Oliver Sacks' Love of Fossils

From yesterday's NYT, a short piece on the prehistoric and lapidary devotions of the neurologist/essayist:

Dr. Sacks can be even more primeval, turning the clock back as far as it will go. To demonstrate, he has a slice of fossilized stromatolite, among earth’s earliest life forms. They date from the Archean era, more than three billion years ago. Stromatolites, once thought to have been long extinct until a large living colony was discovered in Shark Bay in Western Australia in the mid-1950s, are made up of large colonies of bacteria, often blue-green algae, and sedimentary deposits, which grow naturally in a style that Dr. Sacks likened to a layer cake.

Maybe not the most appetizing cake, but he pointed out that stromatolites are held to be responsible for converting the abundance of carbon dioxide in the earth’s Archean-era atmosphere into oxygen. “Over the years, they made enough oxygen to make life possible for the rest of us,” he said.

This should endear them to even the most squeamish. It is their longevity, however, that enchants Dr. Sacks, a man who still writes on a typewriter. “They’re survivors,” he said. “I like the idea of ancient things which have adapted.”

“I am horrified by poor quality and transience,” he added. “If you’re religious, you can believe in the eternal. For me, the next best thing is the enduring.”

As this suggests, his feeling for stromatolites and other long-lived natural-history curiosities is no casual attitude. While he came to the natural sciences as a refuge from a chaotic boyhood, he cherishes them more now that, as he often sees, their integrity is under attack by religious fundamentalists.

“My religion is nature,” he said. “That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”

A final return for the Phoenix and Turtle

Ages ago I asked for bibliography for an article on Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle." Thanks for your help back then, and, if you have time, or the energy, or the interest, or the desire to procrastinate, thank you again for your current help. I've finished a draft of the article, which I present here less to be read than to spur me to get it into a better shape before Tuesday, when I present it to my Brooklyn colleagues, and before Saturday, when it's due for the initial stages of assimilation into the anthology. Comments now will be very gratefully received.

I make no claims to advance queer theory. There's no coinage here. When I'm most tired, I'm convinced that this article is, at best, simply the q.t. article that "The Phoenix and the Turtle" invites and so one that must be written (the text of this short poem: here). At worst, I think I'm flattening out and misrepresenting arguments, tending towards the banal, and wasting everyone's time, including mine. We'll see.

Mine is not one of the poem's many good historical readings. If you're interested in such things, the Times Literary Supplement has been thick with them this century. The tendency now seems to be to read it as a crypto-Catholic lament: if it's read as personal allegory, Elizabeth and Essex, traditional designees for the Phoenix and Turtledove, have been swapped out in favor of obscure (to me, anyway) martyrs. For a superior example of such a reading, see John Finnis and Patrick Martin in the April 18, 2003 TLS (e.g., on the middle stanzas, "But first they are mathematical, and echo Euclid: 'in twain, / Had the essence but in one, / Two distincts, division none: / Number there in love was slain.' The cumulation invites us to ask: What has 'distance and no space,' length and no breadth (Euclid i.1, def 2; translated Billingsley, 1571), no area? A line-by extension, Ann and Roger Line.") But of course!

My argument's below, but, if you haven't done so already, have a look at Jeffrey's most recent posts, especially this lovely meditation on Hebrew, Marie de France, and Mayan bracelets

(EDIT: The comments below are a lovely testament to what academic blogdom can achieve once we put down our swords and try, instead, to help one another. I realize that all this talk of love can make it sound as if we don't have irreconcilable differences. Some of us do; but we need not be jerks about it. And a warning to anyone who wants to quote the draft below: while the version that's going off to Madhavi Menon tomorrow has the same argument, it's different in structure, emphasis, and in its evidence [i.e., I've corrected some misreadings]. I plead with you, quoting people, if such people exist, not to quote this, unless, of course, you're doing a paper on academic blogging or, better yet, revision.

Thanks to all.):

IT'S A DRAFT FOLKS: read above!
Shakespeare's short elegy “The Phoenix and the Turtle” opens by demanding that an unnamed “bird of loudest lay” (1) herald a procession of those birds possessing “chaste wings” (4). Despite the peculiarity of the image, the message is clear enough: eros is unfit for this ceremony, as are death and other tyrannical powers, for the herald also forbids the “shrieking harbinger” (5) and “every fowl of tyrant wing” (6). The prohibitions suggest that the poem will go on to chart a Boethian stoical technique for altogether spurning the powers of death and life and love. It comes as a surprise, then, that it instead aims, first, to celebrate the ecstatic contact of the Phoenix and Turtledove, and then to mourn their deaths. Have unchastity, the shrieking harbinger, and grim death been allowed in?

By no means; but neither have they been forbidden entirely from the procession. Not all tyrants have been proscribed; only all “save the eagle, feather'd king” (11). Granted space to “keep the obsequy so strict” (12), the eagle is participant and enforcer of the ritual’s gravitas. Into this solemn space enters the “death-divining” (15) swan-priest, whose expertise in funereal music is at once professional and highly personal, since the swan’s song heralds its own death. By joining its dying voice with the grandeur of this funeral march, the swan’s service to the procession also dignifies its own end. The swan thus suggests that the poem may be understood as both a memento mori and memento vivare, as instruction on how a decorous life and proper death each serve the other. The crow follows. As a figure clothed in “sable” (18), it is the chief mourner in a ritual that accepts and promotes death “as that which gives 'meaning' to life, or is the precondition for the 'true' life of man" (Marcuse, "Ideology of Death" 64). For in calling the crow “treble-dated” (17) Shakespeare indicates the crow’s long life and also that however long its life, death is its limit: “treble” may be considerable, but it is not infinite. Simultaneously, as John Klause argued, Shakespeare echoes the “hoc, nunc, and usque in saeculum” (henceforth, now, and unto eternity) of the Dies irae (“The Phoenix and Turtle in its Time,” in In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, 2002, 217), a poem that fantasizes about the last judgment and the reduction of the world to cinders. The suitability of the allusion to this poem needs no explanation. Combining its temporal reach with its “breath,” by which it “givest and takest” life (19), the crow shackles together eternity, death, and life. In this complex, life is always a tending towards an inevitable end, at whose conclusion it will be exchanged for and rewarded by ceremony of death. Death becomes no merely technical, biological problem, but rather the last, inevitable, most proper terminus (Marcuse 69). When death comes, as it must come, it should come not as the shrieking, undignified end, not as the terrible loneliness of one's own private death; in a proper death, overseen by the forces these three birds embody, life and death are each communal. And the community’s most suitable response is not noisy grief, resentment at death’s terrible injustice, or a refusal of the sacrifice, but rather only the bloodless tribute of a sighed prayer (67).

An anthem follows to mark the passing of the Phoenix and Turtledove, and also simply to wonder at a love whose intensity bursts forth in otherwise unthinkable modes of relation. Presented with this refusal to fall into line, Property is “appalled” (37) and Reason “confounded” (41). Theirs, after all, is the power by which things are sorted into distinct entities. In its confusion, Reason recapitulates and deepens the avian procession’s first effort, the initial anthem that proclaimed the death of Love and Constancy (22) before it fell into enthusiasm for the two birds’ love. Like the anthem, but with a more sustained dignity, Reason’s threnos mourns what the world has lost with the passing of the Phoenix and Turtle: Truth, Beauty, Rarity, and Grace. Because it seeks to confine the birds to a monument formed of what it demands be recognized as their own separate, and indisputably defunct selves, Reason's song is more a summons than a commemoration. It seeks to fix them into abstractions, which, precisely because they are incorporeal, are perfectly dependent on rationality; in exchange for their own existence, Reason gives them an existence only in itself. By substituting abstractions for the Phoenix and the Turtledove, and by declaring the abstractions now passed from the world, Reason shuts off their existence from all others and hollows out a melancholy in anyone suitably moved by the poem. Reason demands that devotees of the Phoenix and Turtledove recognize that there is a truth, but that it is a truth lost to the world. Joining in the threnos under the terms Reason sets means coming to recognize that there is something to long for, that this something is the greatest of things, and that it can never be had, that it can be experienced only as an absence, that it can only be longed for. When all are made to desire the Phoenix and Turtledove while being made to comprehend themselves in the impossibility of fulfilling their desire, grief becomes a necessary condition of being.

In its threnos, Reason nevertheless allowed the Phoenix and Turtledove a kind of physical presence; if they are present at all, they are present by being “here enclosed” in “cinders.” Yet despite Reason's designation of the cinders as a grave, they should be thought neither the container for the birds, nor as the remnants of their life and love, but rather as witness to a failed effort at enclosure. For in being a form of the Phoenix, the cinders are not “merely an infertile, dead substance, but on the contrary a breeding-ground of new life” (Christine Gilham, “'Single Natures Double Name': Some Comments on the P and the T” 127). The cinders are therefore anything but a mark of finality. They might be thought instead what has been left behind, as the remnants of the legibility of both birds to Reason once they have passed into illegibility; the cinders have been rationalized, while the birds, as the anthem declared, have “fled / in a mutual flame from hence” (23-24); and by slipping away with its flaming lover, the Turtledove has picked up at least one of the Phoenix’s tricks. Understood this way, the cinders signify that something may be occurring elsewhere, and also that Reason gets it wrong. Mourning here is a ceremony by which something too difficult to observe, too troubling to experience, something too titillating, too present, is deliberately misplaced—or, more pointedly, shut up.

Its threnos, then, furthers Reason’s initial appraisal of the two birds’ ecstasy, the moment of its first confusion. It first described the birds’ love as one in which division “gr[e]w together” (42) so that two “simples” (44), the most basic of elements, become “well compounded” (44), joined together into one homogeneous compound. With their two loves collapsed into perfect concord, this is a desire that is no desire at all, but only the self-satisfaction of a single being containing its all in itself. When paradox has been cooled into harmony, and the becomings of ecstatic contact into one being, the poem offers itself up as mystical allegory, as it does in the New Cambridge Shakespeare (both 1992 and 2006 editions). There, the two birds, by modeling Platonic bisexuality, vanish into one body, Shakespeare’s, whose different aspects they represent. Comprehended this way, if the birds have any kind of existence, it is an existence as allegory, disembodied properties of reason sequestered from all the impurities of lived existence. Trying something else, Reason then suggests that the birds are a “true..twain” (45), devoted to one another but also truly double. Split asunder from each other, they are confined to their individual subjectivities. This desire is like that of the mourners at the poem’s end, a desire driven by some lack, tantalized by some promise held out by the other. Here, the only paradox, if it could be called that, would be the “tragic scene” (52), as Reason terms this ceremony, of the insatiability of desire that could not be abandoned.

Reason’s two appraisals at this first contact misconstrue the Phoenix and Turtledove as badly as does its Threnos. The avian procession describes the ecstasy of the Phoenix and Turtledove as one in which there were “two distincts, division none” (27), “hearts remote, yet not asunder” (29), in which “either was the other's mine” (36) and at whose contact “number…in love was slain” (28). In this ecstasy, no one model of contact or desire predominates. When there is no space between “the turtle and his queen,” they are in a relationship in which there are separate but perfectly contiguous; for even in this intimacy, they still remain two birds. This is the touching or being besides described in Cary Howie's Claustrophilia, where he calls for an awareness of “a relationship of contiguity or juxtaposition that would not be reducible to either an antagonism, on the one hand, or simple collapse, on the other” (149). In this touching, the Phoenix and Turtledove are not absorbed into one another; they are embraced, not disappeared; they not assimilated, but with-in. This might also be thought the mutual touching of Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology (“Toward a Queer Phenomology,” GLQ 12 (2006), 551), in which our contact with something, or someone, is also the contact that it makes with us, a contact that conjures us into a mutual, mobile identity of being-with. In this model, neither self of the two birds is “the same” (38) so long as they brush against one another. Theirs might also be thought less a touching and more a disaggregation of boundaries, yet still without the complete disappearance of the two selves. After all, while the “double name” of “single nature's double name” clearly refers to the two names of the birds, Phoenix and Turtledove, as Christine Gilham observes, “double name” might just as well mean an ambiguous name (“Reply,” Connotations 3 (1992/3), 125), something shifting and ultimately unknowable, something without the borderings, however intimate, of the contact described by Howie and Ahmed. Certainly about the precise borders of identity, or indeed certainty about the self-presence of identity, is lose in an ambiguity that might be considered through what Tom Boellstorff called the copresense without incorporation of a queer meantime (“When Marriage Falls Queer Coincidences in Straight Time,” in GLQ 13 (2007), 227-48), or what Cary Howie, drawing on Kaja Silverman, called “participation” (33), a merging rather than mutual touching, yet without a reduction into one being; this might be thought a being together rather than a being with. Or, following the suggestion of the co-presence in “either was the other's mine,” theirs might be yet another model of being, by which they become so intimate that they render the concept of relationship itself inadequate. In this model, the concepts of interiority and exteriority no longer function (echoing Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006), 170); it may not be possible to talk accurately of touching, or of the stimulated contact of phenomenology. Given the multiplication and expansions of being that such contact brings forth, this should not be thought a mutual possession, with its connotation of a possession shared out between a pair, but rather a multiple co-possession in which all hold each other in common. Finally, with the declaration “number there in love was slain,” the two birds model yet another model of desire and its effects, one in which identity is altogether obliterated. This is a “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave,” 217), by which the Phoenix and Turtledove “reject personhood, a status that the law needs [for] discipline” (Bersani, Homos 129). With this approach, the birds have slipped altogether from the poem's sad progress. Not being directed at satiation, nor at community, conjugality, or, for that matter, progeny—certainly the very image of the future-as-child that Edelman has so repeatedly decried—theirs is a contact of pure ends that aims at nothing: by refusing to make the gift of oneself in contact, by not expecting a flowing of their being into the other, without even mutual recognition, the birds in this moment have “trace[d]...the untraversable path that leads to no good and has no other end that an end to the good as such” (Edelman, “Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” Roundtable, PMLA 121 (2006), 822).

Whatever the model of desire, of contact, of presence—and my uncertainty about precisely what's being modeled requires me to stop speaking of desire, contact, and presence and to write, instead, “whatever is being modeled”—the truth of the Phoenix and Turtledove is not a truth of unification, nor a truth of loss. If the birds have been rendered a coherent whole, the whole is only the cinders before which the birds of death raise their anthem and join together in sighing; if anything is lost to this world, it is because Reason demands that it be put away. Without Reason, and here I use without spatially, there can be witnessed another kind of truth, one that can only confound the rigors of Reason: it is no transcendent, unattainable abstract, but rather a truth of the moment that continually emerges into existence, under different forms, at the time of being with, being together, or even the absolute abandonment of being. What truth is here is the truth that is in no way an absolute, that in no way stands apart from the crowdings of bodies in contact, unless, as the middle stanza of the lyric demonstrates, it stands in a watching that is itself ecstatic participation.

If anything has been united, it is the image of pure constancy and pure motion, the emblematic traits of the Turtledove and the Phoenix: one always wending toward the other, refusing to swerve aside, and the other always on a course towards giving itself up to its own self-obliteration and to its own unceasing renewal. If such birds have progeny, it is only themselves (James H. Sims, “Shakespeare's Phoenix and Turtle: A Reconsideration of Single Natures Double Name,” Connotations 3 (1993), 65), not this melancholic community; or it is also this record, which is witness both to their contact and to Reason’s techniques of oblivion. Together the Phoenix and Turtledove form one image, which, however, should not be thought a unity, nor as something fixed in eternity, but instead as an ever-shifting image of dedicated, perpetual falling into one another. Wondering at such an image, I want to imagine—certainly not identify—the unnamed "bird of loudest lay" of the opening line as the two purportedly dead birds, who, by slaying number, by slipping the confines of Property, can sing at their own funeral, unknowable but perhaps not unheard for a procession that would rather give Reason the last word.

Sunday Morning

The opening lines of the Wallace Stevens poem that provides my post with a title come to me, uncalled, almost every Sunday. I love them for how they calmly juxtapose the demands of ancient ritual with pleasures near at hand, communal reverence with the solitary tug of dreams:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.

My life is not and never yet has been one in which the Sunday sunrise offers complacencies or green freedom ... though I have found other ways to dissipate the holy hush. Around ten past nine every Sunday my son Alex and I take the ten minute drive from our home down Wisconsin Avenue to Temple Micah, in a quiet area of DC called Glover Park. We buy a bagel and share it before entering the sanctuary, where we sing some Hebrew songs and listen to a brief, hilarious, and profoundly philosophical meditation on this week's Torah portion by the rabbi. I leave Alex at 10:00 for his class, focusing upon a Deep Issue (today was death and the the nebulousness of Jewish conceptions of the afterlife), followed by a unit on Israel (as problem rather than as propaganda). He typically enjoys both.

While my son is being indoctrinated into Good Jewdom, I take my book bag and hike along Wisconsin Avenue south into Georgetown. The walk is beautiful, a highlight of my day. I stop at the Marvelous Market at P St, buy a coffee and an orange muffin, and read frantically from whatever text I am going to lecture on to eighty students come Monday morning. I say frantically because no matter how many times I've taught a work, I still obsess the previous day about how to make the coming class one which my students will not -- amid the deluge of demands for their attention -- quickly forget.

Today I was reading Marie de France; tomorrow I teach the final six of her lais. As I sat in the café thinking about my thinking about Marie, I flashed back to a picture I'd snapped at Temple, when Alex placed his hand over mine and crisscrossed our Mayan friendship bracelets (his gift to me last December). I'd glanced at the space between the two arms, and saw Hebrew letters peeking through -- an inscrutable allegory, I thought, suggesting some moral about endurance and history, about alliances with things and words and generations that you can know imperfectly, if at all (dark encroachments, old catastrophes). I then looked at the words of Marie's lai Yonec, a story about a woman imprisoned in a tower and saved from her hated solitude by a hawk who transforms into the king of a distant land. This visitor promises her a realm that has so far been denied to her, a realm possessed of histories and stories she can only imperfectly know. I thought how strange that something so fragile as a poem of love and transformation should have survived eight hundred years, and still speak of worlds as yet uncomprehended. And that is what my lecture will focus upon tomorrow: how at the moment in the lai when the lady feels so imprisoned in her present life that she will never escape its constriction, she dreams a past full of possibility and a bird arrives (not a cockatoo, but an avian full of green freedom nonetheless) to lead her to unimagined futures.

That's what I like about the scorpion bracelets from Mexico resting upon a Hebrew song ... a song that Alex and I have not been asked to sing reverently, but that we do sing well.

We'll Always Have New York

It doesn't happen often, but Mary Kate, Karl, and Eileen [and Nicola M.] and others can be found in the same room together this Friday night in New York City. Be there or be perpetually uncool. Or something like that. More details here: Medieval Club of New York.

Some random items

• I didn't know Karl very well when I read his animals essay for Exemplaria a few years back. At that point he and I had lunched together in Leeds, but otherwise were electronic acquaintances. His essay struck me as a major intervention into the rethinking of identities that has preoccupied medieval studies over the past decade. I stand by that judgment ... this is compelling work, Karl, and augurs for you being a molder of the field in the years ahead.
• A recent correspondence with Eileen has made me realize something -- or at least articulate an implicit knowledge. At this point in my life I've authored or edited or co-edited eight books and a circus of articles, book reviews, encyclopedia entries. All of that is fine; writing is something that I enjoy as much for process as product. Yet when I reflect upon what of importance I've accomplished in my career, it isn't this torrent of verbosity that comes first to mind, but instead the tangible way I've been able to touch the lives of others who write, and teach, and wonder: reviewing essays and books as an "anonymous" reader, for example, and being able to support projects that might otherwise not find the attention they deserve [do I need to remind any of our readers that we work in a cruel field, and that too often anonymous review -- like pseudonymous postings on the internet -- can bring out the very worst? Do scholars really need secret clubs?] I've also been asked to evaluate many tenure cases, a task that never seems a chore, because I know this process will likely have a lasting effect on medieval studies as some bright young-in-the-field scholar gets a job for life.
• For an independent study I'm leading, I've been re-reading Sharon Kinoshita's Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature. It's a great book, with lots to recommend, especially its savvy analyses of texts that once seemed familiar but end up quite transformed (Chanson de Roland as Crusade catalyst and re-writer of history rather than mere reflection of pre-existent reality; Marie de France's Welsh preoccupations). I wish, though, that when she discusses postcolonial medieval studies she would be more specific. Her introduction, for example, speaks about medieval postcolonialism in general, but mainly doesn't engage with particular works, other than to footnote them. This allows Kinoshita to make some wide characterizations and then differentiate her own project from this corpus ... a necessary move, perhaps, in order to sell a project. Yet I typically find such maneuvers unconvincing, mainly because it is often difficult to discover specific texts and critics who actually put forth the claims argued against. Kinoshita isn't the only one to do it: I'd put Bruce Holsinger, Ananya Kabir, and Deanne Williams on the list as well (this in no way devalues their work: all four of these people are excellent, excellent scholars). The medieval PoCo is a subfield that I'd like to think I'm well versed in, so here is my pet peeve exposed.
• Lastly, for your amusement, I reproduce below an electronic interchange that demonstrates why you should not allow your ten year old to open his own email account.

ALEX: u stink ur bad and mad in the brain!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ME: no U STINK and ur bad in the brain so there hahahahahaha
ALEX: sikes thats not true smart one (sarcastic laughter)

Soon my family will revert to grunts and other inarticulate noises. Via email, of course ... and I must point out that my study and Alex's room are all of ten feet apart from each other, so why we were emailing such barbarisms to each other when we could have shouted them I have no idea.

Insert Hideous Progeny Joke: My article's here!

You have of course submitted something to the Carnival.

My long-awaited Exemplaria article ("How to Make a Human") is being shipped today, along with the rest of Exemplaria 20.1. Since it's my first article (putting aside a very obscure translation), I'm of course super excited. Let me thank the publisher, Maney, and the Exemplarians, especially Judy Shoaf and Al Shoaf.

And here (pdf) it is. I'm sure most of our readers already know the argument. If not, here's the abstract:

Derrida’s late investigations into the question of the animal chart a path past the persistent humanism of Lacan, Heidegger, Levinas, and animal rights philosophy; they also identify the essential role the subjugation of animals plays in human self-conception. This self-conception, an inheritance from the Christian Middle Ages, suffuses the Middle English encyclopedia Sidrak and Bokkus, whose popularity and ideological conservatism suits it for illustrating the discourse’s characteristic features. Sidrak and Bokkus claims a set of properties for humans and denies them to animals, all of which it construes as fundamentally distinct from, and inferior to, humans. Yet unmistakable but persistent resemblances between humans and animals baffle human claims to uniqueness. The resemblances are not merely a threat to the human, for by invoking, and then denying, animal likeness to humans, Sidrak and Bokkus models the subjugation of animals. Because the human was an effect of such acts of domination, no human could abandon the domination of animals without abandoning itself; the human was therefore constitutively restless, always seeking a foundation it could never obtain.

For nuance, look either here or at Kzoo this May.

Straight Outta In The Middle: Carnivalesque XXXVII

We're pleased to announce that the March Ancient/Medieval edition of Carnivalesque will be hosted right here at In The Middle, to appear roundabout the middle of March, just before the cruelest month that breeds lilacs out of the dead land and mixes memory and desire, yes, before that. If you've run across a weblog post in the past two months that you would like to submit for consideration, or even if you want to submit one of your own posts, email Eileen Joy at ejoy@siue.edu, or the carnival itself at carnivalesque@earlymodernweb.org.uk. Or, if you prefer, use the submission form at Blog Carnival.

Carnivalesque is not just for academics. We welcome perspectives from a variety of fields, especially history, literary studies, archaeology, art history, philosophy - in fact, from anyone who enjoys writing about anything to do with the not-so-recent past. You can nominate your own writing and/or that of other bloggers, but please try not to nominate more than one or two posts by any author for any single edition of Carnivalesque, and limit nominations to recent posts.

A Note on Symkyn's Nose

I taught as much of the Reeve's Tale as I could yesterday, but I must take it up again on Wednesday: for the extended discussion, I offer thanks, first, to the inspiration from the ill wind in Holly Crocker's Comment in this thread, where she characterizes the Reeve's Tale as "one of the ugliest pieces of literature in my scholarly ambit," and secondly, to my students' excellent questions: e.g., "there's a warning to turn the page in the Miller's Prologue. The Reeve's Prologue has no such warning. But the Miller's Tale is a lot less ugly than the Reeve's Tale. What's going on?"

Because I can't wait for Wednesday, here's some (minor!) material I couldn't get to yesterday.

We all know that the Reeve's Miller, Symkyn, aspires to be something more than a churl. Symkyn is in fact slightly better than Oswald himself at playing the clerk: after all, Oswald's sermon on old age is as notable for its incoherence as for its biliousness, whereas for all Symkyn's contempt for clerks, he's the only one in the tale who evidences any knowledge of contemporary currents of academic philosophy ("Myn hous is streit, but ye han lerned art. / Ye konne by argumentes make a place / A myle brood of twenty foot of space" (see William F. Woods, "Symkyn's Place in the Reeve's Tale," The Chaucer Review 39.1 (2004) 17-40). It's like someone in my family--not academics, not readers, unless one counts the Bible and assorted devotional guides--one day snapping at me, "You're the poststructuralist: you should know it's impossible!"

But clerkdom is the least of his desires: you know Symkyn's chief goal is to claim gentility, through his wealth, through his personal arsenal (which, as a figure of excess, is Robyn the Miller's wart in blade form), and, like any good gentil, by erotic alliances: he married the Parson's bastard daughter and hopes to marry poor Malyne, and himself through her, up past churldom.

Symkyn has problems, however, not least among them his name (in the following points I may have been anticipated: see #172). As a familiar form of Simon, it of course recalls simony (admittedly in a loose form): like his father-in-law, he is wasting the substance by which he should be nourishing the community. As morally dissolute as this is, it's not so bad: after all, it's through 'simony' that he hopes to transform his little place into an infinite realm (again, my thanks to the excellent Woods article cited above). But the name's also a learned pun on two other counts.

First, it recalls the Latin simius or simia, ape, surely (barring the pig) the most churlish of animals, and the animal most suited for accusing churls of mere mimicry. In its uncanniness, mimicry of course has its powers of destabilization (e.g., Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," Location of Culture Chapter 4), but whatever its powers, there's no compliment meant. Here we have, for example, a charge of inauthenticity through the implicit comparison between Symkyn's finery ("as eny pecok he was proud and gay") with the Squire's. And so forth.

Second, the Latin for snub-nose is simus (for this point, thanks to John M. Steadman, "Simkin's Camus Nose: A Latin Pun in the Reeve's Tale?," Modern Language Notes 75.1 (1960): 4-8). Symkyn's "camuse" nose (3934) and Malyne's "kamuse" (3974) of course recall the wide "nosethirles" (557) of Robyn the Miller. But if Steadman's correct--and why not?--we also have a pun. We should note that because the pun's based on rather obscure Latin (where "obscure" = vocabulary I don't know off-hand), it's one that only the learned would recognize. Whatever tidbits of clerical learning he's picked up, Symkyn himself would not be in on the joke. Only clerical readers--almost a pleonasm, and certainly a group that includes us--would know that he cannot escape his class, since his name and face are linked in an otherwise secret sign of his peasantness about which he would be totally ignorant. Whatever he is, he must be. It's written on his face: anatomy is destiny!

Seamus Heaney on Tara

Veteran readers of ITM know that I was last in Ireland in April 2006, when I wandered the island with my brother. On a day that could be kindly described as blustery and moist, he and I arrived at Tara. With its melding of the prehistoric and the contemporary, this regal mound surveilling burials pagan and Christian was just the place for me ... even if the post I offered was a bit snarky. Tara is, like Stonehenge or Avebury, a numinous expanse, but -- as with Stonehenge and Avebury -- it is difficult to say if that impingement is the result of knowing some fragments of the place's long history, or if the architecture of the space itself causes that feeling of being touched.

The Hill of Tara has recently become a controversial space, where the demands of a burgeoning and future-focused economy battle the desire to preserve a landscape which has come to embody the past itself. The Irish government would like to ease Dublin's congestion by building a motorway nearby. At stake: Ireland's national identity in its relation to modernity and to history. Letting go of Tara's enchantment and building the road has come to mean letting go of a heritage-focused Irishness (and by that I mean an Irishness which reveres a misty past that may never have in fact existed, but certainly seems better that what had been until recently a fairly dismal modernity). The lure of the ancient has long anchored what it means to be Irish. The booming economy on the island has deeply challenged this nostalgia, and the Hill of Tara has become the point at which past-loving and future-obsessed currents meet. The past that Tara is made to embody, I hasten to add, is as that of a temporally frozen heritage site rather than the landscape as it has actually been lived and is now experienced, with its church and its instructional signs and its temporal thickness and anachronisms and its busloads of pilgrims passing through. Tara is spoken about in the controversy mostly as space that answers the demands of the dead, or as a space that serves the needs of the living, not as a coinhabited geography.

Here's Seamus Heaney on the controversy. Needless to say, he sides with the preservation of history, but does so in an interesting way: by stating that Ireland's heritage was better preserved under its colonial administrators than under its present government:

On the attitude of the Irish government, Heaney said: 'Tara had been protection under British rule. I was reading around recently and I discovered that WB Yeats and George Moore and Arthur Griffith wrote a letter to the Irish Times, some time at the beginning of the last century, because a society called the British Israelites had thought the Arc of the Covenant was buried in Tara, and they had started to dig on Tara Hill. And they [Yeats et al] had written this letter and they talked about the desecration of a consecrated landscape. So I thought to myself if a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what's happening to that whole countryside being ripped up is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work.'

The Nobel literature prize winner said Tara was 'a source and a guarantee of something old in the country and something that gives the country its distinctive spirit'.

Department Chair to Writer in Residence: "I hate you and want you to leave."

Details here.

Chaucer: An Oxford Guide / Postcolonial Chaucer

The latest Studies in the Age of Chaucer has an appreciative review of Steve Ellis's Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, a volume to which I was a contributor. A proliferation of guides, companions, and introductions have burgeoned around Chaucer like microbes in the human genome. Each has a distinct personality (typically reflecting the temperament of its editor), and each is useful in its own way. The only guide I've used in my undergraduate classroom, however, is this one.

My students for the most part liked the volume. I paired major essays with various tales, and used the pieces as an entryway into each day's discussion. The essays invite readers into conversation, rather than lecture them with Things They Must Know Before Even Thinking About Studying Chaucer. The Guide enabled my class to understand how contemporary scholars analyze Chaucer's work. I was hoping that such familiarity would improve their own critical analyses (it mostly did). Oddly, the most beloved and most detested of the essays I assigned was Glenn Burger's on "Queer Theory," an essay that made several of them feel like their heads would explode. It's a dazzling study, centering around category confusion and medieval capitalism. The students who loved it were truly enamored: several then went off and read Burger's monograph Chaucer's Queer Nation, becoming hardcore Burgerphiles as well as protodeleuzians.

Chaucer: An Oxford Guide is composed of sophisticated essays that are also quite lucid. All were written for the book, and many contain significant new work. The range of topics covered is quite broad: from a nuanced overview of Chaucer's life and the limits of what this information allows in the interpretation of his works (Ruth Evans, connecting Chaucer to the scandals that haunt his biography, and usefully invoking parallels from Sylvia Plath to Paul de Man) to a nifty tour of the problems of editing Chaucer (Liz Scala at her best, witty and contrarian) ... even an overview of the genre of Chaucer handbooks.

Below, I excerpt a small piece from my own essay, 'Postcolonialism.' This section centers upon the Prioress's Tale, loss and remembrance.

---------------------------------
In this closing section I would like to turn to a function that medieval studies has always shared with postcolonial theory: memorialization of that which might otherwise be forgotten. We live in a frightening and dangerous world, mainly because we human beings are so frightening and dangerous. But we are also creatures of history, both formed by the past and desirous of the past. Postcolonial critique refuses to see history as inert, and turns to what has gone before in order to remember it differently, less absolutely and less singularly – a way of seeing that isn't so much relativism as perspectivism.

In the tale told by the Prioress, a schoolboy decides to memorize a Latin hymn to Mary, an endeavor that necessitates neglecting his primer. In the religiously plural Asia that the 'litel clergeon' inhabits, the 'litel scole of Cristen folk … in which ther were / Children an heep' (495-97) performs an important differentiating function. That the children are 'ycomen of Cristen blood (497) may hint at a biological dimension to their community. Yet it is the 'litel scole' that imparts to the young pupils the culture and history that will ensure they know their difference from the 'Hebrayk peple' (560) of the 'Juerie,' as well as from the Muslims who apparently govern the land. In choosing the hymn over his primer, the young boy's act of rebellion is not all that subversive: his passion serves to remind the Christians of his unnamed city and the Christians of the Canterbury pilgrimage that a shared and timeless inheritance, codified in the song's Latin words, separates them from the rest of the world, renders them a people with an exclusive history, specially chosen and protected by God. The clergeon's worry over punishment at school is misplaced, for it is the nearby Jews through whose neighborhood he passes twice a day who will harm him, not his teachers. These very same Jews will, by the end of the tale, be tied to horses, dragged through the streets, and then hanged.

The ardor of the 'litel clergeon' for the Latin words which he does not fully understand is supposed to be admirable. Precocious sanctity should inspire exactly the kind of reverential awe that greets the ending of the 'Prioress's Tale' ('Whan seyd was al this miracle, every man / As sobre was that wonder was to se,' 691-92). Yet what happens when the ears through which the echoing hymn is heard are not Christian, but Jewish? Alma redemptoris ('nourishing [mother] of the redeemer'), the opening line of the clergeon's song, means little to a people whose sacred language is not Latin and whose messiah has not arrived. Cried 'ful murily' twice a day in passing through the ghetto (553), the hymn becomes an act of violence, announcing to its unwilling auditors that their religion, culture, and very identity have been superseded.

Postcolonial criticism encourages us to pay attention to how communities come into being and who is excluded. It asks us to listen with the other's ear and interrogate what is at stake when a body of knowledge is created, codified, promulgated as universal and peerless. The culmination of the 'Prioress's Tale' is the eradication of its Jews, leaving its narrative as empty of 'Hebrayk peple' at its close as the English nation was in Chaucer's day. What history is being remembered here, and what is being forgotten?

Though the action is set in ancient Asia, the Jews of the 'Prioress's Tale' are not as distant as they seem. England expelled its Jewish population in 1290, but rather than rid itself of anti-Semitism, the Jew who was no longer anywhere came to be everywhere. Jews were central to post-Expulsion 'English religious devotion and national identity,' an absent presence around which community solidified.' Once Jews no longer lived in England, their eradication was repeatedly performed figuratively, a repetition that demonstrates that violence committed long in the past can still trouble and haunt for many years, seeming to have happened 'but a litel while ago' (686). The Prioress ends her tale with an apostrophe to another boy martyr, Hugh of Lincoln, 'slayn also / With cursed Jewes' (684-85). Young Hugh's corpse had been discovered in a well almost 150 years earlier, but to an England that owed its sense of cohesiveness to the absence of its Jews, that death possessed an enduring vividness. The ideological uses to which his corpse was put can obscure the fact that a boy named Hugh really did perish, probably an accidental drowning, likely at the home of a Jewish friend. Because this death, all the more terrible because it claimed a child, was believed to be an act of murder, other innocents likewise lost their lives. According to Matthew Paris, the ringleader of the group of Jews who had supposedly crucified the boy as part of a secret ritual was tied to a horse, dragged and hanged -- exactly the punishment repeated on the Prioress's Jews. King Edward himself took a special interest in punishing the supposed malefactors; eighteen more Jews were eventually hanged as coconspirators.

Hugh of Lincoln's death and the violence that exploded around it harkens back to the first recorded accusation that Jews routinely kill Christian children, and the first attempt to create a boy martyr for communal reverence. When a boy named William was found dead in the woods outside Norwich in 1144, the grisly murder was blamed upon the local Jewish population. In this first instance of the blood libel, the accusation that Jews commit murder as part of their religious rituals, enough citizens of the city were sceptical of the charge not to attack their accused neighbors. Yet the boy's corpse was eventually interred in the cathedral and worshipped as a saint. Again, I would like to point out what is obvious but often overlooked in the scholarship attempting to analyze the significance of this episode: a young boy died horribly (gagged, stripped, tortured), and a demand is made that other innocents forfeit their lives in order to give some meaning – any meaning -- to this utterly senseless act. This makes William's fate similar not only to Hugh's, but also to that of another boy who died under terrible circumstances, this time at his own mother's hand. Unlike William, Hugh, and the nameless 'litel clergeon,' however, this boy was Jewish.

Besieged by Crusaders who, on their way to the Holy Land, decided that they ought not to spare God's domestic enemies, a group of Jews found themselves trapped inside the archbishop's palace at Mainz. Realizing that barred doors offered only some few moments of safety, these Jews chose to take their own lives rather than be forcefully baptized or hacked by Christian swords. Two surviving Hebrew chronicles narrate the martyrdoms of 1096. A chilling scene centers upon a mother named Rachel, who declares to her companions that her four children must predecease her so that the 'uncircumcised ones' will not convert them to their pseudo-faith.' As her friend takes a knife to her youngest boy and her two girls are cut in turn, Rachel realizes that her older son, Aaron, ought not to have witnessed his siblings' deaths because he is too young to face his own demise with resolve. 'Mother, Mother, do not slaughter me!' Aaron wails, then cowers beneath a bureau. Rachel

lifted her voice and called to her son: 'Aaron, Aaron, where are you? I shall not have pity or mercy on you either.' She pulled him by the leg from under the bureau, where he had hidden, and sacrificed him before the sublime and exalted God.

It is difficult not to see in Rachel a shocking coldness. As she announces to hidden, terrified Aaron exactly what fate she will inflict upon him, as she drags him by the leg from the only spot of safety he could find in this room flowing with blood, as Aaron pleads with his mother not to be cut open like his siblings, her actions seem inhuman … and that is exactly the point of the episode. Rachel's heroism resides for the chronicler in her ability to transcend human emotion and maternal attachment. Aaron is young and weak and human in order to ensure that his mother becomes timeless, a sublime example rather than a mere historical fact. Aaron, in other words, exists in that innocent space between infant insensibility and the adult ability to choose self-obliteration; he is able to feel the pain of martyrdom but horrifically unable to desire it. Aaron suffers so that his parents and his community accrue the glory of kiddush ha-Shem ('sanctification of the divine name'). The story in which he figures is not ultimately about him at all, but about his mother Rachel's sacrifice.

The Jewish choice of mass martyrdom over conversion shocked their Christian antagonists. Based upon the pioneering work of Israel J. Yuval, however, John McCulloh has argued that the fantasy that Jews ritually murder Christian children arose in the aftermath of the Rhineland Jews' choice of death for themselves and for their own offspring. I would go even further and argue that this spectacular choice to take one's life 'in the sanctification of God's name' and the flow of blood which resulted from these actions resulted in an enduring Christian fascination with Jews and sanguinary ritual. The violence that connects the 'litel clergeon' to Hugh of Lincoln, William of Norwich and Aaron of Mainz also binds together Christian and Jewish boys who did not and could not choose their own martyrdom. When childhood becomes the orientalized space of edenic purity, existing only so that adult ideologies can assert themselves, then lives are lost once again. Chaucer's eerily bloodless narrative of the 'litel clergeon' can hide in its conventionality the fact that behind its piety a flow of blood emanates from a boy who, when faced by an inflexible demand to suffer and die for an ideology he knows imperfectly, can answer back only the very human, 'Mother, Mother do not slaughter me!' If there is a historical voice that resonates after death in the 'Prioress's Tale,' it is indeed an innocent one, but it is also a hybrid one, speaking not just in Latin and in English but in Hebrew.

In the gruesome but highly literary demise of the 'litel clergeon' can be witnessed the historical deaths of three boys, two Christians and a Jew, whose furthest thought was martyrdom. I do not think that this knowledge makes the 'Prioress's Tale' unreadable, but it does inalterably transform the text. In the process it also illustrates well what postcolonial critique ultimately aims to do: not simply offer one more interpretation among many, but to alter profoundly the grounds upon which interpretation is conducted.

"We are what we feed our bacteria"

Speaking of the nonintegral body, here is some food for thought:

Only 1/10th of the cells in a human are human; the rest are microbes. There are 1,000 species in our mouths, another 1,000 in our guts, another 500 on our skins, and those with vaginas have yet another 500 species.

Analysis has shown that a tenth of the chemicals used in our body come to us via our gut microbes. “We are what we feed our bacteria and what they give us.”

(via Long Views, the blog of the Long Now Foundation)

Meet me in St Louis

I will be there. Eileen Joy will be there. Karl MUST be there. MKH might be blacklisted if she decides not to be there. You should be there, too.

Between What Is Ours and What is Not Ours: Cary Howie's Claustrophilia, Anachronism, Friendship, and an Open Letter to My Profession

[don't miss Karl's post below on his ennui and weariness with the perpetually recurring fascist Macbeth]

“Salient point is an early and sadly obsolete term for the heart as it first appears in the embryo: I fell upon it in a book of classical obstetrics with a sense of celebration. The heart, I believe, is that point where we merge with the universe. It is salient as a jet of water is salient, leaping continually upward, and salient as an angle is salient, its vertex projecting into this world, its limbs fanning out behind the frame of another. What I love of Caroline is that space of her at rest behind the heart, true and immanent, hidden and vast, the arc that this angle subtends. I would like to cobble such few sentences into a tower, placing them in the world, so that I might absorb what I can of these things in a glance. But when we say I love you, we say it not to shape the world. We say it because there’s a wind singing through us that knows it to be true, and because even when we speak them without shrewdness or understanding, it is good, we know, to say these things.” –Kevin Brockmeier, “These Hands,” Things That Fall from the Sky: Stories

“Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the ‘slantwise’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines [s]he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light.”—Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life” [interview], Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth

“Nothing, it would seem, is more difficult than to conceive, to elaborate, and to put into practice ‘new relational modes’.”—Leo Bersani, “Sociality and Sexuality”

I dedicate these ruminations to Michael E. Moore, whose friendship has given me much joy, and whose thought and writing burns with such ardor for the living and the dead, the real and the fictional.

When I and Myra Seaman were writing our Introduction to Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages [“Through a Glass, Darkly: Medieval Cultural Studies at the End of History”], we knew that we had to define, in some detail, what we meant by an engaged “cultural studies” and, related to that, what we thought we meant when we invoked the “political”—more specifically, in what ways can we really describe a certain kind of literary and cultural studies as “political”? I myself am so keenly aware of all the shallow and ultimately empty ways in which certain cultural studies are described as “political,” that I was almost frightened to make any such claim, and at one point I felt almost frozen in my inability to articulate how it could be that a book such as ours, which gathers together essays by medievalists on subjects as disparate as reality television, Chaucer, and White House legal memos, was really “political.” I found one possible route out of this impasse through thinking about how the work of the intellectual who engages with troubling contemporary subjects [such as torture or terrorism or the loss of the autonomous self and moral community] is simply necessary in and of itself [as work that can’t not be done, if one is compelled or called to do it, if one is paying any attention to the world], or perhaps, as a kind of ethical responsibility, regardless of any immediately detectable material and efficacious outcomes of that work. It may be that you don’t believe that scholarly writing actually changes anything real, but that does not let you off the hook of the attempt to intervene, however you can, into social and political orders and their cultural phenomenon. Or, as we put it in our Introduction, “As medievalists who are, whether we like it or not, the inheritors of a humanist tradition, we bear a special responsibility to the idea that the life devoted to reading, reflection, and letters retains some power in the matter of how history ‘turns out’.” Can we really engage in studies in which we claim we can’t or don’t care about the relation between our studies and the world? Or, as Paul Strohm once put it, and much more eloquently,

Postmodernism has been devastating in its critique of the authoritative observer, exposing feigned objectivity as a construction founded in privilege and supported by social authority. But its seeming obverse—complete disinvestment—is actually its twin, founded in a similar claim of disinterest and no less privileged (in this case, in its enjoyment of the privilege not to care). I associate unpositionality with privilege because history (past and present) is full of people placed in circumstances that require care, full of people who can’t not care. Such historical actors can neither be everywhere nor be nowhere; they have no choice but to be somewhere. And this is where I suggest we position ourselves: provisionally, precariously, temporarily, maybe sometimes bemusedly—but always somewhere. And wherever that somewhere is, that it be an invested place, a place that knows things are at stake. [Theory and the Premodern Text, p. 161]

It is in Strohm’s gesture toward a place—a somewhere—that, when working on the Introduction to our book, I began to sense the beginning of what I hoped could be an authentic answer to the demand made by the invocation of the political within literary-historical studies, but perhaps not exactly in the way Strohm intended. More particularly, it was while reading the conclusion to the essay that Michael Moore contributed to the volume [“Wolves, Outlaws, and Enemy Combatants”], that it really struck me: friendship itself, as a particular mode, which is also a somewhere, of an intellectual life committed to the care [and even desire for and love] of ideas but also of the persons and texts [both in the past and present] that literally body forth these ideas—this is where I ultimately want to locate the political action of my work. In his essay’s conclusion, Michael wrote (and also lamented),

Can we still assert a human-centered ideal of community, based on friendship and binding solidarity among and between individuals? Friendship with oneself, viewed as part of the "fundamental constitution of humanity" might form the basis for a reawakening of the classical political demand for amity and justice. . . . The attempt to preserve a humane culture and to assert our rights or our love of the right, should not be left in the hands of a distant state, since these are qualities of the virtuous life. One should highlight the possibility of friendship and the connections between friendship, liberty, and joy. It is by no means easy to orient oneself during a period such as this one.

By “a period such as this one,” Michael means the era of the G.W. Bush presidency—and more pointedly, its abuses of the due process of law and use of torture in its war on terrorism—but he also means, I believe, the period in which the life and culture of the university itself has become, in the words of Cary Howie, “the place of the agon of reducible and competitive texts and bodies and disciplines” [Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure, p. 144]. I do not think that either Myra or I really worked out a fully satisfactory answer to the question of how, exactly, we see the work of our volume of essays as political [which is always connected, then and now, to our continuing struggle to answer the question of how the collective we call the BABEL Working Group is political], but we gestured in our closing remarks to the idea of Bill Readings in The University in Ruins that, perhaps, the real work of the post/historical university now might be to serve as “one site among others where the question of being-together is raised, raised with an urgency that proceeds from the absence of the institutional forms (such as the nation-state), which have historically served to mask that question for the past three centuries or so” [p. 20].

It is in raising the image of “being-together” as a question [which is necessary if one wants to guard against all the ways in which, historically, the presumption of community or a shared humanity has led straight to cruelty, oppression, and the inhuman], where I think Readings opens a path toward the thought of amity or friendship, in the sense Nietzsche gave to the term in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as a “continuation of love in which [the] possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for . . . a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them.” This would also be the friendship of Thomas Aquinas in which the “love of friendship” [amor amicitiae] produces a kind of “mutual indwelling” [mutua inhaesio], which nevertheless does not necessarily imply shared thoughts or even shared wills, only a shared desire or hope that a certain kind of loving cooperation increases the chances of obtaining something that could be called good, and even of being loved in return [Summa Theologica]. But I would also add, as a kind of caution to these two descriptions of friendship, Maurice Blanchot’s idea, in The Writing of Disaster, that friendship is “not a gift, or a promise; it is not generic generosity. Rather this incommensurable relation of one to the other is the outside drawing near in its separateness and inaccessibility” [p. 50].

And I suppose that I am hoping, here and now, as one avenue toward “raising” the “question of being-together” (and of thinking through how we can draw more near to each other in our shining separateness and mystery), for a practice of friendship as a radical politics that would disturb the usual ways of doing things in here—within the university, but especially the humanities—and that would emplace within the ruined structures of this site multiple heterotopias in which, pace Foucault, the “fragments of a large number of possible orders [would] glitter separately . . . without law or geometry” [The Order of Things, p. xvii]. And after reading Cary Howie’s brilliant and beautiful, and in Karl Steel’s estimation, heartbreaking book, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure, my heart runs over and I am emboldened to ask: how might the chief work of the post/historical university, and especially of an anachronistic premodern studies, be the cultivation of a more humane culture through an erotic [or, libidinal] practice of “close” and “enclosed” reading—of texts, but by extension, of everyone enclosed within those texts, including ourselves—and that would desire what Howie describes as “a communal entrance” where “corporately and corporeally we make room for time, and where time, simultaneously, is given us in and as space, in and as ‘the middle’ of any age”? This practice of reading, which is deeply comparatist and “touching” in its affectively constructed contiguities—bringing into contact, in Howie’s book, Peter Damian and Marie de France and Dante with Gaston Bachelard and Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Nancy with Thom Gunn and Adam Phillips and Mark Doty and all the bodies that the conjunction “and” brings close to us—this is a “gift,” in Howie’s view, that is “inexhaustible” and no “labor of contextualization or so-called historicism could ever fill it up” [p. 151].

The thought and writing of Howie’s book is so radiant, I hesitate to do more than simply urge its reading. Like a secret and profanely holy letter, his book should not be reviewed as such [summarized, evaluated, judged, and perhaps killed], but should, rather, be passed, quietly and with the urgency of desire, from friend to friend. I will not pretend to provide here an overview of all of the book’s aims and subject matter; suffice to say, as the book’s own dust jacket will tell you, that Howie provides “extended readings” of the queer erotics of the enclosure or the “inside”—of the work of art, the hermitage, the anchorage, the monastery, the mystical cell, the marital prison, the lover’s bed, the book, the gay lyric, the Zurich bathroom, the lover’s body, the church wall, the kiss, etc.—in English, French, and Italian writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but also in contemporary letters and art. And he offers, by way of these readings, both a history of the love of enclosure (claustrophilia) as well as the critical practice of “embedded touch” [p. 4], which has some affinities with Elizabeth Freeman’s “erotohistoriography” and with what Carolyn Dinshaw has recently termed a “post/disenchanted temporal perspective” [see Freeman, “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography,” Social Text 23.3-4 (2005): 57-68 and “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ 13.2-3 (2006): 177-95].

Howie’s book is also an extended meditation on poetics and, further, on the ontologies of metonymy and anaphora, especially on the ways in which the “concomitant symmetries” of metonymy are always “about to break out, or break in” [p. 3]. Perhaps most important and thrilling of all, Howie’s book is a powerful demonstration that enclosures are never static and that to “be inside (a chapter, a house, or a chapterhouse) is not to be sealed off: it is to be summoned, paradoxically, into a more, concrete, ecstatic relation to not just what lies beyond but within these boundaries” [p. 4]. Ultimately, the enclosure, a space in which things and bodies are always proximate, is also the site of expansion where the metonymies—“of tongue and page, body and bed—stretch the space in which vice and virtue come together in a common, if differently shared, moment of arrival” [p. 6]. For me, personally, the greatest beauty of Howie’s book is in its vision [and enactment] of a type of scholarship that, in his words,

provides a way to talk about textual proximity, and the extent to which historical moments, genres, and bodies are always dragged from their contingent others while simultaneously giving themselves to be similarly dragged. This traherence . . . never quite gets free of what it ostensibly emerges from, and furnishes the basis for a reading practice that would resist the slavish devotion to the controlled, discrete bloodlines of those patrilinear critical and literary histories that continue to haunt contemporary reading practices.
The implications of this are as follows. To touch is to experience a limit and open a connection. Whether this touch is figured visually, hermeneutically, or sexually, it traces the outline of a community of embodied lovers expropriatively given over to bodies, texts, and buildings sensibly intensified by this gift. Neither a mere idealization of aesthetic attention nor a diminishment of eros to interpretation, the metonymic, participative touch (or look, or reading) beings more fully into being the bodies, texts, and buildings it brushes against. The risk of violence remains—when does it ever go away?—but it is important to stress that, if touch is in some way entry, it is thus only inasmuch as appropriation has been thoroughly relinquished. Such an entry, such a touch, requires an ecstatic reorientation of the most basic (and finally damaging) ontological presuppositions: that this body has fundamentally nothing to do with mine; that this body cannot be touched; that this body is impenetrable or forever lost. [pp. 6-7]

This is scholarship, not just as a type of study or even a practice of reading, but as a way of life, even an ethics, a form of love, or affective solidarity. It is a scholarship and practice of reading that resonates with the thinking and work of my friend Michael Moore, an historian of the Carolingian era, who recently wrote,

The dead have a claim on us with their long-forgotten passions and foibles, and their unwonted delicate breath continues to stir the hair on our necks. This regard even extends to the realities invoked by art and literature. In the poem “Undressing Justine,” Czeslaw Milosz discovers and makes love to a character from an old Polish romance novel. The being of this delectable character is also human, and therefore worthy of being cherished: “Though you never existed, let us light candles / Here, in our study, or in our church.” [“An Historian’s Notes for a Miloszan Humanism,” Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 (Summer 2007): 191-216]

And this brings me to one aspect of Howie’s book that I most want to highlight and celebrate, especially in relation to friendship: its chief mode of address is the tu and nous: you, and we, us. Again and again, when providing illustrations for his thinking or for how he is reading his beloved texts, medieval and more modern, Howie addresses me [but also the writers whose words he is analyzing] directly, as those situated inside with him, as lovers, or is it as co-conspirators in desire and in touch within the enclosure of his book which touches so many other books, and by extension, so many other bodies? Although he highlights this affective gesture on his very first page,

In the pages that follow, I make a series of gestures that attempt to show just how far inside, just how spatially and textually delimited, we inevitably are. Indeed, I argue that there is, finally, no such thing as solitary confinement. The question of being inside and the question of how it is possible to speak this fragile pronoun, “we,” across temporal, spatial, and ontological difference, never cease to overlap and literally to inform one another [p. 1],

it did not really settle inside of me except through repetition. Page after page, Howie would break what might be called the regular mode of seemingly disinterested critique, and address me/us directly: “get too far inside [of love] and you may—paratactically—slide right out of love, pop out of its socket”; “I hide from you; you seek me out”; “love is born of the bed, and all of a sudden we’re bounced right up to the third heaven”; “this is the pulse, the throb, the engendering spasm of a bed that beats. Not just my bed, but ours”; “But if I am enclosed with you, enclosed by and as our touch, then what is there between us?”; “to say I am enclosed in your mouth and I am enclosed in your hand is to inscribe a difference at the heart of you”; “We kiss, and between us someone else intervenes; in truth, a whole series of others, but also the very phenomenon of otherness, and the horizon against which we they all take shape. Difference, created and uncreated, writes itself where we touch”; “being inside you is always simultaneously being beside you, irreducibly”; “there is nothing between us but this fire. No, that’s not right. There us nothing between us. And this fire”; “Claustrophilia takes place . . . in and between us, as the erotics of our being together in space, which is to say, the erotics of our being together at all”; “you can only enter me to the extent that I entrance you.”

The life of the scholar often feels like a solitary confinement, and there is much to lament about the ways we do things in the academy—the way we hire, the way we tenure and promote, the way we review scholarship for publication, the way we convene symposia and conferences, the way we award grants, the competitive nature of all of it in general, and even the indifference we have toward those who are not proximate enough to us, or so we think—all of which fosters a culture of despair, and in some cases, even hatred [and for me, often, just boredom—boredom, my friends, boredom boredom boredom: don’t you want to be thrilled, to be swept away? don’t you want to be with, brushing up against, your fellow travelers in the library and not against, or away from, them?]. How is it, after forty or so years of the most radical blasting open of modes of thought and scholarly practice, that the institution of the humanities—by which I mean, its managerial structures—could still be so mired in nineteenth-century [and earlier] notions of privilege, patronage, prestige, orthodoxy and discipline, anonymous authority, straitjacketed hierarchy, and condescending censure?

There can be no real fraternity, no friendship, in such an atmosphere, although here and there, like small points of light, cells of friends will gather and leave their traces in the epigraphs and acknowledgement pages of books and in the notes of articles. But that is a different sort of friendship than the sort I want to advocate for here, one that could only be accomplished in our collective embrace of what Howie calls a “queer ontology”: “Think what it means to reach out, in the dark, toward something or someone you cannot see”—this would be a “an erotic participation” through which we would become “not identical but singularly shared and mutually, messily incompleted,” and it would be “committed to the intensification of [our] materialities in their very mystery and withdrawal, these multiple and proliferating enclosed spaces upon which we inevitably, extensively touch” [pp. 7-8].

To put it another way that touches directly on the subject of our studies—the so-called Middle Ages—and again in Howie’s words, “if the past is, it is only insofar as it is enclosed by the present, and only insofar as this enclosure appears” [p. 14]. Practices of anachronistic reading are necessary, finally, because, in Howie’s terms, they speak directly to

the spaciousness within objects, and within times, that only becomes sensible when we see them as at once singular and plural, discrete and imbricated somehow in one another; and finally, when we submit ourselves to their frames by seeking to undo them, and still more crucially, by seeking ourselves, singularly in common, again and again, to come undone. [p. 151]

Paraphrasing Howie, between what is ours and what is not ours, what intervenes is close to ours, and to us. And we, thereby, are close to each other. If we could somehow see this better, friendship would be possible between us, and by that friendship, or mutual indwelling, or affective regard, we could light up from within the dark enclosures of the university so thoroughly, they would “space out,” radically, in infinite directions.

Let Us Know We are Steeped in Blood: Macbeth and Ourselves as Documents of Barbarism

Not a medieval post: forewarned is forearmed.

I've seen a fair amount of Macbeth in the last few months. I finally got around to seeing Throne of Blood, I followed this up with the Trevor Nunn Macbeth (with Judi Dench and Ian McKellen), then I saw--this is sounding a bit like an apocalypse, no?--the Verdi Macbeth at the Metropolitan Opera (see the photo to the left), and, just yesterday, I saw an excellent and scary * Macbeth at BAM with Patrick Stewart (who's surprisingly spry and quick for someone who's very nearly 70 years old).

Barring the Kurosawa, all my recent Macbeths occur in a militarized Europe c. 1925-1955. While none is quite so strenuously and particularly set in this milieu as the 1995 Richard III film, while the Nunn is set so minimally that I'd hesitate to identify it as anything but Macbeth, and while the Metropolitan Opera has certain features from the Balkans of the 90s, all nonetheless have in common men with slick-backed hair, jackboots, khaki, and, depending on the production, jodhpurs, assault rifles and pistols, camouflage, and, for the women, evening gowns cut from the 30s.

With all the power at my disposal, which is to say: none, I declare this particular setting a cliché and thus call for a moratorium. Set your Macbeths elsewhere please. Let them be set in Abu Ghraib, perhaps, with Macbeth or better yet the weird sisters played by German Shepherds; let them be set in a hamburger stand in Pennsylvania; let them be set in academia, on the steppes, in the hallways of KBR or Blackwater, at Balad AFB, but please avoid setting them in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa.

It's why this cliché is a cliché that demands it be verboten. The setting's an easy out; it's the theatrical equivalent of a Godwin's Law violation; it appeals to our sense of self-satisfaction and relief at not being fascists, totalitarians, or victims and/or apparatchiks of such regimes. I might call this setting the opposite of Brecht's alienation device: it's a satisfaction device. We recognize Macbeth's horror elsewhere, not in or with ourselves; through this, we attain the self-satisfaction of the original English audiences, pleased to see the rough Scots finally transformed from Thanes into Earls ("My thanes and kinsmen, / Henceforce be earls, the first that ever Scotland / In such an honor nam'd" V.ix.28-30). If not Democracy, then benevolence has come, with the repulsive, oleaginous Malcolm as the voice of our better conscience. How, then, to accuse us of the horror? How to brush ourselves against the grain with Macbeth?

* Excellent and scary except for the embarrassing industrial-techno-chant of the witches cauldron speech, which sounded like muddled, low-grade Test Dept. or Laibach.