Art Will Save No One; Art Requires Salvation

by J J Cohen

From today's NYT, a dispirited meditation by Michael Kimmelman on the failures of art in a Dresden where bigotry has been murderous:

What are the humanizing effects of culture?

Evidently, there are none.

To walk through Dresden’s museums, and past the young buskers fiddling Mozart on street corners, is to wonder whether this age-old question may have things backward. It presumes that we’re passive receivers acted on by the arts, which vouchsafe our salvation, moral and otherwise, so long as we remain in their presence. Arts promoters nowadays like to trumpet how culture helps business and tourism; how teaching painting and music in schools boosts test scores. They try to assign practical ends, dollar values and other hard numbers, never mind how dubious, to quantify what’s ultimately unquantifiable.

The lesson of Dresden, which this great city unfortunately seems doomed to repeat, is that culture is, to the contrary, impractical and fragile, helpless even. Residents of Dresden who believed, when the war was all but over, that their home had somehow been spared annihilation by its beauty were all the more traumatized when, in a matter of hours, bombs killed tens of thousands and obliterated centuries of humane and glorious architecture.

The truth is, we can stare as long as we want at that Raphael Madonna; or at Antonello da Messina’s “St. Sebastian,” now beside a Congo fetish sculpture in another room in the Gemäldegalerie; or at the shiny coffee sets, clocks and cups made of coral and mother-of-pearl and coconuts and diamonds culled from the four corners of the earth in the city’s New Green Vault, which contains the spoils of the most cultivated Saxon kings. But it won’t make sense of a senseless murder or help change the mind of a violent bigot.

What we can also do, though, is accept that while the arts won’t save us, we should save them anyway. Because the enemies of civilized society are always just outside the door.

Powerful writing, especially in the face of some of the ugliest acts of which humans are capable ... but I disagree. I say that not because I believe that art will actually humanize us (and it appears that what Kimmelman means by humanize is something like "render tolerant, nonviolent, respectful, just"); more that I don't think humans ever have had a monopoly on art. To believe that art is ours alone -- something only we can cherish and preserve, something that we create but are separate from -- limits art so severely that it is suscepitable to becoming the passive, imprinted product that Kimmelman describes. But what if art was never human to begin with? What is art has always been inhuman?

Another Idea for Nuclear Waste Spawned Art

by J J Cohen
This is even bigger than the Long Now Foundation's announcement of an iconified list of US land art.

Forget the architectures of ominous warning upon which I've been brooding, perpetual markers of a poisoned Yucca Mountain landscape. How about something more positive -- say a universe generator -- instead? An excerpt from an interview with the artist:

The nuclear waste buried beneath Yucca Mountain will be there for millennia, untouchable and lethal. Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats would put that time and radioactivity to use by turning the dump into a generator of new universes.

His plan is based on the laws of quantum physics, which state that each atomic particle exists in multiple states at once until observation fixes it in time and space. Keats, who recently built a temple of science to explore the implications of science-based religion, takes this literally.

In "Universes Unlimited," an exhibition opening today at the Modernism gallery in San Francisco, Keats unveils a do-it-yourself universe creation kit, on sale for just $20 and made from components bought on eBay — and, as he explains in a half-tongue-in-cheek letter to the Department of Energy, it could easily be scaled up to the dimensions of Yucca Mountain, dotting its 230 square miles with crystal towers glowing in a redemptive fount of creation.

After all, if the pebbles of depleted uranium-enriched glass in his DIY kit produce an estimated 200 universes a minute, the mind boggles at what 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste could generate

[The rest at Wired, via the always brilliant Bioephemera -- which Wednesday featured one of my favorite pieces of DC accidental art]

Medieval Inhuman Art: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Marie de France

[illustration: the subterranean dragons of history erupt into art, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain: Lambeth Palace Lib. MS 5 f. 43v]

by J J Cohen

Below you will find the third section of my draft for an essay on "Inhuman Art," a recent obsession of mine. Part one of the essay is here; part two here; a description of the book in which it will appear here. I've realized, in fact, that I have much of my fourth monograph sketched out, its working title something like Art from a Stone: Dreaming the Medieval Prehistoric.

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Aninormality is an inhuman beauty both superfluous and intimate to that which holds and is held by it, confounding distinctions between self and other, object and milieu. This ecstatic disruption of boundary and its intermixing of what might otherwise seem discrete occurs through the opening up of sublime new worlds -- or, to foreground the activity that inheres in aninormality, broaches a possibly infinite series of worldings. Roger Caillois found such enfolded eruptions within animals and stones. Medieval art, however, is also filled with aninormality’s aesthetic dispossessions and interpenetrations.

Take, for example, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a Latin text widely known not for its artistry, but for its contributions to history: the establishing of a new historiographical tradition, the promulgation of a potent origin myth for Britain, the bestowal to the future of Arthur and his court. Likely composed to boost Welsh ethnic pride, this rhetorically unadorned twelfth-century work could not be more time-bound. Its vision of ancient Britain is an antidote to English triumphalism, to the dominating version of the past of the island, a history previously told in England only from an Anglocentric point of view. The History of the Kings of Britain was an instant success from the moment of its first appearance (c. 1136), likely because it offered a radically reconfigured insular past in which the Welsh and Bretons played a heroic role. By offering a counter-narrative to Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History was seen in the twelfth century as the truth of early English history, Geoffrey’s History offered the possibility of a present that did not have to culminate in lasting English glory, a present in which room existed for the Norman transformation of the country into the appendage of a transmarinal empire. The popularity of Geoffrey’s text can be ascribed to the cultural needs it satisfied: Welsh and Breton patriotism, the Norman desire for a present in which their presence was something more than a baffling interruption of the island’s English destiny, a more pluralistic vision of the British archipelago.

Yet if the text were so wholly of its moment, we should expect the enthusiasm elicited at its appearance to dissipate as the exigencies it arose to address were mitigated by its success. The History of the Kings of Britain should have followed the arc of all propaganda, from spectacular ascent to rapid decline in the wake of the cultural changes it embodied and brought about, to lingering existence at some margin where it could be acknowledged the somewhat embarrassing remnant of a transcended past. Ardor for the text, however, only burgeoned over time. Copies and versions proliferated. Translations from its international Latin into the indigenous tongues of French, English, and Welsh appeared quickly. From historiography its narratives migrated into chronicle, lyric, romance, lais. Each transformation was an amplification: as the poet Wace, for example, translated Geoffrey’s unadorned Latin prose into rhymed French verse (c.1155), he added details like Arthur’s creation of a Round Table. Through his publication of the History Geoffrey created what might be called a consensual world, a time-place that may never have existed, that comes into being and is sustained only through the texts by which writers populate its envisioned landscapes, but a world which nonetheless functions as if real, inviting other authors and scholars and fans to contribute their fictions masquerading as histories, their new characters, their enlargements of the consensual world’s inherent possibility. Without Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Arthurian realm would not have come into being. Stories of the Grail, Lancelot, Morgan le Fay, the Lady of the Lake, and the Green Knight are simply the additions of later writer-fans to a universe of which the loose parameters and initial content Geoffrey of Monmouth was the primary engineer. This expansive worlding of Geoffrey’s rather sparse textual realm originates at least in part from the powerful moments he placed in his narrative when art (which we could gloss as what Caillois called an innate or objective lyricism) propels the text outside of history.

Lists of kings with regnal spans, bare accomplishments, and progeny structure long expanses of Geoffrey’s narrative, a chronicling that tends towards the laconic. The dullness of his lists of data give the History of the Kings of Britain the heft of an artifact, the substantiality of something real. Thus the brief but exciting story of a sodomite king devoured in the wilds by “ravening wolves” is tempered by the dry facticity of his son’s data-heavy vita:

After the death of Mempricius, his son Ebraucus, who was very tall and a man of remarkable strength, took over the government of Britain and held it for thirty-nine years. He was the first after Brutus to sail a fleet to the shores of Gaul. He made war upon the provinces of the Gauls, slaughtering their menfolk and sacking their cities. By the time he came back victorious he was enriched with a vast booty of gold and silver. At a later date he founded a city on the farther side of the Humber, which city he called Kaerebrauc after himself, that is to say the City of Ebraucus.
At that time King David was reigning in Judea and Silvius Latinus was king in Italy. In Israel, Gad, Nathan and Asaph were the prophets.

Ebraucus also founded the city of Alclud over in Albany; and the castle of Mount Agned …

What is more, by the twenty wives which he had, he was the father of twenty sons and of thirty daughters. For forty years he ruled over the kingdom of Britain with great firmness. The names of his sons were as follows: Brutus Greenshield, Margodud, Sisillius, Regin, Morvid, Bladud, Lagon, Bodloan, Kincar, Spaden, Gaul, Dardan, Eldad, Ivor, Cangu, Hector … (78-79)

Twenty sons are listed in total, and, having finished this catalog, Geoffrey goes on to name the thirty daughters, a weighty piling up of information that imbues this catalog of British, Roman, Greek, and invented appellations the verity of an archive. This truth effect is enhanced through reference to events happening simultaneously in Israel and Rome, giving an invented past the authority that derives from unfolding alongside biblical and classical history. Invoking Brutus, the founding father of Britain in Geoffrey’s History, builds Ebraucus’s majesty and buttresses Brutus’s own tenuous reality through self-referentiality.

The inventory of countries conquered, cities founded, and children fathered does its work, answering the preceding account of a king turned too much inward. The sodomitical copulations of Mempricius, Ebraucus’s father, express sexually his unwillingness to think about the life of his country beyond the termination of his reign (“he did away with any who he feared might succeed him in the kingship … he deserted his own wife”), of his inability to rouse himself from self-enclosure in Britain and to expand his domain into an empire. His lupine ingestion within a valley where he wanders alone and abandoned is a rebuke to the tyranny through which he has built paninsular dominion. His son’s regnum offers a complete contrast: a king whose vigorous imperialism is paralleled in his exuberant heterosexuality, whose ardor for founding cities and building castles finds biological expression in his fecundity in producing heirs. Geoffrey’s rhetorical prowess is evident in how he structures the opposition between the two monarchs. His tale of father and son allows him to buttress quietly a kind of empire-loving kingship never practiced by the Britons of whom he writes, but beloved by the Normans who had annexed England to holdings that stretched to Sicily and the Levant. Geoffrey’s History, in other words, advances a useful argument about contemporary kingship and thereby makes itself cultural necessary.

Because it is structured through such cleverly contrived historicality, the History of the Kings of Britain remains largely an unadorned chronicle, its art more evident in its deep structure than in anything that effloresces from the work itself. Yet the narrative is interrupted by moments of unexpected and superfluous beauty, smaller stories that derail the progress of the larger plot with their vividness and, at times, poignancy. Such aesthetically charged eruptions can saturate this otherwise arid text with moments of profound emotional enlargement. Think, for example, of Princess Ignoge, Greek captive on a Trojan ship, forced to marry the warrior who has ruthlessly defeated her father. In this moment when the forward movement of the History eddies backwards, in this interlude when “history itself is forgotten,” we watch with Ignoge as she stares fixedly across a widening sea towards her receding homeland. We behold with her eyes everything she knows dwindling to its vanishing point, lost as an ocean she never desired to sail propels her towards a future she cannot know. We understand why “as long as the shore lay there before her eyes, she would not turn her gaze” [Nec oculos a littore auertit dum littora oculis patuerunt, a nicely balanced bit of Latin lyricism, 8]. We comprehend why she weeps. If we are responsive to this uncharacteristically poignant effusion ebbing through the sangfroid of the text, her tears become ours as well. Geoffrey can give her weeping no answer, no conclusion: enervated by sadness, Ignoge falls asleep in her new husband’s arms.

The vessel speeds onward regardless (“Meanwhile the Trojans sailed on for two days and one night …”), British history speeds onward regardless (“Then they touched land at a certain island called Leogatia …”), but Ignoge’s stubborn gaze upon shores from which she never wished departure stays with us. By leading our eyes back towards what has been left behind, the vision keeps returning us to stories without conclusion: the narratives of those forced onto this vehicle of relentless forward motion, this ship of history on which some unwilling passengers find no waking solace. We last behold Ignoge when, “worn out with crying,” she falls into forgetful slumber. Her story literally ends with that sleep, ends with a hero’s embrace, but emotionally such closure is denied. How can we not wonder about the life towards which she is relentlessly conveyed, how can we not wonder about her future?

Other than to acknowledge that she bears Brutus three sons, Geoffrey is silent. By refusing to provide the narrative space opened by her longing with a conclusion or resolution, Geoffrey keeps Ignoge alive forever in alluring despair, like the heroine of an opera whose voice reverberates long after she has departed the stage. Meditating upon such performers, especially in operas that feature the spectacular demise of female protagonists, Carolyn Abbate writes of the “unconquerable” voice of the women seemingly silenced by opera’s murderous narratives, arguing that “this undefeated voice speaks across the crushing plot.” Abbate observes that such a woman can be “undone by plot,” yet remain “triumphant in voice.” Geoffrey of Monmouth goes farther, demonstrating how a woman can be undone by plot yet triumphant in art – traumatic art, in which grief and death are nearer to hand than survival and life. Yet Ignoge’s tears are an art of endurance that lacks neither beauty nor ethical complexity. Once voiced, her despair and her desires form a circuit of identification between reader and text-event (which is also a temporal circuit between past-as-text and the reading, imagining present) that brings the History out of history and into a new realm, a new world – and this worlding is art. This moment of art, moreover, is wholly in excess of any historical demands placed upon the text, wholly in excess of cultural needs. In its lyricism, its superfluity, its captivating aninormality, its liquid love of oceans and weeping and movement and dreams over the stability of fatherlands and promised destinations, this little work of art within the text opens a space within that narrative, one difficult to close or to forget.

The eruption of art that occurs in the Ignoge episode involves an efflorescence of emotive beauty. An aesthetically moving moment caused by unanticipated estrangement from the dominant narrative of the story, Ignoge’s vision transforms her ardor for a lost home into something that seems striking, new, capable of lifting us out of our solitary orbit (which so far has been tracing great men and their celebrated deeds) to encounter a more capacious world. This ecstatic effect depends upon Ignoge’s human, all too human longing. Yet Geoffrey is also capable of mixing the human and the inhuman in order to produce strange new kinds of art. His book is interrupted at times with moments of lyrical mystery, sometimes through effusion of what is his text’s most sublime substance, blood. Take, for example, the pluvial gore that drenches the island during the rule of the obscure king Rivallo, a soaking in crimson both awesome and gruesome to visualize: “In his time it rained blood for three days and men died from the flies which swarmed” (87). By saturating the landscape with an element alien to it [pluuia sanguinea], this vivid reddening of the island estranges place from world: a medieval version of Christo’s “Pont Neuf Wrapped” or “Surrounded Islands” hitched to a kind of charnel house art in which even death becomes an aesthetic element. The text offers a narrative precursor to T. Coraghessan Boyle’s story “Bloodfall,” in which a similar hematic rain transfigures the world into something violent, rotting, and weirdly beautiful.

A rather similar moment involving blood occurs later in the text, when the History takes a swerve into what seems like a new generic register (though just as likely this swerve is actually the invention of a new genre, romance). On the run from his Saxon enemies, the traitorous British king Vortigern is frantically attempting to bring stability back to an island he once dominated. With the lines Uocatis denique magis suis (“in the end Vortigern summoned his magicians”) the tone of the narrative is transformed: previously Geoffrey’s History has been largely empty of enchantment, its wonder confined mainly to the natural or the naturally inexplicable, such as the sudden rain of blood. Enter the magicians. These magi – the first in the text, and the first therefore in Arthurian myth -- are charged by Vortigern with imagining a way to bring durability to a fugitive life. The magicians declare that such permanence can be found only in the creation of a work of architecture, “an immensely strong tower” (166). When a suitable site is chosen at Mount Erith, however, whatever stones the masons erect one day is swallowed back into the earth the next. The magicians declare that to lay secure foundations, the mortar must be sprinkled with the blood of “a lad without a father” [iuuenem sine patre] – with blood, that is, that carries none of the kind of history that Geoffrey’s own text embodies, obsessed as it is with fathers, sons, and persistence through generations.

Such an escape from history – or at least from story -- is impossible: the lad without a father, a surly and precocious boy named Merlin, is the progeny of a nun and an incubus. In the form of a very handsome youth [in specie pulcerrimi iuuenis], the demon made frequent, secret love with the nun in her chamber’s solitude. Eventually she bore his child. Ancient books verify, according to an authority summoned by Vortigern, that incubos demones exist between moon and earth [inter lunam et terram, 72]. Possessed of a pedigree that ties them to the fallen angels of the Bible, incubi were in the Middle Ages monsters who incarnated the very spirit of Geoffrey’s own History – that is, they incarnated a kind of counter-history, stories at war with dominating traditions and mundane realities. Enter the magicians: What Vortigern’s magi have unwittingly demanded is the coming into the narrative of a living embodiment of the shattered border between the quotidian (the ordinary world where people remain in the times and places history allots to them) and the extraordinary (the space of possibility where a cloistered nun can find love in the embrace of a mysterious, handsome knight). These magicians transport the History of the Kings of Britain into a new realm, where the rules that have so far structured its narrative unfolding are suspended, remade anew.

Merlin, the boy in whose body the blood of a different kind of story pulses, has his own ideas of how Vortigern can construct an enduring structure. Merlin declares that the only true method to create a durable architecture is not to commit more violence in the present, but to acknowledge the unstable history that underdwells that artwork’s coming into being. Merlin insists that Vortigern’s tower topples at each foundation because he is constructing its base upon ground inhabited by unsettled history. Beneath Mount Erith, within an underground pool, inside two hollow rocks [duos concauos lapides] at the bottom of that water, twin dragons slumber [duos dracones dormientes, 73]. These are dragons of history: the white monster embodies the marauding Saxons, while in the red’s pugnacious body resides the story of the Welsh. Once this buried past is spoken and moved beyond (after the boy’s revelation, the dragons are dismissed from their subterranean enmity), Merlin is freed from the compulsion to yield his blood … and can endure in the story to erect on Salisbury plain the vast architecture of Stonehenge, rocks that when drenched with water heal bodily ailments. Vortigern, meanwhile, is eventually burnt to ash within his tower, his incineration a reminder of the oblivion that comes to those who reside only in history.

Stonehenge becomes Geoffrey’s shorthand for art itself, a lithic yet living structure that conjoins distant pasts (the stones journey from Africa to Ireland to Britain, and conjoin the stories of their primal architects, the giants, with those of humans) and unexpected futures (transported to Salisbury through Merlin’s engineering feats, Stonehenge stands for the futurity bestowed upon the House of Constantine, for not only will it last eternally as a memorial to the kings Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon, the only great ruler from this family not interred there will be Arthur, whose absence body allows the possibility of a return to come). Merlin through this calculus becomes not so much an engineer as an author, an artist: his magical power is not the wizardry of spells, but the ability to add to that which would otherwise be merely functional or historical a beauty that enlarges the world into which it arrives, that ensures the structure it inhabits and worlds will nurture its own mobility, that guarantees the artwork will endure. Thus the Vortigern’s Tower episode concludes with some words about Merlin’s transformation from bastard child to uncanny spirit of creativity and estrangement:

[Vortigern] was more astounded [ammirabatur, “possessed by wonder”] by Merlin than he had ever been by anything. All those present were equally amazed [ammirabantur] by his knowledge, and they realized that there was something supernatural about him [existimantes numen esse in illo]. (169, 73)

Like a medieval Caillois, Merlin is expert in the writing of stones, in lapidary art – even when the stone in which this art has been enclosed has been sunken in a pool and placed within a mountain. By discerning the colored dragons within the stones’ heart, or the healing powers within Stonehenge – by discerning the inherent surplus in something as seemingly cold and inert as buried rocks and ancient monoliths – Merlin speaks the inhuman, self-dispossessing, and unhistorical truth of art.

Geoffrey of Monmouth was far from the only medieval artist to discover at the boundary between body and world, history and ecstasy the lyrical yet confounding power of inhuman art. Marie de France, a contributor to the consensual world put in place by Geoffrey, structured many of her lais are around an aesthetic object so dense in its significations that it cannot be reduced to a single meaning: the talkative, bisexual hind and the ship of dreams in Guigemar; the woven cloth that materializes a sexuality in La Cordre; the clothing that maintains and yet confuses the corporal line between human and wolf in Bisclavret. Guigemar, for example, is a knight so self-enclosed that he knows love only of solitary pleasures. While hunting he encounters a deer with antlers, a bisexual or hermaphroditic creature that also possesses human speech. His arrow rebounds from this living artwork of an animal, wounding his thigh and hurling him into erotic possibility. Guigemar’s world, like his body, has been penetrated, and will henceforth never be so circumscribed. He boards a boat that awaits him in the harbor, a ship that may be made of dreams, or it may be the bark of Solomon which worthy knights board to seek the Holy Grail, or may be a metaphor for all the beauty of poetry. The ship conveys him to a distant land, where his ardor for an imprisoned lady allows her access to a more capacious worldview. Notably, she is not allowed to sail across the sea and find him until she makes the choice to propel herself out of a familiar story in which she plays the affection-starved young wife to a dry old man. Once she makes that choice, she finds the door to the tower in which she has been enclosed has always been unlocked, and that the Ship of Poetry awaits at the harbor. Could lyricism take a less human, more beautiful form than that vessel gliding across the world’s seas, enlarging the world with every wave its prow traverses?

In closing I offer a scene that, like Rivallo and the pluvial gore, opens another world through blood; a scene enclosed, like Geoffrey’s sleeping dragons, in stone. The unnamed heroine of Yonec has been imprisoned in a tower by her jealous and elderly husband. She wastes away, losing her beauty, until one day, she wishes that the alternate worlds of which she has apparently been reading might be true, that ladies might discover lovers “so handsome, courtly, brave and valiant / that they could not be blamed, / and no one else would see them” (98-100). She wishes, in other words, that she might be like Merlin’s mother, enjoying in secret the embraces denied to her in the small space into which she has been confined. Upon its utterance her wish takes fleshly form: a hawk flies to the ledge of the tower and enters the room as “a handsome and noble knight” (115) – a man who has loved her from afar for many years, but needed her to articulate her desire for a world configured otherwise before he could fly to her chamber. Not an incubus exactly, but acting very much like one, this fantasy knight eventually impregnates the lady with a son. Her wicked husband discovers the truth of his wife’s enjoyment, and sets sharp spikes along the window ledge. When the hawk-knight attempts to enter, he is torn apart, and stains the bedclothes with his blood (316).

When her dying lover returns to his distant land, the lady decides upon an extraordinary course of action: she leaps from her window, leaps into activity and out of her prison of self-possession. She follows a glimmering trail of blood straight into a hillside, where after a subterranean journey an Other World opens in splendor: “There was no house, no hall or tower, / that didn’t seem of silver” (362-3). She enters a series of chambers, each with a slumbering knight she does not recognize: other lovers for other dream-filled ladies. On the third bed in the third room she discovers her dying knight, who speaks to her of a beautiful future yet to come. The story ends exactly where we expect: with the son taking vengeance against his wicked stepfather, the lady dying in a mixture of bliss and grief at the grave of her true love, tidy closure for this intricate little work of art. Yet to return to the lai’s middle space, to its underground chamber that in no way seems beneath the earth: here we glimpse the entrance to another world where sleeping knights without names, without narrated stories, await the cloistered dreamers who will dare to envision their own rescue from the stories that imprison them. This Other World, sealed beneath a hill but reached easily after a frightening leap of faith, through an encounter with one’s own potential obliteration, this Other World offers the possibility of infinite worlds, of spaces so strange within this earth that human imagination alone fails to capture all their potential for disrupting the seeming solidity of the ordinary worlds we inhabit.

Inhuman art: not in the culmination of the story of Yonec, which is an all too human tale of revenge, but in its dream of a hollow space within the hill, where possibilities are multiplied, where the world as we know it expands exponentially and induces the ecstasy, the vertigo, of ceasing to know one’s place.

Postcard from Maine

by J J Cohen

To your left you will see a picture I snapped along the Marginal Way, a seacoast path that connects the village of Ogunquit to Perkins Cove in southern Maine. The trail is neither long nor solitary, though at the right time of year you can have a vista of dark rocks and thundering waves to yourself. I've been traversing the path almost every year since I was a small child, when my parents would typically take the little Cohens there at the end of a beach day. We'd run from one end of the trail to the other, have ice cream near the lobster boats, then hike back along the path -- often as the moon was rising over the water.

On more recent vacations I've been taking my kids to the Marginal Way to clamber along the rocks and study sea life in tidal pools. We have a tradition of grabbing croissants from a local bakery and eating them within a secluded cove some steps down from the pedestrian path. Katherine and Alexander are convinced that pirates once buried loot beneath the sands here, and we speculate what we would do with the treasure should we be the ones to unearth an ancient chest ... and what curse we might earn by disturbing the fortune.

This year I noticed that a nearby cove had sprouted stacks of rocks. They are obviously the work of human hands, and remind me of the little lithic structures I've seen in Sedona AZ atop the red rocks, typically where astral vortexes are supposed to manifest. I doubt these Maine rocks have any connection to New Age mysticism ... but then again, I have no idea how they got there or who created them. I'd guess there are more than a hundred of these stacks in the cove. I'll even admit that Katherine and I made one ourselves, a miniature stack right at the tide line, knowing the waves would topple our architecture within a few hours. Something innately pleasing resided in that mixture of enduring stone and ephemeral art.

Oddly enough, I also noticed that a store in the village was selling small stacks of plastic rocks glued together in imitation of these diminutive seaside Stonehenges.

Roger Caillois among the Nonhumans

by J J Cohen

[rocky image at left captured by Michel Corboz]

This is Part II of the post instigated here. The essay on inhuman art of which it will form a portion will eventually be published here. Congratulations to Eileen for successfully placing the volume in the promising new series, "Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture" [edited by Ethan Knapp and sponsored by Ohio State University Press].

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Theorizing the interface between humans and their others, especially animals, has proven an especially rich critical topic in the past decade. The work of scholars like Steve Baker, Jacques Derrida, Susan Crane, N. Katherine Hayles, Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Alphonso Lingis, Karl Steel, Julian Yates, Jonathan Gil Harris, Bruno Latour and Cary Wolfe has stressed the tenuousness of any line that would segregate the human from the nonhuman. Just as valuable to this multidisciplinary investigation, I would argue, is the eclectic work of Roger Caillois. Connected in complicated ways to Andre Breton and French surrealism, Caillois’s friendships read like a Who’s Who of francophone theory. He was introduced to Georges Bataille by Jacques Lacan. With Bataille and Michel Leiris he founded the influential College of Sociology in 1938. When Bataille determined that a secret society he had formed (Acéphale) needed to cement its membership around an act of human sacrifice, and when someone (possibly the perennially depressed Leiris) volunteered as victim, Bataille -- it has been suggested -- attempted to convince Caillois to be the executioner. Needless to say, the sacrifice did not take place: Roger Caillois was the kind of scholar by nature ambivalent towards any group desiring his membership. Indeed, this reticence goes a long way towards explaining why his work remains relatively neglected while that of almost everyone who moved through his intellectual circle has proven influential in the world of theory. There is something anomalous about Caillois, both as a person and as a writer.

I became interested in Caillois's work through the reverence shown him by the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, feminist reinterpreter of Lacan and Deleuze, theorizer of boundaries as space of becoming. Caillois is useful for thinking the world from a non-anthropomorphic point of view. He devoted his life to exploring such mysteries as why stones are such accomplished artists and why animal mimicry doesn't actually imitate anything. He never wanted to keep uncertainty in place simply out of reverence. Famously, he broke with the Surrealists when Andre Breton refused to cut open a Mexican jumping bean. Caillois thought it ridiculous to argue that the bean's secret interior ought to be preserved simply to keep a sense of mystery intact. Yet Caillois also insisted that a place exists within science for art.

Claudine Frank, Caillois's recent editor and translator, makes two statements about his early intellectual projects that well summarize his promise for a renewed humanism: that "he was always seeking out new monsters" ("Introduction," Edge of Surrealism), and that he was engaged in composing a kind of "reverie" that could engender a "subversive, revolutionary New Science," interrogating rather than dismissing the imaginative and the fantastic. These projects involved the displacement of homo sapiens from an assumed centrality, discovering the alien within the unraveling contours of the human -- and the human within insects, octopi, butterflies, agates, inhuman architectures, the workings of the cosmos. "Man is a unique case only in his own eyes," Caillois observes in his provocative essay "The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis" (c.1934). Here he takes as his starting point the eternal fascination men betray with the femme fatale of the insect world, the mantis who beheads her partner as a prelude to mating. Caillois acknowledges that this recurring interest may derive simply from "some obscure sense of identification" elicited by the insect's "remarkably anthropomorphic form" (73). Yet he is not satisfied by a principle of simple projection, as if by detailing the function of the mantis within male fantasies the insect's uncanniness would then stand explained. There exists in the praying mantis, he writes, an innate lyricism (Edge of Surrealism 74, 78), an irreducible superfluity. Even when decapitated, the mantis is capable of walking, mating, laying eggs, even feigning rigor mortis to escape impending danger. Attempting to describe this acephalous body having sex, living its life, and imitating a cadaver leads Caillois to observe of his own convoluted language: “I am deliberately expressing myself in a roundabout way as it is so difficult, I think, both for language to express and for the mind to grasp that the mantis, when dead, should be capable of simulating death” (79). He finds a similar impulse to lyricism (or “objective lyrical value”) in almost all scientific writing about the insect, an impulse that overcomes habitual “professional dryness” (78) and swiftly carries writers out of their scientific lexicons and deep into poetry.

The mantis offers no comfortable lessons about the anthropomorphism of insects: its lyricism is not a human projection, but a fact of its being, a cosmic given that it shares across boundaries with other human and nonhuman bodies:

Such research tends to establish that determinations caused by the social structure, however important, are not alone in influencing the content of myths. We must also to take into account half-physiological, half-psychological factors … We should pay more attention to certain basic emotional reactions and clusters that sometimes exist only as potentialities in human beings, but that correspond to phenomena explicitly and commonly observed throughout the rest of nature. (81)

The mantis thereby suggests the entomonous residue infecting the human, breaching the barrier between Cartesian subject and nonhuman environment. It becomes proof of what Caillois calls "the systematic overdetermination of the universe" (76) – quite a burden for a small bug to bear. By refusing allegory, by refusing contextualization into mere human meaning, the praying mantis restores danger to the object under scientific scrutiny, allowing that the act of contemplation itself immediately trespasses the distinction between observer and observed, rendering them inextricable.

Caillois develops these themes further in "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," an essay likewise exploring the intimacy of the insectal. Caillois's work here proved instrumental for the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan as he formed his notion of the Mirror Stage. Against those Darwinians who see in every attribute of an animal its evolutionary use value, Caillois develops an anti-utilitarian argument in which the spatial and the corporeal interpenetrate. Mimicry, the vertiginous displacement of environment onto body, is for Caillois not a survival strategy but an unnecessary surplus, a "dangerous luxury." Predators are seldom deceived, he observes, when their prey adopt attributes of the space they inhabit, such as when a butterfly imitates a twig or a beetle disguises itself as a pebble. Most animals hunt by smell, not sight: "numerous remains of mimetic insects are found in the stomach of predators." Many inedible creatures imitate their environments needlessly (96-97). Mimicry -- whether animals becoming their worlds, or humans imitating their surroundings magically or aesthetically – is a succumbing of body and subject to the "lure of space" (99). This "dispossession" of the privilege of being one's own center spells the death of the autonomous subject, as self is scattered across landscape and landscape intermixes with self. Caillois gives a literary example, Gustave Flaubert's rendition of the desert-dwelling Saint Antony. The hermit rapturously witnesses the "interpenetration of the three natural kingdoms" [vegetal, animal, geological] and "disperse[s] himself everywhere, to be within everything" (101). Elizabeth Grosz writes in summation that what Caillois has identified is "a certain structural, anatomical, or behavioral superabundance, perhaps it is the very superfluity of life over and above the survival needs of the organism." This superfluity of life is, by another name, art.

Later in life this surrealist biologist argued that art is not possessed only by humans or by animals: art is a superfluous beauty that is fashioned by geology as well as by hands. The Writing of Stones is a stunningly illustrated tour of nonhuman art: lithic sculptures offered for no particular audience to admire, the petrification of a universal impulse to produce beyond utility, a union of the human with geological phenomena that had seemed until Caillois looked so intently upon them to be the inert. He finds in marble, amethyst, jaspers, limestone and agates an aesthetic formed of “surprising resemblance” to human art, a resemblance “at once improbable and natural” (The Writing of Stones 1), a resemblance better described as a commonality. This “intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one” and possessed indestructibly by certain rocky formations he describes as the “promise and the foundation” of human beauty:

Stones – and not only they but also roots, shells, wings, and every cipher and construction in nature – help to give us an idea of the proportions and laws of that general beauty about which we can only conjecture and in comparison with which human beauty must be merely one recipe among many others … In stones the beauty common to all the kingdoms seems vague, even diffuse, to man, a being lacking in density (2-3)

Humans may resist beholding in the colors, textures, and resemblances of stones the colors, textures, and resemblances of their own art, the “endless variation” of cosmic phenomena as evident in fern fronds and mollusk shells as eruptions of quartz and Rothko canvases. Humans may resist seeing in themselves and in their works architectures of beauty that connect them to the cosmic, the microscopic, the inanimate, connect them to “works executed by no one” (13), connect them to “the aesthetics of the universe” (3). Yet despite this disavowal something exists within “imperturbable stone which neither feels nor knows” (75) that in its excess of pattern, color, harmony and form triggers “something we might describe as the lapidary” that fills us with “wonder and desire” (3). Often we answer such lapidary pull by becoming collaborators with stone – most famously, when early modern artists painted scenes from Orlando Furioso or the Divine Comedy on pieces of marble that provided naturally occurring backgrounds of forests, ruins, and flames.

Interested as he is with art within stone, Caillois does not mention the stoneworks that would seem the ultimate expression of such alliance: menhirs, dolmens, and vast arrays like Avebury. Stonehenge, for example, may be in part a human version of the naturally occurring standing stones of the Preseli Mountains in Wales. Here dolerite can be found in the form of rectangular pillars, seemingly rough-hewn by some primal architect, sometimes appearing to have been positioned as an orderly line of monoliths. The stones tower over an expansive landscape of grass, lichen-encrusted boulders that appear to have smashed by giants, and springs that according to local myths possess curative powers. These bluestones of the Preseli Mountains were the source of the earliest oldest stones erected at Stonehenge, 250 miles away. The archeologist Geoffrey Wainwright calls the bluestones “a natural monument” of columns and pillars and has found ample evidence that they were venerated in Neolithic times, often through the inscription of artwork on their surfaces. Something about the formations so inspired their beholders that they transported eighty or so monoliths, each weighing up to four tons, through an almost inconceivable amount of effort to distant Salisbury plain. Nature’s exorbitance called forth a human response that was just as excessive. The Preseli bluestones are an artwork wrought through the shifting of the landscape over vast spans of time, the expenditure of gravitational and climatic energies; Stonehenge is an artwork wrought through the release of energy in sinew and muscle, but something more than a simple imitation of a natural original. Both cases seem the product of ongoing and restless forces that effloresce into enduring forms; human or not, both are worlds wrought in stone.

Caillois stresses throughout his analysis that even though this art seems embedded within what is dead, immobile, and unchanging, what in fact fascinates is the active connection between stone and world, evident in the unbearably slow formation of its artwork, and evident as well in the participation it demands from its environment – including the human observer. Gazing upon a sheet of scaled jasper he writes “Even while I am reducing things to their chemical constituents I cannot help descrying swathes of arctic light shining meagerly on inky lichens, struggling vegetation exhausted by rough winds and burned by frost” (64). Such reverie is not human projection, but a participation across kingdoms (animal, mineral) activated by the beauty common to both. Sometimes in stone we behold forms once living: wispy fossil tracing of leaves, petrified bones of animals whose ancient bulk troubles the imagination to body forth again. Sometimes we behold natural resemblances to such recurring forms. Often we witness the preservation of a past that did not endure: “life’s mistakes, to remind nature of its monsters, its botched jobs, its blind alleys” (81). Or perhaps in this abortive past we behold a future that includes ourselves, observers made of more stone-stuff than we care to acknowledge:

[These ‘monsters’] somehow announce the coming, in the distant future, of a species that makes mistakes … They presage new powers, imperfect but creative … They seem to be manifestations of what I have ventured to call a natural fantasy … a lasting and inalienable collusion between this series of fertile abortions and their ultimate beneficiary (82-84).

Roger Caillois has been accused of pessimism, even misanthropy: “a kind of indifference toward what is human.” More accurately, what Caillois attempted was to view the world through a less anthropocentric lens, one in which stones and artists share a common impulse towards the production of beauty, one in which humans and rocks share secret affinities. As the heir to nature’s creative experiments, Caillois, wrote, man must “recognize, among the daunting mass of nature’s ventures, those which, though they did not succeed, opened up for him, through their very failure, a glorious way ahead” (84) – one in which animals, rocks, and homo sapiens bear in their forms and substance the imprint not of some divine maker, not of an intelligent design, but of an art-making “universal syntax” (104) that sometimes through its conjunctions commits artistic errors, births monsters … and sometimes through these same recurring processes animates an imperfect world with a beauty more than human.

Caillois is famous for his meditations on the sex life of the praying mantis, the misfires of mimicry among animals, the power of stones to pull the thinking subject into disruptive encounters with inhuman art – a collaboration of the animate and the inorganic propelled by beauty. His work clearly resonates with recent scholarly obsessions: the monstrous, the inexcluded, the exorbitant. He also formulates modes of analysis that move us beyond arguments based upon evolutionary, cultural, or symbolic use value. Caillois proposes what might be called aninormality: an anti-utilitarian conception of the nonhuman that moves us beyond its normalizing function into a realm where human and nonhuman counterinfect, where all kinds of bodies lose the rigor of their boundaries and become anomalous.

Inapposite Art

by J J Cohen

Eileen in her usual bullying way has forced/cajoled/tricked etc. me into composing an essay for a collection she is putting together on humanisms. I'll be looking at "inhuman art," especially as the theme developed in the work of Roger Caillois, but also in a few medieval texts. I'm trying to develop a concept of what I am calling aninormality (more on that soon). Some of this work has appeared on the blog already. Over the next week or two I'll be offering some pieces of the essay into which this work is condensing. I welcome your feedback.

What I'm wondering right now, though, is: is it really true (as I claim) that medievalists have largely not participated in the "return to beauty," so important in more contemporary-focused humanities? If so, what is it about the aesthetic that makes medievalists reluctant to bring the category to their work? I'm not speaking about formalism (we see plenty of close reading and attentiveness to prosody), but why the reluctance to invoke beauty per se?

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To be trained as a medievalist is to learn worship at the altar of Clio. Because the period we study is so distant from us, so estranged, history becomes our guarantor of truth in explication, the surety that our grasp of what is temporally remote is not distorted by anachronism [1]. Thus the medievalist ardor for historicism, a demanding and research-intensive interpretive mode in which analysis proceeds via nuanced understanding of political events, literary traditions, law, cultural context – in short, of a historical moment in all its complexity. Rigorous yet flexible, historicism endures because it serves the medievalist well. In conventional historicist inquiry, however, synchronic context is typically yielded the power to underwrite what a work of art can mean. Robert M. Stein opens his recent book Reality Fictions: Romance, History and Governmental Authority, 1025-1180 with some words about the relation between text and historical circumstance, demonstrating in the process how standard historicism works:

I suggest in this book that provocation to romance writing is the same as the provocation to history: they grow out of the same cultural need and intend to do the same cultural work ... I am writing about a political process [state formation] and its connection with literary innovation ... I intend ... to deal directly with the pressures on modes of representation that are correlative to changes in the structure of political power.

Stein's linking of romance to history through changes in governmental structures and political ambitions is a highpoint of his study. To make his thesis cogent, he confidently invokes doctrines that historicism taught medievalists long ago to accept: art is intractably enmeshed within its originary geotemporality; art performs a definitive social function; art is enabled by Zeitgeist and itself undertakes cultural work.

Compare Stein's point of interpretive departure, however, to Helen Vendler's swift application of the emergency brake when critics attempt politically-minded readings. As Rachel Donadio observes about this important critic of contemporary American poetry, in Vendler’s conceptualization the work of art dwells in a privileged space, exterior to historical context:

In a review of David Denby’s “Great Books” (1996), the film critic’s account of how he returned to college, immersing himself in Columbia’s core curriculum, Vendler wrote, ‘Seeing the Columbia course use Dante and Conrad as moral examples is rather like seeing someone use a piece of embroidery for a dishrag with no acknowledgment of the difference between hand-woven silk and a kitchen towel.’ In 2001, again in The New Republic, her main venue in recent years, Vendler took the critic James Fenton to task for his interpretation of Robert Frost’s 1942 poem ‘The Gift Outright,’ a version of which was recited by the aging poet at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961. Fenton, in her view, had imposed a mistaken interpretation on a poem as much ‘about marriage as about colonials becoming Americans,’ because ‘his politics has wrenched him into misreading it.’ (Some argued Vendler herself was misreading the poem by choosing to ignore its subject matter.) ["The Closest Reader"]

Most scholars of the Middle Ages will likely find their sympathies drawn more to Robert Stein, James Fenton, and David Denby than to Helen Vendler. Medievalists work in a discipline that stresses historical circumstance so heavily that it is difficult for us as critics to be satisfied with the Vendler-like "impassioned aesthete who pays minute attention to the structures and words that are a poet’s genetic code" (Donadio, “The Closest Reader”) without an anchoring movement into determinative history. The return to beauty, so trumpeted in the contemporary-focused humanities after the publication of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, has failed to recruit many participants among medievalists, who seem constitutionally incapable of detaching formal and aesthetic analysis from a social and cultural context. How we understand the relation of the text or artwork’s past to our present interpretive moment may differ widely: we may argue that the medieval is much like our own times (the Middle Ages as threshold of the Same), or we may hold that the period is vastly different from the present (the Middle Ages as chastely Other), or we may even deploy words like extimité (“intimate alterity”) to stress that simultaneity of both modes. Yet in all cases history potentially predetermines the meaning within the form: context produces art, which remains historically bound and therefore rather inert.

It might be objected that the historicist model does not do that much for the work of art itself. When historicism and other socially-minded forms of criticism ignore art’s aesthetic effects, they do not leave sufficient room for what Jennifer Green-Lewis and Margaret Soltan have described as “art’s thrilling intimation of an untapped plenitude within us and in the world.” In art, Green-Lewis and Soltan argue, inheres the ability “to move us to a condition of ecstasy as we lose ourselves in its particular forms of beauty.” This movement outside of the self offers what they call “a cheerfully secular faith,” one in which “beneath the mundane life of daily consciousness lies a deep source of meaning, a motive to action, joy” [Teaching Beauty in Delillo, Woolf, and Merrill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)]. Conventional historicism, in other words, has a difficult time articulating why the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – with its green holly conjoined to crimson blood, its frisson of terror intercut with infectious exuberance -- should have a bodily, ecstatic effect, should possess a beauty that more mundane medieval texts do not. This beauty, it seems, moves the poem outside of its own history, into an aesthetic realm where its meditations on Ricardian kingship or contemporary Welsh-English relations matter less than its ability to render birdsong in a winter storm as plaintive to medieval ears as to our own.

A paradox exists within aesthetics, however. Beauty is frequently found in emanations from the nonhuman world: oceans, flowers, landscapes, onomatapoeia and celestial objects are favorite critical sources. Claude Monet famously discerned London’s grandeur by painting the city devoid of its inhabitants. Wisps of fog, the glimmering Thames, and stony architectures made nebulous by stains of light (Charing Cross Bridge, the façade of the Houses of Parliament) appear more frequently on his canvases than human figures. Yet for all the privilege the nonhuman enjoys as a trigger to aesthetic experience, beauty is ultimately a deeply human category. For Elaine Scarry, beauty’s innate symmetry is intimately related to a notion of justice based in proportion and balance. Beauty stages an ethical relation; beauty exists to make us better in our humanity. “There will always be those who believe,” write Green-Lewis and Soltan, “the intoxicating power of art inclines us toward civic virtue by invigorating our faith in humanity, clarifying our spiritual and ethical particularity, and inspiring us to do great and good things” (Teaching Beauty 3). While I fervently hope that this ameliorating, humanizing power of art is true, I can’t help wondering what beauty does for the animal or for the rock formation or building that finds itself its bearer. [2]

Something exists in art that is inapposite, extraneous. Art is not reducible to its enmeshment in historical circumstance, even if the time and place in which it arose wholly saturates it; nor can art inhabit some space exterior to history. Can art be imagined as an active agent in world of human and nonhuman forces? Can art produce, intervene within, transform the history within which it arises? As one force among many, can art call worlds into being without falling wholly back into those worlds, without ever escaping from a perpetual unfolding?

Can art be something other than human?

Notes
[1] Thus rejecting the possibility or at least the desirability of such straightforward encounter with the past, queer theory often argues for a perverse or (in the words of Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger) preposterous rendezvous: see their introduction to Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Burger and Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) xi-xxiii, and especially their rejection of “a conventional historicism… confident that it finds the ‘truth’ of the past.” That seemingly univocal truth, they argue, is more truthfully “a retrospective selection of some facts [and narratives] over others,” imbuing the chosen evidence with explanatory force; those roads not taken and stories passed over in silence, meanwhile, are assumed to be “dead ends” (xx). History assumes different contours, and takes a different position alongside the present, when these supposed cul de sacs are followed rather than rejected out of hand.
[2] I do realize that I am using “art” and “beauty” as synonyms here, an equivalence that many would argue against, but one found in Scarry, Green-Lewis and Soltan. Roger Caillois will qualify art as the work of human hands, but will then (as will be seen) find that work to part of a cosmic or universal impulse rather than a strictly human achievement.

Image: Claude Monet's iconic "Charing Cross Bridge," pillaged from the Tate.

Oliver Sacks on Migraines, Pattterns, and Universal Art

In an interesting essay in the NYT, Sacks wonders about the patterns he has witnessed since childhood while gripped by migraine and the cross-cultural ardor for repetitive design:

I started to wonder whether what I had taken to be a personal experience and resonance might in fact be part of a larger whole, whether certain basic forms of geometric art, going back for tens of thousands of years, might also reflect the external expression of universal experiences. Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize, to make art from, these internal experiences, from the decorative motifs of prehistoric cave paintings to the psychedelic art of the 1960s. Do the arabesques in our own minds, built into our own brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of geometry, of formal beauty?

For October 31: A severed head, skeletal fairies, ghosts and a bog man

Fodder for several of our longrunning conversation here at ITM: the Museum of Natural History at Rouen in Normandy has decided that a mummified Maori head in its collections ought to be returned to New Zealand for burial, while the Ministry of Culture has declared the body part preservation-worthy art. Today's NYT meanwhile provides a queer ghost story that ends up rather straight (no gay wizards are involved). Bioephemera has breathtaking images of skeleton fairies attacking a bee and a spider, the mixed media work of artist Tessa Farmer. Lastly, today's illustration is the poster for my impending Holloway Lecture at McDaniel College. Nothing says scholarly fun like an executed peat bog body. The poster was, I'm told, the product of a student competition. Click on the image to enlarge.

At Avebury

Here is the draft opening to my new project on "The Weight of the Past." I'm attempting to frame the problem with an initially negative solution, but (you know me well, my readers) will eventually swing around to something more affirmative.

This project, I should add, is the biggest loser in the theft of my laptop: my research notebook, with the detailed scribblings, observations, outline, and bibliographic notes, vanished with that computer. I had not backed it up since August 17. But (speaking of swinging around to a more affirmative mode), the loss of the project's past has given me the chance to clear out some of the weight of that history, and to think certain components of my argument anew. That's strangely liberating, even if a buttload of work.

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We stand beneath the megalith. Brisk winds roam the grass. The sheep are complaining. “Can you feel anything?” I ask. His palm presses against the rock as eagerly as mine. “Yes,” he whispers, fingers searching clefts and lichen. “I think I do.” He places his head against the stone and closes his eyes, as if through an intimate touch he might discern hoary secrets. He seems as certain and as joyful as when, many years ago, he used to press his head to my chest to apprehend the life of an invisible heart. In a solemn voice, as if he has absorbed from deep in the rock its enduring history, he announces “It knows it killed someone.”

I realize immediately that my son must have pilfered my copy Aubrey Burl’s Prehistoric Avebury: Second Edition. He must have been reading the volume late into the night of our London flat. “Me, too,” I say. “I definitely feel something.”

I am lying. Like my son I want to feel power in the towering stone. Not the energy of astral planes or the pull of a vortex or proximity to pagan divinity. Not whatever it is New Age druids come to Avebury seeking. Yet as in their dreams, my desire is that the stone not be inert. My son is right: this megalith did, after all, take someone’s life. After standing for millennia, the 13-ton rock crushed a man and preserved him for six centuries beneath its bulk. The weight of the past, indeed. Alexander Keiller discovered the body in 1938 when he disinterred and re-erected the stone. Archeologists hypothesize that the skeletal remains were in life an itinerant barber-surgeon. His leather purse contained some scissors, a lancet, and some coins from the early fourteenth century. He was likely witnessing or even assisting in the contemporary effort to obliterate Avebury, “mightiest in size and grandeur of all megalithic rings” until a piecemeal destruction commenced in the Middle Ages. Pits were dug beneath the standing stones so that they toppled and were buried, acts of “pious vandalism” directed at what was probably understood to be an unchristian structure. Perhaps the effort was abandoned when the accidental entombment of the barber convinced its witnesses that these stones could still exert some force. Since its re-erection eight decades ago, the megalith has been known as Barber Rock, its new name bearing witness to the life it took.

As destructive as the fourteenth-century project of toppling Avebury may have been, this attempted annihilation of an architecture four thousand years old paradoxically assisted in preserving its components. Those rocks buried by medieval vandals where they fell were shielded from fragmentation and reuse in later periods. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were especially brutal to the Avebury stone circle. The utter destruction of numerous megaliths was accomplished through the use of fire, cold water, and sledgehammers. We will never know how many of the rocks became, once smashed to pieces, the foundations of local farmhouses and the stuff of quotidian roadways.

My son felt power abiding in a megalith that, having celebrated thousands of birthdays as part of a Neolithic architecture, fell upon and crushed a medieval man. The stone had patiently awaited resurrection for five hundred years so that it could again tower over a verdant field, could again render the humans standing alongside it small and ephemeral. With my son I wanted to believe that histories long separated from us can endure in objects like Barber Rock – and Avebury, and Stonehenge, and the prehistoric past, and the Middle Ages. I wanted to believe that human meaning can survive across inhuman temporal gaps. Yet I knew that the body of the crushed barber-surgeon, of the man who had dared to undermine the stone and had paid for the act with his life, had been rediscovered recently in London. A new theory holds that the barber was dead before the stone toppled over him. So much for the agency of the rock, its dangerous and enduring force. Those are powers we humans yearn to observe because we suspect that they do not exist, that time brings history to an oblivion as mute as stone.

Intimations of mortality. Whatever its initial architects called it, in whatever language they spoke but could not bequeath to us, Barber Rock has perhaps always been inert. The dolmens and stone circles that tourists wander Brittany, Ireland and Britain to glimpse -- architectures we think endure from time out of memory -- are typically modern reconstructions using nearby materials, designed to look Neolithic. Avebury is no different, a product of a massive restoration in the 1930s as much as a time capsule mailed five millennia ago. My son and I touched a megalith’s cold side and felt our own desires.

So much for the weight of the past. History, it seems, is literally immemorial, “out of memory,” impossible to hold for long.

More on assimilating fossils and temporality

While we're on the topic of fossils, alternate worlds, and temporality ... I thought I'd share a link to this very good site focused upon Stoney Littleton, a Neolithic chambered tomb in Somerset. The entrance to the long barrow prominently displays a fossilized ammonite, while the interior is constructed of rocks replete with mineralized organisms.

What the structure's builders thought of this writing on the stones we can't know with the same certainty that surrounds a reading of Augustine on Utica beach, but we can guess (I suppose) that they found these objects to be beautiful, maybe sacred, certainly a kind of art similar to what they were attempting to accomplish in erecting such an unnecessary architecture.

Like most Neolithic sites that look like something other than an ambiguous rise of land or a flattened depression in humdrum terrain, this one owes a great deal to modern reconstruction. Its new life as a New Age pilgrimage site attests to the pull these places exert -- and to the enfolded temporalities at which they dwell.

Inhuman history and POV

In Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World, Martin J. S. Rudwick traces how Victorian illustrations of the prehuman world (especially those crammed with strange life forms like dinosaurs) were deeply influenced by depictions of biblical history, and especially by scenes of the seven days of creation. Rudwick writes:

It is easy to take these scenes from ‘deep time’ for granted. But they invoke a conceptual and material construction of a very peculiar kind. Their realistic style invites us to imagine that we are seeing the deep past with our own eyes, unproblematically, as if from a time machine. Yet we also know that in fact they are based on extremely fragmentary evidence, fleshed out with a complex network of theoretical inferences. Furthermore, a moment’s reflection shows that they are very far from any simple realism, not least because they crowd into one scene a variety of organisms that would unlikely to pose together so obligingly in real life

Rudwick is as interested in point of view as mis en scene: these snapshots of prehistory are always organized as if an invisible human being were the observer. The vanished but assumed human knower is omnipresent, even in dinosaur illustrations to this day, leaving invisible what is in fact a problem:

Scenes from deep time … had not been and could not be witnessed by any human beings at all. By definition they claimed to represent a human viewpoint in a world that was totally nonhuman because it was prehuman. Here, significantly, the only precedent that might have been helpful was one with which many ‘men of science’ were reluctant to be associated. Traditional biblical illustrations had always included scenes from the very beginning of time, before any human beings were present to record events depicted … However, that pre-Adamic human viewpoint was not a divine viewpoint, unless it was that of the anthropomorphic Yahweh ‘walking in the garden in the cool of the day,’ or, proleptically, that of the logos that ‘was made flesh and dwelt among us.'

The organizing principle of the picture, that which gives it meaning and coherence, saturates the visual field with human meaning. Inhuman history is made knowable by making it anthropocentric -- even in the supposed absence of the human.

I was thinking about Rudwick's book this morning while reading a review in the Washington Post of the new Ansel Adams exhibit at the Corcoran. Blake Gopnik writes about the POV in Adams' iconic nature photography and what vanishes from them. Gopnik is specifically interested in the various cars Adams used to transport himself to vistas that seem to lack human content:

Of course, none of those cars are visible in Adams's photos. (Or not in most of them, at any rate. More on that below.) But they are a hidden presence that helps give his photos force and builds their meaning. Adams and his images are a product of the glory days of Machine Age America, and they speak about it.

Adams's photos aren't just about landscape. They're about the particular confrontation between technology and landscape that made those photos possible. The images of the Sierra Nevada are as much about getting easy access to those mountains -- even with dozens of pounds of large-format camera equipment -- as about the mountains themselves. America's love affair with its landscape has never been only about the natural wonders it contains. It's been about pride in America's ownership of those wonders and the ability to go out from settled centers to take them in. Technology made it ever easier to make the trek; photographic technology made it possible to seize the instant of encounter and commemorate that ownership.

Gopnik even provides a commercial photograph that Adams created and which was discovered in a drawer at the Post:

Just by chance, The Washington Post also owns a bunch of Adams advertising shots, discovered in a drawer more than 10 years ago. There's not much of a clue to where they came from, but they feature trademark Adams subjects: the giant trees of northern California, the cliffs and peaks of Yosemite. Yet, in each shot, cars and roads bring people into the scene, so they can have fun and look sexy and, generally speaking, sell the tourist landscape all around them. One of them is a classically Adamsian shot of a famously huge tree -- with a shiny eight-door custom Cadillac parked at its base, disgorging happy city folk. In his commercial work, Adams depicted America's mechanized reality. His art displays its alter ego.

Though the website doesn't offer this image, it is quite intriguing: an absolutely immense Redwood with an absolutely immense Cadillac, Ansel Adams with the human that has always been his frame made suddenly and stunningly visible.

Jumping the Shark, or is it a Cow?: Reply to Jeffrey

Without wanting to "jump" the bracing "Slovenly Slavoj" discussion, I thought I wound return us at the same time to Damien Hirst's shark-in-formaldehyde and to JJC's provocative questions there,

What's the difference between the skulls of history in the Museum of London and Hirst's aesthetically overloaded display of bone? Can curators be artists? Should they be?

And also to his further commentary,

The sacrifice of the animal is part of the power of the artwork. Again, if there were a mania for these things such that no living room were complete without a shark preserved in a tank, I'd have problems -- the same problems I'd have with a hundred green bioluminescent bunnies mass produced rather than one that remains anomalous. I also wouldn't buy the artwork (or sharkwork if you will). In fact I don't particularly want to even see it. But it doesn't seem wrong to me to have produced it, especially the sacrifice was -- at least in my perhaps too generous understanding -- acknowledged and in fact mandated by the conceptual piece, which yoked the loss of life to the challenge it attempted to mount.

All of the comments following the original post are very provocative to thought, and I myself expressed the concern there over what I would term "useless" or "unnecessary" deaths, to which JJC posted the comment just above. I find myself wanting to be very cautious when making so-called ethical pronouncements, I must admit, so as to not be hypocritical, I suppose--I eat meat, by the way, but live with a vegetarian who won't let me do so at home--but also because being ethical, for me, doesn't mean never doing "wrong," but is more a habit of being that strives to be attentive to all the ways in which each one of us is deeply flawed while also desiring to be "better" and trying very hard not to hurt others and being mindful as much as possible of others' feelings and life wishes, etc.

One of my favorite texts on this subject, which I think I've mentioned before, is Neil LaBute's play The Shape of Things, in which a college art student, Evelyn A. Thompson [code for: Eve, and also "e.a.t.": hint, hint], appropriates another student, Adam, as her master's thesis. Without telling him what she is doing, she woos him and slowly gets him to "shape up"--lose weight, get a nose job, change his clothing, get rid of his old friends, etc. The play culminates in the public presentation of the thesis, at which Adam is given the shock of the realization that Evelyn has been "using" him all along, whereas he thought they were in love and that everything he did was out of that mutual love [although much of what he did was downright ethically bad, as opposed to purely selfless: he gave up his friends, who had done nothing wrong except displease Evelyn, he rejected his own "natural" style and personality, he betrayed a friend by sleeping with his fiancee, etc.]. One of the arguments that Evelyn makes to Adam at the end of the film is that if he thought he was in love, even if she did not love him back, then what he felt was "real" at the time and nothing can change that. Furthermore, everyone's ethics are in direct proportion to how much you think you can get away with at any given moment, because all that really matters are "the surface of things, the shape of things" [so, as Adam got better looking, for example, he sensed the possibility of being able to sleep with his best friend's fiancee, and when he had the chance, he did it--something he could not have even imagined himself doing when he was an overweight, slovenly geek]. In other words, ethics are for people who can't, even if they wanted to, sleep with their best friends' wives or shark hunt. When Evelyn accuses Adam, sneeringly, of wanting her to be a "good person, like you" [implying: you are not good, and I proved that already], he replies, "no, just better" [implying that ethics is not, as I would agree, about achieving a state of perfect goodness but about simply trying to be better than you are--all very Aristotlean, actually].

Well, that was long-winded, but I love that play and teach it every year alongside Paradise Lost [for, I hope, obvious reasons]. I love Evelyn's and Adam's confrontation at the end because it is impossible to choose sides--to a certain extent, they are both right: their "love" was never "real," as Adam avers, although since he thought it was at the time, it was real, as Evelyn avers. The surface of things really do matter most of the time versus what is "inside," as Evelyn argues, and for most of us, ethical principles really are easy to wave around like sticks when we ourselves can't get away with much of anything. Although it wouldn't hurt, as Adam argues, to try to be "better" nevertheless, and to try, as hard as possible, not to "use" others, especially under the excuse, "I'm an artist and the only responsibility I have is to my art," as Evelyn says. You can't entirely gloss over some of LaBute's misogny in the play, since it is Evelyn's unbridled sexuality and provocative exhibitionism that prove to be Adam's main undoing, but I try not to let that unpleasant fact stand in the way of what I think is a brilliant meditation on art, ethics, and human relations. It's relevant in my mind to our discussion here, especially as JJC initially framed it in relation to commerce and the "superagency of lucre" and to a consideration of whether or not the display of once-living bodies and body parts is a type of de-sacralization that we should worry about. Well . . . .

of course money has something to do with all this, although, like JJC, to say that art hasn't always had something to do with money would be ridiculous [although just because art and commerce have always been connected doesn't mean anything goes if someone will pay for it, in my mind--it's just, the presence of money does not necessarily "taint" the artwork, although I do not believe, as some free market advocates do that the market is inherently impersonal and therefore morally neutral]. I made this exact same point in my essay, "What Counts is Not to Say, But to Say Again" [published in the Old English Newsletter], in which I tried to assuage the fears of certain Anglo-Saxonists over Anglo-Saxon artifacts being sold on eBay, and where I wrote that,

If it weren’t for the voracious collecting endeavors of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century antiquarians such as Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Robert Harley, who purchased books and artifacts with the zeal of black market scoundrels (Cotton was even briefly jailed in 1629 for owning state papers deemed seditious by the Crown), the British Museum would have lacked its chief founding collections.

I further wrote:

I would argue that it is precisely the cultural artifact’s free market circulation through the global agora that ensures the best possible forms of its future survival. This circulation allows the artifact to be freed from the traditional (and sometimes stifling) constraints of provincial, and even, nationalist “boxes” that ultimately limit the fullest possible range of its cultural appropriation and re-appropriation, without which the item is often either “dead on arrival” or placed into the service of suspect accounts of hegemonic historical memory that often gloss over the messy social relations inherent in the transmission and replication of material culture. I do not want to imply here that museums and libraries (whether private or state-funded) have not done an excellent, even heroic, job of rescuing, preserving, conserving, interpreting, and making publicly available important cultural treasures in a manner that allows us, quite literally, to both read and write history (to “see” the past, as it were, and to place it into meaningful critical and social dialectics); rather, I want to argue that we need a more nuanced understanding of what we think we mean by “original” cultural context, and why we think it is so important that we must worry over its displacement. Furthermore, if we are going to have a vigorous discussion about claims of ownership of the past, I would ask that we commit ourselves to a rigorous theoretical examination of how medieval artifacts circulate in the world both as “things” and as bearers of “cultural meaning.” This will mean joining a theoretical discussion regarding “cultural appropriations” long in progress in the fields of ethnography, sociology, archaeology, historiography, art history, and cultural studies, but also among medieval scholars in fields other than Anglo-Saxon studies. It will also mean recognizing, as Claire Sponsler has argued, that “[t]he tendency of medieval scholars to approach their task as one of salvage has privileged the ‘artifact’ as the focal point of study rather than the ‘process’ of cultural creation and transmission.” Additionally, if we want to talk about “original archaeological contexts,” then we are also going to have to talk about what we think we mean by cultural “origins,” and we will need to pay some attention to the debates over “ethnicity” and “ethnogenesis” that are currently raging among historians, archaeologists, and ethnographers of the proto-historical and early medieval periods. And as long as we are talking about ethics, I would also ask us to spend some time considering the ways in which our insistence on the maintenance of material artifacts within tightly-controlled cultural (and often, ethnically-defined) contexts unwittingly contributes to a process of historicism whereby extremely dangerous political movements—such as Nazism and Serbian nationalism—are able to use these “pristine” cultural objects (and the academic discourses built upon them) as powerfully creative tools for constructing specious collective identities, which identities are then deployed in the service of cultural destruction on a mass scale.

And a little further on:

The fact that the question of the “original context” of the artifact is always inextricably connected to multiple frames of reference and identity—personal and public, psychic and social, material and non-material—brings us right back to ethics. The Anglo-Saxon artifact sitting in its glass case at the British Library may seem fairly benign, and we would be hard pressed to imagine a controversy erupting over its supposed provenance and meaning, or its habitation in a national museum, partly because those who had the most to gain and lose from it are so far removed from us in time. But we would do well to consider the ramifications of some recent controversies over who should own and control the physical objects of the historical past. An illustrative case in point is the bitter international dispute that erupted in the spring and summer of 2001 when Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust museum, removed from a house in Drohobych, Ukraine five fragments of newly-discovered murals, depicting scenes from Grimm’s fairy tales, painted by the Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, who was shot to death by an SS officer in Nazi-occupied Drohobych (then part of Poland) in 1942. Many in Poland and Ukraine objected strongly to Yad Vashem’s removal of Schulz’s work, which they feel is a part of their living Polish and Central European Jewish heritage, but Yad Vashem insisted not only that Schulz’s work more properly belonged in their cultural and moral purview, but that they would also make the more able curators. It is often said of Schulz that he “was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew,” but to the representatives of Yad Vashem who defended the removal of the mural fragments, because Schulz “was a Jewish artist—forced to illustrate the walls of the home of a German SS officer as a Jewish prisoner during the Holocaust, and killed by an SS officer purely because he was a Jew—the correct and most suitable place to house the wall paintings he sketched during the Holocaust, is Yad Vashem.” Given Drohobych’s anti-Semitic history and the fact that the town contains no markers or monuments denoting its most famous son, perhaps Yad Vashem was right to take the murals; nevertheless, the debate raged through the fall and winter of 2001 and into the spring of 2002, with twenty-four American scholars of Central European history, art, and literature arguing in The New York Review of Books that Yad Vashem’s removal of the frescoes “represents an unconscionable statement of moral and cultural superiority” that is “an insult to the people of Central Europe,” as well as “doubly damaging to the local Jewish population which has remained in Drohobych.” Most important, these scholars worried that Yad Vashem’s actions were a dangerous assault on the history of both the artist’s and the region’s “pluralism,” and since all of his work is set in Drohobych, “is it not the best homage to him to salvage some part of the world he loved, in situ?” Here we see both the concern for honoring an “original” local context, as well as an attention to the multi-dimensional and “plural” nature of the historical artifact, which, perhaps, should not be “boxed in” too tightly, but how compatible are these objectives? Can the artifact, much like the individual who creates it, ever sit still? The answer is both “yes” and “no.”

So, I'm hoping that we can see some of the relevancy of what I was trying to say there, in relation to our discussion about Hirst's shark and those skulls in their glass case at the museum in London, although what I was discussing in my OEN essay were artifacts like belt clasps and helmets, not human or shark bodies, or parts thereof. And I think our consideration of whether or not it is okay to display grave remains in museums requires slightly different parameters than the ones I sketched out in my OEN essay, although they are hinted at with my example of the controversy over the Schulz wall murals, which has something to do with what we might call the curator-ship of memory, individual and more broadly cultural.

It doesn't take me too much effort to understand that the shark in formaldehyde or those human skulls, diamond-encrusted or not, have little to do with the living "persons" that once moved and expressed themselves by means of those bodies and body parts. In this sense, they are inanimate objects whose presence--whether at the bottom of an ocean in a shark graveyard or underneath a hillside somewhere in England or in a glass case in a museum--does nothing to "disturb," as it were the human and other living selves who once lived within their material "skins," and who can no longer be harmed. It is more to the question of memory that I believe we should direct our ethical concerns, or non-concerns. To those living in past histories, or even in present "alter-human" spaces like the sea, or to those, like a Barry Lopez, who take it as a personal concern to consider the sanctity of those species who cannot articulate, through speech or gesture, their own possible sacred-ness, and for whom the placement of the dead in particular places did, or does, matter, we might imagine--as historians but also as the artists of history--how some may have wished to have been left behind, in a certain place, close to their ancestors, their tribe, their home, etc. Obviously, everything is in motion all the time, and no one is safe from disturbance--from being moved from one place to another, and with no living representative to advocate otherwise, the question who cares? becomes significant. Which is kind of like another version of the old adage, "why should I care after I'm dead"? Which is another way of also saying, "now that the shark is dead, does it really matter where he ends up?" But does this mean our ethical considerations only ever extend to the question of who, sitting beside us or standing off to the side, in the present, might be hurt? Levinas once wrote that we do not have the right to leave anyone alone at his or her death, but what about after?

UPDATE: I hope that no one will think from the foregoing ruminations that I am of the unreconstructed viewpoint that no one and no thing culled from grave-sites is ever an appropriate object for an artwork, which might also be a museum exhibit. I am not. But I think the context matters a lot. So, if you dig up some Egyptian mummies and put them on display in the British Museum as artifacts of "antiquity," supposedly of interest to antiquarians, Egyptologists, and the like, and the idea behind it all is something like, "gee, weren't the Egyptians really neat?", I'm not sure I'm in favor of that, but if a group of Tibetan monks in Cambodia decide to artfully display mounds of skulls of Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge in their temples and invite visitors to view these and think about their history, as well as about the souls of their former possessors, or if the curators of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC decide to have, as one of their displays, a mound of shoes taken from German and Polish Jews as they were being herded into a concentration camp, and the purpose of this display, which is both art as well as historical testimony, is to call to the viewer's mind the memory of the singular persons who once wore those homely shoes, and to reflect upon their violent and untimely demise as well as upon the small and ordinary material things that "add up" to a person, whether alive or dead, then I can live with that. Indeed, these are examples of museum-ship as the maintenance of the sacred in history.