august philippic

This (from Seattle PI) makes me very sad.

When I worked in the archives, there was a secret path to get a cup of coffee. Let me tell you, nothing makes Qing documents sing like a dopio espresso. I understand why the Chinese would not want it there — indeed, it’s exactly the sort of non-place I complain about below. But this one did not displace local residents, and, dammit, the argument for moving it is about political symbolism, not about making Beijing nicer.

Still, I’m glad to hear the news anchors enjoy a good cup of coffee.

UPDATE 8/20: Mickey Kaus makes a useful proposal:

If we pay Starbucks a surcharge–say $1 on a grande latte–will they stop playing Paul McCartney?

Tags: cities, China // 3 Comments »

I was walking around Central Park this morning, watching neighborhood teams play softball. Actually, I imagine that many teams have a pretty good subway ride to get there. It got me thinking about public spaces — or really, a more simple question: what do people do in parks, and why does it matter?

There is, of course, the famous “Bowling Alone” argument that civic activity fosters voting. If you are one of the folks playing softball, the story goes, you are more likely to vote, more likely to join a political party, more likely to join the PTA or one of the many political clubs in New York city.

Although Chinese authorities punish any formal association, informal gatherings of people are evident in all Chinese cities. There are old women giving each other back rubs. There are kids playing soccer (that seems to be the country’s most popular outdoor sport). Some folks practice calligraphy, others Tai Chi, sword dancing, or other martial arts. Dancing and singing are extremely common — if there are any anthropologists reading, please write an article about this.

Also, there are inevitably groups of old men, airing their songbirds.

My favorite spontaneous association was English Club, an enormous gathering in Nanjing, where people simply show up and start speaking English to one another. If you looked like a native English speaker (which in Nanjing basically meant that you were caucasion), you’d be surrounded by people happy to chat about issues of the day. It was a good way to meet people, and people definitely expressed honest opinions regarding issues of the day.

Political Engagement?

There are two ways of looking at these activities in light of the Bowling Alone argument. One is that they show the argument does not work for China — that groupings of people do not make them politically active. Another way of looking at things is that these neighborhood associations are signs of nascent engagement in government — that the middle class will grow more engaged and more difficult for the current regime to accomodate.

I tend to favor the first argument. I imagine it’s true that in certain scandals, information spreads among folks hanging out in public parks — but cell phones seem to be the more common form of communication when people want to scream about Japanese textbooks or U.S. spy planes. The argument for real activism is often based on the example of East Germany, where church groups were indeed active in bringing down the KPD (German Communist Party).

But the current rulers of China are all too aware of the East German precedent, and they while they tolerate a fairly high level of discussion, they don’t allow any hint of organized activity. It’s a perhaps an open question whether they can maintain such a level of surveillance — but urbanization tends to help the government, making it possible to deploy a very large amount of force in a very short time.

If democratization comes to China, I imagine the more likely path will be splits within the Communist party — between factions, between geographical areas. Party leaders may adapt voting as an anti-corruption measure. I see a splintering of the state, not a splitting of state and society.

Tags: cities, China // Add Comment »

There are various ways to classify cities in China.  A lot of folks go by population, which correlates roughly with   administrative status.  Certain cities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and now Chongqing) are themselves provinces — if you imagine that Chicago, L.A., and New York were the 51-53 states in the U.S., you get the idea.  Other cities are capitals of provinces, of counties, etc.

Another way to group cities is to classify them according to economic activity.  There are various measures for this, but one of the most enduring models has been that of G. William Skinner, who made use of central place theory and fieldwork on marketing networks in Sichuan to classify cities according to a hierarchy of nodes.  The idea is, you need a relatively small population to support a market, a larger population to support, say, a hospital, and by the time you get to an arthouse movie theater or a specialty store for imported haggus, you are likely to be in a very large city that supports a large, perhaps even national or international clientele.

I’ve been thinking about zones of relatively uniform climate and physical geography, and the ways such zones affect urbanization.   Vast swaths of northernmost China are steppes — through much of the history of the area they supported pastoral nomads herding (usually) sheep and goats.  Typically, they would wander in set circles of pasture, but there were times when great nomadic confederations (think Ghenghis Khan) could form and support massive armies on horseback.  This climate did not particularly favor urbanization.  I have to confess I know nothing of, for example, Ulan Bataar.

In the Gobi Desert, an oasis economy developed.  Near the oasis, it was possible to irrigate some farmland, and farther out one might support small herds.  Much of the nomadic activity, however, was trade in goods from China and into (what is now) Pakistan, Central Asia, and Russia.  This is the famed Silk Road.  One of it’s consequences was cities — Kashgar and Urumqi, large markets, each near an oasis, that supported both a local economy and what we might now call international trade.

Those cities and trade routes were at the center of Chinese strategic thinking for thousands of years.   Secure trade routes and peaceful relations with the Turkic peoples of the area could help support campaigns against the Mongol tribes.  After 1644, emperors of China were Manchu, and particularly aggressive in their efforts at frontier expansion.  More recently, the policy has been one of settlement of Han Chinese in order to swamp the local Muslim population (itself the locus of much “war on terror”-esque anxiety among ruling elites).

When I teach, I’m hoping to incorporate these cities of the desert more fully into existing narratives of urban change.  They are today the loci of geopolitical strategies of governance in the region, but also centers of perhaps the most dangerous challenges to the current regime.   It’s a tension I see throughout China, and indeed in all cities, but the nomadic zone means that these tactics find different appearances in urban form.   My goal: to identify and account for such physical differences.

Tags: cities, China // 4 Comments »

New York Review of Books

Every once in a while I’ll read a review that just sticks with me. Pauline Kael’s piece on Clockwork Orange comes to mind whenever I see something in film that is dehumanizing, yet pretends otherwise. I’ve linked above to a review by Charles Taylor of a book called Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear.

Roughly, the question the book and the review pose is: how does one act morally when one’s culture has been so shattered that existing moral codes don’t work anymore. Consider the following statement by the Crow chief, Plenty Coups:

“When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

What does one do when the buffalo go away, when a city is devastated by a nuclear bomb, when all one has known disintigrates?

Well, here’s what Plenty Coups did, and why his story should speak to us:

Plenty Coups was able to help bring about this kind of redefinition for his people. He drew on the established practice of going into the wilderness to seek a revelation through a dream. The dream he reported foretold in thinly veiled terms the end of the Crow way of life, but it also promised a kind of survival for the Crow, provided they could listen “like the Chickadee,” that is, observe others, and find new ways of going on. These were, of course, at that stage wholly unknown, but the dream was the basis for the hope that somehow, beyond just biological survival, the Crow way of life might continue in a yet to be defined new form.

This is what Lear calls “radical hope.” Hope can only exist if you are uncertain about a desired outcome. If it’s really a sure thing, your anticipation of it can’t be hope. But here we have something more extreme than uncertainty: the very shape of this hope remained to be defined.

Sadly, I haven’t read the book. It’s on a long, long list of things to do.

I think a lot of us have some aspiration to immortality: the hope that what we say or write will be considered important, the idea that some value we hold might continue. It’s probably hubris. Still, I took heart from Plenty Coups, from the possible of radical hope. Not that I personally might spur such hope (obviously it isn’t a position I would want to be in), but that there are people interested in facing the world in an ethical way, and that our ethics might survive our atrocities.

Tags: august // Add Comment »

I was just reading an article about Atlanta, a city I hate.  My hatred is born from sad experience, for Atlanta is the worst major city in the world. It is too boring to be Hell. It is a city of nonplaces, a noncity.

You’ve been to nonplaces: airports, shopping malls, Jiffy-Lube muffler shops. Some place called “Chipotle Mexican Grill” recently opened in my neigborhood, and mrs. august, the instant upon seeing it, made me promise never to go there. The nonplace invites ennui because it’s impossible to figure out where you really are. If I were to pass out and awake in a McDonald’s, how long would it take to figure out, from visual cues, the city I was in. Picture Atlanta as a gigantic fast-food restaurant.

Is there an agency of non-ness more celebrated than the Olympics?  Friends tell me that Barcelona is a shining exception, but elsewhere the progress of the games has been followed by a swath of architectural urban drabness.  In Beijing, the city is being bulldozed and dug up and rearranged and made — what?  Made into a sports stadium.

In China the transformation has been going on for some time.    I used to live in an apartment building that was near a sprawling market — a cacophony of vendors, huts, newspaper sellers, fabrics.  IIf you walked down the street, it was impossible to be lost – there could be no other place like that one.  And now, it is gone, flattened, all in the hopes of making Nanjing more — what?  More clean.  More wealthy.  More accessible.  More like Atlanta.

If I told you the name of the article you would be convinced it was the sort of boring anthropological jargon that made you hate half your college courses.  It even has a colon (”Making Place in the Nonplace Urban Realm: Notes on the Revitalization of Downtown Atlanta”), and an impressively credentialed author (Charles Rutheiser).  You might think that Ruthheiser is recycling a complain that you’ve heard over and over again.  But his point isn’t merely that Atlanta is boring — he shows the motivations of urban planners in creating such uniform dizzying drabness. 

The planners of Nanjing, Beijing, and Atlanta will say they are trying to benefit the greatest number, trying to revitalize, trying to root out decay and poverty.  And yet, the victims of such “renewal” iare inevitably the poor, who are shunted to slums or to the far reaches of the suburbs.  The effort to make the city “accessible” in fact only makes it available to a thin, managerial class, the sorts of foks (like me, on occasion) who bunk at the Hilton. 

The effect is to destroy ourselves.  Our cities lose their markets and public spaces.  It loses its individual culture, traded for flourescent indoor weatherproof people-moving corridors.  And the people pushing such measures argue that they seek the greatest good for the greatest number.  

One of the reasons for paying attention to aesthetics: to recognize the ways we make ourselves unfree.

Tags: cities // 2 Comments »

China is changing, China is changing, China is changing.  Every time you round a corner in New York,, or anywhere really, somebody will scream at you that China is changing.  It’s becoming more market driven, more threatening, more advanced, more stylish, more wealthy, more, more, more.

Urbanization is a key aspect of that change, and it underlies more fundamental transformation.  China’s population growth is leveling off, and the reasons have much more to do with people moving to cities than with the one child policy.  Those who believe China will become more democratic point to the rising power of the urban middle class.  Chinese movies, Chinese markets, and a great deal fo its trade with the rest of the world are products of events taking place in China’s cities.  Indeed, there has been massive migration of people Eastward and into cities — colonies of workers inhabit the fringes of every metropolis in the country.

 I’m trying to design a course that will put these changes in historical perspective, and I want to focus on one “debate” in urban studies — freedom vs. surveillance.  I put the word “debate” in quotation marks because it is not yet clear to me whether anybody has argued the issue in these terms.   But it is clear that there is a long tradition of thinking of the city as a center of freedom.    There’s the idea (probably overstated)  that privileges granted to cities in the middle ages were the basis of what were to become legal rights.  There’s the notion of the city as a place of opportunity, where people go to sample new identities, where people are faced with an abundance of choice — things to consume, trades to master, art to stimulate. 

Then there is the view of the city as a place where the forces of the state and (recently) of capitalism conspire to exert a phenomenal level of power on ordinary individuals.  Although Michel Foucault’s work is not primarily concerned with urbanism, his notion of power and of discipline deepens our understanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban planners.  In the case of China, colonialism heightened these effects.  Foreigners established bastions in Chinese cities, “Treaty Ports” that were not subject to Chinese sovereignty, and that developed their own police forces and tactics of urban order.  Soon the Chinese were copying these models, resulting in governmental ambitions that sought to observe and order the lives of even the most ordinary people.

I’m suggesting that this debate will help understand present-day politics.  As China becomes more urbanized, the problem of freedom and surveillance will play out in ways that are difficult to predict.  Still, we’ll be in a better position to register these changes if we have a sense of what has happened in Chinese cities, the ways they have served as playgrounds and workplaces, entrepots and symbols, stages for nationalist rallies and centers for colonial exploitation.  It’s with these thoughts in mind that I’m designing my class.  Stay tuned for more notes.

Tags: cities, China // Add Comment »

When your team really sucks, you have only one joy in your baseball life. When the Mighty O’s take a series win from the evil Yankees, thus totally knocking the pinstripes on their useless, stuck up, overpaid, self-righteous asses, well

that’s bliss.

Tags: august // 2 Comments »

I went back and looked at the Maitland essays on the corporation sole that helped inspire The King’s Two Bodies. I have to say, they do not seem to me to be Maitland at his best, although one can admittedly be a little more critical of the essays when one is holding Kantorowicz in the other hand. Still, the essays are interesting, and as good a way I know of engaging the chapters we’ve both tackled.

Maitland’s problem with the corporation sole is that he thinks it’s useless in the case of parsons, and dangerous in the case of monarchs. To make matters worse, the Victorian era appears to have seen a proliferation of the form (the postmaster was a corporation sole). This last aggravation seems to have so prickled Maitland that he abandons his usual historical sensibilities and goes for the legal jugular.

For parsons, Maitland argues that it would work just as well to consider them to be part of a larger corporation – that of the church. The notion of corporation sole seems confused to Maitland – does it refer to an actual or a fictional person? – and he sees no additional legal benefits.

Maitland is justly famous for his work on legal history, particularly his capacity to elucidate archaic concepts. But his historical instincts failed him here. In his effort to discredit the idea, it seems to me his legal arguments may be valid but he is overlooking some of the work the idea might do. Writing in the 1890’s, Maitland probably had few experiences of great schisms or church closings. Nowadays, however, the events are common. I’m thinking of the closing of parochial schools (and even a number of churches) in New York City, or the recent Episcopal schism over gay marriage. In each case, there arises the question of church property. Does it belong to the congregation, or to the larger church as an institution? The pastor as corporation sole seems to me to mediate between these interests.

Well, it’s a hypothesis, anyway.

At any rate, it seems to me that one similar way of regarding the King’s Two Bodies is as a kind of political compromise – one that recognizes the importance of different parties (the barons and the king, for example) without necessarily spelling out how they can resolve disputes. It’s “theology” is that it depicts a kind of cosmic ordering – it recognizes the community as necessary to the authority of the sovereign (compare the Holy Roman Empire – where certain individuals were sovereign not of a community or an area, but merely unto themselves). Returning to the parson analogy, if the parson is a corporation sole, then those who feel themselves members of a church share in his dignity with the Catholic/Anglican church. The measure that each participates is undefined, but it seems to me an exercise of inclusion.

My absolute favorite bit of Kantorowitcz, and what drove me to look back at the Maitland essay, is his discussion on pp. 448-450, which seems to me to sum up a number of points regarding Time and Space (capitalized following EK). The time of the polity is both synchronous and diachronous – it encompasses all the parts of the state at a given moment and also the continuous nature of the body in time, a collectivity that reaches beyond any individual member. One has, then a “fusion, and indeed a pardonable confusion, of Crown and Dignity” (448) in which the Crown refers to the estates with the King at the head and the Dignity to the whole genus to past and future.

This discussion reminds me of one of my own favorite themes (which I hope to discuss in a subsequent post with reference to China) – the deep connection of polity and time. Maitland’s essay continues in a direction I would not have anticipated from the passages EK cites – he mentions colonies. After all, did not Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts manage to create corporations that served as political entities. And even places that did not – New Zealand, Australia, Virginia, New York – he cites interesting commentary to the effect that these entities are very like a corporation, but different. In thinking of the crown, Maitland concludes, does it not make more sense to speak of a Commonwealth than of a body?

It seems to me that EK has answered this question. For there is nothing mystical, and therefore in medieval thought nothing permanent, about a commonwealth of the kind that Maitland describes. It is also interesting to me that Maitland’s examples are all Criole communities (a la Benedict Anderson – that is, settler communities – colonies that form nationalisms). Rats, when I read it this afternoon I had another thought about this – something about the way the crown is distant – the way that a commonwealth cuts off monarchical power more than would have seemed desirable to many (though obviously not all) in earlier times. I just think Maitland’s notion of time is different. The polity he is thinking about – the British Empire – is not one that people can imagine as having always existed, and it is also not one in which the various components necessarily feel themselves (or wish to argue that they are, however metaphorically) a body – with all the tight coordination and seemingly natural unity that the term implies. Victoria was much more like an Empress, resembling, I think, the Qing more than the monarchy of Henry II. The sun might never set on this polity, but the sun was not setting everywhere all at once.

I have to admit that I do not understand why the postmaster, and various other offices, would be treated as corporations sole in this time. Nor can I make sense of the other non-ecclesiastical example Maitland mentions – the Chamberlain of the City of London. There’s rather more to this concept than examination of the King alone will reveal.

Here I’m reminded of one of EK’s most famous commentators – Michel Foucault, who famously asked if the body of the condemned man was not the counterpart to Kantorowicz’s monarch. Images of the polity necessarily exclude, and I’m wondering who was not in. Here my English history fails me – but Jews, for example, do not seem to have formed a necessary limb of the body politic. Still, it seems to me that England was perhaps more cohesive than most places – closer to modern notions of a continuous sphere of sovereignty than most places. Here I rely on a different work of Maitland – his lectures in the history of the English Constitution, in which he points out a peculiarity of English feudalism – that all land in England was the King’s land, that tenure in land was “held of” the king, and (most significant a contrast to the continent) that military service was due to the King – not to intermediate feudal lords. Whereas in France, if your Comte and somebody else’s Marquis (or whoever) were to have a disagreement, we serfs would have to join the battle – in England (in theory – Maitland is talking about a legal ideal with complicated real-world effects) “the only quarrel by which one is bound is the king’s quarrel.” I’m wondering if this system did not lead to a closer sense of allegiance or tie to the person of the king – if the notion of a linkage between universal corporate body and individual physical body did not make more sense in this context than it would have in France, to say nothing of Germany or Italy.

My main impression, having read the whole thing, is mainly – what a brilliant book. There’s so much to discuss. I want to return to the issue of Bracton, to resume our discussion of current legal issues as well as of medieval aesthetics, to discuss Dante, and to write about my own work (this last may have to take a little more precedence for me, as I have been away from it for too long).

Tags: Kantorowicz // 5 Comments »

This post is really just a way of putting something up other than turgid medieval prose. I think the Mets will have some troubles fending off the Braves, but I like their chances.

I think Barry Bonds is bad for the game. I think the steroid probe is likely to make me feel about baseball the way I feel about bike racing.

Oh, and it will be interesting to see if the Yankees dump Giambi if he’s implicated in this latest mess. They surely want to dump his contract, but if the team is beginning to heat up, will they be willing to lose his bat as they start to climb out of this hole?

Finally — this Yankee team still doesn’t have me convinced. There just aren’t enough players I feel like you can really count on in the big spot. Their bats will win them games, sure, but it will be kind of like the baseball equivalent of the Atlanta Falcons. If they get going, maybe they have a chance to make the playoffs, but it’s more likely that they’ll be in the wildcard hunt than beat the Sox.

Tags: august // 3 Comments »

To my regular readers.. (twif and Keif) — this is part of a long discussion with Geoff about The King’s Two Bodies. If anybody for some reason has the urge to catch up/join in, you can check out his blog Geoff’s Musings. Sorry this is so tedious — its just that working out ideas is often kind of ugly along the way.

What exactly is the problem in The King’s Two Bodies? It is partly a question of origins, or at least of precedents: how did the notion of a single person containing “a Body natural, and a Body politic” come about? It is also a question of effects: what were the consequences of the different manifestations of this doctrine and its antecedents?

I think following up Plowden with Shakespeare addresses the second of these questions as well as the first. It’s not simply a question of legal doctrine, it’s an examination of the interchange between legal doctrine and a wider culture. Lawyers as well as playwrights must wrestle with problems of kingship – it’s a question of royal (yet underaged) gift of the Duchy of Lancaster, and also a question of the way the dual king/King is understood, and (through the brilliance of Shakespeare) understands himself.

So far, the implications of the doctrine include law, self-image of the monarch, and the notion of sovereignty. I’m just going to go through a few more that seemed suggestive to me.

Theology

Kantorowicz also sees issues of theology; (p. 17)

…It is of great interest to note how in sixteenth-century England, by the efforts of jurists to define effectively and accurately the King’s Two Bodies, all the Christological problems of the early Church concerning the Two Natures once more were actualized and resuscitated in the early absolute monarchy.

I’ve mentioned a few times now that a classic way of generating political power is by coupling a hierarchical relationship to existing ideas of the cosmos or the body. It’s a tricky move, however, for it also means a kind of surrender to the expertise of those thought to know about the cosmos or the body. I’m not sure what level to take Kantorowicz here – is he simply creating his own metaphor, with Aryanism and Nestorianism convenient literary tropes for describing what he wishes to communicate? Or does he think that Trinitarian logic/debate helped figure the depictions of the king?
Here’s E.K. (pp. 18-19) :

The implication is not that the lawyers consciously borrowed from the acts of the early Councils, but that the fiction of the King’s Two Bodies produced interpretations and definitions which perforce would resemble those produced in view of the Two Natures of the God-man.

He goes on to say that this similarity is “unsurprising.” I do wonder, however, whether the English Civil War and its discourse of the King’s Two Bodies wasn’t closely related to its questioning of the theological edifice on which this duality rested (or at least, which allowed the duality to make sense).

One other note about the Plowden chapter: to what extent is the dual nature of the king really a “fiction”? It isn’t clear to me what Kantorowicz means by the terms. He shows that it’s a rather compelling and long lived fiction? I guess it’s not clear to me how this concept might be more or less of a fiction than, say, habeas corpus, or private property, or anything else.

Ritual

The bit of the Shakespeare chapter that particularly raised my eyebrows was on pp. 36-37. Richard II is King and king. The King will continue in a new king, but only a King can effect such a separation. So Richard as King must preside over the abdication – and none other has the power to do so.

According to Kantorowicz (p. 36) “Bit by bit he deprives himself of the symbols of his dignity,” but some of Shakespeare’s lines seem anything but symbolic (unless the medieval term “symbol” carries some reality I do not understand). It’s true Richard gives up crown and scepter, but also “The pride of kingly sway from out my heart/with mine own tears I wash away my balm.”

I think that Kantorowicz returns to a reading of the burial of a monarch. That must also be a ritually tricky moment, because one is burying king but not King. What else might fall in the same category? It’s this kind of situation I was referring to when I spoke of “kinks” earlier in the conversation.

Also on the subject of ritual – why is the Christ-centered king “liturgical”? I understand the division between a model or Christ and a model of Justice — but I don’t get the division
liturgical/juristical (for example, page 93).

Language

This is such a quick thought it hardly merits a subsection, but I found the argument about “demise” on page 40 (in which the word “convey” is particularly significant) rather compelling.

At any rate, Kantorowicz’s “problem strikes me as a far-reaching one indeed. All I really have to add to what you’ve said about the “Christ-Centered Kingship” is that the valences of the problem remain multiple in each section. Each example is of law, and of much else. That’s one reason the word “secular” bugs me (I’ve mentioned this before). It seems to cut off certain kinds of associations that strike me as significant

Curious what you made of the argument about the persona mixta on pp. 43-44. You spoke of the commonplace of dual personality in law, and this seems to be another example. There are an awful lot (see the “dual majesties” on p. 20 and the functional duality of man and office on p. 59. And of course the dual natures of Christ I mentioned above). We read that “a certain spiritual capacity was attributed to [the king] as an effluence of his consecration and unction” – again, a power of ritual. But this differs, argues E.K., from the King’s Two Bodies—except in certain cases like the Norman Anonymous? or is E.K. doubling back on his own argument, and I just haven’t followed the rhetoric?

I don’t understand what gemina persona means. But I do get the idea of the dual capacities of the Christlike king, and its expression in..

Art
The haloed Byzantine emperors, and the frontispiece of the Aachen gospels.

So those I think are the spheres we are working with (though surely there are others as well. I guess that’s what interests me so much about law (and about this book) – the way its language, symbols, structures, etc. bleed into other areas of life. It seems to me this must be a real problem for lawyers (well, maybe just for judges). The injunction to follow the word of the law seems to me kind of impossible, for the law is everywhere, and it doesn’t always make sense.

For that matter, I don’t either, and if you have it in you to push me to clarify any of that (especially the last part), let me know.

Tags: Kantorowicz, august // 6 Comments »

April come she will
When the floods subsided
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain;
We sacrificed a lamb, then cooked it in a pit.
May, she will stay,
The flames reflected in the bottoms of the leaves.
Resting in my arms again.
Dancers in the glen circled the maple
June, she’ll change her tune,
Then leapt upon our altar.
In restless walks she’ll prowl the night
We ate meat with bare hands.
July, she will fly
Our priests poured wine into the stamped earth,
And give no warning to her flight.
then affixed our prayer to the leg of a finch,
August, die she must,
Who flew west, who flew
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold;
To find another finch, another glen, anywhere
September I’ll remember
But this place, where, fat with lamb,
A love once new has now grown old.
We could not sleep for the incessant rain.

“April, Come She Will”, by Simon and Garfunkel.

Tags: philippic, august // 3 Comments »

When I leapt off the train, my knees squished like guavas.
In my cave I measured the wavelength of gamma rays.

The husband was Swiss, the children surfed.
She bemoaned that their lake had no waves.

When I fell from the Eiffel Tower, the guards laughed.
They reported a trespasser on their short waves.

The ocean is a concave mirror. Let’s go
to West Virginia, fish trout, snap pics. Wave!

When I drove to the beach, the dunes were black.
Why do I always dream of tidal waves?

Someday they’ll wash me. I’ll swim like a porpoise.
On my island: smell of papaya in April and august.

Tags: august // 3 Comments »

Rabbit, Rabbit

Usually I’m on the can, or scrambling
eggs, when I remember being seven,
my teacher telling me to say “Rabbit, Rabbit”
on the first day of the month, before
my feet touch the floor when I get
out of bed. And of course my instep
has creaked the floorboards long since:
no luck for me in Feburary, or March, or now
April. Sometimes, when the calendar hits the twenty-
fifth (or so), I’ll think I’ll say it this time,
but I haven’t mentioned rabbits in thirty years, just wondered
why I care, now that I know that words
disappoint. Comets depart and return, meteors
shower, Fermat’s Last Theorem all pass
and still no rabbits. Why two? Perhaps the bunny
is named Rabbit, like a John Updike antihero
who understands the cosmos, who brings luck.
Indeed, why rabbits? I see the drawback
of, say, “Sloth, Sloth,” but why not “Hippo, Hippo”
or “Cheetah, Cheetah?” Is it a cultural thing?
Do Chinese kids forget to say “Panda, Panda?”
Would I understand better if I Googled?
Would I acquaint myself with that auspicious hare
who got this whole thing started, who makes
me scream “Rats” every year on the first
(or sometimes I don’t notice until the second)?
I no longer expect a good month, just discipline:
if I can’t say “Rabbit, Rabbit,” how will I ever lose
forty pounds, or climb Kilimanjaro?
It’s a small victory I wish to trumpet,
under the sheets one morning as the moon
takes another pass and the cars start
in the vast city that I inhabit. I relish
the spell I’ll cast: “Rabbit, Rabbit.”

Tags: august // 5 Comments »

Early Daoism consisted of four kinds of practice: philosophical speculation on the nature of the cosmos, breathing and visualization exercises related to health, rituals that displayed (and seemed to allow communication with) various beings in the cosmos, and alchemy. Daoists believed that each of these practices could prolong life.

The Cosmos
These ideas obviously rest on certain assumptions about the workings of the world, and the most important of these assumptions is that each part of the universe is related to all the other parts. What you can see, what you can’t see, everything you will ever know – all these elements form a coherent whole, and it is this fundamental sense of ordering that leads historians to talk about a “cosmos.”

Cosmological thinking emerged in China in the three hundred years leading up to the birth of Jesus. And since Jesus has come up, we might as well dispense with some preliminaries. Because the number of Christians in China is small, it’s a little rude to refer to the period as “before Christ.” Instead we’ll just use an arbitrary label – “Common Era” instead of “A.D.” (meaning “the year of our lord”). Things happening before the Common Era I’ll call BCE. Of course, the Daoists did not date things this way, and they certainly did not think there was anything special about the year 300 BCE.

So we are beginning our study of Daoism around 300 BCE. It’s all kind of arbitrary. Indeed, the name “Daoism” is just as arbitrary. “Dao” simply means “path” or “road,” and it has the same metaphorical connotations as in English – “a way of doing something”, “a correct path.” In 300, numerous states in China were at war with each other, and the rulers of these states were seeking advisors. The advisors were trying to educate the rulers about the correct path – so everybody was in that sense a “Daoist.” Everybody claimed there was a way, and everybody claimed to know the right way. When Confucius talks about what to do, he says that we must follow the Dao. His plan was very different from what comes to be known as Daoism.

Later on, I’ll try to be more specific about some of the competitors who were setting out various “Daos.” For now the important thing to notice is that there is a shared notion of a coherent cosmos, that there are warring states, that there are advisors to the leaders of these states, and that each advisor claims to understand the cosmos. These phenomena are related.

State and Cosmos In the First Three Centuries B.C.E.

The Chinese-speaking world had been unified under the Zhou Dynasty from about 770 to 476 BCE As it became apparent that the old empire was splitting apart and could not be reconstituted, rulers began to seek new ways to reconstitute political authority. Hand in had with this development came new ideas about statecraft, about legitimacy, about the body, and about the universe.

By 221 BCE a single state came to dominance. It was called Qin (note that Q’s are pronounced like “Ch”. “Qin” rhymes with “gin,” and is the root of the English word “China”). The Qin leader declared himself emperor of all China.

There are many ways to be powerful. One of the most effective is to show that your position is inevitable, natural, and good. If I want to become emperor, I probably have to kill a lot of people. If I want to remain emperor, it would be good if I can convince my subjects that my rule results not from brute violence, but from the same forces that create the changing of the seasons. It is in my interest to show that my state is a microcosm of a larger whole.

Here we have a force pushing toward coherence. And given that political rulers tended to have money, and philosophers tended to be hired guns, one finds a lot of philosophy about the relationship of elements of the universe – hence, the creation of the “cosmos.” Probably there were other forces at work as well, but this one is the most obvious. At the very least, you can see how there might be people who would want to say that the elements of the world are all interrelated.

Body

I don’t’ have a handy political argument for the ways the notion of the body developed. It is clear, however, that Chinese thinkers began to think about what we now call “the body” in the same time period (300 BCE to the start of the Common Era). Here again, we have a semantic trap. “Body” is a little like “BC” – it’s not quite the right word. Chinese thinkers were not especially interested in anatomy or surgery. One’s “body” was not separable from one’s “personhood” and “personality,” nor was it ever set into opposition with “mind.” The body was instead a permeable membrane – what happened in the cosmos as a whole also took place in the body. It was a microcosm, a part of a larger whole reflecting all the characteristics of the whole.

The ideas I have described here were not unique to Daoism. But they were essential to the claims that Daoist put forth, namely that the cosmos (including the body) underwent a series of transformations, and that understanding these transformations can therefore help extend one’s life. Daoist philosophy, medical practice, ritual, and alchemy all follow from this claim.

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I’ve been reading Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. I just finished a chapter about a blind man who had surgery removing cataracts, and was thus able to see. His sight was limited, in part because his retinas were damaged, but mainly because his brain had not since birth developed to process visual imagery. Some desultory thoughts:

I’ve been reading it while keeping in mind the criticisms of the doctor in The Echo Maker. Is Sacks invading this man’s privacy? At times the account feels quite intimate, and it is not at all clear that Sacks has helped the man. “Virgil,” the blind man who can see, descends back into blindness when he gets a terrible case of pneumonia that deprives him of oxygen. All that being said, Virgil is clearly capable of making decisions about his own life, and the account would not have been possible without Virgil’s consent. I’m seconding an earlier point by TK that this aspect of the portrayal of Weber doesn’t ring true.

The story (”To see and not see”) gave me great insight into the tendency of the deaf community to reject the hearing, especially to oppose technologies that might enable them to hear. As Sacks points out, seeing for Virgil was disorienting; the experience was one of losing blindness rather than gaining vision. In a footnote, Sacks adds for the deaf, the sense of isolation is doubled – one loses deafness and an entire community. For Virgil, who loses his vision after gaining it, the sense of isolation and rage is far more damaging than the constraints of blindness.

The tale of Mark and Karin got me thinking about our use of “blindness” as a metaphor. It means not merely “not being able to see,” but “not recognizing,” and “not understanding. Mark is blind to Karin. The reader blind to the writer of the note (I write the sentence and it sounds funny to me… why?). It’s not a semantic slippage that I had thought about prior to now, but it must affect the way we treat the blind. It also makes me wonder about Powers’ premise. Sure, the mind can come undone. But it is also remarkably resilient, and I remain not fully convinced (intellectually or emotionally) of the particular kind of undoing that transpires in The Echo Maker.

The paragraph I found most interesting (pp. 135-136) in hardcover edition:

In these episodes Virgil was treated by his family as a blind man, his seeing identity denied or undermined, and he responded, compliantly, by acting, or even becoming, blind – a massive withdrawal or regression of part of his ego to a crushing, annihilating denial of identity. Such a regression would have to be seen as motivated, albeit unconsciously – an inhibition on a “functional” basis.

Thus there seemed to be two distinct forms of “blind behavior” or “acting blind” – one a collapse of visual processing and visual identity on an organic basis (a “bottom up” or neuropsychological disturbance…), the other a collapse or inhibition of visual identity on a functional basis (a “top-down”, or psychoneurotic disturbance), though no less real for him. Given the extreme organic weakness of his vision – the instability of his visual systems and visual identity at this point – it was very difficult at times to know what was going on, to distinguish between the “physiological” and “psychological.” His vision was so marginal, so close to the border, that either neural overload or identity conflict might push him over it.

If Sacks is right, it means our very consciousness is visual. Except when it isn’t. I feel that’s a far more powerful insight into my own mind than anything I read in The Echo Maker.

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One of the things I enjoy about knowledge is that it fosters attentiveness. The words of foreign tourists are white noise unless you know their language, the patterns of sediment deposits meaningless until you walk by with a geologist. I used to play frisbee with a group of ornithologists, and if a neighborhood hawk flew over the game would halt and there would follow a discussion of its plumage, its preferred diet, its economy of movement.

I am not the first to sing the praises of the naked mole rat. Dawn Coyote pointed out that a quarter of a documentary was devoted to an expert on the species. The National Zoo has a naked mole rat cam and handy article describing their salient characteristics. The BBC has some great pictures.

These sources tell us that the naked mole rat lives underground and that it is more closely related to the porcupine than to the young-tough-Norwegian rats that lurk about the New York subways like extras from Kids. They congregate in colonies and act more like what you might expect from an ant or a bee. There is a queen with a harem of a few males, and they handle the copulating. The other members of the colony do not reproduce; and the males are sterile. They are the “workers” who dig around and look for food, helped along by two big front teeth. According to the article:

The incisors can be moved independently, spread apart, or moved together like chopsticks. …When working together to dig tunnels in the wild, naked mole rats line up nose to tail and operate like a conveyer belt. A digger mole rat at the front uses its teeth to break through the new soil. Behind the digger, sweepers use their feet and fine hairs between their toes to whisk the dirt backwards. At the back of the line a “volcanoer” kicks the dirt up onto the surface of the ground, creating a distinctive, volcano-shaped mole hill about the height of a ballpoint pen.

So one interesting thing about mole rats is their social nature, the way they work together. Apparently they roll in feces, allowing members of a colony to recognize each other by smell. The actions of the whole colony are greater than the sum of its parts, much like a beehive or an anthill.

There are good genetic reasons for this level of social cohesion. The naked mole rats are highly inbred. If I am a worker naked mole rat, it is thus likely that my brothers and sisters share the same genes as I do. My genes are thus “our” genes, and to spread them to future generations, the mole rat division of labor can make sense. Leave the actual childbearing to the experts (in a year, the queen can have four or five litters of 12 to 27 pups), and as a worker I can specialize in finding food and defending the nest. Workers have been known to attack snakes, sacrificing themselves for the good of the colony. This system will continue because the genes that create these behaviors continue to propagate.

As I understand it, any female can be queen (there is a chemical trigger for queen-like behavior). When the queen dies, the biggest females fight for the position, and to the winner belong the spoils.

To be clear, I don’t find mole rats cute or human or endowed with admirable behaviors. I just find them interesting, and take a certain delight in my interest.

I’m glad that there is pleasure in knowledge, and I think that on the whole such pleasure is a social good. I say this even though I am aware that there is also pleasure in false knowledge – at the Great Wall of China I met a guy who was enjoying himself immensely because he thought it had been built by spacemen. “Just look,” he said, “tangible evidence of aliens.”

I’m glad there’s pleasure in knowledge because it is so god-awful hard to change people’s minds. When I teach about China I’m struck by the resilience of the stereotypes that students bring to class with them. Sometimes I feel that anything I say can be assimilated and categorized by any world view. And yet there is this pleasure of knowing, which brings with it a certain hope that the man at the Great Wall will sooner or later figure out that Chinese supply lines were more robust than those of Alpha Centauri, or that my students will accumulate enough tidbits that they will sooner or later come across something that does not fit into their respective Weltanschauung.

It’s amazing when it happens – when the slow acquisition of facts forces painful revision of something you always thought to be true. As a teacher, I think I could do a better job of acquainting students with such pleasures.

At any rate, here is my encomium for the naked mole rat: it makes me happy.

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From an online exhibit sponsored by Slate and Magnum. You can find it here, although you may have to rummage through the archive.

A photograph is inherently alienating. It presents an image to a person who is removed from the source of that image, and it arrests time in such a way that the picture seems to belong to history rather than present. The invention of the photograph and the works of early masters like Adams, Evans, and Steiglitz may belong to the modern, but the enterprise as a whole is postmodern — disjointed and cracked, with images that subvert their own codes. It is these qualities, in addition to reproducibility, that make photography an ideal medium for the web.

If “Tokyo, Love, Hello” were a novel, the writer would be Murakami. If it were in a museum, I would buy tickets and take friends. It feels like performance art, like avant garde filmmaking, like art. It echoes my experience of much of the world, but does so with incredible specificity of image and place. Shinjuku montage, stuffed pandas, cigars, subways. How to photograph disjuncture, ambiguity, and confusion yet still make the images precise? Try swan paddle boats, cats in boxing rings, corporate gymnastics, stairwells, monk telephones, ritual and neon.

The piece makes both Tokyo and photography an experience shared between artist and viewers. It makes misrecognition its subject, and thus acknowledges, pays tribute to, photography’s many alienations.

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I saw a movie tonight so romantic I will not tell you the title. It featured a Brancusi statue, a concert pianist, a soap opera, and a café. A thunderstorm hitting as a girl steps onto the rooftop, and the angle gets a little wider and the Eiffel Tower looms behind. Here is a woman who has slept with father and son. Here is a woman who mouths the words of French pop music as she jams to her iPod. Here is a woman who gets a job in a place that only hires men. Here are people beloved by all Paris who wish only (well, not only, and certainly not always) to be left alone.

A striptease in a concert hall. By the soloist.

And the music – music as overtly sexual as late-night cable; music that will float you out to sea like an elderly Inuit, music like lavender, like cloves, like milk and honey.

I saw a movie tonight that was a postcard to art, a comedy in the fullest sense of the word (think Balzac). It reminded me of when I used to come to New York only for movies, for popcorn and for the feel of a city and for a breath of the hope of love. Those movies, like this one, made me want to drink coffee and write, repeating endlessly until I keeled over or ossified like a Brancusi sculpture. I’m still shaken.

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Part I: Tagine

Praising, that’s it! Praise was his mission,
and he came the way ore comes, from silent
rock. His heart, a wine press that couldn’t last
made us an endless supply of wine.

Even in the dust his voice won’t fail him
once the godhead has him in its grip.
All things turn vineyard, all things turn grape,
in the ripening South of his feelings.

Nothing can contradict his praise,
not mold in the royal sepulchre
nor that a shadow will fall from the gods.

He’s the messenger who stays,
who carries his bowls of praiseworthy fruit
across the thresholds of the dead.

– Sonnets to Orpheus I:7, David Young, trans.

The mission of the night is praise (Praise!) and I will praise Paris, though it has been praised before, and better than I could ever praise it. My lyre makes cities reappear — hear the echoing of my feet when I landed flat footed in a square; see the twist of my face when I ate a cigar; I will walk the length of the quays and skateboard around them again; I will eat cake; I will make words from neon; I will speak in tongues; I will praise Paris.

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