Come again?

Interesting take on the question whether the Book of Job's history or fable: If Job is a poetic character, if there never was any man who spoke this way, then I make his words my own and take upon myself the responsibility.

This is from from the young poet in Kierkegaard's (well, Constantin Constantius') Repetition (205), which I have just reread without the exalted repetition-experience its aesthetic author rhapsodizes about:

Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy.... Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection’s love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasy adventurousness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection—it has the blissful security of the moment.... Hope is a lovely maiden who slips away between one’s fingers; recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies, for one becomes weary only of what is new. (131-32)

But of course, in the paradoxical way we expect from Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, Constantius is an inveterate bachelor. His own attempt to test repetition (repeating a trip to Berlin) fails. And the young poet - who seems to need periodically to express himself to the older Constantius but does so in letters without a return address, so the "observer" cannot respond - relives Job's passion (My whole being screams in self-contradiction. How did it happen that I became guilty? Or am I not guilty? ... Even if the whole world rose up against me, even if all the scholastics argued with me, even if it were a matter of life and death - I am still in the right. No one shall take that away from me, even if there is no language in which I can say it. (200-201) and then floats away in rapture fit to be a husband (214).

Constantius lets on that he's invented the young poet, but of course he is himself the invention of Kierkegaard, who was at that point (1843) the age of the young poet. "Constantius" concludes Repetition with a letter to the reader which explains what he's been up in the book:

On the one side stands the exception, on the other the universal, and the struggle itself is a strange conflict over the rage and impatience of the universal over the the disturbance the exception causes and its infatuated partiality for the exception, for after all is said and done, just as heaven rejoices more over a sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous, so does the universal rejoice over the exception. ... The whole thing is a wrestling match in which the universal breaks with the exception, wrestles with him in conflict, and strengthens him through this wrestling.... There are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the universal cannot be explained, either. Generally, the difficulty is not noticed because one thinks the universal without passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, however, thinks the universal with intense passion. (226-27)

What all is going on here? That there's Joban drama I get. But all of this is also about Kierkegaard's breaking of his engagement with Regine Olsen (to achieve a fidelity to marriage greater than can be achieved in an actual marriage - or something like that!), and about his problems with Hegel. And Christianity... It's thrillingly confounding.

Starry night

Awesome image of the Perseus meteor shower - 92 thirty-second takes stacked. The meteors are the straight diagonal lines. (Pic found here.)

Citrus geode

My fair man

Digitizing a few more of the records at my parents' house, I've found the role models of my high school years. Take your pick: Henry Higgins or Knight of the Woeful Countenance?!

TPSRE

Sightings on a walk through the Torrey Pines State Reserve Extension on an overcast day: Del Mar manzanita bark, woodblock print-like Torrey Pine branches, a funnelweb spider's web, the last scarlet larkspur of the season, buckwheat, the hull of a wild cucumber, a family of quail and sandstone concretions.

Draining

Just watched the much-advertised National Geographic special "Drain the Oceans." (Thank goodness my father recorded it, so we could fast forward through the endless adverts, including at least six iterations of an ad for an upcoming program about a nasty invasive fish.) It was a disappointment, but it needn't have been. The material - the topography and history of the sea floors - is utterly fascinating, and the premise (what would we see if we could drain the oceans bit by bit?) catchy. They had enough stunning footage, some of it CGI-generated, to fill an hour, and a soundtrack of portentous grandiose pseudo classical music (Vivaldi to Dvorak). But the program was 2 hours! And even without repeated reuse of images and periodic inundation by advertisement, the program would have been unsatisfying, because it seems to have been written for sixth graders. We kept hearing about "scientists" using "the latest technology" to plumb depths that were "very deep" or try to understand undersea mountains that were "very high," the whole deal "vaster than can be imagined." At no point were we told about the core of the earth or about plate tectonics or even (perhaps they're not strong enough to matter) about ocean currents. Numbers were used infrequently. In their place came analogies with places on land - the Grand Canyon (comparable in size to the canyon off Monterrey but not in its origin), the skyline of Miami (comparable to the heights of coral-generated limestone hills), the flatness of Kansas (comparable to the abyssal plain) - each of which was made with a minute's stock footage, whose purpose seemed either to reassure us with the familiar or to fill time. Bottom line: this was a travel program, not a science program: its climax was the awkward placement of assorted scientists into computer-generated landscapes (water was gone, but familiar clouds miraculously remained) and the arrival at the apparently deepest point in the oceans, at which the program simply ended. Scaled the inverted peak! Next?

Artful

2009 is the 90th anniversary of the founding of The New School. I'm one of several people trying to size up ninety years of novelty and pass it on to new generations - great fun. I'll be leading a team of peer advisers through an online collection of writings, video clips and images culled from this tradition, and they in turn will lead all the incoming first year students through weekly workshops one of whose topics is the History of the New School.

Assembling this collection, which we're calling Reading The New School, was one of the pleasures of this past Spring. (For instance, I taught myself to use google sketchup to get the Benton murals in there, and in 3-D!) Its purpose is anything but generating an official history, forcing things into a single celebratory narrative. There's much to celebrate, but even more to ponder and wonder at, since this has never been a conventional place, and there's never been a party line on what it was about. Serious fun: complicating things is close to my sense of the vocation of the academic (Max Weber's "inconvenient facts" in "Wissenschaft also Beruf.")

And I keep discovering new entries (and new wrinkles in the history) myself. Like the gentleman at left, more commonly associated with the University of Chicago and political conservatism: Leo Strauss. He taught here during what may have been The New School's most glorious decade (1938-48). And the original essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing" was published in Social Research in 1941 - and goes into next year's Reading The New School! Maybe some bright young thing will conclude from its jarring inclusion that the reader itself has an esoteric inner meaning...!

I want this archive to be something maintained by current students, so each peer adviser will also have to find something new to add to the archive for next year. Can't wait to see what they come up with!

Monumental insight

At the San Diego Natural History Museum there's a stunning exhibition of aerial photographs of the American West by geologist John Shelton. This one shows Monument Valley, indeed more of it than one usually gets in one picture. We're used to seeing it from John Ford's perspective (indeed, from John Ford's Point!), and when we see the Totem Pole and the Yei Bi Chei - the cluster of spires in front - it's always on their own.
This picture reminds me of a brilliant use of Monument Valley by a scholar of religion - which also resonates with the humbling lessons of the Burgess/Borges Shale. Bruce Zuckerman, who teaches at USC, was discussing the challenges of working with ancient texts - texts from traditions most of which is lost. That which survives, through accident as much as anything else, strikes us as representative, indeed as the most important work of its time. But who knows? The texts we now have, he said, are like the buttes and pinnacles of Monument Valley. Impossible now not to see them as if they'd always been there, and always been that shape. And yet their shape owes only to the fact that the whole rest of the mesa of which they were a part has eroded away.

Look again at Shelton's picture. The Yei Bi Chei, the buttes, the mesas - all used to be part of a larger geological layer, almost all of which has vanished. Perhaps the Navajo gods, like Michelangelo facing the fabled block of Carrera marble, carved the rest away to reveal them. Or it's Gouldian contingency - which isn't to say it couldn't still be divine.And here, for good measure, is a picture I took, from a cross-country flight two years ago. Burgess Shale sublimity all over again.

Beyond empathy

Now that Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed as the next justice of the Supreme Court (brava!), it's time to look at the much-maligned concept of empathy which has been at the heart of the hearings and ventings. As good a place to start as any, from the editorial in the (right-leaning) San Diego Union Tribune:

[A]lthough she had, in ruling after ruling in nearly 17 years on the bench, overcome her own sense of empathy and simply called balls and strikes - even one of the key senators who opposed her described her rulings as "mainstream" - still others accused her of being a "judicial activist" who ruled from emotion instead of reason.

What's the matter with empathy? Philosophically, lots - even if you could entirely feel your way into being another person, what would happen to you? or to the other? (Read Gadamer on the self-delusions of Einfühlung, and the wiser and more serious listening to others of hermeneutics.) Even without as daffy a concept as the Romantic notion of losing yourself in another, there are philosophical worries: just why isn't tout comprendre tout pardonner? But this wasn't a philosophical discussion. This was a discussion about law and the diversity of cases it is called on to determine. And about the strange balance between character and lack of character we seem to want in a judge. And of course also about gender and ethnicity: the phrase "ruled from emotion instead of reason" comes straight from the women-can't-participate-in-public-life playbook; it also got lots of play in natives-can't-govern-for-themselves situations.

I'm actually less interested in what President Obama meant by empathy (which seems to be the commendable sense that one should listen deeply to everyone and ever think of "the least of these"), than in what made the term available as a political football. In particular, what makes empathy seem the enemy of reason and impartiality? Could one not be empathetic (sic) with everyone, indeed, should one not? (In fact, I think what Obama is after is empathy for all, not just for the powerful and those who understand how the legal system works.)

The Republicans who voted against Sotomayor don't think you can be empathetic with everyone: for some reason they're convinced that empathy is restricted to people like yourself, and so an empathetic person will be unjust. A judge, thus, should lack, or have overcome, empathy.

There are certainly limitations to fellow feeling (try calling it that for a change), though one can certainly work on it. But it may be as naive to think it can be overcome entirely as to suppose it can be universalized. That's why there are no juries of one, and why higher courts have more than one justice.

But there is of course more to this than an abstract understanding of the partiality of every human being. For in a system in which 106 of the 110 past and present justices of the Supreme Court have been white men, justice looks like a white man - and that hasn't seemed a problem until recently because of white men's perceived capacity for impartial judgment. A distinctive capacity. Any of us who've done work in the disturbing history of thinking about difference know that western culture associates white men not with one kind of partiality among others but with with a unique capacity to achieve impartiality, rationality, universality. (I'll be happy to send you my essay on Kant, autonomy and the invention of whiteness.) Women and people of other than "white" color lack all of these, or, to put it less baldly, have other virtues - including empathy. This is why white men alone are thought to be able to represent everyone else.

All of these subcurrents would have been at work in the Sotomayor hearings even without Obama's talk of empathy (from which she prudently distanced herself - which of course made some people think she must be distancing herself from herself, dissembling or cold). Even without the "wise Latina" line, she would have been accused, directly or indirectly, of being constitutionally unfit to interpret the Constitution. And at least some of the worried white men - who surely never rule "from emotion instead of reason" - would have reported having a bad feeling, gut feeling, doubts about her.

But this is no time for gloating. It's probably too late for folks like Senator Sessions to understand that none of us is constitutionally just and impartial, but that democratic institutions can help us live with the fact, and even profit from it in progress toward true justice and impartiality. Forget empathy: let there be listening, and concern for the least of these, and true democracy. And Latina wisdom for all, along with every other kind of wisdom!

Zamfir!

My father's just bought a turntable which converts LPs into MP3s, so some of the records I loved as a child are finding their way back into my life. Joyful discovery! The most joyful - deliriously - is Gheorghe Zamfir, whose flights of panflute fancy to a background of hysterical fiddlers, zitherists (is that a word?) and accordionists are hard to beat.

I haven't listened to these records in many years, and ironically Zamfir's folk music now calls to mind not the Romanian countryside but that of Japan's Tohoku: the city-raised protagonist of Takahata Isao's "Omohide Poroporo," who decides to spend a summer working on a farm in Yamagata, is met at the train station by a man (her future love) who rhapsodizes about organic farming as he drives her into valleys of perfectly terraced rice paddies - to music by Gheorghe Zamfir! (My sense of Romanian folk culture, in the meanwhile, has been colored by the reactionary fantasies of Mircea Eliade.)

MP3 conversion means that, if you've never heard Zamfir, I might be able to send you a track. (Or Paco de Lucia, or the Trientiner Bergsteigerchor, or Errol Garner's Concert by the Sea, or the Orff Weihnachtsgeschichte.)

Shale game

It's a century since the discovery of the Burgess Shale, whose significance - metaphysical as well as biological - many of us learned about from Stephen Jay Gould's book, Wonderful Life. (I'm grateful to my grad school friend B for turning me on to it: a life-changing read!) This table is from the first description of the Burgess Shale findings, Charles D. Walcott's Cambrian Geology and Paleontology (1910), courtesy of Stanford University via Google Books. (Learned of it here.)

What Walcott found in the shale was an unimagined wealth of phylla, most now extinct. It showed that evolution wasn't a single linear thing, every line continued in some form, but a terrible winnowing, most lines cut off. What Gould found in it was a profound sense of our own contingency. During the Cambrian explosion, there was no way to know which phylla would survive the contingencies of selection. Indeed, if one tried to "turn the tape back" one would find it impossible to arrive once again at our same present, so complicated and contingent a story is it. It is an awe-ful chosenness, this natural selection.

The cleverest reference to the Burgess Shale with respect to religion (besides B's insight that Gould's ideas of contingency and chosenness are themselves of religious shape) came, of all places, in Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, where, with less awe than Schadenfreude, he describes the vertigo which the contingency of religious history should present to any current monotheist. Could not Gnosticism as easily have won the day as Christianity? Hitchens recalls a tale of Borges' about just such a parallel reality (here Dante wrote a lovely account of the Gnostic "Barbelo"!) and - here the stroke of genius - coins the phrase "Borges shale" for "the verve and imagination needed to visualize a cross section of evolutionary branches and bushes, with the extraordinary but real possibility that a different stem or line (or tune or poem) had predominated in the labyrinth" (114).

Gould's lesson from the abyss of the Burgess Shale is what you might call an untriumphal tenderness toward all life. There are traces of tenderness in Hitchens, too, behind and driving his rage against the religion machine...

Ich hatte viel Kümmernis

One of the joys of a library is the things you notice out of the corner of your eye. I couldn't resist a book called The Female Crucifix, and once I saw the plates I was hooked. Turns out Santa Librada, whom some of us know from Marcella Althaus-Reid's work, has antecedents in central Europe. Ilse E. Friesen's book documents many centuries of Jesuses with feminine bodies and crucified women sprouting Jesus-like beards. Lordy!

Agua, cielo y tierra

Back in San Diego, whose airport is decorated with exquisite Huichol and Tepehuano yarn paintings - but all alas behind reflective glass! The best I could do to give you a sense of these wonderful worlds was to to snap at extreme angles. Maximino Rentería's "La Inundacion" (above) is actually symmetrical left-to-right, the disk in the center a circle. And below is as much of Te'may's "Agua, cielo y tierra" as I could manage.

Precipitate

Here's a rare sight: New York's latest must-see attraction, the High Line - but without people. How did yours truly - intrepid but hardly on the A list - manage to gain access? He went when it was (once again) pouring!

Around Prospect Park on an uncharacteristically summery day.

Night at the Museum

On a Friday evening of the summer that isn't, as storm clouds gather, where better to go than the Met? (Usually of an evening, especially in summer, it's gloriously empty.) I was there with my friend M ostensibly to catch the Francis Bacon exhibit, which did at least confirm my sense that I needn't have come for it. But since I was at the Museum, I popped into the Chinese collection (whence these rustic dancersof the eastern Han dynasty, 25-220 CE), and then spent a delicious hour practically alone with precious medieval books and manuscript drawings (whence this 9th St. Paul preaching to the Jews and Gentiles of Rome from St. Gallen).

Religious savvy

Last week I stumbled on this nattily designed book in a store in Chelsea specializing in nattily designed things. I picked it up expecting to be disgusted by crassness and ignorance but was instead rapidly won over by subtle wit and intelligence. It's accurate, too, even where it's tongue in cheek. It's the work of a company in Venice (Los Angeles) called Knock-Knock whose humor, the founder explained to me (thank you, Facebook!), "is in the concept and the editing/ curating, but the execution is totally straight." Bingo! Modeled on Consumer Reports-like guides to choosing cars and the like, it works brilliantly not only as a spoof on religion but as a mirror of the religious consumer and what scholars called the "voluntarist" tradition in American religion. But no scholar has offered so handy a synthesis of 99 religions (it probably helps to be in LA to find that many). Not to mention prefaced it with so user-friendly an account of varieties of "seeker" spirituality, and added, for those whom even these 99 leave uncertain, a guide to starting your own religion that actually makes business sense! The Savvy Convert's Guide has a fold-out table which summarizes the page-long accounts of the 99 religions, rated and compared with respect to Sex Regulations, Dietary Restrictions, Time Commitment, Cost, Conversion Difficulty, Afterlife Quality, Traditional, Rate of Growth, Holidays, and Aesthetics. I'm going to introduce this book to the students in Theorizing Religion this coming semester, right after I give them a chance to try out the Belief-O-Matic - which, however, doesn't realize it's a spoof.

Gentrification

My Brooklyn neighborhood's been steadily gentrifying in my absence, and the latest arrival actually makes me happy. Neither organic nor ironic, neither togs for tots nor spas for their mas & pas: it's a used bookstore!

MotCoNY

At the exhibition "Dutch Seen" at the Museum of the City of New York today I was wowed by some enormous portraits by Hendrick Kerstens. They command the eye the way Dutch Golden Age portraits do, but on closer inspection prove to be very contemporary. Don't know what I'm getting at? Know that these are called "Napkin" and "Bag," respectively.
I actually went up there with my friend J to see the exhibition of the Mannahatta Project, which was also worth the trip. It was full of interesting information, like the comparison of land use below - we'd never thought about the space sidewalks take up but lo, it's comparable (when other paved areas are added in) to the space occupied by roads! Here's the Lenape village at the Collect Pond, where City Hall now sits. The exhibition was moralizing but in an unexpected way. The central ecological concepts used in the project were applied straightforwardly - non-metaphorically - to the human ecology of contemporary New York, as in the mini-sermon on diversity below. Is this also a claim of causality, or a call of filial piety to the underlying diversity of this place? Some of the torrential rains which have been soaking NYC today delayed our departure from the museum, so we headed upstairs to see the Stettheimer Dollhouse, which J knew but was new to me. Someone Stettheimer spent 20 years on it, and was well connected: the artwork hanging in its rooms is all genuine, much of it by renowned artists. (Not Chuck but close.)