Between His World and Mine

What struck me most while (finally) reading Ta-Nahesi Coates's personal essay was his emphasis on the body. Racism and slavery was about control of the body. In my hoped-for book/doctoral project, I am also focused on the body as the true locus of human rights, but as one of the mythically "white" people reading the book I became aware that I do not really know this in my body. My only similar experience around this feeling of threat to the body has been as a woman; it arises in situations where you feel inescapably categorized and, in some contexts, utterly invalidated.

Security of the body has been the issue for black people and also for women, but for the former it has been more profound and arbitrary. When he saw his young son nudged off an escalator by a white woman stranger, Coates's anger, justified, arose because of a physical act, an assault on the child's body. Migrants on the border or on Manus Island near Australia suffer in camps that are prisons. Habeas corpus; a power has their bodies and controls their freedom of movement.

Transcending the body happened for Coates at Howard, in a university where he felt safe enough  to learn about and challenge our flawed human situation. But transcendence is not disembodiment. As a librarian, I love that his body ended up in the library, where he claims to have felt in the best place for his style of learning. Rather than hear a lecture, he could just explore and devour the knowledge. The building and the books were protected physically, and maybe that helped strengthen his sense of a secure body as well as his body of knowledge. I am exploring how a book, a codex, a text, is like a human body: complex, related to and sharing other textual bodies, and strong even if not premanent.

Bodies die; books burn; libraries crumble; digital objects disappear. However, some part of the knowledge survives into another person or text. We can imprint each other. Perhaps that reaching out to press the inked stamp on a newer or broader group of our fellow humans lessens the gap, however slightly, between the world and us.

Barnett Newman, Stations of the Cross, and the Grace of Conditions

The east gallery of the National Gallery of Art has reopened after a renovation that serves to highlight some of the most highly-regarded pieces in the modern collection; great news but there is a catch: many of these pieces are works of Abstract Expressionists, and this is not everyone's idea of art. What can a large canvas of paint with swishes or bars of color tell us about real life? Displays of Barnett Newman's and Mark Rothko's works inhabit the top of the renovated Tower, and in the case of Newman, Stations of the Cross: Lema sabachthani is a full- room installation of fourteen paintings; these are fourteen stations of the cross in the catholic Christian tradition. Newman added a fifteenth, Be II.  Thanks to works like the sensitive, figural woodblock depictions of the Stations along the walls of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, many Christians beyond Roman Catholics are familiar with the scenes of the Via Dolorosa, a devotional imagination of Jesus' last walk and one of the ways we are told he was tortured- a long walk struggling to drag a cross on which he would be nailed. This seems like a subject for art at its most concrete, dramatic, and potentially horrifying.

Barnett Newman (1905-1970) was an American Jewish artist, born in New York City; his career is art was slow to take off but eventually made him a prominent member of the New York school of painting that moved away from representational art, albeit in a conscious and careful manner. His Jewish identity and this subject matter seem improbable, but perhaps a bit less so if one remembers that those few Jewish painters worked within a visual tradition that was not favored by their own faith and dominated by recurring themes in religious art that were pillars of Christian belief. Indeed, the art of glass and painting in the cathedrals of the European middle ages had served as illustrated Bibles for the faithful for hundreds of years. Marc Chagall's life as a Jewish visual artist and the fictional hero of Chaim Potok's novel My Name is Asher Lev illustrate the challenge. What's a nice Jewish boy like you doing by creating some version of  late Christian devotional art?

I am a fan of abstract expressionism and I loved the sweep of canvasses I encountered, and so I became immediately curious about them and asked this question myself. This prompted me to learn more about Newman, his reasons for undertaking this project, and also to explore my own attraction to the paintings.

***
These painting are severe human-sized paintings with rigid bars along one or the other side and/or a stripe that is more like a vertical flash of color or the bursts of light on the screen of an oscilloscope. This is the famous "zip" that Newman describes when he talks about his own work. It expresses an energy that fascinates. As one progresses through the fourteen paintings, a pattern seems to emerge. The early ones have a sober bar of black. Gradually the black on the left grows wide and then thinner. On the other side is a black or gray bar stripe. As we move along there seems to be a dialog and for me the left became fear and the right, always a bit lighter in most of the paintings, seemed to me to be Jesus' commitment to the sacrifice and the hope for life it would bring. Acceptance grows as white planes of paint dominate, and yet black takes over much of one of the stations. Newman wanted simply to focus on "Why has God forsaken me?" as a basic question of meaning. [get exact quotation].
In the end, white light, acceptance, stillness prevails. When it is over it is translucent but still. The light of hope moves across the entire field. At the end of the fourteen Newman decided to place a fifteenth canvas, a departure from the number of stations that the traditional visual narrative would include. This canvas, Be II, has the only orange stripe at the left against a field of white. This would seem to be a new color of life and perhaps a tribute to the acceptance of suffering and of hope as the texture of being.

Narcissism, the Woman's Turn

Upon re-reading William Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair for this month's book club reading, I was fascinated again with the personality of the amoral hustler, even at a time and in a world where a poor woman of low parentage was rejected initially just for her lack of social standing.

Of course the brilliant and witty Becky Sharp takes her life in her hands, but for all her courage and striving loses the sympathy her situation initially evokes. Cruel and impetuous, she really mocks a kindly woman at her ladies' academy with no intent other than to prove herself superior and then launches a life of extraordinary focus on keeping one step ahead of the creditors and at all cost avoiding introspection. Her hubris might have completely defeated her but she keeps turning up after living and NOT learning.

Unable to bond, unable really to love even her children, she is an early example of a personality disorder. One marvels at the weird modernity in the depiction of her pathological lying and con artistry.  She gathers circles of friends she impresses (until they learn of her past), men she collects for their usefulness, and then finally tops it off with some war profiteering during the Napoleonic wars.

A great scene involves a troop of friends going out to "watch" a battle of the war as if it were a sports game- and the terror with which they flee as they realize they may be killed.

This literary tradition is in line with Madame Bovary and in another very different way, Anna Karenina. There's a touch of Scarlett O'Hara here. too. The tragedy of the actress, the social mask, as the only alternative to a kind of social oblivion for women makes it tempting for the modern reader to overlook the selfishness and exploitation of Becky Sharp. However, reading this at a time of political chaos in America makes it very clear that to overlook or excuse truly destructive personalities, and to tolerate their whims, just leads to a wilderness without real heroes or heroines and skepticism about whether freedom without a deep sense of caring and responsibility has to be the only way out for the oppressed.

Thackeray urges us to hope not, and to see manipulative, cruel people for who they are and not what we might want or need them to be.

Interfaith Dialogue at its best

This weekend, Episcopal Church of the Redeemer reciprocated the great hospitality of the Islamic Community Center of Potomac MD by hosting another interfaith meeting. Just as they did at their center, this Islamic congregation created an electric atmosphere of love and understanding. Their Imam, Br. Tarif Shraim, explained Sufism and the Sunni/Shiite divide with great clarity during one of many side conversations over food and fellowship after the formal meeting. Women partner in the governance of the center and our clergy were presented with a new translation of the Quran. Since my blog theme continues to be about texts and the codex, we learned more detail that had frankly eluded me when I prepared for presentations on religious law and the schools of Islamic law, about which I still know very little. However, the notion of People of the Book was clarified. The Jewish Torah/Christian Old Testament is not one of their books per se even though the prophets and Jesus are all accepted as sources of the divine. The closest tie regarding texts are that versions of Abraham's binding of his son for sacrifice and the Joseph story both appear in the Quran.

Mary, Jesus, and the Virgin Birth are in the Quran and she is the most frequently-mentioned woman, but Jesus is of course not divine in their system of beliefs. How many are willing to learn and understand the faith of others? Our Islamic guests were curious about the Trinity, and they had heard quite a bit about it! Our western knowledge of the Five Pillars of Islam is perhaps much less, and the Trinity is, let's face it, not something that is understood well within Christianity (and again, explanations and versions about outside of the Nicene tradition).

We look forward to more such meetings. Both congregations are seekers, not fundamentalists. And seekers are needed to counteract a sad reappearance of ignorance, demagoguery, and hatred.

How Should We Plan for the Library of the Future? Try Not To.

Colleagues, please do not plan for the future library. Instead, realize that it is planning OUR future, that of human culture. It will grow organically, as did the current library: a library with a brick and mortar manifestation and an emergent property of information, just as each of us has in addition to our bodies. The library will grow and integrate its manifestations, using the tools of memory and communication available. The texts, images, scrolls, codices, internet pages, databases and networks will continue to emerge, seem chaotic and scattered at first, and then our ordered intelligence will organize it.

For each human inquiry, the more we understand about a field of knowledge, the easier it will be to organize. This has all happened before. Justinian's Code was produced with less understanding of how to outline, or mark legal principles and procedures. Little thought and less technique was devoted to how to retrieve it all. Later, more ordered strategies and tools emerged in the Napoleonic Code and, for common law systems, the West Key Number Digest, edited citators, and so on.

Perhaps I am too optimistic, but human minds, with a consciousness that may or may not be an emergent property of our neurological system and the farthest point in our biological evolution, seem to resist entropy in the collective. Only individual brains deteriorate; it seems that collective knowledge persists even if pared down by tragedies such as wars and their cultural destructiveness.

Both of these statements, the first being the famous original assertion by Daniel Dennett and the second my inversion of it, seem to have the potential to be true:

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.

A library is just a scholar's way of making another scholar.

                                     

..And Ladies of the Club (but no houseboat dwellers, please)

This past winter I did something I always said I would never do- I joined a book club. I already knew about a third of the members, and altogether this is a most insightful and engaged group of intelligent readers who are accomplished women, each in her own right. There is at least one writer in the mix as well. These are my notes on our first few selections as well as my experience of the club, which I've shared with them because, when we read each book, of course we discuss and rate it. In fact, we rate it twice on our 1-10 scale (once before and once after discussion) and keep the history of those numbers. I'll catch upon our readings in this one long post and then blog books separately in the future.

First we read two light comedies, the second a sequel to the first, by Graeme Simsion: The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect. These were fun explorations of first person narration (mainly) by a scientist afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome, or at least, so we are told and so he occasionally observes in himself. He is "lovable/annoying" (on the analogy of cute/ugly) and his journey into a capacity for relationship is touching and the humor used to spin out the tale saves it from sentimentality partly because the hero and narrator, Don Tillman, eschews the emotional side of life and presents a more authentic version of himself than most of the other characters.However, we first see Rosie in the gender-biased mode of many of his fellow scientists and so her scientific career comes to us as a surprise in spite or ourselves. However, she is not all heart and he all head and this at least avoids the stereotypes of some romantic comedy and has a touch of the Beatrice and Benedick about it and perhaps even Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy.

For the next book I suggested Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore. This book left most of the group cold, and yet I still regard it as a brilliant novel, its narrative a metaphor for the mental version of wandering, of being lost, and a microcosm both of British post-colonial society in the years after the war and of the mental state of women at that time. However, the favorite book of the group up to now was Tolstory's Anna Karenina, so it may be that with a few Russian ex-pats in our group, the level of knowledge about that society must be greater than knowledge of Britain. In any case, Americans, for their part, often seem not at all happy with tales of those who are seeming failures or passive in the face of overwhelming rejection and hardship, even if they later on regain their footing. That was Fitzgerald's life when she lived on a houseboat and was not living up to her literary promise as she cared for children alone while her husband careened about and drank. This autobiographical component made a great difference to me and I would want my own story to end with the kind of quiet triumph that Penelope Knox Fitzgerald realized in her real life.

Next for the book club was Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. This was a good choice, although the constantly shifting narrative perspectives and time periods out of sequence bothered some in our group. The prose is luminous. There is a wealth of detail, thought the eyes of children about the German invasion of France in WWII. We follow two sets of families in alternate story lines- a blind girl who is French and a boy who builds radios, a natural engineer. The blind girl likes nature and he likes mechanics. Their stories do not come together for quite some while. Themes of light and dark- the visible and invisible, the natural creation and destruction- in short, the human world of art and war (mining, diamonds- there is a search for a lost one by Nazis and with which the girl's father, a gem curator, is involved) move throughout the descriptions. We do not now if these characters can create ripples of change in a chaotic world. Some may object to the plight of a young German whose conscience troubles him as he watches Jewish friends mistreated and then "disappeared" -but not enough to desert the army. However,such a fate would end with as much death all around as we know resulted. Marie-Laure knows this about her German friend as well as her Uncle Étienne: she realizes that light bursts over foxholes in WWI caused his PTSD:

                                   This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light
                                   you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to 
                                   its mark.

Next up in a separate post: Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Notes on Peter Brown Lecture "Alms, Work,and the Holy Poor: Early Monasticism, Syria and Egypt"

Georgetown University, Depts. Of Theology
Inaugural Costan Lecture series on Early Christianity: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? December 4, 2014,
Professor Peter Brown, “Alms, Work and the Holy Poor: Early Monasticism between Syria and Egypt.”
Introduction, Brian Daley, S. J.
How did Peter Brown change studies in late antiquity?
1. This period is no longer seen merely as a decline from the classical golden age, Tacitus or Pliny
2. Many after Edward Gibbon saw Christianity as a source of corruption of classical culture but Peter Brown has focused on its vitality.
Note: works of Brown to find: 1988, The Body and Society re sexuality in the ancient world; article on “The Holy Man in Late Antiquity.”
Peter Brown begins:
I Social World of the Poor and Monasticism:  key to social world of the poor IS monasticism. One cannot take a chance in how to treat the poor or a cripple- the person may be a freeloader or…an angel of God.
A. Monks of Syria and Egypt have been relatively neglected in early antiquity and Christian studies since Gibbon and the Enlightenment.
i) Monks were seen as fanatics and dropouts; Gibbon had contempt for them.
ii) No! They were catalysts of the social activity of an age.
A. Like St. Francis at a later time, even early monks were in revolt against economic crises and their results in the 3rd to 6th centuries as well; they were part of life in the Middle East and seismographs of changes in the society.
B. To study the east we must move away from the “decline and fall” world of western Europe and look at Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic papyri and documents recently unearthed from eastern churches.
II. The nature of wealth, labor and the poor in the 3rd and 4th centuries
A. From Iraq wit he southern and western part of the empire- wealth and care of the poor – but who were “the poor”? In the 3rd and 4th centuries there was no simple answer.
B. Many thought Christians should give to the holy poor, as in Paul’s letter to the Romans; the poor are among the saints: the holy poor of Jerusalem (the holy poor were the only ones who counted)
C. However, the original world of the monastics who spoke of the poor was not Graeco-Roman. They wrote in Syriac (a final form derived ultimately from Aramaic, spoken by Jesus) and Syriac was a major language of religion and comers. By 600 the speakers of Syriac stretched from Antioch to China. This was a true Third World of Christians
III. There were three groups of middle eastern monks and missionaries:
• Wandering monks of Syria
• Missionaries of the Manicheans (Mani saw himself as a reformer of Christianity and his movement extended into Central Asia)
• Monks of Egypt
A. The 270’s in the fertile crescent one could find many extreme groups of Christian origin.
1. Mani- c. 300 in Syria: the Manichean Elect were cultivating extreme poverty and yet had mobility. Mani died 277.
2.   They were like mendicant monks; hungry and voluntarily poor, this Elect were loved for the Lord’s namesake.
B.  These met up with the monks of Egypt, c. 270 and such was Antony in Egypt- the Gospel of Matthew had converted Antony.
1.  Unlike the Syrian wanderers or Manicheans, the Egyptian Desert monks just stayed in their hermitages.  The first hermit gave alms and then sold his house and all his clothes and gave the cash to the poor.
2.  Such a monk refused alms for himself but believed that one must work to eat. Antony died in 356.
3. Debate: which was the true way of monasticism? Now not just a question of WHO received the help, like only the holy poor, but what about a true local indigent, a beggar?
C. How was human society defined- by obligation to work for a living?
D. What claims do those not working have on those who support them with alms?
IV. The answers of the three groups under our study to the questions above reveals different perspectives on the meaning of work in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries.
A. The Manicheans’ answer
1. Irene, a lay disciple of the Manicheans, put her treasure in for the Elect. In the western desert of Egypt, in a villa, were found letters of the Elect to their hearers, 600 miles south of The Fayum, and the letters refer to the sun and the moon with imagery showing the writer was a Manichean.
         2.     This is how treasure became Treasure in Heaven- at stake for them was a view of the material world, and that world was hopelessly corrupt.
a. These alms went only to the Elect because they were being purified by abstaining from sex, manual labor, or immoderate food.
b. Stopping work stopped the demonic processes of the material world, in their belief system. Pale hands showed they were already somewhat “not of this world.”
B. Syrian monastic answer:      Also there was deep pondering of the burden of work in 4th-6th century Syria as well. Syria was lush and abundant at this time.
1. Adam and the myth of the curse of labor had spread to influence non-Jewish writers such as Hesiod.
2. The gods wanted to be without toil and so that is why they burdened humans.
3. This reflects the social trauma of the agrarian revolution- there was a myth of a golden age of no toil before the fall of Adam and Eve.
4. BUT…the Syrian Christians did not believe that the material universe was corrupted but human society had fallen from a state of leisure.
a. In this literature about the fall of Adam and Eve, it did not bring about a weaker will, but the fall was from the work-free world. Work is the true curse in the Syriac literature.
b. Only toil that was for a  spiritual and angelic purpose was good and this was why Syriac monks were supported by lay people;
c. Wandering angelic monks of Syria were entitled to alms to further the weightless labor of the spirit.
C. Egyptian monks’ answer:    
1. They were posed between two wings of the ascetic movement:
a. Syria rose above labor
b.Manichees despised the world
2. In Egypt, ferocious self-sufficiency! Monks were expected to support themselves by their own labor: anticipates the Pelagian perspective: work of the hands.
3. Work was embraced by the Egyptian monks because in Egypt work denoted the monks’ abiding humanity in contrast to the ethereal non-materiality of the Manicheans.
       D. By 400, a battle of the social imagination regarding work was won in Egypt by workers.
V. Implications of all this: in the west, we are used to seeing the monastery as a kind of holy kibbutz and this work as worship had an effect on the later Rule of St. Benedict.
A.  Syrian could have created a monasticism more similar to Buddhism in that the lay would work to support the monks; in late 4th century there is the legend that  (Fa Sien??) Bodhidharma? Walked from India to China and was from the lands of the begging bowl.
B. Division of rich and poor seemed less disturbing to the Manicheans and the Syrians so they tolerated it
C. Instead, the monks of Egypt were human and linked by labor to the sufferings of society. The monks of Egypt support the real poor and not just the Holy Poor.
CONCLUSION
The model of society that emerges for Christians is that of the rich and the poor with serious obligations placed on the rich.
[Italics indicate this was the real take-away of the lecture, at least in my interpretation.]