Away

And so we're in North Carolina.






These are the days that i really relish being unable not to wake up early. A novel awaits and all is quiet. Water that is not the ocean (a sound?) is beyond those trees and in a few hours, an enormous group of us will go to the beach. Last night gathered everyone and two of my cousins brought a Southern feast (yes, crab quiche is delicious). The Cleveland crowd (my brother's in-laws) were happy. There is a very particular rush of gladness in the realization that your brother, whom you love dearly, is dearly loved. And so vacation begins, our 7th here in 8 years - what now we might well consider a tradition that began with that first wild trip in 2004, when we brought my dad, thinking that being here, where he grew up, would bring him back to us. It didn't, of course, but it's brought us back here, and now the children take us to their favorite places, and the air is sweet with the promise of the sea.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone (first time!)

Having Kippled

Just a short post in some vain attempt to exorcise Kipling from my mind. I know that there are good reasons why this author has a hold on me (memorable phrases, vivid diction, intense narrative, and oh yes, all that time in India and all of that other time wondering about Afghanistan), but I don't know why I can't shake him. (I think that this is related to my fascination with Jean de Meun: language whose meaning relies upon the reader's tone and setting (subjectivity) as much as upon its own words, and therefore language that provokes wildly opposing interpretations). I was up at 4:30 this morning thinking about his short story "The Man Who Would be King" which I'd read before seeing the (incredible, wonderful) film by John Huston from 1975 with friends last night - the story is from 1888, shortly before the people in the Hindu Kush of which he writes about were "explored" by George Scott Robertson in 1890-91 and converted to Islam by the Emir of Afghanistan in 1896, and writhes within the recollections of Peachey Carnehan as he tells of his and Daniel Dravot's adventures in Kafiristan to a stunned narrator, a journalist who must have walked in Kipling's shoes. Kipling is so difficult because interpretations (and emotions, people tend to feel strongly about Kipling) oscillate wildly between a triumphalist strain of colonialism (in which the colonized's wildness brings on the colonizer's own) and an unnerving critique of colonialism's operations on the mind (Kipling's characters tend to unravel when they start believing the ideology of the colonialism that, in saner situations, is but a pretense for the exploitation of the colonized - which is itself nuts, of course). When Orwell dubbed him the "prophet of imperialism" was that to spell out its triumph or its doom? I sit uncomfortably in the latter camp, unable to read anything but dripping, sometimes caustic but then world-weary, irony in Kipling's slightest phrase. Tone is everything with Kipling: how do you read "The White Man's Burden" from 1899? Does knowing that it was written in response to / as a critique of the American invasion of the Phillipines help determine the tone? Read it earnestly, with the fervor of hope and change. Read it ironically, with the world-weariness of fundamental misconceptions and wrongs. Try reading "The Young British Soldier" and see how you feel about wars far away. My position (or what I think I understand about Kipling) is best taken up by a line from his poem "If-": "If you can dream, and not make dreams your master." Dravot's dreams of being a king, indeed the descendant of Alexander the Great himself, master him and all falls away into madness and it's poor Peachey who is cruelly left to live to tell the tale. But it was actually Billy Fish who had me up this morning. He is full of Homi Bhabha's "sly civility" (which I understand best through Jeffrey Cohen's use of the term in considering the grass-eating Welshman in his Postcolonial Middle Ages essay), a Kafiristani who had served in the British Army and translates for Danny and Peachey throughout their exploits to become king. But then his end is so unnerving: he refuses to mount a horse to escape, as Danny and Peachey are attempting to do, because, you see, he was a foot soldier in her Majesty's army - and rushes into the crowd of vengeful Kafiristanis with the joy, almost glee, of someone fulfilling a lifelong promise: that he would be true to the impossible identity put upon him by the British Army, thereby somehow making it true and not impossible after all? The mind reels.

Peacocks on Power Lines

Wonder is relative.  It's prized as a universal human value, but it's really quite relative. It can form groups, identities even (those who wonder, those who wonder at). It self-propagates linguistically (how would you define the fine line between wonder and wonderment?) which is, of course, wonderful.  Mac's return was filled with wonder: the kids' glee, the (it's all true!) wondrous textiles of the Orient, the pictures (which are emerging slowly, each one its own incredible universe), the stories the stories the stories. We heard most of them around a campfire and in the woods, as we gathered in a state park for two nights of camping with Chicago friends. There, all of the ecocritical readings I've been doing were treated to delicious (and sometimes deliciously ironic) applications (let us just say that whatever the hell was sniffing around our tent that first night fulfilled every fear of every medieval monster ever).  Camping is its own strange co-existence with nature, and camping with kids blurs even more boundaries. Oliver's instant happy bond with one of (it turned out) multiple frogs hopping all around was deep, and the frog's final leap into the void out of his hands was heartbreaking to him.  The other, many other, frogs that would experience his joyous possession over the course of the two days were never quite the same - but they were plentiful.  When Tiny took leave of Oliver for good, Oliver spoke of the event as Tiny's "return" to nature - even though we were all in the same forest-y midst, all absolutely surrounded by the same green and sounds and breezes, Tiny was returning somewhere, I think to Oliver's unknowing of him.  Whereas, when Oliver held him, and felt him breathing and wriggling, knowledge (deeply satisfying knowledge, the knowledge of possession) was there.  We discount children (and children's books and children's movies and children's imagination) because they make the mute world speak, they give it intention and agency. But, to quote Graham Harman's prescient line from his review of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, "anthropomorphism may be needed to in order to counter anthropocentrism."  Oliver's wonder of frogs was complicated and all-consuming, actually: thrill, possession, focus, understanding, emotion, loss.  Since coming home, he has stopped speaking of frogs. Iris, on the other hand, doggedly typed in "frog" and (to my consternation) "pet" at the library yesterday and wouldn't you know it, there's a book on the topic. I don't yet know what we're in for, but we've been promised a "convincing presentation."  The boundaries between human and non-human that I seek to critique in my classroom may yet break down in my home.

Peacock from a Medieval Bestiary

Of all the images that Mac has given us to wonder at, consider, turn over in our minds and ask each other about, the one of a peacock flying up to sit on power lines on the highway between New Delhi and Agra has gripped me completely. It's the incongruity at first, and makes me realize that much of wonder is embedded in the incongruous, and that much of the relativity of wonder is caught up in the relativity of incongruity (what doesn't fit for me, may have always fit for you).  A peacock on a power line may well be mundane, if not downright annoying, to the inhabitants of New Delhi. It elicited little wonder within medieval bestiaries, where it is cited for its tough meat and horrific and disconcerting shriek. But, God, is it ever wondrous to me.  A jewel of a bird, whose magical sighting is prized and kept in zoos in my experience, perching atop what I have to realize is actually another kind of wonder: a power line that feeds an electrical grid that services the nearly 20 million people living in New Delhi (that's half the population of France if you want a relative scale). That kind of population creates some very slow traffic and it took them about two hours to get out of the city - plenty of time for Mac to see the peacock's wanderings, its graceful swoops and moves in establishing its bird's eye view of the traffic river below. Is it wondrous because it shouldn't be possible but it is? Because the two parts don't fit yet co-exist? There are opportunities for (big? political? symbolic?) statements to be made within wonder sparked by incongruity. Is that peacock on a power line wondrous because it's unexpected yet absolute? Because it provides that veristic detail (think of the uses of animals in Alexander's letter to Aristotle) that reminds me with renewed wonder each time that my dear Mac was really, truly in India? Because it defies expectation? I can't discount the possibility that it's the alliteration, too.

Wonder

Diamond power. Livre des Merveilles. BN ms. fr. 2810, f. 182

I've been thinking about the multiplicity and double-edged sword of wonder.  It is, like so many words that hold my fascination these days, not Latinate in origin, but rather from the Old English, etymollgically dubbed "of unknown origin."  I love how it works: even saying the word - you purse your lips for the "w" (which gives your face that look of surprise that, yes, wonder first brings), and your lips part to end the word with the full syllable of "er" (leaving you, as wonder so often does, open-mouthed).  The word "wonder" is a close cousin to "marvel," a word which, aside from being thoroughly, beautifully, and, sure, wondrously explored by Stephen Greenblatt, comes from the Latin mirabilia, and so will not hold us here. (But isn't it interesting that already here, at the etymological level, there are two families for this sensation?) It is a sensation (an event? an emotion? an experience?) that at once propels intimacy and distance.  When I read of a land of Ind so fecund that its diamonds are male and female and procreate to have little diamond babies in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, I am completely captivated: I stop at this idea, I think on it, I am there in this fantasy: I turn it over in my mind, my hand can imagine this land.

And they grow together, male and female.  And they be nourished with the dew of heaven.  And they engender commonly and bring forth small children, that multiply and grow all the year. (Chapter 17)

Such vital diamonds have the power to repel wild beasts, and this is the virtue that is illuminated in the wondrous Livre des merveilles manuscript made for the Duc de Berry in the early 15th century and given over and over again until it reached François Ier in the early 16th century. Procreating diamonds are easy to imagine (easy to picture), but hard to represent. At the same time, a distance is created - how far away, how far beyond the reach of my mind, can this land be, that it produces such wonder?  The dynamic of wonder (and here it is not that different from the marvelous) is the dynamic of colonialism: objects of wonder, become objects of desire, become objects of possession.  Speed up wonder, and it becomes rapacious taking. I have students agonize about feeling wonder for distant or other cultures; I have seen them try to normalize or demystify the most wondrous things so as to not feel wonder.  And I have not quite known what to tell them. For me, without wonder (without surprise, without open-endedness), there is no change, no expansion (and I mean of the mind, but boy, what a colonizing word!).  At the same time, in taking your breath away, wonder prompts your hand to take. Or so goes much of Western Europe's relationship with the world since the 1770s.

Tourists at the Buddha's Tree

But wonder has something else up its sleeve.  In its multiplicity, it also has the idea of wondering, a more critical mode than marveling.  Marvel and marveling are closely related in experience; but a critical space creates a difference between wonder and wondering.  I sit in Indiana full of wonder for all of the imagined Indias that I have been reading about, while Mac walks in India, wondering in more precise ways, already bringing back scenarios to leave me wondering: the tourist culture that he shared with Hindu travelers at the site of the tree where the Buddha received Enlightenment. This is the more complicated wondering which the bold, broad strokes of wonder seek to efface, but which, when taken apart (examined critically), will start to speak volumes about a contemporary India, perhaps more free of the wondrous mists with which colonialism (and the proto-colonialism of Mandeville?) (and the post-colonialism of globalization?) enshrouds it.  I can think of many wrong ways to approach India, but no right way.  One could talk about the ethics of wonder, and the ethics of wondering, couldn't one?

From the Hindustan Times

In the absence of the time to do so, I can only appreciate the fashion advice provided here for the monsoon season rapidly swooping into India.  Is the difference for me that wonder is more archaic a sensation somehow? That wondering is a more modern, critical mode? This seems self-serving: I can wonder with impunity, as long as I follow it up with a good dose of wondering?  Hmmm.  I am on this edge: I love the sensation of wonder: it's immediate and thus honest. I fear the sensation of wonder: even though it's immediate, it cannot exist without preconceptions (one of the qualifications of the wondrous is the new - thus the worthy phrase "child-like wonder").

But I'm going to end with the possibility of repeated wonder. Of something - my children playing with friends on a summer evening - that though it is very preconceived (it's downright sentimental), and has been experienced many times, never ceases to fill me with wonder.  I wonder (I do!) about Mac coming back to this place, to these sensations, after what he has experienced.  I am wondering how we will all have been changed by this trip. Mac has gone before us into India, and our imaginations have followed: me in Mandeville, Oliver through an obsession with his Oriental Expedition Lego set, Iris through her questions to my student Vishal about the Red Fort, and Eleanor in her inexplicable use of the word "Maharajah" last night (where did she learn it???).   Wonder is wayward: it is here, there, and maybe even everywhere.

Children, Nature, Selves

The return from Atlanta has been a deep nesting experience (the exact opposite of Mac's days in India which have been unfurling in more and more extraordinary ways).  The fifteen (!) boxes of glorious books from my beloved Donna have emerged, categorized in perhaps new ways, finding new alphabetical companions as they meet books already on my bookshelves.  There are many memories of her fantastic classes in these books, a kind of long look at the love and thinking that go into teaching and research - the spines of these books are worn with consultation, and I think of myself as a 17 year old on the other end of that book-professor relationship, taking notes, thinking on art history all the time, now making my own consultations.  There is a seamlessness in Donna meeting the kids that is wonderfully untrue, considering all of the radical changes that have occurred over the past 20 years - yet, there we were: one art historian passing her books on to another art historian, Donna's lovely daughter meeting my eager kids.  They knew that they were in the midst of something special, the kids, they savored the seamlessness - to them it had to be inevitable that things turned out this way. In the way that photos of loved ones allow us to over-interpret them, the three outlines of Oliver, Iris and Eleanor at the mind-blowing Georgia Aquarium say it all: Oliver, relaxed, with his hands in his pockets, sighting enormous beluga whales; Iris reaching up to touch the glass to verify or count something, to keep track and annotate as she goes; and Eleanor, little pixie, twirling about, engaged in some imaginary dance with the belugas, which she adores.

No need to over-interpret this one: Eleanor is registering everyone's reaction beneath this phenomenal tunnel where whale sharks (which are huge!) and enormous manta rays and dozens of other sea life swim above our heads.  It took our breath away: the gentle beauty, the ease, the enormity, the flow, the quiet purpose, yes, the seamlessness of it all. Which brings me to a realization: that aquaria are starting to be our image of the ocean - that we see more of them than of the actual ocean; that while these gorgeous environments entreat us to do all we can to preserve the ocean, they also allow us to forget its actual demise a little. Reading Bennett and LaTour has made me increasingly excruciatingly aware of the categories and boundaries that have been set up and (more importantly) of the work that these do to perpetuate our primacy (which is not (always) a good thing - wait, is it ever a good thing?).  We categorize nature As Such and make it a place apart, while in lived reality, we are utterly enmeshed in it. To quote Graham Harman on Tim Morton's blog: "Nature is not natural and can never be naturalized."  At the same time, there is an aesthetic (oh no, not that word again!) to Nature As A Place Apart, that of natural history (there's a great term) museums, and museums in general (perhaps Art "in general" is the entire idea of "a place apart) that I wouldn't want to give up. I don't think that any of the people I'm reading for the ecocriticism class are calling for the end of aquaria or museums, but they have become increasingly strange places to me, symptomatic of our will to make nature an aesthetic rather than, say, a politics, or even at times, a reality.  The challenge is to understand all of this within living my life; the other is to make this gripping for students. In the absence of subjectivity, they have a really hard time staying interested. And I know that one of the aims of ecocriticism is to provide nature with a subjectivity (that is not anthropomorphic) that we can all more interactively engage in - but it's still a challenge.

All of this is somehow related in my mind to the latest development here at home. Two days ago, Iris announced that she wanted to be a boy. She came downstairs, having raided Oliver's closet, wearing a shirt and tie, dress pants, and "boy shoes."  When that is too formal, she has taken to wearing the clip-on tie with a t-shirt. She has asked that we now call her "Edgar." I dug a little, and it turns out that these biographies that she's been reading have had a powerful effect on her. Iris has discovered three things this summer: the parenthesis, the phrase "physically impossible," and biographies.  She absolutely adores this genre - gripping narrative, but all facts (she resisted my attempts to get her hooked on historical fiction because she couldn't tell "where the facts end and the fiction begins" - !!!).  BUT, the genre of biography, I now realize, is all about people who break the mold, who change things, who rethink categories.  So in reading a lot of women's biographies (Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart), she has been reading a lot about the historical expectations of women (to stay home, squelch intellectual ambition, and (and I can't believe that this is the phrase seared in my little girl's mind), "worry about their complexion.") And she is balking.  My entreaties that today, women have more agency in defining what it means to be a woman aren't convincing her, although she concedes the point that there are women engineers and women doctors.  Oliver and Eleanor have offered the greatest resistance to Iris's project - they miss her as a girl, they've said, and want her back (remember, it's only been two days). Nothing doing.  Eleanor was the first one to give in, and I took this picture of she and "Edgar" getting married. Yes, it gets weird. And it also makes me wonder if this isn't about Iris missing her dad.  One could over-interpret.  I'll confess to missing Iris as a girl as well. She has been clear, though, that this is a project - she knows that she will have to use the girls' bathroom come the fall (interesting sex-gender realization there), and she has said that her attempt to play with cars "proved embarrassing" (I'm quoting her precisely because these comments have been so vivid to me).  She will try again today.  What is she playing with, my darling girl? My dear child.  I could say that she is testing the boundaries of her gender, but in some ways, with the tie and all, it seems as though she is reifying them. Perhaps it happens simultaneously, or in some kind of continuum of testing and reification, as she makes sense of her self, her "nature."  Or maybe this is about her thinking ahead: yesterday in the car, as Oliver and Eleanor were begging her to go back to being a girl (and their trust in the absolute nature of her decision is dear to me, too) and using the "girls only having babies was a long time ago" argument, Iris said "Well, just in case things go back to the way they were, I'll be ready if I'm a boy."  Progressives, take note: keep the wheels of social progress turning!

Mr. Saint

 

Seeking treasure in my purse upon Saint Patrick's Day this spring, Iris found this Kewpie Doll, which I had been keeping as a talisman of wonderful medieval possibilities.  She immediately named it Mr. Saint, in honor of the propitious day on which he was found, and the doll became the children's collective imaginary, not-so-imaginary friend.  He gets in total trouble. He wreaks havoc. He dies in unbelievable ways (his daily bath in dishwashing liquid in especially treacherous).  And he travels with us everywhere we go.  That this tiny Kewpie Doll has not been lost in a house where I can't find my giant batch of keys most mornings is a testament to how they love him, and amazing.  It made his sudden appearance (compliments of Oliver) in the first picture that I was taking of the Parthenon in Nashville a delight.  Which was only fitting because the Parthenon in Nashville is AWESOME!

Just look at it!  It's to scale and everything!!!  This will make Mac, who has a thing for scale, really happy (Mac, whose e-mail are telling tales of an entirely different scale).  Built for the 1897 Exposition hosted by Nashville for the purpose of housing the Fine Arts pavilion, it's the only monument they kept from the Exposition.  At the time, it was bedecked with light bulbs, which were the hot new things, and it shone brightly in the night in competition with the lit pyramid next to it.  The pediments are there, as are the metopes, but I'd love to know the decisions to not do the frieze - too many naked Athenians? Too dang difficult?

The 40'+ statue of Athena holding Nike, on the other hand, was a go!!!  Eleanor's the tiny little thing in a too-short dress from last summer (I now realize looking at the picture), while Athena towers above her.  Where the ancient Athenians used plates of ivory and gold on a wooden structure, modern Nashvillians used plaster and paint.  The effect is still tremendous and the steady stream of people coming up the stairs exclaiming their wonder was great to behold.  First, because there was a steady stream of people (this is not an abandoned building), and second, because it reminded me of the effect of the Sainte Chapelle and could prompt some musings about the universal affect of awe, and scale and size, and wonder in general.

But our beloved Donna awaits for a great day together, so I will just end with a delighted Iris having found a plaster cast of her namesake, Iris the goddess of the rainbow, from the west pediment. She was truly awed, my already plucky little girl, by the size and power of this goddess on the go.  In some ways, there is no less likely place for a first feminist moment (if that's what this rush to gladness in self-determination was), in others, what a great place to start!

Nostalgia for Aliens

We are safely ensconced in a posh hotel room in downtown Nashville, TN, awaiting the Parthenon (!!!) and my dearest Donna tomorrow. God but I love a road trip - we left in the mid-afternoon and headed straight south.  I don't know this landscape at all (these are not the mountains which we take to head east to North Carolina), but the ride was heavily imprinted by my viewing of the movie Super 8 last night. A movie about loving movies and turning the most banal landscape (pretty banal landscape coming down here) into a vibrant fantasy.. by loving movies.  Preteens make a zombie movie using their Super 8 camera, and the director makes an alien movie using whatever they're using today (lots of great explosions).  The marketing for this film was way too savvy to pass up.

I shot this with a (free) iPhone app called (yes) "Super 8" - it makes all of the Super 8 film noises and inserts the clicks and whirs and skips of the Super 8.  And it look like I shot it in 1978.  What is it about the aesthetic of nostalgia that made me nostalgic for all childhoods watching this movie?  Was Super 8 that shared of a technology that its look inspires such a generalized nostalgia?  And what of kids who didn't know Super 8? I asked Oliver what he thought of it, and he said "Something tells me it looks old."  What exactly is that something? Beyond the clicks and whirs. Or is this like the brushstrokes showing themselves somehow?

The alien was nostalgic, too: an ode to the best and scariest of the 1960s monsters.  A physically brutal monster with unfathomably sophisticated intelligence - a monster who does honor to Jeffrey Cohen's Monster Theory - a Grendel for our time (although Grendel was more cunning than smart, I think, which may be an interesting distinction). The Confrontation Scene between our hero and the alien humanized the alien, and they did this beautiful thing with his eyes, which went from slits of fury to limpid orbs of compassion - really quite remarkable. And heralding the moment of the monster's humanity.  Inevitably, I have to wonder if there was nostalgia for aliens in the Middle Ages - if there was ever a hankering for monsters of yore, the "really good ones" that knew a good scare.  Like the primitive, nostalgia is often discussed as a product and a possibility unique to modernity.  But LaTour has me wondering otherwise - not transcendentally (heaven forbid), but otherwise.

Bruno LaTour's We Have Never Been Modern (which I Should Have Read Long Ago) does indeed weigh heavily here.  He takes us in between the elaborate worlds of Nature and Society, but also between Past and Present (or Modern or Future - it multiplies out).  We received our first detailed message from MAC today and reveled in the details: the Qawwali performance, the rickshaw ride through Chandi Chawk market, his striking out on his own tomorrow (with reluctant permission from the faculty-in-charge) to go to a museum (see what a bother art historians are?).  The sculpture galleries are closed, he learned, thereby proving that the art historian's curse (of galleries being closed) is a universal transcendental.  I'm starting to feel the awe I thought I might in realizing that Mac is really in India, really in its midst.  The wonderful student I am working with this summer is from  Calcutta (which, unfortunately Mac won't be visiting), so we are busy surmising all sorts of things about Nature and Society, Past and Modern in the streets of Delhi.  The mishmash of it all is great.  For now, everything defies categorizations, one of my favorite side effects of travels, whether to the South or to India.  Another day has already begun for Mac on this most assuredly swiftly tilting planet.