Parchment, Echo, Nature?, Epochs?, Bristles: Contact Ecologies, 2013

Yes, again.

I return to Brueghel's Tower of Babel after a conference, this time, in the echo-chamber of the upper reaches of the Tower, whence attempted contact with the divine stretches, and where I can position myself to think (all too briefly) on the gathering of speakers and ideas of "Contact Ecologies" at George Washington University (Jeffrey J. Cohen and Haylie Swenson, architects, GM-MEMSI, site). The phrase/idea/concept/ethos of "Contact Ecologies" is an open one, under construction, in the making. Jeffrey's invitation to speak was insistently unaccompanied by a blueprint, so multiple architectures/points of view resulted. (Realize, I may not be able to let go of this metaphor, try as I might). Bruce Holsinger brought us to the wonder of the "parchment inheritance" through the dizzying numbers of animals sacrifices in the production of manuscripts (knowledge, that gesture of turning the page, finding out more). You can start with any number of thousands in any collection, but those quickly escalate to the millions, and so we have a complex "historical ecology of the animal archive." You know it's a good gathering when the first paper makes the audience gasp. Augustine, the Babylonian Talmud, and a letter from the contact ecology of war (Crusades) followed, each articulating a new scale (at one point, the sky itself was all parchment) of this act of materiality and biology, this thinking on parchment. I spoke about the contact ecology of sound, specifically as shaped by the echo, by Echo herself. And Eileen Joy was right to hear my voice change when I reread Ovid's myth: catastrophe, illness, and desire are all in that myth and in how we practice echo and hearing. William IX, Michel Serres, and Timothy Morton amplified her, made me see how far echo could reach, not only in how sound provides contact but in trying to understand how that sound/contact recedes as echo. I couldn't help but end in an object, and it was the Eleanor of Aquitaine vase and I'll be writing more about that (probably at Material Collective) soon. Kellie Robertson fearlessly placed us in the Augustian/Aristotelian nature/ecology fray. Nature is unsustainable. The idea of Nature "never speaks comfortably from her material bodily form," and I quickly became fascinated with the medieval discomfort with Nature. There was no naïve happiness or sure containment of a concept of the natural in the Middle Ages, and that epoch's discomfort continues to provoke ours. Teleology and Theology became intertwined and the modern insurance-industry phrase of "acts of God" takes on an entirely new set of problems for me. Steve Mentz proposed an "ecological theory of historical change" via a journey through the Anthropocene, the Homogenocene, the Thalassocene, and the Naufragocene. In the shipwreck, we grasp for any grounding and historical epochs offer brief respites of certitudes and ground. But "all epochs are false constructs" (though we need them - profound oscillations/waves provoked here). And so to think beyond the theft model (in which history and ecology both are a series of tales of dispossession) to the composture model, in which a rich, loamy intermingling does the work of history. This is where the shipwreck and its era (the Naufragocene) comes in, and our awareness and embrace of it, of learning to swim in (not desperately away) from it. So imagine our eager minds when Timothy Morton greeted us with the hope and horror of bristles. "Things are ungraspable because they bristle," but they are lively as such - they respond, they are resilient, they are multi-scale. Maybe instead of distance from objects (be they the Eleanor of Aquitaine vase or the hyperobject of global warming), we can think less of distance and more of a fraught approach. Fractals help here (in their multiplicity and edges), and so do hedgehogs - the little herisson of Derrida's contemplation of poetry, the retreat/receding/withdrawal of the prickly thing. But also, its frisson (and, in terms of frisson's relation to jouissance, I couldn't help but delight in thinking of OOO becoming o O O!). Children, a flooded basement, The Day call, so three unformed thoughts: TOYS: "Philosophy," said Tim, "should be in the business of making toys, as opposed to setting down laws. We should be creating new things for others to play with, so as to generously enlarge the domain of thought." GENEROSITY marked this gathering: in the initial questions put forth by Jeffrey, in the willingness to Try Things Out (every sense of that phrase), in the companionship and eagerness to broaden the conversation, which had been brilliantly initiated even before we gathered by Eileen Joy's revolutionary call (ok, you can call it a talk, but come on) for the future of publishing. And (of all things!) CRAFTSMANSHIP: the love of a good sentence, the effort of putting it all together, the assemblage of ideas came up over and over again in conversation. Might we be feeling the imprint of our thinking about materiality in the love of a sentence, the physical thrill of an idea?

The View From In the Out Here

This is the view from the upper reaches of the Tower of Babel.*The horizon stretches far and you are not alone. This year's BABEL Critical/Liberal/Arts gathering showed me again. The workers - the haulers of bricks, the carvers of stone, the facilitators of the great machine that is the tower, pause. What prompted them to do so? The tedium of the work? The glory of of it? I've certainly felt both in the Grand Project of Academe. So we stopped, we looked, and this is what we saw. Henry Turner and the Hollow Earth Society made invitations, strategized an open, reaching university: Henry with the Society for the Arts of Organization (consider the medieval body that is the corporation, join this one, grow the idea!), the HES with an introduction to the edurganism, academe as spreading slime mold instead of ivory tower (or even underground rhizome), academic practice as para_site, doing its work _next to_ the institution (feed your students, hike with them, publish wild things!). Eleanor Johnson with Toad Poetry (look closely, care until it's creepy and then ask all the questions), Ammiel  Alcalay with Lost and Found (gather the archive until it's no longer an archive but a place). Bruce Holsinger with Chaucer and Gower's critical friendship (and yes yes yes, this brilliant scholar's long-awaited historical fiction novel, A Burnable Book, is coming out, and yes yes yes a brilliant scholar wrote a work of fiction), and Allen W. Strouse with Sir Orfeo (and the idea of potential pilgrims which made me think of perpetual potential pilgrimages and made me realize I was on one). Jamie "Skye" Bianco with Q3C (Queer, Creative, Critical Compositionalism with things that have affect, let's start with the flotsam and jetsam that makes it to shore, let's be "para-academic DJs," compiling and collecting, gathering and curating)' and Eirik Steinhoff making "Nothing Happen" (and I held a pamphlet for the first time in forever and there was Rosa Luxembourg and the idea of sabotage, and Kafka, so it got complicated and good). And Michael Whitmore with Fuzzy Structuralism (when software starts to read Shakespeare) and Marina Zurkow and Una Chauduri with Inner Climate Change (and yes, for 7 minutes we listened to a soundscape meditation, and no, it wasn't easy).

And for one of the first times in a gathering of academic to talk about academe, the emphasis was not on despair, but on action. There are Things We Do, and there are Things To Do. You _are_ institutional change, but you are also parasite and collector, producer of pamphlets and writer of wild words, gatherer of students and toaster (!) of friends. You are in the tower and of the tower, but the view from Babel/BABEL stretches out to sea to see a lush island and strong currents. And from there we'll wave to Eileen Joy and Allan Mitchell and Julie Orlemanski and Myra Seaman who got us up here in the first place. Tomorrow, we'll go to Oceanic New York, where Steve Mentz started us thinking Thursday night. For now, I'm going inside to see the art that's clinging to the walls and the objects humming under pools of light.

* This is also my first time composing on my iPad, so pardon the absence of links. I'll get those up tomorrow, because you'll want to visit. I'll try to keep weird autocorrect miscorrects to a minimum.

Whatever this might mean

very far away from anywhere else

A year is not an entirely arbitrary cycle. The planet does spin pretty decidedly all the way around the sun once, give or take that bit that adds up to Leap Year, for that amount of time. But a year anniversary does seem arbitrary: whatever it is you're marking, it was the same five days ago and it will be the same five days from now. It's really only the original day itself that matters. Still, I'm not going to fight the insistent call to let myself remember sitting with you, and holding your hand, and smoothing your hair, and telling you you were doing great and that it was going to be so wonderfully all right, and wanting so badly for your labored breathing to stop being so labored and not ever wanting your breathing to stop. And then it did, and that moment of a year ago has already passed because it was 4 a.m. and this year I slept through it. The hardest part was actually remembering last year and two days ago, when you no longer had the strength to raise your hand to shake Mac's like you did every single time. You just shook your head no and I think the three of us adults in the room knew, while the kids chatted on like it was any other meal with you. Now that the moment has passed, I can think about the slow, grand machinery of the funeral: my first phone calls, all those arrangements taking place, everyone coming down to very far away from anywhere else. The momentum of commemoration. A year later, there's nowhere for it to go, save for the stillness of remembering or Eleanor's wonder that it's already been a year. She's right to wonder - that was fast. There's been a rush of things, and even as I write that, I think of things that are happening right now, the rush I need to rejoin in about 5 minutes. Thus. I'll mark this time with words much better than my own that will help safeguard this moment of wonder. Brian Dolye is a gentle and meticulous caretaker of his dying characters. There are several passages I could quote, and my very very favorite is actually another, but that character is kind of a rotten guy and my dad was the gentlest most loving guy and so I can't copy those words about him. But what Doyle writes about the nun (and my beautiful friend Nancy was moved by these same words in the parallel universe of another blog post) is perfect. As I reread the words to write them down, I know that it's what I fervently wished for for my dad, even the mundane things, as, to use another borrowed phrase, this mortal coil loosened its hold on him. I hope (and there is still room for naïveté, there isn't that much wisdom gained in a year) that his dying might have been like this, that any dying might be like this. So. This is from pages 94 and 95 of Mink River, which is a marvelous place.

The priest left and the manager, who had much admired the old nun, knelt for a moment at her bedside, and then he left, too, locking the door behind him, and the room was still again.  The old nun, or whatever she was now, had seen and heard all this, indeed she could see and hear far better than she could when she was alive, everything in the room now unbearably clear, everything its absolute self, everything rimmed with light like frozen dew rims twigs and leaves, the toaster shining, the refrigerator magnets shining, her coffee cup shining, the painting of Moses shining, her to-do list with fix fan! on it shining, and she could hear for miles and miles, every sound crackling and distinct, every sound announcing its origin in a way she had never heard before. She heard owls, girls, trees, radios, fish, a fist landing hollowly on the chest of a boy, the suck of a baby at a breast. She heard a thousand thousand thousand sounds she had never heard before and would never have been able to identify before but now she knew them and loved them and had always known them and they were delicious and holy and necessary.

Really Real

Courbet, River Landscape (private collection!)

I'd forgotten my camera and kind of cursed doing so and kind of tried to love the freedom you're supposed to have when you don't have a camera. The odd result was that I was louder: more exuberant in my praise of the rocks and moss and trees (fantastic exposed roots!), the great name of the State Park, the belief in its healing fountains in the 19th and early 20th-centuries, and the effects of the sun on the water as it coursed in plentiful bursts through the ravine. These exultations proved supremely annoying to the kids who were, alternately, Lewis & Clark and a lawyer assessing the risks we were taking (the latter to mock me and my useless words of warning about climbing this that and everything). I was actually sympathetic to their plight: no one needs ebullience emanating from behind them at any given moment when they're hiking or being Lewis & Clark or being a risk lawyer. I tried to be less vocal, but I realized that my outbursts were also a response to a kind of frenetic energy that develops when I'm surrounded by unrelenting beauty and overwhelming well-being in this moment (especially as this moment exists in contrast to regular time, where the kids go back to school on Wednesday (indecent) and work is starting to pile up, all of it good, but all of the old anxieties, blah blah blah). A kind of Sublime Lite; and almost-awe; a not-quite transcendence. I continued in this frenetic and exuberant vein until Courbet came to me. A particular turn in the landscape, a blunt yet leading play of light, a flat patch of water - something conjured him up and all of a sudden I could see his landscape, could imagine him loving this place, seeking out its intricacies and what he might hold still. I felt myself relax into a focus, sort of delighted at the realization that images could make me relax, and that they are a part of my hikes. That's a lot of mediation in the face of what should be direct access to the natural "world." Representing Nature is one of our cardinal sins against its force, some (Tim Morton) have said. But representing Nature is one of the ways that I am in it; mediating nature makes it more immediate. Why? Because I see more, I pay more attention to detail, I see the bigger picture, am involved in the dynamic of presence and representation when they are at their closest points of contact. Is that why landscapes were so fascinating to Courbet? Because the move from presence to representation was so quickly mediated that it became itself immediate? One thinks, too, of how awed the owner of the painting's family and friends stand before it.  Of how much Courbet's painting could oscillate with the Real Thing for me today. I stopped pointing out what everyone could see. I focused. I felt the warmth of a kindred spirit. I learned from Lewis & Clark and the lawyer. And I was very present/really there by thinking of representations, of things over there, across the boundary/divide/thrill of images.

"Soeth What?"

Will Princess Olive choose Cinderfella?

The scene is set. The Grand Ball is on. In walks Cinderfella (shh! it's really Popeye) in finery bestowed him by his fairy godpappy. Olive Oyl sweeps him off his feet, wooing him with a singular combination of gender, cultural, and temporal hybridity: "Ah, ma chérie, cometh with me to ye Casbah." But it's only seconds before he's confronting Bluto, who is already contemplating Olive's crown for himself. "I seeneth her first!" quoth he. To which Popeye replies with the memorable words "Soeth what?" The scattershot appending of "-eth" onto words that prevails throughout the barely 7 minute cartoon really sticks its landing here. More defiant than dismissive, it's come to embody a cheeky resistance found useful by my children, who use the phrase liberally. The quick n' classy way to signify Things Medieval, the addition of "-eth" simultaneously gives everything a certain flair and makes it ridiculous. It reminds me of Ira Glass noticing that within minutes of being at Medieval Times, he was no longer using contractions: more formal, more correct, but funny, out of place. Misplaced linguistic elegance (your "soeth what," your "oneth, twoeth, threeeth") has the pleasures of both asynchrony and system. The experiences and repercussions (and yes, pleasures) of asynchrony (explored in Carolyn Dinshaw's exciting new book, How Soon Is Now?, and Jeffrey Cohen's excellent review of the same) engage the abandon and defiance of free play - language takes you to medieval times faster than a car to Medieval Times. You can be there, you can get medieval, you can go all funny, simply by tweaking your speech, your system of talking. Adding "-eth" to just about everything is the comic companion to Jonathan Hsy's observation (in the midst of a brilliant meditation on (re)animating dead or endangered languages) that "[v]oicing Middle English aloud is just one way of physically inhabiting a language that is not one's own." With a quick "Soeth what?" my seven-year old makes the Middle Ages her own for the time of the laughter she elicits.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869)

"Whose Middle Ages?" is a question we are jolly well asking. Sitting in Ira Glass's minivan and then sharing a banqueting bench with him during that unforgettable visit to Medieval Times, Michael Camille talked about the disparate reasons people momentarily want to make the Middle Ages their own: it's an orderly time (when a knight was a knight and a peasant was a peasant), it's a chaotic time (monsters and miracles and beasts), it's everything in between. What it's not, what it can't be, is authentic. This is what makes medieval re-enactments both fantasy and farce. Where Ira Glass at times worried about the accuracy or correctness of the Middle Ages at Medieval Times, Michael reveled in the fantasy and the play - in the end it's what made Medieval Times medieval for him. That, plus, you get a crown.  The class defiance of modern medieval fantasy (so perfectly encapsulated in "Soeth what?") is pervasive, but necessarily occluded in its performance. "You know," the helpful young woman told me as I picked up tickets in the lobby of Medieval Times for me and my students several years ago, "for $10, you can upgrade to royalty." I've never forgotten that. The sweet and simple possibility of moving five rows closer to the action and getting extra medieval Pepsi - for a mere $10! There are so many things to love here: what it means to be royalty at Medieval Times, the ease with which one can become royalty, and the resulting absurdity of royalty. It's, I think (as I read through his travel writing following a trip to Hannibal, Missouri earlier this summer to celebrate the kids' love of Tom Sawyer), what Mark Twain relished: the ease of access that moderns have to the mysticism and pomp of medieval life. The simultaneous immediacy and irony of Medieval Times, A Knight's Tale, and the Society for Creative Anachronisms (the opening question of the website is fantastic!). I'm always amazed at how quickly (how immediately) the Middle Ages can be conjured up ("Soeth what?" / "Getting medieval"). The "transposition of epochs" (a wonderful phrase positioned in parallel to the "transmigration of souls" at the beginning of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court from 1889) isn't even necessarily virtual: you can stand in front of cumbersome and plumed medieval suits of armor in any number of castles open to visitors. The owners of the castles in Twain's day "were all out in the country for the summer, and might not have known enough to ask us to dinner if they had been at home" he quips in Innocents Abroad (Chapter 17), well aware that the ease of access is itself a fantasy - that the aristocratic (even if impoverished enough to open their properties for tours) owners of the castle wouldn't give tourists traipsing through their turf the time of day. Even the "lackey" in his "petrified livery" is "malignantly respectful" of the visitors - because class and access, immediacy and irony, fantasy and farce are always complicated.

Little Audrey

Eleanor, at seven, has discovered the wit and wisdom of Mother Goose, and, it seems, the built-in invitation to mock them. The sing-song of the rhymes, the absurdity of the situation, and the facility of the moralization (not that she would use these terms) make Eleanor laugh. Sitting and reading for a good while in the garden behind our house the other day, she sighed in a Brooklyn accent, "Mother Goose and her nursery rhymes, what does she know about modern times?" The line, it turns out, is spoken by Little Audrey, bored in school that she has to recite Mother Goose rhymes instead of being able to read her Phony Funnies comic book featuring "Pinhead and BirdBrain." The accent is performed by Mae Questel (born Kwestel and appalling her Orthodox parents as she broke into vaudeville and television) who also gave voice to none other than Olive Oyl and Betty Boop. Cheeky defiance is not a critical mode, but in the rimshots and pot shots it takes at the expense of hierarchy and certitude, it's pretty swell.

Love Letter

The Ellé River

This will be short and sentimental. Something that lets me be glad, makes me feel lucky. The moments that gleam, that appear unbidden, the secret life of glee. I've just sent off my first article about medieval art in Brittany, and I'm thinking about it in triptych form, and every part of that triptych (the setting, the scholarly apparatus, the art) holds these moments fast. This is a little ridiculous, I think, this kind of exuberance for an article (for crying out loud). Good luck with my emotions if I should ever write a book. I lived and breathed these ideas and the people that nurtured them in so many ways, though, that I want to write them a love letter. I loved coffee in the morning at the mill, and long conversations with my beautiful hosts, and threading my way through the Breton countryside and those awesome roundabouts, and coming to this river after following the path set by the chapel's fountain, and talking about hunting boar with a local aristocrat at a dinner party, and waking up very far away from anywhere else, and knowing Mac and the kids had been here and here and here and that next time I would show them this and this and this.

I loved finding out (uselessly, it turned out) about late medieval crenellation licenses in Brittany, and laughing at de Guilhermy in 1845 quoting Balzac by writing "Donc, à nous deux, jubé de Saint-Fiacre," and ordering books about woodworking, and going to the U.S. Geological Survey page about springs, and writing conference talks that wove in and out of this, and loving conference talks and that kind of writing and talking and thinking, and marveling at how crippling academic writing still is for me and how much I'm still looking for a way to credit all the scholarship and engage in all the issues and somehow preserve the freedom and the play that the conferences revel in, and the asides as we gather around coffee at said conferences, and dancing while frogs just wouldn't stop having sex after we had all spoken at one said conference.

Et maintenant, jubé de Saint-Fiacre, à nous deux. This is a work of art that takes some serious girding of the loins. But I love your complacent angels, and your devious but ultimately martyred fox (that hen is grabbing his testicles in its beak!), your frightened Mary, and your writhing thieves, your medieval wood injected with resin and silicone and restored in multiple ways, your artist (knighted!) who signed his name, merci mon sieur Olivier Le Loergan, your biniou and bombarde players, your Mass of Saint-Gregory, your glutton barfing a fox, your goose and your duck and your oak leaves and beech leaves and your custodian who knit half a sweater while telling me all about everything.  And now I'm getting ready to go on a road trip to a dinner party in Cincinnati and for now, in this, with you, everything is possible.

Mahouts on the Beach

He was 33 years old at the time, so the war was over, his time with the Merchant Marines had ended, he had graduated from college. This album, simply titled "1953; scènes de passage pendant la deuxième tournée de l'Extrême Orient," must have been during the early years at Citibank. I'm creasing back pages that are still stiff, seeking his handwriting, wishing I knew more about the world in 1953, more about the great machinery of capitalism at that time, more about these landscape photographs that seem isolated, sparsely populated, and may have been.  The first images are of Hong Kong (taken in March, which means he celebrated his birthday that year traveling between Japan and India, that's months' itinerary). Then, next page, Calcutta. My dear student Vishal recognizes a movie theater that's still there while nothing else in the photo remains the same. My dad's words (awkwardly translated by me): "Under a too-clear sky, a too-hot sun, this city pushes the traveler to quickly go somewhere else.  It is full of refugees, half of them sleeping in the streets or in train stations. They await deliverance." I type in "Calcutta 1953" then "Kolkata 1953" and find no major crises that have left their trace, instead this rather incredible video and an American film released that year and these photos which provide another explanation. I don't know who's right, probably both - I do think about India just six years after partition. Citibank didn't wait long. But then I look that up and find out that Citibank had been in Calcutta since 1902. I don't know anything. The past is savvier and more intricate than I can imagine. This 33-year old man, now ten years my junior, writing pithily, critically? For Bombay, he writes: "The white world turns upon itself, waiting its turn, but comfortably." Then, this is the next page:

He has several of these pages with no text, just images. I look at travel times, I realize that it's 27 hours by car from Calcutta to Bombay, how much more by train (plane?) in 1953? He's moving fast, being dropped into these places, time for a quick gin and tonic (good for the malaria, apparently invented by the British East India company), a sit in a wicker chair, a deal. I don't know what he was doing in the bank at the time - when we were born he was an inspections officer, finding fraud and gathering evidence for prosecution. This seems far from that. The more I look at the pictures, the more they amaze me: yes, the contrasts (the adults clothed, shod (though ties and jackets are off) while the kids, having left their shoes, splash in the pool); the composition (second photo: that relaxed hand draped over wicker in the foreground while kids mess with a chair in the middle ground and others swim in the background); the narrative (third: the birds eating what's left of tea after the chairs have been abandoned and the pool is cleared).  What's he thinking? Who does he have to talk to? What is he trying to live with when he says: "British overseas life is an existence at once free and regimented, held in the balance of good taste and violence, the latter most often carrying the day."

By the end of April he's in Ceylon (it will be called Sri Lanka as of 1972) on his way to Singapore. A single line of writing takes 20 minutes to realize: "After the heat of India, the itinerary leads to Singapore, with a first leg of the trip by Comet to Mount Lavinia." Did he fly on the first commercial jet liner, then? There's no declaration of wonder, no proclamation of firsts, but if he flew on a DeHavilland Comet, wow! (and whew!).  Mount Lavinia turns out to be a suburb of Colombo, deeply steeped in the kind of colonial romance that rechristens a local dancer with the name of an epic heroine, names a city after her, and makes a hotel out of the governor's mansion in 1947, one that is still thriving (and makes post-colonialism look like a pipe-dream). If he stayed there in 1953, he left for walks on the beach pretty quickly - those are the only pictures: catamarans pulling up to excited children, long stretches of ocean (thoughts of 1937-1948 in the Navy? maybe not at all), and then, the photograph above. No words on this page, just them, stopping me absolutely in my first flipping of this album two years ago. By the time I rushed in and asked him about them he had little to say about anything, but his eyes were mischievous and he was smiling when he said "They were just as surprised to see me as I was to see them." I pressed for more (why on the beach? where to? what for? the sounds? the movement?) but he had nothing more to say. Closed his eyes, kept smiling. I pull back now and I think of him standing on the beach, the surf coming in pretty loudly, those chains clinking, the elephants' heavy steps leaving eddies in the sand. He pulls out his beloved Leica and there's some kind of communication, the young men drawing their long elephant goads up, looking at him, he at them. If I know my dad (and I knew so little even though I know a lot), he would have thanked them by raising his right hand in greeting and tilting his head down and to the side with that wonderful smile that said "there's more to be said here than we can say." The camera would have fallen back on his chest, the strap pulling its weight against his neck. He would have breathed deeply and closed his eyes and maybe now thought of everything up until now. And then he would have walked on.