To What Are We Accountable?

In my PREVIOUS POST, drawn for a journal entry written shortly after Reagan's defeat of Carter, I asked... to what are we accountable?
A conversation with Iago, Judge Holden, Edmund, King Lear and Zipporah (wife of Moses)
Almost 20 years later, I ask: accountable to what? If I were to say, "to ourselves." it would be too pat. Beg more questions than it would answer. Accountable—but not the accountability of a ledger. Nor to any measure outside it, but to the encounter itself, and only that: an action which is an event, a meeting prior to any normative judgment, prior to good or evil.
Think of the great villains of literature, of Iago, Edmund, Judge Holden—of what makes them so terrifying: the ascendancy of a power that arises out of the relative fullness of their engagement with what confronts them as compared to those lesser figures who they reduce to ciphers in their game.
Think of Lear, the one character who might have matched and more than match Edmund, who begins the play by retreating from the world, an act of abdication of his sovereignty as King and person, and so prepares the ground for Edmund, and under him, Goneril and Regan-- to fill the void he leaves. It isn’t that Lear might have represented Good to Edmund’s Evil, and so checked him. In his banishment of Cordelia and Kent, he is at this early stage, by far the greater monster, and by reports we learn he has always been more noted for strength of body and will than for his virtue. It is his abdication of sovereignty over that aspect of the world whose governance was dependent on the full engagement of his royal person that opens the way, and the first consequence is his own ungovernable rage, setting in motion events which, for a time, only Edmund proves himself able to meet with a fullness of being proportionate to the moment. We are accountable… for our response, in all fullness, without reserve, without withholding of ourselves… not to anything, but to be, to become; prior to good and evil—we become capable, in and through our encounters with what meets us: creators of good and evil.
I think of that uncanny figure (the invention of the author of that scene in D’varim) who—after instructing Moses to return to Egypt, inexplicably attacks him in the night, seeking to kill him. He is only saved from death by his wife, Zipporah, who circumcises him and flings the bloody foreskin at the assailant. An encounter prior to good and evil. We are not, first—human agents meeting the world. We become human, in and through engaging that which meets us, in the encounter.  By ignoring, by turning away—even from the momentary wonder of sunlight on a drop of rain on a blossoming forsythia, we surrender our humanity. Adorno's question? ... no...I answer no... giving ourselves freely to the beauty of the world—fashioning our response in works of art—will not make us good. But in withholding ourselves, our humanity is diminished and we sink beneath even the possibility of either good or evil.

Some Thoughts on the Aesthetics of Process, Realism and Representation

I'm the most unsystematic of thinkers. A pathetic failure as a philosopher, I would never be able to develop a coherent critical, aesthetic theory. I like to think the way I write poetry and fiction, the way I would make a painting: by association.
Mix and match.
A collage of shapes and colors.
Interrupt the static horizontal line with the descending arc of the dancer's arm--a hint of orange in the upper right to compliment the dominant blue-green of water and forest.
And yet I find that my thinking, such as it is, does evolve, does develop, though not into anything organized. Never into something with a beginning, middle and end. My ideas always in tatters, scattered fragments and pieces--but the fragments aren't what matters, or rather, what does matter--is the very state of their fragmentation; that whatever it is that makes them seem to (temorarily) cohere, to fall into and out of shifting patterns--like pieces of colored glass in a kalaidascope, remains outside what I'm able to secure in language.
The space between the words.


A while ago I wrote a review of an Alice Munro short story HERE:

Misquoting Camus... one fragment

Artistic creation demands of the writer
that he/she reject reality
for what it lacks
and for what it sometimes is.

In a recent post, another...

Literature and art are borne of the stuborn and always failed effort to image forth what cannot be seen, to forge into words what cannot be said or thought, to bring to our ears what has never before been heard.
It follows then, that critical writing worth the time to read, will be devoted, always, to exploring a numinous failure. 

Not a failure to achieve something that exists out there, in some mystical or transcendent reality. A  creative failure,  a lack, the not yet: the aesthetic quality of a work that emerges from its generative power, from that which created it, as the first word on a page (or musical note or brush stroke or step of the dance) generates the next--each new word at once, setting limits, and opening into newly infinite multiplicity. The generative process doesn't end with the last word or the final brush stroke--but is continued, awakened from silence and invisibility through the engagement of viewer and reader. A becoming that is never finished, never complete. Not creatio ex nilo, a becoming from nothing, but from the something of the work, as the work is a continuation through the artist, a becoming from the something of world through the artist's dialog with reality... keeping mind that each word, each brush stroke, every cultural idea and convention called upon or suggested, is part of, not seperate or other, no less real...

 ...nature is made better by no mean
but nature makes that mean. So over that art
Which you say adds to nature is an art
That nature makes [...]
...this is an art
Which does mend nature--change it rather, but
the art itself is nature.

Winter's Tale. 4.4

Art (of Politics ?) and Nature's Art

Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So over that art
Which you say adds to nature is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature--change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

From The Winter's Tale:4:4

Is that not precisely (and how precise, as always, Shakespeare's words!) what we seek to do in changing that of nature's power within to a gentler scion.

First in line to vote. Maybe 25 people in line when I stepped out of the booth. Work to get people out to vote now, a break for classes in the afternoon, back to GOTV till the polls close at eight.

Homer Simpson... IS Oedipus Rex!!!! (Late Sunday Salon)

I have long believed that the only possible way to take Titus Andronicus seriously, would be to treat it as high farce. For that matter, I think an Anime animation of Paradise Lost would be a great improvement... Picture it! Those angelic beings heaving mountains at one another... the likely content of GWBush's dream life... if only he knew enough to enough to laugh.

But now we have
Fadi Abou-Rihan of The Psychoanalytic Field, asking the question: "Was the classical Athenian theatregoer any more resistant to the temptations of laughter and hooting than the modern day viewer of television talk shows and situation comedies?"

Look out for the noble and upright king who, because of his pierced ankles, has to hobble his way across the stage. Make sure not to miss our hero’s hyperboles for everything about his words and deeds is in line with the basic structure of humour as exaggerated non-sense. Note the sympathy you feel for him as he heaps his misdeeds and confusions one upon the other, à la Lucy Ricardo, desperate for the clear-minded and practical interventions of a Creon, his Ricky. (Might there be a psychoanalytic import to the implicit homosocial contract between king and brother-in-law here?) Keep track of our hero’s familial lines as they progressively blur beyond recognition: his children are his siblings; his brother-in-law is his uncle; his daughter will soon plan to marry the man who is both his nephew and cousin; many of Jerry Springer’s most outlandish of scenarios could only dream of such twists and complications. Last but not least, do not overlook Jocasta, Antigone, and Euridyce’s final suicidal gestures, sacrificial and redemptive only from the point of view of a modernity that has been thoroughly Christianized; to their original, almost exclusively male, audiences, they remained pitiable and laughable.

This is from the second of three (so far) on his Oedipus Rex series... what an extraordinarily liberating reading!

By all means, do pay this site a visit! HERE for the first and top post:

HERE for the most recent to date.

Translation, Teaching, Reading--passive and engaged

I've been struggling with the problem of how to relieve my students of the habit of passive reading. Keep in mind--I'm teaching college freshman, almost all of them business majors in one form or another. Few of them read for pleasure. They're extra-curricular scholastic experience did not include theater. When they read aloud, they do so self-consciously, without expression. In their mouths, Lear's "Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i'the cage..." comes out no different than were they reading instructions from a computer manual. The words as they read them have no burrs, no points or hooks, no Velcroed edges to catch a thought, a heartbeat or a tear as they pass through. The problem is getting them to slow down, and most importantly, when they read on their own--getting them to recognize when they don't get it, to understand when lines pass through with no effect, as little more than white noise, that it isn't supposed to be that way. No matter how apparently successful the sessions of close reading in class, they invariably revert to form. What to do?

I've heard others tell me they had some success having students write paraphrases, an idea I don't find at all to my liking, but Friday morning I was in a quandary trying to come up with a plan for my afternoon class. We'd done some close reading with Lear, and as usual, it wasn't making any lasting impression. In desperation, I was almost ready to work up an exercise in paraphrase, and then I stopped... how does paraphrase differ from translation, I asked myself? What if I asked them, not to paraphrase, but to translate from Elizabethan to contemporary English? Unlike paraphrase, they would not be able to generalize. What was concrete in the original would have to be concrete in the translation. When Lear compares his situation to a man fleeing a bear and faced with a roaring sea, there would have to be a bear and a roaring sea in the translation.


You don't delete the bear by turning it into a symbol, or worse... a generalized explanation. They would not be able to say or write, as they are wont to do: "He seems, like, you know... there's two different kinds of danger?" This is not a translation of

...Thou'dst shun a bear,
But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea
Thou'dst meet the bear i'th' mouth.

In a paraphrase, you need pay no attention to levels of diction. In paraphrase, the elevated speech of a nobleman and the crude patois of peasant can be rendered in the same style. Not so translation. In translation you would want to find a way to represent the difference. Not describe it--represent it, show it. To translate, you have to pay attention to detail, and hasn't that always been the most difficult idea to get across?

Testing this out, I sat down and began to translate from Act 3. Wow, I thought... this is not easy! But everything that made it difficult pointed precisely to what I hoped they might learn in the process, learn from the trying--that what they had thought of before as reading was but a pale semblance of what happens when you are engaged with the text. I imagined, filled with hope at the possibility--my students suddenly looking up--after struggling with a few lines, overwhelmed with the revelation that up to that point, they hadn't been reading at all! ... one does not teach freshman if one is not given to such fantasies. And who knows... this one just might work!

------

My intention when I started this post was to introduce a piece I stumbled on surfing for articles on translation: Eliot Weinberger's long and thoughtful essay in Issue One of Fascicle.

ANONYMOUS SOURCES: A TALK ON TRANSLATORS & TRANSLATION

Here, from the final paragraphs and postscript. Worth printing out the whole and keeping on file.

... In July of 1991, the Italian translator of The Satanic Verses, Ettore Caprioli, was stabbed in his apartment in Milan, but survived. Days later, the Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, an Islamic scholar, was stabbed to death in his office at Tsukuba University in Tokyo.


As far as I know, Rushdie has never made any extended comment on Hitoshi Igarashi. It would take another kind of novelist– Dostoyevsky perhaps– to untangle the psychological, moral, and spiritual meanings and effects of the story of these two: the man who became the most famous writer in the world at the price of what seemed until recently to be life imprisonment, and the anonymous man who died for a faithful translation of an old mistranslation, paying for the writer's mistake.


Translation is the most anonymous of professions, yet people die for it. It is an obvious necessity that is considered a problem. (There are never conferences on the "pleasures of translation.") Yet it is a problem that only arises in the interstices when one is not casually referring to some translated bit of literature: the Bible, Homer, Kafka, Proust. . . Could it possibly be that translation essentially has no problems at all? That it only has successes and failures? There is no text that cannot be translated; there are only texts that have not yet found their translators. A translation is not inferior to the original; it is only inferior to other translations, written or not yet written. There is no definitive translation because a translation always appears in the context of its contemporary literature, and the realm of the possible in any contemporary literature is in constant flux– often, it should be emphasized, altered by the translations that have entered into it. Everything worth translating should be translated as many times as possible, even by the same translator, for you can never step into the same original twice. Poetry is that which is worth translating, and translation is what keeps literature alive. Translation is change and motion; literature dies when it stays the same, when it has no place to go.

A humanly habitable World, Thoughts for Sunday Salon

Religious traditions have preserved, even while subverting it with their reactionary defensive attacks against critiques that would force them to give up all their objective claims, a subversive aesthetic claim--without which we have no world to live in, no world that will support our human needs--those needs we make out of nature, an artifice to support a communal life that is more than hunting, gathering and reproducing.

What we value as essentially human, as opposed to the life of other animals--are all the variety of ways we are able to act and create that no longer serve those basic, animal needs. We don't need cities, sailboats, architecture or archeology, Super bowl games, symphonies, stock markets, poems, gardens, astronomy or astrophysics, bicycles, formula one race cars, movie stars, waltzes or rock n' roll... or stories about ourselves... all that goes into making the aesthetics of the human, and which we threaten by our over valuation of technology, by a too narrow rationalism--a rationalism not willing to take seriously the special needs we acquire as part and consequence of our partial freedom from the domain of nature (hunting gathering reproducing)--even while remaining simply another species in nature's kingdom.

Shakespeare plays beautifully with this in the garden scene of Richard II, and in the discussion on grafting in the Winter's Tale: the opposition, in his terms, between nature and "art," (that is, art as artifice, craft, skill).

Where in grafting, you take "A gentle scion to the wildest stock, and make conceive a bark of baser kind ... The art itself is nature."

But we practice nature's art as nothing else in nature does, and makes us a question to ourselves, as nothing else in nature is.

A dog, a squirrel, a whale, a tiny patient spider, don't ask, what does it mean to be a dog, a whale, a spider? But who can say what it is to be human? We are both an animal among animals, a species in nature, and something self-created. Something so strange, that we had to invent gods to project outside ourselves what we have done, to deny the responsibility, deny coming to terms with what that means.

Religion attempts to address these questions, and fails by refusing to accept authorship of what it, and we, have invented. By accepting responsibility--that we made up this character we call God--we assimilate religion into the purely human aesthetic, where it becomes, as it was for Blake, a profound well of metaphorical self-reflection, a poetry of the human soul.

The wind is blowing across the plains, the tall grass undulates like the
fur of a great beast dreaming of prey. We wake, the warmth of sleep
abandons us to the chill light of morning, the strength of yesterday’s meal evaporates in
the autumn air. Will today's hunt bring success? Will we make it to the
sheltering caves in the distant hills before the first winter storm? Will
it always be so? The excitement of the hunt, the elation of the fresh
kill, of skins heavy with gathered seeds, the days of sleep in the sun,
the pleasures of the flesh under the beneficent moon... will it always be
so? Will summer always give way to autumn and autumn to cruel winter, to
days when the spoor is cold--when even the dogs catch no scent of eland
or antelope on the glacial wind?
Will we always find ourselves like this, the bones gnawed clean around the
fire, the marrow sucked, our furs too worn to keep us warm?
But look! The mountains are not so far. Surely there are herds--in the
valley over the next hill-- complacent and fearless and without
number. Observe the dogs, there is much they
can teach us--how hunger only makes them the more joyful for the hunt!

Come--we
are not alone... I have felt the warmth of your hand and only last
night I dreamt of such things as the earth has never seen. I believe the
wind spirit, who dissolves all things and returns them to invisibility,
found favor in us as we slept. I see her light shining on your face, and
my own light reflected in your eyes. With such a blessing, we will never
be lost in this great world no matter how far we wander.

No Risk, No Gain: Blakean Mental War

I expanded on some comments to Steve Tills... thought them worth foregrounding as a post.


Original post and comments HERE

Should" is one of those words, isn't it?

It's all about where the "should" is coming from... and that voice can be elusive.

I think of a production of Hamlet by the Arden Theater Company here in Philly when they were still in the tiny theater-in-the-semi-round behind St. Stephen's. The ghost scene. The stage was simply a platform raised about two feet above floor level. The theater went dark. Hamlet alone in a soft spot on stage. Every line from the ghost came from a different side of the platform--as the actor playing the ghost circled around. Hamlet would turn toward the voice, only to hear it come from behind--even the voice sounded different (was there more than one actor?)

It was very effective. Chilling.

Like figuring out where the "should" is coming from.

Which is exactly what's going on in that scene, come to think of it!

I'm happy you're finding my blog of interest... twenty years ago, when I discovered the old BBS connections--pre-internet as we have it now, I naively believed it would be possible to find the kind of creative community we imagine when we think of... say, Poets of the New York School and the action painters in NY in the 40's, or Paris in the 20's, or...

Foolish dream.

But in these past few months I've begun to see at least part of that might be possible--since I set up JRBD. Blogs almost do it.

The discussion forums (Salon, Readerville, The Atlantic) failed because they depended too much on commonality of interest--that is, on common subjects. It was never merely an interest in art or poetry that defined (wrong word...defined) those moments, nor shared vision--but rather each of those involved seeing something before them that didn't yet exist, something different for each... an intrusion of the indefinable Real--what was shared, was what no one of them possessed, what could not be possessed, but only courted, each in his own way.

I see in the way we find and add links something more selective. I'm aware of doing that myself. While I want to be open, inclusive--I don't want to be so inclusive that the pattern of what I favor is obscured. I have something in mind... or just beyond what I'm able to hold in mind. I can't put a label on it. "Experimental" invites as many misses as "Mainstream." And some of what makes it into the mainstream is exactly what I'm looking for. I've chosen the majority of the blogs I've linked because, together, they seem to point in directions that feel promising... fellow seekers, if you will, but seekers who know damn well what they're looking for even if they won't be able to name or describe it till they find it.

Mayhew
is almost a caricature of the type! And I don't mean that negatively. It's that dissonant combination of openness and rigor--holding the tension!. Yes--that's what it's all about--holding the tension. He's amazing--such sharply formulated opinions and yet... he doesn't know what he's going to like till he sees it! So that what he likes, you can trust comes, not from abstractions imposed on what he reads, but from what he discovers from his reading, in the reading. To me, that frees me to both listen deeply to his opinions, and at the same time, never feel obliged to be beholden to them--or to believe he would respect anyone who did.

We cannot be genuinely open if we don't lay our beliefs on the table--stake our intellectual lives on the line. Blakean Mental warfare. But oh, the triumph is not in winning--but in discovering a whole new beginning! To have everything you ever thought or believed overthrown. Never happens to those who have nothing at stake, nothing to lose.

No risk, no gain.