"For a long time . . . ": On asparagus

Adriaen Coorte (c. 1663-after 1707), Still Life (Asparagus) (1697), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Image found here.

For a long time (since my college days, in fact) I have owned the hardback 3-volume C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin translation of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and for a long time now I have been promising myself that I would read it in its entirety. Uh-huh. Long ago, I once taught (and have since forgotten a good deal of) Swann's Way. Long ago, I was younger, too.

A couple of weeks ago, therefore, I started rereading Swann's Way as my bedtime reading, and the plan is to make Proust my bedtime reading till I finish the thing. This may take a while; but then again, this thing is not meant to be rushed through. Example: Last week, the Mrs. regaled me with a lengthy recounting of events in The 19th Wife, which she was then reading (and which she would recommend, by the way). She didn't ask me, So what's going on in Swann's Way? I told her later that day that, had she asked, I would have told her, "Well, I've just read 4 pages of description of the stained glass windows in Combray's church of Saint-Hilaire . . . "

And so it goes with Proust. It's not what one would call plot-driven. Rather, it immerses the reader in the daily, the ordinary; at its best (assuming, of course, you are a reader who is predisposed toward such writing), you get so caught up in the richness of Marcel's (our narrator's) descriptions that you don't notice that anything is, you know, happening. And yet, things are happening. Life is happening. Pay attention to it, too, Proust seems to argue implicitly--this is the space, after all, in which we spend the vast majority of our lives. That's pretty simple, I know, but it's all I have for the moment.

Anyway. From time to time, you may see bits and pieces of Proust "here" over the coming months as I read this thing.

As this post's title and picture suggest, you'll now hear a bit about asparagus:

I would stop by the table [in the kitchen], where the kitchen-maid had shelled them, to inspect the platoons of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little green marbles, ready for a game; but what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet--still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed--with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's Dream) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.

Poor Giotto's Charity, as Swann had named her, charged by Françoise with the task of preparing them for the table, would have them lying beside her in a basket, while she sat there with a mournful air as though all the sorrows of the world were heaped upon her; and the light crowns of azure which capped the asparagus shoots above their pink jackets were delicately outlined, star by star, as, in Giotto's fresco, are the flowers encircling the brow or patterning the basket of his Virtue at Padua. (I:131)

[I don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that there's little room in the world of ad copy for writing like this.]

Over the course of many, many pages, Marcel reveals Françoise, the chief housekeeper at the house in Combray, to be a complex character. He admires her but knows that she can be hard on those in her charge--hence the kitchen-maid's virtuous, even beautiful weariness in the passage above. But it's the extent of Françoise's harshness that Marcel does not (yet) recognize:

There is a species of hymenoptera observed by Fabre, the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat to her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their powers of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which she lays her eggs, will furnish the larvae, when hatched, with a docile, inoffensive quarry, incapable of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder: in the same way Françoise had adopted, to minister her unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of stratagems so cunning and so pitiless that, many years later, we discovered that if we had been fed on asparagus day after day throughout that summer, it was because their smell gave the poor kitchen-maid who had to prepare them such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my aunt's service. (I:134-135)

This sort of organizing of information--the initial memory or composite of memories, then its later, fuller explication--occurs again and again in Remembrance of Things Past. I'll have more to say about that, via an early symbol of it in Swann's Way, in my next post on this novel.

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More on "my own louts": A rifle as a Texas madeleine

Some of you may recall that I posted on my father's brother's unexpected death. There had been a bit of unfinished business regarding his possessions; and so on my recent trip to Texas, my brother and I drove over to Houston to collect those things and, if possible, figure out what to do with them. I've recently found out a little more about one of these objects that, in conjunction with my recent reading of John Graves' Goodbye to a River, has me thinking about the history of the place where I grew up and, as Graves so eloquently puts it in his book, "my own louts."

Among those possessions are two shotguns and a rifle. The shotguns, according to a friend of mine who also buys and sells older guns, aren't anything special--he agrees with my calling them "varmint killers"--but the rifle is a Winchester made in 1903. It's been in thinking about this rifle over the past couple of days that I've been filled with a flood of family and community memory.

Some boring reminiscing follows, below the fold.



Since my grandfather was born in 1907, I'm thinking (though I have no proof) that the Winchester originally belonged to his father. I can't say for sure because, to be honest, if I had ever seen these guns before, I have no memory of them now, and I remember no talk about them. I knew Grandpa had guns, though, because we'd hear the occasional story about his having to shoot raccoons or, on occasion, coatis that were getting into the hen house. But aside from my dad's occasional coon hunts with high school friends of his, we weren't hunters. But the rifle. That takes me back to a time when Oak Hill wasn't on the frontier, but it was still pretty wild: the last black bear in the area, people said, had been shot only in 1900; and if one reads between the lines of this article on Oak Hill, one can see that it was pretty rough around the edges, too (really: ask yourself what a place must be like that has 70 people and 4 saloons; something else it doesn't tell you is that that limestone for the state capital was quarried out of one of the hills by prison labor--hence the name Convict Hill, given to that hill), and would be for much of its first century.

(Case in point: When my dad was a boy (this would have been in the mid-to-late '40s), after school let out the kids would have rock fights between the "clean" kids and the "dirty" kids. The "clean" kids were the ones who bathed more than once a week.

My daddy was a "clean" kid, I'll have you know.)

Oak Hill was just becoming a more-or-less respectable place to be from when I was a boy growing up in the '60s. Most of the kids I went to elementary school with were like me: not farmers, but a generation removed from that life and never to return to it, and often living on land that had been in the family for a generation or (in my case) three. But the son of the man who shot that last bear was a friend of our family, as his father had been (their property adjoined each other), and I was growing up on land with dense stands of "cedar" trees (which are really junipers) and had deer and fox and the occasional bobcat, while across the road was another thousand acres where, somewhere down in a limestone canyon, a mountain lion lived. You get the idea: combine undeveloped land held for generations, a family who loved to tell stories about people whose relatives at least were still alive, and one boy who loved running around in those woods and possessed of an overactive imagination, and you have someone who, when he first read certain passages in Faulkner, understood them at a subconscious level before he could have told you in an articulate fashion what Faulkner was actually saying.

I'm going on and on about all this because that Oak Hill is gone except in memory. Forty years ago, my family thought people were nuts for building a subdivision west of us; today, all those hills, all the way out to Dripping Springs, 30 miles away, are filled with people on one- and two-acre lots enamored of Hill Country living. Driving around that part of the county can be a melancholy experience, to the point that, for a longer time than I can remember, I'd not thought much about those times before me that, when I was a boy, didn't feel all that distant. But something about hefting that rifle--no desire to shoot it, mind you, just holding it--filled me with something a lot sweeter than melancholy.

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In which the Meridian briefly explores some alternate realities

Two fun couples: Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi in Last Year at Marienbad (image found here); and
Zoe Saldaña and Sam Worthington in Avatar. Image found here.

It is a little strange to refer to the entities in the second picture by their actors' names. These figures, after all, never existed in this form in front of a camera; we see them in this form because of a computer: a combination of motion-capture and digital imaging of the sort first introduced to a mass audience via Andy Serkis' Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films. Peter Jackson thought of and promoted Serkis' performance in The Two Towers as Supporting-Actor-Oscar-worthy but, somewhere in the hours and hours of apparatus on that film's extended edition, he relates to the listener/viewer that he was rebuffed: Gollum is computer-generated, he was told. How much of what we see of Gollum is actually Serkis' work, and how much is the machine's work? These are legitimate questions to consider, a version of the dilemma of separating the dancer from the dance that Yeats could never have foreseen but the road for which, thanks to technology, we're already well down. In the commentary for The Fellowship of the Ring, Sean Bean notes that he knows for a fact that he was not physically present in his role as Boromir for the filming of the Fellowship's departure from Rivendell, yet there, in the film, "he" is. True, Boromir has no lines and doesn't do very much for the couple of seconds that he (or his image) is onscreen--he/it stands there, then glances down at the ground. But if I hadn't heard the commentary, I would have been none the wiser regarding what I was seeing. Still, I don't feel deceived, exactly: after all, Middle Earth is not my world, no more than is any space presented to an audience as fictive, no matter how closely it corresponds to my world. But it is strange, this brief, meta moment in which even the actor is reminded that while onscreen he is not himself but a character: an image, a representation of someone else.

In Avatar, we of course do see Worthington in his human incarnation in the film; for those (like me) who don't know what Saldaña looks like when not 10 feet tall and blue-skinned, here you go.

The art of acting is already, in its essence, the creating of an alternate reality that an audience experieinces vicariously. But we traditionally think of that art as a human activity--enhanced by props (broadly defined), of course, but whose final success is attributable at some level to a human agency. At what point, though, will the incorporation of technology so enhance that that activity ceases to remain identifiably a human one? Are there moments in Avatar where that point is passed? Of course, all the above assumes by omission that Alain Resnais' CGI-free Last Year at Marienbad is straight-up realism in which everything we see and hear is a kind of truth; but, as I'll get to a while later, this film is actually the far trickier of the two if the question we're thinking about is, "What is real in the world of the film?"

All this has come to mind in the days since the Sunday before last, when the Mrs. and I donned glasses and joined a few of the developed world's remaining laggards who had not yet seen Avatar so as to become one with the mass-culture cosmos, if only for a little while. THE reason to see this film is, well, to see it. It's visually stunning, and the 3-D technology is easy on the eyes (the aged among you will recall that watching older 3-D films would often lead to headaches). The story, though, is so skeletal as to allow this film to be about all kinds of things, as the Mrs. and I enumerated on our way out of the theater: A retelling of the exploitation of the Americas by Europe (or, alternately, of the destruction of Native Americans by white Americans); an allegory of environmentalism; a commentary on current, competing schools of thought regarding U.S. policy in Iraq and Afghanistan; yet another in the very long continuum (at least in American literature) of "going native" stories. Lots of other people are saying such things about the film as well, so I don't claim for us any particular insightfulness. I'll modestly claim a bit of independent thinking for the following, though: Given my scholarly interests, I perked up early on when I learned that the Na'vi avatars Jake Sully (Worthington) and the others manipulate via their minds are products of the combination of human and Na'vi DNA--in other words, the avatars are somewhat analogous to people of mixed race, and those who have seen the film know that, just as is true of mixed-race characters in 19th- and early 20th-century American literature, neither the humans nor the Na'vi fully trust them, suspecting them of having conflicted loyalties at best.

But the thing that really started me thinking about posting on this film is something else that occurred to me as I thought about the film: that we can also read it as something of a meditation on virtual worlds such as Second Life--in particular, the potential that those worlds have for shaping the off-line lives of those who participate in them.

More on this, and on Last Year at Marienbad, below the fold.

The superficial connections between Second Life and the world of Avatar are obvious: the figures in Second Life are called avatars (or avis for short); male Second Life avatars are scaled to be 7' tall; the Na'vi (and the avatars) are 10'. But all of us have heard or read stories about participants in Second Life for whom the distinction between it and RL ("real life") become dangerously blurred, and it may be that Avatar is (or can be) understood as exploring this territory as well. As viewers of the film know, Sully is a paraplegic. Whatever his other motives for enlisting to be the stand-in to animate the avatar created for his now-deceased twin brother, surely the primary one is, or soon becomes, his virtual liberation from his wheelchair, which soon becomes as good for Sully as an actual liberation. Long before he actually encounters and grows to respect and then love the Na'vi (and I'm not spoiling anything--if you've read the list of allegories above, you could write this film yourself), he's already sucked into this world in a much more fundamental sense: he feels whole in this other, very different world as he has not felt in his own world for a very long time. Add to this the fact that, in the film, it's a risky proposition to abruptly end the sessions while the humans are manipulating their avatars, and the comparison with some people's deep engagement with Second Life seems pretty evident.

The film's point of view is never in question; those hoping for a little Kierkegaard-style moral wrestling to go along with their cool visuals will leave the multiplex disappointed. We will root for jakesully, as the Na'vi come to call him, so that by the time Sully goes all Dances with Wolves on us, those who work to oppose him have become intellectual/spiritual knuckle-draggers in our eyes. But it wouldn't be hard to rework what is here in such a way that we alternately root for Sully and clearly see what he gains through his virtual life with the Na'vi and yet also wonder with him what he loses by trading in his world on Earth for that virtual life. None of that is to imply that Avatar is bad, necessarily. I don't think it strives to be intellectually or emotionally ambitious; thus, it more than succeeds on its own terms. But in stark contrast to Pandora's world of such dazzling color, the black-and-white distinctions it makes among its agents are a little disappointing.

Last Year at Marienbad (which, thanks to a gift card from my daughters, I now own) is just the opposite: a black-and-white film that, for the right viewer, will be every bit as compelling as the film whose mood it so strongly reminded me of as I watched it last night, Hitchcock's Vertigo. Imagine a less plot-driven but still-more-detail-obsessed (and French) version of that film, and you'd be pretty close to this.

The trailer is below; if you like it the least little bit, you might possibly like all 96 minutes of this sort of thing:



(Further nudges: here's the Wikipedia entry; and here is Roger Ebert's brief but thoughtful meditation on the film; and here is something I wrote on the occasion of the death of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the screenplay. One last nudge--probably away from the film: a friend of mine told me that after he saw it a first time at a theater he learned that the projectionist had mixed up some of the reels, so he went back to see it again. He said it didn't make any difference.)

Whereas Avatar's scaffold of a plot gives that film a palimpsest-like quality such that it could be "about" any number of things, Last Year is only about itself . . . which, depending on your tastes, will either fascinate or frustrate you. As the trailer makes clear, the film expects us to be active participants in determining what--if anything--really did happen that previous year between the man and the woman. If, that is, they even met to begin with. The thing is, we can never know for sure: we can know only what we see and are told, but close watchers of the film will note that the man's descriptions of their meetings and images that accompany his descriptions often contradict each other; often, images we see in quick succession will contradict each other as well. When the woman finally seems to admit that they had indeed met, is that in fact the truth, or is she feeling so hounded by the man that she surrenders in hopes of ending his hounding? We cannot know for sure.

I think one thing we can say for certain about Last Year is that while watching it, we find ourselves inside the greatest virtual-reality machine of all: a version of one person's memory of something. The man's memory of his encounter with the woman is, for him, every bit as seductive as some people's experience with/in Second Life is for them. Yet it's important to recall that our recollection of the past and our perception of the present are reality, so far as we can be certain of such a thing. Individual memories can be seductive, but memory itself--specifically, our need to be able to rely on it--is a necessity and not a luxury. So far as we can tell, the man in Last Year really did have an encounter with the woman; his frequent request of her to "try to remember" is evocative of Scottie's request of Madeleine (and, for that matter, of Midge's request of Scottie) to "try" to recall a past that seems to elude their ability to recall it. But the key phrase there is "so far as we can tell." Whether or not he in fact did--or, for that matter, believes he did--are, for us, unknowable.

It's that final unknowableness that makes the world of Last Year a far stranger place than that of Avatar. Odd, isn't it, how CGI-generated worlds have more metaphysical certainty to them than room upon room upon room of people in evening dress.

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What is this "You" you speak of?: Memory as pneuma-tic device?

[First post is here. Oh--and regarding my absence from here: Families are weird, complicated things.]

. . . there are few of us who are not protected from the keenest pain by our inability to see what it is that we have done, what we are suffering, and what we truly are. Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

--Samuel Butler, Erewhon (as quoted in William T. Vollmann, Argall)

Yes, well, Mr. Butler. But Mr. Magritte's painting would appear to be a reminder that the veracity of even so superficial a thing as appearance is suspect.

Onward.

In the first "What is this 'You'" post, I'd promised to do a bit of reading on the idea of pneuma and then return to this. Well: I followed links and leads using this as my starting point. As you can see both there and in Raminagrobis's comment at that first post, one gets into the weeds very very quickly regarding this topic, so I'll not dwell on pneuma's intricacies here except to note that, no matter the specifics of those intricacies, the close association between "breath" and "spirit" persists. In a later post, I'll want to return to this and offer up the observation that, whatever Cartesian philosophy's other virtues, it is not helpful in this instance. In this post, though, I want to play with an idea on the periphery of pneuma: what we say about ourselves and how we say it--in other words, the relationship between memory and language/writing.

Some more musing below the fold.

As good a starting place as any for this discussion is Marcel Proust's great celebration/exploration/exhaustion(?) of the theme of memory, Remembrance of Things Past (more recently translated as In Search of Lost Time). Good Modernist that he is, for Proust's narrator Marcel many individual memories "remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest [of a "long-distant past"]; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection" (Vintage edition of Swann's Way, pp. 50-51). But, as the justly-famous tea-and-madeleine scene at the end of the first chapter of Swann's Way makes clear, memory needs help--even animation--from something Marcel calls the self:

It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. . . . What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day. (48-49, emphasis mine)

But it's equally clear that, for Marcel, these memories have some sort of prior existence apart from the self inside which they are stored and that seeks them out; they're not "created" ex nihilo. Rather, though Marcel does not, here, quite get around to saying it, it is language that "creates" memories, that renders them visible: the flesh of memory becomes, through words, a virtual flesh.

So far, so good. In his novel, Marcel poses as something like a stenographer of memory, not passively (he has to will these memories to come) but impartially recording them. But thanks to the post-structuralists following in Modernism's wake we've come to recognize that language, to the extent that it mirrors reality at all, is at best an imperfect mirror, no matter how faithful to that reality we strive for our language to be. This is no one's fault; it is inherent in language's very nature. Words are not that which they "say at," to borrow Addie Bundren's marvelous phrase from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The opening pages of The Loop, French novelist Jacques Roubaud's new novel, explore this dilemma:

[E]very line in the story of this memory contains a great many implicit conclusions. And it is here that error, if there is any error, lies in wait for me at every turn. For in memory, in my memory (I am speaking only for myself), there is only seeing. Even touch is "colorless," anesthetized. I have no other adjectives to identify this apprehension of material things by thought alone, without form or sensuous qualities, as they arise in their grey and pasty conceptual clay (as certain early theories from Antiquity pictured it). In the process of remembering, I do not feel that my finger is cold, nor do I feel the mild and already fading sharpness of the scraped and frozen dust. I know--because it is commonly and universally known that frost exists and that this mode of the physical existence of water is cold--I know, therefore, that the night was cold, and everything that follows from this. And I recall this knowledge based on experience, as one says. But the image that I reconstitute at this moment is numb to this knowledge, it is indifferent. (from here)

Error, for Roubaud in this novel, is especially fraught with anxiety, given that his narrative's subject is the memory of his recently-deceased wife. For obvious reasons, he wishes to be as faithful to the memory of her as he was devoted to her--and yet language is unable to permit that.

[Just as an aside: Roubaud is very much worth your time if your tastes run in the direction of "novels" that, um, disrupt those things we tend to take for granted about novels--little things like, you know, structure and narrative--and exceedingly precise descriptions of things/scenes/people. There's a passage in his novel The Great Fire of London (described by its publisher as "the ruins of a novel") in which he describes, for the length of a few pages, a night-time photograph his wife had taken while holding the shutter down to extend the exposure and holding the camera very steady against her chest. Roubaud finally notes that the image is slightly blurred because he remembers that she was having trouble breathing that night (and it would be lung cancer, if I recall correctly, that eventually kills her). It's heartbreakingly beautiful: the idea that she--more precisely, her breathing (yes, one could say, her pneuma)--shapes this photograph's image even though she doesn't actually appear in it in the usual sense.]

The ability to be completely faithful to memory is thus an irresolvable dilemma even for the truthful among us. How easy it is, then, to be unfaithful to memory when it suits our purposes. That's where Vollmann's novel Argall comes in: it's subtitled, "The true story of Pocahontas and captain John Smith." This is because Vollmann (or his narrator, "William the Blind") suspects that Smith's chronicle, the General History of Virgina, is less than forthright as regards his abilities as the leader of the Jamestown colony--yet, of course, his is the record of that time we're most familiar with . . . and, of course, it is chiefly through Smith that we know Pocahontas, the story of whom does not appear in the first two editions of the General History. Pocahontas was a real person--that is not in dispute--but what is uncertain is our collective memory of her.

[In case you're wondering, Vollmann is an acquired taste--easily as verbose, and probably as smart, as David Foster Wallace, but lacking what I take to be Wallace's lack of presumption, his awareness that he didn't have everything figured out. There's a knowingness to Vollmann (that's the charitable way to put it) that I find off-putting, especially over the course of a 700-page book. But, you know. Consider who's telling you this.]

For Pocahontas, for all of us, there is the flesh-and-blood entity, and then there is what is remembered of her/us. Yet, if not for the latter, we cannot later recall the former, whether or not we personally knew her/them . . . and, moreover, that later recall, no matter how we try to make it otherwise, will always be a betrayal of, even the memories themselves.

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Adventures at the Wichita Art Museum #3: "American Ruins"

Arthur Drooker, Cook Bank, Rhyolite, Nevada. Image found here.

Yesterday being Saturday--free admission day at the Wichita Art Museum--I biked on over and had a look at a selection of photographs by Arthur Drooker called American Ruins (he has a book out by the same title). The exhibit's subjects come from points throughout the northeastern, southern, southwestern and western U.S., with a picture from a site in Hawai'i thrown in for good measure, and the structures range in age from the 3rd to the 20th centuries. There are images of cliff dwellings, churches and missions, businesses and factories, homes, military structures . . . it's something of a picturebook archeological history of the United States.

I like this idea very much, and I approve of the exhibit's intention, as presented in its introductory placard:

They're rarely seen, mostly forgotten and completely obsolete. Photographer Arthur Drooker visited these vestiges of our shared past to forge a spiritual connection with those who came before us, and restore what they had built to our collective memory.

[snip]

As a photographic series, these images present a rare overview of some overlooked landmarks and allow us, as Americans, to see where we came from, measure how far we've come, and gain a vision of where we might be headed.

Still, I felt in these images some strangeness, one due to the medium Drooker chose, the other to the inclusion of one image, that seem worthy of a few words. What follows isn't criticism but observation.

First is Drooker's chosen medium--depending on the information you happen to be reading at the time, either digital pigment prints (the cards accompanying the pictures) or digital infrared prints (WAM's website's description). Whichever it is, the result is something that I can't always appreciate when seeing the same images on my computer monitor: a startling three-dimensional quality in the images that immediately reminded me of those on my old GAF Viewmaster discs or, alternately, of photorealistic collages. In other words, the objects imaged in the various pictures--not just the ruins themselves but the surrounding vegetation, too--stand out starkly relative to each other, rather than melding more or less comfortably into each other as would have seemed to be the case with traditional photography . . . or, for that matter, when these structures are seen in person. Perhaps, in keeping with his stated intention, that quality is precisely Drooker's point: he wants the viewer really to see these structures, to contemplate them rather than their gradual reclamation by Nature. Still, as I said, this particular quality in the images wasn't something I was prepared for.

And now for the one image in particular, one that made me wonder about what Drooker has in mind when he says "ruins" and compels the post-structuralist in me to want to start unpacking the first sentence in the placard that introduces the exhibit: A picture of the Alamo. Given that structure's centrality to the Texas mythos--not to mention that for decades now it has been Texas' most-visited place--it's difficult for me to think of the Alamo as being in any way "rarely seen [and] mostly forgotten." I will grant, though, that to describe the Alamo as "completely obsolete" would make for a fascinating discussion, among Texans, as part of a "Whither Texas?"-type socio-cultural debate: To what extent does the story--not necessarily the history but the lessons and near-legendary narratives--of Texas' winning its independence and becoming a sovereign nation have a bearing on what Texas is now (whatever that may be) in the 21st century? Also, I'd suggest, if one thinks about the Alamo's hundred-year history from 1836 to the Centennial, one could argue that it was more ruin-like then than it is now: the story of the battle there may have gone far in shaping the Texan self-concept, but whether and how to preserve the structure itself as a trace of that story was clearly not something unanimously agreed upon during that time. Meanwhile, I wonder what the descendants of slaves who worked in the sugar mill on a Florida plantation that Drooker photographed might have to say about that place being designated a "ruin," or the descendants of the cliff dwellers whose structures are depicted here.

All this matters because Drooker himself makes clear that he's interested in much more than creating aesthetically-pleasing images. He wants them to do the work of "restor[ing] what [these structures' builders] had built to our collective memory." Thus, these pictures are more or less implicit political acts, in the broadest sense of the word: they are intended to evoke discussion about why Drooker has chosen them, what he is trying to say--perhaps even argue for--about the American collective memory and how that squares with our own understanding of that memory's (dis)contents.

EDIT: One further thought: In rereading this, I found myself remembering Gertrude Stein's remark about America's having "a history-less history." There is a strong cultural impulse in American cultural history, as embodied in the phrase "The American Adam" (the title of R. W. B. Lewis' classic study of American literature), that is precisely about "forgetting," very broadly defined: through erasure, through a re-writing of the story of one's origins, etc. (To return to the Texas Revolution: The colonists certainly had legitimate grievances against the Mexican government, but it wouldn't be much of a distortion of things to make the case that that Revolution, especially towards the end, was ultimately, at best, a clash of cultures--and at worst, a race war. But the Daughters of the Texas Revolution would rather not tell things that way.) Anyway, Drooker's project engages in a sort of passive-aggressive cultural rabble-rousing, which I personally am okay with.

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We were speaking of memory, as I recall . . .

Well, indirectly, at any rate. No narrative traditionally (that is, Aristotlianly) understood, after all, cannot exist except in relation to some clearly demarcated end--no matter whether the narrative we speak of is a writer's or an autobiographer's or our recounting of our our own adventures on the planet.

But as is usually the case, someone can--and has--said this more eloquently and learnedly than I. My bloggy friend Raminagrobis has a newish post up that addresses precisely the intersection between memory and narrative. I hope you'll go pay him a visit.

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On justice and bitter, bitter irony, Part III

Via Andrew Sullivan:

The phrase "Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation". Other translations include "intensified interrogation" or "sharpened interrogation". It's a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see [in the above translated directive written by Gestapo chief Müller], are indistinguishable from those described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their "enhanced interrogation techniques" would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.

Go read the rest. There's a disturbing picture, but the reading is (or should be) more disturbing by far.

And no, we're not Nazis. That is precisely the point of calling your attention to this. Yet here we are: same methods, and even the same euphemistic phrase for describing them. Explain with an easy conscience and a straight face to someone, anyone--our friends, our enemies, our children--how our duck differs from the Nazi duck.

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Off-the-cuff musing: A culture of savants?

Yesterday I dashed up to Topeka to visit with Mrs. M. for the day at her parents' house, and while there we watched a Discovery Channel piece on Kim Peek and recent attempts by neuroscientists to get at just what it is that results in Peek's extraordinary capacity for recalling fact. Peek is the closest person I know who is like the the title character in Borges' magnificent short story "Funes the Memorious," but that's not why I'm writing this little post.

I'm writing this because, in a couple of ways, he reminds me of some of my students.

I'd prefer to link to a transcript of or a video link to the show, but in the short time I have, I couldn't figure out the Discovery Channel's website well enough to be able to do that, so: apologies in advance for having to rely on my own, imperfect memory. Two separate remarks, each having to do with missing connections but themselves not overtly connected in the show itself, struck me as really interesting. The first was that a scan of Peek's brain revealed that that portion of the brain that, in "normal" brains, links the left and right hemispheres is all but missing in his. This seems to result in the fact, something like what most of us, because of cultural and historical divides, must do when looking at Bruegel’s painting Proverbs, that Peek takes literally what most of us would recognize as figurative language: One researcher said that, when he asked himwhat it means to "get a grip on yourself," Peek immediately began grabbing at himself. The other arose from the comments of a psychologist who interviewed Peek. She noted that while Peek is not shy about approaching people and speaking with them, he has at his disposal a set of stock phrases that he uses with them. There's no semantic give-and-take in those encounters and, thus, no "conversation." He doesn't engage with or respond to others so much as sort of talk at them.

First observation: My students are not savants but, like Peek, many of them have lost, or don't exercise, their capacity to comprehend figurative language. The immediate context for my self-quoting below (in comments to a post of Ariel's in The Vocabulary Reclamation Project) is speculation on the consequences of the loss of metaphor on spirituality, but

As a teacher, I've noticed my students' declining ability to think abstractly, which they may think of as being free of illusion but I think of as neglecting or making harder their chief job, being human.

I think an inevitable consequence of the atrophying of our capacity for figurative language leads to that phenomenon of "collage students":

The picture you see at the top of this post is illustrative of the challenge I face as a college instructor (I know they're middle-school students, but the idea's the same). All those faces, apparently happy . . . but none looking at each other, and only one looking at the viewer. This seemed more representative of what I've found to be true in my classrooms' dynamics than what I saw as I perused similar pictures from college websites. Their pictures have the students either looking at each other or, say, a Bunsen burner, as they earnestly engage in some academic endeavor, or they're looking at the viewer. Would that such pictures reflected the reality of the classroom, at least as I experience it in my little corner at a community college. That's not a complaint, mind: it's simply fact. The vast majority of my students want to be in class, so that's not what I'm speaking of. It is that, as the EMBLOS says in her discussion of Walter Ong, we've entered into a new orality, one which the various new electronic media, going back, I'd say, to the arrival of cable television and including--especially?--the Internet, facilitate, serving simultaneously as that orality's symptom and cause. They're looking every which way because they have so many places to look, but they don't all have a place in common look (and no, Google doesn't count). Thus the absence of appositives and, as I've noted with my students, the difficulty they have in thinking about abstract ideas and in presenting the arguments of people who might disagree with them. All is here and now and/but centers around the individual.

Obviously: I'm in no way arguing that Kim Peek isn't a human being. But part of being human is putting oneself in the shoes of another as a first step toward engaging with that other: metaphorical language, yes, but what other recourse do we have to express the act of engaging? How does one describe that act empirically?

What I was fascinated by as I watched Peek in this program was that he seemed to me a physical embodiment of a cultural and social phenomenon: an unspoken disconnect between Mine and Thine. I was watching him, but in him I saw us.

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