Earth: A Wandering

 

 

 

Alfred Kentigern Siewers

 

Earth is at once both symbol and reality: both a planet with a proper name and a substance, humus, from which the human emerges in participation, along with many of our fellow travelers in the physical world – animals, plants, and others. It is thus also both a wandering and a grounding – and most of all, perhaps, a wondering, at what environmental philosopher Bruce Foltz in a new study of the ongoing life of noetic Christian tradition in environmentalism calls ‘the heavenly beauty of Earth’ (Foltz, 2012). Pre-moderns and non-moderns probably lived and articulated this more particularly than moderns do with our more abstract GreenSpeak. But we all experience the conjunction of meanings of earth at some level. The modern West often expresses it through a type of post-medieval understanding that re-centers us in a medieval middle on Earth, part of the original impetus behind Romanticism. Whether it’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s association of his retro-medieval Shire with Appalachia (Davenport, 1997); the medievalism enabled by a cyberspace that simultaneously removes us from the Earth and enables us to engage different time periods and cultures more simultaneously: or personal traditions that re-form community with Earth, as we weave them from our scholarship through the interstices of our academic lives or arts: we connect with actual people and physical environments on Earth and in earth as both refugees from the modern and ambassadors to it, enmeshed in that which we seek to proclaim.

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As I walk through a last remnant of old-growth forest in Pennsylvania looking for our annual church Fourth of July picnic, passing through shady groves of hemlock trees amid brooks habited by bears, Amish teenagers, and, in earlier days, the nature writer Euell ‘ever eat a pine tree?’ Gibbons, I am reminded of the retro-medieval Forest of Arden.

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the usurper duke’s wrestler Charles asks the dispossessed and out-of-favor Orlando, ‘Come, where is the young gallant that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth?’ (Shakespeare, 1992, 1.2.296).

But Orlando is thrown to earth in a different way than the duke and wrestler envision.

He flees the court for Arden. There he begins carving love poems to Rosalind on trees, in a ‘green world’ in which, as the duke-in-exile remarks, human life ‘exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’ (2.1.299).

Arden, a disappearing forest in the Warwickshire precincts of Stratford-on-Avon, itself becomes a kind of sylvan haunt in the play, written during the time of the Enclosure movement.

Such remnant woods around England had become places where an outlaw forest economy found temporary refuge, while an expanding British Empire cut them down for ships, privatized pasturage, and witnessed a new pastoralism.

Phantoms of the Middle Ages like Robin Hood haunted such woods, while vanishing into Elizabethan stories. These forests of the imagination exemplified C.S. Lewis’ curmudgeonly remark while giving birth to his Oxford History of English Literature tome (a painful project he labeled by acronym ‘the oh hell’) that England had no Renaissance because of its insular medieval continuities (Lewis, 1954, 55–56; Coghill, 1965, 60–61).

Yet in Arden’s ‘green world’ of imagination, the denizens of Shakespeare’s forest (a locality confusable in name also with both Ardennes woods in France and biblical Eden) find empathy not only for crying deer, but for each other, ending in a metonymy of marriage rites as well as a crossing of the human and non-human.

What the exiled duke calls ‘this wide and universal theater’ (Shakespeare, 1992, 2.7.135) of Arden becomes in its engagement of the non-human, a place of experience of earth apart from the human conventions of the court.

In its back-and-forth focus between the ‘green world’ and human society, Arden comes to typify what environmental philosophers (glossing Heidegger) distinguish as earth differentiated from the world of human cultural constructions: ‘The other side of nature,’ the phusis that simultaneously both hides and discloses itself. Yet earth spans the real if ghostly Arden of Warwickshire, as well as the type of older ‘green world’ associations of English folklore identified by the critic Northrop Frye (Frye, 1949), rooted in both the mythological ‘Celtic’ Otherworld and the transplanted Desert of early Christian monasticism.

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The integration of the real, imaginary, and symbolic in this mysterious sense of earth echoes the American Pragmatist Charles Peirce’s pioneering work in ecosemiotics. In Peirce’s model, the process of semiosis, or meaning-making (for him a definition of life), could involve a nature-text, an outward-facing triad of sign, environment and meaningful landscape, beyond de Saussure’s more arbitrary and internalized binary of signified and signifier (Maran, 2007). Landscape, as a meaningful symbolic overlay of earth, thus integrated the contexts of reader and author, while relating them directly to text and physical environment. The earth itself then reads as a nature-text, but always beyond our full comprehension, since we ourselves are allegory in the text.

Arden’s ecosemiotics of ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / sermons in stones, and good in everything’ thus provides context, grounding, and redefinition for Jaques’ famous notion in the play that ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women, merely players’ (Shakespeare, 1992, 2.1.16–17; 2.7.305). Linking that stage to a physical environment offers earth to Orlando not only as ground of humiliation, and not just Jaques’ placeless theater, but as experience of place leading to what deep ecology terms self-realization in the environment of earth. Deleuzean terms take it further into a rhizomic realization. And pre-modern Christian traditions literally and figuratively offer us a vision of the cross between the immanent and the transcendent, the anthropomorphic and the cosmic.

^***

When the Apollo 8 astronauts looked back on our planet from lunar orbit in 1968 and recited the Creation account from Genesis, they offered perhaps the most famous attempt to subsume ancient traditions of earth into the world of modern technology. But their words still evoked a pre-modern sense of our planet as mystery: ‘In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.’ In Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of Genesis 1, the terms used for ‘earth’ integrated meanings of essence and element, a span referenced here in the term ‘Earth.earth.’ Medieval schoolmen later split that relationship, demarcating essence and existence, supernatural versus natural, as if trying to forget the living, integrative metaphor of the earth mother, Gaia, referenced by earlier church fathers.

Earth to the ancients meant a realm including land and sea, ultimately planet and soil, native country and the dust of Genesis, from which humans were energized by God’s breath, pneuma, in Greek meaning wind and spirit, as well as breath. In medieval Greek usage, following the Septuagint γ (from which also developed the root of geology, geometry, geography, and geophilosophy, not to mention Gaia), ‘earth’ metaphorically stood also for the human mind, the realm of material things, the Promised Land, and heaven, following references in Psalms (Lampe, 1961, s.v.).

And the living breath from God in Hebrew and Greek in the clay or dust was related to earth by more than just simple infusion to early exegetes of Genesis. Its pneuma entwined the logoi of the speaking-into-being of Creation, in which logos could mean at once harmony, word, discourse, story, reason, and purpose. The kalos, or goodness, of Creation referenced in the Septuagint Genesis, likewise referred at once to the beautiful and the good, also spanning the physical and the spiritual. A speaking or breathing of harmonies, pre-moderns realized, involved chanting or music. St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century declared ‘the order of the universe is a kind of musical harmony of varied shapes and colors with a certain order and rhythm’ (Gregory of Nyssa, 1999, 27–30). He identified music with the spoken word of God’s Spirit-breath as an essential if dynamic pattern of earth. Music, like a Deleuzean ‘body without organs,’ or colors, as in the early Irish and Native American colors of the winds, span the physical and the spiritual with an energy. The musical description of the logoi echoes this verse from the Wisdom of Solomon: ‘For the elements were changed in themselves by a kind of harmony, like as in a harp notes change the nature of the tune, and yet are always sounds’ (LXX 19:18; emended from Brenton, 1851). St. Basil of Caesarea described the aerial waters and the deeps as both singing hymns of praise to God’s glory – reflecting one another chiastically on the second day of creation, even as man in the image of God in a sense reflects the divine on the sixth day of Creation in Hebrew parallel poetics (Basil of Caesarea, 1999, 71). Music or chanting is a way to indicate the iconographic incarnation of the cosmic logoi in the Creation story, as energy but also as metonymic breath of the Spirit (pneuma), so to speak, the same Spirit that Basil refers to as ‘cherishing’ the waters (using the Syriac version of Genesis), vitalizing seeds of life in the sea as if breathing on them. Man himself is described in corporeal terms as a musical instrument for the nous or energy of the soul/spirit, shaped in the image and likeness of God, the image of God being the Logos in whom man is made. And while articulating a sense of divine logoi as cosmic music, Basil differentiates such cosmic semiosis from the Classical ‘music of the spheres.’ In the latter, to Basil, the human mind dualistically could be considered the objectifying observer-conceptualizer of the music-generating spheres, rather than a liturgical instrument of the very networks of cosmic semiotics that constitute human reason. The latter for him is the dominion of human beings in Paradise over the earth, but in harmonizing semiosis (the making of meaning) rather than arbitrary control. And the human body is not the only participant in that cosmic music of meaning-making. Basil describes the aerial and terrestrial waters as singing hymns, and the Spirit’s cherishing of the waters brings forth life. And humans as cosmic musical instruments interweave color as well as sound in their sub-creation. St. Gregory, associating color with music in describing the cosmic harmonies, evoked hues as virtues, which overlay Creation with layers of incarnational qualities associated with divine likeness (Gregory of Nyssa, 1994, 391).

Earth.earth shares much in common with what could similarly be called Nature.nature. Nature, from the Latin natura, mysteriously means both the essence of something and of all of us, both something enveloping and outside of us, and an organic presence that has emerged naturally through nativity. Similarly, earth apophatically remains both more and less physical than what we mean today by ‘world’ as a globalized human semiosphere, or bubble of meaning. The latter incorporates multitudes of virtual individual Umwelts (the term coined by the Baltic biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the early twentieth century for ‘meaningful environment of an organism’, foundational to biosemiotics). Uexküll, too, heard them singing: ‘The countless Umwelts represent the keyboard upon which nature plays its symphony of meaning…not constrained by space and time. In our lifetime and in our Umwelt we are given the task of constructing a key in nature’s keyboard, over which an invisible hand glides’ (von Uexküll, 1982, 78).

In the semiotics of earth, Umwelts gather into larger semiospheres, including human cultural communities and temporalities (such as overlays of Jewish, Byzantine, Chinese, Julian, and Gregorian calendars sharing the same physical environment). Semiospheres in turn can overlap within ecosemiospheres in eco-regions (such as the peasant-tended wooded meadows of Estonia, Native American-managed prairies of the Upper Midwest, or the urban ecosystems of New York City’s archipelago, celebrated in Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale [Helprin, 2005]). Ecosemiospheres overlap in the Earth.earth. But our own poetics don’t often perceive, celebrate, or experience such overlapping realms of meaning. In the twenty-first century we may still occasionally speak in 1960s space-age terms of ‘planet Earth,’ or even more awkwardly, ‘Spaceship Earth.’ But always, as in the iconic Disney nature documentary Earth, our technological outer-space iconography of earth since the 1960s projects a crisp bright mimetic concept from the outside, a machino-morphic ecosystem of quantitative inputs and outputs. This ‘real’ image, now digitalizable between our iPhone fingers and iPad palantiri (similar to what we used to do between our real fingers with the moon in the sky as children, as if the optical-illusion hotdog between digits), spins around in our electronic extensions, only to disappear in technological magic tricks. So too with the Earth.earth, as Stephen Hawking advocates space colonization to save humanity, leaving behind a trashed planet as we search for more galactic landfills. Technology as a philosophy of Creation erases it. But, in the service of a love for Creation (of which the pre-moderns remind us), the same technology (more as personal techné or craft) can help extend our engagement with the Earth.

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Living at a cultural distance from high-tech centers likelier to follow Hawking’s vision of the Singularity, our home lies in the central Susquehanna Valley, which some geologists call one of the oldest valleys on earth, and some political commentators unflatteringly call Pennsyltucky, amid the rolling hills and larger ridges and mini-mountains of the northern Appalachians, itself one of the oldest mountain ranges. The Appalachians formed a modern model for Tolkien’s retro-Middle-earth, Migarr or Middangeard, a northern European medieval image of Earth embraced by the roots and branches of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil linking different worlds. The Susquehanna River survived various types of primordial foldings related to the movement of continents and the swallowing of part of it by the sea into the lost estuary now known as the Chesapeake Bay. The cosmic tree of the Iroquois in this region morphed into the peace tree of Onondaga Lake, now a Superfund Cleanup site. And while there are no millennia-old Sequoia trees in this eco-region, near us grow the old-growth hemlock groves of Tall Timbers nature preserve, once home to the nature writer Euell Gibbons and now a favorite haunt of Amish teens on buggy dates. To enter into it, as we do for Fourth of July church picnics and family hikes, is to experience a real-world green-world peace that evokes Shakespeare’s Arden.Eden in Penn’s Woods. Nearby the renowned trout of Penns Creek run past an old Boy Scout camp (Karoondina, ‘land of shining waters’ in Delaware), still groaning with summer campers. If there are no salmon of wisdom, there are plenty of fly-casting fishermen.

All this, water and worn-down mountains and woods, in a watershed paradoxically worried now both by gas-drilling fracking and declining river towns, is the earth. From the small plot of enclosed land my wife gardens behind our river-view townhouse in ‘downtown’ Lewisburg (population 5620, give or take a few births and deaths since the last census), to the polluted mud deposited by the river outside our door when it floods and turns our neighborhood into a Venetian-like scene, to old oak trees of the grove in the hilly center of the college campus down the street, and into Amish farmland farther west, this all too is the earth.

Traveling out that way to bike and to get to the rural house-chapel we attend in Beavertown (population 870) on Beaver Creek, we skirt horse-drawn carriages as we go up and down through the rich farmland of West Union and Snyder Counties. The late Davy Jones of the Monkees moved to Beavertown, to find refuge from rock n’ roll celebrity, on a horse farm whose landscape undoubtedly reminded him of rolling countrysides in his native Britain. It’s forgiveable to compare the countryside to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire as well. Tolkien, enamored of America’s archaic Appalachia while seeking refuge from the mechanized destruction of earth in twentieth-century European warfare, drew on a Kentucky friend’s lore for the Shire as the heartland of his twentieth-century Arden in Middle-earth. Names of Hobbit families, their love of tobacco, and speech and lifestyles, draw on the culture of an Appalachian state.

The Susquehanna in our Appalachian valley remains a sacred river in native tradition, interconnected with all the waters of the world, according to river steward Gere Reisinger, a naturopath of Seneca descent, who keeps watch over the hyper-polluted old industrial and coal region of the Susquehanna’s North Branch, known as the Wyoming Valley (Brubaker, 2002, 68). Mormons also hold sacred the river, where they first began their baptisms, and the watershed offered Edenic refuge too for Slavic Eastern Christians along with their Inferno. Slavic immigrants often died in the mines of its watershed but founded Holy Trinity Monastery, whose grounds at a cypress marsh near Cooperstown dip into the farthest edge of the Susquehanna’s headwaters, appropriately, in Jordanville, NY, named for the sacred river of Israel by now-vanished Baptists there.

The urban archipelago of New York City’s islands (population 8,175,133), or the ‘end’ of the river in the Chesapeake near Annapolis’ historic mini-urbanity, both seem a long way from local frameworks of earth in the mid-Susquehanna Valley, but are only each about 3 hours away by car. The mythical headwaters are more distant, about 4 hours by expressway, less time than it takes earth to flow in the river from the headwaters to our mid-valley confluence of the West and North branches. At the headwaters, Otsego Lake still opens up a clearing in imaginary endless Eastern Woodlands, as it did under its name of Lake Glimmerglass for Hawkeye in James Fenimore Cooper’s legendary green world, and in the pioneering nature writing of his daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper. In summer the pristine green Doubleday field of the Baseball Hall of Fame coexists with the lawn that marks the site of the Cooper manse, a traffic jam of American ‘green world’ mythology where a statue of James Fenimore broods over crowds visiting the baseball museum but not him.

It is all of course both the same and different earth, and Earth, as the overgrown garden that I tended with my grandfather as a boy in a backyard in inner-city Chicago, listening to his memories of growing up on a nearby farm swallowed by the city, fantasizing my own Eden in a raspberry patch amid grids of streets flowing downtown to the Loop from out of Thomas Jefferson’s right-angled head, shooting the occasional rapids of a lost diagonal Indian trail. Chicago’s grid, now featuring sodium streetlights blocking the stars and security cameras focusing us back on ourselves in the self-proclaimed ‘city in a garden,’ like myself, and the Susquehanna Valley, are all earth and the Earth, but different worlds amid it. As in Yggdrasil’s entwinements, the worlds entangle both rhizomically and arboreally, as in the cosmic tree in Genesis, however bifurcated by the objectifying gaze of Adam and Eve.

Martin Heidegger helped apply his friend Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics to views of the earth, and while in postwar isolation in a Black Forest cottage helped lay the groundwork for current environmental philosophy, despite his politically reprehensible past. Heidegger described Earth as the region of the withholding of what he termedphusis, the mystery of nature that is not objectively present Being. As environmental philosopher Bruce Foltz glosses Heidegger today, ‘The earth is that whence phusis arises… the closed and self-secluding region that ultimately eluded Greek ontology… Nature as earth is not primarily that “from which” things are made but rather that “whence” self-emerging, self-unfolding, and self-opening arise and “unto which” they recede… The earth allows coming-forth’ (Foltz, 1995, 136).

That ultimately postmodern view of the earth finds suggestive parallels in the ninth-century Periphyseon by the early Irish philosopher John Scotus Eriugena. He defined Nature as both being and non-being, and earth (terra, land or region) as a ‘mystic name’ signifying the restored wholeness of nature, imbued with the divine energies, in theophany or divine manifestation (Eriugena, 1987, 589). ‘Our bodies are placed on this earth or surrounded by this air…bodies within bodies’ like ‘the fish in the sea’ (Eriugena, 1987, 70). His exegesis in his Periphyseon, Book 4, Chapter 4, compares Christ’s Resurrection to a re-synergized ‘earth of nature,’ or ‘His earth,’ uniting earth and Paradise as non-objectified process, in an experiential dialectic of apophasis:Paradise is not a localized or particular piece of woodland on earth, but a spiritual garden sown with the seeds of the virtues and planted in human nature, or, to be more precise, is nothing else but the human substance itself created in the image of God, in which the Tree of Life, that is the Word and wisdom of God, gives fruit to all life; and in the midst of which streams forth the Fountain of all good things, which again is the Divine Wisdom. … In this intelligible Paradise God goes walking. (Eriugena, 1987, 500)

Eriugena throughout the Periphyseon uses the Latin term terra – earth, land, or region – as a mystical name for Creation when experienced in relation with Paradise through the Tree of Life. Terra in its energized (or, as we might term it, non-objectified) state is for him ‘the bliss of eternal life and the stability of the Primordial Causes, from which all things which are have their origin…the fertile soil of the Primordial Causes’ (Eriugena, 1987, 520–521). The primordial causes are Eriugena’s adaptation of the logoi that St. Maximus the Confessor developed as activities of the Logos. In their effects as theophanies, these ‘word-harmonies’ interpenetrate and emerge from the earth. The earth thus functions in a sense as the ultimate Deleuze-Guattarian-style ‘plane of immanence,’ a relational sense of desire as different from Western possessive desire of lack as psychoanalytic models are from the Tao, while also however participating in transcendent meaning.

If earth, like Shakespeare’s Arden, is a palimpsest of layered memories and physicalities, words flickering in and out of metonymy, the divine logoi (or harmonies) are typed in some respects by today’s ecosemiotics. They open a sense of the dominion given unfallen humanity in the earthly garden of Paradise (which, restored, spans the earthly and the heavenly) as reason in the sense of harmony – an experiential semiosis constituting the natural symbolism of the body as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1970). ‘All living things are critics,’ interpreting signs, as Kenneth Burke noted in the opening of his Permanence and Change (Burke, 1984, 1). Modern physics, in notions of the multiverse, quantum entanglements and the anthropic principle, likewise emphasizes potential relationality in the cosmos that turns our abstracting old scientific matrix of sociobiological time on its head. Resulting postmodern notions of temporality and non-temporality oddly remind us of the more ancient and personal senses of Earth.earth as experience.

C.S. Lewis, translating medieval and Renaissance notions of planets into fantasy and science fiction, included in his space trilogy the idea that each planet hosts an embodying spirit, an Oyarsa. Although Earth’s angel is ‘bent,’ a.k.a. Satan, a figure of what in modern terms might be called the objectification of Earth, ‘There is no Oyarsa in Heaven who has not got his representative on Earth,’ explains the hero Ransom (a space-traveling philologist loosely based on Tolkien, in the same way that Tolkien loosely based Treebeard on Lewis). ‘And there is no world where you could not meet a little unfallen partner of our own black Archon, a kind of other self. That is why there was an Italian Saturn as well as a Heavenly one, and a Cretan Jove as well as an Olympian. It was these early wraiths of the high intelligences that men met in old times when they reported that they had seen the gods’ (Lewis, 1996, 313). But if the chief spirit of our objectified ‘silent planet’ was ‘bent,’ a.k.a. the fallen angel, then who is the pre-modern type of Earth.earth, originally good and beautiful? A feminine figure of Mother Earth, in various forms, becomes today reconfigured in the Gaia Hypothesis, as advanced by the late biologist Lynn Margulis among others. The complementarity of biological sex becomes a symbolic reality, subverting social modern constructions of binarized gender and of essentialized/consumerized sexualities, in experience of Earth.

To early medieval Christians, such mystery of a feminine-gendered earth resonated bodily in the figure of the Mother of God, identified in Byzantine hymns as the noetic Paradise, Jacob’s Ladder spanning earth and heaven, containing the Creator in her womb, while contained in God. Luce Irigaray has noted how a double-enfolding landscape of the female body models a landscape in consonance with nature that is both being and non-being, but in personal bodily ways (Casey, 1998, 321–330). Iconography identified the Mother of God with the enclosed garden, the ‘park’ at the root meaning of the biblical word Paradise, the garden and the life-giving stream of Eden, both bride and Mother of God, and in a sense thus transforming the nature of both the human and the divine. In the seventh-century words of St. Andrew of Crete: ‘Conception without seed; nativity past understanding, form a Mother who never knew a man; childbearing undefiled. For the birth of God makes both natures new. Therefore, as Bride and Mother of God, with true worship all generations magnify thee’ (Matthewes-Green, 2006, 179). The Mother of God, at once the Bride of God, turns the sense of Earth.earth inside out. Our sense of both the natures of God and humanity are transformed in that figure of Earth.earth as Mother and Bride of God.

The twentieth-century writer Philip Sherrard, a translator of the collection of patristic writings known as the Philokalia[‘the love of the beautiful’], related the figure of Mary to both the feminine-gendered divine Wisdom or Sophia of theLogos, flowing forth from Paradise, and to Earth.earth:She is Earth as a single immaterial feminine divinity, and she is earth as a manifold, material reality. She is herself the Body of the cosmic Christ, the created matrix in whom the divine Logos eternally takes flesh. She is the bridge that unites God to the world, the world to God, and it is she that bestows on the world its eternal and sacred value. She is the seal of its sacred identity. (Sherrard, 2004, 181)

In medieval cosmology that touches the postmodern but lightly skips across modernity, Mary becomes ‘real symbol’ of Earth.earth spanning Arden.Eden. In her figure the semiotics of life come charged with energy. Thus monasteries became known as the gardens of the Theotokos, and so in the manmade deserts of clear-cut Ethiopian highlands, Google Earth today discloses green groves around ancient churches that guarded and nurtured their trees (like the sacred trees of early Irish monasteries) as living memories of the savanna of Paradise. Such non-modern insights extend social justice to environmental justice, by a realization of ‘our’ supposed objects as indeed numinous gifts shared by us all.

Human song as life mingles with that of birds under the cosmic tree on earth. The logoi or harmonies and purposes of Creation, including ourselves, sing as birds in the branches of the tree of contemplation of the Logos/Harmony, as Maximus put it (Thunberg, 1997, 138–139). Yet the singing or semiosis of the earth calls into question the normality of the discourses of our simulacra worlds of self and society. It engages us with the other as we put on and shed disguises in layers of meaning amid our vanishing Ardens, still personalized in the intersections of time and eternity embodied in the living symbols of trees – medievally the ‘cross’ between the transcendentally semiotic and the immanently incarnational.

Amiens, a courtier-in-exile in As You Like It, thus appropriately put the ambivalent yet beguiling terms of our earthly sojourn into homely song in the twilight borderland of Arden, finished and countered by the self-styled fool Jacques. Very simply, under a cosmic-yet-real tree, the song touches first on the medieval forest of adventure and trans-species harmony, then suggests ascetic sustainability in the greenwood, hinting of post-human futures interweaving categories of human and non-human on earth:

Amiens

Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat:
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live i’th’sun
Seeking the food he eats
And pleased with what he gets:
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.Jacques:
If it do come to pass
That any man turn ass,
Leaving his wealth and ease,
A stubborn will to please,
Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame:¹
Here shall he see
Gross fools as he,
An [if only] he will come to me.
(Shakespeare, 1992, 2.5.302–303)

 

Notes

¹ It has been suggested that ‘ducdame’ is a nonsense word, but also could mean ‘lead him to me’ (from Latin), ‘come to me’ (from Welsh), or a Gypsy term to attract customers, meaning ‘I foretell.’ It could also reference a woman (‘dame’) leading a man, which we here could interpret in terms of Mother Earth.

 

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21. Shakespeare, W. 1992. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. D. Bevington. New York: Harper Collins.
22. Sherrard, P. 2004. Human Image: World Image. The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology. Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey.
23. Thunberg, L. 1997. Man and the Cosmos: The Vision of St. Maximus the Confessor. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
24. Von Uexküll, J. 1982. The Theory of Meaning. Semiotica 42(1): 25–82.

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Alfred Kentigern Siewers is an Associate Professor of English and an Affiliated Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at Bucknell University. The essay first appeared in PostMedieval 4.1.He also co-edits the Stories of the Susquehanna Valley.

 

Two Stories

 

 

Kate Chopin 

 

 

 

The Kiss

It was still quite light out of doors, but inside with the curtains drawn and the smouldering fire sending out a dim, uncertain glow, the room was full of deep shadows.

Brantain sat in one of these shadows; it had overtaken him and he did not mind. The obscurity lent him courage to keep his eves fastened as ardently as he liked upon the girl who sat in the firelight.

She was very handsome, with a certain fine, rich coloring that belongs to the healthy brune type. She was quite composed, as she idly stroked the satiny coat of the cat that lay curled in her lap, and she occasionally sent a slow glance into the shadow where her companion sat. They were talking low, of indifferent things which plainly were not the things that occupied their thoughts. She knew that he loved her-a frank, blustering fellow without guile enough to conceal his feelings, and no desire to do so. For two weeks past he had sought her society eagerly and persistently. She was confidently waiting for him to declare himself and she meant to accept him. The rather insignificant and unattractive Brantain was enormously rich; and she liked and required the entourage which wealth could give her.

During one of the pauses between their talk of the last tea and the next reception the door opened and a young man entered whom Brantain knew quite well. The girl turned her face toward him. A stride or two brought him to her side, and bending over her chair — before she could suspect his intention, for she did not realize that he had not seen her visitor — he pressed an ardent, lingering kiss upon her lips.

Brantain slowly arose; so did the girl arise, but quickly, and the newcomer stood between them, a little amusement and some defiance struggling with the confusion in his face.

“I believe,” stammered Brantain, “I see that I have stayed too long. I — I had no idea — that is, I must wish you good-by.” He was clutching his hat with both hands, and probably did not perceive that she was extending her hand to him, her presence of mind had not completely deserted her; but she could not have trusted herself to speak.

“Hang me if I saw him sitting there, Nattie! I know it’s deuced awkward for you. But I hope you’ll forgive me this once — this very first break. Why, what’s the matter?”

“Don’t touch me; don’t come near me,” she returned angrily. “What do you mean by entering the house without ringing?”

“I came in with your brother, as I often do,” he answered coldly, in self-justification. “We came in the side way. He went upstairs and I came in here hoping to find you. The explanation is simple enough and ought to satisfy you that the misadventure was unavoidable. But do say that you forgive me, Nathalie,” he entreated, softening.

“Forgive you! You don’t know what you are talking about. Let me pass. It depends upon — a good deal whether I ever forgive you.”

At that next reception which she and Brantain had been talking about she approached the young man with a delicious frankness of manner when she saw him there.

“Will you let me speak to you a moment or two, Mr. Brantain?” she asked with an engaging but perturbed smile. He seemed extremely unhappy; but when she took his arm and walked away with him, seeking a retired corner, a ray of hope mingled with the almost comical misery of his expression. She was apparently very outspoken.

“Perhaps I should not have sought this interview, Mr. Brantain; but — but, oh, I have been very uncomfortable, almost miserable since that little encounter the other afternoon. When I thought how you might have misinterpreted it, and believed things” — hope was plainly gaining the ascendancy over misery in Brantain’s round, guileless face — “Of course, I know it is nothing to you, but for my own sake I do want you to understand that Mr. Harvy is an intimate friend of long standing. Why, we have always been like cousins — like brother and sister, I may say. He is my brother’s most intimate associate and often fancies that he is entitled to the same privileges as the family. Oh, I know it is absurd, uncalled for, to tell you this; undignified even,” she was almost weeping, “but it makes so much difference to me what you think of — of me.” Her voice had grown very low and agitated. The misery had all disappeared from Brantain’s face.

“Then you do really care what I think, Miss Nathalie? May I call you Miss Nathalie?” They turned into a long, dim corridor that was lined on either side with tall, graceful plants. They walked slowly to the very end of it. When they turned to retrace their steps Brantain’s face was radiant and hers was triumphant.

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

Harvy was among the guests at the wedding; and he sought her out in a rare moment when she stood alone.

“Your husband,” he said, smiling, “has sent me over to kiss you.”

A quick blush suffused her face and round polished throat. “I suppose it’s natural for a man to feel and act generously on an occasion of this kind. He tells me he doesn’t want his marriage to interrupt wholly that pleasant intimacy which has existed between you and me. I don’t know what you’ve been telling him,” with an insolent smile, “but he has sent me here to kiss you.”

She felt like a chess player who, by the clever handling of his pieces, sees the game taking the course intended. Her eyes were bright and tender with a smile as they glanced up into his; and her lips looked hungry for the kiss which they invited.

“But, you know,” he went on quietly, “I didn’t tell him so, it would have seemed ungrateful, but I can tell you. I’ve stopped kissing women; it’s dangerous.”

Well, she had Brantain and his million left. A person can’t have everything in this world; and it was a little unreasonable of her to expect it.

 

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

The Storm

I

The leaves were so still that even Bibi thought it was going to rain. Bobint, who was accustomed to converse on terms of perfect equality with his little son, called the child’s attention to certain sombre clouds that were rolling with sinister intention from the west, accompanied by a sullen, threatening roar. They were at Friedheimer’s store and decided to remain there till the storm had passed. They sat within the door on two empty kegs. Bibi was four years old and looked very wise.

“Mama’ll be ‘fraid, yes, he suggested with blinking eyes.

“She’ll shut the house. Maybe she got Sylvie helpin’ her this evenin’,” Bobint responded reassuringly.

“No; she ent got Sylvie. Sylvie was helpin’ her yistiday,’ piped Bibi.

Bobint arose and going across to the counter purchased a can of shrimps, of which Calixta was very fond. Then he retumed to his perch on the keg and sat stolidly holding the can of shrimps while the storm burst. It shook the wooden store and seemed to be ripping great furrows in the distant field. Bibi laid his little hand on his father’s knee and was not afraid.

II

Calixta, at home, felt no uneasiness for their safety. She sat at a side window sewing furiously on a sewing machine. She was greatly occupied and did not notice the approaching storm. But she felt very warm and often stopped to mop her face on which the perspiration gathered in beads. She unfastened her white sacque at the throat. It began to grow dark, and suddenly realizing the situation she got up hurriedly and went about closing windows and doors.

Out on the small front gallery she had hung Bobint’s Sunday clothes to dry and she hastened out to gather them before the rain fell. As she stepped outside, Alce Laballire rode in at the gate. She had not seen him very often since her marriage, and never alone. She stood there with Bobint’s coat in her hands, and the big rain drops began to fall. Alce rode his horse under the shelter of a side projection where the chickens had huddled and there were plows and a harrow piled up in the corner.

“May I come and wait on your gallery till the storm is over, Calixta?” he asked.

Come ‘long in, M’sieur Alce.”

His voice and her own startled her as if from a trance, and she seized Bobint’s vest. Alce, mounting to the porch, grabbed the trousers and snatched Bibi’s braided jacket that was about to be carried away by a sudden gust of wind. He expressed an intention to remain outside, but it was soon apparent that he might as well have been out in the open: the water beat in upon the boards in driving sheets, and he went inside, closing the door after him. It was even necessary to put something beneath the door to keep the water out.

“My! what a rain! It’s good two years sence it rain’ like that,” exclaimed Calixta as she rolled up a piece of bagging and Alce helped her to thrust it beneath the crack.

She was a little fuller of figure than five years before when she married; but she had lost nothing of her vivacity. Her blue eyes still retained their melting quality; and her yellow hair, dishevelled by the wind and rain, kinked more stubbornly than ever about her ears and temples.

The rain beat upon the low, shingled roof with a force and clatter that threatened to break an entrance and deluge them there. They were in the dining roomthe sitting roomthe general utility room. Adjoining was her bed room, with Bibi’s couch along side her own. The door stood open, and the room with its white, monumental bed, its closed shutters, looked dim and mysterious.

Alce flung himself into a rocker and Calixta nervously began to gather up from the floor the lengths of a cotton sheet which she had been sewing.

lf this keeps up, Dieu sait if the levees goin’ to stan it!” she exclaimed.

“What have you got to do with the levees?”

“I got enough to do! An’ there’s Bobint with Bibi out in that stormif he only didn’ left Friedheimer’s!”

“Let us hope, Calixta, that Bobint’s got sense enough to come in out of a cyclone.”

She went and stood at the window with a greatly disturbed look on her face. She wiped the frame that was clouded with moisture. It was stiflingly hot. Alce got up and joined her at the window, looking over her shoulder. The rain was coming down in sheets obscuring the view of far-off cabins and enveloping the distant wood in a gray mist. The playing of the lightning was incessant. A bolt struck a tall chinaberry tree at the edge of the field. It filled all visible space with a blinding glare and the crash seemed to invade the very boards they stood upon.

Calixta put her hands to her eyes, and with a cry, staggered backward. Alce’s arm encircled her, and for an instant he drew her close and spasmodically to him.

“Bont!” she cried, releasing herself from his encircling arm and retreating from the window, the house’ll go next! If I only knew w’ere Bibi was!” She would not compose herself; she would not be seated. Alce clasped her shoulders and looked into her face. The contact of her warm, palpitating body when he had unthinkingly drawn her into his arms, had aroused all the old-time infatuation and desire for her flesh.

“Calixta,” he said, “don’t be frightened. Nothing can happen. The house is too low to be struck, with so many tall trees standing about. There! aren’t you going to be quiet? say, aren’t you?” He pushed her hair back from her face that was warm and steaming. Her lips were as red and moist as pomegranate seed. Her white neck and a glimpse of her full, firm bosom disturbed him powerfully. As she glanced up at him the fear in her liquid blue eyes had given place to a drowsy gleam that unconsciously betrayed a sensuous desire. He looked down into her eyes and there was nothing for him to do but to gather her lips in a kiss. It reminded him of Assumption.

“Do you rememberin Assumption, Calixta?” he asked in a low voice broken by passion. Oh! she remembered; for in Assumption he had kissed her and kissed and kissed her; until his senses would well nigh fail, and to save her he would resort to a desperate flight. If she was not an immaculate dove in those days, she was still inviolate; a passionate creature whose very defenselessness had made her defense, against which his honor forbade him to prevail. Nowwell, nowher lips seemed in a manner free to be tasted, as well as her round, white throat and her whiter breasts.

They did not heed the crashing torrents, and the roar of the elements made her laugh as she lay in his arms. She was a revelation in that dim, mysterious chamber; as white as the couch she lay upon. Her firm, elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily that the sun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undying life of the world.

The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached.

When he touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting his lips. Her mouth was a fountain of delight. And when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life’s mystery.

He stayed cushioned upon her, breathless, dazed, enervated, with his heart beating like a hammer upon her. With one hand she clasped his head, her lips lightly touching his forehead. The other hand stroked with a soothing rhythm his muscular shoulders.

The growl of the thunder was distant and passing away. The rain beat softly upon the shingles, inviting them to drowsiness and sleep. But they dared not yield.

III

The rain was over; and the sun was turning the glistening green world into a palace of gems. Calixta, on the gallery, watched Alce ride away. He turned and smiled at her with a beaming face; and she lifted her pretty chin in the air and laughed aloud.

Bobint and Bibi, trudging home, stopped without at the cistern to make themselves presentable.

“My! Bibi, w’at will yo’ mama say! You ought to be ashame’. You oughta’ put on those good pants. Look at ‘em! An’ that mud on yo’ collar! How you got that mud on yo’ collar, Bibi? I never saw such a boy!” Bibi was the picture of pathetic resignation. Bobint was the embodiment of serious solicitude as he strove to remove from his own person and his son’s the signs of their tramp over heavy roads and through wet fields. He scraped the mud off Bibi’s bare legs and feet with a stick and carefully removed all traces from his heavy brogans. Then, prepared for the worstthe meeting with an over-scrupulous housewife, they entered cautiously at the back door.

Calixta was preparing supper. She had set the table and was dripping coffee at the hearth. She sprang up as they came in.

“Oh, Bobint! You back! My! but I was uneasy. W’ere you been during the rain? An’ Bibi? he ain’t wet? he ain’t hurt?” She had clasped Bibi and was kissing him effusively. Bobint’s explanations and apologies which he had been composing all along the way, died on his lips as Calixta felt him to see if he were dry, and seemed to express nothing but satisfaction at their safe return.

“I brought you some shrimps, Calixta,” offered Bobint, hauling the can from his ample side pocket and laying it on the table.

“Shrimps! Oh, Bobint! you too good fo’ anything!” and she gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek that resounded, “J’vous rponds, we’ll have a feas’ to-night! umph-umph!”

Bobint and Bibi began to relax and enjoy themselves, and when the three seated themselves at table they laughed much and so loud that anyone might have heard them as far away as Laballire’s.

IV

Alce Laballire wrote to his wife, Clarisse, that night. It was a loving letter, full of tender solicitude. He told her not to hurry back, but if she and the babies liked it at Biloxi, to stay a month longer. He was getting on nicely; and though he missed them, he was willing to bear the separation a while longer realizing that their health and pleasure were the first things to be considered.

V

As for Clarisse, she was charmed upon receiving her husband’s letter. She and the babies were doing well. The society was agreeable; many of her old friends and acquaintances were at the bay. And the first free breath since her marriage seemed to restore the pleasant liberty of her maiden days. Devoted as she was to her husband, their intimate conjugal life was something which she was more than willing to forego for a while.

So the storm passed and everyone was happy.

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

 

Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong — and Why It Matters

Jim Hinch

One year ago this month, Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt stepped to the podium at the Cipriani Club in New York City to accept the National Book Award for nonfiction. Greenblatt won for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, a 356-page study of the transformative cultural power wielded by an ancient Latin poem called De Rerum Natura by a first-century BC Epicurean philosopher named Titus Lucretius Caro. Holding back tears, Greenblatt thanked, among other people, his publishers at W.W. Norton for committing to “the insane idea that they could sell a book about the discovery of an ancient poem by a Renaissance humanist to more than a handful of people.” In fact, by the time Greenblatt addressed the Cipriani Club’s gold-domed ballroom, The Swerve already had spent more than a month on the New York Times bestseller list, just as had Greenblatt’s previous book, Will in the World, a Shakespeare biography that came close to winning its own National Book Award (it was a finalist). Five months later, The Swerve won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The book remains a strong seller on Amazon.

Clearly, The Swerve spoke to far more than a handful of people. But as American book lovers gear up for another awards season — the National Book Award this month, followed by the PEN/Faulkner Award in March, then the Pulitzers in April — the acclaim showered on Greenblatt’s book about the discovery of an ancient poem raises profound questions about just what these awards really mean. Simply put, The Swerve did not deserve the awards it received because it is filled with factual inaccuracies and founded upon a view of history not shared by serious scholars of the periods Greenblatt studies. That such a book could win two of America’s highest literary honors suggests something doesn’t work in the awards system itself.

The Swerve, in fact, is two books, one deserving of an award, the other not. The first book is an engaging literary detective story about an intrepid Florentine bibliophile named Poggio Braccionlini, who, in 1417, stumbled upon a 500-year-old copy of De Rerum Natura in a German monastery and set the poem free from centuries of neglect to work its intellectual magic on the world. This Swerve, brimming with vivid evocations of Renaissance papal court machinations and a fascinating exploration of Lucretius’s influence on luminaries ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci, to Galileo, to Thomas Jefferson, is wonderful.

The second Swerve is an anti-religious polemic. According to this book, the lucky fate of De Rerum Natura is a proxy for the much more consequential story of how modern western secular culture liberated itself from the deadening hand of centuries of medieval religious dogmatism. “Many of [De Rerum Natura’s] core arguments are among the foundations on which modern life has been constructed,” Greenblatt writes in The Swerve. “Almost every one of the work’s key principles was an abomination to right-thinking Christian orthodoxy.” In other words, The World Became Modern when it learned to stop believing in God and start believing in itself. Here’s how Greenblatt describes the epic transformation Lucretius helped bring about:

Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. […] The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul. In short, it became possible — never easy, but possible — in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.

Lucretius’s role in this cultural revolution was to inject, with a flavoring of poetic wonder, the idea that God and religious faith not only are unnecessary for personal fulfillment but in fact are incompatible with human happiness and the pursuit of truth. Among the influential themes Greenblatt finds in De Rerum Natura: there is no God, no gods, no creator of the universe; all religions are invariably cruel; the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain; the chief enemy of pleasure is not pain but delusion.

Prior to the revival of such insights, according to The Swerve, western Europe endured a long, suffocating era dominated by an obscurantist, pleasure-hating religious ideology. Greenblatt’s characterization of the Middle Ages, scattered throughout The Swerve, is summed up in an article he wrote for The New Yorker shortly before the book was published. The article synthesizes various passages from The Swerve:

It is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing. As the Roman Empire crumbled and Christianity became ascendant, as cities decayed, trade declined, and an anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the ancient system of education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work, scribes were no longer given manuscripts to copy. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books. Lucretius’s poem, so incompatible with any cult of the gods, was attacked, ridiculed, burned, or ignored, and, like Lucretius himself, eventually forgotten.

The idea of pleasure and beauty that the work advanced was forgotten with it. Theology provided an explanation for the chaos of the Dark Ages: human beings were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them. God cared about human beings, just as a father cared about his wayward children, and the sign of that care was anger. It was only through pain and punishment that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation. A hatred of pleasure-seeking, a vision of God’s providential rage, and an obsession with the afterlife: these were death knells of everything Lucretius represented.

This is a powerful vision of the world entering a prolonged period of cultural darkness. If it were true, then Greenblatt’s second Swerve, the anti-religious polemic, also would deserve every award and plaudit it won. However, Greenblatt’s vision is not true, not even remotely. As even a general reader can gather from a text as basic as Cambridge University historian George Holmes’ Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe(published in 1988 and still available on Amazon): “Western civilization was created in medieval Europe. The forms of thought and action which we take for granted in modern Europe and America, which we have exported to other substantial portions of the globe, and from which indeed we cannot escape, were implanted in the mentalities of our ancestors in the struggles of the medieval centuries.” Greenblatt’s caricatured Middle Ages might have passed muster with Enlightenment-era historians. Present-day scholarship, especially the findings of archeologists and specialists in church and social history, tells a vastly more complicated, interesting and indeterminate story.

I’m at a loss to explain how two distinguished prize juries managed to overlook the fact that The Swerve’s animating thesis is at best “questionable,” and at worst “unwarranted,” as Renaissance historian John Monfasani put it this summer in the online journalReviews in History. Still, to make clear the extent of The Swerve’s errors, I’ll go through Greenblatt’s portrait of the Middle Ages point by point. First, it may be true that “it is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing.” But that didn’t happen in medieval Europe. Indeed the Middle Ages are considered Europe’s most bookish era, a time when books — Christian, Greek and Roman alike — were accorded near totemic authority. Medieval readers and writers (not just clergy — lay culture was widely influenced by texts and documents, especially following the 10th century) were apt to believe anything they read in an old book just because it was old and from a book. This was especially true if the book happened to be by a writer like Lucretius, a classical author whose words therefore automatically carried the imprimatur of truth.

There are declines in written evidence during the centuries immediately following the wane of Rome but that’s not because medieval people suddenly became illiterate or bullied by Church culture police. Rather, during those centuries Europe was a primary destination for waves of migration from the interior of Asia and regions east of the Baltic Sea. Most of these migratory peoples preserved their cultural memories orally and so they did not pay attention to books while plundering medieval monasteries, where most libraries were located. Nevertheless it did not take long for these peoples to assimilate to written culture. Anglo-Saxon England, colonized from the sixth century primarily by waves of illiterate Germanic tribes was within decades considered Europe’s finest center of book production, home to such gorgeous volumes as the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Along these lines it is simply untrue to assert that classical culture was ever lost, ignored or suppressed during the Middle Ages. As Garry Wills noted last month in The New York Review of Books (reviewing the latest publication by Augustine biographer Peter Brown): it is a “discredited […] myth […] that the Roman Empire (but only in the West) ‘fell’ overnight when barbarians invaded and brought it down. The light of classical times blinked out and we stumbled straightway into the Dark Ages.” Writers throughout the medieval period read, copied and were profoundly influenced by texts such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The earliest manuscript of the Metamorphoses dates from the ninth century, as do the two earliest copies of De Rerum Natura. In fact, as Cambridge classicist Michael Reeve pointed out five years ago in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, scholars have long detected “Lucretian influence in north-Italian writers of the ninth to eleventh century, in the Paduan pre-humanists about 1300, in Dante, and in Petrarch and Bocaccio.” Greenblatt cites the Cambridge Companion numerous times in his endnotes. Did he read it?

Greek learning was similarly influential during the Middle Ages. Greek texts, brought by Muslim and Jewish scholars who had rediscovered thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle in libraries in Mesopotamia, began filtering into Europe almost immediately following eighth-century Muslim conquests in Spain and Asia Minor. By the 12th century, Aristotle was widely known to European scholars, and major theologians such as Thomas Aquinas spent the 13th century attempting to form a grand synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. Chaucer, at the end of his poem Troilus and Criseyde, written in the late 1300s, sends his poem off to seek its fortune at the feet of “Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan and Statius.” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a weird and wonderful poem written probably by a late-14th-century clergyman for the entertainment of a rural gentry household in the northwest of England, begins with an account of the fall of Troy.

Equally untrue is Greenblatt’s claim that medieval culture was characterized by “a hatred of pleasure-seeking, a vision of God’s providential rage and an obsession with the afterlife.” I know Greenblatt has read Chaucer. He’s quoted from him in numerous books. Has he forgotten the ribald pleasure-seeking in The Canterbury Tales? What about the 13th-century French courtly love epic The Romance of the Rose? The twelfth-century Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes? I find no rage in Dante’s complex vision of human morality and providential grace in the Divine Comedy. Nor do I detect an ounce of asceticism in the ravishing unicorn tapestries in the Cloisters Museum in New York. Or in the rose window in Chartres. Or in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. Or in the gracious courts of the Alhambra.

Similarly, it is a gross distortion to describe medieval people as “an anxious populace” scanning “the horizon for barbarian armies.” By “barbarian” Greenblatt presumably means the Goths, Vikings and other non-western-European peoples who migrated out of Asia and the Baltic regions beginning in the first century. Scholars of Late Antiquity know that this process of migration was primarily characterized by gradual colonization and assimilation, not decisive battles fought by bloodthirsty hordes. (The battles get more prominent mention in written sources but archeology tells a different story.) One of those hordes, otherwise known as the Normans (or “North-Men”), migrated from Scandinavia first to northern France, then to England, and finally to Sicily, where beginning in the 11th century they founded a kingdom that went on to become one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan centers. Medieval Sicily was a thriving melting pot of Muslims, Jews and Christians. Along with Spain, Constantinople and the cities of northern Italy, it formed one of the main conduits to medieval Europe for the riches of Islamic civilization, riches that include many of the scientific and cultural advancements Greenblatt erroneously traces to early modern Europe. Perhaps Greenblatt could have written about this Sicilian Swerve. But then of course he’d have had to open up his account of the Middle Ages to a far more complex story of multiple swerves, connections and continuities. He’d have had to find a new name for his book. He’d have had to write a different book altogether. 

The Swerve, however, is what we got. And nothing in its depiction of the Middle Ages is as tellingly wrong as its bizarre excursus into the practice of medieval monastic self-flagellation. About a third of the way through The Swerve Greenblatt suddenly begins quoting various passages, mostly from medieval saint’s lives (notoriously unreliable as historical evidence), that describe the kind of self-scourging familiar to viewers of medieval film noir — Hollywood blockbusters such as “The Name of the Rose” or “The Da Vinci Code.” These lurid accounts culminate in the claim that “a vast body of evidence confirms that such theaters of pain […] were widespread in the Middle Ages.” A check of the endnotes shows that Greenblatt cites no such “vast body of evidence” and of course he doesn’t. There is no evidence because self-flagellation was not widespread in the Middle Ages. Not in homes, not in churches, not even in monasteries. In fact medieval monasteries were among the least religious and most worldly institutions of their time. Like modern research universities, medieval monasteries were wealthy centers of learning and power whose leaders rotated into and out of careers in secular government. Waves of monastic reform efforts testify to a perennial complaint in the Middle Ages that religious authorities, far from enforcing an ascetic, pleasure-hating discipline, in fact were too luxurious, too cozy with the rich, too willing to dispense with their religious vows.

I mention the self-flagellants because — in a touch worthy of Greenblatt himself — this particular tic in The Swerve turns out to be key to unlocking both the book’s underlying worldview and the reason that worldview won such praise. Here is Greenblatt on the whippers:

The ordinary self-protective, pleasure-seeking impulses of the lay public could not hold out against the passionate convictions and overwhelming prestige of their spiritual leaders. Beliefs and practices that had been the preserve of religious specialists, men and women set apart from the vulgar, everyday imperatives of the “world,” found their way into the mainstream, where they thrived in societies of flagellants and periodic bursts of mass hysteria. What was once in effect a radical counterculture insisted with remarkable success that it represented the core values of all believing Christians.

Greenblatt, as I mentioned, does not cite any primary sources attesting to widespread medieval self-flagellation, so I don’t know where he got this idea. What I’m more interested in is the notion that such asceticism represented “the core values of all believing Christians” in the Middle Ages. In fact no serious scholar would claim to know what “the core values of all believing Christians” were, in the Middle Ages or in any other period, because historical sources never yield enough unambiguous information to make such overstated claims. And yet it is here, where his evidence is weakest, that Greenblatt lays most stress in his argument. And of course he does, because The Swerve is a story about transformation and triumph. And without a caricatured Middle Ages of self-hating religious dogmatists Greenblatt has no clean-cut transformation and no clean-cut triumph. The complex truth about medieval Europe, indeed about all historical periods — that pleasure and pain, love and hate, faith and doubt, curiosity and stupidity, superstition and rationality, existed everywhere and at all times in complex and varying measure — is not so easily packaged as a narrative and so is less likely to top bestseller lists. But that doesn’t absolve Greenblatt of responsibility for getting his facts right. Unless, of course, that wasn’t his goal.

It wasn’t. If Greenblatt remained one of the “tenured radicals” he once was accused of being (by no less a scold than George Will), The Swerve might have told readers that notions such as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are little better than shorthand for arbitrarily bracketed periods of time in which certain changes in the pattern of human life are interpreted as significant and others are not. It might have enumerated the costs of so-called modernity, and the continuities from the past that sustain it, alongside the justifiably celebrated developments. It might have noted that many of the supposed religious values scorned by Lucretius — faith, self-sacrifice, an identity shaped not by individual desire but by family and community — remain widespread in western and non-western cultures and are in no way inimical to human freedom and progress. A truly radical book might have left readers feeling more challenged by the past, less quick to pass judgment and more able to find value in ways of life alien to their own.

Instead, The Swerve’s primary achievement is to flatter like-minded readers with a tall tale of enlightened modern values triumphing over a benighted pre-modern past. It’s no accident, I think, that The Swerve’s imagined Middle Ages bears a strong resemblance to America’s present era of superstitious know-nothing-ism. Or that Lucretius’s secular, principled-pleasure-minded values bear an equally strong resemblance to the values of Greenblatt’s cultural peers — including, presumably, the jurors who awarded him two national literary prizes. The Swerve presents itself as a work of literary history. But really it is a salvo in the culture wars; an effort to lend an aura of historical inevitability to the idea that religious faith has no place in a modern democratic society.

Writing shortly after The Swerve was published, The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda panned Greenblatt’s book as a shallow, derivative “non-fiction potboiler.” Dirda wrote that he couldn’t put his finger on why exactly The Swerve “rubbed me wrong.” I can think of a reason. Unlike other non-fiction potboilers, The Swerve claimed for itself, and received, huge moral and cultural authority it simply didn’t earn. Armed with that authority, the book went on to fool unsuspecting readers (like a reviewer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, who called The Swerve “a chapter in how we became what we are”) into believing that Lucretius, who wrote of placidly watching others suffer secure in the knowledge that all phenomena in the universe are merely a wondrous rearrangement of atoms, somehow symbolizes all that is bright and new in the origin of modern life. (This latter point is developed at length in Morgan Meis’s review of The Swerve in the journal n+1.) Greenblatt obviously admires Lucretius. And, as he wrote in a brief rebuttal to John Monfasani in Reviews in History, “I am of the devil’s party that believes that something significant happened in the Renaissance.” That’s marvelous. But it doesn’t give Greenblatt the right to make stuff up. I would like to think that when America’s literary lions gather to award their best and brightest they are looking for robust factual engagement with the messy complexities of human life, not just intellectual self-congratulation. The honors heaped on The Swerve make me wonder.

I once had a teacher at Berkeley named Robert Brentano, a historian of medieval Europe whose mind crackled with all the restlessness and complexity The Swerve lacks. In an afterword to his most famous book, Two Churches, a study of English and Italian churchmen in the 13th century, Brentano wrote of his desire to dispense with narrative in history altogether. The best historical writing, he wrote, can present “a series of images and ideas whole, clear, bright, and let the transition occur, as it should, without the dullness of written words. Without words, transition becomes beautiful. If I ever have enough nerve, I shall write history completely without transition.”

This awards season I’m rooting for ideas whole, clear and bright. Writing with the nerve to say what’s true. History without transition.

——————————————

(Jim Hinch wrote this piece for Los Angeles Review of Books on December 1, 2012).

¤

Letter from Iowa: Sunil Gangopadhyay

15 June, 1964

313 South Capital

Iowa City, Iowa

U.S.A

 

 

 

Sandipan,

Right now I am resting beneath a largish tree on the bank of this river. Windy it is. And 5 dozen cans of beer. Been watching this white girl in swimming costume. Occasionally I am mildly kicking her bottom—how does that look visually? I am literally resting in this state. But I am not part of this setting.  As soon as I bring my palms closer to my eyes, everything recedes. No woman’s face. No hunger. No thirst. But beer—yes, that is a reality.  Have been reclining on the grass for hours actually. Tried at least 5 times to catch this rabbit but failed miserably.

I was in love with your letter for a couple of days. Especially the letters marked with the red pencil. I knew pretty well that you will not like my story. I have no illusion of delighting you ever with my prose. This is because you have written some great prose at one point. Not anymore. But the kind of magic you have produced—we are simply not close enough. I cannot write such prose. I will not write such prose. But that kind of prose pulls me irresistibly. That you will be one of my readers makes me tremble. Still I write prose. Mostly for money. I do not recall indulging in prose but for monetary consideration. Once I had written a novel—quite unlikely that it will ever get published. I do not fear you though for my poetry. I write poetry like prose and shall continue to do so. I have no qualms about that kind of a style. Shakti has written some extraordinary lines. Much, much deeper and larger than me—this Shakti. I respect him a lot. But his poems are headless. I cannot write like that and do not want to write like that simply because I do not live that kind of a life. I can relate much more to Utpal. But this, my resting with beer, makes me oblivious to all poetry. There is no poetry, no heart, nothing.

Sandipan, why have you not written much of late? What is this thing about occasional prose pieces?  This habit of yours has attracted you to the Hungry Hangama—this latest fad.  I did forbid you. And you did not trust me. And then you simply distanced yourself gradually. I never stopped Shakti. Shakti is greedy. Utpal too has taken that route. But I knew that you were not greedy. I have often shared a bed with you, stood in the same shadow while walking in the sun. I know very well the contours of my own greed. And therefore, I could instinctively feel that your greed is less than mine. I became deeply uncomfortable, generated some strong aversion to this new phenomenon. I had always felt that to compose in the English language in order to earn cheap accolades in the West is the worst possible form of greed and narcissism.  This feeling has deepened this time here, at Iowa. Would you ever like to be an object of curiosity and pity to the outsider?  I have met some Hungry wallahs here—it is these that drive them at the bedrock.  Every single day I receive some invitation or the other to write in English. I have refused.  Steadfastly.  There are 7 crores of potential Bangla readers for me. Much more than French and Italian. I am just doing fine. I write poetry and have no intention to translate my sensibilities. If you wish to access my thoughts in English—do translate me. Happily. I had officially come here to do this kind of mutual back-patting. So far I have resisted that lure.

But the real problem with Hungry is not English. The Bangla is even worse. They try shortcut stuff—the idea is to taste readymade fame by abusing and slighting others in the trade.  I hope you do not end up really thinking that Malay has some writerly stuff in him!  I am wondering because in a recent Hindi literary magazine I have a read an effusive piece by you on this Hungry fad. I was rather surprised that a thinker so abstract as you could feel that writings in the Illustrated Weekly merit any real literary discussion! I know the Hungry folks have tried to pit themselves against the Krittibas or Sunil. I could have dismantled that attempt. That I could. But I refrained.  I am telling all this to you because I so much value you as a writer and thinker. There is no trick in this my exhortation Sandipan.

I did not follow very well the kind of new things that have happened at your end.  Why did you send the same letter to four of your friends—us? I could not fully grasp this method. But then again who has given me this right to understand how your mind works!  The point is that once I return to Kolkata, I will sleep peacefully, will walk around rather happily fleet-footed. I do not need any literary-andolan. I really wondered why Malay had published my letter. I hope he has not published any truncated version. That will be so out of the context. I have written to him recently: “If you edit sections of the head or tail of my letters and use some fashionable rubbish like threesome dots or some such instead, I shall box your ears and slap you real hard once I return.” The same is true of your letter. Shakti’s and yours and my private linen is being washed in the public.

But these are ephemera—really. No one can touch you. And I shall stand by you always. We have fought over many issues, Sandipan. But I have thought about you patiently: we cannot do without you. I cannot. In a manner of speaking you are my obverse—your fragmentary-disjointed character, your errors and your treachery—to all these I aspire.  Like a life I never had but so wished for. Whenever I think of any writer in our generation with some real promise, I think of you and only you (except for Tanmay Dutta). There is no one in the city of Kolkata—who will dare touch your subtle body.  You keep on sleeping softly, oh so softly with Rina and tell her those stories from Mars.

I shall reach Kolkata on the 18^th of August.  Have been detained here for sundry reasons. My idiocy, mostly.  There is an outside chance of staying in Paris during late July or in early August. But before that—by mid July I travel to NY City and then to England. How did you even think that I will join a Master’s program here at Iowa? You have lost all sense of proportion! I have troubled you a lot about your writings in Krittibas, but this time I became rather pensive not seeing your imprint in that magazine. Any hukum for me to get something for you from here?

Love,

Sunil

——————————————————————–

Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934-2012) was a poet and novelist from Bengal.

The Hungry Generation Movement,  a literary movement in Bangla, was launched by what is known today as the Hungryalist quartet, i.e. Shakti Chattopdhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury and Debi Roy (alias Haradhon Dhara), during the 1960s in Kolkata. The approach of the Hungryalists was to confront and disturb the prospective readers’ preconceived colonial canons. They took the word Hungry from Geoffrey Chaucer’s line “In Sowre Hungry Tyme” and they drew upon Oswald Spengler’s  idea of non-linear time in a particular culture for philosophical inspiration. This movement is characterized by expression of  a closeness to nature and sometimes by tenets of Gandhianism and Prudhonianism. The works of the participants in the movement appeared in Citylights Journal 1, 2 and 3 published between 1964 and 1966, edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and in special issues of American magazines including Kulchur edited by Lita Hornick, Klactoveedsedsteen edited by Carl Weissner, El Corno Emplunadoedited by Margaret Randall, Evergreen Review edited by Barney Rosset, Salted Feathersedited by Dick Bakken, Intrepid edited by Alan De Loach, and San Francisco Earthquake, during the 1960s.

Sandipan Chattopadhay (1933-2005) was a novelist and prose writer. He was a staunch supporter of the Hungryalism Movement during 1961-65, though he, along with Binoy Majumdar and Shakti Chattopadhyay, left the movement because of literary differences with some other leading figures of the movement.

——————————————-

Translation: HUG

Good Reasons (HUG Fiction)

Anil Menon

Imaginative resistance. I’d heard the chilly phrase for the first time, just a short while ago, in one of New York Public library’s cavernous lecture rooms. Yet it already feels familiar, as if the phrase had always been in my possession. The speaker had been a philosopher of literature from Harvard, one Doctor Tamar Szabo Gendler.

Imaginative resistance, she said, was the unwillingness of readers to imagine morally deviant fictional worlds.

I had been so busy wondering if readers could be, would be, so perverse, I almost didn’t recognize the man in the elegant overcoat outside Macy’s on 34th.

‘Humbert!’

‘Indeed,’ says Humbert Humbert, smiling in that cautious way he has. ‘Cof­fee?’

He doesn’t introduce his young companion. The look they exchange is appar­ently an instruction, because she disappears into Macy’s. There is something about her mouth’s appealing pout that invokes clenched fists and crumpled white sheets.

Over coffee, I tell him about fiction and imaginative resistance.

‘Sounds like a medical term,’ says Humbert, ‘an absolution for cures that fail to cure.’

‘Dr. Gendler’s given a name to one of Hume’s puzzles. Hume claimed that a story can do a great many things, but it cannot persuade a reader that an immoral fictional world is right. It seems there’s a fundamental unwillingness.’

Humbert considers my claim. His fingers grip his cup formally, as if he were drinking tea rather than coffee.

‘Unwilling? My dear fellow, an author seduces. What is seduction without unwillingness?’

‘Let’s not shift topics. Consider this two-line story: In killing her baby, Giselle did the right thing. After all, it was a girl.’

Humbert smiles. ‘And?’

‘Well, which reader will find that story morally acceptable?’

 

1

‘Trivial. I imagine Giselle has some horrid, extremely painful disease, pecu­liar to women. Alas, it is also transmissible and incurable. Why shouldn’t she kill her baby? After all, it’s a girl.’

Even if morality was necessarily independent of the imagination, Humbert went on to say, that very necessity could be used to unbutton the reader.

I remain unconvinced. ‘Let’s try another. Imagine a deviant, a connoisseur of innocence. Nymphets, perhaps.’

He waited, eyes glittering.

‘Now imagine a story in which a nymphet’s mother knowingly gives lodging to the deviant. I dare you to find it moral.’

Humbert puts down his cup. ‘Yes, readers must be dared. I claim it is an allegory about a God, a deviant serpent and a curious child-woman; to wit, Genesis, chapter 3. Didn’t God know what would happen in that Garden? Yet, millions find the tale quite moral. Imagine that!’

His claim had a certain piquancy.

‘Perhaps God’s Hands were tied.’ Humbert has the air of a man nursing a personal sorrow. ‘What must be done may be forgiven. Who cannot forgive necessity?’

It was a Valentine’s day morning, happy, pure, a premature Spring morning on which anything could be forgiven. His companion smiled and waved at us through Macy’s glass windows.

‘She’s in there supposedly to buy me a card, but I imagine I’ll end up buying her a hat. She’s developing quite a passion for hats.’ Humbert sounds resigned. ‘They grow up so fast these days.’

They do indeed. I remember we talked of other things. Teaching. Transi­tions. Raising teenagers. We shared many interests, Humbert Humbert and I. Yes, yes, I’ve heard what people say. I imagine he had good reasons.

- The End -

Anil Menon worked for about nine years in software before wising up, he says, about easier ways to write fiction. His stories can be found in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan, 2009) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and Carl Baxter Society’s Parallax Prize. [He can be reached at iam@anilmenon.com.]

from Guban

 

Abdi Latif Ega

 

The Water Bearer

The journey to the well was long and scary when Twosmo was younger. She would start before the shadows cast, and would usually reach the well when there was a significant shadow in the day. It was scary because the land was an endless darkness. Her camel, a ten foot beast, would not avail her any form of protection from the many dangers lurking out there – the wild animals in search of a succulent morsel before they returned to their dens.

Twosmo, at this tender age, felt she was being thrown to the hyenas in the darkness, shrouded ominously before the break of dawn. Whenever she felt she could not possibly go through with it, the voice of her mother in her head would sternly urge her on, resoundingly stating how it was her duty to the clan, family, and a further duty to her own homestead of the future.

In the light of the day, brought on by an unrelenting sun, the land assumed an indistinguishable form. Every thorn looked like the others, every ant hill looked identical, there were thousands of well-trodden foot paths all around. The small foot paths in the sandy earth, marked by spaces of grass in the ground resembled a translucent head of thinning hair. The trees were mainly thorn trees – all emaciated and small in stature from a sparse diet of nothing butvery little rain-fall. The trees had this incommon with every living thing in this desolate abode of collective harshness.

It was a most barren part of the world. Everything that grew here had to put up a great fight to merely exist. Plants were as fierce as the rest of the environment; they abounded with thorns to ensure life. The lay of the land was unforgiving, cruel as if still despondent from its volcanic eruptions of long ago. Sand-lodged in places where seasonal rivers once flowed. Barren volcanic mountain ranges in the background presided over everything, stoically, aloof to the daily proceedings, as they unfolded. A flat enormity of semi-arid land was dashed here and there by thorn trees too short to hide or give shade to anything. Mingled with thorny shrubbery, that translucent head of hair grass resembled hay growing out from the earth, what perhaps used to be long luscious grass when this was a savanna.

The ten foot camel followed obediently through a nose lead. This animal with all its clumsy glory reigned supreme to the fierce pastoralist. This animal was the end and beginning of all things. There was conflict as to which was more important: water or the camel. Disputes were always over water rights for the camels, goats, sheep – in that order -which invariably involved bloodshed. Only the camel sufficed as payment for the disputes, often heralding the end to hostilities, although there were those rare individuals who chose a life for a life instead.

The currency of the camel was used in all manner of occasions. It was used for bride price. Since marriage was oneof the most important events in a Somal’s life and procreation, the objectof the nomad’s very existence, the fierceness of life without the camel demanded large congeries of sons to protect the wealth and general well-being of the family from other such families and from treacherous often barren lone operators, barren precisely as a result of the lack of this clumsy currency in abundance.

Wealth in this part of the world is truly in the eyes of the beholder. The camel is the most rugged and austere of the domesticated animals, reflexively soare the wealthy in these parts. If you seea rather gaunt, lanky red and dusty man, he could be rich in camels and sons, or he could just as well be impoverished.

Twosmo would often hear her Awowo describe many such men of many sons and camels. She cut a picture of one in the throes of death induced by sustained hunger brought on by his own miserliness.

After a long solo journey, Twosmo would arrive at the well, as did many of the girls, having walked a quite lengthy distance, exhausted. They would then wait for the men, usually their kin, to draw the water  for  them. The wells were  very  deep  in  the  earth and,  as the men  worked, there  was a chance for  a slight  reprieve for  the  girls before the  arduous journey back  home, leading a camel  now  laden with fifty litres  of water  on  each  side. The water was rusty in  color approximating apple  juice,  a color which permeated everything. It seeped into the clothes, fingernails, and was red, being the color of the loose sand of this region.

After the journey, there were other chores awaiting her return. She would tend  to  the  needs  of Awowo, filling  his abolition water  container full before the  night  prayer, bringing him  milk and  most  of all–the tea before he would retire for the  night. By this time, Twosmo had kraaled the livestock for the night, surrounding the encampment with thorn tree branches as an impenetrable defense against would be wildlife  intruders.

The Arrest

YUSUF WAS  ASTOUNDED BY  THE CITY ITSELF. He was exasperated with   the  desire  to  break  the  monotony of  the  perpetual moving, grazing and  general  animal  husbandry of it all. It was here in these  desolate  places of nature’s  barren garden  that  he would first hear of the larger  world  outside.This eventually kindled his desire to see beyond the  confines of the  limited world  of the  harsh  plains, a world  of constant movement in search  of pasture  and water.A world existed  beyond this  utter  desolation, he  had  heard,  and  it had  cities that abounded with  people who  never moved. Incredibly, they stayed put for years.

Yusuf was determined to  become part  of the  city  and  identified as such, but  he had to shed  his much  ingrained camel  ways. For this, he looked to Commander Ali for  questions. In Ali Deray, his commander, he  saw  one  who wielded the  respect  and  fear  of  his fellow  city  dwellers.Yusuf sought to  understand the  intricate ways of what  made  him, at barely  a few years his senior, so prominent.Yusuf had  met  many  officers  outside and  inside  the  military whose rank equaled that  of Ali Deray, but  who,  despite  their  rank  and file, were just plainly  ignored.

Yusuf rationalized that whatever he  knew in his previous life did not  apply  to the  ways of the  city, and  by extension, the  ways of government. So, when he was ordered to complete the arrest  of aman named Hoagsaday, there  were many layers of adherence in his under­ taking  of the orders.

On the morning he was ordered to do so, he summoned the other soldiers and commenced toward  Hoagsaday’s house. He knew of the man. He was one of many who had left the country in search of better economical prospects and had returned after a long sojourn with much more.The soldiers arrived at Hoagsaday’s inearly after-noon and knocked with the usual arrogance most coercive forces are known for. Everyone was indoors, refugees from the midday’s naked sun. Such was the custom of Mogadishu that from around one o’clock to at least five – longer for others – those who could ate a hearty lunch - quite excessive, particularly if guests were being entertained   and, afterwards, anafternoon siesta was agreed upon by all who lived in this city.

This time proved quite opportune forYusuf to present the full regalia ofcoercive bravado and intimidation. It was an added effect of humiliation for a prominent member of the community, as Hoagsaday was, to be rounded up attheir home by the government and in such a manner and at such a ubiquitous time and place of privacy. The intended audience was the public, who would know of the incident before long. It was a nation populated by news chronicles and worthy disseminators, the news would spread like a tsunami, instilling fear in the almost fearless nomads turned citizens of a modern city state.

Hoagsaday heard the knock which at first drove him quickly into a fit of anger, commonly induced by afternoon sleep –it was probably a mannerless person, particularly rude, probably an impatient person having some business with him who thought nothing of invading his privacy, rather than wait for him at the store during the normal hours.

He called to the servant to answer with a firm admonition to the knocker,then again, he quickly changed his mind,brushing past the servant in a haste offury to answer the door himself.“Who is it, don’t you have any sense at all? I just can’t understand how a mature person can be so inconsiderate.”

As he opened the door with a forceful jerk with one hand, he was confronted by the khaki brown color of a soldier’suniform. Hoagsaday simultaneously heard ,“Are you the rich guy from overseas, we have orders from my commander, to arrest you, Hoagsaday. Come with us now,” almost barking ,“Getin the truck.”

Hoagsaday saw a military truck behind his vehicle in the driveway full of nondescript beige berets, hunched in the back. In a flash of second, Hoagsaday went through a montage in his mind in search of anything that might shed some light on why the military wanted him. The thought of this event at his home at this hour when most people were resting in the privacy of theirhomes was surreal. Since nothing wasamiss, Hoagsaday grew more and moreagitated with these lower ranking enforcers that dared to show up like this. Momentarily regaining his stature as a prominent businessman from one of larger clans, he stood barreling his chest, now returning the bark, “What in the name of God makes you think you can come to my home, at this time, and under such pretentious allegations, and barge into my compound and ask to take me, Hoagsaday, an upstanding member of this city, to the station just like a common and habitual criminal?” By this time, his children, wife, and a number of his relatives both visiting and staying with him were all shocked out of sleep. They were all heading outside towards the fracas on the veranda, alongside the official intruders.

“Hear this bigmouth? Come along quietly before we drag you by the scruff of your neck in front of your wife,children, and your entire family.”

Hoagsaday had by now gone from disbelief to belief in the reality that these goons meant business. There was no doubt in his mind now: this madness was real. It was futile at this point to plead with rocks, and he made a split second decision to acquiesce which was heavily influenced by the gradual milling on the veranda of more and more male family members as they woke up to what was going on.

Abukar, a male cousin just arrived from the hinterland, started an abrasive verbal assault on the soldiers ,“What kind of animals are you? Has the government stopped recruiting humans into the military? How dare you come here with this nonsense? What great balls are these you come with? Do guns have brains? This is not a government matter. When you come here like this, you don’t come here as a government, but as a clan. Everyone has a clan too, and you will reckon with Hoagsaday’s. We see you behind the clan camouflage of your uniform.”

With that, Abukar was descended upon by two soldiers  who had come for  Hoagsaday. The berets  were  now  quickly unloading from the  truck, all heading to  the  veranda to  help  subdue Abukar who was by now  pinned to the  ground with two  soldiers  on  top  of him, engaging in the  scuffle as best  he  could from beneath the  two  sol­diers.  He continued to  harangue the  soldiers  with  open threats,  as other males decided to join in on the  now  potential melee.

One of the  soldiers shouted a command, while  the  loud  cocking of several machine guns  was simultaneously heard, launching the  all too well  known severity in the  air, a severity that  garnered instant access to  obedience. Precisely   at  this  moment,  Hoagsaday stated loudly,mainly  for  the  benefit of his family  and  to calm  the soldiers, that  he would obey  though he requested to go back  into  the  house and change out  of his ma’wiss, a long sarong  worn by males  used both privately in  the  city and  regularly in  the hinterland. In a brave posture, he  reassured  his family  and  went  outside onto the  back  of the truck, whereAbukar was already lying  prone  on the floor,bloody at the soldiers’ boots.

The truck drove fast speeding through the  empty roads  of siesta time, making its way to a non-descript and  heavily  guarded isolated building. Both  men  were  manhandled off the  truck, barely  making the distance   between the  flatbed  of the  truck and  the  ground on theirfeet  because  the  soldiers  were  all busy  thumping them with their boots and  rifle butts. Abukar was given extra rations of hurt for his earlier infraction and  continued defiant disposition.

They were separated at the  entrance of what  looked like a front greeting area office, taken down steps leading to a dark underground,and  then  lead into a holding cell that  had no  bars but  a thick metal door that was promptly shut behind when Hoagsaday was inside. He sat down in a grand stupor, sitting on the floor  of this small rectangle enclosure with  nothing - no  furniture or  even  a mat  to  help  youbrace  the  concrete floor.  It was a concrete slab of drab nothingness. Hoagsaday was on the floor wondering if what  had just  transpired was  real. If so, who was involved? How does one go from a  routine  day to some  underground holding concrete pit? He Started to get out  of the  haziness  of blurred thoughts, slowly  thinking about

Abukar, Twosmo, his young wife whom he had just left hysterically crying, along with his children, during the fiasco. He was not so certain any more whether he could get the ear of someone, anyone. What had just transpired had all the makings of quite a serious problem. There was nothing he knew. He knew absolutely nothing, not even a mere inkling of what he was upagainst. He now tried in his mind to go back to that earlier montage of events in recent memory to somehow put some feet on why the government had interrupted his life today.

Hoagsaday was not in the government. He was a private business man not engaged in anything even remotely breaching any law of the land. He paid his taxes regularly, never borrowed from the government, nor was he engaged in any way withthose who were part of the government, in any partnerships,neither did he solicit any official of the government for powerful whispers on behalf of his company even though this was quitecommon. Hoagsaday was simply a man who had worked hard for several years to acquire what minimal capital he could asseed money, to start a business and buy a home in the city.

He was slightly reassured by the thought that someone from his clan was probably already inquiring on his whereabouts in the hope of finding his location, and on who needed to be talked to inorder to gain his release.As things were in Somal, there would be a hodgepodge of government in the western sense, the traditional pastoral ways of adjudication, and with a large dose of clannishness.

In the meantime, his eyes wandered around this hot dungeon of sorts, the cracked concrete wall full of graffiti, left by those whohad had the dubious privilege of passing through this bare and dirty place. This was quite a change from the normal day for Hoagsaday, who had until this point worked himself into the psyche of the city dwellers, known as an ambitious and innovative hard working man. He had within no time established an operational business that quickly blossomed into many other ones. With prominence came the multitudes of the envious, of course in varying degrees. Some said he dug in toilets, others said he had done a lot of common street begging when he was abroad in the Middle East.

Still others said he beat a hasty retreat after a long career as a thief in the Middle East when his gang  made  a final career  ending score. The rest of his gang were reputed to be non-Somals and  prominent in their  countries as he was here.

This adventurous mystique was created around the person of Hoagsaday sort  of like a modern day version  of the famous Ali Baba fable. But one did not need to look far to find the origin of these rumors. They were  generated by rival business  men  and  the  collective  of idle  naysayer  who had  witnessed  Hoagsaday’s quick  ascen­dancy to the parapets ofbusiness circles in the city and who had been astonished at his conscientious efficiency. There was that,  and  then there were  the  others who wielded power  in  the  government and used  their  high  positions as a means  to public  and private coffers.

Hoagsaday, having spent a significant amount of time overseas, had indeed dwelled in nostalgia. Ideas heavily flavored by a hybrid existence in the Middle East  at  the  confluence of many   cultures. He cultivated some ideas from the West, the Middle East, as though he was somewhat delusional about the reality  of life where he had left. For reasons  unknown he  somehow did  not  configure in  his hybrid ideas about the very spot  he came from.The things  he had left were now worse! In this way, one could say he was quite  delusional. Hoag­saday, was hunched in a cell passing away the time in deep  reflection, or what others would rightfully deem as anxiety about a looming uncertainness over his life, his property.

Twosmo, the  wife of Hoagsaday, right after the incident involving the  military took place, felt a more  ominous feeling in relation to the occurrence ofher husband’s unusual arrest. She therefore summoned the driver and was off to a relative to get things done, as that was how things of such magnitude were broached.

The Bloodlines

THERE WAS  AN  UNWRITTEN LAW  THAT   WAS  INCORPORATED into  fabric  of life - a hold  over  from  the  people and  their  culture of pastoralism - which was  the  hierarchy of  clan  bloodlines. This clan hierarchy was entrenched in religion, government, and  in gen­eral, with all of the  Somali. So whatever one  was, he was above all a member by blood of a clan. Blood affiliations  ran deep  in the society, forming the trajectory for all the  modern occurrences such  as a the modern state,the  officials within it, and  consequently the society at large. Every philosophy, Western or otherwise, was grounded in this concept of the  bloodlines. And  it followed that  distant  clan  rivalries were a pretext for altercations in the  now.

In this spirit, Twosmo went  immediately to a prominent member of weight in the affairs of the clan in the dislocation of the city. Soma­ lia’s clan system was based on patrilineal blood relationships, comple­mented differently by  matrilineal blood  relations. The  male  blood line, however,  and  thus  the  male,  dominated clan  affairs. Though Twosmo was particularly aggrieved in the case of her husband’s sud­den arrest, Hoagsaday’s clan could  never  be represented by her.

The car  arrived at  the  bungalow  of  her   husband’s  relative,  an elderly  businessman like  Hoagsaday and  long  time  resident of  the city  of Mogadishu. The gate  was open. the  car drove  into  the  drive way. Twosmo quickly got  out  of  the  car and  knocked at  the  door purposefully in abandon. A worker came  to the door and recognized her. As she  brushed past  him,  straight  to  where the  women of the household were  sleeping, she  quickly explained the  situation, wait­ing anxiously for an audience with  the elder.

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Abdi Latif Ega is a novelist from Somalia. He is doing his doctoral work at Columbia University.

Isobel Armstrong’s Material Imagination

Steven Connor

 

I draw the phrase ‘material imagination’ from Gaston Bachelard, who uses it to describe two intersecting things: firstly, the ways in which the material world is imagined, not just by scientists and engineers, but by everyone, all the time: poets, children, footballers, cultural analysts, cabdrivers, medics and mad Hatters: the ‘material imagination’, then, as the way in which matter is imagined. In an age of conventional scepticism, in which the mind is always, as a Beckett character says, ‘on the alert against itself’, the prescribed move to make at this point is to doubt whether one can ever look steadily at anything other than one’s own conceptions or categories. But where do these conceptions and categories come from? For there is no way of imagining the nature of the material world which does not draw on and operate in terms of that material world, its spaces, substances, stresses, processes. Imagination is itself always prepossessed by the world that it attempts to imagine, made up, like the gingerbread-man enquiring into the question of his dough, of what it makes out. So the phrase ‘material imagination’ must signify the materiality of imagining as well as the imagination of the material.

Isobel Armstrong’s work is a the most richly significant extension we have seen in recent decades of what might be called a Hegelian materialism of signification. Perhaps that work is, as a result, sometimes caught in the fix that Hegel bequeathed to us all, whereby one cannot imagine any kind of object except as dead and other to us, even as we also cannot help wanting to take that object into epistemological custody, making it our own, making it us, by flooding it with feeling and concept. We either leave the object out in the cold of our objectifying, or we kill it with the kindness of our identification. Wherever you look, whether within the recesses of the subject, or at the object, the same subject-object pingpong is always about to start up.

And yet, Isobel has always been disinclined to let such predicaments bake into impasses. Indeed, the effort of her entire work has been to show the vitality of such predicaments, predicaments which are largely epistemological in Language as Living Form and political in Victorian Poetry. The problem which keeps generating and regenerating the ‘living form’ of nineteenth-century poetry is that of how to marry the self-forming contemplations of Hegel, in which the mind risks overwhelming its own world by taking itself as its own other, with Marx’s insistence on relationship. It is only when there is a relationship between the material act of mind represented by a poem and sets of material circumstances that relations can really exist, that time can be inhabited as well as merely unfolding, and that the poem can act and work (1982, 48-9).

The most significant moments in Isobel’s virtuoso readings of nineteenth-century poetry are often those where a certain field of material possibility is isolated, rotated and worked. There is, for example, the moment in which she reflects on Hopkins’s use of the phrase ‘glassy peartree’, saying that ‘[t]he idea emerges through the particular physical nature of glass and one might say that the notion of transparency is given a soul because it is incarnate in the specific irreducible and particular qualities of glass’ (1982, 8). Or there are these reflections on the idea of an ‘air’ in Victorian Poetry:

An air is a song and by association it is that which is breathed out, exhaled or expressed as breath, an expiration; and by further association it can be that which is breathed in, literally an ‘influence’, a flowing in, the air of the environment which sustains life; inspiration, a breathing in. All these meanings are present in the elegy, as perfume, breezes, breath or sighs, where they are figured as a responsive, finely organised feminine creativity, receptive to external influence, returning back to the world as music that has flowed in, an exhalation or breath of sound. (1993, 326)

Another example would be the reading of a passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in Language as Living Form which concludes that

Everything is moving through everything else and the kinship of exhalation and winds, rain and aerial dew, which are all offered as separate entities and actions, is such that forms and functions merge, reverse and exchange. With ‘it circles round’, ‘it’ is not merely either the original exhalation or the aerial dew but every element in the passage. Exhalation, winds, blooms, fruits, flowers, stems, leaves, dew, as a totality, a unity, circle round. The rapidity, the flux of syntax, the capacity of Shelley’s words to make things dematerialise into aery thinness, is extraordinary. (1982, 45)

These passages have in common the fact that they are reading poems which are themselves at these moments reading aspects of the material world, the world of nonhuman objects, substances, organisms, and processes, dew, air, transpiration, evaporation and, in the process, perhaps also trying to become these objects. In the last quotation, Isobel’s argument is that Shelley can do anything, because the mind of his poem makes everything over into itself. At this point in her argument, she is instancing Marx’s critique of Hegel, that, in the latter’s philosophy, ‘Man cannot create himself in terms of a meaningful and evolving relation with externality; he can only create himself anew as an entity of thought’. (1982, 43) But, in evoking Shelley’s dematerialising power, Isobel seems also to limit or partly to revoke it: if there is evaporation, coalescence, there is also work in Shelley’s writing, if only the work of dissimulating work. Isobel’s own working out of the process whereby work is dissimulated in Shelley’s poem restores the sense of an encounter, a striving, a resistance, an abrasion, a transforming, a surpassing. At moments like these, Isobel is borrowing a poem’s encounter with material objects or processes to release and disclose the nature of the poem as a worked object for her.

All of this might come down, as is suggested at the opening of Language as Living Form, to a question of digestion. You cannot eat the idea of a cabbage; but equally you cannot have your cabbage and eat it except by taking in the idea of a cabbage along with the object itself. Isobel shows the poem wrapping itself round what lies outside it. She similarly wraps herself round or assimilates to herself the poem which lies initially outside her own powers of assimilation. In reflecting upon the struggle of the Romantic poem to find and secure its objects, Isobel is also reflecting on her struggle not simply to swallow up the actuality of her object, the poem. She is trying to protect herself from becoming an ‘entity of thought’, that grows thinner and more spectral the more it consumes. For this reason, she will seem to want to fail to some degree, will want to reveal that Shelley’s poem does not quite bear out her argument, cannot fully be assimilated to its reading, lest she convict herself of taking the poem into custody, as she is saying it does with natural process. She will want, to borrow the term she borrows from Gillian Rose in a chapter of The Radical Aesthetic, to tarry, with a judicious anxiety, somewhere in the broken middle between world and word. Hence a certain rhetoric of approximation and curtailment, a cordon sanitaire that the critical act seems sometimes to want to throw around its object of analysis, as it were to protect its objecthood, and thus to allow the continuing possibility of relationship between object-poem and subject-critic. Significantly, this chapter in Language as Living Form begins and ends with Hopkins, and his ‘sustained attempt to prevent the world of objects from disappearing’ (1982, 51). There are two kinds of disappearance: the disappearance into objecthood uninterpreted, unrelated, untransformed; and the evaporation of objects into mind. Between these two alternatives, allegedly, there is labour, love, life, the life of the worked poem, its corporeal, living form.

Michel Serres suggests that every metaphysics is governed by a physics, that a specific form or theory of the material world bears upon every theory or philosophy. What kind of materiality could be said to be at work in Isobel Armstrong’s writing through the poetry of the nineteenth century during the 1980s and 1990s? It is conspicuously a materiality that makes itself known through struggle, strain, stress, and other similarly stringent terms evoking prodigious labour and strongarm tactics. One of the commonest words of description in Isobel’s analyses is also almost always a word of commendation: the word ‘strenuous’. The cogito of Isobel Armstrong’s work is a cogito not of knowing, but what Bachelard, following Maine de Biran, has called a cogito of striving (1948, 78).

What does one strive for, or, better perhaps, against? The answer is a thoroughly Victorian one, even, should you choose, a thermodynamic answer, since Victorian physics bequeathed its terms to twentieth-century aesthetics, via Freudian energetics. One strives against death, in all its forms, which is to say against the lowering or degradation of energies. And what is death, but depletion of energy available for work? What is death but the incapacity to strive? Death is entropy, indolence, indifference, randomness, chaos, unrelatedness. Without critical striving, with and athwart its poetic objects, there is either the deadness of fixed canonical truth, or the gaseous Brownian motion of mere ‘ludic energies’. Running through the aesthetics of living form, there is the parsimonious impulse not to let energy escape or become unbound, to keep the potential for work high.

And yet the materiality at work in much of Isobel’s writing about nineteenth-century poetry can also become paradoxically abstract and null, as it is often is in the work of Marx, the great idealist of the material. The most striking feature of this materiality is that it is without form and void, a mere mute, insensate impediment to the striving and form-giving actions of mind. Reading Blake’s Jerusalem in a later chapter of Language and Living Form, for instance, Isobel finds him at one moment locked or tonguetied in the enumeration of names:

The listing here is arbitrary and incoherent. The successive items have no meaningful progression or order, neither defined against one another nor related to one another. Repetition is random. It is a landscape of dispersal. Since each item has no existence but in itself it is a landscape of pure matter. Correspondingly words here have become pure matter. If fire, snow, sand, have no meaning but in themselves they are meaningless, and so ‘the voids, the solids’ are equivalents and collapse into one another. (1982, 107)

The assumption that governs this thinking about energy, matter and form, is of a fundamental, energising duality between dark and unreflexive matter and lucid mind. Without this jagged fissure running through things, there can be no struggle, no possibility of charging matter with life, no mastery or winning over of matter to the side of mind. Interestingly, the last completely ‘Victorian’ discussion in Victorian Poetry is of the work of James Thomson, who is seen as a materialist poet, where materialism is the name for a theory in which all the customary energising distinctions between man, nature, God, mind and matter itself have been obliterated. In the end, Armstrong tells us, the dissolving freedom of Thomson’s ‘atheist epistemology’ becomes frozen into negativity (1993, 475). One cannot help but feel that Thomson is not only a forerunner, but also a representative of those modernist and postmodernist writers (she says that Thomson’s is the Nietzschean predicament of the deconstructive sublime) who have abandoned the struggle to create living form out of substantial and intractable social and political content.

For two centuries, the aesthetic has been assumed to be the necessary, sometimes desperately necessary alternative to mechanism, that willed subjugation of life to rationalised matter. Without the flickering, cryptic powers of the aesthetic, we have become accustomed to think for the last couple of hundred years, there would be only blind utility, a life lived according to the imperious, rationalised, calculative logic of the machine. Adorno makes an occupation out of the aesthetic fixes into which this gets him. Either there is not enough form, and the aesthetic becomes mere distraction and frivolity, a mere spume upon the surface of things; or there is too much form and the aesthetic hardens into a kind of machinery, powerful but inert. The specific form of the material imagination at work here is perhaps Bachelard’s ‘cogito pétrisseur’, with the aesthetic as what he calls the ‘ideal paste’ between the alternatives of the soft and the hard (1948, 78).

Do these categories, of form, life and mind, that continue to drive discussion of the aesthetic, and determine the ways in which the relations between the aesthetic and the political are thought about, belong to a classical physics founded upon form rather than information, and a set of ideas about the nature of form, energy and life that no longer seem universally to hold? The interest of the passages such as the ones I have isolated from the two books about nineteenth-century poetry is that in them materiality is never pure, and so starts to breathe, to breed, to work, becoming therefore less abstract, more complex and differentiated, and less merely massy.

Two remarkable departures characterise the distinctive work that Isobel has been doing over the last decade. First of all, there is her remarkable investigation of the cultural history of glass. Isobel began her work before the current rise in the stock of ‘things’, which has made us accustomed in popular cultural history to biographies of subjects such as cod, nutmeg, salt, dust, TB and the colour mauve. Isobel’s apprehension of what it might mean to read the ‘cultural poetics’ of a produced substance goes far beyond this work, while also holding back from some of the places it goes. Where her earlier work on nineteenth century poetry showed matter either being wrought and wrestled into meaning, or falling away exhaustedly into cindery residue, her work on glass implies the active participation of the substance itself in forming consciousness: ‘glass consciousness’ (2000a), a phrase which is meant to evoke not just the heightened awareness and sensitivity to glass in the new culture of lustre and transparency that grew up in the nineteenth century, but a kind of thought and awareness into which vitreous form and organisation have entered and begun to operate.

Isobel’s continuing work on glass has become a kind of mythic endeavour: being a colleague of hers at Birkbeck during these years has been not unlike what it must have been like to be around Walter Benjamin when he was at work on his Arcades project – with the difference, one profoundly hopes, that it will not end its days being lugged in a suitcase over the Pyrenees. Even before it has been finished, and perhaps partly because of this, the very idea of what she has been doing and her many ways of speaking about and characterising it have created rich possibilities for new work at Birkbeck and beyond. Her nonce-characterisation of her work as a ‘cultural phenomenology’ has given me a name for some of the semi-farcical investigations I have tried to undertake of the status of magical objects in the modern world. It has inspired students in Birkbeck to undertake work on different aspects of the cultural life of material forms and processes: a cultural history of gravity, a poetics of air and odour, a philosophy of tremor. Suddenly, and because of Isobel’s allowing, materiality has a tellable history, other than as the raw, primal stuff on which art and culture go puffing to work.

This seems to come at just the right time, at a time at which scientific thinking about the nature of life, matter and form has become unignorable, even by literary critics, and at which the relations between the mental and the material have become so much jumpier and more interesting. How can one any longer Hegelwise counterpose matter and form in the era of DNA, when it becomes apparent that there has never been any wholly uninformed matter except in human fantasy? Information now overflows the gap between form and matter. Previously blind and insensate material forms prove to be alive with information. How will an aesthetics founded upon the laborious, in-forming confrontation of the material and the mental help us to manoeuvre in which the prerogatives of life and the living seem so little assured and in which material processes, from viruses to hurricanes, have come to seem so richly and unnervingly lively? A physics, and an aesthetics formed in its terms, which is based upon work, one-way transformation and determinate output (heat, light, poetry) is giving way to a physics of interfaces, ecologies, probabilities, reciprocities, probabilities and the turbulent circulation of energies. Following the curious temporality of science, from now on, for the time being, this will have been the way it always was.

Nevertheless, I think that what I take from Isobel Armstrong’s work is not altogether what she has put into it. In the end, her work turns to and on specific kinds of object, specific kinds of outputs and integrations. I take from her work an attention to systems and substances and processes – always linguistic, sensuous, actual, material, affective even when they are also theoretical, generalised, abstract – that run through and spill beyond these holding-stations or resting-places, of the poem, the poet, the work. Not that nothing remains to be said about such things; but more remains, at least now for me, to be said about processes of cultural work, about the meteorology, the epidemiology, the natural history of culture. Isobel Armstrong has begun to make available to be thought a world in which matter has its own ‘living form’, and in which ‘life’ is no longer concentrated at the thinking end of matter.

At the same time, and even, as a sort of planned digression from the historical investigation of glass, serving both to detain and prepare for it a little, there has been for Isobel the work which makes up the masterly Radical Aesthetic. Just as the work on glass offers a new way to think about and with the cultural history of matter, the struggle with intransigent and alien materiality seems to drop out of the picture when it comes to the new arguments about the force of the aesthetic deployed in The Radical Aesthetic. In place of struggle, there is now regulated play. Here, for example, the work of André Green helps her to a new stress on ‘the agonistic broken middle between conscious and unconscious’ and ‘the melancholic moment of scattering, of unassimilated material, not the reconciled symbol of completed mourning’, (2000b, 132). In the brilliant and resourceful diversification of the notion of the aesthetic ofThe Radical Aesthetic, she shows how idealistic, abstract and fixated most other accounts are. Like John Dewey, to whom she devotes a discussion, she wants to be able to see the many ways in which experience is art-work, as well as furnishing the raw material for works of art. Hence a notion of the aesthetic which must find a way of having to do with dreams, dancing and gunfire as well as odes and sculptures. Like Dewey, however, she also shrinks – and I will say, like Dewey, not quite intelligibly – from a complete deregulation of the idea of the aesthetic. The aesthetic will be preserved as the name of the form-giving propensity lifted up into its highest form. As such, it will be what ‘quite simply keeps us alive’ (2000b, 19). I hope I would have Isobel’s warrant to point to the many other things, from safety-belts to streptomycin, that keep us alive, while noting, in the spirit of the Auden who decided his line ‘We must love one another or die’ would be better revised to ‘We must love one another and die’, that ultimately of course, nothing does. For Isobel, for whom the work of Klein and Bion have become important, the aesthetic is important partly because it is a way of holding play and disintegration together; but perhaps we will be able to hold on much better to the sheer diversity of ways of being and staying alive that she awakens us to in The Radical Aesthetic by letting the aesthetic go. Yes, I suppose I am saying that I will want to have been led by her radical aesthetic further than she herself will at this moment go with it, to somewhere radically beyond even its rainbow: clean out of the aesthetic.
References

Armstrong, Isobel (1982). Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Brighton: Harvester Press.
———————- (1993) Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London and New York: Routledge.
——————— (2000a). ‘Technology and Text: Glass Consciousness and Nineteenth-Century Culture’. In Culture, Landscape and Environment: The Linacre Lectures 1997, ed. Kate Flint and Howard Morphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 149-75.
——————– (2000b), The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bachelard, Gaston (1948). La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté. Paris: José Corti.

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Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Birkbeck College, London.

The Kitchen

Amiya Sen

Translated by Bhaswati Ghosh

At a time when there was a drought of jobs, Nirupama felt uncertain on receiving a job offer. Her husband, Salil Dutta, figured that by looking at his wife. He still encouraged her, “I don’t want to force you, but you shouldn’t let go of Lakshmi if she’s coming your way. That too, when the offer has come on its own…”

“Is getting the offer everything? How will I cope with that kind of a job?” Nirupama’s voice choked.

At forty-five—though she didn’t look much older than thirty–Nirupama was no longer a contender in the job market.

Salil Dutta used to work in an ordinary government job. He had a lot of weight to carry, mostly in the form of responsibilities towards his extended family. Like any refined bhadralok, he carried that load despite drowning in debt all his working life. After that, the inevitable happened. As he stepped on the shore of retirement, he was in deep sea, with no coast in sight. Attempting to cross the shores on a broken boat would be like counting the hours to one’s death.

The family had to surrender the government quarter to find shelter in the stable-like shed of a rich man’s house. Having been used to a life of struggle, Nirupama didn’t complain. For years, she had rowed the boat of this impoverished household with remarkable skill. But when she could no longer manage with her husband’s 150 rupees of pension, she too had contemplated working—at any petty job. She kept it to herself, however. Nirupama was afraid of the outside world.

That’s when the offer arrived.

Some well-to-do women had started a service centre for underprivileged Bengali girls. The chief project was having nakshi kanthas stitched by disadvantaged women from East Bengal. It was an ambitious project. Apparently, the government would earn hefty revenue just by selling those kanthas. A shelter had been opened for nearly a hundred women—widows or abandoned by their husbands—and their children. Nirupama would have to assume charge of the shelter.

There was a time when Nirupama used to play the sitar quite well. Not that she couldn’t anymore, but time was scarce now.

Sitar was what drew the attention of Bardi or Mrs. Basu, the director of Srimangal. Nirupama had once played sitar at a women’s soiree held in the government quarters. Mrs. Basu was the chief guest there. She had since maintained contact with Nirupama. The elderly lady appreciated Nirupama’s talent and was affectionate towards her. She had brought the job offer.

Nirupama was afraid. Terribly. To begin with, she had never had a job before. Moreover, despite being poor, they were cultured, educated people. But none of those underprivileged women were sophisticated. They formed the society’s fringe.

“Why are you so worried, Niru? Take up the job and find out for yourself. There’s nothing to fear. You are an artist after all. Food and clothing aren’t the ultimate ends of one’s life. We also need artistic sensibilities for the soul’s development. That’s why I suggested your name. In your free time, you can entertain them with your music. All they do is worry about food and squabble with each other. They don’t even know that a world exists beyond all that.”

That was what Mrs. Basu had said.

Another world! Nirupama didn’t say anything, but felt a sting. It occurred to her how women like Mrs. Basu had no work at home, were lavished with luxury, wealth and rich husbands to look after them. That’s why they had embarked on providing entertainment to others. But did the “other world” of Nirupama exist just because she hadn’t come out on the street with a begging bowl?

Sadly, Nirupama was bhadralok.

Salil Dutta said, “Women are working in every field. These days, no middle-class family can survive on one person’s income.”

Nirupama couldn’t take it anymore. She had almost screamed, “Then why didn’t you drag me out on the road thirty years ago?”

“Did I know then that the country will be divided and we will lose all our land and belongings?”

“If I only had a capable son…” Tears streamed down her face before she could finish the sentence.

All this was the first act.

With time, Nirupama became too tired to quibble. She would quietly listen to whatever her husband and Bardi had to say. The situation at home had worsened. For days, she had been serving rice boiled with salt and a spoonful of turmeric to family members. She was still scared to death to go out and work.

Mrs. Basu hadn’t given up though. For two months, she kept hovering around Nirupama.

One evening she showed up unannounced. Nirupama had just finished washing the dishes. As tenants, they had only one small room. In front of that was a tiny cemented area with a tap in one corner. The same area was also used for cooking. The tap was defective and ran ceaselessly, leaving the whole place wet all the time.

The bottom of Nirupama’s sari had become wet. It was December in Delhi. Still shivering, she said, “Please go inside, Bardi; I’ll be right there.”

Mrs. Basu flashed her characteristic gentle smile and said, “Nah, dear, I won’t sit. Come with me; I will show you Srimangal. It’s such a beautiful, expansive, ashram-like place on the city’s outskirts. Come, you will like it.”

“I have to cook, Bardi…”

“Come back and do that. How long will it take in the car anyway?”

“You go, Ma, I will prepare everything for dinner. You come back and cook,” reassured fifteen-year-old Shampa. She was in class ten and lately had been busy because of the approaching annual examinations. There was a secret reason behind her selfless act—she felt a sense of pride when an esteemed lady like Mrs. Basu took her Ma through the neighbourhood in a car.

Nirupama ended up being even more scared after meeting the women at Srimangal. They had always been the rejects of society. But even when someone tried to help them, they didn’t always feel grateful. If aid came from the government, they considered it their right. And if it came from non-governmental sources, they deemed it the whim of the rich. Society had taken their innocence away.

A few barrack-like boxes were divided into four rows. At the end of two rows, there was a patch of open space—green with the women’s’ kitchen garden produce.

So this is an ashram!

A fierce fight had broken out for claiming the rights over two community taps. Blood streamed down the forehead of a woman who had been hit by the end of a bucket.

Looking at the quarreling women Mrs. Basu said with a soft smile, “Don’t worry about that. They are always like this—will become friends in no time. Come, I will show you your quarter.”

“My quarter?”

“Yes, if you take up the job, this is where you will have to stay.”

Presently, Mrs. Basu had brought Nirupama right across the barracks. Six small houses stood there. Barbed wire fences had lent these houses some distance from the other departments. There was a small verandah in front of all the houses. It looked nice from the outside.

“We made these houses for the staff here. Five of them have been taken. Just one is left. Now if only you joined…” As she stepped on to the single stair leading to the verandah, she said, “Come I will show you inside…”

The gatekeeper had already unlocked the house. Upon entering Mrs. Basu said, the rooms are small, but then you will get two of these.”

Nirupama felt as if Mrs. Basu was taunting her rented stable. She was hurt.

“Look, we have also kept a little verandah in the back—it’s covered. Open the door and you enter the walled backyard. On this side is the bathroom; the toilet is on the other side. And over here…” Mrs. Basu pulled open the door of a small room on the right, “is the kitchen.”

“Kitchen?”

“Yes, the kitchen. It’s not too big, but must be double the size of the kitchens that come with rented houses in Calcutta. Look, there are two big shelves—they can hold a lot. Besides, you have a meat safe of your own too. I don’t think you’ll have any issues.”

Nirupama remained immersed in scanning the kitchen. Mrs. Basu’s words escaped her ears.

They had left the government quarters nearly two years ago. Nirupama didn’t have a kitchen anymore, and she alone knew the misery of that situation. As she cooked, something would fall from above, or the landlord’s ten-year-old son would drop something that would land straight into the wok cooking vegetables or the pot bubbling with rice. Weeping remained her only option at such times. In the current economy, it was already a challenge for the lower-middle class to rent an accommodation. If on top of that one heard the word “retired”, even that slim chance was lost. And there wasn’t a second earning member who could be propped up to boost the landlord’s confidence. Even her two children were late harvests in Nirupama’s life—still young. One could deal with not having a bathroom and living in a cramped room, but being denied a kitchen…

“We won’t be able to pay you a lot; it will be a hundred and fifteen rupees in total. However, all utilities are free—electricity, water, accommodation…”

Nirupama had started walking in the opposite direction. She had crossed the distance of forty years…what a huge kitchen her mother had in the village house. Her father didn’t have a pukka brick house. It had a tin roof, tin fence and mud walls. But her mother’s tender touch had turned it into a painting. How tidy Mother used to keep the kitchen!

The kitchen was Mother’s daytime chamber. She would place wooden piris on the kitchen floor to welcome any girl or woman from the neighbourhood who dropped by as she cooked. Mother used to cook for a long time. The spread would be huge—complete with vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes. Baba loved his food.

On rainy days when it became impossible to step out of the house, little Niru would arrange her doll’s box in one corner of the kitchen. As she played, she would observe her mother picking chilies off a plant she herself had planted next to the kitchen. Fat, blackish chilies hung from the branches almost all through the year. Neighbours would take chilies off the plant whenever they needed some.

Niru and her six siblings had sat down for lunch along with her father and uncle. A number of wired bags, neatly strung together by Mother, hung from the roof. She would fill up pots, pans and bottles with food, even fried fish, and hang them in those bags. This was to ward off stealing cats. On the right hand corner of the wall adjoining the stove, there was a raised bamboo platform. After cooking, Mother would keep her cooking utensils there. If, by chance, the kitchen door was left ajar at night, dogs and foxes would come in.

………………………..

“How did you like the quarter? Nice, isn’t it?”

At the time of Partition, the loss of her father’s mud house had brought Nirupama the greatest sorrow. Mother was no more. But those pretty, colourful wired nests still hung from the kitchen roof. Sigh.

“The kitchen has been designed to my liking. Look how big the windows are. Enough room for light and ventilation. The very reason behind the ill health of our women is the kitchen—it’s the dirtiest, darkest, smallest—the most neglected space. That’s why I laid special emphasis on the windows.”

…………………….

Nirupama remembered the kitchen in her in-laws’ house too. It wasn’t as big as the one in her father’s house. Her in-laws were a zamindar family. A huge corridor enveloped the two-storied house. A ground-level room in the north was the dining room. Everyone used to sit on piris to eat. Men, however, never ate in the kitchen. Only the female members ate there; they were the ones cooking too. One of the male elders, Nirupama’s uncle-in-law, didn’t eat food cooked by an outsider Brahmin cook.

As her aunt-in-law cooked, young Niru would stare out of the window. She would be eager to know if the mangoes had ripened on the tree of orange-red mango, right next to the kitchen window. When the mothers-in-law retreated for their post-lunch siesta, all the daughters-in-law would sit down to play cards. This sport didn’t have the approval of the elders, hence the kitchen had been chosen for this indulgence. Following cards, they would relish raw mangoes, tamarind, chalta, karamcha—whatever was in season.

“The job won’t harm you, Niru. You can see the state of our country. A war is on, who knows for how long. More miserable days might be in store for this nation.” Mrs. Basu added the word “nation” as a careful afterthought. The lower middle class of the society was extremely sensitive and sentimental.

The warning of “more misery” jolted Nirupama out of her slumber. She remembered her husband’s words, “1971 is a year of misfortune for India. Such pressure on the country’s economy.”

………………..

The kitchen looked truly beautiful. A lot like the one in the government quarter. Could any household do without a kitchen? Of late, when it rained, Nirupama stayed inside the dark, cramped room, waiting for the rain to cease and the water in the courtyard to clear so she could cook.

The stable had served as the landlord’s garbage dump earlier. He had got it painted only before renting it out to Nirupama’s family. Notwithstanding that, he had made it clear that no cooking would be allowed inside as that could damage the room. Despite all the penury, Nirupama had never felt such despair before. So when her husband referred to 1971 as a bad year, she had said, “My year of misfortune started two years ago. What can be worse than this?”

For two years, Nirupama had been cooking in the courtyard. For two years, she didn’t touch the sitar. On one occasion Salil Dutta had lost his patience and said, “The country is going through such turmoil, but you can’t be bothered about anything other than your kitchen! It wasn’t for no reason that Hitler wanted to push all the women into the kitchen.”

Pausing her study, Shampa had asked, “Baba, what will happen if our prime minister leaves everything and goes cooking?”

“I have no idea where the country was or is. But you knew that, it seems. That’s why we are in this shed with our children,” Nirupama had retorted.

At that moment, son Sanjay had hurled another dart at an uncomfortable Salil Dutta, “Baba, the task of cleaning the mess created by our forefathers has ultimately landed on a woman’s shoulders. So the kitchen’s role can’t be totally negated in a nation’s progress.”

………………

The drone of airplanes flying overhead unnerved Mrs. Basu as she hurriedly carried her bulky weight over to the inner yard and looked at the sky. “Oh my, so many of them together!” she exclaimed.

The mechanical birds were flying overhead with rapid, noisy flapping of wings.

“I will take the job, Bardi. When do I have to join?” Nirupama asked, transfixed to the kitchen.

——————————————-

Amiya Sen is a Bengali novelist and short story writer. Her writing has been published in various Bengali journals, including Desh, Jugantar, and Basumati. Aranyalipi and New Delhi-r Nepathye are her non-fiction books. She also wrote a children’s book called Shonai Shono Rupkatha.

Bhaswati Ghosh writes and translates fiction and non-fiction. Her first work of translation from Bengali into English–My Days with Ramkinkar Baij–has been published by Niyogi Books in January 2012. This work also won her the Charles Wallace (India) Trust Fellowship for translation in 2009. Bhaswati blogs at http://bhaswatighosh.com/

Form, Sensation, Emotion

[HUG interviews Santanu Das in the wake of his talk on D. H. Lawrence’s poetry in Delhi University on February 9, 2012]

HUG: If I may take your reflections on Lawrence this week in DU as a platform to probe a little more on the current state of affairs in European Modernism scholarship (although Lawrence may not fit in with Modernism wholly), the first thing that comes to my mind is about the very idea of poetry itself. When you say that you look for pleasure in poetry, what exactly do you mean?

Santanu: By ‘pleasure in poetry’, I meant at a fundamental level enjoyment of poetry i.e. the formal pleasure afforded by verse, or pleasure afforded by poetic form. Since poetry, more than the novel or the short story, is dependent on patterns of sound (rhythm, meter, rhyme etc), the sensuous pleasure at the immediate, bodily level is often intense. Increasingly, we are addressing and trying to theorise not just the technical aspects of verse – what often goes under the name of prosody – but the role of the human sensorium in the enjoyment of verse. Note that the New Critics were  keenly aware of this, though they perhaps did not theorise it: an excellent example of this is The Music of What Happens by Helen Vendler who remains one of the most important and pleasurable critical voices. A more theoretical approach is developed recently by Susan Stewart in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. The ‘pleasure’ in poetry, with its proximity to the body, can be articulated through various theoretical models: the two that immediately come to my mind are ‘jouissance’ (Barthes) and ‘semiotic’ (Kristeva). However I think that such ‘theory’, if applied, has to be nuanced, and if possible woven into the texture of the writing: see Maud Ellmann’s The Poetics of Impersonality on modernist poetics which to me is one of the most brilliant examples of that combination of close reading, theoretical astuteness and just pleasurable, playful writing. A more recent work, very different but still acutely pleasurable, is Angela Leighton’s On Form,  which may be considered as part of the swell of interest in what is now being called ‘new aestheticism’.

HUG: There is a lovely, understated manner, in which you were trying to read Lawrence neither as a realist nor as a mystic. That brings us to a speculative domain that can be touched and felt at the same time. Is it just about Lawrence’s poetry or would you say that poetry and literature in general is about that kind of speculative materiality?

Santanu: I’m sorry but I don’t think I wholly understand the question; and being old-fashioned (!), I’m slightly reluctant to make statements about poetry or literature in general. You’re absolutely right when you say that Lawrence is neither a realist nor a mystic: as I was trying to say, there is a wonderful play in his poetry between a perceptual delicacy and a performative excess. In fact Lawrence’s poetry, like much of Lawrence himself, flatly refuses to fit into any kind of theoretical model; that’s one of the main reasons I find him so fascinating.

HUG: This brings me to this thing about this reaction against post-structuralist abstraction, historicism and discourse analysis too. You say a great deal about emotions, make sharp points about form but you also fundamentally think kinaesthetically. How is subjectivity related to matter?

Santanu: I think I suggested that it is Lawrence who often thinks in terms of motion and energy, as if kinaesthesia is central to the birth of the poetic object in his consciousness (critics have often noted the influences of Heraclitus and Nietzsche,  but I think this is not solely the reason). And yes, I’m very interested in emotions. Most of my work has circled, in one way or the other, around human emotions, often in times of crisis. As I said, what Lawrence wants to touch after all is not just the body – as often with Keats and Owen – but human feeling: ‘Tenderness’ was his initial title for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When you say about ‘subjectivity (being) related to matter’, yes, I think you were responding to the phenomenological underpinnings of the paper, that our consciousness is not just a subjective shiver but usually consciousness of the world – I was partly reacting against the excesses of some stands within post-structuralism on one hand and the over-density of some new historicist works. I was trying to highlight the acuity of Lawrence’s phenomenological thinking, while paying close attention to literary form and historical context, as when I discuss the startling passage from Lawrence’s ‘Insouicance’.

HUG: On a related point: phenomenological everydayness may have a rough, often an antagonistic relationship to history. But some people that you cite in order to buttress the point on Lawrence’s sense of the tactile—say, Sartre or Merleau Ponty or Lefort, are deep historicists too?

Santanu: Yes, there is often an assumed antagonism between the two but the challenge is to historicise the everyday. Think of a novel about the everyday or a day, such as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or Joyce’s Ulysses, and how absolutely enmeshed the ‘day’ is in the history, whether that of post-war London or semi-colonial Dublin. One of my main aims in Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature was to unravel the everyday in the trenches through the sensuous, and show how historical factors impact on the contingent.  As you know, at the moment there is a big interest within modernism in the everyday, and the phenomenological is increasingly brought in dialogue with the historical – think of a work like Sara Danius’s The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics. I think that Michael Levenson is also very interested in the phenomenological and the perceptual, and how the historical contexts of modernity bring about a shift in perception, or create ‘the shock of the new’.

HUG: What is your sense of transgression in poetry? If we do not look for progressive or programmatic ideas of transgression in the poetry of Lawrence or Keats or Hopkins or Owen, what in their poetry might disturb the banality of ordering?

Santanu: I’m not wholly sure about what you mean by ‘banality of ordering’ but I’ve a sense that you mean conventional/canonical/standardised ideas – am I right? Of course there has been wonderful work on the relationship between poetry and politics, or works that have revealed the political, the dissident and the dissonant aspects of verse.  Jacqueline Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath and Isobel Armstrong’s work on Victorian Poetry (I forget the title – Poetry, Politics?)  spring to mind. But I wonder whether one could/should always look for progressive or programmatic ideas of transgression in poetry (not that you’re suggesting that). While reading against the grain can be thrilling, I’m also slightly wary of readings of poetry that have palpable designs or agendas which are not nuanced to the historical and formal particularities of the poem. Moreover is transgression (so influential and important as a concept in the 1990s and even early 2000) always, necessarily, or inevitably progressive (I find some of the current ‘death drive’/necessarily transgressive assumptions  within queer theory politically problematic, especially when related to actual/medical/lived experiences)?  As to the disturbing qualities of verse by some (not all) poets, I guess you’re gesturing towards Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic? – you’re absolutely right, Owen is a wonderful example – thanks.

HUG: Is there any scope of the theological or the ethical in modernism? There is grappling with death, darkness and God in Lawrence, of course. How does kinaesthesia relate to such questions of non-being?

Santanu: There is a big resurgence of interest in the theological within modernism: Suzanne Hobson’s book on the relation between theology and modernism has just come out from Palgrave (I forget the exact title but I think it has got ‘angels’ in it). Lawrence’s intense engagement with death, darkness and God is informed by but cannot possibly be confined within a neat theological framework. As Lawrence said toward the end of his life, ‘God is after all a great imaginative experience’.  I don’t know how kinaesthesia is related to ideas of non-being but it’s a tantalising line of investigation – have you got any suggestions?

HUG: In wonderful moment of disclosures, you brought Lawrence to life: his concern for his wife, his impotency, his tortured relationship to death and so forth. But that he was bossy and uneven in temperament is also something that you highlight. Of course, his poetry can be detached from his biography—as modernism would want us to do. But, as I said, you stressed Lawrence’s preoccupations—things and ideas he loved and hated, along with a close reading of his poetry. Poetry and the man worked with each other. Does it make a difference to poetry if the man is self centred or bossy or some such? Does that alter the poet’s relationship with his readers?

Santanu: I’m tempted to revert to Wilde (if I remember correctly): there is nothing as moral or immoral, there is good and bad literature. Of course biographical details are important to illuminate the literature, and prejudices such as racism, anti-Semitism or misogyny can seriously compromise the work (as occasionally with Lawrence) but part of the critic’s (and the reader’s) fascination is to untangle such knots and investigate the complexities.

Many thanks for engaging with my paper with such rigour and insight – I’m really grateful.

 ——————————————————————————————

Santanu Das teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (CUP, 2005) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (CUP, 2011).

Of Sublunary Incubus-Demons and Their Givenness

 

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

 “Between the moon and the earth there live spirits whom we call incubus-demons.”

             So declares Maugantius, summoned before the king to explain how a boy named Merlin could have been born without a father. Inter lunam et terram, between a celestial globe in ceaseless circulation and the dull earth: in this intermedial space dwell creatures at once human and angelic. Incubus-demons can assume mortal forms and descend to visit earthly women. “Many people have been born this way,” Maugantius asserts. Among the progeny of such intercourse is Merlin, destined to become our iconic wizard. This genesis narrative marks Merlin’s advent into the literary tradition. The story yields no evidence of his future as a bespectacled and senescent figure, cloaked in robes and wielding a wand. Dumbledore is a diminished and modern avatar. The primordial Merlin is much more difficult to emplace. Between moon and earth is a gap that opens because the two realms cannot touch. Merlin arrives from a kind of heavenly lacuna, a suspended and disjunctive space created because two bodies which are two worlds endlessly withdraw from each other. Aerial and moonlit, this middle realm is knowable only at second hand. Maugantius makes clear that his knowledge of what dwells between lunar possibility and the cold earth’s heft arrives vicariously, through books of history and philosophy.

 Speaking of philosophy books and strange intermediacy, Graham Harman has argued that “Objects hide from one another endlessly, and inflict their mutual blows [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary” (“On Vicarious Causation” 189-90). The Merlin episode suggests a medieval version of this statement that is just as true: “Worlds hide from one another endlessly, and enjoy their mutual embraces [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary.” Merlin’s birth is the weird result/enabler of an asymmetrical, humanly inassimilable relation. Merlin’s mother is a king’s daughter and a cloistered nun who nightly finds a handsome man in the solitude of her cell. The incubus-demon who fathers Merlin is of unknown biography and intentions. He sometimes touches the ordinary world, but just as often withdraws from terrestrial connection. His desires cannot be reduced to the merely sexual. He wants at times to kiss and hold the nun, at times to converse invisibly on unstated subjects. Merlin arrives, that is, through an abstruse relationship that unites for a while two beings from oblique realms. The angel-demon and the solitary princess never fully touch, or do so askew, in a conjoining that is textually enabled only backwards, through the strange progeny who makes possible and embodies their “shared common space” (Graham Harman’s term for the third object within which two others meet, 190) or “thalamus” (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s word for the nun’s cell, a Greek noun that also means “chamber” “bedroom” “bridal bed” and, metonymically, “marriage”: that is, the space of an unequal, complicated, potentially disastrous, possibly transformative caress). The relation between the nun and the incubus engenders a creature who if not wholly unprecedented is nonetheless unpredetermined. Though Maugentius can invoke a history for such an arrival, he cannot account for Merlin’s erratic life to come.

The text that I am speaking about in this language that weds Object Oriented Ontology to Latin historiography is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136). Geoffrey’s history is most widely known for having bequeathed to the future the King Arthur of enduring legend. Without Geoffrey this provincial British warlord would be an obscure medieval footnote rather than the progenitor of a still vibrant world. At his first appearance in Geoffrey’s text Merlin is a precocious and quarrelsome young man. As the story unfolds he will reveal surprising abilities, demonstrating that seemingly inert rocks may contain within them bellicose dragons; foretelling grim futures that include incineration, poison, and flowing blood; enabling through his transformative potions an adultery-minded Uther Pendragon to engender Arthur. Merlin alters completely the timbre of the text in which he appears. The History of the Kings of Britain has until the moment of his entrance offered a chronicle of the island’s early days. Its sedate Latin prose describes how Britain was founded and who ruled its civil war loving kingdoms. Wonders and supernatural events before his advent are few. A tribe of giants to kill, a sudden rain of blood, a sea monster and some ravenous wolves are scant exceptions to a martial account of settlement, inheritance, dissent, and political intrigue. Merlin appears just after the first mention of magic in the narrative, in the form of incompetent magi whom the perfidious King Vortigern summons to assist him in finding a way to escape the persecutions of the Saxons. Merlin is not himself a magician; magi are figures of failure in the story. For Geoffrey of Monmouth Merlin is a prophet, a poet, a schemer, an architect and an author, a figure of singular ingenuity rather than of saintly or demonic inspiration. He cannot be domesticated into mere category.

After his unexpected advent the rules for how the story may unfold change. Earlier in the History when an earthbound king dreamt of travelling spaces of cloud and air, his fate was to plummet with his manufactured wings to a shattering death (Bladud, who practices “nigromantium” rather than magic, 30). That stretch between earth and moon had not yet opened for narrative sojourn. Merlin, however, born of the meeting of nocturnal radiance with mundane constrictedness, conveys the wheel of Stonehenge across the sea “with incredible ease.” This transmarinal relocation is not accomplished through supernatural agency. There is nothing divine or occult about the movement. Merlin works with the earth’s givenness, its alliance-seeking materiality. The monoliths are swiftly transported via his operationibus machinandis (“feats of engineering” 128) and machinationes (“machinery,” “engines,” “contrivances”). Merlin is an engineer, a vicar of causation who knows that objects launch into motion only through the intermediary agency of other objects. The stones are disassembled, loaded onto ships and carried to their current home for repurposing as a British monument, thus proving the power of ingenuity (ingenium, the Latin word that gives us “engineer”). Significantly, we are never told of what Merlin’s machinationes consist. A materialist but not a reductionist, Merlin knows well that “inscrutable depths” intractably hold the objectal world.

Merlin is likewise a vicar or engineer of diegesis. He moves the narrative, but cannot be absorbed back into it. He remains an essential mystery, a figure who changes everything and at a certain point simply vanishes, but even after his quiet disappearance his presence permeates what follows. Though he never meets Arthur, that king’s ambiguous destiny on Avalon is inconceivable without Merlin’s having set into motion the path of his ambivalent life. The text that Merlin creates is eccentric to what precedes: what sought to be history opens into a possibility-laden new genre, a mode to be christened in the future romance.

Merlin embodies the strange prospects offered by that space inter lunam et terram, between earth’s banal givenness and the moon’s unreachable allure. This suspended geography might be called sublunary, but by that term I do not mean mundane. The sublunary designates a region neither terrestrial nor empyrean: unregulated by tedious rules about proper history, untouched by diurnal limitations, immune to the stasis that holds heaven. Sublunary means unpredestined by humans and gods, an intermedial sweep where the fixities of doctrine, custom and theology do not necessarily obtain. The wandering incubus who traces this space, celestial but not heavenly, a lover of earthly things but not bound to the small spaces of earth’s human dwellers, imbues in his progeny the ability to escape constricted textual spaces as well.

 “Between the moon and the earth there live spirits whom we call incubus-demons.” The pithy declaration is sudden, breathtaking. It opens an unforeseen space and populates it with creatures who are both familiar and utterly strange. The advent of the sublunary floods the text with alien luminescence, and for me calls to mind another strange phrase about lunar glow. In his essay “On Vicarious Causation,” Graham Harman describes the solitude of reticent objects, describing how these cloisters are sometimes breached by oblique, transformative, but carefully mediated relations. He writes that “While its strangeness may lead to puzzlement more than resistance, vicarious causation is not some autistic moonbeam entering the window of an asylum” (187). The metaphor does its Merlin-like work, transforming a philosophy that might have contemplated the “dull realism of mindless atoms and billiard balls” into “an archipelago of oracles or bombs that explode from concealment … [the] sacred fruit of writers, thinkers, politicians, travellers, lovers, and inventors” (212). Harman employs this lunar and lunatic metaphor to convey (and reject) meager, inviolable solitariness. We can see already from Geoffrey of Monmouth, though, that radiance from the sublunary sphere cannot be immured in an asylum or convent. It engenders strange and rules-changing progeny by placing into communication seemingly isolated bodies or objects. An angel-demon enters the window of a nun’s cell and enables the advent of Merlin, he who can discern in dead stone the possibilities of dormant dragons and of lithic wheels ready for conveyance across vast waters. No moonbeam is in the end solipsistic, even if some objects in this world attempt withdrawal into utter isolation. Lunar pull is incessant, drawing artists and philosophers to speculative modes, to dreaming of incongruent but at times imbricated worlds where even magic is not weird enough.

Geoffrey of Monmouth is not the only medieval writer to have populated sublunary expanses so vibrantly. Incubus-demons in their inscrutable flights share interlunar space with voyagers who traverse the clouds in ships. Gervase of Tilbury describes a congregation who, upon leaving church, witness an anchor lowered from the clouds (Otia imperialia, c. 1214). A mariner shimmies down its rope, hand over hand. He is seized by the onlookers and drowns in the moistness of terrestrial air. Between heaven and earth sail aerial vessels of unknown design, dwell “beings neither angelic, human, nor animal” (as Robert Bartlett entitles a wonderfully miscellaneous section of England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings). This sublunary space might also open underwater, as in Ralph of Coggeshall’s report of merman caught in the nets of an English fishing boat (Bartlett 688-89), or the belligerent fish-knights of the Roman de Perceforest. Always radiating at a slanted angle to lived human reality, the intermedial realms also frequently erupts from underground. In the Breton lays that are among the literary progeny of Geoffrey’s History, the space is most often called Fairy.

The Breton lays are short, romance themed narratives, often with Arthurian settings. Sir Orfeo, a good example of such a work, describes the lays as full of marvels (“ferli thing”), war, woe, joy, trickery, adventures, enjoyment, fairies, and love (4-12). The Breton lays are an English genre set within a “magical” Welsh or Breton past. Composed in French and English, the stories are replete with radiant objects, magic, strange beings, monsters, and music. Their worlds open repeatedly into unexpected geographies, into spaces similar to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s sublunary expanse: across the roiling sea traversed by the lovers’ ship in Marie de France’s Guigemar, for example. Or within the rock that the author of Sir Orfeo envisions as the entrance to the Fairy Realm, a seemingly underground kingdom where all normal rules for objects, agency, telos and time are suspended. A hunt proceeds without prey, bodies are caught in eternal disaggregation, captivity is a pleasant slumber, being endures without becoming. The Breton lays are a medieval version of speculative fiction, a space to think the possible without recourse to theology, to explore a terrain rich in mysterious objects without predetermined answers or even clear objective.

 Sir Orfeo is a queer story, grafting the classical myth of Orpheus and his lost Eurydice to elements of English history and romance. Its setting is Thrace, but the city has been relocated from ancient Greece to not-so-long-ago Winchester. The queen does not die, but is abducted into Fairy by its enigmatic king. His domain is accessed in two ways: at a grafted (“ympe”) tree under which Queen Heurodis falls asleep, and “in at a roche.” That Fairy should be a kind of omnipresent underworld resonates uncannily with Graham Harman’s description of the objectal world. He writes that we are “moles tunneling through wind, water and ideas no less than through speech-acts, wonder and dirt” (“Vicarious Causation” 210). A subterranean milieu, “numberless underground cavities,” but a place of neither finitude nor negativity. And sparks from that distant satellite do penetrate from time to time, perpetually exploding and renewing a wide sublunary world, “an archipelago of oracles or bombs” (212).

The Fay world obliquely and multiply touches our own. After ten years of wandering, Orfeo discovers his stolen wife in a kind of non-juridical Hades, where bodies are forever arrested in their self-undoing: headless, butchered, burnt, bound, slumbering in a fragmented nondeath, caught in the moment at which they have been taken (y-nome) by the Fairies. This is a somnolence removed from time, preservation in the agony of capture, a withdrawal into untouchable solitude. Among these grotesque sleepers Heurodis is anomalous: the kidnapped queen slumbers peacefully beneath a grafted tree (“ympe-tree”) while the dismembered, the mad, the strangled and the drowned neighbor her dreams. Perhaps the peacefulness of Heurodis arrives because she did not resist the advent of her taking. The Fairy King warned her that should she not appear at the appointed time at the grafted tree in the courtly world, “thou worst y-fet / And totore thine limes al / That nothing help the no schall” (170-2). By surrendering to adventure, to the thing that arrives unwilled and sometimes undesired, she is transported. An ambivalent future opens that otherwise could not have arrived. The queen is the only one of these sleepers who is also glimpsed in movement outside of Fairy, where she accompanies on his aimless hunt the King who stole her from her familiar world.

In her surrender to advent Heurodis is like her husband. Once his wife is abducted by the fairies, Orfeo dons a pilgrim’s cloak but seeks nothing. He wanders the wilds in a bare existence, a barren space of “snewe and frese.” Nothing pleases (“seth he nothing that him liketh”). Whereas Henry David Thoreau famously discovered in the sunbathing of a serpent the appearance of “thing-power,” the invitation that the world’s materiality offers to “be surprised by what we see” (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter 5), Orfeo discerns only “wilde wormes,” unsatisfying roots to eat, and “berien but gode lite” (“berries of little worth”). No vibrant materiality here. Yet through the music of his harp he allies himself with “weder … clere and bright,” with a forest yearning for resonance, with birds and wild beasts hungry for “gle” and “melody.” The ecological conjunction that he creates through his harp seems to call forth the King of Fairy, who wanders the woods with his retinue on a chase in which no animal is pursued. Orfeo, ten years in the forest and transformed now into an arboreal semblance (“He is y-clongen also a tre!” exclaim his subjects upon his return), has given himself over to adventure: a coming or avenir that like the Fairy King’s hunt moves without aim. Adventure is surrender to an overlap of worlds, an embrace of an intermedial cosmos larger than the confines of a single subjectivity.

Orfeo speaks for the first time since his exile began when he beholds the falcons that the fairies bear. These effulgent birds remind him of his abandoned life (“Ich was y-won such werk to se!”). Once he conjoins Otherworld and relinquished court he finds his opening. Adventure is an act of worldly intersection, like the arrival of an incubus at a conventual cell: you cannot seek it, it’s an object rather than an objective, but you can train yourself to perceive its arrival, to recognize the dangerous invitation to the sublunary that adventure offers, an allure that warps the orbit of ordinary life. Orfeo follows the fairy retinue into a rock and across the flattest of plains. He rescues Heurodis with his music. The Fairy King fears the two are ill-matched, but offers no impediment to their return: no fateful injunction not to look back as they depart the Fairy realm, only an unexpected benediction: “Of hir ichil thatow be blithe,” I hope that you are happy with her. Orfeo is.

The Breton lay abandons the grim ethos of the classical myth from which it arises: no fading of Eurydice at the threshold of the underworld, no dismembering of her grieving husband by crazed bacchants. While speculative realism seems to prefer the gloomy and the somber for its image store (heavy metal, H. P. Lovecraft, dark ecologies), the Breton lays tend to conclude with the equivalent of sunshine and rainbows, suggesting a happier but no less serious register at which objectal relations might be explored. Nor do I wish to turn Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History or the Breton lay Sir Orfeo into allegories or romans à clef for the working of object oriented ontology. While it is true that there is an uncanny intersection between Graham Harman’s work on vicarious causation and Geoffrey’s originary myth of Merlin, you won’t find the latter briskly expostulating “five kinds of objects … and five different types of relation” (201). Geoffrey’s sublunary is too chaotic to be organized into a metaphysics, no matter how fascinated he is by causation and allure. He did not compose in 1136 an uncanny prophecy of the advent of flat ontologies in 2011. Art is tangled, sprawling and untidy compared to philosophy’s crisp distinctions. Having explored what is enabled by the conjunction of Geoffrey’s “between the moon and the earth” and Harman’s “autistic moonbeam entering the window of an asylum,” I would now like to ask what is eclipsed when that moon moves into such momentary terrestrial congruence.

Erratic angels like the incubus-demon, the Fairy King and Merlin are the vicars or intermediaries who make possible the world’s vibrancy by enabling contact and relation. They allow the emergence of transformative textualities, even while they themselves are left behind at that luminous advent. These messengers can be dangerous. In the Breton lay Sir Gowther, the same incubus who engenders Merlin impregnates another woman with a son who will become a rapist, a murderer, and his family’s undoing. Sir Orfeo oscillates between a vibrant materialism and a dark vitalism, replete with the messy, melancholic, admixed and unbeautiful stuff of the world that is as just as much an ethical ecology. Such a textual expanse is also an artistic thought experiment conducted through the objects of the everyday world, rendered marvelous through the excitation of objectal and material potency — but it is an experiment in which not every participant is allowed a full story. As the Fairy King, the incubus-demon, the nun, and Merlin learn, a mediator’s love is necessary to make the machinery (ingenuity, contrivances, art) of the text spring into action — and a mediator’s love is unrequited. Though these figures open new worlds for and bestow unexpected futures to others within their texts, their shared fate is silent abandonment. Speculative awareness comes through the labor of those reduced to mere go-betweens, those who move from one place to another in order to change both. These mediators are literally sublunary angels, messengers who in their erratic flights refuse reduction into narrative or philosophical order. Perpetually conveyed, traveling without necessary destination, these disordered angels remind us that a retreat into tidy heaven leaves too many abandoned on the rubbish heaps of the earth.

Speculative realism requires speculative narrative, along with its troubled and troublesome angels. We need to examine the world as it is, in its catastrophic givenness, but also to consider as well how it might be, not just in the past or in the future but in the now: a place where the inhuman has agency, narrative, the power to withdraw, but also to caress, to create sublunary realms that with or without our consent touch us, take us out of our asylums or cells, create strange new beings of futurity, menace, and promise who will vanish into our stories, our futures that are ever arriving — futures that are narratives of the air and the lofty moon, but unfold just as easily in an asylum, a convent, or “in at a rock.”

Notes:

# Sir Orfeo (full e-text): http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/orfeo.htm

# Arthurian Passages from the Monmouth text: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/Camelot/geofhkb.htm

#Graham Harman ‘On Vicarious Causation’:   http://www.lib.rochester.edu/Camelot/geofhkb.htm

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Associate Professor of English and Human Sciences at George Washington University. The essay is part of the talk he delivered in the series Speculative Medievalisms II: A Laboratory Atelier recently held at The City University of New York.