“Fun, in fact, is institutionalized. Everyone has pompoms on their desks,
which they shake at celebratory moments.”
– David Streitfeld, “No Gain, Know Pain,” Los Angeles Times for March 2, 2004 [no link – registration required, including personal info.]
(via my brother Steve, who says, “The Brave New World of panopticon corporations!”)
Laughing in church
“‘Consider, therefore, whether you won’t consult a fool.’ ‘Upon my soul,’ replied Panurge, ‘I will. I seem to feel my bowels loosening. A moment before they were all tight and constipated. But just as we have chosen the fine cream of wisdom to advise us, so I should like someone who is a fool of the first water to preside over our new deliberations.’ ‘Triboulet seems sufficient of a fool to me, said Pantagruel. ‘A proper and total fool,’ replied Panurge. ‘A fatal fool.’ ‘A high-toned fool.’ ‘A natural fool.’ ‘A B sharp and B flat fool.’ ‘A celestial fool.’ ‘A terrestrial fool.’ ‘A jovial fool.’ ‘A jolly, mocking fool.’ ‘A mercurial fool.’ ‘A merry, sportive fool.’ ‘A lunatical fool.'” (Etc., for three more pages.)
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel 3:37-38 (trans. by J. M. Cohen, Penguin, 1963)
In the course of my usual coffee-fueled wool-gathering this morning I realized I have yet to write a single line about Rabelais, or about his foremost interpreter, the 20th-century Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin – like his 16th-century mentor – was the rare example of a scholar who seemed to know a lot about everything, and to remember virtually everything he ever read. Most attempts to develop new theories fail because they attempt to synthesize too much about which the author knows too little. Bakhtin had the sense to restrict his scope to a single author (Rabelais in Rabelais and His World, elsewhere Dostoevsky) and let his discoveries and suggestions about their works ripple outward. Thus, instead of writing a comprehensive history or geography of laughter he situates himself at one pivotal point in human space-time – the Renaissance in Western Europe – and looks in all directions from there.
I was reminded of this while reading some Ashanti folktales about the trickster culture hero Anansi, the spider. It was no more than a tossed-off comment of Bakhtin’s about the original character of religion that first gave me, years ago, what I think is an essential interpretive insight into stories such as these. It’s not that Mircea Eliade’s hypothesis of a separate sacred time existing within but somehow completely apart from ordinary time – illo tempore, as he called it – isn’t useful and important in its own right. But Eliade neglected one key factor: the unique power of laughter to bridge the gap between sacred and secular, between the atemporal utopia and the here-and-now, between the spirit and the body. The king and the fool are born under the same horoscope, says Rabelais. Here is the self-important Anansi, perched ridiculously on a cashew shell “as if he were a chief sitting on a carved stool,” abandoning his role as arbiter among the other animals to claim the right of primogeniture for himself:
“‘If you had come to me first, I would have saved you this argument, for I am the oldest of all creatures. When I was born, the earth itself had not yet been made, and there was nothing to stand on. When my father died, there was no ground to bury him in. So I had to bury him in my head.'”
(Harold Courlander, The Hat-Shaking Dance and Other Ashanti Tales From Ghana, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957)
Laughter pulls the ground out from under us, leaves us hanging, as it were, in mid-air. Ordinary laws are suspended (as in Eliade’s illo tempore) but so, too, is all fear and reverence, all sorrow and anger. In fact, if laughter has been generally outlawed by the so-called world religions, it is because it threatens their monopoly on the primal emotions. You can’t laugh in church. Bakhtin notes that “Early Christianity had already condemned laughter. Tertullian, Cyprian, and John Chrysostom preached against ancient spectacles, especially against the mime and the mime’s jests and laughter. John Chrysostum declared that jests and laughter are not from God but the devil. Only permanent seriousness, remorse, and sorrow for his sins befit the Christian.” (Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky, Indiana U.P., 1984.)
Bakhtin shows, at least within the Western Christian milieu, the central importance of what he calls “the material bodily element” to the unofficial culture of festive laughter. It is, he writes, a “degrading and regenerating principle.” One has only to read accounts of the sacred clowns of the American Southwest and Mexico (see below) to realize the truth of this insight. If Aristotle was right about laughter being a unique and fundamental human trait, what from the perspective of Christian history appears to be a temporary lapse (in what were, after all, the “Middle Ages”) may instead represent a return to the origins of religious expression: “During the Easter season laughter and jokes were permitted even in church. The priest could tell amusing stories and jokes from the pulpit. Following the days of lenten sadness he could incite his congregation’s gay laughter as a joyous celebration . . . The jokes and stories concerned especially material bodily life, and were of a carnival type. Permission to laugh was granted simultaneously with the permission to eat meat and to resume sexual intercourse.”
Laughter and the grotesque were (are) opposed to death and the fear of death through their very celebration of change and renewal. Bakhtin stresses “the essential relation of festive laughter to time and to the change of season. . . . The gay aspect of the feast presented this happier future of a general material affluence, equality, and freedom, just as the Roman Saturnalia announced the return of the Golden Age. Thus, the medieval feast had, as it were, the face of Janus. Its official, ecclesiastical face was turned to the past and sanctioned the existing order, but the face of the people of the marketplace looked into the future and laughed, attending the funeral of the past and the present.” The comic inversions of the folk festivals included travesty/transvestitism; the reversal of hierarchical orders (jesters turned into kings and bishops); parodies of sacred rituals; and of course the celebration of all that was forbidden: drunkenness, gluttony, debauchery.
If I differ with Bakhtin at all it is only in my sense of the relative value of the spiritual/sacred versus the material/festive. My reading of ethnography over the past several years has convinced me that these two principles need not be ideologically opposed; we don’t need to choose between them. I do agree they we would be better to return to a more Rabelaisian, holistic appreciation of laughter. I think Bakhtin describes very well the diminished role of laughter in the post-16th century West, where “the essential truth about the world and about man cannot be told in laughter.”
Our conception of the body has narrowed as well. In contrast to the grotesque and universal body of the carnival, in the modern view bodies are smooth, closed off, private. Serious art and literature studiously ignores nose, mouth, belly and genitals, concentrating instead on eyes and hands. (Think of the language of love poetry, or the Victorian novel.) Whereas “the grotesque body . . is a body in the act of becoming,” the modern body is complete and strictly limited. I can’t help picturing the contrast between the bodies of local working-class people I know – and the kind of earthy humor they tend to indulge in – and the ideal bodily images of Hollywood and Madison Avenue: “That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden or moderated. All orifices of the body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable facade. The opaque surface and the body’s ‘valleys’ acquire an essential meaning as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world. All attributes of the unfinished world are carefully removed . . . The verbal norms of official and literary language . . . prohibit all that is linked with fecundation, pregnancy, childbirth. There is a sharp line of division between familiar speech and ‘correct’ language.” Well, fuck that!
Here’s anthropologist Barbara Tedlock (The Beautiful and the Dangerous, Penguin, 1992) describing one of the two main orders of Zuni clowns:
“I gazed at the ten silly-looking, but nonetheless sacred, serious, even dangerous, Mudhead clowns. Adobe-colored beings in tight-fitting cotton masks with inside-out eyes and doughnut-shaped mouths, simultaneously expressing eternal amazement and voracious hunger. Ears, antennae, and genitals (stuffed with hand-spun cotton, garden seeds, and the dust of human footprints) protruded knoblike from their heads. Without noses or hair, they were naked except for lumpy orange-brown body paint, feathered ear ornaments, black neck scarves, men’s woolen kilts, and women’s blanket dresses, concealing their tied-down penises.”
These ten Mudheads – or Dickheads, we should probably call them – were born through a primordial act of incest, and were the original inhabitants of the Zuni land of the dead, Kachina Village. As real beings who somehow inhabit the bodies of the men who play them every year, they represent more than archetypes: each possesses “a distinguishing personality trait and a sacred gift for humankind.
“Molanhakto, with a miniature rabbit snare dangling from his right earlobe, brought native squash. The Speaker, a daydreamer who rarely spoke, and then only irreverently, carried yellow corn. Great Warrior Priest, a coward, brought blue corn. Bat, in his blanket dress, who feared the dark but saw marvelously well in daylight, red corn. Small Horn, who thought he was invisible, white corn. Small Mouth the glum, gabbling and cackling constantly, offered sweet corn. Old Buck, frisky and giggly as a young girl, black corn. Gamekeeper, in his woman’s dress, speckled corn. Water Drinker, always thirsty, toted his water gourd. And Old Youth, the self-centered, thoughtless adviser of the team, brought the clairvoyance locked tightly within the tiny cracks in parched corn.”
In short, a pretty corny lot.
But what about us, us U.S.ians? By and large, for all the vaunted liberation of sexual mores, the tyranny of the official body remains nearly absolute. Freud, by reducing everything to sex, perhaps shares a great deal of the blame for our continuing discomfort in our own skins. Neurosis is endemic to the psychoanalyzed subject. Modern medicine has reinforced the wall between mind and body, which thus by definition can never truly be healed (made whole). This separation breeds many more. Even for those who abandon themselves to carnality, the body remains unreal: filth or idol, something to be whipped, something to be fetishized. Sex and laughter are still very far apart. Homosexuals no less than heterosexuals, religious and secular alike elevate the same, tortured body inhabited by the same lonely and alienated soul.
Whether we flagellate ourselves like the Shi’a commemorating the death of Hussein or ogle the flagellation of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, our sense of what it means to be compassionate is limited, really, to a single emotion: sorrow. But is it not in shared laughter that people feel most akin? If the goal of religion is, as it proclaims, to promote peace and unite humankind, why is laughter still barred from the churches, temples and mosques? We alternate between the supposed poles of sacred solemnity and profane laughter without perceiving that they form a single axis – that axis on which this whole, vast, bulging, fecund and tragicomic world forever spins.
UPDATE: My sometime debating partner (and faithful reader) commonbeauty has written a highly compatible post, partly in response to this, on ‘vernacular bodies’ in the paintings of Bruegel. A brief and wonderful essay about a fascinating subject – check it out.
Raining blood
Historian Howard Zinn reflects on a photo accompanying an article in The New York Times:
“That was Jeremy Feldbusch, twenty-four years old, a sergeant in the Army Rangers, who was guarding a dam along the Euphrates River on April 3 when a shell exploded 100 feet away, and shrapnel tore into his face. When he came out of a coma in an Army Medical Center five weeks later, he could not see. Two weeks later, he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, but he still could not see. His father, sitting at his bedside, said: ‘Maybe God thought you had seen enough killing.’
“The newspapers on December 30 reported that 477 American GIs had died in the war. But what is not usually reported is that for every death there are four or five men and women seriously wounded.
‘The term ‘seriously wounded’ does not begin to convey the horror . . . ”
***
My brother Mark is one of those left-wing college profs you always hear about, taking it upon himself to try and open the eyes of his young and impressionable charges to the crimes of the powerful and the true horrors of war. Thus, his reactions to my post on cinematic violence were particularly incisive: we don’t so much need less exposure to violence, he thinks, but more exposure to truly realistic violence. Mark is not, however, an experienced blogonaut, and was flummoxed by Haloscan’s limit of 1,000 characters or less “for a non-upgraded account.” So he resorted to e-mail (which I have edited slightly to remove typos and correct orthography). Being a Latin Americanist he prefers the term “Usian” to “American” to denote a citizen of the U.S.A.
“I agree with all y’all’s points, but I think that seeing so-called ‘real’ gross violence is somewhat therapeutic (it can turn people way from naive support for wars, for example), and I’m pretty sure I’m not a psychopath. It is truly amazing how few of my conservative, pro-war students can stomach the graphic photos from the Middle East, Chechnya, and so forth, that are floating around the web–photos of what it actually looks like to ‘have one’s head blown off’ are apparently enough to change a lot of folks’ opinions. If we could get the smells in there too, you might be able to convince a few more. In comparison, no fictional movie is ever more than one long, faked orgasm. Usians understand violence as something theatrical, and they like it, are drawn to it, for that reason. Because it is primarily something they experience vicariously, they have the feeling in the backs of their minds that they can always run faster/draw first/survive flaming crashes, etc. Show them real photos of severed Algerian heads with penises stuffed in them, or severed heads in Nanking with cigarettes placed in them–they literally run and vomit. No Hollywood movie will ever show that type of stuff, because it’s considered ‘pornographic,’ so it gets an X rating.
“Some will argue that plenty of Usians experience real violence in their own lives, but I think that many who do become inured and in turn, as they have been kicked since they were children, turn around and kick others (collectively, the State of Israel, for example). They have been dehumanized and are I suppose more prone to dehumanize others; many of the sheltered who haven’t, however, in my opinion, should be shown a little real gore–especially [images of] the children we use for ‘collateral’–and of course they should empty their arsenals into their TVs while Fox is on.”
***
The Saga of Burnt Njal, arguably the greatest of all the Icelandic sagas, does not shy away from graphic depictions of violence, nor – in contrast to contemporary traditions on the continent – does it idealize them. It chronicles a blood feud that spans generations and engulfs much of northwestern Europe. It also describes the 11th-century conversion of Iceland to Christianity, which is depicted as a more-or-less voluntary, collective decision impelled by the need for a unitary, theological basis for the unwritten constitution – a decision strikingly similar to the one just arrived at by the members of Iraq’s (non-)Governing Council. The anonymous Christian author of Njal’s Saga naturally represents this as something favored by the wisest men of Iceland, who see the new religion’s potential for lessening violence.
What the author does not suggest is that the old beliefs were without basis in “reality.” The matter-of-fact narrative style, common to all the major sagas, actually conforms quite closely to the modern idea of realism. This lends considerable impact to the periodic incursions of the weird, the uncanny and the horrific. From the translation by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson (Penguin, 1960):
“On the morning of Good Friday, it happened in Caithness that a man called Dorrud went outside and saw twelve riders approach a woman’s bower and disappear inside. He walked over to the bower and peered through a window; inside, he could see women with a loom set up before them. Men’s heads were used in place of weights, and men’s intestines for the weft and warp; a sword served as the beater, and the shuttle was an arrow. And these were the verses they were chanting:
‘Blood rains
From the cloudy web
Of the broad loom
Of slaughter.
The web of man,
Grey as armour,
Is now being woven;
The Valkyries
Will cross it
with a crimson weft . . . ‘
“Then they tore the woven cloth from the loom and ripped it to pieces, each keeping the shred she held in her hands. Dorrud left the window and went home. The women mounted their horses and rode away, six to the south and six to the north.
“A similar marvel was seen by Brand Gneistason in the Faroe Islands.
“At Svinafell in Iceland, blood fell on the priest’s stole on Good Friday, and he had to take it off. At Thvattriver on Good Friday, the priest seemed to see an abyss of ocean beside the altar, full of terrible sights, and for a long time was unable to sing Mass.”
***
I used to listen to a lot of music by bands whose lyrics dealt with these kinds of themes extensively – bands with names like Violence, Slayer, Sepultura.
Pumped with fluid, inside your brain
Pressure in your skull begins pushing through your eyes
Burning flesh, drips away
Test of heat burns your skin, your mind starts to boil
Frigid cold, cracks your limbs
How long can you last
In this frozen water burial?
Sewn together, joining heads
Just a matter of time
‘Til you rip yourselves apart
Millions laid out in their
Crowded tombs
Sickening ways to achieve
The holocaust
Slayer, “Angel of Death,” Reign in Blood (Def American, 1986)
I assure you that years of listening to death metal and punk rock did not desensitize me; quite the opposite. By contrast, the much more cerebral, angst-ridden lyrics of so-called alternative bands left me cold. Raw anger seemed, if nothing else, an honest and heart-felt response to the world we live in. But any more, when I hear the latest reports out of Haiti or Iraq, all I can do is weep.
__________
Just one link (because this is not, after all, a political weblog): War Needs Good Public Relations
Via Negativa cross-references: For more on the sagas, see Poetry or vomit? For more on pre-Christian Europe, see Diagnostic test of certain hypotheses about the Old Norse worldview . . .
Dooryard Eurydices
As daylight lengthens, dawn and dusk grow briefer. I’m already in mourning for their gradual demise. That’s what I like best about winter: these long dawns, slow to the point of luxuriousness – though I suppose it seems odd to use that word about such a frozen season. Days like today, when I sleep in until 5:30, I’m not out on my porch until a quarter to 6:00, by which time it’s tempting to linger long past the time when the coffee in my thermos mug begins to cool. (This is about as sybaritic as it gets for me, folks.) I especially like those minutes right before the sun comes up, when the trees are silhouetted against the clear eastern sky, which has progressed from black through indigo through lighter and lighter shades of blue until it appears almost white. The trees’ bare branches are outlined down to the smallest twig, the superimposed crowns creating (from my perspective) an intricate filigree, black on white. Unaccountably, I am in put in mind of graceful models lounging about in lingerie . . .
And it’s usually around this time of year that the northern cardinals add their voices to the still-rudimentary dawn chorus. They start tuning up in late January, but it’s not until mid-February that their contributions become a regular thing, triggered by the lengthening photoperiod. Theirs is not one of more spectacular bird calls, but there’s something cheerful and spring-like about it, and I guess I’m just happy for anything to listen to besides the supremely monotonous peter-peter-peter of the tufted titmouse. To my ear, most of the time what the cardinal is singing sounds like Purty purty purty. Peterson says: “Voice: Song, clear slurred whistles, lowering in pitch. Several variations: what-cheer cheer cheer, etc.; whoit whoit whoit or birdy birdy birdy, etc. Note, a short thin chip.” I believe I have heard all three variations, but I wonder – how can a whistle be simultaneously “clear” and “slurred”?
Despite its common name, the northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) ranges from southern Ontario down to Central America. In fact, its expansion north out of Dixie dates only to the 20th century. It is the quintessential dooryard bird, denizen of brushy and edge habitats, and since it doesn’t migrate one gets to see it in all seasons. Both male and female cardinals are spectacular against the snow; I am especially fond of the female’s more muted tones. No fresh snowfall, no matter how gingerbread-y, seems complete until I have spotted both cardinals. Then, pure magic!
Evidently, at least some American Indians accorded the cardinal a prominent role in their sacred stories. According to John Bierhorst (the Mythology of North America, Oxford, 2002), “In an unusual Orpheus myth recorded among the Cherokee, the people of the ancient time are said to have tried to kill the sun because her rays were too hot. By mistake her daughter was killed instead, and the grief-stricken sun stayed in her house, causing darkness. In hopes of restoring the light, people traveled to the dead land and started carrying the daughter back in a box, not to be opened until they reached home. But before the time was up, they gave in to the young woman’s plea for air, opened the box, and watched her fly off as a cardinal. From this we know that the cardinal is the daughter of the sun. And if the people had obeyed instructions, there would be no permanent death, as there is now.”
__________
James Mooney’s compendium, “Myths of the Cherokee,” published in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology in 1900, is available online at the Sacred Text Archive. Here’s the complete myth, Daughter of the Sun. This is a fun story, and very southern: it’s full of snakes and haints and the Little People, and the Sun is a total bitch – kind of a homicidal Scarlett O’Hara. There’s even a horned devil-type dude, and one can see the Native origins of the snake-handling cults: “Since then we pray to the rattlesnake and do not kill him, because he is kind and never tries to bite if we do not disturb him.”
According to Mooney, the Cherokees hear the cardinal’s song as kwish kwish kwish!
Update: A visit to the Encyclopedia Mythica confirmed my nagging suspicion that my original title, “Dooryard Persephones,” was in error. Orpheus’ babe was Eurydice. Interestingly, the parallel with the Cherokee myth extends as far as cause of death: Eurydice, too, was killed by a snakebite.
Blue devils and the legend of Robert Johnson
1. A shady connection
Barely in time for Black History Month, I want to correct a few common misconceptions about Robert Johnson and his supposed pact with the devil.
I hope no one will be too shocked by the news that the 1988 movie Crossroads is a wildly inaccurate guide to the life and death of the historical (as opposed to the mythic) Robert Johnson. For example, in the movie, Willie Brown is a harmonica player, still living in the 1980s. In real life, Willie Brown was an older mentor to Johnson, one of the three or four greatest bottleneck guitarists of the first generation of Delta bluesmen to make it onto record. He died in 1952.
Johnson was far from the only ambitious bluesman of the 20s and 30s to exploit the bad man image, including the European-derived myth of the pact with the devil. According to the recollections of people who knew him, Johnson lived up to the image, constantly fighting and womanizing and using several aliases to keep ahead of the law. But neither “Cross Road Blues” nor “Me and the Devil Blues” were among his signature songs. None of his friends, former flames or traveling companions who were interviewed by blues fans from the 1960s on had ever heard about a pact with the devil.
The connection between the figure of the devil in southern Afro-American folklore and the Yoruba/Dohomean deity Legba is probably valid. But outside of places like New Orleans and the Georgia Sea Islands, explicitly African elements of hoodoo are submerged in a thoroughly Christian milieu. It would be much more accurate to say that a bluesman like Johnson was living out the Christian archetype of the Prodigal Son than to maintain that he was some kind of underground practitioner of an alternate faith. That is to say, he might have been anti-Christian at times, but he wasn’t non-Christian.
Johnson died too young to go through the complete cycle, but many of his contemporaries (Son House, Skip James, Ishmon Bracey, etc.) periodically swung between the two poles of blues singer/sinner and sanctified Christian. The lyrics to Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” are powerful precisely because they exploit this tension and ambiguity. The narrator begins,
I went to the cross road,
fell down on my knees,
I went to the cross road,
fell down on my knees.
Asked the Lord above “Have mercy,
Save poor Bob, if you please.”
So the cross road initially appears to be a Christian image. The strongest echo is of a revival service, with the narrator as a sinner repenting and seeking grace. In the following verse, Johnson seems to echo the parable about the man fallen by the wayside, waiting for a Good Samaritan who never comes:
Mmmm, standin’ at the cross road,
I tried to flag a ride.
Standin’ at the cross road,
I tried to flag a ride.
Didn’t nobody seemed to know me,
everybody passed me by.
Only in the third verse do we catch a note of premonition, but longing for love and/or worry about where the narrator will sleep overshadows it.
Mmm sun goin’ down boy,
dark gon’ catch me here.
Oooo ooee eeee,
boy, dark gonna catch me here.
Ain’t got no lovin’ sweet woman that, love and feel my care.
And then (given the severe time constraints occasioned by 1930s record-cutting techniques) we’re already at the last verse. Johnson seems more interested in reminding his listeners of his relationship to the famous Willie Brown than in suggesting any supernatural partnership:
You can run you can run,
tell my friend, boy, Willie Brown.
You can run,
tell my friend, boy, Willie Brown,
Lord that I’m standin’ at the cross road baby,
I believe I’m sinkin’ down.
2. Singing in tongues
So where did the Robert Johnson-crossroads myth come from? Over-enthusiastic blues scholars, steeped in West African mythology (where the crossroads is indeed a potent symbol) simply invented it in the 1960s. According to blues scholar Gayle Dean Wardlow (Chasin’ That Devil Music, Miller Freeman Books, 1998), it was Pete Welding who, in 1966, first proposed a “selling his soul” interpretation to the song “Cross Road Blues” in an article in Down Beat. I confess I haven’t seen that article, but I do resent the oft-encountered implication that blues songs were primarily autobiographical. Some were, but many were not. I’m bothered by what I see as a persistent unwillingness to accept blues artists as fully creative lyricists who were capable of adopting alternate personas. In fact, their lyrical creativity is well documented: as in modern rap, the ability to extemporize was highly prized. Further, most blues singers employed a variety of dramatic techniques, including alternating voices and dramatic monologues; an authentic blues song is worlds away from the purely personal mode of a contemporary singer-songwriter. We know from an interview with the musician, for example, that Bukka White’s first-person “Fixin’ to Die Blues” was written in the “expected voice” of an alcoholic he once knew.
“In the 1975 book Mystery Train,” Wardlow continues, “Greil Marcus ‘symbolically’ implied Johnson mastered the guitar because of his alleged pact with the devil . . . In 1982, Peter Guralnik added the Ledell Johnson story of Tommy [Johnson] ‘selling his soul’ at midnight at a Delta crossroad.” Tommy Johnson – no relation to Robert – was another master bottleneck guitarist with a decidedly more desperate tone to his lyrics. He also died young, but not under such mysterious circumstances as Robert did: he fell victim to the blue devils of “Canned Heat” (i.e. sterno) and “Alcohol and Jake” – the titles of two of his songs which, according to his contemporaries, did indeed draw heavily on his own circumstances. (See below for more on the blue devils.) Thus it was Tommy – not Robert – Johnson who was portrayed in the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? as having made a pact with the devil.
The only Robert Johnson song to explicitly elaborate upon a connection with the devil is “Me and the Devil Blues.” Though again, some ambiguity remains: is it Satan himself, or is the narrator simply saying his woman is the devil in disguise?
Early this mornin’
when you knocked upon my door.
Early this mornin’, ooh
when you knocked upon my door.
And I said, “Hello, Satan,
I believe it’s time to go.”
But in the second verse, the narrator owns up and admits that it is he who is bedeviled, and he who bedevils others:
Me and the Devil
was walkin’ side by side.
Me and the Devil, ooh
was walkin’ side by side.
And I’m goin’ to beat my woman
until I get satisfied.
While the listener is still recovering from the shock of that boast, Johnson shifts gears. The narrator has the woman speaking up – and psychoanalyzing him. She says he suffers a compulsion he hasn’t come to grips with; he protests that she’s to blame. It’s not clear which of them decides to blame the devil. By the end of the song, the narrator is defiantly proclaiming his own devilish identity. The segue to the last verse exemplifies the “linked verse” technique of blues composition at its best.
She say you don’t see why
that you will dog me ’round.
[spoken:] Now, babe, you know you ain’t doin’ me
right, don’cha?
She say you don’t see why, ooh
that you will dog me ’round.
It must-a be that old evil spirit
so deep down in the ground.
You may bury my body
down by the highway side.
[spoken:] Baby, I don’t care where you bury my
body when I’m dead and gone.
You may bury my body, ooh
down by the highway side.
So my old evil spirit
can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.
It probably go without saying, but the deity Legba is neither evil, nor is he associated with an afterlife destination “deep down in the ground.” This is as Christian a song as anything Black Sabbath ever wrote.
3. Blues as spiritual ju-jitsu
Another Robert Johnson song, “Hellhounds On My Trail,” partakes much less of specifically religious imagery than it may appear to. The eponymous hounds were actually intended to evoke the police and their bloodhounds, according to Wardlow, who traces the verse to a record by an obscure East Texas bluesman. Given the widespread use of bloodhounds during slavery, when church songs often contained coded messages about the Underground Railroad, it’s hard not to hear some echo of an otherwise lost spiritual here.
Diverse roots (or as the philosopher Giles Deleuze would say, multiple rhizomes) are at work here. A modern listener might need reminding that in Johnson’s world the police were anything but enforcers of justice. Instead, they represented an oppressive and brutal system designed to thwart the ambitions and crush the spirits of African Americans. The word “blues” is Anglo in origin, dating from the late 19th century. Its original usage denoted the blue devils that are said to appear to an alcoholic going through delirium tremens. It would not have escaped the attention of African Americans that the police in their blue uniforms were the most visible counterpart to the now-generalized inner torments known as the blues. I can think of a couple lyrics offhand that come close to spelling this out: Bessie Smith’s “In the House Blues,” and the barrelhouse standard known usually as “Vicksburg Blues,” which Howlin’ Wolf turned into “.45 Blues” (with the reference to policemen judiciously removed). But doubtless there are many more.
People on both sides of the sinner-sanctified divide would have agreed about the absolute necessity of spiritual resistance to this internal and external oppression. In fact, what really distinguished the ‘sinners’ was their insistence on individualism and self-expression, as opposed to the collective, communitarian spirit of the black churches. Although it might be a bit of a stretch to say that bluesmen and women were revolting against the accomodationist stance of the churches, explicit, satirical critiques of church people are not hard to find in the recorded blues. Blues singers tended to stereotype preachers as charlatans, only interested in a free meal ticket and easy access to women. Of course, bluesmen often portrayed themselves as rakes and scoundrels too, but the subtext of the many “Preaching Blues” songs is, “at least I’m not a hypocrite.”
Robert Johnson’s own “Preaching Blues,” subtitled “Up Jumped the Devil,” is a fascinating exception to this pattern. More than that, it is a masterpiece, musically as well as lyrically. In it, Johnson suggests a fusion of church and blues through words that, for me, come closer to true Hoodoo Man conjuring than anything else he recorded. The preacher is evoked through Johnson’s style of vocal delivery alone, and the Devil is nothing but the blues personified: a malevolent force that only a visit to the distillery can exorcise.
Mmmmm mmmmm,
I’s up this mornin’,
a blues walkin’ like a man.
I’s up this mornin’
a blues walkin’ like a man.
Worried blues,
give me your right hand.
And the blues fell mama’s child
tore him all upside down.
Blues fell mama’s child
and it tore me all upside down.
Travel on poor Bob,
just cain’t turn you ’round.
The blu-u-u-u-ues
is a low-down, shakin’ chill.
[spoken:] Yes, preach ’em now.
Mmmmm mmmmm,
is a low-down shakin’ chill.
You ain’t never had ’em, I,
I hope you never will.
Well, the blu-ues
is a achin’ old heart disease.
[spoken:] Do it now. You gon’ do it? Tell me about it.
Well the blu-ues
is a low-down achin’ heart disease.
Like consumption,
killing me by degrees.
I been stuttering, oh, oh drive,
oh, oh, drive my blues –
I been stuttering,
I’m ‘onna drive my blues away.
Goin’ to the ‘stil’ry.
Stay out there all day.
4. Real devils, real contests
All too many white blues fans appear deaf to the racial subtext of blues music. They literally don’t want to hear about it: the blues is good time party music, they say. It’s for everybody, regardless of race.
Well, yes. And it is also potent medicine of the homeopathic variety, as countless blues artists have testified. But if the classic country blues songs seem deep and eerie beyond words, it is because they represent a passionate attempt to escape the devils of poverty, racism, violence, alcoholism, alienation and hopelessness. A consideration of the specific social and cultural matrices from which the music emerged should not diminish its universal appeal.
The immense, inland delta formed by the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers has been called “the most southern place on earth.” It is a thoroughly domesticated landscape, a sea of perfectly flat cotton fields stretching from horizon to horizon, interrupted only by mosquito-ridden streams and backwaters. Its floodplain soil is hundreds of feet deep: rich black earth with nary a stone. As so often in the Third World, great natural wealth has permitted the growth of a powerful and vindictive elite who traditionally possessed no sense of responsibility toward land or people. Why conserve? The river and soil will last forever.
Thus, violence or the threat of violence against black sharecroppers was intense and pervasive throughout the period when the greatest bluesmen and women were getting on record. In this climate, explicit references to racism were off-limits, at least in the recording studio. But the desire to escape is palpable in songs like Johnson’s “Walking Blues” and “Traveling Riverside Blues,” and songs about guns (“32-20 Blues”) fairly crackle with electricity. I personally find these sorts of themes far more challenging to contemplate than the sadly diminished echoes of African religion.
Robert Johnson was a brilliant guitarist, and yes, he mastered the instrument quite quickly. But there seems to have been no shortage of musical geniuses in the Delta region in the first four decades of the 20th century. Johnson’s stature among modern-day, white blues fans seems to derive as much from the myth as from the songs. In the case of the latter, Johnson was lucky to have been remarkably well recorded, and to have found many posthumous fans among top-selling rock musicians who covered his songs. In real life, Johnson is said to have had a relatively weak voice, but you don’t hear that on the record. The poor quality of surviving sides by greats like Charley Patton and Willie Brown militates against their ever achieving even the limited form of mainstream popularity accorded to Robert Johnson.
For hard-core country blues fans like me, Johnson doesn’t hold a candle to fellow-Delta natives Son House and Johnny Shines. These men didn’t have the sense to play up the bad man image and to die young, and thus will remain forever unpalatable to the youth culture that grew up with rock ‘n’ roll. But House, Shines and others who managed to live to a ripe old age had the satisfaction of enjoying what those who died young never could: escape. Not only from the daily humiliations of Jim Crow-era apartheid, but even from the bipolar disorder that was African American society under Jim Crow.
The first- and second-generation bluesmen and women who survived into the 1970s and beyond may never have earned have earned great wealth, but they did at least get the satisfaction of mentoring and playing to fanatically respectful audiences of mostly white people. They got their dignity back, and with it, I would guess, experienced the confirmation of their individualistic ethos. The choice between church and blues became less stark, less black-and-white. If the recorded statements and relatively tranquil later lives of the majority of the “elder statesmen of the blues” are any guide, in the last decades of the 20th century blues artists no longer felt themselves to be stranded at a lonely crossroads, forced to choose between go-along-to-get-along and self-destructive defiance. Unlike Willie Brown, Charley Patton, and Tommy and Robert Johnson, they were able finally to beat the devil at his own game.
__________
Note: transcriptions have been modified from those that appear on-line at The Robert Johnson Notebooks, which gives little hint about the extent of scholarly disagreement about some of these lyrics. The “stuttering” interpretation of verse 5 of “Preaching Blues” is my own, but it seems to fit the song’s dis-ease imagery. The website’s interpretation, “I’ve been studyin’ the rain” is extremely far-fetched, in my opinion.
Questioning the pornography of violence
Commonbeauty has a fairly trenchant analysis of The Movie. “As a continuing sign of our impoverished public discourse, there is a silly debate about whether or not the film is ‘anti-semitic.’
“Well, as the kids would say, duh!
“It’s based on the gospels, isn’t it? I have an intimate familiarity with those texts, and I can tell you, they’re not exactly pro-Jew.”
A little farther along: “This film isn’t primarily about ‘God’ or about ‘accuracy’ or about any of the other trite formulations Christians around me (there are a few!) have been spouting. This film is about the power of the camera, the ability of soft-lighting, precious sound design and fake blood to reduce America’s suburban evangelicals to a giant heap of fanatical sobs and thoughtless sighs. It is a work of pornographic fidelity to dangerous and outdated ideas: blood sacrifice, collective guilt and the redemptive power of torture.
“It is no less than this nation deserves, really, that defines its reality either according to what is projected on the lit screen of the movie theatres or what trails across the lit skies of the theatres of war.”
I dropped some comments in the box as is my wont whenever ol’ CB goes on a truly righteous rant. I am particularly interested in his final statement, about our definitions of reality.
It’s true, NPR interviewed folks as they came out of the theatres. The most frequent comment was about how “realistic” it was. Even the people who labeled themselves as non-Christians were impressed by that. But what is so realistic about making a fifteen-minute whipping alluring enough to watch? In real life, most of us – the 95% who are not clinically psychopathic – wouldn’t be able to watch for a fraction of that time.
I don’t want to sound dense here, but what is it about violence that says ‘realism’ to so many people? Or should I be asking, what is it about people’s perceptions of reality that makes them look for it in extreme violence rather than among the thousand odd, beautiful, serendipitous and inscrutable moments, the acts of kindness and thoughtfulness that make our day-to-day lives worth living?
Could it stem perhaps from the modern cult of honesty, which demands that every ornamentation and decoration, every narrative flourish or poetic touch, every mask and costume, even (ideally) the skin itself be stripped away? It reverberates through proverb and cliche: “Bred in the bone.” “Beauty is only skin deep.” “That’s the way I really am, this is how I really feel.” The same cultural predilection that leads us to scorn the civilized art of rhetoric in favor of cant and sound bite and redneck anti-intellectualism. The same naivete that leads us to feel we can ignore the customs and mores of other cultures – and persuades us that the stark language of guns and bombs is all we need to change minds. The same blindness that keeps so many Americans (and Australians, I gather) from discovering an elemental social fact: that the hoary gestures of hospitality and respect, still practiced in places like Iraq and Old Europe, have a purpose, and that that purpose is to humanize. Reality isn’t just there, a given thing, raw matter. We shape it; we embellish, we embroider it. Some, mindful of transcendence, would say: we co-create it.
I’ll leave for sharper minds questions about the role of Hollywood and market forces and pop culture and imperialism. What seems clear to me is that Gibson – and millions of Christians like him – commit a grave error if they think the testimony of the emotions is sufficient. Would you discount the critical and creative faculties in deference to some literal interpretation? An old proverb about hiding a light under a bushel comes to mind. “Literal truth” is an oxymoron; reductionism leads to nihilism and brutality. So-called faith in the literal truth strikes me as little more than the blind worship of power. If you are religious, you might choose to look at it like this: God gave us imaginations for a reason. We need to combine the ancient Jewish teaching Love Thy Neighbor with the ancient maxim of Delphi: Know Thyself.
Know thy neighbor, love thyself.
Or something like that.
Selah.
Deep hanging out
I got a letter from my friend Chris in Africa last week. He retired, sold his house in D.C. at the end of December and moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with his girlfriend, who started work with a major NGO there in January. Her work takes her all over the continent and Chris gets to tag along, lucky dog!
Chris spends most of his time drinking beer and visiting breweries, but his excuse is it’s all research for a book – the same justification Tom Montag at The Middlewesterner has been using for his peregrinations. Chris’s book will explain How Microbrewing Will Save the Earth by fostering local economies, creating “public space,” encouraging attention to high-quality, organic ingredients, and the like. He refers to this as “fermenting revolution.”
So in January he was in Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, just in time for the biannual Pan-African Film Festival. In addition to a thriving film industry, Burkina apparently has “a solid brewing tradition,” Chris writes. As luck would have it, one of his girlfriend’s colleagues there was “well connected to one of Ouga’s biggest traditional brewsters. I spent a couple days in her ‘factory’ observing, taking notes and digital photos. The beer itself was, when fresh, quite drinkable of course. The only ingredient was red sorghum, plus yeast cakes to get it all fermenting.” (I’m not sure just what a beer would have to taste like NOT to be drinkable in Chris’ view, however.)
Then in Mali the next week he ran into an old acquaintance from D.C. More serendipity: the guy was working on his anthropology PhD in a nearby village, where he was able to set up a demonstration of local millet beer production for Chris to “research.” In a subsequent e-mail to family and friends Chris included a snapshot: “A little village in Mali called Kaniko. The woman in the background is a brewer, feeding her baby some nutritious beer.” (An excellent source of B vitamins and amino acids, I trust.)
But indigenous flavors weren’t the only option; Bamako (Mali’s capital), for example, boasts a Belgian beer bar. I’ve never managed to develop a taste for it, but I gather that, for serious beer afficionados like Chris, the Belgians make the dopest brew on the planet.
Meanwhile, back in Addis, Chris is – as I post this – drinking for free in honor of my recent birthday. Or so he just e-mailed to say. I had told him he’d have to drink for both of us; I fell out of the habit when I started this blog.
I’ve been encouraging him to start a travelblogue if he can. But on the other hand, I also advised him to enjoy his early retirement (he’s around 33, I think) and save all his energies for drinking.
I think it was the anthropologist Clifford Geertz who described his work as “deep hanging out.” That might be an apt description for the sort of research Tom and Chris are engaged in, as well. And why not? After all, most minor and many serious medical conditions are linked to an excess of tension. Ambition kills! Goofing off is more than a just a lifestyle choice – for many of us, it is a way of life.
If the evidence of modern ethnography is any guide, our hunter-gatherer ancestors “worked” an average of only four hours a day. Be that as it may, subsistence-related activities in most societies are not approached with the kind of grim, Protestant, no-pain-no-gain determination that all too many Anglo- (or German-) Americans seem to feel is a direct index of moral virtue.
So Happy Friday, y’all. Be sure to goof off as creatively as possible this afternoon. And this evening, drink a toast to my friend Chris over there in Africa. For the health of the planet!
Clifton again
what spells raccoon to me
spells more than just his
bandit’s eyes
squinting as his furry woman
hunkers down among the fists
of berries.
oh coon
which gave my grandfather a name
and fed his wife on more than one
occasion
i can no more change my references
than they can theirs.
Lucille Clifton, Next (BOA, 1987)
Who has ears to hear
“D nt d uttrth spch; nght nt nght shwth knwldg.” Wht ds t mn tht th Hbrw Bbl ws wrttn sll wth cnsnnts? Wrld wtht vwls – r wrld ncmmnsrbl wth th txt? “Hr, Srl!” Mr thn mr pzzl. Th lgnc f t. Th (nvtbl wrd!) grc.
Hv th vwls trl gn mssng, r wr th cnscsl xcldd? Nd f xcldd, cld t b bcs th prtk f th thr-ntr f wmn? Mss t Sn: “B rd gnst th thrd d: cm nt t yr wvs.” Bcs th dvn prsns – th Shkhnh – cnnt tlrt cmpttn? Fr th Wrd tslf s rrdmbl fml.
T prnnc s t sprt; t sprt s t nsprt nd t dsprt. Yhwh tslf prhs rgnll nmtp: tk dp brth, Yh. Nw lt t t – slwl. Wh. Wht th dctr ss, cl nstrmnt prssd gnst r rbs.
“Day unto day uttereth speech; night unto night showeth knowledge.” What does it mean that the Hebrew Bible was written solely with consonants? World without vowels – or world incommensurable with the text? “Hear, O Israel!” More than mere puzzle. The elegance of it. The (inevitable word!) grace.
Have the vowels truly gone missing, or were they consciously excluded? And if excluded, could it be because they partake in some way of the other-nature of women? Moses at Sinai: “Be ready against the third day: come not at your wives.” Because the divine presence – the Shekhinah – cannot tolerate competition? For the Word itself is irredeemably female.
To pronounce is to aspirate; to aspirate is to inspirit and to dispirit. Yahweh itself originally onomatopoeia: take a deep breath, Yah. Now let it out – slowly. Weh. What the doctor says, cool instrument pressed against the ribs.
***
[from the vault]
Heeding the Call
. . . And after the fire a still small voice.
1 Kings 19:11-12
Sure–the ordinarily pious,
perhaps even the faint of heart
could’ve withstood the windstorm
& the earthquake & fire but
a voice of such utter thinness?
Like a circle of knives
unsheathed with
the barest
hiss–ah
what a dodge to call it conscience
as if a smoothly functioning
digestive system were the whole
aim of religion (thus spoke
Nietzsche for example).
And as if such peptic talk would’ve
been proof against that great
movement of liquid vowels
that made the old partisan
of flint & brimstone
bury his face in his cloak.
__________
Note: In the popular homiletic tradition of mainstream Protestantism, the “still, small voice” of Yahweh is attributed, instead, to Jimminy Cricket. (Awkward question: where was that voice of the modern conscience when, in the previous chapter of I Kings, Elijah directed the public slaughter of “450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah” with God’s blessing?)
***
“Faith is not a product of our will. It occurs without intention, without will. Words expire when uttered, and faith is like the silence that draws lovers near, like a breath that shares in the wind. . . .
“Polytheists are blind to the unity that transcends a world of multiplicity, while monists overlook the multiplicity of a world, the abundance and discord of which encounter us wherever we turn. Monism is a loom for weaving an illusion. Life is tangled, fierce, fickle. We cannot remain in agreement with all goals. We are constantly compelled to make a choice, and the choice of one goal means the forsaking of another. . . . God is one, but one is not God. . . . God means: Togetherness of all beings in holy otherness.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (Noonday Press/FSG, 1951)
Learning language, learning poetry
Metaphor is defined [by Aristotle] in terms of movement.
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Robert Czerny, trans., University of Toronto Press, 1984)
Yesterday’s fresh inch of snow and cold temperatures overnight gave everything a sparkle this morning as the sun rose into a cloudless sky. I remembered my niece Eva’s first use of metaphor at the age of 2 years, 9 months. She had just begun speaking semi-coherently the summer before, when she was in Honduras, and had a very limited vocabulary of mostly Spanish words. One night, during a prolonged Christmastime visit, her grandpa showed her the stars. She always accompanied him to the compost heap/wildlife feeding area after supper, taking out the scraps from the kitchen. It was an exceptionally clear night, and the stars were beautiful; Eva practiced saying “estrellas,” which tripped off her tongue with surprising fluency.
The next day dawned equally clear, and as Eva was riding on my shoulders up to her grandparents’ house for lunch, she surprised me by pointing at the ground and yelling, “Estrellas!” I looked. She was pointing, of course, at the sparkles in the snow.
I don’t suppose this sort of thing is too uncommon. It makes sense that facility with metaphors would be a normal part of language acquisition, since analogic or metaphorical definitions are common for many words (and are probably essential for abstract thinking; all of mathematics is based upon the ability to analogize, for example). Learning a new word involves figuring out the extent of its semantic coverage. In the case just described, was this really an example of the conscious use of metaphor? Perhaps, instead, it was simply an attempt to figure out whether “estrellas” meant solely “sparkly things in the sky,” or if it also included sparkly things elsewhere.
One way or the other, I would like to think that this kind of active, joyous measuring of the world through spoken language is fundamentally poetic. This is the argument Heidegger makes in his essay on a theme from Hölderlin, “‘…Poetically Man Dwells…'” To Heidegger, the comparison of sky with earth is an integral part of this measure-taking. “The upward glance spans the between of sky and earth.” It encompasses “everything that shimmers and blooms in the sky and thus under the sky and thus on earth, everything that sounds and is fragrant, rises and comes – but also everything that goes and stumbles, moans and falls silent, pales and darkens.” The poet does not merely describe such sights, but “calls … that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself. In its familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible imparts itself in order to remain what it is – unknown.” (Albert Hofstadter, trans., Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper, 1971.) In other words, in her making-strange the poet merely testifies to the ultimate unknowability of everything language seeks to measure and describe.
I remember how fascinated Eva was with birds that year. It helped that her daddy was an ardent birdwatcher, I suppose. But more than that, I think birds appealed to her because they were small and quick, always in motion – just like she was. Her word for bird(s) was “Pio!” and she used it constantly – hardly a bird escaped her attention as we walked around the farm. One evening, we gave her a ballpoint pen and a pad of cheap paper and encouraged her to draw. She would put the pen on a blank page, move it rapidly in circling, sweeping strokes, turn the page and do it again. The pad quickly filled up with actionist creations that had little to do with representational sketching. After a while, one of us asked her what she was doing. “Pio!”
By sheer serendipity, one or two of them did end up looking like birds. I saved one that bore an uncanny resemblance to a resplendent quetzal. I wish I’d saved the whole pad.