Whispers of the gods #5

Last time I said I would try to explain what I meant by the ‘thread of self-loathing’ which seems to me to run through George Steiner’s Real presences.¹ Alas, although this post does a few practice runs, it doesn’t quite get there in one jump.

Fifth in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence² and Real presences

See also Whispers of the gods #1; #2; #3 and #4.

George Steiner

And perhaps I should also qualify the claim. It seems a thread of self-loathing runs through the first part of Real presences, the section entitled A SECONDARY CITY. This is not because it cannot be said of the remaining sections. I need to qualify the statement because Real presences is a sequence of such indigestible blocks that I have to get this first bit out of the way so I can stop thinking about it.

It feels as if a chef from hell has served up my least favourite hors d’oeuvres, and he says he’s going to follow it with my least favourite main course and then my least favourite dessert.

The central theme of A SECONDARY CITY is a parable about a theoretically possible society of the ‘primary’, one where art and literature themselves are flourishing, but where all literary and artistic criticism, reviews and discursive interpretation have been banned. There would be no academic or journalistic writing about the meaning or value of particular works of art or literature. It would be a society

devoid, to the greatest possible extent, of ‘meta-texts’: this is to say [sic], of texts about texts (or paintings or music), of academic, journalistic and academic-journalistic – today, the dominant format – talk about the aesthetic. A city for painters, poets, composers, choreographers, rather than one for art, literary, musical or ballet critics and reviewers, either in the market-place or in academe.

But in such a society, literature, music and the arts would not ‘exist and evolve unexamined [or] unevaluated’. In a particularly opaque passage on ‘interpretation and hermeneutics’, Steiner separates (I think!) three related strands of meaning. Interpretation and/or hermeneutics can mean (i) deciphering and communicating meaning; (ii) translating ‘between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions’; or (iii) executing or acting out material ‘so as to give it intelligible life’.

It is this third sense which (I think!) Steiner isolates as ‘good’ interpretation/hermeneutics, which would still survive in his society of the primary, and which he also labels as

the enactment of answerable understanding, of active apprehension.

John Everett Millais: Ophelia

But let’s bring this down to earth. Here are some examples of this type-(iii) interpretation:

An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia. A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography. A violinist a Bach partita. In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation.

…Each performance of a dramatic text or musical score is a critique in the most vital sense of the term: it is an act of penetrative response which makes sense sensible.

When I referred to this type-(iii) interpretation as ‘good’ interpretation I wasn’t going over the top:

Observe the moral aspect… Unlike the reviewer, the literary critic, the academic vivisector and judge, the executant invests his own being in the process of interpretation. His readings, his enactments of chosen meanings and values… are a commitment at risk, a response which is, in the root sense, responsible. To what, save pride of intellect or professional peerage, is the reviewer, the critic, the academic expert accountable?

Interpretive response under pressure of enactment I shall… call answerability. … We are answerable to the text, to the work of art, to the musical offering, in a very specific sense, at once moral, spiritual and psychological. [My emphases]

In the context of music, drama and ballet,

in respect of meaning and of valuation…, our master intelligencers are the performers.

…[This] is less evidently the case in regard to non-dramatic literature…

Well of course. Steiner waxes lyrical about the value and significance of reciting poetry and prose, and learning poetry in particular by heart. I’ll come to this in a moment. But surely there is a much simpler point to be made about acting and performing in general. It seems a bit arbitrary to draw a boundary round the written text of Hamlet and say ‘that is a work of art’, and then point to a particular actress’s performance of the character of Ophelia as an ‘act of penetrative response’ and therefore something different. It is not false exactly, but it is an odd way of looking at it.

It seems to be based on the assumption that a ‘work of art’ is by definition something produced by one and only one human being. Whereas it is just as valid to see the whole group performance of Hamlet as a ‘work of art’ with contributions by a set of people, including the now-deceased William Shakespeare.

Thelonious Monk

John Coltrane

Maybe this is exactly what Steiner is saying, but his language is so dense it is difficult to know. The thing is that in an actual performance there could be all shades of ‘penetrative response’ and ‘answerability’ and ‘responding responsibility’, depending on what is being performed and how it is being performed. An actor learning and then performing the lines from a pre-existing script is one kind. That same actor responding to a fellow actor’s performance is another kind – in theory, although it might be hard to separate the two. John Coltrane playing alongside Thelonious Monk, where both are playing a composition by Thelonious Monk himself or someone else; two jazz performers improvising together on a harmonic sequence borrowed from a song from the Great American Songbook; a cellist’s ‘penetrative response’ to both the score of Elgar’s Cello Concerto and what the particular conductor is getting out of this particular orchestra on this particular day; that conductor’s own ‘interpretive response’ to the cellist’s own performance; …

And so on. What I think I’m resisting is the idea that on the one hand we have the ‘work of art’ – which could be a painting or a sculpture or a poem or a novel or the text of a play – and on the other hand we have the ‘interpretive response’ to that work of art, which at its most direct could be a performance, but could also be private recitation or learning by heart. This idea seems to take it for granted that there is some general primary notion of a ‘work of art’, which can then secondarily be a painting, or a piece of music, or a poem and so on. And then one can have either an authentic ‘penetrative response’ of ‘answerability’ to this work of art, or the inferior ‘academic-journalistic paraphrase, commentary, adjudication’ or ‘meta-text’.

There may not even be a finite set of features which all ‘works of art’ have in common, and which things which are not works of art do not possess. There may rather be a set of overlapping ‘family resemblances’ in Wittgenstein’s sense.

So to pick up Steiner’s thread about learning by heart:

The private reader or listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force… What we know by heart becomes an agency in our consciousness, a ‘pace-maker’ in the growth and vital complication of our identity…

Anna Akhmatova

He then gets political:

The issues here are political and social in the strongest sense. A cultivation of trained, shared remembrance sets a society in natural touch with its own past. What matters even more, it safeguards the core of individuality. What is committed to memory and susceptible of recall constitutes the ballast of the self. The pressures of political exaction, the detergent tide of social conformity, cannot tear it from us…

Under censorship and persecution, much of the finest in modern Russian poetry was passed from mouth to mouth and recited inwardly. The indispensable reserves of protest, of authentic record, of irony, in Akhmatova, in Mandelstam and in Pasternak, have been preserved and mutely published in the editions of personal memory.

In our own licensed social systems, learning by heart has been largely erased from secondary schooling and the habits of literacy. The electronic volume and fidelity of the computerized data bank and of processes of automatic retrieval will further weaken the sinews of individual memory… etc etc.

I am not convinced. The facts about memorised Russian poetry are interesting and significant in themselves, but I cannot see how they support the case he is trying to make. Was the poetry not memorised because that was the only way to preserve it? In what way is preservation by memory more authentic than preservation in print – had that been possible?

Horst Wessel and friends in 1929

And as for the lament on the passing of learning by heart in modern schooling – this seems as much a lament for lost innocence. To learn by heart means you do not have to analyse or understand for the text or melody to stick. This may or may not be a good thing depending on what it is that has been committed to memory. In some German hearts of the 1930s the most deeply engrained text and melody would have been those of the Horst-Wessel-Lied. I doubt George Steiner had this particular Kunststück in mind when he described the citizens of his imaginary city in these words:

The great majority, who are themselves neither writers, nor painters, nor composers, will, so far as it lies in their capabilities and freedom, be respondents, answerers in action. They will learn by heart, perceiving the elemental pulse of love implicit in that idiom; knowing that the ‘amateur’ is the lover (amatore) of that which [sic] he knows and performs…

I’ll try and get to the thread of self-loathing next time.

References

¹ George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

² George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Whispers of the gods #4

On Art Garfunkel’s website there is a section he calls his LIBRARY which lists every book he has read since June 1968. By September 2009 the count was 1084. Not surprisingly there is a subsection for Favorites. 

Art Garfunkel

Fourth in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence ¹ and Real presences ²

See also Whispers of the gods #1; #2; and #3.

As I plod through George Steiner’s Real presences for the second time – the book does not make Art Garfunkel’s 1084 by the way, let alone his Favorites – I find myself wishing George had chosen Art’s rather more economical technique to draw people’s attention to how erudite he is. Instead we get page after page of this sort of stuff:

…criticism is energised into creative responsibility when Racine reads and transmutes Euripides; when Brecht reconstrues Marlowe’s Edward II; when, in The Maids, Genet plays his sharp variations on the themes of Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The most useful criticism I know of Shakespeare’s Othello is that to be found in Boito’s libretto for Verdi’s opera, and in Verdi’s response, both verbal and musical, to Boito’s suggestions…

…There are kindlings of discursive revelation in Plato, in Kierkegaard, in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Adorno. There is a rare force of suggestion in the definition proposed by Gioseffo Zarlino, the principal Renaissance theoretician of music: … [My emphases.]

I am tempted to say Steiner makes name-dropping into an art form. But that would be wrong. Art it is not.

It is hard to understand how someone who has read so widely through so many canons of world literature can manage to write so badly. First an almost trivial example:

…music entails differentiations between that which can be understood, this is to say, paraphrased, and that which can be thought and lived… [My emphases]

Christopher Marlowe - or someone very similar

What on earth is wrong with the simple four-letter word ‘what’? Surely ‘differentiations between what can be understood… and what can be thought and lived…’ is just that little bit more vernacular, and therefore just that little bit clearer? Plus of course, by replacing ‘that which’ with ‘what’ would have freed him to exchange ‘this is to say’ for that tiny bit more familiar ‘that is to say’:

…music entails differentiations between what can be understood, that is to say, paraphrased, and what can be thought and lived…

Far be it from me to subedit the work of a Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, but I wish somebody had.

It is beyond irony that a book cited by John Cornwell (see Whispers of the gods #3 and Touched by an angel #7) as evidence in favour of the ‘argument from beauty’ should be a work of such ugliness. Some examples:

…Not even the most rudimentary of structures of literacy and of musical reception is, one imagines, free from critical or didactic interposition…

…Periods, climates of culture, in which the exegetic and the critical dominate, are called ‘Alexandrine’ or ‘Byzantine’. These epithets refer to the prevalence of grammatological, editorial, didactic, glossarial, and judiciary techniques and ideals over any actual poetic-aesthetic creativity in Hellenistic Alexandria and in the Byzantium of the later Empire and Middle Ages…

…Manifold accommodations between aesthetic consumption and political-social power, between leisure and industrialization, are relevant…

…The transmutation of poetics into texts, that is to say, the lexical, grammatical, compositional analysis of a piece of literature, and the uses of such analysis towards rhetorical, civic and moral instruction, is as old as are the commentaries on Homer in ancient Greece…

Lafond: Sappho sings for Homer

And – sorry – I couldn’t resist this one:

The axioms of the transcendent in the arts of understanding and of judgement – axioms which this essay seeks to clarify – are invested in the overnight. [My emphasis]

Real presences is, needless to say, a painful read. It feels like being painted into Pseuds Corner. (Apologies to those unfamiliar with the UK magazine Private Eye.)

It is self-reflexive in the worst possible ways. For one thing it is its own entrance barrier to itself. It could have been at least 100 times clearer. Maybe its opacity was a deliberate marketing strategy – targeting just that elite minority clever enough and well-read enough to understand it?

But a curious thread of self-loathing also seems to run through it. I am not trying to claim that George Steiner hates himself. It is at level of the voice, and of the text itself.

I’ll try to explain what I mean next time.

References

¹ George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

² George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Fashion cycle

According to popular legend the sudden decline in hat wearing by men started in 1960 as a result of John Kennedy.

John F Kennedy in 1959

Some say he went to his inauguration in 1960 without a hat. Others say he took it with him, but he didn’t wear it during the actual ceremony. Apparently neither he nor his brother Bobby liked wearing hats.

I certainly cannot recall ever seeing a picture of John Kennedy wearing a hat. And I was very aware of the watershed between the hatted Fifties and the hatless Sixties. But I had never put two and two together. In fact it was only when watching An Era of Style, one of the ‘featurettes’ included with the matchless Mad Men Series 2 DVD set, that I learned this most profound sociological fact.

I found myself remembering this today.

I found myself wondering what it was that had happened – maybe some time in the Seventies or the Eighties – to make cycling on the pavement in Britain shift from virtually if not literally illegal to the most done of done things?

Urban cyclist

When I was a child in the Fifties (when men wore hats) and Sixties (when they did not), riding a bike on the pavement was strictly verboten, something the omnipresent police took a seriously dim view of – like underage smoking. Maybe it’s because I’ve been out of the country for most of last 14 years, during which time there’s been a significant cycling revolution? – I mean people these days actually use bikes to get from A to B, as they did in the old days. They’re not just a foil to Lycra fashion. But at least 50% of the distance from A to B is travelled on the pavement.

So, what was the Kennedy moment? What caused the pavement-cycling watershed? Was it a ground-breaking Act of Parliament? Or do today’s invisible police just turn a collective blind eye?

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Whispers of the gods #3

My previous post was on Language and silence¹ by George Steiner. I now turn to one of Steiner’s later books, Real Presences².

Third in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence and Real presences

See also Whispers of the gods #1 & #2. 

John Cornwell: Darwins angel

Real presences was mentioned by John Cornwell in his book Darwin’s angel³, itself an ‘angelic riposte’ to The God Delusion⁴ by Richard Dawkins.

On this blog the series from Touched by an angel #1 onwards is a response to Darwin’s angel.

Dawkins does not think much of what he calls the ‘argument from beauty’ (but which in the context of both his treatment and Cornwell’s riposte might perhaps be better termed the ‘argument from artistic creation’):

I have given up counting the number of times I receive the more or less truculent challenge: ‘How do you account for [eg] Shakespeare, then?’ …But the logic behind it is never spelled out…

…If there is a logical argument linking the existence of great art to the existence of God, it is not spelled out by its proponents…⁵

Cornwell counters with:

You don’t seem to have looked very far. You might not agree with it, but here is one example among many of just such an argument – spelled out at length by George Steiner in… Real Presences.⁶

In Real Presences Steiner

proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence… [and] …that the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of musical form, infers the necessary possibility of this ‘real presence’. The seeming paradox of a ‘necessary possibility’ is, very precisely, that which the poem, the painting, the musical composition are at liberty to explore and enact.⁷

Dawkins’ challenge is very simple. If the argument from beauty (or artistic creation) is to be taken seriously as an argument to support a belief in the existence of God, it must be effectively: (i) beauty (or art) exists, therefore God exists. Anything less will not cut the mustard.

As I mentioned in Touched by an angel #7 Cornwell is good enough to admit that

“Assumption” and “necessary possibility” of God’s presence is not the same as “requiring that God actually exists”. Steiner… is arguing… that there is a connection, by analogy, between authentic original artistic creativity and the idea of the sustaining creation of God in the world. Steiner… is not offering a “proof” for the existence of God. He is talking of the sense of the createdness of the world on the horizon of an artist’s consciousness, and indeed of those who appreciate art… He is… [also claiming] …that a loss of this sense of a wager on God’s presence would likely spell the degeneration and disappearance of art in our lives.⁸ [My emphases.]

This seems very much a retreat from (i) beauty (or art) exists, therefore God exists. It is more a statement about the relationship between artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation (on the one hand) and belief in God (on the other) – in simple language: (ii) people who create art and/or appreciate art tend to believe that God exists.

Now this proposition, even if it is generally true – which seems doubtful – would be neither here nor there in relation to the ‘argument from beauty’ which Dawkins is challenging.

But because George Steiner is such an authoritative figure, I thought I would see for myself – and perhaps discover that my two simple language formulations (i) and (ii) were so simplistic they missed Steiner’s profundity by miles.

References

¹ George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

² George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

³ John Cornwell, Darwin’s angel: an angelic riposte to The God Delusion, Profile Books, London, 2007.

⁴ Richard Dawkins, The God delusion, Bantam, 2006.

⁵ Richard Dawkins, 2006: see ⁴ above.

⁶ John Cornwell, 2007: see ³ above.

⁷ George Steiner, 1989: see ² above.

⁸ John Cornwell, 2007: see ² above.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Whispers of the gods #2

The quote I ended with last time, with its ‘proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world’ and ‘certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours’ comes from Silence and the poet, the third essay in Language and silence¹ by George Steiner.

Second in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence and Real presences².

See also Whispers of the gods #1.

According to contemporarywriters.com, George Steiner has been a Lecturer at Princeton; Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva; and held visiting professorships at Yale, New York University, the University of Geneva and Oxford University. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of Balliol College Oxford, and has been awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French Government and the King Albert Medal by the Royal Belgian Academy. He has received the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

He is Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.

He is by all accounts a clever dude, which is no doubt why what he says commands great authority.

But I have to say I find him difficult to follow – and I don’t think it’s just me being dense. 

Pieter Brueghel the Elder: The Tower of Babel

Silence and the poet starts with images from ancient mythology (Babel, Orpheus torn to pieces, Marsyas flayed) depicting the ‘miraculous outrage of human speech’. We then get the old saw about language being what divides man from other organisms – or at least a few highlights from its pedigree: Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, Ibsen. The approach steers us clear of the open sea of ethology so we end up beached on tribal ethics. Language

is both miracle and outrage, sacrament and blasphemy.

…If speaking man has made of the animal his mute servant or enemy – the beasts of the field and forest no longer understand our words when we cry for help – man’s control of the word has also hammered at the door of the gods…

One would like to ask when exactly did the inhabitants of those alliterative regions know what we were saying and leap, trot, slither or prowl to our aid? But maybe this is not SteinerThink at all – his technique is advanced, exponential name-dropping, so it is hard to know. We have Freud and Lévi-Strauss, Nimrod (he of the Tower of Babel), Tantalus, the Neoplatonists and John of Gospel 4:

…speech is the core of man’s mutinous relations to the gods.

…in the beginning was the Word; but if this Logos, this act and essence of God is, in the last analysis, total communication, the word that creates its own content and truth of being – then what of zoon phonanta, man the speaking animal? Can there be a co-existence other than charged with mutual torment and rebellion between the totality of the Logos and the living, world-creating fragments of our own speech? Does the act of speech, which defines man, not also go beyond him in rivalry to God?

If so the poet is the worst offender:

The poet makes in dangerous similitude to the gods. His song is builder of cities; his words have that power which, above all others, the gods would deny to man, the power to bestow enduring life…

We need to bring this down to earth for a moment: the argument seems to be going in reverse.

We have a variety of living organisms, extant and extinct, sometimes with huge differences between them (oak tree/mouse), and sometimes with relatively small differences (house sparrow/tree sparrow). On that multi-dimensional continuum the differences between man (Homo sapiens) and the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) are relatively small – smaller than those between either of them and, say, the mosquito.

Waggle dance of the honey bee

Nevertheless, the possession of language by humans is something special. Other animals have languages – humpback whales, vervet monkeys, honey bees – but human language is unique in many ways. This cannot be denied – even though no doubt arguments could be made for the uniqueness of whale song, vervet monkey distress calls, and the waggle dance of a honey bee. We can, though, accept for the sake of argument that there is something uniquely unique about human language.

But it is a great leap from here to the ‘classic doctrine’ that

speech… define[s] man’s singular eminence above the silence of the plant and the grunt of the beast…

The proposition is both anthropocentric and circular. We are humans, and we are the ones who possess the uniqueness of our particular language function. Had we been whales we would no doubt be struck by our enormity and the bizarre shuffle of our out-of-the-water, back-to-the-water evolutionary history. Those would advertise our distinctness from the rest of creation. Had we been slime moulds we would be telling the world about our superhero power to leap from cluster of individual single-cell beings to single multi-cellular being and back again.

The point is this. Human language may be special to us, but the only thing special about our specialities as opposed to those of any other organism is that they are ours.

There is more. We have created gods, and because they are our gods we have made them in many ways like ourselves – and in some ways unlike ourselves. As we do language, so our gods do language in spades. Their language skills are magical: their language ‘creates its own content and truth of being’.

Hieronymus Bosch: detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights

But wait – man too ‘creates words and creates with words’ – as if we are trying to be gods ourselves. We cannot of course achieve divine ‘totality’ but the ‘fragments’ of our own language are also ‘world-creating’, so we are ‘mutinous’ and guilty of ‘rivalry’. The act of the ‘god-rivalling’ poet is ‘potentially sacrilegious’:

[T]he motif of the necessary limitations of the human word… carries with it a crucial intimation of that which lies outside language, of what it is that awaits the poet if we were to transgress the bounds of human discourse. Being, in the nature of his craft, a reacher, the poet must guard against becoming, in the Faustian term, an overreacher. The daemonic creativity of his instrument probes the outworks of the City of God; he must know when to draw back lest he be consumed, Icarus-like, by the terrible nearness of a greater making, of a Logos incommensurable with his own (in the garden of fallen pleasures, Hieronymus Bosch’s poet is racked on his own harp).

All very picturesque, but do we need to know when to draw back lest we be strangled by the shadows our own hands are making on the wall?

Yes of course says George. Because for some reason we have forgotten that the shadows are of our own hands we do draw back; and because we draw back, this proves the shadow hands really have the power to strangle us:

[I]t is decisively the fact that language does have its frontiers… that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world.

If anyone has overreached it is Steiner himself. He has conflated two different things. Yes there are limits to what language can express. But the In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God of John’s Gospel is something else, based on an arbitrary projection and extension of human faculties onto a projected entity. Having conflated the two, he cannot then deduce a ‘transcendent presence’ or ‘divine meaning’ from those limits. That’s just playing with words – whether it is the English his essay is in or the lengthy passages of French, Latin, Italian and German he leaves untranslated. Interestingly a Polish poem by Zbigniew Herbert is presented in English. Perhaps Steiner’s own Polish was not quite up to scratch?

Real presences next time.

References

¹ George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

² George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Whispers of the gods #1

Two recent posts (Touched by an angel #7 and Karen’s on the case #1) have mentioned George Steiner because the books I was discussing referred to him. But I had no real background, so I read Real Presences¹ first and then Language and silence².

Those familiar with Steiner’s work will know he wrote them the other way round. Which is the order I will deal with them here.

Karen Armstrong: The case for God

The Karen’s on the case series responds to Karen Armstrong’s The case for God³.

Those who do not have the book can find a sizeable extract from the Introduction (including the Steiner quotes in context) here.

I think my main gripe with The case for God is not the factual content – I bow to Armstrong’s superior scholarship – but pair of linked assumptions she seems to think need no argument. One is (i) that if you do manage to avoid all the deist and/or fundamentalist traps she identifies, and your approach to religion is as über-‘skillful’ as the gospel according to St Karen requires, then you really will get to a real something – another mode of seeing which is beyond everyday perceptions, to a transcendent dimension of life … identical with the deepest level of [your] being. The other assumption is (ii) that this transcendence is necessarily a good thing.

Let me clarify what I am saying and what I am not saying. I do not doubt that religious and spiritual practices have effects. That is an empirical issue. My qualm is with the assumption that these effects have anything to do with the divine, with something transcendent, with the deepest level of one’s being.

There is then another pair of assertions related to how describable or indescribable those effects are:

People… discovered a transcendent dimension of life that was … identical with the deepest level of their being. This reality, which they have called God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana, has been a fact of human life. But it was impossible to explain what it was in terms of logos. This imprecision was not frustrating, as a modern Western person might imagine, but brought with it an ekstasis that lifted practitioners beyond the constricting confines of self.

… One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence.

… Language has borders that we cannot cross. When we listen critically to our stuttering attempts to express ourselves, we become aware of an inexpressible otherness.⁴

There are two distinct assertions here. One is (iii) that the transcendent dimension resulting from religious practice is indescribable. The other is (iv) that the very struggle against the borders of language is itself a path to, or window on, that transcendent dimension.

I am not claiming (iii) and (iv) are unargued assumptions like (i) and (ii). The problems come when they are combined. So for example in the absence of (i), assertion (iii) reverts to something like: ‘the psychological and/or phenomenological effects of religious practice are indescribable’. This may or may not be true – possibly true for some people but not for others. Not something to get worked up about either way.

George Steiner

It gets significant when those effects are seen in terms of transcendence and deepest levels of being – because this can lead to the thought that the transcendence and depth are responsible for the ineffability. This can then lead to the thought that ineffability is a sign that you are in the region of the transcendent and the divine – effectively assertion (iv).

It is in this domain of ‘inexpressible otherness’ that Armstrong enlists the authority of George Steiner:

[I]t is decisively the fact that language does have its frontiers, that it borders on three other modes of statement – light, music, and silence - that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so precisely fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man’s world is eloquent of God. [My emphases]⁵

These are big assertions. But are they sound? A question for next time.

References

¹ George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

² George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

³ Karen Armstrong, The case for God: What religion really means, The Bodley Head, London, 2009.

⁴ Karen Armstrong, 2009: see ³ above.

⁵ George Steiner, 1967: see ² above.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Round midnight #1

I remember someone saying that Don’t cry for me Argentina lodges in the brain like a cerebral virus. Unfortunately I can’t remember who said it. I’ve Googled to no avail. Whoever it was wasn’t being very complimentary to Andrew Lloyd Webber by the way.

Thelonious Monk in 1967

My own viral demon is Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk. But it can lodge there for eternity as far as I’m concerned. At times I think it could be the best tune ever written. Other times I am not so sure, but only because of remembering I might have forgotten what the other candidates are.

I used to play the guitar very badly. (Now I don’t play at all.) But I remember feeling an immense power of profundity just fingering the cycle of chords which make up Round Midnight.

I am no jazz expert. I like what I like and there is plenty I do not like. But the jazz I like the most is for me as great as any musical genre. My Holy Trinity are probably Monk himself, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. No surprises there. But what I find fascinating is that all three have produced stuff I can hardly listen to. They have all produced music I doubt I will ever enjoying listening to. But I can’t imagine saying that about Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms.

Round Midnight can be played and sung like a standard from the Great American Songbook. That is not to disparage it in any way. But when it is given the staccato Monk treatment it becomes almost an essay in brinkmanship – seemingly desperate to explain how that cusp operates between angular beauty and noise. Always from the side of angular beauty though:

Like all great things, it can be abused and ruined. I am a great fan of Amy Winehouse. Whatever it was that got hold of her at the time of Back to Black, it made her a great artist for a while. But Amy’s take on Round Midnight is a sad travesty – it’s as if its heart and soul meant nothing to her:

As an antidote, here is Ella Fitzgerald:

Here is the Miles Davis Quintet – with John Coltrane of course:

And Thelonious Monk again, this time with his quartet. I find the tenor sax rather pedestrian (wash my mouth out with soap and water), but it makes Monk’s solo towards the end worth waiting for all the more:

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Lift to the scaffold #3

Just watched Ascenseur pour l’échafaud again. I liked it even more than the last time.

Poster: Elevator to the Gallows

It is probably all but impossible with today’s technology to recapture that particular monochromatic quality. Like trying to revive vinyl sound on a CD. It’s not just a matter of draining the image of colour. It is also as if the black and white double up as words on a page – making statements at the same time as observing and recording.

The statements are not exactly bizarre in content, but the choices as to what is said and what is not said have a surreal kind of logic. The choices are perhaps best highlighted when compared to other – far inferior – ways the story could have been told.

The theme is a familiar one. Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) and her lover, ex-paratrooper Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), plot to kill Florence’s husband Simon Carala (Jean Wall), who is also Julien Tavernier’s employer.

But there is not a single shot of Julien and Florence together, apart from in a few (highly significant) photographs in the closing frames. The only communication between them is a phone call over the opening credits.

The killers therefore enjoy no sexual contact. As if to compensate there is some inventive deployment of office equipment. As soon as Julien puts the phone down he picks up a card-index drawer which happens to be on his desk and slides it back where it belongs. He goes out, stops the receptionist/switchboard operator who is just about to leave, and asks her if she would mind staying behind. She is delighted to, and immediately plunges a pencil into an automatic pencil sharpener. Of course: why not?

There is then the build up to the central icon which the film as a whole hangs on. Julien climbs out of his window onto a ledge and throws a grappling hook up to the floor above. He pulls himself up and climbs through a window to get to near Simon Carala’s office suite. He presses Carala’s buzzer and is invited in. He hands over plans for a pipeline in Algeria, and then shoots Carala with Carala’s own gun. He puts the gun into Carala’s hand to make it look like a suicide. He then locks all the doors and lets himself out, managing to lock the last door from the inside by the cunning use of a flick-knife. He returns to his own floor by rope and hurries in through the window because his telephone is ringing. It is the receptionist, and he manages to get to it just before she puts the phone down. He answers, and soon after he and the receptionist leave and go their separate ways.

Ascenseur pour l’échafaud: Jeanne Moreau

When he gets to his car on the other side of the road he looks up and sees the rope dangling from the grappling hook. Curses! He forgot it in his haste to answer the phone. So, leaving the engine running,  he dashes back to the office building and goes up in the lift. But now the security guard (who had earlier joked with the receptionist asking her what would happen if he put his finger in her pencil sharpener…) is doing his final rounds, and he switches the power off and unwittingly traps Julien in the lift. Despite all the paratrooper ingenuity and prowess Julien can throw at his predicament, he has to stay there all night, and so for much of the rest of the film. I was going to call it an image of coitius interruptus but, thinking about it, it is more the exact opposite – coitus uninterruptus?

While he is stuck there a thuggish young dreamer – the boyfriend of the girl who sold Julien the flowers he bought for Florence – steals his car and his identity, chases a random German couple up the motorway and then kills them in a motel with Julien’s gun. Meanwhile Florence – who happened to see the young flower seller in the passenger seat of Julien’s car as it sped by – wanders the wet streets of Paris in search of reasons why Julien would have deserted her on the night their new life of bliss was to start, oblivious to the haunting beauty of Miles Davis on the soundtrack.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

 

Ascenseur pour l’échafaud: Maurice Ronet

Karen’s on the case #5

From pre-modern to post-modern, the God question always comes down to ethics.

Fifth in a series responding to Karen Armstrong’s The case for God: What religion really means ¹

See also Karen’s on the case #1; #2; #3; and #4

William Clifford

In her historical survey of Atheism (Chapter 10) Karen Armstrong mentions William Clifford’s The Ethics of Belief², where he

argued that it was not only intellectually but morally unacceptable to accept any opinion – religious, scientific or moral – without sufficient evidence.

She then summarises his example of the negligent ship owner: for more on this see Clifford’s razor.

She goes on:

Clifford’s book struck an instant chord. By the late 1860s, widespread veneration for science as the only path to truth had made the idea of ‘belief’ without verification offensive, not only intellectually but morally. For the American sociologist Lester Ward, … [o]nce you had accepted the idea that some matter lay beyond human comprehension, you would swallow anything…

I have a lot of time for Clifford’s dictum, which I have discussed on this blog in some depth in The ethics of belief.

Armstrong’s reference to the 19th century veneration for science as the only path to truth is a bit circular. Because the science that was and is venerated is not science as some nerdish activity done in white coats, but science as ‘the way of justified belief’. Which does not imply that everything every scientist believes is 100% properly justified, but that the scientific method – for it to be the scientific method – is all about justification.

Lester Frank Ward

Then her take on Lester Ward’s dismissal of ‘superstition’ is almost an inverse caption to her entire book. Her portrayal of religion as mythos is in many ways a defence of the ‘skill’ or ‘knack’ of accepting what lies beyond human comprehension.

What I’m groping towards is something which I think energises both sides of the atheist/believer debate: the atheist thinks there is something unethical about belief (and/or faith), while the believer thinks there is something so ethically special about belief (and/or faith) that to turn away from it deliberately is in itself somehow unethical.

And when the debate gets to this ethical level the mythos/logos distinction, though interesting and informative, does not magically dissolve it.

I lost count of the times I read ‘transcend’, ‘transcending’, ‘transcendent’, ‘transcendence’, ‘transcendental’. Hardly surprising of course in a book called The case for God. But then I realised what was staring me in the face: she seemed to be assuming that ‘transcendence’ was always – and almost by definition – a good thing. This is indeed such a familiar assumption that it seems almost bizarre to question it. But I do want to question it, because I am not convinced it is sound.

Some examples – the emphasis in bold is all my own:

People who acquired this knack [of Daoist self-forgetfulness] discovered a transcendent dimension of life that was not simply an external reality ‘out there’ but was identical with the deepest level of their being.

…

The Indian Aryans, always in the vanguard of religious change, pioneered this trend [to a more interior spirituality], achieving the ground-breaking discovery that the Brahman, being itself, was also the ground of the human psyche. The transcendent was neither external nor alien to humanity but the two were inextricably connected. This insight would become central to the religious quest in all the major traditions.

…

[T]he rationalism of classical Greece would not consist of abstract speculation for its own sake. It was rather rooted in a search for transcendence and a dedicated practical life style… [Armstrong then discusses the Eleusinian Mysteries in depth, ending with their effect on the more successful participants:] …Their ekstasis was a kenosis, a self-forgetfulness that enabled them to ‘assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become one with the gods, and experience divine possession’³.

… 

Bust of Paul Johannes Tillich

For centuries, symbols such as ‘God’ or ‘providence’ enabled people to look through the ebb and flow of temporal life to glimpse Being itself. This helped them to endure the terror of life and the horror of death, but now, [Paul] Tillich argued, many had forgotten how to interpret the old symbolism and regarded it as purely factual. Hence these symbols had become opaque; transcendence no longer shone through them. When this happened they died and lost their power…

…

In all cultures [says Bernard Lonergan (1904-84, a Canadian Jesuit], humans have been seized by the same imperatives – to be intelligent, responsible, reasonable and loving, and, if necessary, to change. All this pulls us into the realm of the transcendental, the Real and Unconditioned, which in the Christian world is called ‘God’.

…

As Tillich pointed out, men and women continually feel drawn to explore levels of truth that go beyond our normal experience. This imperative has inspired the scientific as well as the religious quest. We see what Tillich called an ‘ultimate concern’ that shapes our life and gives it meaning. The ultimate concern of Dawkins and Harris appears to be reason: this has seized and taken possession of them. But their idea of reason is very different from the rationality of Socrates, who used his reasoning powers to bring his dialogue partners into a state of unknowing. For Augustine and Aquinas, reason became intellectus, opening naturally into the divine. Today, for many people, reason no longer subverts itself in this way. But the danger of this secularisation of reason, which denies the possibility of transcendence, is that reason can become an idol that seeks to destroy all rival claimants…

The language is unambiguous. It supports the religious quest for a ‘transcendent dimension of life’ because the transcendent is inextricably linked to our humanity – in fact it is the ‘deepest level of [our] being’. Transcendence is radiant. Without it something important dies. The transcendent is linked to everything that is good (‘intelligent, responsible, reasonable and loving’). To deny it is to be ‘seized and …possess[ed]’ not by just any kind of reason, but a very closed, stunted, ungenerous, dangerous, false and destructive brand of reason.

The next few quotes show an additional spin (again with added emphasis):

[Y]oga also had an ethical dimension. A beginner was not allowed to perform a single yogic exercise until he had completed an intensive moral programme. Top of the list… was ahimsa, ‘harmlessness’. A yogin must not swat a mosquito, make an irritable gesture or speak unkindly to others but should maintain constant affability to all, even the most annoying monk in the community. Until his guru was satisfied that this had become second nature, a yogin could not even sit in the yogic position. A great deal of the aggression, frustration, hostility and rage that mars our peace of mind is the result of thwarted egotism, but when the aspiring yogin became proficient in this selfless equanimity, the texts tell us that he would experience ‘indescribable joy’.

… 

The Sermon on the Mount included Jesus's version of the Golden Rule

[T]he habitual practice of compassion and the Golden Rule… demands perpetual kenosis. The constant ‘stepping outside’ of our own preferences, convictions and prejudices is an ekstasis that is not a glamorous rapture, but… is itself the transcendence we seek. … [S]omething indefinable happens to people who involve themselves in these disciplines with commitment and talent … [which] remains opaque, however, to those who do not undergo these disciplines, just as the Eleusinian ‘mystery’ sounded trivial and absurd to somebody who remained obstinately outside the Cult Hall and refused to undergo the initiation.

…

Religious people… aspired to live generously, large-heartedly and justly and to inhabit every single part of their humanity. … They tried to honour the ineffable mystery they sensed in each human being and create societies that honoured the stranger, the alien, the poor and the oppressed. … [O]verall they found that the disciplines of religion helped them do all this. Those who applied themselves most assiduously showed that it was possible for mortal men and women to live on a higher, divine or godlike plane and thus wake up to their true selves.

I do not want to imply that Armstrong sees nothing intrinsically good in behaving generously, compassionately and without aggression. But the passages above give the distinct impression that disciplined and dedicated selflessness is a path to transcendence.

We therefore have a two-way relationship, a virtuous circle: good behaviour leads to transcendence, and transcendence is good in itself. It takes hard work and self-denial, but as a package it is almost too good to be true.

My qualm is this, and it could be the qualm of other atheists: why do we have to seek transcendence? Aren’t goodness and generosity and selflessness enough? The concern is not a puritanical or Kantian insistence that good is only good if it is done out of duty and without expectation of reward. The concern is with the potential price of transcendence, of seeking or attaining a ‘higher, divine or godlike plane’.

We are all imperfect, all to some extent damaged goods. I am very happy that there are selfless people in the world. I am very happy that there are tried and tested techniques of selflessness, structures of support for people who want to become more selfless. I am less happy to hear people telling me that their favoured discipline or practice has put them in touch with the ‘deepest level of their being’ or allowed them to achieve ‘divine possession’. I would worry about the effect of a belief like that on a psyche which was less than perfect. It is not as if we are without experience of the havoc such beliefs can generate.

Armstrong may be right that

[f]rom almost the very beginning, men and women have repeatedly engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity. They evolved mythologies, rituals and ethical disciplines that brought them intimations of holiness that seemed in some indescribable way to enhance and fulfil their humanity.

But her history of mythos and logos looks back to a time when the mythos of religious faith was an unavoidable reality of people’s lives, a time when there was no competing logos of verifiable and falsifiable theory. She is no doubt right that pre-modern concepts of God were utterly unlike the metaphysical existence claims of Descartes and Newton.

But we do not live in pre-modern times. Yes we can chip off the barnacles of 17th century Rationalism and Enlightenment Deism, but (phew!) we will not get that pre-modern God back. We might get a thoroughly post-modern God, purged of all existence claims, quivering with différance and unknowing. Nothing Armstrong says convinces me that such a God would make the world a better place.

Or, as I said at the beginning: Yes OK, but you know it cuts both ways?

References

¹ Karen Armstrong, The case for God: What religion really means, The Bodley Head, London, 2009.

² William Clifford, The ethics of belief, 1877.

³ Walter Burkert, Ancient mystery cults, Cambridge Mass. and London, 1986.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Lift to the scaffold #2

A wet Jeanne Moreau in Ascenseur pour l'échafaud

OK, after my initial rambling I managed to track down a DVD copy of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, in Volume 1 of the Louis Malle Collection. This also includes Le feu follet, Les amants and Zazie dans le Métro. I watched Ascenseur pour l’échafaud tonight.

First thing that surprised me was how little Miles Davis there was. There was a huge amount of silence. Maybe it was my imagination but there seemed to be far more silence than Miles. No continuous wall of background music, just bits of Miles with miles in between.

Second thing – which didn’t really surprise me once I’d given it a moment’s thought – was how silly the story is. I don’t mean stupid. I mean as far as overt genre is concerned it should probably be described as a kind of ‘thriller’. But the logistics are those of a deadpan comedy of errors. The result is beautifully edgy and unsentimental.

No doubt it has a few technical flaws. But I’m a sucker for the style, the country and the period. I shall watch it again.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.