There Will be Morality Plays

by J J Cohen

I feel in bondage to this post by Eileen, but don't have a coherent thought to offer. Yet. Meanwhile, a question on a different topic.

So I never get to see movies until everyone else has already enjoyed them, analyzed them, and moved on. Such is the fate of he who depends upon a Netflix queue and who lacks sufficient leisure. Last night I finally saw There Will Be Blood, and I must state that I do not comprehend the greatness my friends promised of that film back when they saw it. I intuit that the narrative works something like a morality play, and so as a medievalist who has read the Pardoner's Tale (or even as someone who once watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre) I should udnerstand its conventions and denouement. I know the story comes from Upton Sinclair, an author not known for nuance. I also know that the film's narrative of oil, greed, and immorality probably resonated differently under Bush-Cheney than it does with a change of White House occupancy. But still. Was the message of that film anything more complicated than: capitalism fosters insatiable greed; religion and capitalism are identical twins; greed will make you drink a lot of whiskey, use cute little deaf boys as props, speak in an excessively deliberative manner, and bash people with wooden bowling pins? Is the take away message something more complicated than "oil = riches = worldly goods = bad stuff, bad bad stuff"?

The Pardoner's Tale is a lot more complicated than that. What did I miss here?

Sadomasochism, Temporality, History: Elizabeth Freeman's Historiography Redux, Part II

Figure 1. Gerard David, Christ Nailed to the Cross (after 1484)

by EILEEN JOY

. . . sadomasochistix sex performs the dialectic of a quick-paced modernity and a slower ‘premodern,’ the latter indexed by any number of historical periods. Seen as a kind of erotic time machine, sadomasochism offers sexual metacommentary on the dual emergence of modernity and its others, on the entangled histories of race, nationhood, and imperialism as well as nationhood. Moreover, S/M does this work in simultaneously corporeal and symbolic ways, turning the queer body into a historiographic instrument: more than a cumulative effect of traumatic and/or insidious power relations, the body in sadomasochistic ritual becomes a means of addressing history in an idiom of pleasure.
—Elizabeth Freeman, “Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History"

Sexual practices are banal, impoverished, doomed to repetition, and [in] this . . . disproportionate to the wonder of pleasure they afford.
—Roland Barthes, Preface to Renaud Camus, Tricks: 25 Encounters

History is just a load of stuff that already happened.
—Colin Farrell as Ray, In Bruges

Jeffrey has sent you his valentine and I now send you mine, and if you like a little sex with your violence or a little violence with your sex, then this letter is for you. Somewhat belatedly [although, how do we count time in the blogosphere?], I am returning to my ruminations on the thinking of Elizabeth Freeman on eroticism, temporality, and history, which I began here and here, in order to address her essay, “Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History” [differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 19.1 (2008): 32-70], which I find provocative and challenging. The essay is long [and forgive me, too, Elizabeth Freeman and anyone else for the omissions in my summary and responses, because there is simply so much!], and before settling into her primary argument [see epigraph above], Freeman first takes us on some related (de)tours that address:

1) the “slow” and retroactive time of sexual dissidence in modernity [which allows us to see that “sexual deviants . . . were unimaginable before the modern regime of ‘progress,’ a discourse even more totalizing than the ‘civilizing process’ championed by evolutionism”]

2) how, in Sade’s writings, S/M “shuttles” back and forth between the modern and the premodern [more pointedly, between the power relations of the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution], and thereby becomes “a form of writing history with the body in which the linearity of history may be called into question, but the past does not thereby cease to exist” [p. 36]

3) some of the history of the analysis of S/M by radical & lesbian feminist, critical race, and white gay male theorists, in order to show how there has been “somewhat of a schism in S/M theory . . . between a will to condemn sadomasochism’s historical trappings . . . and a will to ignore or trivialize them,” and to ask the question: “But are we truly locked into a choice of viewing sadomasochism as either an equivalent to the historical forces that oppress or the agent of their complete dematerialization and privatization into psychic drives?” [p. 38]; for Freeman, we need to continue trying to theorize S/M: “to historicize it theorizations, and, most urgently, to theorize its historicisms,” for, in Freeman’s mind, “S/M may bring out the historicity of bodily response itself,” not only “the conditioning of sexual response over time,” but also “the uses of physical sensation to break apart the present into fragments of time that may not be one’s ‘own’ or to feel one’s present world as both conditioned and contingent” [p. 38]

4) how some white lesbian feminist critics [such as Kathy Acker, Lynda Hart, and Ann Cvetkovich] offer different avenues toward a reconsideration of S/M as a form of temporally reorganizing personal trauma into a more positive [or “healing”], or even futural, experience; one insight here might be that “the masochist’s sensations seem to alter the flow of time so that there is an ‘after’ to violence appearing as its ‘before,’ a consensual might-have-been triumphing over a personal history of being victimized” [p. 39]; BUT, while these theorists importantly address S/M’s temporal registers in a sophisticated manner, they do so mainly within the realm of personal/family trauma, such as that occasioned by incest, which still leaves open the question of:

5) how S/M also indexes national and imperial pasts [genocide, slavery, the Inquisition, etc.], and “can also aim for a certain visceral fusion, a point of somatic contact between a single erotic body in the present tense and an experience coded as both public and past. . . . Here, the aim is not displacement, but a certain condensation of public and private, collective and individual subjectivities”; therefore, S/M “might be a way of feeling historical that exposes the limits of bourgeois-sentimental emotional reactions to historical events,” while at the same time “it also refuses to eschew feelings altogether as a mode of knowledge” [p. 40]

The bulk of the rest of Freeman’s essay is taken up by an analysis of Issac Julien’s 1992 8-minute digital silent film The Attendant (originally made for the BBC series Time-Code), the bare plot of which can be summed up as follows: in a British museum, a white museum-goer and a black museum guard have a sexual encounter, one that takes place in relation to F.A. Baird’s 1833 painting of a slave market, Slaves on the West Coast of Africa, in which, in Freeman’s description, “a white, presumably a European man straddles a prone, presumably an African man, as other black and white men look on or continue their business. In the periphery of this scene, more white men whip, bind, inspect, and brand other black men” [p. 42]. When the black museum guard catches the eye of the white museum-goer, the painting in Julien’s film literally comes to life and “metamorphoses into a tableau vivant of an interracial sexual orgy, with participants posed exactly as they were on the canvas, only now wearing modern S/M gear” [p. 43]. Once the museum closes, “the Attendant and the Visitor consummate their lust by whipping one another in a room off the main gallery—or the Attendant may simply be imagining this happening; the film leaves this ambiguous” [p. 43]. It is important to note here that the scene of the visitor and guard whipping each other is presented as a series of frozen stances [first one on top, then the other, then both standing side by side, with only the sound of a whip cracking on the soundtrack]. The film has no dialogue or voiceover narration, but does have various sound and music effects, including a kind of sonic heartbeat that registers throughout. [I have not included all details of the film here, just its bare trajectory.]

According to Freeman, Julien’s film “brings out a certain formal dialectic within sadomasochism, one that hyperbolically clarifies the temporal aspects of power and domination and yet also offers new modes of temporal apprehension and historical consciousness” [p. 43]. One way in which the film does this is by exploring the relation between film and the more “still” arts, such as painting, such that it enacts “a striking meditation on the passive and active modes not only of sex, but also of perception: it explores the dialectic between contemplation and intervention as they inflect sadomasochistic scenes and then open these scenes into history” [p. 44]. Ultimately, Julien’s “innovation is to link the dynamics among film as a temporal medium, the temporalities of the cinema’s various narrative gestures, and the time of still art to sadomasochistic practice itself,” which relies on certain modes of passive inaction [stillness, waiting], pictorial representation, and “moving” bodily narratives that spatialize time. What conjoins Julien’s film to Sade is precisely the mode of tableau vivant, which is both a static and moving picture, and what The Attendant ultimately suggests is that “a large part of sadomasochism’s power lies less in pain itself than in the pause, which the film figures most insistently as the frozen moment of suspense between the crack of a moving whip and its contact with a body that will flinch.” Therefore, S/M “plays with and literalizes power as time” and also celebrates “Freud’s description of the perversions as a form of dallying along the way to heterosexuality” [pp. 49, 50]. Freeman asks us to consider S/M’s emphasis on the pause as a historicist mode that would provide an “antidote” to “the traditional historicist models of progress that Sade . . . repudiated and to the ‘revolutionary’ ideology of a complete break from the past that Sade celebrated” [p. 51]. Similar to Benjamin’s idea that times stands still within certain dialectical images, the pause “reveals the ligaments binding present and past” [p. 51].

The setting of Julien’s film in a museum was certainly purposeful, and Freeman suggests that, while “S/M cannot return its players to a prior historical moment any more than a museum can, it can remind us of what the museum itself represses: memory is not organic or natural at all, but depends on various prompts and even props” [p. 55]. More specifically, in Julien’s film, “the image of the whip travels,” and held by the Attendant, it “indexes the erotic energy that enslaved black men managed to preserve and transmit to their successors despite their sufferings” [p. 57]. It is noteworthy, in Freeman’s view, that “Julien reanimates the dead in sex scenes rather than in the scenes of revenge or fearmongering in which a classically Derridean ‘hauntology’ usually traffics,” and therefore Julien makes an important contribution to “a queer-of-color critique that would hold sensuality and historical accountability in productive tension” [p. 57]. Ultimately, in Julien’s film, “the register of touch can literally open up slavery’s historical baggage and distribute its contents differently” [p. 58].

Because the film ends with the Attendant, in a kind of dream sequence, singing Dido’s “remember me” aria from a theater balcony to a frozen discotheque crowd below him [played by the same men who inhabited the painting], which aria is from Henry Purcell’s 1698 opera Dido and Aeneas, whose librettist Nahum Tate reworked Vergil’s Aeneid in relation to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, thereby conjoining the classical epic to British nationalist strivings, Freeman asks, “What does it mean that The Attendant ends with a black man apparently suffused with homoerotic and sadomasochistic desire inhabiting the role of a diasporic queen as written by a celebrant of British imperialism?” [p. 60]. In Freeman’s view, the Attendant’s inhabitation of Dido’s lament “obliquely illuminates the role of sexuality in the cultural memory of a conquered people,” and Dido’s lament itself “raises its own dead, even as her words frame the story of England’s rise on the backs of dead and dying African slaves” [p. 61]. Time, in Julien’s film, becomes a “modality of power rather than a neutral substance,” and the body becomes, perhaps, “an inadvertent conduit for effaced histories of pleasure rather than a figure for some ahistorical essence or a mere mannequin upon which icons of oppression are scandalously hung for fun” [p. 62]. Further, S/M “is not merely drag: it reorganizes the senses and, when it uses icons and equipment from traumatic pasts, reorganizes the relationships among emotion, sensation, and historical understanding. Its clash of temporalities ignites historical possibilities other than the ones frozen into the ‘fate’ of official histories” [p. 63].

By way of concluding, Freeman asks that we consider S/M as a “critical technique or mode of analysis enacted with the body erotic” that “offers up temporal means for reconfiguring the possible: the ‘slow time’ that is at once modernity’s double and its undoing, the sensation that discombobulates normative temporal conditionings, the deviant pause that adds a codicil of pleasure to a legacy of suffering.” She adds that these “are not, to be sure, reparations for past damages (as if perfect redress were possible) or the means of transcending all limitations. They are, however, ways of knowing history to which queers might make fierce claim” [p. 63].

First, I just want to say how abbreviated my summation of Freeman’s essay and argument is—there is much I have left out [for example, her analysis of what Julien is doing with race/color/skin in his film, and with sound and rhythm], but I wanted to mainly focus on issues that have already been long-discussed on our blog, especially with regard to the relations between temporality, sexuality, affect, and history. Indeed, history is the term I naturally want to linger on here, for while I find Freeman’s thinking on the relations in S/M between sex and temporality utterly fascinating and convincing, I feel a bit more fuzzy-headed on the history side of her triumvirate, which is not to say that I do not understand what is obviously the most critical part of her project—the importance of the queer body as “historiographical instrument” as well as her call for queer theorists to better theorize S/M’s historical dimensions, and also, following the more broad claims of her erotohistoriography spelled out in other writings, such as “Time Binds,” to formulate how “the bodily enjoyments that travel under the sign of queer sex [might] be thought of as temporal practices, even as portals to historical thinking.” Those of us who are interested in the subjects of the body, embodiment, gender, sex, and sexuality in studies of late antiquity and the Middle Ages are lucky, I think, to have a contemporary theorist such as Freeman who is pushing queer theory to take better account of the historical and the pull of the past on subjectivity, identity, sexuality/sex practices, sociality, and the like. More pointedly, with respect to Freeman’s most recent thinking on S/M as an “erotic time machine,” since there have been some excellent books recently published in premodern studies that address S/M [primarily within hagiographical contexts—e.g. Robert Mills’s Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture and Virginia Burrus’s The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography and her even more recent Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects], as well as books such as Karmen MacKendrick’s Counterpleasures, which includes premodern hagiography and medieval spiritual practices in its longue duree cultural history of “odd-seeming” and transgressive pleasures, the time seems ripe for a productive conversation across disciplines and fields with regard to the queer body as an historiograpical instrument that time-travels [an idea given one important launch in our own field by Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval]. It would be important, too, at some point, to bring into this conversation new work that is being done by contemporary theorists on affect, sensation, and touch that also takes up what I would broadly call “movements” in time [e.g. Erin Manning’s The Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty and Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation], and also, given the importance of medieval spirituality to the history of this conversation, the recent thinking by John Caputo [inspired by Deleuze] on a “theology of the flesh” seems apropos as well, but we’ll save that thought for another day [but wouldn’t that be a cool symposium, too?].

In any case, coming at Freeman’s thinking on S/M as a form of historical writing on and with the body from the longer perspective of the Middle Ages, we can first ask how Freeman’s idea that “sadomasochistic sex performs the dialectic of a quick-paced modernity and a slower ‘premodern,’ the latter indexed by any number of historical periods” might travel into medieval contexts such as flagellant communities or medieval schools where enthusiastic whippings were a central part of the pedagogy [the former being obviously more self-willed than the latter, although there were ample illustrations and writings related to the latter that certainly opened the possibility of the practice developing queer sexual valences]? And in what manner might depictions of violent martyrdom, in both the literature and the visual arts of the Middle Ages, perform the dialectic of a “quick-paced” now and a slower then? Or, is this question evacuated from the very start because Freeman’s attention is definitively upon S/M as it is habituated within a post-Sadean modernity [indeed, is possibly even produced within modernity as a type of sexual opposition, albeit an opposition that is historically loaded and saturated with premodern “scenes”], and to speak of S/M within medieval contexts would mean to take account of a different type of shuttling between times, a shuttling that might have more to do with fusion than with opposition, but which nevertheless might involve the suspension or pause that Freeman describes as so essential to S/M’s time scheme. As Bob Mills puts it in Suspended Animation, with reference to the late medieval painting by Gerard David, Christ Nailed to the Cross [see image above],

the representation of [the] protagonist [Christ] looking out from the painting toward the viewer gives rise to a suspension of time, since as soon as we, the beholders, are required to participate in the visual narrative, the illusion that Christ’s passion was an historical event located at a particular chronological juncture is shattered. We too become implicated in the scene, laying the image open to the possibilities of victim identification and (imaginary) corporeal sensation. Motifs of this sort contribute to the process by which sensations transfer, imaginatively, from one body to the other . . . . The medieval principle of imitatio Christi encapsulates the fantasy that pain is transferable and that it can be shared—that worshippers are able to fuse mentally and even physically with Christ’s body. [p. 162]

There are obvious parallels here with how Julien’s film The Attendant negotiates a relationship between the figures in the slave market painting and the two men who participate in the painting’s traumatic scene, while also recuperating [or making more utopic and futural] its dark energies by sexualizing them, and the ways in which medieval depictions of scenes of martyrdom, in Mills’ view, asked beholders “to view pain not simply as a destructive force but also as a phenomenon that produces bliss” [p. 163]. At the same time, the medieval painting, in Freeman’s phrasing, “rings some changes” on historical consciousness by “reanimat[ing] the erotic dimension of affect that is both solicited and repressed in sentiments like nostalgia, patriotism, or pride in one’s heritage,” and here we might substitute: love of or faith in Christ/Christianity.

But we still might ask, if the late medieval painting, or earlier medieval hagiographic narrative, such as Ælfric’s tenth-century Life of Agatha, performs a dialectic between two times, how might we describe in more historical detail those two times and the ways in which they are in productive [but also, possibly, destructive] tension with each other [and why only two times]? What times are these, more specifically? We might tentatively acknowledge that, at least in the narratives of martyrs, there is always the zero-time of Christ’s passion which the martyr is always attempting to return to and fuse with, albeit belatedly if ecstatically [with the mode of exstasis standing in as the time portal]. There is still the question of the real historic occasions and places that were particularly conducive to what might be called the “return” and “repetition with a difference” of the iconography and narrative of Christ’s martyrdom with a particular force [which is also to ask: were martyr narratives equally palpably present in medieval culture in all times and places? I doubt it], a force that could even be called radical and subversive and queer—after all, after the Benedictine Reform, those religious who sought out the most extreme, ascetic forms of a solitary life were viewed with more suspicion. We also have to acknowledge that martyr-saints are never really there in any time at all [“there’s no there there,” as Gertrude Stein might say] because they exist primarily in a cultural [and also political] imagination that gives rise, in particular times and places, to certain texts and pictorial art: they are always being appropriated after the supposed facts of their existence, which is largely invented [also, in some respects, all martyrs are the same martyr: repetitions and mimicries, but again, with a difference]. Whereas the buyers and slaves in the West African market depicted in F.A. Baird’s painting [in Julien’s film] have a somewhat palpable historical reality—i.e., slave markets really existed [and the painting itself can be said to participate in the beginnings of naturalism]—the medieval narrative or pictorial depiction of the martyr-saint does not have behind it a real martyr-saint, only a mis-en-abyme of images of martyr-saints who are all, in one fashion or another, copies of Christ, and often, transgressive copies [because more excessively violent and abject]. [I know that, over time, real persons have been tortured and also executed for their beliefs, but medieval hagiography, in my mind, is very much a type of generic heroic-romance literature.]

It may be that Freeman’s definitions of and insistence upon the categories of a “quick-paced modernity” and the supposedly “slower premodern” would break down entirely within medieval “scenes” of sadomasochism, and yet, Virginia Burrus’s chapter on “Hybrid Desire: Empire, Sadism, and the Soldier Saint” in her book The Sex Lives of Saints, might demonstrate otherwise [but with a twist]. Focusing in this chapter on Sulpicius Severus’s fourth-century Life of Martin, which Burrus typifies as hypernatural science-fiction, Burrus detects in Severus’s portrait of Martin a “precursor to Donna Haraway’s cyborg figures—‘densely packed condensations of worlds, shocked into being from the force of implosion of the natural and the artificial, nature and culture, subject and object, . . . narrative and reality” [p. 93]. At the same time, Burrus also carefully delineates the historical and political contexts of Severus’s writings on Martin in order to reveal Martin as a sort of post-colonial figure as well [i.e., “post-colonial” within the context of late Roman imperialism]. In this sense, Severus’s Martin, especially as he is rendered in various scenes of domination and submission, acts as a sort of switching-station for the negotiation of different times: the zero-time of Christ’s passion, the post-colonial time of late imperial, pan-Mediterranean Rome, the time of Severus’s own love/need for Martin [which is also the time of writing], and the futural time of the cyborg. Believe me when I say I am not even beginning to do justice to this chapter of Burrus’s, but I mainly want to draw our attention to the important question of what it might mean—vis-à-vis Freeman’s work—to consider S/M [now or before the modern] as a practice in which the past drags upon the present and yet out of which a certain modernity is always emerging in dual time with its others [historical others, sexual others, cultural others, etc.]. For Burrus, the very genre of hagiography emerges in late antiquity at a time that is partly charged by the present we currently inhabit and vice versa:

It is scarcely an accident that the incitement to hagiographical discourse arises within the charges and contested transculturalism of a late Roman empire perched at the edge of antiquity. Nor is it an accident that interest in hagiographical erotics reemerges within our own similarly “multicultural,” ambiguously “postcolonial,” even possibly “postmodern” context. We too are perched at a temporal edge (or so we imagine it), awash in an ocean of heteroglossia (in the academy and well beyond), sharply aware of the complex and mobile relations of power that infuse all of our practices (literary, erotic, and otherwise). Hagiography is a historical product, a queer, late version of the ancient novel, emerging at the intersections of romance with biography, historiography, panygeric, martyrology—a statement that does not so much define its genre as announce its persistent subversions of genre, its promiscuous borrowings, its polyphonous multiplication of contesting (and thus always compromised) voices, its subtle and ever-shifting resistances within power, its layered remappings of place and replottings of time, its repeated traversals of the boundaries of history and fiction, truth and lies, the realms of the sacred and the profane. [p. 18]

This also raises the “yet another” question of whether or not, as Freeman argues, sexual minorities “have in many ways been produced by, or at least emerged in tandem with, a sense of ‘modern’ temporality,” or if sexual deviants were “unimaginable before the modern regime of ‘progress’” [“Turn the Beat Around,” pp. 32, 34]. We already have a somewhat thick body of scholarship in medieval studies that has called into question whether or not such terms as homosexuality, heterosexuality, “perverse,” and “abnormal” could have had any force in medieval life in the same way they do now [e.g. Glenn Burger’s Chaucer’s Queer Nation, Karma Lochrie’s Heterosyncracies: Female Sexuality Before Normal Wasn’t, and James Schulz’s Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality]; nevertheless, how modern, really, are certain “minoritarian” sexual practices, such as S/M [and for that matter, how might “progress” be defined/described in certain premodern periods—certainly, there were notions of progress, but what were they, more specifically, and how did they change the pace of particular temporalities in the way, say, the invention of factory assembly lines changed the temporality of labor]? We might think a bit more about the idea of emergence, which can call up linear notions of time, but doesn’t have to [here, I am thinking especially how emergence is defined in the sciences as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems”]. It may be that sexual minorities are always produced by or emerging, in different times and places, “in tandem with” whatever “sense” of temporality is dominant/official in any given moment, but then we have to also do the work of delineating what those different senses of temporality are [in different places] and how sexual practices are either figured by or become more visible and legible in or alongside those temporalities. We will also have to start shifting and sorting out historical and more aesthetic temporalities: the arts create their own time, and this is directly relevant to some of my further thoughts on Freeman’s work, SO:

This also leads me to want to further consider what “history” signifies, exactly, in Freeman’s thought, especially with regard to S/M as a kind of time machine. Is history some kind of actual past in this scenario, or is it only ever a retroactively-posited representation of a particular [overly self-invested] memory or image of history [or even, of a dream of an image of history, or of something that is behind/anterior]? Further, if S/M is a “hyperbolically historical, even metahistorical way of having sex” [p. 42], is S/M then helplessly, perhaps even laughably, anachronistically clichéd [in the way a bad Renaissance Fair is anachronistically clichéd—this also raises the issue of how S/M inscribes on bodies what I would call an unreflective historical nostalgia]? My questions arise out of the tension I detect between two statements Freeman makes in her essay—first, that S/M “gestures toward the possibility of encountering specific historical moments viscerally, thereby refusing these moments the closure of pastness” [p. 42], and second, that it brings the body “to a kind of somatized historical knowledge, one that does not demand or produce correct information about or an original experience of past events, or even engender legibly cognitive understandings of one’s place in a historically specific structure” [p. 62]. So, while S/M might gesture toward the possibility of encountering a real history [and thereby “faces” history, as it were, and bends toward it], it does not demand or produce “correct information” about the past—okay, fair enough [I mean, this is like . . . common sense], BUT: I worry about the ethical slipperiness that is created in the gap between the reaching toward the possibility of viscerally encountering the past [which is never really “over”—I couldn’t agree more] and the admission that the “historical knowledge” produced in the body in S/M ritual does not necessarily correspond to anything historically “legible.” Here we brush up against the idea of historical knowledge embodied in certain postures and sensations as maybe spiritual or mystical [at the very least, mystified—it is Virginia Burrus, we might recall, who asks if eroticism is nearer to theology than to anything else]. Oddly, I find myself in this gap recalling Pierre Nora’s statement that “[w]hat looms on the horizon of every historical society . . . is presumably a final, definitive disenchantment,” and I reflect that Julien’s film stages a sort of re-enchantment of history in which a certain traumatic history’s pores, in the words of poet Spencer Reese, literally “ooze with the brine of discotheques.” But I must also confess that I find myself a bit stuck here—I don’t know, exactly [yet], what to make of this gap or slippage between these two statements and would only say here [for now] that they create an intriguing crux in Freeman’s overall argument, one that we might return to and ruminate more collectively. At the very least, the presence of this gap leads me to also ask:

What is the relation between history and art/artifice, both in Julien’s film and in Freeman’s erotohistoriography? As indicated above in my summary of Freeman’s analysis of Julien’s film, Freeman does pay very close attention to the ways in which Julien’s film negotiates still and moving pictures, sound effects, and the tableau vivant, in relation to “a certain formal dialectic within sadomasochism, one that hyperbolically clarifies the temporal aspects of power and domination and yet also offers new modes of temporal apprehension and historical consciousness,” such as the Benjaminian-historicist mode encoded in the pause so critical to S/M sex. But I am concerned, too, to at least wonder at the relation, both in Julien’s film and in Freeman’s erotohistoriography, between history and its representation in art/writing as an event—an event, moreover, that is re-played, however inaccurately, in S/M sex [which itself becomes in the process its own event], but also in the art form that purports to perform and “act” such sex and in the criticism that describes that performance, and here I would also say, of Freeman’s criticism, cadging from Carol Jacobs writing on Benjamin’s thought, that “it is already in the work of art as its potential” [In The Language of Walter Benjamin, p. 7]. [This also raises the issue, which I can’t fully explore here, of whether or not S/M as a sex practice is as historically saturated and temporally aware as Freeman makes it out to be, or rather, if it is primarily within the realm of art and of the criticism that illuminates that art that such historical consciousness within S/M sex is drawn and performed—I just don’t think most practitioners of S/M sex are as sophisticated or as hyperbolically historically aware as an Isaac Julien or other artists in their appropriations of and encounters with historic scenes vis-à-vis sadomasochism.] Even if we stick with the Benjaminian historicist mode that Freeman purposefully invokes [and perhaps precisely because of it], we have to interrogate a bit further what of the historical inheres in the shock of the past or now-time [Benjamin’s jestzeit] that results from the constellation of past and present objects and images assembled by Julien in his film.

Might we start, first, with the premise that the historical was never itself to begin with [and that narrativization, which is about meaning, always comes later]? And also, that history cannot be thought outside of presentation and re-presentation? And yet, there is always the ethical imperative to not completely elide what of the pre-symbolic Real sticks, as it were, to all of this, and how. I think this is something Freeman is actually attending to when she suggests that Julien’s film offers “a queer-of-color historiography grounded in bodily memories of a nonorginary pleasure—one perhaps never experienced ‘as such’” [p. 63], and yet, isn’t something of those supposedly originary bodily memories dragged forward somehow, albeit only as phantasms, but still, as a result of this, does anything still linger/haunt once the film ends, insisting on its own always-fugitive presence and perhaps even saying, noli me tangere? At the same time, because Julien’s film is set in an art museum and begins with a painting coming to life and ends with a drag performance where the black museum guard sings Dido’s lament from Purcell’s opera [a scene that also serves as a repetition of that lament since it also appears earlier in the film when the painting comes to life], which is itself a hybrid appropriation of Vergil and Geoffrey of Monmouth, the film would seem to highlight the idea that the only real access to history is through these performances and re-framings of history-as-art, and the bodily memories evoked in the film exist only in a series of traces and relays between artworks which possess their own history and embodiment as artworks. And I would say, too, that the utopic energies that Freeman locates in S/M’s temporal promiscuities [through which painful collective histories are re-charged with futural pleasures] are not realizable outside the realm of the aesthetic. S/M itself is an artwork, for which history is one prop among others. Is history really encountered through S/M, or do we just keep meeting up [again] with a certain collective [Western] dream of a violent historical romance?

This brings me, finally, and again, to Dido’s lament. It fascinates me that Julien ends his film with an aria that connects his narrative, and also us as his audience, to one of the penultimate moments conjoining love and death in the Western experience [while, obviously, it also connects the Africa of Baird’s painting to the Africa of Vergilian epic]. Yes, as Freeman points out, I understand that, on one level, Julien’s appropriation of this operatic moment undermines “the British empire’s monumentalizing history of itself” [p. 63], and also, because its refrain is, essentially, “remember me, but forget my fate,” it is well-suited to carry, as Freeman argues, an “historical memory of pleasures that exceed the parameters of [Dido’s] own lifetime, her individual love affair, her geopolitical location, and her death” [p. 61]. But in what ways also, does Dido’s lament, especially situated as a drag performance in the fin-de-siecle present of Julien’s film, remind us of what Jonathan Goldberg has called that “strange dynamic which, in Western culture, binds death into desire,” and which “is not the product of a marginal pathological imagination, but crucial in the formation of that culture” [Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, p. xii]? And if Sade has anything to do with it—with S/M sex practice in general but also with its artistic representation in Julien’s film—can we really relegate to the background all of the cut and carved and dead bodies that serve as such exquisite corpses in Sade’s oeuvre [granted, on one level, it’s all a hyperbolic joke at the expense of a certain society’s supposed mores and politics]? Likewise, how does the lament, situated in Julien’s film, and regardless of the subversive nature of its placement there, function as just one of an endless series of performed fantasies of sacrificial desire that, as Simon Gaunt has recently shown, have functioned as the “insidious lure[s] of a symbolic order” that has been crucial to the evolution of Western European thinking about love—thinking about love, moreover, that, although often located in secular poetic registers, relies heavily upon the religious language of ascesis and martyrdom [Love and Death in Medieval French Occitan Culture, p. 210]?

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I was partly troubled by Freeman’s essay because there is a part of me that does not want to hear how S/M, as a sex practice [never mind as an historical-aesthetic temporal practice], can utopically re-charge, and thereby partly recuperate and re-encode, traumatic histories of violence. I sadly admit my terminal unhipness by disclosing here that I am one of those persons who, until I read Freeman’s essay at least [I’m all for positive, affective readings of anything, so she mainly has me], had decided that S/M, wittingly or unwittingly, simply repeats or participates in various histories of violence [past and present] and is thereby ethically unsound, or unbearably sad, or both. And sometimes, it even makes me laugh . . . nervously, because I know that sex and violence have intertwined histories and it is likely almost impossible to think one outside the other. Further, the relation of pain and pleasure is similarly intertwined [perhaps they are even co-dependent, as MacKendrick’s book Counrterpleaures amply demonstrates], and it may be, too, as Leo Bersani has famously written, that all sexuality is “ontologically grounded in masochism” or is a “tautology for masochism” [The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, pp. 39, 89]. All relations, sexual and otherwise, are in some respect relations of force, and as Hent de Vries has suggested, violence may be “the inescapable horizon or inherent potentiality of any act, or of any refraining from action” [Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, p. 18]. And if it’s ethics I’m really worried about, I could recall Derrida’s insight that there is no ethics “without the presence of an other, but also, and consequently, without absence, dissimulation, detour, difference, writing. A violent opening” [Of Grammatology, p. 139]. Perhaps, in one sense, S/M is just putting one’s cards on the table [if in highly stylized and hyperbolically dramatized fashion], although I will continue to worry about our love affair, at least in the West, with the annihilation of the self and with desire as death. And I would not be lying if I told you that, although I devote a good portion of every day thinking and writing about the past, there are days when I would like to see it obliterated.

Valentine's Day: It's Not Just for Massacres Any More

[image: Saint Valentine baptizing Saint Lucile, Jacopo Bassano, 1575]
by J J Cohen

For your 14 February delectation, the story of Saint Valentine, martyr by decapitation, as translated into English by William Caxton (1483) from the Latin of Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa (1275).

42// HERE BEGINNETH THE LIFE OF ST. VALENTINE

Valentine is as much to say as containing valour that is perseverant in great holiness. Valentine is said also as a valiant knight, for he was a right noble knight of God, and the knight is said valiant that fleeth not, and smiteth and defendeth valiantly and overcometh much puissantly. And so St. Valentine withdrew him not from his martyrdom in fleeing, he smote in destroying the idols, he defended the faith, he overcame in suffering.

St. Valentine, friend of our Lord and priest of great authority, was at Rome. It happed that Claudius the emperor made him to come tofore him and said to him in demanding: What thing is that which I have heard of thee, Valentine? Why wilt thou not abide in our amity, and worship the idols and renounce the vain opinion of thy creance [faith]?

St. Valentine answered him: If thou hadst very knowledge of the grace of Jesu Christ thou shouldest not say this that thou sayest, but shouldest reny [deny] the idols and worship very God.

Then said to St. Valentine a prince which was of the council of the emperor: What wilt thou say of our gods and of their holy life?

And St. Valentine answered: I say none other thing of them but that they were men mortal and mechant [bad] and full of all ordure [garbage] and evil.

Then said Claudius the emperor: If Jesu Christ be God verily, wherefore sayst thou not the truth?

And St. Valentine said: Certainly Jesu Christ is only very God, and if thou believe in him, verily [truly] thy soul shall be saved, thy realm shall multiply, and he shall give to thee alway victory of thine enemies.

Then Claudius turned him[self] unto all them that were there, and said to them: Lords, Romans, hear ye how wisely and reasonably this man speaketh?

Anon the provost of the city said: The emperor is deceived and betrayed, how may we leave that which we have holden and been accustomed to hold sith [since] our infancy? With these words the emperor turned and changed his courage [mind], and St. Valentine was delivered in the keeping of the provost.

When St. Valentine was brought in an house in prison, then he prayed to God, saying: Lord Jesu Christ very God, which art very light, enlumine this house in such wise that they that dwell therein may know thee to be very God.

And the provost said: I marvel me that thou sayest that thy God is very light, and nevertheless, if he may make my daughter to hear and see, which long time hath been blind, I shall do all that thou commandest me, and shall believe in thy God.

St. Valentine anon put him in prayers, and by his prayers the daughter of the provost received again her sight, and anon all they of the the house were converted. After, the emperor did do smite off the head of St. Valentine, the year of our Lord two hundred and eighty.

Then let us pray to St. Valentine that he get us pardon of our sins. Amen.

Text available all over the web, but I took from here.

Loss, Mourning, Affirmation

[illustration: memorials]
by J J Cohen

Apropos to a lively discussion that has come to focus on education jobs, as well as to this recent post about mourning, and especially to this ancient post about grieving for a lost teacher (see #6), I want to share with you an event that has preoccupied my family over the past few days. Though its relevance to this blog is at best tangential, writing about it seems (for reasons unclear to me) a necessity more than a choice.

My son Alexander entered sixth grade this year, and thereby transitioned from a small elementary to a vast middle school. The place can seem chaotic, especially in the morning as hundreds of preteens arrive en masse, or when a bell rings and a sudden swarm races for rows of lockers. I feared that Alex would have a difficult time adjusting, but assisted by compassionate teachers he adjusted to his new life without problems.

His favorite teacher this year has been Mr. Hegedus, who teaches sixth grade Ancient World History. Last autumn during visiting day I observed his class. I was impressed. Actually, I was both inspired and a tad envious. Using little more than a dog-eared book, a projector, a seemingly endless bag of Jolly Rancher candies, and his considerable charisma, Mr. Hegedus kept a classroom of thirty eleven-year-olds fascinated by the minutiae of daily life in a Mesopotamian city. The population of this required social studies course is quite diverse, with kids of various backgrounds and motivations brought together for a communal exploration of a subject that likely seems remote from them. Yet Mr. Hegedus made his students feel the kind of palpable connection to that distant past that requires a teacher of great personal magnetism to conjure.

Of course, given that Alex chose to be Augustus Caesar in his third grade wax museum, the Ancient World has been an easy sell to him. He loved the section on Greece because it gave him an excuse to watch the historically accurate film 300 again. He marveled when Mr. Hegedus brought up the topic of Greek homosexuality, and offered that the word gay doesn't always mean the same thing at every time period. He enjoyed composing a letter from a Roman footsoldier to his family at home, describing what it was like to be part of a frontier legion (much emphasis on various military hazings in that one). He already has his toga ready to go for Greco-Roman day at school. I also see that Alex has deeply enjoyed having a male teacher, a first for him.

On Tuesday Mr. Hegedus was driving home from the school at which he has taught for 13 years when he suffered a stroke. Fortuantely he was able to pull to the side of the road before he lost consciousness. When informed of their teacher's perilous condition on Wednesday, students and teachers wept. I do not believe a more popular educator can be found at the school. I met Alex as he walked home that afternoon: he fell against me and cried. Later I took him to his piano lesson, and we had an uncanny encounter with a hawk: the bird sat in a tree watching us with such attention and such fearlessness that it gave us both a feeling of foreboding (even though we knew very well that we were overinvesting a natural event with human significance).

Yesterday Mr. Hegedus died.

His students had no chance to speak their farewells. The cards they created remained undelivered. Alex told me that the most unbearable part of the day was walking into the social studies classroom, knowing Mr. Hegedus would not be present. Not knowing what else to do, he swiped a pen from his favorite teacher's desk. When I asked him why, he said: "Because the last thing Mr. Hegedus said to me was 'Where is my pen?' He couldn't find it to check off my homework. Now I'll always have it for him."

In class yesterday Alex also created a small memorial to Mr. Hegedus, a sheet of red paper on which he inscribed his teacher's name and his two favorite sayings ("Veni, vidi, vici" and "Carpe diem"). Two paperclips are attached to the plaque. This weekend he will fasten two helium balloons to the clips, and -- as is now his custom -- will launch that message into the heavens, the good-bye he never was able to speak.

Festive Friday Comes Early: Your Worst Job

by J J Cohen

We have an ancient tradition at In the Middle of bringing to the occasional Friday more frivil and festivousness than is our quotidian custom. Mentally I am already inhabiting Friday (mostly as a coping mechanism: if I keep telling myself I am not really imprisoned in Thursday I will potentially escape the meetings that are about to devour my day like so many keen toothed piranha). So, let the festivities begin.

Those of you who have spent any amount of time with me in the flesh know that in my ongoing quest to assimilate to ordinary earthly conventions I sometimes employ discussion-breaking questions of the kind that a good diner party host will, just to render the guests convivial: i.e., what is your Proustian food? (thanks to Betsy McCormick for that one). The problem is that I'm not actually good at such things, and have a way of asking something too penetrating or too personal. In New York, for example, I believe I made us go around the table to admit our moment of most extreme humiliation, the one to which instant death was in every way preferable. Or later that evening I asked each person for a credo, a statement of heartfelt belief. I now understand why people generally avoid sitting in propinquity.

But here is an actual question that led to some interesting answers: what is the worst job you ever held?

My answer: In order to afford college I always worked an after-class job. I had a federal work-study grant, but the pickings for such positions were slender when I was a new student. I thought seriously about taking a make your own hours job at the medical center morgue, removing the corneas from cadavers. But what I chose instead was to be the guy who files the various smears of sundry growths removed from the skin of those who came to a dermatology clinic. To this day I know my squamous cell carcinomas from my actinic keratoses. I also have nightmare flashbacks to their purple puss-soaked ooziness.

What about you?

A Digital Codex

by Mary Kate Hurley

[illustration from the Lindisfarne Gospels -- thank you, BBC!]

Within a few hours of it being posted on the Valve last night, as a result of Scott Eric Kaufman's reading of a blog called "Readin" -- a number of my friends were emailing me about this. I haven't had the time to fully explore the website, but it would seem that UCLA has put together a page that allows for the easy browsing of all MSs that are digitally available online. Granted you may have already noted its existence through a post at ITM all the way back in December, but given that I noted it only in passing at the time, I thought it worth a second look.

From this article on the website:

Highlights of the virtual holdings include:

• The largest surviving collection of the works of Christine de Pizan, one of the first women in Europe to earn a living as a writer. The manuscript was commissioned by Queen Isabeau of France in 1414 and is now held by the British Library.
• An Irish copy of the Gospel of John, bound in ivory and presented to Charlemagne sometime around 800, now in the library of the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland.
• The Junius manuscript, one of only four major manuscripts preserving poetry in Old English. Dated to around 1000, the book is now among the holdings of Oxford's Bodleian Library.

As an Anglo-Saxonist, I got no further than the Junius Codex. Along with Exeter, Vercelli, and the Nowell Codex, it houses Old English poetry, including Genesis, Exodus and Daniel. It was also my first Anglo-Saxon codex, which I saw at In the Beginning at the Smithsonian back in 2006. I'd be curious: do other medievalists out there remember their first manuscript? I mean, I'd seen other MSs here at Columbia's RBML, and at various museums and such. But to see the Junius, in person, even if I didn't get to "read" it more closely than through the glass protecting it -- that was pretty amazing.

I also couldn't help but think about the materiality of the codex. Of course I've gone on about this before. After a full semester, however, of one class on paleography and another on medieval book culture (the latter with Chris Baswell, who is part of the team that worked on assembling the UCLA site), I can't help but think about the objects themselves. Perhaps it's the lingering questions raised by Jeffrey's Weight of the Past talk last week, but I do tend towards feeling rather strange about digitized manuscripts. As teaching resources, they make the kind of intense paleographical work I did with Professor Dutschke possible in a way that before it would not have been outside of a few select places ten years ago.

However it also raises the question that all digital technology raises: that is, access. In this case, it's a question of access to the past. I'm working on a cataloging project with Prof. Dutschke for a few hours a week (along with several colleagues) -- and what I've realized is that there is so much to a manuscript that perhaps no digital reproduction, however fine, can represent. For example, I've often felt too squeamish to be a medievalist -- the thought of reading books that are written on animal skin often makes me hesitate to touch a manuscript. This Monday, for example, I sat in the Rare Books reading room and looked through a Chronicle written on parchment. The material of the text was utterly beyond my comprehension -- in addition to being in what was one of the worst late medieval hands I'd ever seen, the text was in German, a language I am slow to read when it's legible. However, the materiality of the book, the object itself, was exceedingly clear. Vellum, like un-moisturized skin, wrinkles. Yes, wrinkles. Texts age, and do so visibly. It's oddly similar to human skin in that regard.

This all tied in quite nicely to my Intro to the Major class, which I also taught this past Monday. I was introducing some of the ways medieval poetry thought about language, and the authority of the speaking or writing voice. After I gave an "introduction to Old English culture" that made me cringe slightly with its brevity -- we worked with one of my favorite of the Old English Riddles, Number 47:

Moððe word fræt. Me þæt þuhte
wrætlicu wyrd, þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn,
þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,
þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide
ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs
wihte þy gleawra, þe he þam wordum swealg.


A moth ate words; a marvelous event
I thought it when I heard about that wonder,
a worm had swallowed some man’s lay, a thief
In darkness had consumed the mighty saying
With its foundation firm. The thief was not
One whit the wiser when he ate those words.

Trans. Richard Hamer

When a poet in the Middle Ages looked at a book s/he didn't see something pristine, like my copy of Klaeber's Beowulf, which is still too new to be dog-eared and worn. Rather, books had long histories already, even when new -- it was not, as it were, their first life. And books were not safe from the ravages of time or even of the worms that also rend human flesh after death. Perhaps its worth remembering that even digital materials have worms which feed on data. Transience, it would seem, was and is part and parcel of textual experience. Rightly so, given that humans create them.

In part, and as always, it seems I've come back around to where I began when I started my musings: materiality and the medieval. We're always dealing, in some fashion, with what's left -- never an established whole, never a static object-of-knowledge. The medieval, it would seem, is always contextual, and therefore always contingent on the kinds of contexts we can find for it. It seems obvious, I suppose -- but every time I open my web browser and look at my first Anglo-Saxon codex, I don't know that I'll always acutely feel the absence of the codex Junius (given that it's not at my beck and call -- or even on this side of the Atlantic). But I do sense another kind of absence -- albeit one that is paradoxically full of lives and ideas and cultures that are always just beyond our ability to recall fully. I'm sure someone else has already said this -- but maybe we're always missing the Middle Ages?

Thanks to Scott Kaufman of The Valve for bringing this back to my attention, and to all the friends who forwarded it to me.

Cross posted at OENY.

More on something Beowulfian -- the conference for which it is intended -- on the morrow.

Haecceity / Motion / Pause

[illustration: my current Facebook profile picture, a sourpuss expression that offers a tiny window to my ugly soul. Plus, my hair is out of kilter.]
by J J Cohen

Last week I gave a paper at NYU. Time has already conveyed that event far from me, in the way that time will sometimes pluck and flee with that which you most want to hold close.

My New York trip offered some moments of pause during a period of intense activity. The preceding week had been filled with twelve- and thirteen-hour days as festivities related to my chairing the English Department and my directing GW MEMSI vied with obligations less enjoyable to fulfill. The New York trip, on the other hand, offered a brunch chez Karl that began around noon and ended only as the sun was forcing long shadows from the Brooklyn trees, late drinks at a bar where we lingered in growing quiet until the place closed, a train ride during which I surrendered every thought to Chrétien de Troyes while lounging in the "Quiet Car" (what library-loving scholar invented the "Quiet Car"? Why doesn't every transportational mode have a "Quiet Car"?).

These moments of pause did not last. The moment I returned home I was attacked by an eleven year old and a four year old, both of whom wanted many things from me -- primarily the sugar-fortified treats I had lugged from the Zaro's in Penn Station, but also this weird thing called "parental love" that I hear so much about and try hard to feel.

The week is only halfway elapsed, and already I am dreaming of its termination. Yesterday's agenda, for example, included attempting to answer ten to the ninth power of emails; ironing out problems with the fall teaching schedule; soothing a grad student and an adjunct in distress; and courting a potential donor over lunch. Then the president of GW hosted the English Department's faculty meeting at his home: he is, after all, a literary scholar and a member of my department. I seized the chance to appoint him Chair of the Student Complaints Committee, but he deftly avoided my authority. But I had to run from the cookies, sherry, and bons mots to grab my son Alex and convey him to Hebrew school -- a disciplinary apparatus about which, to his immense credit, he complains far less than I do.

On a typical Tuesday and Thursday my wife drops Alex off at synagogue because she can leave work earlier than I can get out the door. I pick up my daughter from preschool on my way home from GW, and then the three of us eat a quick dinner before I leave to retrieve Alex. We do this little ballet twice a week, and we do it pretty well. Yesterday, though, Wendy and Katherine had an obligation in Virginia, so I had to excuse myself from the department meeting/sherry swilling party early and dance the choreography solo. Fine, of course ... but as I said good-bye to Alex and wandered south into Glover Park to eat dinner by myself, I realized it was the first moment I had had to myself since running that morning (at 5 AM). I wasted most of this alone time by eating take out food from Whole Foods while reading the latest Studies in the Age of Chaucer: what a nerd. Afterwards, though, as the clouds darkened to deepest blue, I walked back towards the synagogue with my headphones on, my iPod turned to "In Our Bedroom After the War." I was early, so I was taking my time.

The breeze was too mild for February, the rush hour headlights too beautiful for mere machinery. The floodlit National Cathedral should have been the intrusion of postcard platitude into the dullness of an ordinary evening, should have made me return to my thoughts of business and of how time escapes. Yet the cathedral's tower drew my eyes and held them, impossibly clean and vexingly modern tribute to distant medieval architectures. There I was in Washington, the song playing, the evening warm, caught bewteen a church and a synagogue, and grateful for the pause.

The Future of 'The Weight of the Past' / Credo

[illustration: a projector supported by The Flowering of the Middle Ages and The Faerie Queene, a talk supported by more collaborators than any bound volume could contain]
by J J Cohen

First, a tremendous thank you to those who invited and coddled me in NYC (especially Hal Momma, Liza Blake, the Anglo Saxon Studies Colloquium and the NYU English Medieval Forum), and to all who attended my talk, asked me questions that ripped away its foundational assumptions, and otherwise provoked me to rethink everything I thought I knew. Subjective destitution and an existential angst hangover are a small price to pay.

Highlights: a reception before my presentation, so that I could urge attendees that I would sound a lot smarter if they would imbibe a glass or five of wine; an intimate dinner for 22 afterwards, with an excellent food and excellenter company; shenanigans and antics later that evening; hanging out in Brooklyn chez Karl; a good Indian dinner with a taste-free dessert; shenanigans and antics Friday evening at a faux British pub with red telephone booths and an upscale nautical-themed bar serving absinthe-infused "zombie" drinks in ceramic tiki head cups (where we got deep).

So I gave a presentation entitled "The Weight of the Past" at NYU on Thursday.

Of all the pieces for public performance I've composed, "Weight" is my favorite. The talk originated as my Holloway Lecture at McDaniel College, then underwent a series of radical mutations as it was adapted and refined for some other venues. NYU was its final performance: a form of the essay will soon see print, and I observe that unwritten academic rule that thoughts hardened into books don't get oral existence any more. Yet the closing night of "The Weight of the Past" has already proven to be far from its last metamorphosis. To adapt what I was attempting to argue in the presentation itself: as substantial and as fully materialized as the thing might seem, its trajectory has yet to be arrested and "The Weight of the Past" keeps becoming other things. The questions I was asked at NYU were so penetrating that they've challenged me to refine and even reconceptualize some of what I yearn to achieve -- especially as this nexus of obsessions begins to take its form as a future monograph.

This reformulation will be most evident in the closing movement of "Weight." In its current version, the coda arrives just after a conversation I restage with my daughter Katherine, one in which we think about memorializing the dead, especially in museum displays of prehistoric corpses. I posted one version on the blog quite some time ago as Who Mourns for Lindow Man?, then later reflected on the function that these vignettes perform in The Moment of Interpretation and Those Carried in Its Wake -- though spurred by a question by Carolyn Dinshaw, I want to emphasize that these are for me moments of collaboration rendered visible, rather than the use of a story, person, or object to achieve something that does not necessarily require extrinsic participation or agency. So, here is the ending to "The Weight of the Past":

To intertwine meditation upon past and future while retaining some confidence that we are doing justice to history, we must encounter the materiality of the past in a way that grants life to what might otherwise seem inert. We must keep the distant past, the present moment, and the future—near and distant—alive, capable of plenitude, heterogeneity, change. We must never cease to grieve for Lindow Man, no matter who in life he was. We must never think of Stonehenge or of Avebury as anything but a ring of stones that does not cease to dance. We must never forget that the past has a weight, but that weight is seen only in the past’s movement, in its desire ever to remain alive.

And here is the provisional credo (or the credo of provisionality) that starts to move beyond such termination.

Many things about the closing paragraph do not ring true to what I had hoped to achieve in the piece: its hortative mode, its ethical high-handedness, its injunction to mourning, its funereal finality.* I realize now that what I have been attempting in "The Weight of the Past" project is not an ethics but an ethos: instead of an ethics of compulsion to remembrance, an ethos built upon the practice of wonder. I am attempting an explicitly collaborative praxis -- and by "collaborative" I actually mean "inhumanly collaborative": I'm as interested in alliances with rocks, texts, forces of nature, and corpses as I am with the living and the dead. The project offers, I hope, an invitation to coinhabit a world made strange.

I don't think I can say it better than that right now.

*Questions from Karl Steel, Glenn Burger, Carolyn Dinshaw, and many, many others made me realize these facts so essential and so close to me that I could not discern them well.

Back

[illustration: utterly flavorless coconut custard dessert consumed in an Indian restaurant at 6th and 1st. I am still wondering what gave the gelatinous creation its vibrant orange color, and where they put the flavor once they extracted it.]

by J J Cohen

Had a great time at NYU and in NYC, and hope to do a blog post about the event soon. At this moment one child is begging me to play Pretty Princess and the other Risk 2210, so I have things to do.

In the meantime, though, enjoy this brief report about David Wallace's recent talk at GW.

Medievalists Trash Washington Square Hotel Bar: Fistfights, Mayhem, and De-ossification Ensue

by EILEEN JOY

Only one of the above things is true, and we leave you to guess which, but what we will say is that after Jeffrey's beautiful talk at New York University last night, "The Weight of the Past," which had a lot to do with rocks and stones and how heavy and inscrutable they are [but are also good dancers!]--well, really, the talk was much more complex than this, but we are too tired to provide a brilliant precis at present--and after a lovely dinner arranged by Hal Momma, some of us retired to the Washington Square Hotel Bar where we stayed until they kicked us out. Not for smashing chairs or throwing the Bosworth-Toller dictionary at the bartender's head or for asking the security guard to please take his hands off of us and yes, we really would come out from under the table and leave, and quietly, but because it was late and because there are laws, people, laws about this sort of thing. And, oh yes, because we were good and ready to go.

Off to NYC ...

by J J Cohen

About to embark upon my frigid walk to the Metro station, thence to be conveyed via subway, train, and subway again to NYU. All four ITM bloggers meet up tonight and again tomorrow.

Antics may ensure. Watch this space for more.

The Holy Grail is Filled with Gatorade

by J J Cohen

So I've just discovered that a sports drink that comes in a rainbow of unnatural colors is citing Monty Python in its recent commercials. Even Les Hecklers have been redone. Just as two wrongs don't make a right, a parody of a parody remains a parody.

And makes me thirsty. I'm packing for my trip to NYC tomorrow, but first I've a hankering for some Gatorade brand energy drink "Fierce Berry" mixed with "Xtremo Mango" (only Gatorade brand energy drink can render fruit so ominous). I will be so energized I will be up all night. Plus my electrolytes will be back in balance.

Now I just need to find that Grail dish I had lying about in order to sip this most blessed of nectars...

Texts Inexhaustible to Meditation

by J J Cohen

So I taught Beowulf again, this time in an introductory level course with ninety students.

As I prepped for the class I tried to ascertain how many times I've read the thing, and came up with a number of approximately thirty -- not bad for someone who is not an Anglo-Saxonist. Two of those reads were early in my scholarly life, when as an undergraduate and again as a graduate student I took a semester-long course in which we translated the poem in its entirety. Beowulf has been on my syllabus since I started leading my own classes in 1992 ... though it didn't become as teachable as I find it now until Seamus Heaney's translation/reinvention appeared.

Thirty times through, and yet the poem offers novelty at every reading, opens new worlds at every discussion. So I wonder: what other texts do readers of ITM find never grow stale? What is your favroite work that, no matter how frequently you read or teach the thing, at each encounter something living, breathing and surprising emerges?

The End of the Weekend

by J J Cohen
[illustration: my Sunday morning reading. Alex goes to Hebrew school, I go to the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf in search of something meaningful to say to my 90 students come Monday. Post title pirated from my favorite sex-death poem by Anthony Hecht]

In a few moments I'll join my family downstairs and watch the Superbowl, not out of any interest in which team wins, but simply to be there with them. For the moment, though, I am enjoying a moment of solitude ... and composing a real blog post: not an excerpt from my work in progress, not the kernel of my next article, not a snarky thing about slankets or medieval universities, but a post that ruminates in an off-the-cuff way on the happenings of the past few days.

And those happenings are legion. On Thursday I introduced Steven Knapp, the president of my university and a fellow professor of English, who then introduced Edward P. Jones, currently in residence in my department. The night was the most important since I became chair of my department, choreographed carefully to announce that (1) English reigns supreme at GW and (2) all must bow before the supremacy of English. My evil masterplan worked pretty well, in that the auditorium of 240 seats was standing room only, and the president hosted a well attended reception at his house afterwards. The evening marked the first time that Knapp has had anything to do with the department in which he holds his tenure. Times are a-changin.'

Edward P. Jones himself is an eccentric, smart, solitude-loving and (unlike the charming-to-the-point-of-revulsion but also solitude-loving Nadeem Aslam), quite shy. I love him. Hanging around with Jones has been so much fun: when you find the way to connect with him, he reveals himself as an incredibly witty, humane, and affable person. His devotion to our students is admirable ... and his ability to keep complex worlds in his head (he does not sketch out plots in notebooks, and if you have read The Known World you know how intricate the realms he envisions are: the novel was composed as he walked the other paths of his ordinary life, shopping at Safeway and waiting for the bus). I lingered for a long time after the reception with President Knapp, Edward, and a few donors, then drove Edward home. He lives not far from my house, near National Cathedral and the synagogue at which Alex was studying today while I rererererereread Seamus Heaney's Irishized Beowulf.

Friday David Wallace came to GW to give a talk under the auspices of GW MEMSI. I met David in 1990 or so, when I was still a graduate student and he was, I believe, at the University of Minnesota ... and widely held to be the coolest scholar in medieval studies (yes, I do realize that the competition was not what one would call "fierce"). He came to an afternoon series called "Medieval Doctoral Conference" where various people in various ill fitting clothing would typically deliver a paper about the precise geographical location of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Poet based upon a new survey of dialectic evidence, or macaronic verse as an underappreciated genre (take away message: appreciate this verse, because it is appreciable), or ... well you get the picture. There was nothing wrong with such topics, of course, but let us just say that they lacked a certain joie de vivre and did not tend to scintillate in their delivery. David, on the other hand, delivered his paper while slumped -- slumped -- in the throne-like chair in which they made speakers preside. He wore a leather jacket, was damn smart, and said things so unpredicatble and illuminating that I vowed I'd read everything he writes.

I've been very good about following up on that vow.

David delivered a typically erudite talk at GW centered around his latest project, a mapping of European literary history that does not stay within the conventional parameters of Europe, of the literary, or of history. Focused upon the post-plague, post-catastrophe period of 1348-1418, the project breaks into nine itineraries that follow wandering byways along the roads and waters of eastern and western Europe, and beyond, even to Africa: e.g., Aberdeen to Finistère by way of Iceland, the Orkneys, Dublin, and Cornwall; Palermo to Tunis by way of Mallorca, Aragon, Lisbon, the Canaries, Granada. We took him out for dinner afterwards at GW MEMSI's favorite restaurant, and then drinking at our favorite watering hole (ITM's DC venue, and the Tiny Shriner's haunt). We resisted the urge to befez him. All in all an excellent night.

After which I became extremely ill. The migraine that seized me at midnight had nothing to do with David's visit (he is about as low maintenance a medievalist celebrity as you could wish for), but everything to do with Thursday's hoopla: so much was at stake in the Edward P. Jones fest for my department that the stress was for me even higher than I realized. I don't often get a migraine ... and fortunately for me it did not come until Friday had ended, and did not linger past Saturday.

And so I find myself on Sunday evening with a weekend passed, Beowulf digested (not literally: Grendel attempted that, and see how things turned out for him?), and a week ahead that will bring me to NYC and many friends.

OK, and now for that Superbowl. It's a basketball game, right?

Back to the Middle Ages in Arizona Higher Ed

by J J Cohen

All monks, please don your Slankets: Arizona State University may need an as yet undetermined number of you. Or so says John Kavanagh, Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, of proposed budget cuts there:

Back to the Middle Ages . . . There are many ways to measure the impact of state-budget cuts. There's the obvious dollar amount. There's the effect on people's lives. And then there's the historical perspective.

Members of the House Appropriations Committee were debating the cost of photocopying at Arizona State University and whether those costs decline as the semester wears on and students drop classes.

But committee Chairman John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, interrupted to say the conversation was way too 21st century.

"Since our cuts are going to send ASU back to the Middle Ages, the question is how many monks will they need?" he said.

Kavanagh warmed up to the Middle Ages metaphor, noting that the Department of Chemistry should be changed to the Department of Alchemy.

Department of Alchemy? I could be in to that (as would my vaguely Harry Potteresque son). Just don't change my English Department into a scriptorium. And please also void logic from the philosophy department, since the linking of budget cuts to medieval-destined time travel makes very little sense. Did Arizona really have an institution like Cambridge or Oxford or Bologna or Paris during the Middle Ages, and if so who was attending it? Was their budget truly that slender?

Story pasted from here. Thanks to my colleague Margaret Soltan for sending it my way.