful objects abound. One photo shows vast piles of oil barrels that will be flattened into trunks.”

Although this article is no longer available for free on the Internet, another, much longer and more scholarly article is. A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal was authored by the exhibition’s curators, Allen F. and Mary Nooter Roberts, and appeared in African Arts magazine (Winter 2002). Roberts and Roberts identify the Muslim concept of baraka, or blessing, as the catalyst for the Mouride synthesis of life and art. Though others have translated this blessing power as “charisma,” they feel the word “aura” does more justice to its popular Senegalese usage. I like the way they put some fairly abstruse theory into play here:

“‘Aura,’ from the Greek, literally means a ‘breeze’ or ‘breath’ (OED 1982:565), and is extended to refer to the inherence of power and presence within a work of art (Freedberg 1989). ‘In the auratic experience the object becomes human, as it were’ (Foster 1988:197), and possesses the capacity to produce a response, bestow well-being, and protect its viewers. Through the theorizing of Walter Benjamin and the debates his work has engendered, ‘aura’ has also come to be associated with the ‘authenticity of a thing … [and] the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’ (1988:221). When Benjamin wrote that ‘to perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return’ (1988:188), he might have been speaking of a Mouride sense of how their icons possess baraka. That an image with aura has ‘weight, opacity and substance’ and ‘never quite reveals its secret[s]’ (Baudrillard 1983:22-23) also echoes Mouride sentiments. Above all else, Mourides feel that baraka does things: it works, changes, and helps.”

And as the Monitor passage indicates, this is no fringe movement. In the 1980s, Roberts and Roberts note, “At a moment of dire tensions between urban youth and the Senegalese government over a lack of jobs and the collapse of basic city services, young people took to the streets–not to riot, as had been feared, but to refabulate their neighborhoods. That is, they cleaned, reclaimed, repainted, and renamed alienated spaces by endowing them with icons of their own imaginary [sic]. Instead of reminding people of colonial humiliations, new monuments and murals celebrated soccer stars, musicians, politicians, human-rights heroes, and above all, the saints of Senegalese Sufism. Portraits of Amadou Bamba figured importantly in this vibrant collage, and the Saint emerged as an ‘alternative figure in nationalist memory’ standing for and promoting both ‘a rupture in postcolonial memory’ and a ‘new modernity’ (Mamadou Diouf, personal communication, 1995).”

Given that one out of every three sub-Saharan Africans is a Muslim, and considering the instrumental role of Sufi brotherhoods in spreading this more tolerant form of African Islam from the 18th century onwards, we are not grasping at straws here to glimpse in Mouridism the shape of a new and more civilized future. But the inspiration need not be Muslim – or even explicitly religious. From the other end of the continent, Steve Biko delineated “Some African Cultural Concepts” in an essay later selected for The African Philosophy Reader, edited by P.H. Coetzee and A.P.J. Roux and published by Routledge in 1998.

Biko describes African society as fundamentally humanistic and communalistic. He contrasts this with Europeans, among whom “a visitor to someone’s house, with the exception of friends, is always met with the question ‘What can I do for you?'” Seeing people as instruments, as “agents for some particular function” is foreign to the Bantu worldview, he maintains. “We believe in the inherent goodness of man. We enjoy man for himself. We regard our living together not as an unfortunate mishap warranting endless competition among us but a deliberate act of God to make us a community of brothers and sisters jointly involved in the quest for a composite answer to the varied problems of life.”

While these views may be anathema to those who buy into the cant about an ineluctable conflict between “anthropocentrism” and “biocentrism,” I would merely point out that it is precisely our distaste for each others’ company here in the U.S. that fuels the on-going orgy of road building, SUV manufacturing and suburban and exurban sprawl. If Americans were more like Africans, there’d be a hell of a lot more unfragmented wild habitat left, and the air would be a lot cleaner, too.

This humanistic philosophy is on display in another, more recent article from the Christian Science Monitor (they specialize in this kind of hopeful stuff): “From Rubble to Revival,” by Megan Lindow (Feb. 26, 2004). It details the successful struggle of a South African artist, Mandla Mentoor, to galvanize his neighbors and turn their Soweto neighborhood around. Mentoor began as a local activist focused on unemployment, crime, and environmental degradation. He traces his inspiration to the student protest movement of the 1976, in which Steve Biko had played a leading role.

“At first, he says, he recruited young people and unemployed women to salvage paper, cans, and other waste materials to sell, but he quickly realized this was not the best way to make money. So he developed Amandla Waste Creations and began teaching people to use these materials to make low-cost building materials and crafts such as papier-mí¢ché and wire sculptures to sell to tourists. . . . The organization’s first real grant money came when Mentoor won the World Wilderness Forum’s Green Trust Award in 2002. Mentoor’s group voted to use the prize money ($1,500) to buy rakes and masks needed to clean up ‘the mountain.'”

The neighborhood’s visual focal point, a little hillock topped by a water tower, had been strewn with garbage – the legacy of over a decade of local tax revolts against the Apartheid regime, which led to the cessation of all garbage pick-up services. “Criminals frequented the area, women were raped, and local people sometimes found abandoned babies and dead bodies in the rubble, Mentoor recalls. He had the vision to look past all that: to see, instead of wasted space, a unique and powerful place, the neighborhood’s true heart.

“Today . . . the trash is gone, and patches of dusty hillside have been planted with trees and vegetable gardens. Residents have built makeshift theaters and cooking huts, and walls of rock have been piled up to form ‘dialogue circles’ – spaces for meetings, parties, and performances.

“Projects like this reflect a ‘greening’ movement that is slowly spreading in neglected urban townships and degraded rural settlements, where most South Africans live,” the article continues. Part of Mentoor’s genius was to recognize the importance of creating ties to place through community gardening, art, even renaming: “We call this place Somoho, the Soweto Mountain of Hope.” And though the article focuses largely on his vision, it’s clear that hundreds of people are now involved and employed in enterprises ranging from bakeries and sewing shops to film and recording studios.

“Sydney Cindi, who runs the waste-art section of the program, says he’s trying to get young people involved so they won’t make the mistakes he did. He learned to work with clay in prison, where he served four years for robbery. ‘To me, Somoho is not just a project, it’s a school of learning,’ he says. ‘When we started on the mountain it was a dumping place. Now it’s a place where people sit under the trees.'”

“We reject the power-based society of the Westerner that seems to be ever concerned with perfecting their technological know-how while losing out on their spiritual dimension,” Steve Biko declared. “We believe that in the long run the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in this field of human relationships. The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa – giving the world a more human face.” God grant that it be so!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Giving ourselves up

From the AP’s daily dispatch of disinformation comes this puzzling statement:

Without ruling on el Motassadeq’s guilt, the appeals court said the lower court erred because it failed to consider whether the lack of direct evidence from Binalshibh should have influenced its decision.

A lawyer for relatives of Sept. 11 at both trials, Andreas Schulz, said Thursday’s ruling “will certainly be met with incomprehension” by them.

What does it mean to brag about one’s own (or one’s clients’) willful ignorance in this context? Could ignorance be somehow essential to innocence, that sine qua non of victimhood? It certainly inspires more pathos to imagine (say) new prisoners at Auschwitz actually believing the death camp’s motto, “Arbiter Macht Frei” (Work Makes [You] Free). But what about those among the prisoners who were both well aware of the fate that awaited all the camp’s inhabitants, and who were appointed by the Nazis to positions of power over their fellows? Doesn’t the consideration of their fate and motives somewhat muddy the “moral clarity” that neo-conservative nabobs are always nattering about? What does it mean to talk about “victim’s rights” if the right to reconciliation, the right to hold or withhold forgiveness, is routinely overshadowed by the demand for retribution? Should the wronged party in fact be permitted to claim a right to retribution, or should simple recompense suffice?

****

I wonder if the victim of a crime can ever be repaid in the way that retributive justice seems to demand. In Germanic tribal law, blood guilt could only be averted through arbitration, and the victim (or the victim’s next of kin, in the case of murder) agreeing to some settlement, usually monetary. For truly heinous crimes, exile was the severest penalty. By contrast, in our supposedly more enlightened society, most people don’t see anything wrong with making someone pay for murder, say, by depriving them of freedom and dignity and subjecting them to privation and often extreme violence and psychological trauma for the rest of their life. And we consider this more humane than simply executing them, which at least has the advantage of proportionality to the crime.

“Primitive” law codes, written or unwritten, express a tautological truth that many seem now to have lost sight of: that the legal system was developed to avert lawlessness. Lawlessness, in tribal societies such as those of the ancient Germans or Western Semitic peoples, did not mean primarily “lack of obedience to authority,” because authority tended to be fluid and decentralized. Rather, social disorder equated to illegitimate violence: another tautology. Better to say: disproportionate violence, violence that spirals or threatens to spiral out of control. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” may seem vengeful, but in fact it was intended to replace “an arm for an eye and your firstborn’s life for my tooth.”

What is it about the cycle of revenge that tends to send it spiraling out of control? Years ago my father came up with a physical analogy to describe what happens when individuals remain mired in their own points-of-view. “‘I was willing to go halfway, but he was not!’ How many times do we hear this sort of statement advanced as self-evident proof of reasonableness and good intentions?” my father asked rhetorically. “But here: let’s look at each other from a few feet away. Now, I am going to put my finger where I think the halfway point is. You do the same.” Between our fingers a gap of a few inches remained.

His conclusion: we each have to be willing to go more than half-way toward the other, from our own perspective, if harmony is to be preserved. There must be give as well as take. Is this not the root meaning of forgiveness, I wonder: to give in excess of that which strict justice would seem to require?

****

Martin Luther King: “Peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.” In this sort of usage, I think, justice is invested with a broader meaning that encompasses both fairness and harmony. It includes seeing oneself as another and seeing another as oneself. To practice respect, to engage in hospitality. It’s not so difficult, really. As the quote with which we began this inquiry strongly suggests, willful ignorance is essential if we are to cling stubbornly to our own perspectives, insist on our unique and fundamental victimhood. No qualifiers are permitted; nuance is impossible. It is an outrage. The very ground cries out for blood.

But simple hospitality and mutual respect do not suffice to bring about social harmony. For proof, one need look no farther than the perpetually warring tribesmen of northern Yemen, or other parts of the world where the canons of hospitality are strictly observed. A more radical form of hospitality seems to be in order, one that transcends bilateral relationships to perceive the intricate web in which we all move, human and non-human alike, the living and the dead and the generations yet to come.

What might such a perspective entail? What are its preconditions? Does it depend upon religious institutions for its propagation, or might it flourish more readily beyond their reach? These are each huge questions; any answers I propose now or in the future must remain highly tentative.

****

A few angles of approach do suggest themselves. One is the possible centrality of the very kind of unknowing that has been the underlying theme of this weblog. In contrast to willful ignorance, which involves a self-conscious refusing to look/hear/understand, what I call “unknowing” describes a realization of inadequacy to anything approaching full and comprehensive vision/hearing/apprehension. Knowing that one doesn’t know is essential to understanding, both at the mundane and supramundane levels. At the supramundane level, I suppose, one comes acropper of the unknowability of Creation, the way in which the material world exceeds mater/matter at every turn – the way in which “a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” And “more beautiful is the hunt than the pelt,” as the Dutch proverb has it, because when that which is hidden gives itself up for dead, we run the great risk of accepting a diminished role as killer, rather than recipient of a gift which is never fully deserved.

So we can perhaps draw a parallel with the religious concept of faith – not in the usual Christian sense of blind, unwavering belief in absurd propositions, which probably belongs more under the heading of willful ignorance. What I have in mind here is something more universal: the religious person’s sense that they must give themselves up to a higher or deeper power. “No gesture is more significant,” says the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, “than the joined hands of a believer, mutely witnessing that nothing can be done and nothing changed, and that he comes simply to give himself up.” Or in that wonderful phrase of Heschel’s I quoted last week, “Faith is not a product of our will. It occurs without intention, without will. Words expire when uttered, and faith is like the silence that draws lovers near, like a breath that shares in the wind.”

There is a feyness to such faith – a sense of ourselves as hunters no longer, but helpless prey. Lambs of God the great predator. I am reminded of a Vishnavite devotional painting that depicts the petitioner stretched supine across the knees of a multi-armed, multi-headed manifestation of the Godhead, Whose foremost arms end in the razor-clawed forepaws of a lion. The petitioner has been disemboweled; the Divinity’s fangs drip with blood. The petitioner gazes upward, rapt, enraptured.

This sounds horrific until one recalls that god and worshipper are not immutable roles. From the vantage-point of evolution, humans appear as both predator and prey. In the strictly religious realm, one goal in many traditions is personal transcendence through moksa, nirvana, imitatio Christi, etc. God can die within us (in the dark night, in the cloud of unknowing) just as we can die within God. When we partake of the sacrificial lamb or the wafer or the psychadelic mushroom, we are consuming the flesh of God, dissolving it within our own bellies. In these and many other ways, individual human beings are encouraged to strive for a realization that experience and thoughtful reflection tells us is beyond our powers. We need to somehow unite our own inadequate power with what the Pure Land Buddhists call simply Other-Power.

Usually outside the religious realm (at least here in the West) is the self-transcendence experienced during sex. But sex is an interesting case because, at least in its heterosexual form, it contains the implicit promise of a form of literal self-exceeding not possible with other altered states. (The Vajrayanists might argue with me here. I don’t discount at least the possibility of emanation-bodies and the like.) The literature on so-called entheogens – mind-altering drugs used for religious purposes – does suggest that shared visions are possible and even common, at least in some South American traditions. And as Andrew Weil once pointed out, the mind can be trained to do on its own anything that it can be made to do through chemicals. This, incidentally, may reduce the sense of dependence on gods and spirits but, if anything, increases one’s reliance on Other-Power in the form of the guru. Be that as it may, we should be careful not to succumb to the current fashion of treating sex as the standard by which all other self-transcending experiences must be measured. (Western science, too, can breed a form of fundamentalism!)

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This discussion of self-transcendence brings us back to the subject of my two most recent posts. Recall, first, Tedlock’s comments about the Newekwe transcending all boundaries. Recall too how the Mudheads offered a graphic representation of material or biological being as grotesque. In the medieval European culture of the carnival, we saw the material body celebrated for its self-transcendence. “It is a body in the act of becoming . . . It is continually built, created, and builds another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world,” Bakhtin writes.

This returns us to the dance of predator and prey: “the gaping mouth, the teeth, the swallowing” are central images in the popular-festive system, connecting life and death, the banquet and the underworld. In greater Mesoamerica, of which Zuni was a far-flung part, the swallowing and disgorging underworld merged with the image of the world serpent (roughly analogous to the Sumerian Tiamat, ancestral to the West Semitic Leviathan).

In the Zuni worldview, culture involves a necessary but somehow tragic relinquishing of power: we are literally and figuratively less than our animal selves. Zuni creation myths offer an indigenous analogy to the now-discredited Darwinist myth expressed in the formula “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” The Zuni believe their ancestors emerged from their original home in the dark and watery underworld with webbed fingers and toes, tails and extra sets of genitals on their heads – they were all basically Mudheads. Interestingly, it was a sinister character known as the First Witch who performed the job of civilizing the ancestral Zuni, bringing death into the world at the same time. I am greatly oversimplifying, of course, but this ought to give at least a hint of the kind of deep ambiguity with which the Zuni view our separation from Nature, and the utopian idealism that motivates their efforts to escape the tyranny of death and the dailiness of civilized existence. Levi-Strauss was sufficiently impressed by Zuni theorizing (as recorded originally by Frank Cushing and translated into French) to title one of his influential volumes on structuralist anthropological theory The Raw and the Cooked.

The notion here is of humans as eaters-of-cooked-food who “are what they eat.” Before a newborn can be given a name, shown the sun and welcomed into the world, it must first be “cooked”: placed in a bed of gently heated sand every day for ten days. The originally African practice of circumcision involves a somewhat related realization that to be civilized is to be reduced or refined (the analogy here is with metallurgy and alchemy).

Frank Cushing himself, in his ever-popular monograph Zuni Fetiches, captures the Zuni understanding of their position in the chain of being through a formulation just general enough to permit comparisons with a large number of traditional societies the world over. “The animals, because alike mortal and endowed with similar physical functions and organs, are considered more nearly related to man than are the gods; more nearly related to the gods than is man, because more mysterious, and characterized by specific instincts and powers which man does not of himself possess.”

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But of course modern science must show these ancient intuitions to be inaccurate, right? I’m not so sure. The capacity of other animals to experience joy and sorrow, to dream, to anticipate, to recognize their own images in mirrors are fairly well attested now. Several years ago, in an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, psychologist Frans B. M. de Waal reviewed the literature on empathy in rats and monkeys and concluded that, if anything, these creatures displayed more empathy than humans might have shown under similar circumstances. “Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the strength of empathy in monkeys came from a group of psychiatrists led by Jules Masserman at Northwestern University. The researchers reported in 1964 in the American Journal of Psychiatry that rhesus monkeys refuse to pull a chain that delivers food to themselves if doing so gives a shock to a companion. One monkey stopped pulling the chain for 12 days after witnessing another monkey receive a shock. Those primates were literally starving themselves to avoid shocking another animal, clearly a stronger reaction than that of the rats in [Russell] Church’s experiments.”

De Waal proposes some possible explanations for the existence of empathy. One is “emotional contagion” – the way in which even human infants will experience distress at the distress of another. De Waal notes that, though many theorists consider emotional contagion a peculiarly human trait, he has observed it quite commonly among infant rhesus monkeys as well.

“In all of those studies, the most likely explanation of the rats’ and monkeys’ behavior seems to be what, in humans, is called personal distress. That means that the acts of apparent kindness are not based on a concern about the other’s welfare but rather are a way of dealing with the distress of seeing the distress of another individual. For example, young children often get teary-eyed and upset – and run back to their mothers for reassurance – when they see another child fall and cry. They cry not because they are concerned about the other child, but because that child’s emotions vicariously overwhelm them. It is only later, when children develop a distinction between self and other, that they learn to fully separate another’s emotions from their own.”

Or to put it another way, animals and young children experience distress at the distress of another because they have not (or not yet) learned to fully distinguish between themselves and others. As cultured animals, human beings differ from the others not so much in our “level of consciousness” – an obnoxious conceit that implies a hierarchical arrangement with guess who at the top – but in our degree of self-consciousness. That is, our alienation. Thus there is, I believe, a trade-off. And rather than exhaust my limited supply of adjectives along with whatever remains of the reader’s patience, I’ll end by quoting from Rilke’s Eighth Elegy (Duino Elegies, translated by Edward Snow, North Point Press, 2000).

With all its eyes the animal world
beholds the Open. Only our eyes
are as if inverted and set all around it
like traps at its portals to freedom.
What’s outside we only know from the animal’s
countenance; for almost from the first we take a child
and twist him round and force him to gaze
backwards and take in structure, not the Open
that lies so deep in an animal’s face. Free from death.
Only we see death; the free animal has its demise
perpetually behind it and before it always
God, and when it moves, it moves into eternity,
the way brooks and running springs move. . . .
__________

For a Buddhist perspective on what this Open might look like, and how the self might be transcended, see Dale’s discussion of “Ye Emptynesse of Selfe” at Vajrayana Practice

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Houston, we have a problem . . .

In yesterday’s post I had wanted to balance Barbara Tedlock’s description of the Mudheads with a quote about Zuni’s other major order of clowns, the Newekwe, but I ran out of room. In any case, so much has been written about the Zuni in the last 130 years, and their society is so unbelievably complex, it would be nearly impossible to do justice to any aspect of their culture in just one or two posts.

I should mention that my familiarity with this literature stems from a project a couple years ago when I was doing research for my book length poem Cibola. Set in the spring of 1539, the poem attempts to re-create the fateful encounter between the Ashiwi (which is what the Zuni call themselves) and the African shaman-conquistador Esteban. Shiwanna (Zuni) then consisted of six or seven separate pueblos that sat astride the main east-west trade route connecting the High Plains with the Pacific – a conduit for goods such as white shell and buffalo hides – and was also at the terminus of a north-south trade route, source of the ritually important scarlet macaw feathers. There is good reason to suppose that the trade in religious ceremonies and spirit beings (call them gods if you wish) was equally brisk. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the Zuni received a new dance from their traditional enemies and trading partners the Navajo which is still performed today. This dance was intended as a remedy for a specific disease outbreak; forgive me if I can’t remember which one (most of the materials I consulted were from the university library). And at the end of the nineteenth century, the Zuni were equally grateful for the assistance of Mormons from a nearby settlement in combating another epidemic, though no new ceremony was gleaned from this experience, as the Mormons relied on faith healing through the laying-on of hands.

Thus, the violent reception of Esteban in 1539 was a mysterious anomaly in Zuni’s history of generally peaceful interchange with its neighbors. (In brief, I believe the Esteban-Marcos expedition was correctly understood as the advance guard for a mission of spiritual conquest, based on a few accidental parallels with other such missions that may have occurred periodically in the region, beginning as far back as the rise of the Chaco/Anasazi culture in the 11th century.) What is most important to understand is the absolute centrality of healing – broadly understood as the proper integration of the individual body and the body politic with the cosmos – to Pueblo religion. Like other religious specialists in Zuni, the clowns are, first and foremost, medicine men.

And as a matter of fact, the Newekwe clowns are regarded as the most powerful among all the myriad religious orders. I believe this relates, once again, to the necessity of laughter, farce and parody as a kind of catalyst for all major transformations. Like Ghede in Haitian religion, the Newekwe command the crossroads between the human and spirit worlds. They resemble our image of a clown or jester much more closely than the Mudheads. They perform between dances in most major festivals, and every performance is a completely original skit. They are permitted to break every taboo, and do so with great glee. Such taboo-breaking very often includes the celebration of the material bodily realm – burlesques of sexual intercourse, non-faked consumption of urine and excrement. Nor is the parody of their more serious brethren off-limits. What Bakhtin described as official and unofficial religious expressions, in the case of medieval Europe, here exist side-by side or in alternation.

Newekwe (the second vowel is long, hence it is sometimes written Neweekwe) means something like Milky Way People, but their “cosmic” nature is anything but ethereal. Bakhtin would have been delighted to hear where they locate the center of the microcosmos: exactly where the carnival locates it, in the belly. “Membership [comes] when a person with a stomach ailment [seeks] help from the society. Neweekwe knowledge not only cures stomach aches but enables clowns to eat any kind, or amount, of food or garbage, including human excrement, and to engage in outrageous public behavior without shame,” Barbara Tedlock writes. By all accounts, even from observers who didn’t understand a word of the language, the Newekwe are extremely funny.

Incidentally, if I quote exclusively from The Beautiful and the Dangerous, that’s only in part because I don’t have many other sources at my elbow. It’s simply one of the best books ever written about the Zuni. It ranks with anything by the justly celebrated Frank Cushing, in fact, whose late 19th-century observations, collected in a number of monographs and anthologies, would be my only other source of corroborating quotes if I had them handy.

Newekwe healing can be seen most clearly in the way they help the tribe to adjust to the shocks of change, acting as interpreters for the often very threatening world that presses in from every side. For example, from the time of the Sputnik launch onward, Newekwe performances began to include burlesques of white men in space. And with the moon landing of Apollo 11, Zunis were faced with a “new threat to their religious beliefs. If what the studio cameras recorded was true and not merely a studio fiction, then the Moon Mother, who together with the Sun Father is the ultimate source of all light and life, had been violated by two crew cuts in a metal space capsule. Not only did these men fail to practice sexual abstinence and make offerings of jeweled cornmeal and prayer feathers before they visited the Moon Mother, but they tramped around on her, planting a TV camera, seismometer, mirror array, solar-wind detector, and a permanently curled plastic American flag in her belly. And then, just before departing, they removed nearly fifty pounds of soil and rock, her sacred flesh, without offering her so much as a prayer.” Tedlock’s informants described the whole space program as Exhibit A to support the general contention that white men are all witches, or spiritual adversaries – “harbingers of the coming of death to the world.”

One afternoon shortly after the disastrous Apollo 13 mission, Tedlock joined the rapt audience as “an astronaut clown climbed up on the tallest building in the Old Pueblo and, making a round ball of himself, was tossed aloft in a blanket by a group of clowns. When he landed on the plaza below, he was surrounded by clowns bearing a stretcher. They hauled him over near the central kiva to a group of nurses and doctors, who examined him carefully with their stethoscopes, pounded him all over with their rubber hammers, took his blood pressure, made him pee into a paper cup, gave him a series of shots in both arms and buttocks with a giant hypodermic syringe, then asked him what it was like on the moon. He reported that there were people, animals, mountains, volcanoes, lakes and watermelons – all to howls of laughter.

“Over and over clowns dressed as satellites, rockets and astronauts ran madly around the village, threw one another into the air, and fell off roofs. Finally, in a wonderfully risqué skit, a clown from Houston Control telephoned the moon to talk with ‘The Man in the Moon Mother.’ Audiences laughed and laughed at the absurdity of space exploration . . . ”

The other Newekwe skits Tedlock describes in detail parodied the annual Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, making fun not just of other Indians but, more incisively, of Indians who play Indians and the white people who love or hate them. Role reversal and travesty abounded: the “Indians” put drunk “Whitemen” in jail; a transvestite sang “Indian Love Call” in a screeching falsetto; make-believe Plains Indian fancydancers rotated on their bellies in the dirt. And to cap things off, the newly elected members of the tribal council were forced to participate in a blasphemous skit mocking their office and parodying their supposed greed.

“Neweekwe clowning, because it revolves around a continuing discovery, or rediscovery, of religious and secular boundaries, provides an anticreed for a religion that lacks any formal creed, or codified body of doctrine. Beyond creeds and anticreeds, the clowns, by their burlesques, display their ultimate detachment from the particulars of religious beliefs of all kinds. . . . In their gluttony the clowns even violate the boundaries of their biological being: not satisfied with saying the unsayable, they eat the inedible.

“Their path is finally that of the Milky Way, arching clear across the night sky. From this perspective, they see boundaries, of whatever sort, as easy hurdles rather than as walls. Which is why they never laugh at their own jokes but, by causing others to laugh at the leaping of a boundary, share a moment of shamanic detachment with the uninitiated.”

Clown societies such as the Newekwe have probably played a central role in the cultural survival of the Pueblo and Din&#233 peoples. As Aldous Huxley seemed to recognize with his portrayal of Zuni in Brave New World, it is quite possible that we will ourselves fall victim to the on-going spiritual conquest of the Americas – and the world, and worlds beyond – long before these wise and good-humored people ever lose their sense of balance – or their bounce.
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Barabara Tedlock’s The Beautiful and the Dangerous remains in print. As a Penguin book, it should be easy to order from your local independent bookstore. But here are the links to Amazon and Powell’s for those who, like me, lack that option.

Unlike the Rio Grande pueblos (which were much more traumatized by Spanish rule), Zuni remains open to tourists during its frequent ritual performances, though photography is strictly forbidden. As the official website of the Zuni Tourism Department says, “there are restrictions in place for non-Zunis wishing to witness our religious activities. We ask that visitors respect our cultural privacy by following the appropriate etiquette and guidelines.” Hiring a guide (necessary for any real exploration of the reservation, including ecotourism) should help visitors avoid giving inadvertent offense. Finally, if you can afford it, please be aware that your support of the Zuni arts is vital to the maintenance of their rich ceremonial life. Cottage-industry production of high-quality arts and crafts helps support around 80% of Zuni households, which allows Zunis to maintain control over the single most endangered resource essential to communal spiritual health: time. Throughout Indian Country, the time-pressures of wage labor have been as much if not more injurious to the practice of native religion than all the efforts of missionaries put together.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Laughing in church

“‘Consider, therefore, whether you won’t consult a fool.’ ‘Upon my soul,’ replied Panurge, ‘I will. I seem to feel my bowels loosening. A moment before they were all tight and constipated. But just as we have chosen the fine cream of wisdom to advise us, so I should like someone who is a fool of the first water to preside over our new deliberations.’ ‘Triboulet seems sufficient of a fool to me, said Pantagruel. ‘A proper and total fool,’ replied Panurge. ‘A fatal fool.’ ‘A high-toned fool.’ ‘A natural fool.’ ‘A B sharp and B flat fool.’ ‘A celestial fool.’ ‘A terrestrial fool.’ ‘A jovial fool.’ ‘A jolly, mocking fool.’ ‘A mercurial fool.’ ‘A merry, sportive fool.’ ‘A lunatical fool.'” (Etc., for three more pages.)
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel 3:37-38 (trans. by J. M. Cohen, Penguin, 1963)

In the course of my usual coffee-fueled wool-gathering this morning I realized I have yet to write a single line about Rabelais, or about his foremost interpreter, the 20th-century Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin – like his 16th-century mentor – was the rare example of a scholar who seemed to know a lot about everything, and to remember virtually everything he ever read. Most attempts to develop new theories fail because they attempt to synthesize too much about which the author knows too little. Bakhtin had the sense to restrict his scope to a single author (Rabelais in Rabelais and His World, elsewhere Dostoevsky) and let his discoveries and suggestions about their works ripple outward. Thus, instead of writing a comprehensive history or geography of laughter he situates himself at one pivotal point in human space-time – the Renaissance in Western Europe – and looks in all directions from there.

I was reminded of this while reading some Ashanti folktales about the trickster culture hero Anansi, the spider. It was no more than a tossed-off comment of Bakhtin’s about the original character of religion that first gave me, years ago, what I think is an essential interpretive insight into stories such as these. It’s not that Mircea Eliade’s hypothesis of a separate sacred time existing within but somehow completely apart from ordinary time – illo tempore, as he called it – isn’t useful and important in its own right. But Eliade neglected one key factor: the unique power of laughter to bridge the gap between sacred and secular, between the atemporal utopia and the here-and-now, between the spirit and the body. The king and the fool are born under the same horoscope, says Rabelais. Here is the self-important Anansi, perched ridiculously on a cashew shell “as if he were a chief sitting on a carved stool,” abandoning his role as arbiter among the other animals to claim the right of primogeniture for himself:

“‘If you had come to me first, I would have saved you this argument, for I am the oldest of all creatures. When I was born, the earth itself had not yet been made, and there was nothing to stand on. When my father died, there was no ground to bury him in. So I had to bury him in my head.'”
(Harold Courlander, The Hat-Shaking Dance and Other Ashanti Tales From Ghana, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957)

Laughter pulls the ground out from under us, leaves us hanging, as it were, in mid-air. Ordinary laws are suspended (as in Eliade’s illo tempore) but so, too, is all fear and reverence, all sorrow and anger. In fact, if laughter has been generally outlawed by the so-called world religions, it is because it threatens their monopoly on the primal emotions. You can’t laugh in church. Bakhtin notes that “Early Christianity had already condemned laughter. Tertullian, Cyprian, and John Chrysostom preached against ancient spectacles, especially against the mime and the mime’s jests and laughter. John Chrysostum declared that jests and laughter are not from God but the devil. Only permanent seriousness, remorse, and sorrow for his sins befit the Christian.” (Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky, Indiana U.P., 1984.)

Bakhtin shows, at least within the Western Christian milieu, the central importance of what he calls “the material bodily element” to the unofficial culture of festive laughter. It is, he writes, a “degrading and regenerating principle.” One has only to read accounts of the sacred clowns of the American Southwest and Mexico (see below) to realize the truth of this insight. If Aristotle was right about laughter being a unique and fundamental human trait, what from the perspective of Christian history appears to be a temporary lapse (in what were, after all, the “Middle Ages”) may instead represent a return to the origins of religious expression: “During the Easter season laughter and jokes were permitted even in church. The priest could tell amusing stories and jokes from the pulpit. Following the days of lenten sadness he could incite his congregation’s gay laughter as a joyous celebration . . . The jokes and stories concerned especially material bodily life, and were of a carnival type. Permission to laugh was granted simultaneously with the permission to eat meat and to resume sexual intercourse.”

Laughter and the grotesque were (are) opposed to death and the fear of death through their very celebration of change and renewal. Bakhtin stresses “the essential relation of festive laughter to time and to the change of season. . . . The gay aspect of the feast presented this happier future of a general material affluence, equality, and freedom, just as the Roman Saturnalia announced the return of the Golden Age. Thus, the medieval feast had, as it were, the face of Janus. Its official, ecclesiastical face was turned to the past and sanctioned the existing order, but the face of the people of the marketplace looked into the future and laughed, attending the funeral of the past and the present.” The comic inversions of the folk festivals included travesty/transvestitism; the reversal of hierarchical orders (jesters turned into kings and bishops); parodies of sacred rituals; and of course the celebration of all that was forbidden: drunkenness, gluttony, debauchery.

If I differ with Bakhtin at all it is only in my sense of the relative value of the spiritual/sacred versus the material/festive. My reading of ethnography over the past several years has convinced me that these two principles need not be ideologically opposed; we don’t need to choose between them. I do agree they we would be better to return to a more Rabelaisian, holistic appreciation of laughter. I think Bakhtin describes very well the diminished role of laughter in the post-16th century West, where “the essential truth about the world and about man cannot be told in laughter.”

Our conception of the body has narrowed as well. In contrast to the grotesque and universal body of the carnival, in the modern view bodies are smooth, closed off, private. Serious art and literature studiously ignores nose, mouth, belly and genitals, concentrating instead on eyes and hands. (Think of the language of love poetry, or the Victorian novel.) Whereas “the grotesque body . . is a body in the act of becoming,” the modern body is complete and strictly limited. I can’t help picturing the contrast between the bodies of local working-class people I know – and the kind of earthy humor they tend to indulge in – and the ideal bodily images of Hollywood and Madison Avenue: “That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden or moderated. All orifices of the body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable facade. The opaque surface and the body’s ‘valleys’ acquire an essential meaning as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world. All attributes of the unfinished world are carefully removed . . . The verbal norms of official and literary language . . . prohibit all that is linked with fecundation, pregnancy, childbirth. There is a sharp line of division between familiar speech and ‘correct’ language.” Well, fuck that!

Here’s anthropologist Barbara Tedlock (The Beautiful and the Dangerous, Penguin, 1992) describing one of the two main orders of Zuni clowns:

“I gazed at the ten silly-looking, but nonetheless sacred, serious, even dangerous, Mudhead clowns. Adobe-colored beings in tight-fitting cotton masks with inside-out eyes and doughnut-shaped mouths, simultaneously expressing eternal amazement and voracious hunger. Ears, antennae, and genitals (stuffed with hand-spun cotton, garden seeds, and the dust of human footprints) protruded knoblike from their heads. Without noses or hair, they were naked except for lumpy orange-brown body paint, feathered ear ornaments, black neck scarves, men’s woolen kilts, and women’s blanket dresses, concealing their tied-down penises.”

These ten Mudheads – or Dickheads, we should probably call them – were born through a primordial act of incest, and were the original inhabitants of the Zuni land of the dead, Kachina Village. As real beings who somehow inhabit the bodies of the men who play them every year, they represent more than archetypes: each possesses “a distinguishing personality trait and a sacred gift for humankind.

“Molanhakto, with a miniature rabbit snare dangling from his right earlobe, brought native squash. The Speaker, a daydreamer who rarely spoke, and then only irreverently, carried yellow corn. Great Warrior Priest, a coward, brought blue corn. Bat, in his blanket dress, who feared the dark but saw marvelously well in daylight, red corn. Small Horn, who thought he was invisible, white corn. Small Mouth the glum, gabbling and cackling constantly, offered sweet corn. Old Buck, frisky and giggly as a young girl, black corn. Gamekeeper, in his woman’s dress, speckled corn. Water Drinker, always thirsty, toted his water gourd. And Old Youth, the self-centered, thoughtless adviser of the team, brought the clairvoyance locked tightly within the tiny cracks in parched corn.”

In short, a pretty corny lot.

But what about us, us U.S.ians? By and large, for all the vaunted liberation of sexual mores, the tyranny of the official body remains nearly absolute. Freud, by reducing everything to sex, perhaps shares a great deal of the blame for our continuing discomfort in our own skins. Neurosis is endemic to the psychoanalyzed subject. Modern medicine has reinforced the wall between mind and body, which thus by definition can never truly be healed (made whole). This separation breeds many more. Even for those who abandon themselves to carnality, the body remains unreal: filth or idol, something to be whipped, something to be fetishized. Sex and laughter are still very far apart. Homosexuals no less than heterosexuals, religious and secular alike elevate the same, tortured body inhabited by the same lonely and alienated soul.

Whether we flagellate ourselves like the Shi’a commemorating the death of Hussein or ogle the flagellation of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, our sense of what it means to be compassionate is limited, really, to a single emotion: sorrow. But is it not in shared laughter that people feel most akin? If the goal of religion is, as it proclaims, to promote peace and unite humankind, why is laughter still barred from the churches, temples and mosques? We alternate between the supposed poles of sacred solemnity and profane laughter without perceiving that they form a single axis – that axis on which this whole, vast, bulging, fecund and tragicomic world forever spins.

UPDATE: My sometime debating partner (and faithful reader) commonbeauty has written a highly compatible post, partly in response to this, on ‘vernacular bodies’ in the paintings of Bruegel. A brief and wonderful essay about a fascinating subject – check it out.