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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Diogenes’ Tub (14)

From the NY Times: “Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, has shown that if the normally pugilistic rhesus monkeys are reared with the more conciliatory stumptailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys learn the value of tolerance, peacemaking and mutual hip-hugging. Dr. de Waal, who wrote an essay to accompany the new baboon study, said in a telephone interview, ‘The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained,’ he said. ‘And if baboons can do it,’ he said, ‘why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there.'”

First, let’s kill all the lawyers. Then, arrange to have all future lawyers reared by stumptailed monkeys. It just might work! And even if it doesn’t, it would make for some great reality TV.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Notes toward a beginner’s course in poetics

With the kind of naive self-assurance peculiar to the self-taught, I firmly believe I could do a better job leading would-be poets to discover something original about their craft than the majority of professional writing teachers out there today. So why don’t I? Largely because in order to do so I would need to be certified in precisely that form of schooling I reject, which understands the poem as an art object intended for elite consumption. Most academics seem convinced that poetry has (or ought to have) a mainly ornamental function, and that composing poetry involves “self-expression,” understood as the communication of private thoughts and feelings to a properly educated audience.

However, the growth of new, vital poetic traditions in the last few decades of the 20th century relates directly to the spread of liberation movements around the globe. “Free verse” gradually reached its potential to loose the tongues and unchain the spirits of many who had previously been silenced. Poetry had and continues to have the ability to revitalize and even recreate communities, as people imbibe its anti-hierarchical, make-up-your-own-rules message. Surveying ethnographic and literary texts, one finds few generalizations that apply to more than a sizable majority of all the many stylized forms of intensified language that humans have ever dreamed up. But one generalization that does seem almost universal is this: words have something to say. And this: words in the form of poetry or song lyrics can heal.

In my imaginary course for beginning poets, I would work with the students one-on-one to try and fit the teaching to whatever poetics seem most necessary for their own growth. For example, students who agonize about the loss of traditional values might be steered initially toward a neo-Confucian program, while students infected with the germ of psychologism might be exposed to shamanistic thinking. ROTC students could be encouraged to think of poems as a way of making peace, studying the song-duels of the Greenland Eskimos and the poetics of warrior societies like Yemen and Somalia. Excessively rationalistic or super-organized people might learn to let themselves go a bit by imitating certain Beat poets, while more laid-back people would probably profit from an intensive study of highly structured verse forms. Here are some excerpts from a few of the texts I would have on hand.

“A song ain’t just to play with. It’s for a reason. It comes out of the mind. If you got good thoughts that song comes out of your body clear and strong. It’s like praying . . . like the Cedar Smoke. The drum and the rattle carry the song out to everything. The song goes into things . . . into people . . . straightens them out.”

Anon. Washoe Indian, in Straight with the Medicine: Narratives of Washoe Followers of the Tipi Way, as told to Warren L. d’Azevedo, Heyday Books, 1985 (ellipses original)

“A man who desired a spell did not put his mind on word and tunes: he put it on pleasing the supernaturals. He must be a good hunter or a good warrior. Perhaps they would ‘like his ways’ and one day, in a natural sleep, he would hear singing. So does the Papago interpret the trancelike state of the artist who derives his material from the unconscious. ‘He hears a song and he knows it is the hawk singing to him or the great white birds that fly from the ocean.’ . . .

“A man who really longs for dreams does more than wait and be industrious. There are Indians who bid such a man to fast and pray, but not the practical Papago; he asks the would-be singer to perform an act of heroism . . .

“One who has performed an act of heroism has placed himself in contact with the supernatural. It is after this has been done, and not before, that he fasts and waits for the vision. The Papago sternly holds to the belief that visions do not come to the unworthy. But to the worthy man who shows himself humble there comes a dream. And a dream always contains a song.

“To us, with our scheme wherein the singer stands outside the practical scheme of life, and wherein he is thought of . . . as an idler, this philosophy is hardly comprehensible. Yet on it the Papago system of life has worked since time immemorial. The honored men are singers. The man who has fought for his people gets no honor from that fact, but only from the attendant fact that he was able to ‘receive’ – or compose, shall we say – a song. We who take the structure of our own society as a sample of ‘human nature’ might pause over this idea. What of a society which puts no premium whatever on aggressiveness and where the practical man is valued only if he is a poet? What of a society where the misfit, wandering hopelessly misunderstood on the outskirts of life, is not the artist, but the unimaginative young businessman? This society not only exists but has existed for hundreds of years.”

Ruth Murray Underhill, Singing for Power: the Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona, University of California Press, 1938

When you are content, you sing; when you are angry, you make noise.

When one shouts, he is not thinking; when he sings, he is thinking.

A song is tranquil; a noise is not.

When one shouts, his voice is forced; when he sings, it is not.

Basongye proverbs, quoted by Alan P. Merriam in The Anthropology of Music, Northwestern U.P., 1964

“When asked why he took up composing, [the Tiv singer Chen Ugye] gives two reasons: poverty and grief. He states simply, ‘Poverty [ican] made me become a composer.’ But it should be noted that ican has a more explicit range of meaning than our word ‘poverty,’ a range that encompasses ‘difficulties, suffering, physical weakness, a feeling of being disliked by others.’ Ican is often concretized in idiom and song as something that can be tied up, thrown down, defeated; a praise singer is forever noting that so-and-so has dealt with his ican in a dramatic and convincing way.”

Charles Keil, Tiv Song, University of Chicago Press, 1979

The first time I met the blues, mama, they came walking through the woods,
The first time I met the blues, mama, they came walking through the woods,
They stopped at my house first, mama, done me all the harm they could.

Little Brother Montgomery quoted by Houston A. Baker, Jr. in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1984

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine. Go to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.

Matsuo Basho

“Only Dionysius, the god of possession and ‘otherness,’ is able to assure this play of deforming mirrors. In the remarks made earlier concerning the face of the Gorgon, we have seen that frontal representation in classical Greek iconography was reserved for those figures who go beyond the limits allowed for human action; Dionysius holds a privileged place at the center. The god of wine is thus the one who guarantees that the epic myth can be staged and presented face to face before the public; he guarantees that the mask, the enunciator (representing the Self, with his political identity) and the protagonist of the dramatic action (representing the Different, with his ‘mythological’ identity) coexist. Or, to put things somewhat differently, we could say that he assures the recovery of the Other in the Self. He also guarantees, through the process of imitative reversal, the normative, civic values of tragedy.”

Claude Calame, The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece, trans. by Janice Orion, Cornell U.P., 1995

If you do not study [the Book of] Poetry, you will not be able to converse.

Confucius, Analects

Nothing approaches The Book of Poetry in setting up standards of right and wrong, in moving Heaven and Earth, and in appealing to spirits and gods. The ancient kings used it to make permanent the tie between husband and wife, to perfect filial reverence, to deepen human relationships, to beautify moral instruction, and to improve the customs of the people.

Poetry is where the heart’s wishes go. What lies in the heart is ‘wish,’ when expressed in words, it is ‘poetry.’ When an emotion stirs within one, one expresses it in words; finding this inadequate, one sighs over it; not content with this, one sings it in poetry; still not satisfied, one unconsciously dances with one’s hands and feet.

Preface/blurb to The Book of Poetry, attributed to Confucius’ disciple Pu Shang (507-400 B.C.E.).

Both of the preceding quotes are from James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry, University of Chicago Press, 1962

“By far the most important social context in which zamil poetry is composed [by Yemenis] is in the dispute mediation. When a serious conflict breaks out between two or more villages or tribes or two different tribal sections – a conflict that might involve a dispute over land (private property or tribal boundaries), women (abductions, runaways, adulteries), or water rights – warfare among the contending parties often results. . . . The fighting at first is often a kind of symbolic violence in which the offended party tries to restore its honor by a show of force, and almost immediately after the first shots have rung out, intermediaries arrive to try and persuade the parties to agree to a truce . . .

“The intermediaries may arrive chanting a zamil poem . . . announcing their intention of mediating the dispute and offering up cows or sheep for sacrifice in token of their sincerity and good faith. If . . . the plaintiff . . . agrees to a truce, it sets the conditions in numbers of cows, sheep, guns, and, in the most serious conflicts, even hostages . . . These demands are put forward by the intermediaries in the form of zamil poetry. . . .

“It is practically impossible to delimit a class of occasions on which someone might use zamil poetry for his own personal ends. . . . Once I was riding a bus on which more boarding tickets had been sold than there were seats available for passengers, with the result that a luckless passenger who happened to be an old tribesman had to sit on the floor of the vehicle. Resenting the injustice of not having been given a seat like everyone else when he had paid for one, he composed a zamil on the spot voicing his complaint. It had its intended effect: everyone on the bus started to laugh when they heard the poem and taunted the ticket seller, who in turn relinquished his seat to the now greatly mollified old man.”

Stephen C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe, University of Claifornia Press, 1990

“At the core of the women’s poetry movement is the quest for autonomous self-definition. Shaping that quest is a heritage, external and internal, which opposed female autonomy. ‘If we don’t name ourselves we are nothing,’ says Audre Lorde. . . [To] Adrienne Rich . . . a woman seeking her identity is like a woman trying to give birth to herself:
your mother dead and you unborn
your two hands grasping your head
drawing it down against the blade of life
your nerves the nerves of a midwife
learning her trade”

Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, The Women’s Press, 1986

“Choosing words is a waste of time. Let the words choose you, let them choose their own place, time, identity, meaning. Writing is a waste of time in a sense because we try ‘to fit’ words into an order that makes sense to us and to other people. That’s arrogance, ego, artistic illusion. No matter what we do, what we think and feel, what we want words to do for us, we can’t fit them into an order that’s ours. They have their own power, their own magic, wonder, brilliance. Where and how they fit, that has nothing to do with us. The only thing we can do is recognize, admit, and accept that. Let words chose us. Let language empower us, give us beauty and awe. We cannot do anything about it. When we think we can, when we choose words, it is a waste of time.”

Simon J. Ortiz, After and Before the Lightning, University of Arizona Press, 1994
__________

Cross-references: Other quotes and essays on the anthropology of poetics include Poetry or vomit? (on Old Norse poetics); The world of the riddle (Anglo-Saxon); Portrait of a bard (Maninka); Holding forth (Judeo-Christian); Qarrtsiluni and Building Dwelling Eating (Inuit). For some more quotes on masks and the art of drama (including another quote from Underhill’s Singing for Power), see Mask and Pageant.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Questionnaire

If you’ve been reading this blog for a little while, how about giving me some feedback? Such as: what I could different, what I could better, what you’d like to see more or less of – that sort of thing. I put together a survey form that you can use if you want to – it’s here (and the link will be permanently archived in the Backgound and Backtalk section at left). I tried to make it as entertaining as possible. But please feel free to make up your own questions, too. Or send me a questionnaire of your own. Thanks!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Clutch

Right before I woke up
I was having the time of my life.
One for the cutworm & one for the crow,
I told the bartender.

*

The sky got light without me.
I was in the shower, & then
I had a thought that hurt
& I had to suck on it for awhile.
Four years after my last cigarette
& I’m still a smoker.

*

All the while I sip my coffee
a tom turkey up on the ridge
recites with great enthusiasm
from the endless list of his virtues.

*

It’s cold. The sun is trying to shine
through the bare April trees.
The high ceiling of clouds
begins to thin; dim
shadows form. But
the winter wren couldn’t sound
more delighted with
the upturned butternut tree
above the creek, the grotto
where its roots had been.
Troglodytes troglodytes, how
you dance! Bob & bow
& pump the tiny teapot of your body
up & down. Then let
the song spill out: one half
a rush of mountain air, the other
a trickle under the rocks, silver & thin
like an exposed root. I lean
breathless over the porch railing.
Friend, I murmur, spelunker,
little poet, you got it right.

*

I spotted something I can’t describe.
I’m not even sure I saw
what I think I saw.
But I remember what had been
rattling around in my head
at that very moment:
from the Book of Exodus, that phrase
the bone of the day.

*

O.K., snakes. All in a ball. The common eastern garter snake. You know what it looks like, right? Only, picture twelve of them (as it turned out), tying & retying an endless knot. There’s one at the center that’s larger than all the others; we’ll assume she’s female. Only she remains calm & relatively still. The others writhe and enwreath her, sliding, trembling, intertwining yellow stripes & green & bluish brown & the pale bellies.

We stood watching as this thing, this mass of snakes rolled slowly down the lawn, fell apart, reformed. It made us dizzy to try & count the heads. Tongues in constant flicker: what an elixir must that pheromone be, we thought, almost jealous, noting no sign of aggression among all those squirming males. Once we saw the female stretch her jaws wide in an apparent yawn.

It was late morning. The sun by this time had broken through the clouds & the temperature had risen from the 20s to nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit. There was still a bit of shiver in the breeze. It seemed to me as if the whole air trembled, & the titles of books from my poetry collection began to haunt my tongue: The Arrangement of Space. Figures of Speech. The Laws of Falling Bodies.* I thought of clocks and Eden and the fabled ouroborus, the Appalachian hoop snake that’s said to take its tail between its teeth & roll down hills.

At length the female made a break for it, sliding smoothly out & racing off toward the stream. She managed to lose all but one who, perhaps according to plan, caught up with her in a little pit outside the wind. There they made what seemed at last to be the definitive braid. The lawn was full of snakes gliding in all directions, their little pink flames trying to pick up the scent. First two, then three others found the couple & insinuated themselves into the braid as best they could. Another tangle formed, but this time two heads remained still, the smaller male’s resting behind the larger female’s, the tongues quiet in their mouths. For close to an hour those two pairs of nearly sightless eyes stayed pointed in the same direction, gazing toward the maple tree. But who knows what they really saw? A world of pure sensation, I suppose. I remember the sound of Japanese temple bells: not a clang – far from it! But a low & resonant boom you hear with your entire body & it just goes on and on until the hills soak it up & gradually the day returns to its dailiness, with only some minor, barely perceptible shift from what it had been.

*

Clutch, muse: hold
this tremolo note. Sing
of the cargo cult, the blazing
egg-shaped sun, the long
parturition. Multiple
paternity is common,
says the field guide, though
each male deposits a so-called
copulatory plug. The wetter
the summer, it seems,
the larger the clutch.
Dozens of young are possible.
In goldenrod time
the shells will dissolve inside
her oviduct &
the bright-striped
birthlings pass whole
through their mother’s cloaca
& into another dark crack
in the earth or under a rock.
They ball together then, reform
the ball they formed in her body,
ontogeny recapitulating erogeny:
oh beautiful cluster
fuck, oh holy clutch.
__________

*The authors are Martha Collins, Enrique Linh and Kate Light, respectively.

Incidentally, this all happened last Wednesday; I’ve been brooding on it since then.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Several impossible things

“In Wonderland, Alice’s White Queen tried to believe several impossible things before breakfast, an exercise we might all consider taking up, or at least consider giving credence to several unlikely things by lunchtime, given how unlikely everything is – from the generation of an oxygen atmosphere by anaerobic bacteria some several billion years ago to, oh, say, Boise Cascade swearing off wood from old-growth forests . . . ”
Rebecca Solnit, The White Queen’s Vision (Orion magazine)

*

For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin. . . .
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose utterance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.

“The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” trans. by George MacRae (from The Nag Hammadi Library in English, James Robinson, ed., Harper, 1988)

*

“The [Gimi] women [of Papua New Guinea] claim that their cannibalism enables men to achieve eternal life. Older women remember that human flesh had a uniquely delectable sweetness, but they assert that their main desire was to prevent the ravages of decomposition. They say to the body: ‘Come to me so you shall not rot on the ground. Let your body dissolve inside me!’ The rotting flesh contains vital essence. Until disintegration is complete, the rotting flesh retains vestiges of the deceased ‘s awareness. Women say, ‘We would not have left a man to rot! We took pity on him and pushed him into the bamboo (cooking vessels) and ate him!’ The cannibalism is necessary for the rebirth of the man’s vital essence. For by eating his flesh, women prepare his bones (the symbol of a man’s essence) to return to the spirit world to fertilize nature.”
Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System, Cambridge U.P., 1986

*

“Absolute self-contradiction is the very raison d’etre of the self.”
Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview (David A. Dilworth, trans., University of Hawaii Press, 1987)

*

“The news of the defeats of Napoleon dampened, as they could not but do, the Messianic movement among the hasidim. It goes without saying that what weighed so heavily upon their hearts was not the fact that he was defeated, but that the life of earth slipped back into its accustomed grooves. Nothing pointed to extraordinary consequences of the things that had come to pass. The man had been viewed as a phenomenon of superhuman or of unhuman stature; as the Gog of the land Magog, he had stamped his way over the supine and beaten nations. A thing so monstrous ought to have been the prelude to some decision of all decisions. And now there was nothing notable except that men breathed more easily. Everywhere men were happy that they had come home, as it were, from the horrors of history into the common course of things in which death occurred on the same wholly human plane as birth.”
Martin Buber, For the Sake of Heaven: A Chronicle, Meridian/JPS, 1953

*

“Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can’t tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.”
Noam Chomsky, “For Reasons of State,” Psychology and Ideology, 1973
__________

UPDATE: The best way to compose brief chains of quotes, I’ve found, is not to expend too much thought on them, just plug in the first things that come to mind. One of the first things that came to mind yesterday was to use some lines from the poet Jack Gilbert, but I couldn’t find what I wanted – until now (Monday morning). From Monolithos (Graywolf, 1982), here’s

Games

Imagine if suffering were real.
Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.
What if the midget or the girl with one arm
really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be
to live if some people were
alone and afraid all their lives.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Origins of Easter: all together, now

I’ve bundled all twelve “little known fun facts” sequentially into a single document and uploaded it to my other website. Please feel free to print out and read at your leisure. (If anyone would prefer to read it in MS Word, I’ll be happy to send it as an e-mail attachment.)

Someone asked if I will be issuing a “Cliff Notes” version. My reply: these are the Cliff Notes!

My only addition consisted of two sentences at the end of the introduction: “Finally, please note that I have made little effort to achieve internal consistency here. How the ‘facts’ enumerated might or might not be built into a systematic argument I leave to the reader’s imagination.” Is that a great cop out, or what?!

Oh, and by the way: Happy Easter!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The origins of Easter (part 5)

Fun fact #11: At the time of Jesus, Jews were probably not awaiting the Messiah

The Hebrew Moshiah means simply “the Anointed One.” There are 38 instances of this usage in the Hebrew Bible, and in 36 of them, the King James Bible does employ “Anointed One” – meaning (as the context in each case makes clear), the person singled out by Yahweh for a specific task. In two cases the KJV substitutes “Messiah” (from the Greek Messias): in Daniel 9:25-26. However, even here, in the Hebrew Bible’s one apocalyptic text, it’s evident that – as historian Donald Harmon Akenson says – the passage “is not about the coming of a Messiah in the Christian sense, but about an Anointed One, a purely Judahist usage. . . . Moshiah in Daniel’s ‘seventy weeks’ . . . personifies the situation in which a covenantal relationship between Yahweh and his people will flourish: when the liturgical-sacrificial system operates with its two major components intact, an authentic High Priest, and a purified, daily-sacrificing temple. Moshiah here is the divinely sanctioned system whereby the Chosen people and Yahweh touch and mutually affirm their covenant” (Donald Harmon Akenson, Surpassing Wonder: the Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, Harcourt Brace, 1998).

In the Hebrew scriptures, then, the term Moshiah refers to priests (e.g. Lev 4:3), prophets (Psalm 105:15) and kings (1 Sam 12:3, 2 Sam 23:1), and in each case it designates a servant of Yahweh. Such service may even be completely unwitting: Cyrus the Great becomes a Moshiah (Isaiah 45:1) for ending the Babylonian captivity. But the figure of a unitary Moshiah of eschatological significance does not exist in the “Old Testament,” except as later tradition (Rabbinical as well as Christian) has read one into it.

Nor is the term Moshiah employed often, or in a manner differing significantly from traditional usage, in the large number of texts produced during the inter-testamental period (Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, Dead Sea Scrolls). Akenson concludes from this that “the concept of Messiah was only of peripheral interest to later Second Temple Jerusalem.” But that needn’t mean that a creative, charismatic leader of the period – or his followers – couldn’t have employed the term in a new manner. We know from Josephus that the age was rife with self-styled prophets and insurrectionary leaders, and creative reinterpretations of tradition formed a major part of their modus operandi. This is true of most revolutionary movements, in fact: rarely do the leaders describe their innovations as something completely new. Instead, they tend to cast them as a return (whence revolution) to the roots (whence radical).

However, Akenson would disagree with me here. As a faithful disciple of William of Ockham, he insists upon the fact that “Moshiah, or Messiah, does not emerge as a primary idea until after the Second Temple was pulverized.” Whatever the case, there’s little doubt in my mind that the destruction of the Temple was an absolutely pivotal event for both Judaism and Christianity, precipitating their final and acrimonious divorce.

Fun fact #12: The earliest account of the resurrection, by Paul, implies a belief in a spiritual rather than a bodily resurrection

Paul’s letters are the earliest accounts of the life of Yeshua ben Yosef, and the only canonical or extra-canonical works we can date to before the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul states “that Jesus died for ‘our sins,’ that he was buried and rose again on the third day. He was seen by Cephas (one of the twelve apostles) and after that by 500 of his followers simultaneously. After that Jesus was seen by James (his brother) and then by all of the apostles, ‘and last of all he was seen of me also, as one born out of time.'”

That’s Akenson again. As an historian rather than a Biblical scholar, he takes it upon himself to point out a number of fairly obvious, if uncomfortable, truths. Among them: “Paul draws no distinction between his seeing Jesus and the experience of the others. All the believing witnesses (and, according to Paul’s account, it is only believers who see the risen Jesus) had seen the same figure. Paul, in his own writings, does not provide any direct information about his own experience of encountering the resurrected Moshiah. However, the author of the Book of Acts narrates that, within a year or two of Jesus’ death, when Paul, as part of an anti-Christian crusade, is on the road to Damascus, he has a vision of Jesus, sheathed in light from heaven. Paul and the risen Jesus converse briefly, and thereafter Paul becomes a Christian and an enthusiastic proselytizer (Acts 9:1-11). The textual bridging here is obvious enough: Paul’s own account in First Corinthians makes no distinction between his own experience of the resurrected Jesus and that of the other disciples, and in Acts it is clear that he encounters a visual embodiment of the spiritually resurrected Jesus, but not a physically resurrected human being. If one accepts this textual bridge, then it implies that Paul’s own view was that he and the other disciples had encountered a spiritually-raised Christ, but not a physically resurrected Yeshua.”

In fact, Paul makes a special point of distinguishing between “natural” and “spiritual” bodies (1 Cor 15:44), concluding that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God; neither does corruption and incorruption.” But as Akenson notes, the authors of the gospels and Acts “show some difficulty in making up their minds about what form Jesus’ resurrection actually assumed.”

To me, the actual doctrine isn’t as important to the evolution of Christianity as the attempt to enforce doctrinal conformity down through the ages. That, more than anything else, bred an intolerance of the kind of nuance and paradox that one finds more or less at the theological core of all other major religions. Like many moderns, I resist making sharp distinctions between the corporeal and the spiritual, and am equally resistant toward what I regard as excessively literalistic readings on the one hand and excessively intellectualized readings on the other. In the Hebrew Bible, Elijah is taken bodily into heaven (2 Kings 2:1-11), which paradoxically has the effect of allowing him to remain an earthly figure – the very image of the unforeseen Guest, in fact. As William H.C. Propp observes, for modern Jews Elijah has completely replaced the demonic element in the original Passover story – and he is symbolically welcomed into the home, not barred at the door.

In a similar manner, in Christian tradition, the risen Christ returns to earth not merely as Messiah, at the end of time, but potentially right now. For most of the Christian Era, saints and mystics have taught that Jesus is present not merely in the mystery of the Eucharist but in the very real bodies of the widow and the orphan, the homeless and the lepers, the illegal alien and the AIDS victim. (This parallels the official doctrine homologizing Christ with the Church Universal.) The figure of Jesus has also evolved into the preeminent (but far from the only) spirit familiar in the Christian tradition. And with increasing force, down through the centuries, believers have sought to reenact Christ’s self-sacrifice within their own lives, and even within their own bodies: it’s a short step from Imitatio Christi to the stigmata and the Pentecost.

Whatever one makes of the promise of resurrection, and however one views Jesus – as God, as man, or somewhere in between – I think it’s important to acknowledge the centrality of the cross and the empty tomb as symbols of mortality and transcendence in the West. In his thinking about these symbols, the radical Catholic priest Ivan Illich (David Calley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, Anansi, 1992) draws upon the terminology popularized by Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane. “The term sacrum, the Latin noun corresponding to our sacred, has been used for a long time by religious scientists to describe a particular place in the topology of any culture. It refers to an object, a locality, or a sign, that within that culture is believed to be . . . a doorway. I had always thought of it as a threshold, the threshold at which the ultimate appears, that which within that society is considered transcendent. For Eliade, a society becomes a conscious unity not just in relation to neighboring societies – we are not you – but also by defining itself in relation to what’s beyond.”

According to this analysis, the cross should be the Christian sacrum par excellance, and I believe that it is. For Illich, however, “faith in the incarnate word sacrificed on the cross is not a religion and cannot be analyzed within the concepts of religious science.” Well, no doubt the adherents of every tradition would feel that the categories and concepts of anthropologists and comparative religionists fall far short. I would argue that such inadequacy is endemic to the discriminatory process.

But I am struck by the remainder of Illich’s argument.”If there is something analogous to a sacrum in the Christian tradition,” he says, “it is the tomb; and Christian holy places are built around an altar, a table, which stands on top of an empty tomb and is covered by a cupola. It is at this event that Christians remember a historical event and expect one by which history will be closed. This historical event is part of sacred history, from creation to ascension, which will be concluded by the coming-again of the real person, who is Christ. The empty tomb had a powerful, structuring influence on fifteen hundred years of Western history.”

To Illich, this emptiness is far from nothingness, because it is filled with the promise of Life which Christ uniquely embodies. By contrast, he says, our modern attempts to locate “life” either in the uterus (the fertilized zygote) or in the planet as viewed from space (Gaia) are truly empty, in the nihilistic sense. Science doesn’t even recognize this concept of life; it is so much pseudo-scientific idolatry.

Here I am reminded of Dale’s translation, back on March 1 at Vajrayana Practice, of the Buddhist term sunyata: it really means openness, not emptiness, he wrote. From what Illich is saying, the tomb/altar on which the Eucharist is performed is also open in precisely this manner. And my father reminded me the other day that, for Protestants at least, representations of the cross are always empty – or open – as well. A number of interesting and fruitful conclusions might be drawn from this, but I believe it’s up to practicing Christians to draw them. As an amateur scholar and Bibliophile, my job here is finished.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Break

I’ll be away from the computer for much of the day, so I probably won’t get a chance to complete the fifth and final installment of “The Origins of Easter” until tomorrow. To tide you over, here’s a brief essay I wrote last July (reprinted from my other website). I think it kind of demonstrates how much fun one can have if one studiously avoids doing any research whatsoever!

LIFE HISTORY OF THE COAL MINER’S CANARY

I am wondering about the coal miners’ canaries, the quick & perilous lives that must’ve been their lot, a century or more before they ever gained entrance to the long linguistic half-life of metaphor & byword. Were they rotated, with a different canary assigned to every trick? Or, once drafted, were they kept down there full time? Wouldn’t their bright feathers have faded as the memory of the sun dwindled to a pinprick from a distant lamp? What about their songs of green & silver, palm frond and minnow flash? Even a stray note might’ve turned fey in the face of so much ageless & unattainable fire.

But surely the miners had every reason to keep their guardians as lively as they could. In an era when even epidemics like yellow fever & of course malaria were attributed to bad air, the sacrifice these birds stood ready to make, however unwitting, must’ve seemed a fine, brave thing. I picture them in cages of polished brass, swinging perches lubricated with whale oil, caches of hempseed & sunflower, pressure-activated water fountains, the works. And of course the miners must’ve had lots of superstitions, little amulets wired to the bars: rosaries & crucifixes, probably some patron saint’s emblem. I can even imagine someone entrusted with a cloth of fine white linen to go over the cage during blasting.

Because it’s one thing for the rational mind to accept that the canary must not be shielded from death–that its life is precious mainly for its potential to suddenly cease. But getting the heart to buy into it is another matter. As long as the canary stays safe, we’ll all make it! murmurs the dogmatic pulse, that thick dark stuff that keeps us soft & resilient. Faithful blood that turns red in the presence of oxygen.

Though of course any man who goes down to the coal spits every day the smudgy spore of his own death into his handkerchief. He folds it three ways for politeness’ sake & returns it to a breast coat pocket, where it lies like a little miscarriage pining for milk.

Sooner or later a long-lived canary must’ve become like family: so familiar, so easy to forget. The whistle blows, they get in the cars & half-way up someone says who’s got the bird? And the poor thing will perish there overnight–whether from hunger or from terror, who knows? Because you can’t expect the bosses to let them go back & hunt for it a quarter mile down some new shaft. They split up quickly at the entrance, then, & go straight home, evading their wives’ queries, evincing a sudden interest in weeding the garden. Kneeling in the coal ash-coated dirt, half-expecting to find under every ball of roots some scrap of brightness, a lost coin, a child’s toy whistle.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Diogenes’ Tub (13)

From the AFP: “No Sunnis, no Shiites, yes for Islamic unity,” the marchers chanted. “We are Sunni and Shiite brothers and will never sell our country.”

Ah, the Brotherhood of Man. Give us a common enemy and we’ll unite, every time. This particular nation-building project is beginning to show real promise.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The origins of Easter (part 4)

Fun fact #9: In naming the paschal holiday for Ostara, the goddess of spring, Anglo-Saxon Christians recognized the original character of Passover as a springtime rite of passage

The original, combined holiday of Unleavened Bread and Passover amounted to, in William H.C. Propp’s estimation, “a rite of passage from season to season and from year to year. The weeklong celebration is what [anthropologist Victor] Turner calls [in The Forest of Symbols] a ‘liminal’ period, a transitional interval set apart from quotidian activity. Throughout the Near East, both equinoxes were times of fate and danger, evoking special rites of purification and protection. In the lunisolar calendar, months were intercalated at the equinoxes – a procedure that strikes us as routine, but in antiquity was fraught with significance.”

Propp continues with a detailed analysis of the multiple parallels between Massot/Pesach and Sukkot/Yom Kippur, the other Jewish New Year festival associated with an equinox. “Both . . . are liminal periods involving evacuation of the house. For the former, one removes all leaven; for the latter, one removes oneself, to live in a temporary shelter (Lev 23:42). Again, time must be punctuated: to live perpetually in a house or to keep yeast alive indefinitely would be unnatural.” Thus, both festivals emphasize ascetic practices and the healing return to primitive Creation/wilderness.

Both festivals involve blood rites beginning in the evening, and “each in some manner placates a supernatural malefic agency: a demon or the Destroyer at Pesah, the demon (or death god) Azazel on the Day of Expiation . . . Both rituals have undertones of purification and vicarious offering played down by the Biblical authors . . . Since Pesah is a domestic rite, while Yom hakippurim is a national rite, the two equinoctial observances annually cleanse the nation at the micro- and macro- levels.”

One should keep well in mind that, however loosely we may now use the term “rite of passage,” for most pre-modern and indigenous peoples such rites were fraught with danger. To this day, initiatory rites for young men in some societies remain sufficiently grueling as to ensure that not all will survive. The paschal rite appears to have grown out of widely practiced ancient Middle Eastern sacrifices of atonement and purging, in which “blood from the slain beast is applied to humans, animals, the ground, a pillar, a domicile – or a doorway.” In folk beliefs prevalent among Middle Eastern Christians, Jews and Muslims to this day, “demons are attracted to and powerful against those undergoing major life transitions.” Blood is used to distract the malevolent spirit, to trick it into thinking its intended victim has already died.

This use of blood from a sacrificial victim which is then consumed in a fellowship meal distinguishes Passover (and the analogous Muslim rite called fidya) from an ordinary sacrifice, where the animal is completely consumed by fire “in a ritual of pure substitution,” Propp notes. “Arguably, sharing food creates fellowship both among celebrants and between celebrants and the demon or deity at whom the rite is directed. Ingesting the meat may also reinforce, or even actuate, the fictive equation of victim and sacrificer underlying vicarious sacrifice.”

An additional nuance in the Biblical account arises from the fact that the Destroyer is identified as an aspect of Yahweh himself. The rigorous monotheism of the Hebrew Bible propels an identification that may or may not have been present in the folk beliefs from which the festival grew. By the time that Yeshua ben Yosef was ready to give himself up as a paschal lamb to try and prevent what he probably foresaw as the imminent destruction of his people, the Devil had, of course, developed into an autonomous figure. But as we have seen, Yeshua’s teachings emphasized that only God has power over life and death. And if we allow “the fictive equation of victim and sacrificer underlying vicarious sacrifice,” we begin to see what may have been the original meaning of the role of “the Jews” in Jesus’ crucifixion. But first, a little more background.

Fun fact # 10: In the original conception of Passover, the blood of the goat or sheep – and the blood of the first born Egyptian – is intended as a vicarious substitute for God’s first-born son, Israel

According to the Torah (e.g. Lev 17:10-14), blood must never be eaten by human beings. That’s apparently because it was viewed as a highly charged, ambiguous material. “It is the current of life,” says Propp. “Its quasi-magnetic bipolarity both attracts and repels the divine, removing and causing impurity.” The blood of circumcision averts Yahweh’s attack of Moses in Exodus 4:24-26. This demonic attack by a God who had just revealed himself to Moses and appointed him prophet and deliverer of Israel has puzzled many commentators. Propp offers the sensible suggestion that the attack was more-or-less automatic upon Moses’ return to the land of Egypt, prompted by the blood guilt he had incurred years before, when he slew the overseer. Recall that in the Bible’s very first murder, Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, land, people and blood are closely identified.

The gospels make the connections between Yeshua’s cruxifiction and the apotropaic rites of Passover as explicit as possible: even the herb used to sprinkle the blood of the lamb on the doorposts in Exodus – marjoram or hyssop – is recalled in John’s account of Jesus’ final drink. The passage builds upon an incident also reported in Matthew and Mark, and alludes to a passage from the Psalms (69:21) popularly associated with the Messiah:

For my food they gave me bitterness,
and for my thirst they gave me sour wine.

In both of the other accounts, this wine is offered to Jesus at the beginning of his crucifixion, and he refuses. It is described as a medicinal wine, infused with myrrh. One might suppose he refuses it because the crucifixion alone is to be his medicine. And in fact, Yeshua himself does envision the crucifixion as a form of bitter medicine: “Let this cup pass from me,” he prays on the Mount of Olives (Luke 22:42). Thus, only as he prepares to die (John 19:28) does he ask for a drink. In Willis Barnstone’s translation:

After this Yeshua, knowing that all had been done to fulfill the words of the Psalms, said, I am thirsty.
A jar filled with cheap wine was lying there. So they put a sponge soaked with the vinegar on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.
Then when Yeshua had taken the wine, he said, It is ended.
And bowing his head he gave up his spirit. (John 19:28-30)

The identification of this wine with Yeshua’s own blood is reinforced by the incident immediately following, in verse 34: “But one of the soldiers stabbed his side with his spear, and at once blood and water came out.” And the hyssop/marjoram in this passage has more than one antecedent, as the Epistle to the Hebrews (9:18-20) points out: Moses used the herb to sprinkle the sacrificial blood of the bulls in the original covenant of Yahweh with Israel.

The participation of Romans in this national sacrifice would seem to parallel the role of the Egyptians in the Exodus story. But if there were ever any implications in earlier versions of the gospels that the Romans should have been punished as the Egyptians had been, they were, perhaps wisely, edited out. In any case, I don’t think that the Christological interpretations should blind us to the likelihood that Yeshua himself understood his sacrifice as the paschal rite writ large.

If the reader will permit me to speculate just a little, I think it is important to remember how a Jewish messiah would have perceived himself: not as the literal son of God – much less the second person of the Trinity – but as a very human being who would willingly sacrifice himself on behalf of his people. The author of Exodus 4:22-23 embeds quote within quote within quote when he has Yahweh command Moses (in Propp’s Anchor Bible translation):

And you will say to Pharaoh, “Thus has Yahweh said: ‘My son, my firstborn, is Israel. And I have said to you, “Release my son that he may serve me.” And if you refuse to release him, see: I am going to kill your son, your firstborn.'”

“The firstborn of man and beast are holy to Yahweh,” Propp notes. The book of Numbers depicts the Levites as Israel’s figurative firstborn; the holy Nazarites Samson and Samuel are both first sons dedicated to Yahweh at birth. This conception of divine sonship seems to me the most obvious origin of the phrase “earthly son” or Son of Man, which is how Yeshua describes himself in the gospels. Of great significance for anyone interested in what Jesus may have thought as a good Jew, he never refers to himself as the son of God. We infer that he thought that way only from later tradition, and from the fact that he addresses God as “Father” – a term of intimacy probably not uncommon among teachers in the neo-Nazaritic tradition who wanted to emphasize their independence from the official, priestly cult.

The popularity of the term “earthly son” for the messiah in intertestamental texts recovered from the caves at Qumran suggests how universalized Israel’s sense of divine mission had become by Yeshua’s time. If Yeshua indeed saw himself as God’s annointed, his use of the term “earthly son” probably meant that he viewed his attempt to avert the destruction of Israel as something done on behalf of all the children of Adam (whose name literally means “earth”).

In the paschal symbolism of the crucifixion, the cross now performs the liminal function of the doorpost/altar. Potent symbolism of varied origins and great antiquity could thus be marshalled to construct a message of unmistakable import to the greatest empire the world had even known: no farther. The ambiguity of the cross must have seemed the most effective magic against such a confounding enemy: whatever its sponsoring Power, it was told, Here. Let this cup pass. For (says Propp in reference to the Exodus account) “the paschal blood may not divert the Destroyer by its own virtue. Rather, it may create a zone of ritual purity attractive to Yahweh’s presence . . . God then protects (psh [possible root of paschal]) the household from his own demonic side.”

This interpretation seems obvious, yet it was not the one the gospels foregrounded, probably for the simple reason that the sacrifice failed: the temple at Jerusalem was destroyed a generation after Yeshua’s death. The charm was broken; instead of the “fictive equation of victim and sacrificer,” the followers of Yeshua began to blame their fellow Jews for the catastrophe. What was the charge? It would have been absurd to blame anyone but the Romans and/or Yeshua himself for his sacrifice, and in any case the sacrifice had been thought necessary to try and avert God’s wrath. The strongest biblical antecedent was of course the binding of Isaac by Abraham. No one would have accused Abraham of treachery – he was simply following orders. And so, in a sense, was the disciple known simply as Yehudah (Judas), “the Jew.”

But the story of Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac reminds us of one salient fact: the followers of Yahweh had always placed a great emphasis on the inner intention of the worshipper. Abraham is rewarded for his unquestioning faith. Perhaps, thought the Yeshua-Jews, the crucifixion of the Messiah failed because too few of their fellow Jews had “circumcised their hearts” in the required manner. Perhaps their refusal to participate in the new, reinterpreted paschal rite triggered the national disaster.

O.K., I have no idea how Jews of 2,000 years ago would have thought. But this line of speculation does sort of suggest how all that Near Eastern mythology about the dying and resurrecting god got in there: it was needed to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the original justification for Jesus’ death. From the Annointed One of Israel, Yeshua ben Yosef transmogrifies into the cosmic Lamb of God. Mithraic and Magian worldviews, dominant throughout the region, impose a much sharper dualism than normative Jewish theology would ever allow. God is now all good; no dark side is permitted. (By contrast, in rabbinical Judaism evil is generally explained as a consequence of human free will and/or as an outgrowth of that aspect of the godhead that favors strict judgement. The sayings attributed to Jesus suggest he would have endorsed this view.) For the early Christians, God is now responsible only for life; death becomes the devil’s domain. Sin is generalized to the human condition and read back into the Genesis account, in which the serpent is now interpreted as Satan. “I am the light and the life,” proclaims John’s Jesus. Conspiratorial fantasies about Yeshua’s death pit the few righteous against the many damned, in history as in eternity. Christian dualism and anti-Semitism grow up together.