Spinning Wheels in the Suburbs:
Ozu in the 1930s
September 29, 2008
I Was Born, But.. (1932) by Yasujiro Ozu opens with a family moving to the suburbs. The wheels of their moving truck get stuck in the mud and we meet the exasperated father and his two young sons, who will be the center of this silent comedy-drama. The image of wheels spinning in the mud is hardly accidental since by the conclusion to the film we will understand how socially fixed this family is.. even as they strive to better their lives.
More trains pass through the screen in this film than in any film I can remember seeing. But that is what it means to live in the suburbs: to live near a station of the rail line. Nobody owns a car except the wealthiest man in the neighborhood.. who also happens to be the father's boss. This economic inequality is one of several signs picked up by the young boys concerning the true social position of their father.
The delightful movie, much of which is spent following the adventures of the two boys in their new neighborhood, features settings that offer a clear idea of what it was like to live in a new suburb. The houses face out onto the tracks; the power lines cut across every shot; large undeveloped plots stand ready for the boys of the neighborhood. Here are two screen shots that illustrate what I mean:
These shots remind me of early Fellini (Nights of Cabiria) in their surprising and unvarnished images of development out past the lines of the city. These images of development contrast with the home-movies that the boss shows in a social gathering.. focusing on urban sights and events.
Near the end as the two boys witness the servility of their father to his boss, they rise up against their father and call him a nobody. At first the father responds with anger, but then he comes to a remarkably lucid sense of his own place in life:
father: I don't cozy up to the boss because I enjoy it. Are you kidding? But we're far better off now than we were before.
mother: I know that
[both enter bedroom of their two sons and look down on them as they lie soundly asleep.]
father: Will they lead the same sorry lives we have? Don't become miserable apple-polishers like me, boys.
This brings us to a classic emotional resolution for an Ozu film: a recognition of one's own limited position in life. The way forward for the father in his relationship to his sons will not be to prove himself as a "somebody".. but rather to acknowledge his low position.
Indian Mounds as Cultural Signs in Melville
September 28, 2008
I have been reading slowly through Clarel by Herman Melville. It's a work I have always wanted to read, and I can't say what pushed me over the edge just now. It might take me all year to read at my current pace. (For those who don't know Melville's work, this is a long epic poem set in the Holy Land and containing much ruminating on faith and doubt.)
The canto "Nathan" works well as a stand alone poem. It describes the restless spiritual journey of a midwestern descendent of the Puritans who finds his way to Judaism and life in Palestine. What I found most gripping was the early description of how doubt crept into his heart:
A stripling, but of manful ways,
Hardy and frugal, oft he filled
The widow's eyes with tears of praise.
An only child, with her he kept
For her sake part, the Christian way,
Though frequent in his bosom crept
Precocious doubt unbid. [lines 48-54]
The young man plays a dutiful part and keeps to his Christian upbringing, partly for his widowed mother. But then Melville introduces the notion that doubt assaults this young man. He is clear that there is no searching for doubt, but that it stalks this young man. He goes on to describe some portals for doubt present in the American landscape:
...The sway
He felt of his grave life, and power
Of vast space, from the log-house door
Daily beheld. [lines 54-57]
Melville points first to the inherent gravity of life imposed by the vastness of the Midwest (a farm in Illinois). The scene is reminiscent of section VI of "Auroras of Autumn" by Wallace Stevens. There too a small person opens a door upon vastness and feels himself engulfed: "The scholar of one candle sees/ An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame/ Of everything he is. And he feels afraid." In this presentation of nature, there is not familiar resort to the heavens as declaring the glory of God, but a darker sense that the nature can strip one of personhood.
Then Melville adds something else to his vast emptiness:
...Three Indian mounds
Against the horizon's level bounds
Dim showed across the prairie green
Like dwarfed and blunted mimic shapes
Of pyramids at distance seen
From the broad Delta's planted capes
Of vernal grain. In nearer view
With trees he saw them crowned, which drew
From the red sagamores of eld
entombed within, the vital gum
Which green kept each mausoleum. [lines 57-67]
Melville refuses to have anything to do with the crazy legends about the origin of Indian mounds. He straightforwardly describes them as the tombs of ancient Native Americans. Moving into a more metaphorical stream of thought, Melville associates the greenness of these mounds with their vital connection to those Native American chiefs (sagamores) buried within. Thinking again of the basic scene, we have these ever-green mounds seen from a small cabin on the prairie. To Nathan, living in that cabin, the mounds communicate an alternative spiritual life. And by comparing these three mounds to the pyramids of Egypt, Melville also endows them with immense age and mystery. That age is another way that these mounds call into question the Christian narrative with which Nathan had grown up.
What is most notable about this passage is the way Melville introduces the Indian mounds of the Midwest and endows them with cultural and religious meaning.. and it is a doubt-inducing meaning. This stands opposed to the ways in which other groups in 19th century America made the mounds into some confirmation of their own sect or race.
Children's Literature
September 25, 2008
The above picture is from The Happy Man and His Dump Truck, first published in 1950. It is a book I have read a number of times with Aurora, but looking at the picture I am amazed that the book is still around. That truck is certainly an old rattle trap! But on the other hand, the book is easy to read with Aurora and the notion of a pickup truck that hauls around some farm animals is not hard to grasp.
Another example:
This picture is from a real favorite around here, Harry the Dirty Dog. Again, I love the images of road work here.. down to the funny grenade-like warning lights at the edge of the work zone. The lack of orange safety jumpsuits on the workers and standardized signs may surprise a contemporary observer. But this whole scene must have made perfect sense in 1956 when this book first came out. Once again despite the antique-ness of the scene, nothing is qualitatively different than what we see today.. and Aurora can recognize the individual elements.
I often note the dates of the children's literature as we read, and I'm interested in how many of these works go back to the 40s and 50s. There is a steady trickle of classics that come out in the following decades, but children's literature before 1945 does not seem to be represented in our collection. My theory is that the the visual culture of America changed so dramatically in the 1940s and 1950s that earlier representations feel outdated in ways that slightly later texts do not. If we move much earlier than 1940 we might find foreign and inexplicable pictures.. horses and buggies? model Ts? These might be interesting to a grown up, but to a child the pictures would not match their experience.
It is curious to me that this is similar to what holds for film. 1940 represents the golden age of Hollywood and we get a stream of classics. It is fun to watch silent films, but the "look" of American cinema is a child of the 1940s and after. Likewise in popular music, it is relatively easy to think of important singers from 1940 on.. but much more difficult before that. Tellingly, the singers you likely would name from before 1940 were not really the popular singers of that time.
There are technological changes that are important to note in the film, publishing, and recording business. But is it just a coincidence that all these mediums changed and found a classic form at about the same time? And what must it have been like in 1950 with a new world growing up around one and nothing to look back on that formed a usable past. Children's books, movies, and recorded music from just 15 years previous seemed strangely distant and disconnected from the present. Meanwhile, writing in 2008, the books, films, and music from the 1950s seem quaint but always legible and connected. We are closer to 1950 culturally and stylistically than 1950 was to its own recent past.
The Dancer and the Dance:
The Life of Yukio Mishima
September 22, 2008
The bio-documentary Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters tells the story of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. The bio-documentary (Paul Schrader, 1985) takes the novel approach of telling the life of Mishima in a series of triply nested narratives. The frame story continues piece by piece to the final denouement, while black-and-white biographical episodes regularly interrupt this main story. Into these biographical episodes are dropped dramatized examples of the fiction of Mishima.
The climax of the life of Mishima is a curious and strange event. It is one of the oddest endings of a literary life I have ever encountered. Here is Wikipedia's version of the event:
On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of the Tatenokai, under pretext, visited... the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan's Self-Defense Forces. Inside, they barricaded the office and tied the commandant to his chair. With a prepared manifesto and banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped onto the balcony to address the soldiers gathered below. His speech was intended to inspire a coup d'etat restoring the powers of the emperor. He succeeded only in irritating them, however, and was mocked and jeered. He finished his planned speech after a few minutes, returned in to the commandant's office and committed seppuku.
It's an absurd event. The author lectures to a derisive crowd from a balcony and then declares himself disappointed in Japan and proceeds to commit suicide. As political action it was inept.. and more than a little ridiculous. But it gains interest as symbolic action.. as a performed work of art that is underlined by self-destruction. The fact that his works such as Patriotism appear to point to this very end also adds symbolic weight.
I recall from my days reading and re-reading Yeats that there was an interest in Yeats in Japan of the 1930s. He spent some time there and was also fascinated by Japanese dramatical forms such as the Noh. Watching this bio-documentary on Mishima I could spot lots of areas where the high Romanticism of Yeats dovetails nicely with the aesthetic philosophy of Mishima. Consider the passage by Mishima that is read near the end of the documentary:
Never in physical action had I discovered the chilling satisfaction of words. Never in words had I experienced the hot darkness of action. Somewhere there must be a higher principle which reconciles art and action. That principle, it occurred to me, was death.
This search for resolution between the duality of life and art is characteristic of Yeats, who declared perfection of life and work impossible, yet dreamt of uniting the dancer and the dance. The drama of the later poetry of Yeats is centered in this impossible dream of bringing together the impurity of life and the purity of art. For Mishima this symbolic action that marked the end of his life was a way of finding resolution to that division. It was ultimately a Romantic act.
The passage continues:
...There I saw a great circle coiled around the earth, a ring that resolved all contradictions, a ring vaster than death, more fragrant than any scent I have ever known. Here was the moment I had always been seeking.
Again Yeats is the most relevant precursor.. who called this ultimate resolution Byzantium. Behind Yeats we can think of Pater and his pure burning flame. This is not to deny the importance of traditional Japanese influences.. I am sure those are present. But it is hard for me to believe that high Romanticism has not overpowered the traditional elements.
The life of Mishima works as a useful critique of Romanticism.. and that is the best way to approach this bio-documentary. Some lessons: 1) purity is not something to aim at in life, 2) life is fragmented and the attempt to meld it into a unity is dangerous, and 3) settle into a muddle and don't look for a final statement. I guess those three lessons are pretty similar..
Looking for a Leader
September 21, 2008
With the addition of Sarah Palin to the McCain ticket, the question of what constitutes readiness for the presidency has reached a new level of muddiness. The argument runs that Palin is every bit as experienced as Barack Obama.. so Dems shouldn't complain! And then there was the Mitt Romney proposition that management experience is what really matters.. so Palin is actually ahead of everyone.
What we are dealing with is a mass of confused notions that no one is bothering to straighten out. I would suggest that there are several skill sets that we are looking for in a leader. Instead of conflating them, or acting as if only one matters, we should separate them for clarity's sake:
1) management skill. The president sits atop a pyramid of aids and bureaus. The ability to coordinate these independent individuals and groups poses a purely managerial challenge. This is what Mitt Romney is always going on about: the need to be able to run a state or a business.
2) knowledge of Washington. McCain has little management experience, but he does have inside knowledge about how Washington works. This is undoubtedly his strong suit.. although in the current national mood he ends up running from it as much as running on it. All things being equal, we would want a president who has a deep knowledge of Washington and how to do things there.
3) expertise and ideas. Actual expertise is overplayed on the level of politics. We never, so far as I can see, vote for experts in an important field. It might seem smart to elect an expert in finances or foreign affairs to the office of the presidency, but those people will be disqualified on other categories. What we want is someone intellectually engaged with the currents of our time and broadly knowledgeable of the issues that face government. We can tolerate someone who does not know everything about the financial crisis, but not someone who can't grasp the central political issues inherent in the crisis.
4) character and personality. This one looms frustratingly large in America. But like it or not Americans want a president who can stand as a role model and who can meet our emotional needs in a time of crisis. This is perhaps the first and most obstinate hurdle to running for president. People have to be able to imagine an individual coming on television in a time of crisis.
5) judgment and issues. I find it funny that right wing types are always challenging people to name legislation that Obama has authored.. because I know very little about what bills any politician, including McCain and Biden, has authored. The Bush years were pretty lousy when it comes to realistic opportunities for passing progressive legislation.. impossible, in fact. So what I (and I think others) listen for is stances on current issues and a coherent sense of where the country might go. Past public judgments about the economy and foreign matters also add to the candidate's profile, allowing me to see how a candidate "tends" to think and act.
One other issue to bring up is that although we want to think of an election as one candidate vs. the other, in truth both candidates bring with them a team of people. We could think of the race as McCain & Co. vs Obama & Co. Each will have a slate of technical experts, management gurus, and personal advisors to help them out.
Thinking about the above categories the difference between Obama and Palin stands out clearly. So far it seems that while Palin has some management experience and has a personality that appeals to some, she fails completely when it comes to a category such as #3.. and is questionable when it comes to #5. Listening to Obama talk and it is clear that he is engaged with issues and has ideas about where we should be going as a nation. And his engagement goes way back.
The "experience" issue that used to be McCain's great card is connected to category #2 and only in a tangential way with #3. McCain knows his way around Washington, but is there anyone who believes he has an intellectual grasp of the Middle East or the economy? He is a Washington mover and shaker who picks up his talking points from conventional wisdom. McCain also should not get a pass when it comes to personality. I liked what Nicholas Kristof had to say in his column today:
(Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border ...)
Theory of Popular Theology
September 20, 2008
In my introduction to what we do in Religious Studies I try to separate it from theology. In my experience at a religious college the goal was explicitly to build up a religious frame for understanding the world. This educational goal went by various names, such as the "development of a Christian worldview." The school also attempted to train us in tearing down other frames and building the "correct one".. that is to say, it was a school with a missionary emphasis. Something similar (although not as fierce) would go on at any religion-based school, whether Lutheran or Unitarian.
My work in teaching religious studies is to get students to think and talk about the process of building that conceptual frame. How do groups construct a "correct" way to view the world and then enforce it through symbols and values? That is much more of a meta-question than any direct engagement with theological statements.
This is not to say that theology is not important to study. In working on early Christianity or medieval Islam, it is essential to have an idea of the system of thought that establishes the frame by which the world is experienced. Theology in this case is studied with a different emphasis: not as a set of truth propositions, but a way of defining a way of life and habit of perception.
Another way of thinking about this would be to say that if our goal is to see the world through the eyes of some historical figure, then a grasp of theology is a necessity. Not, however, perfect academic theology with i's dotted and t's crossed, but the trickle-down theology that represents the set of expected ideas and assumptions and values held by a large percentage of the populace. In this way theology really is interesting and valuable.
The upshot of this is that I am hostile to contemporary positive theology. Attempts to rationalize and academicize religion will be boring.. and useless. I think this way about liberal centers of theology.. which have intricate ideas about the world and God but no real popular following. Better to walk into a Charismatic church and listen to actual popular theology. A bit of knowledge about the Rapture and the Great Tribulation will go a long ways in understanding America.. way more than, say, Process Theology.
This interest in popular theology opens a door for taking up contemporary critical theory. Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard can be approached not only as thinkers, but also as the purveyors of something like a "popular theology" that enables a certain way of living and being. An exact understanding of Derrida in this case would not be the goal (difficult as that might be), rather a sense of the way those ideas translate into a conceptual frame for understanding life among a group of people. I can attest that the study of theory titans like those listed above comes to resemble theology classes.. with right and wrong answers and a body of correct notions to be held. But we who are looking to understand the world must flee from this kind of theological or critical indoctrination.. and take a more sociological and contextual approach to every thinker and idea.. no matter how perfect they seem.
Sputnik Festival in Manitowoc
September 18, 2008
This year featured the first ever Sputnikfest in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. When I decided to video this event I thought it was a longstanding local tradition.. just the kind of thing I look out for. After all, the small piece of the Sputnik fell on Manitowoc's main street way back in 1962! That's plenty of time for a festival to get going. But this year was the first.
The video, I think, is fun, but it also does not ask the really interesting theoretical question: what is going on here in terms of the creation of place? As it is explained in an interview, the idea was to do something fun and wacky. All the creators of this event would presumably say something similar: this is a chance to have a fun community festival.
It is more important to place the Sputnikfest in the context of the economy of small cities, which actively search for identities.. since any strong identity can serve as a magnet for business and tourism. In an era when small cities like Manitowoc have to struggle to get people to come to the downtown, the festival/farmer's market circuits are one of the best tools for building commerce. People may think in terms of "fun".. but what is going on is more fundamentally commercial in motivation.
In the video there is a reenactment of the fall of a piece of the Sputnik.. and its discovery by two police officers. At the end the players come out and sing an ode to the Sputnik to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Some of the lines include:
We're glad you joined us here our friends
To celebrate this day
When Sputnik fell upon us
And became our claim to fame.
But events don't really create anything, what matters is that human societies seize upon events and use them in certain ways. The Sputnikfest is what makes the fall of the Sputnik a central narrative for the city of Manitowoc. The festival itself is the claim to fame.. while the actual thing.. that exists now in Manitowoc only as a plaster model.. is just the excuse for all these curious human convolutions.
Someone ought to write a book about how this all works. Oh, wait a second, I already have, and it's coming out at the end of October!
Documenting Buddhists
September 15, 2008
The image that will stay with me longest from Werner Herzog's documentary Wheel of Time is that of Buddhist monks casually wiping away the sand mandala that they had labored over for so long. My instinct is to preserve and save.. and what more deserving of preservation than this spiritual geography. But Buddhists clearly think differently about this. Life is transitory and preservation is in the long run an illusion: as if all that art in museums is really anything but sand that will someday be wiped away!
Wheel of Time was a good documentary.. most notable for its engagement with everyday scenes surrounding the annual pilgrimage to Bhod Gaya. But Werner Herzog also seemed somewhat off balance. He does best in works such as Grizzly Man or Aguirre, the Wrath of God where he can sink his teeth into a philosophy that he finds wrong or even abhorrent. He finds too much to respect in Buddhism to really launch a personal critique.
Watching this documentary I was reminded of my frustration that film makers are never academics and academics never film makers. Herzog has lots of great tools and skills for capturing images and working out a narrative, but he does not have an eye for historical detail or a familiarity with critical frames of thought. Herzog is great when it is him talking since he has developed a view of the world that is fascinating in its own right (kind of grim), but when it comes to locating and representing other systems of thought, he runs into difficulty. That is what academics learn how to do.. but their work is so often hidden away in some monograph.
Oriental Institute Museum
September 14, 2008
My weekend in Chicago got rained out. I was there to attend some meetings for the Urban Studies Program sponsored by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM).. for which I am now an adviser. I had expected to be able to roam around on Saturday afternoon after the last meeting, but that was not to be.
I did manage to walk around the University of Chicago and see the Oriental Institute Museum (pictured above). It was a disappointingly small glimpse of Chicago, but it also reminded me that a city as big as this will not be experienced all at once.. not even close. Over the next decade or so I just have to keep getting to Chicago and picking off one or two new sites each time. Then someday I will look up and know my way around the city and its neighborhoods. But yesterday I just got turned around and confused in Hyde Park and University of Chicago (=lost).
The Oriental Institute itself was an excellent and well signed tour through ancient civilizations in the Near East. The displays were oriented toward specific sites and not "masterpieces." The individual artifacts, which ranged from the monumental to pot sherds, were used to tell a story about cities and then civilizations. I find that ancient works, because of their cultural distance, are an aid for spurring me to think about the construction of place and the projection of symbolic values. So much that would have been unconsciously understood by an ancient viewer leaps out to us as bizarre. I think realizing that allows us to walk back into our own world as better readers of culture. That is a special benefit of working with ancient material.
Along with ancient artifacts come modern representations of the ancient world. Above is the Ishtar Gate in Babylon. Other representations are more schematic and less artistically accomplished, but this level of imagining the ancient world is one that I find fascinating. It is one thing to pile up figurines and pots and texts.. it is something else to put this all together into a coherent picture of how a culture lived and viewed their world. And to get at those questions, it is necessary to re-create space. And doing that requires a leap of the imagination. It is an imaginative leap every bit as great as writing a novel.
The above figure is El from Megiddo in present day Israel. El is the word for God employed throughout the Hebrew Bible.. but it was originally the name for a specific god. Religion is a historical phenomenon that develops out of the past.. and in my opinion it should be studied in that way. The Hebrew conception of God was different than that of the Canaanites, but it was also related to this figure from the past.
Genres We Live By
September 10, 2008
The account of the prophet Elijah's tapping of Elisha to follow him in 1 Kings chapter 19 is fascinating for its parallel to the calling of the disciples by Jesus. Here is the account from 1 Kings 19.19-21:
So [Elijah] set out from there, and found Elisha son of Shaphat, who was ploughing. There were twelve yoke of oxen ahead of him, and he was with the twelfth. Elijah passed by him and threw his mantle over him. He left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, 'Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.' Then Elijah said to him, 'Go back again; for what have I done to you?' He returned from following him, took the yoke of oxen, and slaughtered them; using the equipment from the oxen, he boiled their flesh, and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out and followed Elijah, and became his servant.
Moving forward a number of centuries, we find Jesus also passing individuals at work and calling upon them to follow him. They put down their work and followed their master.
Looking at the parallel between these calls to discipleship in the New Testament and this earlier story of the prophetic call of Elisha, a critic could be tempted to see the New Testament account as simply a copy of the earlier one. In other words, perhaps the writers of the Gospels, knowing Hebrew Scripture well, imported this manner of calling disciples into his account so as to match the status of Jesus to a figure like Elijah.
No doubt that is partially true. It would be impossible for someone to write about Jesus and not be influenced by the canonical portrayals of what a prophet is supposed to do. We might especially see this reflected in word choice and positioning. But to press this case too far—so that the New Testament story becomes suspect—would require neglecting the fact that genres are not solely literary artifacts, but also social artifacts. Scripts for how certain kinds of events are supposed to work exist in our minds and get acted out as we go through our lives.
If the position of "prophet" can be posited as existing in the minds of ancient Israelites, then the proper responses and attitudes toward that position must also have been present. The Elijah passage from 1 Kings may have helped to construct the way people understood the position of prophet, but after that anyone who claimed this position would have put into motion a set of social scripts. When writers or artists attempt to portray that script, we necessarily see some overlaps in the representation: because they are describing the same social script!
This is a point worth keeping in mind, since too often people reason that similarity of representation equals literary or artistic copying.. and that means the event can be discounted as a true event. Occasionally social scripts die while the literary genre becomes fossilized (pastoral poetry). But most of the time we should be looking for an interaction between lived social scripts and literary and artistic representations.
Clothes and Culture
September 10, 2008
I am reading Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski and quickly came across an account of his first trip abroad from Poland during the Cold War. He arrives in Italy and one thing that sticks out to him is the difference in dress:
The confrontation between East and West took place not only in the military realm but in all other spheres of life as well. If the west dressed lightly, then the East, according to the law of opposites, dressed heavily; if the West wore closely fitting clothes, the the East did the reverse— everything had to stick out by a mile. One did not have to carry one's passport around:—one could see at a distance who was from which side of the Iron Curtain. [12]
Kapuscinski is right: when cultures define themselves against each other they begin to express that self-definition in outward forms such as clothing. These outward differences then begin to take on symbolic value, such that somehow tight fitting clothes are "decadent" and baggy, heavy clothing "backwards" (depending on who is doing the talking).
We should bear this example in mind when it comes to criticizing Islamic culture for the way women dress. The place of women in Islam is a complicated topic.. but it is clear that right now it is cultural conflict/competition that is driving the differences in dress style between the West and the Islamic world. Forces on both sides are allowing these two social categories (West, Islamic world) to be defined as identity categories.. and people caught within this construct seek outward means to express that identity. Clothes are a crucial part of this symbolic drama.
Ryszard Kapuscinski. Travels with Herodotus. Knopf, 2007.
The Fox River
September 9, 2008
This video inaugurates a projected five part series on the Fox River in Wisconsin. I had originally thought I could cover the river in a single 10 minute video, but I ended up spending my entire first day filming just the short section from Neenah up to the point where the river nears Appleton. The series will eventually include the following five parts:
1) Neenah and Menasha (industry)
2) Appleton (river as scenery for development)
3) Heart of the Valley (locks and early transportation)
4) undeveloped stretch (natural world)
5) De Pere and Green Bay (more industry)
A river makes for an unexpected approach to contemporary culture. Roads and cars provide us with the usual points of view on our world. The river is often mere postcard view, looked down upon from above. But to take the river as a vantage point may let us see more clearly the values and assumptions embedded in our culture.
The Fox River also bears witness to past versions of these cities in the Fox Valley. It was once the highway, the industrial center, and the source of power. The remnants of those past versions are still present in or around the river, even if only in concrete piles, worn industrial buildings, and rarely used locks.
Patriotism and Higher Causes
September 5, 2008
The short Japanese film Patriotism (1966), directed and written by Yukio Mishima, makes fascinating viewing in the aftermath of the Republican convention.. and especially after the closing speech by John McCain. A problem in listening to that pitch by John McCain is our collective inability to hear the overtones of the argument being made. The appeal for personal dedication to a cause greater than self and the overt talk of honor and country is echoed in plenty of nationalists from the past. It is a way of thinking that on examination is notably hollow. I think we easily recognize this when we see it from within a system of symbols that has no pull on our emotions.
In an interview for a Japanese television program included on this new Criterion DVD, Yukio Mishima explains his view of death.. and by the end you will see how this pattern of thinking connects to the thoughts of McCain. The war Mishima is talking about is World War II.
I was most intimate with death during the war. I was 20 years old when the war ended, so all that my teenage friends and I would talk about was how and when we would die. We entered our 20s full of such thoughts. The youth of today, in contrast, may seek out thrills, and thought they're now exactly afraid of death, theirs is not a tense existence in which death becomes a precondition for life...
Human beings aren't strong enough to live and die only by themselves. That's because we have ideals. We can only act for the sake of something. We soon tire of living only for ourselves. It necessarily follows that we also need to die for something. That something used to be called a "noble cause"...
Democratic governments obviously have no need for heroic causes. Yet if one cannot find a value that transcends oneself, life itself, in a spiritual sense, is rendered meaningless.
The world appeared to have grown slack and soft after the war. Mishima does not appear to give real support for the war; he is more interested in that crest of life and meaning felt by someone who is fully invested in a cause.. a transcendent cause. The nation has a powerful way of offering itself as a candidate for that preeminent cause.. and the symbols of nationalism come together to seal that case.
Why does Mishima dismiss Democracy as a producer of noble causes? It would seem that a Democracy by its nature produces people with split identities and each pursuing their own version of happiness. Democracy in this view is a tent for the small causes and personal pursuits that make up everyday life. It is not easy in a democracy to elevate the state to a position of "noble cause".. but that's exactly what we have seen developing in the Republican party.. with religion getting melded to nationalism.
Mishima looks back fondly on the days when death was a constant possibility:
When I consider my own case in particular, in the days when I expected death... I was happier than I am now. It's a truly strange happiness, both because it seems so beautiful in retrospect and because one can even feel it at all.
Listening to those sentiments it was difficult not to think about the acceptance speech of John McCain and the centrality of his experience as a POW in the speech. He learned to love America in Hanoi "because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again; I wasn't my own man anymore; I was my country's."
Patriotism tells a story of a man whose comrades had embarrassed the emperor and who was now ordered to arrest his friends. This puts him in a spot where the only honorable thing to do is to commit suicide. The largest part of the film includes a graphic depiction of ritual suicide by him and his wife. The stage is simple, patterned after the stark setting of a Noh drama. Husband and wife sit facing each other:
The characters written behind them read: "wholehearted sincerity." Patriotism, no matter how gory, justifies itself through the highest sounding words.. through mom, apple pie, and God. The symbolism is filled out with the traditional dress of the wife and the uniform of the husband. The initial realization that they are going to commit suicice together leads to a night of uninhibited love making. Life is strongest, Mishima seems to imply, when death is a keenly felt presence.
But that is the result of this patriotism: a body mangled and bloody. A wife about to kill herself as well. To me it is an outrageous film.. although convincing in its portrayal of human beings caught up in a system of symbols and doing terrible and meaningless things. But it does not feel outrageous for people caught within a "noble cause".. I can guarantee you that. We would do well to put away from us each and every noble cause.
Thoughts on the Republican Convention
September 3, 2008
Watching the conventions on television (we just bought one) has impressed on me the extent to which there is a pitched battle over the narrative frame for this campaign. Both Democratic and Republican commentators appeal to a settled stock of points.. and repeat, repeat, repeat. I suppose the justification for this way of doing things is that the people who closely follow politics are decided, and the undecideds are probably not watching all the coverage.. so the idea is to keep sowing a few key ideas that might settle in someone's mind. But for anyone who follows this stuff closely, the television commentary is pretty inane. Much of it is "push commentary".. that is, aimed not so much at delivering an actual opinion as stating a hint at the way viewers should receive the event. (Yglesias has an interesting post on the phenomenon of commentators with private and public opinions.)
If I try to imagine how this campaign will look in, say, fifty years.. after the party narratives have worn off.. I would guess that it will seem quite different. The McCain camp works hard to make it sound as if Obama is offering himself as "the One" who will personally change the world. But just listen to the way John McCain is extravagantly praised by every speaker. Here is Rudy Giuliani:
And we can trust him to deal with anything, anything that nature throws our way, anything that terrorists do to us. This man has been tested over and over again, and we will be safe in his hands, and our children will be safe in his hands, and our country will be safe in the hands of John McCain. No doubt.
That repetition of "safe in his hands" calls up for me the song "He's got the whole world in his hands.." only now we have an eerily smiling John McCain looking down upon us.. perhaps with a green background. The safety appealed to here is not based on policies or actions that might characterize a McCain administration.. we are to rest secure in the hands of John McCain. If anyone at the Democratic convention had said that, we would not yet have heard the end of it.. Obama would be an egomaniac who thinks he can personally save us. But to the onlooker fifty years from now, that is exactly the message of John McCain.
Ah, and Sarah Palin. You knew this big home run (or grand slam) speech was coming.. but it was remarkable how untethered from reality it was. We know that she was actually for the "bridge to nowhere" before there existed a political pay-off to refuse it. Then she was a pioneer in small town lobbying efforts in Washington.. the author of the same unnecessary federal pork that John McCain has tried to eliminate. Then there is her basic chumminess with Ted Stevens and the corrupt Alaskan establishment. Since she has not had a press conference.. and since apparently the Republicans think no one will notice.. she was allowed to go out and repeat falsehoods about her actual record. It is easy to construct a fiction to sketch a character you would like to be.. it will be much more difficult over the next two months two actually maintain that story.
Another point: those reform and maverick lines. Despite the bizarre charge made by Mitt Romney that liberalism is the going philosophy in Washington, the reality is that the Republicans are the establishment. So on a "reform Washington" plank one would assume that there would be some effort to define oneself against the current Washington. The basic question is: What will McCain and Palin do against the Washington establishment and its values? Presumably to be a reformer would mean hurting the feelings of someone who is actually in power. But no.. we get nothing like that, no details about what reform will look like (notice: in the campaign narrative it is Obama who is vague). It is like we are supposed to accept this deafening silence about what will be reformed. We should just trust the honorable John McCain to do the right thing.. and now the honorable Sarah Palin.
Before the Palin speech I had been wondering how Joe Biden would tip-toe around attacking Palin so as not to be seen as too negative. Now I trust there will be no such worries.
Globalization in the New Ray Davies CD
September 1, 2008
The new Ray Davies CD comes with a DVD that contains Americana.. a homemade documentary of his solo tour of America right after 9/11. At the beginning of the video Davies gives some directions for understanding his career:
People associate me with writing songs about England, but I've never really seen it that way. I write about characters and there are characters all over the world. I'd written as many songs as I could about my London experience. I felt I needed to research other places, find new experiences to write about.
As the film goes on to make clear, this new "research" would involve America. Working Man's Cafe (2008) thus joins his previous album Other People's Lives (2006) as conscious— that is, researched—explorations of America. Apparently the solo career of Ray Davies will be an American period.
Whatever the change of location, the lyrical concerns of Davies have stayed pretty consistent. He has a soft spot for passing ways of life and personal oddity.. along with a working class point of view. In this last album those characteristics are melded with a curiosity about the process of globalization. I will highlight two songs and how they take up globalization:
1. "The Working Man's Café"
As the title song, and the song that seemingly provided the inspiration for the artwork for both the CD and the Ray Davies website, this is probably the place to begin thinking about the album. The singer describes wandering in various commercial settings that are significant for the change they have seen:
Bought a pair of new designer pants
Where the fruit and veg man used to stand
I always used to see him there
Selling old apples and pears.
That old fruit seller, who used to chat up the pretty girls, was a working man.. and working men would once gather in the "working man's café." The café is thus the sign of an absence.. something that used to thrive but now can't be found.
It's really good to see us come so far
But haven't we forgotten who we are?
That is a classic Ray Davies expression of sadness at cultural change.. here not aimed at anything specific or English, but at the changes everywhere.. and especially in America.
2. "The Real World"
Despite the statement by Ray Davies that he is interested in "characters," this is the only song on the CD that tells a story. As the final song on the CD it carries some weight. It describes an escape from the "real world" to a new exotic reality.. which we easily see is New Orleans:
You danced and partied at the Mardi Gras
Threw back all the beads at the parade
Fake worlds and logos in the shopping mall
Where you came from
Everything looks the same the whole world now
So you headed down south
Left your old home town
Relocated so far away from the real world
But where is the real world?
It is a theme mined long ago by the Beatles in "She's Leaving Home." A young woman tries to get away from her old life and find something new. In this case the localities are important: a standard American small town where everything looks the same and New Orleans "down south." She made the escape but is left wondering "Where is the real world?"
Davies suggests that it is difficult to really know where true life begins. The one hope is to just wake up and live:
One day you'll turn around and you will feel
"I am alive this is real."
The search for a transcendent life is a false path.. and in our age of globalization there is no authenticity out there to be found. Warning:
There's a lot of lost souls looking out
For a sign for the real world...
The answer is to wake up! Live! Accept life!
Working Man's Café is quite consistent in this philosophy. The nostalgia and love for the past is here.. but also a recognition that life has to be lived and accepted. In "You're Asking Me" Davies explicitly rejects the notion that his experience (presumably from the 60s) has any bearing on the present:
First time around it was really grand
But inside something said to me
Go get a life get a life
Now that I'm here I can't understand
Why anyone is asking me if I could give a damn.
These are songs for getting a life in the middle of a world that does not stop changing.
