Via Negativa

From the LA Times: “‘If you are intellectual and have a lot of book learning and talk in ways that make that clear, then you are feminized,’ said Messner, who researches gender stereotypes. ‘You are seen as someone who could waffle when it comes time to make a big decision. All of that is code for not being masculine enough.’ . . . Polls indicate more women remain preoccupied with so-called ‘soft’ issues such as jobs, education and healthcare.”

Actually, all issues of any kind are now clearly “soft.” Seeing who’s hardest isn’t about issues, it’s about guns. Desperate times require desperate measures, say the manly men. I agree. For the health of the republic, the time has clearly come for male suffrage to be revoked.

From the vault (Capturing the Hive). Every aspiring poet sooner or later takes on Joan of Arc. I imagined not so much the fanatic Maid of Orleans shouldering the immense weight of her own destiny, but a real prophetess, a kind of Gypsy Queen with humor and confidence to spare.

JOAN

Like a fly in amber this world
she wants to save: golden. Brittle.
A talisman that burrows into the breast,
impervious to all but the sharpest instruments.

Or with a spin of the wheel, an ordinary pebble
wedged under the shoe
of her carousel horse.

While the world she has no use for
goes soft, pulpy, membranous,
inebriate with shadows.
Wobbles like an old newsreel
about the Enemy: delusional.
It cannot be bargained with.

In her neck of the woods it’s no big deal
to hear voices. I don’t get
love letters, she jokes as
she suits up. Just chain mail.
With her left palm making
circles on her scalp: rosemary oil,
specific for vagaries of the brain –
equally good for weddings as
for wakes – and henna,
for that hint of flames.

Even so, to ride without a helmet –
Men will follow a flag only
if they think it’s inviolate.

I watch the unlit spliff
in the corner of her mouth
bobbing, waggling
with every consonant.
Little white bone how you shake,
how you never fall!

****

If forced to describe my own religious beliefs – I mean the things I really believe, not the things I would like to think that I believe in because they appeal to me intellectually – I would have to conclude that I worship Lady Luck.
What a disgrace! How more immature and egotistical could I get? For we know, don’t we, that one man’s good fortune is another’s disaster? Luck seems finite almost by definition. She is capricious, imperious, beholden to no one by herself. At least give her a pair of wings and call her Grace!

But hold on a second. It’s all in the interpretation, yes? If I can convince myself that everything that happens to me happened for the best, luck becomes, in effect, infinite. Plus, there is no reason why I can’t share in the good fortune of another – or, if the occasion demands, try to mitigate another’s bad luck by sharing from my own virtually inexhaustible store of good will. (Good will and good luck are close cousins; I haven’t quite figured out the relationship, but I don’t think you can have one without the other.)

O.K., but what morality? Despite my abundant admiration for Judaism, Buddhism and the other Organized Religions, I guess I still incline toward the position of the ancient Daoists: that the explicit formulation of an ethical system is a sign of failure. Only chronic social chaos and the disintegration of ordinary human bonds can explain the need to spell out something so self-evident. Most people know intuitively that you shouldn’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself – it’s human nature to avoid conflict and work for social harmony. Our minds and bodies revolt against the artificial pressures of conflict and competition: 98% of men will crack up after 60 days of continuous conflict, according to studies of British troops during World War II. And the pressures of life under monopoly capitalism destroy the bodies of the rulers along with the ruled: their insides turn themselves into knots.

Thus when Daoism itself, in competition with Buddhism, morphed into a religion, it focused on body-as-microcosm, with this-worldly, personal immortality as the unreachable utopian goal. The Chinese are a uniquely earthy people. In Chinese popular religion – a rich blend of Buddhism, Daoism and folk beliefs of diverse origin – the god of good fortune is a quintessentially Rabelaisian figure, like Santa Claus crossed with the Carnival King. And yes, divinatory systems like I Qing and astrology occupy an honored place – much as they do in peasant religions the world over.

To die-hard rationalists, this sort of belief system is anathema. But I think they’re missing the point. In virtually every traditional society I’ve ever read about, personal auguries are meant to function much as the communal fortunes told by the nebiim (“prophets”) of the Hebrew Bible: as visions of what could happen, not what will happen. It makes sense that fortunes read for an individual’s benefit would tend to be quite a bit sunnier than the national prophecies of Isaiah et.al.: their purpose is self-empowerment, not moral self-questioning.

But what is morality? If it involves nothing more than an utterly fatalistic dependence on the inscrutable will of an infinitely wiser and more powerful Being – the situation, I fear, with vast numbers of the adherents of Organized Religions – it seems more likely to breed irresponsibility. “Why should I care about the earth? It’s in God’s hands. Why should I involve myself in social change movements? It’s up to God to change people’s hearts.”

So yes, my trusting in Fortune may seem naive and superstitious. It certainly seems that way to me, sometimes! But to the extent that reliance on Lady Luck has taught me to expand my definition of fortune to include, basically, the very “music of what happens,”* is it such a bad thing? And if I end up viewing my life as the result of an active collaboration between my own imagination and the sum total of social and natural events that are too fearsome and wondrous and complex for any human mind ever to encompass – well, that leaves me in pretty good company. As near as I can tell, the vast majority of all the people who ever lived believed something very similar.
__________

*from the Fenian Cycle, translated by James Stephens in Irish Fairy Stories and reprinted in John Montague, ed., The Book of Irish Verse (Macmillan, 1974):

THE FINEST MUSIC

Once, as they rested on a chase, a debate arose among the Fianna-Finn as to what was the finest music in the world.

‘Tell us that,’ said Fionn, turning to Oisin.

‘The cuckoo calling from the tree that is highest in the hedge,’ cried his merry son.

‘A good sound,’ sad Fionn. ‘And you, Oscar,’ he asked, ‘what is to your mind the finest of music?’

‘The top of music is the ring of a spear on a shield,’ cried the stout lad.

‘It is a good sound,’ said Fionn.

And the other champions told their delight: the belling of a stag across water, the baying of a tuneful pack heard in the distance, the song of a lark, the laughter of a gleeful girl, or the whisper of a moved one.

‘They are good sounds all,’ said Fionn.

‘Tell us chief,’ one ventured, ‘what do you think?’

‘The music of what happens,’ said great Fionn, ‘that is the finest music in the world.’

From the Associated Press: Outside the Popular Party headquarters, some 100 supporters chanted “Viva España! Viva Aznar” and waved party flags although there was nothing to celebrate.

How rare to encounter such honesty about patriotism and team spirit in the mainstream media!

“Thinking outside the box.” Not here, folks. Though I don’t claim immunity to the occasional appeal of sophistry (hell, I’ll quote anything if it supports whatever position I happen to be holding at the moment), I would never be so foolish as to claim that thinking – even of the most poetic, artistic variety – can take place outside some kind of “box.” It can be any shape; it can be as large as you please; it can overlap only to a very small extent – if at all – with received thinking. It can and should be a very topologically malleable sort of box. But I can’t see how any meaningful expression could take place apart from such framing. And the frame employed, if we are paying proper attention, will always seem something of an arbitrary imposition, a superfluity, extrinsic to “objective reality.”

I don’t discount the possibility of direct apprehension of reality unmediated by thought/language, of course. In fact, I’m inclined to think such apprehensions are rather more common than we might suppose. I will go so far as to propose that all kernels of insight, the sparks of inspiration out of which genuine thinking arises, represent in fact the commonest version of such direct, unmediated seeing. Let’s ignore for now the possibility that more complete, more fully transformative realizations can be had. I want to ask the poets and artists out there: isn’t this what keeps you writing/creating, really, this realization of something that cannot quite be put into words/forms?

And such an experience does seem transformative, at least in a small way. I think of how Rilke ended his famous poem about the “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: Du mußt dein Leben ändern – “You must change your life.” Because of that, that summons one feels at the heart of an authentic insight, one feels one must keep trying, poem after poem. If I can just find the optimal words in the optimal sequence, then something very similar to my original intuition might be passed along, might be felt in turn by the properly attentive reader or listener.

And who can’t read or listen with the necessary degree of openness? Who are these people who say things like “I just don’t understand poetry?” What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with us, that we don’t know what they’re talking about when they say that? Perhaps they have been taught that every poem is a puzzle to be solved, that it takes a peculiar kind of intelligence to unlock it. But whence the insensitivity to that which lies beyond language? No normal five year-old seems ever to suffer from the obtuseness that so frequently afflicts otherwise intelligent adults who imagine a one-to-one correspondence between words and reality.

Such ignorance is not inborn, I believe, but must be deliberately inculcated through years of intellectual bullying and the meticulous application of soul-destroying curricula. Eventually, if all works according to the lesson plan, the Möbius river of time shrinks into a one-way street, and the Klein bottle of imaginative space acquires a definite inside and outside: it becomes a non-topological box, a mental jail cell. This is the box that must not only be thought outside of: it must be escaped for good.

This morning I am thinking about icon worship and its connections not merely to sexuality (as in yesterday’s post) but to the literal imitatio Christi of many mystics, especially since St. Francis (who was, in many ways, a second Christ). Not content with taking into themselves the body and blood of Christ, they seek to replicate his suffering in their own bodies, often receiving the stigmata as a reward. The fact that so many of these mystics have been women subverts traditional concepts about the gender of divinity. Beth at The Cassandra Pages posted about “holy anorexia,” the subject of a recent article in the London Review of Books. The author, Hilary Mantel, observes about many fasting female mystics that “Starvation was a constant in these women’s lives. It melted their flesh away, so that the beating of their hearts could be seen behind the racks of their ribs. It made them one with the poor and destitute, and united them with the image of Christ on the cross . . . ” This post provoked some interesting reactions in the comments thread, as well.

To say this is a disturbing subject would be a vast understatement. Anorexia and bulimia both fall into the category of what anthropologists consider cultural afflictions: conditions endemic to specific cultures and rarely found outside them. The “running amok” behavior of Melanesians is one example. Such conditions are often greatly susceptible to treatment by traditional, faith-based medicine, so perhaps in the case of anorexia we should consider to what extent Western Christian practices may have helped young women exert control over a condition that seems to derive, at least in part, from the fear of losing control. One of Beth’s readers stated that she felt as if she were “feeding the jinnis” when she put food into her own body. Apparently, then, she experiences her body as no longer fully her own.

From both a religious and a romantic perspective, this perception is not necessarily problematic. (I know – that’s easy for me to say. Can the canons of romantic love be supposed historically to have fed this neurosis, if that’s what it is?) In fact, if traditional ways of knowing can be trusted, this experience may be initiatory, leading to a profound realization of communion or exstasis. Then, too, it makes sense to try to conquer the anorexic’s fear or sense of helplessness through a homeopathic approach: fear can be conquered by love, and the anorexic can only love her own body if she regards it as, in some sense, the body of another. So she turns herself into an icon.

But this latter analysis privileges the modern, “scientific” framing of the problem, which I find perhaps even more unsettling. Modern psychology will medicalize everything if you give it half a chance; even love is regarded as a neurotic obsession. I feel Bakhtin gives us better clues in this case: the self-denying, self-escaping body of Lent contrasts with the self-indulging and self-exceeding body of Carnival. Both are expressions of transcendence, but face in opposite directions, as it were. And since Aristotle if not before, the Western soul has been deprived of any obvious route of escape from these opposing terms, these twin archetypes. Paradox has not been honored as an authentic way of self-knowledge. The law of the excluded middle traditionally ruled out any transformation of negative Lack into positive Openness (sunyata) such as Buddhist ontology encourages.

I was reminded of this a little while back by a citation in Log24.net of a paper about Hamlet, pointing out that “nothing” was Elizabethan slang for the vagina. This gave me a funny feeling, because I remembered a paper I wrote about Hamlet way back in college in which I analyzed the language of nothingness in Hamlet, and I sure don’t remember finding any such discussion of the true meaning of the insults Hamlet flung in poor Ophelia’s face. But thinking now about the original meaning and sordid history of so-called hysteria, I wonder how I could have missed it? In a semantic system where “nunnery” could mean both a holy community and a whorehouse, and where “want” – meaning both desire and lack – was the basis of innumerable puns, it only makes sense that woman’s sex be seen as both nullity and matrix – the world/stage for (male) action.

What passes through the mind of the more ordinary worshipper of saints? Does she see something of herself in the starved child or the virgin burned alive by sadistic pagan kings? What role does the saint’s image play in the worship of believers both ordinary and mystical?

Those who didn’t have the time to soldier through the entire, lengthy essay I linked to the other day, A Saint in the City, by Allen F. and Mary Nooter Roberts, would’ve missed the following quote: “Mourides use the term ‘mirror’ to refer to how they see themselves in Bamba’s portrait, and in the words of the Mouride artist Mot Gueye, such reflection occurs as he paints the image. Such visual hagiography is an active process of identity formation conceptually located between memory and history. That is, hagiography retains origins as diffuse as memory, yet it can be as purposeful and politically driven as history. Hagiography causes or permits one to become swept up by a saint’s biographical narrative in such a way that one’s life becomes an extension of the saint’s. As Edith Wyschograd [Saints and Postmodernism, University of Chicago Press, 1990] asserts, saints’ lives do not merely exist, they are constructed and reconstructed endlessly, ensuring that they are perpetuated in a present that is continuously grafted onto the pure potentiality of a remembered past.”

In a footnote, the Robertses state that “Similar metaphors abound in Sufism outside of Senegal, for ‘the mirror (mazhar) of signs reflects the visible and announces the invisible,’ while the speculation that Sufism encourages ‘consists of polishing the mirror of the soul.'” (The quotes here are translated from Jean-Michel Hirt, Le miroir du Prophete: Psychanalyse et Islam, Bernard Grasset, 1993.)

Perhaps the logical next step in this discussion would take us toward Eastern Orthodoxy, but let’s return to Roman Catholicism instead. There’s a beautiful book by the Chicana poet Pat Mora that should interest anyone who wants to understand the inner experience of icon devotion. It’s called Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints. Beacon Press spared no expense in publishing it – the full-color reproductions of folk-art saint’s images (santos) are crucial accompaniments to the poems. We learn about what scholars call Sonoran Christianity through a delightful series of prosopopoeic prayers. “Aunt Carmen is impatient with cerebral notions of faith,” says the dust-jacket blurb, “but she knows her saints.” And learning about her life and thoughts inter alia, in the course of reading what she has to say to the santos, is of course half the fun.

Carmen honors and reveres the saints without becoming in any way subservient, a distinction I think that may be lost on many who have abandoned ritualized religious expression in favor of a purely private spirituality. Carmen’s “practical” approach to icon devotion is revealed in her prayer to the patron saint of cooks, San Pascual Bailón:

Like all saints, you’re a mirror.
We make of you what we need.

Carmen is an octogenarian widow and pillar-of-the-church who plays at being crotchety and inscrutable in order to keep the young priest in his place. This is important because some local practices are far from orthodox, such as the very Mexican reverence for La Muerte – not a saint, but a black-shawled, female skeleton with a Cupid’s bow and arrow:

You don’t belong, fea Doña Sebastiana.

Some pull you in a rock-filled cart,
a penance they impose
when the priest’s not looking.
They fear his frowns.
He fears mine and well he should.

Carmen wonders at the reactions of her God (mi Diosito):

¡Ay! What must He think,
this modern religion with no backbone,
no Latin, no chanting, no confession,
no fiery scoldings, just priests frowning
and electric candles. A church that fears
fire – and women. The same world inside
and out. No transformation. No mystery.

The poem’s concluding stanzas are appropriate to the season and worth quoting in full.

Ash Wednesday. “Thou art dust
and unto dust thou shalt return,”
the priest said today. He frowns
when I drag you from the closet at Lent.
You don’t belong,
but I save what can be useful.
You’re not official, yet you’re persistent,
¿verdad, Comadre? You and I
can be informal. Dos viejitas.
You don’t scare me.
I’ll look you eye to eye.

Shoot, Doña Sebastiana. Go ahead.
Slipping out of this crumpled body
will probably feel good, like slipping off
my winter coat in spring. I’ll feel
lighter, more my true self,
ready to visit with mis santos,
have a real conversation, revel
in their words, shining, like candles.

By their clichés shall ye know them:

“You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” says the environmentalist Cassandra.

“In a perfect world . . . ” says the politician with a shudder.

“The end-times are drawing near!” says the evangelist whose wife calls him “the minuteman” behind his back.