How Rumi Works
November 30, 2007
I have been growing more and more enchanted with Rumi. His Masnavi in the new translation by Jawid Mojaddedi (Oxford World's Classics) taught pretty easily, and I think he will become a standard part of my Islam class. One of the stories I taught this year was "How a Hare Killed a Tyrannical Lion". Rumi signals an explicit source for this tale: "Look up this tale in Kalila and Dimna/ And find the page to which this part is similar". (I could do without the rhyming couplets.) The book Kalila and Dimna was a book of animal fables aimed at instructing princes in wisdom. It was therefore a secular book and the stories could be expected to map onto the domain of kingship.
Rumi lifts the story from its prose source and adapts it to a form made up of rhyming couplets. The complete fable is there, but in Rumi's hand it has been split up into several parts.. as shown above. These parts could be reassembled and read in a straightforward manner, moving from left to right.. following the yellow arrows. But the pleasure of reading Rumi is in watching him take a section of the story and develop a spiritual insight out of it.. and then return to where he left off in the story. The sections of spiritual insight hang like pendants from the various parts of the fable.
From what we know of the composition of the Masnavi, Rumi composed it orally as his disciple Hosamoddin copied down his words. This text could of course be edited later and tweaked in various ways, but the central movements of the text have a fluid and off-hand feel to them.. reflecting oral composition. Rumi begins by telling a well known tale, but then he recognizes a spiritual truth and veers away from the tale. These expansions on the tale are what I label spiritual insights, and they are the most remarkable sections of the Masnavi.
Crucial to understanding these spiritual insights is to realize that Rumi is not building a coherent allegory. That is, he is not beginning with an elaborate model that says: lion=self, hare=spiritual person, etc.. That would lead to a much less fluid form than what we actually find in the Masnavi. As Rumi moves from section to section of the fable he feels free to develop a spiritual insight that reinterprets the various actors in the fable. In the tale of "How a Hare Killed a Tyrannical Lion" the lion begins as a positive character arguing in favor of spiritual exertion.. then as the story shifts in its interest to the hare and its response to the lion, the lion becomes a tyrant and finally a representative of the self. There is no single spiritual value assigned to the lion. Rumi is utilizing the fable to make various spiritual points. This shifting symbolic register makes Rumi hard to follow at times, but they also are his particular triumph.
Rumi also narrates inset tales that are illustrative of his spiritual insights.. and both the insight and the tale are held in suspension within the main fable. In the tale of "How a Hare Killed a Tyrannical Lion" Rumi tells a version of the tale that we know as the Appointment in Samarra. This adds nothing to the fable itself, but helps to further develop the spiritual insight that Rumi is making. This tales-within-tales format is reminiscent of the 1,001 Nights, which also packs in layers of stories.. without coordinating them for any spiritual points or morals.
Courts in Everyday Life
November 29, 2007
It would take a lot for me to go to court in America. If I were ever ripped off badly in a business transaction, I would probably swallow the loss rather than pay some huge fee to a lawyer. This is not lawyer bashing.. it's bashing of the American court system. So far as I can see it is a system that is set up to do two main things: 1) send minorities to jail and 2) adjudicate corporate disagreements.
Early modern Cairo is not the first place that many Americans look to for ideas about social policy, but while reading Making Big Money in 1600 by Nelly Hanna I came across an intriguing description of Cairo's court system:
A number of factors encouraged people to use the courts extensively. Justice was simple and quick. People who were not highly educated or sophisticated could have immediate access to justice. It was not necessary to have a lawyer to act as an intermediary between the claimant and the judge, nor did people have to wait for months to have a judgment on a case. As a matter of practicality, numerous courtrooms were set up in the various districts of the city and were thus accessible for almost all its inhabitants... A more important factor that encouraged people to take their disputes to court perhaps, was that the qadis took into consideration, when applying the law, the 'urf (habits and traditions of people). [xxi]
That sounds so much more reasonable than the American system! In fact it illuminates for me just how uniquely cut off Americans are from the everyday working of arbitration and legal rights.
I was reminded a few days ago of our cut-off legal status by a post from Kevin Drum, noting the way many businesses are requiring that anyone they do business with sign away their right to trial.. allowing instead for private arbitration. But the sticking point on this alternative is that private arbitration overwhelmingly sides with business.. naturally, since that is who pays them! This is one case out of many in which we witness the deck being stacked against the ordinary person.
It is ironic that with our historically dysfunctional and out-of- touch legal system it has become commonplace to say the word shari'a with loathing. The specter of the imposition of shari'a fuels books about the destruction of Western Civilization. But Ottoman-era Cairo was not equivalent to the Taliban.. and Islamic law, while not accommodating all our ethical values, was remarkably effective. I would even say that we could learn something from Islamic law: the desirability of having the courts accessible to all people. One unfortunate aspect of the current political climate in America is that obvious inefficiencies in our social system are propped up as symbolic of our values. We become blind to the way that a little modeling of the American way after the shari'a might be a good thing.
Sustainable Hibernation
November 27, 2007
Graham Robb wrote an editorial for the New York Times that should get the "Most Curious Editoral" award. It is on the subject of human hibernation. Apparently French president Nicolas Sarkozy wants to roll back the 35 hour work week.. which he deems "madness". Robb counters with a discussion of the way French peasants once slept through the winter, and he cites a 19th century witness:
These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food.
And I think I know the feeling. When it gets chilly I seem to sleep more deeply..
Robb appears to be making a silly point, tweaking the French for historical laziness. What is one to make of the call in the final paragraph to introduce tax incentives for hibernation? But there is an important point underlying this bluff: is annual economic growth really compatible with a sustainable future for humanity?
Last year I gave a talk on the representation of the Nile in al-Maqrizi's Khitat. The Nile throughout the medieval period was not controlled in a defined bed but allowed to drift, and that drifting opened up new space for building. The notion that nature was something to be "controlled" was absent from discussions. There was a complicated system of canals and dikes, so it was not the case that human beings were uninventive.. but on the macro-level they designed a life that worked around the necessities of their natural environment. This is a long way from the philosophy of maximizing nature that led to the High Dam at Aswan.. and the newer dams in China that we have been reading about.
Medieval Cairo had its recurrent problems, but it is possible to imagine that world being extended for centuries. Robb is making a similar point for French peasants who slept away the winter. They had a lifestyle which worked for their environmental context. In contrast, the modern world that we inhabit is a glutton for resources. It is not at all clear that human beings can live this way for the next two centuries.. let alone that economic growth can continue indefinitely at this pace.
With his reference to hibernating French peasants Robb reminds us that ecological sustainability may mean genuine changes in lifestyle. Here in Wisconsin we have another winter coming on and it is interesting to watch energy prices continue to nose their way upwards. There must come a time when energy prices cut into this lifestyle we have built for ourselves. It may well be that the cognitive resources we need for dealing with these new economic demands will be found in the past. Perhaps we will someday grow more medieval?
The Old, Weird France
November 25, 2007
I spotted The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War last week while browsing in a bookstore in California. Then on arriving home I found a review of the book by Graham Robb in the New York Review of Books (must pay to read article online). This book explores something that I believe is not widely known: France until only very recently was not a cultural unity. That is to say: a large percentage of its inhabitants did not know French and did not identify with the nation within whose borders they resided. The reviewer notes:
[By the middle of the 19th century] France was still a mosaic of tiny pays, each speaking its own patois or dialect. Just how tiny, Robb is at pains to bring home to us. It might be the area within which its own church bell could be heard more distinctly than those of other villages; and on the other bank of the local river people might very likely speak an altogether different dialect and have quite different traditions and manners.
Those who lived in such a small pays found in it their primary identity. Their pays would have stirred up intense feelings of attachment and their favored narratives would have related to events relating to it. They were politically within the borders of powerful France, but they were distant from its aims and narratives.
So how did France become a nation? How did all these peoples come to think of themselves as French? It appears to have been a matter of the slow extension of "Frenchness". That identity radiated out of Paris. Robb points out how many "provincial dishes" originated in Paris. It also owes something to the French literature that was centered in Paris but came to represent an entire nation by means of education. The loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the aftermath of the Prussian War in 1870 led to a systematic attempt on the part of the government to forge a more unified nation:
Newspapers and magazines urged their readers to visit the unknown parts of France and the "lost provinces." Parts of the country were given new names to make them sound more attractive (the coast of Provence became the Côte d'Azur, Brittany's the Côte Émeraude, etc.). Tourist offices persuaded rival villages to work together, laid out signposted walks, and organized colonies de vacances (holiday colonies) for schoolchildren.
So a common identity does not just happen, it is something that a nation encourages and constructs. We should not gloss over the loss of local identity that occurs in this process. The building of a national identity is a terrible thing.
Robb is onto a great story here.. and I am eager to get this book. But it is also worthwhile to step back and remember that the same book could be written about every nation in the world. There is always an "old, weird [insert nation here]" history waiting to be written. That basic story is simply more surprising when it involves a classic nation state like France.
Two of my students this term are writing about Islam in Thailand, and it turns out that there are Thai-Muslims and Malay-Muslims in that country. The most worrisome for the Thai government are naturally the Malays.. located in the south and bordering on Malaysia. How does a nation state deal with cultural outliers? It inevitably embarks on a course of education and encourages the use of the national language. It also works to get greater circulation of people within the country. That line separating Malaysia from Thailand now looks historically random, based as it is on the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909. But whatever the origin of those lines on the map, successful nation states find means to unite their citizens into a flag-waving whole. The "old and weird" are the first things to get eliminated.
I is for Igloo:
Nanook of the North
November 23, 2007
One word that every five year old knows, but which they have no need of knowing, is the word igloo. Few more words are more useless. Giraffes and xylophones and ostriches will conceivably come their way, but an igloo probably not. In the documentary Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty there is a fabulous igloo building scene.. and since this film was quite a hit in 1922, it occurred to me that maybe this was the film that popularized the image of the igloo. One slender piece of evidence appears in the narration for this silent film:
Note how "igloo" is not allowed to stand on its own, but has to be glossed as "the snow dwelling of the Eskimo". I don't think that today even young children would need an explanation as to the meaning of igloo. Could it be that before 1922 "I" was not commonly for "igloo" in children's works?
The film takes its time portraying the construction of an igloo. The right kind of snow must be found, the igloo built by means of snow bricks, each brick fitted individually to the others until the familiar rounded form takes shape.. and finally the door is cut out and an ice window installed.
We could almost go out and build our own after the demonstration.
In addition Flaherty was keen to portray the social world that surrounds the igloo. As it is being constructed by the adults, the young ones slide down a slope and most humorously a child sits on a tiny sled being pulled by a puppy. We also see the extended family waking up in the morning, lined up together underneath fir blankets:
By combining attention for material details with that for social situations, Flaherty is a model documenter. I'm not at all offended by the fact that some of these situations were set up.. such as the above inside-the-igloo shot which has far more light than could be had from a lone ice window. Flaherty had his subjects construct an open, three-sided igloo for the sake of the film. But the point is truthfulness of representation: to make as clear as possible the traditional lifestyle of this people. With respect to that goal Flaherty is an unqualified success.
It is often noted that Nanook of the North was the first documentary. But for a film that is heralded as such a "first" I was surprised at how second-hand much of it felt. The scenes in which the sled dogs fight could have come straight out of Jack London. The whole theme of man versus nature.. and the intense search for food.. is also a staple of Jack London.. as is the northern setting (although this is Hudson Bay and not Alaska). London's major works came out early in the 20th century, so there is no question that Flaherty was building off of a preexisting interest in this material. His next documentary was Moana (1926), set in Samoa—and there was no lack of Western treatments of Polynesia! So in the case of Flaherty we are better off speaking of his adaptation of literary, artistic, and anthropological elements into the medium of film.
That should not be taken as a complaint; I intend to go through all of Flaherty's work. Nanook of the North can be compared favorably to the more recent March of the Penguins:
The story for March of the Penguins is incredible.. and the film is beautiful. But there is a certain cuteness factor that has crept into the documentary.. evident throughout the above trailer narrated by Morgan Freeman. We can deal with strangeness in birds, but if human strangeness were ever presented so forthrightly I am not sure it would be so widely appealing. Flaherty worked in a time when people could be strange.. and March of the Penguins comes from a time when only animals are allowed to be strange.
Making a Local Church Sacred
November 20, 2007
photo used under Creative Commons License, by Flickr user Richard Winchell
One of the interesting papers on my panel at AAR was given by Katie Day of the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Her paper was entitled "The Construction of Sacred Space in the Urban Ecology". Her work focuses on churches that lie along Germantown Lane in Philadelphia—a historic road with some very old churches, but which is now urbanized. How do church structures become sacred space?
The story goes something like this: a congregation moves into a new structure and reshapes it according to their needs. The members of the congregation pour in time and money to get this church going. It becomes the site for services and worship. At the end of this process the building has become sacred and even people in the community come to see it as a set-apart zone. Thus we arrive at sacred space.
One major problem with this reconstruction is the fact that a Rotary or Lions club would go through exactly the same process. They would build or refurbish an existing building, put a lot of effort into it, and finally have a building of which they were proud. Yet this is not a "sacred" site, right? It is just "significant". And as for the respect given to the church by outsiders, that is simply a measure of respect for its cause. A secular Civil Rights Society would likely get the same level of respect, while a white supremacist oriented church would not get that respect. So we are not talking about anything that is specifically religious; we are talking about a human process of space construction that is tapped into by religious groups.
The first task is to throw out the term "sacred". It is a muddying word that implies the existence of some "secular" landscape out there. Nothing can be understood from that position. What we have is an undifferentiated landscape, some of which is taken up by groups and invested with a level of symbolic significance. For the people that invest money and time in a building, and then once a week attend some form of communal worship, a group identity forms. That identity is then transferred to the building itself: the building becomes the outward manifestation (symbol) of a particular identity commitment. That process as I have described it requires no belief in God.. or religious stance of any kind. It is a process that the Rotary and Elks clubs, veterans associations and AA groups, have in common.
Conferences and Traveling to Cities
November 19, 2007
The past few days I have been in San Diego for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. These large national conferences are strange animals. I understand their usefulness.. and as the years pass I could attend my groups and begin to recognize names and faces.. and make friends. But there is another part of me that is uncomfortable with the corporatizing of such conferences.
I stayed at a small hotel in the Gaslamp District—the old town area just beyond the convention center. The convention center setup was convenient: I could walk from my hotel to the convention center and there were tons of restaurants and upscale shops to attract me in off hours. But the artificiality of this arrangement was offputting. There was nothing old about the Gaslamp District except its geographical location. It was resurrected (probably on the model of Pasadena's Old Town) precisely to cater to convention goers. And it struck me while I was here that the whole business of conventions is designed to enable such fake Old Towns. These are zones of the American landscape that I particularly dislike.. upscale and aimed at traveling business types.. nothing local about any of it. I see no reason why academic work should play into this cultural dynamic.
Tied to this unease is my sense that advances in web-based applications make this kind of national meeting unnecessary. Why not facilitate online meetings and exchanges for specialized groups.. and then put some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars toward getting professors overseas or at least someplace where they can absorb a culture besides the faux-culture of a convention zone? As things stand there is a perverse reward system in place for academics to do things that are resource intensive and yet low in content. A web-based group would allow for regular postings and for more developed dialogues. (This change will come.. mark my words.)
One last comment.. offered from a more emotional standpoint. Why should intellectual life mimic the rich life? This business of staying in Sheratons and Hyatts and Mariotts is degrading. Over the past decade the "haves" have gained a larger and larger portion of American wealth.. and the "have nots" have dramatically increased in numbers. From this economic situation I find it repugnant to walk around in the places that flaunt their privilege and commitment to the hollow fakery of wealth. Holding conferences in these sites constitutes an unspoken approval of this privileged landscape and a temptation to take for granted the values that it enables.
We were at the conference to give critical readings, but our presence in this landscape disabled our ability to respond critically to American privilege. The following photo is the scene I looked out on after stepping out of the hotel in which I presented my paper on the cultural landscape of medieval Cairo. I would say this picture deserves a critical reading. What are we doing here?
Foreign Terrain: Americans in Iraq
November 16, 2007
Jon Lee Anderson's article on the surge in this week's New Yorker gives a better sense than I have previously seen of what is going on in Iraq. The experience of war for most Americans over the past few years has meant the effort of trying to understand through the fog of numbers and statistics that are offered to us. Currently the question revolves around what to make of the drop in casualties and the widespread Sunni change of heart.
The article at one point described American soldiers at a "Joint Security Station" in Ghazaliya, a suburb of Baghdad. The name of the JSS is Thrasher, named for a Sergeant Thrasher who was killed by a sniper. Anderson then notes the oddly Americanized geography of their zone:
The Americans had superimposed their own lexicon on the neighborhood's geography, to make it comprehensible to themselves. Just as Ghazaliya had been divided into three areas—Casino, Thrasher, and Maverick—all the major road arteries were referred to in Pentagonese: Red Falcon, Caradine, Vernon, Cecil, R.P.G. Alley, High Tension Road, and so forth. Few of the American soldiers knew how the locals referred to those same streets.
I argue in my upcoming book (Religion, Culture, and Sacred Places, TBA) that places are created by means of stories that get attached to the land. It is inevitable that with all these American soldiers in the area, that the landscape would not start to reflect their own stories. Instead of references to saints or political leaders, their streets and regions are named after fallen comrades and vividly experiential terms. Parts of the American West have this same transparent topographic quality: Dead Man's Alley, Scotty's Peak, etc.. In the West the events of a few exploratory years have become the permanent language for referencing the landscape. In the case of the soldiers' mental maps of Baghdad, it is a geography that is bound to vanish.
At the close of that passage Anderson makes an interesting comment: "Few of the American soldiers knew how the locals referred to those same streets". This implies that there exists a parallel mental map on the part of locals: they have different names for these streets, but that is the only difference. Actually, much more than this distinguishes the mental map of a locality in the Middle East. My experience in Cairo and other places has been that although there are diminutive signs in random places that indicate a street has a name, few people actually know those names (except in the case of popular thoroughfares). People get places, but they do so without the imagined visual map in their heads that we customarily use. When the American soldiers superimpose their place names, they are not simply creating a "parallel" geography, they are actually creating a new landscape that did not previously exist. I would not be surprised to learn that in the process of naming streets there was also a degree of physical rationalizing and streamlining. Names create a map.. and a map demands that streets lead places and do rational things.
It would be a worthwhile project to interview some soldiers and have them talk through the Iraqi landscape as they knew it. In fact I would love to tackle a project like this. A soldier's geography is like a map traced in water. The words for these places that mark their lives will be erased by the Iraqis, but will surely be the stuff they talk about whenever they meet fellow soldiers: "Do you remember Thrasher and that suicidal drive down R.P.G. Alley?"
"Beating the Bitch":
Notes on Campaign 2008
November 14, 2007
It's tough to convey my distaste for this crowd. A commenter on TPM's website wrote:
OMG - that room is definitely my version of hell. absolute hell to have to spend any time with those fake, belicose, disturbing people. Not the America I am proud of, that's for sure!
We here at Old Roads concur.. and would not be caught dead in such a crowd. I don't care what election or party we are talking about, I will only vote for someone that would cut short an ugly statement like that.
A central argument against Sen. Hillary Clinton is that she is a polarizing figure that would unite Republicans against her candidacy. Andrew Sullivan posts occasion letters from readers claiming that the nomination of Clinton is the one thing that could turn them away from the Democratic ticket. I am skeptical of this. Barack Obama looks at times like a candidate who could mediate and bring new people into the contest.. but I wonder whether these people will really hang with Obama once the vitriol from the right starts to pour in. The coarseness of "How are we gonad beat the bitch?" gives a glimpse into what is coming.
After Swift-Boating in 2004 and the racist campaign against Harold Ford, Jr. in the 2006 Senate race in Tennessee, I can't believe that Obama would get out of a presidential campaign with lower negatives than Clinton. The recent lying e-mail forwards concerning his Muslim schooling demonstrate how easily and swiftly the attacks will come. A good chunk of these people who profess openness to the Democratic ticket if there was anyone besides Clinton at the top of it will fall away once the attacks come full force.
A second point is that while listening to the Republican criticisms of her, I don't actually hear a lot of tangible points. There is talk of her introducing socialized medicine.. OK, she actually offers the health care plan that is least open to this criticism among the main Democratic candidates. So it is fine for Republicans to use that as an applause line at their rallies, but in an actual head-to-head debate they will get knocked over the head with a solid answer from Clinton. She is in fact more moderate than Obama or Edwards.. and Bill Clinton ran the country largely from the center. So the idea that Hillary Clinton is a radical will not be too hard to dispel. If this is all the Republicans have, then I think she is in good shape.
Then comes the crucial argument: but people already have their minds made up! You can't dispel those negative opinions so easily! I think we overestimate the strength of her negatives. She has won twice (and handily) in New York. In her last Senate run she got 67 percent of the vote and won over Republican counties. Presumably her negatives in New York would have mostly mirrored her negatives elsewhere. (OK, maybe those negatives are stronger in the South, but Obama will have some obvious prejudice to deal with in the South too.) So Clinton has a track record of winning elections and impressing people as she goes about doing that. I see no rational reason for that not to continue when it comes to the election in 2008.
The promise of Barack Obama nevertheless calls out: a new politics. It is this promise that prods Andrew Sullivan to annoyingly add "know hope" to the end of some posts. The idea is that Obama could be a re-shuffler and mark a new direction. He could break out of the baby-boomer politics that are present at times such as when Clinton gets attacked for seeking money to fund a visitor center at Woodstock. Obama could move us out of the Sixties.
I go back and forth on this idea and the plausibility of a new start for American politics. Right now I will write from a pro-Clinton standpoint: there are no new starts. Belief in new starts is a Romantic fallacy. There is a lot of poison out there.. and I believe it comes overwhelmingly from the Republican side. It fills talk radio. It fills Fox News. There is a lot of money on the table. There is certainly anger on the Democratic side, but not this "beat the bitch" type of ugliness. For Democrats there is anger and even rage at the war and the nearly constant reports of corruption. That is a far cry from the type of personal smear campaigns the Republicans know how to run. If I had to choose a Democratic nominee that I felt in my bones could stand up to what I know will come, and beat these people.. I would choose Hillary Clinton.
The Use and Misuse of Origins
in Religious Debates
November 12, 2007
Teaching Islam makes one hyper-conscious of the arguments that swirl around the idea of origin. Back and forth one can go about whether Islam was violent from the start or peaceful.. both sides generally press their claim a little too hard. More important is to ask why an origin matters?
The assumption I often detect in discussions about religion is that somehow the beginning is the true version of a religion. A religion becomes set in stone with respect to its true character. That proposition is so manifestly false as to hardly need refuting. At their origins religions begin a long historical development. A religion at B, C, and D points of its development is every bit as truly itself as it was at its origin. Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Pat Robertson.. what does anyone gain by labeling one or all of them "not truly Christian". Each is worlds apart from the others.. and a long way from Galilee.. but there could be no point to arguing about which is truly Christian.
If one wants to understand from a historical perspective the development and identity of a religious group, the way to do that is to examine the immediate context. If my goal is to understand a religion as it existed at point D in the above graph, the way to do that will be to look back to point C and try to get a handle on the specific historical influences that moved the religion a little further down the road. Perhaps broad social unrest led to a tightening of hierarchical control; perhaps a greater familiarity with another religious tradition, led to an attempt to find theological common ground. Religious development will always be driven by context.
In an academic historical reconstruction of religious history, there will almost never be a need to refer to origin. But that does not mean that origin will not figure prominently in sectarian discussions. When there is a felt need to reform a religious tradition, that reform will often be justified by means of an appeal to an origin. This has proven to be a powerful argument in many religious traditions. "We have gotten away from the truth and must return to the original teaching of our leader." It is difficult to directly counter such an appeal, so the other side will often present its own version of the origin. But just because the sectarian debate about reform is cast in terms of the origin, does not mean that is what the reform is really about. We will be better off if we stick with a close analysis of the immediate historical motivations.
So can we forget about origins? Should anyone be interested in my class on the Qur'an.. which is largely a look at the origins of Islam? I would say yes, for the following reason:
What arises at the origin is a set of concepts and ideas that come to define a religious tradition. In Islam one can right away think of the prophethood of Muhammad, the revelation of the Qur'an, the unity of God, and the call for submission. These concepts remain the boundaries for any definition of Islam. The tradition can develop and change, but what makes that later tradition "Islamic" is its continued connection to these concepts. These concepts tend to be abstractions, and not historical events. What we study are the plastic outlines of a tradition and not a defining and central essence, as defined by what someone "really did".
Why Write Mystical Poetry?
November 10, 2007
For the next week and a half I will be working through Rumi's Masnavi (book 1) with my Islam class. One point I look forward to making is the way Rumi caps so much of our earlier reading. His allegorical use of hadith and historical narrations, plus his creative inweaving of passages from the Qur'an, gives a sense of how the Islamic tradition was plastic in the hands of a creative master.
Re-reading the Masnavi I began to consider my standard query aimed at mystical poetry: why bother with poetry? If the ultimate goal in life is an ineffable experience.. the presence of God.. then why spend time writing or otherwise representing that experience?
Rumi's opinion on the value of the material world is pretty clear:
Physical senses are like muzzles too
That keep the milk of mystic truth from you;
A jewel has dropped in your heart's deep core,
Which neither seas nor heaven knew before,
So why worship form, an empty shape—
Your soulless spirit must learn to escape! [65]
Form is to be shunned; the jewel deep inside should be sought. That is a prescription for turning away from art if I have ever heard one.
The supreme philosophy for the creation of art is a firm belief in the importance of the present life. With that recognized, there grows a need to pass the time in a pleasing manner, and this is the door for creative work. This creative work will have as its primary aim the alleviation of boredom and the causing of pleasure. This worldly art learns to manipulate form and audience expectations; it thrives on craft. Such art may also become fused with a myth of personal immortality bestowed by artistic accomplishment, thus spurring practitioners on to greater subtlety and formal excellence. This kind of worldly art has taken root in many religious environments, but it is fundamentally a secular art.
How can a mystic who wants nothing more than union with God or the One compete with a craftsman who spends all his time laboring over a few lines? The better poetry should come from the craftsman, obviously. For a mystic, poetry will have to be subsumed under didacticism. That is, art can best be justified by an appeal to the need to communicate the excellence of the mystical life to others. Mystical art slyly implies: "I really don't need to do this, but I want to help you out.. let you glimpse the deeper things.."
Didacticism is generally considered the kiss of death for poetry.. so what why do we still like mystic poetry? The mystical poetry of someone like Rumi represents an unexpected kind of didacticism. Take the following couplet:
Word, sound, and speech I strike relentlessly
So I can talk to you without these three. [108]
The idea is that Rumi is pulling out all the verbal stops in order to get past verbal communication. His poetry is not a form of moral didacticism, expounding on rules to be followed, rather a kind of mystical modeling.. exemplifying through his language the way this world and its forms can be overcome. The best mystical poetry goes a step further: its recitation or audition can be considered a tool for reaching a further state. Mystic poetry thus can be thought of as doing something.. not simply sitting on a page for leisured enjoyment.
For every mystic artist such as Rumi there are probably a dozen who stick with a much sterner form of didacticism. Plotinus at times seems like he can barely write Greek.. so crabbed his sentences get. But obviously he cares nothing about the presentation—he wants us to get to the One. There are also plenty of Sufis who enumerate the stations of mystical advancement in dense prose. This is the natural mode of expression for mysticism. It takes a peculiar combination of circumstances for a mystical artist to arise.. and often such a development will be dependent on the presence of an art form that can actually be used to trigger mystical experience.
How to Matter in the World
November 9, 2007
image used under Creative Commons License, by Flickr User Pinhole
Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for the New Yorker, managed to rouse my interest in contemporary art with a beautiful little review of the work of the sculptor Martin Puryear (see a slide show of his work here). After reading the lengthy article in the same issue of the New Yorker about art collector/seller Jeffrey Deitch ("A Fool for Art" by Calvin Tomkins) I felt disgusted at the way market fads and deep pocketed businessmen drive the art world. But with two columns of text Schjeldahl sketches an artist engaged in his art.. and engaged with life. It was not a view of the art world from the vantage of Sothebys or businessmen from China.
At the end of his short review Schjeldahl writes a sentence that flies off the page.. and qualifies as wise:
By these and myriad other stratagems, Puryear shows how to matter in the world: be interested and thereby, perhaps, interesting, as often and for as long as you can.
Those are words to live by. On further reflection they work as a statement as to why I blog: it is the outgrowth of a ceaseless interest in the world. Such an interest may become "interesting" to others—"perhaps". But I can hardly control what others find interesting.. so no use sweating that "perhaps". The goal of life is to sustain this interest in the world for as long as possible. I like this because it puts the emphasis on the personal need to be interested in the world, and only secondarily mentions the possibility of being interesting to others. That should be the order when it comes to writing a lasting blog: interest in the world, then, perhaps, interest in what you do. But the only reason to write about the world is because it is a deeply interesting place.
The Message Screen and the Blank Screen
November 8, 2007
If I had one wish for American politics over the next year, it would be that every candidate give up the annoying message screens that have become ubiquitous behind political speakers. This is not a frivolous wish. Renouncing these message screens would signify something important: politics is not about a slogan mindlessly repeated until it is the conventional wisdom—which is pretty much the way the country has been run for the past seven years.
There exists a cynical group of political managers who believe that voters should be given a shorthand of political talking points and undeniable keywords.. and that they won't bother examining anything too deeply. Further, these managers believe that slogan-vulnerable people are the ones that actually decide elections.. and so there is no need to thoughtfully respond to thoughtful critiques. This strategy may actually work, but it represents one of the danger points in a democracy: the possibility that democracy can be managed.
When I worked at Carl's Jr. during summers, I remember how an advertising campaign came out praising the great service or smiles that could be found at our restaurants. The slogan could draw customers, and was plenty catchy, but it was disconnected from our actual work. In other words, nobody gave us any lessons on service or smiling, the idea had simply been dreamt up back in some boardroom, subcontracted to a PR firm, and then broadcast to the world. There was no real connection between the advertising and our work. Something similar could be said about the disconnect between slogans and policy-making.
I can think of nothing more inspiring than a willingness to stand in front of a blank screen and speak ideas. Cut the flags; cut mystical scenery; cut the repeating slogans. Admit alternative ideas and seek reasonable compromises. The only problem with this idea is that it takes two honest parties to conduct themselves in that way, and the Republicans appear to be addicted to sloganeering and simple framing as a way of life. When up against an opponent that is willing to hammer a simple message at every stop, one must hammer back a counter message. But still, it is a sorry state of affairs..
In the most recent edition of the New Yorker (Nov. 12, 2007, unavailable online) Elizabeth Kolbert's article "Unconventional Crude" discusses the environmentally dirty efforts to extract crude oil from the vast tar sands of Alberta. Near the end she notes how despite local and federal unease with the environmental consequences, the work goes on. A leader in the Liberal Party is quoted as saying: "There is no environmental minister on earth who can stop the oil from coming out of the sand, because the money is too big." When the stakes become millions upon millions of dollars.. even billions of dollars in the long run.. then the push becomes too strong. That kind of money buys elections.. it buys towns.. it buys jobs. It bulldozes everyone who stands in its way.. not physically, but with words repeated and then repeated some more.. with words pasted behind a candidate.. with words sending out a dubious smoke screen of legitimacy for a self-serving opinion.
American politics is in a similar place. The possible gains that come from access to political power are too great. The temptation to manage a democracy will continue to grow. George W. Bush and his associates have used their power to directly benefit the powerful.. and I feel certain that a candidate like Hillary Clinton would go some way toward easing the degree of this national thievery (and therefore if nominated she will get my vote). But I doubt she would foreswear the slogans and managed democracy of her predecessor.. and that remains the central issue with respect to the long term health of our democracy.
Identity and Facts on the Ground
November 6, 2007
Reading medieval travel narratives I often notice how individuals relate to their world on quite different terms than we might think. On trips to complete the hajj in Mecca, Muslim travelers did not have to stop at national borders and show their passports, nor did they see their world as split into as many categories as we habitually do. I have covered this ground before, but I remain curious as to the connection between identity as it exists in our minds and the physical layout of the world.
For example, what does a wall do? If it separates a population from each other then it also gives rise to a vocabulary with which people discuss the split population: perhaps there are the westers on the west side of the wall and easters on the east side. As soon as a vocabulary exists to talk about these two groups, there will also come into being a mental category. Before you know it the side of the wall that a person lives on has come to shape a group identity: the westers are proud to be westers.. and will kick the asses of the easters!
Think of all the ways that physical boundaries construct identities. To enter a country we pass a border and show a passport. That border is a security mechanism, but it is also a constructor of a national identity. In other countries there are well defined neighborhoods based on religion or tribal affiliation.. these are constructors of identity. In America we have voluntary associations (churches, clubs) that reinforce our more fluid conceptions of identity.
In The Great Arab Cities in the 16th-18th Centuries André Raymond makes a related point about the structure of Cairo:
The distribution of Cairo's residential districts thus reproduced in the field the frontiers that separated social classes, the most underprivileged strata being pushed toward the outskirts of the city in the zones of hara, whereas the middle class and bourgeois population lived in the vicinity of the center... To a large extent, therefore, the structure of Cairo society showed up on the town plan, social or community divisions being accurately expressed through geographical localizations. [68]
The layers of identity that existed in the minds of Cairenes got written onto the actual landscape. I would suggest that this is something of a law: our mental worlds almost infallibly recreate themselves in the physical world. I remember Plotinus and the image of forms falling fluidly from the Intellect down into Nature. What is at first a disembodied concept gains a body.. i.e. is embodied in something physical. Something like that is at work in city structure.
But what also must be remembered is that physical barriers (even natural features like a mountain range) push back and shapes our mental worlds, creating identity categories that become part of the way we see the world. This last point is not so Platonic.. but equally important.
"We're All Shooters Now"
November 5, 2007
My new book on shooting video begins with an interesting mock rant:
I'll be honest with you. I hate DV. I hate everything about it. And that goes for HDV and the new inexpensive HD cameras as well.
I hate all of it for one very good reason: Not long ago I was a revered craftsman of privilege and status, a special person with unfettered access to the world's best and priciest storytelling tools...
Today I am no longer that special person as almost anyone can afford a decent camera and be a Video Shooter. The tools have become so easy to use and commonplace, it is no longer much of an issue who possesses the means to tell captivating stories—we all do.
This introduction is in support of the book Video Shooter (by Barry Braverman).. but it lands on a central fact of modern life: an extreme democratization of the means of producing creative works.
In this case we have a professional video shooter who had access to very pricey equipment. He was a specialist with a craft. There is still a place for specialists, but that place—on any reading of the trends—is getting narrower. The ability to get high quality film, to edit, to work with sound.. all this can be done almost as well by amateurs sitting in front of a personal computer.
To add just one example: consider the photo sharing site Flickr. There are thousands of talented photographers out there.. I am constantly surprised by the images I stumble across. What separates these images from those by professional photographers? Not much. Amateurs have high quality cameras and amazing darkroom abilities thanks to Photoshop. It is possible that professional photographers craft better images.. but it will be a marginal difference.
Bottom line is that this is a good time for creativity. An unbelievably good time. But a bad time for making money from this creative work. Think about that: the tools for creating are open to all of us, but we can't make a living at it. Art does not have to be controlled by any guild but can be everyone's hobby.
Creative work could begin to move away from dominance by geniuses and toward a more shared and open experience. If I exchange photos with a small group on Flickr, and only look at these photos, I may miss out on a few works of stupendous genius adored by the art crowd, but the quotient of beauty in my life will nevertheless be high. That quotient is what should matter.
In a world with over 6 billion people it is absurd to think about artists in the same way. We should look forward not to great artists, but to art making sub-cultures.. circles of people who exchange their work and dig what they do.
Bob Dylan and Preservation
November 3, 2007
Forget all the stuff about authenticity and selling out (greasy kids stuff). Dylan doesn't care about that particular frame for his work. The idea that somehow he is after money is also absurd. No one would tour like him year after year.. small venue after small venue.. if he just wanted money. Dylan has a legacy and something to say.
This commercial gives a vivid sense of the way Dylan works with old material. Here at Old Roads we are interested in the preservation of old forms and styles. We like old cars; we like old radio programs. Listening to Dylan you might think that we have found our perfect match. He is loving the idea of rolling down dusty deserted roads in a Cadillac and playing the part of an old time radio DJ. But there is an important point to note: he is not driving an old Cadillac; he is driving a new Cadillac SUV. He is not on a traditional radio broadcast; he is on satellite radio. In other words, Dylan is attracted to the trappings of old things.. their signs.. but is not committed to the preservation of the actual form of those things.
Understanding this makes sense of many of his creative choices. For example, last year's limited edition release of the CD Modern Times came as a little booklet that looked like a miniature version of the old 78 albums.
Note the way the binding for this 78 album comes in a bit on the left and has a satin-like texture to it that is different than the picture on the cover.
In this album you can glimpse the way the 78s are top loading and carried in brown sleeves. Once again note the distinctive way the binding comes in on the left.
The limited edition of Modern Times was packaged exactly like these 78s. That could be taken as just a cute wink at the past, except this use of the past is such a recurring pattern with Dylan. He has no use for producing actual 78s. He is not going to travel down the road of Pearl Jam and release is music in an actual classic format. He tips his hat to the past and carefully aligns himself with that past through its signs.. but has nothing of a preservationist ethic about him. This attitude is perfectly on display in his long version (2 minutes) of the Cadillac commercial.
Prefer the Present:
Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us
November 2, 2007
The short film summary on the Netflix envelope mentioned that The Wind Will Carry Us is the most "socially critical work" by Abbas Kiarostami. It did turn out to be socially critical, but not in the way one might expect. Watching an Iranian film, I thought a socially critical work would turn its attention to clerics or the place of women in Islam. but if this film is critical about anyone it is the secular and somewhat mysterious engineer who is at the center of the film. City life in general seems to be made to stand judgment in the person of the engineer.
The engineer has come to a small hillside village 450 miles from Tehran. We are never quite sure why. He is waiting for an old woman to die. Meanwhile we see him endlessly maneuvering the entrances and open corridors of this traditional village. Kiarostami is fond of repetitive settings.. perhaps showing us that life is most interesting in the places where we always are.
One element of comedy that runs throughout the film is the constant interruption caused by cell phone calls. Inevitably the engineer ends up racing for higher ground in his jeep. This zone of cell phone reception turns out to be a graveyard.. and there is a man digging a trench. Why is he digging a trench? The man answers that it is for "telecommunications".
In this village the concept of telecommunications is absurd. The engineer rushes to receive his long distance calls from Tehran but they are inevitably inconclusive.. not real acts of communication: so- and-so will eventually talk to so-and-so. Bu it is not that the village is simple.. and thus not in need of cell phones. As we watch, Kiarostami gives a sense of the richness of communication: people looking on from roofs, neighbors talking, people sitting in a cafe, or news exchanged casually at a door. The village stands out as the greatest technological advance ever.. while the modern world struggles to get a signal.
Near the end the man who is digging a telecommunications ditch has the dirt fall in on him. Luckily our engineer is there and he goes to warn the neighboring men of the danger. They all show up and work to save the worker.
The comradery.. or at least sense of community.. is evident in the scene. Miraculously it appears the man will survive. They pile into the engineer's truck and head to the hospital.
This sets up a long shared motorcycle ride. The engineer rides with a poor doctor, his motorcycle marked with a red crescent. At the end of their time together they discuss the old woman whose death the engineer is awaiting:
engineer: old age is a terrible illness.
doctor: yes, but there are worse illnesses.. death.
engineer: death?
doctor: yes, death is the worst. When you close your eyes on this world, this beauty, the wonders of nature, and the generosity of God, it means you'll never be coming back.
engineer: They say that the other world is more beautiful.
doctor: But who has come back from there to tell us if its beautiful or not? "They tell me she is as beautiful as a houri from heaven! Yet I say that the juice of the vine is better. Prefer the present to those fine promises. Even a drum sounds melodious from afar." Prefer the present.
Those final lines are from classical Persian poetry.. Omar Khayyam, the great poet of disillusion. These sections of the work of Kiarostami often seem to carry the meaning of the film; a similar scene comes near the end of Taste of Cherry. You can hardly call it a moral.. it is too ethereal for that. It is a sense of life that seems aimed at the petty modern world of the engineer, who with his camera could easily be a stand-in for the director himself.
Shortly after this scene the engineer picks up and leave, even though the death of the old woman has finally come. Whatever he has been waiting for is now here. But oddly he hastens to leave. He snaps a few photos.. where perhaps he wanted to document the whole ceremony.. and takes off.
The village should be left alone, evidently. It is a city that we learn was built and named by the "ancients". The modern world could only make such a place go backwards. This is a strikingly romantic view of the village.. although it conveys that view without the usual Hollywood trappings.
Two Notes on Globalization
November 1, 2007
[photo used under Creative Commons license,
by Flickr user Pete the Painter]
1. Architecture in Dubai
I did not know that the tallest building in the world is now under construction in Dubai. Philip Kennicott had an insightful article on Dubai in the Washington Post a week ago. Besides informing me about the Burj Dubai, it is a smart discussion of the creation of an "iconic" architectural landscape.
Imagine creating a world out of virtually nothing.. making someplace out of noplace. There are a limited number of strategies for an architect in such a situation. Las Vegas tries to create a hundred micro-environments that transport the visitor to different places. Casinos borrow from ancient Egypt, Rome, Venice, New York.. or any number of others. This is the creation of a new place by means of borrowing the elements of some tried and true place.
Dubai does not appear to go in for this kind of mimicry.. so how does it make itself into something fantastic? It seeks the stupendous.. that immediately noticeable and uncopyable look. This is what Kennicott terms the "iconic". The Burj al-Arab, the five star+ hotel that costs $5,000 per night and sits alone away from the shore, is an example of the iconic structures that Dubai is seeking to build. Speaking of this and the Emirates Towers, Kennicott notes: "They are found on postcards and are reproduced as key chains. Elegant stencils of their shapes appear in the elevators of the government building where one goes for permits.."
I was also interested to learn that Frank Gehry has designed a building for Dubai.. and that makes perfect sense! Gehry is the poster-architect for the "one of a kind wonder structure" that will create a place out of noplace. In a world divested of traditional forms and local stories, one important route to the creation of place will be through Gehry-like buildings. We should be suspicious of places created by wonder buildings. We should insist on a form of built community that reaches beyond the sterile confabulations of the international business elite.
[photo used under Creative Commons license,
by Flickr user Kalavinka]
2. Cacao Beans in South America
The New Yorker has the habit of running articles on the origin of various foods. The October 29, 2007 edition has an article on Chocolate and its production from cacao beans ("Extreme Chocolate" by Bill Buford, not available online). The article mentions that the first chocolate shop opened in London in 1657.. but the development of chocolate that resembles what we mostly consume (milk chocolate or fancy chocolates) would take considerably longer. The chocolate innovators have names that sound familiar: the Cadbury Brothers, Henri Nestlé, and Milton Hershey.
At one point in the article, as Buford recounts the history of chocolate, he mentions as a valuable source the book True History of Chocolate by Michael Coe. And I thought to myself: what a typical modern book. It seems as if all the time someone is writing a history of salt or coffee or some other commodity that we take for granted. Here are a few examples of the genre that I found quickly on Amazon:
Spice: The History of a Temptation
The Potato: How the humble Spud Rescued the World
Salt: A World History
Cod: A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World
The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unlocking the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean
Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors
These works focused on a single food could be taken as a non-fiction genre that is indicative of our globalized culture.
Why would someone not have written a book on the true history of chocolate in the 18th or 19th century? Getting at the history of chocolate meant travel to the rainforests of Brazil and other difficult to reach spots in South America, and if someone in the 19th century had made that journey the traveler would be likely to write up such experiences as a travel narrative rather than as a narrowly focused book on a single food. Our ability to travel most anywhere has made big travel narratives less interesting.. and this in turn has pushed forward works of non-fiction that concentrate on something like chocolate.
