GOD and Culture
May 16, 2008
I often note just how convenient certain beliefs are for various cultures. I know that cultural systems build over time and are not the product of an individual sitting down and deciding: "Let's make this our official story since it will be believable and provide us with a strong sense of identity." These stories and beliefs only look as if they were created by a single guiding mind.
Today it struck me that natural scientists are in a similar situation when they try to talk about natural selection, another process that works automatically as time passes and various traits are selected. The end product looks amazingly as if there were a guiding consciousness. Science writers have to decide how to portray this process.. and they often land on a literary device that allows them to talk as if there were a guiding consciousness.
Here is Matt Ridley explaining himself on this question:
Since I have an aversion to the passive voice, I intend to avoid that problem throughout this book by pretending that there is indeed a teleological engineer thinking ahead and planning purposefully. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls such an artifact a "skyhook," since it is the rough equivalent of a civil engineer hanging his scaffolding from the sky, but for the sake of simplicity I shall call my skyhook the Genome Organizing Device, or GOD. [The Agile Gene, pg. 40-1]
This also allows him to sidestep religious questions by almost prodding religious-minded readers to understand "God" in this construction.. and I find that a cop-out.
Useful, however, is the notion that an unconscious natural process can arrive at a rational looking result. I think this concept is underutilized when thinking about culture and religion. For example, this week my class was reading a section of the Kebra Negast, the Ethiopian expansion of the story of Solomon and Sheba. It is exactly the kind of story that a person would make up. It draws from an ambiguous or at least incomplete story in Hebrew Scripture and uses those loose ends to attach the nation of Ethiopia to the story of Israel. It creates an ancient identity for Ethiopia almost out of whole cloth and establishes political legitimacy for a line of kings.
There may well be someone who fabricated a portion of this story.. but fabrication is almost always too crude a word for the social process that leads to a filled-out historical identity. These identities begin with a seed idea and then individual members of the community, without even thinking about what they are doing, add to that seed. This is the kind of unconscious creativity that animates culture. Take Islam. The tradition begins with a series of at times vague revelations to Muhammad, and then individuals proceed to connect the dots and fill in the stories.. and pretty soon there is an amazingly durable group of stories about God's people in pre-Islamic Arabia. Take Coptic Egypt. There is a brief mention in Matthew about the Holy Family going down to Egypt to escape Herod.. but then through visions and local detective work the entire itinerary of the Holy Family is mapped out.
These large scale creations of identity and history are obviously not the creation of an individual.. they are the brave efflorescence of cultures that hunger for identity and meaning. In order to avoid the passive voice it might be useful to refer to this social process as the Concept Organizing Device (COD). It works slowly but surely in every culture to create a complex system of meaning out of the rough stuff of life and history. The COD is so good at what it does that it will be tempting to refer to this process as having a consciousness.
Academic Literature
May 14, 2008
What would happen if we began to think about academic writing in the humanities as akin to literature? I ask this because I've been looking back over Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization by Barry Kemp. The book summarizes a lifetime of work in Egypt.. but more than that it is the product of a finely critical mind. It is a book that I would nominate for the top 100 non-fiction books of the century.
Kemp's book is on ancient Egypt.. which I study, so this is a convenient work to reference and re-read. But why should I be constrained by books in my field? I would get more out of a great book on a city in China or South America than I would out of the next mediocre book to cover Cairo. In other words: the fineness of an author's perceptions and creative presentation largely trumps the bare information conveyed by a book closer to my subject area.
Given the barriers between academic disciplines it is difficult to know the texts that would be most stimulating for me to read about other cities and civilizations. This is not a problem when it comes to literature. We choose novels based on the excellence and insight of the author.. and not so much on a narrow field of research like "southern short stories." The literature-phile looks everywhere for authors who can present the world in a surprising way. Why couldn't those in the humanities begin to conceptualize their reading in a similar manner?
I know this would require re-thinking the way journals and conferences work. But if that is impossible a website such as this one can be a start at highlighting creative academic work.. work that is startling and lasting in the way that a great novel is.
Augustine on Cultural Change
May 10, 2008
For the last couple of years in my Intro to Religious Studies course I have had the class read Augustine's On Christian Teaching. It is not as well known as the Confessions or City of God, but it manages to nicely define a Christian frame for interpreting and understanding scripture. It turns out that scripture should be interpreted as supporting love of God and neighbor and abhorring lust and sin. Any biblical material that apparently goes against that rule must be interpreted as figurative or allegorical in nature. Such a rule in no time will lead to a contradiction with the obvious historical import of a passage.. and that is what I think is important to see: interpretive frames govern what we get out of a biblical passage.
Another issue that Augustine highlights is cultural change. He addresses this issue in an attempt to justify the actions of the Old Testament patriarchs in committing actions that would later be considered sins. Case in point: polygamy. In defending the patriarchs Augustine outlines a theory of cultural difference. We should not judge another culture by our own standards:
We must therefore pay careful attention to the conduct appropriate to different places, times, and persons, in case we make rash imputations of wickedness. [78]
The patriarchs could carry on polygamous relationships but were not sinning (as we would be today if we tried the same) since they were following their own culture's practices.. and expressing love of God through those practices.
This leads Augustine into radical territory:
Whatever accords with the social practices of those with whom we have to live this present life—whether this manner of life is imposed by necessity or undertaken in the course of duty—should be related by good and serious men to the aims of self-interest and kindness, either literally, as we ourselves should do, or also figuratively, as is allowed to the prophets. When those who are unfamiliar with different social practices come up against such actions in their reading, they think them wicked unless restrained by some explicit authority. They are incapable of realizing that their own sort of behaviour patterns, whether in matters of marriage, or diet, or dress, or any other aspect of human life and culture, would seem wicked to other races or ages. [79]
That extended passage can almost be left to stand without comment. It allows for the notion that external ethical standards will be different at different times and places. And although Augustine would have disapproved of gay marriage, it is easy to see how his ideas here could be used against him as an argument in favor of this practice.
What I find fascinating in this passage is the unspoken static view of culture. Each person takes his or her place in life with a group of people who follow X system of social practices. Christianity (defined as love for God and neighbor) is capable of being expressed in every such cultural system (this is made even more explicit in the sentences after my already long quotation). But what first jumps into my mind is what to do about cultural change. What if someone is born into a group of people who are in a transition from x system to y system. What side should this Christian fall on? Should he or she stay with the old ethics or transition to the new one?
That is an obvious question to us because we understand culture as constantly changing, either progressing or declining. Those two dominant metaphors for cultural change in fact might even be said to underlie our entire political system! But Augustine sees culture (which he also casts as "race") as being largely static. A person should fit in to a cultural pattern. And while it is true that cultures separated in time or space are quite different, every culture remains its own unique system. I am curious how this works out elsewhere in Augustine.. and I will keep my eye out for a similar instance.
The Woodmans Experience
May 9, 2008
We recently shifted our weekly grocery store trip from Copps to Woodmans. Neither of those two names meant anything to us until we moved to Appleton, Wisconsin. Our weekly Woodmans experience, however, never fails to make me think about the changes in American shopping patterns. The unfailing pattern is to choose stores that privilege price and to a lesser extent choice over the experience of shopping.
There is nothing fancy about the layout of Woodmans. Often a product is presented still in the box:
The point would appear to be: look, we got this big shipment that we are offering to you at the lowest price possible. We are not going to waste our time or your money stacking this up into some fancy pyramid!
Bulk is the name of the game. Keeping overhead cheap is the best way to deliver all this bulk food. The Wikipedia article on Woodmans gives a sense of the size of these stores:
Woodman's works on a warehouse model, operating stores in the 200-250,000 square foot range, as opposed to the 50-75,000 square foot size of typical grocery stores. Stores are built with a minimum level of amenities, usually with the cheapest materials available at the time.
Nobody comes looking for an aesthetically pleasing experience. This is about getting the food and getting out.
Big box stores have steadily eaten into other forms of retail. Even with respect to air travel, we choose overwhelmingly the cheapest option and as a result the comfort of traveling on an airplane is plummeting (meals anyone?).
Why is this our direction? My guess is that as the earnings of most Americans steadily erodes our tendency is to maintain lifestyle and habits.. which means steadily sacrificing comfort and pleasure for bulk and price. Stores like Woodmans cater to this economic pinch. We want to keep telling ourselves: "things are still the same. I can afford the same things." Now imagine the situation if Americans broadly were feeling like they had more money and spending ability. My guess is that the trend would be toward improving the experience and quality of stores. Instead of seeing air travel become harder and harder to stand, we would see corporations work to improve it. American economic expectations are clearly falling.. slowly and slowly, but steadily.
The other side to this trend is Whole Foods and flying first class. This past decade has seen the rise of specialty stores and luxury options on a grand scale. Those signs at the airport for "elite boarding" always burn me up. This trend points to the existence of a class of people in America who are living quite well and upping their quality demands while the majority of Americans are preserving their lifestyle by bargain shopping.
Fans and Scholars
May 8, 2008
What would it mean to study baseball in an academic setting? There are thousands of people who are baseball fans and who could reel off batting averages, ERAs, and golden glove awards without even thinking. Even casual fans have an immense amount of institutional knowledge.. and the person who really follows a team likely spends a good part of each day digesting bits and pieces of information. So what is a scholar to do?
The temptation for a scholar would be to compete with the knowledge of a diehard fan. The reason this is a temptation is because the wider public expects it from you. Try walking into a bar and mentioning that you are researching a book on the Dodgers or Brewers. Chances are you will find someone who knows a lot more than you about players and history.. and that person will feel vaguely dissatisfied to learn that you really do not know as much as he does about the team you are writing on. This person may even go home to his wife and complain that he really should be the person writing a book about the team.
The scholar can never compete with a fan in terms of general knowledge because what he/she does for fun is likely not related to the subject being studied. The amount of time a scholar has to put into baseball is far more limited than the person who goes to all the home games of a team and reads the newspaper every morning.
What the scholar has is a critical frame of reference. Because of the critical tools acquired during study and from reading other books of history, the scholar is able to bring to bear on the data of baseball a frame of reference that allows for conclusions and comparisons that are far outside the realm of possibility for a fan. Questions about marketing, about narrative construction, about relations with the press, about perceptions of athletes.. these are the sorts of things that a scholar can ask but which a fan cannot.. because a fan is by definition someone who is a participant in a system.
This same group of issues is present in many other areas of scholarship. The one that mostly concerns me is the case of teaching the Quran. There are literally millions and millions of people in the world who could better call up a Quranic verse and explain its accepted significance.. but that is not really the point. There happen to be very few people who can apply a historically informed critical framework to it, and that is why I teach the Quran while millions of other people memorize it. But it would be a false path for me to decide to compete with all these people in general knowledge of the Quran.. after all, they devote a major percentage of their time to this pursuit and since the Quran does not express my own religious views, I have only a fraction of that kind of time. If I were to compete with this kind of knowledge I would have not time for other interest.
Colleagues who study the Civil War, the Bible, film, popular music, or even cars will run into something similar. The prize for the scholar is to see cultural meaning in specific actions and social patterns, which often can be had without encyclopedic general knowledge. Fans experience social meaning but they do not have the chance to reflect upon its workings or constructed nature. Scholars lose out on social meaning.. but they do manage insight into human patterns. I'd take the latter.
Ozu's Presence in Lust Caution
May 7, 2008
Lust Caution seems more familiar than it really is. The time is World War II and we are in an occupied country. The resistance battles the collaborators. But we are not in Paris or anywhere else in Europe.. we're in Shanghai and the occupiers are Japanese. Ang Lee introduces a different part of the world into our cinematic vision.. and demonstrates how beautiful the results can be.
Toward the end of Lust Caution the collaborator (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) has his mistress and secret member of resistance (Tang Wei) brought to the base of the Japanese occupiers. The mistress has to walk through a complex filled with private rooms entered by sliding doors. I am not sure what to call this kind of entertainment complex, but it brings to mind similar scenes in the films of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. This is exactly the environment in which Ozu brings his characters together for social occasions.. especially his groups of men. Now this typical Ozu scene takes on scary overtones: the soldiers are drunk and the theatrical painted singers look and sound hollow. It has a nightmarish quality.
The collaborator and his mistress finally sit alone in the traditional Japanese setting. Although it is the type of scene that we know from Ozu, it is now occupied by two internally conflicted Chinese. The temptation to switch into an Ozu-like visual style is rejected by Ang Lee as he keeps the camera moving and avoids internally framed scenes.
The collaborator (responsible for the torture and killing of Chinese rebels) describes the scene:
They sing like they're crying. Like dogs howling for their dead masters. These Japanese devils kill people like flies, but deep down they're scared as hell. All our days are numbered since the Americans entered the war, yet here we are with our painted faces, listening to their off-tune songs.
The ideas of "Japanese devils" and "off-tune songs" puts a whole new interpretive frame on this traditional scene.. making us think back to those still and quiet Ozu scenes, and wonder if we did not miss something. In this setting the collaborator and his mistress feel most unified. Among a foreign people both must hide themselves. Both are now genuinely closer to each other than to those around them.
It is at this point, as these two Chinese lovers are settled within a quintessentially Japanese setting, that the mistress sings a beautiful and traditional Chinese song. The message seems clear: Ang Lee is colonizing the setting for his own version of international film. It is a style that will be at the same time more historically skeptical and emotionally searing. This will not be allowed to turn into an homage to the master craftsmanship of Ozu.. in the way that a film like Yi Yi by Edward Yang is. It is an appropriation of a setting but with the application of a modern cinematic style that takes control of the space as masterfully as the traditional song in the midst of those off-tune songs.
Stamping out Violence
May 4, 2008
An article in the New York Times Magazine addresses the issue of how to ease the levels of violence that continue to plague some inner city neighborhoods. The article focuses on the efforts of Gary Slutkin, epidemiologist and founder of CeaseFire:
He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.”
This is a better analogy for violence than my own previous comparison of violence to a bad cough (OK, not a great metaphor). But the import is the same: violence should not be allowed to rage out of control in the hope of "getting it out of our system," but should be stifled as soon as it appears ready to flare up. This approach to violence can be mapped onto the way disease is fought.. which is another effort that is never conceptualized as a purge or cleansing.
This post is already bogged down in metaphors.. which is fascinating. We might discuss rooting metaphors out of the discourse on violence, but that will not change the fact that our leaders see violence through the lens of dominant metaphors. With shocking consistency the Bush administration has talked about violent flare-ups abroad as clarifying moments and opportunities (most recently in conflict in Basra with Mahdi militia). This reliance on an underlying metaphor of the healthiness of conflict is one of the most frightening aspects of our current leadership.
A person who grows up in a violent neighborhood (in Iraq or inner city Chicago) is like a person who walks into a bathroom stall covered with graffiti. In such a situation there is little psychological resistance to adding yet another scribble on the wall. But if every day that wall is cleaned thoroughly and one is confronted with a clean wall that bears no evidence that people have written on it, there will be an added barrier to marking that wall up. The work of combating violence is in every day making that bathroom wall look as new and untouched as possible. This is a principle that can be applied to foreign policy as well as beating violence in American cities.
Clinton on "Elites"
May 3, 2008
I understand why some people would vote for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. If I were voting solely on who I judged would deliver health care, I might well vote for Clinton. Ditto if I were choosing someone who would be a fighter against Republican attempts to reward the wealthy at home and make a sham of our historic values abroad. What I can't stand is the increasing tendency of both Hillary and Bill Clinton to use Republican culture-war tactics to smear the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Here is Bill Clinton talking about Obama and his "elite" supporters:
Former President Bill Clinton was in West Virginia on his wife's behalf. In Clarksburg, he called her a scrapper and contrasted her appeal among working-class voters with the elitists he said support Obama.
"The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules," he said. "In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it."
I know exactly who Clinton is referencing in the second paragraph: people like me. Republicans have gotten a lot of mileage by proclaiming candidates like John Kerry elite and out of touch.. not the kind of person one wants to have a beer with. Their followers get easily lumped into the same "elite" category. Then laughably we get "average Joes" like Bush and McCain, both more wealthy and privileged than most Americans can imagine. The deliberate enflaming of suspicion toward a group of people who are educated and engaged is sickening.. and a tactic I had previously believed was the special territory of Republicans.
Even more worrisome than the attack itself is the apparent moral blindness of a couple that had the Rolling Stones play as part of Bill Clinton's 60th birthday party, and whose satisfaction with American celebrity culture is obvious, calling Barack Obama an elitist! Maybe the logic here is that if the people in question have made the cover of People magazine then they are not really elites? But I will take any day someone who has consistently chosen instead to engage with local organizations and community building efforts.. even when it brought him into contact with people who are not People celebrities and who don't show up well on Fox news.
Writing As One Without Authority
May 2, 2008
Every now and then I peak at Technorati, the king-maker of the blog world. A long time ago I signed up Old Roads so that it would show up on the service.. and perhaps have subjects appear on keyword searches. Every return trip to Technorati reminds me of why I never spend much time there: the use of "fans" or popularity as a gauge for ranking blogs is inane. In fact, this way of conceptualizing the blog world leads to a kind of enforced ephemerality as everyone is chasing round and round to be the first to say something snarky or spot something hot. Equally depressing are the top searches, more evidence that blogs for the most part serve as an extension of popular culture.
My model for blogging is far more inward looking than the ones that make the Top 100 Blogs list on Technorati. The blog does not have to be a space for instant comments on the latest celebrity or political events. It can also serve as a vehicle for reflection and measured thought. Or, as I like to think of these posts: reviews that come too late. That is, too late for the pulsing crowd of up-to-the-minute news hounds.. but perhaps just right for people who operate in a longer time frame. At Old Roads we strive for the longest possible time frame.. and don't worry about being first or last.
It Was All Said 4000 Years Ago
May 2, 2008
Preparing for my Ancient Egyptian Religion course I was struck by the opening paragraph of the Lamentations of Khakheperre-Sonbe from Middle Kingdom Egypt:
Would that I had unknown speeches, erudite phrases in new language which has not yet been used, free from the usual repetitions, not the phrases of past speech which our forefathers spoke... For indeed whatever has been said has been repeated, while what has (once) been said has been said. There should be no boasting about the literature of the men of former times or what their descendents discovered! [212]
It struck me as odd that at the dawn of literary production there is already the complaint that everything worth saying has already been said. This is echoed over 1000 years later by the writer of Ecclesiastes when he notes: "There is nothing new under the sun."
Robert Alter on the Psalms
April 30, 2008
My small dose of pure enjoyment for the term has come from a reading of the new translation of the Psalms by Robert Alter. Following his translation of The Five Books of Moses and The David Story, Alter turned his attention to the poetry of the Psalms, providing a commentary to accompany the text.
There is something salutary about taking a book out of the Bible and presenting it on its own. Being wrapped in the same cover as all those other biblical books leads the mind to an easy conclusion: these books must be saying the same thing. Alter's translation of the Psalms is a testimony to how well one book can stand on its own and be understood according to its own values and assumptions. Can we finally say goodbye to that Reformation principle of letting scripture comment on scripture?
Alter's most impressive achievement may well be his ability to effortlessly dismiss deadbeat biblical scholarship. In numerous places he shows himself a skeptic when it comes to hard and fast conclusions about the setting or genre of a Psalm:
What should be resisted is the inclination of many scholars, beginning in the early twentieth century, to turn as many psalms as possible into the liturgy of conjectured temple rites—to recover what in biblical studies is called the "life-setting" of the psalms. [xvi]
Alter continues in a similar vein two pages later:
The case of [Psalm 137] should alert us to the limits of one of the most common scholarly modes of analysis of Psalms, the form-criticism that identifies distinct genres of Psalms (supplication, thanksgiving, Wisdom psalm, royal psalm, historical psalm, Zion psalm, psalm of praise. [xviii]
These are two examples from the introduction; similar notes are scattered throughout the commentary.
For the most part I find this skepticism directed at scholarly categories valuable. The imagination does not run down such narrow and prescribed lanes. Scholarship often has trouble imagining the fluidity of creation, from a subjective standpoint, and loses for that reason a sense of how literary types and physical applications can metamorphose into something different.
On the other hand there are places, such as the Psalms of Ascent, where a reasonable confidence that this is a mini- book of psalms used on pilgrimage could be quite enlightening. But Alter is quick to raise objections: "Most scholars assume that 'ascents' refers to pilgrimages to Jerusalem.... But among other meanings that have been proposed..." (435). Alter actively resists the non-bookish, ritual qualities of these works.
Alter is at his strongest when the Psalms conforms most closely to a book of poetry. A beautiful example of what I mean is in Alter's commentary on the heading for Psalm 56, which reads "For the lead player, on jonath elem rehokim, a David michtam, when the Philistines seized him in Gath," With respect to those odd Hebrew words Alter writes:
This is one of the most mysterious of the musical terms in Psalms. The literal sense of the three Hebrew words is haunting: the mute dove of distant places. The great medieval poet Judah Halevi responded to the evocativeness of the phrase in his poetry by turning it into a concrete image of Israel's exile. [195]
Reading through the commentary there are numerous traces of this community of sensitive Psalm readers.. and it is as a member of this invisible and partially forgotten group that Alter would clearly love to be remembered. A goal that we at Old Roads applaud.
Reflection on -izations
April 28, 2008
All -izations are a result of the secret ministry of cultures. Set a group of people down someplace and they will begin to conform everything to their own patterns. If the French take up residence, we see a process of Frenchification. If Muslims take up residence we see Islamization. If on the other hand these groups have minority status in a new country, we witness the reverse: a process of Americanization or some other -ization. This all happens quite unconsciously.
The book Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 by David Prochaska sketches the process whereby a single Algerian town went through this -ization process. This often involves details that appear unimportant when seen from a grand historical perspective: statues, street names, postcards, and architectural styles. These details work to guide perceptions and create a city that not only houses, but represents an identity. And every identity will elide other identities.. or at least make them seem not to exist. If we ask who is in charge of all these details like the naming of streets, we will not get much of an answer. People just go about their lives and individuals make choices about naming a street after a personal hero or constructing a building that conforms to their architectural taste.. and the end result is a "French" city in Algeria.
A book I read over the past couple of weeks covers another version of -ization.. Islamization. Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society by Leor Halevi follows the changes in burial rituals that came about as Islam became dominant in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Burial rituals are a convenient way to measure -ization because every culture has to do something with the corpse and at the same time religious leaders will feel compelled to have some say about the manner in which it will be treated. So these rituals at death, while not pretty reading, are an exceedingly useful window on the process of Islamization.
One ritual involved the placement of a tombstone to mark the site of a burial. Burial markers inscribed with verses from the Quran became a popular way to memorialize a deceased person, yet the pious-minded were firmly in opposition to this practice and looked back to the unmarked graves of Medina as an ideal. Halevi uses this to point out the early (8th century) divergence of the traditionist and popular versions of Islam (41). And that is a good point, but I think more interesting is the way this ends up complicating the way we think about the process of -ization.
For example, one might imagine that Islamization would take place as leading thinkers reflected on their new religion and formulated Islamic rituals and patterns connected to death for the rest of the group to follow. An alternative picture might be that as Muslims came into contact with other cultures they mostly adapted to the practices that were around them, wrapping them in superficially Islamic terms. But the reality seems to have been messier. No one had control of the reins of -ization. Islamic thinkers did formulate rules.. but the crowd didn't listen; they liked their gravestones with verses from the Quran! Muslims adapted some practices from the cultures around them, but mostly they found their way to specifically Islamic rituals and practices. And again, the strange thing is that this is all an unconscious process, the end result being a constellation of ritual practices that reflect the new commitment to Islam.
About a Son: Kurt Cobain
in His Own Words
April 26, 2008
Emily presses me about how I can admire Kurt Cobain.. a guy who seemed to radiate negativity. I was asking myself that question as I watched Kurt Cobain: About a Son.. and I have no great answer. I can't say that the interviews, recorded on audio tape between December 1992 and March 1993, do a lot to get Cobain into focus. The topics stay close to the basic outline of Cobain's life.. and while Cobain gets plenty of time to rant about reporters or stupid people, we never really encounter a surprising illumination. At the end of the documentary we read that these interviews were done mostly late at night "between midnight and dawn".. implying perhaps that these were full of late night, guard-down insights. But I generally had the feeling that these were topics Cobain had been over many times. The evasions with respect to his drug use could be maddening and I knew from the Cobain biography by Charles Cross that many of his stories were questionable (such as the one about living under the bridge).
The filmmakers thus had an odd cultural artifact on their hands. They had the eerie voice of Kurt Cobain describing his life, but at times with suspect truthfulness and at all times with a certain flatness. They made the interesting choice of allowing the words to float in our ears, accompanied by beautiful images taken from the various places Cobain lived, principally Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle. The words themselves were broken up by snatches of music that meant something to Cobain, from Queen to punk to Leadbelly. The documentary thus adds rich specificity and detail to an audio interview that sorely lacks that. The bareness of Cobain's responses to the world contrast oddly with the images of diverse people going about their lives. If we were meant to think that Cobain's voice can give insight into all this stuff, and that this world would somehow look small in comparison with the truthfulness of Cobain's barbs and pain.. they were wrong. It is Cobain's barbs and pain.. even the mysterious stomach ailment.. that start to seem small in comparison to the ordinary life of this world.
The Wisdom Tradition
April 25, 2008
The perennial philosophy tends to get brought up in relation to mystical philosophies.. pushing people to understand that underneath the externals religious thinkers share a similar view of God and humanity. Our antipathy to this leveling of religious traditions goes way back here at Old Roads (see here). But today as I was getting ready for a lecture on wisdom literature it occurred to me that we seriously underestimate the ancient consensus about wisdom.
The wisdom tradition can in part be followed by looking for collections that are addressed from a father to son. The biblical book of Proverbs conforms to this pattern: "My child, if you accept my words..." (2.1). Likewise the under-read Wisdom of Ben Sirach urges: "My child, when you come to serve the Lord..." (2.1). When we turn to other ancient traditions we find this same pattern. The best later example of this may be the Mesopotamian Story of Ahiqar:
And he returned, and implored the Most High God, and believed, beseeching Him with a burning in his heart, saying, 'O Most High God, O Creator of the Heavens and of the earth, O Creator of all created things!
I beseech Thee to give me a boy, that I may be consoled by him, that he may be present at my death, that
he may close my eyes, and that he may bury me.'
Then there came to him a voice saying, 'Inasmuch as thou hast relied first of all on graven images, and hast
offered sacrifices to them, for this reason thou Shalt remain childless thy life long.
But take Nadan thy sister's son, and make him thy child and teach him thy learning and thy good breeding, and at thy death he shall bury thee.'
There follows a number of proverbs prefixed with "O my son." Here we see the same pattern, this time with an elaborately framed setup. The father finds a young child to instruct and teach.
These central wisdom texts can be thought of as elaborations on themes worked out a millennium previous in Egypt. The Maxims of Ptahhotep being the stately and complete model for these works, although we know this literary type goes back into the Old Kingdom. This pin-points the importance of ancient Egyptian literature. It is not a tradition with a Gilgamesh or an Odysseus, but one that gives us the earliest examples of wisdom texts. And these wisdom texts will be the basis for an international wisdom culture that dominated learned discourse for centuries.
The goal of these wisdom texts was not to adjudicate theology or national conflicts, but to propose rules for life in the most artful manner possible. It would not be hard to locate a small constellation of values and problems that these texts share.. among them a sense of deference to the social order and a confidence in the possibility of success. In essence, these wisdom texts can be understood as an early kind of perennial philosophy.. not a mysticism or even a religious position, really, but a widespread and interlocked faith in rational order.
This steady horse is now riderless.. as Yeats would say. It is a literary tradition that was displaced in the West by the high-profile genres of epic and drama and lyric. The current examples of wisdom literature, from etiquette books to the Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, are sub-literary. One place this tradition survived for a long time is in the Arabic and Persian traditions. The Arabic notion of adab or correct behavior is a successor to these wisdom texts.. as are the multiple works that contain advice for princes.
It is difficult to stir up excitement for these jewels in the Arabic and Persian literary traditions.. and the reason for that is clear enough: these texts look back to an older system of genres, and therefore fall outside our modern taste for excitement and sublimity. To enjoy wisdom texts one must have an eye for detail and an ear for subtle modulation. Repetitions cannot be a source of boredom, but a cause for curiosity. Didacticism is not a banned word, but a natural result of life's inherent seriousness.
Ritual Spots in Time
April 23, 2008
Reading through the Psalms in Robert Alter's recent translation I am reminded how much I love this biblical material. I was particularly taken by Psalm 73, which begins with a complaint about the wickeds' well-being:
"For they are free of the fetters of death,
and their body is healthy.
Of the torment of man they have no part,
and they know not human afflictions."
Thus haughtiness is their necklace,
outrage, their garment, bedecks them.
Fat bulges round their eyes,
imaginings spill from their heart. [vs. 4-7]
In a book which begins with assurance that God watches over the way of the righteous and that the way of the wicked will perish, it is a problem to see an evil person prospering.
Thinking too much about a prospering evil person could give one a crisis of some sort.. and that seems to be where this singer is heading until we reach the turning point of the Psalm:
Till I came to the sanctuaries of God,
understood what would be their end. [vs. 17]
That verse encapsulates some kind of experience.. and it is hard not to ask: what happened to the singer in the sanctuaries of God? In the absence of specificity we should probably fill in all the ordinary things that took place: sacrifices, hymns, the priests going about their business, men and women supplicating God. In that mix something caught up our singer and made the world outside seem small and forgotten.
The singer then snaps back to the theme, but now he is able to see clearly what will happen to the wicked who are prospering:
How they come to ruin in a moment,
swept away, taken in terrors! [vs. 19]
In this new vision the world is set right.. even if "out there" this is not actually true yet, and the wicked continue piling up wealth.
It occurred to me that this Psalm presents a wonderful picture of what human beings get out of any cultural text. Here we need to switch over to what Clifford Geertz wrote about cockfights in Bali:
Like any art form—for that, finally, is what we are dealing with—the cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and been reduced... to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived. [pg. 443]
It may seem strange to characterize cockfights as an art form, but Geertz explicitly compares them to the experience of King Lear or Crime and Punishment. That is to say, these are each cultural texts that bring about a higher level of comprehension in the one who experiences it. With a great text we feel within ourselves more than enjoyment.. rather something more akin to a deep understanding. In symbolic form the lines and distinctions of our lives rise up before our eyes.. and we feel a sense of peace as these essential values are represented. (I wonder if this is what Aristotle was getting with katharsis?)
The singer of Psalm 73 alludes to the experience of a cultural form: worship in the temple. We don't get an exact description of what was experienced, but we see the result. The singer has had his vision of life renewed along the lines of the ethical ideal. The righteous will be rewarded while the wicked will be punished. This renewal comes with a certain feeling as well..
In this Psalm's ethical crisis, renewal, and reaffirmation of the ethical ideal we see mapped out the human response to cultural texts. We may look to other sources to get the specifics of temple worship, but we could have no better insight into the way ritual forms reaffirmed the ethical ideal of ancient worshippers.
