The Hitler Question in Education.

The twentieth century has proven that the liberal arts cannot prevent civilizational slide into barbarism, but can only add a unique horror to man's native capacity for the brutal by embellishing it with the grinning death-mask of gentility. Having played Schubert beneath the gas chambers, why do we continue to educate? Would it not be better to control men, firmly and technocratically, rather than continue to naively hope that the educated mind will freely resist its natural inclination to evil?

The great, possibly counterfactual enterprise of education rests—for me—on three ideas. They are hopes, not certainties. The first: that a nation whose people have been educated to be free citizens of an equal polity will be conditioned, as a group, to create just laws and institutions whose strength and resilience will be sufficient to resist our cyclical and apparently irresistible urge to salt the earth and reduce ourselves to dystopia. The second: that though we may be defenseless against this special mania and addiction of mankind, this brutality, we have been given a flabbier enemy to resist: if the 20th century was an abbatoir, the 21st promises to be a squalid room lit only by a flickering television and a blinking modem. Man is naturally violent, but he is perhaps not naturally empty; the humane letters, whose sole function and great merit is to grant the man-animal a soul, a personhood, a core resistant to distraction, parochialism, smallness of being: these are our study in the dream of a mankind brightly lit, house to house, doorway to doorway with inner life. We educate to create humanity where there would otherwise be consumers, implements, data points, the impersonal activities of massed reaction and impulse. Last: that even if none of this is true (and it may not be; our institutions may be feeble, human history may indeed be Hitler history, the vast majority of mankind may be incapable of attaining real self-awareness; our hope rests on something feebler than conjecture, a thing more akin to magical thinking or solipsism) nevertheless to educate is to cultivate the only transcendent good within our grasp and within the power of pessimism to imagine realized—that it is a thing like praying, a liturgy possibly without recipient, a cyclical rite to the divinities of man's better nature.

Shelo asani goy.

Attached are five short essays my new rabbi requested I write for him, a page each on my reasons for converting to Judaism, my idea of G-d, my thoughts on the sabbath and kashrut respectively, and my feelings about the nation, land and people of Israel. The following obtuse droolings constitute a kind of apologia pro vita sua to date and may be of interest to those who have the misfortune of knowing Our Hero in real life.

I. Shavuot 39a

I am a rationalist, uncomfortable with metaphysical explanations that cut the bowels out of insoluble paradoxes through resort to incontrovertible spiritual claims. Explanations must come to an end somewhere—I'll return to this again—but in this case I have put my self into the hands of mystical thought because my reason cannot take me to the place where I am standing now.

Our sages taught that the souls of converts were also present at Sinai to assent to and confirm the covenant with the rest of Israel and its future generations: As for me, some part of me has also assented to that covenant and now must make its separate confirmation. Here too I break my usual monistic view of man and am forced to say that the soul which assented must be distinct in some way from the mind and organism which justify, since it is impossible that I would have assented to this on my own terms and improbable that my extremely predictable nature (resistant to change, suspicious of subjectivity, culturally parochial) would come to this juncture of its own right. You can tell from the stiffness of my language here that I'm still uncomfortable with my explanation even though the grandeur of the metaphysical event of Sinai is deeply appealing to me as a creature of literary aesthetics—Sinai is, for me, a true myth, an event whose reality has hijacked what would have been the normal and reasonable trajectory of my life.

In any sense in which I would usually use the word "know," then, I don't know why I am a Jew. But I am.

Let me resort to a short history. Here are the facts: I was raised in a christian household and, as is so universally the case with people like myself, revolted from the revolting church-camp atmosphere in which I grew up by adopting the aggressively atheist worldview which has become a cliché of American university life. In my junior year I fell into the company of the most remarkable person I have ever known, a classmate of mine in the German program who was something of an amateur scholar of the Shoah and with whom I began to discuss Israel and the Jews. My friend, a gentile and also an atheist, was at that time an outspoken advocate for Israeli interests; I found myself gripped by a wrenching and totally irrational affinity for Israel as a political entity and for the Israeli people as the last living example of real national grit in the Western world. The only shouting arguments I've ever had have concerned Israel—let me tell you that my nature is phlegmatic to the point of defectiveness; nobody was as surprised as I was that this topic, irrelevant to me and utterly unrelated to my interests, could reduce me to a species of ideological attack dog, aggressive, loyal and more than a little vicious.

I aged and cooled. My interests are literary, and I began to read the Bible as an exercise in criticism; my fascination with Israel turned into a voracious appetite for Hebrew scripture. This went on for some time until, in the summer of 2010 (and after a great deal of astonished resistance) I began to pray, in retrospect as a totally uneducated Jew. Suddenly—and these are the only words I can think of to describe it—a theological mindset had congealed in me, or rather materialized at the bottom of my mind as a kind of chemical precipitate. It was there, stubborn and unsettling and indifferent to my self-concept as a materialist thinker. At about this time I began gesturing toward sabbath observance; In 2011, after a year of eating through a disorganized and ludicrously non-comprehensive mass of readings, I presented myself to R. Bass and told her what I have told you. To my reckoning I have had the Jewish people lodged in my head for five years, thought of myself as spiritually Jewish for two, and lived as an increasingly observant Jew for one.

II. Echad

I have been able to justify my religious convictions to myself because of the sublimity of monotheism or, as I irritatingly refer to it in conversation, radical monotheism. The development of Jewish thought toward a god which is truly and in the full sense one god, a concept we share with Islam and some forms of protestantism is, for me, the central mystery of Judaism and an answer to the central Christian mystery of the body of christ, at once fully human and fully divine—another supreme idea which, however, does not speak to my soul and which I consider an impossible contradiction in terms. I believe that G-d is and can only be perfectly simple, unbounded by time and space, present in a complete, unchanging, independent and self-sufficient state in every moment, separate from (neither within nor containing, but—for lack of a better term—through, like a bed of nails piercing a sheet of paper) the universe, utterly unapproachable on His own terms but whose thought holds every particle of the world in its place: a thing to which the words exist, is, believe, like do not and cannot apply. I refer here, in a philosophically sloppy way, to the negative theology of Maimonides.

Here there is, however, a paradox. How to be at once both a monotheist in the true sense and also, as I do, assent to the truth of Torah? Our God is not only necessarily the ineffable One of philosophy but also, in his revelation to us, the holy one of Israel who walked in the cool of the evening with Adam, spoke with Abraham at Mamre, who wrestled bodily with Jacob, came against Moses at the inn, and whom Ezekiel saw in a chariot of fire. How do we hold in mind both the philosophical truth of His perfection and also the religious truth of the J author, whose god has hands, face, voice, emotions, the capacity to change His mind, to love and grieve and rankle in the human sense?

Some time ago I was listening to a JTS podcast. The question arose: is G-d Jewish? Certainly not, responded the panel. At the time, I was scandalized. The thought stuck to me like a burr for some weeks until I realized that it was correct—how impossible that the ineffable and unbounded One could be bounded, contained in some way, in Judaism! At the same time, it is a truth that He made a particular and continuous revelation to the Jewish people at Sinai, and that although G-d is not a god of the Jews alone or exclusively, he is accessible to us in—and only in—a uniquely Jewish way, and, uniquely in human history until that point, a way mediated primarily by the written word. It is this tension between philosophical purity and the complex paradox of sacred text that saves the philosophy from sterility and the text from a fundamentalism indistinguishable from idolatry; without this coupling the former is useless, the latter fascist.

III. From all He had created

As with so much of the law there are, as I understand it, two principal ways we think of the sabbath. The first is a matter of religious law and its attendant theology; the second is ethical, in the Aristotelian sense. I will touch on both.

Theologically: A memorial of creation and the day in which G-d rested from the act of creation. For us, this means that we attempt to participate in the timeless ratiocination of a timeless god whose nature is such that the act of creation is not past but continuous, since, existing at all times, the moment of creation is as completely present in the experience of G-d as the heat death of the universe and the metaphysical event we refer to as olam haba. I've begun to joke to my friends that eventually I will wake up to discover that I've begun making preparations for the sabbath on Sunday night; in a sense, this is the purpose of the sabbath as an institution, so that not only the day itself but the days of the week before it might allow man to imitate his creator, putting his tiny purview into order so that he might also rest from all his labor and contemplate the abstract, language-dwelling world of thought which (I believe) the Torah refers to when it teaches that we are made in His image, namely that we have access to the abstract and participate in the unique ontological condition of language-using creatures. I believe that this opportunity to imitate the creator is the best way to rationalize its condition as chief among our days of assembly.

We refer to it also as an offering of sabbath rest, which suggests to me that we should regard the sabbath as another way to replace the temple services and—given that the institution of the sabbath both predates the possibility of offering sacrifice and also commands observance even when temple rituals are impossible (i.e. we must rest from purification of the temple on the sabbath even if this means abrogation of continuous offering)—it would not be unreasonable to think of this supreme sabbath offering as the teleology to which animal sacrifice was a necessary predecessor. In any event, sabbath observance is obligatory, non-negotiable, paramount, and casually disregarded by the laity of all non-orthodox movements within Judaism.

Ethically: Someone else's rabbi taught explicitly that the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath; our rabbis confirm this, though (to my understanding) less directly. The conservative movement has supplemented its siddur with meditations on the sabbath as an opportunity to relax and find tranquility which, although only part of the picture, it certainly is. From personal experience I can say that the institution of the sabbath gives us the opportunity—or compels us, depending on one's perspective—to focus the mind (the da'at, binah v'haskeil which in our times typically rest in a state of hibernation) and fully come awake. It is a gift of and commandment to clarity. Further, and for me especially, it provides a fixed structure that organizes the week into a meaningful cycle of beginning and ending, preparation and completion; this is endlessly better than a round of drudgery followed by two days of frantic recreation—although I do sometimes miss Saturday.

IV. If an Unkosher Meatball Falls into a Pot of Kosher Meatballs, Should You Tell Anyone What Happened or Just Eat the Meatballs Anyway?

Kosher means "suitable," and as such extends far beyond food to all forms of Jewish interaction with the world; but I'll deal with food here. As before, I'd like to touch first on theological, then on ethical points.

Theologically: we begin with ritual purity and the corporate purity of the Jewish people. I mentioned in my first essay the idea of arbitrary boundaries; putting aside the rationalization that kashrut began as a hygenic measure—there is nothing unsafe about camel or horse meat; the tribal origins of the law proceed from disgust, not proto-science—let me take the opportunity to talk about the productive arbitrariness of the law. Explanations come to an end somewhere; here, they have no beginning. The orthodox do not eat caviar not because caviar is, of itself, foul; they do not eat it because they do not eat sturgeon. Why? Because they do not eat the scaleless sturgeon. Shrimp do not stink in the nostril of the holy one—they are an abomination for us, and the project of explaining why inevitably ends in some form of intellectual disingenuousness. This is not a bad thing. To assent to an arbitrary and inexplicable holiness code is to take the necessary step outside the self which allows us to exist in a universe, even for a moment, that is not us; to behave not according to pure subjectivity but to behave according to a structure and system of boundaries which we cannot change to suit us. For me, this is the glory of being a people of the book; the existence of the text (with all its perplexity) keeps us on the one hand from superstition and solipsism, from bloodless rationalism on the other.

Ethically: I have heard keeping kosher described in terms of mindfulness about what we buy and eat, which to me sounds suspiciously similar to the rationale behind buying organic and can, I think, banalize the theological justification of dietary taboo. Having casually dismissed hygenic explanations for kashrut, I do however think that the sociological function of dietary law is historical fact. Keeping kosher keeps us separate; it makes it impossible, observed with a not unreasonable level of strictness, to fully interact with gentiles in social settings. Eating together is, anthropologically, the beginning of coming to mutual understanding with people who are unlike you: A man who eats nothing in the company of eaters is an alien, a sinister figure; it is impossible for him to create fellowship under such conditions. Viewed in a positive light, kashrut unifies the Jewish people. My kitchen, for instance—once I am taught how to kasher it—will be kosher; I keep my kitchen to a much higher halachic standard than I observe when I am out of the house. I eat hot dairy in public but—as a vegetarian—instead of having separate meat and milk dishes I have disposable tableware should I ever order a pizza. Why? Because it is crucially important to me that any observant Jew be comfortable eating in my house, this almost fantastic-seeming prospect of the existence of scrupulous Jews who, analogous to the coming of the messiah, I hopefully and faithfully expect to eventually show up at my doorstep. Kashrut binds me to the Jewish people more than it separates me from gentiles.

V. Yevamot 47a

I've already talked about my relationship to the state of Israel, so let me here deal with a counterfactual I probed fairly stringently as I began to consider the possibility—then the necessity—of actually converting to Judaism. First: What if this were in fact some kind of post-ethnic maneuver for identity, especially in a university environment where minority status carried such rhetorical and social clout? I freely admit that my nature is viciously flawed by an impulse toward exhibitionism, posturing, and self-regard; but after much thought I decided that this was not the case. I here resort again not to argument but, uncharacteristically, to my feelings: I investigated my heart and found that I was not experiencing a desire to be a Jew or to be a Jew in the eyes of others, but rather that in some irrational way I was a kind of Jew—although a Jew fundamentally damaged and in need of repair. There is the fact that my grandfather was a lapsed Jew—he married a mafia princess named Siniscalo who proceeded to destroy my father's life—but this narrative of regaining what my shliemazl grandfather dithered away is just a rationalization for a condition I cannot explain. "Prunes are a good Jewish food" was the sum total of my father's transmission of Jewish identity to me, and whatever this is, it's not a converso's pot of lentils later re-identified as crypto-cholent. There is the troubling coincidence of my values with the ancient qualities of the Jewish people—scholarliness, argumentation, a traditionally cerebral rather than charismatic approach to religion—and I think it would not be unfair to call my identification with the Jews the coping mechanism of someone who has been intellectually and socially lonely, to invent an ideal heritage of people—finally! like me!—who share my apartness and congenital intellectualism. What can I say except that this is not the case? It is not.

I do not think of myself as a subscriber to a creed so much as a member of a nation. Let me recount an experience that took me rather by surprise: One day last summer I set out to teach myself Hatikvah, and found a youtube upload of the Jews of a liberated death camp singing it after the arrival of the American troops. While it was loading I had trundled off to my kitchen to wash up a teacup or something; I listened to this historical curiosity for about a minute and began bawling. You have most probably intuited by now that I am not an emotional man, but let me tell you that I can count on one hand the number of times I've broken down like that in my adult life—previous culprits being my mother, graduate school, romantic relationships designed specially by Kafka's angry ghost—you know, the things people ordinarily cry about.. Shaken, I immediately and frantically turned it off. This, perhaps, is the reassuring fact half-buried in so much emotional reasoning; perhaps this is why I would get red in the face talking about settlements in the west bank when I was an undergraduate: Even then, when I would have given the lie to anyone with the amusing notion that I would one day show up at a synagogue in Arlington and be horrified to discover that we sing our entire liturgy, some part of me already identified with the Jewish people in the same way that my pre-rational, clannish, entirely human prejudices cleave to my friends and family. What injures the Jews injures me; their triumphs (it's strange to refer to the Jews in the third person) are mine, this people is my people, their god my G-d.

You mention the suffering of the Jews. This gives me pause: What right do I have to this heritage, this enduring peoplehood in the face of so much misery and deprivation, especially now—G-d willing—that the historical persecution of Jews in the free world has come to an end at the cost of the extermination of European Jewry? I have none. I know, and I am unworthy.

Parashat Vayetzei.

Let's talk about Jacob for a minute. Last week's parshah includes a callback to Parashat Toldot:

וַיִּשַּׁק יַעֲקֹב, לְרָחֵל; וַיִּשָּׂא אֶת-קֹלוֹ, וַיֵּבְךְּ.

And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice, and wept. (Bereshit 29:11)

Why does Jacob weep? In Toldot, after he realizes that his blessing has been stolen from him as well as his birthright, Esau begs his father Isaac:

וַיֹּאמֶר עֵשָׂו אֶל-אָבִיו, הַבְרָכָה אַחַת הִוא-לְךָ אָבִי―בָּרְכֵנִי גַם-אָנִי, אָבִי; וַיִּשָּׂא עֵשָׂו קֹלוֹ, וַיֵּבְךְּ.

And Esau said unto his father: 'Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father.' And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept. (Bereshit 27:38)

Jacob has stolen his brother's blessing even more shamelessly than he stole his birthright, and my understanding of the patriarchal blessing―influenced, I'm sorry to say, by Bloom's rubbishy Book of J―is that it conveys a metaphysical quality of vitality, a kind of innate power and irresistible charisma passed down from Abraham: a real and crushing loss, like the loss of one's health, a realization of limitation and entanglement. It's the difference between Saul and David, between Jeroboam and Rehoboam, between the nation of Israel and the tiny semitic tribes wiped from the face of the earth before Rome grew old. Esau weeps in annihilated desperation. What has Jacob lost, that Torah repeats these words (וַיִּשָּׂא אֶת-קֹלוֹ, וַיֵּבְךְּ / and he lifted up his voice, and wept) and establishes a secret parallel? After all, Jacob has recognized the love of his life and the last of the matriarchs; the blessing that he stole from Esau, just recently made manifest at Beth-El, is standing in front of him "of beautiful form, and fair to look upon" (29:17).

Rashi says that Jacob experiences a prophetic insight, seeing his whole future and specifically that Rachel will be buried apart from him on the road to Ephrath and not in the cave of Machpelah with himself, Rebeccah, and Sarah. If he does experience this revelation (and I'm not at all convinced that we should call the patriarchs prophets, despite the rabbinical conviction that they certainly were), then he certainly sees his whole future laid out in front of him―of which he will say, "few and evil have been the days of the years of my life" (47:9). But he would also see his immense progeny, his years of happiness with Rachel, his reunion with Joseph: all the glory of the blessing of Abraham. Jacob does not weep for Machpelah.

Esau weeps at his loss. What has Jacob lost?

In his revelation, Jacob will foresee everything: but what happens immediately? He will be indentured to Laban for seven years, cheated, and indentured for seven more. For fourteen years and in order to achieve his heart's desire he will not be his own master; to achieve the fulfillment of the blessing he loses his freedom, he loses the precious days of the years of his life to frustrating subordination while Esau ranges across the wild places and, as they say, waxes very great. Does Jacob weep for fourteen years?

Let's go back to the beginning of Vayetzei, to Beth-El. Now, Jacob has shown himself as a prototype of Joseph, that consummate charlatan, and has―I mean this with the full force of the expression―stolen for himself the vitality of the seed of Abraham, the power and the charisma. He is a young man in terms of the lifespan of a patriarch and has only now broken free from his father's house; he is on the road to make something of himself, to find his own way and to be more than his father's son. To my mind―if I were in his position―there should be at his back a commanding imperative to be an un-Isaac; his father is a pale figure in comparison to Abraham, a man who has lived his life in the image of Moriah and who has been little more than the obedient offspring of the revolutionary who left Ur full of broken idols. What would his escape route be?

The family of Abraham is a cage. Abraham protects Isaac from the kind of marriage that helps transform Esau into an Edomite, his "daughters of Heth" that trouble Rebecca; Abraham went so far as to send his servant with explicit instructions to bring a woman of the tribe to Isaac, to make certain that the boy would have no chance to fall in love with a woman that would undermine the house. Isaac, imitating his father (as in all things,) gives the same instruction to Jacob (26:1-6), but does not send him out with a chaperone: there's no time; Jacob is too weak to defend himself. Whatever plans Isaac might have had for his son are now partially in Jacob's hands, and the son is free―should circumstance present itself―to take whatever wife he wishes. Torah says he assents ("Jacob hearkened to his father and his mother," 28:7), but you can look at any Conservative congregation in America and wonder whether the nature of the male striking off into the world has changed so very much in 3,500 years. Whatever his best intentions, surely the possibility of freedom is at the corners of his mind. When the tent of Isaac dips beneath the horizon on the road to Paddan-Aram the enormous potential of the unfettered blessing must open around Jacob like a O'Keefe vista. Perhaps G-d will never speak to him. Perhaps he will live without compulsion, his own man, his own family, his own future.

He lays down to sleep at Beth-El and dreams of the ineffable god of his grandfather standing beside him, just outside his peripheral vision and speaking in the terrible voice:

וְהִנֵּה אָנֹכִי עִמָּךְ, וּשְׁמַרְתִּיךָ בְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר-תֵּלֵךְ, וַהֲשִׁבֹתִיךָ, אֶל-הָאֲדָמָה הַזֹּאת: כִּי, לֹא אֶעֱזָבְךָ, עַד אֲשֶׁר אִם-עָשִׂיתִי, אֵת אֲשֶׁר-דִּבַּרְתִּי לָךְ.

And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. (Bereshit 28:15)

I will not leave thee, I will keep thee whithersoever thou goest. G-d has placed his heavy hand on Jacob as surely as he placed it on Abraham, and his life is not his own. He cannot escape. He, too, is in the cage of Abraham.

Bereshit is punctuated by killswitches, points at which the whole enterprise of creating the nation of Israel could have been nipped in the bud and all the glory and suffering could have passed away: Abraham could have refused to send away Ishmael; Isaac could have died on Mount Moriah; Jacob could have married a Hittite. Later, Moses could have been killed at birth or G-d himself could have aborted his project were it not for Zipporah's intercession at the inn: how many times could the road to Sinai have been stopped short, or a crossroad taken, or G-d repent of his undertaking and spare the world? Had Jacob married a daughter of Heth there had been be no passover, no Sinai, no Talmud, no Israel and no Shoah. Should Jacob weep?

I think he weeps because he sees Rachel and his heart is moved with desire, with real assent to the bizarre project that has hijacked the life of his father and his father's father: he loves Rachel, knows that his life is not his own, and kisses the rod. What of Esau? He weeps to have lost the blessing and the birthright―but he goes on to live in freedom, the pure freedom of all the nations that are not chosen, not born in the cage of Abraham. Edom is free but Israel is holy to the Lord. Edom is erased in its freedom, but Israel endures in beauty and the covenant and every kind of suffering forever.

Every morning I thank G-d that he has restored to me a soul that, much against my will, was also present at Sinai―but I weep with Jacob.

Anton's crush.

When I read Narziß und Goldmund for the first time, the book struck me―hardly surprisingly, lonely and sensitive teenager that I was―immediately and obviously as a kind of love story, albeit a love story gone to seed in cerebrality's garden. In fact Hesse's oddly claustrophobic, utterly homosocial novels have always appealed to my basic romantic loneliness; how could these not be the documented yearnings of a gay intellectual? And yet, a lazy glance at his biography reveals nothing of the kind―the man took wives; I hear no google-rumors of male lovers. And yet, as they say, it moves.

As it happens, I'm rereading Das Glasperlenspiel. The first time through I was too young, too basically stupid to take much from it except a hazy feeling of my own superiority; reading it as an adult―well, as whatever I am now―I tripped and fell across a passage in chapter 3 that confirms that homosexual attraction was at least a pixel in his worldview. Knecht is at Mariafels and encounters a novice, Anton, who immediately succumbs to the influence that Knecht has always exerted over younger men:

As time went on, it became evident to Knecht that this young man with the intense eyes under heavy black brows was devoted to him with that enthusiasm and readiness to serve so typical of the boyish adoration he had encountered so often by now. Although every time it happened he felt a desire to fend it off, he had long ago come to recognize it as a vital element in the life of the Castalian order. But in the monastery he decided to be doubly withdrawn; he felt it would be a violation of hospitality to exert any sway over this boy who was still subject to the discipline of religious education. Moreover, he was well aware that strict chastity was the commandment here, and this, it seemed to him, could make a boyish infatuation even more dangerous. In any case, he must avoid any chance of giving offense, and he governed himself accordingly.

This certainly doesn't prove anything about Hesse―although I'll leave the elaborate prophylaxis to Henning Bech and his absent homosexuality―but just in case this is insufficiently explicit, a page later we watch Knecht watching Anton watching Father Jacobus with filial solicitude, which the anonymous pedant explains in unambiguous terms:

Knecht's first reaction was delight; the sight was pleasing in itself, as well as evidence that Anton could so look up to older men without any trace of physical feeling.

Well, I leave this for what it is. There are doubtless subtle articles on the topic, but, bless the Lord, I'm a schoolteacher; why should I do actual research when I can instead attend three-hour classes on administering Formative and/or Summative Assessments? These, by the way, mean "exam" and "final exam" to the initiated, if you are curious.

I take my quotations from the R. & C. Winston translation, one of the very few paperbacks I've bought in recent memory―sometimes you need to possess a book At once!!, as Propertius may well have known.

From the florilegium: Conrad.

I had started to put book darts in my Glass Bead Game when I abruptly ran out. Where were the rest? A search reveals them still tucked into my edition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which reminded me of the whole peck of quotations I'd never gotten around to copying down. These are they.

Marlowe chats to his friends in terms that remind me very much of my relationship to my boon companion, as was, Heldenberg―

I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of Indian ocean, Pacific, China seas―a regular dose of the East―six years or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize you.

Near the close of my graduate studies he had begun to refer to me as "hopelessly itinerant"―let me tell you, nobody likes to find himself standing on a doorstep with an Israeli duffel bag on one shoulder and the carefully concealed irritation of his friends at the threshold in front of him.

Conrad has an ear for satire. About his early attempts to get a position that will take him into Africa, he complains that

The men said 'My dear fellow,' and did nothing.

In these straits he throws himself on the ministrations of the women―much to his chagrin―and soon finds himself en route to Brussels to present himself to his new employer:

In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre. Prejudice no doubt.

Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam delendam esse. Speaking of wise cynicism in the face of modernity, Marlowe jokes about his interview with the company doctor that

I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

I watched Berg's Wozzeck recently―as of this writing it's available on Youtube in a fairly nice video production, much to my delight―and am reminded of the doctor in that work as well, also a specimen of that particularly ugly 20th century literary trope, the vile man of reason. Doesn't Alex Ross say that Berg was working out some of his frustrations with Schoenberg in that character? Well, I digress. Do I need to introduce the following? The spooky majesty of Conrad ventriloquizing Marlowe ventriloquizing Kurtz stands on its own. We've all read this before, anyway, so reread, if you like; and if not not.

You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying 'My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes, but this―ah―specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball―an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and―lo!―he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. [...] You should have heard him say, 'My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my―' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him―but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible―it was not good for one either―trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat among the devils of the land―I mean literally. You can't understand. how could you?―with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you on or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policemand, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums―how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude―utter solitude without a policeman―by way of silence―utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?

It is magnificence. More, and famously:

All Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his―let us say―nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which―as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times―were offered up to him―do you understand?―to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appeal to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings―we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence―of words―of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'

Retyping this tonight I'm struck by the virtuoso satire of which Conrad was capable and the calculating, even manipulative intelligence hiding beneath his naturalism―it makes me want to fast-forward past the rending of the temple veil, to one of the Faulkner novels I've been saving for the event of intestinal fortitude. Well, hope springs eternal. Meanwhile, Conrad on Marlowe on a particular kind of character type we've been seeing since the dark ages, if not before, perhaps seen critically for the first time:

The glamor of youth enveloped his particolored rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months―for years―his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration―like envy. Glamor urged him on, glamor kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with the maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth.

Marlowe is wiser than I am, and as such in his case it's only something like envy, whereas I'm drinking my dissatisfaction neat. Do we have the strength for more concentrated Kurtz? Of course not. Yet:

And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head―though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too―but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him―himself―in his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! He had kicked the very earth to pieces. he was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.

And more. Is this about our century? Was this prophecy?

"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! it rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now―images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas―these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mold of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinctions, of all the appearances of success and power.

This could have been written in 1949. One last, here in the mouth of Kurtz' Intended:

"Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?" she was saying. "He drew men towards him by what was best in them."

I am reminded of Heldenberg.

"The same sort of song."

I spent several days laboring over a half-formed essay about a footnote in Gibbon accusing Pope of "improving on Homer's theology" in Iliad 15. Several pages of block quotes in two languages later I decided that my earthshattering exegesis―that Pope's Jove is omnipotent and Homer's is just more potent―couldn't justify the labor, space and mouth noise. If I'm bored with a topic I can only assume that you would be, too. So, for lack of an intelligent thought, something that made me smile instead:

"Horace was one of the least self-deceptive of writers and like many expert craftsmen and artists he found it progressively harder to satisfy his own animum censoris honesti. He had worked his vein very thoroughly and even the most undemanding reader cannot deny that there is a grain of uncomfortable truth in the schoolboy's complaint that 'Horace always seems to be singing the same sort of song to the same sort of tune'." A. T. von S. Bradshaw, 1970. "Horace, Odes 4.1." CQ 20: 142-53. (142)

In any event, all this futility with Pope's pretty poem led me to some material worth sharing: have a look at the labors of a certain Jim Manis of Penn State, an e~lexandrine (forgive me) copious library of PDFs, certainly a κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί for those of us melting our hearts in the blogosphere of the muses. I also ran into this micro-compendium of Greek aphorisms, perhaps worth a look on a rainy day.

Oh,―apropos of nothing―I had been joking lately about Gilgamesh in terms that reminded me of this interesting video, in which a pair of very earnest PBS types play with a reconstructed mesopotamian lyre to the tune of a recitation from tablet 10; you may enjoy it too.

Negative theology.

"Do you believe in G-d?"

I was recently excoriated, as sometimes happens, for describing myself as religious―how could I have fallen into such self-involved mysticism? How could this have happened? Indignation vied with contempt for a few minutes before the subject, and conversation, were dropped. (Unclean, unclean! A whole generation of my peers has codified its very own secular leshon hara.)

The new atheism just isn't designed for confrontation with religious intellectuals. It asks the wrong questions, it's too confined by its own discourse to engage the sacred in meaningful terms; its enthusiasts just aren't equipped―as far as I've experienced―with the literary or contemplative background to approach people like myself, sitting on top of my column here in the dregs of time.

Still, though, the argument put me to thinking about that great conversation-at-midnight question of our century―I wonder how many people would find it strange, if they really thought about it? I mean the question itself as well as its strange relationship to history. Think of it―it began very objectively, almost empirically: "Why did Sarah laugh?" It was a question of power, an old transitional monotheism of the omnipotent struggling to define itself against the warring dominions of heathen cult. I think it's very easy to lose the revolutionary force of Bereshit 18:14 in the smallness of Abraham's concerns: for some time now I've been searching out the point at which G-d first reveals himself to Abraham as more than a personal divinity, and though I don't think this the point at which our ancestor realizes that he must be more than a henotheist―if that ever comes; it may not come at all until Moses―I think HaShem might be intimating exactly that, just in passing, an offhand remark that Abraham accepts in silent perplexity. After all, his god is striding off to destroy a city; under the circumstances you can't judge him too severely for being distracted from novel theological questions. So it begins as something quite different, a question of confidence rather than faith in the 20th century sense: the Jahwist author wonders whether we're confident in this alien presence and his mightiness.

Then of course it changes dramatically: now we have the missionary question put to half-reconstructed pagans, "do you believe in my god, all three of him, though you didn't before?" You hope this is closer to Elijah and his barrels of water than to another misguided species of henotheism―"your gods exist, but they're demons; only this god is omnipotent"―but this is wishful thinking, isn't it? Europe was littered with idols in everything but name until the Reformation.

But now Christianity had covered Europe like a settling snow; we entered an age of religious monoculture, of heterodoxy and heretics in a land where everyone takes the same god as a given stretching onward toward apocalypse. The 20th century question of faith would have been meaningless to these peasants and potentates: the question was never existential but doctrinal, and accusations of atheism were more than a little disingenuous.

Suddenly it occurred to mankind that there might not be a god at all. The rest is a long history of widespread banalities and the secluded palace of the mandarins: we acquired the Enlightenment, and when Gibbon writes of pagan antiquity that

the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful (ch. 2, p. 22),

I wonder if he isn't speaking rather more of his own age than Trajan's. But yes, by the philosophers indeed: don't think I'm sneering at them. Their tendency was toward the Stoics' almost-monotheism or else the rigorous materialism of their rivals; if you put theology in the hands of intellectuals it almost always seems to tend one way or the other. Small, wonder, though―Kohelet is right; of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness of the flesh. Over and over again we pile book on top of book in our scramble toward G-d, turn back, see that we've built a ziggurat, and privately despair.

Or at least I do.

But now we've come to the 21st century where the question has become well and truly existential, very much like asking whether someone believes there's life on other planets. I look back over the different ways we've asked that unusual question―first exultant, next suspiciously, then as an inquisitor, finally with caliper in hand―and I wonder whether you can really ask that question of a monotheist, or as a monotheist.

Is it meaningful to ask whether you, such as you are, acknowledge the existence of―can we even call him a being? better to resort to a naked relative pronoun―that which cannot be described except in negative terms, which is so different from us on an ontological level that to use the verb "exists" is to abuse the language? Omnipotence and omnibenevolence: what is all this in the face of a god without qualities? Omniscience and simplicity: these I understand. But you can't wash good or action clean of their human context, or at least clean enough to really apply them to our one G-d; and omnipresence is beyond my ability to question. Perhaps it's a misuse of language, perhaps not―at this instant, at least, I simply don't know.

My negative theology:

I am afraid that I will solve these problems with either mysticism―with a theology of sentiment―or resignation.

I am afraid to find G-d in the logos because this is a philosopher's heresy, a bounding of the incommensurate, idolatry in iconoclasm.

I am unable to believe in the literal truth of scripture because it manifestly isn't, but suspicious of the double-mindedness by which I hold it to be true without being truth: that 20th century willingness to discard the exclusion of the middle makes me queasy.

I am suspicious that I can formulate the thought the study of religion is the study of literature, but the reverse is not true: inevitably the disjunction will fall away; I'll conflate the books I love with the G-d my soul cries out to worship.

There is a god; he is one; and from this nothing follows. The use of language unravels into nonsense; reason is inadequate but feeling is idolatry. Every form of belief is idolatry. But this can't be true―οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος. My spouse accused me of "sublimated, postmodern Judaism" the other day―well, what else can I possibly have? Where can I go from here? I am totally unequipped to wrestle with the angel.

I mentioned Stylite saints in passing and this led me to Tennyson's "St. Simeon Stylites," which you can find here along with a very engaging and humane critical essay by USC's J. R. Kincaid as well as the arresting photograph included above, which I found unattributed on a blog unworthy of mention: I wonder what it is? A reenactment? A 19th century emulator? Very mysterious.

A footnote, with comparandum.

As I think will soon become very irritatingly apparent, I've picked up Gibbon's (divine, says Noel Coward) Decline and Fall after two years of enduring its silent recriminations from my bookshelf. A footnote to his description of Roman siege weaponry ("military engines ... all of which, either in an oblique or horizontal manner, discharged stones and darts with irresistible violence" [!]) caught my eye and reminded me of Minivier Cheevy, whom we all know:

Minivier cursed the commonplace
      And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
      Of iron clothing. (21-24)

The charming annotation in question comes on page 12 of my edition (Heritage 1946), practically meaningless to you since display editions of this work are promulgated with the same metastatic commercial glee as are Gray's Anatomy and Paradise Lost. Woe to display editions and their fate, laudandis, ornandis, tollendisque! In any event, it's footnote 16:

The subject of the ancient machines is treated with great knowledge and ingenuity by the Chevalier Folard. He prefers them in many respects to our modern cannon and mortars. We may observe that the use of them in the field gradually became more prevalent, in proportion as personal valour and military skill declined with the Roman empire. When men were no longer found, their place was supplied by machines. (Emphasis mine.)

In any event, G-d grant Cheevy his iron clothing and Folard his engines with their oblique (or horizontal!) discharge.

A meditation.

Over at City Journal, Claire Berlinski is giving herself a sprain proclaiming in the wilderness about secrets squirreled out of Soviet archives and now freely available to the media, if only anyone gave a damn. Lamentable that she's wasting her breath.

I don't think there's real hope of turning back the steady slouch of things to that earlier politics of the manichee. Yes, it served us well until Vietnam and the New Left—or served, at least; there was a mechanism in place, and though it gave us the House Committee on Un-American Activities it also gave us moral purpose, that supreme fiction so dangerous and ennobling. (But we are deadly afraid of moral purpose; after all, the fascists had moral purpose, and the fascists still have their boot on 20th century thought—we're like those damaged twentysomethings who were harassed as children and now can think of nothing else.)

But of course it's only dangerous, not ennobling—well, at least that's where my mind goes with it, inevitably, but who knows? I grew up in a university.

Athens: not really democratic. (Corollary—Persia: not really so bad!)
Augustus: autocrat. (Maecenas: toady. Vergil: deeply morbid.)
Marcus Aurelius: platitudinous.
Crusades: brutal & unnecessary & genocidal.
Oliver Cromwell: autocrat.
Pilgrims: vicious & genocidal.
Settlers: genocidal.
The Raj: venal & brutal & racist.
Old Dominion: venal & racist & vicious & brutal & unnecessary but not genocidal.
Cold war: propaganda scheme (plus red scare).
President Bush: buffoonish & venal & racist.

Fine, you win, you win. I can't think at this point of a broad moral impetus that didn't go terribly wrong, at least if it wasn't disingenuous to begin with. My heroism, O sages and hierophants, is well broken. Mazal tov. But I don't believe you.

Crying out for the mos maiorum, that ever-receding Good Old Way—it's never really a puritanical exercise, I don't think. I don't buy into the very popular narrative of the power-hungry hypocrite, that famous and imaginary would-be tyrant with his fingers in other people's pastry (from theatrical to reproductive)—anything that easy and that convenient must be false. Reality is dense, and human beings are the densest part of it, swept around like seaweed in the wash of their own logos. After all, the mos maiorum recedes in front of you like Aeneas' Italy, nightmarishly further away the faster you chase it; go back in time and your reverend father's world is crumbling, too, and his father's father's. When a flippant person discovers this truth for himself he'll inevitably snigger about how, ah, clearly it's a question of disposition, or a kind of power-play, or just open delusion, or revanchist moaning: I've heard that enough times, G-d knows it.

But he's right in a sense—it is a question of disposition, but not in his terms. Conservatism, political and cultural, begins in human loneliness. It's not a question of forcing other people into virtue, or really even trying to slow a real civilizational decline; it's the terrible realization that other men are not like you, that your concerns are different, that you are wherever your thoughts are and that is very far indeed from the soul sitting next to you in the lecture hall—no, decline isn't a falling-away from an old gold standard but a declension from yourself, from the fragment of the mind of G-d you hope is in your breast, nominative to vocative: me, of me, apart from me, to me, Ah, O other, o hysterical man.

It's a longing for human companionship, for the impossible Zion of sharing your mind—really sharing it, sacred heart's longing finding answer—with your brothers. Conservatism is the agonized cry for that lost city of G-d where your worldview is not at issue, never part from your fellow man in the knowledge that no amount of argument could bridge the impossible gulf between you—for the city where no man goes out into the world alone.

But all this is true of the progressive mindset, too, only with different aims, different anxieties. The loneliness is the same, and so is the echo-chamber comfort of ideological purity. Think of the repulsiveness of commentators on Jihad Watch with their frog-chorus of agreement: you want that impossible unison with such an agony of wanting that you turn to vicious extremity and the party line, to a deranged ideological monomania that drives all things out of mind. Or think of greenpeace protesters, or raw foodists, or any other fragment of our ruined civilization—fellowship at the cost of penury, inertness, grimace. (But not ruined, I have to remind myself: Always the same, always the old balance, always the same mess. This is the truth, but I don't believe it. Yet, I mutter like Galileo, it declines.)

For a moment in American history we were confronted with such an unimaginable evil that it was possible to form a broad cultural coalition—and of course people were ruined by it, Jews, homosexuals, the innocent idealists of the left who didn't know any better because they loved the Idea and as such sinned in ignorance. But you can't go back, at least not now: no amount of journalism will save it, much to our dismay; the dog won't hunt, brother.

Down into the yellow-peeling onionskin of the dregs of time.

No, at heart we curmudgeons and antiquarians and other misplaced dreamers are waiting for Saul to die in his sin and the coming coronation our David, that cultural climax more beautiful and impossible than Michelangelo could have imagined. We want to see a society, a president, a king after G-d's own heart, and yet at this point in history—this postmodern hysteria, perpetual, nerve-wracking, labyrinthine—we could never acclaim the David of our heart's hunger.

Because we can't stop thinking of the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Philistines—even Amalek.

And it drives us to derangement.

Still yet more Simone Weil hagiography—a florilection.

Pursuant of my comp lit defense—and let me tell you, rarely have I produced something so indefensible—I had the pleasure of reading that extremely famous pamphlet by short-lived and, apparently, saintly communist [!] Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force. Let me say that, although I'm not at all certain I agree with her wholeheartedly, McCarthy's lovely translation left me dazed with pleasure. I have excerpted some quotations, with little comment.

Still more poignant—so painful is the contrast—is the sudden evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the far-away, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those about him.

She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace
To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing
A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle.
Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,
Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles' arm.

Far from hot baths was he indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths. (4)

By some trick of my neurology, anaphora reduces me to quivering emotional jelly. (Case in point, a completely banal and uninteresting poem of Edna Millay's, "The Bobolink," is the only work of art ever to reduce me to tears—and, if you can believe it, does so reliably, as if by witchcraft. The culprit? The mindnumbing, kitschy refrain "I shall never be sad again, / I shall never be sad again.") But never mind. Another:

Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny that extreme hunger does; for it possesses, and in perpetuo, the power of life and death. Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter. The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in the desert. (10)

Weil's pithiness is a world wonder—the whole essay is like this.

A postmodern abecedary.

My recent noise about philological congeries—which, like spring, must inevitably turn a young man's fancy to thoughts of fragmentary material and the means of arbitrarily arranging it—coincided handily with being reminded of the word abecedary. In its basic sense it means an inscription of the alphabet, used especially as a pedagogical tool—try telling your first grader that the two-zone print alphabet above the blackboard is a paper abecedarium, he'll win friends and influence bullies. More interestingly, though, the word applies to texts organized according to an alphabetical scheme.

This of course blew my windy intellect toward Louis Andriessen, who wrote a little suite of songs for the odd 1991 video festschrift M is for Man, Music, Mozart, a sort of euro-PBS celebration of Mozart's tricentennial. The first piece's vocal text was actually written by Peter Greenaway. It is, of course, the postmodern abecedary in question:

A is for Adam and
E is for Eve;
B is for bile, blood, and bones.
C is for conception, chromosomes, and clones.
D is for Devil.
F is for fertility and for Venus’ fur.
G is for germs and growth and genius.
H is for hysteria.
I is for intercourse.
J is for Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue.
K is for kalium, or potassium, if you like.
L is for lust—and lightning, lightning.

Clearly it's a red letter day (Ha! Ha! Good grief, forgive me.) I'll restrain myself, sincewe don't want a rehearsal of my Carson piece any time soon, and be brief. Now, let it be said that this is a vile text—all the little self-satisfactions of our crumbling civilization wrapped into one biologicized parcel; but I have come to bury Greenaway in exegesis, not to praise him. A couple of things are particularly interesting: for instance, the abecedary stops at L. Now there's the archaeology, which teaches us that ancient abecedaria were sometimes left incomplete for ritual or magical purposes; I'm reminded of the folkway of the ouija board that instructs you to stop the planchette if it begins to cycle through the alphabet in order. But putting that aside there's the element of the arbitrary: organizing a fragmentary text according to the alphabet presumes exhaustiveness, doesn't it?

Three women dreaming, part 2.

Let's look at the Apollonius passage again. It's a devil to translate because it's so hypotactic, so many fragmented phrases plastered together with breathless conjunctions, δέ δέ δέ. If there's clarity in Agamemnon's dream, all elements pared down to the apparition head of Nestor and its speech, Medea is dreaming in smeared images only—it's a confused sequence. Is the first passage, the perverse revision of Jason's motives, an imaginary scene in itself or just a kind of background conviction, an underpinning for what follows? I think it's more likely the latter: the dream proper is a mashup of scenes and visions, explicitly experiential, and lines 619-623 stand apart from what follows, only introducing it, coloring and explaining the strange pantomime beginning in 623 with ὀίετο δ’, and she thought she was struggling with the bulls herself, that she wrought the deed—so easily. Apollonius has given us a kind of epistemological mimesis of dreaming when he pictured the rootless convictions that sometimes invade our dreams and drone behind their action like a cantus firmus, but with μάλ’ εὐμαρέως he moves into the peculiar experience of dreaming itself: Medea wrestles with the bulls with timeless rapidity, with the liquid effortlessness of dreamt action conforming to the will; it's not just a literary forward-reference to how her arts will save Jason at the end of the book but something more mimetic, a realism new to the literary dream.

But the scene changes suddenly, her parents are there, a decision has been made: σφωιτέρους δὲ τοκῆας ὑποσχεσίης ἀθερίζειν (625), but her parents scorned their promise. It's not just the fluidity of scene and action at issue here but really the wordlessness of Medea's dream: everything that follows is in indirect discourse, reported from the same remove as was her fantasy on Jason's intentions. I think this has much to do with the relationship to tradition I had mentioned earlier, that Apollonius is reacting to the speech-centered clarity of the Homeric dream. Those divine dreams drove everything but the central word from the dreamer's mind, and it's the word that they wake up pondering; here, though, it's the scene, the strange action, its consequences. That οὕνεκεν of line 626 only emerges from the background of the dream, only intrudes onto the experiential now of the νεῖκος ἀμφήριστον (627) because it explains the scene that actually occupied Medea's dreaming mind—it's only the revision of a waking and recollecting mind that can order the text the way Apollonius gives it to us, with the explanation before the scene, rationalization before experience. That we read this dream as if Medea were narrating it to us is another point of departure from that old Homeric clarity: we should have a text that runs in linear fashion, that a quarrel came to a draw ... because her parents scorned their promise, since it wasn't up to the girl to yoke the bulls, etc., experience before explanation. It's an insoluble narrative problem, though: if 625-627 are only a concomitant understanding or mood that underpins the νεῖκος and judgment, there's nowhere the explanatory passage can go without straining the mimetic organization of the text—Apollonius' ambition is remarkable.

That ἄφνω in line 630 has much to do with the passage as a whole, though, doesn't it? The separate parts—bull-labor, judgment and scream—all blur into one another, changes in circumstance and action piled together with the same hypotactic rapidity as Apollonius' phrases: you see the same thing in receptions of this passage by Ennius (fr. 34ff, Warmington) and Vergil (Aen. 465-69). But what about the end, that syntactically ambiguous scream?

Electric cabinets of unreal curiosities.

Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti recently mentioned his collection of asyndetic privative adjectives, a philological curio cabinet at this point not only marvelously expansive but—apparently—still growing. Bless G-d, said I, a collection, really? On the internet! Well, the whole notion transported me, as Noel Coward sang of the unleashed matron—

hot flushes of delight suffused her,

—changing my whole demeanor. Well, well, well. Here we are in the dregs of time, to be sure, but this is a really charming way to wait for the barbarians, isn't it? I can't explain the charm of this kind of Alexandrian hobbyism, but I spent a happy hour looking through that arbitrary and charming word-cabinet and was glad.

Partially I think it's a symptom of that nameless, quasi-postmodern delight in imaginary collections: I think of the preposterous and lovely books in Prospero's library according to the 1991 Peter Greenaway film or Borges' imaginary compendia. The endless, trackless, authorless noise of Web 2.0 gives us an opportunity to realize little fragments of this ur-fantasy, doesn't it? I mean, imagine.

This is a compendium of all the asyndetic privative adjective-series in Greek, Latin, English and Sanskrit.

This is an anthology of 124 spurious fragments from Ennius' Annales, and arbitrary corruptions of them.

This is a collection of the last lines of verse published by every English poet 1914-1934, hyperlinked to deleted lines in the variorum of Tennyson's Idylls.

This, interpolated into the Homeric hymns, is a hidden cabinet of Theocritean hapax legomena.

This is a gallery of 400 famous images that include a eunuch.

It's only a half-formed thought, but I wonder if this fascination with fantastic pedantry might have something to do with the out-of-control vastness of the 21st century logos. There's so much written, so much available for recension, so much lost both through evanescence and human limitation—I think some of us must come to carry around the fantasy of stumbling over something immeasurably rare and immoderately specialized, some literary cabinet of curiosities that reflects the eternal-lifetime of abstraction we want but can never have.

Ankh ankh, en mitak:
Yewk er heh en heh
Aha en heh.

Live life, thou shalt not die:
Thou shalt exist for millions
of millions of years,
For millions of millions of years.

Well, it's the old longing, from Amenhotep to transhumanism. The text is from one of the best passages in one of Philip Glass' better operas, by the way.

An academic parlor game.

The lengthy essays I've been writing lately put me in a position to learn how to introduce "keep reading" breaks into my main feed, which of course couldn't be called "keep reading »" or "read more »"—no, my friends, I'm chased by this need to be clever as ever was Orpheus chased with snakes and torches. But to the point, my insipid chalkboard humor brought me to think about the doctrine of the lectio difficilior and, predictably, realize that I know nothing at all about textual criticism.

Here though, I have a game you can play while knocking back your gin and water. You'll need at least two people of perverse disposition, a third who's painfully literal-minded—ferret out a philologist, it shouldn't be hard—and at least two copies of a short poem, perhaps twelve lines, the more modernist the better. Give these to your incorrigibles.

The rules: make a glorious mockery of lectio difficilior potior and brevior potior too, if you have enough liquor. Your text should be counterintuitive enough to begin with; exploit that. Make strange words stranger. Strain English syntax with gleeful brutality. Propose lacunae after you've secretly manufactured some of your own. Pervert the allusions, and do it convincingly. But it's an absolute statute that whatever you produce should be probable, even if it's confounding; your heterodox text should crumble, not rot.

Now the fun begins! Destroy the originals utterly. Your poor scribbler of dissertations should be by this point both impatient and curious (in that pedestrian way he has), so hand him the copies—all the better if they're inscrutably handwritten; and lo, the scholars shall say, nay, but there shall be a redactor over us; that we may also be like all the philologists, and that our redactor may judge us, and apply cruxes for us, and edit our texts. (This is part of the rules.) Of course he shouldn't be familiar with the poem, so make sure you've picked something obscure in provenance as well as in the ordinary ways.

For extra fun, offer him gradually diminishing prizes according to his final accuracy in comparison to the ur-Texte. Finally finish the game by subjecting the redacted text to close reading, carried out with utmost moral seriousness, then defend the redacted text against the original: reveal to the historiographer that the "original" has been purposefully and badly mangled just for this exercise and that he is frightfully intelligent to have untangled so much depravity so well; continue dissimulating in this manner until everyone is too sauced for further pretense.

Well! I seem to be expiring from surfeit of leisure, which at any rate has given me the pleasure of celebrating Housman's deathless odium philologicum in the shape of his essay "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism." In seriousness, does anyone know of a good introduction to the subject, especially for English texts?

Three women dreaming, part 1.

Isn't it interesting how dreaming seems to be the special prerogative of women in epic? I don't mean the prophetic, numinous kind—shaggy Hector scowling over Aeneas' bed, Julia appearing to Pompey—but ivory-gate dreams in all the fluidity and fragmentation we expect of them. This passage in book 3 of the Argonautica, for example: the arrow is smoldering deep in Medea's cor carbunculus, but when sleep finally overtakes her she dreams a remarkable dream—

κούρην δ’ ἐξ ἀχέων ἀδινὸς κατελώφεεν ὕπνος
λέκτρῳ ἀνακλινθεῖσαν. ἄφαρ δέ μιν ἠπεροπῆες,
οἷά τ’ ἀκηχεμένην, ὀλοοὶ ἐρέθεσκον ὄνειροι·
τὸν ξεῖνον δ’ ἐδόκησεν ὑφεστάμεναι τὸν ἄεθλον
οὔτι μάλ’ ὁρμαίνοντα δέρος κριοῖο κομίσσαι, (620)
οὐδέ τι τοῖο ἕκητι μετὰ πτόλιν Αἰήταο
ἐλθέμεν, ὄφρα δέ μιν σφέτερον δόμον εἰσαγάγοιτο
κουριδίην παράκοιτιν. ὀίετο δ’ ἀμφὶ βόεσσιν
αὐτὴ ἀεθλεύουσα μάλ’ εὐμαρέως πονέεσθαι·
σφωιτέρους δὲ τοκῆας ὑποσχεσίης ἀθερίζειν, (625)
οὕνεκεν οὐ κούρῃ ζεῦξαι βόας ἀλλά οἱ αὐτῷ
προύθεσαν· ἐκ δ’ ἄρα τοῦ νεῖκος πέλεν ἀμφήριστον
πατρί τε καὶ ξείνοις· αὐτῇ δ’ ἐπιέτρεπον ἄμφω
τὼς ἔμεν ὥς κεν ἑῇσι μετὰ φρεσὶν ἰθύσειεν·
ἡ δ’ ἄφνω τὸν ξεῖνον, ἀφειδήσασα τοκήων, (630)
εἵλετο· τοὺς δ’ ἀμέγαρτον ἄχος λάβεν, ἐκ δ’ ἐβόησαν
χωόμενοι. τὴν δ’ ὕπνος ἅμα κλαγγῇ μεθέηκεν.

But as she lay back on her couch, an overpowering sleep unburdened the girl of her love-pains—but straightaway dreams assailed her, lying, destructive, the same as do troubled women. She thought that the stranger had undertaken the labor, not in fact because he was so eager to carry away the ram's fleece—no, he hadn't come to Aeëtes' palace for that reason at all—but rather to take her home with him, his lawful wife. And she thought she was struggling with the bulls herself, that she wrought the deed—so easily—but that her own parents sneered at their promise because it wasn't up to the girl to yoke the bulls—they had tasked him with it. Oh yes, and there was a quarrel because of that, and it came to a draw between her father and the strangers; and both sides turned it over to her, how it should be, however she wished it in her heart of hearts—and she suddenly was heedless of her parents, chose the stranger: then an agony of grief siezed them, they were enraged, they let out a scream—and amid the shriek sleep released its hold on her.

I think Apollonius is chafing against the literary tradition here—the divine clarity of epic dreams gives us no real precedent for this; the really salient quality of Homer's dreams is their lapidary directness, a narrowing of focus down to the speech that drives all things out of mind—think of Agamemnon's dream in Iliad 2. It's a lying dream, and baneful too—βάσκ᾽ ἴθι, οὖλε ὄνειρε, says Zeus (Il. 2.8); make haste there, evil dream. Yet when it comes to the monarch's bed something amazing happens:

στῆ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς Νηληΐῳ υἷι ἐοικώς
Νέστορι, τόν ῥα μάλιστα γερόντων τῖ᾽ Ἀγαμέμνων,
τῷ μιν ἐεισάμενος προσεφώνεε θεῖος ὄνειρος:
εὕδεις Ἀτρέος υἱὲ δαΐφρονος ἱπποδάμοιο... (20-23)

Oh yes, it paused there above his head—the very likeness of Nestor, the son of Neleus, indeed the man Agamemnon honored above all his counsellors; in this semblance did the otherworld dream address him: you're sleeping, son of wisehearted horsetaming Atreus...

The dream is chastising him—he's sleeping on the job, it says. But it's a remarkable declaration, isn't it? Εὕδεις—what you're seeing isn't true, I'm only a semblance of Nestor, but what I say is true in the way these dreams are always true because you're sleeping and this is the unreal real of revelation.

Three passages without comment, & an epigram.

.בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֶלוֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הַעוֹלָם שֵהֵחְיָנוּ וְקִיְימָנוּ וְהִגִעָנוּ לַזְמַן הַזֶה

I am graduating. The nightmare is over.

1. Timon of Phlius:

πολλοὶ μὲν βόσκονται ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ πολυφύλῳ
βιβλιακοὶ χαρακῖται ἀπείριτα δηριόωντες
Μουσέων ἐν ταλάρῳ. (Supplementum Hellenisticum frag. 786)

Many are pastured in populous Egypt—
Cloistered scholars, disputing endlessly
In the birdcage of the muses.

2. Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1.7-8.

φημὶ δὲ και Τελχῖσιν ἐγὼ τόδε· 'φῦλον ἀκανθές,
μοῦνον ἑὸν τήκειν ἧπαρ ἐπιστάμενον...'

But here's what I say to the Telchines: thornthicket race,
race that knows only how to melt its heart away...

3. Bereshit 41:51 and 48:14.

.וַיִּקְרָא יוֹסֵף אֶת-שֵׁם הַבְּכוֹר, מְנַשֶּׁה: כִּי-נַשַּׁנִי אֱלֹהִים אֶת-כָּל-עֲמָלִי, וְאֵת כָּל-בֵּית אָבִי

And Joseph called the name of the first-born Manasseh: 'for God hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house.'

.וַיִּשְׁלַח יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת-יְמִינוֹ וַיָּשֶׁת עַל-רֹאשׁ אֶפְרַיִם, וְהוּא הַצָּעִיר, וְאֶת-שְׂמֹאלוֹ, עַל-רֹאשׁ מְנַשֶּׁה: שִׂכֵּל, אֶת-יָדָיו, כִּי מְנַשֶּׁה, הַבְּכוֹר

And Israel stretched out his right hand, and laid it upon Ephraim's head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh's head, guiding his hands wittingly; for Manasseh was the first-born.

4. Epigram.

πολλοὶ μὲν βόσκονται ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ πολυφύλῳ


A black ship bears me across the isle of Pharos,
Out of the carbon shoals, where our sunken lighthouse
Leans out of silt and old Alexandrian losses—
    From where it washes,
Receive this remnant, Ephraim, honored brother:
I am Manasseh of Carthage, cloistered scholar
Who melted his heart in the birdcage of the muses.

            — Claudius Vandermeer, M.A. 2010.

A crib on Genette.

After railing about uselessness, I've been humbled: I ran across the notes of a Dr. B. Clark of Texas Tech, who seems to have provided a wonderful chapter-by-chapter crib on Narrative Discourse to his Spring 2007 literary theory course. Behold, the loaf.

Genette on Narrative Order
Genette on Narrative Duration
Genette on Narrative Frequency
Genette on Narrative Mood
Genette on Narrative Voice

See also a brief crib on Bakhtin. Oh, my big mouth!

From the florilegium, in re exam season.

May I joke for a moment, just to distract myself from the impending clades omnium rerum balefully signified by the next two days? I was walking home from the library and lamenting that the internet is totally and woefully inadequate for purposes of reviewing for my narrative theory exam when a line from Sallust popped into my head:

corpus patiens inediae algoris vigiliae, supra quam quoiquam credibile est. (Bel. Cat. 5.3)

His body was tolerant of hunger, cold, and sleepless nights? Even more than you'd think was humanly possible? Goodness me, I thought, Catiline should have given up the treason business and become a professional student. This caused me to page through my notebook for a few moments, only to find this:

iam pridem equidem nos vera vocabula rerum amisimus, (52.11)

which, let me tell you, seems too appropriate on a night when I'm trying to keep the distinction between an autodiegetic and a homodiegetic author straight--"we've long since lost track of the correct vocabulary for things," indeed.

And why am I in this position? Because as far as the last term is concerned, Sallust has my number:

sed multi mortales, dediti ventri atque somno, indocti incultique vitam sicuti peregrinantes transigere; quibus profecto contra naturam corpus voluptati, anima oneri fuit: (2.8)

But there are a great many men, interested in nothing but gluttony and sleep, who have gone about their lives disheveled and ignorant--as if they were just passing through; for them, unnatural as it is, the body was a thing to be pampered and the soul a burden.

It may not be totally fair, but ah, a two-inch-high Calvin sits on my heart of hearts, baneful and perceptive taskmaster though he is.

Well, praise the L-rd and pass the ammunition. If I don't pass that History exam I'll be polishing shoes in an airport before I know what's become of me, so I should hit the books; as for this, it was written in praise of Sallust and as a plaything for myself. ("Ha! Ha! I'm Gorgias of Leontini!")

Bucolic Phantasmagoria.

I wonder if there might not be a connection between a passage in Theocritus that's always troubled me, Idylls 1.132-37, and the oddly unsettling final moments of Idyll 7. Daphnis is in his death throes in the Sicilian woods and has just called Pan down from the mountains to receive his pipes; one stanza later he will throw himself into a stream, Hylas-like, and drown.

'νῦν ἴα μὲν φορέοιτε βάτοι, φορέοιτε δ’ ἄκανθαι,
ἁ δὲ καλὰ νάρκισσος ἐπ’ ἀρκεύθοισι κομάσαι,
πάντα δ’ ἄναλλα γένοιτο, καὶ ἁ πίτυς ὄχνας ἐνείκαι,
Δάφνις ἐπεὶ θνάσκει, καὶ τὰς κύνας ὥλαφος ἕλκοι,
κἠξ ὀρέων τοὶ σκῶπες ἀηδόσι γαρύσαιντο.
      λήγετε βουκολικᾶς, Μοῖσαι, ἴτε λήγετ’ ἀοιδᾶς.'
χὢ μὲν τόσσ’ εἰπὼν ἀπεπαύσατο ...

'But now let let the brambles bear violets—let thornbrakes bear them; let the lovely narcissus deck junipers, the pine come to fruit with pears—let everything be changed because Daphnis is dying--let the stag tear hounds apart, from the mountains let owls cry in contest with nightingales. Leave off, ah muses, come leave off the bucolic song.' So much he said, and ended.

We ordinarily take this as a series of ἀδύνατα, impossible disruptions of the natural world unhinged by the death of Daphnis--as though Daphnis thinks of himself and his life as so central to the natural order that his death is just as much an impossibility as fruiting pines or savage stags.

I'm not sure this is the whole story, however. Daphnis doesn't give us any other reason to expect solipsism from him; he doesn't wish for the whole woodland of Sicily to huddle about his agonies with consummate concern, they simply do—it's a function of his beauty and his song. No, if he cries out for the world to burst into alien glory when he breathes his last there must be something else at stake, not narcissism certainly; it's not youthful incredulity in the face of death, either, since this is a voluntary wasting. After all, Priapus can chide him in lines 82-85, saying

                                                  ἁ δέ τυ κώρα
πάσας ἀνὰ κράνας, πάντ’ ἄλσεα ποσσὶ φορεῖται
[...]
ζάτεισ’· ἆ δύσερώς τις ἄγαν καὶ ἀμήχανος ἐσσί.

The girl is roaming on foot among the fountains, through all the groves, in search of you—ah, you are cursed in love, too cursed, and helpless.

This changed world—πάντα ἄναλλα—isn't a world in mourning, either: strange, yes, but indifferent to Daphnis' pain. I do think there's a logic to these ἀδύνατα, though, even if a strange one.