Kith and Kin

Against all logic and much rationality, I am in D.C. with Iris, settling in for a week-end of adventures with Baby Henry.  There had been talk of surgery for Gina and then that went away, and then I thought "Well, I'm not really needed," and then I thought of all of the times that Steve has come out to see us at the drop of a hat, and then I thought of lovely Gina and dear Steve and brand new Baby Henry, and so there we were with Iris in the car on the way to the airport at 5:30 p.m. and here we are now. I have a set of exams with me, and final papers from my three independent studies - the other paper grading and grade compilation will have to wait upon our return. Plus, Iris really wants to go to the Natural History Museum, and Gina does, too!  After a semester of non-transcendental everything, being in the presence of a newborn is pretty powerful.  For how many thousands of years have babies started out like this? Small, helpless, determined. Really, really cute.  Freud's "oceanic feeling" visible in sweeping gestures of the arm.  That odd, ancient wisdom in their eyes, fleeting and oft replaced by some painful physical accountability to food or sleep or want.  My little kith, my little kin. It's not even the genetic stuff, it's that it's my brother raising him!  A Soviet historian dad and a State department mom. A Steve and a Gina. Who are both so happy, and so calm, and so filled with wonder and fun - I admire them greatly. I think of all that he is surrounded by.

Which leads me to this awesome image about which everything is cool. It is a birthing tray from around 1400, from Italy, and depicts Venus in a mandorla being adored by six heroes of legend and lore: Samson, and Tristan and Lancelot and the like.  These trays (and there are a surprising number left, especially from Italy) were used to bring in nibbles for the laboring mother (!) - and then, once the child was born, they were used to bear gifts from the mother to the godparents and other witnesses waiting outside.  Some ritual! I guess what I'm marveling at is just how surrounded by narratives babies are, from the very beginning.  Their transcendence recedes in the face of our specificity. But you never forget those first moments, those first gifts.

Glad Music

There's my petunia - the littlest one, with her belly still kind of poking out the way little children's do - she seems so small up there!  But she was expansive in her possibilities playing her three pieces of piano for the recital. There does indeed seem to be a great deal of music going on these days - many many people making a joyful noise - and the good will and fervor in that recital hall was marvelous.  I'm so grateful for all these glad songs, and I am grateful that I can broadcast them into the ether and its expansive possibilities - the image of music spreading gladly across some unknown expanse from such tiny fingers is really kind of lovely.

So that's a piece called "The Waltz of the Christmas Toys" - Iris thought it sounded more "toylike" up high, so dear Mrs. Carkeek said by all means, play it up top.

 And here are "The Blue Bells of Scotland" to take you back to the old country (!). Check out the curtsy on that girl!  She had such a good time - we both did.  There was a third one called "The Butterfly," too.  While the recital was happening a snow storm whipped up quite a bit of excitement outside - this season is bringing out some real warmth.

Songs of Songs

Angels. Ghent

Does anybody give it their all the way the angels from the Ghent Altarpiece (1427-29) do? Their effort, their gusto, and the concerted (ha ha!) effort of those incredible frowns render the act of singing a completely physical, and possibly existential, one.  Their refinery is pretty swell, too.  The Ghent Altarpiece is a world unto itself, and the angels have always been favorites: the most physically real of the hundreds of figures painted by Jan and Hubert van Eyck.  While we know that their facial expressions are actually prescribed by singing manuals (one could read the music on singers' faces as well as hear it in their voice in the Middle Ages), I don't think that we know what they're singing.  A song oft sung before, undoubtedly, a song of a song.  And so today, I have two songs of songs - two sets of renditions of songs originally sung by someone else.  For how else to know if a song lives then by someone else singing it?

The first is of wee Eleanor, singing "Cornbread and Butterbeans" (and you across the table; hugging you and kissing you, as long as I am able).  It's by none other than the Carolina Chocolate Drops (who just received a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Folk Album!!!) and there I am driving her to school the other day, when out of the back seat emerges this little song.  Nice.



The second song resung is actually a gateway to a whole universe of songs resung. History teachers have taken our favorite songs from the 1980s (and yes, mistakes were made, but Siouxie and the Banshees did rock) and rewritten the lyrics to give us prescient and pithy (and rhyming) versions of history. I give you Beowulf, but they have their own channel on YouTube where you can enjoy all 48 they've done thus far (Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" for the French Revolution is pretty swell).

Happy Holidays to us all!

With an Eye to Babel

Oxford, Bodleian, MS lat. th.b.4, f. 168r. Decretals of Gregory IX, 1234.

And so this is where we leave this semester: with an eye to Babel, inspired by good friends, spurred by events, puzzled by ideas, and pushed by desires.  For what else is there? What else does there need to be?  Well, actually, there is one more thing. Ok, two (we all want jet packs). The other thing would be gloss.  Wonderfully strange word, isn't it?  And yet that is the medieval term for writing about writing: to gloss a text is to interpret it, to frame that text with your interpretation. And in this fantastic manuscript page, which I have here big for I want for you to be able to revel in its Babel-alia (you can click on it to see even more), you see at least three levels of gloss framing the original text (the two columns in the middle) - a first reader/ writer/ interpreter hugged the text close, then there's a second hand in the margin to the right, and a third whisper down at the bottom of the page.  I wish that I could tell you that this was the Bible, being interpreted and reinterpreted (for what I really really want is a Talmudic tradition, a habit of interpretive struggle, extending into today), but no, the text being glossed is a copy of the Decretals of Gregory IX, the new collection of canon law written between 1230-35 - basically, laws and regulations to live by according to the Bible.  Pretty fantastic, though, how they couldn't leave the text alone, how visible they made the acts and consequences of interpretation: reframing, reshaping, rebinding that text.  The litcrit term is "hypertext" and my beloved advisor, Michael Camille, talked about the hyper-textuality of post-modern internet text - writings dematerialized in being rewritten thusly, but re-understood in the process.

Possibly my favorite part of that page is where they stitched the velum back together again (do you see it in the middle right section? with the red thread?) - medieval manuscript surgery.  Well, it is skin after all (lamb's skin) - clearly a well-worn page, but salvaged, these stitches being another gloss. Glosses can appear in the most unexpected places: Chaucer, ever impish, wakes his Book of the Duchess dreamer up in a room lit by the colors of stained glass windows depicting the siege of Troy (the Aeneid to you and me) and walled on one side by a mural depicting "the entire Romance of the Rose, both text and gloss" (at almost 22,000 verses and already hundreds of pages of interpretation by the time Chaucer was writing (millions now), that is a fantastically impossible wall).

What's amazing is that in Brittany, the simplest statements brought the greatest joy: "Cinq croissants, s'il-vous-plaît," - "Oui, oui, un petit café" - "C'est si gentil, on arrive!" Here, I seek to complicate things.  Both are equally fascinating: to notice blades of grass around a neolithic megalith, or to get ready to read 14 student exams about "Secrets, Epistemologies, and the Ethics of Readership"  and images of Tristan and Isolde, Gawain and the Green Knight and the Romance of the Rose. (They're taking the exam as I write, and, truth be told, I can't wait to read what they've written). If an epistemology pushes us to ask how we know what we know (what kinds of assumptions and expectations frame our knowledge), then maybe that is why this love of interpretation, this gleeful push to over-interpret at times so that the categories collapse (and that potentially, every secret is its own epistemology and every epistemology its own secret)? Is it just the absence of beauty and history and direct truths that make American scholars wander so?  Sometimes I think so. Other times, I think I do it in response to my students' convictions that things are simple, that there is black and there is white, there is good and there is bad, and that that is that.  Without complications, can there be change? Hardly.  Change is the most complicated thing. It takes the most understanding.  I see David's point better now: an eye to Babel is a return to the human task of understanding - each other, the inexplicable, the divine.  Is this why I love France? Because there you can do it and enjoy a buttery pastry? Mmmmm - delicious complexities.

Not Sharing the Wealth

Greed, from a Vices and Virtues capital at Autun (France) c. 1120

I want to write something intelligent and angry about Obama caving in on prolonging tax cuts to the wealthiest of the wealthy, the Republicans holding the unemployed as hostages to those tax cuts, and probably other things, but the blogosphere, twittersphere, and every other thing internet is pretty much bristling with intelligent and angry things. Plus, while I have the anger, I have neither the intelligence nor the time these days. The wonderful woman at Apt. 11D cites the indefatigable Robert Reich's twitter posts, which are really quite wonderful, and make me think of bold pronouncements spoken in the marketplace - I'm thinking medieval transmission of discontent here, even more than examples of Tax Revolts, of which there were plenty.  So instead, I'll let Autun's creature of Greed do the talking - and it is rather eloquent, with its great big greedy mouth, holding on to its full, full money bags. Note how it squats under the weight of the bags, its legs drawn up to almost under its arms. Its great big greedy mouth is open: is it chortling, calling out, in pain? Haunting little thing, isn't it?

Most of us don't know what it's like to have 5 million dollars newly immune to taxation, so I'm not sure where to draw my understanding for the wealthiest from on this issue.  And I do know that much philanthropy comes from the wealthiest - this isn't about parsing the good rich from the bad rich. It's more the principle of a government telling those who could contribute to the common good that they don't have to.  It's more the cold statement about people with more than they need being justified to ignore those who don't have the basics of what they need. It's more further tanking of the federal economy. There are so many exasperated statements to make (no, this isn't a call for communism, or socialism; yes I understand the basic incompatibilities of capitalism and democracy), but no time to be lucid about them.  The bottom line: to throw crumbs at the poorest in order to justify keeping the fattest meat on the lord's table didn't sit well in the Middle Ages, and it doesn't today.

Adventures in Reading the Bible

That's my Dad's Bible - the one he had with him during WWII, along with the red Shakespeare volume.  Oliver and I found it over Thanksgiving, clearing out an old box of my Dad's.  I realize now that finding it triggered yet anew my growing ambivalence about the kids' religious education.  Sometimes I marvel that this ambivalence has grown as much as it has. I was raised Protestant in Geneva, Switzerland, making me pretty solid Protestant stock. Mac was raised Catholic in Chicago, making him pretty solid Catholic stock (the priest that married us stuck with Augustine for the homily). But that's not the ambivalence (no, no, that would be too easy).  No, it's an ambivalence about Christian religious education period.  And no, I'm not ambivalent about all of the horrid idiocies that have been promoted under Christianity's name (the exclusivity, the condemning to hell of complete innocents, the condemning to hell period, the hundreds of years of oppression and the millions of deaths). Nor am I ambivalent about the strange, soft beauty of some of Christ's pronouncements (the helping of the weak and helpless, the forgiveness of those who have hurt you personally, the call for social justice, the hope for those suffering right now). I love those. It's the relationship to all that we know about Christianity, the good the bad and the ugly that I'm ambivalent about.  At some point (and really, I need to nail this down), Christian teaching traded in critique for acceptance.  The point now seems to be to accept what is in the Bible, and accept it uncritically. There's so little struggle, so little questioning of the text or of its authority, so little asking about the historical period in which it was written, so little wondering about the uses over time of an idea.  So little doubt. So little room for being perplexed. The sources are right. Jesus is always right. Paul is always right. And the interest is not in saying they're wrong - the interest is in asking about the anxieties and challenges that follow from these ideas. The interest is in not being preached at, but talked with. And recognizing the utter hybridity and general and utter strangeness of this text we call the Bible - its arbitrariness, its struggles to capture a sense of divinity, one that people can live with, its losses in translations, its manipulations, its history, its shortcomings, its silences, its borrowings, its unwitting contributions.  One of the wildest things about the Middle Ages is that there was no Bible - there were lots and lots of holy texts, but those didn't become consolidated into The Bible until the 17th century and the King James Bible.  What gets called the Bible in the Middle Ages is the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) - everything else existed in bits and pieces, each explored, tested, stretched, tried, extrapolated on its own.  What we call The Bible today was always already incoherent in the Middle Ages, always already in pieces that sought each other out through resonances and references.  The Bible was not a material entity - it was an ever-shifting and re-interpreted and used assortment of texts which themselves produced hybrid texts (liturgies, books of hours, meditations, and more).

So all this to say that the children have never been to church around here. We go when we're in North Carolina and they're generally interested in the pageantry and the stained glass windows (one of which bears my grandparents' names) and the awesome barbecue and fried chicken and pie afterwards. (And I do know that one of the great benefits of religion is community, but that's not the discussion here, the relationship to the text is).  But there's not a whole lot more engagement for them.  And I do want more for them.  But how? And then (who knew?) I discovered the Bible App on my iPhone. I'd been looking for access to an on-line Bible for the trip to Israel, and lo and behold, there was one for free with not only 23 English translations and 46 overall translations, but various and sundry Reading Plans (the Bible in 90 days! the Essential 100 passages!) including one entitled Rediscovering the Christmas Season. And there it was: the framework within which I would be eager to talk about the Bible with my children. A dematerialized text, one lifted out of ritual and community and what clearly is for me a consequential amount of baggage - a dematerialized, digitized, serialized text. That was the answer.

And so we threw ourselves into it with gusto.  Too much gusto.  For it turns out that one is only to read a very few select verses from the chapter for that day. And when it came time to read Mark 9, I was only supposed to read verses 33-37 (which are really cool and about Christ lifting a child up on his knees and telling the disciples that to be first you must be last and a servant to all - it has the "welcome the little children in my name" line). But like a fool I kept reading and in verse 43 Jesus tells the disciples that if their hand causes them to stumble, they should cut it off, because it's better to be maimed than to go to hell.  (The kids got quiet.) Verse 44: if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off, because, well, better than hell.  (Good grief, I'm thinking, what is this text doing to my kids? It's ok, we're going to talk about it, but what the Christmas message is here, is lost on me.) Verse 45: if your eye... yep, pluck it out.  There's a total silence at the table at this point, and Oliver ventures "Maybe this is the Halloween reading."

So what's the lesson here?  Read bits and pieces of the Bible? This is not a coherent text (how do you emotionally follow helping the helpless with brutal self-mutilation, even if it is metaphorical?) (and then that really weird passage about salt losing its saltiness in verse 50) and one of the hardest discussions about the Bible is how all of these parts are meant to relate to each other.  Once you start reading there's nothing simple and coherent about it. And that's what makes it interesting. That's what makes the struggle come. And so we've kept on reading, past the maiming bit, and on to Christ as the light of the world, to the idea of a light of the world, of hope - the very cool and demanding concept of hope that humans have come up with. Do animals hope, or just desire? Is hope more painful than desire?  What can hope push you to do? to endure?  We talked. We talked about Biblical text, and it didn't necessarily make sense, and there was no one message to walk away with, but there they were my little ones talking about it all.

I feel like Oliver at breakfast yesterday morning whose first words of the day, completely unrelated to all of this, were: "I'm overwhelmed. There's just so much to say."

So here's a pretty nice picture of the snow everywhere.  I love the observatory under snow - makes its attempts to see the stars that much more audacious, so heavily does the snow blanket the entire sky.  The kids played out there every day - snow angels down to the grass below they flapped their arms so hard.  They bounded out the door within minutes of the "Halloween reading" incident.  They are resilient and eager for the next thing.

Which is my segue to this fantastically absurd image of Iris and my Dad.  Why she chose to wear sunglasses and a purse with her outfit, I don't know, let alone why she is staring at my Dad with what, by all appearances, is a stony stare.  He was explaining this tiny piece of paper that Oliver and I found (cleaning out the same box) folded into a tiny ring box with a pearl and diamond ring within it.  It turns out (most probably) to have belonged to my great-grandmother (widowed two years after the Civil War - that's some incredible genealogical math!) and, like her wedding ring which is now mine, fits my finger perfectly.  My dad used to be very sentimental, and had a hushed and loving awe for his family and its past - it's different now, of course, but I could tell he was satisfied that the ring had come to light, that it would get some life now. No use hiding your light under a bushel.

No segue here, just Eleanor and Iris in front of the fantabulous Christmas display at my Mom's retirement home, before we went to The Nutcracker.  And now to work, and then somehow to bed, and a final brutal week of university life - with nothing resolved and that's ok.

Leaks in the Ship of State

The Great Khan sending a letter to the Pope, 1410.

How does one stop reading about the WikiLeaks? They've become a not-so-minor obsession, every revelation another wince, another stunned face, another foray into rarefied vocabulary.  Sarkozy is "mercurial" (one of my all time favorite words to use for a political ruler) - delightful! Switzerland is a "frustrating alpine democracy" (as opposed to those easy-going sea-level democracies). Berlusconi is "feckless" - do tell! Medvedev is Robin to Putin's Batman - come on, now you're making this up! Angela Merkel is apparently "risk averse and rarely creative" - who knew?  Well, now we know that the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi once called the Iranian president "Hitler" (to quote Mac sitting here next to me: "If the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi compares you to Hitler, you've made a poor impression on the world.")  I know that this is serious, I know that Hillary Clinton has other problems than these.  But out here, David will take a minute to laugh at Goliath ; be (frankly) impressed by the precision of wit of the American diplomats' language (mercurial? alpine?); and wonder about how the divide between what we say and what we mean shrinks when we think no one's listening.  Plus, we get to wonder about the effect of the private conversations of a major bank organization coming to light (first democracy exposed - now capitalism!).

In the same manuscript whence the wonderful image above depicting an early diplomatic cable is pulled, John Mandeville describes a conversation he had with the Sultan, just the two of them:

Now I shall tell you what the Sultan told me one day in his chamber.  He made everyone else leave his chamber, lords as well as others who were there, for he wanted to have a private talk between ourselves alone. And when they had all gone out, he asked me how Christians governed themselves in our countries. And I said, "Lord, well enough - thanks be to God." And he answered and said "Truly, no. It is not so.  For your priests do not serve God properly by righteous living, as they should do... On holy days, when people should go to church to serve God, they go to the tavern and spend all the day - and perhaps all the night - in drinking and gluttony... Christian men commonly deceive one another... And they are, moreover, so swollen with pride and vainglory that they never know how to dress themselves... For Christians are so proud, so envious, such great gluttons, so lecherous, and moreover so full of covetousness that for a little silver they will sell their daughters, their sisters, even their own wives, and no one keeps his faith to another... Certainly it is because of your sinfulness that you have lost all the land which we hold and keep.

Pretty harsh assessment, no?  Kind of makes "feckless," "risk-averse," and "alpine" seem tame, yes?  This ought to get Mandeville's dander up - the injustice of these accusations! The cheek! But instead... 

I asked him with great respect, how he came by so full a knowledge of the state of Christendom.

Wha-? No wincing, no stunned face, no foray into rarefied vocabulary ("lecherous" counts)???  Scholars have taken Mandeville's reaction to mean that he recognized Christendom in exactly the vilifying terms the Sultan gave it.  And that's the thing, isn't it? We recognize the characterization of these political figures - the revelation is not in the knowledge itself, it's in the incontrovertible proof that the highest dignitaries criticize each other with perhaps more wit, but definitely with less dignity than we had thought.  But Mandeville is serious in his question: "No, really, how did you come to know us so well? We thought all of that stuff was only in the cables, in our private conversations, in our intimate sphere..."

And then he had all the great lords and worthies that he had previously sent out called in; and he detained four of them - great lords - to talk to me.  These described to me all the manners of my country, and of other countries in Christendom as fully as and as truly as if they had always lived in them.  These lords and the Sultan spoke French wonderfully well, and I was astonished by that.  Finally, I understood that the sultan sends some of his lords to different kingdoms and lands in the guise of merchants - some with precious stones, some with cloths of gold, some with other jewels - and that these visit all realms in order to size up the manners of us Christian men and spot our weaknesses.  

Medieval spies! Looking for leaks in the medieval Christian state and finding it in the flagging moral character of its inhabitants. Mandeville's Travels is a generally pretty astounding text, but this passage may be one of the most confounding of all, don't you agree?  What is the author doing in revealing what the Sultan really thinks of the Christians and (worse) what the Christians really think of themselves? What has been sought here with WikiLeaks? What has been revealed? Well, the diplomats' petty humanity (and there's some kind of great sympathy in seeing this - "Oh wow, that guy (just happens to be the president of Iran) got on your nerves, too?"). And the real emotions and resentments behind the façade (we knew it had to be there and look there it is!).  So we have more realism - do we have more understanding? and of what?

On this night it might make sense to think of Judah the Hammer and his five sons and all the others, and of the re-dedication of the Temple and of the language of ritual supplanting that of war, and of both eschewing diplomacy altogether  - but maybe let's just enjoy the light.