A charitable way of describing Jessica Valenti’s book, Full Frontal Feminism, is that it fails to reach out to anyone. People who already read feminist weblogs, such as Valenti’s Feministing, will already know everything Valenti says in her book. People who do not will find it either incomprehensible or unappealing. Less charitably, Valenti’s writing ranges from weak to offputtingly juvenile, and uses bait and switch tactics that will not turn anyone feminist. If she wrote her book intending to trigger a new wave of feminism, fueled by women in their late teens or early twenties, that next wave will have to wait for a better activist.

Valenti’s starting point is that lately, young women do not identify as feminists because they consider it uncool. For them, feminism is for shrill old women who still fight the struggles of the 1970s; cool girls are post-feminists. If that is indeed how they think, then the best way to dispel the notion that feminism is dead is to show post-teens that it is cool to be a feminist. In the book, Valenti does it by deliberately using very informal language, by defining feminism to be the mere belief women deserve equal rights, and by discussing personal issues such as sex and attractiveness. Thus she not only has chapters devoted to sexual assault or reproductive rights or academic feminism, but also a chapter entitled “Feminists Do It Better.”

The book’s biggest problem is that in her attempt to be cool, Valenti surrenders any pretense to intellectual seriousness. She introduces one statistic as “Eighty frigging percent.” At one point, she introduces a conservative stance and responds only with, “Puke,” rather than with an argument. She repeatedly follows sentences with “Fuck it.” A good example of her language appears on page 102, when she criticizes Utah State Senator Chris Buttars, who called parental notification laws for abortion a matter of consequence. She reproduces his quote, and then adds a parenthetical remark, “The consequence of having the last name Buttars is apparently being a huge asshole. Appropriate.”

Another example appears in her chapter about sex on page 38, when she lists sex tips that include not only good ideas such as condom use but also the disclaimers “Don’t have sex with Republicans” and “don’t have sex with someone who is anti-choice.” Most people in her target audience are Democratic and pro-choice, but not nearly so shrill or partisan or with a strong liberal personal identity as to not dismiss Valenti the same way they would dismiss someone who advised them not to have sex with Southerners or Hispanics or poor people.

So on the one hand, Valenti ensures everyone who is looking for a serious introduction to feminism will ignore what she has to say. On the other, those swear words do not make Valenti look cool. To truly be cool, Valenti would have to talk about issues that truly interest most apolitical teenage or college-age American girls today, such as television shows or music with feminist themes. But she nowhere mentions Joss Whedon or Pink or Ani DiFranco. Instead of talking about those, or about other feminists who are familiar to many people who are well-versed in pop culture, she references issues from her own social circle of feminist weblogs, which hardly nobody knows about. MTV reaches 440 million households. The weblog with the highest traffic on the net, BoingBoing, averages a little more than five million pageviews a week; Feministing averages 150 thousand. The 98 or 99 percent of Valenti’s target audience that knows very little if anything about political blogs, much less feminist blogs, will have no idea why she quotes feminists bloggers whose name recognition is about the same as Valenti’s blog’s.

Unfortunately, the references that only people who read feminist blogs will get do not end with obscure quotes. At one point, when writing about abortion, she attacks South Dakota State Senator Bill Napoli, who justified his vote for a comprehensive abortion ban by saying abortion should only be permissible when the woman is a raped virgin. On page 95, she reproduces his full quote,

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated.

So far, so good. But that is the second reference to Napoli in the book. The first one occurs in the middle of the preceding chapter, on page 68, where she says, “Remember our friend Bill Napoli on the only girl who should be able to get an abortion? The sodomized virgin?” People who read local South Dakota newspapers or watch local television might be familiar with that, as well as people who are well-versed in American abortion politics. Everyone else will find it incomprehensible.

Worse, Valenti misdiagnoses the stumbling block that keeps many non-feminists away from feminism. It is not coolness; political movements are never cool. This decade’s gay rights movement, whose success in normalizing homosexuality in American culture is staggering, is eschewing coolness, instead focusing on mundane and bourgeois rights such as marriage and military service. Rather, the stumbling block is censorship. The people in the penumbra of movement feminism, who a more skilled writer than Valenti could bring in, are by and large liberals who oppose censorship, including of pornography.

Feminism has gotten a lot of bad rep due to its homegrown anti-porn movement, which systematically scared liberals away in the 1970s and 80s. Since about 1990 that movement has waned, but Valenti never mentions that. The closest she comes to attacking anti-porn feminism is a short derisive reference to Ariel Levy, of Female Chauvinist Pigs fame. But Levy is not the best known feminist critic of sexual liberalism; Catharine MacKinnon is, followed by Andrea Dworkin. MacKinnon is by no means obscure, and chances are that Valenti’s readers have at least heard of her and her attempts to ban pornography, even if they are not familiar with her theory.

If Valenti had devoted a chapter to explaining that nobody in the feminist movement cares for MacKinnon anymore, the book might have been worth the ink it was printed on, despite the bad writing. But on the contrary, Valenti’s take on Levy gives off the impression that there is a serious current within the feminist movement that tells young women which sexual practices are feminist and which are not. In addition, in a way Valenti comes off as very similar to Levy. Levy is not MacKinnon; the brunt of her argument is not that certain sex acts are inherently degrading, but that the growth of sex-positivism has given girls only two choices, a raunch culture in which they cannot say no to any sex act and a puritan culture in which they cannot say yes. That is hardly different from what Valenti says later in the book when she commands her readers not to change their name when they marry, and rants about plastic surgery and liposuction.

That scolding could easily be justified using an appeal to the feminist principle that the personal is the political. But Valenti never mentions that principle by name. Instead, she prefers to define feminism around nearly universal notions of women’s rights, only to repeatedly allude to the notion that the personal is the political. In theory, this bait and switch tactic is meant to lure people by showing them how the movement’s goals are self-evident. In practice, there is nothing self-evident about those goals. The feminist theory of rape, which holds that sexual assault is a mechanism for all men to control all women, does not follow from the principle of gender equality, nor is it justified by evidence.

Feminists are not the only people who use those tactics. Much of the above paragraph applies to libertarians, with “women’s rights” replaced by “personal freedom.” Even more than feminists, libertarians like to pretend that their political prescriptions follow from trivial principles. And even more than feminists, libertarians have spectacularly failed to persuade people using those tactics. Every libertarian success in the last thirty years has come from pragmatic arguments about the failure of welfare or the benefits of low tax levels, rather than from anarcho-capitalist rants about the immorality of the income tax. The vast majority of people do not find taxation immoral and do not think politics belongs in bedrooms. Any movement that tries to mount a frontal assault against those people’s notions is doomed to failure.

Now, it is worth mentioning that there are plenty of books that are inaccessible to people who are not already in the group or movement, but are nonetheless well-written and informative once one knows the movement’s basic ideas. However, Full Frontal Feminism is not one of them. As noted on Feminist Review’s review, it only examines each issue very shallowly. Valenti may have failed to reach out to non-feminists, but she certainly succeeded in crafting a book that is even more useless to people inside the movement. Few of its statistics or quotes will be new to readers who are already politically motivated or involved in feminist activism. Even feminist blogs, which due to the limitations of the medium cannot delve very deeply into anything, routinely engage in more thoughtful and careful analysis than the book, and in almost all cases they also do so without liberally using swear words.

The statistics Valenti does use tend to be unsourced and at times false. The best example I know comes from the chapter on sexual assault. Valenti inflates the number of rapes in order to make her arguments about rape as a universal female experience seem more plausible. For example, she says on pp. 65-66,

[The National Crime Victimization Survey] shows that every two and a half minutes, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States, and that one in six women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape. (Keep in mind, rape is one of the most underreported crimes, so that statistic is likely too low.)

The statistic in question comes from a crime survey rather than from a police report, so it gets around the underreporting problem. That same survey even asks people if they reported the crime to the police, and its reporting rate figure, 38% for sexual assault and rape, is widely used in feminist circles. And even if the one in six statistic is true—the more recent statistics I have seen are closer to one in eight—it is a vestige of an era in which rape rates were far higher than today. If the rape rate in the US holds steady, the statistic will settle at one in twenty, and another one in twenty sexually assaulted but not raped. How can I believe her unsourced statistics about the economic losses women suffer when bearing children when the statistics she quotes that I do know something about fail to check out?

Despite Valenti’s intention to dispel myths about feminists, she only plays to stereotypes. She is about as shrill as one can get, and even when she is right, she comes off as unreasonable. The gratuitous swear words certainly do not help her image. She relegates issues affecting low-income and minority women to an almost marginal role, even as she accuses mainstream feminism of catering exclusively to the white middle class.

Valenti could have written a good book. If I had read the book but nothing else by her I would conclude that she cannot write, but in fact I have read some good things by her. In a promotional interview on Salon she hints that she understands the real problem young women have with sex-negative sentiments, even if she does not refer to MacKinnon by name. She could write a book that uses professional language, that talks about undercurrents of feminism within pop culture, that introduces the main ideas of political feminism without bait and switches, and that demonstrates that feminists today are anti-censorship. She could write a book that could appeal to young women interested in learning about feminism. Instead, she produced a low-quality rant that will not and probably should not get through to anyone who is not already familiar with everything she says.

Nobody loves a pedophile. No one. Not even their mothers.

American society prefers them dead – done in by fellow inmates incarcerated in some human inferno of a prison. If that doesn’t work, it’s perpetual ankle bracelets or indefinite incarceration. Out of shackles and out of prison, a registry of their names is kept, their houses noted, their neighbors notified.

I knew some pedophiles, or presumptive pedophiles, when I was 15. They are likely dead now, as the events I describe here happened forty years ago. I was a lonely, depressed gay kid. I knew what a homosexual was because my parents, to their embarrassment, took me to Gore Vidal’s play, The Best Man, in 1960. The play is Washington-based melodrama in which a presidential candidate’s homosexual past becomes a weapon used in blackmail against him. Though I never used the word, I knew what it meant all the same. I knew I was a homosexual too, but I only told it to myself. Moreover, to escape imagined annihilation at the hands of the male heterosexual mob, I worked hard to leave no traces of my true identity in any part of the world I inhabited.

Well, I suppose, almost. I found a sympathetic listener in my drama teacher. He was a remarkably self-assured man of about 45, I would guess. I might even say he was flamboyant, given that flamboyant in a drab suburban high school in 1963 meant dressing a couple notches above Robert Hall’s, wearing fashionable glasses, and using a very fine fountain pen instead of a cheap Papermate. He walked on his heels with his head held high. He had a wonderfully full voice, and yes, a high-pitched bit of a cackle. When he got mad, whether in class or in a rehearsal, he would slam the papers or the clipboard down, and walk away rather than at us, which I find all the more remarkable now having realized how many bullies I have faced in classrooms. He was a passionate man, full of spirit. You never would have known that he had gone to a small Methodist college.

He would drive me home after school. I would hang around his office with several others, or stop by to chat after the activity period that followed the regular school day. He would offer me a lift home, and in the confines of his big white Pontiac convertible, we would talk. I lived only a mile and a half away from school, so he would circle block after block as we talked, or I talked about me, for a very long time. I remember little of what we talked about, except for one time when I solicited his support for my decision not to ask a girl to the prom. It had been put about that she wanted me to ask her, but I didn’t want to, and he said it was okay not to invite her and not to go.

I loved talking with him. I never talked with him about being gay. It never occurred to me, as I felt so comfortable just being with him. Sometimes, he would laugh and grab and squeeze my knee very hard, like how I would tickle some one now with whom I had some degree of physical intimacy.

It only occurred to me that he was gay after his roommate made a pass at me, and I met my first pedophile. My drama teacher had taken a job in California and had gone on ahead to find a house, and his roommate was to follow. Meanwhile, the two of them had a friend who worked for the Educational Testing Service and knew a lot about colleges. My teacher left it that his roommate would be in touch with me over the summer to set up a meeting between their friend and me, so that I could get some sense of what schools would be best for me.

It was a good meeting. I realized later that I had met my first lesbian couple, and they were living in respectable suburban circumstances. I learned a lot, and he drove me home. On the way, we were stopped by a very long freight train passing. His hand found my knee, not in the jolly way of his lover, my drama teacher, but in a caress that gave his intention away immediately. I turned away and simply ignored him, feeling scornful. How odd, I think now: to be scornful instead of so many other things. I suppose scorn was not a feeling, but a defensive reaction – a pose to counter his move. The train moved on, and so did we, the caress withdrawn without comment.

Two days later, he called me at home. “What about dinner and a swim?” he asked. It was so easy to say no. I knew what he wanted, and I didn’t want it. My mother overheard the conversation, and wanted to know what it was about. I was certainly not going to tell her what was really going on, that I was gay and my drama teacher’s lover was hitting on me, but I didn’t feel the need to confess or plead for protection either. I told her my teacher’s friend had invited me out, but I didn’t want to go. I ignored her interest in knowing more, and walked out of the room.

With my drama teacher confessor gone, I felt very lonely my senior year. I had sung in the school choir for four years, and was invited to join the music honor society. I was no Caruso, especially after my voice changed, and the audition was to be a trial. The assistant choir director stayed after school to help me prepare a solo piece, and he coached me with a kind of friendly dismay. He wore red socks, he was roly-poly, he made mistakes on the piano when he was nervous (which was often given that our director was a tyrant), and students made fun of him.

He offered me a ride home. As we stopped in front of my house, he asked if I wouldn’t mind answering a few questions. A friend of his was doing a study on the onset of male puberty, and my responses would be useful. He began to sweat heavily, and his upper lip trembled. I looked right at him, though he looked straight ahead. Where on your body do you have hair now? Under your arms? Your chest? Your genitals? With each of his questions, what I thought was his unease grew. I suppose now it was his arousal that grew.

I answered his questions, though I didn’t really like them. Once more, though, I knew I was in contact with a man who wanted something sexual from me, even if in this case, hearing rather than touching was enough.

I think I was just a cubby to my drama teacher, somebody he wanted to squeeze and tickle and make happy. I suppose, on the other hand, that his roommate/boyfriend liked boys. Perhaps this makes him a candidate pedophile like the music teacher. They were in their forties, and I was 16 by my senior year. Do the math.

I would hardly call myself a model of self-possession in those days. It took another six years and some pretty big hard knocks to come out. But I had felt sufficiently self-possessed, it seems in retrospect, to understand what my teacher’s boyfriend and my music teacher wanted, and to do what I wanted. Or at least to head off what I didn’t want.

Others were not so lucky. Over the years, I have heard many accounts from friends and acquaintances, women and men, about fathers, step-fathers, uncles, cousins, and big brothers who took them sexually, mostly against their wills. There must be mothers involved too, but I have never heard anything of the sort first hand.

I have often wondered: Did I in fact get a free pass? Were these more near misses than they seemed to me at the time? Was this pedophilia lite? The teacher’s boyfriend and the music teacher surely were no avatars of evil, deserving mean justice in a prison cell. Though they were surely interested in boys, I will never know where these experiences fit into their lives, and whether they had any meaning for them at all. Likely not much, to judge from a distance now.

(The music teacher might be glad he lived in another age, I might add. Just this year at my old high school, a teacher was convicted of molesting a student, and my nephew gave testimony at the trial.)

Where evil is so often imputed, I offer a cautionary tale. It is only one story, so take it for what it is worth. My story, however, makes me wary of how easily we adjudge pedophiles evil, and of how quickly we consider them less than human. When they commit crimes, they should be punished. In our time, have they ever as a class gone unpunished or been under-punished? The bar marking the age of consent has been raised and lowered from time to time, and from place to place, but it seems likely to me that an adult having sex with an under-age person, if discovered, would be punished. Rape adds violence, and adds penalties. As a lay person, it seems to me that the law is getting clearer on adult sex with minors and on sexual violence against persons of any age.

What lies beneath the clarities of law are these particular facts of life, the near misses, the halting gestures of perhaps a candidate pedophile or two, and the resolve of a gay teenager who wanted to be near older gay men, but not have sex with them. I think it would be naïve still to believe that my choice alone was the deciding factor. The two men came near, one nearer than the other, but both pulled back of their volition too.

One might say that in each of these cases a line was crossed, especially from our vantage point today. Yet one might just as easily say that a line was drawn by me or by them – and observed by both sides. Is the would-be pedophile who draws back an avatar? Is he touched by evil too?

For me, the path from judgment to justice is less secure, though perhaps it is because I got off lightly. Exactly so. These events and the lack of distress they caused then and now have awakened in me, given these times, the need to urge more careful examination of the facts in cases of pedophilia. To recover reason and proportion and to see this part of the world more clearly would be best for all.

It helps to me to think of Dante. Having reached the eighth circle of hell, and thus have practically imagined all the horror that evil can throw up at him, writes the following:

“The crowds, the countless, different mutilations,
had stunned my eyes and left them so confused
they wanted to keep looking and to weep,

But Virgil said: ‘What are you staring at?
Why do your eyes insist on drowning there
Below, among those wretched, broken shades?”
(Inferno, XXIX, 1-6)

Unlike the well loved and generally well reviewed ‘Lost in Translation’, Sophia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ struck a mostly sour note with the critics. I take two essays, one in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane and one in the New York Review of Books by Daniel Mendelsohn to be indicative of the general position. They are both written by intelligent critics and both essays contain useful insights. Mendelsohn’s essay is more sympathetic to the movie. At least he is willing to admit that the idea of exploring the ‘inner life’ of Marie Antoinette is possible, if not explicitly interesting. Mendelsohn writes that, “there are scenes of great charm and freshness that suggest what it might have been like to be the immature and hapless object of so much imperial pomp”. Lane, by contrast, writes the following: “Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage, and declares, in her notes on the film, that she sought to capture her heroine’s ‘inner experience’. Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie.”

In the final analysis, Lane and Mendelsohn both accuse Coppola of surrendering to the shallowness that she is portraying. They both seem dissatisfied by Coppola’s unwillingness to step outside of the experiences she conveys. Portraying Marie Antoinette must not be just about portraying that ‘inner life’, it must also be a critical reflection on the failure of that life, which is inextricably related to the failure of the ancien regime and the subsequent developments of the French Revolution. Coppola’s failure, then, is the failure to have said anything significant about the Revolution and its meaning. The movie, these critics seem to be saying, is utterly lacking in its own critical edge and because of that it amounts almost to an endorsement of the empty superficiality that Marie Antoinette herself embodied.

This same kind of criticism, in general, has been applied to a handful of filmmakers of recent vintage, most notably Wes Anderson. I remember a friend commenting about Anderson a few years ago that his filmmaking could be described as Mannerism. The comment stuck with me. Yet it is this same ‘Mannerism’ that rubs critics the wrong way both in Anderson’s films and in Coppola’s. So we might as well call them the New Mannerists.

Mannerism was a term first applied to painting of the late Renaissance. It got its name from the stylized, one might even say ‘affected’, way that the Mannerists painted. The Mannerists were interested in style itself. And those who criticize Mannerism tend to do so from the perspective that it is style simply for the sake of style. Thus the connection to the New Mannerists like Anderson and Coppola. In criticizing Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’, Lane and Mendelsohn were essentially asking, ‘Where’s the substance?’.

But I think Mannerism has a pretty good response to that question. There is something light, even breezy, about Mannerist painting and the way it plays with style and surface, the way it seems comfortable in the world it is portraying. Mannerists are not ‘getting to the bottom of things’ in the way that some of the powerful painters of the early Renaissance do. But that is not to say that they aren’t getting at anything at all. And this applies to the New Mannerists as well. Coppola and Anderson make films that feel nothing like the great works of, say, Antonioni or even the New Wave directors or, for that matter, the films of Francis Ford Coppola. The New Mannerists are conveying a different kind of experience. They are interested in getting a certain feel or a mood right and they value achieving that sense of mood far above accomplishments in narrative or character development.

Mannerists in general are not compelled primarily by subject matter and the films of the New Mannerists are not ‘about’ things in the way that other films are. That is one of the things I find so remarkable about Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’. There are few subjects of world history as fraught with content and meaning as the French Revolution. It’s a minefield one is expected to come to with strong positions and the goods to back them up. Coppola lets the camera drift around in scene after scene where we learn next to nothing about the events of the day. We simply see daily life as it unfolds.

Even when the Revolution itself begins to occur—a prime opportunity for drama and narrative arc—it does so in an oddly stilted way, as a kind of non sequitur. Mendelsohn criticizes the movie for precisely this reason. He writes,

“The final silent image in this movie, so filled as it is with striking and suggestive images, tells you more about Coppola, and perhaps our own historical moment, than it could possibly tell you about Marie Antoinette. It’s a mournful shot of the Queen’s state bedchamber at Versailles, ransacked by the revolutionary mob the night before the Queen and her family were forced to leave, its glittering chandeliers askew, its exquisite boiseries cracked and mangled. You’d never guess from this that men’s lives—those of the Queen’s guards—were also destroyed in that violence; their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris. But Coppola forlornly catalogs only the ruined bric-a-brac. As with the teenaged girls for whom she has such sympathy, her worst imagination of disaster, it would seem, is a messy bedroom.”

It is as if Coppola is not up to the serious events of the adult world and thus her movie must be a mockery of those events and that world. But that is not the truth that Coppola’s movie is after. Viewed from Marie Antoinette’s perspective, from her ‘inner experience’, there was no other way for the French Revolution to come about than as a non sequitur whose immediate result is best portrayed as a messy bedroom. To me, that scene in the messy bedroom is lovely, disturbing…true.

To say that the New Mannerists are good is not to say that they are the only game in town or that goodness must now be measured with a Mannerist criterion. But when New Mannerism is good it is exceptionally so and it is producing movies that capture something important about the mood of our time. It captures a gesture, a moment, the passing of a moment that gets at something about who we are right now. It isn’t a comprehensive picture, admittedly. The films of the New Mannerists succeed often in the degree to which they give us smallness, writ large.

There is a scene in Marie Antoinette, where she is riding in a carriage toward Versailles for the first time. Bored, she breathes onto the window, which leaves a steam mark that she proceeds to draw on, doodling absently as the motors of History churn away elsewhere. It is a moment just right, small and brilliant and beautiful.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

In The Guardian in March 2007 Ruth Padel listed what was styled as the top ten women poets, perhaps better noted below the headline as ‘her favourite poets who happen to be women’: Sappho, Dickinson, Bishop, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Plath, Carson, Duffy, Shapcott, Ní Dhomhnaill. Personally, I couldn’t think of anything more insulting than being gendered up in this way. Surely one is either a good poet or not, not a good woman poet or a top ten male poet. It is very easy to play these pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey listings—six critical booming bores, seven preposterous pronouncements on poetry at Bunyip Bollocks, five Collected Poems that would be better off halved, and so on. People have their own ideas about culture, and they seldom coincide with other points of view, which is just the way it should be.

Whilst I can agree with a large swathe of the poets listed as being very good poets, I can’t then refer to them as good woman poets. As far as I’m concerned, Dickinson sends nearly all poets down to the lower slopes of Helicon, whereas I have never understood wherein Sylvia Plath’s greatness is supposed to reside. I should very much like to say that I can see the greatness, but I can’t pretend. 

A bad habit has developed in some discussions of Australian literature—the reduction of writers to a supposedly representative handful who are then meant to stand in for the many. Subtle readings that bring out the complexity and breadth of Australian writing are not helped by this kind of simplification, and someone from another planet, or the United Kingdom, might get the idea that Australian poetry was restricted to a choice between two or three somewhat self-serving aesthetic billabongs. Professor Geoffrey Blainey’s well-known formulation that Australian history and culture had been formed under the pall of ‘the tyranny of distance’ had its literary equivalent in the strangely disjunct yoking of cosmopolitan yearnings and parochial machinations. With a smallish readership, and when some of the poets concerned also reviewed, the resulting attempts at creating instant canons of the various orthodoxies were probably inevitable.   

‘Woman poet’ in Australian literature used to mean Judith Wright, famous for her love lyrics and evocations of the Australian landscape, but even then it was an inaccurate  pinning down of history to a convenient holding pattern. Now, good as Wright is, I think there is one poet who is not only one of the best Australian poets, but one of the best poets of her time: Gwen Harwood. Harwood did not fetishise fashion accessories (Sitwell/Moore), get caught up in an historical terror (Akhmatova) or put herself conspicuously forward (Plath). Neither does she come trailing woe-is-me poisonous bon mots or turning her personal life into verbal stigmata. Born in Brisbane, Queensland, but spending most of her life in Tasmania, in Kettering, far from the madding crowd of supposed hot spots, she produced a remarkable body of poetry and librettos that still awaits its international due. Her poetic concerns were the suburban round, friendships, philosophy (Wittgenstein) and music. Her work is amenable to a wide readership and, though she is satirical—especially about academe—the warmth of her personality comes through. Harwood sometimes wrote under pseudonyms, the poems adhering to differing personas—Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer, Miriam Stone, Timothy Kline. She was not above being rude with acrostics in poems to editors, but generally there is a clear bringing forth of the resolute certainties:

From A Young Writer’s Diary

A day, a night, a day, another night,
Frau Schmidt fingers her washing. It’s still damp.
Sunset hangs out its washing. That’s not right.
Four days without a word—a sort of cramp

stiffens the heavy sameness of my thoughts.
I read the paper I’ve already read.
(Horrible sentence). so-and-so reports   
from Moscow: Is the Russian Novel dead?

He can afford to travel, on that grant.
Rose, peach and saffron clouds invade the air.
A grand but natural style, that’s what I want.
Light comes from nowhere and from everywhere,

rinsing the secret pathos from this room
until materials say what they are.
My things summon the visions they become.
That wineglass flares like an exploding star.

The west, solid with colour, glows above
earth that seems a mere pretext for the sky.
I stare at the chrysanthemums with love.
Night falls. Hell stirs again, and so do I.

Frau Schmidt is beating schnitzel. I believe
she’s pregnant. Women have an easier life.
Blessed Franz Kafka, comfort me, receive
my prayer: What could I offer to a wife

or want from one? Grant me the honesty
of evil thoughts, of torture, nightmare, fear.
Messy poeticism clings to me
like sensual wax. Let me be quite sincere.

The banging stops. Frau Schmidt is practising
her English phrases in a lazy drawl.
She’ll never master them. I’ve heard her sing
sometimes, in her own tongue. Across the hall

life, life! They say that Hogarth tried to paint
The Happy Marriage and then gave it up.
I read the journal of my patron saint
and drink enchanting tortures from his cup:

last hopes of every kind, extremities.
Frau Schmidt comes out to put the spade away.
How like a gentle animal she is!
A night. A day. A night. Another day.

Deceptively simple, yet full of fierce solicitations.

Harwood’s mordant eye can work up a kind of invective, but generally she loves too much to really hate:

Suburban Sonnet

She practices a fugue, though it can matter
to no one now if she plays well or not.
Beside her on the floor two children chatter,
then scream and fight. She hushes them. A pot
boils over. As she rushes to the stove
Too late, a wave of nausea overpowers
subject and counter-subject. Zest and love
drain out with soapy water as she scours
the crusted milk. Her veins ache. Once she played
for Rubinstein, who yawned. The children caper
round a sprung mousetrap where a mouse lies dead.
When the soft corpse won’t move they seem afraid.
She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper
featuring: Tasty dishes from stale bread.

How good it is to come across a poet where there is no look-at-me subtext going on. Meditative, rueful, this is writing one can immediately relate to. Harwood’s philosophical bent has made her world the tangible one we all know: about the house, glimmers of beatitudes, thinking on the meaning of friendship, loves remembered, nature’s beauty holding off darknesses. Eloquent music. A memorable and hard-earned calm in the face of the telltale X-ray or the tragicomedy of having the large sensibility in the small-town environs. And there is passion too.

Carnal Knowledge l

Roll back, you fabulous animal
be human, sleep. I’ll call you up
from water’s dazzle, wheat-blond hills,
clear light and open-hearted roses,
this day’s extravagance of blue
stored like a pulsebeat in the skull.

Content to be your love, your fool,
your creature tender and obscene
I’ll bite sleep’s innocence away
and wake the flesh my fingers cup
to build a world from what’s to hand,
new energies of light and space

wings for blue distance, fins to sweep
the obscure caverns of your heart,
a tongue to lift your sweetness close
leaf-speech against the window-glass
a memory of chaos weeping
mute forces hammering for shape

sea-strip and sky-strip held apart
for earth to form its hills and roses
its landscapes from our blind caresses,
blue air, horizon, water-flow,
bone to my bone I grasp the world.
But what you are I do not know.

Reputations. Swings and roundabouts. It often all seems quite absurd. Yet genuine writing goes on, unaccompanied by the usual bling. In Tasmania the genuine writing went on, music and philosophy special joys close to hand, the Antarctic winds that sometimes blast Tasmania finally reaching Gwen Harwood in 1995.   

Since I cannot do justice to this poet here, I can only encourage others to discover Harwood’s poetry for themselves. The Collected Poems 1943–1995 of Gwen Harwood, edited by Alison Hoddinott and Gregory Kratzmann was published by the University of Queensland Press in 2003 ISBN 0 7022 3352 8.

When in the fall of 2002 Thalassa Ali was introduced to the crowd gathered for her debut reading at the Brookline Booksmith, a taste-making independent bookseller in Brookline, Ma., her agent, Jill Kneerim, admitted taking many months even to open the manuscript of A Singular Hostage, Book I in Ali’s Paradise Trilogy.  “Thalassa had by far the worst background I’d ever heard of for a novelist,” Kneerim explained.  “She was a Boston Brahmin and a stockbroker.”  That got a laugh, but no one walked out. And at the conclusion of the reading — I was there — when all suspicions as to what kind of novel it was had been banished, sales of A Singular Hostage were brisk.   

Thus began an unlikely literary career that would unfold over the next five years in the U.S., in Europe and ultimately in Pakistan, where as a bride and then a young widow, Thalassa Ali lived for many years and raised her children, and where, not coincidentally, The Paradise Trilogy is largely set.

The novels that make up the trilogy — A Singular Hostage, A Beggar at the Gate, and Companions of Paradise — tell the story of a young Englishwoman in the 1830s, Mariana Givens, a clergyman’s daughter haunted by the loss of her baby brother some years before.   Not without wondering what else fate may hold in store for her, Mariana is on the lookout for a husband in India, where a marriageable girl without a dowry can expect to nab a British officer and embark on a life of the utmost conventionality and Englishness.   Knowing only this much, you might feel set up for a ladylike novel of a Punjab that never was — the covers of the books seem to promise just that.   However, the opening scene of A Singular Hostage, wherein an elephant struggles under the absurd and horrible burden of British picnicking equipment, including a vast folded tent, leaves little doubt how the Empire is perceived in these pages.  Impressively researched historical novels of the Raj are easy enough to find, and readers looking mainly for that will hardly be let down by The Paradise Trilogy.   But there is more intimacy with life on the sub-continent and more relevance to issues in our own day than they may have bargained for here.   For Thalassa Ali did not merely research and observe the life that, decades later, she would write about, but entered it and lived it fully. The improbable result is an outwardly English novel that owes its essence to Sufism — and you simply surrender to the story.

A few weeks ago, after her return to Boston from Karachi, I conducted a wide-ranging conversation with Thalassa Ali.  The author is a student of military history, and we spoke of the First Afghan War that figures so prominently in her fiction.  Though The Paradise Trilogy was in the planning stages many years before 9/11, after that, how to write about Islam would be a freighted subject for historical novelists and for others.  Ali, a convert to Islam, spoke of her experience of the Sufi Path.  The question of Orientalism arose — can an Anglo-American writer setting a story of adventure and passionate quest in the time of the Raj evade this charge?  Should she?  Highlights of our conversation are posted below.

EH: Were you surprised to see your books finding such a large readership in Pakistan?

TA: Yes and no — the books are set mostly in Pakistan, and they’re suspenseful.   I wouldn’t necessarily expect an historical novel to appeal to younger readers when there’s so much good contemporary Pakistani fiction around, but then people like to read a well-researched book about their own history.   In the beginning, when I told people in Pakistan I was writing a novel set in 19th Century Lahore, the first question I got was, “Where are you doing your research?”  Readers also seem to be drawn to the books because they’re not only historical adventure stories, they’re Sufi allegories.    I have noticed that a new popular interest in Sufism has surfaced in Pakistan.   When I moved to Karachi in the 1960s no one spoke about it, but now things are different.   Someone came up to me after a reading in Karachi and said solemnly, “I have much to learn from you.”   Very flattering, but not necessarily the case!

EH: Something to do with Pakistan being modern enough by now that looking modern doesn’t count for as much?

TA: I’d like to know what other people think about that idea.   I would say that the Pakistanis I know are more conscious of their culture and history than they were 30 years ago, but I can’t say that the popularity of Sufism is because of that.   Perhaps there’s a general need all over the world for something more — something that satisfies the heart.   I read a little while ago that Jalaluddin Rumi is the most popular poet in the United States. 

EH: In all three novels, you write about a family of mystics in Lahore — they play a larger role in the trilogy than anyone other than your protagonist, and they live on very accepting terms with the supernatural. It took me back to reading Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads — the ease with which these characters slip into and out of that mode.   I’m wondering — what on earth can have prepared you to write about this?

TA:  I’ve been a Muslim for 23 years.   For seven of those years I was also a rigorous follower of the Sufi Path, getting up before dawn to do zikr.   Doing that taught me a lot about the country of the heart: about what is seen and what is unseen.   Also, my murshid, Syed Akhlaque Husain, was very interested in umls, practices like curing poisonous snakebite through recitation.   He taught me a great deal.   Every example of a supernatural event in my books is a genuine Sufi practice.  He also taught me not to put too much emphasis on these things.   A British reviewer once said that she liked my ‘matter-of-fact’ approach to mysticism.   I have Akhlaque to thank for that attitude.

EH:  How did you come to follow the Path?

TA: I read a lot of ‘fairy stories’ when I was young — a typical example would be the story of a young prince who is hunting with his brothers when they meet a beggar in the forest.  The brothers push him aside, but the young prince takes pity and gives the beggar something.   He then proves to be a sage who offers the prince a magic sword and sends him on a long journey towards a fabulous goal.   Those stories set fire to my imagination. Later, when I studied Sufi philosophy and poetry at Harvard, I realized that those fairy stories had been Sufi allegories. Madly in love with all of it, I resolved to embrace Islam and become a Sufi practitioner, but when I married my husband Bobby and came to live in Pakistan, I found that Sufism was not discussed.   It was close to a taboo subject.   It was 21 years before I found my murshid — 12 years after my husband Bobby died of a sudden heart attack.

EH: What year was that? I know the children were very young.

TA: In 1972.   My children were seven and four.   I stayed on for several years — the children were Pakistanis, and I wanted them to have the life they knew, but ultimately there was a political shift.  My friends began to leave for the Gulf, and I knew it was time for me to return to Boston.   It was very hard to do.   I can understand why the West is so lonely for many Pakistanis and others from South Asia.

EH: How often have you gone back to Pakistan since you left?

TA: I’ve gone back almost every other year since I left it.  Since I left the brokerage business, I’ve been able to go back for months at a time.   Bobby used to say that the one thing one absolutely had to do was attend weddings and funerals, so I do that as much as I can.   It was on one of those trips, in the middle of my stockbroker phase, that I met my murshid, and embraced Islam.   My children have kept me emotionally in Pakistan, too. They identify themselves as Pakistanis and Muslims, and always have. My son is a banker in London, and my daughter is producing the first indigenous educational television show for the children of the sub-continent — she travels constantly between Pakistan, India and New York.   It is a little different going back with a book or three to sell, though…

EH:  How did it feel to go back to Pakistan with the published novels?

TA: It was strange.  When I first went there, I was Bobby Hakim Jan’s American fiancee. Then I lived there as his wife and the mother of his children, and later as his young widow.   After that I was Thalassa the visitor, who kept up with people.   Now I’m someone who comes with an offering, a gift for Pakistan: a trilogy of books about this part of the world, and about the softer side of Islam.   Of course it’s up to the people whether they want the gift or not…

EH: I like these photos!   You’re the only writer I know who had a book party in Dubai. But what were some of the high spots of the book tour in Pakistan?

TA: I did four readings, a book signing and a lot of print and TV interviews — some 10 TV interviews in all — and a radio interview.   One highlight was being on a very popular television show that non-Pakistanis can’t believe exists — The Late Night Show with Begum Nawazish Ali. The hostess is a cross-dresser, and quite funny. We got along very well.   I was also interviewed by Dawn, The Friday Times, The Herald,  Newsline, SHE Magazine, and other periodicals.   This photo shows the most fun of all the events –a dramatic reading from Companions of Paradise in Rehana Saigol’s garden in Karachi.  Rehana is a well-known TV personality, President of the Pakistan Bridge Association and one of the most generous people alive. Imran Aslam, the other reader, is a journalist, and is now president of GEO TV, an influential news network. Afterwards there was a reception for several hundred people. Rehana put on a huge tea with pani pooris, fresh dahi burras, and other desi dishes, not to mention latte as well as tea. It was all very thrilling, and would have been fun even if people hadn’t been buying my books — which they were doing.

EH: You mentioned earlier that a well-researched historical fiction meant something in and of itself to Pakistanis.   Could you tell me a little about the research?  I’m especially curious about how you conducted research for the final volume, Companions of Paradise, which was set mainly in Afghanistan.

TA: I’d collected books on the 19th century in northwest India for over 20 years, not really knowing what I intended to do with them.   When these weren’t enough, I went to London, and spent a lot of time in the Oriental Collection of the British Library.  Lucky for me that my son lives in London! At one point I knew I would need an Afghan advisor, but Fatana Gailani, the only Afghan I knew well, was up to her ears in refugee work in Peshawar, and not likely to have time for my questions. Fortunately I was invited to a dinner to benefit Fatana’s organization. Determined to find my advisor, I spotted a well-dressed lady in the crowd and followed her, balancing my dinner plate, dodging other guests, hoping she was the right person.    I sat down, introduced myself and asked casually what she did.   She was a researcher, she said.   On what subject?  I asked.  History, she replied.   That’s how Kamar Habibi, who is also a linguist, became my friend and guide.   Throughout the writing of Companions of Paradise, she saved me from mistakes, offered nuances of language and thinking, and gave me an understanding of Afghanistan and Afghans that I would never have found otherwise.

EH: In the wake of the U.S. bombing campaign in October of 2001, you and several other Boston women, including me, formed an Internet-based fundraising group to send money for Afghan refugees to Fatana Gailani. Was Companions of Paradise in the works then?  What might we learn about the present from the period of the Afghan Wars that you were writing about?

TA:  Actually, at that time I was writing Book II of the trilogy, A Beggar at the Gate, set mainly in Lahore.  It wasn’t until the U.S. had invaded Iraq that I began work on Companions of Paradise, and the parallels jumped out at me.   And they are indeed striking.   The most obvious are the politically driven British invasion of Afghanistan  — carefully explained by a series of lies — and their consistent misunderstanding and underestimation of the population of the country they now occupied, which led to military disaster.    We’ll have to see what happens this time around.

EH: I’ve been reading through the press about The Paradise Trilogy — in the States, in the U.K., where it was simultaneously published, and in Pakistan, where the U.K. edition was distributed. While the work has been well received and has obviously sold very well, some Pakistani writers who sincerely like the books want to talk about Orientalism — with you or without you. Is it ever a fruitful discussion?

TA:   Edward Said’s book has been with us for nearly 30 years, and he makes many excellent and accurate points for everyone to think about. It’s certainly an important issue.  Orientalism is at least in part about standing at a distance and regarding people as quaint and picturesque and not wanting them to change.   It’s about superiority.  I think sensitivity to slights is very refined at this stage in history, and some of what I wrote clearly set off alarm bells.  It could be partly due to the somewhat old-fashioned style of my writing, which is appropriate both to Sufi allegory and to the early Victorian era, but might appear to be exoticism.  It could also be that I used the word ‘native.’   I chose to do that because it was a usage belonging to the time and to the main character’s point of view when she first came to the Punjab, but it may have been an inflammatory choice.  Other mistakes popped out of some wrinkle in my past, too.  But I was a little amazed at that reaction, given my personal history, and that I had made a point of telling my story from both sides. That said — you write, you send what you write out into the world, and people have a perfect right to interpret it any way they like.

EH: You mentioned that you were pleased that young people in Pakistan were reading and enjoying your novels.   What else do you notice them reading there?

TA: There’s a real literary scene in Pakistan now — so much great stuff to read, compared to when I was young and living there.  I can’t talk about fiction in Urdu, but Mohsin Hamid is certainly the most brilliant and successful of the new crop of writers in English.  There are plenty of other young writers too.  Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography was short-listed for the Llewelyn Rhys Award.   Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing was short-listed for  the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Nadeem Aslam’s novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, won the Kuriyama Prize. I’m pleased and proud that amidst all this, there’s room for me too.

EH: Is it too soon to talk about another book from you?

TA: Definitely.  My mind is a complete blank that way.  But I hear that’s normal.  The Pakistan earthquake of October, 2005 has been occupying me lately.  After I finished Companions of Paradise, I joined a group of concerned Pakistanis in Boston who were raising money for the Bugna Goat Project, a livestock replacement program in six villages in Muzaffarabad, one of the areas hardest hit by the quake.   I went to Bugna last summer, and will probably go again before long.  We’re working with the Human Development Foundation, founded by a group of Pakistani-American physicians. They have adopted a total of 400 villages in all provinces of Pakistan.  The HDF will be celebrating their 10th anniversary with a conference on human development in Chicago later this month. This work is where my focus is right now.

EH: I’ve been hearing a lot about the HDF lately. One of the things I noticed about your site, www.thalassaali.com, was the links page of Web resources about the First Afghan War, Sufism, and the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz. I’m pretty convinced this is still your material, even after a trilogy. I’ll check back in with you about what’s next another time — thanks!

The Lomi-Ek

Justin E. H. Smith

To the great benefit of scholarship, an electronic version has finally been made available of Sir Thomas Fudge’s 1594 translation of the 15th-century Venetian explorer Girolamo Policarpo’s travel report on his detour north of the Silk Road.  Having gone looking for the lost Christian kingdom of Prester John, he wound up instead in the court of the great khan.  Here is a sample of Policarpo’s communication to his sponsors back in Venice, as transcribed for me by my assistant, Tanya Vainshtain (who, like so many Eastern European scholars, had resourcefully obtained a username and password for the “STaNS” digital archive at the University of Arizona long before I myself could get around to it, hell, long before I’d even heard of it):

You may take it as fact that there never was a Khan as mighty as the Khan of whom I am about to speak.

Yea, here is how this is so. He wears a necklace of an hundred pearls, pulled from oysters by divers in narrow straits, and he prays on them to his hundred gods.  For he is an idolater.

And his gods have blessed his land, which is called Fu, with mulberry trees that host the eag’rest mealy worms, spinning out the stuff for manufacture of the finest silks in fabricks big as mountains.

And you should know that there are other plants and stones, too, which give spices and salves you assuredly know not, as spodium, yea, and tutty.    

And you may be sure that there is pasturage aplenty for the grazing and chewing of hooved beasts, which in that land produce a musk so strong that, you should know, a Christian could scarce endure it.

You should also know that when the great Khan dies, an hundred of his slaves will be killed, and an hundred of their horses. And they will all be propped up on spikes piercing from arse to mouth ’round a great dining table on which will be served sundry game, as boar, stag, lynx, and coney.

And they will feast for seven days, or until a maggot drops from the great Khan’s nostril, whereupon it will be said, you should know, that he be no longer Khan, and was not so mighty withal.

There are several references in the treatise to an inferior people living within the khanate of Fu.  Though their identity remains unclear, many scholars believe them to be the ancestors of today’s Lomi-Ek, a group of about 80,000 people speaking a language isolate, with their own autonomous oblast‘ just to the Northeast of Vuta.  (Wikipedia wrongly identifies them as belonging to the Aral-Ultaic language family.  God knows I’m not going to be the one to make the correction. If I chimed in for every error I found, I would have to quit my job for lack of time.)

Policarpo writes of the Lomi-Ek (in Fudge’s rendering): “There never was a people as brutish as the people the Khan takes to him as slaves.  You should know that these people, which are called the Loomey-Ecke [‘i Luomecchi‘, in Policarpo’s original], love their horses far more than men should love their horses.” Some scholars believe that, whatever the factual basis of Policarpo’s report of a mass feast of the dead following the khan’s demise, it is highly likely that the Lomi-Ek were regularly sacrificed along with their horses.  Human and equine skeletal remains have been found together in mass graves, some with men buried in full riding regalia and in a mounted position upon their loyal steeds.

“Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran,” Tanya was now telling me in her cramped apartment back on Prospekt Vernadskogo after our largely unsuccessful jaunt out East, and after a few shotglasses of Moskovskaya chased by pickled cucumbers and pickled herring, scooped out of recycled jars and shoved down our throats to dull, by way of contrast, the alcohol’s jolt, “was once asked why rock stars marry supermodels.  For the same reason, he is reported to have replied, that dogs lick their own balls: because they can.”

I didn’t know why Tanya was talking about this rock star I’d never heard of, but she seemed intent on going somewhere with it.  I’d been planning to stay in Moscow for just one night as a guest in Tanya’s home before continuing back to Indiana. Tanya seemed to have been looking forward to bringing me home with her, and seized upon this opportunity to share her Russian pain.  Vodka, pickled herring, Vladimir Vysotsky barking from the cassette player about Taganka, Magadan, the 1980 Olympics, God knows what.  I knew the routine.  There’s no telling how this night will end up, I thought to myself.  We’re about the same age. My wife’s dead and buried in Davenport, Iowa. We’re both compulsive documenters, Tanya and I.  We’re both, though in very different ways and for very different reasons, obsessed with her father, and we’re both perpetually driven to the verge of emotional collapse by the sense that everything that matters is receding, irretrievably, into the past.

“Just how self-contained can a creature be?” Tanya went on, apparently prolonging the autofellating-dogs routine.  But then she switched tracks as abruptly as she’d started.  “In the Vedic tradition of India,” she announced, refilling our shot glasses, “the horse was the victim of a ritual sacrifice that was believed to keep the universe ticking along smoothly.  The horse was itself an embodiment of the cosmos.  It’s in the Upanishads.  The Brhadaranyaka, I think.  I’ll show you.”

Tanya slid a book out from under the couch.  It looked like Hare Krishna material, of which there was by now plenty in the streets of Moscow.  She began to read, translating haltingly, whether from the Sanskrit or from the Russian I don’t know: “Dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse. The sun is the eye of the sacrificial horse,” and so on, down through the horse’s breath, its mouth, its back and belly, its flanks, its ribs, its nostrils.  I lost focus at some point, but tuned back in for the conclusion after nearly every part of the poor creature had been listed and correlated with some feature of the cosmic or terrestrial landscape. “The food in his stomach is the sands,” she went on, “the rivers are his bowels, liver and lungs; the mountains, plants and trees are his hairs; when he yawns, it lightens, when he shakes himself, it thunders; when he urinates, it rains; speech is his voice.”

“Now the horse is an Asian creature, you know,” Tanya was lecturing me, for some unapparent reason, “though those of you who grew up on cowboy-and-Indian movies, and probably even the cowboys and Indians themselves, no doubt think it emerged from a distinctly Western-Hemispheric evolutionary line.  You once had rhinoceroses, and camels, and elephants, and glyptodonts of your own, after all, why couldn’t just one creature of equal stature and import have managed to hang on?

“The word for ‘horse’ in the various Turkic languages extending from Istanbul to western China,” Tanya continued, “is ‘at‘, very nearly the most basic and primitive sound a human voice can make.  Vowel, consonant, finish.  And the horse is itself something too basic and primitive from Anatolia to Outer Mongolia to command denotation by any sounds that take as long, or require as complicated an acrobatics of the tongue and teeth and lips, as cheval, or loshad’, or Pferd, or even horse.   At: a mere preposition in the language we are speaking now, so basic as to barely even count as a word.

“Now the Lomi-Ek, who as you know speak a language isolate, but who borrowed their word for ‘horse’ from their Turkic neighbors, have contracted it even further.  For them it is simply ‘a‘.  In some dialects it is shorter still: just a glottal stop, if you can believe that, without anything before or after it.  For the brief period of contact in the 16th century with the Saffavid dynasty to the southwest, during which Lomi-Ek was written in the Arabic script, ‘horse’ was spelled with a solitary ayn.  Now this curious spelling would of course never be permitted in Arabic itself, and even the distant Uighurs wouldn’t put the script of Mohammed to such odd uses.  But that’s the thing about alphabets: no one owns them, least of all God.  Anyway, if we were to transliterate poetry from this period and from the dialect I just mentioned, ‘horse’ would thus be represented by a mere apostrophe: ‘.  It barely leaves a trace on paper, yet for the Lomi-Ek it is everywhere.”

Tanya was right.  The horse was an important part of Asian life.  The 19th-century Lomi-Ek poet Baraqat Maqöb –briefly canonized in volumes of the literature of the Soviet peoples, only to be removed in the mid-1930s and forgotten until the 2003 publication by Duquesne University Press of an anthology of Great Nationalist Poets of North Asia, where he is hailed in Rosalind Needleman’s introduction as a genre-transcending, playful modernist, remarkably anticipating the European avant garde from his distant colonial outpost– captured in a short poem of 1893 the central place the horse occupied in his own traditional culture:

Lo but I’ve yet to praise the proud, tall horse [‘], Lord of the steppe, who doth desirously snuffle up the Zephyr through volcanic nostrils.   

Desire for what? Why, for a mare! And as he leaps over crag and crevice toward her who’s provoked him, he leaves behind a scattered trail of residue that our people call horse-madness.

And the peasant girls will come along, and collect the droplets, and mix them in bowls together with life-giving leaves only they know, and the leaves and the seed will feed the corn.

For our elders say the corn comes from the dead, but those older still say it comes from seed. 

And here we all know horse [‘], and we all know corn.  And here all the other words derive from ‘horse’ [‘] and ‘corn’.  Here the talk is always ‘horse [‘] this’, and ‘corn that’.

Here, indeed, they will tell you that the world itself is a giant horse [‘].

I asked Tanya what she thought of Maqöb, but by now she was busy shuffling through a pile of papers and notebooks on the coffee table.  I stretched out on the couch. After some minutes she produced a  yellowed Soviet report, of which I could just make out the year ‘1963’ on the cover.  Something about collective farms in the Lomi-Ek oblast‘.  Something about milk yields.  Why does she have this stuff just lying around?  Where are the Alice Munro novels and David Sedaris trifles Helen would have had instead?  Where is the New Yorker? Jesus I miss my wife. 

“What do you think I think?” was her unexpectedly angry response.  “By the 1930s,” Tanya set in, “the horse was valued among the Lomi-Ek, of course, though not as a microcosm of the whole of nature.  It was valued for its output.  Thus we learn, and I’m quoting here, that ‘the high milk yield of the Lomi-Ek horse is worthy of note. At the Karl Marx experimental farm of the Lomi-Ek Institute of Agriculture the mares produce 1200-1700 kg of marketable milk in a 6-month lactation.’ But hold on,” Tanya held forth, “this is my favorite part: ‘The  Lomi-Ek horse is also worthy of note as a good meat producer; the carcass weight of 6-month-olds is 105 kg, reaching 165 kg by 2.5 years of age and 228 kg in adults…” Tanya stopped reading, I suppose, when she saw my eyes were closed.  My bare feet were in her lap at the other end of the couch.  We stayed like this for some time.

“Can you imagine what violence these horsemeat factories must have done to the Lomi-Ek way of life?” she finally asked.  I opened my eyes.  I didn’t know how to answer. I was drunk.  “Everything dies,” Tanya replied for me.  “Isn’t it better to be sacrificed in the name of cosmic renewal than to have your carcass measured up for meat yield?”  Ty takaya krasivaya, I replied, my Russian finally deciding to come back at just the moment this dithering, eccentric old dame was magically transfigured by the vodka and the hour, and even, somehow, by her odd and interminable cri de coeur for the Lomi-Ek, into someone, if not desirable exactly, at least well-matched with me.  With my limited vocabulary, anyway, telling her she was ‘beautiful’ would have to do. 

Tanya’s face flushed red. I stood up, kissed her forehead, and stumbled to the bathroom.  My head was pounding.  I could feel the herring rising back up towards my esophagus, ready to reappear.  I kicked the toilet seat up and stared into the mirror behind the toilet.  I was rotund, grey and bearded, with fat jowls with ruptured blood vessels.  The very caricature of the tenured fool. When I urinate, it rains, I mumbled to myself.  Speech is my voice.

**

Previous installments in the Imaginary Tribes series may be found here:

Imaginary Tribes #1: The Yuktun

Imaginary Tribes #2: The Yamkut

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, go to www.jehsmith.com.

Welcome to New Orleans–it is nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina, and your federal tax dollars are asleep on the job. You won’t disturb the slumber of dumb money should you come to Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest, two essential sources of local revenue, where you will register few traces of Katrina’s destructive power. Only by venturing beyond the warm embrace of the restored French Quarter, with its familiar old-world charms, can one experience the vast stretches of physical devastation and ruined lives that federal and state monies have yet to address.

Today the City Council and local government paint a prosperous, resilient image of New Orleans. It is, after all, cheaper to spin a hopeful message than to rebuild residential areas, schools, commercial centers and the levees to protect the city against future replays of the tragic storm. In the face of FEMA’s failure, and the less-documented, glacial slowness of the ‘Road Home’ program, the New Orleans power elite are cheerleading the city’s boot-strapped recovery efforts, while playing down remaining needs. This serves both to allure tourists frightened by the lawlessness of the Katrina aftermath and to minimize their own failures in leadership and management of the crisis response.

Hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans area early morning August 29, 2005. The storm surge breached the city’s levees at multiple points, leaving 80 percent of the city submerged, tens of thousands of victims clinging to rooftops, and hundreds of thousands scattered to shelters around the country. Three weeks later, Hurricane Rita re-flooded much of the area.

The storm is estimated to have been responsible for $81.2 billion in damage, making it the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. At least 1,836 people lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina and in the subsequent floods, making it the deadliest U.S. hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. Katrina redistributed New Orleans’ population across the southern United States: Houston, Texas had an increase of 35,000 people; Mobile, Alabama gained over 24,000; Baton Rouge, Louisiana over 15,000; and Hammond, Louisiana received over 10,000, nearly doubling its size.

Recovery efforts across the Gulf region are almost wholly driven by volunteer relief and reconstruction agencies, some of them bootstrap operations that did not exist prior to the storm. Many are funded by private donations from churches and community non-profits across the country; others receive a mix of corporate one-time grants and government-stipended volunteer staffers for a few months at a time, who can serve the recovery effort to reduce their college tuition (Americorps and its affiliates: National Civilian Community Corps, Volunteers in Service to America). The most well-known volunteer agency working in the region is Habitat for Humanity, whose slow progress was the subject of a recent NY Times article.

As someone who works on disaster relief programs worldwide, I was invited to come for a month and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of various projects in New Orleans and Biloxi, two centers of urban devastation. The experience thus far has been surprisingly positive and inspiring, an unexpected antidote to my entrenched cynicism regarding relief efforts in places like Darfur or Congo, where I typically work.

The aftermath of crisis in New Orleans and Congo, for instance, is surprisingly similar, and I’ve pondered over some perhaps facile but nonetheless empirical truths about the dynamic of human response to extreme disasters. First there is the universal ineptitude of governments–big or small, inept or adept, rich or poor–to provide adequate protection and succor to victims of major disasters, natural or man-made. The repeated and insistent rejections by US authorities of foreign offers of Katrina assistance, despite appalling need and clear ineptitude on the ground, is a case in point. Some of these offers the USG later humbly accepted, but by then it was far too late. Government officials are the least pragmatic when lives are at stake: expect delays and denial, not action.

Also identical across disasters is the chorus of resignation heard from victims: no one hears our plight, no one will help us, nothing can be done, etc. I suspect this is conditioned by the individualized trauma of loss, a kind of PTSD, for the follow-on symptom or behavior to a crisis onset is often sheer inaction or a very elemental ‘just enough’ survival impulse. While the flight to safety is one common ‘just enough’ survival impulse, it is rarely organized and executed collectively, with the interests of all in primary view. The mass looting and predatory behavior in New Orleans mirrors what I’ve seen in many foreign conflicts where law and order are absent.

Group survival happens all the time in Hollywood, though. Take a movie like Troy: under seige, the community instinctively came together to defend itself. I’ve never seen such a mindful reaction to unfolding doom in nearly 20 years of disaster and conflict-related work. Crisis atomizes and disarms its victims: it scatters groups, disentegrates families. Communication fails; actions are never collective, but primarily individual. In the aftermath, groups of victims may coalesce to support and protect. We may know there is safety in numbers, but in the midst of crisis we dont behave that way.

For the recovery efforts in New Orleans and Biloxi, volunteer mobilization has been massive, attracting Americans and internationals from all walks of life. This outpouring of support in the form of citizen sweat equity, mostly provided by outsiders, has been the primary service model among relief and recovery agencies operating in the region. As one homeowner in the Gentilly area of East New Orleans joked, “We Rebels doin’ nothin’–only Yankees comin’ to fix this mess… .”

But the fact that Katrina recovery, such as it is, has been largely achieved through short-term, unskilled volunteer labor provided by outsiders invites a critique often directed at aid agencies working in developing countries: a vertical charity model (from haves to have-nots) is more efficient at providing a feel-good experience for volunteers than it is at meeting beneficiary needs. In other words, by refusing to engage the politics of suffering by denouncing perpetrators, exposing official corruption, failure or hypcrisy, and pursuing justice for victims, aid agencies become complicit with the causes of suffering they are there to address. The alternative–to provide succor to victims while exposing and denouncing the causes of their plight–may be confrontational, even politically dangerous, but it is this approach that won Doctors Without Borders the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.

Having worked for Doctors Without Borders for many years, my conviction that the traditional charity model of most relief work perpetuates the power inequities responsible for suffering (thus making it a sweet-smelling means of maintaining the status quo), was unquestioned as I arrived in New Orleans for this review. I’ll share with you some of the ways that conviction has since been questioned by the quality of the recovery work seen here, and its novel use of Fortune 500 companies to finance the effort.

I’m evaluating a national volunteer-based, community development network based in Atlanta GA, called Hands On Network. The Hands On operational model is curiously apolitical: it is built on volunteer community service aimed at a variety of social problems, but it refrains from shaping or interpreting the experience it provides for the volunteers who come through its doors. Illiteracy among inner city youth, for instance, is a need that is met with volunteer tutoring programs–the phenomenon itself is not branded as a failure of public education, or a manifestation of institutionalized discrimination, or any other political interpretation.

Precisely by avoiding the activism informed by a politicization of socio-economic disparity in many American cities, Hands On is able to attract volunteers from across the political spectrum, from all walks of life. Their exclusive focus on service (‘Be the Change’ is their motto) has, in recent years, allowed Hands On to forge relationships with a number of corporations seeking to expand the limits of Corporate Social Responsibility beyond simple wealth redistribution in support of  a given social or environmental cause. Hands On takes willing CEOs and their army of drones and marshals them all into direct community service.

When Katrina hit, Hands On had no affiliates in the Gulf area, no existing relief program or prior experience in disaster response, but wanted to see what could be done. Several volunteers piled into cars and drove towards the storm’s epicenter, Pass Christian and Pascagoula, Mississippi. In the months that followed, the agency was able to establish operational bases in both cities, mobilize its national network of affiliates, and secure corporate donations of several million dollars.

Volunteers began pouring in (they house, feed and equip squads of 50 to 120 volunteers a day), and basic recovery projects began to take shape, resulting in two distinct operations: Hands On New Orleans and Hands On Gulf Coast in Biloxi. Unlike Habitat, they do not build new homes but focus on evacuees seeking to return who lack the means and knowledge to begin the reconstruction process. There is currently a six-month waiting list for their services in the areas of central and eastern New Orleans where they focus their efforts.

Rehabilitation of schools, public spaces (debris removal and murals–see photo above) such as parks, playgrounds and roads, and the gutting and de-molding of private homes form the bulk of their activities today, almost 20 months after the storm. Corporations such as Home Depot, Timberland, Target, and Cisco have contributed funds and spent weeks at a time working in projects organized by Hands On. Entertainment figures like Usher or the cast of The Guiding Light (yes, the soap opera) have come to participate and contribute, even to shoot footage and film episodes using Katrina recovery as a backdrop.

Not prone to celebrate the flowering of a social conscience among CEOs, rap stars or soap opera stars, I continue to wonder at how quickly I’ve come to qualify the impact of Hands On programming as positive and uniquely vital to Katrina recovery. But I’ve been looking at their work for almost a month now–meeting beneficiaries, talking to volunteers, corporate and non-profit partners, and debating with Hands On staff–and have gathered a lot of first hand evidence of their impact. Although a number of technical issues remain, it is genuinely uplifting to see how a bootstrap operation built on a dubious alliance between ordinary volunteers and corporate largesse can result in tangible improvements for the people whose lives were ruined by Katrina and the federal failure that followed.

Jane Jacobs attained a certain degree of fame after she published her iconoclastic approach to city planning in The Death and Life of American Cities in 1961. Subsequently she wrote two more books about cities that eclipsed The Death and Life in their level of iconoclasm; sadly, those books are still exceedingly off-mainstream. The first of the two, The Economy of Cities (1970), introduces the ideas that the basic unit of macroeconomics is not the nation but the city, and that economic development always begins in cities. The second, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), takes the idea to the next level and talks about broader city regions, inter-city trade, the rise and fall of cities’ economies, and cities in relation to nations.

Jacobs’ ideas are sufficiently unknown that I am going to spend half this article just summarizing the two books. If you’ve read them, feel free to skip to the second half, though the first half might still give you a glimpse into how I mentally organize those points before I critique them.

The starting point of The Economy of Cities is that development comes from cities. It begins with a (weak) archeological argument that even the agricultural revolution was an urban renovation, with small trading posts functioning as cities in the preagricultural age. From there, Jacobs builds her points into a considerably stronger thesis that a certain level of population density is necessary to sustain economic development. It ranges from very difficult to impossible to put a factory on the ground without a network of urban suppliers. When Henry Ford tried producing every part of his automobiles at one site, he failed. Only when he changed his operation to assembling car parts produced in other factories, which formed part of Detroit’s manufacturing network, did he succeed.

At the same time, Jacobs makes it clear that development can only happen in one way: import replacement. A city develops by having entrepreneurs and inventors take apart imported goods and learn how they work and how to produce parts for them until they can produce them more cheaply than they can be imported. The example she keeps referring to is Tokyo’s bicycle industry, which replaced American imports with local production. Once a city replaces an import, it can use the extra money it gets to import other, typically more expensive goods, triggering further import replacement. This process is coupled to the full cycle of division of labor, in which division of labor involves adding new work, which in turn triggers more division of labor, and so on.

Finally, Jacobs warns, these processes can never work outside cities. Programs meant to develop agricultural countries by creating jobs in rural areas, most spectacularly the Great Leap Forward, invariably flop. This includes many softer programs for rural development, notably the green revolution and birth control. The green revolution’s productivity increases displaced the rural poor without creating city jobs to compensate, Jacobs says. And birth control does not matter so much given that Japan, Western Europe, and the eastern US have high population densities without widespread poverty.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs broadens her theory. First, she defines a city region, a penumbra of a city that appears to reach somewhat beyond its metropolitan area. Within that city region, the city’s economic development spills over without wrecking society too much. This is based on five factors: the city’s thirst for supplies of primary goods, job creation, productivity increases, transplants, and capital formation.

The most interesting factor, supplies, contrasts cities with supply regions—for example, oil-producing states—which are temporarily wealthy due to their richness of primary goods, and then crash once the goods run out or are replaced with alternatives. That, Jacobs says, is what places Saudi Arabia in the third world. It is economically passive, while the US is not.

More in general, she divides the world into productive and passive regions. Productive regions, i.e. vibrant cities, are in the first world; passive ones, including all rural areas as well as economically dead cities such as Pittsburgh, are in the third world, and only appear comfortable because of subsidies from Jacobs’ first world. In that third world, stagflation, defined as high prices and not enough work, is endemic. She gives the example of Portugal, where unemployment is high and the prices, while low by American standards, are out of the population’s reach. The problem, then, is that mainstream economists mistook the boom of the 19th century and much of the 20th century for a constant economic condition, not realizing that stagflation was perfectly normal.

Much of the rest of the book is devoted to fleshing out her earlier ideas more in full. She talks more about how productivity increases can hurt rural areas by making too many people redundant. She integrates trade into city development, showing how cities grow by not only replacing imports but also exporting goods. She continues her historical narrative, skipping from the agricultural revolution to medieval Europe; her main argument is that Venice developed by trading not only with Constantinople but also with other cities in then backward Europe, and in general cities should not become colonies to bigger cities by only trading with them but also create their own mini-networks of cities.

While she gives some examples of how cities can stab themselves in the back in The Economy of Cities, it is only in the later book that she develops that into a coherent idea, which, incidentally, is also where she is weakest. First, currency feedback is crucial in telling cities when to import and when to replace imports, so national currencies at best depress all cities but one—London in Britain, Paris in France, Milan in Italy, and so on—and at worst create a total disharmony of economic feedback, as in multi-city countries like the US. In developing countries, national currencies are pegged to rural goods or primary supplies, which tend to strengthen the currency beyond what the cities can take without deindustrializing. One major reason Singapore developed so fast is that it was kicked out of Malaysia for political reasons and subsequently used its own currency. The US and Japan needed explicit tariffs to protect local industry; in Singapore (and Hong Kong), this tariff was called the national currency.

Further, cities can stifle themselves by engaging in various forms of discrimination, including against small businesses. Caste systems and racial and gender inequality rob the city of needed talent. Regulations such as ground rules established in New York in the 1960s, wherein the city let firms bid on the redevelopment of 37 buildings in Harlem but only if they could bid on all 37 at once, ensure blighted neighborhoods cannot develop their own talent. In the US it is so egregious that in The Economy of Cities, Jacobs quotes a civil rights activist who says government interference with slum development causes so many problems it would be better if it left black neighborhoods alone entirely.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs also introduces the idea of transactions of decline. These are forms of spending that on paper increase GDP but in practice never produce any innovation or further growth. She identifies three such transactions: military spending, subsidies to rural hinterlands, and trade with backward countries. Military spending can help the economy when it is temporary, but otherwise it is a drag since it produces nothing. The same applies to subsidies to the hinterland and loans to third world countries that can never pay them back. All three are preoccupations of great empires, which is why cities tend to have cycles of growth, followed by imperialism, followed by decline.

Before criticizing the specifics of Jacobs’ argument, let me say that I think the basic notion that cities are the basic units of macroeconomics makes some sense. There is no special reason for nations to be the basic unit, especially not in the age of the European Union and the Euro. Urban areas and city regions are natural units defined economically and socially, independent of arbitrary political boundaries. Nations—and, incidentally, city limits—are not. In addition, let me note that there are many sub-issues I cannot address for space constraints. My above summary has 1,100 words; Mark Rosenfelder’s has more than 6,000 and still misses some important points.

The weakest point in Jacobs’ argument is the exact definition of import replacement and when it occurs. She peppers her writing with examples of when cities replace imports and when they do not, without a shred of evidence that this is in fact what happens. It is subtle and remote enough in the two books I am dealing with here, which is why I only noticed it upon reading Dark Age Ahead (2004). In that book, she talks about Canada’s rapid economic growth in the early 2000s as an example of import replacement in Toronto. The sum total of the evidence she includes there is an anecdote of an office chair with “Made in Canada” printed on it. The evidence she gives that some city in the US or Britain underwent a surge of import replacement in the 1840s is even thinner.

In fact, her example of Toronto’s import replacement shows how fragile her analysis is. One of the major factors behind Canada’s recent growth is the fact that Alberta is sitting on more oil than is present in the entire Middle East, albeit in tar sand form, which is more expensive to produce than Saudi crude. Increasing development of tar sands is causing labor shortages in much of Alberta, which then translate to reduced unemployment in other provinces, which send migrant workers to tar sand mining operations.

Second, the three transactions of decline she identifies are not the only or even the most costly types of spending that do not produce wealth. Health spending, debt interest, infrastructure repair, policing and internal security, and even some forms of welfare that go to the urban poor are just as economically unproductive. Much of this is covered by the difference between gross and net domestic product. The rest boils down to how much the city spends versus what level it could theoretically lower its spending to, which is itself a function of its wage level, or its existing level of economic development.

In fact, health spending dwarfs Jacobs’ three transactions of decline in almost every developed country. The US spends 4.5% of its GDP on defense, and New York’s tax imbalance with the state and federal governments, which significantly overlaps military spending, totals 5% of its gross city product. Aid to other countries, including loans, totals 0.2%. That compares with 15% of American GDP spent on health care. Although other developed countries spend closer to 9-10% of their GDP on health, they also spend closer to 1.5-2% of their GDP on the military. The only developed country that spends more on the military than on health is Singapore, which has no hinterland to subsidize (though Israel comes close, and also massively subsidizes settlers above and beyond IDF protection).

There are a few more areas in which Jacobs’ theory is fuzzy. It says nothing of how subsidies to poor regions can in fact produce innovation by investing in education. It entirely misses the fact that population pressure can impoverish countries, and at any rate birth control and family planning are necessary to move women from the production of babies to the production of new wealth. It dwells on manufacturing but says nothing about service economies. It is overall tailored to the 1980s, when the shock of American deindustrialization was at its peak, Germany and Japan were forward-looking innovators, China had barely recovered from Maoism, and Ronald Reagan was busy hiking military spending and running unsustainable deficits.

Two points of fuzziness stand out. The first is that Jacobs leaves cities undefined. It is implied that they all work like London or New York, that is have a core surrounded by rings of decreasingly urbanized areas. But that is not the only way for a city to arise. The biggest urban area in Germany is not Berlin, but the Ruhr, an agglomeration of many relatively small industrial cities, none of which dominates the region. On a larger scale, Jacobs leaves out megalopolises, which severely complicate her proposed scheme wherein each city region mints and prints its own currency. How can New York and Philadelphia have separate currencies when their metropolitan areas overlap?

The second fuzzy point is the definition of the third world. The third world is not defined by economic passivity, but by various social problems centered around poverty. Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Beijing, and Bangkok are perfectly dynamic, and fit perfectly into the third world. Moscow has gotten far more economically active since the fall of the Soviet Union, but its upsurge in poverty and breakdown in public health triggered a painful process of third-worldening spreading in Russia.

To some extent, it is hard to fault Jacobs for consistently preferring anecdotes to data. When the economic mainstream focuses on nations, it is very hard to find accurate data about the economies of cities. Jacobs is by and large forced to talk about import replacement in the almost magical terms she uses, invoking it whenever there is no other explanation for economic growth that fits her theory. And the historical overviews that stay away from handwaved import replacement are strong.

But the solution to problems with data is to look for empirical clues, such as the number of bicycles or cars or computers a developing country imports every year. Import replacement will occur whenever we see a decrease in the imports of a lower-level good without a corresponding decrease in its consumption. Supply-oriented growth will occur whenever increased exports of primary goods account for big enough a fraction of economic growth.

Jacobs’ policy suggestions span the entire gamut from politically insane to extremely cogent. It is not especially hard to divert subsidies to areas where they increase productivity: education, worker retraining, public transportation instead of roads and cars, direct scientific research rather than military research, minimum income as opposed to a mishmash of welfare programs that cost too much and reduce poverty too little. There, Jacobs is completely right. Her suggestion that budding empires not squelch city development in colonies the way Britain did in Ireland and tried to in the US could work, but is politically difficult to implement. In contrast, small currency regions will never work, and neither will ending trade with backward areas.

Make no mistake about it: Jacobs understands macroeconomics. Her theory has a fairly sound core, even if it requires tweaking to account for changes brought in the previous decade and in this one. The problems only start when she heaps onto the theory sundry sub-issues that only detract from it.

Elatia Harris

Until 1967, when the excavations of Prof. Spyridon Marinatos began to bring it to light, the clock had been stopped on the settlement of Akrotiri, on the Aegean island of Thera – better known as Santorini – for about 3600 years. Volcanic ash from the largest geological event of ancient times, several hundred feet of ash that would have taken fully two centuries to harden, had both destroyed and preserved the town, setting it apart from history for a very long time.

The precise dating of the event is a difficulty – one of those problems that arise when there’s a spread between archeological and geological data.  Though the Egyptians – this would have been about the time of Queen Hatshepsut – suffered no damage on record from the eruption, its ashy traces blew northeast to Anatolia, helping to date it to around 1600 B.C.E.  Its effects, including a tsunami that pounded the northern coast of Crete, would have been marked with awe throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and may have made an impact on weather systems as far away as China.  Examining a satellite photo of Thera, it is easy to see the outlines of the caldera, the vast undersea crater around which the present island takes form. The Thera Eruption, as it is called, was not the first from this furious caldera, several hundred thousand years old — only the first to impinge on civilization.

Who, then, lived on Thera?  Not that it was in those days called Thera; the name came into use well after the eruption.  The Therans had much but not everything in common with the palace-dwelling Minoans on Crete.  Thera being the southernmost island in the Cycladic arc, just about equidistant from mainland Greece and Asia Minor and 70 kilometers north of Crete, its roots in Cycladic culture went deep. Of Minoans in general, we know what we can infer from archeological sites, but we cannot read their language, written in the tormenting and fascinating script called Linear A, at which scholars have puzzled ever since the Phaistos Disc was unearthed on Crete one hundred years ago.  Shards covered with Linear A have been found on Thera, too, tantalizing in their mute abundance.

One of the most baffling losses pre-history confronts us with is our not knowing how an ancient people referred to itself, or what its place was called by those who lived there. We don’t know Minoan place names, or what the Minoans called themselves, and the sound of their speech is but a guess. We do know that the time of their late flourishing — roughly the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C.E. — corresponded to a period of internationalism and vigorous trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

This was the Late Bronze Age, and many of its gorgeous refinements were fully present on Thera. In the harbor there were 50-foot ships of cypress, with resinated linen-covered hulls and benches for 30 oarsmen. Thanks to the same geothermal activity that would one day disastrously increase, hot water ran in pipes through multi-storied houses with stone stairs. Ventilation was understood, with light wells sunk in blocks of dwellings. Then as now in the Mediterranean, staples were stored in gigantic ceramic jars – olive oil, grain, dried figs. There was intricate and characteristic jewelry – out-sized crescent earrings, for instance – and there was perfume, of coriander, almonds, bergamot and pine. Weaving was so fine that garments could be woven sheer and then embroidered. There were blue-toned vervet monkeys from Egypt, tall stone vases for lilies, and sufficient paint for many radiantly colored and figured walls — had there not been paint, we would know very little of the rest.

And there was saffron, the dark red thread linking so many ancient peoples.  Saffron is obtained by plucking the stigma — the female parts of the reproductive system of the saffron crocus – and drying it. The dried stigma are called saffron threads, and these are typically ground to a powder before or after being sold.  Harvesting and drying saffron is intensive labor, performed almost everywhere by women. Known and used since Neolithic times, the wild-growing crocus species that produces saffron, C. cartwrightianus, has given over to a cultivated species, C. sativus.  Numerous crocus species, some with mythological associations, bloom in the late winter, the spring and the fall.  C. cartwrightianus and C. sativus, with their petals of violet-blue, bloom in the late fall, a time of tremendous fecundity in both plant and animal life in the Mediterranean. It takes about 70,000 deep orange-red stigma to make a pound of saffron.  Always regarded as very, very precious, it is now mainly known as the world’s most expensive spice.  In its defense as a flavoring for food – the taste is epiphanial, and you only need a little.  More about that another time.  Its 4000-year history includes not only culinary applications, but use as a dye, a medicine, and a ritual substance.

Anyone looking for the cultic aspects of saffron had better begin with Akrotiri. Though history’s most ardent kiss – language that we can read – has not yet been bestowed here, the images on the walls tell us a story of their own.

In the building known as Xeste 3, larger and more decorated than any other in town, is a two-storied chamber of frescoes – true frescoes, painted on wet plaster for a time-defying bond – depicting women and girls gathering saffron crocus blooms, bringing them in baskets to a saffron-cushioned goddess seated on a three-tiered platform. It is by far the most splendid and evocative cycle of paintings from the ancient world to be discovered in our time, and a match for almost any painting from pre-classical antiquity.  Since the Aegean Late Bronze Age was a time of complex cross-currents in artistic influences, striking parallels between the Egyptian and Minoan painting styles are to be expected.  The precision with which landscape elements as large as harbors and as small as individual flowers were imagined and represented on Thera, however, is without peer in either Minoan civilization or Dynastic Egypt.

Xeste 3 was probably a public building – on an ashlar wall there is an altar surmounted by a painted pair of horns tipped and dripping in red and, below, a lustral basin, both too large for domestic use.  If public or semi-public rituals were performed here, then to what end? And in whose propitiation?

Mistress of the Animals

It is hard not to look at the goddess on the saffron cushion. Though her state of preservation is less than optimal, she is the focal point of the cycle. Necklaces with a duck and a dragonfly motif hang in an arc from her throat. Her blue and white costume is richly embroidered with a saffron crocus motif, the easily recognizable silhouette of the wild-growing C. cartwrightianus that is everywhere represented in Xeste 3 – clinging to rocks, garlanding its gatherers, piled into baskets, and patterning the creamy white field on which all the images are painted. The sheer visual inescapability of the crocus on these premises where rituals were enacted may represent its fragrance suffusing the atmosphere. A sign in Greek mythology of the presence of a deity is the scent of flowers, and one thousand years earlier on Thera, it may have meant the same, for the Greeks routinely endowed the Olympians with the attributes of far older gods.

To us, perhaps the most compelling aspect of the goddess is not her regalia, but her expression. Head turned in profile, her eye is starry with interest, her lips parted as if in speech with the blue monkey to her right offering a handful of saffron. A gryphon flanks her left, present only in paw and wing. While she commands girls to gather and bring her tribute, her companions are animals, on the same level of the platform as herself. We don’t know her name on Thera, but she is known to us anyhow: this is the Mistress of the Animals — potnia theron — one of the oldest goddesses of ancient times. A mountain deity of the Near East – the mountain here recalled by the three-tiered platform – potnia theron held sway over wild animals, the wild and the holy being, for purposes of propitiation, terribly similar. A fierce Nature Mother, she was allied with the animals, needing to be won over with worship to the side of the hunters. 

In her earliest known incarnations, potnia theron was wild and implacable to look at, anything but easy to sell on the idea that her creatures should be slaughtered to feed and clothe humans, and nothing at all like the luxuriously adorned beauty inclining her head to the ear of the monkey on the walls of Xeste 3.  It is probable that what we see represented here is the priestess of the cult – the most highly stationed woman in the town — standing in for the deity during the ritual, and in a moment of awful mystery, actually assuming her throne.  It was understood as a sacred performance, and doing just this was one of the major functions of cultic priests.  It still is, as, for instance, with the vicar empowered to forgive a penitent in the name of God at the end of a ritual confession, literally to hand out God’s forgiveness in His place.

Saffron from Thera

What role did saffron play here? In the thirty years since scholars began to study Xeste 3, their appreciation of this role has grown, but that is only to say conjecture ranges ever wider, for however lavish the visual clues there is a crucial absence of record. Perhaps, however, visual clues and the inferential processes they stimulate can point the way to an accurate understanding of what is seen.

Most educated guessing about the meaning of the paintings in Xeste 3 has tended towards the interpretation that fertility rites are being enacted, or coming of age ceremonies performed, even that a goddess is overseeing the production of perfume or spice. The youngest looking members of the troop of saffron-gathering girls have curious coiffures not seen elsewhere among Cycladic and Minoan peoples – banded heads with shaven, blue-painted skulls and long black locks at the forehead, ears and crown. Boys on Thera are painted this way too – it seems to have been a youth thing, no doubt fraught with meaning.  Based on documented head-shaving patterns and rituals in Asia Minor, more than one scholar has concluded that Xeste 3 might be where the youth of Thera dedicated its hair to the gods – the offering of hair, symbolic of one’s strength, being in many places in the ancient Near East the maximum offering that one could make. 

These guesses speak to Late Bronze Age folkways in a general sense; initiations were known to take place at childhood’s end, spices were ground, plants were processed for perfume and incense, and what the ancients did with their hair – how they considered it –was deeply meaningful to them. What has been until recently overlooked is the specific focus on saffron in this large chamber.  It’s everywhere, and because the flower that produces it, the saffron crocus, is extremely accurately represented it cannot be a generic flower motif, for lilies, irises and other flowers are elsewhere in Akrotiri painted with the same careful and characteristic attention to plant anatomy. But these others are not shown being handled by humans.

Could the Xeste 3 murals pertain to the dyeing of luxury goods?  Prof. Elizabeth Wayland Barber observes in Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years (1994) that yellow was the color of women’s garments in the ancient world, with saffron the dye that produced those tonalities – from radiant warm yellow to deep orange-red – reserved for women of high status.  The use of saffron as a component in pigment goes back about 50,000 years to cave painting in Iraq, so the Therans were more likely simply to have used it as a dye than celebrated it as such. A young, blue-skulled priestess in a saffron robe is found on a wall of the West House, a nearby building at Akrotiri, and a long-haired woman suited in a tight-fitting saffron-colored costume raises her arm – signaling what? – on a wall of the House of the Ladies, also near Xeste 3.  Looking closely, it’s possible to see that the priestess’s lips and ear-tips are colored a deep orange-red, and on the cheek of the woman in fitted saffron clothing, there appears an emphatic red stain. Make-up? It’s probable that these facial markings are cultic, like the smudge of ash on the foreheads of Christians on Ash Wednesday, or the bindi on the foreheads of Hindu women, originally made of saffron paste, and a mark denoting both status and cultic affiliation.

By the time of the Thera Eruption, yet another supremely important use for saffron was known.  It was powerful medicine.  In about 1550 B.C., in the XVIII Dynasty, the Ebers Papyrus, not only a medical treatise but perhaps the first known complete book of any kind, was rolled up and placed between the thighs of a body prepared for burial in Egypt. It consists of over 3000 lines of text written in the cursive script called Hieratic, with 811 prescriptions and diagnoses interspersed with spells and incantations. It recommends saffron powder blended with beer as a poultice for women in difficult labor, and recognizes saffron as a diuretic, as well.

Prof. Jules Janick of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University writes that “the early medical arts were associated with the search for knowledge about healing substances on the one hand and magic and religion on the other.  Plants with strong tastes and odors (herbs and spices) that were seized upon to alleviate illness and enhance food were considered sources of power, and became associated with ritual, magic, and religion. The prehistoric discovery that certain plants are edible or have curative powers and others are inedible or cause harm is the origin of the healing professions and its practitioners — priest, physician and apothecary.  For thousands of years the role of the priest and the physician were combined.” 

The theory that diseases had natural rather than supernatural causes would not be expounded until Hippocrates, more than 1200 years after the Thera Eruption.  The notion that healing properties inhered in plants with or without divine intervention likewise belonged to a later, more rational era.  In the long meanwhile, medicine was magic assisted by careful observation.  And on Thera, the magicians were women.

In 2004, Dr. Gordon Bendersky, a cardiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Susan Ferrence, an art historian at Temple University, published in the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine an acclaimed article, “Therapy with Saffron and the Goddess of Thera,” in which they propose that the Akrotiri frescoes suggest the Therans had developed saffron as a versatile medicine.  Citing not only that the women in the frescoes are picking crocus flowers and emptying their elaborately detailed stigma — where its medicinal phytoactivity is concentrated — from small baskets to large ones, but that facing the goddess there is a seated girl with a bleeding foot and her hand to her head in the gesture that, in the Egyptian painting that influenced the artists of Akrotiri, indicates suffering, Bendersky and Ferrence hypothesize that “the program of Xeste 3 does not merely include the secondary medicinal value of saffron, but in fact emphasizes its primary therapeutic function, and exhibits the production sequence in cultic recognition of its precious curative value. The frescoes express a divinely encouraged concept – the medicinal healing that is the major function of saffron.”

Since ancient Eastern Mediterranean healers and worshippers often invoked a deity to potentiate a medicine, the paintings may promote the belief that the goddess depicted has conferred curative properties on the saffron. Benderski and Ferrence argue for the interpretation that saffron as a medicine could have originated on Thera at a slightly earlier time than the Ebers Papyrus catalogues its use, or at the very least, that Akrotiri was a major production center.  Interviewed for the New York Times about the findings presented by Bendersky and Ferrence, Dr. Ellen N. Davis, a professor of archaeology and specialist in the Mediterranean Bronze Age, said, “It’s the most valuable and convincing study of the medicinal uses of saffron in the ancient Mediterranean world.”

Over the next three and one half millennia, there would be written records from many cultures and countries about the use of saffron to treat over 90 illnesses – among these, menstrual disorders, melancholy, libido loss, eye diseases, liver diseases, wounds, joint pain and headache. Saffron appears in the botanical dictionary at Ashurbanipal’s library and in the Song of Songs. Alexander the Great bathed his battle wounds in it, Cleopatra bathed in it before meeting her lovers, Ayurvedic and Tibetan physicians prescribed it, and Western researchers have begun to study its active ingredients to determine whether its Bronze Age reputation as a curative substance is supported by modern science.  In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, saffron or its derivatives – crocin and crocetin – were shown to have anti-tumor activity against different malignancies in humans and animals both in vivo and in vitro. The potential success of saffron against many of the ills it was used to treat in antiquity has been confirmed by phytochemical studies and experimental evidence.

Was a Bronze Age island town capable of processing and packaging enough saffron to make it a major manufacturing center?  Bendersky and Ferrence point out that very little saffron would be necessary to achieve a therapeutic dose – just a few milligrams – and that there is such a thing as too much saffron, as the ancients would have known.

In 2006, two years after Bendersky and Ferrence had published their paper, a 3200-square-foot perfume factory dating to 2100 B.C.E. was discovered by an Italian team of archeologists at Pyrgos on Cyprus.  The complex had been destroyed by a major earthquake in 1850 B.C.E., but perfume bottles, mixing jugs and stills were preserved underneath the collapsed walls.  This discovery has enlarged once again our already impressive understanding of Bronze Age manufacturing and trade capabilities, and suggests that several hundred years later on Thera there would have been few technological obstacles to producing commercial quantities of saffron-based medicines.

The Thera Eruption

In the three decades that the world has been aware of it, Akrotiri has seen inevitable comparisons with Pompeii and Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E.  But the accuracy of the comparison is for many reasons imperfect. The Pompeiians were famously caught by surprise, the devastation occurring in the middle of normal town life, as the ash-preserved fallen figures attest.  Quite plainly, people dropped what they were doing and fled for their lives, with no time to gather up their valuables.  At nearby and slightly wealthier Herculaneum, they ran to the sea, where many of their bodies were found huddled along the coast.  Yet it was a much, much smaller eruption that caused all this destruction than the one 1600 years earlier on Thera. For the Theran Eruption, there had been years – perhaps decades — to prepare.

On the satellite map of Thera, two small islands in the crater can be seen – these are Nea Kameni and Palaia Kameni, and one may sail out to them to be closer to where the catastrophic eruption was centered, on a small island now vanished that was just to the north.  Here, the eruption that many times surpassed Vesuvius occurred.  It was four times bigger than even Krakatau in 1883, and roughly commensurate with the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815, which occasioned the well-documented “Year of No Summer.”

A geological event of this size cannot have gone unheralded, and it did not. A series of warning earthquakes must have prompted a mass evacuation from Thera. Only one body relating to the eruption has been found, on the island of Therasia just off northernmost Thera. If, as at Herculaneum, there are human remains on the coast of Thera – people who were not evacuated in time – they have yet to be found.  The kinds of metal artifacts that gave such a vivid picture of life at Pompeii have not been unearthed at Akrotiri – neither jewelry, nor weaponry, nor even a frying pan. Items of this kind were carried away by the Therans.  All they left, really, were their jars of grain and their painted walls.

It is not known where they went, or what kind of life they made as migrants to foreign shores, only that they got away in fairly good time.  While there is no reason to suppose that, panic-stricken, they plied their oars through hissing seas, there is the awful pathos of their foreknowledge: the mouth of hell would open to swallow up their world, and no Mistress of the Animals or Saffron Mother endowing plant parts with the magic to heal was any match for that.

To judge from the buckled stone stairs at Akrotiri, the warning quakes coming five or ten or twenty years before the eruption were hugely damaging, but not so bad it wasn’t worth it patching things up.  Everywhere in town during that interval, the work of repair was undertaken, even continued up to the time of the eruption, and the sheer scope of these repairs would have taken an organized and numerous population considerable effort to effect. In a bedroom of the West House, the location of the young priestess of the red-tipped ears and saffron robe, two vessels full of dried plaster and a third of dried paint were found; this room was in the process of redecoration when Akrotiri was abandoned once and for all.

None of those who left it, or their children, or their children’s children, would make a return trip, for once the ash from the volcanic plume reaching 40 kilometers into the sky had settled over the island, it would be sterile, every last plant extinguished, and uninhabitable for several hundred years.  Akrotiri, a world still striving for order and beauty when it came to its long-foreseen end, would go missing even from memory as the subsequent history of the island transpired.

Around 1100 B.C.E., the Phoenicians came, then the Dorians, the Athenians, the Romans. The island was called Kalliste — “beautiful one”— and Strogyli – “round one.”  In the middle ages, Venetian crusaders called it Santorini, after Saint Irene, a martyr of the Eastern Church.  This is the name that has stuck, although the Greeks call it Thera or Thira, too.  The unquiet caldera, the most active volcanic center in the South Aegean, last erupted in 1956, and will do again; sulphur and steam are often seen rising from Nea Kameni, dead center in the peaceful dark blue bay.  For many hundreds of years now, the saffron crocus has been back. You would find villagers to say it has always been there.  It is gathered every October, the stigma plucked from it and processed – a small local industry, run by women.

Coming: SAFFRON MOTHER, Part II

SELECTED RESOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE

The White Goddess, by Robert Graves
The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology, by Joseph Campbell
Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion, by Walter Burkert

Online Resources:

http://www.therafoundation.org/
Beautifully designed and well-maintained site, rich in visual content relating to Akrotiri and Thera. Many learned articles posted on the Thera Eruption as well as on topics more specific to art, architecture, religion, social organization, technology.

http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/les/17.html
Lectures on Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean from Dartmouth College. Excellent, readable overview.

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/history/default.html
Lectures on the History of Horticulture, Lessons 1 –26, by Prof. Jules Janick of Purdue University

About a year ago I started working on an article about the use of vertical space in cities, confused over why, beyond the ground floor, most buildings are totally inaccessible except to their occupants. Without much confidence and convinced that I should engage in further exploration, I abandoned the piece and bottled up my frustration over what I perceived as a fundamental problem of urban design. I’ve spent the last year studying cities, and haven’t made much progress regarding this issue, so here we are. I’ve gone public with my complaint.

The problem is simple: most cities contain tall buildings (though, ironically, I’m writing this from Los Angeles), and yet despite sharing scale and parallel planes, these buildings rarely connect or contain any physical relationship to one another. The average city dweller only really enters vertical space for specific purposes, whether to go from his 16th floor apartment to his 42nd floor office or from his friend’s basement flat to the observation deck on the top of Rockefeller Center. That is to say, from private space to private space. This isn’t about rooftop restaurants or mid-building showrooms, but rather the problem of urban circulation that forces pedestrians down a stairwell, across the street, and up an elevator—ultimately and forever bound to move over a singular plane at the feet of the city.

With arguments abound over the state of public space in urban environments, especially in light of the recent mid-brow pop fascination with Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, these discussions have been limited to basic ideas about development, preservation, and the ever-present demand for parks. Why, though, does no one look up in cities to see the wealth of space and potential that looms overhead?

This silly rhetorical question is indeed that. Countless architects and planners have tried to conceive of ways to utilize above-ground space through a diverse range of measures. In the 1950s and 60s, just as Corbusian ideals of modernist planning were stroking the want of our rational selves, smaller movements of frustrated designers were forming across the globe. From England’s Utopianists and France’s Situationists to Italy’s Superstudio and Japan’s Metabolists a diverse array of designers were devising urban forms that proposed new networking systems to connect cities from the ground up.

Buildings would be connected by sweeping, dramatic bridges and pedestrian walkways. Pompidou Center–like stairs would span blocks and would begin at one building’s 20th floor and end at another’s penthouse. Bucky Fuller offered modular cities that could grow with need but within a pre-existing structural system that allowed buildings to float hundreds of feet over the ground. It was the city that might be born of a union between Jacobs herself and the creative team behind the Jetsons. These plans represented simultaneously everything that was right about what are known as “Paper Architects”—intellectuals whose radical designs are seldom realized—and everything that was wrong given their impossibility of execution. But comparable plans need not be so unattainable.

[Projects such as New York’s High Line present dynamic examples of off-the-ground development. An existing elevated railway cutting through 1.5 miles of New York’s West Side, shown in the picture on the right, is presently under renovation and will link to various galleries, apartment buildings, and hotels.]

Two years ago I saw a thesis at Wesleyan University where a student designed a fantastic proposal for a derelict waterfront neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts. The project addressed these issues with phenomenal clarity and pragmatic foresight. In it, a public park comprising a pedestrian walkway, gardens, and athletic facilities was incorporated over and through several adjacent warehouses, factories, and office buildings. Park-goers would enter one building and walk through floors of retail and restaurants, onto roofs where basketball and tennis courts were thoughtfully planned, and along (though above) the waterfront.

The simplicity of the proposal was remarkable: the traditional notion of the sidewalk with storefronts and services was stretched and pushed; in a sense rendered three-dimensional. This was no elevated pedestrian system, however. Those exist, without much success, in cities around the world. Two that spring to mind are constantly derided for their detrimental effects on the surrounding neighborhood, those in Minneapolis and in Los Angeles. These systems, though, do not a vertically-integrated city make.

On two recent trips, one to Shanghai and the other to Istanbul, I found interesting solutions to this problem of vertical space. Shanghai is host to an interesting phenomenon where restaurants, bars, and clubs are located on upper floors of office buildings. Not, like in America, the marketable roof-top venue, but rather on middle-floors, soaring thirty stories over the ground but under twenty others, sandwiched between offices. Here I found a convenient, profitable, and novel solution to the problem of desolate commercial neighborhoods in cities, a subject of constant study and debate. By attracting night-oriented retail, whole blocks that would be otherwise deserted were teeming and vibrant.

Istanbul, situated on a hilly landscape, features amenities and retail on atypical floors as in Shanghai, but complements this integration by bringing pedestrian circulation through buildings, connecting to others above and behind and forming mini-pathways up steep inclines in the topography. These developments have come about through a seemingly organic process due both to the store owners and nature of the urban economy of these cities. This same process has yet to occur here in the US, and likely won’t as the buildings in question are usually operated by corporate owners none too concerned with innovation.

And the issue becomes clear that what’s really preventing the realization of these types of developments is the issue of funding and responsibility. I’m sure many of you figured out this obvious problem from the get go. Barring any unforeseen hullabaloo, however, businesses would do well to let certain floors to retail. New York is a perfect example: while new office buildings continue to languish with unfilled vacancies, empty storefronts downtown continue to rent for far higher prices and are rare to encounter.

Simple policy strategies could finance the infrastructure needed for this type of system, and policy should support these types of endeavors. If you read the strategic plans of most major metropolises—I can say with certainty this is true for London, New York, and Los Angeles—you know that, increasingly, local governments are seeking out measures to encourage and ensure greater density in central urban spaces. In addition, a recent emphasis on the benefits of greenroofs has introduced a new playground, as it were, of experimentation in public space.

Before building taller and taller buildings, however, we should determine better ways to connect them efficiently and in a way that takes acknowledges and takes advantage of scale. While we’re in the midst of enormous construction booms across the globe, now seems as good a time as any to re-imagine how cities can work, how we can reduce sprawl, and how we can realize a future so idealistically conceived in the past.

Mildly desperate, my investment in writing a loss, I decided to get a job.

I was 27. The last person I had worked for, a lawyer, was (long story, I had zero to do with the mess) under indictment. My prior work experience was patchy, cash jobs I had taken for survival or taxable ones to satisfy around six months of a fleeting interest. I had refused to commit to the cruise ship of a discernible career and found no place on the deck of the merry and like-minded who, seeing themselves in me, would give me a chance. My friends were not far along enough in their careers to help and were weary anyway of what seemed like commitment issues on my part. I had no pedigree of any kind to fall back on. My parents were recently divorced and totally broke. I was broke and exhausted from not having enough control over whether I might be broke again. I longed for a quaint steadiness, one that I perceived as being under the governorship of a large relatively anonymous office.

The advice I received from the career services of my alma mater, from my mother, from friends and others, was to take my unrelated experiences as connected by skill sets within each that pointed towards a type of office place I could make a case for having always wanted and long prepared for. I chose law.

(Inevitably, suggestions of law school followed to which I demurred. Many a decent, restless brain grew tired of being alone and set off to law school. Some found a home, others a crematorium. Understanding of the law is useful for practical, social hermeneutics, but as a science it is far broader then it is profound and I disagree with the average lawyer’s only tenet—that all narratives are arguably equal. Besides, I needed money, pronto, not loans.)

I scoured the search engines, met with recruiters and alumni, fine tuned the list of specials called a resume, repeated and repeated my personal pitches and after two months received one offer, which I took.

For $41,500 (I scoffed at the original proposition of $40K), dental and all the overtime I could get, I became a paralegal at a Midtown law firm of some 40 lawyers that specialized in litigation and real estate. I was given a desk and existence as email address and phone extension. Not much happened the first week. I even asked the guy who hired me when I was going to get some work. Shortly thereafter I was swimming in recyclables.

Because our hours were all billed to clients and because I had to keep track of all my hours, I know that out of 125 days at the law firm, 96 were spent filing, 50 were spent indexing and over 25 were spent copying, entering data or running one word searches of pdf files with tens of thousands of pages to them, with considerable overlap of tasks over the course of the day. Occasionally, I was sent out of the office to deliver documents, usually to a court (on 27th and Madison is a tiny marble and wood galleon of a courthouse, free to the public and superlative), once to a kosher steakhouse to get a signature from a couple:

    Wife, “Why’s he interrupting dinner?”
    Husband, “He has something for us to sign.”
    Wife, “Will it get me in trouble?”
    Husband, “Just sign and keep eating.”

The trips out of the office were billed by my co-workers as the major perk to my role; I would be the only one who could get away from the office; I would be the only one who would not always have to engage in dreaded work. I never bought the idea behind this supposed perk, that work inherently sucks and by extension nothing is better than to leave work. The tasks I was given sucked big time for sure, and I did not have to step far back to think of much worse jobs (most of these have to do with killing or jerking off animals, to say nothing of the expedited death that comes with much of the developed worlds forced upon endeavors. My personal soft spot for worst job has always been with the weathered model who poses provocatively with shawarma, white sauce smeared on lamb shreds with gusto, on deli posters; wherever you are, babe, I got an acre on my wide heart waiting for you.). Still, averse as I am to the environment, I have never been convinced that to be in an office was to hand over an essential part of oneself for the duration of the time one spends under florescents. Cubiclitis, in my experience, was never a degenerative disease but a cold most everyone caught.

I did not make any major friends at the law firm, but I got along well enough. Denise from accounting told me about her daquiri infused weekends. Marcus, a fellow paralegal, a neocon with a flaccid Masters in German literature, was good for political talk in a two North ends of a magnet meet kind of way. I got a workplace nickname from a lawyer who trusted my efficiency, Alexcelente.  I had my water cooler conversations, was pulled into some important projects and emailed silly forwards. My workplace enthusiasm was drenched after I followed loud laughter to a cubicle with three people around a screen watching what turned out to be cat bloopers. This, the cat bloopers, happened a number of times, with different people, at all hours, cat bloopers. I bore the machine gun fire of the cultural epitaphs, “you’re fired”, “that was easy” and quotes from Goodfellas. I was condescended to more then I care to be and regularly kept late, far far past my tolerance for my dull tasks.

The lawyers were hardworking and generally cordial, with one requisite jerk screamer who, outside of his office, was pretty contained. They were almost all men and all white except for one black lawyer who lived with his door shut and a well-aged blond who was the sole member of their booming divorce practice and always had her door open. The secretaries were almost all women and fell into two categories: young mamacita’s surrounded by pictures of their kids and faded Mediterranean beauties consoled by pictures of their grandkids. A good portion of them kept candy I lived off of on their desks and almost all of them were nice as well.

For most, the community seemed to be the major draw of the office. Where the repetition of tasks and conversations stunted me and made me anxious, most were comforted by the familiarity of their roles and the personalities around them. Even many of the cases I worked on followed formulas so pervasive—fighting over a dead relative’s house, one brother ruins a family business but keeps all the money, the building of malls—and central to human nature that it was hard to tell them apart sometimes. This community seemed a decent enough attraction for the employees. On its best days the large office was a cousin of, two or four times removed, the kind of personalized neighborhood whose looming extinction people often point to but rarely offer winning solutions for. The office had policemen and mailmen, sports leagues and boards and local representatives, drunks and idiots. The Mom n’ Pop store was the old secretary who helped with the copy machine and in passing compared the easy-to-handle-once-you-get-used-to-them pitfalls of the machine with navigating a long life. This community, complaints of Monday aside, the general longing for a vacation or just taking in how emotionally engorged people would become with a long weekend on the way, kept the majority of my co-workers contented, if not quite fully so.

I was nowhere near content and in my entire time there learned only two things, both on the same occasion, one month into the job. On that occasion I attended a commercial real estate closing for a lawyer who could not be present or did not care to be. My assignment was to deliver checks and wait until the money went through. People have told me that residential real estate closings can be exciting, touching—a young couple buying a bigger apartment or, not long ago, flipping one for the money afforded by our faded housing boom. Commercial closings are bureaucratic affairs. One waits, hands over a check and waits some more; $50 million might be exchanged, but it could just as well be $50.
So, I was sitting in this conference room, checks in hand, on the 38th floor of a Midtown office building, with a long wait on the way and everyone else jibber-jabbering on their phones about what they were doing the next hour and the hour after that and thereafter, and I was looking out at all the tall buildings around me and I realized.

I realized what architects are getting at when they design these tall buildings and how New York never ceases to provide engaging angles from which to be viewed. Any space can be observed from an infinite number of angles, but life quickly teaches us that the majority of these angles are quite similar to each other. Except in New York, where the viewing experience rarely repeats itself, is often new and generally wonderful. And, I realized that I would never make it to the surface of the sea I had willfully decided to start at the near bottom of.

Five months after my thoughts in the conference room on the 38th floor, I left the firm to incredibly little fanfare. Writing a book for a combined two hours a week while being stuck at an office wasn’t cutting it. Ten months later the novel’s far from done. I’m still broke. I squatted for some time at a girlfriend’s. That ended. I stay at my mother’s. Some days I get a bunch of writing done. Some days I get a blissful amount of writing done. Some days I wonder at the purpose of writing a stupid book and wonder at what I am trying to achieve, devoted to a wilting form. Some days I set aside an hour to masturbate, turn it into three, read through several newspapers and a handful of, ehem, good blogs, and have meandering conversations with friends, some at an office, doing quite well (what was a sea to me is for them more like one of those knotted ropes hanging from the ceiling in gym class. They are scaling the rope quickly).
Which brings me to the trouble-free point of this here break from my writing. Do not take on a job that does not challenge you, no matter what your impression is of how the world works. This applies as much to the individual plying at a desk as to the idealist spinning like Samson in his mill around an art form he or she might be better served leaving for an engaging office. And if you do pick an unchallenging affair, your reasons for doing so must be very strong. In my case they were not.

by Ruth Crossman

The first round in the French presidential election is less than a week away, and the top contenders are still running hard. The neo-Gaullist Interior Minister Sarkozy enjoys a commanding lead in the polls, but the fate of Socialist Ségolène Royal is less certain; she has spent the last several months trailing behind third-party candidate François Bayrou in the polls. Bayrou’s performance was been the surprise of the campaign season. The self styled outsider and Third Way maven has superseded the radical populist Jean-Marie Le Pen as the official ‘Third Man’ of French politics. But the question is whether voters truly prefer Bayrou’s policies, or if they have simply bought into his packaging.

Bayrou comes from the center-right UDF (Union for the Defense of France,) the faction associated with the liberal policies of former President Valery Giscard D’Estaing, in opposition to the RPR (Rally for the Republic,) the party of neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac. The relationship between the two parties is been complex. In general, they compete during presidential elections and ally during legislative elections. The RPR was dissolved in 2002 (after the indictment of party leaders on corruption charges) and replaced by the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement), which was established as an electoral vehicle for Chirac, before succumbing to a friendly takeover at the hands of his former protégé, Nicolas Sarkozy. Bayrou, who garnered only 6% of the vote in 2002, has used the ascension of Sarkozy to reinvent himself. Historically, one of the defining splits between the UDF and the Gaullists was the economic role of the state. But Sarkozy has completely effaced this cleavage by running on a platform of aggressive neo-liberalism. This has allowed Bayrou to run to his left, positioning himself as a ‘Third Way’ candidate in the mold of Clinton and Blair. By promoting economic reform coupled with continuing social protection, Bayrou attracts those (and there are many) who feel that Sarkozy is too extreme.

Given the historical rivalry between the UDF and the RPR, Sarkozy’s loss of support to Bayrou is understandable. What is more remarkable, and more telling, is the level of defection from the left. On February 22 the left-leaning newspaper Libération carried an endorsement of Bayrou penned by 30 high ranking Socialist functionaries. Even schoolteachers, who have historically been a bed rock of support for the Socialists, are now split, with 45% supporting Bayrou. Royal now faces the possibility of being the second Socialist candidate in a row to be eliminated in the first round.

The general consensus in the French media is that Royal ran her campaign badly. It is true that she has made several gaffes (such as calling for Québécois independence during a visit to Canada,) and has suffered from her association with Socialist “elephants” such as Jack Lang and Lionel Jospin. But many of her problems are actually structural. Politics in France have undergone a series of realignments, and the ‘Old Left’ has become more and more irrelevant. The Socialist Party itself is becoming increasingly fractured over questions of economic policy, and the presidential campaign only highlighted the lack of party unity. In February, Party Secretary Eric Bésson resigned his post after a public dispute with Royal over the cost of her social proposals. Royal refuses to discuss specific figures, a strategy which has only deepened the public’s suspicion that she is either economically irresponsible or politically disingenuous. At this point in time, hard core leftists are likely to opt for smaller and more extreme parties in the first round (as they did in 2002), while moderates are increasingly likely to support Bayrou. If it continues to bleed votes from the left and the right, the Socialist Party will be doomed.

It is still unclear what Bayrou’s popularity signifies. Are the French finally willing to quit treating ‘liberalism’ like a dirty word? Does Bayrou’s promise of a balanced budget carry more weight than Sarkozy’s nationalism and Royal’s appeal to equality? If Bayrou defeats Sarkozy in the second round, a scenario which is becoming increasingly likely, will the government finally be able to carry out economic reforms without triggering protests? Or is Bayrou merely a highly polished and processed protest candidate?

Environmentalists have been writing apocalyptic books for decades, but in recent years, more mainstream figures have written about the possible decline of current civilization. Jared Diamond’s Collapse concentrates on environmental pressure; Jane Jacobs’ Dark Age Ahead (largely motivated by the same work as Collapse—Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel) is more economic. Yet other works moralize about the fact that Western civilization may be heading the way of Islamic and Chinese civilizations in the late Middle Ages.

When you come right down to it, the main issues are not overarching narratives about population pressure or economics, but concrete social problems. Not coincidentally, Jacobs and Diamond, who proceed from almost diametrically opposite approaches, end up talking about very similar pathologies in American society: specific failures of government responsibility, failure to adapt to changing conditions, bad economic planning.

Jacobs starts by listing five problems in American society, corresponding to the erosion of five basic pillars: family/community, higher education, science, governmental responsiveness, and self-regulation of expert organizations. As it turns out, none of the five is really the problem. Rather, Jacobs applies her work on cities and economic growth to all of those factors. For example, when talking about the decline of the family and of communities, she never goes into any of the problems mentioned in any number of books moralizing about the future of the American family; instead, she writes about how car culture constricts economic development.

When talking about higher education, she identifies the problem as one of “credentialing versus educating”—that is, university education is more about getting a degree than about learning. That in itself, she says, is really just a problem of flooding universities with people who aren’t serious about learning, partly because of the GI Bill. Her complaint about science is that engineers and social planners aren’t practicing it seriously, so for example traffic controllers talk about road closures by analogizing them to blocking the flow of water rather than by gathering real-world evidence. Her complaint about governmental responsiveness boils down to mistreatment of city resources. And her comments about self-regulation are most applicable to Enron.

So in fact, what she says is that the United States has a large supply of incompetence, greed, corruption, and bad government. Essentially, that’s exactly what Diamond says. Collapse is largely about why societies decline—they can fail to adapt to changing climate conditions, or deplete their natural resources, or promote decision-making procedures that encourage the elites to ignore the people, or increase their population beyond what is sustainable—but Diamond can’t resist concluding by evaluating the United States and the world based on the same criteria. Globally, he talks about environmental damage in the standard terms that are climate change, habitat loss, overpopulation, and so on. But within the US, the social problems he identifies are almost the exact same ones Jacobs’ boil down to. For example, when talking about the way the American upper class segregates itself into gated communities he is basically repeating Jacobs’ points about self-regulation and responsiveness.

Now, you could make a convincing case that the US is indeed in decline. But such a case would necessarily have to involve new problems, rather than problems that didn’t prevent the country from keeping ascending in the robber baron era and that it ultimately weathered in the 1970s. For example, take a recent example neither Jacobs nor Diamond uses: the breakdown of public health in the US, exemplified by the e. coli outbreak in US spinach products. That indicates that the US is falling behind the rest of the world, even regressing to third-world status (in the normal sense of lack of social and economic progress, as in Delhi, rather than in Jacobs’ sense of economic passivity, as in rural areas everywhere), but not that it’s about to collapse or go into a dark age.

A distressing number of the books I’ve looked at try to interpret decade-long trends in modern times in terms of centuries-long ones in history. To some extent it makes sense, insofar as things are happening a lot more quickly lately than they used to. But still, a trend isn’t something that happens on a ten-year scale—at least, not on a scale that determines a civilization’s fate. Between 1500 and 1800, China clearly fell behind Europe, in a gradual process that bears little to no resemblance to what Jacobs and Diamond describe. It just happened that technological advancements helped Europe more, and in the very long run, Europe’s fractured political system and inhospitable environment proved more conducive to growth than China’s unified government and good climate.

I tend to have little trust in people who extrapolate from short-term trends. A good system of predicting civilizations’ fates should at least be good enough to, for a start, retrodict the Soviet Union’s collapse. And yet so far I haven’t seen anyone tackle what must be the greatest failure of the modern prophets.

Look, no matter whether you are religious or an atheist or some other thing, no matter what you believe, I expect you’ll agree with me about the importance of this question: why do so many people believe the wrong thing? The reason I can be fairly sure that this is a question which has deep meaning for you, as well as for me, is that none of even the religions with the greatest number of adherents (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) comprises anything even close to a majority of the world’s human beings (and atheists, of course, are no more than a drop in the bucket of humanity). So, as long as you have some sense of curiosity about other humans, you probably wonder why most people don’t share your correct beliefs. (And this is not even to take into account the many rifts within each religion: Catholic v. Protestant, Shia v. Sunni, etc.) Atheists and the faithful are alike in this: they all hope, sometimes rather desperately, that one day everyone will share their own salutary views. But we’ll come back to this question a little later.

Today, I would just like to set down a few loosely related observations about the debates that have recently raged around the publication of several very high-profile books attacking religion. The most prominent of these have been Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, as well as his Letter to a Christian Nation. (Yes, I’ve read all of them.) What has been remarkable to me is the degree of harshness of the polemic that has been directed at these books by eminent intellectuals as well as journalists and laypeople. Many of these criticisms seem to me to fall roughly into three broad categories, each of which I’d like to examine a little more below:

1. These views of religion themselves exhibit a sort of fervid faith (in rationality, in science, etc.).
2. These are theologically naive views of religion from individuals unqualified to examine it.
3. These views of religion miss the important political underpinnings of recent religious resurgence.

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Rationality as a Sort of Religion

This is perhaps the least damaging of the objections but, not only is it very common, it betrays a very basic philosophical confusion endemic to our postmodern era which I want to try and dispel here. But, first, a quick example of what I am talking about taken from the comments section of a post right here on 3QD about the Harris/Sullivan debate on religion:

…there are several unexamined “faiths” at the bottom of Harris’s rationalism. That the world is rational, for one thing. That ontology and epistemology overlap. That all that is “real” is material, and vice versa. That a thing can be known from the sum of its parts. And many more.

Reason works very well once it has been lifted up to a functional level by foundational assumptions. To attribute the “rationalist” perspective to someone like Harris, allows us to make these assumptions transparent, which goes a long way toward making someone like Andrew Sullivan look awfully silly. It’s a charlatan’s game, and we shouldn’t fall for it.

–Deets, April 5, 2007

Here’s the foundational problem that Deets brings up, stated simply: there is no neutral perspective from which science or even rationality itself can be defended or deemed superior to anything else. This is uninterestingly and tautologically true (but leads to much mischief!), as one must be scientific, or at least rational, to show anything at all. In other words, it is not possible to convince anyone of the truth of anything, unless they share certain background beliefs. This means that if someone tells you that AIDS is caused, not by the HIV virus, but by evil spirits whom we must appease by ritually sacrificing cats, for example, there is no way to convince them otherwise without using science, and presumably, a belief in the overall correctness of the scientific method is not something that one shares with one’s interlocutor in this case. So Deets is technically correct in pointing out the “foundational assumptions” here, but there is no need for the sophomoric conclusion that this makes Harris’s arguments a “charlatan’s game.” Indeed, Deets’s line of reasoning could be used to make any- and everything a charlatan’s game. The Earth is not flat, but round, I say. Nope, says Deets, this requires an unwarranted assumption of scientific method. Potassium cyanide is a poison, I say. Maybe, maybe not, says Deets. Sodium metal and chlorine gas can combine to form table salt, say I. I don’t think so, says Deets. I nervously ask, does the sun rise in the east? Says Deets (and I ain’t makin’ this up!):

As you well know, the sun only “rises” in the “East” … from a particular perspective, which our culture long ago rejected as illusory. There is no East, and there is no rising.

–Deets, April 6, 2007

What can one say to Deets? Nothing. One can’t say anything because if Deets is responding in this way, then one does not share enough beliefs with Deets to make communication with him (or her) possible. After all, even just using language to communicate requires that the other agree on what “sodium” is, what “chlorine” is, and even what “is” is. Presuming that we agree on what all these things are, I could try to show Deets that I can repeatedly bring sodium and chlorine together and reliably end up with salt, but that would assume that Deets is impressed with the scientific method, an assumption which I am not allowed to make. (Of course, context is always important to meaning, and therefore to truth, so of course there are contexts in which “The Earth is flat” will be true and others where “The Earth is round” will seem a gross over-simplification or false, which is why there is always an element of good faith in communication.) There is really no point in having such a conversation. There is, literally, nothing one could say. (Okay, I apologize to the real-life Deets for turning him/her into a bit of a caricature for the purposes of my argument, but this really is the outcome of his/her line of thinking.)

The good news is that as human beings we share a huge set of background experiences and beliefs that do make communication possible, and we do agree on many things, and most of us can talk to each other. Even Deets actually has rationality in plentiful supply in his (or her) comments, and carefully follows accepted lines of reasoning in constructing clever arguments. Technical and foundational issues in epistemology or even ontology needn’t keep us from making everyday judgments of truth about all sorts of matters, including whether, say, smoking is bad for one’s health, or whether HIV causes AIDS or evil cat-loving (or hating?) spirits do. (One of the things that human beings all over the planet agree on to a remarkable degree, is science itself. It is a truly shocking–and pleasing–thing to me, that for the most part, scientists in Japan, Malawi, Pakistan, Sweden and Indonesia essentially agree on a huge volume of knowledge and even the methods by which it is produced.) So what is the point of debate about anything, you might ask. It is this: what our project becomes, at least with those people with whom we share a basic understanding of logic and enough background beliefs about the world to be able to assert things like “sodium metal and chlorine gas can combine to form table salt” and have them assent, is an attempt to convince them of something by getting them to be coherent about their beliefs. So if someone says “I agree that sodium and chlorine combine to form salt, but I don’t believe that hydrogen and oxygen gases can be combined to produce water,” I can perhaps try to show that the same beliefs this person shares with me which lead her to believe that sodium and chlorine combine to produce salt, also entail that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to produce water. In other words, all of us share so large a number of beliefs, that it is not possible to be aware of all the logically possible statements that they entail, so the purpose of argument and debate is (often) to show someone that they are holding contradictory beliefs, one of which should be given up; this is how, despite Deets’s reservations, it is possible to have useful discussion.

You might by now have lost track of what this has to do with the “rationality as a sort of religion” objection. What I’ve tried to explain is that while it is logically true that certain assumptions of rationality or even agreement with the methods of science, etc., need to be made, these are not unreasonable assumptions. It is perfectly legitimate of Harris or Dawkins or Dennett to make an argument of the following sort to a religious person, “Since you agree that sodium and chlorine combine to produce salt, and you agree that X, and you agree that Y, and you agree that Z, … and you agree that such and such is a good method of deciding these things, and this thing, and that thing, and… then you should also agree that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old.” What if they don’t agree that sodium and chlorine combine to produce salt, or even that the sun rises in the east? In that case, yes, there isn’t much to say.

—–***—–

Theologically Naive Examinations of Religion

This, for some reason, is the objection most dear to the more sophisticated critics of Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris. There are two related ideas here: there is the standard cheap-shot of “What made X an expert in Y?” (As if only astrologists should ever be allowed to judge the claims of astrology!) And then there is the more credible, at least at first blush, idea that important and serious theological ideas and arguments have been completely ignored by these writers. Once again, first some examples. Here’s the very first paragraph of renowned Marxist-and-psychoanalytic-literary-theorist Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins (gently entitled “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching“) in the London Review of Books:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

Much of the Eagleton review continues in this vein, getting more hysterical, if anything:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?

And this is H. Allen Orr, also reviewing Dawkins, in the New York Review of Books:

…The God Delusion [is] a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they’re terminally ill?).

These gentlemen do protest far too much, but before I get to them let me say another thing: the problem with arguing with a religious person, say a Christian, or to be even more specific, say a Catholic, is that you have no idea what she actually believes. If I tell you that I believe science is correct, you can be pretty sure about a lot of my very detailed beliefs. You can be sure, just to beat this example to death, that I believe that sodium and chlorine can combine to form table salt. You know that I believe that the Earth is close to four billion years old, that the sun is a star, etc., etc. You can be fairly certain that I don’t pick and choose my beliefs in some arbitrary fashion: “Yes, sodium is real, but uranium is just a figure of speech!” On the contrary, as soon as one begins to corner a religious person about one of their more egregiously silly beliefs, they weasel out with some version of “Oh, but I don’t take that literally!” Transubstantiation may be literally true to some, and only a metaphor to other Catholics. Same with pretty much everything, so it is just not possible to examine every way to conceptualize even just the concept of God, which is just one of the things that theology has spent centuries doing. Religious concepts tend to be slippery as they need not cohere even with each other, much less experience, or dare-I-say-it, reality. The constraints (if any) on how one conceptualizes God, or the afterlife, or hell, or sin, are very loose. No one can be expected to argue with every single one of these conceptions that an army of theologians may have produced over millenia.

But maybe they have produced some particularly significant arguments or ideas worth grappling with. Yeah, sure, maybe they have. What are they? It is remarkable that for all the times this objection, that writers such as Dennett and Dawkins and Harris are ignoring sophisticated theologians, is raised, not a single actual idea or argument due to these theologians is ever mentioned. Why not just say, Mr. Eagleton, what exactly in Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Eriugena, Rahner, and Moltmann refutes Dawkins’s arguments? Unless this is an empty and desperate display of erudition, why not bring up how these subtle examinations of grace and hope might confute Dawkins? Orr can scarcely believe that Dawkins has written a whole book about religion without bringing up William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example. Well, Professor Orr, he chose not to, but you are certainly free to show us how James and Wittgenstein weaken Dawkins’s case. Why don’t you? No, really, just think about it: suppose you are trying to argue that astrology is nonsense, and someone keeps piping up that you haven’t read this or that work by this or that astrologer (especially if there are millenia worth of output from “astrologians”). What will you say? I would say, you bring it up. Show me how what someone wrote weakens my case.

—–***—–

It’s All About the Politics, Stupid

Actually, this is the only objection to Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris to which I am at least somewhat sympathetic. Roughly, it is really a set of related ideas which go something like this:

1. I am smart and well-educated enough to know what you are trying to tell me about religion.
2. Only people like me will read your book, and you are not telling us anything new, so at the least, your book is boring.
3. The only reason you have written this book now, is that many in the West are fearful of a resurgence of a highly politicized, dangerous, terroristic, and fundamentalist Islam and the infamously imminent “clash of civilizations”, and this is therefore an opportune time to attack religion in general and sell books.
4. Your examination of religion ignores the victory in the West of an economic system which has resulted in such a skewed distribution of not only wealth, but even opportunity for education, access to healthcare, etc., that to ease their noisy lives of desperation, more and more people turn for solace to religion.
5. And similarly, your focus on the violent and evil acts of a minority of religious extremists, for example, in the Islamic world, with no mention of the systematic political and economic violence done to their societies in the name of strategic considerations, oil, spreading the shining light of democracy, etc., allows your readers (at least the less religious ones) in the West to ignore these latter political considerations and blame everything bad happening in, for example, the middle-east, on the evil irrationality of religion. [This doesn’t apply only to the middle-east or Islam, but anywhere there is religious conflict. The idea is that even if religion were to disappear, there are underlying political injustices that would need to be addressed, and too great a focus on religion allows us to ignore these.]

I do not agree with items 1, 2, or 3 of this list, but feel that there is something to the last two. The first step is wrong because there is much new material in these books (more on that below), and there are new ways of thinking about familiar problems. The second step is clearly not true, as the books have been on best-seller lists and it is clear that a lot of religious people have read them, to their benefit (even if not with full agreement) I am sure. The third step is just silliness, and anytime is a good time to fight irrationality! As for steps four and five, although one cannot dictate to people what their books should be about, given the demographics of religion (at least in America) and the overall salience of religion in the current geopolitical mess, one wishes that these authors would have had something to say about the factors that have produced a resurgence of such hypocrisies as evangelical Christianity, such odious forms of faith as jihadist-fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam, etc., or at the very least acknowledged that religion does not exist in a vacuum, but is shaped and exploited in reaction to political and other realities. Their not addressing this at all leaves one with the uneasy feeling that an elephant in the room has been ignored.

—–***—–

So, we come back now to the question with which I started these brief observations: why are so many people wrong? We tend to agree with humans everywhere about most things, after all. This is not just true in the realm of knowledge (because of which science is the same everywhere, as I mentioned earlier), but the other two classical realms as well: the moral and the aesthetic. Leaving religion aside, we find the same things morally repugnant: incest, murder, rape, dishonesty, theft, etc., and we even find the same things beautiful: sunsets, poetry, music, Angelina Jolie, whatever. Why then is religion the exception? Well, because religion can be seen as just one more phenomenon in the natural world, this, I believe, is properly a scientific question, and the greatest value of the books I have been discussing has, at least for me, been to present new scientific work in anthropology, in psychology, in neuroscience, and many other fields, which bears on this question and is suggestive of possible answers. I wrote a short account giving a flavor of some of these developments here, if you are interested.

My previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

UPDATE: In all fairness to Deets, he has a post at his own blog about his views on all this here.

It’s often best to reflect on certain issues once the storm is over and the dust has settled. I’m going to try it on the recent events surrounding two dictators and their dictatorships, much in the news recently: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Both have much in common. Nothing perhaps more significant than the hope and optimism the two generated for their people on coming to power. Mugabe overthrew the colonial British, while Musharraf overthrew the colonial locals (corrupt, decadent, feudal democrats). Both promised freedom and development to their nations. Both glowed and basked in the glory of their place in the sun, until things began to unravel. And with no checks and balances on their power, the unraveling took on a more dangerous form. And their lies the danger of absolute power, never mind the benevolent smokescreen.

Governance is a difficut art and often even the best tend to come up short. Dictators are no different. Except that we can’t change them. Dictators tend to be liberal as long as you agree with them. Any serious opposition, and they tend to want to crush it, never mind the democratic intent. Mugabe hasn’t turned violent or suppressive recently vividly depicted by the press photographs of the battered face of Morgan Tsvangirai. He crushed a revolt by the Ndebele speaking people of Matabeleland way back in the 1980s. Musharraf too has gone about ruthlessly suppressing regional opposition, most famously in the state ordered assassination of prominent Baloch leader Nawab Bugti.

Freedom of the press, or other institutions of the state, like the judiciary for instance, is another sham in these regimes. Freedom is about the same as for an animal in a zoo, okay in confined spaces. Mugabe feels free to expel, intimidate or even kill the press reporters he doesn’t fancy. Musharraf while not so bad (but then he’s been around for less time), too doesnt think highly of independent opinion. The Chief Justice of Pakistan recently found out the hard way, earning the sack for questioning the military regime on its human rights record. The media which backed the judge saw their offices vandalised, and freedom clamped down upon. One of the more subtle methods being the slow withdrawal of government advertisements from prominent anti-government newspapers, thus choking their resources. The state can also put pressure on other private actors like industrialists to follow their No-Ad byline in such a system.

Oh, and lets not forget the false enemies, the straw men which keep the likes of Mugabe and Musharraf going, well past their ‘best before’ dates. It would be the ‘white man’ or the long gone British for Mugabe, or India and its intentions to nuke Pakistan, for Musharraf. The trouble is that they ignore the trouble within, and deflect attention towards the irrelevant. Yet, some people buy it, I wonder why?! Or maybe it isn’t such a wonder. Its just simple self-interest. Those small groups who profit from the regime within the country are collaborators, and the rest suffer from the age old problem of collective action: who’s going to organise them cohesively? Important actors outside the country are relevant too. Powerful countries back these regimes for their own self-interest. Nigeria and South Africa continue to prop up Mugabe fearing an improbable but possible backlash on their domestic politics, while the US and the West does it with Pakistan, allegedly fighting terror together, more likely like dosuing a fire with oil and then fighting it with more fire. The rest, like in the UN are vetoed, and some like in teh Commonwealth are simply impotent.

So the regimes survive and prosper as the people suffer. Yet the dictator’s unshakable belief in themselves ( hubris if you ask me) to be seen as the ‘true democrats’ doesn’t seem to blinker. The only instrument to prove the point seems to be a sham election ,or a ridiculous referendum, which give people no real choices, either because their is no opposition (or they have tapes on their mouths), or because the questions are so cleverly phrased (in referendums) that they have only two answers: yes and yes!

So don’t ever be fooled by a dictator because he’ll get you by the throat later, if not sooner. It’s only a matter of time before the whole edifice of state begins to crumble. It has already happened in Zimbabwe. One feels that it may be a matter of time in Pakistan.

The only rays of hope: civil society groups. Let’s everyone back the Catholic bishops of Zimbabwe who have taken the lead in calling for free and fair elections in that country (or alternatively for the incumbent regime to face a mass revolt). Let’s everyone back the lawyers of Pakistan who have taken to the streets demanding greater freedom and accountability for the judiciary and for the rest of the country, from the military regime in Pakistan. A utopian hope probably. They should actually demand that the military return to the barracks or that the people will push them there.

It isn’t all wishful thinking. Nepal has rid itself of an autocratic and dictatorial king through a popular uprising. Ukraine had its Orange Revolution. Georgia had its own Rose revolution. The people must rise, and they must be backed politically across the globe, to restore democracy. Despite its many flaws, it is still the best political system. And despite their many mirages, dicatorships are really an unending desert of hopelessness.

It’s time everyone recognised that. Don’t even spare a second to praise Mugabe, Musharraf, and the like. You give them a hand, they will take your arm, then your limbs, and then everything.

“Going home. Going home. I’m a-going home.
Quiet-like some still day, I’m just going home.

Mother’s there expecting me, Father’s waiting, too.
Lot’s of folks gathered there. All the friends I knew.”

Paul Robeson. The voice was unmistakable. Light snow falling. The comfort of Chicago’s last classical music station waking me at dawn. I was home.

Dad’s stroke, Mom’s dementia, my uncle’s depression. My father, his sister, and my mother’s recently widowed sister the last of this local life’s combatants. The battle continues.

Little houses, little blocks, now pockmarked every seventh house by makeovers and  tear-downs. Still, sixty years later, the plan-book Cape Cods and Georgians, ours now shorn of its two elm trees, form a distinctive neighborhood, gridded with street names like Elm, Memory Lane, and Maple.  All thanks to the GI Bill.

Our house was a Cape Cod with 740 square feet and an unfinished second floor. My father and his father, my grandfather, finished off the upstairs by themselves, only calling in a plasterer who was a fellow Knight of Columbus with my grandfather and the official plasterer for the Archdiocese. We were small potatoes for the plasterer, but he had it done by his men on a Saturday as a favor to my grandfather. 

It was a working-class neighborhood, neat, tidy, and lawn-conscious, but a far cry from the ranches and bi-levels by the country club across the tracks. The men, bricklayers, pressmen, mechanics, telephone linemen, factory foremen, and the occasional drummer, had good jobs, union jobs, but were seldom home. Mr. Hoffman was a traveling salesman for A.B. Dick, the grand dispenser of the mimeograph machine. He turned off most of the other men with his bragging.

My father’s father was a lawyer who had profited from the first suburban expansion after World War I. Attorney for a small town and its only bank, he made a lot of money and drove a Pierce Arrow. But he got mixed up with a Republican governor who went to jail, and crash-landed financially in the Depression. Grandpa was a textbook case of downward mobility, working as a foreman in a defense plant during the second war. But my mother’s parents treated him with deference, as they were working class and considered him middle-class, great fall or no.

My father couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do. With the GI Bill, he tried dental school and law school, and finally found himself writing service orders in a city Buick agency. We had nice cars, always white and with those three holes below the hood, that were probably financed by the dealer at insider rates, as my father’s $100 a week salary wouldn’t have enabled him such largesse.

After working sales for a family-run oil company on Chicago’s south side, he set out on his own, selling insurance out of the house and getting into used car sales on Chicago’s Western Avenue, where the competition quickly pushed him out. He went into car repair with a man named Norm, whom he often called Father. Some years later, their second garage burned down. Dad fled into teaching, first shop and then worked his way up to college counseling as he acquired more degrees, mostly through night school. He became a civil servant, in effect, a state employee, and never looked back, though he did continue to sell Christmas trees every year outside the third garage where and his partner had worked. Until he became a teacher, he didn’t want the neighbors to know what he did. He was accumulating college credits; they were not. He bounced form one job to the next; they didn’t. I think he was ashamed.

The neighborhood was a world of women and children. There were many children. Even the Protestants had many children. The women, insular, their mothers and sisters their best friends, nonetheless formed little block bands. As their kin typically lived in the city, they were forced to confront and befriend strangers in their new suburban neighborhood. The churches, den-mothering and bridge clubs offered some sociality, but as their houses were teeming with kids, their need for mutual aid was paramount.

So the weekday summer barbecues. They weren’t much: hot dogs or hamburgers  cooked on small flat grills, with cans of  Green Giant Niblets corn lodged next to the coals. This was no place for play dates. Kids were amassed, mothers indifferent to their children’s needs for friendship; they intervened only in cases of bullying.  We played games like Kick the Can and Mother May I. When it grew dark and the mosquitos came out, we went home, the bands dissolving into households once more where the little conflicts between sibs would flare up, only to resolved by falling asleep.

Race was irrelevant. Parents were no doubt bigoted. After all, we Catholics were informally forbidden to join the YMCA, though the only gym in town, because it was Protestant. Imagine race. Perhaps the “n” word was passed among the adults. Absent  the sometime progressive autoworker in the neighborhood mix, the fathers  doubtless benefited from race prejudice and exclusion. But to me and my sister, race, when we encountered black people in our occasional trips to the city, was a source of wonder. When my grandfather took us to a cafeteria in the city on our way to General Motors’ annual Motorama at Soldier Field, a middle-aged black woman handed my sister a plate of very large french fries. At home, we ate those skinny frozen fries laid out on cookie sheets and baked in the oven. The big fries, deep-fried, made a lasting impression on my sister. Like any good native, the black woman and the tasty big fries were fused in her memory.

My mother never knew of the connection, and thought my sister’s requests for big fries were more symptoms of how this shy little girl, unlike her bigger brother, knew exactly what she wanted. My sister always insisted on lobster for her birthday too. It came frozen from South Africa. Rock lobsters. But no matter. For my sister, they were some sign of the good life, or of her life. A little light glowed behind her shyness.

Food at home seldom varied. Tuna fish and egg salad sandwiches  with Miracle Whip were standard for lunch, though I grew fond of Buddig’s chipped beef,  with which my mother would make sandwiches for my school lunch box. Monday dinners consisted of swiss steak cooked on a stove top. For the rest of the week, we had spaghetti and meatballs, store-bought frozen chop suey, baked chicken and tuna fish casserole alternating with frozen fish sticks on Fridays. Saturdays were for hamburgers; Sundays for steak and the occasional roast. There were always potatoes — the one non-meat dish that wasn’t frozen, except for the nasty frozen french fries. Boiled, baked, scalloped, whipped: though we were Irish, we could have been Russian for our devotion to the potato.

My mother spent those years washing clothes, cleaning the house, and raising five children. She had had dreams of being a ballet dancer, but these were quashed by the war and working in Marshall Field’s. She finished two years at Loyola University along the lake. Like my father, she had gone to Catholic schools and to a Catholic university. We went to Catholic schools too, and I was the first of my father’s family to attend a non-Catholic college. My mother’s sister had married a Protestant, and they had joined the profane world of public schools and public universities. 

My sister and I would bike over to the parish school across the tracks. The Irish nuns equipped with big crosses, white breast plates, and sweet-smelling holy pictures took us up in tow. Sixty to a class, dressed in khaki and blue, we were the soldiers of Christ in what we sensed was a hostile Protestant town. We had no gym, we had no science, little math, and a lot of reading and religion. I was smart, and got in a lot of trouble, I think, out of sheer boredom. My sister didn’t speak for two years. They wondered if she was all right.

Catholic school actually taught us little religion. That was simply memorized, like the Latin I spoke as an altar boy at weekday Masses. The key was comportment, and the only intellectual exercise that emerged was deciding what a sin and its gravity were. Matching the injunctions and your infractions was left for you to parse: after all, no one knew exactly what self-abuse was, and we were left to ponder its meaning aided only occasionally by a priest.

Being a Catholic, thus, was more about being somewhat holier and superior to Protestants. Oddly Jews were held in much higher regard, the reason stressed that Christ was a Jew, and the faithful called him Rabbi. So glorious, doubtless because it was prefatory, was Jewish history that an ancient and likely arteriosclerotic nun who knew me well over the years in school called me up to the head of the class, and solemnly asked me in a loud voice to write the history of the Jews. I tried to do it. My first unfinished manuscript.

We Catholics were meant to set a public example for the Protestants. When the Salk vaccine was given en masse to the town’s school children, the nuns drilled into us that we must smile, stand straight, take the shot, and thank the doctor. We were supposed to teach those public schoolers, read Protestant children, how to behave.

Yet, there in Catholic school, as Catholics were Catholics before they were middle and working class, I got to know  through my classmates the habits of the town’s new bourgeoisie. In my class, there was my doctor’s son, a dark-skinned Italian-American bespectacled egghead; the Hungarian architect’s son, tousled hair, obviously brilliant, and an a completely oblivious deviant; the Irish downtown restaurant owner’s daughter left with only one eye after an early bout with cancer. There was the Irish town savings and loan president whose son became a big town lawyer. Other fathers were managers or sold complex machinery. No sample cases and retail routes for these men. Some were even small technical business owners.Their houses were bigger, uncluttered, and kids slept one to a room. Their parents were solicitous, and mothers made you lunch at their houses. Their families took vacations.

I thought these middle class classmates had it made. I never had my classmates over. I went to their houses. Except for these occasional sojourns, I played with the kids in my neighborhood. We contented ourselves with baseball.

The boredom was killing, relieved only by childhood sexual intrigues which stopped under the heel of Church discipline by age eight, and by reading. My father would bring me books from the Chicago Public Library: dog-eared renditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable, the adventures of Tom Sawyer, and so on. I read easily. Summers, however, were wasted reading endless sports biographies.

My home was in a little world, no bigger than a Catholic parish and a working class  neighborhood. It was often stifling and depressing for me. But it was not an ignorant world . People read newspapers, and you knew right away by their choices which political side they were on. People had opinions. My father by heritage was a Republican, the libertarian type of Republican. He would switch to the Democrats during the Vietnam War, thanks to our persuasion and the anti-war movement of the party’s left wing. My mother was born a Democrat; her mother was a tiny voluntary cog in the Daley machine. They were New Deal Democrats. My mother, sister, and I were thrilled when John Kennedy passed on the town main street in a 1960 motorcade. My father took us to a Nixon rally at O’Hare airport. My sister and I wore our Kennedy buttons.

Most important, as I returned this weekend, is the realization of how unpretentious life at home was, and to some extent still is. Plainness is preferred. Putting on airs and graces isn’t.

Actually, my trip home began 10 days ago in New York. My university faculty is recruiting new members, a time when the humdrum of everyday work ceases, and out come the peacocks and their plumage. Who has the prettiest feathers? Who can show them to advantage in brighter better light?  Better to have strutted in a palace than some rude pasture. After a colloquium finished, and the mating dance of department and candidate recommenced over wine and cheese, I  felt nauseated. Perhaps it was due to the cheese, or the Chinese food I had grabbed earlier to avoid getting drunk, I thought.

Then, I had an impromptu conversation with a colleague whom I like and respect, notwithstanding the fact that he himself was to the manor born, and enjoys the fact. We were searching together for descriptions of how we felt about the colloquium performance of the candidate, when suddenly I blurted out that I found it slick and pretentious. This last judgment, I confessed to him, was based on life with the levellers at home. He agreed with my judgment, choosing slightly different grounds.

Though I grew up calling professors “mister,” even at a prestigious private university in the sixties, I live in an academic world now  where one’s title, fancifully like the “J. Worthington Fowlfeather Professor of…” is longer than the occupant’s name. It is a hall of mirrors, of conversations that reflect themselves or are only reflected in the comments of others similarly caught up in the game. Snobbery is the key to success, and pretension its handmaiden.

Christopher Lasch in The True and Only Heaven (1991) argues that the lower middle class, armed with the ethic of hard work, loyalty, denial, thrift, and equipped with a strong sense of life’s limits were perhaps the only sane and salubrious class left in the United States. Perhaps too trenchant, as he always was.

Somewhere along the way through childhood, I heard Paul Robeson. I heard Leonard Berstein perform Das Lied von der Erde on Chicago’s WFMT. But returning home, I feel the moral strength that stems from the unpretentious life.

Robeson and Mahler fit inside.

“I saw a man on a stage

scream, “Put me back in my cage!”

I saw him hanged by his tie;

I saw enough to make me cry.”

— “Planet Earth,” Devo

As a young child, I had a pronounced morbid streak (much to my mother’s dismay), devouring anthologies of ghost/horror stories from the library, and willingly paying the price of the inevitable bad dreams that followed my on-the-sly viewings of midnight monster movies. Once, after watching the classic I Was a Teenage Werewolf while sleeping over at a friend’s house, I awoke in terror in the wee hours, convinced there was a werewolf at the foot of my bed. (It turned out to be a poster of David Cassidy.)

But nothing was more tantalizing than the Alice Cooper record collection owned by my friend’s teenaged brother. Long before I began buying records of my own, I would sneak off to my friend’s house and beg her brother to play Billion Dollar Babies, School’s Out, or Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. Thus, by age 12, I knew all the lyrics to “Generation Landslide,” “No More Mister Nice Guy,” and “I Never Cry,” and naively sang along to the catchy, but decidedly off-color, “Blue Turk,” with no idea of what the lyrics actually meant. Yet it was the narrative-driven, staged theatrics of Welcome To My Nightmare (WTMN) that resonated most with my budding neo-Goth soul.

Many years later, while living in New York’s East Village, I rediscovered Cooper’s music, and found it still had that same resonating power, especially WTMN. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that I found the “story” of Alice so compelling, given that we both hail from a religious background. Alice Cooper was born Vincent Furnier in Detroit in 1948. His grandfather was an ordained “apostle” of the Church of Jesus Christ, and his father was a deacon. The Judeo-Christian mythos was thus ingrained in young Vince at a very early age. Not even the worldly trappings of rock superstardom could erase that early imprinting.

Superstardom didn’t come overnight. As a teenager in Phoenix, Arizona, the future Alice Cooper was on the track team, dabbled in surrealist art, and formed a band for the local talent show with some fellow cross-country teammates. Evincing a fondness for insects, they first called themselves the Earwigs, then changed it to the Spiders after graduating from high school, then (briefly) switched to The Nazz, before finally settling on Alice Cooper. (Rock legend has it that the name came out of a Ouija board session in which Vince learned he was the reincarnation of a 17th century witch of the same name, although Cooper himself later debunked that story. It was meant to conjure up an image of “a sweet little girl with a hatchet behind her back.”) The name originally referred to the band as a whole, but gradually became associated with the group’s flamboyantly androgynous lead singer, with his demented Kabuki-style makeup and penchant for wearing tattered women’s clothing onstage.

From the start, theatrics were a big part of Alice Cooper’s live act, but they didn’t become notorious until September 1969, when a chicken ended up onstage mid-performance at the Toronto Rock ‘n Roll Revival concert. Figuring that chickens should be able to fly, Cooper picked it up and tossed it back into the crowd, where it was ripped to shreds. After the incident was reported in national newspapers, rumors flew that Cooper bit the head off a live chicken and drank its blood onstage. The group’s mentor, Frank Zappa, encouraged the rumor, and the band’s theatrics became increasingly violent — and legendary. (To this day, Cooper is widely credited with being one of the first to bring storylined theatrics to the concert stage.) The more loudly politicians and churches denounced the band and called for the shows to be banned, the more wildly popular they became. Sex and violence sells, a maxim that was true then as it is now. By the 1973 Billion Dollar Babies tour, it had become a full-fledged rock opera, with highly advanced special effects, many designed by magician (and future notorious pseudoscience debunker) James Randi, who even appeared onstage as the executioner during some of the shows.

A consistent (thematically speaking) storyline was also emerging, one with a surprisingly strong moral center. “Alice” became a stage villain, committing all manner of vile acts (complete with live boa constrictors, fake blood, and the lewd fondling and chopping up of baby dolls during the tune “Dead Babies”), and finally being “punished” for his crimes in the climactic scene via some form of onstage execution: hanging, electrocution, or the guillotine. The audience ate it up, in fine Aristotelian cathartic fashion. But Alice didn’t stay dead: during the encore he would re-emerge triumphantly, this time in white tails and top-hat — almost a figure of salvation and redemption. Somehow, Cooper had turned the stage show into a modern day rock ‘n roll Passion Play, with himself as the central Anti-Christ figure who is sacrificed and resurrected from the dead.

Christians in medieval Europe would have grasped this immediately. So-called “mystery plays” were all the rage in the Middle Ages, most likely originating with the staging of Bible stories in churches, often with accompanying songs or musical performances. Thematically, the passion and resurrection of Jesus were among the most popular stagings, especially around the Easter celebration. Although they started out simply, the plays gradually became more elaborate and embellished, eventually spreading beyond the churches to become a mainstay of traveling troupes of players. According to Wikipedia, in later centuries, such plays “were often marked by the extravagance of the sets and ‘special effects….'” Papier-mache masks were often worn to better delineate the stock characters, often grotesque when depicting Satan or his minions. One suspects Alice Cooper would have felt right at home in a medieval mystery play.

He might also have felt comfortable with commedia dell’arte (“comedy of humors” in Italian), a form of traveling improvisational theater that was hugely popular in Renaissance Italy. Despite the improvisational nature of the format, there were set characters — each with its own telltale accompanying masks and costumes — and situations that influenced literature and theater (even music) for centuries to come, from Shakespeare and Moliere, to Rostand’s Cyrano and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The Alice Cooper stage shows featured the same elaborate costumes, props, even a few slapstick elements, albeit of a darker variety than one would have found in 15th century Venice. And Cooper’s trademark painted face is a version of a mask, now forever associated in the public mind with that particular demonic character.

Masks predate modern theater, of course, and have played many symbolic roles throughout human history. In ancient Greece, they were used to depict mythological gods, and belonged as much to religious ritual as to drama. In such diverse cultures as Africa, Indonesia, Egypt, China and Mexico, they were used as a protection to ward of evil spirits. And among some New Guinea tribes, masks were seen as living demons or spirits: they were treated with great respect, with natives conversing with them as if they were alive.

Something of that anthropomorphic character of masks seeped into Cooper’s colorful stage persona. Somewhere along the line, it stopped being an act. The stage “Alice” — the fictional character — began to take over, as the Man Behind the Mask (Vince Furnier) sank further and further into chronic alcoholism to cope with the mounting pressure of having to “be” Alice Cooper 24-7. He split with the group in 1974, releasing his first solo record, WTMN, in 1975. It told the story of a young boy named Stephen’s nightmare, and featured narration by Vincent Price and the most elaborate stage effects to date. The tour was a spectacular success, even being filmed live for a concert film that remains popular with the midnight movie crowd today.

Yet despite his spectacular solo success, Cooper was drinking more than ever, even founding his own drinking club, The Hollywood Vampires. (There is actually a cocktail named the Alice Cooper, a blend of vodka, whiskey and lager, that originated in Australian bars.) He was rumored to be consuming up to two cases of Budweiser and a bottle of whiskey a day at one point, and the habit soon had a deleterious effect on his performances. His 1976 follow-up album was appropriately titled “Alice Cooper Goes  To  Hell,” and it was clear from the wretchedly shambling live concerts that the rock superstar was on the road to ruin and professional (if not spiritual) damnation.

Like a 52-car- pile-up on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, it was impossible to look away; one stared in horrified fascination at the spectacle of a performer clearly hellbent on destroying himself for his real or imagined sins — a super-slo-mo, public suicide, performed to a driving rock beat. It was enough to break your heart, even at the tender age of 12. Like everyone else, I couldn’t look away, but inside, I ached for Alice, at the site of such obvious psychological turmoil and pain. Because for all his naughty shenanigans, there was always something likable about Alice, something that made us root for the “bad guy” — and it was the part that belonged to his “creator,” Vince Furnier.

Sometimes even Mega-Villains can be saved. In 1977, right after concluding a disastrous Lace and Whiskey tour, Cooper checked into rehab and cleaned up his act. He used his experiences inside the sanitarium as fodder for 1978’s From the Inside, featuring “How You Gonna See Me Now,” a rather touching ballad whose lyrics centered on his trepidation about how his long-suffering wife would react to him after his hospitalization. Alas, while his health was on the upswing, his musical career was on a downward spiral, and subsequent albums failed to achieve much success. By 1983, he was back in rehab — and this time, the treatment took. Vince made his peace with Alice, learned to set some critical boundaries between himself and his demented stage persona. The two have co-existed ever since, each in his own realm: Alice on stage, Vince in private, and never the twain shall meet.

Isn’t that a compelling tale? All the more so because, well, it’s real. Cooper still performs regularly, still releases albums, even hosts his own nationally syndicated radio show, Nights With Alice Cooper. He’s still playing out that age-old story, finding new mythological variations on the Mystery Play. For instance, in 1994, he released The Last Temptation, a concept album dealing explicitly with faith, temptation and redemption, accompanied by a graphic novel written by Neil Gaiman (the Sandman series, American Gods). He remains one of rock ‘n roll’s most magnetic stage presences, his shows still visually striking, except now they lack that edgy, self-destructive desperation of his shows during the Uber-Alcoholic Era. Some might mourn the loss of the intensity, but it came at such a huge personal cost to the performer one can hardly begrudge the man his inner peace. (What is it about rock ‘n roll culture that demands we sacrifice our rock gods on the alter of our continued entertainment?)

I’m glad Cooper has battled back his personal demons and emerged triumphant from his own private nightmare. These days, he plays golf at his local country club. He’s served on the PTA. He owns a couple of restaurants, and makes the odd cameo guest appearance, most recently as a murder suspect on the USA Network’s Monk. He even (gasp!) votes Republican. (Okay, that one’s hard to forgive….) But as far as his many loyal fans are concerned, his place in the modern musical pantheon is secure.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette blogs about science and culture at Cocktail Party Physics. Her latest book is The Physics of the Buffyverse.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

In Act Three of Jules Massenet’s opera Manon, the Chevalier des Grieux, now an abbé, attempts to cast off his passion for Manon Lescaut. He prays for equanimity. But the aria, ‘Ah! fuyez, douce image‘, leaves him broken. However, his passion is soon rekindled. Beauty has him in its grip. Tragedy ensues. Manon dies on the road to Le Havre and des Grieux is left despairing.

The Chevalier has taken beauty seriously. And who has not been subject to its predations? There have been repeated efforts in recent times to explain beauty, meaning the entirety of apprehended life, in all its diversity and configurations. Life is adaptation, due process. A starlit sky: fortuitously reflective random astral matter; a rose: petals, stamens, bees; you have a conversation with your dog after a hard day at work: spare me this anthropomorphic dog delusion. A great love: sexual instinct, add oxytocin; whales rearing out of the ocean: they need air, dominance behaviour, clearing parasites from the skin—anything but ‘the beautiful’, you dolt. We can’t even greet someone affectionately now without another piece of reductive scientism getting its paw jammed in the wheel: we embrace one another on first meeting, an article in Nature proclaims, to assure one another ‘we have no hostile intent’, musings about spider monkeys, ostensibly the subject of the article, providing the corroborative Q.E.D.

Thus is everything limited to the level of explanation. If I ask what you—or I—know about brain surgery, aeroplane mechanics, the geomorphology of Poland, Romania’s political history, Caesar’s eating habits or corruption in Haiti, for example, the answer is, probably, close to absolutely nothing. And yet some people, who can’t predict which nag will win a race in five minutes, or what a stock price will be at the end of the day, with their very little knowledge pumped up to universal wisdom, now hector us with Delphic certitude about the meaning of existence, consciousness and the purpose(lessness) of the universe. Beauty fits in with this bulk disposal lot as just another adaptive response to be ticked off, along with truth, goodness and death. In recent times, philosophy, as far as I understand it, also seems to have let down the side badly, beauty being a stretch too far for protomodern sensibilities. We are now supposed to take seriously the ideas on aesthetics of someone like Heidegger who couldn’t see that Hitler wasn’t exactly a good thing. 

I guess these people haven’t been reading Faust recently, wherein a pact with Mephistopheles has the scholar dabbling on the further shores of hubris. Goethe knew humility before the greatness of the world was essential for any real insight into meaning and purpose. The brave new future, where everything is going to have explicatory pins put through it, is only going to end in tears before bedtime if we do not stay open to, and accept, the strangeness and marvellousness of our residence on Earth—’the beautiful’, in other words. This does not entail appeals to the higher superstition, throwing off scientific method or contracting intellectual discourse—the scientific imagination is beautiful too—but it does require an acknowledgement that one’s understanding is finite and that this circumscribed knowledge of the world leaves the vast whole, largely, a terra incognita. A great deal of our knowledge of the world comes to us through our feelings and how they perceive beauty, the gift unsought, and often importunate, but insisted upon.

Happiness, I read elsewhere [Scientific American Feb. 18, 2007], has something to do with accepting ‘declining marginal utility’—whatever that might be—as part of the human lot. As if you could ever define what is going to make any individual happy in any particular instance. Would des Grieux have been happier, known more, or less, beauty, if he had never met Manon? These ‘what if’ questions are beside the point. We encounter beauty, often in the form of eros, unexpectedly, and precipitously. If it is a profile, a Greek vase, the morning light, that sets the heart racing, so be it. Accept it, rejoice in it. It may leave you alone soon enough.

There are people who need to play Cassandra, perpetually rediscovering the fact that the world can be a very bad place—’India to set up orphanages to curb aborted female fetuses’ is one headline I read recently. Some Modernism belongs to this miserabilist school of hand-wringing. You read a book, see a play or go to an exhibition that is saying, basically, I don’t much like the world, or myself, but please, love my work. But why should we love the work if it only offers negativity. This negativity has gone hand in hand with the kind of utterances noted above, though these, unfortunately, are just as numerous in the arts. Eliot says in ‘Burnt Norton’ that ‘human kind / Cannot bear very much reality’. Tell them that at the entrance to Auschwitz or in the slums of Manila. History teaches that human kind has been bearing mountainous reality forever. Eliot wrote one of the great poems of the twentieth century—’The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’—but that doesn’t excuse this kind of holding forth. 

When spider monkeys start performing the Appassionata, come and let me know, will you. In the meantime, I’m content to accept the world with its gross imperfections, the beauty in the human and in nature that I don’t pretend to understand, but which is the best truth I’ve found. Like des Grieux, we are perplexed by beauty and sometimes wish the cause of our perplexity to leave us. But we cannot do that. We accept our perplexity and incomprehension, and that is our joy, our greatness.

                                                                *
          Take Me To The People Who Know

Quickly, take me to the people
Who have found the truth
Of the way this world is
And what the human means.
I want to sit before them and give thanks
For showing me the error of my ways.
Before, I believed in the heart
And the mystery of being,
That love was the greatest truth
In an inexplicable world.

The millions who pray each day
To their deities—
Why can’t they see their folly,
Like that crowd who showed up
When the Pope expired.
They were certainly in error,
As much as composers like Bruckner,
That peasant from Linz,
Who wrote all his work for the glory of God.
Talk about the future of an illusion.

The torrent of generations
Is turning at my shoulder,
Dust in a glitter of hope.
How miserable their lot,
Not to have had the chance
To know they were wrong, and adjust
Their beliefs to genetic sutras.
Those disinherited led to us,
An evolutionary triumph,
Since progress is always upwards.

But this net of consciousness
Is really due chemical process.
So, quickly then,
Take me to the people who know,
For I need wisdom now.
I am humble before their greatness of mind
That has fathomed the final meanings
And brought from ignorant time
This evidentiary might.
O Beauty! O Truth! O delight!

Written 2005

You can hear Marcelo Alvarez singing ‘Ah! fuyez’ in Paris, 2001 here. 5′ 40” 

Hameed Haroon, CEO and Publisher of Dawn, the largest English-language newspaper in Pakistan, has kindly given 3 Quarks Daily permission to publish this introductory note to a dossier (see Appendices at the end) that he has compiled about recent assaults on freedoms of the press in Pakistan:

Dear Madam / Sir,

I am writing to draw your attention to an important matter that indicates the rapidly worsening environment for the freedom of press in Pakistan.

It has always been difficult for governments to coexist with a free and independent press in Pakistan. Of late, however, the government headed by President Musharraf has become increasingly intolerant towards criticism in the press and towards the publishing of news that reflects poorly on the performance of his government on security matters.

One of the intended casualties of this swelling hostility between government and press in Pakistan is the DAWN Group of Newspapers, the country’s largest independent English language newspaper and magazines publishing house.

Since December 2006, the DAWN Group is facing massive advertising cuts equivalent to two thirds of total government advertising. This has occurred primarily as a consequence of a decision ostensibly taken by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s government, but in reality ordered by General Musharraf and engineered by several of his advisors that constitute the government’s inner cabinet.

It is clear that objections to the propriety of the DAWN Group’s editorial policies emanate mainly from President Musharraf’s office and his stance is heavily influenced by key advisors who have been entrusted with responsibility for implementing crisis management and conflict control in flashpoint areas. Particularly sensitive for the agreement are the escalating developments in Pakistan’s western province of Baluchistan, and in the tribal agencies of North & South Wazirstan on the Afghan border. Also irksome have been the DAWN Group’s related attempts to monitor a recurring tendency toward covert militancy among responsible decision-makers in government.

While preparing this dossier, I have attempted to include details and supporting documentation wherever possible, to facilitate your assessment as a key practitioner in the press rights movement internationally. Recent events in Pakistan indicate that attempts by the government to curtail the autonomy of the judiciary have been on the increase. This may have facilitated a temporary unintended pause in the government’s relentless campaign to muzzle the press. But such pauses presage a return to more coercive methods by government against the press, once the messy business of the executive – judicial conflict is brought to a successful halt.

If you peruse the documents accompanying this letter, you will find a chronology of events that cover the continuing conflict between the DAWN Group and the Government of Pakistan in the critical years 2004 to 2007. (Refer Appendix A 1.0) and that reflects some of the main causes of the present breakdown of communication between the government and the DAWN Group.

In the first phase, approximating with the years 2004 to 2005, the Government of Pakistan essentially worked by attempting to exert pressure on the Dawn Group by proxy – the proxy in this case being the Provincial Government of Sindh. It is in Sindh’southern metropolis of Karachi, that the headquarters of the DAWN Group of Newspapers are located.

This period first witnessed the government’s exerting of harsh pressures on our daily evening newspaper – The STAR – by attempting to intimidate and harass journalists with false cases and concocted charges, and by a failed attempt to implicate the writer of this letter, as CEO of the Group, in a totally fabricated incident of terrorism and illegal weapons possession. (Refer Appendix A 1.1.1, to, 1.1.4 and 2.1.2)

This attempt culminated with a complete ban on advertising on DAWN Group newspapers and magazines by the Government of Sindh. However, in response to a petition filed by DAWN’s lawyers, the Sindh High Court ruled in DAWN’s favour. The Sindh Government sensing an impeding debacle withdrew the advertising ban in advance of the Court’s final verdict.

The second stage involved the direct exerting of pressure by the Federal Government itself. After a series of fumbling measures and half-hearted advertisement bans by the Federal Government with respect to DAWN in 2005, a turning point was reached when one of our influential current affairs magazines, the HERALD, published a series of controversial stories and articles from June 2005 onwards on topics such as the Pakistan Government’s war against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in North and South Wazirstan; a possible resurgence of covert government support to Kashmiri militants; and also on the mushrooming policy debacle for government with respect to the Bugti insurgency in Baluchistan. (Refer Appendix A 1.2.1, to, 1.2.4 and 2.2.2)

In September 2006 when the government approached DAWN in its attempt to seek a news blackout regarding Baluchistan and the troubled FATA agencies of North and South Wazirstan, the editor of DAWN, Mr. Abbas Nasir, and the Directors of the Board of the DAWN Group, concluded that the government’s ‘request’ was unreasonable and needed to be firmly turned down. (Refer Appendix A 2.2.2 September – December 2006)

As a consequence, the government imposed an almost comprehensive ban on Federal Government advertising. (Refer Appendix A 2.2.2t) with an intent to provoke the financial collapse of the DAWN Group.

The DAWN Group had somewhat anticipated events from the increasingly strident tone of government criticism of its news policies and from the subsequent escalation in unreasonable informational demands from the government. As a precautionary measure aimed at reducing large financial deficits, we were forced to suspend the publication of our newspaper, the STAR, an important, but financial deficit generating newspaper, which has existed for over half a century and had been founded by working journalists of the DAWN Group.

Financial conditions within DAWN now became even more vulnerable to outside pressures as a consequence of our decision to commence work on a new TV channel – DAWN News. The grant of television broadcasting licences by the government towards such end is farmed out to a government organisation – the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) set up courtesy of an Ordinance passed in 2002. The President of Pakistan had on three different occasions in the last three years publicly announced that the controversial cross-media ownership rule (illegally tagged onto the PEMRA Ordinance as a subsequent rule/regulation by the authority) would be withdrawn and the large resource of talent available in the print media would be allowed to participate in the burgeoning electronic media revolution in Pakistan. Public opinion expressed itself in the widely held conviction that with the entry of the mainstream print media in the electronic media profession, discriminatory attitudes and the repressive stance of PEMRA with respect to press freedoms in the electronic media (Refer Appendix B & Appendix C) would be rolled back. However, the government’s current position in the courts with respect to DAWN’s application for a television broadcast licence (Refer Appendix A 2.3.2) has forced a rapid reassessment of public opinion with respect to the bonafides of government intention and clearly demonstrates that President Musharraf’s government is bent on pursuing a policy of blatant cronyism vis a vis the inclusion of selected and preferred print media houses in the electronic media revolution, and the rejection of others considered as hostile or non-compliant to government needs.

The government also appears determined to continue the domination of all news content on TV channels and on FM radio through harsh and repressive regulatory directives from PEMRA, evidenced in the grant of temporary uplink permissions in place of valid broadcasting licenses to selected channels of PEMRA’s preference.

The recent spate of programmes banned on television by PEMRA and a physical attack engineered by government on the offices of a prominent TV news channel-cum-newspaper office, clearly demonstrate the prevalence of government’s excesses in this matter.

In early December 2005 when the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr Shaukat Aziz summoned the undersigned to a meeting at Governor House (Sindh) to announce the Sindh Government’s decision to withdraw its advertising ban on the DAWN Group, he clearly informed me that the government was keen that DAWN should go ahead and set up a TV channel for the broadcast of English language news. The President’s constant public declarations regarding the withdrawal of the notoriously exclusionary cross-media ownership clause in the PEMRA rules and regulations and Parliament’s decision to finally withdraw this rule have not resulted in the licenses promised to newspaper publishing houses outside of government favour- this despite the passing of the legislation by both houses of Parliament . Such permissions have only been granted arbitrarily to selected groups by the government. This has led to a situation where we, at DAWN, in anticipation of the government decision to implement the new law have set up an entire organisation in Pakistan, employing over 350 journalists, technicians and managerial personnel and are anxiously awaiting the promised government license, all the while being forced to squander large financial outlays in anticipation of this.

The government’s refusal to give us a license mainly stems from our refusal to submit to its unethical pressures while reporting events in Baluchistan and North & South Waziristan. This refusal has become an acute cause of concern for the future financial viability of our publishing group.

Clearly the government would dearly like to see us lay off our journalists as they are viewed as a potential source of unwelcome criticism of government policies, rather than as compliant sheep to be hurriedly shepherded by PEMRA according to government whim.

Our colleagues in organisations devoted to protecting the freedom of the press throughout the world have always been a source of moral inspiration and help to us in our struggle for press freedoms in Pakistan.

We therefore urge you to extend your help in this matter and would appreciate if you address your concerns to the authorities in Pakistan regarding the following areas:

1. That the advertising ban by the Federal Government on the DAWN Group’s advertising is both unwarranted and unethical and a transparent mechanism to exert pressure on the newspaper group’s policies in contravention of the internationally accepted norms of objective news reporting.
2. That the decision to withhold a television broadcast license to the DAWN Group by the government is in violation of the judgments of the High Court of Sindh and the consent declarations made by PEMRA and the Federal Minister of Information in the Sindh High Court. Such right should be granted to other applying media groups as well on the same terms .
3. That the Government of Pakistan continue to submit its policies in Baluchistan and its agreements with the pro Taliban tribesmen of North & South Waziristan to the rigorous assessment of public and media scrutiny.
4. That the Government of Pakistan desist from abducting and arresting journalists in the judicious performance of their duties, and desist from physically attacking newspaper offices as has occurred last week in Islamabad.

Your concerns in this respect may be addressed to:

• The President of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf,
• The Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr Shaukat Aziz,
• The Acting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Justice Rana Bhagwandas,
• The Federal Minister for Information Development, Government of Pakistan, Mr Mohammed Ali Durrani.

In addition your concerns should also be expressed to other key decision makers in the Government of Pakistan, urging all of them to desist from repressive, illegal and unethical practices deployed in their effort to subvert press freedoms.

For your ease of communication, I am including relevant fax contact details:

• General Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan +9251-9221388
• Mr Shaukat Aziz, Prime Minister of Pakistan +9251-9212866
• Justice Rana Bhagwandas, Acting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan +9251-9213452
• Mr Mohammed Ali Durrani, Federal Minister for Information Development, Government of Pakistan +9251- 9203740

Thank you in anticipation for your much needed support in this matter.

Appendix A — SUMMARY & CHRONOLOGY: 2004-2007
Appendix B — MEDIA CONTROL THROUGH THE PEMRA ORDINANCE
Appendix C — EXPLANATORY NOTE ON THE PEMRA RULE ON CROSS MEDIA OWNERSHIP
Appendix D — SUPPORTING DOCUMENTATION

The Yamkut

Justin E. H. Smith

We all know the deer: a beast formed of grace and terror. She is graceful because all the visible terror, at being shot, at being torn by claws, is concentrated in the eyes alone; she is terrified, in her eyes and in her soul (which is invisible), because the world is cruel to whatever does not prey.   Throughout the serpentine empire of the river Yam, the deer (or more precisely, capreolus pygargus) is a ubiquitous enough zoological entity to make its presence felt cartographically, in place-names both Russian and native.  The capital and business center of Yamkutka is called by the Russians ‘Olen’sk,’ (‘Deerville,’ if you will).  The Yamkut name for the city, ‘Yum,’ also honors the region’s second-most common large mammal, and first-most among the ungulates. 

In contradistinction to most self-descriptions of indigenous peoples, which are usually very nearly translatable simply as ‘the people,’ Bocharov and Ginzburg report in their groundbreaking 1958 study, Perspektivy na iamkutskoe obshchestvo: primitivnyi kommunizm ili paleoaziatskii men’shevizm? [Perspectives on Yamkut Society: Primitive Communism or Paleo-Asiatic Menshevism?], that the elders of the tribe sometimes offer as a translation of the Yamkut word for ‘Yamkut’ [jam’çïa]: “Those who are not cloven-hoofed, shit not pellets, and are neither graceful nor –though they certainly ought to be– terrified.”  If you are a Yamkut (which you assuredly are not), deer and life are as one. A Yamkut creation myth tells of Mother Deer, a doe whose udder grew and grew until it gushed forth seas and lakes and rivers of fatty and clotted milk, and of how in the dreamtime before the time we know the mighty Yam flowed thick and white.   

In the golden age of Mosfilm and Lenflim, after the Georgians had founded Gruzfilm and the Turkmen had founded Turkmenfilm and even Tadzhikistan had its own studio of some renown, the Yamkut became determined to convince Moscow that they too needed Yamkut-language films created at their very own Yamkut studio. True, they were just an autonomous oblast and not a Soviet Socialist Republic, but, they thought, it was worth a try.  The red tape took no more and no less time to cut through than for any other project under communism, and after a number of years, Yamfilm was born, with technical consultants arriving daily from Moscow and Kiev, workers diligently constructing a movie set on the outskirts of Olen’sk that, for some as yet unknown reason, had slowly begun to resemble the Reichstag.

It would turn out that the elders among the Yamkut had been forced to cut a deal with the bureaucrats in Moscow in order to gain approval for the Yamfilm project. The Yamkut could have their studio, but the first five films, to be completed in the first five years of production, were to depict the Soviet victory in the Great War for the Fatherland, with a particular emphasis on the enemy camp.  Now the Yamkut would much rather have made films depicting their way of life, films about what interested them, what they spent all their time discussing, which is to say, most importantly, the deer-hunt.  In fact, most Yamkut found it difficult even to act, before a camera and under pressure from Mosfilm supervisors, as though they cared about anything other than deer, such as heroism, medals, and the purported difference between Stalin and Hitler. To the Yamkut, it was just two men with moustaches, enormous moustaches, having it out over issues that ought to have had no bearing on the lives of scraggly-whiskered, Mongoloid hunter-gatherers such as themselves. 

But a deal’s a deal, and so the first Yamkut film made it into production.  Some particularly memorable footage I saw on a recent visit to the Yamkutka oblast‘s historical archives shows rejected takes of a scene in a conference room at the Reichstag.  A crucial strategy meeting between all of the highest ranking Nazis was about to begin. Yümat keeps screwing up his lines, slipping out of character, while lead actor Yügd has failed to show altogether.  Here is the translation T. L. Vainshtain provided me of the outtake’s dialogue (I decided to pay her to come along with me from Moscow to work as my interpreter):

Goebbels: Heil Hitler, Herr Speer.  Where’s Goering?

Speer: Heil Hitler, Herr Goebbels. Goering comes. (Goering enters). Oh, Herr Goering, Heil Hitler… Hey, where is Hitler, anyway?

(Tense pause.)

Goering: Hitler out in tundra. Hunting deer. Back at sundown.

Yes, the Yamkut know deer. But it is the Yamkut alone who know the mysterious çüm’t.  The name might roughly be translated out of Yamkut as “That which wreaks pure terror, and perceives not grace, with glowing quills and without a face.”  Bocharov and Ginzburg (ibid.) describe it variously as “a Yeti for the steppe,” “a spectre haunting Siberia,” “the opium of the hunter-gatherers,” “a running-dog for idealism,” and, more to the point, “a big lie.” 

But whatever the çüm’t is, it’s no Yeti, and it’s no lie. Unlike the mythical mountain-bound snow monster, the çüm’t is a river-dweller, or, more precisely, a Yam-dweller, its habitat extending no more than 100 meters from the banks of this great flow. Moreover, the çüm’t is a quadruped, if you can call those things feet.  In all the world, these are the only feet, if you can call them that, that are both webbed and clawed. The webs help the çüm’t propel itself as it wishes, upstream or downstream, through the Yam’s swift currents. The claws help the çüm’t to subdue its prey, though this is seldom necessary, for its prey is the docile deer. Its face, which is to say its mouth, is located somewhere beneath that mass of glowing quills. Some Yamkut elders say the teeth glow as well. Some even say there is no real difference between the quills and the teeth at all, that other than its webbed, glowing-clawed feet the çüm’t is nothing more than an enormous mouth. 

The çüm’t’s existence has not gone entirely unnoted by the scientific community.  In his largely forgotten 1934 field guide to the wildlife of Siberia, Die Tierwelt Siberiens, Macarius Müller mentions the Hystrix candens Mülleri or ‘Müller’s glowing porcupine.’ He notes: “Just as the people of Jamkutka might be said to exhibit in an exaggerated form the physiognomic and behavioral traits of their cousins to the south, the Dravidians of the southern tip of India and the island of Zeylon, with eyes that bespeak an indifference to suffering and defeat: at the hands of the Indo-Aryans, in the case of the black-skinned Hindoos, and of the Slavs, in the case of the Jamkut; with a communal life as much bereft of concern for basic hygiene as of interest in the profounder things; with a single-minded lust for the steaming blood of the graceful deer they claim to love, and perhaps for the blood of a curious traveller such as myself, so too the glowing porcupine is but a fiercer, more savage cousin of the Hystrix indica or Indian porcupine. Whether it has a face –or not, as the Jamkut claim– I have not been able to approach close enough to determine. But that it glows like an ember, that I can see quite clearly from a safe distance.”

Müller, a young, adventurous soul, lusting for a bit of blood himself, rushed back to Europe at the first promise of war and died a few years later in a so-called fox-hole. Within a few years of his book’s publication, “going East” would take on a new meaning, and few after Müller would ever try to track down the glowing porcupine. It was the fate of the Hystrix candens Mülleri to remain but a çüm’t.  And so it has, right up to the present day.

When Tanya and I paid a visit on our way back from Olen’sk to the Kazakhfilm archives at the brand-new national history museum in Astana, we came across a notebook of the legendary Kazakh director Mubarak Zhubaikanov.  Assigned in the early 1960s to make films based on the national epics of each of the Soviet Republics, in alphabetical order, he had scarcely begun production on the Armenia installment when he found himself in prison for promoting (i) idealism (i.e., Italian neo-realism), and (ii) the corruption of Socialist values (i.e., homosexuality).  Say what you will about the Azerbaidjanis (alphabetically first, in Cyrillic terms), the Pravda editorialists reflected, it is simply not like them to lounge about pointlessly on interminable island holidays, gazing at one another’s youthful torsos.  The notebook contained what looked to be a sketch of a movie he hoped to make, someday, about the Yamkut, though for the life of me I can’t imagine how he thought this material could ever be translated into the medium of film. “The çüm’t takes a claw-footed/web-footed hike, or swim, or something in between,” Zhubaikanov writes, “against the current of the mighty Yam, in search of a deer.”  He continues:

“The çüm’t makes its way upstream.  It seems as though the icy water ought to extinguish the glow of its quills, and yet they only seem to glow brighter the more fully they are submerged by the current. Soon enough, the beast spies what it’s looking for, a six-year-old doe with white spots, drinking gently at the side of the river. The doe spots the çüm’t, in turn, and freezes, not out of fear, or at least not out of fear alone, but out of awe at the sight of this waterborne fire. No deer that’s seen it has ever lived.  None has ever had the chance to teach the fawns how to survive this terrible beauty.

“The çüm’t draws nearer, and the remaining awe in the doe’s eyes transforms quickly into terror; the terror concentrates in her eyes alone and, however much she would have it so, cannot be communicated to her sinewy legs. The frozen doe watches the glowing beast draw nearer, and as it draws nearer she sees what no Yamkut has ever seen: she sees the mouth of the çüm’t begin slowly to open.

“Located at the front of the torso, at least if we wish to determine front and back in this case by the direction of motion, the quills part down the center of its body and reveal something of a hole, a hole doing something quite the opposite of glowing. Around its rim, there appears a ridge of tiny, sharp, only lightly glowing quills, which would have to be identified as the teeth if anything were to be. The hole is floating in the middle of the fiery light, more powerful than the hottest flames, the sharpest quills, as if ready to devour the deer whole.

“Presently, the çüm’t opens its mouth as wide as it can be extended and plunges the ridge of teeth into the neck of the motionless doe.  The çüm’t leans with all its weight into the deer’s body. The deer, much to her own surprise, finds herself leaning in as well. The çüm’t pushes toward the deer and sucks, and the deer pushes toward the çüm’t as she feels her blood flow out into her partner’s mouth.  She kneels –the first motion we’ve seen from her since she caught sight of the glowing beast– in part because she feels weak, in part because she longs to be closer to her squat attacker.  Just to be closer, just for now, whatever this may bring.  For they are partners, and they are conspiring.

“The deer says to her partner: ‘I am a deer, and I have no defense. Those who are not cloven-hooved, and shit not pellets, and ought to be terrified, but are not, believe that I am formed out of grace and terror. But as you now know, çüm’t, I am formed out of blood, which fuels the fire in your quills, and I am covered in soft velvety hair, which is of a kind with your quills, however different these may seem.  I am formed out of taut muscles and lightning-fast synapses, and I dart across the tundra away from the bang of the clumsy unterrified ones’ weapons, until I am ready to give myself to them.  I haven’t given myself to you, çüm’t. You have taken me.  My blood feeds the fire in your quills, and I cannot keep it from flowing.  My only weapon is my fecundity, which flows like blood throughout the generations of deer, which flowed into my fawn and will flow from her to other fawns still, into generations without end. My own blood will cease to flow when it has all flown into you, but it does not matter, for my own blood would have flown into nothing had you not come to take it. It is sweet to flow like this, for just a few moments more, my çüm’t, though the life flows out of me and into you, sweeter than the soft flow of the rivulets of the mighty Yam, sweeter than the mighty flow of time, and of the soft rivulet of time that was my soft and sinewy life. This is no longer my life flowing, my çüm’t. This is your life flowing, and you are everything.’

“And the çüm’t replies: ‘I am a çüm’t and I cannot help what I am. Those on two legs, who keep their distance, and who know that I glow like embers, but know not that I have a face, say that I am evil itself.  But they are mistaken.  As you now know, deer, I am appetite itself.  I kill in order to live, and I glow because I live, and I cannot help but live.  Evil has nothing to do with it. Some may think that I am evil, but I am only appetite, and appetite is love, and love is all there is. If I am evil, then, all is evil and it says nothing to point this out. You, deer, are feeding my appetite, for now, for this morning. This afternoon, I will feed on another.  You, my deer, know that I love you as much as one creature has ever loved another, my love grows as you cease to be another creature altogether, as you become me, and we become more.  I am all there is, and through me all is one.’

“The çüm’t plunges onward, upstream, and the deer’s carcass lies still at the side of the Yam, flaccid from bloodlessness, one eye underwater, one eye staring expressionlessly toward the overcast sky. And the maggots and flies will soon come and take what the çüm’t did not want. And a Yamkut may happen along, and consider peeling off the velvety hide, but, with a pang of shame, an evolved aversion to vulturism, decide not to. And off in the forest, the bear will say to the rabbit: let us conspire.  And the leaf will whisper to the humus: shall we conspire?  And the fairy ring will ask the deer pellet: why not conspire?  And the sunbeam will beseech the maggot: let us conspire.  And the mighty Yam will cry out: all things conspire.”

*

For Chingiz Aitmatov.

An extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing may be found at www.jehsmith.com.