The Mazeppist

Bob Dylan in Denver

2009-10-22T13:46:00.001-05:00

I grew up in the 1960's listening to Bob Dylan's music, but I first saw him perform live in the old Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh Pa. It must have been '79 or '80--'81 at the latest. It was the "Slow Train" tour and Dylan was on fire for the Lord (or a Lord), inspired, defiant, and brilliant. I've seen him repeatedly since then, in various parts of North America, and through thick and thin. During the 1980's, there was a lot of thin. But towards the end of that decade, there were faint glimmers of light--a song here, an album there. And in the early '90's, Dylan decided he had either to quit or go down swinging. Thankfully, he chose the latter and, ever since, he has been honing his sound and (with the stable anchorage of bassist Tony Garnier) perfecting his live performance. Last night's set in Denver was ferocious with songs like “Cold Irons Bound” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” among the big guns booming. The amazing guitar work of Austin's Charlie Sexton (recently returned to the line-up) was an added treat. If you haven't seen Dylan live in the last decade or so, or if you’ve never seen him live, you must go see him now. He is a force of nature. Go and hear the old lion roar.

From the back cover of Isaac Gewirtz's I Am With You: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: 1855-2005

2009-09-23T17:15:00.003-05:00

"...the golden thread of Whitman’s intention: that a new American man and woman might join him on a 'perpetual journey' of self-realization, discovering along the way that 'All truths wait in all things.'"

This "golden thread" is the deep charter of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic--not what Mr. Springsteen has termed the "Badlands" (i.e., the country we live in), but what he has termed the "Promised land" (i.e., the "America we hold in our hearts"). The country we must continually struggle to "achieve," as Richard Rorty so sagely expressed it (alluding to James Baldwin).

The perpetual journey of self-realization is the soul-craft that will continually re-invent the American experiment. The two journeys are, as a practical matter, intimately inter-related. And as we continue to limp along with an out-dated 18th century Federal Constitution and a self-defeating two-party system that is securely in the hands of the Plutocratic War Party, determined (as it is) to "naturalize" the permanent war economy, we must heed N. O. Brown's call to abandon politics (as usual) in favor of "metapolitics"--the Whitmanian road to soul-craft, and soul-craft to nationhood.

With each passing year I become more and more convinced that Leaves of Grass is the reason for America (USA). I am teaching myself how to live Whitman. How to cultivate a large sense of life. How to reach out to others--to be expansive as it were. To achieve "love's body" hoping for the day when that body becomes the body-politic.

And whoever has been blind in this life, will be blind in the next (Q 17:72). Whoever is incapable of finding their way clear of the culture of fear induced by the governmental and corporate purveyors of "soft" terror shall wander endlessly in the wilderness and be barred from entering the longed-for Canaan-land.

Why Lawrence?

2009-09-22T18:22:00.002-05:00

Because D. H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, wrote what may be the single most insightful essay on Walt Whitman yet composed. Next to Lawrence, I place Roger Asselineau's 2 volume study, The Evolution of Walt Whitman, and next to Asselineau, Henry Miller's brief essay "Walt Whitman," collected in Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.

Mirabile dictu, it took an Englishman to appreciate Whitman's great struggle to read Emerson aright and, in the process, to re-invent the American experiment as "soul-craft"--where "soul" is none other than the body "accomplishing herself" as what Norman O. Brown would later term "love's body."

Of Whitman, Miller would write: "He is worldly through and through, yet serene, detached, the enemy of no man, the friend of all. He possesses a magic armor against wanton intrusion, against violation of his being. In many ways he reminds one of the 'resurrected' Christ" (Miller, 108).

And so he does. He is Lawrence's "escaped cock," the "man who died," and "the Risen Lord." And he is pre-figured in the Qur'an as ibn as-sabilah, the "son of the road," the "wayfarer," the "passer-by," and in all Gnostic speculation that claims the resurrection has already occurred for those who have eyes to see.

The African-American Muslim intellectual Sherman A. Jackson offered a very interesting twist on these themes in his book Islam and the Blackamerican (see his notion of "immanent spirituality" in that book).

By collecting these broken threads, one can begin to imagine a way forward for an original American religiosity that looks beyond the present impasse of sect and creed. But we are a long way from that.

The Invisible Whitmanian Republic Recognizes 9/11 as an International Holiday

2009-09-21T14:21:00.001-05:00

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 at what is now 8a Victoria Street, Eastwood, near Nottingham, the fourth of the five children of Arthur John Lawrence (1846-1924) and his wife Lydia (1851-1910).

Architects of Native Radicalism

2009-09-07T13:59:00.009-05:00

In addition to its "founding fathers," the Invisible Whitmanian Republic stands on the shoulders of intellectual giants whose writings inform the critical tradition that Professor Rick Tilman has termed "native radicalism" (see Tilman's 1984 intellectual biography of Wright Mills published by Penn State University Press: C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and his American Intellectual Roots). The IWR looks to a broader (and more eclectic) group of thinkers than Tilman includes in his "school," but the Whitmanian republic is not a sect: it is an intellectually promiscuous and robust attempt to revitalize the tradition of native dissent under the present American regime of a perpetual war economy and the world empire it seeks to establish.

Pictured from top left: Thorstein Veblen, Economist; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Historian; G. H. Mead, Philosophical psychologist; Emma Goldman, Essayist and activist; Richard Rorty, Public intellectual; John Dewey, Educator and public intellectual; C. Wright Mills, Sociologist and theoretician.

Founding Fathers of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic

2009-09-04T14:58:00.010-05:00

From top to bottom: Walt Whitman, Bard; Martin Van Buren, Jacksonian democrat; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wise man; Norman O. Brown, Psychologist; Seymour Melman, Economist; George S. McGovern, Jacksonian democrat; Thomas Jefferson, Enlightened aristocrat; Andrew Jackson, Flawed giant; Noam Chomsky, Linguist.

Norman Oliver Brown

2009-08-10T14:15:00.004-05:00

"I am Defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born" --Ralph Waldo Emerson

I spent a couple of weeks in June 2009 reading the unpublished archived notes and typescripts pertaining to all things Islamic of the late, great Norman O. Brown.

In my view, Brown belongs to the intellectual tradition that Professor Timothy Marr has termed "American Cultural Islamicism" (ACI). For Marr, ACI "is ultimately a complex configuration of cultural ideologies that reveals more about the constitution of American imaginations than it does the character of Muslim beliefs" (Marr, 7).

Marr discerns three trends of thought (he calls them "valences") operating within the ambit of ACI: domestic, comparative, and romantic (ibid, 10) and finds all three deeply problematic. I tend to agree with Marr on this score (and here I should disclose that I was a colleague of Marr's at the University of North Carolina, that I admire his work, and that I consider him a friend); that said, I would also say that I have read my Kant and Schleiermacher and, consequently, affirm that every attempt at interpretation, of coming to terms with the "Other," necessarily proceeds by way of misunderstanding. Of the three misunderstandings of Islam on offer under the rubric of ACI, the romantic is the least troubling to my conscience--so long as by "romantic" one understands the Islamicism of Ralph Waldo Emerson's love affair with Sufi poetry and not the variety of romanticism that exoticises Islam and caricatures Muslims as the passive objects of over-heated Orientalist sexual fantasies. See Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Brown, in my view, belongs to the Emersonian "school" of ACI. In his engagement with Islamic materials, he found much food for thought, much inspiration, much to love. Indeed, he found in Ismaili political thought and life a counterpart to the project he initiated with his book Life Against Death and continued in Love's Body. Centuries before Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche diagnosed the worminess in the apple of Western civilization, Muslims experimented with a pre-modern version of what Brown would admiringly describe as "a subterranean counter-culture of protean polymorphous complexity"--an apt description of what I have advocated in these pages as the "invisible Whitmanian republic" (Brown, "Shi'ite Islam"--a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the AAR in Dallas, TX, December 21, 1983).

In Brown's notes and in the recently published volume Norman O. Brown, The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition, ed. Jerome Neu (Santa Cruz, CA: North Pacific Press, 2009), one witnesses NOB thrill to the discovery that--despite his friend Herbert Marcuse's trenchant critique--the cultural revolution he had called for in the 1960's had not only historical precedents but had experienced some (short-lived) historical successes.

The conclusion Brown drew from his studies of Islam is that more study was needed--of Islam as, in Marr's words, a "horizon for expanding the global repertoire of domestic expression" (Marr, 14). In other words, 20th (now 21st) century Americans should stop demonizing Islam and Muslims and, instead, sit at the feet of the history of Islamic thought and culture and learn how we might best re-invent our own.

Once Again: Why "Mazeppa"?

2009-05-18T12:44:00.006-05:00

In his "Talk on Mythology," Friedrich Schlegel issued a call to modern poets to "earnestly work together" to create a new mythology that could serve as an inexhaustible fund of ideas for modern poetry; in this way, moderns would not be disadvantaged vis a vis their ancient counterparts who were blessed with an inherited corpus of myth and legend upon which to draw.

Lord Byron's epic treatment of the Mazeppa legend in his eponymous poem may be regarded as an ambitious attempt to answer Schlegel's call. Nietzsche's Zarathustra may be regarded as another. The work of Freud and his students, another; Sir James George Frazer's Golden Bough yet another.

Sadly, the age of Scientism and its pious twin, Fundamentalism, intervened (the genius of Freud and Frazer were both deeply compromised by the former contagion). As a consequence, Schlegel's insight has been lost amidst the resulting noise and confusion.

The antidote: a renewed discovery of what Fred Beiser has termed "the Romantic Imperative"--the notion shared among the early German Romantics that poetry is more than words on a page that conform in some degree to particular agreed upon stylistic conventions. Poetry is a revolutionary ideal of human creativity; poets are those who embrace this ideal and carry it forward in their daily endeavors.

The goal is the Romanticization of the world: the insatiable desire for connection, the transgression of the artificial borders imposed between self and other and, yes, the embrace of Otherness as a necessary component of selfhood...

Hence, Mazeppa.

An American Athenaeum

2009-05-11T14:11:00.001-05:00

Break out the bubbly! A new siblogling has emerged!

Findings: To the Rescue of Romanticism

2009-05-06T15:07:00.002-05:00

Re-inventing Romantic Orientalism in a manner that places "East" and "West" on an equal footing of mutual respect and inquiry and then, in the process, dissolves the imaginary borders that make "East" "East" and "West" "West" requires a Romantic resurgence. Any Romantic resurgence must grapple with the dirt done on Romanticism by its detractors over the years. This 1940 article by Jacques Barzun is a good place to start:

Findings: To the Rescue of Romanticism

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Herman Melville: Pantagruelist

2009-03-25T12:12:00.002-05:00

The Lightning-Rod Man
What grand irregular thunder, thought I, standing on my hearthstone among the Acroceraunian hills, as the scattered bolts boomed overhead and crashed down among the valleys, every bolt followed by zigzag irradiations, and swift slants of sharp rain, which audibly rang, like a charge of spear-points, on my low shingled roof. I suppose, though, that the mountains hereabouts break and churn up the thunder, so that it is far more glorious here than on the plain. Hark! -- some one at the door. Who is this that chooses a time of thunder for making calls? And why don't he, man-fashion, use the knocker, instead of making that doleful undertaker's clatter with his fist against the hollow panel? But let him in. Ah, here he comes. "Good day, sir:" an entire stranger. "Pray be seated." What is that strange-looking walking-stick he carries: "A fine thunder-storm, sir."
"Fine? -- Awful!"
"You are wet. Stand here on the hearth before the fire."
"Not for worlds."
The stranger still stood in the exact middle of the cottage, where he had first planted himself. His singularity impelled a closer scrutiny. A lean, gloomy figure. Hair dark and lank, mattedly streaked over his brow. His sunken pitfalls of eyes were ringed by indigo halos, and played with an innocuous sort of lightning: the gleam without the bolt. The whole man was dripping. He stood in a puddle on the bare oak floor: his strange-walking stick vertically resting at his side.
It was a polished copper rod, four feet long, lengthwise attached to a neat wooden staff, by insertion into two balls of greenish glass, ringed with copper bands. The metal rod terminated at the top tripodwise, in three keen tines, brightly gilt. He held the thing by the wooden part alone.
"Sir," said I, bowing politely, "have I the honor of a visit from that illustrious God, Jupiter Tonans? So stood he in the Greek statue of old, grasping the lightning-bolt. If you be he, or his viceroy, I have to thank you for this noble storm you have brewed among our mountains. Listen: that was a glorious peal. Ah, to a lover of the majestic, it is a good thing to have the Thunderer himself in one's cottage. The thunder grows finer for that. But pray be seated. This old rush- bottomed arm-chair, I grant, is a poor substitute for your evergreen throne on Olympus; but, condescend to be seated."
While I thus pleasantly spoke, the stranger eyed me, half in wonder, and half in a strange sort of horror; but did not move a foot.
"Do, sir, be seated; you need to be dried ere going forth again."
I planted the chair invitingly on the broad hearth, where a little fire had been kindled that afternoon to dissipate the dampness, not the cold; for it was early in the month of September.
But without heeding my solicitation, and still standing in the middle of the floor, the stranger gazed at me portentously and spoke.
"Sir," said he, "excuse me; but instead of my accepting your invitation to be seated on the hearth there, I solemnly warn you, that you had best accept mine, and stand with me in the middle of the room. Good Heavens!" he cried, starting -- "there is another of those awful crashes. I warn you, sir, quit the hearth."
Mr Jupiter Tonans," said I, quietly rolling my body on the stone, "I stand very well here."
"Are you so horridly ignorant, then," he cried, "as not to know, that by far the most dangerous part of a house, during such a terrific tempest as this, is the fire-place?"
"Nay, I did not know that," involuntarily stepping upon the first board next to the stone.
The stranger now assumed such an unpleasant air of successful admonition, that -- quite involuntarily again -- I stepped back upon the hearth, and threw myself into the erectest, proudest posture I could command. But I said nothing.
"For Heaven's sake," he cried, with a strange mixture of alarm and intimidation -- "for Heaven's sake, get off the hearth! Know you not, that the heated air and soot are conductors; -- to say nothing of those immense iron fire-dogs? Quit the spot -- I conjure -- I command you."
"Mr Jupiter Tonans, I am not accustomed to be commanded in my own house."
"Call me not by that pagan name. You are profane in this time of terror."
"Sir, will you be so good as to tell me your business? If you seek shelter from the storm, you are welcome, so long as you be civil; but if you come on business, open it forthwith. Who are you?"
"I am a dealer in lightning-rods," said the stranger, softening his tone; "my special business is -- merciful Heavens! what a crash! -- Have you ever been struck -- your premises, I mean? No? It's best to be provided," -- significantly rattling his metallic staff on the floor, -- "by nature, there are no castles in thunder-storms; yet, say but the word, and of this cottage I can make a Gibraltar by a few waves of this wand. Hark, what Himalayas of concussions!"
"You interrupted yourself; your special business you were about to speak of."
"My special business is to travel the country for orders for lightning-rods. This is my specimen rod;" tapping his staff; "I have the best of references" -- fumbling in his pockets. "In Criggan last month, I put up three-and-twenty rods on only five buildings."
"Let me see. Was it not at Criggan last week, about midnight on Saturday, that the steeple, the big elm, and the assembly-room cupola were struck? Any of your rods there?"
"Not on the tree and cupola, but on the steeple."
"Of what use is your rod, then?"
"Of life-and-death use. But my workman was heedless. In fitting the rod at top to the steeple, he allowed a part of the metal to graze the tin sheeting. Hence the accident. Not my fault, but his. Hark!"
"Never mind. That clap burst quite loud enough to be heard without finger-pointing. Did you hear of the event at Montreal last year? A servant-girl struck at her bedside with a rosary in her hand; the beads being metal. Does your beat extend into the Canadas?"
"No. And I hear that there, iron rods only are in use. They should have mine, which are copper. Iron is easily fused. Then they draw out the rod so slender, that it has not body enough to conduct the full electric current. The metal melts; the building is destroyed. My copper rods never act so. Those Canadians are fools. Some of them knob the rod at the top, which risks a deadly explosion, instead of imperceptibly carrying down the current into the earth, as this sort of rod does. Mine is the only true rod. Look at it. Only one dollar a foot."
"This abuse of your own calling in another might make one distrustful with respect to yourself."
"Hark! The thunder becomes less muttering. It is nearing us, and nearing the earth, too. Hark! One crammed crash! All the vibrations made one by nearness. Another flash. Hold."
"What do you?" I said, seeing him now instantaneously relinquishing his staff, lean intently forward towards the window, with his right fore and middle fingers on his left wrist.
But ere the words had well escaped me, another exclamation escaped him.
"Crash! only three pulses -- less than a third of a mile off -- yonder, somewhere in that wood. I passed three stricken oaks there, ripped out new and glittering. The oak draws lightning more than other timber, having iron in solution in its sap. Your floor here seems oak."
"Heart-of-oak. From the peculiar time of your call upon me, I suppose you purposely select stormy weather for your journeys. When the thunder is roaring, you deem it an hour peculiarly favorable for producing impressions favorable to your trade."
"Hark -- Awful!"
"For one who would arm others with fearlessness, you seem unbeseemingly timorous yourself. Common men are choose fair weather for their travels; you choose thunder-storms; and yet --"
"That I travel in thunder-storms, I grant; but not without particular precautions, such as only a lightning-rod man may know. Hark! Quick -- look at my specimen rod. Only one dollar a foot."
"A very fine rod, I dare say. But what are these particular precautions of yours? Yet first let me close yonder shutters; the slanting rain is beating through the sash. I will bar up."
"Are you mad? Know you not that yon iron bar is a swift conductor? Desist."
"I will simply close the shutters, then, and call my boy to bring me a wooden bar. Pray, touch the bell-pull there."
"Are you frantic? That bell-wire might blast you. Never touch bell-wire in a thunderstorm, nor ring a bell of any sort."
"Nor those in belfries? Pray, will you tell me where and how one may be safe in a time like this? Is there any part of my house I may touch with hopes of my life?"
"There is; but not where you now stand. Come away from the wall. The current will sometimes run down a wall, and -- a man being a better conductor than a wall -- it would leave the wall and run into him. Swoop! That must have fallen very nigh. That must have been globular lightning."
"Very probably. Tell me at once, which is, in your opinion, the safest part of this house?"
"This room, and this one spot in it where I stand. Come hither."
"The reasons first."
"Hark! -- after the flash the gust -- the sashes shiver -- the house, the house! -- Come hither to me!"
"The reasons, if you please."
"Come hither to me!"
"Thank you again, I think I will try my old stand -- the hearth. And now, Mr Lightning-rod man, in the pauses of the thunder, be so good as to tell me your reasons for esteeming this one room of the house the safest, and your own one stand-point there the safest spot in it."
There was now a little cessation of the storm for a while. The Lightning-rod man seemed relieved, and replied --
"Your house is a one-storied house, with an attic and a cellar; this room is between. Hence its comparative safety. Because lightning sometimes passes from the clouds to the earth, and sometimes from the earth to the clouds. Do you comprehend? -- and I choose the middle of the room, because, if the lightning should strike the house at all, it would come down the chimney or walls; so, obviously, the further you are from them, the better. Come hither to me, now."
"Presently. Something you just said, instead of alarming me, has strangely inspired confidence."
"What have I said?"
"You said that sometimes lightning flashes from the earth to the clouds."
"Aye, the returning-stroke, as it is called; when the earth, being overcharged with the fluid, flashes its surplus upward."
"The returning-stroke; that is, from earth to sky. Better and better. But come here on the hearth, and dry yourself."
"I am better here, and better wet."
"How?"
"It is the safest thing you can do -- Hark, again! -- to get yourself thoroughly drenched in a thunder-storm. Wet clothes are better conductors than the body; and so, if the lightning strike, it might pass down the wet clothes without touching the body. The storm deepens again. Have you a rug in the house? Rugs are non-conductors. Get one, that I may stand on it here, and you, too. The skies blacken -- it is dusk at noon. Hark! -- the rug, the rug!"
I gave him one; while the hooded mountains seemed closing and tumbling into the cottage.
"And now, since our being dumb will not help us," said I, resuming my place, "let me hear your precautions in traveling during thunder-storms."
"Wait till this one is passed."
"Nay, proceed with the precautions. You stand in the safest possible place according to your own account. Go on."
"Briefly, then. I avoid pine-trees, high houses, lonely barns, upland pastures, running water, flocks of cattle and sheep, a crowd of men. If I travel on foot -- as today -- I do not walk fast; if in my buggy, I touch not its back or sides; if on horseback, I dismount and lead the horse. But of all things, I avoid tall men."
"Do I dream? Man avoid man? and in danger-time, too."
"Tall men in a thunder-storm I avoid. Are you so grossly ignorant as not to know, that the height of a six-footer is sufficient to discharge an electric cloud upon him? Are not lonely Kentuckians, ploughing, smit in the unfinished furrow? Nay, if the six-footer stand by running water, the cloud will sometimes select him as its conductor to that running water. Hark! Sure, yon black pinnacle is split. Yes, a man is a good conductor. The lightning goes through and through a man, but only peels a tree. But sir, you have kept me so long answering your questions, that I have not yet come to business. Will you order one of my rods? Look at this specimen one? See: it is of the best of copper. Copper's the best conductor. Your house is low; but being upon the mountains, that lowness does not one whit depress it. You mountaineers are most exposed. In mountainous countries the lightning-rod man should have most business. Look at the specimen, sir. One rod will answer for a house so small as this. Look over these recommendations. Only one rod, sir; cost, only twenty dollars. Hark! There go all the granite Taconics and Hoosics dashed together like pebbles. By the sound, that must have struck something. An elevation of five feet above the house will protect twenty feet radius all about the rod. Only twenty dollars, sir -- a dollar a foot. Hark -- Dreadful! -- Will you order? Will you buy? Shall I put down your name? Think of being a heap of charred offal, like a haltered horse burnt in his stall; and all in one flash!"
"You pretended envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to and from Jupiter Tonans," laughed I; "you mere man who come here to put you and your pipestem between clay and sky, do you think that because you can strike a bit of green light from the Leyden jar, that you can thoroughly avert the supernal bolt? Your rod rusts, or breaks, and where are you? Who has empowered you, you Tetzel, to peddle round your indulgences from divine ordinations? The hairs of our heads are numbered, and the days of our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of my God. False negotiator, away! See, the scroll of the storm is rolled back; the house is unharmed; and in the blue heavens I read in the rainbow, that the Deity will not, of purpose, make war on man's earth."
"Impious wretch!" foamed the stranger, blackening in the face as the rainbow beamed. "I will publish your infidel notions."
"Begone! move quickly! if quickly you can, you that shine forth into sight in moist times like the worm."
The scowl grew blacker on his face; the indigo-circles enlarged round his eyes as the storm rings round the midnight moon. He sprang upon me; his tri-forked thing at my heart.
I seized it; I snapped it; I dashed it; I trod it; and dragging the dark lightning-king out of my door, flung his elbowed, copper sceptre after him.
But spite of my treatment, and spite of my dissuasive talk of him to my neighbors, the Lightning-rod man still dwells in the land; still travels in storm-time, and drives a brave trade with the fears of man.

Spite of the Mazeppist's dissuasive talk to his neighbors, the Lightning-rod man still dwells in the land; still travels in storm-time, and drives a brave trade with the fears of man. O how we have been taken to the cleaners by the Hucksters of Homeland Security! So much so that no one even blinks when President Obama's budget includes historic cuts to "discretionary non-defense spending." And though the President promises "procurement reform," he's not the first President to promise such a thing. The only hope we have to restore long-term health to our economy and our democracy is to dismantle the millstone that hangs about their necks: the military-industrial-complex.

Of course, no one in this country's political elite has dared to broach this topic, not even our good President. And no one will. The American experiment continues to stumble forward, like a drunken man; in its eyes, the vacant aspect of the hard-core alcoholic: its republican ideals swept into the dust-bin of history. But the dream is dead. Long live the dream!

Waldo

2009-03-11T10:50:00.003-05:00

Since I invoke the Romantic Orientalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I should probably dedicate a little space to discussing his importance for my thinking.

I began reading Emerson in High School. My paternal grandmother had passed down her copy of The Complete Writings to my father, who kept it on the shelf as a kind of memento. Imagine that! It's like keeping a stick of dynamite on the shelf as a knickknack. When I first dipped into this volume, I didn't know what to think. Emerson was clearly not a Christian--not at least as I understood Christianity at the time--but what he was, I couldn't say. Years later I would read Harold Bloom's authoritative opinion: "What matters most about Emerson is that he is the theologian of the American religion of Self-Reliance" (Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? p. 198). Bloom's notion of the "American religion" (a variety of native Gnosticism--or gnosis in the American grain) has yet to be taken seriously by members of the Religious Studies guild--but no matter. All in good time.

When I went off to college, Emerson came with me. While I studied philosophy with the Analytic school, Waldo kept me mentally (and spiritually) alive. His love affair with Persian poetry and the promiscuous ease with which he moved from the Bible to Shakespeare to the Bhagavad Gita to Plutarch and Montaigne to Hafez and the Qur'an (and on and on) impressed upon me the conviction that here was, as Robert Richardson put it, a mind on fire. Here was a mind to emulate.

I have never left Emerson. Emerson has never left me. The question arises, however, was he a Pantagruelist? He was unquestionably a sublime ironist--but one who managed somehow to embrace Plato without much of the Socratic leaven intact. Emerson's self-conscious gravitas allowed him to be a theologian; his natural humility made his gravitas bearable. Pantagruelists everywhere should make Waldo a focus of intense study (as Tolstoy appears to have done) and welcome him to our feasts. If the shenanigans of our table cost him his appetite, then we will know that he is not of our tribe. But what of it? His was a mighty spirit; we should therefore honor him all the more.

Pantagruelism is a Humanism...

2009-02-06T17:06:00.004-05:00

to paraphrase Sartre. When Sartre delivered the lecture that became "Existentialism is a Humanism," he was attempting to clarify what he understood by the term "existentialism" as well as defend this philosophy from its detractors.

Would that Pantagruelism were lucky enough to have detractors! Jean-Paul! You had no idea how good you had it.

This is the trouble we Pantagruelists must face. No one cares enough about our non-(I would even go so far as to say "anti-") sectarian sect to bother to challenge us, insult us, attack us. The best response we can arouse from anyone is a knitted brow and a hesitant, "You're joking, right?" And, yes, of course, we ARE joking--there's no denying that. But with a serious purpose.

In some quarters, donning the mantle of Humanist does invite shoulder-shrugs and sets eyes to rolling. Humanism is popularly equated by some with atheism. Such an equation would confuse the religious humanists of early modern Europe and their Muslim predecessors--wait! That's it! Muslims!

Now, there's a sure bet to draw fire. Let's talk about Muslims. And not just any Muslims; let's talk about Islamic humanism. Oh, ho, ho! Finally, a phrase that rings! It has the same wicked sonority as a phrase like "Godless Communism" only better, because Communists these days are, at best, quaint relics of demonizations past. Islam is the enemy du jour and we need to strike while the iron is hot.

So what about Islamic humanism? Is it not (exquisitely) the worst of both worlds? Yes! Of course! It must be! And yet...I can already sense the yawning, the watery eyes, heads pitching forward towards desk-tops. Careful! Your computer's keyboard will leave unsightly marks upon your forehead. Sit up straight, pinch yourself, do whatever you must do to keep from losing interest...

Oh, but it's a lost cause. Even the scholar-class with its libido for sharp pencils and endless droning textual explication has not been able to keep awake long enough to draw a simple line "between the Islamic studia adabiya and the studia humanitatis of the Italian Renaissance...Highly worthy of mention, however, is the reference of Charles James Lyall, in his Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry (London, 1885, 1930), to the early Islamic philologists as 'the great Humanists' (1930 edition, p. xxxix ff.), a name which Reynold A. Nicholson applauds in his A Literary History of the Arabs (London, 1907; Cambridge, 1930, p. 32), though neither eminent Arabist makes an explicit connection between the humanism of Islam and that of the Christian West"--so complains George Makdisi in his magisterial The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh, 1990, p. xxi).

Oh, please! Do stop it with the string citations... Erudition will get us nowhere and Bloomian influence anxiety is the order of the day. Modern Europe owes nothing (do you hear?), NOTHING to Islamic intellectual traditions. Look up "sui generis" in the dictionary and there you will find modern Europe and its North American progeny proudly displayed, colors flying. We sprang full-blown from the head of Zeus--who was a Christian, by the way. And don't be fooled by Gargantua's recommendation of Arabic study to his beloved son Pantagruel (Book II, Chapter VIII of the Complete Works): Rabelais never meant a word he wrote.

He was, after all, a Pantagruelist.

Tolstoy and Pantagruelism

2009-02-02T16:34:00.003-05:00

It is unlikely that Leo Tolstoy would look kindly upon the association that I am suggesting in the title of today's dispatch. But no Pantagruelist worth her salt ever heeded the advice of Dale Carnegie. Leo Tolstoy deserves mention alongside (if not entirely within) the ranks of Pantagruelists, because his personal attempt to re-invent Christianity on the basis of his own reading of the Sermon on the Mount shares a significant family resemblance with the "Philosophy of Christ" advocated by Erasmus and approved by Rabelais. Moreover, Erasmus and Rabelais agreed, in the main, with Tolstoy's pacifism: to follow Christ is to forsake violence as an option for settling conflict. Finally, Tolstoy was not the stern and humorless figure he is popularly remembered to be. Even in the late novel Hadji Murad, written after his religious awakening, Tolstoy includes a chapter in which, with withering satire, he savages the old, corrupt Czar Nicholas. As every devout Pantagruelist understands, satire does not exhaust the possibilities for comic engagement with the world, but it occupies an indispensable position in the repertoire.

Tolstoy may well have taken himself a bit too seriously when the end drew near. There is no record that, while he lay dying at the rail station of Astapovo, he had enough of his wits about him to deliver a bon mot like that attributed to Rabelais: "Draw the curtains; the farce is over!" Instead, he lay on a cot lost in delirium; in a pocket of his great coat, hung upon a peg in the wall of the station-master's office, was a copy of Allama Sir Abdullah al-Mamun al-Suhrawardy's collection of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. In that collection, one finds a fair summation of the Pantagruelist's creed:

"What actions are most excellent? To gladden the heart of a human being, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful, and to remove the wrongs of the injured."

This hadith, as Tolstoy might say, encompasses the "gospel in brief."

Pantagruelism

2008-12-11T18:00:00.004-05:00

Pantagruelism (a term coined by Francois Rabelais, pictured at right) is my religion.

It is the unwavering belief in the redemptive possibilities of laughter. Rabelais was himself a Pantagruelist of the Erasmian school. Erasmus, the reader will recall, was the author of the learned treatise "In Praise of Folly" and argued, during the Protestant Reformation, for an alternative to the movement of Luther and Calvin: something he called the "Philosophy of Christ"--a sane and humanistic interpretation of Christianity.

Henry Miller was no doubt a Pantagruelist of what he termed the "Rosy-crucifixion" school, a kind of hermetic neo-paganism. Mazeppa's wild ride aux loups was a kind of "Rosy Crucifixion."

Among philosophers, Voltaire may have been the most accomplished of Pantagruelists. And he was no atheist (a charge typically leveled at my co-religionists). He simply insisted upon the right to practice a faith purged of credulity by the disciplined application of doubt.

I myself am a Pantagruelist of the school of Jahiz (al-Jahiziyya): a Pantagruelist avant la lettre (pictured above at left).

Jahiz was himself associated with the Mu'tazila, or rationalist school of Muslim theology. He was also an African who mastered Arabic prose and was famed in his day as a satirist.

As I often say, in a truly civilized society, you would never hear someone say, "You'll be hearing from my lawyer." In a truly civilized society, the appropriate retort is: "You'll be hearing from my satirist."

Ending the Ideology of "Western" Exceptionalism

2008-07-07T12:35:00.002-05:00

The late Richard Walzer (author of Greek Into Arabic) has rapidly become my favorite Orientalist, alongside Walter Burkert, my favorite Classicist (tied in that department with the late, great N. O. Brown). Each, in his own way, chose to eschew the ideology of "Western" exceptionalism--and, thereby, the dogmas which underwrite and justify imperial expansionism. Both subscribe to Donne's dictum that no man is an island and, if no man, then no collectivity of men and women. No culture, no society, no civilization is an island, entire unto itself.

As Burkert writes in his book Babylon Memphis Persepolis: "Civilization...develops through contact with foreigners and distant partners, mainly by way of travel and commerce. Interaction gives people the chance 'to see the cities of many humans, and to learn about their minds,' as Homer says in praise of Odysseus right at the start of the Odyssey. Culture, including Greek culture, requires intercultural contact."

Classicists who speak of the "Greek miracle" may pretend to be historians, but such claims are no more historical than Muslim celebrations of the "miraculous" appearance of Muhammad and the rise of Islam from a vacuum of ignorance and stubborn opposition. Modern historiography does not content itself with the uncritical recounting of miracles; awe is not encountered in the failure to explain phenomena, but in the process by which explanations are constructed.

To be able to conceive of human collectivities as organisms that are born, develop, interact, and decline in time is a humbling activity...or it ought to be. Understanding how every explanation, no matter what it accomplishes, leaves so much un-explained, is productive of both knowledge and awe.

Lest We Forget...

2008-06-25T09:23:00.001-05:00

Tim Russert, RIP

2008-06-16T13:01:00.003-05:00

While I think it bad form to speak ill of the recently deceased, Tim Russert was a public figure who, in my humble opinion, did infinite harm to the role of journalism in this former democracy. But don't take my word for it; here are some (slightly edited) comments that I consider to be spot on (from the Web Site Capitol Hill Blue):

1. "I am sorry that the man is dead, but I do not understand all the gushing homilies about him. He was just another media whore who capably guarded the status quo; he was just more skilled than most." --kmo591

2. "Tim Russert was a great man. That is why former Cheney communications director Cathie Martin during the "Scooter" Libby trial testified that "Meet the Press" was their first choice for Cheney TV appearances - Martin said it was "a tactic we often used" when they wanted to "control" their "message" because Russert's compulsion to suck up to power made his show their "best format."

When Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press on December 9, 2001, he said it was "pretty well confirmed that [9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack." On June 16, 2004, Gloria Borger, host of CNBC's Capitol Report, read Cheney the "pretty well confirmed" quote, to which Cheney responded, "No, I never said that. I never said that. Absolutely not." On the next broadcast of "Meet the Press," Russert rather than addressing this bald faced lie said absolutley nothing like the power suck up he always was.

He banned Arianna Huffington from NBC, and work to marginalize Kucinich by asking him if he ever saw a UFO.

Yep, quite a journalist he was." --kmo591

3. "kmo 591. Absolutely! I agree with you 100%. I have noticed that a whole bunch of people who made comments about timmah and the village are suddenly gushing about how great a person he was. The Daily Howler, no fan of timmah, did not praise him, but simply said that they would have no comment. He fed softball questions to all repigs, and never asked a followup. His appearence at the many debates showed him to be more interested in talking than asking actual questions about policy. Always a master of the trivial and the ambush question designed to make one look foolish. But never against the party in power. He also helped to push the sexist comments about Sen Clinton-while I am no fan, I did not think that his attitude was right for a journalist. But then again, he really wasn't one, was he?" --Timr

4. "Lets call a Spade a garden tool, shall we.

FACT of the matter is, Russert testified, UNDER OATH, that he gave the White House favorable treatment so he could maintain "exclusive access".

If Russert hadn't sold his soul to the Devil, he could have used his sizeable influence to hold GW Smirk and company accountable for their ramp up to war.

Thousands of American soldiers, and countless Iraqi civilians DIED, just so Russert could have his "exclusive access".

He should have kept his integrity and told the TRUTH.

RIP Tim...." --Baal

I'm afraid that there is more at stake here than the feelings of the Russert family; the man shilled for criminals when he was supposed to be interrogating them and publicly exposing their murderous lies. Tim Russert contributed substantially to the downfall of the American republic. That is his journalistic legacy.

Miller and Durrell

2008-05-08T13:03:00.003-05:00

Lawrence Durrell to Henry Miller, Corfu, Fall 1936:

"I'm tired of political people. They have confused the inner struggle with the outer one. They want to bread poultice a primary chancre. Politics is an art that deals in averages. Art is a man that deals in people. If the people are wrong, then no system is fool-proof enough to stop them cutting each other's throats. And the artist finds that the people are wrong. The driving force behind him is his self-isolation, the dislocation of the societal instinct. Vide Lawrence, Gaugin, etc....To have art you've first got to have a big personality, pass it through the social mincer, get it ready for misery. Art nowadays is going to be real art, as before the flood. IT IS GOING TO BE PROPHECY, in the biblical sense."

Art "nowadays" insofar as "nowadays" is the ever-present always. Durrell's "big personality" is analogous to Harold Bloom's "aesthetic audacity." Audacious is what the Near Eastern prophets were and those who dare follow in their footsteps. But most of those who claim to be doing so are merely playing a political game: that is, they are dealing in averages, not in women and men.

Ecstatic Miller

2008-04-29T09:28:00.003-05:00

Then there is Henry Miller the ecstatic. This Miller has no equal in American literature, and few can compare with him in all of world literature. This is the American writer who broke through the parochial grain to seize hold the cask of "new" wine--new only to our soil. It is in fact a very ancient liquor, an intoxicant that was the private stock of Sufi saints and Indian gymnosophists. An elixir that may have been known to the native peoples of this continent, but that died with them after the genocidal contact with the white man. Henry Miller is, in a sense, the ancient and native world's revenge. Embedded in a very particular (and not particularly attractive) time and place, he somehow channeled the spirits that slaughter had set free. Sitting at his desk in his Brooklyn apartment, Miller fired off flares into the night; distress signals that could only be seen and interpreted on an astral plane. And before he knew it--and before the reader of a book such as Tropic of Capricorn can prepare her or himself for it--Henry Miller was surrounded by the ghosts he had summoned in his desperation to make contact, pure unadulterated contact, with whatever lasts, with whatever is meaningful, with whatever lives on unflinchingly in the face of death, and he was lifted up beyond the stratosphere to commune with this cloud of witnesses. When he returned, armed as he was with Promethean fire, or bursting with the stuff that drove Nietzsche's Zarathustra down from the hill, it was certain that he would be marginalized, parodied, and his work tied up in court for decades. It was not the satyric side of Miller that the gods of this world feared and loathed and were determined to suppress--no! That Henry Miller could be easily accommodated. It was instead the Henry Miller who had so clearly liberated himself from their money-murder-madness. The Miller who dared invoke the name of the Gnostic's laughing Christ--the one who stands by the cross watching while his phantom body writhes like a snake on the executioner's spit (the Qur'an, by the way, alludes to this Christ at 4:107-108). Henry Miller the proletarian American Over-soul--that is the man that the authorities have labored to marginalize: shunting his books off into the hands of pornographers and those who have been so blinded by their sex addictions and whatnot that they are incapable of recognizing how, comprehended in his torrent of words, is a raw testament that they, too--could they but see it--they, too, could forsake the shadows to bask in brilliant, life-giving, sunlight...

By placing his work within a particular body of national literature, we tell only a partial truth. Henry Miller wrote an American literature designed to overcome American literature--once and for all. He broke through all conventional boundaries by burrowing deep within. He belongs now to the world and to the ages. America, as anyone who is paying attention has noticed, is finished. The Empire has no clothes. The nation-state is rotten to the core. Miller saw this state of affairs with diamond-like clarity decades before anyone else had the slightest inkling. At the same time, Miller understood something else: he understood that victory over the victors has already been accomplished. The Qur'anic Messiah/Gnostic Christ has been lifted up. The captives need only to recognize the illusory nature of their chains to be set free. Forget power politics. Take hold the weapons of the "weak." Rise up! Rise up! Refuse! Refuse! Refuse!

Tropic of Capricorn

2008-04-28T09:25:00.003-05:00

Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn from, say, page 267 to page 333 (in the 1961 Grove Press edition)--roughly 56 pages--contains some of the most incandescent prose-poetry in the annals of the English language. In these pages, Miller articulates his "Rosy Crucifixionism"--the Whitmanian vision chewed up and spat out by one who, as he avers on the opening page, has "given up the ghost." If Whitman was Christ, then Miller was Paul (Emerson being the Baptist, if not Enoch or Elijah or the Father of All). And like Paul, Henry Miller does not merely pass along the savior's teachings--oh no! He re-invents them for a new time and place; a new people. Having gone in search of the Whitmanian Republic, he discovered only an "air-conditioned nightmare." To his credit, Miller did not attempt to sugar-coat his findings or to pass them off as something other than they were. There is far more of the Jew in Henry Miller than there is of the Christian--as there is far more of the Jew in Paul than has come down to us in sectarian lore. Miller thunders like a prophet--he fumes and fulminates--but this is only one part of an oeuvre which, when taken as a whole, constitutes a kind of wisdom literature.

Miller on Discovering Dostoevski

2008-04-25T11:50:00.000-05:00

From Tropic of Capricorn:

The night I sat down to read Dostoevski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the world. Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don't know any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know. It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoevski was the first man to reveal his soul to me? Maybe I had been a bit queer before that, without realizing it, but from the moment that I dipped into Dostoevski I was definitely, irrevocably, contentedly queer. The ordinary, waking, workaday world was finished for me. Any ambition or desire I had to write was also killed--for a long time to come. I was like those men who have been too long in the trenches, too long under fire. Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions--it was just so much shit to me.

The Happy Rock

2008-04-24T10:26:00.004-05:00

Re-reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn after almost three decades... Miller's genius was proletarian; furthermore, it was the genius of a man who, in his writing if not his daily affairs, had never acquired the super-ego, the censor, shame. He was pure, proletarian id. He was Walt Whitman without the ear for a higher calling. Whitman wished to elevate his reader with his Leaves; Henry Miller just pulls one aside and runs at the mouth. And what a mouth! One moment, the wisdom is Heraclitean and profound. The next, the mind-numbing ramblings of a colossal boor. And this seems to me to have been his project: to record everything, to slowly translate himself, word by word, into the symbolic residue of his voice--his genuine Brooklynite voice.

In a way, this had to happen: Whitman had to be followed by one who would sing a song of himself that few could stomach. Of course, he was followed by multitudes with such songs, but Miller's song has remained because, at the end of the day, say what you will, it is artful. Brutally frank, obscene, embarrassing, disgusting, revolting, even--but artful. And he knew it. He knew he had the chops and so he exercised them with wild abandon. And this is what remains: an early 20th century white American proletarian Brooklynite; a man like any other man, only moreso. A man in full. A man revealed from the inside out. A man who would dare to confess himself a man. No more, no less.

Strange as this may sound, his was a remarkable achievement. It took a singleness of purpose and unflinching resolve to tell it all and, at times, to tell it all superbly. If, as Lawrence Durrell argued, "American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done," we are entitled to ask "whither American literature?" For once one particular writer has managed to "get it all down," what remains to be done? Here, perhaps, time may prove itself on a writer's side. For with the passage of time and the consequent shifts of what it means to be an American, it is possible that the task of "getting it all down" is generational. In the wake of Miller, this may be what being a writer in the American grain has come to. Then again, there may be other vistas, other visions, other tasks, as yet unseen. American literature awaits the arrival of its next genius, its next "prophetic figure" of letters in the Emerson-Whitman-Miller line.

Coeur, Instinct, Principes

2008-04-17T16:46:00.002-05:00

There are times when it is difficult to stomach some of Pascal's Pensees; and yet, he was a seeker, a sincere one. And for that reason alone I suppose I return to him, again and again. He was at his best when his writing exemplified this threefold motto: Heart, Instincts, Principles--contained in his "Critique de la Raison." Asserting that "C'est le coeur qui sent Dieu et non la raison. Voila ce que c'est que la foi: Dieu sensible au coeur, non a la raison" and, famously, "le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait point..." Pascal had said all that he needed to say ABOUT religion; but he simply could not check himself. He had to rail, to vilify, to reason most egregiously on behalf of this doctrine or that. But so it is with sectarians: the need to be right, rather than righteous.

No Greek Tragedy Here

2008-03-13T09:49:00.001-05:00

To describe Eliot Spitzer’s recent fall from grace as a "Greek tragedy" (as several pundits have done) does a disservice to the Greeks. It is yet another example of the pervasive dumbing down of our public discourse.

Spitzer was self-righteous and arrogant. He somehow got it in his head that electoral success entitled him to certain perks that he himself had vehemently denied to others.

For Spitzer’s fall from power to qualify as "Greek," it would have to be truly "tragic" as Aristotle defined it. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, "The change to bad fortune which [the tragic hero] undergoes is not due to any moral defect or flaw, but a mistake of some kind." Oedipus, for example, murdered his father and slept with his mother by mistake, i.e., the circumstances of his life were such that he did not know the true identity of his parents. Had he known his parents’ true identity, he would not have committed the acts which caused his downfall.

Spitzer, on the other hand, knew exactly what he was doing. He just felt that the rules no longer applied to him. Garden variety arrogance is NOT tragic hubris.

Oedipus was a tragic hero. Eliot Spitzer, a self-important weasel.

There is a difference.