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Texas is the New Empire of Evil Reply

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I’m going to deviate from our normal fare here and offer some from the sports world. If you are only interested in reading about Faulkner and his obsession with Southern landscapes (I happen to share your interests by the way) look away now.

So apparently, the Historians at the University of Texas have been busy, or maybe not.  It appears over the weekend that the Treaty of Versailles Agreement to keep the Big 12 Athletic Conference was reached between the remaining 10 schools.  Texas was rumored to be off to the Pac 10, along with the already defecting Colorado, and Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State.  Texas A & M was reportedly headed to the uncontested strong-man of college football the SEC, while Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State, Missouri and Baylor were left to try and find friendships elsewhere — maybe the Mountain West Conference.  Lets be clear — this was all about money!

In what appears to be a D*^k move effective negotiating, Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma agreed to return to the Big 12 in exchange for a larger piece of the financial pie than all the others.  Specifically, the three schools will receive $20 Million a piece annually in the projected new television deal, while the rest of the schools will receive only $15 Million a piece.  Moreover, Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma coerced got the rest of the schools to agree to forfeit their shares of the penalty money that Nebraska and Colorado would have to pay for leaving the Big 12.  In another stunner, the Universities agreed that the coaches wives at Missouri, Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State, and Baylor all would officially slap their husbands while singing the Eyes of Texas are Upon You, every year when the school played Texas.

Two observations.  First, Is this good bargaining or just a bad idea for business relations?  It strikes me that history tells us that it is never a good idea to gloat in victory at the expense of others.  See e.g., France and Germany, circa 1918, George W. Bush “Mission Accomplished;” Ivan Drago defeating Apollo Creed in the Ring and then believing that he could as easily beat the Italian Stallion Rocky Balboa, etc…It seems that this marriage is destined to end, and if Karma has anything to say about it, watch out Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma — your day is a coming.

Second, how diminished must Oklahoma State and Texas Tech feel.  Its one thing to be the ones that were always on the outside looking in.  But to now be forever linked to Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma, without any more benefits than the others must be humiliating.  Nice show fellows.

Simkin’s Dormitory Part II Reply

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Over at the Lounge we are having a good discussion on the role of history and remedial acts.   Tom Russell, the author of the article that revealed the Klan affiliation of the Simkins Dormitory namesake, has chimed in with some thoughtful comments.  (Tom may stop by the Table as well to offer his thoughts more fully).  For now, allow me to provide Tom’s comments to Al Brophy’s latest post here, as well as my response.

Tom said:

Let me say briefly, though, if UT stops honoring Prof. Simkins by taking his name off the dormitory, plenty of opportunities to discuss race, history, and law will remain on UT’s campus. For starters, a portrait of Simkins hangs in the law library; I’m fine with that. There is Painter Hall and the Sweatt Campus. There’s a statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Pres. Jefferson Davis; buildings named after confederate soldiers; the Darrell Royal stadium, and a host of other monuments, none of which I think should be removed or renamed.

On the flip side, there’s also no reason to believe that The University of Texas would in fact turn Simkins Hall into the history lesson that it might be. The history of the university’s administration suggests the opposite.

Finally, I do not believe that those who are harmed or insulted by Simkins’s undeserved honor in having his name on the building should have to continue to experience insult or injury in order to provide a possible history lesson to whomever is subjected to a plaque, lecture, or website post. I’m looking for the right metaphor to describe this–something along the lines of “We won’t set your broken arm because it’s a good teaching opportunity.”

I have posted the following response to Tom’s very good points:

Allow me to offer a brief interjection. First, let me say that your logic is thoughtful and I don’t want to sound like my disagreement is in anyway critical of the importance of the work you are doing in this area. I also agree with you that we have to be very careful not to cause further insult to those populations that are offended (and should be offended) by this vile representation of an awful past.

With that said, however, let me push back on a couple of points. I think it matters greatly to distinguish between opportunities to talk about race and the methods that we use to talk about race. In my mind, this is not just an opportunity to talk about race relations. I agree that there are many opportunities to do so in a variety of contexts. Rather, this is whether we are going to faithfully represent our past as we have those discussions. Let me key in in on two comments.

First, I don’t think the metaphor of a setting a broken leg is not quite correct in this case. Legs can be fixed and show virtually no signs that there was ever a problem. I also worry that the analogy suggests that we may try to fix something. If we are trying to fix the past, then I have real reservations for all of the reasons described in the first post. I think the better metaphor is the environment. Like so many of our actions in the environment, we do things that cause harmful effects, that cannot be undone. However, what we can do is begin to live more responsibly with what we have. This can have a powerful effect. In some ways, it can rehabilitate the environment. In the same way, we cannot undo the Simkin’s name on a building. It has been done. But we can begin to live more responsibly with it by having frank discussions about its impact, and adding to its vile nature something that better represents our normative view of the world.

Second, if the University of Texas is not inclined to deal responsibly with its past as suggested, isn’t it just as important to maintain the building’s name as a reminder that we have not come as far as we think we have? It seems to me that we often remove uncomfortable things from sight, when they remain just as powerfully present as they did before we covered them up. Changing the landscape rarely changes the actual environment. Perhaps the building’s name serves a purpose of reminding us of how far we still have to go, rather than allowing the name’s removal to fool us in believing that we have actually come pretty far.

This is a very thoughtful discussion in which the relevance of the historical narrative has meaning for our everyday interactions.  Your comments are welcome.  Come join the discussion, either here or at the Lounge.

Edgar Allan Poe and Mesmeric Possibility 3

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Sidney E. Lind, writing in the 1940s, said of the “mesmeric lexica” of nineteenth-century America:  “It is safe to say that the terminology of mesmerism was bandied about in much the same manner as the language of psychoanalysis was to be eighty years later, and with, in all probability, as little real comprehension on the part of the public.”

Lind’s reference to psychoanalysis—signified, at that moment, by Austrian physicist Sigmund Freud—is particularly telling for 21st century audiences, who have witnessed an avalanche of criticism of psychoanalysis, a pseudoscience, according to the naysayers, the results of which are un-testable at best and bogus at worst.  Lind’s aim is not to destabilize the practices of psychoanalysis but to interrogate three short works by Edgar Allan Poe in which mesmerism features prominently:  “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”  “These three stories,” Lind submits, “constitute a series within which the mesmeric experiment becomes more profound, irrespective of plausibility or implausibility, or of whether or not Poe in at least two of the three was hoaxing his readers.”

Lind’s point is well-taken.  In Poe’s day, the subject of mesmerism was “in the air” and therefore “it was logical that Poe, as a journalist sensitive to popular interest, should have exploited it.”  True, these three stories exhibit, often wryly, a profound familiarity with mesmeric techniques and influences.  But more is going on in them than Lind lets on.  Indeed, Lind goes to great lengths to contextualize these stories within scientific (or other) discourses on mesmerism in Poe’s era, but he overemphasizes their “unity,” “theme,” and “intention” (always mimetic) instead of their singular dialogic contribution.  That is to say, Lind treats the stories as “echoes” or “reiterations” of other thinkers rather than as unique theses in their own right.  For Lind, the stories are indebted to other sources because they derive their vocabularies and methods from these sources.  I would suggest that Poe’s stories are in conversation with various dissertations on mesmerism rather than mere signs of cherry-picking or copying.  Although Poe’s modus operandi or preferred genre is fiction, his supposedly plagiarized passages lend substance to the notion that he might actually have been dissertating on mesmerism, animal magnetism, or hypnosis.  The luxury of storytelling is that the storyteller can dismiss unverifiable data as hoaxes or products of imagination; nevertheless, the storyteller can at least hope to hit on something real, novel, or scientific.  Two examples, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, writing well after Poe, conceived of technological advances—most notably space travel—long before such advances were practical.

Lind’s work, at any rate, is impressively researched, laying the foundation for future analyses of Poe and his infatuations with mesmerism.  But why does Lind downplay Poe’s role in developing pioneering work?  All arguments are indebted to previous arguments; indebtedness does not take away from the originality or force of their articulation or genre.

Unlike Lind, Matthew A. Taylor calls attention to the distinctiveness of Poe’s contributions to “mesmeric theory” (for want of a better phrase) and its progeny.  He locates Poe in contradistinction to Herbert Mayo:  “Unlike Mayo, […] Poe radically deviated from the utopian utilitarian, or benign notions of mesmerism at play in most contemporary discourses on the topic, picturing instead the unsettling implications for human ontology consequent upon the idea that persons are less sovereign entities than manipulatable effects of external powers.”  In short, Poe considered mesmerism a bad thing, or at least a dangerous thing that did not lead down a road to human improvement.  “Poe concluded,” Taylor opines, “that an all-encompassing cosmic energy inevitably troubles human-being by suspending the autonomy and interiority of individual humans; the disorientation of normal, corporeal functioning and the literal loss of self-possession attending mesmeric practice illustrated for Poe the fact that people are little more than occasions for the demonstration of an impersonal power.”  If Taylor is right, then Poe’s take on mesmerism is not only unique but also quite sophisticated; it demonstrates a full understanding of mesmeric theory while simultaneously rejecting that theory.  More to the point, if Taylor is right, then Poe’s take on mesmerism stands on its own and demands critical attention.  Unlike Lind, Taylor seems to acknowledge Poe’s special role in shaping mesmeric theory—or, more precisely, mesmeric counter-theory.  In fact, Taylor seems to think Poe’s ideas about mesmerism reflect an entire cosmology about human nature and the imperfectability of humankind.  This is a tall claim.  For present purposes, it shows that Poe might have been worried about more than entertaining readers with fanciful mind-candy.  He might have been positing a worldview that flew in the face of prevailing physics (that “perverse yet consistent calculus that unites everything in existence under a single, universal law that, by definition, eliminates all difference—including, of course, the human difference”).  Poe, the relativistic Renaissance man, might have been demonstrating his facility as both scientist and philosopher.  To further establish Poe’s uniqueness, I might add to Taylor’s observations the theological dimension of “Mesmeric Revelation,” which accounts for evangelical objections to mesmerism without plainly endorsing or rejecting them.

Besides the three stories that Lind interrogates, there are, Martin Willis claims, “many other tales that exemplify [Poe’s] abiding interest in the contestation between the science and the human, as well as his fascination with the borderlands of scientific achievement, both in terms of their advancement to new states of knowledge and their place within the scientific pantheon.”  Poe’s interest in scientific trends was not a passing one.  Willis points out that Poe spent years studying science in general before turning to mesmerism in particular.  Whether Poe “believed” in mesmerism is unclear.  It seems plausible that his stories about mesmerism were meant, in Willis’s words,  to “consider mesmeric debates in the realm of fiction rather than that of science.”  I would argue that Poe collapses any distinction between science and fiction by teasing out various theses—which, for all he knew, might one day be proven—through the medium of imaginary characters.  In doing so, Poe forges a distance between theories and their authors: if the theories turn out to be “true,” future generations will consider Poe a genius; if they turn out to be bogus, future generations will claim Poe was merely hoaxing.  Thus the dual-advantage of employing fiction to hash out scientific hypotheses.  Regardless of whether Poe is ultimately “right” about any of his dissertations, which he dresses up as fiction, he demonstrates an impressive breadth of knowledge that should not be ignored.

Not all scholars have ignored it.  Antoine Faivre takes pains to explain how Poe appropriated scientific knowledge and then inserted it into fictional narratives.  He suggests that many readers have mistaken or misread Poe’s tales as “factual, non-fictional case studies,” which in turn has led to a “flurry of reactions and debates.”  My point is not to argue that Poe treats his stories as factual case-studies but to suggest that he left open the case-study possibility.  In other words, Poe might have wanted readers to misread his tales as factual, or else to have some later scientist come along and verify the “truth” of his hypotheses, notwithstanding whether they were in fact his, or whether they were intended as reasoned argument at all.

Lind allows that Poe might not have been hoaxing readers in writing about mesmerism.  “Mesmerism as a theme for fiction,” he explains, “was, like metempsychosis and the exploration of the realm of the conscience, so well suited to Poe’s principles of literary composition that it was natural for him to work this new field, to attempt to achieve the sensational without deliberately attempting to mislead.”  More than simply avoiding misleading commentary, Poe might have been dissertating with the hopes that, one day, scientists would look on his fiction as a catalyst for new and innovative practices.  While not aspiring to complete verisimilitude, Poe’s stories about mesmerism are highly sophisticated tracts, informed by trendy scientific theories (and their counter-discourses), and very probably marked with the faint expectation that their subjects, though fictional, might somehow contribute to future systems of knowledge.

See the following for further reading:

Faivre, Antoine.  “Borrowings and Misreading:  Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Mesmeric’ Tales and the Strange Case of their Reception.”  Aries, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2007: 21-62).

Lind, Sidney E.  “Poe and Mesmerism.”  PMLA, Vol. 62, No. 4 (1947:  1077-1094).

Torrey, E. Fuller.  Freudian Fraud:  The Malignant Effect of Freud’s Theory on American Thought and Culture. Lucas Publishers, 1999.

Taylor, Matthew A.  “Edgar Allan Poe’s (Meta)physics:  A Pre-History of the Post Human.”  Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62, No. 2 (2007: 193-221).

Willis, Martin.  Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines:  Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent State University Press, 2006.

Losing their Religion, or The Ironic Reader of Judicial Religious Temperment 1

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How should our Supreme Court justices embrace their religious preferences? In another stunning blog post on CNN Stephen Prothero confronts the tendency to think that justices of the Supreme Court lose all personal touch with the world in which they have lived — a world that largely includes religious temperaments and experiences. (We have blogged about Stephen’s other posts here). Stephen writes:

If Supreme Court justices were impersonal computers, taking in laws and facts and spitting out impartial decisions, then we would not need religious diversity on the court. We wouldn’t need racial or gender or regional diversity either. Nine old white Catholic men would work just fine. Or for that matter nine young African-American Muslim women. But the world is what it is. And it is in the real world, not the world of should and supposed to, that the flawed and imperfect human beings we call justices operate.
So here is the question I would put to my critics: Are human beings creatures of objective thought, able to click their fingers and magically set aside their biases, passions and “self-love”? Or are we creatures of subjective passions whose interests should be subject to the sorts of checks and balances that Madison so vigorously defended and a diversity of experience offers?
Judges do make decisions based on experience. Holmes’s haiku laden phrase “The Life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” begs the question of whose experience (did not know that this quote maintained a 5-7-5 structure did ye?) If the experience of the law is the collected experience of us all, then perhaps the law should be agnostic towards the individual faith. But as we know, the law’s experience has excluded as much as its included, whether by race, wealth, gender, property or sexual orientation, the law’s experience has not been all of our experiences. Why then should we expect the experiences of the whole, to be excluded because we perceive that the whole has been adequately represented. After-all, should we treat our judges as potted plants? See i.e. Richard Posner, What am I? A Potted Plant?, The New Republic (1987).

These tendencies to down play the individual experience in favor of the collected experience is revealed perhaps most acutely in one’s religion. We can see that in the exchanges during oral arguments with Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, during the Salazar v. Buono hearing. (Salazar v Buono involved the maintenance of a cross in the Mojave National Preserve erected by the Veterans of Foreign Wars after World War I). Both of Scalia and Kennedy are devoutly catholic. At one point, when it was suggested that a Jewish star would more appropriately honor the Jewish soldiers that died in World War I, Scalia responded
“It’s [the cross is] erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. It’s the—the cross is the—is the most common symbol of—of—of the resting place of the dead, and it doesn’t seem to me—what would you have them erect? A cross—some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Moslem half moon and star?”

Later in the same oral argument, Justice Kennedy said:

Although certainly a Christian symbol, the cross was not emplaced on Sunrise Rock to promote a Christian message . . . Time also has played its role. The cross had stood on Sunrise rock for nearly seven decades before the statute was enacted. By then, the cross and the cause it commemorated had become entwined in the public consciousness . . . Congress ultimately designated the cross as a national memorial, ranking it among those monuments honoring the noble sacrifices that constitute our national heritage . . . a symbol that . . . has complex meaning beyond the expression of religious views . . . one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion.

I want to point out that both Scalia and Kennedy seem to neutralize their religious sentiments in favor of a secularized view of the cross. Let me say, they are right. The cross serves a secular function in our country, depicting our shared national myth of a Western Christian world. But here is the ultimate question. Who actually believes the justices when they down play their religion. Scalia, more so than Kennedy created substantial commentary largely because it was so shocking to hear him, of all justices, secularize a symbol of his own religion. These justices cause us to consider whether their words are to be read through the lens of an ironic reader. Just as we might question the double meaning of Billy Budd’s “farewell to the Rights of Man” upon being conscripted aboard an English vessel, we might also question the ironic tone of Scalia and Kennedy’s remarks. Scalia and Kennedy want us to believe that they can take off their religion like a coat and commence judging, saying “farewell ye vestments of faith.” Like Prothero, I seriously doubt that they can. Like Billy Budd, I am not sure we should read them literally even if they think that they have succeeded.

6 Catholics + 3 Jews = 9 Protestants 4

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Stephen Prothero, writes on CNN that the religious diversity of the current court may not be as diverse as it appears and may actually just be the same old protestant court that we have all grown to love.wpid-americanjesus.jpg

Prothero has written some interesting pieces. Religious Literacy is perhaps his best known work, but probably his best was American Jesus: How the Son of God became a National Icon. Here is a quote:

Historians like to believe that their work is exempt from the rough and tumble of contemporary concerns. But objectivity is a concern on both sides of the Christian America debate. Participants often oscillate between the descriptive and the normative, confusing what is (or was) with what ought to be. They also routinely conflate demographic, legal, and cultural questions forgetting that a country may be Christian in one respect and secular in another. Typically those that understand the United States as a multi religious country focus on the law and cheer on religious “outsiders,” while those who emphasize its Christian character focus on demography and cast their lot with the “insiders.” While for one group Christian dominance (either real or perceived) is the problem, for the other it is the solution.

What is interesting about Prothero’s observations in the CNN column is the conflation that has occurred across religious boundaries. We seem fairly comfortable that religion has become a historical fact more than a persuasion of interests. Of course we talk about Catholic opposition to Abortion every few years, but in large measure the religious preference of a judge maintains little value EXCEPT when the other pieces of the judges activities suggest that his religion is not the sort that we want serving on the court. The mixing and blurring of religious ideology has, in short created a pluralized democracy of religiosity in which to participate one must at least have a religion to be taken seriously, but then mitigate his religion into the beliefs of the whole.

Is this a good thing? Part of me says yes (I suppose the part that defers to the law and cheers on the outsiders) and part of me says no. Like Prothero I wonder, where are the Muslim judges? Where are Buddhist, Agnostic and Evangelicals.

Why Arizona’s Undocumented Person’s law will fail — Actual Empirical Evidence — Part II Reply

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Well, with our household resources being used up by additional persons that we did not count on, we knew something had to be done. We could have taken an approach that favored those that were already here. Just stop more from coming in. Instead, we decided the only solution was to purge the house of any manifestation of their presence. We went on a witch hunt burning books, destroying Dora Castles, breaking CDs. We even went so far as to completely outlaw the use of maps or spanish in the house. We would become francophonic (albeit difficult in Southern California).

Our initial decision was very popular amongst several groups. First the labor groups openly supported our decision. wpid-images.jpeg The leader of the labor party called this “a smurfingly positive step towards the establishment of equal opportunity. Other groups also saw new opportunity. For instance Toot and Puddle, two male companions that travel the world together, initially supported our decision, saying that equality should first be guaranteed for currently legal persons. Little Bill chimed in stating that this would certainly add to his popularity and therefore could not be bad.
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But not everyone was on board. One unintended consequence of our decision was that we alienated Handy Manny. Apparently, Handy Manny felt like our new decision to only extend access to non-annoying programing put him at risk of being alienated, even though he had never been annoying in the past. We were certainly at a dilemma. While Dora and her friends brought about certain characteristics that we did not care for, we did not anticipate losing out on Handy Manny. Also, very soon, Toot and Puddle and Little Bill both changed their minds about the new decision. They realized that we could very easily decide that we wanted to limit cartoons to only male and female pigs together, or even force certain cartoons in unattractive time slots at the end of the day. Losing their support made us reconsider.

But what really pushed us over the edge and back into reality was realizing who liked the law — namely the labor movement. At first, they were quite congenial. “We are just interested in smurfing work for those that are here legally.” But the more things moved along, the more belligerent they became. “They began to organize into militias, guarding the remote control, and even telling my daughter, “Don’t you Smurf with us! Don’t you even think about Smurfing with us.” I don’t even know that means I told her, but it sounded very obscene. Also, the Smurfs, did not really even bring value. We tried to build a tree house with them, but they insisted that we use their proprietary mushroom design and pay four times the cost of what it would have cost before.
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We finally realized that we messed up. We listened to the group that we should have ignored all along. I mean its not like they were not vested in seeing that our household tune away from Dora. We also realized that Dora and all her friends maybe created some inconveniences, but also brought about good things too. They made our children more diverse and open to a diverse world. And because of that, I am happy to say that Dora has been made welcome into our home again. And the costs, whatever they may be, are well worth it.

Why Arizona’s Undocumented Person’s law will fail — Actual Empirical Evidence — Part I Reply

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As everyone is well aware, Arizona recently passed a law making it illegal for undocumented immigrants to be present in the state. What you may not know is that similar experiments have taken place and failed. I have first hand experience with one of those experiments.

About three years ago, my wife and I decided to ban Dora the Explorer from our house. It was a particularly difficult decision. In fact, we were quite aware of the irony that we ourselves invited Dora into our house. Frankly, the decision made allot of sense to invite her over. In Dora, we got all of the benefits of a babysitter, at approximately 1/1016 of the market rate. (If we paid $12.00 per hour for a babysitter in thirty minute blocks for twice a day for thirty days, the financial decision makes complete sense — and yes, Dora did work for us seven days a week).

To be honest, we knew that Dora came with some complications. For instance, we had to decide whether Dora would have her own television to broadcast from or whether she would have to share the community television at the times that were available. We elected the later, though we recognized that it would have been more fair for Dora to have her own access to a unique broadcast opportunity.

We also knew that Dora would come with friends. We were willing to accept that Dora’s friends Map, Boots, Tico, Benny, Swiper, and Izza. Frankly, we did not mind too much. Dora’s friends often provided added value without additional expenditure of resources. wpid-images3.jpeg

But what sent us down the road towards expelling Dora from the house was that Dora began co-opting additional resources. Not only was there the Television program once, but twice, and then three times. There were the videos. There were the books. And then there was the dora Castles, blanket, and ugly pajamas that she wanted to wear everywhere. We could not get away from Dora!

Then more started coming around. Dora’s cousin Diego began hanging around. After observing Diego we became convinced that he was involved in the illicit drug trade — I mean what nine year old has a submarine.wpid-1____images3.jpeg

We were also certain that the baby Jaguar that he kept was being trained for pit bull fighting at a later date. Investing resources in Dora was one thing. But investing in Diego — a certain drug pusher and pit bull orchestrator — could not be tolerated. And it did not stop with Diego.

Soon this new gang, which we heard came from the same places that Diego and Dora came from (the Republic of Nickelodeon) started hanging around. This gang, called the Backyardigans are a bunch of idle ne’re do wells that we believed were affiliated with the infamous M-16 gang. For instance, they are always, always, hinting that they want more food. (Always talking about getting a snack).

Their ringleader Pablo seems to be insistent that wearing a bowtie makes him respectable.

The problem is that non-white people wearing bow-ties and leading gangs leads to violence every time. Really, it makes the whole wearing bow-ties business look seedy. Just think for a moment — when have white people wearing bow ties caused the types of crises that non-white people have caused?




Well obviously what started with an innocent attempt to save money created an irrepressible circumstance. Something had to be done

Random Thoughts while Driving Through Arizona and New Mexico Reply

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  1. Interstate 40 in Arizona is better than Interstate 40 in California.
  2. Northern Arizona is greener than I would have thought. However, its not as pretty as New Mexico.
  3. DON’T SPEED THROUGH THE NAVAJO NATION. Spotted twelve (yes 12) cops lined up ready to catch speeders.
  4. Finding a hotel in Albuquerque that takes dogs is difficult. I still can’t believe the Residence Inn wants to charge $100 non-refundable pet deposit.
  5. New Mexico does not know how to move traffic through construction. One hour to move five miles!
  6. At what point during a twelve hour drive do you defer to Christmas music to stay awake — apparently at the 10:30 mark. We’ll see if that changes since there will be another twelve hour day.
  7. I started the day listening to the Brothers Karamazov. Heard a line that I did not recall reading — Habitual Liberal Irony. I’ll have to think about that one — perhaps a post later.

Ok — That’s all for my random thoughts.

Islam & Poetry: Addendum 1

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In the final introductory post on Islam and Poetry (Part 3), I wrote in response to several lines from Sanā’ī’s Hadiqa al-haqīqa (Enclosed Garden of the Truth) that what Sanā’ī “lack[ed] in aesthetic unity [he] makes up for in rather proud religious purpose.” My original and somewhat sarcastic response to the quoted passage is akin to the manner in which others have reacted to the following final verses from Farīd al-Din ‘Attar’s celebrated mystical epic, the Mantiq al-tayr  (The Conference of the Birds):

This book is the adornment of time, offering a portion to both elite and common.

If a frozen piece of ice saw this book, it would happily emerge from the veil like the sun.

My poetry has a marvelous property, since it gives more results every time.

If it’s easy for you to read a lot, it will certainly be sweeter for you every time.

This veiled bride in a teasing mood only gradually lets the veil fall open.

Till the resurrection, no one as selfless as I will ever write verse with pen on paper.

I am casting forth pearls from the ocean of reality. My words are finished and this is the sign.

If I praise myself a lot, how can that praise please anyone else?

But the expert himself knows my value, because the light of my moon is not hidden.

These lines are in fact missing from the well-known English translation of the epic poem by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (1984). In the Introduction, Davis notes that they have translated the entire poem “with the exception of the invocation and the epilogue. The invocation, a traditional prelude to long narrative poems in Persian, consists of praise of God, of the Prophet [Muhammad] and of the founders of Islam. [….] The epilogue, again a traditional feature of such poems, consists largely of self-praise and is a distinct anticlimax after a poem devoted to the notion of passing beyond the Self.” One wonders if that is sufficient justification for omitting the end of the poem (and the invocation for that matter!).

In his essay, “On Losing One’s Head: Hallājian Motifs and Authorial Identity in Poems Ascribed to ‘Attār,”* Carl Ernst well captures the puzzlement that inevitably follows reflection on such lines from renowned Sufi poets like Sanā’ī and ‘Attār. Discussing the aforementioned epilogue from the Mantiq al-tayr, Ernst writes that

“This passage is remarkable for the boast it contains in which ‘Attār claims that no one has ever annihilated his ego as successfully as he. Conjoined as it is with a bold advertisement of the quality of ‘Attār’s literary works, this paradoxical boast of ego-annihilation raises a difficult question regarding the nature of authorship of Sufi writings. If the goal of the Sufi is the annihilation of the self, what sort of self may be ascribed to the authors of the central writings of Sufism? As ‘Attār himself remarked in comparing Hallāj’s utterances with Moses’ encounter with the burning bush on Sinai, it was not the bush that spoke, but God. ‘Attār’s declaration is a specimen of the rhetoric of sainthood which permitted the spiritual elite to engage in a boasting contest (mufākhara) to demonstrate the extent of God’s favours to them.”

Familiarity with this “boasting” rhetoric of sainthood should temper if not eliminate the reaction I had to the lines from Sanā’ī’s Hadiqa al-haqīqa as well as help one appreciate why the omission of the epilogue from the Mantiq al-tayr might be troubling. With Ernst, we need to consider the extent to which the Sufi tradition incorporated the pre-Islamic Arabic tradition of mufākhara into “its earliest dialogical pronouncements,” a fact “explicitly recognized in early Sufi manuals of conduct,” and thus “what is distinctive about the Sufi rhetoric of sainthood is that unabashed boasting is permitted and even encouraged as a means of indicating one’s direct contact with God” (From Ernst’s Ruzbihan Baqli: Mysticism and the Rhetoric of Sainthood in Persian Sufism, 1996: 45 and 146 respectively). Thus what at first glance appears as grandiose self-praise, the very antithesis of selflessness, turns out to be a refrain from the traditional rhetoric of sainthood, one in which it could be said that we witness “the flickering of the authorial ego in the storm of divinity.”

Finally, yet another perspective is provided by the following lines from ‘Attār’s Mantiq al-tayr, reminiscent of the disparaging comments Rūmī came to write about his own poetry:

With his dying breath that sage of faith [Sanā’ī] said,

‘If only I knew long before this

How more honorable is listening to speaking,

When would I have wasted my life with words?’

If words were as fine as gold,

Still, they would be inferior to unuttered words!

Doing it is the lot of true men!

Alas, my fate was just talking about it.

Such sentiment, held in common by both the “practical” man and the true mystic, arguably contains an implicit critique of the limitations of reason, in particular of the, in the end, spiritual constraints of both theology and philosophy (especially a rationalist metaphysics), when viewed in the supernal light of Divine silence. Put differently, words, or reason, can only “point” or indirectly refer to that kind of mystical experience which has, I think, been properly characterized as a “pure consciousness event”  (i.e., consciousness without an object), involving a non- or para-cognitive form of “knowing” or awareness said to encompass one’s entire being and thus beyond the realm of subject-object duality.

*In Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle, eds., Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight (London: I.B. Tauris in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2006: 330-343). This essay is also found online here.

The (original) image is here.

For an illuminating analysis of Habīballāh’s painting (the image above) as a “complete visual rendition of ‘Attār’s entire cosmology,” please see Michael Barry’s essay, “Illustrating ‘Attār: A Pictorial Meditation by Master Habīballāh of Mashhad in the Tradition of Master Bihzād of Herat,” in Lewisohn and Shackle, eds., pp. 135-164.

Brief biographies of both Sanā’ī and ‘Attār (the former penned by yours truly) can be found in Oliver Leaman, ed., The Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy, 2 Vols. (A-I and J-Z) (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2006).

Happy May Day! 1

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The Chimney Sweeper (from SONGS OF INNOCENCE, 1789)

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl’d llke a lamb’s back. was shav’d: so I said
”Hush. Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”

And so he was quiet & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight,
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned or Jack.
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black.

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open’d the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river. And shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father & never want joy.

 

The Chimney Sweeper (from SONGS OF EXPERIENCE, 1794)

A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? Say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

─William Blake

For more on May Day, please see here.