The Shark God: A Modern Travel Narrative
December 31, 2007
It was an odd choice for my winter break reading, but I don't think I could have chosen better than The Shark God: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific by Charles Montgomery. I have a lingering fascination with the South Pacific and this book gave me a clear sense of what it would be like to travel through this area.. and it had the added advantage of an author who asked the kinds of questions that fascinate me: What do people believe? What stories do they tell? How do they understand their past?
Most impressive about this book is the path it charts toward a successful modern travel narrative. Montgomery refuses to spend all his time searching for a pristine vision of the past.. or bemoaning its absence. With equal success he does not fall into the postmodern trap of delighting in the cultural hall of mirrors or smirking at native attempts to profit from the past. The world of the 18th and 19th centuries may be gone, but that does not mean a complex and valuable cultural system cannot be discerned here.
The traveler today needs sharp eyes and a fine sensibility to spot the bloom of the new in the midst of a landscape marked by globalization and its homogenizing force. Even as a place comes to look like every other place, a certain mixed individuality can take root. Discovering this is a more difficult task than that which confronted earlier travelers that witnessed a novel culture with minimum outside contact. All that early explorer had to do was describe verbatim the world as he saw it.. and that record was historically valuable. The traveler today has to be understand the ways that the common forms of globalization are being manipulated and combined into novel patterns.
In the case of the South Pacific, the traveler must see that beneath the church attendance and Evangelicalization there are powerful local beliefs and values that are being maintained and transformed. Toward the end of The Shark God we get a passage that throws light on all this complexity beneath the surface of what seems like a homogenized world:
The central struggle in Melanesia was no longer the fight between Christian and pagan mythology. The Christian God had pretty much won the battle. Paganism was on its last legs. The old spirits survived only in a few last pockets of resistance, like the wounded remnants of an army at the end of a long siege... But the old way of thinking, the way of mana, had survived and flourished within the Christian churches. The real fight now was the tug-of-war between mana and mysticism; between those who tried to claim and direct supernatural power... and those who were certain that the heart of the Christian myth was self-sacrifice and divine love. [345]
This passage brings to a judicious conclusion observations made throughout the book. Sure there are churches that look and feel like churches all over the world.. and the Christian vocabulary may dominate the talk. But underneath that sameness is a difference in meaning. The Christian terms have been infiltrated by pagan values, but not to the degree that they are simple conduits for the old religion. No, by the mixture of old pagan values and traditional Christian vocabulary something new and complex comes about.
Parts of this book could be annoying.. let me grant that. I found the theory of myth that Montgomery developed to be not so helpful.. and the section where he breaks in with a Star Wars analogy involving Obi Wan Kenobi was terrible! But putting that aside he shows himself to have the patience to find layers of meaning in a place that presents itself as simple.. and that is valuable.
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
December 29, 2007
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of virtual trips to places that have long fascinated me but which have exceeded my travel budget. By spending a little time on sites like Flickr or YouTube.. and combining this on-the-ground imagery with the satellite imagery provided by Google.. it is possible to get a lively sense of a distant place.
So why a fascination with Yellowknife? I think it is the holdover from a period in high school when I read a lot of Jack London. It is a country that demands self-reliance and toughness. This Jack London thing is part of what convinced me to go to a tiny school in Alberta. But even from Alberta I could let me mind wander north and think about what it must be like way up there.. and "way up there" seemed to be what Yellowknife was all about.
The following is a map on which I have set the photos that have formed the version of Yellowknife that I now hold in my imagination.
[Note: you may need to zoom in to see all the marked sites.]
Charlie Brown's Christmas
December 27, 2007
You have to look pretty carefully on the back of A Charlie Brown Christmas to discover that it was first shown in 1965. It is boxed along with the Peanuts Halloween and Thanksgiving specials.. and labeled "Peanuts Classic".. giving it a certain out-of-time feel. And that is the point of selling these DVDs: they are not presented as historical exercises, but classics that every child will love for all time.
I have strong memories of certain Christmas specials. They were on television every year: Frosty the Snowman, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.. I could go on. All these shows.. including the Peanuts specials.. were geared for television viewing. They fit snugly into a half hour slot. They filled a niche for television programming.. and in turn came to define Christmas for my generation.
The curious thing about our present cultural moment is that even in the midst of transformation in terms of medium, the television-developed canon of holiday programming continues. Instead of seeing these programs on television, many children now experience them through DVDs. Often changes in technology lead to a high level of changeover.. forcing the development of a new crop of works to fill the new niche. But we seem poised to more or less accept the television canon as a part of our heritage.
We should imagine what it might have been like to see a program like A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. That was over 40 years ago! Were these people in the mid '60s also consuming works made in 1925? That would include radio programs and silent films and 78 records. There was tremendous technological change between 1925 and 1965 and those works from 40 years earlier could not fit in to the television canon. Who would watch a silent film on television?
But the forty years between 1965 and 2005 are remarkably united. You could draw a straight line between that world and ours now—in terms of televised holiday specials, movies, and popular music. The level of technological change is surely as great or greater than that of the earlier period.. so why the continuity?? Right there is a question that I want to answer.
Landscapes of Globalization
December 22, 2007
It used to be common to worry that children have no idea where their food came from. Milk comes in cartons; meat in styrofoam packages. Today this worry could be extended way beyond food: where does anything in the aisles of a Target or Wal-Mart come from? Who makes the little electric fans we use in the summer? Who puts together a computer? Many of these items are more mysterious today than they were even a couple of decades ago. Our world is growing more mysterious.
The value of Manufactured Landscapes is its relatively non-judgmental gaze at the point of origin for much of what we encounter in our daily life. Perhaps the most eloquent scene in the documentary is of a woman assembling from perhaps 50 small plastic and metal parts some small powerbreaker. You can close your eyes and imagine it selling for a few dollars in Wal Mart.. and there right before your eyes are all the small parts coming together. Likewise in the long assembly lines evident in the opening tracking shot we can imagine all manner of gadgets getting put together through multiple assembly lines. By means of such scenes Manufactured Landscapes becomes necessary viewing for anyone who wants to understand our everyday world.
Beyond the giant assembly plants we are taken to the places where the detritus of our global civilization.. used computers and useless ships.. are gathered and taken apart. We see the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and the voracious expansion of Shanghai. All of this takes labor.. and we see young Chinese men and women doing their jobs and staring into the camera. They reminded me of photos of American laborers and factories from years ago.. only now on a scale that is grander than anything imaginable back then. At some point the narrator points out that this entire system is dependent on cheap energy.. and hints that maybe this is the last great stand of the era of cheap energy.
It is never possible to pass a harsh judgment on what is going on in China (or Bangladesh, where we stop briefly). The photographer Edward Burtynsky points out how even his own artistic project is dependent on this same globalized mass-industrial world. To re-imagine all this would mean to re-imagine his own work too. Coal burning plants and environmental damage in China can hardly be critiqued by America either.. since this is the landscape that we create, far away from our shores, every day with our own choices. Old Roads is dedicated to locating the values and ideas that will enable us to someday collectively make another choice. But if you want to look straight into a mirror as to who we are today, then this is the film you need to see.
Napoleon in Egypt
December 20, 2007
It is unclear for how long Juan Cole worked on Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, but the book as it stands could not have been conceptualized before the beginning of the present Iraq War in 2003. The folly of our current undertaking in Iraq has been documented by a shelf of books and DVDs. A week or two ago a finally watched the documentary No End in Sight.. and it made the perfect companion piece to Napoleon's Egypt: both concentrated on the imperialistic hubris of the conqueror.. and the way high flown rhetorical ideals come crashing down when they meet colonial reality.
What I found disappointing in this book is the complete focus on the military and imperialistic project of the French in Egypt. I had wanted to learn more about the group of scientists and artists that produced the Description de l'Egypte (now available online!). But I found it hard to imagine the compilation of that great work in the midst of the chaos that Cole was describing. Cole has told a story that would never have taken this exact form were it not for the exemplars in books and film that have taken up the topic of the Iraq War. I am not, of course, saying that imperialism and colonialism are topics just discovered, but to write about them by means of a near exclusive concentration on personal foibles, administrative mishaps, and rhetorical bombast is a formal choice that has become possible only recently.
Cole's writing style in this book is oddly reminiscent of his widely read blog. I have a fascination with the difference in voice that arises between a blog post and a book.. and often times I find I can read a blogger in a short blog format but lose patience when it comes to a book format (Andrew Sullivan). Cole wrote Napoleon's Egypt in a voice easily recognizable to readers of Informed Comment. There was the same marshalling of possible views (often content to leave contradictory statements unresolved) and then a colorful summarizing sweep.. crowned by a quick step back and a moral judgment: "If this is true, then it was clearly a war crime.." It is a style that was blog-honed.
Cole gave a few hints about a story I would like to see further developed: the French response to the Egyptian landscape.
The engineers among the officers began rearranging the city to their specifications, tearing down what they viewed as useless tombs or sufi shrines that got in the way of straighter, broader avenues, or removing the barriers between city quarters. Turk recalled that they destroyed "the mosques and minarets at al-Azbakiya Square so as to widen the streets for the passage of their wagons." [185]
As I have argued elsewhere, this re-alignment would have been almost unconscious. "Obvious" renovations would be added by the French.. but those modifications would willy-nilly introduce a new way of thinking about the landscape.
Here is another example:
Bonaparte ordered that extensive new fortifications be built in Cairo and environs, even if they involved tearing down mosques (al-Jabarti lamented the demise of the al-Maqs Mosque, another at Imbaba, and the al-Kazaruni Mosque at Roda Island, among others). The military engineers widened streets and chopped down date palms. [214]
Details about these efforts at Frenchification of the Cairo I think would be fascinating.. just as a look at the Americanization of Iraqi cities and villages would likewise be fascinating.
Arrested Development:
Pulling the Wisdom Teeth
December 18, 2007
I got all four of my wisdom teeth pulled on Monday afternoon and I sit here writing on Tuesday night. What promised to be a season in hell has turned out to be, if not a ride in a Cadillac, pretty smooth. From time spent browsing discussion lines on the Internet I know that horror stories exist, but for now it looks as if it will go down in my book as one of those things that is worse in the anticipation than in the actual event. Beginning tomorrow morning I should be off the major pain killers and beginning to take small steps back into life.
When I got called back into the small well-lit room where the work was done, the nurse had me sit down and she had the laughing gas breather settled against my nose. I began to breathe deeply since this would be my only defense against full consciousness of what was going on in my mouth. In a minute or two I was feeling numb all over. Nothing was too funny feeling, but I got reduced to that heavy/light state that you feel on first being woken up from a deep sleep.. but without the painful necessity of actually having to get up. My Fleetwood Mac songs were coming through loud and clear on my ipod but I had to make a real stirring effort to respond clearly to the doctor.
I came out of the experience a fan of laughing gas. I was present but not all the way. I knew what was happening to me but my mind kept drifting away. In fact, I remember that in the midst of my oral surgery I began thinking about writing a blog on laughing gas. As I tested out some of the possible directions for a blog I realized that the prose of altered states is a well trodden path.. and something that I have always found tedious to read. It's like writing about a dream: it may be trippy and strange but why should I care what strange associations were stirred up in someone else's sleep? So I will spare everyone my Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Wisdom Teeth Extraction blog.
My doctor was fantastic. All motion. He came in first to give me the Novocain.. which was when I first drowsily responded to him through the laughing gas. Then a few minutes later (hard to judge time) he came in to ask about my numbness. Then on his next entrance he started to work and did not stop until those teeth were out. There was drilling and cracking and pulling.. which brought me a fair ways back to the real world out of drowsyland.. but his attitude seemed to be that nothing should be prolonged. If I can't feel anything then let's get it done with. And then it was done! Just 40 minutes or so after I was called in.. and I would guess that only 20 minutes or so were related to the extraction itself.
My recovery has been aided by some rented DVDs of Arrested Development. So there has been no shortage of laughs during this recovery.. although I do often drift away into the gentle night of pain killer drowsiness while watching them.
Associating with Kings
December 14, 2007
In Rumi's discourses I ran into the following paragraph concerning the danger of associating with kings:
The danger in associating with kings is not that you may lose your life, for in the end you must lose it sooner or later. The danger lies in the fact that when these "kings" and their carnal souls gain strength, they become dragons; and the person who converses with them, claims their friendship, or accepts wealth from them must in the end speak as they would have him speak and accept their evil opinions in order to preserve himself. He is unable to speak in opposition to them. Therein lies the danger, for his religion suffers. The further you go in the direction of kings, the more the other direction, which is the principal one, becomes strange to you. The further you go in that direction, this direction, which should be beloved to you, turns its face away from you. [Signs of the Unseen, trans. W.M. Thackston, Jr., pg. 10]
Conventionally the problem with associating with kings is that they turn on you and you lose your life. Wiser to stay away from power. Rumi takes up this bit of wisdom but adds a deeper spiritual danger that comes from such an association: the pressure to see the world in a non-spiritual manner.. and to speak of the world in a way approved by the king.
Rumi is a writer I greatly enjoy and this passage exemplifies why. I don't accept the mystical and theological basis for his work, but it is generally possible to translate his message into something like a secular spiritualism. In this case I am moved by the notion that there is a direction in which I should be traveling.. a direction that I know inside is my true path.. and that it is possible to be subtly and internally pushed away from that direction. Association with kings is hardly a modern temptation, but the analogous danger must be celebrity or worldly respect. Getting taken up into the popular frame of a culture results, almost always, in a person learning to adopt that same frame as one's own. Our goal here at Old Roads is to loosen and question this tightly held modern frames.. and wealth and celebrity therefore represent a false path. Movement down that path runs the danger of making the true path appear strange.
Rumi is not only a light from the religious past (doctrines untenable now), but a continuing source of wisdom for living this life.. that is, if one sets value on an internal ideal and not simply the acquisition of wealth and pleasure. Rumi is not a writer who pushes us toward the sweet life, rather the true life.
Teaching Fundamentalism
December 13, 2007
I find fundamentalism a difficult idea to teach. The reason is that when talking about religion people grasp at doctrinal content. We want group A to hold certain propositions and group B to hold contrary propositions. Those doctrinal distinctives are popularly what separate religious groups.
Fundamentalism stems from Christian experience in the 20th century. A series of volumes entitled The Fundamentals was published between 1910 and 1915. These contained essays that were a direct response to the perceived threats of modernism and Darwinism. It is from these volumes that we get the term fundamentalism.. meaning a movement that holds to the basic truths of Christianity. The term transfers well to other religious traditions since the underlying situation of religious views eroded by modernism is an experience that would be repeated by many traditions.. and the answer to this situation is often to re-entrench basic foundational beliefs through a literalistic approach to texts.
The problem is that the doctrinal beliefs of fundamentalists are not really different from those held by less defensive believers today.. and they are also indistinguishable from the beliefs held by people two or three centuries ago. What makes some guy who believes now in a literal interpretation of the Bible different from some guy in the 19th century who believed the same thing? Yet one is a fundamentalist and the other is not because he lived before there was any such thing. This could lead someone to simply toss out the term fundamentalism as useless.
But it is not a useless term! The point is to get away from defining a religious position in terms of overt doctrinal content and instead focus on an internal religious shift. Often when people discuss fundamentalism they talk about it as a particularly virulent form of Christianity. When I was growing up I heard a fundamentalist defined as an Evangelical with an attitude. Searching a little on the web I came across a Welsh minister who writes similarly:
But the doctrines of fundamentalism are often (actually, almost always in my experience) accompanied by an attitude which is contemptuous and judgmental of differing views, so if you do find me attaching the word ‘fundamentalist’ to any noun other than Christian you can be fairly sure that it is this attitude that I have in mind.
These kinds of statements are a hint that generally people understand fundamentalism to be about more than just an intellectual position.. it is an "attitude".
I think we can do a lot better than that kind of popular definition. For starters we could answer the question: what is at the bottom of this fundamentalist attitude? I think issues surrounding identity would be a great place to start.
Let me for a moment drift into Islamic fundamentalism. Milestones by the Egyptian writer Sayyed Qutb (1906-1966) is a central book in Islamic fundamentalism.. defining the movement. One chapter on "A Muslim's Nationality and His Belief" sets out clearly the importance of a Muslim identity:
Islam came with this total guidance and decisive teaching. It came to elevate man above, and release him from, the bonds of the earth and soil, the bonds of flesh and blood-which are also the bonds of the earth and soil. A Muslim has no country except that part of the earth where the Shari'ah of God is established and human relationships are based on the foundation of relationship with God; a Muslim has no nationality except his belief, which makes him a member of the Muslim community in Dar-ul-Islam; a Muslim has no relatives except those who share the belief in God, and thus a bond is established between him and other Believers through their relationship with God.
This is a totalizing and militant version of Islam. It is actively at war with alternative identity categories, most notably nationalism and any form of tribalism.
When reading a medieval traveler like Ibn Battuta or Ibn Jubayr it is striking how at home they feel all across the Umma, or nation of Islam. These men have a local identity that every now and then shows itself, but mostly they identify with the broader Islamic community. They have one primary identity category and then some smaller categories that are pretty clearly secondary.
Now fast forward a few centuries to our own time and the situation is different. We are born into complex situations in which nations and ethnic categories.. along with class and even sexual categories.. make a strong play on an individual. Most of us are now used to living with a lively group of identity categories that each define part of who we are. These are not categories we choose, but categories that are embedded even in the language we use to talk about the world.
Islamic fundamentalism seeks to establish Islam as the single identity category within a human being.. and when one tries to do that today one bumps up against a host of other categories and claims.. which must be abolished. Right here enters the "with an attitude" issue. It is not easy to just jettison alternative identity claims; it means a new way of talking and processing the world.
To the fundamentalist this process appears simple: the goal is to live like the religious paragons of another age. Muslims of the past lived in a world where that more unified identity category did not lead to mental strife.. instead it made sense of their world and smoothed their transactions within it. This religious identity cannot be simply translated into the modern world. An Islamic fundamentalist may believe the same things as some Muslim from another purer age.. but the internal place of religion is no longer the same. The attempt to re-create that past identity, embedded in its own cultural context, results in a high level of mental stress.. and at times anger.
That is what we should define as a fundamentalist: someone who attempts to establish a perceived identity category from the past within a modern system of multiple identities.
Student Web Projects
December 11, 2007
As the Internet challenges traditional business models from book selling to music distribution, somehow there continues to be a sense that academic work can glide through all this mostly unchanged.. or with simply the addition of a few convenient search engines. I am betting that big changes are coming. I am particularly interested in the way student work will be transformed by the new platforms for knowledge. Instead of thinking in terms of a student needing to go through years of work in order to someday write something worthy of publication, I think we should encourage students to take part immediately in online discussions and knowledge dissemination.
This term I have two projects that I can point to as examples of the way the Internet can be used by students.
The first example is an honor's project completed by Ayse Adanali. It is a website that contains photos from her trip to Sierra Leone last summer, along with a brief description of what she saw there. Consider the difference between developing photos and showing them to a handful of professors.. and posting them on the Internet in a format that allows them to be accessed by people all over the world!
The second example is a blog written by Raad Fadaak over the course of this term. The blog reflects his work on an independent study on women and gender in the Middle East. I envision requiring all of the independent studies that I direct to involve a similar blog.. thus building up a public record of student writing and thought.. and allowing for a greater level of interaction with visual culture.
Making Big Buildings in 1600
December 9, 2007
picture by Flickr user MPR529, used under Creative Commons License
Nelly Hanna's book Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma'il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant follows the life of one merchant. Hanna provides a map of what was then central Cairo and it is fascinating to see that Abu Taqiyya's home was right here in the center of what is now Islamic Cairo (across from the al-Aqmar mosque). His daily itinerary took him past all the stunning mosques and religious structures along the Sharia al-Muizz al-Din.
Today this area is near the Khan al-Khalili, where tourists come to get souvenirs. It is a rather poor area.. filled with old buildings but not housing any of the truly wealthy members of Egyptian society. When one imagines a city as it existed in the past, this is one of the big problems: changes in social composition occur but the urban landscape remains the same. A zone that was once the center of privilege is converted into a place one goes to visit old buildings.. if one visits at all. So the husk remains the same but the kernel of experience has been transformed.
Hanna discusses the changes that came over the landscape in terms of who was doing the building. The area around the home of Abu Taqiyya was filled with imposing mosques built mostly by the Mamluks, for whom Cairo was their capital. By his day the Ottomans had incorporated the city into their own empire.. and the scale of building declined. Throughout each of these eras contributions to the landscape were always strategic:
The Mamluk sultans had used their monumental structures to further their own glory; their large, imposing buildings, with forceful inscriptions set exactly where the eye of the passerby would see them, were symbols of power. The architecture of the Ottoman pashas likewise displayed symbols of Ottoman power and hegemony, although many provincial features were incorporated. Merchants too could further some of their objectives by using the same formula. Building a mosque, a public school, or fountain was a sign of success... [126-7]
The landscape was constantly being recruited to further the social goals of those with power.
One way to trace the history of a place is to note who the major builders were. Above we can see the trajectory: sultans to pashas to merchants. Those who are in the position to work their power out onto the landscape can be considered central.. yet that group is always shifting. A modern analog to this would be to consider the invasion of the corporate world into the construction of modern sports stadiums.. or the sponsorship of bowl games. What would once have been a civic project gets shifted to corporate benevolence. (I say "benevolence" but obviously it is a way to project power onto the landscape.. so it is hardly a matter of altruism.) In that shift from civic to corporate construction we can trace the rising importance of corporations within American society. In other words: shifts in who pays for big buildings on the landscape will tend to be significant as we try to understand a place. The Staples Center (pictured above) says something important about our shifting social structure.
A Meditation on the Popular
December 8, 2007
Emily and I have been reading the new biography of Charles Schulz by David Michaelis. As we get further along some more direct comments on Schulz and his cartoon strip Peanuts will inevitably make their way into this blog, but for now I want to comment on the value of reading a comic strip like Peanuts.
If most people were asked about why they read a comic strip they might find the question itself funny: one reads a comic strip because it is enjoyable. It is a popular comic strip precisely because so many people have found it enjoyable. But I am interested in the next question: why do so many people find this strip enjoyable.. and what can we say about a culture in which Charlie Brown and company is popular? Or put a different way, how can Peanuts be read anthropologically?
Trying to answer those last questions may strike some as perverse. But anything that appeals to a wide group of people deserves attention. I might personally find some local comic strip as enjoyable as Peanuts, but the fact that millions of other people love the creations of Charles Schulz privileges his work. One might compare Peanuts to the Balinese cockfight described by Clifford Geertz. If the cockfight were popular only among poor laborers, then it would be much harder to build a case that what takes place there is symbolic of key Balinese cultural traits. Geertz's sweeping multi-level interpretation is enabled only because of the popularity of this event. The popularity of a comic strip like Peanuts similarly allows for some ambitious interpretations of its significance.
What makes something popular? if we imagine human culture as being a web of meanings and values.. comprising something like a worldview.. then comic strips, rock bands, and TV shows have the facility to get plugged in to some aspect of that worldview. A work will come to represent some part of this worldview. Anything that is truly popular (as opposed to just widely known) is thus liable to a cultural analysis that attempts to interpret the work and explain its significance within that larger web of meaning.
There are always things worth studying that were never popular. We like to think that we thrive on such works here at Old Roads. Two favorite examples are Pausanias and William Blake. Neither had much of a contemporary audience.. so it cannot be said that either tapped into their zeitgeist. Both were surely interesting writers, but the cultural interpretations that arise from examining such a writer are inherently more limited than those that arise from examining a writer who has achieved great popularity.
So what does an interpreter do with popularity? The important issue will be to establish how a body of work was popular. What are the Peanuts stories that stick out in people's minds? What are the images that they know best? Are there canonical stories that shape most people's perception of these strips? The answer to those questions may be quite different than the answer one would come up with after a thorough reading of the complete Peanuts series. In addition the Geertzian attention to a thick description in which the winks and nods gain a meaningful place within a social context seems like an eminently reasonable way to go about looking at a comic strip.. where winks and twitches (and missed kicks) will be quite common.
update: I noticed on the back of the new Michaelis biography the following blurb:
Charles Schulz's cartoons have a profound depth and resonance that touched the soul of modern America. David Michaelis now explains why. The brilliance of the Peanuts gang is rooted in the life and emotions of its creator... —Walter Isaacson
That is fairly common boilerplate. Schulz "touched the soul of modern America". Well, what does that mean? I would translate the phrase to mean that some element of the Peanuts strip came to be associated with some element of our social identity as Americans. There was some kind of deep congruence at work. That opens up the possibility for what I called above an "ambitious" interpretive agenda.
War without Patriotism:
Rescue Dawn
December 6, 2007
Rescue Dawn is unlike any other film by Werner Herzog. It is a straightforward mass-audience film from the director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982).. films that are decidedly off beat. On the other hand Rescue Dawn is the twin of Herzog's documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997).. recreating in a dramatic setting the vivid descriptions of Dieter Dengler that are captured in the documentary. It is as if Herzog decided that here is a story that must be told to a wider audience than would ever watch the documentary. There was something important enough in this story to warrant its re-telling, and not only that but to complete this re-telling in a style that has broad Hollywood appeal.
Vietnam is a loaded topic.. and when Rescue Dawn opens with some stock footage that is also featured in Apocalypse Now, we are aware of the cultural baggage. Herzog ditches the "Flight of the Valkyries" so as to animate the napalm bombs with a more soothing classical piece. There will be a similarly contrarian nature on display throughout the film. I am not sure I have ever seen a jungle so vividly green and lushly beautiful.
Herzog is an expert at appropriating historical material for his own ends. Lessons of Darkness (1992) is a stunning vision of the burning oil wells in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.. but instead of having anything to say about the Gulf War.. or even the environmental destruction.. Herzog uses the images to illustrate his own poetic fiction. Rescue Dawn similarly dances away from any serious engagement with the Vietnam War, the politics of torture, or questions about the representation the other.. and adopts a much narrower frame than we would expect.
This frame of interest can be defined as the human spirit of survival and brotherhood. There is not much reflection on what ideologies drive these values because Herzog does not believe they are secondary values. This tremendous need to live goes so deep in Dieter (Christian Bale) that there is no way to discuss the matter. Characters in these situations are not doing what they realize in their minds is the right thing; they are acting in the only way they can.. mindlessly and naturally.
In Rescue Dawn it comes as a surprise when Dieter's actions are co-opted by social groups. At the end of the film when he gets a hero's welcome on the aircraft carrier, he is immediately asked by the MC about his faith in God and country. Dieter looks around but only says that he needs a steak. When asked to give some word of advice that could help out the other men in a time of need he can only say: "Empty what is full; fill what is empty; scratch where it itches".. lines that are hardly a statement of faith, only an affirmation of immediate response to the physical world. No wonder there is not a lot of reflection.. no Terence Malick inspired mental wandering to liven up the interior worlds of the characters.
There are few discernible moral judgments made through the film. It is clear that Dieter did not enlist in order to to war, but only to fulfill his dream of flying. When confronted by the Viet Cong with a chance to denounce the US, he demurs.. noting how the US has treated him well enough. The question as to how someone would let himself get involved in a war toward which he felt indifferent is not asked. The implication, it seems to me, is that we are all necessarily part of conflicts and groups that are beyond our control.. and patriotism and various other faiths guide those group refluxes. But for an artist to focus on such changing human ideals is to lose sight of the deeply human drive that makes Dieter a survivor and a loyal friend. Being that kind of person is not something you think about.. it is something you just are.
The Essay and Old Roads
December 4, 2007
The formal ideals cultivated here at Old Roads have yet to be explained. I have identified "interpretation" as the broad goal of this site, but I think we can take that a step further and state that the essay is the natural form through which interpretation is embodied.
I can get at what I mean by "essay" if I draw a few points from Clifford Geertz's essay "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture".
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. [5]
The idea of explication is memorably tied to the example of winks and twitches. An observer could watch a rapid exchange of winks and twitches within a group and describe exactly what was seen. This literalistic reportage would constitute "thin" description. Those winks and twitches, if we think about it, could be quite complex: communication, parody, fake-winks, social commentary. Lots of time could be spent getting at the meaning of all those winks and twitches. An analysis that attempted to explain what was really going on in those exchanges we could call "thick". So there is the first goal: to look for the meaning of details.. not simply to describe, but to place the details within the web of cultural values. That is to say: we are interpreting.
Geertz goes on to call the essay the natural vehicle for this mode of interpretation:
...the essay, whether of thirty pages or three hundred, has seemed the natural genre in which to present cultural interpretations and the theories sustaining them, and why, if one looks for systematic treatises in the field, one is so soon disappointed, the more so if one finds any. [25]
He is clearly working from a rather broad definition of the essay. In common parlance the essay is the non-fiction mirror of the short story.. both being a less than book length piece of writing. For Geertz the essay could well be a book.. and it is not so much length that counts as the nature of the writing: does it set out to interpret cultural specifics? It would seem that acts of interpretation are, by nature, essays.
That is the logic by which I have taken to grouping much of my work under the label of essay: blogging and academic presentations are two examples. I now label my efforts at video documentary "essays" as well.. feeling uncomfortable with the rather thin approach to culture that is exemplified in most documentaries. A website, insofar as it attempts to interpret a work or place, could also be conceived of as an essay. None of this means that the word "essay" is losing its meaning, it is simply being tied to a kind of content rather than a page count.
One problem with interpretation is the limitless footholds for such interpretations that exist within any given culture. At the end of "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" Geertz acknowledges this problem. He has provided a brilliant interpretation of the way the cockfight embodies specific cultural values, but then he backtracks and admits that one could pick up some other cultural text and through close analysis come to a similar insight: "As in more familiar exercises in close reading, one can start anywhere in a culture's repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else."
Geertz gets around this possible endless succession of interpretations by noting the goal of it all:
The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said. [30]
That way of describing the goal gives a distinctly Old Roads cast to this labor. All these interpretations are not being added to each other with the hope of arriving at the universal human, but rather with the hope of creating a record of human choices and points of view.
That record implies the preservation of texts. Perhaps, though, we should distinguish between thin and thick preservation. A translation of a classic text or the re-creation of a vanished cityscape would be a form of preservation, but by themselves such works are thin. They do nothing to recreate the human experience of these works in a specific time. How did people read? How did they identify with the contents of a story? What kind of details in the cityscape caught their attention? By attempting to answer questions such as these we arrive at something like thick preservation.
Possibly someone will ask: aren't you talking about commentary? I am uncomfortable with the baggage connected to the traditions of commentary. Historically speaking, commentary has not been about interpretation as defined above, but about the re-inscription of cultural values through linguistic expertise. Commentary may itself be a candidate for interpretive work.. but it is not a lineage to which an interpreter of the past should wish to be connected. It is time we speak more confidently of the essay.
I've Been High - REM
December 2, 2007
Say I handed you the following quotation:
you see there's this cat burglar
who can't see in the dark
he lays his bets on 8 more lives,
walks into a bar.
slips on the 8 ball. falls on his knife.
says, "I don't know what I've done,
but it doesn't feel right!"
If I told you these lines were from a poem, who would you guess wrote them? My guess would be John Ashbery, with its nonsensical narratively challenged patter. In fact this stanza is from the last studio album by REM; it is the opening to the song "The Worst Joke Ever".
Michael Stipe's lyrics have always been engmatic, but this Ashbery-like late phase is enigmatic in a different way than "Swan Swan Hummingbird", the lines are longer, sentiments more diffuse. It's hard to imagine John Ashbery lyrics set to music, and that is perhaps the central challenge faced by REM: how to find the right musical setting for Stipe's mature lyrics.. which will not fit with a Document-era musical approach.
One place in REM's recent work where Stipe's lyrics get a perfect musical setting is "I've Been High" from the album Reveal (2001). I found a live treatment on YouTube that I have embedded below.. but I am not sure the song comes off as well live as it does on the CD. It seems inert onstage but can be layered and beautiful in an ambient electronic version. I would argue that this is just the kind of subdued and subtle setting that works best for these lyrics.
"I've Been High" works its way around the idea of experience.. always in Stipe's inimitable one-step forward one-step backward manner:
have you seen?
have not will travel.
have I missed the big reveal?
A broad question is thrown out to the singer: "have you seen?" It's a question tied to nothing in particular. It probes experience: have you seen.. really seen. The response is "no" and then the plan: will travel. This is followed by a self-doubting question: has he missed "the big reveal", a phrase which in an abstract way points to illumination as to the meaning of experience.
Stipe follows this stanza up with lines that build on the metaphor of sight:
do my eyes
do my eyes seem empty
I've forgotten how this feels.
I've been high
I've climbed so high
but life sometimes
it washes over me.
Empty eyes are what we expect from someone who has not seen.. and who has missed the big reveal. Despite this emptiness he recalls that he has been high in the past, conceptualized (in typical Romantic fashion) as a climb up a mountain:
The Romantic climber has a stupendous gaze upon the world, and Stipe knows this Romantic vision.. but sees it as lost. Life with all its dailiness has washed over him and dimmed that vision. The hunger to get it back impells him to travel, but that moment of vision is elusive.
The next two stanzas dispense with the sight imagery and push into "being":
have you been?
have done, will travel.
I fell down on my knees.
was I wrong?
I don't know, don't answer.
I just needed to believe.
"Have you been?" is again an odd unanchored question, and like the earlier question "have you seen?" it reaches for a deep place: are you a true person? The negative is implied and again there is a renewed desire to travel and really "be". These lines also bring up a religious response to his sense of emptiness: "I fell down on my knees". And that response is immediately interrogated by Stipe: maybe that is a hopeless path, but he needed to believe in something.. something that could get him back to the heights of experience.
An odd bridge intervenes between these lines of emptiness and the confession of hope that ends the song.. and the bridge is perhaps the hardest section of the song to interpret:
so
I dive into a pool so cool and deep that if I sink I sink
and when I swim I fly so high
No doubt it is strange to go from the visionary Romantic mountain to a pool. Stipe has elsewhere sung about the freedom of night swimming.. and the modern swimming pool is a useful metaphor for experience:
I am not suggesting that Stipe is directly referring to this painting by David Hockney, but the same web of ideas surrounds this visual meditation "Painting of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)". The singer of the song is in much the same ambivalent position as the painter staring into the pool. Notice how the freedom of the pool is combined in the painting with the vision of heights. There is a possible Romanticism in the picture.. if only the painter grabs hold of the freedom in front of him instead of meditating on his secondary position.
The next lines of the song are some of my favorite in popular music.. and I often find myself singing them silently:
what I want
what I really want is
just to live my life on high.
and I know
I know you want the same
I can see it in your eyes.
There is no grasp of the visionary ideal, but there is a clear apprehension of that as a goal: to live life on high. That is again frustratingly abstract. What can it mean to live life on high? It would at least be free of emptiness.. and clear of the dailiness that washes away the soaring sense of freedom. The second stanza is a turn to someone else (finally) and the recognition of the same goal in that other person's eyes. This will not be the Manfred model of lonely Romantic accomplishment. There will be a companion and love.
Having expressed this ideal, the song comes up against the same recurring problem:
I've been high
I've climbed so high
but life sometimes
it washes over me.
washes over me
close my eyes so I can see
make my make-believe believe
in me.
but those last lines offer the first real theory as to how ordinary experience can be transcended: the imagination. His eyes can't see because they are dulled by the everyday, but the answer is not to seek out a greater more vivid experience. The answer is to close the eyes and re-imagine the self and the world: "make my make-believe believe in me". It is a classic Romantic turn toward the interior world.. and a confession of faith in the power of fiction.
Look back at the cover to Reveal. It does not feature a vision from the heights, but a washed out everyday photo. The shadow of the photographer can be seen in the bottom left corner. The "big reveal" will not be a grand vision encountered on some grand trip.. it will arrive only with an internal re-alignment and a sense of the self as creator.
