Culture in an Arabic Fable
March 30, 2008
The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn is a lengthy fable drawn from the encyclopedic work of the "Brethren of Purity".. an anonymous and secretive group of philosophers living in Basra, Iraq during the 10th century AD. The main effect of the fable has been to get me daydreaming about how cool it would be to teach a class on Islamic animal fables: Kalila and Dimna, parts of the 1001 Nights, the philosophical story of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, and the Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Attar.. and perhaps some examples from Jahiz? It would be a fascinating class because the fables are put to such different uses. We would see didactic tales aimed at the court, pure popular entertainment, and Sufi allegorizing of these tales into spiritual truths.
ama ba'd.. reading through this fable of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn I was surprised by the presence of something like a notion of culture in this 10th century work. The fable is pulling some philosophical weight as the 22nd chapter of the encyclopedia.. the one detailing "the generation of animals and their kinds." The fable spends a lot of time outlining the main branches of living creatures (who have rebelled against the mastery of human beings). After the animals receive an ordering, we also find human beings divided into groups. These groups are something like cultural divisions.. or so I will argue.
The King of the Jinn at one point surveys 70 representatives of humanity standing before him "in all of diverse forms, garbs, tongues, and colors..." (118). Not all these representatives get a chance to speak, only seven. Each is from a distinct and recognizable human group.. such as the man from India: "..a man with a lean brown body, a long beard, and a great mane of hair. He was wrapped in a red waist cloth tied, with a string, about the middle" (120).
The people of India, with their particular appearance, are settled onto a specific land: "the most plentiful of all in minerals, its trees the finest, its plants the most medicinal, its animals the most massive... Our trees are teak, our reeds are cane, our grass bamboo..." (121). We could say, then, that a group of people have a natural appearance and that they are connected to a particular place. Although it is not specified how, people are an outgrowth of their land and reflect its means or extremes.
Naturally accentuating the positive, this Indian man explains how God "vouchsafed the subtlest sciences of astrology, sorcery, wizardry, soothsaying, and divination." And a jinn breaks in to add some negative elements of the Indians, which include burning the bodies of the dead, worship of idols, fornication, and eating betel nuts. This is not a complete list, but its elements correspond to practices that we now think of as a result of cultural difference.
Later in the fable these differences are explained. For the Brethren of Purity it seems that all human religions are pursuing the same thing: slaying the self. This is accomplished in various group-specific ways, but all can make it back to God. "The laws of all religions were laid down for the sake of the liberation of the soul" (195). Human beings have a universal goal but diverse bodies and habits based on their difference experiences and environments.
This philosophical view, based on Platonist principles, would seem to take us some distance toward the recognition of individual cultures. It can be distinguished from religious views that see other groups as falling away by degrees from a single truth. In that case the true human path is defined as being the way of one group. The "correct" answer is surely to find a way to recognize universal human qualities at the same time as ingrained differences.
How to Experience the Jungle
March 28, 2008
Euclides da Cunha in his essays on the Amazon worries about the boredom of the scenery: "There is something unearthly about this amphibian nature, this mixture of land and water, that is hidden, completely at ground level, within its very grandeur" (32). A bit later he gives some actual advice about how to enjoy this scenery that could be seen as monotonous:
In the Amazon, what generally takes place is the following: the observer who wanders the basin in search of its varied perspectives, at the end of hundreds of miles, derives the impression that they have circled about in a closed loop filled with the same beaches and walls and islands, the same forests and stagnant sloughs called igapos stretching out to empty horizons farther than the eye can see. By contrast, the observer who stays at the margins is intermittently astonished by unexpected transformations. Scenes that are repetitive in the realm of space change over time. To the eyes of the person in motion nature is stable; to the eyes the sedentary person whose project it may be to subject that nature to the stability of human cultivation, it seems frighteningly changeable and fragile, and the appearance of that mutability occasionally overwhelms him. [13-14]
That paragraph should be savored. It occurs to me that what Euclides has to say about the experience of Amazon jungles applies to life more broadly. One temptation of life is to grab as much experience as possible.. maximizing the quantity of new things. We throw ourselves into the jungle and try to really "see it all." But on this approach experience becomes a blur; everything starts to look the same. The right way to experience the jungle is to stay in one place and watch the transformations that come with time.. the the light falls differently during the day, the way the patterns of leaves constantly shift. The implication here in this passage is that experience can be richest through patience and attentiveness to time.
This passage more generally reminds me of the work of William Bartram.. which although biologically and botanically correct in terms of its descriptions, often seems to be insinuating something about life. Birds become melancholics and mosquitoes lead to questions of life's value.
Identity of Assassins
March 26, 2008
A key point in the multi-volume A Mediterranean Society by Shelomo Goitein is that those who lived in the Mediterranean regions from 950-1250 AD shared a fluid sense of national/ political identity. Goitein calls the Mediterranean during this period a "free trade community".. pointing out how even during wartime merchants went back and forth between antagonistic states.
At the root of all this was the concept that law was personal and not territorial. An individual was judged according to the law of his religious community, or even religious "school" or sect, rather than that of the territory in which he happened to be... [vol. 1, pg. 66]
Today we are resolute subscribers to the territorial version of law, and carefully follow the rules of whichever nation we happen to be in. This makes sense for a time in which the nation state is a primary means of identification, but for a man living in Cairo around 1000 AD, our current way of thinking would make no sense. His primary identification would be to a specific religious community that came with a specific religious law.
The Assassins, a branch of the Isma'ilis, are an example of the odd effects that can be stirred up under a more fluid political environment. Marshall Hodgson in The Order of Assassins traces the world order that surrounded this extreme branch of Islam.
The foundation of this world order was a strong view of the unifying power of the Sunni shari'a:
Their stress on the shari'a suggested a religious and military egalitarianism in which each individual could rise as high as fortune and his merits permitted, without affecting the universal legal structure. Within the forms ideally held constant across all lines of race or tongue, every adventurer could look for a throne somewhere in the Islamic world at last... [39]
So, a far-spreading cultural agreement about the nature of Islam contributed to a situation in which multiple princes and warlords could set up small states. These states could grow powerful.. and they might even have the support of the population.. but the primary identification of that population would be with the international Islamic consensus, as embodied by shari'a. Rulers could come and go, but that would not mean a whole lot to the ordinary person.
Contrast this with the situation in the United States. We have a high level of ideological variation. There is no strong religious/ethical consensus in play, so far as I can see. However we expect the political frame for this ideological shifting to stay consistent. We would be shocked and terrified, I suspect, if our American political system was overturned. In other words we have flipped the structure of medieval Islam, where the religious/ethical consensus was stable while the political frame was constantly shifting.
The Assassins (known also as the Nizaris) come up with a novel approach to this political situation. They founded a state.. but it was a state that was only tenuously connected to actual territory. They held a string of fortresses in various places from Syria to Afghanistan.. and around these fortresses they had swaths of territory. But their power was diffuse since followers were spread throughout this region—even in majority Sunni populations.
As can be gathered from the brief description of the political context, there was not a single state to be fought against, but rather a Sunni consensus that had to be undermined. It would not be enough for Hasan-i Sabbah (founder of Assassins) to establish simply another petty state.. not when he espoused such a grand vision of history. I wonder if part of the appeal to assassination (their weapon of choice) came from this need to fight with a different kind of group identity.. i.e. a non-territorial state locked in conflict with a non-territorial consensus
Following the development of a small and extreme group can give a sense of the odd possibilities for group identity formation. In the case of the Assassins we seem to find a group that functions as a state without territory within a world that has no real state, only an ideology.
The Amazon of Euclides da Cunha
March 24, 2008
photo by Flick user matt.hintsa, used under Creative Commons License
I am a little late stumbling on this, but Oxford University Press has been steadily releasing volumes for their Library of Latin America series. These are English translations of works that are important for understanding the Latin American tradition, but which do not break into what we might call world literature.
The volume I have been reading is by Euclides da Cunha, and is entitled The Amazon: Land Without History. This work relates to my long standing interest in the way places acquire cultural meaning. The place in question is the Amazon basin, which Euclides visited in 1905 and about which he proceeded to write a series of short essays. The commercial exploitation and human settlement of the Amazon was well under way even a century ago. Euclides, in fact, sees himself as arriving at the tail end of this process:
The contemporary narrator arrives during the final act of a drama and sees, astonished, only the close of the last scene. [45]
The Amazon and its continuing destruction has come to our consciousness over the past couple of decades. Saving the Amazon is a cause taken up now by celebrities. But the stakes were already clear in 1905..
Euclides appears to fill the important role of mediator and interpreter for the Amazon. He acknowledges that other important writers have described the Amazon, but nevertheless he views the Amazon as a culturally empty space. Here is a passage from the opening paragraph of his first essay:
But since, from early on in life, each of us has drawn an ideal Amazonia in our minds thanks to the remarkably lyrical pages left us by the countless travelers, from Humboldt down to today, who have contemplated the prodigious hylean rain forest with almost religious awe, we experience a common psychological reaction when we come face to face with the real Amazon: we see it as somehow lacking with respect to the subjective image we have long held of it. [3]
So the Amazon is hardly "empty space" in cultural terms. Countless travelers have written about this space.. even with "religious awe"! Meaning has therefore been generated for the Amazon, but Euclides is complaining about the way this international cultural frame does not match up with what a traveler actually encounters in the Amazon. Immediately following this passage we find Euclides switching to a nationalistic frame of reference:
...as a strictly artistic phenomenon... it is decidedly inferior to countless other sites in our own country. In this regard, the entire Amazonian region cannot match, for example, the stretch of our coastline that runs from Cabo Frio to Ponta de Munduba. [3]
That simple phrase "our coastline" drags us away from the international audience that Humboldt had in mind and lets us know that this is an essay in Brazilian cultural geography.. i.e. how to imbue this space with nationalistic meaning.
The problem with the Amazon as Euclides first describes it is that it cannot hold history:
...because of this lack of the vertical dimension, essential to imparting a sense of life to a landscape, within a few hours the observer tires in the face of an unbearable monotony and begins to notice that their gaze is less and less frequently directed to that endless horizon as empty and undefined as that of the sea. [4]
Place gains meaning through its association with culturally central narratives. Those narratives need what we might call a foothold.. some way for a particular incident to be identified as occurring at a particular spot on the earth. Although the oceans have witnessed many historical events, those events can never be marked on the ocean. There are no landmarks for the open sea and the ocean is history-less in that sense. Euclides, by invoking the image of the sea, sets the Amazon as a natural blank slate. This blank slate image is further aided by his description of the shifting rivers and their random destruction of river banks. Just try to settle down history here!
His second essay begins by citing The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania (1889) by the geographer William Morris Davis. He sketches quickly what he finds interesting in this North American work:
...revealing [our watercourses] to be possessed of an ebullient infancy, a rebellious adolescence, a self-controlled maturity, and a melancholy old age or decrepitude... [18]
Euclides goes on to discuss the natural history of the Amazon and its tributaries, adapting this narrative approach to his South American setting. This conjunction of a history-less land with a natural history that provides a long back story for a place is a textbook example of the cultural use of scientific work.
We might ask more broadly: why does natural history become such a flourishing form in the modern period? A common answer would be that this form of writing mirrors scientific advances. I lean more toward the notion that as Europeans encountered lands with foreign populations, they turned to a new mode of writing that allowed for the emplacement of a new history. This was part of the colonial enterprise, but the new nations that formed in the wake of colonialism took up natural history for themselves, using it as a way to define and give history to their land.
That contextualization of scientific works might sound strange, I know.. but that is because we continue to live under these same assumptions about scientific work. Euclides is particularly valuable for the clear connection between national interest and natural history.
The Aesthetic Perspective
March 23, 2008
I have been coming back repeatedly to the essay "Religion as a Cultural System" by Clifford Geertz.. in which he lays out a definition of religion. What has been sitting on my mind is his differentiation of the "religious perspective" from some other common perspectives: the common sensical, aesthetic, and scientific. (That's not meant to be an exhaustive list.)
At one point Geertz writes that
...no one, not even a saint, lives in the world religious symbols formulate all of the time, and the majority of men live in it only at moments. The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts is, as Schutz says, the paramount reality in human experience. [119]
So if we imagine religion as a cognitive frame for understanding the world, it is nonetheless not a frame that anyone employs all the time. A saint has to get out of bed, pull on his or her clothes, navigate to the kitchen, and figure out how to work the coffee maker. No matter how much one insists on repeating the names of God or muttering "praise the Lord", these daily actions are not religious in nature and make use of a common sensical frame for understanding the world.
As soon as the saint looks up from the coffee maker and sees a scene on television about a governor who has paid for a high priced prostitute.. well, then the religious perspective snaps into place. The religious perspective could be defined as the cognitive frame that mediates meaning and value in life.. from which we pass down moral judgment and find ultimate purpose. The work of some monastic systems may be to extend this level of religious meaning to every corner of life.. so that even putting on one's clothes has religious significance. But I doubt it would be possible to keep that religious frame in place all the time. There will be times when one just wants a cup of coffee..
Geertz sketches what he means by the aesthetic perspective:
...it involves a different sort of suspension of naive realism and practical interest, in that instead of questioning the credentials of everyday experience, one merely ignores that experience in favor of an eager dwelling upon appearances, an engrossment in surfaces... [111]
So in those moments when we abandon practical concerns as well as the questions of meaning that are related to the religious perspective, we have access to the aesthetic perspective. When someone can look at the sunset and not think about the fact that it will soon be dark.. and without thinking about a creator or moral purpose in the day.. when the scene stands out just as a scene.. a surface.. that is when the aesthetic perspective is in place.
I find that this aesthetic perspective comes naturally.. and I am drawn to a way of living that cuts back the religious perspective.. that cognitive frame that judges and discerns meaning. That may explain why I am fascinated with the process of meaning creation as embodied in religion. But I have no great longing for a discovery of a religious frame.. I am happiest when such a frame is gone and I am able to just perceive. In that state of mind even religious texts.. the Psalms or Augustine or Bob Marley.. become texts that can be enjoyed free of the religious frame that gave birth to them. They become a mere delight.
I am reminded of a poem by Wallace Stevens.. which makes for a fine Easter meditation:
The crosses on the convent roofs
Gleam sharply as the sun comes up.
What's down below is in the past
Like last night's crickets, far below.
And what's above is in the past
As sure as all the angels are.
Why should the future leap the clouds
The bays of heaven, brighted, blued?
Chant, O ye faithful, in your paths
The poem of long celestial death;
For who could tolerate the earth
Without that poem, or without
An earthier one, tum, tum-ti-tum,
As of those crosses, glittering,
And merely of their glittering,
A mirror of a mere delight?
"Botanist on Alp (no. 2)"
The crosses are transformed into "mere delight" as they are perceived aesthetically.. with religious meaning emptied. The convent and the heavens are dismissed as being of any interest. Still there is a need for "poem".. which may point to some kind of meaning even here.. but I will have to think about that a little longer..
Question: this notion that there could be movement between cognitive frames fits in with my sense of what it is like to experience the world, but is this the way humans have historically experienced the world, or is it a product of our modern world? Wouldn't an ancient Egyptian have had more trouble separating out so neatly these realms of experience? Maybe one of the hallmarks of the modern world is the demand of switching quickly between these different cognitive frames.. along with a sense of multiple identities.
Imagining Fatimid Cairo
March 21, 2008
The image above is from an essay entitled "Bayn al-Qasrayn: The Street between Two Palaces" by Nezar Alsayyad (from the edited collection Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space). This is a representation of the central zone of Cairo at the end of the Fatimid dynasty.. so say 1150 AD. The two main structures in this image are the palaces for the Fatimid caliph/imam. Out of everything seen in this image, only the small al-Aqmar moque labeled #4 remains today. The gardens behind the palace labeled #2 were filled in with structures almost as soon as the Fatimids fell. The palaces themselves were quickly transformed.. the space they occupied becoming the sites for numerous monuments.
This is the most detailed attempt to imagine the palace complex of the Fatimids that I have yet found. The area of the palaces is not difficult to reconstruct since the length and breadth of the palaces are all described by al-Maqrizi. But it is something else to try to imagine how it actually looked. The Persian traveler Naser-e Khusraw describes the palace.. which as the home of the Fatimid imam was more than a political center.. as towering like a mountain when seen from a distance. I am not convinced that this image represents such a towering palace. But that is not to say we are not impressed at the attempt here to represent the complex. We will try to point out other attempts to visualize Fatimid Cairo as we come across them.
High Hopes 1960
March 19, 2008
Robert Drew's documentary Primary takes us back to the Wisconsin Democratic primary of 1960. The two candidates are John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. It is strange to watch Kennedy flickering on a television set before it was clear he would win the 1960 election.. let alone before his face became an iconic image. Remarkably, his words and image will be appropriated and hotly claimed a full 48 years later.
The documentary expends little energy in explaining the political context. I had various questions about the candidates and how this primary fit into the wider story of the campaign, but I got little help. The interest was not exposition but immediate experience: what was the process of running for president like as it unfolds in a state like Wisconsin? Viewers get a feeling for the everyday-ness of the political process.
In the above photo we see Kennedy in the midst of a crush of autograph seekers. In another scene we are shown some young girls racing down the street. Kennedy has the excitement while Hubert Humphrey addresses solid farmers and small towners. You might even start to compare Kennedy to a rock star.. and that might end up making you think of a very similar documentary: Don't Look Back, a documentary that followed Bob Dylan around without comment in 1965. D.A. Pennebaker, maker of Don't Look Back, was a photographer for Primary.. so that connection would not be just in your imagination.
It occurred to me while watching Primary that it can be watched with some quite different perspectives. There is the political and cultural history that is present throughout. There are also the glimpses of small town Wisconsin seen through the windows of campaign cars and busses. The trees are bare and the houses white and small. The roads are modest and windy—no big highways out there it seems. Mainstreet store fronts are not filled with instantly recognizable corporate brands. I would argue that in the long long run these images of Wisconsin that fill the screen for a few seconds as the camera pans are as valuable as anything else. It is too bad we did not have more cameras just walking down mainstreet and getting people to talk.
An image like this one above spurs me to try harder to record the world around me. It helps if you have John F. Kennedy in your camera viewfinder.. but I'll get along without a celebrity. That will be the point of the next season of Wisconsin Views.
By the way, Primary featured the Kennedy theme song which went to the tune of "High Hopes". I found on YouTube a video of someone playing an original 45 of this tune with the lyrics in support of Kennedy. It is sung by Frank Sinatra!
Obama's Speech on Race in America
March 18, 2008
Old Roads is not a political blog.. but there is something about Barack Obama that draws me in. It has appeared that Obama is on the brink of being accepted as a black candidate for president of the United States. Lots of people seem all right with his skin color, but the sermons clips from Jeremiah Wright bring up a deeper question: is America ready for a candidate who not only has black skin, but is also identified with Black culture.
A parallel phenomenon can be seen on our televisions. We grow accustomed to seeing black actors stand with white ones in commercials and various programs, but the world in which these black actors stand is always that of mainstream white America. We pat ourselves on the back for racial acceptance, but we never learn to see Black America. That is, we never see the living rooms and daily struggles that are reality for a many blacks in our country.. instead we get images of suburban life filled with black actors.
The Jeremiah Wright incident tells us that Barack Obama is indeed coming from the Black community.. and his refusal to completely disown Wright as his preacher speaks to his enduring commitment to it (in sharp contrast to Clinton and his "Sister Souljah moment" in 1992). Obama is not going to stand before us and say that everything is OK with respect to race in our nation. In this speech he describes a church that may sound strange to mainstream Americans:
Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
This is the alternative world that Obama is asking Americans to care about.. and to try to hear. That strikes me as an incredibly brave maneuver.. and one that I am not convinced Americans will want to hear.
Wright's statements have been extracted from their context and characterized as political discourse outside the proper bounds. Karl Rove (a man known for loving kindness) labeled these words "extreme and vicious comments about our country." This misses entirely the important place that Black literature and discourse has in our body politic. America is not univocal in its response to major events.. we can recognize a mainstream voice but also something else: a voice dissenting from that main narrative. This counter voice often gets its most eloquent expression from Black Americans.
James Baldwin makes this point near the end of his essay "The Fire Next Time":
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's more direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that... [344]
That "collection of myths" sounds a lot like contemporary political talking points. I am sure Sean Hannity would do a verbal war dance over anyone who said that America might not be the greatest country ever.. or that America can't do anything it likes. But no matter Hannity, we are indebted to the dissenting voice that reminds us of our failures. African American literature (such as "The Fire Next Time") is included in the Library of America and required on most university reading lists for this very reason.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright by his comments shows himself to be a part of this dissenting and often angry tradition.. and as such he should be embraced and allowed to have a voice. Obama appears to have it in him to move beyond this dissenting shout.. that is the unmissable message of his books and speeches.. but it is to his credit that he will not pretend that the triumphal voice of mainstream America (which got us into this unending war!) is the only one out there.
Gender and Sexuality in the Marshes
March 16, 2008
A useful aspect of Wilfred Thesiger's Marsh Arabs (1964) is his eye for details about gender and sexuality. Keep in mind that the marsh Arabs are conservative Muslims and steeped in tribal values. Within this social system there was acceptance of gender ambiguity.
Several times Thesiger mentions being entertained in a group by dancing boys. The most remarkable of these dancing boys were known as dhakar binta.. or "male girl." These were male prostitutes hired to dance at public festivities:
Later in the evening, while the audience intoned a religious chant, they performed a blasphemous and indecent parody of Muslim prayer, with one boy making suggestive gestures behind the other's upthrust bottom. Used to more conventional behaviour among Moslems, I looked anxiously at a venerable Sayid who had brought his two grown-up sons for me to circumcise in the morning. All three were chanting with the best. [116]
We also get a fine description of this type of dancing boy:
The boy wore a scarlet gown with ropes of imitation pearls and heavy gold ear-rings. His hair, combed and scented, hung round his shoulders; his breasts were padded and his face was made up. He looked like an affected girl and behaved with the mincing mannerisms of a female prostitute... [125]
Thesiger goes on to discuss the way sexuality worked in this setting. With honor killing the sure result of any sexual dalliance on the part of a woman (thus making that kind of illicit pairing a bad option), the young men met some of their sexual needs with each other. This explanation for the practice of homosexuality among tribal Arabs is parallel to the speculations of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. There I believe Lawrence argues that the almost complete absence of women from male social settings leads to homosexual bonding. I am not really sure how to judge this line of thought.. but it is a common one among these classic English travel writers.
In another place Thesiger writes about the acceptance of gender switching. There is the mustarjil, the name for a woman who lives like a man. Such a woman usually wears her hair short like men and takes part in male social events. Thesiger asks an informant: "Do mustarjils ever marry?" and receives the answer: "No, they sleep with women as we [men] do." Absent is any use of our "lesbian" category of identity.. but clearly this amounts to the same thing.
Next Thesiger describes a rather bizarre incident:
...I was sitting in the diwaniya when a stout middle-aged woman shuffled in, enveloped in the usual black draperies, and asked for treatment. She had a striking, rather masculine face, and lifting her skirt exposed a perfectly normal full-sized male organ. 'Will you cut this off and turn me into a proper woman?' he pleaded. [165]
It turned out that this woman participated fully in female social life. Thesiger noticed her washing dishes at the river with the other women. Although the people of the tribe could not have explained this, they were allowing gender to be constructed rather than determined by sex organ.
It would be fair to say that gender and sexual ambiguities occur in all societies. Plenty of anthropologists relate similar anecdotes concerning Native Americans or other peoples. It is healthy for a society to allow for sexual and gender exceptions. Concerning the woman with a male sex organ Thesiger notes: "These people were kinder to him than we would have been in our society" (166). It strikes me that nations have had a hard time figuring out what to do with such exceptions.. at least a harder time than smaller scale tribal societies.
The Coward Robert Ford
March 15, 2008
This movie ended up catching me by surprise. Being about Jesse James one might expect train robberies and bank heists.. but, except for an opening train robbery, the movie mostly follows the lines of a psychological thriller. Jesse James (Brad Pitt) appears increasingly violent and moody, while his hero-worshipping follower Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) comes to realize that he must assassinate James. The psychological toll of being around James is obvious. He is always prying and looking for weakness.. always threatening.. and for Ford his past idolatry of James is a mental burden. Ford is finally given the chance to shoot James, but, contrary to what one might expect, this climactic moment does not come across as a moment of cowardice. Young Ford seems for an instant to be breaking free of some fascination that has held him for too long.
Surrounding the basic psychological thriller is a wealth of material about the public version of James that circulated in popular serials and stories and songs. It is the juxtaposition of this public version of James with the realism of his portrayal that makes this a notable film. We see Ford's box of James memorabilia and we hear him recite to James all the little ways that they are alike. Then after Ford's assassination of James we see him performing that defining deed before audiences and receiving notoriety for it. But the public version of James' death turns firmly against Ford by the end and he is a hated man for his "cowardly" deed. In the end he is murdered by a self-appointed avenger of the death of James. (All this, by the way, seems to follow the actual events.)
The realistic portrait of James is powerful in its screw-loose violence, but Ford is complex in a different way. He is a man at the mercy of public narratives. As a boy he buys into the James legend.. only to get his illusions stripped away by the man's senseless violence. Then after he assassinates James he is taken up into the vortex of public narrative.. and watches as he slowly becomes the bad guy in the most common telling of the story. I felt disappointment when Ford proved unable to defend himself and offer a counter narrative to the public version of events. If we define courage as the ability to let one's private sense of truth overrule the public narrative, then Ford's crowning courageous act was the assassination of Jesse James.
The public narrative would be written by people like his mother who gave James the following epitaph: "In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here." The film.. in what I hope is an ironic title.. does right in giving us back Robert Ford as a semi-hero.. at least for a moment.
Faith Communities
March 15, 2008
I am beginning Marshall Hodgson's classic history The Order of Assassins. He begins by quickly sketching early Islam so that he can contextualize this radical Shi'a group.. and he makes a point that has long interested me:
An alternative way [to justify a faith] was through accepting the continuity of a community which claimed the allegiance of all men. Increasingly since Hellenistic times men had come to be aligned in religious communities, in conscious groupings devoted to explicit religious tradition, and claiming an ultimate human loyalty. Mohammed had from the first taken for granted the alignment by religious community. [5]
Hodgson is identifying a tendency during a particular period of history for human beings to find their primary identity in a religiously grounded community. We often refer to these communities by shorthand as a "state".. but that is somewhat anachronistic. Thinking of the world into which Islam was born, the primary competitors would have been the Persians and the Byzantines.. each explicitly founded on a faith. In the first volume of The Venture of Islam Hodgson refers to these as "confessional empires." Even when a faith community was divided between competing local powers, the legitimacy of a ruling group was grounded in their ability to defend and propagate their faith.
I think as moderns used to a global system of nation states we often are at a loss to imagine the experience of a medieval person. We find a complete absence of nationalism (thus the ability of many peoples to put up with rulers who were not ethnically related) and at the same time a high level of what we might call "religionism." This religionism allowed for large scale groupings of people and settled the grounds upon which rulers could compete for legitimacy. Even in periods when the Middle East is factually split into smaller states, there would always be the notion that these diverse groups could be brought together were a sufficiently strong ruler to arise. The concept of the nation state starts to put an end to that idea of a large scale community spanning ethnic groups.
Quiet Life
March 14, 2008
I was taken by the notion of simplicity this past week. I feel somewhat silly since the occasion for these thoughts was the 3rd century BC writer Chuang Tzu, who I have been teaching in Freshman Studies. But parts of it resonated with me:
Do not be an embodier of fame; do not be a storehouse of schemes; do not be an undertaker of projects; do not be a proprietor of wisdom. Embody to the fullest what has no end and wander where there is no trail. Hold on to all that you have received from Heaven but do not think you have gotten anything. Be empty, that is all. The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror—going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing. Therefore he can win out over things and not hurt himself. [94-5]
There are aspects of the academic world that encourage one to become a "storehouse of schemes" and an "undertaker of projects." The academic publishing system rewards time spent wandering on the trail.
As this blog works into its third year of activity, I hope it can embody a kind of quietness and measuredness. That is certainly the place from which most of these blogs come from. The end of the day is upon me, I am tired, but I also have the chance to gather my thoughts and set down some ideas that might even surprise me. I like to think this is about getting off the trail.. and embarking on a project—thought—that has no end.
Chuang Tzu might see this blog labor as too intellectually motivated and determined.. I am sure he would disapprove. Besides praise for the True Man of ancient times, there is little loving care for the past.. just concern for the proper frame of mind in the present. But the nice thing about books is that we can find in them what we want and need.
A little closer to my real longing is the image of a Chinese painting from the 13th century.. entitled "Wang Xizhi Watching Geese" by Qian Xuan. The commentary alongside the painting is as follows:
The calm watcher is the fourth-century scholar-artist Wang Xizhi, father of classical calligraphy and model for living an active life in retreat. He is depicted by the painter Qian Xuan, another connoisseur of reclusion...
A fascinating notion: an "active life in retreat." Check out the image and then try to imagine a version of it in our own time. Hard to do. Except in our minds where we can filter out the world and watch imaginary geese sailing over an imaginary plain.
Giving Lots of Money
March 13, 2008
The recent New York Times Magazine (3-9-2008) is dedicated to philanthropic giving in the United States. The cover features Natalie Portman with a woman from Mexico who received a microloan. It is apparently good times for giving away lots of money. An article begins:
Philanthropy's largest problem these days probably isn't a lack of big gifts. Over the past few years, new records have been set in the number of individual donations of $100 million of more, and talking with those in the philanthropic community who advise potential donors reveals a sense of widespread anticipation that many billions of dollars, earned during the recent boom in the hedge-fund and private-equity markets, will soon pour into the social sector.
There is a slice of America that has grown phenomenally wealthy over the course of the 90s and the 00s. In the long term this boon of giving will be seen as a result of the rising levels of social inequality. In other words, it will be seen as a symptom of a sickness in our economic system.
My question is: why should I rejoice that those who made a truckload of cash from hedge-funds or private-equity markets get to make decisions about my world and what is important in it? I am glad all these entrepreneurs get to innovate and think outside the box with their wealth, but might there not be a skewed perspective on national priorities if the top 1% are the ones who get to address the problems? And then these philanthropists get to have buildings and theaters adorned with their meaningless names!
I would prefer a system where the people who could give 100 million dollars were made to pay a stiffer tax and we therefore got that money into the public treasury.. from where elected officials could apply this money to areas of our common life that matter to us. The main argument with this plan is that government makes a mess of everything and would squander the money. The entrepreneurs know best!
Have you noticed the double standard? The same people who insult government programs take umbrage at any attempt to call into question the competency of the military. Somehow the American military is the greatest thing on the face of the earth, but simultaneously any social program undertaken by the government is a waste of time. This is a false paradigm.. erected by people who want to see social programs fail.
This is not to say I don't see the writing on the wall. Millionaires are getting to write their names on our public space; charities and celebrities are becoming one thing. We will have none of this so far as we can help it.. and it is against this world that we will launch our critique.
Imagining Cycles
March 12, 2008
As Americans we have one national narrative. There are lots of subplots, but since we became a nation in the 18th century our capital city has accumulated the signs of nationhood in the form of structures and statues. From this standpoint it is difficult for us to imagine a capital like Cairo that contained the layers of quite different dynasties. We miss the careful physical negotiations a new dynasty must engage in if it is to distinguish itself from the past.
More than you might guess, I find myself asking my students to imagine that at some point in the future our nation is taken over by a foreign power. I try to sketch an image of Canada as a future power that could take over the US. In that case the Canadians would be faced with some choices about what to do with Washington DC.
Think about it: If you were the invading Canadian power would you take over the capitol building or raze it and build something new? Your answer to that question will probably depend on what kind of government you imagine yourself as being. If you fashion yourself as a restorer of democracy (in the distant future) you will likely feel comfortable with the capitol and make use of it. If you think of yourself as a neo-communist power, then you will probably want to raze the capitol completely to make way for a new symbolic building. Which is to point out what is perhaps obvious: this real estate has an immense symbolic value that would be either appropriated or destroyed.. or perhaps a combination of those two options. But any new power would deal with the capitol.
If we thought hard enough about this, we could probably come up with a taxonomy of possible responses to the capitol. A military coup d'etat would want to keep alive the illusion of continuity. An ideologically opposed conquering power would seek to transform the landscape into a reflection of their own power structure. A completely alien power (from another planet?) would mindlessly destroy and do their own thing.. being ignorant of the symbolic values of our culture (like we were of the world of the Native Americans).
This sounds like science fiction when applied to America (surely we are an eternal nation!), but the landscape of Cairo exhibits each of these typical responses.. as dynasty succeeds dynasty and ideologies battle each other. The landscape is always demanding an interpretation and each dynasty sets out to spin it in its own way. Even if a capitol-like structure is destroyed, its place is filled with something new and symbolic. I would love to see more attention paid to the generic qualities of these cultural choices. I mean, why not give some names to the degree of acceptance or rejection one culture makes toward another culture.. thereby allowing us to speak about the actions of an ancient Chinese dynasty, a medieval Egyptian one, and a future Canadian empire with some common technical terms for cultural reception.
Wisconsin Waves Goodbye
March 10, 2008
Here in Wisconsin people are reeling from the news that Brett Favre is retiring. Our upstairs neighbor wrote out his own version of goodbye on the snow-dirty exterior of his truck. I thought it was a bit of Wisconsin culture that was bound to fade away if I did not capture it.. so here it is:
Chuang Tzu as World Literature
March 9, 2008
Reading through Chuang Tzu (Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson) I am fascinated by nearly opaque anecdotes. Like this one, for instance:
A man of Sung who sold ceremonial hats made a trip to Yueh, but the Yueh people cut their hair short and tattoo their bodies and had no use for such things. Yao brought order to the people of the world and directed the government of all within the seas. But he went to see the Four Masters of the far away Ku-she Mountain, [and when he got home] north of the Fen River, he was dazed and had forgotten his kingdom there. [28]
Cook Ting and the man who dreamed he was a butterfly are more available for interpretation.. but a large percentage of what we have of Chuang Tzu reads more like the passage above.. which explores in two quick sketches the way a skill appreciated in one context is worthless in another. But how does that fit in with other themes in Chuang Tzu? I don't know.
This body of writing comes down to us under the name of Chuang Tzu, who may have lived in the 4th century BC. It is interesting to think about how this ancient Chinese philosopher fits into the category of "world literature." It appears that some pretty radical surgery has taken place to allow him his place: we are presented only with the seven inner chapters, and not the 15 outer chapters and 11 miscellaneous chapters. Basic Writings consists of a series of anecdotes and reports organized loosely into chapters. Many of these have a certain density and playfulness that start to approximate what we expect from a work of literature. But here again I think it is important to look at the lesser known and opaque portions: these fit uneasily into a category like literature.
When we talk about a work as "literature" we broadly mean that it has more than historical interest. There is something entertaining and edifying in reading a particular work even now. That the work retain some kind of value "even now" is, I think, crucial to our popular usage. We could thus more objectively describe literature as that body of texts that happens to fit comfortably into contemporary niches of experience. Our own niche is highly influenced by the novel and the expectations generated by this form. We want the experience of texts from distant cultures to be something like a novel.. and if a text can be read in this manner, then it probably already exists in a paperback Penguin Edition. Texts from distant cultures get cut and edited in all kinds of strange ways to make them fit our expectations.
An opaque anecdote can draw me up short, though. I am tempted to just keep reading, looking for the good parts. Like I wait out the boring parts of a film to get to the interesting parts. But that could be dangerous if the point of a work is exactly to be opaque.. or perhaps jarring and shocking. In that case I should not read over the difficult parts so quickly. There is always the possibility that a work is not meant to be an entertaining experience, but rather to affect me in a certain way.
Take a Zen koan: "Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?" That statement could be anthologized just the same as a haiku or very short poem.. and the koan would become "literature." But that would obviously lead to a misunderstanding of the koan, which is out to do something to us.. shake us up or put us into a different state.. not entertain us. The anecdotes that populate Chuang Tzu are longer than koans, but they are trying to do something not so different. If understanding is our goal, then it is important not to make Chuang Tzu into literature.
To make my point about literature clearer, imagine that in a hundred years people were even busier than they are now (hard to do!). In fact, they spent on average three hours of every day commuting to work on a public rail line. Everyone owns a small multi-functional gadget that is a lot like an iphone. All forms of popular entertainment—from movies to video games to books—have migrated to this platform. With its limited screen and the hectic social niche in which it is used, most people gain an appreciation for shorter works that can be digested easily on this gadget. In this context "literature" would be the word we use for those texts that continue to have value. We might be surprised how such a change in experiential format could shake up the canon. Some works that had previously been unimpeachable would now be boring (like some of these long modern novels!) and works that were obscure and short might gain a new hearing (maxims by Erasmus?). Of course discussions about literature would undoubtedly still go on under the annoying heading of "greatest universal works of humanity." But we should by then know differently: "Literature" is just a ten letter word for what fits into our schedule.
Chuang Tzu and every other ancient author (Homer!) deserve to be understood in their own right.. and I promise I won't skip over the hard sections. The hard sections are what we are all about at Old Roads.
Reconsidering Taxes
March 9, 2008
I wonder sometimes if we are not due for a positive reconsideration of taxes. I know that sounds to some like asking about a positive reconsideration of the flu.. but seriously, we don't hear enough about the way taxes could work for us. For example, here in Wisconsin during budget debates the University of Wisconsin regularly absorbs cuts. Which is stupid.. I mean, if Wisconsinites paid a little more in taxes they could have a first-rate public university (it is already no slouch), and then when their children came of age they could avoid paying the sky-high tuition for a private university. That sounds like a deal to me! A little extra taxes, but superior services that will save me thousands in the long run. That kind of thinking can be applied to health care as well. The primary impediment is the weird meme that "government messes everything up." But clearly public education has an illustrious history.. its problems come when its budget is gutted. I suspect that this negativity about the government comes from corporations that love making a profit doing jobs that the government could do as a service for its people.
Unions at Google?
March 8, 2008
Why won't we ever see scenes like this one from the Battle of the Overpass in front of a corporation like Google or Microsoft? Despite the presence of an effort like The Washington Alliance of Technical Workers (Wash Tech), there seem to be few efforts to unionize high tech workers.
Browsing on the Internet for past articles on this topic, it turned out that one reason people are skeptical about the possibility of a union for tech workers is that these workers are already well compensated.. as opposed to the service employees of the world who definitely need collective representation. This past month Google faced a union rally demanding union representation for a hotel about to be opened. But that is the point: this is not about actual Google workers; it is about service sector employees.
I have also seen the argument that creative work like that done by tech workers at Google would be stifled by an extra layer of bureaucracy. But Walter Reuther was a dye caster.. which, while a physical job, was highly skilled machine work. I don't see much of a difference between that kind of physical creative work and that done by tech workers today.
I would like to propose a more conceptual reason for the difficulty of forming a union at Google or Microsoft. Corporations like these fashion themselves in a quite different way than a place like Ford Motor Company or General Motors used to. The corporation is becoming more than a place to work, but also an identity. Note the YouTube video below on the experience of working at Google:
Working at Google is more all-encompassing than work at Ford would have been in the 1930s, at least at the level of the average employee. The more successful a corporation is at fashioning itself as a "family" or "lifestyle" the less unionizing will be a cognitive option for people employed there.
Unions depend upon a perception of the world that is class-based. There is the "worker" and the "management".. and the rights of the worker will be abridged without collective representation. Identification as a "worker" brings with it a broader sense of being part of the working class. Union systems have been used by professional ball players and Hollywood writers to get a larger share of profits, but the politically powerful labor unions of the past were focused on what we would call the working class. A worker at Ford Motor Company did not see his/her identity aligned with that of the corporation.. rather with that of a social class employed by multiple corporations. The split inability of a corporation to establish itself as a central identity meant that workers would see their relationship as adversarial.
This is one of many points where perceptions of identity work their way into our everyday world. We can argue till we are blue in the face about the way globalization has undermined unions.. but we are missing a key part of the issue if we neglect the perceptual changed that have occurred in the corporate world over the past generation.
Talking About Lunch
March 7, 2008
The last track of The Beach Boys Today! (1965) consists of a recorded conversation between the members of the band (Al Jardine is not present). The beginning is all about food. Someone claps his hands and rubs them together and says "Food!" There are a flurry of lines from different people:
Did you get a malt?
Didn't bring any malts
What'd you get us?
A burger I mean cheese here's cheese
Oh it's mine
Did you order one?
No I'm kidding
What'd you get me?
Mike I'm gonna take a bite pretty quick
Oh thank you
I would've rather had that
No that's all wrong
Hey there's onions on this so I hope all you guys don't mind
Hi Earl
Here's some french fries you can all split
Oh there's kosher pickles
Thank you for the french fries I'm really uh
It sounds pretty unimportant, but anything that gets put on an album will be a carrier of a message. In this case the desire to connect the Beach Boys to common American taste is pretty apparent. It becomes even more so when Brian Wilson states that the only thing that really stuck out to him about Europe was the bread. This conversation makes them sound like ordinary guys and we can bet that studio execs instantly saw the logic in including this conversation on an album that was expected to be a top seller.
Another way to approach this conversation is to think about what it says about material culture. Listening to it I am struck by how easily I can follow what is happening. I don't mean just the words, but the wrappers being opened and the hand motions. This took place over forty years ago, yet I know just what is happening and what their food tasted like. The group has sent someone to pick up a fast food order: burgers, fries, milk shakes (malts).
This recognition may not seem remarkable, but I suspect that a conversation about food prior to World War II would be difficult for me to understand. Any similarly recorded conversation from the 19th century or earlier would be completely foreign. I would have no idea what the foods looked or tasted like. But with this conversation of the Beach Boys I have no trouble going back over 40 years and imagining everything.
The Beach Boys Today! contains the songs "When I Grow Up to Be a Man" and "Help Me, Rhonda." Their follow-up album would contain "California Girls." This was a classic period of American popular music creation.. and I don't think it is coincidental that even as the songs remain in popular circulation, the food they were eating also has stayed well known. Which is just to say: "classic" periods create pockets of cultural stability in multiple areas of consumption. We are today much closer to The Beach Boys Today! than they were to the cultural fixed-points of the pre-World War II period. The fact that the music is so easy to listen to is related to the fact that I can effortlessly imagine their informal fast food meals.
Nothing lasts forever. It is extremely unlikely that in a hundred years this same familiarity will be present. Odd as it may seem, the Beach Boys music will come to sound strange and the food they were eating a relic of the past. These will come to resemble the obscure music and food references that mystify me in classical Greek or medieval Arabic literature. They will be something to wonder at: what would that have been like? What is that rustling sound? Why is there a pickle in the bag? Part of our job here at Old Roads is to listen to the present as it will sound to the distant future.
Your Credit Rating, Your Character
March 7, 2008
Last Sunday the New York Times ran an article on the tough job market out there now. The story had the following sketch of a woman looking for work:
But the bills for Ms. Thomas are still coming due. She lost her car in November 2005 after she fell behind on the payments. Unable to drive to work, she lost her job. Since then, she has been unable to find a job.
Several times, she has landed interviews that seemed likely to bring offers, but the jobs required a credit check — a test she cannot pass.
“My credit is just so in shambles,” she told a classroom full of people gathered for a credit counseling session at the Private Industry Council. “More and more jobs are checking your credit. They’re saying that credit is a reflection of your character.”
The entire article is a reminder of the way the lower classes in our country have been shafted by the economic policies of the Bush administration. I was also surprised to note the way credit checks are being used in the hiring process.. along with the notion that credit is a reflection of character. I would never have thought of that. A credit rating could be due to thousands of contingencies and I would never connect that number to character and job performance. In fact, I would have guessed that it was illegal to refuse to hire based on a credit report. This may well be an indicator of where we are heading. That nice number we get from a credit report may someday soon come to be basically an index of our character. Many people believe that someone up above is keeping an account of their deeds.. but now that account may be an omniscient computerized credit report. This invasion of financial statistics into our evaluations of personal worth should be resisted wherever possible.
Modern Medicine in the Marshes
March 5, 2008
A few weeks back I wrote a post about The Shark God by Charles Montgomery. I praised this book for its unwillingness to get caught up in a search for a pristine version of the past. Wilfred Thesiger is a negative example of a writer who is explicitly looking for a culture uncontaminated by the modern world. He says as much in various places:
I had spent many years in exploration, but now there were no untouched places left to explore, at least in the countries that attracted me... What little I had seen of the Marshmen appealed to me. They were cheerful and friendly and I liked the look of them. Their way of life, as yet little affected by the outside world, was unique and the Marshes themselves were beautiful. Here, thank God, was no sign of the drab modernity which, in its uniform of second-hand European clothes, was spreading like a blight across the rest of Iraq. [60]
Thesiger writes a fascinating book.. invaluable for its portrait of life in the Iraqi marshes. But the underlying antipathy to the modern world works as a kind of second theme throughout.
What is so bad about the modern world? At one point Thesiger emerges from exploration of the marshes and finds himself in an outpost of modern Iraq.. the town of Kubaish along the Euphrates:
Behind a cement-faced esplanade, complete with lamp-posts, was ranged a row of ugly brick houses—the district office, a police post, a small dispensary, a school, a club house and the officials' quarters. Some were new but all contrived to look derelict... surrounded by tattered reed fences and a litter of broken bottles, rusty tins and pieces of newspaper, they merely looked as if the drains smelt. [102]
You get the idea: he doesn't like the way it looks. Nor is he any more comfortable with the obsequious social habits he experiences in places like this.
The people of the marshes live in a way that Thesiger finds admirable. They construct houses and large guest houses (mudhifs) out of qasab stalks from the marshes. Their skiffs (taradas) are constructed by traditional means. As a people they are self-sufficient, living off the marsh and what they can hunt or grow. Their social life is traditional and reflects centuries old practices and habits. Although Thesiger, writing in the 50s, does not have the vocabulary of modern ecology, he seems to be drawn to the sustainable lifestyle of the people with whom he has chosen to live.
In addition to feeling deep respect for these capable and adaptable people in the marshes, Thesiger looks with horror at the sicknesses and injuries that are commonplace:
They suffered from Trachoma, and other eye troubles, from scabies and piles, from stones, from intestinal worms of many varieties, from dysentery, both amoebic and bacillary, from bilharzia and from bajal, to name only a few of their complaints... Then there were the accidents. Some of the victims had been appallingly burned when their houses caught fire, and all too often small children upset pots of boiling water over themselves. Men were brought to me who had been gored by wild boars. [108-9]
He was no doctor, but dispensed as much medical help as he could. His meager medical skill was more helpful than the alternatives out there in the marshes.
I find it curious how medicine is an unquestioned good of the modern world.. or even disconnected from that world. In this case we find a critic of the modern world nevertheless absolutely certain about the need for medicine.
Thesiger doesn't hesitates to treat those around him in need of help, but by introducing modern medicine he is doing just as much to disturb the traditional way of life of the marshes as t-shirts, tin cans, and light bulbs. I think we have to be very straightforward about this: traditional cultures are fascinating and complex, but they are filled with accidents and terrible physical complaints.. not to mention high infant mortality.
Lots of people, like Thesiger, bemoan the coming of the modern world to pristine places. But almost nobody is willing to criticize the presence of modern medicine in allowing more infants to live and lengthening lives. It would strike most as cruelty, in fact, to withhold this medical help. But medicine also should be seen as the lance point of the modern world.. and entrance into its economy. The fact that there appears to be no principled way of arguing against medicine points to the impossibility of actually siding with the traditional over the modern.
There are lots of times past that I admire—say Cairo at certain points during the medieval period. But if I were to say: "I wish that magnificent culture was still with us", I could well be thought cruel. Traditional social systems depend.. at their base.. on a certain level of infant mortality and poverty that we today find unacceptable. Our inability to contemplate this level of physical suffering makes us unable to imagine any alternative to the need for traditional cultures to merge with the modern world. What is not mentioned in this equation is that with a decline in infant mortality and a longer life expectancy comes more.. many more.. people. And this new population density has miseries and forms of poverty all its own.
Chicken, Egg, Politics
March 4, 2008
I could do with an end to this topsy-turvy Democratic primary. But even if this goes on for another month or two, the complexity of this race, on both sides, should force everyone to build a more complex model as to how these contests work. Simplifications are everywhere: it is about the press; it is about money; it is about the people. People want an easy explanation for success.
If the race were all about money, then Mitt Romney would have trounced everyone. He spent and spent and cash strapped Mike Huckabee ran away with his voters. Money is not the determiner of success.
If the race were all about the press then Giuliani would still be with us. He got plenty of press, especially early on. Hillary Clinton would have been a goner after Iowa. She survived that near death experience and tonight may be in the process of a similar feat. So the press can go one direction and voters in another.
So maybe the race is all about the will of the people? Money and press are the only ways to actually get your name out to the people.. not to mention get on a ballot. The crazy election system that has come about makes it possible that the final candidate for the Democratic party will not be the one with the strongest popular support.
What we have going in these elections is an incredibly complex system that has several feedback loops. The press is not about to start covering person X just because he announces he is running for president. There needs to be some sign of support first. This can be in the form of fundraising success, high profile political backing, or broad name recognition. In every case I believe it could be shown that the press had some real signal that a person was a "for real" candidate. Money can be used to get the attention of the press, but it also needs press coverage to lend a campaign legitimacy and therefore signal to people that this campaign is a good bet.
The people can be fooled sometimes, but they do generally seem to recognize when a candidate is flawed. But while the voter can be depended on to make some reasonable calls, it is also true that the popular vote can be managed and cajoled by means of advertisements and slogans. Further, the election system itself.. the order of contests, the caucuses, and the delegate system.. add a dimension of chance to the contest.
The tendency is to look for a single cause that would have the power to explain why some candidates get pushed up and others get pulled down. The fact is this is as useless as asking the old chicken versus egg question. We instead see a complex system which has a number of levers guiding the outcome.
Borges, Foreseer of the Internet
March 3, 2008
There has been recent discussion about how the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges may have foreseen the Internet. A New York Times article from January of this year sketches this claim:
Yet a growing number of contemporary commentators — whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco — have concluded that Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web. One recent book, “Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds” by Perla Sassón-Henry, explores the connections between the decentralized Internet of YouTube, blogs and Wikipedia — the so-called Internet 2.0 — and Borges’s stories, which “make the reader an active participant.” Ms. Sassón-Henry, an associate professor in the language studies department of the United States Naval Academy, describes Borges as “from the Old World with a futuristic vision.” Another work, a collection of essays on the topic from Bucknell University Press, has the provocative title “Cy-Borges” and is expected to appear this year.
It is not hard to see Borges as someone who could be fascinated by hypertextual possibilities opened up by the Internet. The seemingly infinite world of the Internet is matched by his own seemingly infinite library of Babel. The noise of languages and choices of interpretation on the Internet would have been interesting to him, as would the possibilities of Second Life or a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG).
Our question should be: how exactly does the work of Borges resemble the Internet? Borges inhabited a world of classic literature, his avatars being Cervantes, Dante, Coleridge, 1,001 Nights, and the musings of theologians from all mystical traditions. The Internet is as kind as daytime television to the books that Borges loved. That is to say, not kind at all. Aside from a taste for detective fiction, Borges gives no evidence of embracing the radical leveling of the Internet.
The creation of a "second world" such as that seen in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is by no means limited to the Internet. The best example of the creation of a second world would be Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.. soon to be followed by roll playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. The Internet is beginning to come into its own in this area, but it represents only a continuation of earlier fantasy experiments. Later Internet efforts could have provided Borges with fodder for his fiction, but Borges would have been as interested in these Internet worlds as he was in Tolkien's work. It is a line of development that is interesting from a certain theoretical line.. but a great bore in and of itself.
The work of Borges does not conform easily to the Internet. Translations of his stories can be found online, but they are barely readable. His work is involved and does not easily lend itself to the keyword-style that is the heart of hyperlinks. So there is nothing Internet-y about his fictions; they work best in books that rest in the hands of a careful reader. Of course more and more reading will be done online, and that will include reading of Borges, but this is only incidental to the appreciation of Borges and so far as I can see adds nothing important to the experience.
As soon as one starts actually naming qualities about Borges that resemble the Internet, those qualities look rather flabby. The connection between Borges and the Internet relies on superficial "woh dude" parallels. But the interesting fact is that Borges gives us a tool for understanding exactly this kind of specious relation-by-hindsight in his essay "Kafka and His Precursors." His point in this essay is useful: our knowledge of Kafka allows us to read literary history backwards and group together disparate writers as Kafkaesque: "The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future" (365).
The Internet is a lot like Kafka. It is an imaginatively strong form that has certain remarkable characteristics that we tend to read backwards into literary history. Borges is thus Internet-esque, you could say. And why not push back further and add William Blake and Callimachus? From this perspective a host of writers appear and group themselves together into a category that did not exist in their own time. That is fine, but let no one be fooled that they were actually of the Internet party without knowing it.
The Detailed Style: The Marsh Arabs
by Wilfed Thesiger
March 2, 2008
Wilfred Thesiger leaves no doubt about why he chose to spend a good part of seven years living among the marsh Arabs in southern Iraq: he enjoyed it. He writes exactly that in the preface to The Marsh Arabs (published in 1964). In the last chapter of the book he similarly notes that although the government was suspicious about his motivation for being in the marshes, "...the villagers, who had come to rely on me, knew that I was simply there to enjoy myself, and help them if I could" (217). Along with this assertion comes a disavowal of anything like anthropology: "I am not an anthropologist nor indeed a specialist of any kind" (13).
I find this un-academic style of Thesiger exhilarating. The weight of theoretical models and academic citation is absent. Thesiger was fascinated by tribal ways of life and preceded to write perceptively about them.. but there is no effort spent on impressing anyone in a university. He clearly has his eyes on the past models of English Orientalism.. Edward William Lane, Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence.. (and a few more names could be tossed in). One of the hallmarks of this tradition is palpable pride in getting physical actions described just right.
Bedu always roll rice into a solid ball in the palm of the hand before popping it into their mouths, but here they used only the tips of the fingers. I noticed they ate rice with the chicken, and bread with the fish. [50]
Plenty more such passages could be provided, related to putting up a reed house or building a boat or hunting wild boar. I enjoy this kind of detail-oriented writing.. but I also recognize that it stems from a particular tradition.
It is as if these writers had internalized the notion that external details of life are the standard of true knowledge of any culture. To set down accurately the way people sit, the hand motion they use to greet someone, and even the way people shit.. that is the real task of the travel writer. Incidentally, this detailed style is also what separates these writers from academic anthropologists, who seek patterns and interpretation more than raw description.
When discussing Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians this term I made the point that this work is as close as we can get to a running video camera in the 19th century. The marriage procession is not just mentioned, but described with such details that a later reader could almost re-create the event. And maybe that is part of the point: these were writers who were, yes, intensely competitive and willing to show off their knowledge.. but who also somewhere in their head knew that they were viewing a world that could not last long.. and that in fact was fading even as they set down in writing their hard won details.
Thesiger certainly has this sense of impending doom. It leaps out all over the place. At the end of a marvelous description of the tradition mudhif, or guest house, Thesiger writes:
Probably within the next twenty years, certainly within the next fifty, they will have disappeared forever. [208]
Or writing about government officials who hunted gazelles in their automobiles:
Riding down that way from Kurdistan, I had seen herds of fifty and more gazelles, but soon they would all be wiped out in Iraq, as the onager and the lion had been before them. [211]
In this setting the documentation of a way of life could understandably become a priority. The work comes to resemble a time capsule that can be used to re-imagine, if not re-create, something that is gone. That implicit use of the work as an imagination aid for the reader transforms what could be thought of as just show-offy into something truly valuable.
