Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman in the Los Angeles Review of Books

by J J Cohen
Hunter Dukes reviews Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman in the latest edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books. The framing of the project is generous, and I'm deeply grateful: such has not been my experience of reviews in the past, which have tended to speak of the book I should have written rather than the book I published. I had also been worrying that the three excursus would seem extraneous, so it is also gratifying to know that at least this reviewer sees what I was attempting.

And now to pack for New Zealand ...

Man is the Pasture of Being, Part 1: Evilmerodach

by KARL STEEL

This series of posts is going to be about sky burial, ecomaterialism, edibility, and birds vs worms as eaters of bodies, and it’s going to be the rough draft for the first section of my “worms” chapter for my second book. Hang tight if that’s what you want. If the first thing you want, however, is a deep dive on the cultural afterlife of one of the less famous Babylonian kings, then you, my friend, my perhaps avian friend, are in for a treat.

This is the story of Evilmerodach, who cut up his father's corpse and fed him to 300 birds.

Sometime in the early fourteenth century, the Speculum humanae salvationis (The Mirror of Human Salvation) hit Latin Christendom like a ton of allegorical bricks. Available in more than 380 manuscripts from 1324 on, a typical page looks like this:

BnF Lat 512 34r - non-allegorical bricks?

Above, we have two illustrated scenes from the Bible, and below, an interpretation in Latin verse (or, as the fourteenth century wore on, still other languages: English, French, Dutch, Czech, and especially German, but oddly not Italian). For the most part, the SHS illustrates expected scenes: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden; Noah’s ark; Jonah’s slithering out from the whale; Abraham’s interrupted sacrifice of Isaac; the misery of Job. More surprising are the many historical scenes, largely drawn from the life of David and the Book of Judges: Ehud kills Eglon; Samson pulls apart a lion’s jaws; Benaiah (whom you might remember as a son of Jehoiada) also kills a lion; and, in illustrations as horrific as Goya’s Disasters of War, David punishes his enemies.

BL Sloane 346 18v

And, in every illustrated version I’ve seen (17 so far), Evilmerodach (elsewhere also spelled Evilmarodach, Awel-Marduk, and, less likely, Amel-Marduk) is dismembering the exhumed corpse of his father, Nebuchadnezzar the great, and feeding his limbs to the birds. He is supervising, alone or with his retinue; or he’s standing over a slab or table or down in the sarcophagus, doing the dirty business himself; he has an ax, a knife, or a falchion, presumably coded as the weapon of an “eastern” tyrant. We know he’s the king because he’s wearing a crown; his father’s also crowned, although his head’s likely to be lying on the ground, staring up blankly at his son; or it might be the meal of one hungry bird. Or, it might be hoisted aloft, slung between two. Like a cocoanut (BnF Latin 512, 27r or especially BL Sloane 346 18v).

This would clearly seem to be a bad thing. This is how, for instance, Jacopo de Cessolis’ kingship manual-cum-commentary on chess takes the story: though I don’t know why Friar Jacopo made Evilmerodach his exemplary bad king (research is ongoing, but my eye's on you Giles of Rome), this exhumation is chief evidence that our Bablyonian king needs moral instruction: for Evilmerodach was “a jolye [vigorous] man without justyce and so cruel that he did do hewe his fader’s body in thre hondred pieces and gaf hit to ete and devoure to thre hondred byrdes that men calle voultres” (Caxton’s translation; for the medieval French, see here). I would be astonished if this late thirteenth-century work (surviving in more than 100 manuscripts) were not the immediate source for SHS’s Evilmerodach moralization. But I’m just as certain that neither treatment is quite fair to our king.

The earliest account dates to Jerome’s early fifth-century commentary on Isaiah (for 14:18). He ascribes the story to the Jews (narrant Hebraei huiusmodi fabulam; PL 24: 162C-D), but Josephus’s history, for example, confines itself only to the Biblical account of Evilmerodach’s involvement in Joachin’s triumphal return (Jeremiah 52:31-34, essentially the same as 2 Kings 25:27-30); the Biblical history in pseudo-Philo (middle of the 2^nd c?) doesn’t go any later than the Book of Judges; the twelfth-century traveler Benjamin of Tundala sticks to the Biblical account; so the earliest extant written Jewish version of it belongs to the fourteenth-century Rhineland. Or so says Louis Ginzberg. It may be that the tradition passed, in fact, from the Christians to the Jews.

In Jerome, Evilmerodach gets what Jacopo doesn’t grant him: a motive. Evilmerodach had reigned during the seven years his father lived as a beast, and, when Nebuchadnezzar returned to sanity, he, in his gratitude, flung his son in prison, where he (along with the Jewish king Joachin, aka Jeconiah, aka Coniah) languished until the old king finally died. But Evilmerodach’s counselors needed convincing that Nebuchadnezzar was really gone (metuebant ne viveret qui dicebatur exstinctus); so Evilmerodach had him dragged from the tomb with hooks and ropes, and, with all the moral authority of a just king, proclaimed: “Sepultis omnibus qui a te interfecti sunt, tu solus insepultus iacebis” (all will be buried whom you killed, and you alone will lie unburied). End of story. Quite the opposite of tyranny.

The story shows up next in one of Agobard of Lyon’s (d. 840) many treatises against the Jews, where this Johnny One-Note uses it to prove the truth of Christ’s resurrection. Of course. Still hooks and a rope (unco et funibus); no dismemberment; no birds. These we first get in Haymo of Auxerre’s (d. 855) roughly contemporary Isaiah commentary. Evilmerodach is certain his father will come back: “my father dies when he wants, he rises up again when he wants!” (Pater meus quando vult moritur, quando vult resurgit). Joachin – now coming into his own as a clever courtier – knows just the trick: get 300 birds from various parts of the world, exhume the body, cut him into tiny pieces, and tie every part to a bird (ligaret unicuique avi partem suam), saying: whenever these very birds gather together, then your father will resurrect (Cum hae simul aves quandoque convenerint, tunc resuscitabitur pater tuus). Hugh of St Victor’s (d. 1141) commentary on Joel, like Jerome, ascribes the story to the Jews (Hebraica docet), and simply has Evilmerodoch, still scared, concoct the idea on his own. Here he burns his father to cinders, which he splits into four bags: tying the bags to the necks of four eagles, he releases them to travel to the four corners of the world (Quo in quatuor marsupiis dispertito ad quatuor aquilarum colla ligagavit, quibus per quatuor orbis climata dispositis eas avolare permisit).

It would take Peter Comestor’s (i.e. Peter the Eater’s) enormously successful Historia Scholastica (1173) for Evilmerodach story to get close to its final form: king, 300 parts, 300 birds, and, finally, birdfood. Peter’s version also benefits from an admirable directness:

When he began to reign, he raised up Joachin, whom he had a companion in prison, and fearing that his father would resurrect, who had returned from being a beast into being a man, took Joachin into counsel; at whose counsel, he exhumed the corpse of his father, divided it into 300 parts, and gave the 300 parts to 300 vultures. And Joachin said to him, “Your father will not resurrect until these vultures return together”
 [Cumque regnare coepisset, elevavit Ioachim, quem socium habuerat in carcere, timensque ne resurgeret pater suus, qui de bestia redierat in hominem, consuluit Ioachim. Ad cuius consilium cadaver patris sui effossum, divisit in trecentas partes, et dedit eas trecentis vulturibus. Et ait ad eum Ioachim: “Non resurget pater tuus, nisi redeant vultures in unum.”]

All that Peter misses is the accusation of tyranny. For my friends in English departments, one last, less recherché citation: Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, which is basically Peter Comestor’s version, with its English translations having Nebuchadnezzar’s diced corpse going to “þre hondred vultures” for “etynge” (in Higden’s Latin, “devorandas”), and in the other, as well, to “iij c. gripes” [300 vultures; def. C], presumably also for eating.

To look at this with more charity than Jacopo de Cessolis did, Evilmerodach is simply doing what any king must do. He must secure his rule, both against other present claimants, and against his own lineage, which must neatly, definitively swap him in for the previous king. The previous king really needs to be gone: the king is dead (“are you sure?”); long live the king (“but only this one, for now”)! Faced with this, Evilmerodach, like any king, does what he must. Antique psychoanalytic interpretations of the primal hoard, with everything that follows from that (non/nom/nomnomnom du Père), should also be suggested: the dismembered father, made really dead, is all at once an overcoming of Nebuchadnezzar’s tyranny, a perpetuation of it (by dishonoring the dead), an act of power (who else can get away with desecrating a king’s corpse?), an act of fear (“is dad really dead?”), and of course something that looks more than a little like butchery. As if Evilmerodach were planning to eat his father’s corpse.

Like a ferocious beast. Recall that the story is also one about humans and animals: being with the beasts is like being dead; and being returned to the beasts simply reverses what he had been in his madness. He ate grass as an ox (Daniel 4:30), and now he himself is fodder.

Evilmerodach makes his father a bird feeder.

But Jacopo de Cessolis made him a tyrant, and the Speculum humanae salvationis piled on, so that, even in published scholarship, Evilmerodach’s sometimes charged with having killed his father (this post is, among other things, a resource to ensure that no one else makes this mistake). The Middle English verse explains:

King Evilmeredach of swilk / some tyme gaf for lyknesse
When he in his dede fadere / exercised his wodenesse
Whas body dolven out of the grave / in thre hondreth gobets he kitte
And to thre hondreth voltoures / forto devoure dalte itte
So in thaire fadere crist for thaym dede / haves fals cristen thaym wodely
What thay wilfully synnyng hym est sones crucifye
And thay synne more wreching / crist in his deitee
Then they yt crucified hym lyving / here in humanitee.

That is, Evilmerodach’s treatment of his father is like those who through their sin crucify him over and over again. And that would seem to be that: Evilmerodach is now just plain Evil.

Except that Evilmerodach normally shares his page with Absalom, David’s rebellious son, captured and killed when his long, beautiful hair tangles itself in a tree.

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1806 31v

 For the SHS interpretation, Absalom is no bad son. Instead, he’s a symbol of Christ: Absalom is stabbed by three spears as he dangles from the tree, just as Christ was stabbed by three lances, that is, three pains, namely, the severity of the pain, the bitter grief of his mother, and carrying the weight of the sins of the damned.

This delirious allegorization, like nothing so much as the modern habit of finding Christ in any given thing (warning: dog), reminds us that allegory does not completely overwrite the vehicle. Instead, the sometimes shocking inadequacy of the vehicle to tenor forces us to remember the vehicle’s continued material existence. Though allegory is sometimes -- especially in the Middle Ages -- held to be the “nut” underneath the shell of a literal reading, in this case, the “nut” is the historical referent, available for, and grounding, unceasing and mobile interpretation. In this case, though he is temporarily read as Christ, Absalom remains behind the SHS interpretation what he must still be, a bad son; though he is temporarily read as a figure for blasphemous, false oaths, or just sin in general, Evilmerodach likewise remains a frightened king, doing what he must. And whatever the interpretation, his father’s corpse remains a corpse, dismembered, and the birds remain hungry birds.

We should not lose track of the material business of Evilmerodach. If we remember that, we can pay better attention to the Evilmerodach’s craft. Certainly, sometimes the SHS just throws the new king into the tomb with his father, losing itself in the specificity of this weird solution to royal succession (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. germ. fol. 245 48r; similar, but less odd, BnF Latin 511, 26r). At times, Evilmerodach wields a sword, a royal weapon, and just hacks away at his father’s corpse as he would any other human body (Ms Douce 204 25v or Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 206(49) 25r). Sometimes, however, he uses an ax (BnF Latin 9585, 30v), sometimes with the body on a wooden table, working like a butcher (Sarnen, Benediktinerkollegium, Cod. membr. 8, f 26r).

Sarnen, Benediktinerkollegium, Cod. membr. 8, f 26r

We can compare it to this butcher, for example, from Caffaro di Rustico da Caschifellone’s groundbreaking annals of Genoa, one of whose manuscripts features this worker among its many other civic marginalia (BnF Latin 10136, 6v).

BnF Latin 10136, 6v

As I observed in How to Make a Human (208-10), medieval people were fully cognizant of the similarity between animal and human flesh (after all, the Latin carnis doesn’t differentiate between the two), and the concomitant similarity between butchers and, well, people butchers. Like soldiers. And not only soldiers.

But the distribution of the royal body to the birds also recalls a ritual that has captured the love of ecocritics, me among them. This is the Tibetan ritual of “sky burial,” which, regardless of its variations, always sees corpse fed to wild birds. I’ll have much more to say about this in my next post: about the sometimes ahistorical enthusiasm for this ritual in ecocritical art, in what would have been known about it in Latin Christendom, what this has to do – and doesn’t have to do – with late medieval Christian burial practices, and what is at stake, from an ecocritical perspective, between being esca vermibus (food for worms) and esca avibus (food for birds). And I’ll also have something to say about Heidegger (a sneak preview: I’ll argue that der Mensch ist das Futter des Seins, Man is the fodder of beings).

For now, though, I’ll leave you with this: the connection of Evilmerodach with sky burial seems to be a stretch, and, indeed, for most of the manuscripts I’ve been able to examine, it is. Evilmerodach is a bad, bad king, and he’s doing a bad, bad thing, although he is also, in some manuscripts, being a perfectly good butcher, albeit with an unusual carcass. It may be too much to see this as intimating any kind of sky burial.

Except that at least one German illustrated adaptation of the Bible, Morgan M.0268, fol. 021v, features – surprisingly – Alexander the Great arriving (naked?) through the woods, and, in the middle, a dinner party with Roxana of Bactria, and then, in the right, what I think might be mistakenly labeled as Evilmerodach, dismembering his father and feeding him to the birds. Whoever he is, he's not wearing a crown; but the Morgan believes him to be Evilmerodach; notably, he is in the east, where this late fourteenth-century artist would have expected to find sky burial. And in at least one German Alexander, Evilmerodach’s shrine [“sarc”], green as grass, makes an appearance (3563-67) .

Morgan M.0268, fol. 021v

 I may just be on to something. Part two will arrive in several days.

What Does Normal Look Like? Stephanie Trigg's TEDxSydney Talk

An astonishing meditation upon Thomas Hoccleve, work life, maintaining normal, mental illness, countenance and emotional connection across time and bodies. Well done Stephanie Trigg!

 

Futures of the Past @ GW: Subvention for Travel for Grad Students (and Others) Available

by J J Cohen

On Friday October 30 the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (GW MEMSI) will hold an all day symposium called Futures of the Past that will welcome the following scholars to present and converse on recent and forthcoming book projects that promise a major intervention in the field:

• Kim Hall, Barnard College, author ofSweet Taste of Empire (forthcoming)
• Patricia Clare Ingham, Indiana University, author of The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation
• J. Allan Mitchell, University of Victoria, author of Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child
• Julie Orlemanski, University of Chicago, author of Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Signs, and Narratives in Late Medieval England (in progress)
• Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia, author of Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire (forthcoming)
• Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University, author of The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651 (forthcoming)

Like all GW MEMSI events, this symposium is free and welcomes all who wish to attend. We have also set aside funding to enable some graduate students, recent PhDs, and NTT or un[der]employed faculty who do not possess adequate research resources to travel to DC to join us and participate. The funding we possess should cover travel (plane, train or bus) and two nights at a local hotel (which we will arrange on the awardee's behalf). Lunch and a reception are included in the symposium and those receiving the subvention will also be invited to dinner afterwards.

I realize that this is funding is in no way adequate: we can likely sponsor only two or three scholars, and we do not have enough money available to provide a per diem or anything really beyond transportation, a nice place to stay for two nights, some food and drink, and a hearty welcome into our community. But we do hope that this opportunity will be a valuable one, and we wish we could do more.

If you are interested in the subvention, please send a short email that speaks about the importance of the event and its speakers to work with which you are engaged. Deadline for receipt is August 1, 2015.

Jeffrey Cohen
Director, GW MEMSI 
jjcohen[at]gwu.edu

The Selfie and the Self

by J J Cohen

You might enjoy this piece from the Atlantic about branding, the rainbow selfies of Facebook, and the Luttrell Psalter (among other things).

Here Comes the Summer! More on Writing, and more Medieval Posthumanism

Pygmalion and Galatea come to life

by KARL STEEL

So much good stuff down below: Robert McCruer on resisting the torpor and emptiness of academic assessment, and our own Jeffrey on "Writing Lockdowns." Read it.

On the latter point, I'm reminded of two things:

1) last Spring, I co-led a workshop on publication at the CUNY Graduate Center (thanks again to Mary Catherine Kinniburgh for organizing!). Everything I said was good and useful but I myself was a foul fen through which flowed a pure stream of truth. I don't really spend 20 minutes a day writing during the schoolyear: sometimes I don't even manage that during the Summer. Like our heroes Akbari and Gillespie, I write in bursts. And I write to clear my plate (really: a to-do list is a marvelous thing). Now, having checked off the final boxes (a review for Speculum, and, right after, a long overdue encyclopedia article on "Beast Fables"), and facing no list, having only to write for myself through the end of the year, and knowing I really ought to write BOOK2, poor Karl's a-feared.

2) The most glorious moment, though, came between June 8 (when I was asked to write a piece) and June 12 (when I wrote it): 5000 words for the "medieval" contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman. If you've pulled off similar stunts (Asa Mittman, I'm looking at you), let us know in comments. Here I am with more on the problem of AGENCY, a favorite topic at least since New Chaucer Society 2014 (here and, for MLA 2015, here):

We see a still more explicit questioning of free choice in the medieval epistolary debate between Alexander the Great and Dindimus, leader or spokesman of vegetarian sect of Brahman philosophers. Both sides accuse the other of abandoning their human prerogatives: so far as Dindimus is concerned, Alexander is driven relentlessly and irrationally by an instinct for conquest, while Alexander considers the virtuous, anarchic vegetarianism of these fictionalized Brahmans to be just a symptom of their bestial misery, suffered amid a wretched absence of natural resources. Both sides of the argument presume themselves to be the sole human; both suppose themselves to be exercising their free will, either through the enjoyment (and conquest) of the world, or through its rejection; arguably, however, we may understand the debate as little more than the clash of a warrior-machine with an ascetic-machine, each unable to do anything but occupy the positions each is compelled to take.

My final example will be an equally widespread medieval imagining of the pagan orient, the tradition of Barlam and Josephat, a Christianization of the life of the Buddha, itself adapted from adaptations by Manicheans, Muslims, and various non-Roman Christians (see here and here for more!).  A Middle English version of the story often condemns idolaters for believing that “dumb and deaf” idols were “those who made us,” explaining that these mere objects, like beasts, are properly here only to serve us, who alone among created things have a “reasonable will and desire” to chose to “do good or evil.”  But the Christians decrying idolatry themselves hardly seem free of being objects. Their one difference from the idols is that they are not silent objects, as they recite a limited set of scripts in a manner most reminiscent of amusement-park animatronics. It is not only that the text always resorts to the same language to condemn idols – on three, widely separated occasions it calls them “dumb and deaf” – as if it were following a recipe rather than freely arguing;  it is that the Christian credos it repeats to an audience have themselves been fossilized into orthodoxy by centuries of doctrinal pressure. The “freely chosen” belief praised by this text is also, like the idols, a man-made object that humans have fetishically invested with freedom, all the while evacuating themselves of any chance to break with the old debate between objects and agents, constraint and free will.

For the whole thing, see here (or, if academia.edu bothers you, here). This argument can and should be taken further, perhaps through contemporary considerations of Asperger's (see NPR here on "best practices," which are, functionally, formula for living with others), and through the knotty issue of those violent individuals granted the grace of individual pathologies ("he was a loner") and those identified as just the symptom of a pathological culture (i.e., a culture of honor, shame, fanaticism, atavism, animality, lebensunwertes Leben, etc). Both of these give us violence in which everything is responsible but the individual, in which the individual is only ever the victim of larger forces. And neither really gives us a workable model of "agency."

For still more that might help us, see Jack Kahn at The New Inquiry ("On Neuronationalism: Autism, Immunity, Security") on the ways that agency, responsibility, surveillance, and neurodiversity require and contribute to political thinking. Kahn writes, for example:

As the security of the nation becomes enmeshed with the neurological security of its citizens, medical machinery promises to immunize the social body from the pathogenic emergence of danger.

We might (as others no doubt have) think of the atypical as running programs not entirely in its own control (and therefore needing intervention), but we might also think of the typical as doing just the same (and therefore being left alone). Somewhere in the middle of all this, agency might be found, just as a miracle might be found amid the humdrum cause and effect of business as usual.

Creativity, Routine, Writing Lockdowns, and the Necessity of Ignoring Those Who Offer Themselves as Example

by J J Cohen

This humane, truthful, useful post on How Do We Write? by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Alexandra Gillespie has already been read more that 7000 times ... and it was published only a little more than a month ago. A larger project has been inspired by the post (I won't scoop the authors or publisher by speaking about the details ... but it does look to be fantastic: stay tuned!). I'm contributing a piece that brings together a blog post from 2011 (edited and condensed), a selection from a series of Facebook updates I disseminated during what I called my Writing Lockdown in 2013 (lightly edited), and a short reflection on both.

Long story short, looking back on what I wrote I find myself to be incredibly annoying and don't understand why anyone reads anything I blog or place on Facebook. But I think there are some useful lessons that emerged from my documenting my writing process, especially about the utility of social media. Indeed, the archive exists only because of social media.

Let me know what you think: there is still time to revise.

Creativity, Routine, Writing Lockdowns, and the Necessity of Ignoring Those Who Offer Themselves as Examples

Habit and Routine (A Blog Post, 2011)

Two versions of the same aphorism seem equally true: "Habit and routine are the nemeses of innovation" and "Habit and routine are the precondition of innovation." When it comes to writing, I need a familiar time, schedule and space ... and I need to break out of this regularity sometimes since it offers the ingredients not only for accomplishment but boredom. I finished my doctoral program from start to finish in a fairly quick five years (having entered directly from undergraduate) in part because I did not stall at the writing stage. Funding and being miserable helped, but so did routine and a semester of teaching release. Each morning I would bike a wide circuit through Cambridge, along the Charles River via the Esplanade, and over to Newbury Street. There I'd sit with my books at a coffee shop. With a refillable mug and a slice of marble pound cake, I would pour over whatever writing I'd accomplished the previous day, filling the printout with marginalia (this was long before laptops were affordable). I'd then add as much as possible to what I had just revised, attempting to extend the chapter as far as I could. When fatigue eventually set in, I'd turn to a book or essay I'd brought along. Back on my bike around lunch time, home to eat quickly (yogurt, banana, granola), and then at my computer, typing in whatever changes I'd made and transcribing the new paragraphs I'd penned.

This daily routine of bike rides and writing in two locations sustained me through the most intense period of composing my thesis. Biking was an essential part of my thinking, not a delay. Most of my research was already done, so I didn't need to visit the library often. I also had drafted thorough outlines of how I expected chapters to unwind. Even if each was in the end disobedient to its draft, possessing a road map for each was essential to writing without agonizing over what comes next. During my final semester in graduate school, I was assigned to TA two different classes, Shakespeare and History of English. Time for bike rides evaporated, but the reshuffling of my schedule wasn't a complete catastrophe. I invented some new routines, and managed to carve smaller spaces within which to write intensely, helped along by a firm deadline for submission and a passion to be done. Work, I learned, has a way of filling all available space.

I don't want to idealize this period. Days were solitary to the point (at times) of sadness. Often I’d throw away what I had written as a false start or a dead end. But I kept at it. Throughout graduate school I also lived with at least one person, and found a powerful motivation in knowing that if I worked as hard as I could during the day I might not have to spend a night locked in my room with a computer and a hundred open books. And I suppose that also shows another reason I could get the writing done: I am rewards-driven as well as generally too impatient to procrastinate. I hate having my post-deadline time robbed by a project that overspills its allotted frame, even when the deadline is self-imposed.

Ever since children entered the picture my working days are significantly shorter than those I describe above. When Katherine and Alex are home, I don't want to be cloistered in the study. I try to end my writing just before they arrive, except for email and odds and ends. It doesn't always work and chaos (in the form of sick days and snow days) enters the equation frequently. Possessing a comfortable space dedicated to writing is essential: the former nursery of our house, a room about the size of a walk-in closet into which I've somehow managed to fit all my important books.

Other strategies that I use, with varying degrees of success:

• Every day I wake up at 5 AM and (on most of them) run. That seems crazy, I know, but holds many rewards. The world is more vivid at that liminal hour. Running provides me with solitude and reflection to start the day, and I feel better afterwards. 
• I try to write or revise something every morning. My mind shuts off late in the afternoon so I cannot do much more than email. 
• Sometimes I simply can't get the words out of me. I fiddle with what I've written, I surf the internet, I go back and try again. But if writing doesn't come it doesn't come. I let myself off the hook rather than allow self-recrimination to snowball. Sometimes you need a fallow day to obtain a fertile one. 
• I reward myself with small amounts of social media after writing for a bit. Reading blogs or Facebook doesn't necessarily distract from getting work accomplished; sometimes it is the small break needed to return with more focus. 
• I use an outline not only for my writing, but for my time. I focus on getting a semi-discrete task accomplished within a time period -- a particular section of an essay written, a certain book read. I use Google Calendar and Apple Reminders to keep track of approaching deadlines and portion out my time. I try not to miss these deadlines because then I screw up the work schedule. I have too much travel and too many essays due to allow that happen without triggering panic. 
• In writing all this down I realize that one of the reasons these strategies work for me is that I'm disciplined -- as well as, I admit, relentless to the point of being annoying, even to myself. I’ve sometimes not been a good collaborator because of my calendaring and my drive. These strategies likely won't work for many because they would be oppressive rather than liberating. 
• Conference papers (and other public talks) are great motivators because, well, who wants to commit an Epic Fail for an audience? 
• Running, practicing guitar, swimming with the kids, cooking dinner, having lunch with a friend and off-topic reading are not distractions from my writing. They are what enable me to approach it with freshness and, when it is working well, without resentment. I have to tell myself these things repeatedly. 
• Writing can be immensely pleasurable. I love it when I get a sentence right, or when a text opens as it never has before, or the argument I am formulating suddenly seems to work. But writing can also be agony, or just tedious. The only way out is a focus on a long view and small joys, because that is what will carries through. 

Writing Lockdown (Facebook Status Updates, 2013)

DAY 1
Writing Lockdown begins now, fifty days committed to long hours spent on nothing but my the manuscript of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. I watched The Shining last night to prepare.

DAY 3
Made progress reworking introduction to be less chirpy. Started on first chapter, a recursive monster of a thing. First bout of project induced melancholia -- or maybe it's the usual early summer funk. Progress will continue tomorrow at an undisclosed location due to fact son will be home practicing "like a thousand times” the song for his final in his piano class.

DAY 4
Have discovered that revising is as enjoyable as poking sticks in your eye again and again. Imagined I was Bartleby, but the version who can't stop typing away at a book chapter even when his eyes hurt from all the poking. Ate a ginger cookie in Bartleby's honor.

DAY 10
The cashier at the Undisclosed Location where I often do an hour of writing lockdown each morning insisted that my coffee is on the house because I’m now a regular.

DAY 11
Encountered much of my writing at its worst (sentences that run on so long they leave their subjects stranded twenty lines from their verbs, catalogs so lengthy they gesture towards infinity, repetitions that tend towards redundancy), but also accomplished some rigorous thinking about the ultimate shape of the book. I do have confidence that it will come together, in time. I've sketched out three possibilities for its final form and we will see what clarity tomorrow brings. Unlike last Friday, when I was declaring that an untimely death would at least free me of this albatross, today I lack lucidity about the final shape of the thing but it seems OK.

DAY 13
Today did not start well, mostly due to insomnia about Writing Lockdown and the shitty chapter I am faced with revising.

DAY 17
No matter how long I looked at the chapter most words seemed ill chosen and the argument I thought I had nailed down dispersed into chains of associative logic and topical meandering. I have a string of terms I can't make cohere and the whole thing seems a repetitious amalgam that doesn't accomplish much (and yet is the product of a great deal of research and labor). The chapter kicked my butt. I need to, um, sit on a pillow or something so that it doesn't do that to me again.

DAY 19
A half day: Wendy and I will escape to Luray for a long weekend, where exploring some caves and hiking the mountains will keep the geologic real even when lockdown is suspended. I feel OK about departing the hermitage because yesterday's deadlock was broken by an outpouring of helpful FB comments (44!) as I tried to wrap my mind around rocks and terminological failure. All hail the power of social media -- and the generosity of those who use it.

DAY 20
After an awesome Geologic Shenandoah Escape, Writing Lockdown began inauspiciously last night with a massive onset of anxiety matched with the thunderous nearing of a storm: each reverberating boom was a footstep of Day 20 approaching and the topple back into my book. Threaten as it did, however, the storm never arrived, and after a tense hour I fell asleep ... and maybe that is a sign that return to lockdown will be OK.

DAY 21
Still going strong. 12 hours after waking up this morning, chapter now seems vastly improved in a critical section. If, however, I am ever compelled to write anything at any point ever again in my career about medieval carbuncles O FOOL, I SHALL GO MAD.

DAY 24
The turgidity of my prose depresses me enough that today I retrench a bit, pruning and clarifying rather than attempting to finish. Puts me off schedule but I'm thinking of it as a cleaning day, just as sometimes the only way to get work done at your desk is to diminish the clutter.

DAY 26
Book chapter down to 25K words, but an incoherent mess that shows no sign of wanting to organize itself into unity. Not a great day.

DAY 28
My reserves of creativity are tapped out, and my chapter is an embarrassment to rational beings everywhere. AND the copyedited manuscript of Prismatic Ecology just arrived. And Wendy is having surgery on her hand tomorrow.

DAY 29
Rather than post an update that mewls about my insomnia, the flooding storms, the work I have to accomplish, Wendy's surgery and the things to do beforehand, I will simply note that (1) Writing Lockdown Day 29 will be a soporific half day; (2) I know that I am very fortunate to have a life that allows me to devote time to writing and rewards me for what I've undertaken, (3) much of that good life comes about from the support of family, good friends, and you, the person reading this: I'm grateful for your companionship.

DAY 32
The end of Writing Lockdown Day 32 witnesses my body rebelling against this regime. My shoulders smart, my right wrist is sore from the edge of the laptop pressing into it, the arch of my left foot aches from the crazy position I place it when I'm not paying attention.

DAY 35
Blue clouds against black sky, and the radiant Thunder Moon behind. A good omen from this morning's run for Writing Lockdown.

DAY 40
40 days and 40 nights of Writing Lockdown either means I'm Noah sailing in an ark full of chapters which are in turn crammed with horrendously strained metaphors OR that I have only two weeks of Writing Lockdown remaining before departure for Maine.

DAY 41
Writing Lockdown Day 41 ends with the drawing of a necessary line. I could read endlessly and add infinite amounts of material to this book but I need to stop somewhere ... and this is my somewhere. Now I start the process of going through the book slowly and carefully to ensure the writing is up to snuff, the argument fully coheres, the footnotes are worked out, and everything is mechanically perfect.

DAY 42
I wish Douglas Adams were still alive so that he could tell me what Writing Lockdown Day 42 means.

DAY 46
Frustrating day. Tried so hard to complete revision of chapter; failed. Discovered that closing section also appears verbatim in last chapter. Overall structure not gelling. Too many quotes, too much digression. Tomorrow had better yield an epiphany or I will complain or Facebook or something.

DAY 48
A reminder of the affective roller coaster intense writing projects produce. After the happiness of yesterday's small achievement, a night of a single, short, dull and infinitely looping dream that kept waking me up -- agitated by its inane repetition, and angry enough at my brain that I'd stay awake for an hour. Reset. Repeat. Anxiety, because Writing Lockdown is nearly over.

DAY 49
Thinking about the health costs of this long regimen. Losing the 75 lbs might be possible but the curvature of my spine and the heroin addiction are going to be more difficult to address.

DAY 50
Writing Lockdown began on June 3 and has repeated intensely fifty times. I've been working like a dog. But even summer dog days come to their close, and mine terminate now. Writing Lockdown ends NOW with a Dark n Stormy.

Backwards Glance (written on a holiday when I got up early due to stress over having too much writing to do: 2015)

I composed the words that appear above on social media, the blog In the Middle (www.inthemedievalmiddle.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/jjcohen). The blog post records a time in my life when I was good at getting things done. I wish that time had lasted longer. By the summer of 2013 I had taken on so many projects – and had a book due to press – that I was plagued by insomnia and constantly anxious that I would not be able to complete all that loomed. I used fifty nonsequential days that summer as a Writing Lockdown, working harder than ever so that I could get Stone to UMP. My plan was to have the manuscript almost there by the second week of August so that I could enjoy a family vacation hiking in Acadia without bringing books or thinking academic thoughts. I posted about the Lockdown every day on Facebook as a way of being accountable to the world outside my mind. Reading through these posts now I can see that there will come day when my relentless drive will cause me harm.

Well, honestly, it did cause me harm: I was something of a wreck by the end of the process, emotionally and physically. I injured my shoulder badly enough that it took several months of physical therapy to restore full function. People think the life of the mind is not dangerous, but it will kill you, if you let it. If I could travel back in time I would tell the Jeffrey Cohen of graduate school, 2011, and 2013 to chill the hell out. I offer these words and reflections here knowing full well that underneath the processes I describe run currents of apprehensiveness, fear, self-punishing discipline, and relentless drive that I do not think is healthy and is certainly not offered for emulation. What I want to say in closing is that no one can tell you how to write, only how she or he writes. That process changes as life proceeds: writing is a mode of living, and must therefore be adaptable. Possibilities exist within every model. And so do perils.