Ways of Thinking: Death and Life in Ancient Egypt (2)
January 31, 2008
In talking about cultures one of the hardest things to realize is that people do not think like us. It is comforting to take refuge in the idea that people everywhere and at all times looked out upon the world just like us.. but this falls apart on actual examination of texts. People value surprising things and associate ideas in strange combinations. The fun of careful reading is in teasing out these differences.
Jan Assman in his chapter on "Death as Dismemberment" tries to get at something fundamental in the way ancient Egyptians thought. He begins with a summary of the theory of Emma Brunner-Traut, who
postulates a psychological, cognitive basis for certain especially striking peculiarities of Egyptian art, which she sets in parallelism with other phenomena in Egyptian culture... According to her theory, Egyptians cast a dissecting glance at the world, one that perceived only individual details and was incapable of seeing larger unities. In other words, they did not see the forest for the trees. [26]
This references a basic mode of processing the world. If anything, our own contemporary culture is marked by an over-willingness to group details into larger unities.. which we gleefully and unconsciously do on an hourly and even secondly basis. But what if ideas just kind of came and stayed and never joined a larger conceptual container? That would change dramatically the ways we express ourselves.
Assman proposes another way to think about this difference in mental processing. He notes that disintegration into parts was at the heart of Egyptian ideas of bodily death, drawing on texts as old as the Pyramid Texts. Social decay was also signified by disintegration of the whole into smaller parts. "Death was the principle of dismembering, dissolving, isolating disintegration, while life was the principle of integrating animation, which conferred unity and wholeness" (31). Assman accepts the notion that there is a non-organic principle at work in the Egyptian frame of mind.. but also finds a principle of binding together and salvation:
This preoccupation with the principle of integration is what I wish to call the embalming glance. For in Egyptian thought, that which integrated was also that which preserved, that which conferred continued existence. [31]
Assman subtly changes the issue from an analysis of how a people think to an analysis of the metaphoric relationships that govern their views of death. Parts=death; whole= salvation; embalming=art of integration. These metaphors are conditioned on culture and I find it helpful to think of varying metaphors rather than varying mental systems.. or software differences and not hardware differences. The job of the reader is to discover the associations that formed the mental chains of connection.
Sentimental and Specific: An Exhibit by John Shimon and Julie Lindemann
January 29, 2008
The Wriston Art Center at Lawrence University is currently hosting the exhibition "Sentimental and Specific" by John Shimon and Julie Lindemann, two long time artistic collaborators. The exhibit features large color prints of Wisconsinites in their places of work.. and the sheer size of these prints reminded me of how small my computer screen really is. No matter how much I enjoy Flickr or other means of viewing photos online, it is no comparison to seeing a large beautifully detailed print.
Most of the prints resemble in tone the one shown above (taken from the promotional material for the exhibition). We find a man standing proudly by his bottling machine—if you look carefully you can see the tops of orange pop bottles. The photo is not critical in intent. The subject is not undercut by any details that mean something to us but of which he is unaware. It is a kind portrait that allows one person's world to stand crisply before the viewer. The formal details from the red legs of the table to the intricacies of the machine impress, but do not overwhelm the man in the center. The photo is carried by his facial expression and the easy arm rest over his bottling machine.
With no overt attempt to "get to the bottom" of a character like this man.. and with the acceptance of his own view of himself and his work.. we are in a sentimental world. Maybe because we all hold sentimental views of ourselves? The mass of details in the photo convey something of a counterpoise to this acceptance of the sentimental.. and thus the "specific" part of the title. My attention was often caught by these unexpected details of a Wisconsin setting: from a tanning salon to the exteriors of large family-run farms.
Shimon and Lindemann effectively use a series of large prints linked together into a panorama. Since each photo is taken successively it is possible to have subjects move around in the various photos.. creating the appearance of movement within a single landscape. This technique is most strikingly used in the work "Brad and Amber in their Memphis Clothes", featuring the couple dressed snazzily and looking serious in the middle print.. but then engaged in more everyday and playful activities just to the side. The work is enhanced by the presence of a second image of Amber nearby.. this time standing in work clothes at a Papa John's pizza place!
I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition.. and I keep trying to figure out why. The images are not emotional investigations, nor are they really documentary in nature. What they show is an unfailing sense of admiration for rural and small town characters. No bank managers or university professors are mixed into the group. We come away from these prints with a stronger appreciation for the way everyday people create their worlds and at the same time are fitted into various worlds.
Conditions for Bush's Greatness
January 29, 2008
Somehow the claim continues to be made that George W. Bush will be seen as a good president as time passes and people see his work in more perspective. So what are the types of things that will need to happen in the future to shore up the reputation of our current president?
1. Global warming turns out to be false and instead of investing resources and personal energy into a false crisis, Bush held steady with pro-industry policies.
2. Peak oil is a mirage and the earth contains an unlimited amount of energy. We can breathe a sigh of relief that we did not worry about long term energy issues or our lifestyle choices.
3. The world clamors for a unipolar world with the US at its lead instead of a multi-polar world.. as seemed to be developing in the Bush years.
4. It turns out that there was far more organization in international terrorism than appeared to be the case at the end of the Bush presidency. Without Bush's policies of torture it is likely the terrorists would have acquired WMDs.
5. Shortly after Bush leaves office Iraq becomes a functioning secular democracy (note: not simply a functioning state).
6. Palestinians admit that Bush was always right and they were wrong.
7. The redistribution of wealth to a very small number of extraordinarily rich people proves to be short lived.
8. New Orleans rebounds on its own and becomes vibrant multi-cultural city. African Americans see that their misgivings were misplaced.
Obviously I think that all of these conditions are long shots. If he is wrong on a fair number of these then his presidency will be judged pretty badly.. so it seems to me.
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Islamic Cities/Muslim Cities
January 27, 2008
It has been interesting this term to see what kind of pedagogical mileage I can get out of maps and overhead images from Google Earth. Above is an image from the outskirts of Cairo, a typical example of the spread of unregulated housing onto agricultural lands. Across the bottom right a multi-lane freeway cuts across the image. Running vertically through the image is a canal.
In all likelihood 100% of the people who live in this area are Muslims. So can we call this an example of an Islamic city? Superficially the city looks something like traditional Cairo with its narrow streets and lack of a strong grid system or radiating streets. But more important is what is lacking. In looking at similar photos of traditional Cairo one notices lots of white squares marking important mosques. Traditional Cairo was spatially organized by these mosques, but in the above photo there is no hint of any mosques. There will be mosques here, of course, but they are present in makeshift storefronts and without any monumental presence. Traditional Cairo had space devoted to the ruling class (at the citadel for centuries).. and also there were elite estates and homes that stood out from less well to do homes. In this city there is simply an undifferentiated mass of apartment buildings.. with no hints of civic pride or control.
So we could conclude that although we see a Muslim city in the picture, it can hardly be thought of as an "Islamic city." By that latter term we should mean a city that has developed organically from traditional Islamic values and social practices. This edge city is the product of modern economic forces that long ago overwhelmed the city building that we find in traditional Cairo. This is not to say that there will not be examples of the longue durée of Islamic patterns.. but those details will now be in the margins.
It is striking that in modern Islam various popular groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Hezbollah have incorporated social concerns into their religious message. The above image partly explains the success of these groups: they are confronting a social situation that traditional Islam did not encounter. The pared-down message of Islamic fundamentalism also finds a ready home in places that have little in the way of shrines or sacred structures. Perhaps in this case it is the place that gives rise to the beliefs.
ABC Africa by Kiarostami
January 25, 2008
The documentary often implies a high level of authority. Directors immerse themselves in a topic and interview experts in order to wrap themselves within an unassailable point of view. Abbas Kiarostami makes no attempt to build himself up as an expert in ABC Africa. He is unabashedly a newcomer to Africa and during his ten days in Uganda he simply keeps his eyes open (and camera recording). It is a risky creative path for a documentary maker.. as it would be easy to make cultural errors that could discredit his work. But by means of transparency in the creative process Kiarostami turns this documentary into a meditation on his ability to see and know another culture.
Let me unpack that a little bit. It is absurd to think that with a ten day trip to a foreign country a person gains the insight to comment intelligently. Instead of faking it and trying to build in an external authority, Kiarostami is forthright about his lack of full knowledge. In several scenes we view Kiarostami (and his collaborator) in the act of filming the people of Africa. The kids preen themselves for the camera and adults go on with their work.
It is obvious from these scenes that Kiarostami is a visitor.. that he is not seeing anything like the "real" Africa.. only a single surface.. one that surely breaks down as soon as the visitors are gone. This transparency shifts our focus from interest in learning about the way Africa "really is" to learning about how difficult it is to see Africa as a visitor.
Kiarostami turns out to be a great model for me in my Wisconsin Views project. There is one sequence where he simply walks from small store to small store, peering inside. It is a potent reminder of the power of simply documenting life. Looking into a hair salon his camera scans the posters on the wall:
A scene like this is filled with cultural information.. the kinds of daily things that largely escape filmmakers who take up the really "big" ideas.
Any film that records the surface of Africa will be in danger of sentimentalism. Scenes of orphans dancing and running around the camera make it possible for a viewer to get the impression that "despite problems" Africa is doing fine. Kiarostami manages to undermine this in two ways. First he has a frankness about the place of death.
In the above scene is a nurse placing a tiny corpse into a makeshift cardboard coffin. We have just seen the nurse smiling and laughing.. and then we follow her into this scene of death. From the context it is clear how little this death means.. how ordinary it is. I don't believe an American film could let death feel so meaningless.
Kiarostami's film technique itself is a second force undermining sentimentality. Numerous times we note the camera shifting to details of life or clothing that are not complimentary and that give hints of what life is like when the camera is gone. This is subtle and I would need some examples to fully make my point.. but truth in filmmaking comes about by means of a truthful gaze. The camera records those minute impulses to see beyond the surface.
Near the middle of ABC Africa is a strange scene in which the small group of Iranians who are part of this project talk amongst themselves at a hotel late at night. The electricity cuts off and they make their way to their rooms. The camera is still recording, but all we see for a few minutes is a black screen.. except for subtitles:
-How can they live their lives in this darkness?
-Where we were 200 kilometers back, there was no electricity. Here it is cut off at midnight.
-Imagine that grandmother living with 35 or 45 kids in a single room.
-
The sun is gone, life is gone. With no candles, no lights, no television, and no internet.
-I can't think of anywhere in this world where the sun could be more precious and welcome.
-They live half their lives within these dark walls, like blind people. We can't even handle 5 minutes of it.
-Because it is 5 minutes. If it was 5 or 50 years, we'd get used to it.
This conversation could bear several paragraphs of interpretation. To begin with I was struck by the way Kiarostami's theme of the preciousness of small natural things (think Taste of Cherry) gets an unexpected mention: within this darkness the experience of the sun would be more powerful than in another well-lit country.
Taking place as it does in the dark, with a dark screen, Kiarostami manages to give the viewer a sense of darkness. We literally are subjected to 5 minutes of darkness as we watch the film.. thus finding ourselves within the conversation.. and having a chance to understand something more about life in Africa. The initial impulse in the conversation is for the participants to distance themselves from Africans: imagine what it would be like to live like this! But at the end a voice asserts that actually we could live like this: we could be Africans if our context was different; we'd get used to it.
Keeping Cairo Traditional
January 22, 2008
One question that leaves me grasping for an answer is whether there were ever any options for allowing traditional cultures to survive their contact with the modern world? I hardly imagine that cultures could stay isolated indefinitely from the wealth-creating engine of Western industrialism.. nor do I imagine that somehow dramatic cultural contacts could be avoided. But could a traditional society somehow survive?
Today in my Cairo class we began to look at the changes that came to Cairo in the 19th century and then accelerated in the 20th century. The traditional Islamic city was transformed, both in terms of landscape and social practices. To me that is a sad sight: the traditional Islamic city is quite appealing, at least as an intricate social system. It was not perfect.. I don't mean to imply that.. but it worked on its own terms and an argument could be made that it was a sustainable way of life. But the city was also ill-suited for modern growth and international commercial demands.. and so it could not last.
Could it have happened that this Islamic system stayed intact into the modern period? Somehow could the double colonial city have been averted and Cairo stayed its traditional self? The sad answer is that to remain as it was would have required the acceptance of infant mortality and death rates that cannot now be accepted. It also would mean the refusal of much of modern technology, because the second the goods of the modern world are accepted there is a need for a high rate of economic growth.. and that growth in turn demands rationalization of the city. For too many people health advances and modern conveniences are thought of as a positive good.. and so there would be no chance of keeping Cairo free and clear of the modern world.
Much the same can be said about any culture. There was no possible traditional response to the modern world. Nobody could remain themselves. The healthy response was to take elements of the modern industrial system and to selectively merge them with traditional values. But that assumes a level of consciousness that is impossible. The modern world changes the way people understand and perceive their world.. and that leads to new ways of living and constructing the world.. and before one knows it the mental habits that support a traditional social system are gone. We can feel sadness at this, but I see no way of avoiding it.
Empty Allusions: A Case from Brazil
January 21, 2008
Toward the end of Brazil (1985/1999) by Terry Gilliam there is a battle scene, with harsh looking storm troopers from the Ministry of Information Retrieval trying to stop the exit of a band of rebels. In the midst of this battle a small duct-machine is sent cascading over a staircase. The scene is quite brief but reminiscent of a famous scene in Battleship Potemkin in which a baby carriage rolls precariously down a large bank of stairs.
In his audio commentary to the scene from Brazil Gilliam calls this an homage to Battleship Potemkin.. and then dismisses its significance: "I'm sure there are many film societies that read into that a lot, but it's really me just fighting boredom." So this direct allusion to another film is just for fun. Viewers recognize it, and perhaps derive some pleasure from that recognition, but the allusion provides no direction for understanding either the scene or the film as a whole. We could label it an empty allusion.
I don't mean to come down on the use of an empty allusion. It is worth noting the existence of these authorial motions. Wherever we find a sophisticated audience with a deep knowledge of a particular genre, we are sure to see the use of allusions to past canonical works. These allusions will vary in purpose and use. On the one side we can place allusions that go far in placing the film and guiding the viewer to a specific reading of the work. The first thing that pops into my head is the use of Fellini's 8 1/2 in Stardust Memories by Woody Allen. To understand the latter film it is almost essential to know the former. On the other side we can place allusions such as this one in Brazil. It has no directive purpose but is there only to give a moment of pleasure to the viewer.
I have a tendency to like artists that are very careful with their use of allusions. One of my main issues with Brazil is the way it oversignifies and leaves the viewer with the impression that there are a lot of "deep" connections being made.. when really we are talking about connections made on the fly. As I was just re-watching the commentary and searching for what Gilliam had to say about the Battleship Potemkin scene, I came across his explanation of the scene in which Sam Lowery attends his mother's funeral and sees a vision of her entertaining some younger men. Lowery calls to his mother and when she turns around it is Jill, the woman he loves. Gilliam immediately laughs away the Freudian connections and tries to provide a more ordinary way of understanding the scene. But by playing around with strong Freudian overtones he is tossing out to viewers what could be a bewildering interpretive framework. In my estimation that cavalier use of allusion muddies his work.
Packers on the Internet
January 20, 2008
Since the home team was playing today for the chance to go to the Super Bowl, I thought I should mention it on the blog. Emily said today that she did not realize I was such a football fan, to which I replied that checking the score online during the game is not likely to make me a real fan in the eyes of most people around here.
We have no television, so even if I had wanted to watch the game I could not have done so. For most things in life the Internet does just fine. In watching election results, for example, it works perfectly. The vote numbers come up and I can keep track of various speculations about exit polls. But football does not seem to have any kind of live Internet presence (outside of live blogs from a news service like the New York Times). It is a sport that is overwhelmingly television oriented.
The argument has been made that football is a uniquely television oriented sport. Football's explosive growth into the biggest American sport and the crowning of the Super Bowl as the most watched game in the country has coincided with the maturation of television as a medium. In fact, when historians take a long view of the development of sports in America it may very well be that the medium of television will take its place as the catalyst for the creation of football as we know it. It also strikes me that the fate of football is unusually hinged on that of television.
Baseball works nicely on the radio. "Line drive to right field" or "ground ball to the shortstop" are generic descriptions that can be easily filled in by the imagination. Line drives and ground balls tend to look pretty similar. Football trades on the unique and spectacular. It is a game that feeds on visual images of "The Catch" and other canonical visual moments. Sure someone might listen to the game on the radio out of necessity, but the true experience is visual in a way that baseball has never been.
The New York Times had an article today on "Ice Bowl II".. looking back to the 1967 game against the Dallas Cowboys.
"Frozen tundra" became part of the sporting lexicon, and images of steam rising from the heads of players were burned into the collective memory.
Then even more interesting the article catches a player thinking about those canonical images:
"This is one of those games that you usually watch on TV when you're at home, and you're like, 'Man, I wish I was at that game,'" Giants defensive end Michael Strahan said. "'I know it's cold, but I wish I were out there.' Now we have the opportunity to be out there."
Note that this is an entirely television created phenomenon. The classic Ice Bowl, along with other Green Bay games, is about a look: visible breath and snow. And then modern players get to imagine themselves in that same classic situation.. and dream of seeing themselves in those classic reels that get replayed in slow motion in pregame shows and fan videos. That is the football version of immortality.
Death Is the Mother of Culture (pt. 1)
January 19, 2008
On occasion we find a book that is worth a series of posts. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt by Jan Assman is one such book, due to its implications for the study of culture in general. The book sets death as the primary entrance to a culture: "death is the origin and the center of culture" [1]. That might get no argument when it comes to studying ancient Egyptian religion, profuse with mortuary texts and ruins, but Assman wants to set this as a central concern in the study of all cultures: "I thus pose... the question of whether and in what sense death and the way a culture articulates it, treats it, and copes with it might perhaps not constitute the center of the consciousness of that culture..." [2]. In other words death will be at the center of every culture and the individual elements of a culture can to some degree be understood through it.
Assman distinguishes between two visions of the relationship between death and culture. The first is the notion that death must be forgotten in order to live.. and culture therefore as a tool whereby human beings invent themselves. The second recognizes the imposing reality of death and uses culture as a structure built to protect itself from the bleak knowledge of what is to come. Culture (and religion) is therefore an immense and energy-consuming path to security from an excess of knowledge. The multiplicity of cultural paths and practices can therefore be analyzed from the standpoint of death. This is the point that Assman would like to prove as he moves through ancient Egyptian responses to death.
I am not sure death deserves this much credit for culture creation. It makes culture into a more heady and conscious matter than I think it deserves. Clifford Geertz writing on the cockfight in Bali calls attention to the way that event connects to the deepest cultural values of the Balinese.. and I do not see why it would be important to introduce death into a matter that seems to embody social hierarchy and status. As humans we are alive and form patterns of meaning.. and yes, some of that meaning will help individuals overcome the paralyzing fear of death.. but culture works irrespective of death (thus we even see evidence of a kind of proto-culture among animals that have no consciousness of death).
None of this takes away from Assman's success at demonstrating how death was a central notion that drove Egyptian culture. He is successful as no one else in pointing out how Egyptian wisdom literature and cultural values are tied organically to the ideas expressed in mortuary texts and rituals. I would be inclined to say that different cultures find different centers of gravity.. leading values and metaphors. Egypt happens to have taken up the notion of death with a steady determination. I have no problem with the idea that the constellation of ideas revolving around death could be insightful with respect to ancient Egyptian culture. I am just not sure if that can be applied to all cultures.
Finding Nemo Everywhere
January 17, 2008
So I am getting my mind around the fact that I will be watching kids movies a lot more in the future. A couple of weeks back I watched Finding Nemo.. which everyone probably remembers as the cute Disney/Pixar film in which a daddy clown fish goes looking for his son. This quest takes the daddy on an extended road trip that is driven forward by colorful encounters in the ocean world.
Watching Finding Nemo I began to imagine its composition. I am suspicious about how almost everything I know about the ocean found a place in the storyline. If I were sitting around trying to think of what fun events could happen to a fish in the ocean, I might take out a pad of paper and start to brainstorm: the colorful fish that swim around a reef, sharks, shipwrecks, jellyfish, schools of fish, turtles, sea currents, those strange fish that live deep deep in the ocean. Once these events/settings were sketched, it would be relatively easy to string them together into an episodic story.
The episodic story (as are many travel narratives) lends itself to this approach. Maybe I am writing a story about a woman searching for someone in Los Angeles. I could play it straight and emphasize a linear plot.. in which case the settings would be functional. Or I might opt for an episodic story that forms around several iconic sites in Los Angeles. If I were to take this latter option, I might well sit around and plot out the sites that would be of most interest. Perhaps I even felt that my real goal was not to tell a straight story, but to give viewers a tour of the best sites in Los Angeles. In that case I would really focus on getting the sites right.
I think this manner of composition could help make sense of a novel like The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. Reading this work I was struck by how all kinds of antiquarian landscape forms found their way into the storyline. I don't think that kind of effect is just luck. It makes sense to talk about a method of composition and story imagining that allows for the forefronting of a group of scene types. Imagine Cooper asking himself: "What are the elements in this American landscape that people are most curious about?" The result turns out to be an episodic story that allows each one to receive an explanation. A story thus becomes an alternative way of writing about a place.
One Year Old!
January 15, 2008
One year ago little Aurora was born. Emily and I agree that she is the perfect little girl. Maybe all parents say that, but temperamentally she is just an angel. The chance to watch her grow and change over this year will rank as one of my life's true blessings. She started out at just 6.1 pounds! Now she is somewhere in the twenties (we will find out where in the twenties at her one year checkup tomorrow). She is walking and has a wide range of words that she can understand..
But forget all those milestones. I want to write about the personality that we are seeing take shape. What are her characteristics?
1. attention to detail. She can sit around for a long time messing with the small parts of a toy. She will sit with a big person's book and work to turn the pages. If there is a button to be pushed she will find it. Technically I think I would summarize this as a high level of interest in fine motor skills coupled with an amazing patience. She rarely or never gets flustered, but will turn a toy over and over.. pushing here and there, turning this nob and then that one.
2. caution. She is an exploratory little girl, but she does not go charging over boundaries very easily. We have a pillow marking the end of her play room and she will crawl up to the pillow, but not cross the line. Instead she stops and looks back for us. Her walking has been right on time, but she is no daredevil and feels no apparent need to rush around. We have had remarkably few hard falls.
3. sense of fun. Emily likes to say that Aurora loves to make us laugh.. and that is true. She likes people chasing her and playing peek-a-boo. She also likes funny faces. It seems as if once a day she has a good laugh session. Remarkably she also likes to come up with games. She will even do fake-outs. When she realized that if she put a piece of lint in her mouth mommy came to take it away, she right away began to pretend to put lint in her mouth. She has a number of fake-outs: the fake sleep when trying to get away, the fake offer of food.. and others.
4. love of sleep and food. In the former she is clearly her daddy's girl. She goes out quickly and sleeps deeply. I by habit whisper when she is asleep but Emily points out how this is unnecessary with our girl. In the latter she is her mommy's girl, loving every vegetable she has ever laid eyes on (even cauliflower!). When I assume she wants blueberry baby food little Aurora reaches for the broccoli.
5. friendly. There have been some minor incidents of stranger anxiety, but mostly she responds positively to people.. even to lots of people. She is able to win people over with a smile. When someone new visits our home she will approach and act in a friendly manner.. going so far as to lay her head on the visitor's lap.
6. musical. I don't have any amazing stories about how she can sing or pluck a tune on a piano. But from her earliest days she could be soothed by listening to music and still when I know she needs to take a nap I will put on music and walk around with her. Her musical diet has consisted of the Beach Boys and Raffi.. although Mommy keeps Tori Amos going on the stereo as well.
7. nostalgic. This is a debatable trait.. because it might just be a stage that every baby goes through. But Aurora loves to see pictures and videos of herself. Part of why I am writing this post is so that someday she will be able to look back and see what she was like as a little girl. I have this feeling that she will always want to hear about what funny things she did.
We love you Aurora and think we have been blessed to have you in our family!
What's Going On, Marvin Gaye
January 12, 2008
The main reason for listening to Marvin Gaye is pretty easy to locate: that smooth voice. It really doesn't matter too much what he is singing.. it just feels right. But in the 70s Gaye becomes more than a voice. He releases a string of albums that are some of the great accomplishments of the rock period. These albums combine the musical strength of Motown with the genre experimentation that was taking place elsewhere in popular music. What's Going On came out in 1971 and its title song deserves analysis.
First I should mention how exciting it is to begin to discover musical crossover in this era. On Aretha Franklin's album Live at Filmore West she performs "Love the One You're With" and "Eleanor Rigby." Both songs receive her musical imprimatur, but they point to an appreciation of the broad pop music world.. before the individual components get sealed off from one another. Marvin Gaye does not cover any pop songs, but he casts a sympathetic eye at the world around him and asks: "Who are they to judge us, just because our hair is long?" The long hairs must be the anti-war protesters.. the counter-culture.. and Marvin Gaye takes them all in with that amazingly inclusive "us" and "our."
That is the kind of spirit that myself and others hear in the campaign of Barack Obama.. and which we want badly to believe in. Obama's campaign is often referred to as "post-racial" in the sense that he refuses to divide the world in the same tired ways.. but I think by listening to a few Black popular musicians some of that same spirit is present. In the spirit of Borges, maybe we could call artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder Obamaesque.
Let's take a look at "What's Going On":
Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today - Ya
Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
Most notable about these two opening stanzas are the references to family members: mother, brother, father. Mothers stand in for the sorrow of loss. Brothers are those who are dying (in the Vietnam War). Fathers are the figure to whom one can appeal not to escalate the war. The travails of a nation at war are mapped onto the family. This is a rhetorical coup because Gaye does not have to address an other. The authority figures who might "escalate" the war are not pictured as an enemy, but as a family member to be pleaded with.
Love is the answer for this inter-familial tension. That claim is supported by a citation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that "war is not the answer." The call for love is a bromide, but one that harkens back strongly to the counter-cultural ethic as enunciated by the Beatles in "All You Need Is Love." Strangely then, the messages of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Beatles are combined.. and applied within a family dialogue that allows for no bad guys to appear.
The next stanza in this musically complex piece is ushered in with a striking shift in rhythm:
Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on
In a more direct way than previously we are present in the midst of the social tension of the late 60s and early 70s. You can see in your mind's eye the lines of anti-riot police officers and the stormy youthful protesters. Gaye pleads: "Don't punish me with brutality".. thereby aligning his voice squarely with the protesters. He further asks: "Talk to me, so you can see/ What's going on.." Again he is eminently reasonable: don't beat me up, talk to me and hear me out. It is a "come let us reason together" moment, the aim of which is to figure out "what's going on".. i.e. what's really going on, not what you have been told is going on. The song title thus contains something of an epistemological claim: how can we know something genuine about the world? By listening to people who have experienced the world.
Next comes a musical interlude with some elusive words:
In the mean time
Right on, baby
Right on
Right on
The original single version of the song is different than the version that appeared on the album.. and I have to assume that these lines are unique to the album since they point forward to the song "Right On." This is an important reference since that song goes some way toward explaining how Gaye could go from a socially conscious album like What's Going On to a self-gazing album like Let's Get It On. The key is to understand the elastic nature of love, which can work on a lot of levels, from social ills to personal sexual enjoyment. In "Right On" after praising those who understand that it is good to care for society's ills, Gaye breaks off and praises a more hedonistic lifestyle:
Those of us who live a life
Hey, hey, hey enjoying ourselves
For those of us who got drowned
In the sea of happiness
For the soul that takes pride in his God
And himself and everything else
Love
That's all it is
We need love
That's all it is
Oh, oh
Love, love
Love's the thing
That is exactly the message of "What's Going On" but now the notion of love has lost any boundary. "What's Going On" used family love as a path by which we could escape national hatreds, "Right On" allows love to be everything to everyone. I love the album Let's Get It On, but it is hard not to miss the moral authority of its predecessor.
Sucked into Obedience to Authority
January 10, 2008
With Freshman Studies we are back to Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority. My only misgiving about the book is its lack of bookiness. On reading it I am never quite sure what its existence as a book adds to my experience. The experiment is ingenious.. but it can be just as well explained in a lecture or an article. And once understood, is there anything more? Why should I read a book?
Obedience to Authority is extremely modest. At one point while noting a person's agonized response to the experiment, Milgram breaks in and admits that this tension is hard to capture in writing. It is no wonder, then, that the video clips of these experiments are probably more widely known than the book itself. But while something of the basic situation and the pull of authority can be understood through a video or lecture, the genius of the book is its ability to pull in the reader.. to slowly let the reader see him/herself in the responses of the teachers.
I have yet to have a student who really fights the idea that he or she would follow the trend and take the shocks to the highest point. Not too many books get people to admit that in the right circumstance they would kill someone.. but this one does. As I read the book this time it seemed to me that all the introductory material—the reproduction of the announcement, the photo of the testing machine, the photo of the nice man who would supposedly get the shocks—were parts of the rhetoric of the book. Likewise the pages that contained tables with surveys of expectations and then of actual results. By the time one is done with this material the reader has a sense that it could have been him/herself that answered the original announcement.. and that although most people think they would never shock someone else to the maximum level, actually most people do.. ergo: the reader would also take the shocks to the highest level.
Convincing people of their possible guilt is no small matter.. and in this case it is not the strength of the prose that does it. The reader is never won over by intensity of language or perorations. The trick is in the plainness of the text and its layering of examples and numeric charts. These turn out to be rhetorical moves that should not be underestimated.
A Season in Mecca
January 8, 2008
A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi is easily the best modern account of the hajj. A Moroccan professor of anthropology at Princeton University travels to Mecca and takes meticulous notes as to what he sees and feels during the pilgrimage season. Yet the book is much more than a Richard Burton-like outsider account of Mecca and Medina. Hammoudi is himself a Muslim, although distanced from his faith, and the narrative of hajj events is enlivened by musing on the nature of his faith and the meaning of the rituals in which he participates.
Hammoudi gives a here-and-now narrative of events.. which is not to say that he reports everything that happens. His strong narrative control steers our attention to social and concrete details. Lacking is a rich sense of how he is following in the footsteps of previous travelers. There are no references to Ibn Jubayr.. few references to the theological discussions that give the hajj historical resonance. That layering of experience always interests me, and Hammoudi tries hard to avoid that.
The chapter "Dead Ends" is an eloquent rage against the Wahhabis and their abstract, placeless religion. Hammoudi looks around Medina and cannot locate anything like an old city:
Medina's beating heart had two chambers: the mosque and the marketplace. Some of the merchandise spoke the language of the Qur'an—books, prayer rugs, verses printed in gold letters under glass—but the goods mostly proliferated in English, French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese. [100]
In addition to being confronted with this cross-section of globalization, Hammoudi notes the wanton destruction of anything that resembles a historic city. In the pursuit of God's ultimate oneness all historical multiplicity can be sacrificed. Ground that could at one time be called sacred is now barren of meaning.
Frustrated with this ahistorical city Hammoudi heads to the date market and enjoys the natural sweetness of this traditional Medinan crop. The dates are the one thing that allows him to make a connection with the Medina of his imagination:
Medina, my home. Not the Athens of Pericles, not the Jerusalem of the Temple of of Constantine, not the Rome of plodding divinities and of Saint Peter, not the Paris of the Concorde's sacred square, where the sacrificed king was buried beneath an obelisk (in a grandiose ritual with revolutionary crowds gathered around the guillotine). None of these could displace Medina, my mythological home. It lived on in all of Islam's cities. it will find its way around the city that forbade me even from seeing the Prophet's tomb, that kept me from everything I wanted to see, touch, smell, everything that might have taken the prayer and the chanting of the Qur'an and connected them physically to the miracle of a tradition's birth. In the absence of streets, buildings, or sanctuaries, in the absence of old Yathrib [old name for Medina], only palm trees and dates led to this place. Palm trees and dates gave me what Islam's charismatic community had seen and eaten, which I, too, in turn could see and eat. [110]
What Hammoudi desired was to experience some physical relic that would lead him back to the historical place that gave birth to his tradition. But it was all gone.. the streets, the buildings, the sanctuaries. Only the dates remained.. and a small number of people—such as some Iranians he met—who labored to imagine Medina as the old Medina.. thereby escaping at least in their minds the ravages of the Wahhabi faith.
We also get a rare view of the counter globalization that currently is proceeding all over the world. As pilgrims arrive in Saudi Arabia they encounter a barrage of Wahhabi propaganda. They learn that their local traditions are wrong, that they have always worshipped in the wrong way, that they are too lenient when it comes to their women.
Altercations between partisans of Wahhabism and of the Malikites [followers of Morocco's main legal school] were intense. The Saudi propaganda services were winning over many Moroccans to rigorous gender segregation, to the condemnation of sacrifices and festivals at sanctuaries ("saint worship," they called these), and to the total rejection of ideas, institutions, and lifestyles current in the West. [200]
By right of their immense wealth and position as overseers of the pilgrimage the Wahhabis have spread their abstracting and bare belief system all over the world. This is a snapshot as to how the spread of these religious ideas occurs.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali vs. Islam
January 7, 2008
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a compelling figure.. as anyone who watches her in an interview will concede. The above interview with Glenn Beck is striking because she is much smarter than him.. and even as he works to corral her into his narrow view of events in the Middle East it is clear that she has a broader, more nuanced view. Although Hirsi Ali can express her opinions about Islam in philosophical language, her opinions should not go unexamined.
Take her recent review in the New York Times of The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the Enlightenment by Lee Harris. She summarizes the author's position as follows:
Harris does not regard Islamic fanaticism as a deviancy or a madness that affects a few Muslims and terrifies many. Instead he argues that fanaticism is the basic principle in Islam. "The Muslims are, from an early age, indoctrinated into a shaming code that demands a fanatical rejection of anything that threatens to subvert the supremacy of Islam," he writes. During the years that this shaming code is instilled into children, the collective is emphasized above the individual and his freedoms. A good Muslim must forsake all: his property, family, children, even life for the sake of Islam. Boys in particular are taught to be dominating and merciless, which has the affect of creating a society of holy warriors.
Anyone who has spent any time in the Middle East or who even knows any Muslims will laugh at this. I imagine the people I have met in Cairo.. could they be called "a society of holy warriors"? That's absurd. The Muslims I have met in the Middle East are largely consumed with the difficult prospect of making a living and raising their families.. like most people in the world. Sexism and machismo are no doubt alive and well in the Middle East, but that is a long way from a world in which boys are taught to become "dominating and merciless." There is no shortage of gentle and kind Muslims in the Middle East.
Hirsi Ali is here reporting the opinions of Harris, but she never challenges those statements. She disagrees with Harris concerning the notion that the Enlightenment notion of reason must be challenged if Western civilization is to survive. For Hirsi Ali reason is the power that allows individuals to change and move away from previously held religious views. She defends the Enlightenment from Romanticism. But all this philosophical talk is worthless in the context of a charge against Islamic society that is absurd. All the philosophical positioning in the world cannot cover the baselessness of the idea that Muslims create "a society of holy warriors."
This review highlights Hirsi Ali's willingness to be co-opted by the most alarmist of American writers about Islam. Her writing appears to exist above the fray and she makes careful distinctions, but she is subservient on the larger issue as to the nature of Islam. Her silence discredits her.
The Career of Yasujiro Ozu
January 5, 2008
The work of an artist fortunate enough to have his/her career spread over a few decades organizes itself into periods. The very best output of an artist will often fall within a single discrete period. The work that we read today by William Wordsworth falls within a remarkably short period of time (like 7 years) when considered from the perspective of a very long career as a poet. Plenty of writers and musicians follow a similar trajectory: great creative success that flattens out into uneven work as the years pass. A few artists manage a series of creative plateaus. Philip Roth would be remembered for Portnoy's Complaint, but his output in old age has pushed him to another level.
If we graph the creative peaks of Yasujiro Ozu we find an odd pattern. His well-known works fall overwhelmingly within the late period of his career. His surviving films range from 1929 to 1962, but the ones easily available in the US are from the period 1949-1961. Criterion recently crowned these years with their five DVD box of "Late Ozu". It would seem that the consensus is that his best work is his very late work.
I am curious why this is the case.. and it now looks as if I will be able to explore some earlier Ozu with a friend who owns many of the Hong Kong releases of his work. Our first foray was The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941). This was one of only two films made between 1937 and 1947.. on account of the disturbance of World War II. The film follows the treatment of an aging mother who, when her husband dies, is mistreated by her older children. The theme of parents getting passed off impatiently by children will reappear in Tokyo Story (1953). The Toda Family works this theme effectively, but having seen Tokyo Story I thought it came off as something of a rough draft. Ozu has his themes.. and anyone who appreciates Ozu will find much to admire in the film.. but no one is going to nominate this as one of the great films of all time—which is the case with Tokyo Story.
It would seem that there was a crystallization of sorts that came to Ozu in the late 1940s and then continued pretty much to the end of his career. Part of this might be a result of a maturing national cinema. Any person who works in a studio system is going to be at least partially buoyed or sunk by the system itself. But discounting the possible gains in craftsmanship, I wonder if we could also point to Ozu's best work as a product of post-war Japan. That is, the emotional cruxes of his work took on a new point in the midst of the immense social changes that occurred after the war. The hauntings of lost spouses and children add something ethereal to his later period. The war is always there, unspoken mostly, but the cause of losses that drive the characters.
This is obviously a hypothesis that I need to test.. and I may well decide that there is something in his earlier work that is powerful in its own right. But for now I am working with this war-change theory and thinking that the focus somehow came together for his work after the war. This would account for his oddly shaped career: relatively little of importance in his early years and then a spectacular flowering for the last third.
Congrats Obama!
January 3, 2008
We have approached the Iowa caucuses with a high level of curiosity. We follow the campaigns closely, but have not seen the candidates up close.. and there has been a certain sense of swaying back and forth here at Old Roads headquarters. So we were interested in the opinions of those who have been in the thick of it. How did the candidates strike the people who listened to them and saw them in person? It now appears that Sen. Barack Obama was quite impressive to the Iowans.. and brought a massive number of people out to the caucuses. I have not previously been convinced by the "believe in me and how I will change politics" line from Obama.. but tonight was certainly one giant step toward making me a believer that Obama can win next year.
There are lots of angles by which these primary battles can be viewed. But it occurs to me that the candidates are caught between the character of a rock star and a businessman. The rock star trades on authenticity and heart. We like our political winners to be able to play the saxophone or guitar.. or even to be able to shoot hoops in a competitive spirit. But rock stars and athletes go on benders and have to check in to rehab. Not so good.. although we recognize all that as a hazard of the rock star trade. So we also want the model businessman who shows up to work everyday and sets about methodically reaching goals. Mitt Romney and Sen. Hillary Clinton are businessmen in the steadiness they exude and their emphasis on hard work. But businessmen lack heart. Tonight was a major victory for the rock star component of the political equation..
Poor Mitt Romney! To the extent that he loses because he is a Mormon I feel bad for him. If he had everything he has now and attended a Baptist church, I am sure his path to the Republican nomination would be more comfortable. But isn't it impressive how a Mormon candidate for governor could have won in Massachusetts? The voters had to be mollified with respect to how he would act on certain issues (like abortion), but they apparently had no issue with his religious affiliation. But now look what happens when he tries to get the support of evangelical Christians.. they spurn him on account of his religious stances! (Something that evangelicals would find intolerable if it happened to them.)
Bloggers and Their Books
January 2, 2008
Popular bloggers and newspaper editorial writers share a special conundrum. Both are enjoyed for their ability to provide resonant commentary on current events, but both are also singularly handicapped when it comes to producing books of lasting interest.
I have been thinking about this because of the fact that one of my favorite bloggers, Matthew Yglesias, now and then mentions that he is working on a book. I enjoy his commentary on political events, but muster no excitement about a book from him. There are other blogger/editorialist failures: Andrew Sullivan's Conservative Soul and this new idiocy on liberal fascism by Jonah Goldberg.. and let's not even talk about Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich from the New York Times. It makes no difference what side of the political spectrum a writer is on.. I am claiming that there is something about the job that makes it hard to produce a truly useful book.
What is a useful book? One way to answer that would be to say that it introduces new data into public discussion.. and that in turn means actual research into sources and perspectives not readily available. Books like The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright or Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran may have been written by journalists.. but they are hardly opinion writers. Their accounts become a treasury of hard data for commentators, whose job is to digest all these data-filled works. Likewise academics by nature are adding new data to public discussion, taking up and exploring a subject that would otherwise receive little attention. But commentators are by nature synthesizers and repeaters.. which works fine in a column or a blog, but gets pretty thin when it comes to a book.
Anyways, why does everyone want to do what the other guy is doing? Singers want to act; novelists want to write poems; bloggers want to write books. The crossover into a new genre is always trouble.. and always underestimated.
