Elm flurries

Chatting with my friend L in Washington Square Park on Friday, I was enchanted by some fresh green garlands of seeds on our bench, so I went back today to see if I could find some. One obliged me...

The tree from which it hailed, looming high overhead and backlit by midday sun, is a Siberian elm. In this season, these are among the trees that look to be overflowing with flowers or early foliage... 

The samaras of a nearby tree were dried and fluttered along the path below. Looking closer I found them scattered wherever a puff of breeze might send them, like a blanket of crepe paper snowflakes.

The scale of it confounds me, puts me in mind, in fact, of the theophany of Job by way of Kant's theory of the sublime. Job's God conveys the majesty and otherness of the sacred through animals

fearful and weird, which accomplish their ends in ways human beings cannot fathom. Trees play a different part in Job but evoke a sacred sublime for me too, especially in this season. How to explain it?

Each of these samaras, light as a breath and nearly as transparent, contains a tree. But also: how many tens of thousands are produced each year by each tree, as good as none of which will become trees?

Job for trees

I've stumbled on a book which is messing with my sense of the history of humans and trees - in a good way! I mean, how could I not appreciate a book which picks up on a line in the Book of Job?

the way trees sprouted when cut gave people an intimation of immortality. When Isaiah envisioned the coming kingdom, he sang that no child would die or old person not live out their days; rather, each would have the life of a tree. Job too saw it plainly: in chapter 14, as he demanded that God tell him why He had broken him, he complained that death simply puts an end to men. He wished he might have been a plant: "For a tree there is hope, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again and that its tender shoots whill not cease. Even though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the dust, yet at the first whiff of water, it may flourish again and put forth branches like a young plant." (25)

The central claim of the book, William Bryant Logan's Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees (Norton, 2019) is that the way human beings lived with trees, from ten thousand years ago until two hundred years ago, was by cutting them to stumps to let them regrow. (pic) This process, known as "coppice," and supplemented by "pollarding," coppicing at at a point up the trunk of a tree above the reach of hungry animals, supplied the wide range of supplies of wood on which human socieities relied. A single stump can produce many shoots. Ttrees are in fact designed to keep sprouting, and a coppiced tree can in principle live forever, as its branches are always young.) Inspired, perhaps, by the rebounding of trees munched by megafauna and taken especially under wing by the emintently coppiceable hazel, early and later humans were by this method able to produce reliable crops of logs and poles of all strengths and girths as well as softer sprouts for fences and baskets and weirs - and nuts and fruit, too. 

Since it took several years for trees to produce the desired sprouts, woodlands were subdivided into many areas coppiced at staggered times, making for dynamic and incredibly diverse ecosystems. Logan describes one such area (known as a fell or hagg or cant) which had been coppiced every 12-15 years since the 12th century - until the 1960s and now restored. Worth quoting from at length (87-90):

A fell was between half an acre and five acres in size. When first cut, it looked stone dead, littered with tumps. The shade-loving, four-eaved woodlant plant called herb Paris had bruned tips. A few sedges bravely tried to poke up their heads. ...

In the first three years following the cut, the sunlit dirt bloomed. At Queens Wood in London the gardeners counted 39 plant species in a hagg whe they coppiced it in 2009. Three years later, the same cre had added 156 more. Most of them had waited dormant for ht years sine the last cut. ... Most of the plants had done the same decade by decade for more than a thousand years. ...

In the fourth year after the cut, the young poles of the resprouting coppice began to shadow the ground. Life changed in their shade. The bramble and raspberry that had sprouted with the sun-loving flowers ... suddenly covdred every bit of open ground. By year's end, the meadowy landscape had become a thicket. All the other flowers had retreated to the edges or dropped their seed to wait for a change of days. No new species were added at this stage. Not a square inch of ground could be seen. Two more years passed, the poles growing taller and speading wider, the spiny shrubs rambling over everything beneath them.

By about the seventh year after the cut, the spreading tops of the coppice trees first closed the canopy. They quickly shaded out both raspberyy and branple. The two disappeared ebem ore quickly than they had come. Under this canopy, the ground opneed again and the shade dwellers emerged. Some fhese, like herb Paris and daffodils, wrre the same as had grown at first, but now they were joined by bluebells, dog mercury, wood anemones, ivy, and an occasional insistent bramble. ...

At Bradfield Wood there were only about seventy plant species in the closed coppice wood, a third of those that had grown in the sun. Under the regime of the closed canopy, these plants would grow on until the coppice was felled again, somewhere between the fifteenth and twentieth year. 

Each coppice cant is a woodland history in miniature, repeated again and again as the cycle of cuting comes round. If there are fifteen cants in a given woods, though, it is only one scene in the performance. The art was to mix all of the stages in a way that could help the whole to thrive. The annual rhythm of cutting might move in a round, from one cant to the next in space. This brought beter light to the young panels, but it also helped the animals that preferred a given stage to stay with it.

In short, 

A coppice wood is not a single being, but a synthetic ecosystem in which human participation is the key. Far more species of plants, insects, birds, and other creatures inhabit such a mixed landscape than would live in an untouched woodland. (86)

It's a marvelous vision of a recently lost way of living in temporal and spatial harmony - and interaction - with the natural world! It puts paid to modern images of trees with clean lines and single tall trunks, rising insouciantly above us, a vision of higher things or invitation to ponder them. Those are not the trees with whom human beings lived, shared, celebrated, cared. Those are not, in the terms Robin Wall Kimmerer (who blurbed the book) taught us, tree peoples. (I'm put in mind of the chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass which describes the harvesting of tree bark for basketry, and how the careful selection of - and thanks to - trees increases the flourishing of those species.)

Coppice may not have been quite as widespread as Logan implies (it doesn't seem to be the case, for instance, that the old Indo-European word for "tree" also means "cut," as he asserts, 10) but it's still nourishing food for thought. Controlled burns make sense as "fire coppice" (213), a stretch but arguably a really helpful one. It helps undo the pernicious idea of "wilderness" which bedevils our imagining healthy relationships with communities of plant peoples, and might point to some of the contingent causes; coppice was abandoned just as the Anthropocene got going in Europe. What will I do with it in "Religion of Trees"? We'll see... ! 

Pollareded beeches, Gorbea Natural Park, Basque Country, in Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: Illustrated Edition, trans. Jane Billinghirst (Greystone Books, 2018), 30-31

Tabled

A friend teaching at another college told me he traced suspiciously similarly analyses of the Book of Job in papers for one of his courses to this source, a sort of illustrated lecture available on youtube. "An invitation to trust God's wisdom" from the opaquely nondenomina-tional "Bible Project," it's rather less bad than I expected.

Hope of a tree

How didn't I know that Marc Chagall had designed a huge tapestry about Job? It was commissioned by the Rehabilitation Center of Chicago; dated 1985, it's one of his last works. Familiar characters from Job's story are on the right and bottom but the upper left is filled by a crowd of people. What's happening? Its inspiration is apparently one of my favorite lines of the text, intriguing and even inspiring in this context:

For there is hope of a tree if it be cut down, that it will sprout again. And that the tender branch thereof will not cease. (14:7)

Some see the gathering of people as taking the form of a tree! 

[Actually, as I learned from a talk by Sebastian Spivey at AAR, the work is anticipated by an oil painting from 1975, now at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Yet there's power in the labor-intensive form of the hope-themed tapestry co-created with weaver Yvette Cauqil-Prince, especially as the Hebrew word for hope is the same as that for thread.

Canon fodder

My foray into great books today was a blast. It was a lecture for the instructors of Columbia's venerable Literature Humanities first year curriculum, some of whom, I learned, had been teaching this occasionally updated series of great text for decades. It was a new thing for me to think about how Job might fit into a program of "Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy." Here's the semester's trajectory:

Homer, Iliad • Enheduanna,“The Exaltation of Inana” • Enuma Elish • Genesis • Homer, Odyssey • Fragments of Sappho • Song of Songs • Job • Aeschylus, Oresteia • Plato, Symposium; • Virgil, Aeneid • Life of Aesop • Gospels of Luke and John • Apuleius, The Golden Ass

It's a strange amalagam of traditions, but at least Job doesn't have to stand in for all of the Hebrew Scriptures (or biblical monotheism tout court). Still, this is a different company than I'm accustomed to seeing it keep, humanistic rather than biblical or, well, "spiritual" (with Bhagavad Gita, Dao De Jing, etc.). What "literature and philosophy" is it that students are supposed to learn from it?

I decided to wend my way to Job's assault on canons of all kinds. I began with Job's desperate and defiant wish that he had never been born, his fearless attack on the apparent immorality of God, then let God enthuse about his non-human creations, from hailstones to ostriches and wild asses. Each of these has been celebrated as an instance of the literary sublime (Robert Lowth for Job 3, Edmund Burke for the paean to the war horse in Job 39), and none of what either says is assimilable in received canons of knowledge. The former reduces Job's well-intentioned friends to a kind of panic, the latter reduces Job himself to a mumbling acquiescence in "dust and ashes." The depths of individual human experience and the vastness of the cosmos burst the limits of our thought - if not of our language.

Inviting Job into your canon is asking for trouble, I said, as soon as we recognize that his friends represent canonical knowledge - the best that any human (including Job) had been able to do before the events of this vertiginous tale. We miss this point because moderns dismiss the friends out of hand as pompous and insincere. But what if their failure to do right by Job or God came not from an inability or unwillingness on their part so much as from flaws in the forms of thought they held true? Does canonical knowledge disclose the depths of the world to us or shield us from facing it? Job threatens shipwreck not just for the particular pieties of its writers' time but for all views cherished as pieties, especially our own. How thrilling!

Cored

I've been invited to address the instructors for the Columbia Core on the Book of Job, one of their texts for the semester. (Not the only text from the Bible, I was happy to ascertain; they're also reading Genesis, Song of Songs, and the Gospels of Luke and John.) I've long known that Job often appears in great books curricula, but never had a chance to really think about what it would do to Job to encounter it in this context - or what Job might do to the context.

What I'm thinking of offering is a three part way into Job with a coda. First, I'll encourage them to focus on the most compelling speeches of Job and of God. Let them hear Job's grief and accusation at divine indifference and the surpassing nature poetry of God's response - and the apparent gap between them. Both Job's gut-wrenching vertigo and God's thrilling paean to the non-human world have been celebrated as surpassing examples of the sublime. And beyond that - the gulf between Job's complaint, focused on his own and ultimately all humanity's fate, and a divine response which never mentions humans at all, is as awe-ful now as it ever was. And the resolution in 42:6, is as powerful as it is obscure. I'll suggest that how we understand Job's final words determines the meaning of the whole thing.

Second, we'll zoom out to the larger context, starting with God's words at 42:7 (and 8) that his "servant Job" has "spoken rightly of me," unlike the friends. Is Job's bitter arraignment of God thus given divine imprimatur?! Or perhaps God is praising only Job's words at 42:6, whatever they were? I'll point out that 42:7 appear in the prose epilogue, and then talk a little about the apparent disjunction between the poetic speeches and the folk-tale like frame. I'll mention the temptation among moderns to shear off the frame story as unworthy of the sublime core of the book, and urge folks to resist the temptation. Not only has Job shaped cultures for two and a half millennia in this full form, but, properly understood, each of the components plays a vital part. I might suggest what I ask my students to do: to imagine staging it.

Finally, I'll turn to the question of Job and canonical wisdom. I'll start with the question of what Job is doing in the scriptural canon in the first place, and how it shows biblical traditions to be richer and more complicated than many an enlightenment critique of supposedly blind and unquestioning faith supposes. If God's words in 42:7 vindicate and even authorize Job's unfiltered words, the inclusion of the Book of Job in the canon of scripture does the same. Job shows us how to confront incomprehensible fate - not with docility but with persistent demands for recognition... and perhaps in the company of other questioners.

I'll wrap up with Job's friends, and urge folks not to dismiss them as insincere or hypocritical. They represent the best wisdom known - the very wisdom which has sustained Job up to this point. The experience of reading the Book of Job can't just be the new revelations of the integrity of the human and the sublimity of the divine but must include the collapse of all received knowledge even before these arrive under the weight of human suffering. As a frontal attack on received knowledge, the Book of Job actually fits uneasily into any canon, since it suggests not only that canonical knowledge closes us to some of the profoundest mysteries of existence, but that it can provide a refuge from which we refuse to face these mysteries. Warning word to the wise, canonizers of scripture but also of great books.

And the coda: where, then, should we locate ourselves as readers and interpreters of the text? In the space where Job meets God? Outside the whole thing, with the editors of the tale? Both are presumptuous. We're in line behind Elihu, called to the impossible but necessary task of being friends.

Carving

Behold Elijah Pierce's (1892-1984) representation of the expulsion from Eden, including scenes of what led up to it and some of what followed, from 1931. Seeing this at the Columbus Art Museum (another museum!) gave me a sense of what Pierce's carving "Story of Job" (1936), in Milwaukee but included in a CMA exhibition catalog, must look like.

Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver (Columbus Museum of Art, 1992), 123

Graphic

I've started reading Damian Duffy and John Jennings' graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and it's terrific. I'm not sure if readers unfamiliar with the novel will get everything - they've put a lot of Butler's detailed world-making into the imagery, along with the way the narrative works. But look at the way they start! The looping things are the laser wire surrounding the fortified suburb where the protagonist Lauren Olamina grows up; Butler writes that this wire is nearly invisible and birds sometimes die trying to fly through it. But it's Duffy and Jennings who bring back the white bird carcass a few pages later, as Lauren describes her disaffection with the Christianity of her father; her favorite book of the Bible, she tells us, is the Book of Job! (And another 16 pages later, as we learn how the community learns to protect itself with guns and uses BB guns against pests who eat their tree crops, we see the black bird shot.) Best of all, an adaption of the sequel, Parable of the Talents, is in the works!

(NY: Abrams Comics, 2020), 2-3, 13

Job defunds the police

Theater of War has taken its Job project (which I know from their Superstorm Sandy performances and from visits to my class by the director, Bryan Doerries), online. With excellent readers and in partnership with Exodus Transitional Community, an organization that helps people restart their lives after prison, it made for a powerful event. I might use the Job reading in a class in the future; with the right readers it really works in zoom. Job is more 'talking heads" than theater, and zoom's basic uncertainty about who a speaker is actually seeing and addressing - they seem to be looking at you but you know they may not be, and their gaze never quite meets yours - fits the edges of the variously hollow resonances of the speeches in Job.

(Theater of War's first online foray, a reading of scenes from Oedipus Rex in early May, didn't work as well for me, neither the zoom boxes - Greek tragedy needs to happen in a single space - nor the contemporary tie-in. Thebes is visited by a plague because of Oedipus' unwitting crime, which has no helpful parallels with the pandemic.)

As in all their work, this reading was followed by a discussion, kicked off by responses from representative members of the hosting community. Today's were all staff at Exodus who had themselves been sustained by it after long periods of incarceration, and were the sort of testimonials essential to the work of such organizations. Less about Job than about being saved, most sharing the importance of knowing that God had a plan for everyone. The ensuing discussion, a little zoom-disjointed too, moved more into reflection on our flawed "justice" system. Someone pointed out the "transactional" nature of the whole premise of Job (this was a theologian who knows what she was talking about). Another was reminded, in Job's receiving everything in double at the end, of the settlements for people who had been exonerated, their damages putting them into a social class they'd never been in before.

What's really resonating for me with the current moment is a Black woman from Toronto's observation that Job's friends had a "will to ignorance." It should be obvious to all with eyes that the system doesn't work for all, and yet those whom it serves persist in believing it does. Job (she didn't say but I'll hazard) probably used to think it worked too.

Amnesty for Job

My lecture course on the Book of Job and the Arts transitioned online today, and I think we did alright. More than alright: our guest speaker Brian Phillips, the founder of the Journal of Human Rights Practice, was at once mesmerizing and accessible - and wonderfully good-humored about the changed format, too. The thirty-nine students tuned remotely biz Zoom in may well have had a more direct experience with his passion and generosity than they could have in a lecture hall.

And what amazing ideas he introduced us to! I can't summarize all he did, but can highlight two particularly powerful insights. Brian was speaking about ways the Book of Job articulates things he encountered during a decade's work for Amnesty International in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Job is just like so many people he met who obsessively tell their story of loss and injustice to anyone who will listen, and have indeed in some way become their story. He cited for us Job 19:23-24:

“O that my words were written down!
    O that they were inscribed in a book!

O that with an iron pen and with lead

    they were engraved on a rock forever!"

As a human rights worker one is like a "porter" for such stories, he told us, taking them to governmental and intergovernmental bodies. (One has delicately to lower witnesses' expectations of what the human rights workers themselves can do, though, and must resist the temptation to become like Job's friends, seeking salvation in theology - in their case that of the international human rights regime.) But Brian's also seen that these witnesses, whose identities have become so closely associated with their stories, can be exploited. Others might help fix you as that story. He described a meeting with a Croatian government official hoping Amnesty might take their side, bringing out a series of women to tell of lost or missing fathers, husbands, sons; "you see," the official said, "they are crying." (I thought of the reality TV show of the State of the Union Address.)

From Brian's description I learned to hear Job's words in a new way - but also those of Job's friends. While it won't work to tell someone who has identity has fused with a story of misfortune and injustice to snap out of it, one can see why a friend might be tempted to try. Perhaps the friends, in their better moments, were trying to remind Job that he was, and could be, more than the story of the loss of all his world which he had become.

The second set of insights involved the mystery of someone like Job's continued life, in conversation with the several ways Elie Wiesel had made sense of it over decades. (Brian found me because he read my book, particularly appreciating the chapter on Wiesel.) Somehow, in their own time, some of the Jobs a human rights practitioner encounters do manage to live on. Brian told us about the Bosnian Muslim Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the ethnic cleansing camp at Omarska, whom he got to know over several years, and whom he helped publish a book about his experience, The Killing Days: My Journey through the Bosnian War (1999). Brian read to us from his preface to the book (xiii):

He added another anecdote, describing a dinner with Kemal one beautiful summer night some years later, on a deck overlooking a river in Bosnia. Kemal recognized a woman a few tables away: she'd been the public face of the Omarska camp, brazenly denying its atrocities to international authorities. Like most people involved in the genocide she had never been, and was not likely ever to be, punished. Kemal thought of going over to her, just to say "I know who you are." But then he thought better of it. In Brian's telling, which invoked Wiesel's idea that Job in the end of his book had not capitulated but rather engaged in a "revolutionary silence," this was a moment of freedom, of healing. He didn't explain how Kemal had arrived at this freedom - he didn't pretend to know. But Kemal's journey resonated with Job's, even in its ending.

Brian thinks the Book of Job is inexhaustible, a remarkable resource for people suffering some of the most traumatizing kinds of experiences, and is writing up an account of it to share with other human rights practitioners. We were so fortunate to hear it!

Connecting the dots

Meanwhile in the Job course, building on last week's riveting experience of hearing the words of Job, today I had students speak words of Job themselves. First, as part of explaining the pros and cons of separating the "impatient Job" of the poetic center from the "patient Job" of the frame story, I had them read aloud David Rosenberg's version of Job 3 in the style of William Carlos Williams and John Coltrane. Later, as we explored further textual complexities, they got to read aloud the King James Version translation of Job 28, first as the sort of disembodied "interlude" as which it is usually marked in Bibles today, and then again, with a lead-in from the end of Job 27, as the continuation of the words of the person speaking before (there's not indication in the text itself of a change of speaker) - which would be Job himself. How the story changes, how the character of Job changes, how the dialectic of patience and impatience changes!

This left us ready, I thought, to try to formulate some words of our own. Carol Newsom, our guide through the texts' perfectly calibrated challenges, suggests that the Book of Job works its magic as a "polyphonic" text because its different parts keep each other in a kind of constant check. Far from forcing us to choose one as authentic, they are incommensurable, operating simultaneously to remarkable dialogic effect. She introduces this way of approaching the text with a better take on the contrast between the folk tale-like frame story and the jagged brilliance of the poetic speeches. The frame story leads us to expect a certain kind of story, an expectation which is shaken but not replaced when the dialogue intervenes. The speeches don't offer an alternative narrative shape, and in fact rely for their continued shock value on their continued pushing against the frame's story expectations.
 

Newsom illustrates this with a cool illustration (The New Interpreters Bible, IV:324). The frame story continues in the background even as the poetic dialogue grabs the mike. But - and this is where it gets really fun - there must have been a dialogue between Job and his friends displaced by the poetic dialogue, and we can, with a little effort, reconstruct what kind of dialogue it must have been. So I asked the class to try to do just that, giving them for orientation Job's last words before the intrusion of the poetic dialogue

Shall we receive the good at the hand of God,

and not receive the bad? (2:7)

and the God's works after the intrusion ends

My wrath is kindled against you [Eliphaz] and your two friends;

for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. (42:7)

I'm not sure everyone understand what we were doing but enough got it so we could have a useful discussion afterwards. This Job is more like chapter 28. He doesn't complain that things don't make sense, and certainly does not protest or wish he had never lived. As Newsom and other intepreters have pointed out, the Job of the frame story doesn't have a retributive view of divine justice, where good behavior is rewarded and bad punished. This is the Job, rather, of 1:21's “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He could easily have said wisdom is inaccessible to mortals except as the fear of the Lord and leading a good life (28:28). It makes perfect sense that God should, in the aftermath, commend this way of speaking which, when you think of it, even squares with the divine speeches.

But what, then, might Job's friends have said - something God instead condemns in anger? To perform this exercise we had to take seriously what the text tells us but people routinely dismiss, that they were truly friends. (You know this is an old refrain of mine.) A student nailed it: "what's happening to you isn't fair!" and we were off. We didn't have as much time as last time I tried all this but I think I explained Newsom'e argument better today...

Greta of Uz

We had some powerful theater in the course on the Book of Job and the Arts today! As in the first iteration of the course, Bryan Doerries, director of Theater of War Productions (earlier name: Outside the Wire), was with us, telling us about their experience performing the Book of Job for communities who had been devastated by natural disasters in Missouri, New York, Japan, Mississippi. But this time we were also again able to recreate the experience with a performance of the version of Job Theater of War uses, a condensed version of Stephen Mitchell's poetic rendition, read powerfully by four gifted students from our own School of Drama, and seamlessly integrated into a far-reaching discussion by Doerries. The young woman who read the part of Job, Sophia Rizzulo, was especially compelling. Watch this:

In the discussion which Doerries led afterward, one of the students articulated what many were surely feeling. Seeing and hearing Job as a young person, a woman, utterly transformed the Book of Job, whom the student had of course pictured as an old man. The founding premise of Theater of War is that, if we but encounter them in the right way - not in a theater but in a place that's already part of our lives and together with others in our community - the words of ancient plays will speak directly to us across gulfs of time and culture. That's what happened today. Job wasn't from Uz but our contemporary, her anger and pain that of the generations who find a world in ruins, while those who should have taken care of it deflect and equivocate and cynically blame her for her own suffering. One of the teaching assistants told me he was reminded of the transformative anger of Greta Thunberg. How dare you?

Missing megafauna

The Guardian had two pieces on cave art in the last two days. One reports on the discovery in Indonesia of figurative art twice as old as any yet known. Can you believe this giant animal being harangued by tiny human figures, as well as therianthropes (mixing human and animal features), is 44,000 years old? That makes the 12,000 years of the Holocene, whose end we've been hastening, seem a mere afternoon! The other, appearing today, is an essay by Barbara Ehrenreich trying to make sense of the absence or insignificance of human forms in decorated cave around the world. Noting that most of the animals depicted were megafauna now extinct (yes, we did that), she observes:

The marginality of human figures in cave paintings suggests that, at least from a human point of view, the central drama of the Paleolithic went on between the various megafauna – carnivores and large herbivores. So depleted of megafauna is our own world that it is hard to imagine how thick on the ground large mammals once were. 

Turns out the animals depicted on cave walls (like this one at Lascaux) weren't the ones ancient humans (and Neanderthals) were able to kill and ate; we were more vulnerable to megafauna than they to us. Pushing back at interpretations of cave art as necessarily magical or religious, as well as that it shows the triumph of humans over other animals in the hunt, she suggests that it may also contain play and humor (like the Cueva de los Manos in Argentina, bottom), and builds from that toward a conclusion at once amusing and a warning:

Our Paleolithic ancestors ... knew where they stood in the scheme of things, which was not very high, and this seems to have made them laugh. I strongly suspect that we will not survive the mass extinction we have prepared for ourselves unless we too finally get the joke. 

I'm not sure we can imagine not being the dominant species (well, non-bacterial species) on the planet. Though folks in the Sundarbans genuinely fear the Bengal tiger, to an urban American like me (or the gents in suits in Altamira, above) rhinos and whales, like ancient redwood trees, seem the vulnerable ones. Like flies to wanton boys are they to us, we kill them for our sport - and even more by accident.

Assorted tables have been turned since Yahweh silenced Job by rhapsodizing about the megafauna Behemoth and Leviathan. (Yes, I have Job on my mind again, as next semester's "Book of Job and the Arts" approaches.) We become impatient at the attention lavished on these ungainly also-rans, knowing their very size marks them for extinction. It makes God seem quaintly out of touch too. But perhaps there's a way back in through Ehrenreich's musings? What if Job's final words were spoken laughing? Perhaps Job contains a memory of an earlier time when humans jestingly but also seriously reminded each other of their middling place in the foodchain. Hang with us, the Book of Job may be telling us, not with Behemoth, the first of the works of God (40:19).

Going rogue

Remember Job? I'm teaching my course on the Book of Job and the arts again next semester. I thought it might be a good way to get back to it, and with enough time meaningfully to revise the storyline if needed, to read this brand new translation. But this isn't just any new translation. Edward L. Greenstein is Vergil to Job's Inferno. He's spent three decades parsing every word. Finding the fruit of his research in this form is a major event.

Greenstein thinks the text's vaunted obscurities are the result of centuries of error and timidity. A certain number of scribal errors are to be expected, especially with a text as linguistically rich and adventurous as this, and it wouldn't be surprising for some whole passages to have fallen out of sequence when papyrus came unglued (or was unbundled to accommodate the addition of Elihu). But the timidity of editors and translators had to do also with the "fundamentally amoral world"(166) the text describes, which they couldn't, or wouldn't, see,

Greenstein claims to have restored the text to something like its original form (post Elihu). The headliner, I suppose, is that, in the face of the bullying bluster of YHWH, Job doesn't concede or recant, let alone repent in dust and ashes. Instead, his final words (42:5-6, later commended by YHWH for their "honesty" at 42:8) are:

As a hearing by the ear I have heard you.
And now my eye has seen you.

That is why I am fed up;
I take pity on "dust and ashes" [=suffering humanity]. 

(Yale UP, 2019), 185

But this comes at the end of a fundamentally different story than the received one. It's not just the textual emendations, and clarification of the many ways in which Job and his friends respond to (and parody) each other and engage the language of other biblical texts - though these are significant in their own right. What changes the whole flow of the story is the restoration of 4:12-21, a vision, from Eliphaz to Job.

Yet to me did a word come in stealth,
And my ear grasped a hint of it. 
In shudders from visions of the night,
When slumber falls upon people.
Fear overcame me, and trembling; 
As shivers set my bones to shaking.

For a spirit passed across my face;
It set the hair of my flesh on end.
It stood still, but I could not discern its demeanor,
(Nor) the form in front of my eyes.

A moaning and voice did I hear:

"Can a mortal be righteous before Eloah?
Can a man be pure before his maker?
If in his servants he puts no trust,
And in his angels he finds fault,
Then all the more those who dwell in clay houses, 
Whose foundation is in the dust.

They are quashed before twilight;
From day-break until evening they are crushed;
When it is not even nightfall they forever disappear.

Their tent-pin is pulled up on them;

They die without (ever finding) knowledge." (16-18) 

It never really made sense coming from Eliphaz, disconnected as it is from Eliphaz' arguments. It's been assimilated to Job's view for years, in fact, from Jewish liturgical song to Calvin (although all of these folks presumably encountered the same corrupted sequence Greenstein is repairing!). Restoring it to Job makes sense of much else in the text, too, from Job's complaint of being tormented by nightmares and visions (7:14) to the friends' accusation that he claims he's got inside knowledge of the divine court (15:4, 8). It also lines up with the lines in Elihu's speeches about God speaking, just once, to people in frightening nighttime dreams (33:14-17).

But moving 4:12-21 to the end of Job's first speech (ch. 3) does more than tie up loose ends. It dramatically changes the story. By the time Job breaks his silence, cursing the day of his birth, he's already had this terrifying vision. This explains why he desires death rather than an audience with God, or even an explanation. It is only in response to his friends' growing judgment that he must after all be guilty that he decides to call YHWH as a witness. He eventually lodges a formal complaint, something proposed by Eliphaz (5:8), because it requires a response. But when it comes, the response just confirms what he'd already heard, and satisfies him not at all. "That is why I am fed up." No resolution, no closure (though the restoration must mean something).

New questions arise, too. Who is this "renegade" or "rogue spirit" (Greenstein's terms) who speaks to Job? Elihu, who we can assume heard of Job's nighttime vision, thinks it came from the top. But was it sent by YHWH? Greenstein doesn't mention the possibility it might be the Satan, but there must be a reason he calls it "rogue." Stepping back a bit, who wrote this whole uncompromisingly unconsoling story, and for whom? How did it end up canonized - before or after the consciously and unconsciously pious changes to it? And did the real story somehow keep being told alongside the canonical version, the way the pious frame story did in the "legend of Job"? (Greenstein doesn't even mention debates about the primacy of prose frame or poetic center of the book.)

It's all quite exciting but it confronts me with a quandary. Should I give next semester's students this translation to read? If so, you can be sure that many will write off the whole history of Job reception - the reception of the erroneous text Greenstein claims to have corrected - as illegitimate, as presumably would he, the twisting in the wind of a tradition fundamentally unwilling to let the text speak.

I've tended always to go at least part way with "literary" approaches to the Bible, putting to one side what we're learning through historical and philological research about the problems with the texts we've inherited, and focusing instead on the text as we find it, as it finds us. Asking those sorts of text historical/critical questions is a relatively new thing, and should come near the end of this text's effective history. But I'm also persuaded by Carol Newsom that the problems Job engages resist closure, requiring the unsettling and never-ended dialogue on the level of moral imaginations the book of Job as we find it enacts. Greenstein might give glib students the chance to say it's an open and shut case.

But still, I need to start them off somewhere. I've tended to punt on this, recommending Raymond Scheindlin's translation but letting them read any version they have access to, so long as they subsequently compare it with another, and with the King James Version. Greenstein's Job, though, is qualitatively different from all of these. What to do?

(Images from the Morgan Library's Blake watercolors)

Illuminations

In other news, someone just told me that the illuminated Byzantine Bible from which I took the cover picture for my Job book Has been digitized! There are many more scenes than Paul Huber was able to reproduce in the book where I found them at UCLA. Above, messengers bring Job news of the destruction of his world; through it you can make out shapes from the scene on the page before: the death of his children.

Who could have guessed

余华 Yu Hua's novel 活着 To Live came up again in this year's iteration of my Renmin course (in fact already in the first class session) so I decided it was time to reread it. Like many, I was more familiar with the prize-winning film Zhang Yimou made of it, and it was good to be reminded of the ways the original book is different. It was interesting also to read it explicitly as one of the books sometimes referred to as the "Chinese Job" (Camel Xiangzi is another), but I emerge from the experience puzzled, even confounded. And intrigued. What are my students seeing in Job that makes this seem a kindred tale?

The story is in some ways quite simple. Fugui, the wastrel son of a wealthy family, loses the family property gambling and the family is cast into poverty. His father dies of shame. His pregnant wife leaves him with their young daughter - but returns. He is conscripted into the Nationalist army for two years, losing comrades and returning as the civil war nears its end to find his mother has died and his daughter become deaf-mute. He and his wife and two children farm a small plot of what had been his family's land, suffering with the rest of China the ups and down of collectivization, the starvation attending the Great Leap Forward, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Over time, he loses everyone - his son (drained of blood by callous doctors during the cultural revolution to help the wife of a magistrate in childbirth), his daughter (in childbirth, nobody helps her), his wife (of a long wasting illness), his son-in-law (in an accident) and finally his grandson (nearly starved, he chokes to death on a bean). When the narrator meets him, years later, Fugui is living with an old ox he has given his own name, apparently at peace.

What makes this a Job story? Well, superficially, it's the story of someone who loses everything. But Fugui is no moral hero, although his character has been changed from its early thoughtlessness. (His family are unequivocally good people, though.) Also, Fugui isn't exceptional. I'm told everything that happened to him was something which had happened to people Yu Hua met in his early career as a country dentist. What Fugui suffered was suffered by everyone, or might have been. Fugui is Everyman, not Job.

Is the Job-likeness to be found, then, in Fugui's attitude to his suffering? Like one version of Job, he never complains, not just as an old man worn down by a difficult life, like a gnarled tree, but even early on. He gets angry at people who treat him or his family wrong, but isn't angry at fate. His wife Jiazhen doesn't really wish for a different lot either. I hope that I’ll be able to spend my next life together with you again, she says on her deathbed. Her view isn't quite Job-like either.

The moment Jiazhen said she was willing to be my wife again in the next life, my tears trickled down onto her face. After blinking her eyes twice she smiled and said, “Even though Fengxia and Youqing both died before I did, I can still rest easy. I don’t need to worry about them anymore. No matter what, I’m still a mother. Our kids were good to me when they were alive, and just for that I should know contentment. 

“You’ve got to keep on living,” she told me. “There’s still [son-in-law] Erxi and [grandson] Kugen to take care of.” (211-12)

Fugui's final view, after Erxi and Kugen, too, have died, isn't so different from this.

Sometimes when I think back I feel sad, and sometimes I feel a kind of peace. I took care of the funerals for everyone in my family. I buried them all with my own hands. When the day comes that my body goes stiff, there will be no one left to worry about. (230)

Along with the villagers, Fugui is surprised at how long he and Fugui, the ox, have lived. To have outlived all the others is not a reward or punishment but it is some kind of achievement. He stayed alive for different reasons along the way, including but not restricted to caring for his family. That his children didn't get to live long is a cause for sadness, but not complaint. To whom would he complain?

The difference with Job isn't just that there's no God for praise, pleading or protest. There's no expectation of justice. And yet one lives on. What does Fugui live for? "Man lives for the sake of life itself, not for anything other than life," Yu Hua apparently wrote in the preface to the Chinese edition (not included in the English translation; I learned of it from student papers last year). Job has given up on life: he longs for his lost life, or for death, or for vindication after he dies. (Instead he gets an awkward abundance of new life.)

On reflection, the affinity my students felt may be something deeper than these differences. Both Job and Fugui live in a morally topsy-turvy world, a world which doesn't just visit suffering on the innocent but one where nothing can be counted on. The way Fugui tells his story, things no sooner settle into some pattern, happy or unhappy, but change comes. The shift usually happens within one of Yu Hua's already compact paragraphs, with some variant of We never expected... or Who could have known... or Who would have guessed... what was about to happen next. Fate is not just arbitrary but utterly unpredictable.

At times this might seem a version of the frontiersman Saiwang's long-run "who's to know that's not good?" Because Fugui has lost the family land, for instance, he is spared when the communists come to power and execute landowners. Sometimes apparent curses are really blessings - and vice versa. But at other times the unforeseeable plot twist is just confounding - as when Fugui, madly attacking the magistrate for whose wife's life his own son has been bled to death, is stunned to find this is a man he knows. It is Chunsheng, his teenaged companion during the years of military conscription. Each thought the other had been killed in the war. If there's a moral sense to this, it's impossible to scan.

“Chunsheng,” I said, “my only son is dead.” 

Chunsheng heaved a deep sigh, saying, “How could it have been your son?” 

I thought of my son lying all alone in that little room—the pain was unbearable. I said to Chunsheng, “I want to see my son.” 

No longer did I want to kill anyone. Who could have guessed that Chunsheng would suddenly appear? I took a few steps and turned around to say to him, “Chunsheng, you owe me a life. You’ll have to repay me in your next lifetime.” (156)

This last line might seem a nod to karma but it's really an acknowledgment that, in this life, things don't get worked out. And the next life, as Jiazhen saw it, isn't really likely to be any different. The only peace, in fact, comes from the finality of death. Fugui's family is complete and, somehow, safe now that all have died. And yet, Fugui lives on in a kind of Daoist simplicity - there's no reason. This life doesn't operate on reasons.

Five of last year's students wrote their final essays comparing Job and To Live, noting some of the things I've mentioned here. Fugui is more accessible, they wrote, being an ordinary person - and writing in the first person. His story, while awful, is more realistic too - he doesn't get it all back. China's Tian is unlike Job's God - not in control and not accountable - and Fugui's attitude is understandably different. And yet, one of the best concluded,

But I think sometimes it's not a good thing for Chinese to be too patient. It may be easier to live without thinking too much about asking why, but we lose the spirit of doubt and the thought of human destiny. Job tried to find answers about his suffering. I admire Job very much for this. His questions may not be answered, but it is the performance of a person's thinking ability. Man is a reed grass that can think. It is the ability of thinking that makes us different from other animals. In conclude, [To Live] makes me cry, but The Book of Job makes me think. I think this is the reason why The book of Job become a classic work.   

But while To Live is clearly read, here and abroad, as describing a particularly Chinese experience, Yu Hua's intention was something universal. The novel, he explained in both the Chinese and English prefaces, was inspired by a song about a slave in the antebellum American South.

I once heard an American folk song entitled ‘Old Black Joe.’ The song was about an elderly black slave who experienced a life’s worth of hardships, including the passing of his entire family—yet he still looked upon the world with eyes of kindness, offering not the slightest complaint. After being so deeply moved by this song I decided to write my next novel—that novel was To Live. … An American slave song with only the simplest lyrics grew into Fugui’s life—a life imbued with upheavals and suffering, but also tranquility and happiness. Old Joe and Fugui are two men who could not be more different. They live in different countries and different eras; they are of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds; even their fundamental likes and dislikes are different, as is the color of their skin—yet sometimes they seem to be the same person. They are both so very human. Human experience, combined with the power of the imagination and understanding, can break down all barriers, enabling a person truly to understand that thing called fate at work in his life—not unlike the experience of simultaneously seeing one’s reflection in two different mirrors. 

(A whole essay could be written about the circulation of identities in Yu Hua's use of this song - not a Negro spiritual but a "parlor song" published by the white composer Stephen Foster in 1853.)

I'm left wondering... wondering if I should perhaps include To Live in my New School class on Job and the arts. What might students at an American university make of Fugui and Job?

Land of the religion-free

Well, Horace Kallen's quite the character. Given the chance to write something about him. I'm feeling more than a little overwhelmed. The man was beyond prolific - forty books and countless articles, in all kinds of different venues and fora. I've found my Virgil, though, a scholar who's just completed a biography of Kallen (coming out end of this month!), with whom I've been exchanging passionate e-mails. He's helped me understand many things, not least how Hebraism - a term Kallen wrested from Matthew Arnold's pejorative usage - comes to define modernity and all its values: science, justice, democracy, internationalism. The "Hellenism" Arnold praised has been refuted by Darwin, who has shown concern with unchanging essences to be not just untrue to the world we live in but a refusal to accept and engage it.

We've persuaded the biographer to write a piece for the New School histories vertical, and it's been fun to watch it take shape. While New School was a center for Kallenism, most Kallen scholarship focuses on work he wrote before he came here, and on his participation in secular Jewish movements which crossed paths only implicitly with the New School. For each story, it turns out, Kallen left a not inconsiderable archive of works. For the moment I'm trying to find a way to characterize his engagement on multiple fronts simultaneously, to audiences which might have been distinct - but might also have overlapped. Was the Jewishness of Kallen's understanding of American democracy (Hebrew prophets by way of the Puritans, but especially by way of the proto-secularist Job) an open secret, an accepted open secret? Was Kallen operating in discrete worlds or linking them?

Today's discovery: at the very time Kallen was giving the talk on toleration at the New School which it's my task to contextualize, he had just published a poem in a journal called The Humanist. Another tussle with Arnold, this does "Dover Beach" one better (well, not perhaps poetically better), evoking the desolation someone might feel on a shore ever assailed by waves of gods called forth by human fear! A taste:

There's a denouement, which rather scrambles the metaphor. After a lampoon of assorted religious rituals (Catholic litany and Buddhist/Hindu Om) appears a lighthouse promising safe harbor - at Sankety, which a note explains is the easternmost point in the United States. America, refuge from the dull booming roar of old world religion!

Land ho! Strange prophet.

Horace M. Kallen, "Dr. Freud Says It's Compensation,"

The Humanist vol 10 (1 Jan 1950): 54-57, 55

One and only?

My copy of the Muriel Spark Centennial edition of The Only Problem just arrived. The rather disappointing introduction by Richard Holloway (remember him?) rehearses the impossibiity of theodicy and wonders at the seriousness of Spark's religion:

She believed in God, but it was a God in her own image. As a great novelist, she understood the impulse to tinker with her characters, much in the way God plays about with Job. (xiv)

I'm amused that the line from the book which I used to frame my Renmin course (you might have noticed it in the group photo with a big question mark over it) appears on the cover: It is the only problem. The problem of suffering is the only problem. It all boils down to that.

But is that really so? (Holloway thinks it so only for those who believe in God.) Part of what I learned from this teaching experience is that there are all sorts of unexamined assumptions in this claim: That suffering is one thing. That it - all of it - is a problem. That it's one problem. That it's the same problem. Here's another mistake I shouldn't have made, should have known better than to make! Did I not make a big deal, way back when, of rejecting "the problem of evil," replacing it with the intentionally ungainly but truer "problems of evil"?

Perhaps it's spending too much time with Job that's made me so forgetful. I suppose the Book of Job is the prooftext for those assumptions, the back story to the western monotheistic sense that everything else does boils down to that, that things tend to boil down to one problem. Perhaps I need to spend time with other figures! I don't have time for it today, but soon I'll mull what would happen if one's prooftext weren't the story of Job but, say, that of the Warring States period poet and archetypal "virtuous failure" Qu Yuan. Several folks in my Renmin class suggested such a comparison might be illuminating...

A new test for Job

(actually the prompt was to find some new way to comfort him)

此何遽不為福乎

How does the story of Job sound to Chinese ears? Any Chinese analogs? A first reference is the ill-fated poet Qu Yuan, a long suffering righteous man who even composed a series of Questions to Heaven; more about him anon. But there's also the frontiersman whose tale is told in the Daoist collection Huainanzi, and who lives on in the saying 塞翁失马焉知非福: Sai Weng lost his horse, who's to say that's not good?

As for the revolutions and mutual generation of calamity and good fortune, their alterations are difficult to perceive. At the near frontier, there was a [family of] skilled diviners whose horse suddenly became lost among the Hu [people]. Everyone consoled them. The father said, 'This will quickly turn to good fortune!' After several months, the horse returned with a fine Hu steed. Everyone congratulated them. The father said, 'This will quickly turn to calamity!' The household was [now] replete with good horses; the son loved to ride, [but] he fell and broke his leg. Everyone consoled them. The father said, 'This will quickly turn to good fortune!' After one year, the Hu people entered the frontier in force; the able and strong all stretched their bowstrings and fought. Among the peoplee of the near frontier, nine out of ten died. It was only because of lameness that father and son protected each other. Thus,
             good fortune becoming calamity,
              calamity becoming good fortune;
              their transformations are limitless,
              so profound they cannot be fathomed.

淮南子 §18.7