Nightmare of nightmares

Thankfully none of my friends in Japan were hurt by the earthquake, tsunami and aftershocks, though everyone is in shock and everyday life is disrupted by power outages, food shortages, and consumed by worry. But many will be affected by the radiation leaking from the stricken nuclear plants. (Graphic from The Australian) And in the earthquake and tsunami-ravaged areas, snow is expected. When will it end?

Apocalyptic

Trying to grasp the enormity of the cataclysmic series of horrors striking Japan - earthquake then tsunami then fire then shortages and outages and radiation leaks and economic calamity, with worries that these latter might get much worse - and to resist the false solace of sensationalist headlines worst in recorded history! - worst since WW2! - worst since Chernobyl! I'm boning up on my never very strong newspaper Japanese. Headlines especially are in a kind of telegraphic shorthand that reminds me I can barely scratch the surface. (The photo caption from the online Asahi Shimbun is different: why...welling up tears.) That keeps it real.

Red tide

From 「いざ！というときのためのサバイバル・マニュアル」,
the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Earthquake Survival Manual.

津波

Eastern Japan earthquake-triggered tsunami washing ashore near Sendai (before the water became black with churned up soil, thick with debris of shredded houses and bobbing cars); seeing the speed of it - much faster than a person could run - we have a visual, too, belatedly, for the Indian Ocean tsunami. As new threats from tsunami to fires to failure at a nuclear plant occupy attention, I imagine we haven't begun to see the damage from the earthquake itself - and this in the land probably better prepared than any other for such calamity, from long experience with earthquakes. Mercifully the shock of a 20 foot drop across a 500 mile stretch of sea floor dispersed with less damage across the Pacific.(Source NOAA; check out this this eerily beautiful animation too.)

Religion and film I

Watched two amazing movies today, each of which resonated with one of the courses whose midpoint we've just reached. (Next week is Spring Break.) This post is about the one I showed in "Aboriginal Australia," the next about a new film which exemplified something we discussed in "Exploring Religious Ethics." Today's film was Warwick Thornton's "Samson & Delilah," the first Aboriginal-made film to win prizes from Australia to Cannes. It's not an easy movie, but powerful. (And great cinema too, especially in its use of music.)

"Sampson & Delilah" balances, or perhaps balances out, the idealized image of a whole Aboriginal world of the film with which the course began, "Ten Canoes" (which is also Aboriginal-made, though the director was Balanda). Thornton's world is very decidedly not whole - he says the film was a wake-up call to Aboriginals to tend to a generation of youth which was getting lost (Sampson, above, is a glue-sniffing addict), and I understand that the sort-of happy end was tacked on so as not to be too depressing.

In the context of our course, it marked a turning point in several ways. From images of the Aboriginal past, whether Aboriginal or scholarly-white, we turn now to the difficult present. And from the Dreaming in putatively timeless rituals we'll turn to contemporary ethnography, art and politics. What about religion? It's still there, complicated by the changes in ritual resulting from dislocations, stolen generations and sedentarization. "Sampson & Delilah" also introduces another important factor in contemporary Aboriginal life: Christianity.

Religion and film 2

The second film was Xavier Beauvois' "Of Gods and Men" ("Des Hommes es des Dieux"), the true story of a community of French Trappists in Algeria who were victims of the violent unrest there in the 1990s - although they knew they are in danger, they chose to stay. It's a beautiful if not always easy film, certainly deserving of its accolades.
I went to see it with my sometimes excitable friend M, who was incensed by A. O. Scott's enthusiastic review in the Times which described this as one of a handful of powerful religion films in recent years - but his highest praise was this: [M]artyrdom is not part of the Cistercian creed, Scott notes; What motivates [Brother] Christian and the others is rather an almost fanatical humanism. Maybe. But the film is suffused (as "Into Great Silence," for instance, is not) by the rhythms of monastic communal life - we spend perhaps half the film with the monks in their daily office - and an explicitly Christian spirituality.

[T]hough [Beauvois'] sympathy for the Trappists is evident, the film does not treat them as saints, or as mouthpieces for any particular theology, Scott also remarks. Rather, "Of Gods and Men” works to balance the two terms of its title and treats the relationship between them as a grave and complex mystery." That's better, a little. Except that saints aren't mouthpieces for theology - which is where this film dovetailed with "Exploring Religious Ethics." Just this morning we discussed a reflection on sainthood by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, focusing on the way he began:

"All it takes to make a man a saint is Grace. Anyone who doubts this knows neither what makes a saint nor a man," Pascal observes in Pensées with his characteristic trenchant style. I start with this observation to point out the dual perspective of these reflections: in the saint the celebration of God (indeed, of his Grace) combines with the celebration of man, with his potential and his limitations, his aspirations and his achievements.

(grace completes nature - it doesn't have to overthrow it!) and culminated in this observation:

In an age of the collapse of collective utopias, in an age of indifference and the lack of appetite for all that is theoretical and ideological, new attention is being paid to the saints, unique figures in whom is found not a theory nor even merely a moral, but a plan of life to be recounted, to be discovered through study, to be loved with devotion, to be put into practice with imitation.

"Of Gods and Men" seems to Scott an apotheosis of humanism precisely because it is true hagiography. The seven Trappists aren't superhuman - each is a fully realized individual - but they are able to show a dazzling human potential because of their life together, and its anchoring in the redemptive suffering of Christ. Their humanity is never left behind or even eclipsed by their heroism. The human is exalted.

I can't resist citing one of my favorite lines from William James (which I'm surprised I haven't yet quoted in this blog):

the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, [are] a genuinely creative social force ... The saints are authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness.... The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. And yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy.

(Varieties, 1902 edition, 357-58)

Misfortune cookie

Rainy day

Tanguy Pine

Wow! My father's managed to get a bunch of Torrey Pine seeds to germinate. Curiously, the first set of needles in each case was 13 strong.

Shadow of the rising sun

This is proving a bit of a woozy semester. That might be because being ready to go at 8 o'clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays means out the door at 7 (here the view), which means up at 6, which means in bed by 11. Meanwhile, back to back 8 and 10 o'clock classes means desperate attempt to recall and record what happened in class at 12 followed by a few hours of zombie blur.

Time space warp

Here's an amazing thing: triptropnyc will make you a map which shows how close places are in time, not just space, from anywhere in the four boroughs of New York. Above's the city from where I live in Prospect Heights. And below is from where I work in Greenwich Village. Red = 10 minutes, orange = 15, darker yellow = 20, and from there on each color represents 10 more minutes until you get to light blue = 60, after which come 75, 90 and 120 minutes. Not perfect but suggestive!

Said that

Have you ever noticed how a new or rare turn of phrase suddenly becomes ubiquitous - and then you find yourself unable to live without it yourself? I remember that happening with the verb "segue," which I thought pretentious and ugly - and then one day couldn't finish a sentence without it. Had my thinking changed too? This is a more interesting example than the similarly irresistible "and he was like..." for "and then he said...." Other recent ones include "Been there, done that," the intensely annoying "It is what it is," and the whole "walk the talk" thing. I guess this is what memetics describes, though I recall a passage in Milan Kundera about a history of gestures which would fit as well, and more literarily.

I mention this today because a stack of papers for one of my courses has made me aware of the latest such phrase - one I realize I just used in an e-mail a few days ago: "that said." It pops up in five of six papers! Even more than "segue" it suggests a broader rearrangement of discourse, as it allows a disavowing u-turn in your line of argument (or the line where an argument should be).

Out of nothing

This is one of the most famous poles in the study of religion, the kauwa-auwa of the Achilpa (an Arrernte group) of Central Australia. Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen mention it in passing in their very copious The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People (1927), where it caught the eye of Mircea Eliade. Primed by the insights of comparative study, Eliade had his eye out for anything like an axis mundi, the paradigmatic hierophany which forges a link with the transcendent, providing existential orientation to people lost in the "chaos of homogeneity and relativity." To find one among the "archaic" Australian Aborigines would validate the universality of his theory of religion.
In The Arunta, we read of Achilpa ancestors wandering and wandering, encountering various peoples whom they ignore, circumcise, have sex with, and/or have ceremonies with, usually leaving one of their number behind when they move on. They break up into four groups which wander on until eventually each dies. One group was carrying along a kauaua, something we'd read about much earlier, before the wanderings began: after creating the land and its denizens, the ur-ancestor Numbakulla had made his exit by climbing up a kauwa-auwa he'd covered in blood; the Achilpa he bade follow couldn't because he kept slipping, so Numbakulla went on alone, drew the pole up after him and was never seen again (360).

Back to the wanderers: one day an accident befell them which made them all feel very sad: an old man accidentally broke the pole off just above the ground where it had been implanted. They were already on their last legs, having lost members of their group at every recent stop to disease. They were just surviving on infusions of each other's blood. This was the straw which broke the camel's back. When next they encountered a thriving group of ancestors our protagonists gave up: They were too tired and sad to paint themselves, their Kauaua in its broken state was inferior to many of those which the Unjiamba people had, so they did not erect it, but, lying down together, died where they lay. A large hill, covered with big stones, arose to mark the spot. (388)

[They're group iii, and end at Unjiacherta. Can you find them?]

Eliade uses the story prominently in his discussion of "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred" in The Sacred and the Profane, and glosses it: Life is not possible without an opening to the transcendent (34). Some years later, in a book on Aboriginal religions, he tells the story again, and concludes: Seldom do we find a more pathetic avowal that man cannot live without a "sacred center" which permits him both to "cosmicize" space and to communicate with the transhuman world of heaven. So long as they had their kauwa-auwa, the Achilpa Ancestors were never lost in the surrounding "chaos." Moreover, the sacred pole was for them the proof par excellence of Numbakulla's existence and activity. (53)

It's a powerful story, but, it turns out, almost completely concocted: for starters, Numbakulla's not mentioned in the story of the breaking pole! ("Concocted" is a term from Sam Gill, who was so incensed by the evident plantedness of Numbakulla's pole that he wrote a whole book about it.) In class today we read the chapters in The Arunta to which Eliade refers, and tried to understand what Eliade was up to. I'm not entirely sure quite why, but I defended him - tongue of course firmly in cheek, though students don't always notice: Eliade thought he could see farther than Spencer and Gillen. What seemed an unimportant detail to them loomed large for him because his decades of work in the comparative study of religion had taught him what the sacred looks like. His construction also made a teleological whole of what in Spencer and Gillen's account otherwise seemed no more than aimless rambling.
Of course we know, as neither Eliade nor his sources could even imagine, that there's nothing aimless in the world of hunter-gatherers, and no rambling along story tracks. The Arrernte world is fully and completely horizontal, no axis mundi required, thank you very much! But it's useful for us to figure this out, since the presumption that religion is about transcendent creators and vertical solutions to the existential problems of the horizontal is part of our own cultural inheritance. (Gill actually shows that Numbakulla was already concocted before Eliade shone his spotlight on him. Spencer conflated various things he fudged from field notes and wishful thinking to generate a cosmic creator out of a mere ritual ancestor whose name is but the nominalization of an adjective, ungambikula, which means "jump up of themselves" or "out of nothing" and referred to fly-catching lizard ancestors (13).)

It was actually quite fun to excavate in Eliade and then in the Spencer and Gillen text, peeling away their structuring assumptions and distortions and finding what seemed like evidence for the dynamic land-based kinship-related understanding of Aboriginal religion we've been getting from more recent work! But things really got interesting when we looked at some of the things Eliade had ignored, like the stories of incest and cannibalism that had floated the boat of fellow Spencer and Gillen fan Sigmund Freud. And then a student drew our attention to a cameo of the old canard that Aboriginal people were somehow unaware of the connection between sex and pregnancy:From it dangles this remarkable footnote, which proved the trigger for a veritable landslide of postcolonial deconstruction: It must, of course, be remembered that this expresses the primitive belief of the natives before the advent of the white man and half-castes. (363)

Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions: An Introduction (Cornell 1973)
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987)
Sam D. Gill, Storytracking: Texts, Stories & Histories in Central Australia (OUP 1998)
Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People (1927, rpt. Anthropological Publications 1966) - also where all the images are from

Here comes Spring!

The liberty tree vs. duration

I saw the Metropolitan Opera's production of John Adams' "Nixon in China" not quite a fortnight ago. Somewhat to my surprise I found it very moving (though less at the finish than at the start), and bought myself a recording of the premiere production from 1987. The work's rhythms and strange haunting melodies have been following me ever since. One moment, from the scene in the aging Chairman Mao's study (Act 1, Scene 2), has not let me be for days, perhaps because we are living its world-historical questions again. It's the first 3 minutes on this clip from 1987:

Here's the libretto by Alice Goodman:

CHOU EN-LAI:
You've said
That there's a certain well-known tree
That grows from nothing in a day,
Lives only as a sapling, dies
Just at its prime, when good men raise
It as their idol.

NIXON:
Not the cross?

MAO:
The Liberty Tree. Let it pass.
It was a riddle, not a test.
The revolution will not last.
It is duration - the regime
Survives in that, and not in time.
While it is young in us it lives;
We can save it, it never saves.

KISSINGER:
And yours will last a thousand years.

(Chou: Sanford Sylvan - Nixon: James Maddalena - Mao: John Duykers)

History in the making

While we putter around over here, it's 1989 (or 1848?) in North Africa. It's epic. Everything could change. May it happen peacefully.

View from the mountaintop

Until I heard my brilliant colleague Fran Snyder say this at an interfaith program tonight, I'd never realized: "The only person who dies in the akedah [the story of the binding of Isaac] is Sarah." This is one of the insights of the midrash, which notices that Sarah disappears from the story at the point where Abraham is commanded to sacrifice Isaac, and the next thing we hear of her is that she dies. Sure, an advanced age is given, but the rabbis don't let the numbers get in the way, any more than we should be taken in by the late addition of chapters (her death is Gen 23:1 but unconnected to what follows). Like Kierkegaard later, they can't imagine how Isaac and his father will return and continue their lives as before; they can't imagine their telling Sarah - or not telling her. Instead, they find a variety of creative ways of having Sarah's death result from the (non-)event on Moriah. In one, the adversary (satan) appears to her in the guise of Isaac right after the sacrifice is interrupted and tells her what happened. She kills herself.

Immersion

We finished the first section of the Aboriginal Australia course today, with a screening of Kim McKenzie's 1980 film, "Waiting for Harry." It records the (third and final) funeral of an Anbarra elder on a beach in Arnhem Land, and in just an hour manages to capture the joy, complexity and the longueur of the process. Many people from many clans gather for the ceremony, but various parts of it can only be performed by particular people - for instance: each animal on the hollow log coffin can only be painted by someone who owns that image, possibly managed by his sister's son. This includes some island people who speak a different language and have only a trading relationship with the Anbarra, and the dead man's sister's son Harry, who is hard to find. By the time it finishes, and we see nothing but the painted coffin upright in a sand-sculpture on an abandoned beach, we have seen the remarkable interweavings of kinship, Dreaming performances (painted, sung, danced) and contingency which constitute Yolngu tradition. I hope the class recognized a lot of what was going on, and noticed that they were recognizing it.

Our journey through Yolngu traditions has taken a rather quixotic course. We began with the film "Ten Canoes," then read the study guide to it prepared for Australian schools, and watched the making-of docco "The Balanda and the Bark Canoes." There followed three essays about the film, two by a historian of material culture (here's one) and the third by an important film critic, and another film shot in the same environs with some of the same people performing, but in every other respect different: "Crocodile Dreaming" is the work of an Aboriginal (though not Yolngu) film-maker, and uses genre conventions of horror films rather than documentaries. We finished with accounts of Yolngu ethnography, religion and funerary culture by anthropologist Howard Morphy, paired with the website "12 Canoes," an analysis of Aboriginal kinship systems (Walbiri rather than Yolngu but similar in important respects) from an ethnomathematics textbook, and, finally, "Waiting for Harry."

Reviewing these today (the most media-heavy teaching I've ever done, let alone the most media-reflective), I explained why we'd not started with Morphy's masterful ethnographic overview (something a few of the students had said they wished we'd done). I told them I wanted them to have an experience more like immersion, and also wanted them to have to wrestle with issues of representation, collaboration, authenticity and indigenous reinvention without the easy comfort of a road map, a master plan, an objective scholarly analysis and synthesis. My sense is that climbing around in the tree of which "Ten Canoes" is a twig gives a more authentic picture of the ongoing vitality of Aboriginal traditions, and of the challenges facing Aboriginal communities today.

Our next section's on "storytracking" representations of Australian Aboriginal religion in western theories of religion - more familiar turf for me, though who knows, after this sojourn among the Yolngu, it may seem unfamiliar, too!

Image: a Yirrkala bark painting representing ganma,
the coming together of sweetwater and saltwater rivers,
and a metaphor for intercultural understanding in Australia. (Source)

In their retro comics style the brilliant RSA Animators illustrate a talk by David Harvey about the crisis of capitalism. See it happen here.

Dangerous bore

Remember our old friend Job? He crops up everywhere! Here's a midrash where the rabbis are trading interpretations of Levitucus 2:3-4: "If a soul shall sin through ignorance against any of the commandments of the LORD concerning things which ought not to be done, and shall do against any of them: / If the priest that is anointed do sin according to the sin of the people; then let him bring for his sin ... a sin offering."
It is, needless to say, neither the first nor the last proffered interpretation. One of the striking fables which make midrash so rich, the story of the ship-borer is also interesting for the several things it suggests about the nature and dangers of Job's protests to God - and for the way it seems to imply that this part of Job, at least, may represent a danger to Israel.

Midrash Rabbah - Leviticus,
trans. J. Israelstam & Judah J. Slotki (London: The Soncino Press, 1983), 55