tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post1515625612174260813..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Woofing and Weeping with Animals in Ava's Das Jüngste GerichtCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-67260652822315643022008-06-25T18:27:00.000-04:002008-06-25T18:27:00.000-04:00Just wrote a ghazal with related couplet.Just wrote a <A HREF="http://thewhim.blogspot.com/2008/06/now-is-good-time-to-start-bothering.html" REL="nofollow">ghazal</A> with related couplet.Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-89596359860557854132008-06-25T16:18:00.000-04:002008-06-25T16:18:00.000-04:00I would want to think about time here. For example...I would want to think about time here. For example, if Doomsday is the end of time, and the experience of it concerns the *temporal* experience of the end of time, and part of such experience is the foreclosing of future, and medieval animal temporality is not simply the atemporality of captivation (Heidegger *poor* in world, as Derrida shows, is conspicuously vague here), but as Aquinas for instance argues something that includes hope as an instinctive relation to future, then the animal cry at the end of time means . . .Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-70970714705827116662008-06-25T11:29:00.000-04:002008-06-25T11:29:00.000-04:00Well, first, I hope that what's happening here is ...Well, first, I hope that what's happening here is NOT unusual, as just one instance in this tradition seems too thin to hang a reading on. I was pretty disappointed by the absence of animals from the Golden Legend, and I'm hoping that other versions of the 15 Signs (and there are probably tens if not hundreds of versions, either as independent texts or as sections of others) tend towards an acknowledgment of animals. <BR/><BR/><I>But what markers in the language here indicate Ava's sympathy with/pathos over this state of affairs?</I><BR/><BR/>I'd say it's (simply) the acknowledgment of animals. It's something akin to casualty counts for the Iraq war that include only "Coalition" casualties and leave however many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis unlisted (if I can get away with this example here). Given the profoundly anthropocentric character of sacred history--since however much God or Creation matters, God and Creation matter only insofar as they serve humankind--any acknowledgment of other lives is always in excess of what is required. Animal life should not rate; after all, they have no share in the afterlife, there's no friendship possible with them (at least in medieval moral philosophy/ethics that I know, although whether this is operable in the 1120s here, I don't know), &c. I think here of Heidegger's conviction that animals, in their total captivation in their world and thus their total inability to relate to the future, can only "perish," that they cannot die.<BR/><BR/>Yet we have several stanzas concerned solely with disruptions to animal life. We can conceive of these stages of the 15 signs as a systematic undoing of creation (hence the fish first, then fowl, then beasts of the field), and hence as moving in a trajectory towards the human. Nevertheless, Ava--and I hope not only Ava--marks the suffering of animals as a <I>particular</I> suffering in creation. It's not simply that the mountains are falling, the seas turning to blood, freshwater is turning bitter, and all the other business from John's Apocalypse; nor do we see how humans respond to these days when things go so badly for fish, and so forth. <BR/><BR/>Instead, Ava acknowledges, in excess of what is strictly necessary for her project--IN a project that nowhere else pays much attention to animals--the lives and deaths and passions of animals. And she acknowledges the relations of animals WITH each other. <BR/><BR/>This acknowledgment does not redeem animals, but I'd say that the fact that animals CANNOT be redeemed increases the interest. We might say that we see <I>zoē</I>--mere life--and "animal sacer" given what they should lack: a voice, a sadness, rage, a death that matters, even at the very moment when their deaths matter least of all (since they're not being sacrificed anymore to human appetite or instrumentality). And we might say that this is not "given" but is rather revealed. At the very moment humans pass into redemption, at the very moment when their lives are marked for eternity as the only lives that 'really matter,' we see the catastrophe of human indifference to animal life. Sacrificed life speaks and reveals itself as what it was all along, AS life, but only at the moment of its destruction.<BR/><BR/>Now, this reading--and thanks for your question, EJ, as Kzoo 2009 is coming together RAPIDLY--will work much better if/when I can GET MORE STUFF. Again, I'm hanging a LOT of reading on something very small unless I can discover that Ava is not alone in this.<BR/><BR/>===<BR/><BR/>Then there's Ava's imagining the animals <I>helping</I> us lament (and I can't even GUESS at the German here: "so hilfet uns daz vihe chlagen": I presume hilfet = help and chlagen = lament). Lord knows what's happening there!Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-16904859836455388442008-06-25T09:40:00.000-04:002008-06-25T09:40:00.000-04:00Quick question, Karl, as this is a subject [mediev...Quick question, Karl, as this is a subject [medieval texts relating Last Judgment] I have no real familiarity with--it appears from your extract that, at the Last Judgment, the animals are all dying ["it doesn't go well"], and I assume [?], without hope of redemption? But what markers in the language here indicate Ava's sympathy with/pathos over this state of affairs? Is it that her focus on animals is unusual and overly-extended, indicating an ethical concern of some sort, or is it a type of attempt at realism?Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.com