Nostalgie Russe

Here’s a news story that caught my eye: the Russian Cathedral in Nice is being returned to Russian governmental control. No, they’re not going to load it onto a flatcar and send it back to the Motherland. Moscow says that the only administrative change will be the elimination of the 3 euro admission fee charged to tourists.

I used to pass this cathedral every morning when I took our daughter to grade school. On warm days she and I would buy hot dogs (served in hollowed-out half-baguettes) from the vendor under the train tracks and eat them for lunch on the cathedral lawn. Some of the huge old trees were propped up by metal crutches impaled in the ground, like the ones that Dalí often put in his paintings.

Here, courtesy of Anne, is a photo of a crutched-up tree on the Cathedral grounds.

Imitation of Life, 1934/1959

The Last Sentence

I’ve reached the last of my seven magical sentences. This one is the longest and, on the face of it, perhaps the least enigmatically promising:

“These are: intention-reading and cultural learning, which account for how children learn linguistic symbols in the first place; schematization and analogy, which account for how children create abstract syntactic constructions out of the concrete pieces of language they have heard; entrenchment and competition, which account for how children constrain their abstractions to those that are conventional in their linguistic community; and functionally based distributional analysis, which accounts for how children form paradigmatic categories of various kinds of linguistic constituents.”

This sentence appears toward the end of Constructing a Language by Michael Tomasello. And already, in writing this first interpretive sentence, the unconscious associations are starting to pile up. For the title of Tomasello’s book I first wrote Constructing a Boob, which I then emended to Constructing a Book.

I’ve previously written a few posts about Tomasello’s work in psycholinguistics. Curiously, in my immediately-preceding post on the sixth magical sentence I made reference to a new novel written by the wife of Steven Pinker, who is also a psycholinguist. Tomasello and Pinker don’t see eye to eye. Pinker agrees with Chomsky that humans are equipped with a distinct language module, and with Gould that this module evolved all at once as a kind of punctuated equilibrium. Tomasello, on the other hand, contends that a gradual evolutionary path can be traced from lower-level primate cognition to human language. Magical sentence 7 lists the component processes that together comprise the ontogeny of language acquisition, a skill set that Tomasello traces incrementally both in children’s gradual improvement in language use and in other species’ sublinguistic capabilities.  Tomasello emphasizes that language itself has developed over historical time, from early basic namings and commands to the wide variety of grammatically complex systems used by all modern humans. Most of this progression is attributable not to biological evolution but to cumulative cultural learning, ratcheting up linguistic complexity across successive generations.

This stuff is fascinating in its own right, but for my purposes I’m interested in the conflict between punctuated equilibrium and gradualism. If the human language module popped fully formed into the heads of our primate forebears, then it’s easier to contend that there is some basic discontinuity between apes and men. And what, pray tell, gave rise to this discontinuity? Mutation, you say? Fine, but how about the Big Punctuator Himself? Maybe he infused some lucky protohuman ancestor with the ability to understand and to speak. And while he was at it, he also bestowed upon this earliest human — call him Adam — the most important punctuation mark of all: an eternal soul.

In my last post I mentioned that I’d quoted Pinker in my Genesis 1 nonfiction book, emailed the reference to him, and received a courteous and relevant reply. I did the same with Tomasello, except he never responded. Looking back at my email to him I can see why: I wasn’t specific enough in what interested me about his work. Despite his nonresponse, I’m more persuaded by Tomasello’s theory of language acquisition than by Pinker’s. I won’t rehearse the rationale here; instead I’ll point back to my own project, since presently I’m engaged in a talismanic reading of texts rather than a scholarly one.

“Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3)

It would appear that light is the first thing God created, but look again. Language came first. God said, and then there was; signifier, and then signified. This observation is pivotal to my reading of Genesis 1: God, or probably some itinerant Sumerian trader, happens upon a primitive protosemitic tribe. Being a cosmopolitan sophisticate, the trader is possessed not of a more complex brain than the villagers, but of a more complex language. The trader points at the campfire: “light,” he says. He points at the distant volcano: “light.” He points at the eastern sky at dawn: “light.” And so it was that, for this tribe, a universe came into being in six days: not a de novo and ex nihilo material reality, but a socially-constructed reality for making sense of an already-existing material universe.

I personally think this is an inspired reading of the Genesis 1 creation narrative. Is it true? Well, it truly happened to each one of us as children, that we learned to associate words with things and to compile things into larger realities in precisely this way, through cultural transmission from language-users more adept than ourselves. But do I know that Genesis 1 is the more-or-less empirically accurate recounting of an ancient conversation between a linguistically sophisticated visitor and his primitive hosts? No, of course not. So what separates my interpretation from all the other readings, plausible and crackpot alike, that have been handed down through the generations and that are still being spawned by imaginative exegetes? Well… Do I have especially strong scholastic credentials or historical evidence to back my claims? Um… Have I received a special revelation, and can I back up its authenticity by signs and wonders? Er…

It’s at this point that I watch my interpretation of Genesis 1 receding into the mists of speculative metaphysics from which Genesis 1 itself emerged so long ago. Can I bring it back before it disappears altogether? I’m hoping that I can. How? Not by renewed efforts at persuading an imaginary audience of the truth of my claims, but by letting them take shape as religious fiction. So there’s this guy — call him the Exegete — who’s come up with a new interpretation of the Biblical creation story. He shops it to the usual religous types: no sale. Frustrated, he eventually gives up. One day over coffee the Exegete tells someone about his crackpot idea. You should go talk to so-and-so about this idea, his interlocutor suggests. The Exegete does so. Soon he finds himself entangled in the mad and grandiose schemes of a shadowy and widely dispersed organization called the Fellowship. Not only do the Fellowship embrace the Exegete’s idea; they extend and distort the idea to potentially catastrophic proportions. And so on.

So now I think I’ve got two novels to write. There’s the one about the Iconist, which I’ve mentioned in recent posts. And now there’s the Exegete’s story, moving what had been a nonfiction book written by a nonfictional person, namely me, into the realm of speculative fiction. And I think these two stories fit together as part of the same imagined parallel reality.

It seems fitting that the last sentence extracted from my mystic praxis of personal meaning points me back to the first sentence of the primal Creation.

Christianity as Fiction

Yesterday I received an email from my old buddy Steven Pinker. Well, it’s not like he’s a really close friend: about three years ago I quoted him in my nonfiction book about Genesis 1 and sent him the relevant passage, which he commented on. So I guess I got automatically stored in his email directory. Anyhow, my pal Steven wanted to let me know that his wife, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, had just published a new book called 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

As you can imagine, especially if you’ve been reading my recent posts, the title immediately captured my attention. Goldstein, being married to one of the more famous of the “new atheists,” isn’t really offering an apologetics — the 36 Arguments appear in an Appendix, each accompanied by a convincing counter-argument. Besides being a novelist, Goldstein is a serious scholar, having taught philosophy at the university level and having written biographies of Gödel and Spinoza. One of her novels in a fictionalized account of the life of William James. The new novel was just released just yesterday, and today it’s number 200 among all books, fiction and nonfiction alike, on the Amazon bestseller list. [I just checked again: it’s down to 246]

The update from Stephen dovetails nicely with the sixth of seven randomly-selected sentences from which I’m hoping to discover personal meaning and direction for the new year. It goes like this:

“Thus he is given almost equal status to Peter, who sits in a similar position to the right of Christ, and they are distinguished from the other disciples in being accompanied by two female figures, one representing the church of the Jews and the other the church of the Heathen, offering wreaths to Christ.”

The “he” who serves as subject of this sentence is the Apostle Paul, on whose writings I’ve written frequently at Ktismatics. The sentence appears on page 200 of Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind, a book which I found in the giveaway box at the local library and which I’ve not yet read. According to the back cover, the book traces the decline of scientific and rational thought in the West as a consequence of Constantine’s consolidation of a Christianized Roman Empire in the fourth century. Previously the church had emphasized the Gospels, in which Jesus is presented as a Jewish national hero and a rebel against Roman authority. After the crucifixion Peter had sustained the essential Jewishness of Christianity. Paul, on the other hand, universalized the Christian faith to embrace Romans and barbarians alike, imposed a hierarchical church authority structure, and counseled cooperation with the political authorities — an approach that proved much more compatible with the consolidation of the Empire. Augustine emerged in the fourth century as the pre-eminent Pauline theologian and enforcer of a standardized Christian dogma.

In my nonfiction book about Genesis 1 I made the opposite argument: that a revival of Augustinian influence within Christianity during the Protestant Reformation restored a more empirical and creative orientation to Western culture. In all likelihood I was being overly charitable, largely because I was trying to establish a basis for collaboration and compromise between believers and nonbelievers. Three years later I don’t care as much about compromise, or even about religion-bashing. I’m prepared to regard Christianity as the fiction I believe it to be, along with most other forms of metaphysical speculation, and to exploit it for my own amusement. At the same time, I agree with Fabio’s contention that

“In the West we cannot ignore how the history of Christianity influences our every step (and on this point, I find extremely telling the constant subtle interest of extremely timely ‘radical thinkers’ such as Badiou and Zizek with Christianity, not to mention of course Meillassoux own polemic against fideism and yet his confrontation with theological, or divinological, issues)”

So, like Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, I’ll continue incorporating religion into the fiction I write, as long as it stimulates my imagination and contributes to my glee.

The Secret Discourse of All Things

“However, it is not possible to describe all the relations that may emerge in this way without some guide-lines.”

This is the fifth of seven randomly-selected sentences from which I’m hoping to derive some guide-lines for my own personal 2010. It comes from the first chapter, page 29, of Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, and I have to say that, on the face of it, the sentence isn’t particularly rich in connotations. Still, the sentence points away from itself toward its own meaning — which relations? in what way? — and it’s in those referents that something significant starts to emerge.

Foucault describes a threefold project from which this particular book takes shape. Most importantly, he wants to explore “discontinuity” and “rupture” as they appear in discourse. In order to do so, he needs to clear away the usual unifying themes that block the discontinuities from awareness. Foucault contends that there is no unifying force linking multiple texts within a genre or field, or even texts within a single author’s body of work, except through the interpretations that readers impose on those texts. By exposing these socially constructed unities and setting them aside, the intrinsically fragmentary composition of texts is revealed. Only then can Foucault’s third agenda begin to take shape, namely the identification of unexpected unifying themes that link discursive fragments across texts, across authors, across genres.

On page 25 Foucault renounces the traditional insistence that behind every discourse lurks the identity and intentionality of its speaker/writer as a unifying force that transcends the actual words and phrases. It’s as if the whole discourse is “already said” in the speaker’s mind even before any actual words are spoken. The job of the listener then becomes one of listening for this unspoken discourse behind the words, “the silent murmuring, the inexhaustible speech that animates from within the voice that one hears,” which is whole psychological presence of the speaker. This is crap, says Foucault: it points to an ever-receding point of discursive origin that can never actually be reached. Listen to the discourse itself: its irruptions and non sequiturs and dispersions are more real than the unified speaking subject in whose intentional and unconscious thoughts you imagine the discontinuities can be neatly tied together.

“Once these immediate forms of continuity are suspended, an entire field is set free. A vast field, but one that can be defined nonetheless: this field is made up of the totality of all effective statements (whether spoken or written), in their dispersion as events and in the occurrence that is proper to them. Before approaching, with any degree of certainty, a science, or novels, or political speeches, or the œvre of an author, or even a single book, the material with which one is dealing is, in its raw, neutral state, a population of events in the space of discourse in general. One is led therefore to the project of a pure description of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the unities that form within it.” (pp. 26-27)

But Foucault doesn’t want “to spread over everything the dust of facts,” merely listing and cataloging the discrete elements he encounters empirically in actual discourses. Breaking the hypnotic spell of psychological unity, he seeks other relations between elements, other unifying fields and forces that link seemingly disparate and incommensurable source materials. But, Foucault cautions with regard to these newly-linked discursive events, “in no way would they constitute a sort of secret discourse, animating the manifest discourse from within.” Consequently he suggests some “guide-lines” to avoid this sort of mystifying operation.

*   *   *

It’s at this point, however, that I must part company with our eminently reasonable guide and his systematic project. My project isn’t reasonable; it’s fictional. I allowed randomness to select seven disconnected “discursive events” for me, and now I’m seeking the “secret discourse” that animates and unifies these events for me. It’s like invoking Kabbalah for discerning the hidden portentious meanings of seemingly ordinary occurrences. Or like listening for an immanent and universal spirit of discourse from which all manifest discourses emerge.

One of the projects I’m considering, to which I’ve alluded in recent posts, is to write about an iconist. This character specializes in discerning the secret discourse behind manifest discourse, or behind manifestations that aren’t usually regarded as discourse: objects, assortments, gestures, scents, and so on. The iconist is also able to speak the language of secret discourse, assembling things that speak in silent murmurings to the universal interlocutor who exists behind and before all. Under what guide-lines will the iconist perform his mystic praxis? Will the paranoiac chaos into which his world is descending start making sense again? Will he be able to restore some hidden source of unity, or will he usher in some irreversible rupture in the fabric of the universe? Where at last will he reach the vanishing point: at the beginning of all things, the invisible arche-fossil; or at la fin absolue du monde, where every manifest thing culminates in extinction? Or will the iconist find no hidden language that holds together the hermetically isolated objects of the universe, the spaces between them gaping onto the profound and depthless void?

That sort of thing perhaps. Fiction, of course.

Bad Lieutenant by Ferrara, 1992

“Woe to him who builds his house without righteousness and his upper rooms without justice, who uses his neighbor’s services without pay and does not give him his wages, who says, ‘I will build myself a roomy house with spacious upper rooms, and cut out its windows, paneling it with cedar and painting it bright red.’

“Do you become a king because you are competing in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink, and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He pled the cause of the afflicted and needy; then it was well. Is not that what it means to know Me?” declares the Lord.

“But your eyes and your heart are intent only upon your own dishonest gain, and on shedding innocent blood and on practicing oppression and extortion.” Therefore thus says the Lord in regard to Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, “They will not lament for him: ‘Alas, my brother!’ or, ‘Alas, sister!’ They will not lament for him: ‘Alas for the master!’ or, ‘Alas for his splendor!’ He will be buried with a donkey’s burial, dragged off and thrown out behind the gates of Jerusalem.

“Go up to Lebanon and cry out, and lift up your voice in Bashan; cry out also from Abarim, for all your lovers have been crushed. I spoke to you in your prosperity; but you said, ‘I will not listen!’ This has been your practice since your youth, that you have not obeyed My voice. The wind will sweep away all your shepherds, and your lovers will go into captivity; then you will surely be ashamed and humiliated because of all your wickedness. You who dwell in Lebanon, nestled in the cedars, how you will groan when pains come upon you, pain like a woman in childbirth!”

– Jeremiah 22:13-23

Last night I watched Bad Lieutenant: not the new New Orleans re-envisioning by Werner Herzog, but the New York original starring Harvey Keitel. It’s a much harsher and bleaker film than Herzog’s, but ultimately it’s a morality play, a Catholic parable about sin and guilt and penance, about the terrible capriciousness of fate, about justice and mercy and forgiveness. That the story centers not on ordinary civilians but on cops and mobsters and nuns means that the movie is also a social commentary — a jeremiad. Even Jesus makes two personal appearances: once on the cross, once off it.

Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant is as old-fashioned and impassioned, as personal and universal as the Old Testament. As fascistically sadomasochistic too. In my prior writing about the Testaments I’ve gone for intellectual and weird in fiction, for creative and conciliatory in nonfiction. But now I’m becoming persuaded that to get at the meaning of this ancient reality you have to paint it red.

Iconic Speculations

“I think I have shown that all the propositional attitudes require a background of beliefs, so I shall concentrate on conditions for belief. Without belief there are no other propositional attitudes, and so no rationality as I’ve characterized it.”

– from Donald Davidson, “Rational Animals”

In October 2007 I wrote a post about another Davidson essay, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in which he makes the same point. At the time I was interested in the implications primarily for hermeneutics, secondarily for psychoanalysis, and tertiarily(?) for language acquisition. I could revisit Davidson’s arguments this time with respect to epistemology — is there an important difference between knowing something and knowing that you know it? We could talk about whether belief is (Davidson) or is not (Dennett) an important distinction between human language-users and other kinds of creatures. Though Davidson doesn’t really get into ontology in these papers, we could surely engage in yet another discussion about the difference between what is and knowing that it is. However, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to set my amateur ontologizing aside as best I can.

But now I’m thinking about fiction, and especially about the idea of an icon-maker. An old-school icon isn’t just a symbolic representation of a holy object or person; rather, the icon actually participates  in the reality of that which it depicts. Icons played an important part in my first novel, The Stations, including the idea of humans participating iconically, as avatars, in the reality of non-material beings. So maybe I am hung up on ontology after all, especially in its medieval variants, and especially in speculative fiction.

Davidson contends that “propositional attitudes require a background of beliefs.” The relationship between proposition and belief is particularly salient in the case of icons. If I express the propositional attitude that “this icon gives me access to an alternate reality,” implicitly I’m saying that “I believe this icon gives me access…” But if I don’t first believe, does the icon “work”? And, ontogenically speaking, might not the icon be effective in opening up access to an alternate reality even if no one recognizes it or believes it? But this is ancient thinking, and only tangentially related to my interests in the book I’m thinking of writing.

In his “Rational Animals” essay Davidson interacts with two thought experiments invoked by other philosophers to illustrate their ideas. The first, from Norman Malcolm, involves a dog chasing a cat; in the second, Donald Weiss proposes a scenario involving what Davidson calls “a superdog from another planet” who hatches on earth. Inventing fictions to explore serious philosophical theories is a time-tested strategy. I could invent a fiction that would explore a serious ontology and epistemology and hermeneutics of icons. But my seriousness is entirely fictional here, entirely speculative, occupying an imagined alternate reality without any attempt to apply the results of the thought experiment to the reality most of us ordinarily occupy.

Finally, I like the idea of fictional characters actually speculating about their own ideas, attitudes, beliefs, theories, ontologies, and so on. I understand the appeal of not doing this, of showing without telling. But the people who interest me are often self-reflexive. Why shouldn’t fictional characters be this way too?

Enough of this. I’ve been looking at seven randomly-selected sentences as icons: that’s what I see in this sentence.

The Angriest Dog

In his little book Catching the Big Fish David Lynch writes about the origins of his long-running comic strip in the LA Reader called “The Angriest Dog in the World”:

“I drew a little dog. And it looked angry. And I started looking at it and thinking about it, and I wondered why it was angry. And then I did a four-block strip with the dog never moving — three panels were set in the day and one was at night. So there’s a passage of time, but the dog never moves. And it struck me that it’s the environment that’s causing this anger — it’s what’s going on in the environment. He hears things coming from the house. Or something happens on the other side of the fence, or some kind of weather condition. It finally boiled down more to what he hears from inside the house. And that seemed like an interesting concept. That it would just  be balloons of dialogue from within the house with the dog outside. And what was said in the balloons might conjure a laugh.”

I read elsewhere that the idea first came to Lynch during a time in his life when he was feeling chronically angry, but he didn’t actually start producing the cartoon until many years later. By then TM had presumably cured him of his rage, and he wrote the strip not from personal experience but from trying to picture this little piece of the world from the dog’s point of view. The dog is staked to a corner of the yard bordered by the house and a tall fence. He’s straining at the end of his rope, aimed like an arrow as far away from that corner as he can reach. “Grrr,” says the dog in every panel. From inside the house, through the window, someone might say: “It doesn’t get any better than this.” Grrr. Or: “Bill, who is this San Andreas? I can’t believe it’s all his fault.” Grrr. One episode per week for nine years.

I like the episodic structure. I once wrote a comic strip called “Time Out!” (a sample episode can be found on this blog somewhere), in which a young kid has been sent to his or her room for having violated some unstated parental rule. What does the kid think about in there? That’s the premise for each episode. No drawings: just talk/thought bubbles. My second novel, Prop O’Gandhi, also consists largely of short episodes. Originally I modeled this novel on the old-style superhero and fantasy comic books that I read avidly as a kid, where the graphic main story often alternated with a separate text-only story. The first draft of my novel alternated episodes of the “Time Out!” comic strip with textual episodes about an adult character (O’Gandhi) who seems to have trapped himself in permanent time out inside his own house. The overall structure was Mobius-like: in the last episode of “Time Out!” the kid vanishes and the parent takes his/her place, implicitly pointing back to the beginning of the O’Gandhi text episodes.  In subsequent drafts of the novel the comic strip sloughed away, having served as a catalyst for a more traditional text-only structure. As the text extended itself beyond the original premise its episodes got longer, its story arc more coherent — until the end, when the whole structure fragments, exploding out of the house once and for all. And while I like the continuity of the middle section of the book, I also like very much the concluding return to hyper-episodicity.

Yesterday I wrote that I wanted to write an iconist. I think this idea too lends itself to the episodic. The iconist creates or discovers or assembles icons, be they objects or the distances between objects, images or gestures or sounds. Each written episode would be centered around an icon and the hidden meaning toward which it supposedly points, seen from the iconist’s viewpoint and possibly also narrated by the iconist. Larger structures of character, story, reality would emerge piecemeal from these episodes.

As Lynch once was, I too am at times the world’s angriest dog:

“The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl… Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.”

There are some who write their own anger in raw, jagged, snarling prose that, instead of achieving release, strains and stiffens at the strictures of language until it chokes itself. Like Lynch, I’d rather channel the character’s anger from a cooler distance. Though I can draw on my own emotional experiences, I don’t want to represent them. I also don’t want to feel what my characters feel, using that emotional charge to propel the writing. I’d rather create an affect, then let that affect expand it until it becomes a reality in and of itself, immersing characters and settings and stories inside of itself. As Lynch said about his dog, “it’s the environment that’s causing this anger.”

But whatever the off-screen characters said to provoke the dog wasn’t itself angry, nor did it even seem anger-inducing. Day and night the dog goes on growling, straining rigidly against his restraint, regardless of the aphorism or silly joke or ambiguous remark that happens to appear in the talk bubbles floating out of the house. It seems that the dog is intrinsically angry, entirely unaffected by his environment. Strangeness is what Lynch is after, strangeness emanating from the anomalous juxtaposition of images and words, of feelings and thoughts that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. I too am after this sort of disjunctive strangeness that relies on layering and distance.

So, will my iconist be the angriest iconist in the world? Probably not. But if all goes well, the anomalous contrasts between affects, words, and icons will generate a strange, mood-infused reality in which the whole book is immersed and from which its distinctive qualities reveal themselves.

Corners

In The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard writes about the corner: as trap, as refuge, as lair, and then as the place in which forgotten things accumulate. Few admit to being “corner readers,” interpreting the patterns inscribed in the dust and cobwebs and detritus.

“Yet in such daydreams as these the past is very old indeed. For they reach into the great domain of the undated past. By allowing the imagination to wander through the crypts of memory, without realizing it, we recapture the bemused life of the tiniest burrows of the house, in the almost animal shelter of dreams.”

While I respect the symbolism expressed by corners, I find little in them that either attracts or repels me. Memories accumulate in boxes and notebooks, in drawers and on shelves, in closets and in basements. Corners are for wastebaskets, plungers, ironing boards, and other useful but homely objects, ready to hand but unobtrusive to the eye. If my glance is drawn to the corner of a room usually it’s an upper corner where the walls join the ceiling. I tend to see upper corners not as enclosures but as vectors pushing outward and upward, extending the boundaries of the room.

Memories rarely comfort me; more often they feel like traps. Generally I ignore them, letting them gather dust on the shelves in the basement. Useful memories I keep in the corner, pulling them out when I need them but never really paying much direct attention to them.

I did a word search on “corner” in my two novels. Mostly I wrote about outside corners: going around the corner on the street, the four corners of the earth, the corner cafe. The outside corner defines the boundary of an enclosure, but it’s also a frontier, a limit to be surpassed.

Anne and I used to live in St. Louis Park Minnesota, which is also the home town of the Coen Brothers. A sizable Jewish population lives in St. Louis Park, including a fair number of kosher-keeping conservatives. While we were living there the town erected an eruv, a set of interconnected fences and utility poles and wires that define a perimeter surrounding the town. This perimeter marks the symbolic walls and doors of a “house.” Jewish law forbids people from carrying things outside their houses or between houses on the Sabbath; the eruv encloses a space that, for Sabbath-keeping purposes, counts as a house.

The eruv appeals to me a great deal. To the Jews of a modern American suburb it may symbolize a house, perhaps a village, perhaps even a ghetto, drawing on the deepest cultural memories. To me it’s a strange abstraction totally disconnected from memory, its corners demarkating the boundaries of an alternate reality hidden in plain sight. The eruv is the daydream of an undated past, but it is someone else’s dream of a past to which I am not an heir. It’s as if memory were an impersonal force in the world, erupting in things like medieval ruins and text fragments written in forgotten languages and old snapshots of people I don’t know. These things have mysterious iconic value, portending meanings that are themselves lost to all understanding.

For awhile I was hoping that Anne would become an iconist, demarkating eruvim, creating talismans, carving niches, randomly culling sentences from books — abstract icons that betoken mysteries known only in part and only to herself and her clients. Upper inner corners and outer corners would be particularly important loci for iconic interventions. I think I am going to write an iconist.

Found Meaning

Seven books sit together on a shelf near the chair I’m sitting in. I’m going to flip to a random page in each of them and type the seventh sentence on that page. Assembling those seven sentences, I will construct a meaning for my 201o. And so it begins…

Yet in such daydreams as these the past is very old indeed.

And it looked angry.

I think I have shown that all the propositional attitudes require a background of beliefs, so I shall concentrate on conditions for belief.

“Is that not what it means to know Me?” declares the Lord.

However, it is not possible to describe all the relations that may emerge in this way without some guide-lines.

Thus he is given almost equal status to Peter, who sits in a similar position to the right of Christ, and they are distinguished from the other disciples in being accompanied by two female figures, one representing the church of the Jews and the other the church of the Heathen, offering wreaths to Christ.

These are: intention-reading and cultural learning, which account for how children learn linguistic symbols in the first place; schematization and analogy, which account for how children create abstract syntactic constructions out of the concrete pieces of language they have heard; entrenchment and competition, which account for how children constrain their abstractions to those that are conventional in their linguistic community; and functionally based distributional analysis, which accounts for how children form paradigmatic categories of various kinds of linguistic constituents.

I have to say that I like these sentences. I’m sure I could conjure up some way in which the seven of them, extracted from their original contexts, collectively produce a meaningful trajectory propelling me into the new year. Instead I think I’ll take them up one by one, in context, and write what comes to mind about them as separate posts.

White Christmas Revisited

On Christmas Eve Anne and I watched White Christmas for the first time in who knows how long. I wrote about this movie toward the end of my second novel. For me it’s the novel and not the movie that induces nostalgia:

…He wondered if there was anything Portalic in those old Bing Crosby holiday musicals. Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, both self-consciously ridiculous as frilly drag sisters, lisping their way through that corny Irving Berlin number. Bing and Danny marching in full uniform with the rest of the boys across that Vermont ski mountain, reassuring Dean Jagger that even a retired Army hero occupied a very special place in the post-War nostalgia. Bing seated at the piano in the chalet, singing White Christmas to an enraptured Rosemary Clooney. Yes, of course that was it: that was the Portal.

Prop remembered reading somewhere that in real life Bing had been rather a cold-hearted bastard. This spiteful allegation had endeared the Crooner to Prop in a way that the smooth, schmaltzy screen persona never had. Bing wasn’t simply being himself up there: he was an artist who had created an alternate version of himself so consistent and compelling that the public bought it. Prop wondered whether the on-screen Bing wasn’t more real than the brooding and insular workaholic chain-smoking in his trailer between takes. A mean SOB singing a Jew’s Christmas song to a lush: this combination, this synergy, had opened a Portal so pure and powerful that it still worked more than half a century later…

It turns out that Prop remembered it wrong. Bing sings the song at the very beginning of the movie, in the WWII trenches. Then the whole troupe sings it at the very end. Bing sings a different song to Rosemary in the chalet.

The Name

[For three years I’ve been a lurker on a Biblical Hebrew online forum. Usually I ignore the discussion threads, but here’s one that caught my fancy. Call this my Christmas post.]

It’s pretty widely known that the Biblical name of the Hebrew God, transliterated into English, is YHWH. There’s a longstanding Jewish tradition of not writing or speaking the name of God as a token of respect. In most English translations of the Old Testament the name Yahweh is usually written as LORD, which conforms to the time-honored Jewish practice of substituting adonai — Hebrew for “lord” — for YHWH when reading Scripture aloud. This euphemistic substitution was evident also in the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible completed in the second century BC. The Septuagint translators generally replaced YHWH with kurios = Greek for “lord.” The New Testament writers, who wrote mostly in Greek, never used the name YHWH when referring to God. When they quoted passages of the Hebrew Bible they followed the Septuagint precedent of substituting kurios for YHWH.

However… Most of the earliest manuscripts of the Septuagint date to the 2nd C AD. In the very oldest fragments, from the first century BC, YHWH still appears in the text and has not been replaced by kurios. Is it possible that Jesus and his followers spoke the word YHWH, that the original New Testament documents likewise wrote YHWH and not kurios, that the prohibition against speaking or writing the name of God didn’t happen until later, say in the 2nd C AD? This seems unlikely, since not a single one of the early New Testament manuscripts or fragments contains the name YHWH instead of kurios. The first-generation Christians frequently engaged in heated public debates about how Jewish they should be with respect to following the laws and traditions. Never is there a mention about whether the name of God should be written or spoken. It would seem that either the issue hadn’t come up yet, or else it had already been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

So when did the tradition of not speaking God’s name begin? There’s no prohibition against it in the Bible itself. To the contrary: when God reveals his name to Moses at the burning bush, he tells Moses that “This is my name forever, and this is my memorial name to all generations” (Exodus 3:15). In telling Moses what to say to the elders of Israel, YHWH explicitly says that Moses should speak the name YHWH. The text of Exodus probably reached its final edited form in the 5th century BC. The original Septuagint continued using the name YHWH in the 2nd century BC. By Jesus’ time, the name of God had probably already been euphemized to adonai, kurios, and even the more indirect version KS (abbreviation for kurios). So that suggests a time period around the first century BC.

Between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC, the Hellenes extended the Greek civilization throughout the Middle East, where most of the Jews lived. Greek became the official language throughout the region. Even after the Romans conquered the Hellenes, the Greek language maintained its dominance among the educated classes in the eastern sectors of the Roman Empire. In Hebrew the word YHWH looks like this: יהוה — read from right to left. But by the time of Jesus Hebrew had become virtually a dead language even in Israel. Someone encountering this Hebrew word in a Greek text might well have thought it looked like the nonsense Greek word πιπι — read from left to right, that’s pipi. According to St. Jerome this is exactly what happened, although how in the 4th century AD he would know isn’t clear (unless there were still texts in circulation using the Hebrew name). So there’s  one pragmatic reason for making the change. But why not just transliterate the Name from Hebrew letters to Greek? For one thing, there’s no Greek letter corresponding to ה (transliterated as H in English). But if people were used to hearing the name pronounced aloud the pipi error would likely not have happened, suggesting that the prohibition on speaking The Name was already in effect.

It’s possible that the non-Jewish population among whom the Jews lived would use the name of YHWH in vain, thereby violating the Sinaitic commandment. Surely blasphemy against the Jewish God had been common during the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BC, but no evidence of the naming prohibition appears that early in Jewish history.

Here’s my guess, though I’m open to counter-persuasion. During the 150 years before Christ, Israel witnessed a significant upsurge in messianic and holiness and nationalistic movements. The successful Maccabean liberation of Israel from the Seleucids and the subsequent Roman conquest and occupation provoked an internal conflict within Israel between the conciliatory pragmatists and the separatists. Both factions might well have agreed on no longer speaking the name of the Hebrew god. Those Jews who wanted to blend in with the Greco-Roman culture wouldn’t want to call attention to their Hebraisms, whereas those who wanted to purify themselves from the outside corruption permeating Israel would want to emphasize their God’s transcendent separateness by withdrawing even his name from unworthy human voices and ears and eyes.

But now this question comes to mind. We’re presuming that the prohibition against speaking/writing/reading the name YHWH was already practiced by Jesus and his followers. The Epistle to the Philippians is widely regarded as authentically Pauline, written around 62 AD. Included in the letter is the so-called Kenosis passage, which may have already been a well-known Christian hymn that Paul incorporated into his text. It says:

“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord [kurios], to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil. 2:5-11)

It sounds as if the Hebrew God, who isn’t named here but who is referred to as “the Father,” regards the name “Jesus” as the highest of all names. But it also sounds as though God the Father assigned the name “Jesus” to this guy after he had been crucified. But that’s not right: he was named Jesus at birth (Luke 2:21), and everybody called him Jesus during his life. Maybe a distinction is being made between the guy’s well-known human name, Jesus, and the name bestowed on him by God: the “name which is above every name,” which is the name. The name “Jesus” is to be proclaimed far and wide, but let it be understood: that name also points to another name, the highest name, a name which must remain unwritten and unspoken, the name he shares with God the Father.

I’ll keep my eyes open for further clarifications from the Biblical Hebrew discussion. And of course if’any readers of this post have insights or knowledge I hope you’ll divulge.

In Memoriam

This morning Anne and I attended a memorial service for the homeless people who died in Boulder during the last year. The inner wall of the outdoor band shell was encircled by nineteen enlarged photographs, each graced with a single red rose. They looked rough, the men and women in those photos, as did many who had come to mourn their passing and to share a few words of memory and solace. Here’s one of the songs played and sung at the ceremony.

Deterritorializing High School

I’m neither a student nor a teacher in the educational system, so I don’t think about school as much as many people do. I’m writing now as an outside observer of the excellent American high school our daughter attends in this affluent and well-educated community. I have to say that I find the institution troublingly efficient and effective.

From a societal standpoint, the high school serves largely a preparatory economic function. It assigns tasks, equips individuals and groups to assume responsibility for completing these tasks according to the requirements, imposes external evaluation of outcomes, encourages both competition and cooperation in playing a game for which the rules and objectives have already been decided.

From the family’s perspective, the high school establishes the parameters of the sort of  task space in which one’s kid must learn how to function. Again, high school is a preparatory environment, simulating the workplace. If my kid is smart, she’s got a leg up on everyone else’s kid. If she can apply herself successfully to the tasks as they’re presented to her, earning high marks as evidence of success, then she can further exploit her natural talent in the competitive sphere. If she can package herself attractively, she can position herself for a big promotion: admission to an elite university, preferably a choice among several excellent options, with hopefully a financial scholarship offered as further incentive. It’s the parents who insist that the schools be tougher, assign more homework, achieve higher average scores on standardized tests. It’s also the parents who try to get their own kids an edge within this tough environment, pushing them to take the toughest course options, helping them with their homework, disciplining them if they underperform, sending them to SAT preparatory courses so they look smarter to the university admissions offices.

While I’m sure I’m not the only parent who questions this educational approach, I am, I’ve come to realize, one of the few. I don’t doubt that kids learn things in this sort of school. I also acknowledge that there are right and wrong answers, effective and ineffective ways of organizing ideas, good and bad art, foundational skills and knowledge on which to build more complex intellectual performances. I also recognize that many kids thrive in the high school environment, and that things tend to work out better for the high school thrivers at the next level.

Still, adolescence is more a cultural construct than a biological life phase. There’s empirical evidence that adolescent brains aren’t as hard-wired as they will be in a few years, making them both more malleable and more open to alternatives. Kids are also less risk-averse, which is certainly cultural at least in part, but it’s also probably neurological as well. Society expects nothing of adolescents other than staying out of trouble. And, let’s face it, most jobs can be performed competently with maybe six months of training. So you’d think that high school would be a perfect environment for taking intellectual risks, trying out unprecedented possibilities, following interests and passions wherever they might lead, cultivating standards and commitments.

I think about Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis applied at the high school level. The high school, and the high school student, seem like prime candidates for deterritorialization. The adolescent’s territorial channels would seem to be rather shallow and inchoate — which is part of the problem as far as many parents are concerned. Parents of primary schoolers exert discipline in order to get their kids to follow the rules. For high schoolers the parents and their adult allies shift tactics: now the main disciplinary objective is to get their kids to perform successfully in the socio-economic territorialization program laid down in high school. The territorial markings of lectures, homework, and grades have already been laid down in primary school; now you want your kids to internalize these markings. The disciplinary incentive shifts from present to future, from avoiding the displeasure of teacher and parents to earning a spot in a good university. And to a large extent these shifts succeed: the high school peer group seems hell-bent on reinforcing the standard objectives among one other. Kids who aren’t making it are either stupid or troubled. The kid who thinks the whole high school experience is stupid might well have caught on to something important, but the usual response of parents and school personnel is to treat the symptom rather than listening to it. Find a tutor, find a therapist, find a coach. Kids with a passion or special talent are admired by their peers and their peers’ parents — these kids will have an edge in applying to Dartmouth and Stanford. The talented kid who isn’t getting the grades? It’s inspiring: there’s room for all of us in this democracy of ours. And it’s encouraging: this talented kid has eliminated herself from the competition, possibly opening up a spot for my own kid at the next level.

What about deterritorializing the high school itself? There are some excellent schools that encourage self-study and customized curriculum-building. Generally these are private schools, available only to well-heeled families who can afford the tuition. Some public charter schools adopt this flexible approach, but they’re typically regarded by parents as sort of hippie schools, best suited for the free spirits (kids and parents), artsy/techie, not particularly challenging academically. The smart kids (and their parents) tend to self-select out of these schools. As a consequence, aggregate results on standardized tests tend to suffer, and so these free-spirit schools are regarded with some suspicion by the university recruiters.

So I’m wondering whether it’s possible to slice through the overly-territorializing high school machine at an oblique angle, a “schiz” that enhances experimentation both individually and societally. Most kids accumulate more than enough course credits to graduate and to satisfy the minimum requirements for university acceptance. Some kids do the bare minimum; most (at least around here) tend to fill up their schedules with elective courses selected from the high school menu, or from the local university for the more advanced students. What about self-study instead of electives? Encourage the curious kid to delve into some interest or cause in depth, pursuing lines of flight as they open up rather than following a prescribed curriculum, cutting across traditional disciplinary boundaries in the pursuit of some bit of truth or beauty or justice. Figure out a way for the kid to get academic credit for the project. Build some sort of collaborative component for kids whose individual interests converge. Help the kids make connections with experts and fellow enthusiasts in the larger world.

Hey, it’ll look great in the Dartmouth application portfolio.