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Organizing My Interests
May 31, 2007
Tomorrow is my last class for the year here at Lawrence. There is still plenty of grading to do.. so I won't say that I feel like I have arrived at summer yet. But still.. the last class of my first year at Lawrence is worth noting.
I have been reflecting some on the nature of the academic path:
Grad school has a certain rhythm. I entered and then started taking classes with professors who opened up new areas of knowledge. The first few years involved more or less constant exploration of new ideas and thinkers.. then as the dissertation set in there was a point where that expansion had to get culled back so that I could finish my work. My reading needed to shadow the subjects taken up in the dissertation.
Dissertation completed I felt free to work on whatever I wanted. I knew there would be a second project that in time would take the place of the dissertation, but that would all now be more under my own control. What I did not reckon on is how the specific classes I teach here at Lawrence would help to define my new areas of interest. As I set books into my Amazon.com cart, it is often to strengthen my knowledge in areas that I plan on teaching someday.. or to nail down an issue that I feel I may have fumbled in a class. Since the classes I am now teaching will get repeated regularly, they become cyclical points in the extended academic calendar at which I must return to these topics.. each time adding a new book.
The upshot of this is that my set of classes will come to define the topics I will continue to push forward as a scholar. Some interests of mine are bound to fade as they fail to find a place in my teaching schedule. This also means what courses exactly I choose to develop has immense importance for me in the long term. These are now my topics. And this is not a deck of cards that will be reshuffled when I finish my dissertation. this may be my permanent deck of cards.
In the summer I plan on making a diagram to visually set down my interest areas.. which I will certainly post here..
Africa in The Last King of Scotland
May 30, 2007
I enjoyed The Last King of Scotland (2006).. and I will join the chorus of praise for Forest Whitaker's portrayal of the dictator Idi Amin. In the past few years we have been awash in what might be called "international serious drama". These films tend to be set in Africa or the Middle East.. two regions evidently with box office appeal. Most of the action in The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamonds was in Africa.. but neither film was as convincing in terms of the view of Africa.
This photo above is a quickly passing interior scene in which you can glimpse the usual photos of the great leader hanging in the tailor shop. Up on the balcony are a couple of African workers handling some of the grunt work.
The tailor shop is run by Indian merchants.. who we are shown briefly. These men will appear once more toward the end when Amin expels all foreigners. A scene like this helps to build up a mental image of social complexity in Africa.. something that filmmakers do not always rush to embrace. You get more popular kudos for evoking Africa as the poor Africa of the popular imagination.
This scene reminded me of A Bend in the River (1979) by V.S. Naipaul. The novel takes place in an unnamed African city, but the situation is parallel to the way things got out of control in Uganda under Idi Amin (who ruled from 1971 to 1979). The narrator is a young Indian merchant who arrived in an interior city from the coast. The reader is allowed to watch as the country prospers and then falls apart under an African populist leader. The novel is more complex than The Last King of Scotland because of the willingness to describe the world from a non-western viewpoint and to break down for us the social world of an African city. I would go so far as to say that knowledge of Naipaul's novel makes The Last King of Scotland feel like the shadow of a richer experience.
Why is The Last King of Scotland diminished next to a novel by Naipaul? The above scene gives a clue. We need a handsome young Scot (James McAvoy) to serve as our normative lens for events in Africa. The main events of the film (and the novel by the same name on which it was based) are based on historical events.. but the central piece of fiction is the addition of this young man who becomes a trusted advisor to Amin. He naturally gets involved with one of the beautiful wives of Amin (a bad idea). Naipaul's young Indian merchant, on the other hand, is a stranger to us. An out of place person without any real home.. and who toward the end we find in London trying to make sense of his identity and how to fit into the modern world. Perhaps those are not the struggles of the ticket buying public? That is a devastating limitation for Hollywood.
Honor Is Just a Word
May 28 & 29, 2007
Yesterday I tried to write a Memorial Day blog. I wanted to reflect a little on the rhetoric of the hero, but I found it a difficult topic to approach. Difficult because the last thing I want to do is to state an opinion that seems to tear down the families and individuals who have lost someone they love. On the other hand war seems to elicit flabby language.. words that are disconnected from reality. In the midst of war it is more important than ever to be clear about what we are saying.. and not hide behind pious phrases.
Memorial Day is obviously an occasion for pious phrases. Our local paper here in Appleton ran an editorial opinion that included the following description of the motives of our soldiers:
Not many people are asked to soberly consider their own mortality at age 18. The decision to join the military hinges on one fundamental question: "Are you willing to die for your country?"
I realize that this sounds nice, but it is divorced from reality. First, it is not as if military recruiters actually force young men and women to "soberly consider their own mortality". Military recruitment posters and ads often appear comical on account of the absence of any mention of Iraq.. and the obvious dangers there.
Second, only someone with an exceedingly simple-minded view of psychology could claim that the decision to join the military "hinges on one fundamental question.." People join the military for many reasons: one person just wants a change in life.. someone else just wants to get the hell out of a small town.. someone else sees it as an opportunity to get an education.. someone else is fascinated by guns. There is no reason to send every individual who joins the military through some kind of hero-making machine..
The editorial opinion continues:
That takes faith, humility and courage, and those are the qualities we celebrate every Memorial Day. Every man and woman who has fallen in combat in the name of our great nation had those attributes.
That is a grand claim. In the past month or so I have seen articles on the abuse of military women in Iraq.. then there was the military survey that revealed lax attitudes toward the mistreatment of civilians.. and a recent article on the general demoralization of many serving in Iraq. The picture I get is that military life in Iraq is filled with human problems.. the ones you would expect from a bunch of young men and women in the midst of a trying situation. To settle a claim to high virtue on everyone who falls in combat is to radically simplify military life. Someday our men and women of the military will reintegrate themselves back into the fabric of our society and one of the real barriers in this process will be this moral simplification.
The editorial opinion ends on another uplifting point:
Then remember our fallen soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who made that decision over the past 231 years so the rest of us wouldn't have to.
I think it is dangerous to equate American conflicts with freedom and the good of the world. Not every conflict in which the United States engaged has been about our freedom. The Mexican-American War of the 19th century was questionable.. and we have had our share of military adventurism. What about the soldiers who fought with Custer at Little Big Horn? These battles claimed plenty of lives.. but were they all heroes? Only in the most general sense that any soldier fighting anywhere is a hero. It is difficult for me to separate the word "hero" from the notion that there is some greater human value to a conflict.. and that implies the need for an individual value judgment on the nature of each war. Heroes fight for causes and not for countries.
The following videos from YouTube gives a better sense of the self image of many soldiers than all the pious phrases of Memorial Day. Note the obvious fascination with weaponry, the cockiness, and the pride of living. It is hard to locate the "hero" in videos like these.
It was reported last week that the US military will be suspending the ability of soldiers to access YouTube. It is hard not to understand this as a way to encourage pious phrases over complexity.
Life Blogging as Creating
May 27, 2007
The New Yorker this week has an article by Alec Wilkinson on Gordon Bell, a man who is trying to put everything in his life into digital format:
Bell’s archive now also contains a hundred and twenty-two thousand e-mails; fifty-eight thousand photographs; thousands of recordings of phone calls he has made; every Web page he has visited and instant-messaging exchange he has conducted since 2003; all the activity of his desktop (which windows, for example, he has opened); eight hundred pages of health records, including information on the life of the battery in his pacemaker; and a sprawling category he describes as “ephemera,” which contains such things as books he has written and books from his library; the labels of bottles of wine he has enjoyed; and the record of a bicycle trip through Burgundy, where he tried to eat in as many starred restaurants as he could (he averaged 2.2 stars per meal—“I do a lot of measuring,” he says).
My first response to this is to think about how useful this may be someday. Imagine a historian in 500 years looking back on the beginning of the digital age. It will be immensely valuable to know something about the way individuals used the web. Not just what sites were popular, but how people interacted with various pages. Other historians may be curious as to the rhythms of modern life. Anthropologists will love the treasury of daily scripts (what you say when ordering a coffee at Starbucks). For these reasons it is valuable to have someone like Bell recording in digital form everything about his life..
As I continued reading the article my interest in the project began to wane. The obvious issue is the incredible amount of information that is being amassed. Bell walks around with a SenseCam around his neck (pictured above), and this gadget takes photos of whatever happens to be in front of Bell. Day in day out there are thus photos that record a large portion of the minutes of Bell's life. Other piles of digital material are coming in from other sources. It sounds to me like a never-ending pit of data. Who is going to spend a lifetime looking through this record of every minute of another person's lifetime? Not me.
Then there came this:
...Bell and Gemmell would like software that organized the contents of the archive into movies—something, at least, to compress and shape it, to summarize its parts. “Auto-storytelling,” Gemmell calls it. “My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, ‘Go blog it,’ so that my mother can see it. I don’t have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images.”
Of course.. they need something like "auto-storytelling" because that would be the only way to add form to this mass of images, texts, and audio recordings. Since no one is going to browse a lifetime of random images, there needs to be an automated editor that selects and highlights what is of value. This should mean becoming a creator.. but Bell seems to have no interest in becoming one.
How would software give organization to all this minutiae of experience? It would undoubtedly take a generic storyline of people having a good time and mold the mass of data to that storyline. Or maybe there are a dozen main generic categories of experience to which the data could be matched. However this works out, we see here an example of making life more generic and more internally the same as everyone else's. Bell might eat at fancier restaurants than you or I, but our lives would share the same narrative dimensions.
Needless to say, this use of technology is the opposite of what we are working on here at Old Roads. We love the freedom that technology gives to forge narratives and identities for ourselves.. but this is done by creating those narratives for ourselves. The genius of the web is that everyone can become their own editor and creator.. not the hope that someday there will exist an automated editor for this information. Bell's data collection system seems geared to avoid the actual work of life: editing.
I am grateful that this kind of mass data collecting was not around earlier in history. What is most fun—and ultimately important—about reading travel narratives by writers like Ibn Jubayr or William Bartram is that they select information that they think is important. In other words we can glimpse their minds working and measure the way they evaluate the world around them.
We continue to define exactly what we are up to here at Old Roads, but we believe it is connected to creation. This is not a site dedicated to putting up a mass of information drawn from the details of our lives. Rather, everything here comes from a sustained effort to understand the world around us.. and to present our viewpoints in a way that is a new creation.
Rory on Playmat
May 27, 2007
The Idea of Exploration
May 25, 2007
In telling the story of human exploration Felipe Fernández-Armesto presents a globe as a novel physical object:
The world-girdling voyages that followed made so much accessible that distances seemed to dwindle. Globe makers gave their customers the curious sensation of being able to cup the world in their hands. Carlos Borja, thanking his famous uncle Francis... for a gift of a globe in 1566, said that it made him realize how small the world was.
This is the pleasure of Pathfinders: its ability to communicate something of the changing perceptions of the world as the centuries pass.. something of the thrill of holding a globe in the first half of the 16th century.
The plot that runs through the book is the importance of cultural values to exploration. It is tempting to see exploration as a fundamentally economic and realistic enterprise.. pushed forward by tangible gains. Sure, there might be fanciful tales and mythmaking involved in the wake of these explorations.. but those are after-the-fact additions. That way of thinking is wrong.. if we follow the argument of this book.
Fernández-Armesto spends a number of pages asking why Spain and Portugal managed to be the pathbreakers for global exploration. Why not the wealthier and more advanced countries of the Indian Ocean?
That is where economics came in. The Indian Ocean was an arena of such intense commercial activity, and so much wealth, that it would have been pointless for its indigenous peoples to look for markets or suppliers elsewhere. [116]
There is no reason that the Spanish and Portuguese had to become explorers. Morocco faces the Atlantic, but it does not develop this kind of exploration. What made the Spanish and Portuguese different was a culture that valued adventure. The chivalric code got applied to the sea-faring world:
The hero, down on his luck, who risks seaborne adventures to become ruler of an island realm or fief, is the central character of the Spanish versions of the stories of Apollonius, Brutus of Troy, Tristram, Amadis, King Canamor, and Prince Turian among others, all part of the array of popular fiction accessible to readers at every level of literacy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. [145]
So the world owes popular fiction a debt of some kind. These crazy ideas about the ideal path of life get embedded in our heads and end up pushing us out onto the high seas of the world. Fernández-Armesto grimly recounts the deprivations experienced by conquistadors. and yet people kept coming they kept coming.. seemingly driven crazy by the ideas in their head:
Chivalric self-perception did not just inspire madcap exploits. They helped to make the consequent sufferings bearable—for the reality endured by Quirós could hardly have been tolerable without some psychological strategy of escape. [208]
One could study this mass of popular stories and extract some of the values widely accepted at the time. More interesting is to read narrative accounts written by explorers and to see how these popular stories directly influence the perception of a new situation. Fernández-Armesto cites several examples of this phenomenon. The narrative of Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá is most vivid. On the occasion of an Indian woman arriving at the Spanish camp looking for her husband, Villagrá writes:
The sergeant saw how gracious and polite
She was, how calm and frank and fair
And ordered all to grant her, without let,
The freedom due to all unblemished beauty,
As courtliness for gentleness commands. [233]
The more we reconstruct the scene historically.. taking place in the new world under harsh circumstances.. the more this description appears as some kind of bad joke. But evidently even here it was possible for Villagrá to experience his life wandering in the new world in terms of codes of chivalry.
The Spanish are not unique in this dependence of exploration on cultural values as embodied in popular literature. We know comparatively little about the cognitive world of the Polynesian explorers who spread across the Pacific, but what we do know is suggestive of a system similar to that of the Spanish:
Long-range navigation... was the achievement of people inspired by a culture of adventure. This culture was recorded in their many epics about heroic voyages. It was demonstrated by their rites—the cannibal feast, for instance, in honour of a Tongan navigator's homecoming from Fiji, witnessed by an English mariner in 1810. [47]
If Fernández-Armesto is correct in citing exploration and global connection as the big story of the past few millennia of human history, then the inevitable deep background to this time period must be the enduring ability of human cultures to send up popular stories that incite individuals to extravagant actions.. like setting off for unknown lands or searching for mythical places.
The Author of Sartor Resartus
Critiques the Qur'an
May 24, 2007
Thomas Carlyle takes on the Qur'an in his book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. He sets down what seems like a vicious attack:
Very curious: if one were sought for 'discrepancies' of national taste,' here surely were the most eminent instance of that!... I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; —insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.
Tell us what you really think, Thomas!
If I read someone laying into me like that, I would probably put down the review and figure someone just doesn't like me. But actually Carlyle has a soft spot for the Qur'an; he just has a funny way of showing it. Note his comments on the following page:
When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off your hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the essential type of it begins to disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite other than the literary one. If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that. Once would say that the primary character of the Koran is this of its genuineness, of its being a bona-fide book.
Now it is a haunting book that gets into you by its genuineness. Carlyle has torn down the Qur'an only to be able to build it up again on his own (Romantic) terms. We see here a miniature version of what Coleridge does to the poetry of Wordsworth in his Biographia Literaria.
A little later Carlyle describes Muhammad as "an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him". By evoking Muhammad as a "Son of Nature" Carlyle simultaneously pushes him away and elevates him into a Romantic hero. The Qur'an can be understood as the type of book that a "Son of Nature" would deliver. Faults may be pointed out by the literary critic.. but that would be a facile way of talking about something so elemental as the Qur'an.
It is important to remember what kinds of books Carlyle wrote. He is the author of Sartor Resartus, a kind of philosophical metafiction. At the beginning of this book is an editorial introduction in which the purported author Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is sketched and the composition of the book described. This is all fictionalized information.. but it allows Carlyle the chance to comment critically on his own work:
Considered as an Author, Herr Teufelsdröckh has one scarcely pardonable fault, doubtless his worst: an almost total want of arrangement... of true logical method and sequence there is too little... Many sections are of debatable rubric, or even quite nondescript and unnameable; whereby the Book not only loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded...
This is the kind of book that Carlyle, as author, could glory in. His critique of the Qur'an could have almost been lifted verbatim from his own self-critique!
I would add to this that a Romantic sensibility is an ideal way to approach the Qur'an. It allows for a certain level of jumbledness in a work. It also is comfortable reading for the fragment instead of for a linear unity. My love for Arabic literature absolutely stems from the way my taste was formed by major works of the Romantic tradition. Let's see. Read through Moby Dick, then Biographia Literaria and maybe Don Juan, and then move forward in time and plow through the poetry of John Ashbery. I predict: you will be well trained to read through long stretches of low-level prose, only to be rewarded by stumbling across something beautiful. That is the experience of reading that I most enjoy..
But the Qur'an is not the product of Romanticism. Carlyle points to an additional issue:
Very curious: if one sought for 'discrepancies of national taste,' here surely were the most eminent instance of that!
This is a slightly uncomfortable topic.. but why are we so nervous about addressing the way aesthetic appreciation is in part a cultural acquisition? It follows that different cultures will have different aesthetic standards. I try to tell students that if they dislike the style of the Qur'an they will have trouble with the entire tradition of Arabic literature. The hadith, the history, the poetry, the story-telling.. it is all much more fragmented than we would like. Which makes sense since in the West we have been raised on a tradition that values linear stories and a strong authorial presence. Homer stands somewhere back there.. and his influence can be felt in the Saturday morning cartoons. But in the Islamic tradition it is the Qur'an that has formed aesthetic taste.
Madison, the Capital of Wisconsin
May 20, 2007
A Mediator in Material Form
May 19, 2007
At the end of Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang we encounter the image of young Freder joining the hands of his father and the representative of the workmen. A caption tells us that between the head and the hands there must be a mediator. The film throughout has been a thinly veiled allegory.. but here the moral becomes explicit: a Christ-like mediator is needed to bring together the wealthy and the workingmen. Without a mediator both are doomed to destruction.
In my recent re-reading of Twenty Years at Hull House I noticed how Jane Addams, with her ideas about Settlement houses, is proposing a similar religious allegory. This allegory would not be realized in a cultural product like a film or novel, but rather in the material context of Hull House. Her radical social project encouraged urban readings which were at heart allegorical.
Here is a quotation from an essay by Jane Addams (taken from a website which provides an amazingly complete context for the work of Jane Addams):
These hopes may be loosely formulated thus: that if in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which every associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air; until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Addams is here emphasizing the necessity of elite cultural values making their way to the masses.. but quickly she reverses this and notes the importance of the common life finding its way into the pristine world of higher culture.
The overall image is of a need for cross-pollination between the masses and those fortunate enough to spend their leisure involved in cultural pursuits. Hull House (and the Settlement Movement more broadly) represents a way to bring about this difficult connection. In other words, Hull House will serve as a mediator between the head and the hands.. and will allow both to meet their greater potential. Hull House becomes a rather spectacular example of an abstract concept becoming embodied in a material context.
The above image gives a sense of the material context for Hull House. This crowded neighborhood served as home for numerous ethnic groups. It is a section of the city which could easily be ignored by the wealthy. There was a range of economic levels within these living areas, but the poorest would have lived in conditions similar to what Jacob Riis found in New York City toward the end of the 19th century.
This portrait of a family betrays scant opportunities for moral improvement or the cultivation of abstract religious thought. I'm not claiming that religious sentiments aren't there.. I just think that in this kind of conditions they will be hard to find.
Now look at an interior view of Hull House:
It is not a room "dumbed-down" for poor people.. but one that strongly encourages abstraction and re-connection to aesthetic sensibilities. It is a room for meditation and creation. Rooms like this existed in cultured and wealthy upper class households all over America, but what is unique about this room was its placement in the midst of poverty such as what was documented by Jacob Riis. In that context, this room becomes an image of the mediation that Jane Addams was working to accomplish. It is space to lift up the poor and also space for the cultured to encounter something of the common life. The room can thus be read.. and understood as a concrete representation of an abstract ideal.
One direction in which my mind has been going is to wonder what the analogue to this would be in Cairo. The level of poverty on display in a Jacob Riis photograph can be found today in the unplanned neighborhoods of Cairo. But what would the social aid look like? The Settlement House program set forward by Jane Addams strikes me as being difficult to translate across the cultures. The difficulty lies in the fact that Hull House is not just a "good idea" but an outcome of a Christian conceptual framework. The idea of a mediator between head and hands would not be culturally in play in the Islamic world. But that doesn't mean there will not be some more appropriate model that draws on Islamic concepts. It would be valuable to explore the philosophies behind charity work by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. How are those movements placing into a material context an abstract ideal?
Smile, Maybe
May 18, 2007
A central question for Brian Wilson's Smile (2004) is the extent to which it reflects the album that should have been completed back in 1967. The official narrative, as told in the documentary Beautiful Dreamer, is this modern Smile is the completion of that old project. This is the album we have waited 37 years to hear!
There are reasons to doubt this congratulatory narrative. The Smile album that was released in 2004 is divided into three suites. It is hard to imagine these three suites being transferred to a double sided LP.. which would have been the requirement in 1967. Insofar as Smile depends on this triple format, it departs from any realistic guess as to what the original would have sounded like.
Beautiful Dreamer had the opportunity to showcase Brian Wilson as a renewed creative force.. but in fact Brian Wilson comes through as a rather passive force in the creation of Smile.
The steps as they appear in the documentary are as follows:
All the surviving tracks from the Smile sessions were loaded onto a computer and arranged. This ordering of tracks seems to have been a product of a collaboration between Darian Sahanaja and Wilson.
When we are shown video of the early practice sessions, we find Wilson sitting by himself and barely participating. Several of the band members profess to being nervous that Wilson would not engage with the material. So far as we can see from this documentary, the musical arrangements for Smile were completed with minimal input from Wilson.
Once the band starts rehearsing the material, Wilson is still detached. He sits at a keyboard with two monitors supplying him with the lyrics for every song. The band behind Wilson is excellent.. but there is little interaction between Wilson and the members of the band.
If you listen to old studio sessions from the Beach Boys during their creative height, you hear something strikingly different. Wilson is in command telling people what to play and when to come in. He is domineering even. That is the Wilson who composed some of the most beautiful American music of our time. Few traces of that person remain.
The music does remain. There were plenty of beautiful fragments from the original Smile sessions, and they were ripe for someone to pick them up and arrange them in a winning order. It is either the spirit of a marketer or a fan blind with nostalgia who believes the line that this modern Smile is what the 1967 album would have been like. Appreciation for the modern Smile means forgetting about all that.. it means recognizing that this is a modern stitching-together of old tracks.. a beautiful new album that happens to be named Smile.
King Midas in Reverse:
The World George Built
May 16, 2007
The list of national and international institutions that have been damaged by the Bush administration is getting quite lengthy. Recently we have been treated to the spectacle of Paul Wolfowitz clinging to his job at the World Bank. The Justice Department is not a happy place to be right now with Alberto Gonzalez discredited. The list could go on to include FEMA, the United Nations, and the EPA. News stories that point to corrupt practices are easy to pass up these days. You might not have seen this one on the hiring of a former industry lobbyist to take over the Consumer Product Safety Commission. It would appear that there is hardly an institution that Bush does not feel can be weakened and gutted of legitimacy.
We could also throw into the mix the worsening situation in Iraq and the Middle East broadly. The New York Times Magazine had a saddening article on the fate of Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries. The article is laced with first hand accounts of life for Iraqis, such as the following:
On Sept. 2, 2006, Lujai’s husband went to work and prepared for the first of three operations scheduled for the day. At the end of his shift a patient came in unexpectedly; no other doctor was available, so Adil stayed to treat him. Adil was driving home when his way was blocked by four cars. Armed men surrounded him and dragged him from his car, taking him to Sadr City. Five hours later, his dead body was found on the street.
As she told me this story, Lujai began to cry, and her confused young children looked at her silently. She had asked the Iraqi police to investigate her husband’s murder and was told: “He is a doctor, he has a degree and he is a Sunni, so he couldn’t stay in Iraq. That’s why he was killed.” Two weeks later she received a letter ordering her to leave her Palestine Street neighborhood.
Hundreds of thousands of such stories are floating around in the Middle East.. ready tinder for a larger conflagration.
But then turn from this article to the posturing of the Republican candidates for president. You may have already heard it, but listen to Rudy Giuliani put an emotional stopper to any possible questioning of American actions in the Middle East:
Andrew Sullivan posted an insightful letter from a reader who noted what drew applause from the Republican crowd:
It's just fascinating that the Republican audience is so moved by certain statements that they simply must applaud (despite requests that they abstain). What floats their boat so far?
1) John Edwards in the beauty parlor - they simply adored that one
2) McCain's super-wimpy cop-out on the Confederate flag
3) Giuliani's shameless twisting of Ron Paul's caution about interventionism
4) Three cheers for torture!
5) Romney: Let's double the size of Guantanamo!
6) More cheers for torture!
I try very, very hard not to believe that Republicans are jerks. This debate has been most unhelpful.
This is just unreality. The Republican field as a whole stands for an embrace of a vision of America as strong and belligerent.. and right by virtue of being America. It is a scary vision.
This week I have been reading Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams in my Intro to Religious Studies course. The last time I read it was in the fall of 2000. It is fascinating to realize how far I have come since then. Addams ties her progressive social actions to fundamental American values and symbols.. to Abraham Lincoln and to democracy. I see what she was getting at.. and I think that in her context those were beautiful ideals. But I will never trust America again.. nor intellectual versions of what America can do in this world. That is over. The world of Jane Addams is gone. Read the article on Iraqi refugees. Watch the Republican debates. Listen to the applause.
Axial Opinions of Karen Armstrong
May 15, 2007
Over the weekend Emily and I picked up Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. The decision to read Armstrong stemmed from Emily listening to her in a radio interview on NPR and my own general guilt about not knowing anything about her except that she is popular among people who browse for books in the religion section. We began to read this book.. but I am not sure how long I will really be able to do this. (Emily thinks my reading style changes once I get annoyed at an author's opinions.. thereby, I think, lessening her pleasure in listening.)
This book looks at the period known as the Axial Age in which many of the world's great religious traditions came into being, ca. 400 BC. My interest is in her introduction to the book.. and in making clear the ways in which she is not an Old Roads scholar.
We can start with a look at the creation of a religious Golden Age:
But how can the sages of the Axial Age, who lived in such different circumstances, speak to our current condition? Why should we look to Confucius or the Buddha for help? Surely a study of this distant period can only be an exercise in spiritual archaeology, when what we need is to create a more innovative faith that reflects the realities of our own world. Yet, in fact, we have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age. In times of spiritual and social crisis, men and women have constantly turned back to this period for guidance. [xvi-xvii]
Armstrong sets up a false choices: dead spiritual archaeology or modern religious innovation. Her answer to that false choice appears to be a return to the living faith of the Axial Age, whose insights "have never been surpassed". So if we were to graph this on a historical chart we would see a great spiritual peak in the 4th century and then subsequent religious actions that fall away from that Axial Age ideal. I am in agreement that something interesting happens in the world at this period.. a certain abstraction of religious concepts that allowed for the creation of larger religious blocs. But that does not mean that this time period should be set up as some kind of canon for religious people.
What is so wrong with "spiritual archaeology"? I find this a great phrase for the approach to religion that is being developed here at Old Roads. The word "archaeology" is helpful because it implies that the study of religion should bring with it material aspects of culture. The phrase also pushes us to establish some distance between ourselves and earlier cultures. It will never be immediately clear how the beliefs and practices of earlier cultures can be affirmed and applied in a much later time. That difficulty is never apparent in the writing of Armstrong.
A couple of pages later Armstrong provides another helpful quotation:
The consensus of the Axial Age is an eloquent testimony to the unanimity of the spiritual quest of the human race. The Axial peoples all found that the compassionate ethic worked. All the great traditions that were created at this time are in agreement about the supreme importance of charity and benevolence, and this tells us something important about our humanity. [xix]
Old Roads takes the opposite approach to religion. Our fascination is in the differences.. and the way a spiritual metaphor such as "quest" does not apply to all traditions. People conceive of themselves and their lives in ways that are quite different and efforts to say that we all share a common ethical or spiritual approach to life are wastes of time.. because they erase what is valuable in those traditions.
So why is Armstrong so popular among those that browse the religion section? She affirms what we want to believe about the world. Namely, that religions and their adherents are nice and that the same wisdom is to be found in all traditions.
Getting Along in Ethiopia and the World
May 14, 2007
The Washington Post had an article yesterday about rising tensions between Muslims and Christians in Ethiopia. The article presents Ethiopian Christians and Muslims as having lived in peace "for centuries":
For centuries, Muslims and Christians here have lived in the same neighborhoods, celebrated each other's holidays, intermarried and blended religions with indigenous beliefs. Relationships are cemented through such Ethiopian institutions as the idir -- groups of neighbors, often religiously mixed, that raise money to pay for funerals.
During my time in Ethiopia in the winter of 2003 I saw hints of these problems. My friend and I visited a small rural church outside of the city of Tana and brought a young student along with us to translate the sermon. The congregation was urged not to go over to the side of the Muslims.. even though they had more money. Evidence for the wealth of Muslims was obvious as the minarets of a newly constructed mosque rose in a nearby neighborhood. I was told that this mosques was financed by Saudi money.
It is sad to read about the ongoing changes to the religious culture of Ethiopia:
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the competition has been heightened as a strain of more fundamentalist Islam has woven through Ethiopian society and, in Dese, taken hold in some mosques. One mosque in the city now barricades the area at prayer time. Some young men have begun growing their beards long, and more young women are wearing burqas, sights that were once rare.
How should we understand this phenomenon of surging Islamic identity?
I would categorize it as an example of secondary globalization. When people talk about globalization they often mean something like the spread of English, international corporate commerce, and Western values and popular culture. But while that may be the big wave of globalization, there is an accompanying undertow associated with this wave. It is a counter or shadow globalization that is visible in a range of movements, from anti-globalization protesters to militant versions of Islam.
These examples of shadow globalization exhibit (ironically) the same tendencies of homogenization as the primary wave of globalization. This shadow globalization breaks down traditional social structures and replaces them with something that could not possibly have existed a century ago. People become the same.. and so to my mind this movement fails in its main goal of countering the homogenization of the primary globalization.
The film Children of Men managed to distill the complexities of the two globalizations into two distinct sides.. set a couple of decades into the future. On the one hand there is the militaristic/Christian/white side that holds all the real power.. and on the other everyone who can't fit into that side. The symbolic marker for that second outsider group is Islam. The following are three scenes which illustrate the way the film uses familiar images to delineate these sides.
Entrance to the camp means going through Abu Ghraib type scenes of hooded and chained men, dogs barking at prisoners.. and in the above picture you can glimpse the hooded man standing with his arms outstretched, referencing the well-known image from Abu Ghraib.
Within the refugee camp we get this image of graffiti. In back of "The Uprising" you can see the Arabic word Intifada scrawled. One way to understand The Children of Men is as a version of the future in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come to characterize the entire world.
In the above scene the characters walk through a protest that consists of men wearing hoods, carrying guns, and chanting "Allah hua al-Akbar". So once again the naysayers to the main power are represented through reference to Islam. This is actually quite perceptive on the part of the director Alfonso Cuaron. There are many facets of the shadow globalization, but its most potent symbols are related to Islam.
So back to Ethiopia. There remain parts of the world that are still dominated by traditional ways of life, but they are getting rare. Ethiopia, despite its political turbulence could be counted as traditional.. and traditional culture tends to find ways to downplay internal differences. One of the hallmarks of the arrival of globalization (primary or shadow versions) is the destruction of older patterns of co-existence. As individuals plug themselves into a new global identity, those old patterns of co-existence cease to make sense. Certainly on a global scale the last century has produced more ethnic separation than ever before..
Pocahontas, Neil Young
May 12, 2007
Rust Never Sleeps (1979) by Neil Young and Crazy Horse reminds me of our short time in New Orleans. For some reason this was the CD that we played over and over during our two and half weeks there. I remember turning the sound way down for "Welfare Mothers" as we passing by some projects and I judged someone might take offense. But that is a personal sentiment.. and everybody who is alive comes to associate certain songs with different events in their lives.
The songs on Rust Never Sleeps are uniformly strong but share a certain level of incoherence. I am thinking especially of "Thrasher" and "Powderfinger".. brilliant songs, packed with resonance, but ultimately very hard to say anything about. To read the lyrics of these songs is like encountering a French Symbolist poet who somehow got lost in the American landscape.
"Pocahontas" is my favorite song from Rust Never Sleeps, and although it shares a level of incoherence (in this case mostly historical), it is possible to make sense of it. It begins with a striking evocation of the old virginal America:
Aurora Borealis
The icy sky at night
Paddles cut the water
In a long and hurried flight
From the white man to the fields of green
And the homeland we've never seen
I should note that our daughter might not have been named Aurora if it wasn't for this opening. "Aurora Borealis" makes for a confident and perfect opening.. casting our minds to a distant and haunting light. The real Pocahontas, living in what is today Virginia, would never have seen the Aurora Borealis.. but that's OK, because Young is not going to get tied up with historical technicalities in this song.
The opening involves us in a journey. We are on the move, hushed and passing through an erie landscape to get away from the white man and arrive at the fields of green. Those "fields of green" are also identified as "the homeland we've never seen". It is not just a matter of escape.. but of coming home to something we should know but don't.
The second stanza gives us the world from the point of view of a Native American:
They killed us in our tepee
And they cut our women down
They might have left some babies
Cryin' on the ground
But the firesticks and the wagons come
And the night falls on the settin' sun
The image of a home getting sacked and women killed is best known from the point of view of white settlers.. scenes from The Searchers come to mind. But having left the white man and fled to the fields of green, we are disappointed to discover the natural world destroyed.. the homeland in the process of being settled. The final line provides a double closure to that world: the night falls on the setting sun.
They massacred the buffalo
Kitty corner from the bank
The taxis run across my feet
And my eyes have turned to blanks
In my little box at the top of the stairs
With my Indian rug and a pipe to share
It is now clear that we are moving quickly through time. The new settlers are present in the first line killing the buffalo, but that image immediately gives way to images of the modern world: taxis and apartments. We walk up the stairs and enter a little box of an apartment and see the pitiful remnants of the Native American past: Indian rug and pipe. Perhaps we should consider this apartment a little hippy hideout. There is nothing here but loss. What began as an escape has ended now as a captivity within the busy modern world (again reversing a stock theme of white encounters with Native Americans).
I wish I was a trapper
I would give a thousand pelts
To sleep with Pocahontas
And find out how she felt
In the mornin' on the fields of green
In the homeland we've never seen
Opening this stanza with "I wish" alerts us to the fact that the situation is different than it was in the first stanza. There we were guided by some mysterious light and could hear paddles cutting the water.. now we are in a counterfactual world. Would that I were a trapper! But not the kind of trapper we know from history.. not the kind who collected piles of pelts and made a fortune. Rather one who would take that fortune and exchange it for one night with Pocahontas. (Again, the historical references are mixed, trappers being a development that came into its own long after Jamestown.)
That is a daring line.. that wish to sleep with Pocahontas. I am sure it could cause offense somewhere or other. Who wants to imagine the symbolic Pocahontas sullied by some trapper? But as an expression of pure desire the line is right. Pocahontas appears, opens herself to the trapper, but then fades away into the land. The morning dawns on those "fields of green".. and on "the homeland we've never seen". That land is what the desire is for; that land is what has been lost.
And maybe Marlon Brando
Will be there by the fire
We'll sit and talk of Hollywood
And the good things there for hire
And the Astrodome and the first tepee
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Pocahontas
Marlon Brando comes out of nowhere. But suddenly he is sitting there by the fire with the imagined trapper and Pocahontas. I have always found the sudden presence of Marlon Brando surreal, but then come to find out Brando was an activist in the American Indian Movement.. and so it makes more sense. But I like it the old way.. with an eccentric Hollywood actor suddenly turning up by the fire. Another escapee from the modern world.. who can reminisce about all those modern things. The Astrodome, for instance. By this final lyrical gambit the modern world comes rushing back into the fields of green. The wannabe trapper who desired the old pure America is suddenly thinking about baseball and astroturf. And maybe even wishing he could get the hell out of those fields of green. And poor Pocahontas.
Science vs. Religion
May 11, 2007
The debate between science and religion is a canard, but clearly it is where one gets the big bucks these days. Check out this list of funding areas from the Templeton Foundation. If you can muster something nice and conciliatory to say on the topic of science and religion then there is probably a publisher out there who would like to talk to you.. your odds double if you happen to be a scientist.
I don't trust this whole business and anyway I have never understood why I should care what some biologist or physicist has to say about religion. Consider the education of a scientist: an undergraduate education that allows for a few electives and then graduate school entirely focused on acquiring a research skill. Contemplation of religion will be mostly a personal matter.. and since most people in the US are religious, many scientists will continue their religious beliefs, with slight modification. Then miraculously this scientist becomes an authority figure on religion.. or someone who can get paid to recount how she reconciled science with her religious faith.
Talking about science and religion may be an overall aid to religious belief. It keeps the focus on questions that can be taken as unknowables: is there a God? is there such a thing as miracles? could there be angels? do we have an eternal soul? Science does have something to say about each of these questions.. but the answers will also never be conclusive. Perhaps asking about religion and science is like asking about the relationship of nationalism and science. We might be able to find something to say about nationalism and science.. but it is not the most insightful direction from which one could approach the topic..
Problems mount for religion as soon as one leaves the realm of metaphysics and starts talking about history or philology. Whether we are talking about Hebrew scripture, the New Testament, the Qur'an.. or the story of the Buddha.. religious claims on examination fit comfortably within a cultural context. I have been reading the Qur'an this term, and one constant theme is its inimitability. The standing challenge for those who oppose Muhammad is to create something like the Qur'an.. and if they were unable, then the Qur'an must be divine. But despite this challenge most evident to a modern reader is the extent to which the book partakes of Arabian culture. The references to jinn, popular stories about biblical figures like Solomon, and contemporary social practices make the Qur'an a book that is obviously a part of its cultural context. The same thing happens upon close examination of Hebrew scripture and the Book of Mormon.
Most damaging to religious faith is the work of competent historians or philologists. Unique religious claims get contextualized and as soon as that happens they become less compelling as documents pointing toward an eternal truth. This process of contextualization will also cover the development of religious bodies like the "church" or "ummah". It is difficult to see these as miraculous God-aided communities when they conform to what we expect of movements and social change.
A renewed emphasis on the importance of history and philology in the study of religion will also have the salutary result of correcting some of the idiot attacks against religion. The following is a paragraph from a review of the new book by Christopher Hitchens:
Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist, standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church. The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all? Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how can the “argument from design” (that only some kind of “intelligence” could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all?
I find these critiques blindingly stupid.. and they appear to stem from an inability to think of religion in historical terms. The above critique of the Ten Commandments might make sense if one accepted the fame story of Moses getting them from God on top of Mount Sinai, but if one thinks historically about the development and cultural use of this story, then the critique makes no sense at all.
Place and the Holocaust:
Night and Fog
May 8, 2007
Some of the most interesting attempts to imagine place are found in works on the Holocaust. The formal challenge is obvious: the concentration camps are fairly nondescript places in which great—almost unimaginable—evil has been done. So how does one make this evil imaginable?
The documentary Night and Fog works with three main elements. An essay by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol provides a narrative that holds the film together. Documentary footage (film and still photos) is mixed with later color footage of Auschwitz as it stood about ten years after the close of the war.. the scenes for the ghastly events of the Holocaust now appearing empty and overgrown.
This first image gives a sense of the challenge.. "capturing this reality" must always be the goal of the filmmaker. Given the resolutely normal appearance of the sites for the Holocaust.. how can these events ever really be imagined?
Having shown images of the camp's buildings, we are taken inside and shown the bunks on which victims of the Holocaust were crowded. Now they are clean and seem to to bear no traces of their past. The narrator again emphasizes that these empty bunks cannot be made real to the imagination either by word or image.
Panning away from the wooden bunks the camera reveals to us more of the interior structure. The point made by the narration is again the inability of this documentary medium to do anything but show the externals.. the "outer shell".. of the camps.
So far we have been presented with a mostly negative assessment of the ability of words and images to come to grips with a past event. Sure we can see the setting of these events, but the experience of history is always receding away from us.. out of reach. The goal of most artists is to make some kind of experience real to the viewer.. but that goal seems to be abjured here.
Despite this negative assessment, the documentary gives us a series of images that directly connect to the color scenes of the camp that we have just been shown. The pace of the narration picks up and the descriptions become quite tactile. It is as if someone decided suddenly: OK, let's try to communicate this experience in as vivid a manner as possible.
This is an image that effectively brings to life those clean empty bunks that still stand at Auschwitz. It may be true that "no description, no image can reveal their true dimension".. but this single image does have an impact. It makes that modern scene more imaginatively real.
This is the formal irony of Night and Fog. A documentary that expends a lot of energy letting the viewer know how far away the true experience lies, and how unimaginable a place might be, succeeds in making an experience and a place come alive in the imagination. That is a limited goal.. and it is not as if the viewer has actually "experienced" anything like what happened during the Holocaust.. but that is always true of art, right?
Those negative assessments of the ability of word and image to communicate an experience might be better viewed as a simple rhetorical device. Their job is to prime the viewer to want those modern images filled in with historical images and information.. and the film immediately complies.
One final point: doesn't the Holocaust present a rather clear case of an event that demands the full expenditure of creative ability? The grim tallies of deaths in the image below points to the need for an ethical use of human creativity. You can't say "never again" unless you can imagine what must be avoided.
Migration of Museums to the Web
May 6, 2007
On Saturday morning we visited the Wisconsin Historical Museum. This was on our short list of things to do in Madison over the weekend. We went straight to the second floor, dedicated to Native American history. The exhibits were informative.. but they did not tell me much that I had not already encountered in my reading. It was nice to see genuine artifacts and models.. but these were not accompanied by deep information about the topics.
My disappointment at the experience of a museum has become habitual, and is not limited to the Wisconsin Historical Museum. I can think of two related reasons for my disappointment in natural history/science museums. First, they are aimed at a different audience than me. That may sound obvious.. but I walk into every museum believing it will speak to my own interests. The primary audience for this museum is school age children (arriving either with a school group or a family). Second, much of the fascinating material owned by museums is now turning up on the web. If you visit the Wisconsin Historical Society website, you will find plenty of eccentric paths to trace out. Before writing this blog I got sidetracked looking at a series of watercolors painted by Winifred Ford in 1938-9 (and I started imagining how I could do something similar for Appleton's buildings).
These two reasons are related because the migration of material to the web has re-oriented the purpose of museums more strongly toward children. The apparent flourishing of "children's museums" is another indication of the current in physical museum design. I might as well admit that this trend irks me.. and it leads to a particularly unimaginative use of space. The alternative would be to let the strengths of the internet inform the design of the museum.. virtual models, image galleries, and even original interviews become suddenly possible. But this would mean acknowledging that museum space has special properties and constitutes a unique opportunity for the communication of information. As it is we have to settle for taking children to the museum..
I have offered a mild critique of the Wisconsin Historical Museum, but I have nothing but praise for the website of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The web format offers a wealth of images and maps, plus copies of articles and books. I think an argument could be made that much of the creativity of museum design has migrated to the design of web pages. Somebody remind me next time I am thinking about going to a museum that instead I ought to just plop myself down in front of my computer and browse all these galleries and texts.
Pathfinders
May 5, 2007
I have just begun Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration by Felipe Fernández-Armesto. It is a book that tells one part of the grand story of humanity: global convergence. There could be no convergence without a previous divergence. If all human beings alive on the earth can trace their lineage back to a common ancestor who lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago, then human beings must have spent those intervening millennia going their own ways and developing a multiplicity of cultures. Only in the past few millennia has that process of divergence been seriously reversed.. and human beings from all corners of the earth put back in touch with each other.
My issue so far with Pathfinders is the lack of fluidity in the description of cultural change. It seems to me that diverging and merging have always been a part of human cultural experience.. the only difference is that now, because of technology, that process goes on at a global scale. But at all times individual cultures were getting amalgamated into a larger structure and then that larger structure would split into new cultures.
For some reason this process has for some time reminded me of the patterns that Windows Media Player uses as an abstract background for music. Note the following series of images:
There is a story in those pictures. The blue had been dominant, but then the orange invaded and created a completely orange screen. Then blue comes back and reverses the situation. This blue dominance gives rise to another pattern and then orange comes back and takes over the screen. This series of images illustrates the way diverse patterns get swallowed up by a totalizing pattern.. but then that totalizing pattern itself breaks up into smaller parts.. which are then promptly captured by yet another totalizing pattern. Thanks to technology the totalizing pattern is now global instead of regional.. but the same fluid interchange between whole and individual parts remains.
Think of this in terms of popular music. At one time there were lots of small musical cultures in different parts of the United States. In a few decades these small music cultures were overwhelmed by the development of a national popular music.. their individual traits having been incorporated into this national music. Out of that national music culture new subcultures arose.. such as rap or punk or reggae. At first these seem like small differences, but before long they start to break down the unity of the national music culture. It is the same pattern as outlined above: small cultures overwhelmed by large totalizing one, which in turn dissolves into small cultures.
Had I a little more mathematical know-how I could define this pattern with a formula. But I don't have such know-how.. and so I have tried to describe it. Such patterns are everywhere.. and incidentally have something to do with our propensity to see "golden ages" and "declines" in different traditions.
Drive Across Wisconsin
May 3, 2007
Ironic Uses of the Beach Boys
May 3, 2007
Once a body of work is before the public there is no way to control the meaning that will be assigned to it. The music of the Beach Boys is a case in point. Their music has acquired an ironic resonance.. at least for anyone who does not buy into the nostalgia trip.
In Michael Moore's Roger and Me there is a scene in which we see a laid-off worker playing basketball to the accompaniment of "Wouldn't It Be Nice". When you think about it, the lyrics are meaningless for the situation. The song is effective here because it relies on our sense of irony.. our ability to feel the contrast between the narrow hope of the laid-off worker and the expansive hope of the song. And that is my argument: when we reach for something to express our naive versions of the world, we often land on the Beach Boys.
This ironic use of the Beach Boys began early. The Beatles' "Back in the USSR" is a send-up of "California Girls".. remember the lyrics: "Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out/ They leave the rest behind/ Moscow Girls make me scream and shout.." The geographic tour of the girls of the USA is replaced by an ironic tour of the USSR. I don't hear in the song any praise for the Soviet Union.. just a willingness to stand pop expectations on their head. It is unfair, but by means of such uses the work of the Beach Boys is transformed into the sound of the naive past.
A second option for appropriating the sound of the Beach Boys is the route taken by Van Halen in their literal re-appropriation of "California Girls".. which becomes in their hands a lustful paean to girls. But this gets us nowhere.. and only makes the work of the Beach Boys seem more available for ironic use. Needless to say, the contemporary appreciation of the Beach Boys depends upon being able ot set aside the cultural resonance that has accrued to their music..
Individuals and Cultures
May 2, 2007
In our discussion of the biblical book of Lamentations I noticed how easily the class could move back and forth between individuals and culture. In the case of Lamentations we encountered a culture whose political capital and cultic center has been destroyed.. its leaders taken captive. We learn how a culture can work through a disaster. They crafted a narrative that makes sense of events: God is like a parent, we have been rebellious, God punishes, but God still loves us and will restore us. A shared narrative frame can provide strength to a culture.. and hope.
Curious to me was the way we seamlessly moved back and forth between individuals and cultures in our discussion. People could understand the way a culture overcame disaster by thinking about the way they would overcome personal disaster. In the case of an individual narrative and meaning again looms large. Even as we were talking I was wondering how far is would be possible to push this relation between individuals and cultures.
Individuals are the basic-level responders to experience. A culture (by which I mean a social group with a shared cognitive frame) obviously has no consciousness or will of its own. A culture only appears to act as a unit because it is made up of a large number of individuals with a shared cognitive framework.. lending a level of coherence to group responses. Since a culture mirrors the shared responses of many individuals, it is fair to talk about it in terms of the experience of an individual. Thus a culture can be in denial.. it can be delusional.. it can even create explanatory narratives.
Last term James Hall came up with a wonderful video project for my class Hajj to Mecca. The full series of videos is available here.. but one segment in particular is useful to analyze:
This is a perfect example of narrative creation. James selects two somewhat vague elements present in the visual culture of Lawrence and converts them into fantastic stories about the past. The video is humorous because it is obvious that he is making it all up. But laugh as we may, the explanations that cultures concoct about the past are often equally absurd. These explanatory stories are not the result of a single individual constructing a narrative.. rather they come about over long periods of time and result from oral patterns of narrative transmission. If we step back and look at the cultural process of narrative creation, it looks a lot like what James is doing in this video.. only completed over a much longer period of time and not attributable to any single conscious individual.
The upshot of this is that we can speak of culture as creative. Human beings as individuals are active meaning constructors.. tying together bits and pieces of narrative into a coherent whole. We all agree that individuals are creative in this way. But culture, as an aggregate of many creative individuals, will create narrative structures that from a distance look like what an individual would create.
Orson Welles Reading Moby Dick
May 1, 2007
The documentary Orson Welles: One-Man Band includes some brief scenes from various projects by Orson Welles. Some of the most fascinating include Welles simply reading text into the camera. He gives a reading of sections from Moby Dick.. and whether he envisioned ever supplying dramatic interludes is unknown. All that is left are his characteristic fragments of a project. I find this state of affairs fascinating since it allows the imagination to rush in and complete the project.. building masterpieces in the thin air of the mind.
In the above scene Welles recites the introduction to Moby Dick.. "Call me Ishmael.." It is a surprisingly effective scene with mysteriously rippling light streaking his face. The documentary plays this scene and then notes: "No one knows when or why Welles decided to read solitary chapters of Moby Dick".
Another example of this tendency to simply read texts is found in the recital of Shylock's speech from the Merchant of Venice. Here Welles mostly completed a film of the play but the negatives for this crucial scene were lost. So at some point Welles simple filmed himself speaking these lines in his everyday clothes:
I think they should release what remains of the Merchant of Venice and then simply stitch this scene into the text.. It would break the illusion of the film and provide a moment in which not a character, but the director himself takes on the lines, eyes moist with emotion.
These bits and pieces of film appear to come from the early 70s. This past week I watched the 1956 version of Moby Dick directed by John Huston. Orson Welles puts in an appearance as the whalers preacher. We are shown a somewhat dour congregation with plaques on the wall to commemorate sailors who have died in the business of whaling. Welles enters the scene and climbs up onto a pulpit which is in the shape of a ship's keel. There he opens a books and preaches a sermon about Jonah.. which I assume holds closely to the sermon in Melville's Moby Dick.
This scene puts later bare textual recitals into context. Here in the film Moby Dick he had a bit part requiring only five minutes of preaching.. yet the viewer watches and listens to Welles fill his role. His speaking voice alone, with its modulations, holds our interest: "Jonah thinks a ship made by man will take him out to countries where God does not reign".
Welles developed what we might call a declamatory style. He is most comfortable with high flown rhetorical passages.. and he relies on his voice. This rhetorical flare turned out to be perfect for the creation of fragments.. which makes sense since pure acting would seem to require the most dramatic context, while purple passages have the affect of standing out from their dramatic context.. allowing for fragmentation of the experience of the play.. and for anthologizing. In films like Moby Dick Welles fills parts that call for rhetorical drama.. and then later as he works independently he begins to strip down drama in favor of bare recitation. I am not convinced this was the most fruitful direction for Welles.. but that does not mean I would not shell out whatever I needed to spend in order to hear him recite fragments of a text like Moby Dick.
