The Cloisters

Life and Fate

2010-08-23T09:34:00.009-06:00

More nostalgia for some lost Russia (c. 1910) :

Who knows, at the mention of 'farewell,'
What separation awaits us,
What the cockscrow augurs
When flames glow on the acropolis,
And in the dawn of some new life
While an ox chews lazily in his shed,
Why the cock, the herald of new life,
Beats his wings on the town's walls?

--Osip Mandelstam, "Tristia"

Drawing Out the New Year

2010-01-01T17:23:00.004-07:00

Three by Alexander Voitsekhovsky to begin the year:

Bougainville

2009-12-24T16:21:00.001-07:00

A small island in the Solomon Sea east of Papua New Guinea. Discovered, isolated, embattled in World War II and then torn up again in a 1990s successionist war. Behind Lloyd Jones Man Booker Prize winning novel, Mr. Pip, is that island of Bougainville.

In Jon Lewis's images, the faces of the inhabitants seem far from the novelistic lessons that Jones suggests through the talismanic tale of Dickens' 19th-century Pip; lessons of coming to be morally cognizant, of coming to bear the responsibility of (human) rights. The idea that such ideal inscriptions might so nimbly take root in the soul, and that the price for articulating the moral ideals presented in this literacy project is a savaging of the human body, is a familiar story in the era of human rights. Such hopes would seem, however, to have little to do with the brute inheritances of that island, becoming yet another veil of a worn language that shrouds its actual wars and their aftermath.

Resisting the Call

2009-12-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

When the Stoics counsel removal from radical investment it is is easy to feel the intimate bonds of family and love being dissolved by the rational.

There are, however, moments when claims made for the sake of the Other rekindle that the Stoic call for the chilling of the passions: the charioteer harnessing a horse gone wild with circumstance.

From last month's Haaretz:

"Just weeks after the arrest of alleged Jewish terrorist, Yaakov Teitel, a West Bank rabbi on Monday released a book giving Jews permission to kill Gentiles who threaten Israel.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement, wrote in his book "The King's Torah" that even babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the nation.

Shapiro based the majority of his teachings on passages quoted from the Bible, to which he adds his opinions and beliefs.

"It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation," he wrote, adding: "If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments - because we care about the commandments - there is nothing wrong with the murder."

Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have recommended the book to their students and followers."

That is not what New York Times columnist David Brooks had in mind when he also wrote last month, with his signature style of accusation and peculiar sense of measure ("most" and "fringe"):

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.
That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don’t see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.
This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics.

Stories enter the imagination and shape perceptions of the world, some selected and cultivated others not. There are some used as shield and others that invade like festering cancers. Both kinds can shape the readings of representations, are shared, repeated and repeated and repeated, whether in extractions from ancient texts or the rancid circulations of the myth of The Protocols, each distilled into a "blood-dimmed tide" where the "worst / Are full of passionate intensity." The only call that makes sense is the calming lure of reflection unburdened, thought apart from the Righteous.

Piece and Piece Perceived

2009-12-06T10:42:00.004-07:00

piece and piece
piece and piece
moving still trippingly through
through the morningmist

long after the engine
has fought by

and disappeared

in silence
to the left
--William Carlos Williams, The Descent of Winter

Lithographs: Louis Lozowick

More Drones of History

2009-12-03T21:12:00.004-07:00

Standing in front of the cadets in gray, his head shifting back and forth with such rapidity and practiced cadence that it was as if he were man trying to escape his own skin, and therefore at times almost impossible to watch, the President announced what had been expected: there would play out the myth of leadership, control, liberation, and the completion of the right war, the just war.

More men and women would be sent. Not enough for anything but some slim tragedy, but enough of a symbol, so he must think, just enough of a symbol, to suggest that he is not an "architect of surrender."

At this time of year it is easy to imagine Afghanistan as a hellishly cold place. But there was little talk of the place as it is today. Instead there was the parade of grand abstractions that recalled Hemingway's famous passage about inflated in A Farewell to Arms, in which int he end the dead smell not of some grander purpose but like the unburied death rotting in the Chicago stockyards. Instead there was an argument about how to read history.

Obama's argument for the distinctions between Afghanistan and Vietnam only worked to drive home their similarities. With contractors and cadets instead of the drafted he is in part right about differences. But as he trafficked in a tired language of necessity and America's altruistic gift to the world, one could clearly hear Lyndon Johnson 's famous Minneapolis declaration to the farmers that the US seeks "no wider war."

There was not talk of austerity, though, only of an "honest" accounting of trillions.

And just under the surface, like the phantoms of Tonkin, there seemed to be the message that there is always at the ready

the honor of thuggery

and the necessity of plunging headlong into destabilization by the compelling force of history.

Thanksgiving, 2009

2009-11-26T09:18:00.005-07:00

The autumn rains have begun

but are over for the moment;

leaves float

on the pools of water on the pavement.

The lonely walker hears

only the swift motor-cars.

--Charles Reznikoff

The Disconnect

2009-11-10T10:34:00.000-07:00

In a recent New Yorker article on Gaza -- but more on what Israel has done and might do with the people and land it has "secured" -- the author inexplicably stammers over Operation Cast Lead, as if the events that transpired and the variation of methods used were somehow irreconcilable.

Lawrence Wright's essay, "Captives," offers a fragmented portrait of the military project, offering loose juxtaposition rather than connecting transitions to report that: a) the Israeli military worked hard to avoid killing civilians when it telephoned targeted homes ahead of time or sprinkled metal warnings on rooftops before sending down the munitions; b) vandalism of the Palestinian homes that were not rocketed, strafed or bulldozed was not tolerated and IDF soldiers were duly punished for transgressions; c) tactics, like the use of white phosphorous, increased civilian deaths but was possibly done in such a way as to fit within the boundaries of a legally sanctioned act; c) the genocidal act of destroying "cultural institutions" was part of the project; d) soldiers were primed for an assault without limit or regard for the human life they would encounter trapped within the area attacked.

Wright's writing creates the sense that the facts and testimony gathered are somehow at odds and they take on a dream-like uncertainty in his presentation. Perhaps this is a way of saying what the Goldstone Report has said without having to align oneself with that product. Perhaps it is meant to communicate the horrific and irrational plight of the "captives" (of whom the Israeli Gilad Shalit is the most noted and symbolic). But perhaps he and the editors are simply unsure of how to connect a democratic nation defending itself legally and with utmost pride in its purpose, righteousness and humanity to a nation that while claiming "self-defense" made the first principle, as one IDF claims, "no innocents." Every child, if not in the old and tired cliche, a potential terrorist, then in this context, a potential "spotter" or "shield" and therefore available as target. (That only, if one accepts the Amnesty International number, 300 children died, the only conclusion can be that Israel used great restraint in applying its own approach).

That the process of sparing selected lives in selected ways is the the quantifying gesture of just wars, the legalizing rationalizations of democratic institutions are possibly more opaque in their process but no less clear in their function than the Spanish El Requerimiento of the early sixteenth-century.

The words calm the bloodied nerves. Pushed out between the method and madness, as rote responses written down in advance, or as a confused postmortem, they maintain the disconnect.

Making an Inhumane Science

2009-11-08T06:01:00.000-07:00

In the theater of "health care reform," which late last night took a step toward final legislation, the phrase "best practices" has come to stand out as a defining concept of contemporary politics.

Last year, as a candidate, the President said that if we were to design health care from scratch a single-payer system was the preferred and logical model; it would be the supposed wide-spread public resistance to change that dictated smaller steps and compromised measures. The allure of a bi-partisan symbol was something else altogether. But as the minority party resisted any changes to how health care is distributed and paid for, polls repeatedly indicated support for the very idea Obama was in the process of turning from in the name of political realism: namely a single-payer system. Instead of leading, he chose a passive course of capitulation. His to a path of false realism brings into sharper relief the particularities of his technocratic ideology; one that is less about the efficient functioning of government than an avoidance of analysis, decision, or engagement.

Rather than an agonistic stance that eschews pre-packaged mantras for the sake of dialogue, persuasion and the battles of arguing positions, Obama's pattern is to posit as steadfast limits that are mere fictions, and continually promote his practical positions in terms ambiguous and ill-defined. This could seem like a typical third-way politics of opportunism (with the Keynesian elements of liberalism stripped away in our perpetual emergency to become only rhetorical moralizing), but the "best practices" provision of the health care bill reflects Obama's "philosophy" of governance as much as the drone strikes of Afghanistan and Pakistan: one accepts that there are no choices to be made so as to appear, to or to feel, victorious while simply enduring the time of choice.

Evidence based practice is rooted in the idea that beliefs can be corrected by evidence and that practices can be authorized by the calculations of observing experts. Authority moves from a kind of faith (posited as almost mythic) in the physician to the aggregate determinations of the data. The assumption, or dream, is that a whole range of treatment modalities may be thus liberated from tradition and opened to new (already proven) methods.

The "best practices" language haunting the current health care legislation represents the economic and political leverage that can emerge from those assumptions. When physician Jerome Groopman describes this to the New York Review of Books, we hear how the benefits of clinical analysis quickly give way to an economic calculus that prescribes away the physician's most micro-level interactions with singular patients; patients whose histories, sensibilities, physical and psychological responses vary widely to treatment options. Where there is, and there can only be, conjecture in the face of the individual, the aphoristic, the bodily clue of symptom, there will be, the legislation promises, something more predictable, managed, enduring. Influenced to adhere to the legal fiction that there are no choices to be made, success will be measured in securing malpractice protection, and the idiosyncratic encounters of a humane "science" -- in that regard the tension unchanged from the time of Hippocrates -- made an inhumane gesture of mere endurance.

And Then the Time Passed, Claude Levi-Strauss: 1908-2009

2009-11-03T12:35:00.005-07:00

"Why did I do it? When I work, I suffer moments of anxiety, but when I don't work I'm bored, and my conscience keeps pricking me. Working doesn't make me any happier, but at least it makes the time pass."

--Claude Levi-Strauss, interview.

Roy DeCarava, Light, Shade, Play, Movement, Passing

2009-10-29T11:12:00.005-06:00

Roy DeCarava, 1920 - 2009

Into Oblivion

2009-10-25T08:00:00.000-06:00

The Afghanistan fixation continues to present a war without the war. The stories that circulate are of troop-level debates, comparative national investments in the hopelessness enterprise of "defeating" insurgency; dreams of "decapitating" the Taliban, as if it were an organism instead of a functioning organization. The death of it all awash in the lavish language of "Hellfire," "Predator," "human terrain."

There is, sometimes, the tough lament for, but no pictures allowed of, the Marines sacrificing their ultimate safety and their comrades for a "policy," for a choice of method. It will matter less that it is for the sake of people sleeping in a hillside house that are quite innocent of whatever it is that is to be blown apart. The people themselves, so remote, remain in the imaginary more or less a mysterious, likely barbaric remnant; mere data in homeland calculations or the crude anthropology that helps determine targets.

There is, in incremental obscurity, Pakistan quietly emerging as the backdrop for the elevated and distant strategic conversations about air-power and force, which themselves dovetail with the truth of CIA contractors operating drones, the tactical function of which has become nothing more, and nothing less, than carrying out Pakistani or Afghanistan assassination requests. The blood price of doing business.

The notions of legality are dissolved and as the slow build up "on the ground" becomes ever more groundless, and at least one steps away from another Richard Holbrooke fantasy, our plot of death unrolls: unstoppable, unthinkable, inexorable in its tragic cadence.

Photographs: Fazal Sheikh (from The Victor Weeps)

Seeing the Stern Facts through the Theater of Mental Operations

2009-10-19T06:00:00.002-06:00

"He who habituates himself, in his daily life, to seek for the stern facts in whatever he hears or sees, will have these facts again brought before him by the involuntary imaginative power in their noblest associations; and he who seeks for frivolities and fallacies, will have frivolities and fallacies again presented to him in his dreams."

--John Ruskin, Modern Painters

"The boldness of such an approach is . . . compensated for the humility . . . of observation as it is practiced by the anthropologist. Leaving his country and his home for long periods; exposing himself to hunger, sickness and occasional danger; allowing his habits, his beliefs, his convictions to be tampered with, conniving at this, indeed, when, without mental reservations or ulterior motives, he assumes the modes of life of a strange society, the anthropologist practices total observation, beyond which there is nothing except -- and there is a risk -- the complete absorption of the observer by the object of his observations. . . . We really can verify that the same mind which has abandoned itself to the experience and allowed itself to be moulded by it becomes the theatre of mental operations which, without suppressing the experience, nevertheless transform it into a model which releases further mental operations."

--Claude Levi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology

When the World Is Wet with Autumn

2009-10-15T09:53:00.005-06:00

Because we are in the direct situation: it is. If you don't like it you may choose to avoid it.

But if you avoid it that's a pity, because it resembles life very closely, and life and it are essentially a cause for joy.

--John Cage

Irving Penn, 1917 - 2009

2009-10-11T08:05:00.007-06:00

The day the New York Times announced the death of Irving Penn I was in the Chicago Art Institute passing by a Barnett Newman painting and thinking of a gallery trip to Berkeley in 1985. The show then was Penn' s portraits; large and dense; the wash of the big bulbous bodies he turned to fruit; the arched and aching pictures he made of authors and artists; gorgeous platinum palladium prints. The book of Penn's work from that show was one of the first books I ever owned, certainly the biggest and nicest, and the first that was not a paperback bought at a used shop.

The faces he presented in his highly formal arrangements did not need names. They were eyes with lids just so, lips pursed or agape like the mask he had read onto the character, and heads that seemed to be rotating so slowly around the sun of Penn's lens so that you could imagine him like an astronomer, waiting beneath the hood, waiting and waiting until just what was needed came into view.

When I did look at the captions, few names stood out. Capote, yes. Maybe Mencken. The rest came slowly, piece-meal, year by year, through the accidents of encounter. One was Barnett Newman. I had seen the Penn portrait a hundred times. Later, much later, I came to see the paintings here and there, beside a Rothko, maybe. When I made the connection between the man in the picture and the painter of the color blocks with their singular line of alteration, there was no end of pleasure in the link, in the new meaning behind the portrait. I carried that with me this week, not knowing that when I did, Penn had died, leaving the innumerable traces that craft, formally, if fleeting, in a singular moment, or onement, how one can come to see the world.

photo: Irving Penn
painting: Barnett Newman

Nobel Peace Prize, 2009

2009-10-10T08:14:00.005-06:00

Reading the Book of Life

2009-09-08T21:11:00.000-06:00

Sherlock Holmes the character was also an author. Like some of Poe's disquisitions on the logic behind the character of Dupin, the analysis of analysis is more alive that the detective genre can ever allow. This in part helps explain why Hammett refuses its conceits and created his own. In the case of Holmes, his writing on what of life there is, through the coal dust of London, to be detected is far more interesting than the strange and foreign riddles portrayed.

His method is described by way of an anonymous article he pens, which Watson reads almost as an introduction to him. It is called "The Book of Life." There he describes the infinite task of careful appraisal that renders the system of the world as legible as Galileo imagined the heavens to be.

In this, if only this, he sounds like an anthropologist who believes that culture is nothing less than the "the order of the symbolic" and that in the creative exercise of that symbolic material, culture is made and remade, sustained in its perpetual, baseless, and communicable expression.

"Let the inquirer . . . learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade and profession to which he belongs. . . . By a man's finger-tips, by his coat sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his fore-finger and thumb, by his expression, by his short-cuffs--by each of these things a man's calling is plainly revealed."
--A. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

In and Out of Someone's Eye

2009-08-18T08:48:00.005-06:00

"And each of us said to the other: maybe."

--Alberto Giacometti

"Strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone's eye."

--Samuel Beckett, Happy Days

Portraits: Henri Cartier-Bresson

Centuries More of Unrest

2009-07-14T22:10:00.000-06:00

Too old to carry arms and fight like the others --

they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler
I record -- I don't know for whom -- the history of the siege

I am supposed to be exact but I don't know when the invasion began
two hundred years ago in December in September perhaps yesterday at dawn
everyone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time

all we have left is the place attachment to the place
we still rule over the ruins of temples spectres of gardens and houses
if we lose the ruins nothing will be left

I write as I can in the rhythm of interminable weeks
Monday: empty storehouses a rat became the unit of currency
Tuesday: the mayor murdered by unknown assailants
Wednesday: negotiations for a cease-fire
the enemy has imprisoned our messengers

we don't know where they are held that is the place of torture
Thursday: after a stormy meeting a majority of voices rejected
the motion of the spice merchants for unconditional surrender
Friday: the beginning of the plague Saturday: our invincible defender
N.N. committed suicide Sunday: no more water we drove back
an attack at the eastern gate called the Gate of Alliance

all of this is monotonous I know it can't move anymore

I avoid any commnetary I keep a tight hold on my emotions I write about the facts

only they it seems are appreciated in foreign markets
yet with a certain pride I would like to inform the world
that thanks to the war we have raised a new species of children
our children don't like fairy tales they play at killing
awake and asleep they dream of soup of bread and bones
just like dogs and cats

in the evening I like to wander near the outposts of the City
along the frontier of our uncertain freedom
I look at the swarms of soldiers below their lights
I listen to the noise of drums barbarian shrieks
truly it is inconceivable the City is still defending itself

the siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns
nothing unites them except the desire for our extermination
Goths the Tartars Swedes troops of the Emperor
regiments of the Transfiguration
who can count them
the colors of their banners change like the forest on the horizon
from delicate bird's yellow in spring through green through red to winter's black

and so in the evening released from facts I can think
abut distant ancient matters for example our
friends beyond the sea I know they sincerely sympathize
they send us flour lard sacks of comfort and good advice
they don't even know their fathers betrayed us
our former allies at the time of the second Apocalypse
their sons are blameless they deserved our gratitude therefore we are grateful

they have not experienced a siege as long as eternity
those struck by misfortune are always alone
teh defenders of the Dalai Lama the Kurds the Afghan mountaineers

now as I write these words the advocates of conciliation
have won the upper hand over the party of inflexibiles
a normal hesitation of moods fate still hangs in the balance

cemeteries grow larger the number of defenders is smaller
yet the defene continues it will continue to the end

and if the City falls but a single man escapes
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City

we look in the face of hunger the face of fire face of death
worst of all -- the face of betrayal

and only our dreams have not been humiliated.

--Zbigniew Hebert, "Report from the Besieged City."

The Knowledge of Violence

2009-07-09T08:33:00.007-06:00

When Rene Girard describes an education of violence, he appeals to the possibility that there is something to be learned from war's disasters, that there may be an escape, through a retrospective appraisal, from the mimetic economy of war-making and the logic of attack-counter-attack-wounding-revenge-plot-wounding-attack-counter-attack.

In the 1960s, dismayed at the cultural numbness that seemed to permeate the rebuilt Germany, Adorno wrote that if nothing else, the hollow echo of postwar appeals to Hitler and fascism should have been unthinkable. And if not by attention to the victims of the regime, then at least by virtue the brute sufferings endured by even the staunchest nationalist supporters. But instead, there seemed little interest or capacity to connect the ideology designed to dispense destruction outward and the ruinous results absorbed, best symbolized by Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin.

And so one thinks too of Brecht's postwar version of Antigone where the tragedy is not in the image of a controlling Creon who comes to see his error too late, but in the "unteachable" Creon, a maker of war who controls even the dead.

Still, Girard, citing Clausewitz, describes the extreme forms of mimetic desire that drives war forward and the race toward forms of destruction. And from this Girard holds to the possibility of breaking that cycle, insisting, however quietly, that violence can teach one what not to do. There is, he says, a possible otherwise: one can make a leap out of the tragic propulsion by refusing the rules given and the form to be copied.

Is this what Robert McNamara, who died this week, did late in his life, after helping to formulate the air terror inflicted on Japan and unleashing the "rolling thunder" of the bombing of Vietnam? Did he testify to a new vision?

McNamara's memoir, In Retrospect, and his presentation in Errol Morris's The Fog of War, may have been appeals for a forgiveness most would not and should not grant. It might have also been a Girardian attempt: to learn from the process of deciding upon such horrific destruction, to dispense a new wisdom of war in the nuclear age, to teach the lessons that might instigate a new mimetic desire for avoiding war, for developing empathy, for an illumination beyond a crude, groping violence. But there are still deep reservoirs of thought and memory that McNamara seems incapable of fathoming. What we hear instead of learnable lessons is the cadence of someone who long ago passed from the realm of the living. He remains too comfortably on the surface of his survival and so the lessons seem hollow, escapist, the tragic in lockstep with the insight.

Uses and Abuses of Reading

2009-06-28T10:34:00.007-06:00

Three summers ago, Hamid Dabashi wrote an essay about imperialism and its cultural weaponry. At its core is a correction of the distortion that comprises the cover of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, an image that, says Dabashi, attempts to fill an amnestic void.

Nafisi's memoir has been widely read and much praised. Its clear and saccharine portrait of western values defying the tyrannical forces of Iran's current ruling regime helps explain her current position at Johns Hopkins, where at the School for Advanced International Studies, she joins colleagues like Fouad Ajami and Francis Fukuyama.

In a 2003 address, she offers the following contradictory statements about reading practices in Iran, which it seems would be, or should be, the focus of her book. First, as for her work's title and its chapters like "Gatsby," her insistence is that western literature means freedom. She says:

Nabokov once said, 'Readers are born free and they ought to remain free.' Grasping this simple yet profound statement is essential to understanding why I chose Lolita and why my book is both a celebration of reading, as well as a window into a stark world offering few choices. Contrasting sharply with daily Iranian life, Lolita stands tall as a literary figure symbolizing personal choice and the freedom of thought – precisely what Iranians are denied. The revolution didn't just seize their political rights and the right to own private property, it stole from millions of readers a fundamental freedom to imagine and think for oneself. The Iranian readers' plight is akin to those who have suffered under communism and fascism, where the regimes' conception of the world, imposed on an entire nation, eradicates any contradictory voices.

At the same time, though, she acknowledges that there are many forces at work in the cultural currents of Iran, with nothing as simple as a leaden ideology stifling all reading and thinking. But even when conceding this obvious truth she insists on removing the political from the discussion. There can only be, for her, the claim that there is a magical transformation when an individual -- beforehand, utterly crushed by evil -- beholds a western "masterpiece" :

Across the republic, regular people, not the elites or the so-called "reformers," are restive in their demand for change. The same students who took hostages during the 1970's and 1980's are now thoroughly disillusioned and find what modernity has to offer appealing. As was the case in the past, young Iranians are spearheading an ideological transformation as they are increasingly drawn to the language of secular liberalism and its architects; Alexis de Tocqueville, Hannah Arendt, et al. … Once strictly forbidden authors and literary masterpieces are beginning to see the light of day and are consequently growing in popularity. Activists, questioning the very pillars of the revolution, are also pressuring the regime to hold a referendum on the constitution.

The nonsensical certainties are easy enough to dismiss, easier even than seeing Foucault's error of being seduced by the ecstatic sheen of the 1979 revolution. But there is a richness of simplicity in one part of Dabashi's correction. Setting aside his claims for the post-colonial project associated with Spivak, Said, and Amy Kaplan, there is this:

In fact the case of this cover provides an intriguing twist on Roland Barthes' binary opposition between the denoted and connoted messages of a photograph and its caption. The twist rests on the fact that the picture of these two teenagers on the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is in fact lifted from an entirely different context. The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.
The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are 'Reading Lolita'--with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of 'in Tehran.' In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading Lolita strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem.

The vitality of literacy Dabashi describes includes a discourse of reform and the press, the poster for a reformist (dismissed by Nafisi) and the public act of looking, reading, and being -- in nothing more and nothing less than posture and pose -- publicly political. Nafisi may cite Arendt but she misses what Arendt would have drawn our attention to: the two women and their willingness to be seen reading the reformist paper in the schoolyard; a public, participatory act in an ongoing project of Iranian politics.

There are indeed western voices at work within Iran. There is, as Danny Postel says in Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, much talk of Arendt, Said and Chomsky, but also readings of Heidegger, celebrations of Kant, citations of Popper, and obviously, a use of Habermas. They are taken up in varying degrees and for various purposes, and used within a cultural climate that is politically fraught and changing now, again, but hardly alone and pure, so as to give some new name to a moribund situation. As Dabashi writes:

No one will ever know, reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, that Iranians, like all other nations, have a literature of their own, a constellation of women writers, poets, artists, activist, and scholars second to none, that they are survivors and dreamers in terms not just global to their geopolitics but also domestic to their own perils and promises, and that in the span of the same period of time (the 1990's) that Azar Nafisi deigned to live in Iran and sought to save the soul of a nation by teaching a privileged few among them "Western Classics," Iranians had produced a glorious cinema that has captivated the globe in awe and admiration, produced a feminist press and literature rarely matched in any other country, and elected more women to their parliament than those in the United States. The narrative eradication of Persian literature and Iranian culture while writing in an entirely Iranian context mutates into a more global dismissal of world literatures at large, any literature or culture that might pause and pose an element of resistance to imperial designs and their ideological foregrounding.

The Significance of Precise Organization, or What We Are in Fact

2009-06-25T20:05:00.006-06:00

From Ted Barron's discovery, the voice of Henri Cartier-Bresson, trying to give shape to the eye that seizes, through the mechanism, the crucial instant of shapes themselves converging.

"We have to be alert. . . . It is given. Take it."

The rigorous interplay is found, recognized; there, in the instant, a way of cognition, a means of entering the world's difficult realities.

Forms of Revolt Without Revolution

2009-06-16T18:32:00.004-06:00

Uprisings belong to history, but in a certain way, they escape it. The movement through which a lone man, a group, a minority, or an entire people say, "I will no longer obey," and are willing to risk their lives in the face of a power they believe to be unjust, seems to me to be irreducible. This is because no power is capable of making it absolutely impossible. Warsaw will always have its ghetto in revolt and its sewers populated with insurgents. The man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable. There must be an uprooting that interrupts the unfolding of history, and its long series of reasons why, for a man "really" to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey.

--Michel Foucault, on Iran, May 1979

Zahra Rahnavard

I think that the first thing to do is to recognize the fact that there are democratic pluralists in Iran fighting for democratic values and civil liberties. Their struggle for empowerment or Iranian civil society goes beyond a simple act of contestation. The process of democraticization in Iran is a day-to-day challenge which is not only political, but also social and cultural.

Democracy is not a place where you sit and relax for the rest of your life. It is about responsible civic participation and intellectual integrity. So without this sense of responsibility I don't see how we could manage to have a strong civil society wherein people find their confidence in speaking and acting. . . .

The actors in Iranian civil society need to find their own logics and practices of togetherness rather than those imposed on them. But this cannot be done without intellectual maturity. Maturity is the condition of possibility for pluralism in Iranian society.

--Ramin Jahanbegloo, Iranian dissident, 2006

With the semi-spontaneous demonstration in Tehran and other major cities (including Shiraz, where we have had eyewitness accounts by members of my family), the civil unrest that began on 13 June with opposition to the announced results of the presidential election of 12 June has entered a new phase. The assumption of the election having been rigged is now a "social fact." It is no longer relevant if the election was or was not rigged. Millions of Iranians believe it was and they are putting their lives on the line to announce and assert it — with at least 12 fatalities, as just reported by The Guardian.

We need to have a careful and accurate summation of what has happened so far. On 12 June upward of 80% of eligible voters, about 40 out of 46 million, have voted. This has been the most magnificent manifestation of the political maturity of Iran as a nation and their collective democratic will. This nation does not need, nor has it ever needed, either a medieval concoction called the Vali Faqih in Qom or Tehran to patronize it or else a Neocon chicanery called "Iran Democracy Project" in Hoover Institution in California to promote it. This nation, as always, can take care of itself. It needs nothing but the active solidarity of ordinary people around the globe to be a witness to their struggles and demand from their media an accurate and comprehensive representation of their movement. So please, hands off Iran! No "democracy project," no sanction, no threat, no military attack, no regime change.

The day after the results were announced, on 13 June, there was a spontaneous demonstration in Tehran by supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi demanding recount and charging vote rigging. The following day, on 14 June, the government staged a major pro-Ahmadinejad rally in which his supporters were bussed in from surrounding villages. It is important to keep in mind that Ahmadinejad's supporters come from the poorest and most disenfranchised segments of Iranian society, subject to his and his campaign's populism and demagoguery. From this fact one should not conclude that all the impoverished segments of Iranian society, suffering from double digit inflation and endemic unemployment, are on his side or fooled by his charlatanism. The supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the Reformist movement come from a vast trajectory of Iranian society.

Today, on 15 June 2009, the uprising has assumed an entirely different dimension and may have already transmuted into a full-fledged civil disobedience movement, with hundreds of thousands (according to BBC, which is usually quite conservative in its estimations), demonstrating peacefully and joyously between Meydan-e Enqelab and Meydan-e Azadi. Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mohammad Khatami have led the demonstration and made speeches, as has Zahra Rahnavard, now an inspiration and role model for millions of Iranian women. Please take a good look at her and keep a print of her picture and the picture of other women participating in these demonstrations in your files before some other charlatan comes and crops it for the cover of the next edition of Reading Lolita in Tehran, or else puts together a collage of it for yet another book on "Sexual Revolution" or "Sexual Politics" in Iran. Whoever has won this particular presidential election, lipstick jihadis, career opportunist memoirists, obscene and fraudulent anthropologists on a summer "field work" in Iran, useless expatriate "opposition," and comprador intellectuals in general are among its main losers.
--Hamid Dabashi, June 15, 2009

Memorial Day

2009-05-25T09:06:00.008-06:00

The white crosses on a vast manicured green, all the way to the horizon, or marble slabs set on a Presidio slope under ocean fog, as if ascending to the sky. The white crosses go on and on, stark and clean and in their scale, sublime; the marble gathering blades of blown grass and moisture marks and the dullness of time, slipping out of alignment -- a carefully controlled ruin.

These are the backdrops for the slightest of memory gestures confined to the ritual performance on date, at place: formal dress and wreath-laying, stiff, awkward, empty. Bitburg. More likely, these spaces will be avoided today and forgotten. Their confusing array of dates and bare boned details are too confusing and abstract -- war upon war in the wake of the war to end all wars -- and better left alone while towns assemble for one of those warm-day distractions. A holiday.

If the day is to be a way of avoiding the war dead, whose memories might be only addressed in fear and trembling, then let the dead speak instead. And let speak in a language that will not be understood, murmuring curses and wonders to themselves.

Let them speak from a forgotten and insignificant moment of a war that does not belong to the nation, but simply was, a generation ago, on a landscape that is coming to be adopted as our own calamity, though the seeds were planted then, growing first then, at that moment presented in Jeff Wall's photo-work, an imagined scene called "Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986)":

The Season of Distintegration

2009-03-31T22:00:00.010-06:00

God and all angles sing the world to sleep,
Now that the moon is rising in the heat

And rickets are loud again in the grass. The moon
Burns in the mind on lost remembrances.

He lies down and the night wind blows upon him here.
The bell grows longer. This is not sleep. This is desire.

Ah! Yes, desire . . . this leaning on his bed,
This leaning on his elbows on his bed,

Staring, at midnight, at the pillow that is black
In the catastrophic room . . . beyond despair,

Like an intenser instinct. What is it he desires?
But this he cannot know, the man that thinks,

Yet life itself, the fulfillment of desire
In the grinding ric- rac, staring steadily

At a head upon the pillow in the dark,
More than sudarium, speaking the speech

Of absolutes, bodiless, a head
Thick-lipped from riot and rebellious cries,

The head of one of the men that are falling, placed
Upon the pillow to repose and speak,

Speak and say the immaculate syllables
That he spoke only by doing what he did.

God and all angles, this was his desire
Whose head lies blurring here, for this he died.

Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips,
O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!

This death was his belief though death is a stone.
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.

The night wind blows upon the dreamer, bent
Over words that are life's voluble utterance.

--Wallace Stevens, "The Men That Are Falling," 1936-37

A German Spring

2009-03-29T21:45:00.004-06:00

Poverty of experience. This should not be understood to mean that people are yearning for new experience. No, they long to free themselves from experience; they long for a world in which they can make such pure and decided use of their poverty -- their outer poverty, and ultimately also their inner poverty -- that it will lead to something respectable. Nor are they ignorant or inexperienced. Often we could say the opposite. They have "devoured" everything, both "culture and people," and they have had such a surfeit it has exhausted them. . . . Tiredness is followed by sleep, and then it is not uncommon for a dream to make up for the sadness and discouragement of the day -- a dream that shows us in its realized form the simple but magnificent existence for which the energy is lacking in reality.

The existence of Mickey Mouse is such a dream for contemporary man. His life is full of miracles -- miracles that not only surpass the wonders of technology, but make fun of them. For the most extraordinary thing about them is that they all appear, quite without any of his supporters and persecutors, and out of the most ordinary pieces of furniture, as well as from trees, clouds, and the sea. Nature and technology, primitiveness and comfort, have completely merged. And to people who have grown weary of the endless complications of everyday living and to whom the purpose of existence seems to have been reduced to the most relief to find a way of life in which everything is solved in the simplest and most comfortable way, in which a car is no heavier than a straw hat and the fruit on a tree becomes round as quickly as a hot-air balloon. And now we need to step back and keep our distance.

We have become impoverished. We have given up one portion of the human heritage after another, and have often left it at the pawnbroker's for a hundredth of its true value, in exchange for the small change of the "contemporary." The economic crisis is at the door, and behind it is the shadow of the approaching war. Holding on to things has become the monopoly of a few powerful people, who, God knows, are no more human than the many; for the most part, they are more barbaric, but not in the good way.

--Walter Benjamin, "Experience and Poverty," 1934

Photomontage: John Heartfield

Another Open Letter

2009-03-24T09:41:00.006-06:00

To Lawrence Ferlinghetti on his 90th birthday:

Dear Lawrence,

Yesterday was just another cold March day on the morning Metra commuter from Hyde Park into Chicago until looking down from my second-level seat I saw a man reading a book with a familiar logo at the base of the spine, a figure with outstretched arms. Tales of Ordinary Madness it was. Indeed.

When I am back in San Francisco -- where in grad school I learned by browsing in the basement of City Lights -- I always go in and make sure I buy a book, something like Shepard's Motel Chronicles -- and then take it up to Trieste so I get the first taste of it there. I am devoted to that ritual. But yesterday was the true measure of the gift you've given; a stray look and suddenly the most affirming recognition and I was back "home," and I certainly felt kinship with that stranger, and I have no doubt that such recognition happens over and over, over the whole world, each day.

Happy birthday.

Sincerest regards.

Returns to the Island of the Dead

2009-03-17T19:13:00.005-06:00

Another year of memory, to the time now dead but forever, it seems, a page to be marked and revised. A galley of promise.

To be dead is to stop believing in
The masterpieces we will begin tomorrow;
To be an exile is to be a coward,
To know that growth has stopped,
That whatever is done is the end;

Correct the proofs over and over,
Rewrite all the old poems again and again,
Tell lies to yourself about your achievement:
Ten printed books on the shelves.
Though you know that no one loves you for
What you have done,
But for what you might do.

And you perhaps take up religion bitterly
Which you laughed at in your youth,
Well not actually laughed
But it wasn't your kind of truth.

--Patrick Kavanagh, "To be Dead"

White Light and Black Sites

2009-03-17T08:44:00.003-06:00

Further notes from ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody, 2007:

I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can't remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by [the] hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket. Water for cleaning myself was provided in a plastic bottle.

I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure [a nutrient supplement] and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.

During this first two to three week period I was questioned for about one to two hours each day. American interrogators would come to the room and speak to me through the bars of the cell. During the questioning the music was switched off, but was then put back on again afterwards. I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face.

"The state of [legal] exception, which used to be essentially a temporary suspension of the [lawful] order, becomes now a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by that naked life that increasingly cannot be inscribed into that order. . . . The camp intended as a dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of politics in which we still live, and we must learn to recognize it in all its metamorphoses. The camp is the fourth and inseparable element that has been added to and has broken up the old trinity of nation (birth), state, and territory."

--Giorgio Agamben, "What is a Camp?" (1994)

An Open Letter to John Yoo et al.

2009-03-15T22:16:00.004-06:00

"Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime....

[in conclusion]

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

From the International Committee of the Red Cross report: ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody, 2007

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow

2009-03-05T21:25:00.004-07:00

As if they had been sent out like two messages in a single bottle, a pair of photographs arrived tonight.

They show an intersection of Brooklyn; a cross of quiet streets hushed by snow.

The first was taken in the day. The cross of street and square of four corners shows the calm commotion of city life in the peripheries. Walkers in pairs, cars moving. You can hear the image, hear the ways tires on snow beautifully murmur. On the corner an awning promises business and something sustaining the busyness. If it had a caption that caption would contain the word "errands."

The other is a night scene of the same space. The snow seems replenished, but still slight over the city, casting the rough gauze of burning streetlight glow into the cloudy night, making earth and sky almost the same color. The awning on the corner shop is dark, emptied of meaning, as if it really is asleep.

There are some distinct footprints on one of the sidewalks. The neighborhood seems to have agreed on the need to turn in, though surely many peek out to see and feel the quiet, as the photographer did before claiming the moment with a click. Only one figure is visible below. Small and remote, a blur of movement becoming shadow that could so easily be missed; a woman, certainly, going home alone, maybe; maybe leaving the restaurant shift behind, or carrying the bar talk with her, the conversation living on in the cold close of a long day.

If the long season of February turned the words brittle and left too little of the mind able to see differently the familiar scenes buried by weather and blurred by numbing repetition, then it surely seemed March might follow just the same until April would become as cruel as promised. But then a glance at a stray cast off image from a city far off presents an image that makes the difference, marking, in its passage, the tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow of living in recognition, which in its petty pace, is all there is.

From Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang and written by Paul Auster:

From a Daybook Scrap

2009-02-27T01:00:00.000-07:00

"There is not a 'cure' for us, reversal of some wrong or perverse decision we have made somewhere or sometime. It is the death of time which has passed, the acumulation of knowledge which has confronted us with despair.

We simply know too much"

--George Oppen, a fragment, from Selected Prose, Daybooks and Papers

Marred

2009-02-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Life consists of antagonism.

Struggle against those of ill will, shifting reefs which hole the ship below the waterline.

--Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain

Photographs: Radek Skrivanek

Untitled

2009-02-19T08:58:00.001-07:00

Within the Lining of the Heart

2009-02-15T17:47:00.010-07:00

Standing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean is to see its force and know its immensity; dark gray undulations and white foam peaks, the constant shifts, the pattern of motion and invisible depth growing all the way to the horizon, all of it always familiar yet always in every second of light change and motion, new. But to wade into it, even just ankle deep, was something different. The wave would come in cold and thick, eveloping, making you part of the water and pushing away what counts as shore. Then as if after some exhale, the water returns to the ocean, pulling you with it. You hold your ground, claim your spot, dig your cold feet into the sand, only to find that it too dissolves under the movement. You are stuck and vulnerable, caught in the watery sand as another wave comes, which is constant, and it feels larger than before, as if the ocean were trying to find the necessary gravity to absorb whatever would resist it.

Under the pressure brought by the torrents of history, the feeling of being absorbed by a language, a way of being, and a grounding alien to one's own mode of cultivation is so amplified that the quiet adjustments and deflections, the slight forms of re-articulations and the almost imperceptible, except by accretion, variations on the performance of self give way to more dramatic gestures. And rather than for showing it is for knowing, within the lining of the heart, how one will claim presence in the world.

The Egyptian Jewish poet Edmond Jabes, who at an advanced age landed in France after being cast out of his native land, wrote lovingly of a certain practice known to belong to the Marranos of Spain. Against the tide of forced conversion these

"carried in a well-hidden pocket fitted into the lining of one of their wide sleeves -- usually the left -- a tiny book of commentaries on the Torah or with the prayers of their childhood.

Thus, while making a show of humble submission to the implacable masters' will, they could at any time stroke with their free hand, through the dense material that protected it from being seen, the book of their ancestors and reaffirm with their secret, but O how significant, gesture their loyalty to the words of their invisible and now also silent God."

In a prison in China in the 1970s revolution, the landscape painter Mu Xin was imprisoned and given paper on which to record a "self-criticism." Instead, he wrote out a kind of dialogue with those who were not there but who nonetheless informed his choice to survive hopelessness.

The scraps of paper were archived, it is said, in the cotton lining of his prison uniform, encasing him, armoring him for life. And surely more than the words themselves, and the ideas that incited him to write, he felt the paper he had written on as he turned or sat or twisted. He must have felt, like a current, that slight resistance to the body's movements there within the fabric, like an invisible aura.

Paintings by Mu Xin: "The Beach" and "Spring".

A Forced Relocation of Values: What the Soldier Saw

2009-02-10T08:41:00.003-07:00

When they went into attack they used to wear their blankets as capes, slit in the middle, plunged over their heads and blowing out, trailing about them in the wind. He loved that. That was as close as one came in this war to an heroic stance, to a banner, to a suggestion of flair or gesture. Of course, it was not for the sake of image, or even warmth that they wore them so, but rather in the superstition or belief that they created an indefinite and distributed target. Often, after an assault or firefight on patrol, they would count the holes in their blankets and marvel -- how was it possible to remain so invulnerable! And I suppose that was partly it, a way to press closer to the myth of immortality, of one's own state of blessedness and magical survival. Each throw of the dice that left you in possession of the field and unscathed built the incredible and sacred odds within which you breathed, and walked. The air was keener, sweeter in your nostrils in that time -- each choice, each insignificant choice, no longer insignificant.

He remembered once, advancing across a field under a cordon of fire where the sporadic tracers floated like fiery bees in a soft net in the air about them; and as they advanced in a staggered line up a broad slope of golden field at a slow walk, firing assault fire, the wind took their capes and wove them around them from their shoulders in dark and sinuous veronicas, as though each of them was passing by his own dark and deadly beast. Afterwards, he would think that in all his life he had never seen anything quite so beautiful.

--Robert Gajdusek, Resurrection

The Drone of History

2009-02-04T20:56:00.003-07:00

He had already been co-opted into the soft legitimation of torture. When Cheney, and then Bush, made such public and prideful pronouncements about instigating illegal practices, their war-crimes posturing was met with niceties about looking to the future. Instead of prosecuting past violations, all attention would be on the pragmatic necessities of the current situation. In other words, there would be no turning back, as if the storm of progress made it an impossible, naive notion.

Now Obama, no doubt having to prove himself to the mechanisms of "defense" and "security," authorizes air strikes in the remote reaches of Pakistan, continuing the Bush administration's fall offensive.

The use of robotics in war has greatly expanded in the laboratories of Iraq and Afghanistan, from the variety of surveillance and de-mining contraptions to a hope for the coming deployment of mobile machine guns. The drone, an unmanned missile machine in the air, is the prime symbol.

Aristotle, Diderot, Hume, Smith, Orson Welles in The Third Man. All spoke of, or wondered at, the moral freedom born of distance. "But for the fear of punishment," wrote Diderot, "many people would find it less hard to kill a man at a distance from which he appeared no larger than a swallow, than they would to slit a bullock's throat with their own hands."

And if the swallow-sized man is on a screen visible to someone couched in a remote location of Nevada or Colorado, or nothing more than a piece of intelligence data, invisible in a potentially crowded house, the calculus surely becomes all the more absolute; a deeply seductive temptation to do a good job.

Add to this, the creeping corrosive dissemination of the images themselves. Their circulation must also play a roll in the ways in which the discipline of war turns on the discourse of games: some sense of control and some lack of ultimate consequence.

Or worse, it becomes, as Don DeLillo suggested in various ways, a plot from which one cannot turn and within which one's participation is sanctified by history itself.

And so if the decision is not really a decision, and instead a deferred look toward some future in which morality and illegality and consequences will not matter -- retreating into the imagined past -- then the moment seems to find its inarguable and necessary form, as if "history is to blame."

Remnants and Recastings: Benjamin's Realm

2009-01-31T18:58:00.006-07:00

"Only on that particular day was catastrophe possible."

--Hannah Arendt, "Introduction" to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations.

At Passages, J. Bowring, author of A Field Guide to Melancholy, shows a clip of her venture into the Walter Benjamin memorial of Dani Karavan.

The space is a descending slant along, almost hovering above, the rocky shore of Portbou, on the Spanish coast. While Karavan's work is often marked by a false whiteness -- bright paths cut into grass, towers rising from the brownish soil, pillars in a public alley -- the memorial to Benjamin is aptly and strikingly dark. Perhaps this is to echo the title of Benjamin's massive project, Passagen-Werk, and the sense of the dim afterglow he evoked in those Paris arcades. But it must also refer to the passage through the Pyrenees from France, and obviously, in Benjamin's case, to death. Its brick and steel tones speak to both the slow erosion of entropy and the more powerful, unavoidable grind of the sea at the bottom of the memorial's arc.

Because Spain's rail system uses a different track system than the rest of Europe, Portbou has long been a dreary point for arrivals and departure along the coast; those waiting to enter from France, or leave for it, often stacked in the station, dull and tired. Or that is how it was a long time ago, when a great many fewer people would have heard the name -- now with its saint-like aura -- of the writer who committed suicide there in 1940, his attempt to escape Nazified Europe having failed. Today he is more widely recognized, if surely few would have made a pilgrimage to his memorial on a biting January day, and perhaps, though his burial spot was long unmarked and is now expanded to include the sea and earth, the station fills and empties like clockwork, most passers-through oblivious to what occurred so close, where a catastrophe occurred just once, on a certain day, and even then was hardly understood by those who found the body of just another escapee.

Leaving Writing

2009-01-30T10:57:00.005-07:00

"Writing: a way of leaving no space for death, of pushing back forgetfulness, of never letting oneself be surprised by the abyss. . . .

Maybe I've always written for no other reason than to win grace from this countenance. Because of disappearance. To confront perpetually the mystery of the there-not there. The visible and the invisible. To fight against the law that says, 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, nor any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above of that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.' Against the decree of blindness. I have often lost my sight; and I will never finish fashioning the graven image for myself. My writing watches. Eyes closed."
--Helene Cixous, "Coming to Writing"

Photos from Graeme Mitchell: John Updike, 1962; Graeme Mitchell, "Inside a Found Book."

Critical Lens

2009-01-24T20:10:00.004-07:00

Through Brecht's glasses; viewing a dedication by Walter Benjamin:

From Tomoko Yoneda's "Between Visible and Invisible" series.

Thresholds

2009-01-20T10:30:00.014-07:00

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I can not be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the National Constitution amended. While I
make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it. I will venture to add that to me the convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take or reject propositions originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they would wish to either accept or refuse. I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.

The Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people, and they have referred none upon him to fix terms for the separation of the States. The people themselves can do this if also they choose, but the Executive as such has nothing to do with it. His duty is to administer the present Government as it came to his hands and to transmit it unimpaired by him to his successor.

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? In our present differences, is either party without faith of being in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of Nations, with His eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people.

By the frame of the Government under which we live this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief, and have with equal wisdom provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance no Administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four years.

My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

--Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

Remembering the Older Forms of Renunciation

2009-01-19T02:00:00.000-07:00

The State of Israel: Through millenia of persecution, the Jews held together for the sake of justice. Their rituals, marriage and circumcision, dietary laws ad holy days were moments of cohesion, of continuity. Jewry was not a powerful state but the hope for justice at the end of the world. They were a people and its opposite, a rebuke to all peoples. Now, a state claims to be speaking for Jewry, to be Jewry. The Jewish people in whom the injustice of all peoples has become an accusation, the individuals in whose words and gestures the negative of what is reflected itself, have now become positive themselves. A nation among nations, soldiers, leaders, money-raisers for themselves. Like Christianity once in the Catholic church, but with smaller chances for success, Jewry is now to see the goal in the state of Israel. How profound a resignation in the very triumph of its temporal success. It purchases its survival by paying tribute to the law of the world as it is. Hebrew may be its language, but it is the language of success, not that of the prophets. It has adapted to the state of the world. Let him who is free of guilt cast the first stone. Except . . . it is a pity, for what was meant to be preserved through much renunciation disappears from the world as a result of it, as in the victory of Christianity. The good is good, not because it is victorious but because it resists victory. It must be hoped that the national subjection to the law of the world not meet as drastic an end as that of the individuals did in Europe of Hitler, Stalin, and Franco, and as it may under their overdue successors.

--Max Horkheimer, 1961

Wyeth in Winter

2009-01-16T09:38:00.008-07:00

Andrew Wyeth, of muted winter light and living cold, dead.

Watching Them Burn

2009-01-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

And now far-off smoke pearls from homestead rooftops
and from high mountains the greater shadows fall

--Virgil, Ecologues I

They took to the Tennessee hills to watch the civil war battle below (1864). Today, Israelis watch the smoke pearls from the besieged Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. The reported story points out that only two miles separates the spectators from the bombing and those being bombed; only two miles of hills and ground and rock, absolutely walkable, divides the citizens of one state from the stateless dwellers of a patch of coralled territory beneath them.

As the political economist and Gaza-expert Sara Roy has said of late, the walling in, the concrete division of the civilized from the barbarians -- who are tunneling, cunning, vile and clever, it is said, over and over -- was the first, long stage of this assault. With withdrawal of the settlers came the purity of curtailing human movement, the further cleansing of Jerusalem, the ensnarement of the prey. It is almost a year to the day that she published a piece describing the absolute economic and psychological and legal collapse of the strip. A year of weakening before the figurative bulldozing of life by air, sea, and finally land.

Those sitting upon the hill, on plastic chairs, eating olives, drinking Pepsi, what do they see? Do the plumes of smoke rising so close bring them a feel of homestead calm? Of righteous delivery onto that land? Does their skin shiver with the thrill of death delivered to the enemy? Or do they shift in the dust, knowing that their IDF has not yet killed enough, that the government they choose cannot create a wall high enough, and that the enthusiasts for the slaughter cannot bring their dire dream to fruition fast enough to fend off the eventual inheritance of incomplete empires?

An Unforeseen Logic

2009-01-09T10:57:00.003-07:00

Child, certain skies have sharpened my eyesight. Their characters cast shadows on my face. The phenomena agitate. And now, the everlasting inflection of moments and the infinity of mathematics hunt me throughout the world where I experience civic popularity, the respect of strange children, and tremendous affection. I dream of a War -- for right or power -- of an unforeseen logic.

It is as simple as a musical phrase.

--J.N. Arthur Rimbaud, "War"

Finding Ways to the Persecuted

2009-01-05T22:44:00.007-07:00

With the persecuted in late, un-
silenced,
radiating
league.

Das Morgen-Lot, gilded,
hafts itself to your co-
swearing, co-
scratching, co-
writing
heel.

--Paul Celan.

The demonstrations expand, city to city. Reports today suggested they were fueled by the old equation of Israel with Nazis, occupation and confinement with the Holocaust. But as people in pockets around the globe now gather, march, and waive signs, the indications are clear that the lingua franca of the world-wide outpouring is generally one of solidarity and support: a long-ignored flag becomes before us, a more potent symbol; posters proclaim the ideal of a unified Palestine; calls for peace in a placid font and bolder insistences to stop the massacring of civilians. The language of human rights, the capacity to clearly name evil, to recognize, through the fog of foreign strategy discourse, the reality of Palestinian suffering beyond all that is acceptable, may be evolving here. Maybe, maybe not.

As the bodies pile higher in what must be the many make-shift morgues, or sink further into rubble, hospitals are bombed and aid workers killed. A conservative estimate, tonight, of 125 civilians killed. The (legal, all too legal) use of white phosphorus. The people of Gaza cannot, it is suggested by Livni, suffer a humanitarian crisis because humanity, says Netanyahu, is on the side of the righteous aggressor. His remark was typical of the bombast, hers perhaps informed by the Israeli High Court's willingness to rule that the minimum amount of fuel and food allowed to seep through the blockade constituted the avoidance of international law violation and the responsibility of a governing body. Against the backdrop of territorial dissection of a densely populated area by tank, entrenched positioning by a sophisticated army, and continued aerial bombings, nothing that does not cry with remorse is credible from those on the side of safety.

In response to the persecution, for now: mourning, solidarity noise, a flag new to many contexts. The rest may come. Maybe, maybe not.

This Year We Are Here

2009-01-01T22:19:00.007-07:00

The days and their thoughts are split. Particulars are abstracted out, "again and again," the melodies divided into tones, the verses into words, the statue into the discreet swings of the hammer, persons into things, bombs into reason.

Also, respite into peace. So the paths of the disparate crisscross one another, the bleeding ideas shaped by the difference with the affirming feeling still there, the time of particulars dissolving into the utterance of beauty, the timely timelessness of prayer -- then "the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and the whirl doom congeals." No deception there: "here is the cradle of actual life" (Martin Buber, I-Thou).

This actual is said to remain in spite of the realities all around, cataloged and dispiriting. It is felt in the humane healings and the very capacity of hope by those most feelingly vulnerable to hopelessness.

"Madness, thou has prevailed. . . . But we need not therefore think that we must sink altogether. Reason and spirit have known, through many thousand years, that things do not go their way on this earth; surely they have not confuted, or crushed, or given the lie, by a defeat as preposterous as this. It is the way of the world -- it always has been; but that does not mean we did wrong to wish it otherwise. To be against such a thing as [we witness] is always to be right, let it turn out as it will. The way that history has taken in this instance is so foul, it has such a stench of lying and knavery, that no man need be ashamed of having refused to take it. And who can say whether it will not still lead through such abominations that we are justified of our faith?

We must have no fear. Reason and truth may suffer apparent eclipse. But in us, in our hearts, they are eternally free. And looking down from the bright regions of art, the spirit may laugh at the triumphant folly of the hour. Not forsaken and alone, but secure in the bond uniting it with all the best on earth." (Thomas Mann, 1938)

And so for the year to come and for that which is not forsaken, nor forsaking the world as it is: Steve Earle, courtesy of Ted Barron: Jerusalem

Photos: Gaza (1/1/2009) and Andre Kertesz

Without Exit

2008-12-27T12:33:00.008-07:00

Tom Segev's bitter commentary in Haaretz today attempts to tie the restrictive weight of history to the momentum of the ongoing Gaza seize. There is nothing new here, he says, as if the past disasters could possibly serve to illuminate the present rather than explain its necessity. Bombardment as enlightenment-styled punishment of the barbarians, the attempt to create a particular political perspective in a sphere beyond control, the anxious moral blindness of claiming "self-defense."

To that he may have added the compulsion to act out of the need to avoid passivity. And to that the desire to beat back the specter that says all failures were the result of prior restraint. As Segev writes, "[the one] historical truth worth recalling in this context: Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the Land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians."

As Ehud Barak promises to kill this ghost of Lebanon, to employ the necessary excess, to stop at nothing to eliminate Hamas rocket fire, the rockets reach further into Israel.

Segev's comments are brief. One suspects he cannot bear to say too much more. For what? He has written too much already to too little effect. The stories of the 7th million, the dangerous deliriums of 1967, the summer of 2006, and still now, yet again, it plays out deadly and heartbreaking: the return to the grotesque place without exit. Surely he feels his words strangled.

It was, then, in another newspaper piece that recently appeared where, perhaps, a more appropriate idea came for thinking about these "dark times." It was not about the long conflict, its brutality and senselessness, but about the now dead playwright Harold Pinter. It was about the subtle play between idea, word, and proximity; people trapped with each other.

In his economium, Ariel Dorfman praised Pinter's artistic treatment of a fundamental recognition -- that political plights came from the intimate turns of language, the trembling distance between people bound together in tight quarters; where words build brittle bridges, all too many of which are blown. There may not have been commentary on historical and political events in those early plays, Dorfman writes,

And yet, by trapping us inside the lives of those men and women, Pinter was revealing the many gradations and degradations of power with a starkness I had not noticed before in other authors who were supposedly dedicated to examining or denouncing contingent politics. All power, all domination and liberation started there, he seemed to be saying, in those claustrophobic rooms where each word counts, each slight utterance needs to be accounted for, is paid for in some secret currency of hope or suffering. You want to free the world, humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that it is in language where the other parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

The shouts of protest, the statements of statesmen, the editorial endorsements and cries of rightful outrage seem so far from what is actually being exchanged with that "secret currency" of need and evil.

Untitled

2008-12-25T13:40:00.003-07:00

A Promise of Miracle

2008-12-24T13:41:00.003-07:00

Arvo Part:

Arctic hysteria

2008-12-21T16:21:00.005-07:00

It is ferociously cold outside, dead white and bitter. Inside of the old brick building, which is dense and thick and protecting. There are storm windows dropped, insulated, and tight. There is steam heat running through the walls. A fire burns in the fireplace and no shortage of wood. There are lights brightening many corners; the electrical current wholly shapes the space. Still, it is possible to feel the faintest thread cold that blows in, somehow, like an ominous whisper.

Eliot Weinberger writes of living amongst the dynamic lifelessness of ice. He describes the point at which the mind of the hunter in the kayak off the coast of Greenland--forced to hunt ahead of the coming winter-- can no longer keep the immensity of the threat from the thickening, darkening water from devouring their consciousness. They never go out onto the sea again.

"The landscape is always changing. The icebergs are always moving. They calve, drift, suddenly flip over. The ice is alive. It creaks, groans, grinds, trickles, gurgles, drips, thumps. Sea slaps it; wind howls through its hollows."

He writes of Arctic hysteria: nineteenth-century seamen leaping mad from their ships, huddled in tents, delirious and paranoid.

He repeats the story told in Greenland of three men who set out to know the world and come across an igloo. They are unable to escape it. The igloo seems like an continent. They walk inside for days and days, holding fast to its walls, searching on and on, for days, weeks, and months:

"Two of the men could take it no more and sat down and died. The third kept walking. He finally found the exit: his kayak was where he had left it. He returned to his village an old man, and he told the people: 'The world is just an enormous igloo.'"

Photo: Cape Prescott, Franklin Pierce Bay, by Charles White (1875)

The Gyre of Passionate Intensities

2008-12-17T11:20:00.004-07:00

After the UN's official for Human Rights in the Palestinian territories was denied access to Gaza by Israel, the New York Times described Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton, this way:

He has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies between the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that “only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book.”
In his capacity as a United Nations investigator, Mr. Falk issued a statement this month describing Israel’s embargo on Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, as a crime against humanity, while making only cursory reference to Hamas’s rocket attacks against Israeli civilian centers. Israeli officials expressed outrage.

In other words, Falk is not an "honest broker." The comment alleging support for 9/11 conspiracy theories is, of course, crude demagogy and reflects nothing of Falk's real questions about the implications for reductionist thoughts of 9/11, which are outlined in his book, The Declining World Order: America's Imperial Geopolitics (Routledge, 2004).

The first line above mobilizes without reference one of Israel's chief criticisms, which is that Falk "draws shameful comparisons to the Holocaust." Such policing of the Holocaust comparisons is nothing new. As a metaphor it is repeatedly called upon to advance Israel's national needs, and as a historical lesson it can easily be used to characterize the Palestinian/Arab threat, which as public figures like Bernard Henri-Levy still insist on asserting, contain the DNA of intractable Nazi sympathies. If 1967, the threat of annihilation was felt more directly, and so when there was talk of a coming Auschwitz, the public was fueled by deep-seated fears, a need for vengeful protection, and an identity-affirming aggression. "Never again" was not a mere phrase then, but an orienting principle that sustained the new state. It is so common a gesture now, however, that its rhetorical impact may be nothing at all.

Except, however, when it is brought forth by outsiders trying to describe the plight of Palestinians. Alain Finkielkraut has written of the comparative phenomenon in France, where domestic political positioning too often relied on the specious assertions -- and crude formulations -- which marked Israel as Nazi-esque and Palestinians an undifferentiated mass of assembled victimhood. Finkielkraut was correct in drawing out the historical obfuscation at work in that context. But there is a far different tenor in what Falk wrote in 2007:

There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species. Its massiveness, unconcealed genocidal intent, and reliance on the mentality and instruments of modernity give its enactment in the death camps of Europe a special status in our moral imagination. This special status is exhibited in the continuing presentation of its gruesome realities through film, books, and a variety of cultural artifacts more than six decades after the events in question ceased. The permanent memory of the Holocaust is also kept alive by the existence of several notable museums devoted exclusively to the depiction of the horrors that took place during the period of Nazi rule in Germany.

Against this background, it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as 'holocaust.' The word is derived from the Greek holos (meaning 'completely') and kaustos (meaning 'burnt'), and was used in ancient Greece to refer to the complete burning of a sacrificial offering to a divinity. Because such a background implies a religious undertaking, there is some inclination in Jewish literature to prefer the Hebrew word 'Shoah' that can be translated roughly as 'calamity,' and was the name given to the 1985 epic nine-hour narration of the Nazi experience by the French filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann. The Germans themselves were more antiseptic in their designation, officially naming their undertaking as the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question.' The label is, of course, inaccurate as a variety of non-Jewish identities were also targets of this genocidal assault, including the Roma and Sinti ('gypsies'), Jehovah Witnesses, gays, disabled persons, political opponents.

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy. If ever the ethos of 'a responsibility to protect,' recently adopted by the UN Security Council as the basis of 'humanitarian intervention' is applicable, it would be to act now to start protecting the people of Gaza from further pain and suffering. But it would be unrealistic to expect the UN to do anything in the face of this crisis, given the pattern of US support for Israel and taking into account the extent to which European governments have lent their weight to recent illicit efforts to crush Hamas as a Palestinian political force.

His title, "Slouching Toward A Palestinian Holocaust," and opening paragraphs acknowledge the poetic groping for an arresting image in a time of desperate need. His grim conclusion is that Israel's effective control of borders and air, its manipulative and fluctuating blockades of international aid, and its policy of air-strike assassination have entrenched a reality of collective punishment that cannot be dislodged; it will go on and on, unabated by humanitarian impulses from without or within, the catastrophe scripted and certain. Still, he cites the Fatah v. Hamas proxy war in the territories, the hands-off posture of neighboring Arab countries, and the legacy of UN impotence and irrelevance, all in an effort to untangle the complex dynamics in which the Palestinians are trapped.

Any honest discussion of Falk, the UN, Israel, the Middle East's slow war, the prospects for a solution that would do less damage than the current state of affairs, and the place of fundamental human rights for those living encamped in Gaza will have to deal with the real assertions and real measures, and then talk about the path toward a responsible apprehension of real possibilities and likely outcomes. Instead, the New York Times demonstrates the wide-spread pattern of such cruel incapacity.

Reef upon reef

2008-12-04T10:16:00.004-07:00

Your mother's soul hovers ahead.
Your mother's soul helps sail around night, reef upon reef.
Your mother's soul lashes the sharks on before you.

This word is your mother's ward.
Your mother's ward share your bed, stone upon stone.
Your mother's ward stoops for the crumb of light.

--Paul Celan, "Der Reisekamerad [The Travel Companion]"

The Eye Seeking Safety, the Mind a Veil

2008-11-30T19:43:00.008-07:00

The province of the poem is the world.
When the sun rises, it rises in the poem
and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark .

and lamps are lit, cats prowl and men
read, read--or mumble and stare
at that which their small lights distinguish
or obscure or their hands search out

in the dark. The poem moves them or
it does not move them. Faitoute, his ears
ringing . no sound . no great city,
as he seems to read--

a roar of books
from the waddled library oppresses him
until
his mind begins to drift .
Beautiful thing:

--a dark flame
a wind, a flood--counter to all staleness.

Dead men's dreams, confined by these walls, risen,
seek an outlet. The spirit languishes,
unable, unable not from lack of innate ability--

(barring alone sure death)

but from that which immures them pressed here
together with their fellows, for respite .

Flown in from before the cold or nightbound
(the light attracted them)
they sought safety (in books)
but ended battering against glass
at the high windows

The Library is desolation, it has a smell of its own
of stagnation and death .

Beautiful Thing!

--the cost of dreams.
in which we search, after a surgery
of the wits and must translate, quickly
step by step or be destroyed--under a spell
to remain castrate (a slowly descending veil
closing about the mind
cutting the mind away) .

SILENCE!

--William Carlos Williams, "The Library" (1949) from Paterson

Where they have themselves and their wives risen to prepare

2008-11-27T10:03:00.006-07:00

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

From Rosmarie Waldrop, A Key into the Language of America:

Indian corne, boiled with free will and predestination is a dish exceedingly wholesome if taken through the mouth. Their words, too, fit to eat. And crow. A mark of "cadency." Similarly, an eye devouring its native region must devote special attention to its dialect. Where they have themselves and their wives risen to prepare. Against initiative of elements, against white bodies, against coining of new words: Tobacco. Unsuccessful.

Mishquockuk.
Red Copper Kettle.
cycle
chain
for thought

I began my education by walking along the road in search of the heoric. I did not think to ask the way to the next well. Wilderness like fear a form of drunkenness or acting like a boy. The ground begins to slip. Rhythm of swallows seen from below. It is a strange truth that remains of contentment are yet another obstacle.

the spelling in my mother's recipes
explains
why she gave birth to me
and in the greatest heat
should feed
on me
all flesh considered
as a value

All the Forms of Happiness and Peace

2008-11-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

In the famous opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx not only offers the formula of farce following from the replication of tragedy, he suggests there is a way out of the "tradition of all the dead generations":

In like manner the beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can produce it freely only when he moves in it without remembering the old and forgets in it his ancestral tongue.

Moves in it suggests a swimmer losing consciousness of the form of the stroke and feeling only the propelling effects of the unthinking, necessary effort; the after-effects of practice become performance. And that image in turn conjures the Burmese uprising of 2007, which in an echo of 1988, saw students amassing behind the monks who were the symbolic voices of the opposition. The students raised their long-hidden banner of revolution -- the peacock flag -- and with nothing but presence, mass, and the spirit of martyrdom, challenged their military opposition to do what the military did: kill the unarmed, raid the monasteries, disperse the very idea of resistance. As George Packer wrote in The New Yorker, the protests followed the script of older moments of protest, failing as other before had failed.

Packer's article, "Drowning," is about the tidal force and retreat of the protests themselves, as well as the horrors of the tsunami that devastated Burma in the wake of the arrest and torture of so many of the participants in those actions against the government. But it is moreover about how the political imagination is shaped in anti-liberal environments.

He tells the story of a political prisoner who finds his orienting principles in Dickens rather than Hardt and Negri. He interviews a man who produces clandestine theater pieces (like Sartre's "No Exit") in small apartments out of the sight of authorities, and who staying out of the September 2007 protests explained that he did so because it was not an "endgame." Surely he was aware, as you made the statement, of the irony that Beckett might well whisper in his ear that a play played out of sight, cut off from the world, might just feel like imprisonment within a plot -- whatever its declarations of "play" -- that always ends poised to repeat. You're on earth, there's no cure for that. And so each revolutionary act comes to feel like the fruitless and mad -- and yet necessary -- demand for an absolute center.

As for the political prisoner who had learned to rely on imagining contemporary Burma through the lens of 19th century England -- crowded, decayed, desperate -- he says, without mentioning the physical abuse her suffered, that he came to appreciate the time he was afforded. Being caged had its disciplinary effects on his learning. "Outside [of prison]," he tells Packer, "we waste so many hours, so many days." He participated in the marches, but as someone for whom freedom has come to mean not the freedom of expression, or the freedom promised by rights, but the freedom from anger and despair, the rage and enthusiasm of the crowd was a bewildering and alienating phenomenon.

Seeing the blood in the streets and the real human devastation of the efforts there, perhaps a famous passage of Dickens came to his mind. In that passage the man who has seen "much trouble" gazes at a scene of shadow and light, of the watery play around a scene of decay and "ruined battlements." He muses on the need for forgetting what has come before and the equally strong desire to make right has been wronged. "Did it ever strike you," he says, "that on a morning such as this drowning would be happiness and peace?"

Epitaphery

2008-11-09T10:17:00.005-07:00

TRANSLATE
INTO OLD OR MIDDLE ENGLISH
FOR MY EPITAPH

Mother used to listen to the B.B.C. news
transistor awry on scattered bed clothes,
on in the morning when we came in
to see if she was still alive. Now
I am glued to the World Service at 3 AM,
two Irish nationalists, this is what we like.

TRANSLATE
INTO THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO
EPITAPH

I saw the sun dance, the Virgin Mary
came by, she was cool Buddha eyes,
I poured a drink. Catholic. Necking started:
love and sex both thoroughbreds
galloped past the post. Which lost,
which won? Lost sex sweet sex.

KEROUAC

(Tender romanticism is our Vietnam.)
The friend of your friend
is a drag queen is you buddy
in the coffin. The neon
has come on, it's time for coffee.

TRANSLATE
INTO THE DUBLIN ACCENT
FOR MY EPITAPH

In my mother's womb I sipped
the potion of nationalism and words.
Her boyfriend in her mind Yeats
gave me rhythms. Joyce sent language,
Ginsburg bestowed liberation.
In Hodges Figgis the City Lights books,
I was devoured by Howl. I began
hyperventilating. Bars of Dublin
turned into jammed paradises
with wandering disheveled starlets.

James Liddy, Dublin, San Francisco, Milwaukee, 1934-2008.

"To cease fleeing from reality and to change it"

2008-11-06T09:31:00.011-07:00

The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

South Carolina representative James Clyburn, a veteran of the violent times, called the results a non-violent revolution, and the victory gathering at Grant Park -- orchestrated, protected by the police, an amassing -- seemed to expel, with the shouting happy presence of 250,000 people, the ghosts of the Democratic Convention of 1968.

The revolution may not be political in an immediately recognizable sense, since it is still not clear that there is any agreement, even among those gathered in Grant Park, where the actual problems are and what their solutions demand. And if not agreement, perhaps not even any meaningful recognition. Leafing through a collection of writing, this scrap of an essay written more than ten years ago jumped out, offering the uncomfortable reminder of the stakes that remain in many ways far from the election of a president, in the struggles of labor and poverty and survival.

Talking about the perils of the community-based organizations that operate among the vulnerable for very limited ends -- neglecting or ignoring the imperatives of any larger, binding civic discourse and actual political negotiation, thereby exchanging the hope for "change" for coercive power in a sphere of influence -- Adolph Reed wrote in 1996:

In Chicago . . . we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program -- the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance ("The Curse of 'Community'").

The twelve years between then and now have added much to that rhetorical patina of the embattled kitchen tables where people are made to seek solutions on their own, and Reed has continued to write against the illusion that an Obama presidency will mean joyous change when the fundamental problems -- urban poverty, working strife, a vast prison complex -- will remain invisible. Or if visible, then presented as barriers to a particular kind of progress sought by liberal foundations and those invested in the development world.

Those twelve years and the migration from the community-level to the "national stage" has necessarily changed the political role of the Harvard-lawyer-become-president. He seems now to stand in for a withdrawal from the strict claims of some false "authenticity" and the diminishing effects of identity politics. In this withdrawal, and the symbolic force of his presence, actual and rhetorical--a symbolism encountered in the kitchen, on television, through the internet and airwaves--one hopes that the necessary political negotiations can again take place closer to home. We may not witness the stuff of true agonism at the presidential level, let alone a language of an analysis that exposes, in a materialist sense, the constructions of our condition. But given that so many are feeling cast out, compelled into a collective exodus through the wilderness of war and the wider threats of economic havoc, there is also the potential for some new recognitions to also take root on a larger scale; if hope, hope brought through mass pain.

The election two days ago was, after all, the culmination of a slow, cascading, majority rejection of the hateful, the fearful, and the insidious traps of a long history. The votes were cast when there is much to fear. Many refused it even as it still continues to play out across the dim, angry faces that were holding tight to the reactionary non-sense. It remains, brutal and brutish and selfish and naive, but it also seems more isolated than ever before, a shrinking island of death.

In 1962, James Baldwin wrote, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of emancipation, a letter to his nephew, in which he said that this history had bound white America in a terror that it could not understand. He tells his nephew not to retreat from the rooted sense of belonging to Harlem, to America, to possibility, even as "the details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you." The reconciliation of those two truths was to be found, says Baldwin, in "the words acceptance and integration."

You, don't be afraid. I said that I that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never having being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But those men are your brothers--your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, that is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease feeling from reality and to change it. For this is your home . . . do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become ("My Dungeon Shook," The Fire Next Time).

Untitled

2008-11-02T07:17:00.006-07:00

The chapel far off, in the rain.

At Night with a Lowered Book

2008-10-28T00:01:00.000-06:00

Born as an idea in Milwaukee, the Edmund Fitzgerald has become a mythic ship, a historic wreck. Once the largest freighter on the great lakes, having sank in a November storm on Lake Superior, it has become an icon of darkness. A Cleveland brewery has named its cold black porter after it.

Home after the long day, home to two bottles of it to take away the weight of what was, and then whiskey after. Midnight does come, and the news fades, and everything slows into the quiet. Something about the image of the ship on the bottle, and knowing its fate, reminds me of Brecht. Something about dark times and bad trouble, against which the small gestures of pleasure, the thinking through the wreckage without ever becoming mere spectator:

Years ago when I was studying the ways of the Chicago Wheat Exchange
I suddenly grasped how they managed the whole world's wheat there
And yet I did not grasp it either and lowered the book
I knew at once: you've run
Into bad trouble.

There was no feeling of enmity in me and it was not the injustice
Frightened me, only the thought that
Their way of going about it won't do
Filled me completely.

These people, I saw, lived by the harm
Which they did, not by the good.
This was a situation, I saw, that could only be maintained
By crime because too bad for most people.
In this way every
Achievement of reason, invention or discovery
Must lead only to still greater wretchedness.

Such and suchlike I thought at the moment
Far from anger or lamenting, as I lowered the book
With its description of the Chicago wheat market and exchange.

Much trouble and tribulation
Awaited me.

A Wreck on the Shore

2008-10-25T10:10:00.006-06:00

Spectatorship. To watch the world's passing calamities, vast and public, or small and domestic, and take their measure. Are they, from that point of sanctuary and safety, seen as essential destructions, unavoidable eruptions, essential sacrifices? made for the sake of an unfolding future, or what Hegel calls the "true result of history"?

Or is the saving quality actual distance, which is described by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where the European man reads of a Chinese village swallowed by an earthquake and, over his breakfast, feels pangs of pity, a true tremor of sadness; then meditates on life's fragility or geological risks, only to continue soon enough on with business, pleasure, life? Or does even the witness of some proximate disaster bring the selfish relief of the survivor?

In the tragic mode, that which is unjust and deplorable is worked over and eventually harnessed by reason, which may well allow for the great gift of pity for the unfortunate, but not the sustained fear and trembling at human vulnerability.

The spectator keen to see the drama of history on the stage, avoids the brutality of the waves of passionate dislocation, and instead rests on "the calmer shore and, from a secure position . . . look[s] on at the distant spectacle of confusion and wreckage." One must, as a living being, a brute with an "eye of prey," become a spectator to suffering, including one's own; give it cause, plot, parameters, justification, reason. But be it by rising tides, geological upheavals, or the scandals on the stage that seem mere drama, something other, the figurative shipwreck is almost always a destiny in one form or another, a point of contact with what cannot be escaped through political cant, self-satisfying judgment, or the vast refusals of ill-purpose.

Photograph: "The Wreck of the Viscata," San Francisco Bay, by Carleton Watkins (courtesy of Wood S Lot).

Sovereignty of the Idea in the Time of Catastrophe

2008-10-19T15:41:00.005-06:00

From Alain Badiou's reflections in Le Monde; the spectacle of the financial crisis being played out like a disaster film:

La seule chose qu'on puisse désirer dans cette affaire est que ce pouvoir didactique se retrouve dans les leçons tirées par les peuples, et non par les banquiers, les gouvernements qui les servent et les journaux qui servent les gouvernements, de toute cette sombre scène. Je vois deux niveaux articulés de ce retour du réel. Le premier est clairement politique. Comme le film l'a montré, le fétiche "démocratique" n'est que service empressé des banques. Son vrai nom, son nom technique, je le propose depuis longtemps, est : capitalo-parlementarisme. Il convient donc, comme de multiples expériences depuis vingt ans ont commencé à le faire, d'organiser une politique d'une nature différente.
Elle est et sera sans doute longtemps très à distance du pouvoir d'Etat, mais peu importe. Elle commence au ras du réel, par l'alliance pratique des gens les plus immédiatement disponibles pour l'inventer : les prolétaires nouveaux venus, d'Afrique ou d'ailleurs, et les intellectuels héritiers des batailles politiques des dernières décennies. Elle s'élargira en fonction de ce qu'elle saura faire, point par point. Elle n'entretiendra aucune espèce de rapport organique avec les partis existants et le système, électoral et institutionnel, qui les fait vivre. Elle inventera la nouvelle discipline de ceux qui n'ont rien, leur capacité politique, la nouvelle idée de ce que serait leur victoire.
Le second niveau est idéologique. Il faut renverser le vieux verdict selon lequel nous serions dans "la fin des idéologies". Nous voyons très clairement aujourd'hui que cette prétendue fin n'a d'autre réalité que le mot d'ordre "sauvons les banques". Rien n'est plus important que de retrouver la passion des idées, et d'opposer au monde tel qu'il est une hypothèse générale, la certitude anticipée d'un tout autre cours des choses. Au spectacle malfaisant du capitalisme, nous opposons le réel des peuples, de l'existence de tous dans le mouvement propre des idées. Le motif d'une émancipation de l'humanité n'a rien perdu de sa puissance. Le mot "communisme", qui a longtemps nommé cette puissance, a certes été avili et prostitué.
Mais, aujourd'hui, sa disparition ne sert que les tenants de l'ordre, que les acteurs fébriles du film catastrophe. Nous allons le ressusciter, dans sa neuve clarté. Qui est aussi son ancienne vertu, quand Marx disait du communisme qu'il "rompait de la façon la plus radicale avec les idées traditionnelles" et qu'il faisait surgir "une association où le libre développement de chacun est la condition du libre développement de tous".
Rupture totale avec le capitalo-parlementarisme, politique inventée au ras du réel populaire, souveraineté de l'idée : tout est là, qui nous déprend du film de la crise et nous rend à la fusion de la pensée vive et de l'action organisée.

Translation and images from Infinite Thought:

The only thing that we can hope for in this affair is that this didactic power may be found in the lessons drawn from this grim drama by people, and not by the bankers, the governments who serve them, and the newspapers who serve these governments. This return to the real has two related aspects. The first is clearly political. As the film has shown, the "democratic" fetish is merely the zealous servant of the banks. Its real name, its technical name, as I have argued for some time, is capitalist-parliamentarianism. It is advisable, as several political experiments have begun to do in the past twenty years, to organise a politics of a different nature.

Such a politics is, and no doubt will be for a long time, at a great distance from state power, but no matter. It begins level with the real, through the practical alliance between those who are most immediately available to invent such a politics: the newly-arrived proletarians from Africa and elsewhere, and the intellectuals who have inherited the political battles of the last few decades. This alliance will grow on the basis of what it will be capable of doing, point by point. It will not entertain any kind of organic relationship with the existing parties and with the electoral and institutional system that keeps them alive. It will invent the new discipline of those who have nothing, their political capacity, the new idea of what their victory will look like.

The second aspect is ideological. We must overthrow the old verdict according to which ours would be the time of "the end of ideologies". Today we can clearly see that the only reality of this supposed end lies in the slogan "save the banks". Nothing is more important than recovering the passion of ideas and countering the world such as it is with a general hypothesis, the anticipated certainty of an entirely different state of affairs. To the nefarious spectacle of capitalism, we oppose the real of peoples, of the existence of all in the proper movement of ideas. The theme of an emancipation of humanity has lost none of its power. Undoubtedly, the word "communism", which for a long time served to name this power, has been debased and prostituted.

But today, its disappearance only benefits the advocates of order, the feverish actors of the disaster movie. But we will resuscitate communism, in its new-found clarity. This clarity is also its oldest virtue, as when Marx said of communism that it "breaks in the most radical fashion with traditional ideas" and that it will bring forth "an association in which the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all".

Total break with capitalist-parliamentarianism, the invention of a politics on a level with the popular real, sovereignty of the idea: it's all there, everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and to give ourselves over to the fusion between live thought and organised action (everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and rise up).

"A thousand sources of sudden enrichment"

2008-10-16T20:44:00.006-06:00

In this time of anxious need, the call goes out. The order is placed, the machinery is fired up and the new printings of standard editions are readied for sale and re-sale. The product, this time, is Marx's Das Kapital. Perhaps it is produced offshore, waiting to be brought back "home" to be distributed with magnificent speed and propped in bookstore windows for buyers desperate for a way of understanding what is not being adequately explored.

However it comes to be, and come to be owned, it is in many more hands today, talismanic in its heft and density, promising the promise of answers and explanations; a way of knowing what is so frightful.

What trickle of pleasure will a weary train traveler feel when, at the end of a tiring day, the eye impatient with Marx's grueling care and seemingly infinite patience, finds a footnote citing Luther, who writes, "Whoever eats up, robs, steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder (so far as in him lies) as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits while safe on his tool, when he ought to rather be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten by as many ravens could stick their beaks in and share it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves . . . "?

What memory of the Hugo Boss suits and well-shined shoes seen that day will creep in when he finds that Marx writes, "The progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment. When a certain stage of development has been reached, a conventional degree of prodigality, which is also the exhibition of wealth, and consequently a source of credit, becomes a business necessity. . . " ? Or, "Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven"?

But just as Benjamin refused an easy reduction of the Paris arcades, those enclosed "worlds of delight," the grasping for answers that come too quick are to be refused. The formulations that might allow one, raven-like, to stick their beak in and pluck out a pronouncing judgment, will always give only false pleasure. They are only avoidance of the shock that rattles the body. The temptation is to look for small symptoms in the normalcy, and seeing both at once, find assurance. If so many continue to take the train to work, to walk the same path, day after day, no matter what the newspapers say, then surely it is a matter of just waiting for whatever it is we claim to know is happening, to have happened; like a hurricane that eventually turns to mere rain over land.

A few years back, Alan Greenspan rejected the very idea that there was a brewing crisis because of the play of credit, which metastasized in housing. He referred, then, to the not very uncommon phenomenon of "irrational exuberance." In other words, to a very simple condition. No cause for alarm. This is as helpful as saying that markets run on fear and greed. And it recalls a fragment from Horkheimer's Dawn and Decline:

As one walks through an insane asylum, the horrible impression the sight of the raving mad makes on the layman is allayed by the matter-of-fact statement of the physician that the patient is in a state of excitation. Being subsumed under a specific scientific category, the terror at the phenomenon is presented as somehow out of place. "It's just a state of excitation." There are people who will not be disturbed about the existence of evil because they have a theory that accounts for it. Here I am also thinking of Marxists who, in the face of wretchedness, quickly proceed to show why it exists. Even comprehension can be too quick.

Roots of a Crisis

2008-10-09T13:53:00.008-06:00

From an apple orchard in a beautiful shallow valley and out of the autumn woods of the Dunes Highway that runs along the shore of Lake Michigan and into and through Gary, Indiana. The rain is steady, the last light of the gray fades quickly into a wet smear of dark colors. The industrial markers are enormous. Train yards, British Petroleum tanks, a harbor canal, the proliferating rusted-metal land of docks. Old buildings on wide streets for trucks are close to the road, bare and lit by street-light. For longer stretches of the two-lane highway, however, there are few signs of people among the homes that sit dark in the side streets. The only commercial glow is from the scattered liquor stores. Cash checking outlets, not banks. Occasionally a billboard.

Then at night, past more and more of the areas marked by boarded-up homes. Some others have the look of being lived in, but are paradoxically, and glaringly, unlit, as if the electricity was inconsistent, shut off, or long dead. Block after block of blackness and cold and wet. One after another, the shells of shelter. And in the rain the feeling of something dire that has penetrated every space where the living take shelter, that the city space is being re-forested vine by vine, cracking wood and overwhelming the old asphalt.

There is a presidential debate scheduled for later that evening. The subject is the economy. The working and middle classes are both starting to realize the long term effects of the neo-liberal epoch. They are fearing for their employment futures, their wages, and very idea of pension prospects in the face of the great unwinding following the speculative excesses of the rightfully named naughts; fears of an epic recession, another depression. The debate will say nothing to these regions that are spread around the Great Lakes like natural deserts.

They exude the feeling of numbness, immune from political prospects because they cannot be touched by the necessary fear. Stripped of their ties to the collective, it is as if these spaces lack the luxury of a populist nerve. With the welfare state made threadbare, what is there left to lose in these realms that are pockets abandoned to nature, the drama played out beyond tragedy and into the baseless, unacknowledged ruin?

Photo of Gary by Lee Bay.

The Legislation of Catastrophe

2008-10-06T20:19:00.004-06:00

And the most terrible, the most horrible catastrophes imaginable, the conflagration of the universe, can it be anything more than the crackling, the burst, and the evaporation of a grain of powder on a candle?
--Joseph Joubert, 1821

In the long wake of the French Revolution, particularly between 1815 and 1850, liberal politics waged war on the threats to social order. Trying to bolster the prospects of liberty in the time of the excessive, ruinous promise of revolution, liberal politics tested again and again the dream of a justice fit for the feared worst. As the grounds forming and supporting the law shifted with the seismic force of violent antagonisms, however, there was a dramatic collision of fears.

For some, the events of the half-century demonstrated the absolute vulnerability of the individual exposed to the riotous calamities of revolution; annihilating social forces quite capable of extinguishing all individual liberties, devastating personhood itself.

For others, the notion that those so vulnerable might be offered legal assistance, and thereby given a voice in the systems of the civic arena, threatened the notion of the law itself. It was as if the impulse to the protect the poor came as the sound of a dam cracking, the wall between order and catastrophe splintering case by case, until the whole social order dissolved under the raging waters of an infinite clamor for justice.

This old negotiation with catastrophe comes to mind when one thinks of the thickly paged bill passed this week to (supposedly, possibly) tend to the financial "crisis" before it becomes a catastrophe. As before, the threat cannot be measured. As before, the measures have no way to dim the threats. This time, the mathematical sublime is not just a philosophical formula, but an apt rendition of the inability of anyone to ever know the risks that are supposed to be contained. Even for those for whom "one trillion" is a real number, there is no one who can know the true amount of credit default swaps that have infested the system of capital. If there is a specter in that machine it is a communal failure of the law, of contracted promises -- a curdled moment in the dream of the risk manager's equation.

And when those promises are broken? When the magical thinking ends? Will we sense at all the tiny flick at the end of the candle, somewhere? Or only feel the loss of some distant light that went out long ago, like some star?

We have now learned that these intertwining bets against and for disaster have come to cast a net over everything were, not surprising, the result of a law. An eleventh hour budget passed on December 15th, 2000 contained legislation that removed the prospect of regulation; it ensured our collective exposure to the blind and hysterical risk games, and that such risk would continue unchecked until now, when it is far too late to address and correct.

Slavoj Zizek is fond of saying that given the state of capital, now is a time above all for thinking, for theory, for finding the true measure of our situation. "What is to be done?" requires knowing with what, as well as what is at stake. He is not so confident that this can be done, however, for we are so often lacking a language, a calculus that can ground a critique. One waits for the language to come, one dreads the catastrophe, one recoils from the abuses written in by the law itself.

"Death of an Heir of Sorrows"

2008-09-26T10:25:00.014-06:00

So many of the characters he portrayed had a restless want that was made of bitterness and need. There was the steady beat of an alertness to the century in them, a familiar fierce ache of protest in the middle of some tangible decay or mood of enclosure. The hustlers, thieves, prisoners, and wounded players. The want faced with the death of some necessary fiction, some beckoning image (as if undoing his own power in the light) proving too weak, too fragile, too pathetic. And so the themes of escaping the binding lure of the American dream, or the binds that made it impossible.

They push back against constant presence of ideologies, the forces that shape what is being represented, as if in his eyes he could demonstrate that the battles were always more than those against actual opposition. The torturers of the prison may embody an evil, but it is already the chain gang, a small institution of delusion, that is the culprit.

Even that figure who was supposed to represent the worst of the new breed was given a line that knowingly nodded to the dark times that come. And so while embodying the evil himself he is able to remind the audience that the blame is beyond him, that it rightly goes beyond any single man's moral character, or barbed-wire heart, all the way to the very stuff of the system at work.

And so the son Hud says to father Homer, who takes the government ordered slaughter of his cattle with a wounded grace, and touch of tragic acceptance:

"This country is run on epidemics, where you been? Price fixing, crooked TV shows, inflated expense accounts. How many honest men you know? Why you separate the saints from the sinners, you're lucky to wind up with Abraham Lincoln. Now I want out of this spread what I put into it, and I say let us dip our bread into some of that gravy while it is still hot."

That performance as Hud may seem notable for its refusal to turn away from the destructive qualities that force a man to devour the gravy regardless of the moral measures that might come before, but more than that, it stands for what drives the compulsion of the rest of the characters, the immeasurable losses that cascade across the screen, decade after decade, insistence after insistence, betrayal after betrayal, cowardly act after cowardly act, refusal after refusal, sorrow after sorrow, in some form or another.

"Death of an Heir of Sorrows," by the Silver Jews. (Courtesy of Ted Barron).

In the City of Expectation

2008-09-25T08:48:00.009-06:00

I had arrived ... to visit a woman friend. Her house, the city, the language were unfamiliar to me. Nobody was expecting me; no one knew me. For two hours I walked the streets in solitude.

Never again have I seen them so. From every gate a flame darted; each cornerstone sprayed sparks, and every streetcar came toward me like a fire engine. For she might have stepped out of the gateway, around the corner, been sitting in the streetcar. But of the two of us, I had to be, at any price, the first to see the other. For had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I would have gone up like a powder keg.

--Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

In the City of Memory

2008-09-20T19:14:00.017-06:00

Dating from the first century BC, the Rhetorica ad Herennium outlines the interconnection of rhetoric and memory. It presents a system for organizing the materials of memory. An orator stores and arranges his knowledge and learning for recall and access, quickly locating within the necessary fact, fable, or quotation. It describes the need for structures and scenes to ground and secure what is known. With these structures in place, images to be recalled can be placed, just as writing is impressed upon a wax tablet. The scenes and structures make a cosmos in which to wander mentally, street to street, house to house, room to room.

Moreover, each of these loci acts as a theater that disappears under the pull of the drama it nonetheless supports. And contrary to expectations, the drama is defined by images, not words. A thinker such as Walter Ong insists that the written word -- from the Greeks onward -- announces the technology that births philosophy itself. With the abstracted quality of words written down, steadied and made to represent ideas removed from a living present, the perpetual becoming of speaking in oral culture gives way to literate culture's questions of a transcendent abstraction: Being. The word, always at a distance from the particularity of any speaker, is used to form knowledge within; it is absorbed in solitude, made something by the introspective musings. Hence, writing as a technology that structures thought.

The Rhetorica ad Herennium, however, stresses that memory and knowing relies upon remembered images and not steadied words. The images are only like writing. What we see is the "material" presence of recollection, and attached to these, like a comet's tail of reflection, are the words. They appear within the mind only through the associated images of remembrance. In the theater, the visual presence of the actors gives voice to the script, enlivening the words, undeniably, ontologically there, to be seen.

In a famous Russian case study (cited by Mary Carruthers in The Book of Memory), a mnemonist, or performing memory-artist, describes his system of memory as a conscious translation of word into picture. Each word becomes a thing in his mind, and each thing is carefully placed in his mental metropolis. Luria, author of the study, writes: "beginning at Mayakovsky Square, [he would] slowly make his way down, distributing his images at houses, gates, stores windows. At times, without realizing how it had happened, he would suddenly find himself back in his home town . . . where he would wind up his trip in the house he had lived in as a child." To call forth a passage he makes his way through imagined streets, looking up at buildings that hold the signs he can recognize and then re-translate back to words.

The imagined loci, and the imagined images, if not properly set could sometimes obscure their purpose. Thus clues were not properly seen, like when the nuances of a drama slip by due to inattention. The mnemonist describes losing images in the background. He makes a pencil too small in the scene, a white egg is placed against a white door. As a corrective he makes the settings less natural, distorting scale, playing with increased contrast, ensuring the elements do not blend too much together.

The weakness of his method were two-fold. One, noise and the speed of his initial perceptions could crowd his placements, intruding upon the necessity of space and time. He needed room: to hear sharp, uncluttered sounds and to imagine buildings and homes defined by alleyways and buffers. Each scene needed its break, the black buffer of a nowhere to accentuate the sharp, distinctive placement of image into scene. To back to the idea of theater, his method of placement and recall might best be thought of as Brechtian -- it uses scene and setting and image for another purpose of thought, and built into the system is the room to consider, to gain footing, to know where one is. The spectacular pace of a Mueller piece would, by contrast, would distort and disturb the harmony necessary for orderly recollection. (Mueller may have been Socratic in disposition, ready with innumerable anecdotes and recollected details that could emerge in dialogue, but his works seem intent on crowding out any efficient forms of remembrance. One must hurry through the uses of other texts, like someone taking flight from the police and trying to sightsee along the way.)

The second weakness is therefore connected to the first. How was it the mnemonist was to purge his city of memories he no longer needed? Trained to collect, arrange, and recall, he could not simply shake lose the images and the words attached to them. He tried writing down the words, to externalize them, purge them. No use. He tried to select them from their scene and imagine himself burning them. His solution to the pale Funesian plight was much simpler than he had initially anticipated. He needed only to will them gone. Through an active disregard, he created the necessary space to repopulate his city of memory.

Photos: Shimon Attie, "Between Dreams"; detail of 1511 Venice edition of The Rhetorica; Steven Foster, from his repetition series.

One Aftermath

2008-09-19T15:57:00.003-06:00

Kathryn Cook's "Memory Denied," product of an Aftermath Project grant for photo-essays of lives in the remnants of war and violence and genocide:

An Armenian mother who escaped, a son who inherited, through a birth in Syria, the displacement, as well as the memories that the mother passed on, but which fade, slip, concretize into talismans of identity.

This Mourning

2008-09-11T06:00:00.000-06:00

This morning, many will surely go about their day, casting backward glances toward New York in 2001, or with even more historical reckoning, to Chile of 1973, and Allende's overthrow. For a select few, the families who suffered and the individuals whose friends were killed will mourn with more intensity, surely, because of the calendar's turn and the trick of waiting for the day when the release is framed and held open for public remembrance. Will they read the names again this year at ground zero, tolling the bell, and is it left to those individuals alone to wait and listen and hear, in the sound of public address, the enunciation of their loss?

For another set of the self-selected, this is a day of melancholic identification; the day they can again kill off the quivering intelligence of ambivalence, claim the righteous mantle of the most-wounded and still undaunted, insist on the project of eternal ruin and absolute rebuilding, and project always the purest motives of their mad defense. Where does this come from? What motivates the entrenchment? As Wendy Brown thinks through the political manifestation of this, she finds the reflex that inevitably follows the seduction: "Idealizing the lost object as it was never idealized when alive. Straightforward, perhaps, but not simple, for this affect also involves remorse for a past of not loving the object well enough and self-reproach for ever having wished for its death or replacement."

As Brown works through the so-called politics this creates, she pricks away at the aggressiveness engendered. There is, she says, in the fortressed posture that arises, the gnawing guilt of having been so seduced. Thus the response is to fall in turn for the foul temptation to defend the idealization, and one's right to idealize, "tout court." One idealizes themselves into a crypt, an inesapable hold of the past and a sensibility as a alive and alert as concrete. This is, as Auden wrote in a poem he would later reject for its own assuredness,

The habit-forming pain
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Beyond Gaza

2008-09-05T10:34:00.006-06:00

On the same day the Israeli group, Rabbis for Human Rights, sadly marked their twentieth year in operation -- admitting their task as greater and more impossible than ever -- the two ships operated by The Free Gaza Movement returned to Cyprus. Israel did not stop them on their way to Gaza, nor intercept them on their way back to Cyprus. The rationale for the blockade remains "security" and since Free Gaza brought only balloons and hearing aids (perfect props for antagonistic quips about the "hot air" of activists" and the "deafening silence" that for the most part surrounded the event) Israel allowed them to arrive and leave unhindered.

With their ships back in Cyprus, The Free Gaza Movement encourages more ships to sail. What will the next ones bring, both in terms of critical attention to the plight of Gazans and in actual cargo? Israel says it will decide how to handle each ship seeking to dock in Gaza on a case-by-case basis. The standard for intervention is the judgment that the material being brought in constitutes a threat, and that anyone being taken out constitutes an enemy. At what would actual humanitarian aid constitute a threat to the policy of collective punishment? How many sick and dying would be deemed propaganda material? If Israel sees clear to block Fulbright scholars from leaving Gaza to attend U.S. universities, the absurdist calculations of control are bound to unfurl, the blood trickle of 1.3 million people caught in the grip of Erez and Rafah.

Human rights work, therefore, is not defined by the blockade to be run, but in the small acts of pushing against the death-logic of denials, divisions, and distinctions that mark the vulnerable for death. Furthermore, in the end, such work does not meets its enemy in the unjust policy and practice to shout at.

Instead, it seems to work as the spectral haunting of something to come, emerging in injustice's exhaustion, the point at which the strangle-hold -- the bondage to security -- becomes the impossibility of holding fast to the threat.

Last week also marked the death of Abie Nathan, a leftist and twice-jailed Israeli whose work for the defeat of insane boundaries found its perfect symbols in his acts of flight and his pirate radio ship, which broadcast calls for peace and pop music floated into Israel for 21 years. He mistakenly shut it down after the Oslo Accords provided its false promises, but the very idea remains: the floating, ungrounded insistence; the waiting just beyond the horizon of the law; something insistent, always there awaiting a chance to be tapped.

Exodus reprise

2008-08-12T11:23:00.004-06:00

One of the signature moments in the Zionist project between the end of the Second World War and the founding of Israel was the summer of 1947 Exodus affair. When a ship (the Exodus 1947) of Displaced Persons gathered from camps in postwar Europe was set on a course for Palestine, the goal was not the delivery of persons in need of land, sanctuary, a home, and a life. It was instead a sacrificial exercise designed to run aground on the British blockade at work to limit immigration. It was undertaken as performance of victimization - using real victims - to garner support through the shaming of the British and the blockade. Antagonizing the blockade, having the persons turned away and sent back to France, back to Germany would succeed in delivering the Holocaust unto Jewish Palestine in symbol only.

Now human rights activists are setting sail from Cyprus, on their way to the Gaza strip, which remains isolated under an Israeli blockade and the delicate truce between Hamas and Israel. These activists are using two sail boats. Their gesture is one of quiet passage, of a tiny, collective assemblage intent on opening Gaza to the world once again.

Unlike the events of 1947 there can be no expectation of martyrdom or sacrifice, simply the opening of a passage. There is something of the gesture's smallness, then, that strikes a chord in opposition to the history that has been written in those waters. But it will not, for all that, escape the cameras or slip silently into oblivion. It is easy to anticipate the images that will come out, the press conferences to follow, the public display of concern for those dwelling in Gaza. Will the gestures, however pronounced, be noticed at all? Or will they be like some song sung into the night wind along a far-off quay, a plaintive plea for some bodily peace that has all the worldly force of silent prayer?

Expectation, Escape, and Equivalence

2008-07-30T08:12:00.005-06:00

The temptations of a Moitessier, the sailor who refused completion of "the course," who took the race for a finish and turned it into a celebration of process; who steered away from the pre-determined destination that would be crowded with an expectant public ready to devour, and measure, and mark his experience like their very own Lindbergh. Moitessier abandoned all that, and much more, and chose instead his own way through the "oblivion" of the ocean and globe. That was 1968. No wonder the tiny street-theater "revolutions" by the students in some cities, no wonder the race-raging violence in others, when the choices seemed so murderously and stupidly dull and deadly on the (one) land, so fantastic, so absurd, so ego-driven on those alternate waters. Few can set sail, become Ishmael still aloft atop the mast of the devoured ship.

A century before, a French worker named Claude Genoux crossed the Atlantic. He left Marseilles and found the world. Not the romantic dream of oblivion, but the hard lines of global trade; the earth's matrix of markets and possibilities. Genoux sees enough, sees poetically enough, to know that there is no escape from the markets and no dimming of the dream of flight. The wander is all, and all is equivalent within it. As Ranciere describes his odyssey in Short Voyages:

"What he found was the boredom, the suffering and joy, the labour without poetry and the pleasures without refinement that the happenstance and wanderings of proletarian existences always come back to and always seek to escape. At the end of these adventures marked by equivalences -- a law of poetry, tourism, and commodities -- he has recognized the foundation of the universal equivalence: enclosure within the circle of the brutal efforts and pleasures of voiceless labour. A proletarian's hell that he seeks to flee all the way to the end of the world, where he finds it again exemplified int he figure of the free sailor on the high seas and the adventurous whale hunter. . . .

If he writes, he does so to pass from one condition to another, from someone who loads the paper to someone who lays out the pages, even someone who writes them. And he will not stop writing. Just as he refused to die in a bed in the hospice for aged workmen. Forty years after his return from the South Seas, once again a bootblack by trade, he will take off for a walk in the forest of Fountainbleau. Which is where, a few days later, his body will be found."

Swept Away

2008-07-26T21:25:00.003-06:00

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . .

Sitting, Reading, Thinking, Leaving, Living

2008-07-18T06:31:00.004-06:00

* * * *

After

2008-07-06T09:14:00.001-06:00

The death, when it came, announced in a phone call, was already, as it was always going to be, far away. It had happened the night before; likely in the deep quiet between midnight and dawn, in an apartment complex on the edge of a distant nondescript town where in the stillness of street lamps and cul-de-sacs, with maybe only the sound of the air-conditioner and the oxygen machine to be heard, she worked to stand up, and then up on her own feet, died. It was, by all signs, a catastrophic instant. A stroke. Knocked from within. One feels it, sensing it must have come like a hammer that cracks the body forward, how they found her. Maybe, though, it came as nothing more than an exhale from without. The air-conditioner hummed. All around, in the cell-like apartments, in the town, beyond, everything lived on, without a ripple of difference.

The doctors had long ago promised that the system of breath and blood would collapse life. Too little oxygen, too much strain on the body, every part suffering, weakening, slowly; month upon month. An equanimity while inhabiting such failure and its torments is almost impossible to imagine, but it was there, and still there, one prays, in the instant that was less than an instant of knowing, without fear.

The loss is so multiform that it doesn't seem to be any loss at all. There is an uncanny dispersion of memory, a kaleidoscope of images and affective moments that tumble through the days now, nothing solid, nothing gripping, nothing that can make some substantial grief, like a line of Yeats, or the weight of a casket to be buried.

What is harder to figure is the loss of your existence as their child, the small thing they held, and which in the repeated stories seemed to be something contained and definite, but was also surely somewhere beyond the language and scripted anecdotes, was instead your very presence and being that made up a reservoir of feeling that could never find form, and so was only ever reflected in their being.

* * * *

When she painted or drew, she painted or drew mostly from images at hand, from forms given -- old photographs, master works, found images. Nothing was ever sustained as a serious project, but there was a consistent ability, even with the weakening eyes and frail hands: joyous things made in response to what was already made, whether the miniature versions of Van Goghs that went into doll houses or an ink drawing from a portrait by Paul Strand. The lines could come quick as an impulse but there was above all else, an insistent precision of hard lines and exacting reproductions that became translations. This is the expression, I think, of living without prejudice, with great capacities for forgiveness and for allowing what was to be.

We never sat over a big book of Gerhard Richter and yet such a dream scene has been the sustaining way in these days after death. And it feels now imagined, like some imprinted. To think of working through the pages one by one has become the act of mourning. Surely she would have appreciated the boldness of the abstracts, the audacious colors and peeling layers. The others, though, of families, still-lives, outlaws, figures, would have resonated. She would have recognized and reveled in, though, as I imagine it now, the series upon series of shadowy realisms. In the after-effect pictures, some crisp, some blurred, the best like polaroids scraped by rough-handling or from having been left unattended in a dusty heap, she would have seen something kindred in the so-different style: the repeated gesture of refashioning what was already itself just an image. Hands and eye grasping for what it is that memory cannot hold to form, what photographs point toward but falsify, the real that runs aground the swift pursuits of wish and desire.

She would have loved the essential force of transience inscribed, what passeth show held and re-made, turned into a newness to see and behold.

Winter Memories in Blinded Summer

2008-06-26T15:57:00.004-06:00

More than most photographs, the specter-laden images of Alexey Titarenko are made by what slips past, barely apprehended, maybe wholly unseen. Looking at some of his pictures of Russia, Cuba, Venice, one senses that the dust or snow is suspended like a patina, some gorgeous gauze of memory; a protective coating that announces proudly that things do not change. But in most there is the movement, the long look that plays with the play of the eye and mind. Those frames are filled with whispers of light, as if some of the strands detected are what await memory's work of return, the mind's ability to conjure ghosts for the sake of dialog and the others are perceptions of what will never yield to the demands to perceive. We live, breathe, and think, and are always losing so much of what passes.

It makes sense, then, these winter scenes seen out of season:

"Just as little as the eye can see at its blind spot, where the nerve enters the retina, is what has just been experienced perceived by any sense. This blind spot in the soul, this darkness of the lived moment, must nevertheless be thoroughly distinguished from the darkness of forgotten or past events. When past material is increasingly covered by night, this night can be lifted, memory helps out, sources and finds can be excavated, in fact historically past material, even if only patchily, is especially objectifiable precisely for contemplative consciousness. The darkness of the lived moment, on the other hand, stays in its sleeping-chamber. . . . Together with its content, the lived moment itself remains essentially invisible, and in fact all the more securely, the more energetically attention is directed toward it: at this root, in the lived In-itself, in punctual immediacy, all world is still dark."
--Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope

The Weight of the Smoke

2008-06-17T08:41:00.003-06:00

Paul Auster's film Smoke opens with a parable of time, action, and memory: the writer Paul Benjamin enters a Brooklyn tobacco shop and while buying his tins of Schimmelpennicks cuts through the banter of the loitering regulars with the story of Sir Walter Raleigh introduction of smoking to the court of Queen Elizabeth; finishing with Raleigh's proof that he could tell the weight of smoke:

DENNIS
You mean, weigh smoke?

PAUL
Exactly. Weigh smoke.

TOMMY
You can't do that. It's like weighing air.

PAUL
I admit it's strange. Almost like weighing someone's soul. But Sir Walter was a clever guy. First, he took an unsmoked cigar and put it on a balance and weighed it. Then he lit up and smoked the cigar, carefully tapping the ashes into the balance pan. When he was finished, he put the butt into the pan with the ashes and weighed what was there. Then he subtracted that number from the original weight of the unsmoked cigar. The difference . . . was the weight of the smoke.

Expenditure makes the measure of the absence. Like weighing someone's soul. The weight is the residue of accumulated effect less the living, disappeared action; the inhale and exhale of time. This idea of what remains is the spirit of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, a sparse collection of word artifacts that are assembled to take the measure of the cataclysms that came in crematoria and fire bomb.

When Louis Menand tried to review the book he became fixated on the afterword, in which Baker reasons that the best actions of the period, morally, were those of pacifistic resistance. The substance of the book, however, is not in the author's afterword, but in the remnants through which Baker takes the measure of the war. The sparsity of the prose, the fragmented approach, and as Baker himself emphasizes, the strategic use of white space, constitute a crucial rhythm of reading; a re-creation of the tap-tap of the figural cigar as the war was approached, the tap-tap of Churchill's fine dining while people were starved. In other words, to speak historically, which Menand insists upon, safe-guards the righteous thought by positing only the strategies of states against the eventual, grand necessity of allied victory:

These were the imperfect states that history produced to oppose a genocidal, imperialistic totalitarianism. Why did these states resort to violence? Isn’t the obvious answer “Because appeasement had failed”?

Baker, on the other hand, offers the chance to remember that the decisions taken to use starvation as a weapon, and to annihilate civilian populations for purposes in fact detrimental to that "victory," are made in living environments of contested ideologies and the battle of possibilities. To write of "imperfect states that history produced" is to confuse levels of authorship, to deny that so much abundant life and word and attempts to resist power went up in smoke before the historian came to cut apart the cooled corpse.

That Work in Progress

2008-06-15T14:19:00.003-06:00

Undervoicings

2008-06-04T13:12:00.003-06:00

From the beautiful day's making of Wood s Lot:

"A Commonplace Day" by
Thomas Hardy

The day is turning ghost,
And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively,
To join the anonymous host
Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe,
To one of like degree.

I part the fire-gnawed logs,
Rake forth the embers, spoil the busy flames, and lay the ends
Upon the shining dogs;
Further and further from the nooks the twilight's stride extends,
And beamless black impends.

Nothing of tiniest worth
Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or praise,
Since the pale corpse-like birth
Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays -
Dullest of dull-hued Days!

Wanly upon the panes
The rain slides as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet
Here, while Day's presence wanes,
And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set,
He wakens my regret.

Regret--though nothing dear
That I wot of, was toward in the wide world at his prime,
Or bloomed elsewhere than here,
To die with his decease, and leave a memory sweet, sublime,
Or mark him out in Time . . .

--Yet, maybe, in some soul,
In some spot undiscerned on sea or land, some impulse rose,
Or some intent upstole
Of that enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows
The world's amendment flows;

But which, benumbed at birth
By momentary chance or wile, has missed its hope to be
Embodied on the earth;
And undervoicings of this loss to man's futurity
May wake regret in me.

There, in the waning light

2008-06-02T09:39:00.008-06:00

Encountering a particular space that once held the greatest intimacies and the most undefined forces: the landscape where one grew up; a landscape, in this case, where the landscape meant livelihoods and seasonal shifts and crop changes; where the openness meant encounters that were almost always mediated by the car and driving; where the sensibilities were unknowingly taking shape.

This time the car is a rental. It is appropriate. This return is as tourist. It is not just that the land belongs to others. It is that the landscape as possession has passed, so that passing through brings the concentrated hour, or two, of borrowing; taking up the land's light and shapes for the sake of remembering palely the old sense of connection, the time when the turns in the country roads were taken with unthinking reflex and intuitive ease, when habit made true memory unnecessary. And this work of memory that dictates the navigations -- around the old town plaza, to the house that ancestors built just after the Bear Flag revolt, along certain backroads that once led to the houses of girlfriends -- also makes the present details all the more present. For while in this kind of transit, a return and something absolutely present and new, those details are filled with the clarity that comes from stripping away habits of non-seeing, of not having to hunger and hold to that which remains, dying there, in the waning light.

"The identification of immediate with past experience, the recurrence of past action or reaction in the present, amounts to a participation between ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance. Such participation frees the essential reality that is denied to the contemplative as to the active life. What is common to present and past is more is more essential than either taken separately."

--Samuel Beckett, Proust

The intensity which I wanted

2008-05-20T21:37:00.003-06:00

(Painting by Felix Nussbaum).

I had been bothered by a secret weariness
with meter and regular stanzas
grown a little stale. The smooth lines and rhymes
seemed to me affected, a false stress on words and syllables--
fake flowers
in the streets in which I walked.
And yet I found prose
without the burst of song and sudden dancing--
without the intensity which I wanted.
The brand-new verse some Americans were beginning to write--
after the French "free verse," perhaps,
or the irregular rhythms of Walt Whitman,
the English translations of the Hebrew Bible
and, earlier yet, teh rough verse of the Anglo-Saxons--
seemed to me, when I first read it,
right:
not cut to patterns, however cleverly,
nor poured into ready molds,
but words and phrases flowing as the thought;
to be read just as common speech
but for the stopping at the turn of each line--and
and this like a rest in music or a turn in the dance.
(I found it no criticism that to read such verse as prose
was to have a kind of prose,
for that was not to read it as was written.)

--Charles Reznikoff, "Early History of a Writer"

Denying al-nakba

2008-05-17T11:04:00.005-06:00

The marking of Israel's sixtieth year has also brought the circulation of its counterweight, the Palestinian remembrance of al-nakba, or the catastrophe of massive displacement that followed the 1948 war.

Beersheba 1948:

Post-independence Beersheba,
with Leonard Bernstein, November 1948:

Not surprisingly, there is the continued insistence that their independence not be woven tight to the price Palestinians paid then, and pay now. Israel is currently trying to pressure the United Nations to avoid using nakba. This attempt to influence the common "lexicon" is nothing other than trying to banish the very idea of a historical view of the Palestinian plight from general thought. It is indicative of the worst contradictions that saturate the problems in Palestine. In the same way, while Israel's Foreign Minister Livni suggested that the path of for a Palestinian is paved by forgetting -- saying they will have their own independence day when the word nakba falls from their vocabulary -- Defense Minister Barak reminded everyone that "there is no future for a nation that does not know its past." Israel cannot shape the vision of the past from sheer rhetorical gamesmanship. There is too much already written into the land, like the script their security fence and West Bank bypass roads, and the more obscure traces in the shape of deeds for homes lost or the diaried memories of refugees.

That such history might disappear is the revolutionary dream. That the myths of a clean creation must be so obscenely protected is the impulse of weak nationalism. Of course, the past remains, and it seems increasingly present beyond the limited use of emigrants, exiles, and refugees, people who are not so absent as to have their past erased and scattered, but living reminders. The "right of return" for them may be framed in moral terms, as a just insistence, but that is a political matter, It is an object in a struggle for recognition since it, as a right, must be recognized. Without being part of an agreement it has as much substance as the claim that other should not remember their losses, that should agree to displacement. For that decision to forget would also be a political choice and not a human one.

Human catastrophes, however, are not so easily negotiated, and so one begins with recognition that not only are such memories powerful, but that they belong to all of Palestine, whatever its future formations. In other words:

"No national 'right,' as in organic and pre-given. No self-determination, as in self-sufficiency, of nations. To [this] we can add . . . no singular selfhood. Rights . . . relies on a fully rational, monochrome, conception of the person. I must know who I am when I claim them. But if the mind is not its own place? If my claim delves into the depths of my own history, trawling through my dreams and nightmare, to create its own law? The image we have of displaced persons tends to be cast in terms of endurance, survival, the fierce adherence of all human creatures to their own life. It bears no investigation of inner worlds. I suggest instead we see peoples on the move at least partly as sleepwalkers, trundling through each other's dark night."

--Jacqueline Rose, "Displacement in Zion," The Last Resistance

Not for Victory

2008-05-15T08:38:00.003-06:00

In Israel to help celebrate its 60 years of statehood, George Bush called upon a familiar national symbol for Israelis. As Haaretz reports it:

"In an historic address to Knesset on Thursday, U.S. President George Bush reiterated America's commitment to Israel and said his country was "proud to be Israel's closest ally and best friend."

Bush, on a three-day visit to Israel on the occasion of its 60th anniversary, told a special session of Knesset that "Masada will not fall again," in reference to the Roman-era desert fortress which he visited earlier in the day.

The site is a national symbol in Israel of Jewish fighting spirit and self-sacrifice against powerful enemies and overwhelming odds."

The sacrifice, according to the adopted chronicle by Josephus, was mass suicide. The Jewish revolt led by Bar Kokhba (or Kosiba), and crushed by the counter-insurgency onslaught of the Romans, died by its own hand in the isolated hilltop fortress.

Seeing no way out but through battle or living with the finality of defeat, each took the life of the other in succession until one remained; one left to tell the tale. The hilltop bastion thus became a mass grave and a witness/survivor story of destruction and willed death.

Raised as a special site in the twentieth century's project of developing and promoting a national consciousness, the site of memory and commemoration was finally excavated and "restored" in the 1960s. Masada, as a site and symbol, is a thoroughly modern creation. To invoke it as the standard symbol of national will, and to say at the same time that it will not fall again, both mythologizes the present through the desperate affect of the tragic past and cuts the present free from the painful price held in the story of destruction. The modern nationalist myth uses death as a glorious symbol of sacrifice for the military spirit of the (eternally) besieged nation. The promise made to undo its tragic course, to refuse the hard lessons buried in the myth, comes from a hard, terrifying wish for a final victory.

If Masada exalts the beauty of battle, Yavne stands for the gesture of just escape. In that story Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is smuggled out of Jerusalem in order to surrender the political center for the sake of a new spiritual one. The Second Temple was destroyed but a place of Jewish learning, Yavne, was established in flight, in the spirit of survival rather than self-sacrifice to the enemy.

Charles Reznikoff's poetry, which always tempers loss with presence, with life and remnant and true remembrance, with the true notion that the saving gesture was not in sacrifice but in continuation through memory and adjustment and adaptation, serves, for today, as antidote to the all this:

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

--"Te Deum"

Making a Promise: Performance as Political Coercion

2008-05-04T17:16:00.008-06:00

More than ten years before 9/11 brought such concerns to the fore, Anthony Kubiak was trying to tease out the nuanced interweave of terror and theater, of violence and its representation, or its seeming collapse, as Artaud would have it in his theater defying (and destroying) theater of cruelty.

Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History appeared during an era when the terrorist-as-media-artist was a concept that had been cemented in spectacles ranging from Entebbe to the Iranian taking of the US embassy in Tehran and the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the infamous scenes from TWA flight 847 in 1985.

He begins by taking on the common insight that is a symbiotic relation between media spectacle and terrorist act. Much of that talk suggested that acts "done for the cameras" -- as a means of gaining a platform -- were being conjured, in part, by the technology of image distribution. But Kubiak saw rightly that the relation was no more solely a symptom of the camera than Jihadi videos are strictly by-products of the internet. There is a deeper history, a more fundamental and intimate connection. Kubiak, therefore, must trace the trajectory which emerges through the tragic history of our artistic and political traditions.

"While terrorism is not theater," he writes, "terrorism's affiliation with political coercion as performance is a history whose first impulse is a terror that is theater's moment, a terror that is so basic to human life that it remains largely invisible except as theater. The history of theater's filiation with psychic and political terror is the perfect twin of terror's own history as politics."

There is a complex interweave of the actual and its showing that marks theater and its difficult distinction from what it is not. This was famously identified as the struggle to disentangle authentic acts from what Derrida, describing Artaud's exuberant failure, called the closed cycle of representation (tragic precisely because of representation's inexorable grip and "its gratuitous and baseless necessity"). If representation already has its hooks in us, what happens when an artist like Stelarc shows the body's being by enduring the tortured piercings, and suspends himself as spectacle?

For Kubiak, the risk is that such performance, whatever its critical intentions, could not expose us to the terror as much as further mute its presence by unavoidably pacifying the encounter. In such an economy it is easy for the real pain to disappear into aesthetic packaging. But that does not mean that its effects are harmless on the spectator or the artist, only that there is a displacement from body to mind. For our encounters with a body on hooks or a protester in flames or a distant explosion all, in different ways, feed what he calls a "habit of thought" that orients itself away from is witnessed and toward what is to come, which is the desire for the future encounter. This can surely come in dream or wish or lucid dread. And this helps us see that the Jihadi videos of today are not merely an archive of the destruction, but a promise of what will continue, almost timelessly, ceaselessly, without measure. Surely this is where the supposedly pre-political, or anti-political violence, makes its political claim. The "terrorist" rhetoric claims that such gestures, rituals, exacting and murderous deeds will go on, leaving the actual deaths -- and there is the link to state sponsored actions in the name of "security" -- lost in the imagery proliferation.

Meanwhile we get caught in the loop. It is a bloody and terrifying show of force and counter-force. What the image hides it nonetheless produces, as expectation. "[When terror] becomes less and less experiential and more and more a habit of thought," he writes, the driving and weakened thought "hungers for the experience of real violence," crippled "in the coercive ambience of its endless reproductions."

Circulating Terror

2008-05-03T11:11:00.010-06:00

The dreams are anonymous but authentic. Both dreams involve a narrative; they contain action with a beginning and an end, action which, however, never took place in the way in way it was recounted. They are dreams about terror, or more precisely, dreams of terror itself. The terror is not simply dreamed, the dreams are themselves components of the terror. Both recount a vivid inner truth which was not only realized, but was immeasurably outbid by the later reality. . . .

--Reinhart Koselleck

A recent talk -- "The Death of Politics: Human Rights, New Public Spheres, and the Jihad" -- offered a brief tour of the Jihadi terrorism network. While the referent of a single Jihad was called into question, so too was the nature of the small films "it" produces and distributes. What can be understood by this global exercise of dispersing an archive of "terrorist" acts? In the few samples shown we hear music and see graphics that announce an opening, and then the action. In the first, a military convoy in the distance silently bounces along until an explosion under the front of the first vehicle signals its end. Another is more intimate with its subject, but the subject is a rocket launcher. The camera pans over the metal cone noses nestled in their tubes. The small movie ends with their launch and excited voices. We don't see where the rockets land. There are more and more, some longer form. We see a lush countryside, an "interview" or "profile" of the driver of a car that we see packed carefully with explosives. The end is the destruction of the far-off target.

Of the details, there was no comment during the talk. The films were left to lodge themselves in the imagination; impossible, now, to forget that they are not mere citations in an academic paper, but filaments free-floating all around the world.

These brief visuals were framed in the talk, however, by the discourse of human rights, which in the authorial voice of Michael Ignatieff, defines terrorism as anti-politics, and therefore as the opposite of human rights. Ignatieff, now part of the Canadian Parliament, is a defender of human rights as a political project. Above all lofty ideals, for him human rights are an expression of values that do not exist outside the political sphere. As such, they may even marshal violence on the behalf of protecting, or installing, those values. The caveat is that the violence should be used only as a last resort, however that last stage is to be determined. Here, state violence, or politics in the form of "last resort," is seen to achieve the economic and civil stability required for what we call human rights to exist as the dominant "moral intuition."

In such a construction terrorism is bracketed, simply, as the inverse. Borrowing Ignatieff's language, it is the unjust use of violence; a violence of first resort against civil society -- chiefly with civilians as target. Moreover, it is posited as a pre-politics, a gesture meant to disrupt a political process with its end-point of potential consensus, one reached in a respected public sphere. It is a vulgar disregard for deliberation.

Even leaving aside, for the moment, the idea of hegemonies at work in the imagined neutral space of a true and just politics, Ignatieff's formula will not, cannot, hold. The small samples of terrorism production we've seen destroy the distinction. We're reminded, first, that human rights has long used media representations to effect change, to shame the perpetrators, to expose them or at least to show the horrors that must be stopped. We're reminded, next, that in a society of spectacle, perpetrators use cameras, too. The trust in the power of images works for all, and images can come to stand prior to any actualities. In both cases one might act for no other reason than to be seen, acting.

Does the terrorist's violence destroy the public sphere as Ignatieff says? Or does the image become more than what gives rise to the image -- the essence becoming the proliferating images re-assembled in the uncertain "public" sphere that feeds a binding economy of witness? Framed this way, the "Jihad" seems less the violence as an end in itself than as the substance of images, the easiest currency to persuade, move, inspire, perhaps with purpose, perhaps with gratuitous animus. As the pictures do the work of advocacy in their media sphere, the packaged events present a dream terror: anonymous, authentic, and in narrative form, played out in the mind of the viewer.

Dreams on the Landscape

2008-04-27T22:07:00.012-06:00

Martin Weber's photo project, A Map of Latin American Dreams, is build around the terse translations of want written in chalk and positioned in the frame of the photograph. In each image words take their own place in highly staged portraits. They are not merely inscriptions of interiority, the captured character of the subject, but there before us as writing, as something removed, outside, the very force that prompts the scene represented.

The theatrical "drama" of Weber's images comes from these characters of chalk. The characters are two-fold. There is the writing itself, the markings that carry the message -- like "My brother dreams of studying music" (above) and "to have friends" (below). At first glance we assume the message reflects the character's inner desires, their confessional exposure of drives and needs. Staring, seeing more and more, and then less and less, there is the uncanny confusion of where to find the "author" of such a message. What scripting has prompted this scene, this position of the body? What mode of word that has driven history's wreckage (neoliberalism, deindustrialization, free market) also stained the very language -- an idea shared by both Eliot and Celan -- of dreams?

And so the dreamer in Weber's staging is also a character who has been written within in the words of inherited circumstance.

The language in the lush anti-realism of Weber's photographs is that which comes after the dream; an articulation of what has vanished as feeling and remains and now appears not only as an idealization of the wish, a reformation of the dream's content, but as a cue for further action.

Of course the camera, which would have stilled any movement he meant to imply, captures Weber's aesthetic of unrelenting stillness. He is ensuring that the dominant feeling is one of being suspended, caught along a threshold or border of compulsions, memories, living with and against the bloodwork of history, language, and self.

(Above, in the picture made along the Mexico/US divide, the dream is "Affection." Here the more universal sense of displacement, and the dream to have land).

Living Next to History

2008-04-16T07:43:00.008-06:00

Susan Griffin's collection of history, memoir, and tentative speculations, A Chorus of Stones, is built to be incomplete, to be structured as a ruin. As she describes the systems of denial that make up the "private life of war" -- and the war within our private lives -- there is a continual refusal of what was surely so tempting: a fully articulated counter-memory that would, after brushing against the grain, take solace in the newly exposed presence.

If she is an advocate for a particular form of understanding, it is for a feeling of how history lives within us as an all-too often horrific inheritance; for a sense of the complicated uncertainties that mark human experience. The experiences in Griffin's explorations are almost always the kind of projects blighted by fear, fueled by self-loathing, the sources of torment and rage, and misunderstood because of an abject refusal. In other words, where there is a sense of security there is the greatest vulnerability, when the past is faced as a reality to be mastered, it appears only as a wish or delusion; framed by a cant, a comforting creed, a rush of the ego.

If her writing in A Chorus of Stones can seem too eager to make parallels where none rightly exist -- a set of willful category mistakes -- she is in no way glib about the means of reaching clarity and insight about our condition in the social world. The motivations for cruelty, or the acceptance of what is -- what Adorno calls the coldness which "does not for one second think or wish that the world were any different than it is" ("Education after Auschwitz") -- are too potent to be erased by whatever construction of insight. The effects of such motivations, however, may be tempered by stacking the stones into the ruin, an open-ended work which asks the critical imagination to account, more than is our want, for modernity's grisly traces; traces which scar us, imperceptibly and irrevocably, like the erosion lines on stones.

Griffin is fond of metaphors through which history is metastasized within, moving from the psyche to the X-Ray to the nuclear weapon, images of the molecular destruction of Being. But her insight that it is the need for security which drives the systems of destruction that cloud the world we now inhabit reminds one of a later work, more supple, and that is W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz. For Austerlitz begins with architecture and stonework, the vast mausoleums of modernity's worst impulses, whether it is the colonial barbarity visible in the cool grandeur of the Antwerp train station, or the modern fortresses that grew more and more complex in defense and defiance that they became nothing but elaborate tombs. We enter these, seeking the past, and finding that the expected presence cannot be grasped. It is as if it never were.

The word that echoes is "gentrification," the idea of a pacified space in which to dwell. That is the necessary space of denial and the very Thing with which one must reckon. There, History is the neighbor, the inscrutable otherness of where we reside. The only response to this, says Sebald, says Griffin, is to write, write; to enter into the symbolic restructuring. In Zizek's language, this is what it seems to be to live next to history:

"We need the recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and insofar as the other whom we encounter is not only the imaginary semblant, but also the elusive absolute Other of the Real Thing with whom no reciprocal exchange is possible. In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order . . . the pacifying mediator, has to intervene." (Slavoj Zizek, The Neighbor)

After the Fevers

2008-04-13T10:46:00.003-06:00

"No one experiences pleasure like one who is convalescing. His delights are not orgiastic in nature: the flow of his renewed blood resonates with the murmur of streams, the purer breath from his lips with winds in the tree tops. [There is a] childlike nobility for those who have escaped from the depths of night and madness, the madness, namely, of myth."

--Walter Benjamin

Exposure

2008-03-30T10:59:00.004-06:00

"How does a collective deal, finally, with its vulnerability to violence? At what price, and at whose expense, does it gain a purchase on 'security,' and in what ways has a chain of violence formed in which the aggression of the United States has wrought returns to it in different forms? Can we think of the history of violence here without exonerating those who engage it against the United States in the present? Can we provide a knowledgeable explanation of events that is not confused with a moral exoneration of violence? What has happened to the value of critique as a democratic value? Under what conditions is critique itself censored, as if any reflexive criticism can only and always be construed as weakness and fallibility?

Negotiating a sudden and unprecedented vulnerability -- what are the options? What are the long-term strategies? Women know this question well, have known it in nearly all times, and nothing about the triumph of colonial powers has made our exposure to this kind of violence any less clear."

--Judith Butler, Precarious Lives

Philip Gourevitch's and Errol Morris' New Yorker piece, "Exposure" -- about the army m.p., Sabrina Harman (above) -- presents the psychic fissures introduced by an unbearable intimacy with human violence. Once upon a time, some of Harman's photographs of Abu Ghraib were the momentary talismans of imperial destruction; U.S. torture exposed. Now that acts which shock any conscience worthy of the name have become the lawful prerogative of this state, the images are no longer shocking, no longer indicative of anything that can be addressed as an "issue" for reckoning.

The forms of cruelty her photographs, among others, brought to light have receded into the realm of the historical facts of the war (still being) waged. They have dissolved into the long disquisitions on the ways modern man, from the Inquisition to today, abuses the human. Those photographs are ready relics of what seemed at the time to be the excavation of ruined civilization.

But by presenting the eye that saw, the woman who worked along the edge's of Abu Ghraib's systemic chaos and destruction of human beings, the horror that the "issue" of torture deflected is finally introduced. (Morris, who presented so insistently the internal deceptions and categorical divides of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, has made of film of Harman called Standard Operating Procedure). The horror is that Harman participated without being able to process the implications of her participation. The camera seems like her last defense, a device of transference with which to work through the wretched. For whatever decency she exudes in the conversation with Morris and Gourevitch, she participated in the military's brutalization of men, women, and children in that prison.

And still, her conscience was shocked. She also photographed the violence there with the aim, she says, of giving it an afterlife; of creating an indicting residue of the policies that operated as the standard reduction of human beings to soft targets. And still, she does not see the impossibility of simply showing, or simply getting close to the carnage as a recorder. So she participates (to a degree) and protects her fellow soldiers, and then, like a form of flinching, places a camera before her conscience and the crime.

And when she appears in the photographs, there is the same defensive gesture -- the sweet sign of open, youthful enthusiasm; a willed innocence, a tactical naivete -- no matter the proximity to death.

The theme of "forced" participation in cruel policies saturates "Exposed." From an American perspective, the effects of that participation is where the horror of torture will have to be rooted if there is to be any recognition of the stakes. In this way, the article by Gourevitch and Morris will offer the temptation of a moral exoneration of Sabrina Harman. For she is certainly negotiating a sudden and unprecedented vulnerability. But the determinations to come, the struggle for which will be, one expects, the intellectual nerve-enter of Morris' forthcoming film, is how the individual is to be armored with the recognitions necessary to withstand the participation and dissolve immediately the defenses against the vulnerability.

For the time being, I return

2008-03-17T21:28:00.012-06:00

The day dawns with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed -- my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy --
I towel my shaven lip and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.

It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.

Below my window the awakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities,
And how should the flesh not quail that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young and not renewable, but man.

--"Mirror in February," Thomas Kinsella

The secret of movement
Is not the secret itself
But the movement
Of there being a secret.

For example, the movement
Of an accordion which closes
On one side and opens
On the other.

Or your folding one arm
Against your pushing body
At the turn towards waking
Which is the full length

Of your dream. When
You look at me as a man
May look, it is like a break
Of real sky where one branch

Crosses its fellow, a brown leaf
Taking September into
A brown stone, or green
Under green, grass below trees.

You ask the differene
Between a green shadow
And a brown one? Here
Is a green answer.

I can only say
I feel that green shadow,
That short, morning shadow,
Through and through me,

With a sense of hair in a coil
Recoiling from the fingers
That held it, smoothing
Its darkness till it would seem

Like whatever it is furthest
From, one of those blonde
Napes velvety as leaves
With the tip pointed towards you.

By now you will have painted
The first of the sea fresh-staring
Yellow and changed its name.
So that now I always hear

The sea in the wind, though
I like a wind in which
You hear the rain, however moist
With breath its mask may be.

And after last night's rain
I actually dreamed of you,
Falling asleep for that
Wild purpose, seeing

Your face through the floor
As all the light left
On the flat of a hand.
I wish they could hear

That we lived in one room
And littered a new poetry
Long after both doors, up-
And downstairs, shut.

--"The Time Before You," Medbh McGuckian

It has been for so long a date on the calendar filled with only the glib charms and silly rituals. But this year, before the fire and with the whiskey, the memories were conjured in their cluttered, clustered constellations, the will-to-see making them flicker, uncertain but there, against oblivion: Glendaloch's "ancient" status like a lesson, the deprivation necessary for faith and existence there, in a cell of cold, wet stone, there twelve hundred years before Kierkegaard; the side streets that rise and wind off Grafton where as many mornings as possible there was coffee in the same modern cafe; the Long Hall on a summer Sunday night, the house lights not dim, with noone hidden in any shadows and the talk quiet despite the full room; the dusk walk alone, away from the others, between Ennis and the famous cliffs, with grass and stone fence, the wind carrying high into the air the voices from a small red fishing boat, next to which a big, blackish dolphin arched out of the water; Belfast seemingly empty at night and the sun seeming to hang in the air all evening; a northern seaside town with one taxi, its lone place to drink the tiny, yellow foyer of a man's house--twenty or so packed in there, glass held high under the chin to keep it out of the small of a back, tipped almost sideways; a Pauline, a Polly; sheep and space; a hotel bar in a town I will never find again, serving me a pot of coffee and a piled plate of wheat toast in the morning before they had even opened and there reading the paper as if the news of that world were wholly elsewhere; how many pricks of the remembrance can be built this way, with the effort increasing, those hollow images and taste-like sensations overlapping as shadows that, if colored, are rightly green and brown? Yes, littered poetry in the wake of having lived, and yet for all that, not at all made whole.

Promises and prophecies

2008-03-04T20:32:00.009-07:00

"There would have been no Jewish refugees had Israel lost the war [in 1967]. . . . There would have been two million corpses added to the six million Holocaust victims. [No] individual who lived in Israel in the days between 25 May and 5 June can ever forget the atmosphere of devastation which hovered over our stressed and pressured country . . . surrounded and besieged . . . bombarded day and night with prophecies of the approaching end."

--Israel Foreign Minister Abba Eban, June 1967

In the week when the IDF's exercise of force killed 116 in Gaza, the Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai warned that continued Hamas attacks on southern Israel would result in a bigger "shoah" for the Palestinians, "because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."

Vilnai's use of the term became an irresistible reference when rightfully decrying Israel's military response to the barrage of Qassams emanating from Gaza. It seems certain from the context, however, that Vilnai did not make a direct reference to the Destruction of European Jews, but simply to a disaster, a catastrophe; the consequence of Israeli military might. Of course, it is also true that there is no simplicity in the ways the term shoah traffics in Israeli discourse. For almost a half-century, since the time of Eichmann in Jerusalem, the use of a Holocaust poetics to render real political and military problems as existential threats has been standard. Therefore, "shoah" no longer escapes its associations with the planned murder of millions any more than the word holocaust simply refers to a "burnt offering." It cannot be used in innocence.

Vilnai's conjuring, however unconscious, of a "final solution" for the residents of Gaza -- even if his threat was not that -- is that the term used retains its suggestive power while promising something less. That the less is nonetheless an extension of the violent campaign of collective punishment and the death of so many this past week is muted by the reference to the Holocaust that wasn't. And so the bombardment, all of the bombardments, driven by myth, dreams, anxieties in the extreme, are destined to continue.

The Agonizing Predicament

2008-03-01T15:09:00.005-07:00

True to its spirit, Gillian Rose's The Broken Middle does not hold up to fragmentation. There are few passages that sit well on their own, detached from the accretion of her philosophical insistence. Rose's style is dense. It has little of the soothing poetic resonance of those who can craft thought into sculpture by the patient shaping of the material.

For her, the style seems intent on trapping the mind and holding it en route. It feels as though one never arrives. This is surely owing to the necessity of a rigor she claims as her own, a rigor missing too often, she says, from an approach loosely defined as "postmodern," or "post-structuralist."

This passage--

'Irony' as this yawning rent of yearning, passing to and fro between interchangeable poles -- evident throughout the authorship -- is transformed . . . into the sober statement of 'irony' as 'the pathos of the middle . . . its moral too, its ethos.'

"I have been told that in Hebrew the words for knowing and insight have the same stem as the word for between."

The famous essay . . . itself exercises irony as 'playful reserve.'

-- comes from the chapter, "Myth out of the Hands of the Fascists," wherein Rose reads both the impulses of Thomas Mann's Joseph books, and Mann's own reading of Freud in the light of those works. Given that they appear as Nazism does its infernal damage, Rose turns to Mann's works in order to trace how myth is called upon and yet wrested from the instrumental use of fascism; or how a hyper-vigilance over the performance of myth effectively undermines its force.

The "substitution," she writes, "of an overly rationalized 'ethical' for the equivocation of the middle brings both the psychology and the politics into discredit" (133). Where the ethical remains uncertain and an agonizing predicament is precisely where, Rose suggests, we must dwell -- neither surrendering in defeat nor claiming that the violence we do brings victory.

Throughout, Rose seeks a "middle" suspended between the poles of pure repetition of the past and a utopian rejection of whatever forms of history have been inherited; this is the realm of ethical equivocation. For Rose, what is vital is where ethics and the law remain unharmonized, where there remains uncertainty in the face of authority and an uncertain authority; an authority that refuses the authoritarian temptation to heal the necessary divides between "universal, particular, and singular, individuals and institutions," and "inner morality and outer legality, individual autonomy and general heteronomy, active cognition and imposed norm" (xii).

And so on . . .

2008-02-28T05:48:00.008-07:00

From Side Effects to Passages, and now onward to shores unknown:

The game, as it was said, "Unfortunately . . . doesn't involve playing croquet with flamingos for mallets," but instead the following:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

In honor of the very idea of passages and words thrown outward to shores unknown, from the desk's corner pile pull Gillian Rose's The Broken Middle:

'Irony' as this yawning rent of yearning, passing to and fro between interchangeable poles -- evident throughout the authorship -- is transformed . . . into the sober statement of 'irony' as 'the pathos of the middle . . . its moral too, its ethos.'
"I have been told that in Hebrew the words for knowing and insight have the same stem as the word for between." [Thomas Mann]
The famous essay . . . itself exercises irony as 'playful reserve.'

And this then cast outward to friends and strangers both: Monkey Fur, Hidden Noise, Spurious , and Castrovalva. (Nods to the promise of The Space in Between and Le Colonel Chabert, where newness and prior enlistment in another cycle keep them out of tagging reach.)

Counting the turns of a screw

2008-02-17T10:18:00.005-07:00

When The Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel's Steven Bradbury appeared before Congress on Valentine's Day, his message was couched as one offering comforting clarifications. In truth it was more in the continual clouding of our relation between state power and illicit violence.

Bradbury was there, it seemed, to assuage the "reasonable" fears about America's policy of interrogation that many, in Bradbury's eyes, misconstrue as torture. It was meant to affirm how carefully the U.S. operates during its enhanced interrogation so as to measure its application of "pressure" in the search for intelligence. "The program [of interrogation,]" Bradbury told the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, "is operated in a professional manner, and all the methods of interrogation authorized for the program are subject to strict limitations and safeguards."

According to Bradbury, while waterboarding is no longer being used -- though he spoke of it in the present tense -- if it were again to be used:

"First, the Director of the CIA, together with the Director of National Intelligence, would have to determine that the new method is necessary to obtain information on terrorist attack planning or the location of senior al Qaeda leadership; second, the Attorney General would have to conclude that the use of the method, subject to all conditions, limitations, and safeguards proposed for its use, would be lawful under current law (and that includes the requirements of the Detainee Treatment Act, the Military Commissions Act, and Common Article 3); and, three, even if the Attorney General concludes that the method’s use is lawful, the President would have to personally authorize its use. In addition, Congress would be appropriately notified—including, per the commitment from the Attorney General, specific notification to the Judiciary Committees if there were a plan to add waterboarding to the program.
Let me be clear, though: There has been no determination by the Justice Department that the use of waterboarding, under any circumstances, would be lawful under current law."

In other words, while waterboarding has not been determined lawful "under any circumstances," it remains lawful under certain circumstances, as determined by the Intelligence Directors and the Attorney General. Furthermore, the OLC simply does not consider the technique to be torture. The standard that "shocks the conscience" is not met because for those making the decision there may not be a conscience to shock. The standard of extreme mental and physical suffering is rejected by the OLC because the CIA method is regulated, regimented, and much closer to to modern variants of the Khmer Rouge and French in Algeria than the medieval excesses of the Spanish Inquisition.

On the one hand, there should be nothing surprising in this. As Talal Asad outlines in his essay, "Reflections on Cruelty and Torture," the codification of pain has long been a means for modern liberal-democracies to integrate the very processes of power they denounce as antithetical to their "values." His prime example is Israel, which forbids the use of torture, but allows "pressure" to extract confessions and garner evidence. How many turns of the screw are allowed? The answer to this question of how much is given by a "classified annex . . . defining [what is] permissible." What is permissible is that which is not deemed gratuitous to the objective ends. In the U.S., defenders of the administration -- like members of the House Subcommittee or Supreme Court Justice Scalia or Bradbury and John Yoo -- use the objective ends, the circumstances, to eliminate the consideration of means. For Asad, this is just one example in a culturally complex relation of "pain" and permission.

On the other, the grotesque rhetorical gestures of Mr. Bradbury and his many ideological defenders call to mind another complex relation of violence and law, now unavoidable:

"Fascist movements seek the monopoly of non-legitimate violence: that is why they require the rule of law, which they undermine. They seek to overturn the age-old impulse and wisdom of politics: that to guarantee my self-preservation and the protection of my individually usurped property, I must grant the same guarantees to the persons and property of others. Fascist movements want universal law to apply so that they may have no rivals in their use of non-legitimate violence." (Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law)

Abdications

2008-02-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

In order to separate ourselves from our griefs, our last resort is delirium; subject to its distractions, we no longer meet our afflictions: parallel to our pains and adjacent to our melancholies, we divagate in a salutary darkness.

--E. M. Cioran, “Abdications”

On the Sixth Day, Without Reserve

2008-01-19T13:22:00.000-07:00

"Anyone who says life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being of animals to have intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh."

--J.M. Coetzee, "The Lives of Animals"

Alessandra Sanguinetti's photographs of Argentine ranch life go by the title, On the Sixth Day, and they are saturated images of the spirit of that stage of the Genesis: man given dominion over fish, fowl, creatures upon the earth. The series begins with the lavish textures of a farming existence, a domesticated wildness. The grass is rich green, the dirt road well worn, and a dog, head dropped, peers into the lens. The title is "stray," but his muzzle suggests a sweet menace, a posture curious but trained for the protection of space. A territorial claim, of course. And of course such claims always begin with a straying.

We know this. We have strayed into a strange world and perhaps will make a claim upon it, just as this dog might become a guard dog, taken in as a family pet and a farmland tool of production. From the first photograph in the set there is the sense that the space behind this dog promises an experience at once unpredictable and anticipated.

There is a nostalgia in the "free" form of the life and death caught in her photographs. This farm may be commercial but it is not industrial. She strengthens this sense by shooting, it seems, so much at day's dawn or close. The long shadows and cool tones are seductive; the house is a blurry outline in the background of a yard full of roaming and mingling chickens, geese, turkeys; and they are just relief for the foregrounded duckling trying to escape its cardboard box in the back of a pickup. Escape. The fight for life. And so while the images play off memories of "hard work," of what makes one calloused, of ritual and routine, of the early morning and coming night toss of feed, those familiarities are forced to give way to a bloody animal kingdom.

At first the profile of the pig and the stare of the rooster close in the frame, as if in dialog. A cow's bellowing profile, the field play of horse, foal, emu. Then, only after this, a closer, more intimate portrait of a dead rabbit before a hunter's boots and the large, happy tongue of a panting dog, and there, like an afterthought that becomes the central sign, the signature of the cycle: two eggs out of focused, nestled in the grass.

After this we will encounter forms of killing and of that Genesis dominion. A wounded horse fights with wide, wild eyes against a tether. Like the hare it too will be stripped of its hide. Thus Sanguinetti exposes, without reserve.

Or rather with all the reserve that the still image still protects.

Bursting on the broken backbone of an age

2008-01-02T17:42:00.000-07:00

To describe the seeming connection of disparate expressions, to speak of a literature, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam called upon the language of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Comparing the unfolding fan of seamed phenomena to the lines that stitch together a literature, Mandelstam gave poetry the presence of a breathing, dying, remembering body.

He writes of language itself as a field of duration. Not as a medium of accumulation or the expression of progress, but words as both fighting to still the living flux of time and themselves the unhardened breath of being; elastic and ghosting in a commanding potency, while vulnerable to the forces that will, it is promised, diminish, deaden, and silence them:

"The age will cease its noise, culture will fall asleep, the people will be regenerated after having been given over their best energies . . . and all this current will draw after it the fragile ship of the human word into the open seas of the future, where there is no sympathetic understanding, where sad commentary replaces the fresh wind of the enmity and the sympathy of contemporaries."

Celan, in the wake of the Holocaust, described poetry as a message adrift, a bottled bundle battling to find its proper shoreline. With his ever acute sense of isolation, the analogy accentuates the islands of reception. For Mandelstam, writing before the Holocaust, but with a desperate sense of that age to come, poetry moves through those entropic waters polluted by history, linking the future to its past through the memory of what cannot be purified.

The words move with the waters, defined by their weakening and endurance, like an image flashing on the blood-sotted screen of a closed lid. They thus bind us to the most necessary expressions of the past, while the poison waters, like thinning or clotting blood, risks wrecking the reception:

My age, my beast -- who will be able
to look into your eyes
who will glue together with his blood
two centuries' vertebrae?
Blood the builder gushes
through the throat from earthly things,
the hanger-on is only trembling
on the sill of future days.

Blood the builder gushes
through the throat from earthly things
and like a burning fish it throws
warm sea-cartilage on the shore
and out of the high bird-net,
from the damp blocks of azure,
pours, pours indifferently
onto your mortal wound.

To liberate the captive age,
to make a start at the new world
the passages of knotted days
must be connected by a flute.
That's the age that rocks the wave
with human melancholy
and in the grass the adder breathes
to the age's golden measure.

And the buds will go on swelling
and the spirit of green will burst,
but your backbone has been shattered,
my beautiful, pitiful age.
Cruel and weak, you'll look back
smiling senselessly
like an animal that used to be supple
on the tracks of your own paws.

--O.M., "The Age" 1923 (Clarence Brown translation).

Returns, Resolutions, Remembrances

2007-12-31T16:14:00.000-07:00

To read only children's books
Only childish thoughts, throw
Grown-up things away
And rise from deep sorrows.

I'm tired to death of life,
I accept nothing it can give me,
But I love my poor earth
Because it's the only one I've seen.

In a far-off garden I swung
On a simple wooden swing,
And I remember the dark tall firs
In a hazy fever.

--Osip Mandelshtam, from Stone (1908)

Rituals of Generation and Degeneration

2007-11-22T22:22:00.000-07:00

The so-called feast of thanks returns each year, each succeeding year seemingly shorter by a month, as if twelve is shaved ever closer to zero. Then there was continued encroachment. A Key into the Language of America, 1643, by Roger Williams, written in Narragansett territory as a guide to that other language, the language of America, that must be translated, or over-written. The son of the King of the feast becomes King Philip and devises his devastating war; his head on display, his people indentured into colonial homes. Resignification is thusly inevitable, no matter the weight of power's survival. The formations and meetings become, however bloody, the scriptings of myth, the ever-layered template of ritual that act out the past as it can be, needs to be, and in that acting out, becomes actual.

"They have thirteen moneths and are content to settle for that many. The courage to grow organs in reply to want, the way a giraffe stretches her neck to mounting advantage. If seasons can force the day around the sun there is no end to threshold or shedding skin. The chief difficulty with nature's outline yields hand-held exposures such as Tashecautummo. How Many Years Since fatal expression, since semantics, since influence.

able

ing."

--Rosmarie Waldrop,
A Key Into the Language of America