Category: Uncategorized

Thanks to everyone who joined the discussion in the comment thread to Via negativa and the road to hell. I was reminded once again why it’s a good idea to keep writing even when one isn’t feeling especially inspired, as was the case last Wednesday (and almost every other day last week – summertime humidity is setting in). Sometimes the best ideas do emerge from dialogue. And judging from people’s reactions, it’s gratifying to think that some of my wilder and woollier notions may not be entirely half-baked. There’s still a part of me that believes that an idea has to be obscure to be of any real value. But another, louder voice says, on the contrary, that ideas only gain value as they approach the vatic or poetic; anything else amounts simply to rearrangement of semantic furniture. Which, to the extent that it allows us to reconceptualize the symbolic spaces where we live and work, is no empty exercise either. And which does not begin to account for the power of mathematical ideas… (Aaagh, here I go again! Somebody hose me down!)

1. Eastern fence lizard

The male eastern fence lizard moves his body to show off bright blue skin on his throat and stomach. If the female is not ready to mate, she arches her back, raises herself off the ground, and jumps away sideways.

2. Blue-footed booby

The male begins by lifting up his enormous clown-feet one-by-one, and then stops in a distinctive pose, beak raised skyward, announcing his manhood with a loud whistle, pointing out his tail, and opening his wings. This is accompanied by a love-offering of sticks and twigs. Females join in the mating dance, following the same movements, but respond with a guttural honk.

3. Brook lamprey eel

The females would laboriously construct nesting hollows in the gravel bed of the stream. Moving one tiny piece of gravel a time in their suckers it would take hours but eventually the tiny creature would have made a depression about the size of a computer mouse. Exhausted she would fasten her sucker to the largest stone in the wall of her nest and wait.

Within half an hour the little nest would be a seething mass of lampreys! I never found out whether it was just males from other parts of the stream or whether there were other females there that had been too lazy to build a nest. Unlikely, I think, because sometimes one would even see two or more females collaborating on a nesting hollow that would be correspondingly larger.

The mating frenzy would go on for hours, in an orgiastic scenario which would have doubtlessly provided scope for any aspiring producer of piscine pornography. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the frenzy was over. The exhausted lampreys would drift away and fasten themselves to rocks and just shimmer in the water like seaweed. The next day they would all be dead.

4. Scarlet-bodied wasp moth

As a caterpillar, the insect feeds on a non-toxic plant, climbing hempweed. Then, when it becomes a moth and is ready to mate, the male changes his eating habits. As darkness falls on his big night, he visits the poisonous dogfennel plant. Dogfennel is easy to spot in pastures, says [Prof. William] Conner, because the cows eat all the grass around it, but leave the tall toxic plant standing.

The male moth extracts toxins called “pyrrolizidine alkaloids” from the plant.

“He lands on the plant, regurgitates on the plant to dissolve the alkaloids and then reimbibes the toxin-rich liquid,” says Conner.

The small red and black moth stores the toxins in a special pouch. The pouch, located on his underbelly, is filled with fibers that have a cotton candy consistency.

Once he has ingested the toxin from the plant, the male is no longer tasty to his common predators, particularly spiders and bats. After gathering the poison, the moth goes in search of a female. When he finds his insect bride, they mate for nine hours. But, just before mating, the moth releases the toxin like a cloud of miniature confetti that sticks to the female. The toxin protects her while she is mating and while she lays her eggs. The female moth then passes the toxin to her eggs. The toxin deters egg-eating insects like ants and ladybugs from devouring her young.

5. Crane

Cranes form lifelong monogamous pair bonds.

The mating dance of the crane is spectacular. The birds walk stiffly around each other with quick steps, wings half spread, alternately leaping high in the air. During this, the cranes bow deeply and stretch. Next, the cranes pick up sticks or blades of grass; throw them in the air, and stab at them with their beak as they come down. Both sexes, mature and immature, take part in the dances.

When males and females call in unison, both point their bills to the sky and the male raises part of his wing over his back and joins the female. The two birds call back and forth for about 10 seconds. Scientists believe these calls reinforce the monogamous pair bond and also serve to defend their territory.

Other cults taught enthusiasm, the possession of a soul by a god. What seems to be original in Orphism is that it interpreted this sudden alteration, this rapture, as an excursion from the body, as a voyage in the other world, rather than as a visitation or a possession. Ecstasy is now seen as manifesting the true nature of the soul, which daily existence hides.
– Paul Ricouer, The Symbolism of Evil (Beacon Press, 1967)

I’ve been reminded recently of a number of notions of Buddhist “pessimism,” & I think the root of all of them is missing an assumption we make: that when you remove the suffering and confusion, what you are left with is bliss. There’s no need to cultivate it or go anywhere to find it. So the process of achieving paradise is an entirely negative one. Delight is the spiritual default.
– Dale

Judaism is not about chasing the next great aesthetic high. It’s not about just having feel-good experiences where the sky opens up and you feel all, like, connected and spiritual. I’ve had them, lots of them, some really big ones. They’re fun. But they are not the point. The point is staying focused and present and connected to God in all the small moments, the hard moments, the drudge moments.
– Jerusalem Syndrome (via Velveteen Rabbi)

The candle is not there to illuminate itself.
– Nawab Jan-Fishan Khan (quoted by Idries Shah in The Way of the Sufi, Dutton, 1970)

I wasn’t planning on posting anything this Memorial Day – or Decoration Day, as some people still call it – but then I saw that the discussion in the comment string to Friday’s post continues, and thought it might be appropriate to call attention to it here. My mention of burning some old journals when I was 12 or 13, and my determination never to make a similar mistake since, prompted other people to recall similar incidents. We seem to divide up into burners versus shredders.

What does it say about us, that we feel these impulses to do away with painful or embarrassing records? I would certainly not go so far as to claim that this is a peculiarly American trait – far from it. But I am reminded of our failure as a nation to admit to so many shameful chapters in our collective past. How many people are willing to acknowledge that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a terrible mistake, and that the official explanations make little sense? How many textbooks dwell on the massacre at Sand Creek, or the Bonus Army march on Washington? About the latter event, Howard Zinn writes in a People’s History of the United States:

Four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine gun squadron, and six tanks assembled near the White House. General Douglas MacArthur was in charge of the operation, Major Dwight Eisenhower his aide. George S. Patton was one of the officers. MacArthur led his troops down Pennsylvania Avenue, used tear gas to clear veterans out of the old buildings, and set the buildings on fire. Then the army moved across the bridge to Anacostia. Thousands of veterans, wives, children, began to run as the tear gas spread. The soldiers set fire to some of the huts, and soon the whole encampment was ablaze. When it was all over, two veterans had been shot to death, an eleven-week-old baby had died, an eight-year-old boy was partially blinded by gas, two police had fractured skulls, and a thousand veterans were injured by gas.

In 1996, folksinger Utah Phillips recorded an album with Rosalie Sorrels called The Long Memory. In the liner notes, he wrote:

The long memory is the most radical idea in the country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going but where we want to go.

The same year, he collaborated with Ani DiFranco (another one of my heroes) to produce The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere. In interviews with Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, both singers had plenty to say about the role of artists and public performers. I think a great deal of it probably applies to bloggers, as well.

“I don’t think with either one of us it’s either/or,” says Phillips of the contrast between outward-looking and inward-looking music. “It flows back and forth as a pulse, as a sensibility. Woody Guthrie wrote, ‘When I was walking that endless highway’–there’s a lot of I in Woody. Even when he was writing about someone else, he would still transpose it into the first person, as he took these journeys into himself. I can’t fault that and say that’s primarily ego-driven. What I think you’re talking about is music which is ego-driven, what you would call journal-entry songwriting. That’s not what Ani does, the way that I hear it. I know that’s not what I do, [which is to] let people know that I’m alive and present, and this is how I’m authentically perceiving and thinking, but to expand it to the point where it can take in a lot of what other people are experiencing.”

“That whole introspective singer-songwriter thing has been kind of foisted on me,” DiFranco adds. “Some people perceive what I do in that way because I write songs through my own experience. But whenever people say, ‘Well, your work is very confessional,’ I say, ‘It’s not confessional. I’m not confessing anything. I haven’t sinned. These are not my secrets. This is just my life; this is the stuff I’ve seen, the stuff I did, and what I thought about.’ There are different ways of speaking your political perceptions, and it may be [talking about] an event that occurred in your life or an event that occurred in your town . . . but each is a valid path to a certain realization. I think that what we both do is very much about our small, little epiphanies along the way, moments of connection between things.”

This is really a more interesting question than the one I started out asking, I think: In our writing, where do we draw the line between sharing and self-indulgence? After all, what could be more self-indulgent than editing out the darkest, most uncomfortable chapters? But on the other hand, what could be more empowering that letting go of possibly unhealthy attachments to the dead hand of the past? This whole analogy between public and private histories might not be as sound as it first appears. I’ve always hated the leftist cliché that the personal is political, because I resent the implication that any one point-of-view can best describe all circumstances. And besides, life is not all about power. But we ignore at our peril the power element in all relationships – even (or especially) in our relationship with that largely unknown person we call the self.

Since the root meaning of the word “radical” is, uh, “root,” I suppose we could say that Memorial Day, with its emphasis on our rootedness in family and history, is our most radical of holidays. But roots do many more things than simply reach into the soil and hold the plant upright. The roots of most species of plants enter into symbiotic relationships with root-like fungal structures called mycelia, which encase every root hair. Not only water and nutrients, but even chemical messages pass between them, and from one plant to another through the fungal network. This network is thought to be responsible for the well-documented ability of trees to produce unpalatable tannins, for example, when neighboring trees are attacked by insects. And in an old-growth forest, tree roots become physically engrafted to each other, forming multi-species, nutrient-sharing communities whose properties and purposes remain largely unknown. In time, they may well reach a stage where cooperation becomes as significant as competition. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure.

The stalke of this Comfrey is cornered, thicke, and hollow like that of Sow-thistle: it groweth two cubits or a yard high: the leaves that spring from the root, and those that grow upon the stalkes are long, broad, rough, and pricking withall, something hairie, and being handled make the hands itch; very like in colour and roughnes to those of Borage, but longer, and sharpe pointed, as be the leaves of Elecampane: from out the wings of the stalkes appeare the floures orderly placed, long, hollow within, of a light red colour: after them groweth the seed, which is blacke. The root is long and thick, blacke without, white within, having in it a clammy juice, in which root consisteth the vertue.

Comfrey joyeth in watery ditches, in fat and fruitful medowes; they grow all in my garden.

The rootes of Comfrey stamped, and the juice drunke with wine, helpeth those that spit bloud, and healeth all inward wounds and burstings.

The same bruised and laid to in manner of a plaister, doth heale all fresh and greene woundes, and are so glutenative, that it will sodder or glew together meate that is chopt in peeces seething in a pot, and make it in one lump.

The slimie substance of the root made in a posset of ale, and given to drink against the paine in the back, gotten by any violent motion, as wrastling, or overmuch use of women, doth in foure or five daies perfectly cure the same: although the involuntary flowing of the seed in men be gotten thereby.

The rootes of Comfrey in number foure, Knotgrasse and the leaves of Clarie of each an handfull, being stamped all together, and strained, and a quart of Muscadell put thereto, the yolkes of three egges, and the powder of three Nutmegs, drunke first and last, is a most excellent medicine against a Gonorrhaea or running of the reines, and all paines and consumptions of the backe.

Moreover, it staieth the overmuch flowing of the monethly sickenesse, taken every day for certaine daies together.

It is highly commended for woundes or hurts of all the rest also of the intrailes and inward parts, and for burstings or ruptures.

The root stamped and applied unto them, taketh away the inflammation of the fundament, and overmuch flowing of the hemorrhoides.

JOHN GERARD, The Herbal or General History of Plants: The Complete 1633 Edition as Revised and Enlarged by Thomas Johnson (Dover Publications, 1975)

(For a more recent description of comfrey and its medical benefits, see Maude Grieve.)
__________

I blogged about Gerard’s Herbal here and here.

Friday catbird blogging

“The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form. For print is comfortable only with finality. Once a letterpress forme is closed, locked up, or a photolithographic plate is made, and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts. By contrast, manuscripts, with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies) were in dialogue with the world outside their own borders. They remained closer to the give-and-take of oral expression. The readers of manuscripts are less closed off from the author, less absent, than are the readers of those writing for print….

“Manuscript culture had taken intertextuality for granted. Still tied to the commonplace tradition of the old oral world, it deliberately created texts out of other texts, borrowing, adapting, sharing the common, originally oral, formulas and themes, even though it worked them up into fresh literary forms impossible without writing. Print culture of itself has a different mindset. It tends to feel a work as ‘closed’, set off from other works, a unit in itself. Print culture gave birth to the romantic notions of ‘originality’ and ‘creativity’, which set apart an individual work from other works even more, seeing its origins and meaning as independent of outside influence, at least ideally. When in the past few decades doctrines of intertextuality arose to counteract the isolationist aesthetics of a romantic pint culture, they came as a kind of shock. They were all the more disquieting because modern writers, agonizingly aware of literary history and of the de facto intertextuality of their own works, are concerned that they may be producing nothing really new or fresh at all, that they may be totally under the ‘influence’ of others’ texts. Harold Bloom’s work The Anxiety of Influence (1973) treats this modern writer’s anguish. Manuscript cultures had few if any anxieties about influence to plague them, and oral cultures had virtually none.”

– Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word (Routledge, 1982)

Before the modern era, originality and creativity were no less honored, however. They just weren’t tied to a cult of the autonomous individual “closed off,” in Ong’s terminology, from the rest of society. Originality was available to any poet or author who sought inspiration at its divine source; thus, authors of new Buddhist sutras or new Biblical works could in good conscience pass them off as previously existing texts only now brought to light. Ancient origins were more prestigious because they were closer to the ultimate origin of the world. Periodic re-enactments of sacred drama and the ritual recitation of divinely inspired works – let alone the creation of new such works – enabled the experience of originary, sacred time in the present moment. As with any mind-altering substance, set and setting are absolutely crucial to the experience of a text. Without the Sabbath, for example, the Bible becomes a text like any other, a collection of hymns and stories capable of momentarily distracting the mind from its present concerns.

Can we see the common science fiction trope of time travel as a nostalgic re-invention of an ancient yearning? Sacred dramas, and the holy manuscripts that augment them, are nothing if not time machines. To a religious Jew, a Torah scroll has a metonymic relationship with the history of the Jewish people, imbuing it with potent manas. To study the Mishnah’s descriptions of temple ritual is tantamount to performing a sacrifice anew. Dialogues among scholars of these holy texts span time and space.

Originally, the text is read the way the world is read. Many if not all writing systems seem to have evolved as a way to record the results of divination, and some people still consult texts such as the Bible, the Koran or the I-Ching for divinatory purposes. Oral cultures offer plenty of parallels: the Yoruba Ifa corpus, for example, demonstrates that the use of more-or-less finished “texts” for imaginative travel into the future need not depend upon textuality per se. The important thing, as I’ve said, is the mindset one brings to the encounter with a text. If one approaches it as a knowing actor in a self-transcending drama of performance or recitation, then words can regain their power to charm, to enchant, to transport. Even in a modern, secular context, the retelling of a story in the charged, eternal present of a poem can lure a reader into empathetic participation, awakening her mind to manifold possibilities beyond those suggested by her immediate circumstances.

But stories can also serve the interests of the omnivorous distraction machine that is modern capitalism. In addition to varied embodiments of text, we must contend with the world of images, moving or stationary. Consider the difference between listening to a drama on the radio versus watching it on television: immediacy and visceral impact are purchased at the cost of imaginative re-creation. But beyond this rather commonplace observation, consider also what the Internet, and especially the blogosphere, do to the act of solitary reading. Here, too, we seem to have traded a certain degree of absorptive power for a sensation of greater immediacy, but in addition, we recover an older sense of text-as-shared-manuscript. This textual revolution will probably not survive the imminent crash of petroleum-based civilization, but something of its spirit may live on in a newly talmudic – i.e. engaged and argumentative – approach to received truths, or perhaps in a much more self-consciously intertextual and communal poetry culture in English, similar to the traditional literary cultures of Arabic or Chinese speakers.

I must confess, though: I love printed text, in part because of the very illusion of self-sufficiency and perfection that, as Ong says, it so easily projects. The book presents itself as an object to be treasured and even fetishized. But I have grown also to love the malleability and even the ephemerality of texts on the Internet. Instead of despairing at the appearance of one of my poems in print because it retains features that I may already have eliminated, it is a simple matter for me to go online and replace or augment an older version with a newer one. I can watch other poets, writers and image-makers do likewise, participating vicariously in their creative processes – though the possibility of erasure or revision of the past constitutes also one of the Internet’s greatest threats. Time machine, or machine for distraction? The Internet can be both by turns.

Blogging builds on millennia-long traditions of journal keeping and letter writing. A blog mirrors the river of time in a manner much more reminiscent of a scroll than a bound book. I have this fantasy of Via Negativa someday being copied out on a long, continuous roll of parchment or birch bark, from deer or trees that I would kill and skin with my own hands. But then, how would the links work? Maybe instead I should strive for this blog’s reproduction on some kind of metal bar or strip, which would periodically intersect with other blog/strips, the whole of it forming a vast jungle gym.

We could build a literal Internet, a scaled-down reproduction of the World-Wide Web suitable for installation in some public park or stadium. Readers would be given harnesses and climbing gear and let loose. Pigeons would strew the installation with comment spam. Hawks diving in after the pigeons would became helplessly entangled, dislocating wings, breaking their talons. Finally, someone would fall to their death, and the resulting hue and outcry would compel its removal and destruction. We’d argue for a decent burial at sea, plotting its next incarnation: sunk in shallow waters off the coast of Florida, it would become in time a new metropolis, a coral reef.

Thus, at any rate, the scenario that arises from my reading of the grounds at the bottom of my coffee mug, just now. While I was typing, a catbird landed on the stone wall outside my window and gaped at me. He was, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words.

A Boston Globe editorial entitled “Driving Out the Butterflies,” by Derrick Z. Jackson, concluded with my nomination for Quote of the Week:

Monarchs as a species are not endangered, but the migration is. The butterfly is losing its wintering mountains in Mexico, where millions of them famously cluster, to illegal logging. In its summer grounds of the United States and Canada, fragmentation happens in the form of sterilization. Suburban tracts and their asphalt and pesticide-protected lawns are wiping out meadows. On farms, herbicides meant to protect crops wipe out everything else….

“At some point, the fabric starts to unravel,” [biologist Lincoln] Brower said. “People ask me, What’s the difference whether we have a monarch migration or not? I say, Why do we care about the Mona Lisa or classical music? We care because it is a cultural treasure. We have to start viewing the natural world as a cultural treasure.”

This in turn reminded me of Pennsylvania poet Harry Humes’ poem “Butterfly Effect,” from his book of the same name. Humes riffs on the image from Complexity Theory, popularized by James Gleick in his 1988 bestseller Chaos, of a storm’s ultimate origin in something as minor as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on other side of the earth.

Women turn away from sifting and measuring,
a man watches a deer stagger,

starving, across the frozen river.
The horizon hardly stirs,

and all the pianos are silent.
The bright wing of the sky

drifts so close you could raise a hand
to it, the air delicate

and your fingers itching a little,
as if something had landed there.

In another reminder of just how little we know about this planet against which we are busily committing ecocide, biologists announced this week that a species new to science, from what appears to be a previously unknown family of mammals, has been discovered in the mountains of Laos.

Outside drinking my morning coffee on the front porch as usual, it’s nice and cold and I get to listen to a wood thrush singing on one side of me and a catbird on the other. I can’t imagine a better way to start the day. In my left ear, lacrimae rerum; in my right ear, Rabelais.

The catbird is the resident master of scatting and improvisation. He lifts the “tinkling bell” theme from the wood thrush song and plays with it like a cat toying with a stunned chipmunk. Poor thing, you think, at the same time admiring the cat’s ability to turn on a dime and pounce. The catbird’s laughter does have a touch of cruelty to it: Such a simpleton! he seems to be saying about the more classically inclined thrush. But the thrush keeps right on singing, a deep well full of sweet water.

An idea pops into my head: Friday catbird blogging. It could be the start of something big!

Unfortunately, though, I don’t have a picture of a catbird, so I’ll have to post one of a cat instead. I’m thinking there might be one or two other bloggers out there who wouldn’t mind the occasional photo of a feline – who knows? Stranger things have happened. Anyway, her name is Margaret. I’ve never heard her sing a single note.

The end of racism.

Abdul-Walid writes feelingly about being black and not encountering significant racism in his adopted country of “Acerbia.” But he also misses something else in his chosen academic field: other African Americans.

Even African-American literary studies, where arguably the biggest strides in African-American scholarship have been made, is characterized more by boosterism and cheerleading than by the rigorous and dispassionate analysis that gives other scholars a sense of what’s worth celebrating and what should be consigned to the dustbin of history. But this, I suppose, only mirrors trends in the academic humanities, where political considerations trump aesthetic ones. And yet, in the absence of internal criticisms, systems will naturally tend towards the fascistic, stifling dissent, and reifying one final and official version of all narratives.

The parochial narratives African-Americans are writing for themselves prepare them ill for full participation in a truly multicultural society. Other stories need a place at this table. A good place to start would be to ask why more of the 80% of African Americans who are partly white don’t explore this part of their heritage. Why don’t people take the absolute miscibility of race as evidence that race ultimately is a social fiction? Why is it almost universally assumed, among blacks, that race should continue to matter indefinitely? It’s one thing to be shackled, but to be shackled by a fiction is a galling thing.

When I meet African-Americans (especially in the university context), and they ask what I am doing, I tell them. My field of study, which is basically something as “authentically black” as Byzantine epigraphy or Japanese architecture, is not what they expect. The reaction, often, is not good. “What the hell are you doing that for?” Peer pressure doesn’t end with grade-school.

But I met a man once, late-middle aged and black. This was in a used-bookshop in a midwestern university town. We were both browsing, and I started to speak to this man. I consider him a hero now, a view of the future we yet might achieve. He was a full Professor of Ancient Greek at one of the best classical departments in the country. He had studied philology at Cologne and Oxford, and I imagined him poring over his analyses of Thucydides or Pausanias or whatever it was with the mystical concentration of a priest.

And this man was African, only coming to the US after his graduate studies. That, perhaps, was the crucial difference. No one, while he was growing up in Ghana, had bothered to tell him that classical literature was only for blacks who were not “keeping it real.” He probably studied it out of some assumption that this was a fascinating part of world heritage and as such was a legitimate object of his attention.

In the environment of identity-politics that universities are now, he is probably a figure of fun to some, an example of not “keeping it real”, but he surely has the satisfaction of knowing that, by not limiting himself to some foolish notion of “acting black”, he inhabits a more robust reality than those critics of his could imagine.

– Part Four, “Owning All the World”

This is what blogging should be. Please go read, and leave comments.