History of Emotions

Roman de Fauvel

Opera just blows my mind.  It's been years since I've gone, yet there I was on Friday night for an IU Jacobs School of Music performance of Puccini's La Bohème.  Wagner's gesamkunstwerk always helps, with the sensory assault of costumes and sets and trying to not think too much about plot but instead about everything else.  But it's the emotions that get me - the incongruity and intensity of the emotions.  One minute there's Christmas Eve revelry and the next Marcello is writhing in agony before Musetta's pretty prancing (and the most famous tune of the opera); one minute there's song and laughter about pretend champagne and the next Mimi is dying (dead!).  And we're right there with each emotion. You're laughing one minute, and choking back a sob the next. Granted, this was an IU Jacobs School of Music audience (thousands of people who live and breathe music absolutely), but still, it was pretty incredible.  What is it about the swell of music that can do that to you?  You know the emotions are caricatures (thus the Fauvel image here - it's a parade, a charade), but the laughter is real, the tears are hot. 

Yvain and Laudine

One of the chief complaints students have about medieval art is how little emotion it displays. How expressionless it is. Stony-faced knights and damsels - how are students to believe Yvain and Laudine are feeling passion? The complaint can sometimes extend to literature as well. "What's their motivation?" I'll often hear.  Lancelot is Lancelot, he loves Guinevere, that's it - there's no motivation, just being.  Yvain loves Laudine and goes instantly mad when she spurns him, that's it.  Laudine hates him (ok, he killed her husband - good motivation), but then she loves him (ok, Lunette's pragmatic argument that her fountain needs a protector - good motivation).  It's the back and forth (she hates him, she loves him, she hates him, then at the very end, she loves him) that puzzle us.  Frederick Cheyette and Howard Chickering take this on in one of the best examples of the relatively new study of the history emotion.  They're trying to understand the strangely abrupt ending of the story in which, despite his betrayals and inconsistencies, Yvain is taken back by Laudine and there is "happiness" and "peace," when really it's clear that Laudine is having her hand forced, and that Yvain stumbles back into her life not really the wiser (this is "Love, Anger, and Peace: social practice and poetic play in the ending of Yvain," Speculum 80:1 (January, 2005): 75-117).  They ask us to consider the emotions associated with peace and social reconciliation as defining this "happiness" - an emotion differently subjected, I would say: an emotion that we today associate with the individual ("I'm so happy!"), here associated more with the state of the community ("A happy realm").  That's the way over-simplified version of a much more complex argument.  But it confuses things productively to then consider the incredible shift that the image provokes in its final image, in its response to the scenario of reconciliation of happiness: it depicts Yvain and Laudine in bed, under the covers.  That sure looks like a personal reconciliation, but I also completely buy the argument that the reconciliation is social and communal.  Metonymic sex?  If the lord and lady are doing it, all is well in the realm?  I can only wonder.

Smiling Angel of Reims

So I'll end with what may be the most direct emotion in medieval art, the smiling angel of Reims.  Surely this is an easy one to read: this is the Angel of the Annunciation, downright gleeful with his secret but displayed knowledge of everything from (depending on how far you want to follow the theology) divine presence to virgin birth to the redemption of humanity.  This angel could be happy about a lot of things, actually.  He could be happy about something else entirely - his return to the celestial realm, the kings and queens and tourists walking beneath his gaze, his nicely his wing feathers sit.  The thing is, emotions displayed (whether in opera, painting, literature, or sculpture) elude easy deciphering.  And yet, they are so fundamental to our understanding of emotions - they resonate, these displays these representations, as transcendentally true - as the shining examples of the reaches of human emotion.  Thus why we herald them, and come to know them, and somehow, feel with them.

Books Doing Their Own Thing

Between piano and fixing dinner and rushing out to hear the incredible Karen Abu-Zayd, I glanced down on our coffee table and had to laugh to see the pairing that someone's strewing(s) had provoked.  Underneath is Jacques Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am, a heady tome that was the subject of a reading group this semester that I've been too sick to attend (the book has, consequently, been following me around the house successfully inducing guilt and longing); and on top is Nick Bruel's Bad Kitty vs. Uncle Murray, a romp between a dolt and a cat. The former questions the line drawn (by philosophers of all people!) between the human and the animal from the human point of view; and the latter has a cat vehemently reassert the line between animal and human thank you very much. I can't tell you how much I mourn not being a part of that reading group - Mac and I might read the book together next summer, which I'm looking forward to, but it's not the same as sitting in a group of twelve pondering.  On the other hand, I've read Bad Kitty vs. Uncle Murray about 15 times - so there's your accomplishment for you.  The Bad Kitty That Therefore I Read.

But that unlikely juxtaposition of books is, of course, an expansive allegory. Of life in academe ("It's Tuesday, must be the Late Roman Empire!" after one's morning coffee) and elsewhere. I think of Karen AbuZayd's call for dialogue and (and this is what we talked about the most afterwards amongst ourselve) naïveté.  Can you believe that, naïveté? A woman who has worked and negotiated for refugees for over thirty years making a call for naïveté, as a necessary element to sitting down and starting a dialogue (she spent 10 years in Gaza, which only makes her statement the more remarkable).  A colleague of mine said it beautifully when she shrugged and said "It's about how you keep working in the absence of actual progress."  I love this colleague. And so I think of my students' naïveté, and my own (neither of which are productively directed, but there they are), and I've been mulling the fourth paper assignment in my Jerusalem first year seminar for about a week now, and I think I have it: I'll be working on it right after this, and it will ask them which event in the history of Jerusalem they would choose for discussion, if (the naïve part), both sides had agreed to sit down to discuss a historical event.  Since we're right before the Balfour Declaration in the syllabus, this could include a great number of events.   They were fascinated as a whole by Suleiman the Magnificent's clearing of the area around what we know today as the Western Wall, and his securing of it for Jewish worship.  An unexpected pairing, a naïve second look.

Almost a Palimpsest

Little did I know when I wrote that last entry that it would herald a road to nowhere. Yeesh.  I have felt the slow erasure of all vitality this semester - a short series of rubbing away that has changed the picture. Nothing drastic, nothing tragic - but a change. Thus why we see king David praying to God on his own, his accompanying demon having been rubbed out by some later, cautious and more tremulous viewer.  I'm definitely more tremulous, weakened it seems. I have been involved in conversation, these past many weeks, with entities that can't talk back: my past via therapy (finally), and my body via a tenacious virus (and insistent secondary infections).  They strike back, yes, but they don't talk back.  And I can't talk about them, because they are at once incredibly too trite, and excruciatingly too personal.  And so here we are with erased muddles in the picture.

Yet, there are positive/extreme love erasures, too.  Drawings like the wound of Christ (and yes, we could go there about its form, but we won't tonight) which have been kissed and rubbed into near oblivion.  The third entity that I'm in conversation with but that doesn't talk back is our dog. Our big black dog who provides such comfort and surety, but has also so completely taken possession of us and the house that no one can come over without major barking and drama. We are eagerly going to, as Mac calls them, "dog re-education" classes, but the beast within and all his mysteries remain.  I love his animal presence, but am utterly mystified as to his gentleness with us and his crazy barking-ness with others.  Doesn't he see the conviviality?  There must be other parameters. More to feel out, to understand, to sense. These can't really be discussed either, as they are trite, too. But we're reading about the Holy Greyhound for my Gothic class (Jean-Claude Schmitt's classic) and I can't wait to read it with new eyes.

I keep thinking that if I can get through these trite but meaningful erasures, if I can (what?) see to the other side of the page, I might become that most wonderfully transformed of medieval matters: the palimpsest.  The manuscript scraped clean and rewritten. (Here is a current, fascinating example). There has been, equally in this semester, plenty of materials for re-awakening: a visit by Yo-Yo Ma and transcendence, a beautiful funny and true (more transcendence) story from my dear friend in Brittany, the exciting, energetic work of others...  I think that there's something transformative going on - or my attention is skewed, or I'm getting older and feeling some frailty (the ever-helpful French phraseology calls it a "coup de vieux"); or we're just far enough out from Brittany that we've lost the vitality that infused us all there; or maybe in all this summer's thinking about a world filled with the agency of non-living entities, I have lost some of my own - which I can't see as all a bad thing. A certain humility to one's past, to a virus, and to a dog may yet uncover new ways in which the world moves.

Territories, Boundaries, Marks

The walk today

There's a game you can play in which you move through a word from its Latin root to its Latin-derived French cognate to its Anglo-Teutonic root. So: exit, portal, door.  You could do this for a long time with many words if you're sitting around in total goofy love without kids.  In the quiet of the morning walk created by Sawyer, the game came back to me when I rounded a bend in what had already been a walk full of surprises. On the week-ends, I try to go farther out with him and so here I am finding parts of our tiny town I've never seen before. This is a stretch called the People's Pathways: they seem to be either abandoned railroad tracks or otherwise unclaimed pieces of land.  This particular path blooms lushly between two housing developments so new there's not a tree to be had anywhere.  So there's this unexpected forest all around, really thick and wonderful, and Sawyer and I are elated (for different reasons - I'm fairly certain, his involve the tiny rabbit tushes scurrying in all directions as he approaches). I couldn't help but think of medieval forest law: a separate set of laws for the forest - who has the right to hunt, to live there, to use its resources, to claim it. Can you imagine?  Well, yes, we're even more territorial and territorially specific today.

The walk had already been surprising because of a ritual that Sawyer's making apparent. Today was the third time that he's left the house with a well-chewed rawhide in his mouth with great intention. The first day, he dropped it the block from our house that we always walk no matter where we go.  About five days later, he dropped it two blocks from our house in a direction we mostly go (these are long blocks).  And today, he dropped it another block further, this time in a different cardinal direction (the streets are laid out that way, but still).  And then, on the way home (which can be 30-45 minutes later), he picks it up again.  What's he doing?  Is he marking his territory somehow? Is he testing the boundary of his roaming with us?

And so today, I thought about those three words: territory (from the Latin territorium), and boundary (from the medieval French bodne, itself from a _medieval_ Latin word bodina, which is interesting), and then mark (from the Old English mearc).  We all probably have difference valences for each one.  I see territory as a more political, intellectual term. I think that perhaps it's no wonder that boundary is one of the most popular words of therapy. And I have that shudder (familiar now in realizing how Old English root words move in our psyche), of how physical a word like mark is.

What commemoration will we engage in today? I think of W.J.T. Mitchell's provocative play with what he calls the false etymology of territory and terror (this is from his article "Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness in Landscape and Power).  I wonder about the threatening of every boundary once a territory's center has been marked.  I think about the fine line between marking and claiming a territory, about the process of violating and shoring up boundaries, and, if you think about the site itself, about the marks left behind.  Boundaries don't fall away: even my dog needs to know where the space beyond him begins and ends. The question might become how we get from one familiar spot to the next. Or create them.

Empathy for What You Would Never Be

Canterbury Adam

Goodness. How the start of the academic season will take over.  Today is the first day that feels like it had traction, and so the first day to have a clear thought (all else is of new things and people and formats and improvements and ah, academe).  On the first day of Gothic class, I found myself saying the title phrase out loud as one of the underlying philosophical goals of the class: "empathy for what you would never be." Either because it would be impossible or improbable.  We'll see about achieving the goal (and about what empathy might actually mean - in a classroom, in life, in relationship to the Middle Ages), but I've liked the challenge of confronting differing identities with the promise of empathy.  Much must precede empathy: curiosity, some degree of understanding, warmth.  Gothic is my "class" class - I've modeled the class on the vision of a tripartite social order of those who pray (your monks n' such), those who fight (your knights and kings), and those who labor (your peasants) first articulated in the age of Charlemagne (c. 800) and finally dismantled decidedly in the French Revolution (1789 and on) - a rather long-lasting socio-political system, contested the entire time. What I love about the Gothic period (1200-1500 in art history) is that the identities are dividing out: there are now monks in the city (Franciscans, Dominicans) competing with the Benedictines and Cistercians of the countryside; the dukes are in constant roil against the king (a little something called the Magna Carta from 1215 exemplifies this); and there are urban laborers now with all sorts of wonderful complications (I was stunned to remember that in his Book of Chess, Jacobus de Cessolis includes Gamblers and Courtiers as the eighth pawn).  These are all identities that are remote in every wise save through the familiarity of my studying them.  I am fairly confident in claiming that I teach the modern-day equivalent of the knightly classes at my college, and yet the students feel closer to the peasants than anything else.  It also helps to have Michael Camille's incredibly sympathetic article (" 'When Adam Delved': Laboring on the Land in Medieval English Art," in Agriculture in the Middle Ages, ed. Del Sweeney. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995: 247-276) to have you feel unity with the Adam of the Canterbury glass.  Knowing that the spade was used in February prompts instant sympathy for Adam's nearly unclad state; seeing the axe, which is a land-clearing tool, in the tree, lets you know that Adam has already been working quite a while to prepare this pebbly soil for his crop.  Details create intimacies.

Art Institute of Chicago

 So do calls for equality in the midst of articulated hierarchies.  Especially if they rhyme:

When Adam delved and Eve span

Who was then the gentleman?

They loved that: the simple logic, the biting rhetorical question.  I love it, too.  The phrase is probably as old as the Canterbury glass (c. 1200) says Michael, but it came to prominence around the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.  The radicality of Biblical history.  The nature of origins.  Wonderfully tricky business.  At the end of the day, though, it was this image from a Picture Bible at the Art Institute of Chicago (must find color image!) that I found most empathetic. It's God, teaching Adam how to use a spade. Click on it for a closer look: Adam's astonished open-handed gesture, his almost delighted face, his pink cheeks, his foot tripping over the edge of the image, his scrawny body clothed in a fragment made of the same fabric of God's garment.  And God: delving, holding the spade with a strange intimacy (because though a Bible Moralisée shows God using a compass to make the earth, it's seldom you see him with such handy tools), pressing his foot upon the spade to break open an unfriendly earth. The rubric above the image reads "Adam apprent a laborer [la] t[e]rre" -  Adam learns to work the earth. This is no longer Eden (is it? did God give Adam a quick lesson before the Expulsion?), yet God and Adam are together, and it seems friendly and empathetic - as God gives Adam the tool of his salvation, having created the need for it. One could argue about this.

Summer's Writing

There is much that I could write about the anxiety of putting together invigorating writing assignments for my syllabi, about anxieties and aspirations of writings for myself, and about all of the other seasonal writing anguishes of this time of year. Instead, as inspiration to keep on writing throughout the coming year, and grow the little writing I did this summer, I just want to write down two of the children's writings from this summer. As ever, I keep their spelling. Thanks, guys.

Three Poems by Iris about Getting a Dog
Prologue
Dear Mom and Dad, I have writin three poems that prove my point that a dog or pupy is way better then a cat or kittin.

Puppy, a poem

I'd really like a pupy dog thoe

my siblings want a cat. A cuet

little pupy dog that will jump when I open the door.

Unlike a cat.

The pupy dog I want is going to be like Misse Kissy Face.

Pleas Mom and Dad, say yes.

Cat, a poem

A cat just sits aruond all day and meows when you pet it.

A cat is really worthlis

Unlike a pupy dog.

My siblings want a cat a boring pet

Well, I want a active pupy dog.

Pleas Mom and Dad, say no.

Pupy and Cat, a comparing poem

A cat just lays around all day.

It prrs when you pet it

like a mashein.

While a pupy dog jumps when you enter.

and is very active.

Which one do you think will keep us beesy for the summer?

A Brief Response by Oliver to the prompt "What is a place that makes you feel like a different person and why how?" [he crossed out the "why" and wrote in "how"]

Usually, I'm Oliver everywhere. A place that makes me feel diffrent is Israel. It just makes me feel free and without boundaries and laws and I feel very adventurous.

For Keeps

And so, after months of earnest discussion, and weeks of serious house rearranging, we have brought Sawyer home.  He is a one-year-old black lab with a little something else thrown in, and is gentle and attentive and beautiful and curious and really, really nice.  We somehow managed to keep it a secret from the kids (they had basically given up on us ever coming through), and so the homecoming was all theirs.  There was standing aghast and running and looking at us and a lot a lot of talking.  We've had friends over to meet Sawyer and provide wise counsel (Mac grew up with dogs, me, not at all) and the neighborhood itself looks different (other dogs come over to say hello while on their walks) than it did before.  Eleanor declared this the best day ever (and this part of it may well be), Oliver was full of questions ("How does a dog feel love?" "Do you just recognize someone by their smell, or do you really get to know them, know who they are by their smell?").  Iris said nothing for a long, long time - too busy hugging her dog and walking with him here and there. But at the end of the day, I did ask her: "What do you think of it all?" and she replied "It's just incredible that it's for keeps."

Yolande de Soisson

 Do animals have a history?  Can one speak of a medieval dog the way one does of a medieval person, as a being with different conceptions of self and world?  Nature (ask Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists) can be understood as the ultimate transcendental entity - it may change in form, but not in essence.   Humanity, on the other hand, has cultivated and ritualized even its most "natural" behaviors (sex, childbirth, death have produced cultures and subjectivities whose essential differences are the historian's fervent work).  Where does a dog, so closely tied to humans, so closely attuned to nature, exist on the continuum between nature and humanity?  Would the same things matter to a medieval dog as to a modern dog?  Is the human-hound relationship transcendent? Is Yolande de Soisson's lap dog represented as attentive to the statue (or vision) of the Madonna and Child because its mistress's concern for salvation has become its own somehow? Or is the artist using the dog to point out that "even animals" respond to the presence of the divine?

Gaston Phoebus

 Would I be better off asking questions of survival rather than symbolism?  Looking to the mutual benefit of the human-hound relationship in something like hunting?  But looking at Sawyer tonight, and watching him keeping track of the kids, feeling glad when he decided to settle at my feet, I have to think beyond pragmatism, to the complexity of emotion that accompanies a hunt, or that presides over the company after a victory (J. Salisbury, in The Beast Within; Animals in the Middle Ages present examples of ritualized feeding of certain cuts of meat to the hounds after a hunt).  

Mary of Burgundy

 What, then, of Mary of Burgundy's dog, curled up in her lap while she reads her Book of Hours?  Does its comfortable inattention to the divine signal a distinction between her secular world and the sacred space framing the Madonna outside her window?  Or is it her own, a comfort to her?  I don't know the answers to any of these questions, and I wonder how you'd research them.  The one I return to is, Would the same things matter to a medieval dog as to a modern dog?  These images of intimacy and comfort would venture to say yes, even as the selfhood and worldview of a young woman today are essentially different entities.  Or is it that animals awaken the transcendental in us: have young girls throughout all history looked up and marveled "for keeps"?