Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Thursday Translations, #14

Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin

The Ages of Life

You, cities of Euphrates!
You, alleys of Palmyra!
You forests of columns in the plain of the desert,
What are you?
The fire stripped you
Of your crowns as you passed
Over the border of the breathing
By the smoke of the heavenly beings;
But now I sit under clouds, in which
Each thing has its quietude, under
Well-ordered oaks on the meadow
Of deer, and strange to me
And dead to me seem
The spirits of the blessed.

*

Lebensalter

Ihr Städte des Euphraths!
Ihr Gassen von Palmyra!
Ihr Säulenwalder in der Ebne der Wüste,
Was seid ihr?
Euch hat die Kronen,
Dieweil ihr über die Gränze
Der Othmenden seid gegangen,
Von Himmlischen der Rauchdampf und
Hinweg das Feuer genommen;
Jetzt aber siz ich unter Wolken, darin
Ein jedes eine Ruh hat eigen, unter
Wohleingerichteten Eichen, auf
Der Haide des Rehs, und fremd
Erscheinen und gestorben mir
Der Seeligen Geister.

**

A Fragment of a Hymn

What is God? unknown, and yet
Is the face of heaven full
Of signs of him. Lightning in fact
Is the wrath of a god. The more one is
Invisible,       the more one conforms to what one is not. But thunder
Is the glory of God. The love of immortality,
As ours, is likewise the property
Of a god.

*

Was ist Gott? unbekannt, dennoch
Voll Eigenschaften ist das Angesicht
Des Himmels von ihm. Die Blize nemlich
Der Zorn sind eines Gottes. Jemehr ist eins
Unsichtbar,     schiket es sich in Fremdes. Aber der Donner
Der Ruhm ist Gottes. Die Liebe zur Unsterblichkeit
Das Eigentum auch, wie das unsere,
Ist eines Gottes.

How to Think about Violence

[Sketch of a talk I was invited to give to a student conference on philosophy and primatology. Are we still on, guys? Or will I have to add this to my already huge pile of stillborn projects?]

An effective antidote to the persisting myth of the European monopoly on brutality in the New World is offered by Richard White, in his account of intertribal violence among Great Lakes Natives in the 17th century. "Every night as the Senecas traveled home," he relates, "they killed and ate a Miami child. And every morning, they took a small child, thrust a stick through its head and sat it up on the path with its face toward the Miami town they had left. Behind the Senecas came the pursuing Miamis, and at every Seneca campsite, brokenhearted parents recognized their child" (White 1991, 4-5). The images this report conjures up have been haunting me for the past few weeks, though I relate it here not to spread the infection, but rather as a point of entry into a question I would like to ask about the way philosophers talk about morality.

When I read this, I feel a mixture of revulsion and horror and, yes, awe. What I do not feel is the slightest inclination to moral judgment. I get the sense that to think about the case in these terms would be to make a sort of category mistake. The mistake arises from the assumption that there is a lapse here to be explained, that there is something that human beings properly and ordinarily are, from which they deviate when they engage in bloodshed, that they are being untrue to their real nature. This is an unsupported assumption, and one that seems to me to direct the thinking of most moral philosophers. We might group these philosophers together with those 'progressive social scientists', criticized by Walter Burkert, who attempt to "locate the roots of the evil of violence" while setting out from "short-sighted assumptions, as though the failure of our uprbringing or the faulty development of a particular national tradition or economic system were to blame" (Burkert 1983, 1). Burkert seeks to locate the roots of the evil of violence in the fact that human beings are a species of primate with a certain behavioral profile, one that includes, in the simplest forms of social organization, raids on neighbors.

Why this behavior should simply die away as sociocultural organization grows in complexity, rather than just transforming along with society, is never explained by anyone who takes contemporary violence to be an atavistic throwback to earlier times. Yet, carefully observed, almost everything about a developing human male starts to appear as such a throwback. Take the little boys who shape their very hands into the form of a 'ray gun' and make that ray-gun sound with their mouths: pyoov-pyoov, or something similar. One might suppose that this behavior could only be a recent development, following upon the invention of the idea of ray guns sometime in the mid-20th century. I take the ray-gun component of this behavior, however, in something like a Chomskyan sense: there was something all along that little human males wanted to do with their hands, and in a certain cultural setting this gets expressed as the shooting of an imaginary ray gun, just as every human infant is biologically bound to start talking about basic, salient features of its environment, such as food, whether the word it will eventually use for this is the English 'food' or something else. What is that thing that male children innately want to do with their hands? They want to project their power. The gun, like the bow and the spear, is a congealing of that desire; it is not a perversion of the basic human behavioral profile, but an extension of it. Human hands have been gun-holders in potentia all along, at least since our distant ancestors first evolved the ability to grasp and throw.

Friday Symptoms #3

Causes of Death in the City of London, 1647-1660

Abortive and Stil-born; Aged; Ague and Fever; Apoplex and Suddenly; Bleach; Blasted; Bleeding; Bloody Flux, Scouring and Flux; Burnt and Scalded; Calenture; Cancer, Gangrene and Fistula; Wolf; Canker, Sore-mouth and Thrush; Child-bed; Chrisoms and Infants; Colick and Wind; Cold and Cough; Consumption and Cough; Convulsion; Cramp; Cut of the Stone; Dropsie and Tympany; Drowned; Excessive drinking; Executed; Fainted in a Bath; Falling-Sickness; Flox and small Pox; Found dead in the Streets; French-Pox; Frighted; Gout; Grief; Hanged, and made-away themselves; Head-Ach; Jaundice; Jaw-faln; Impostume; Itch; Killed by several Accidents; King's Evil; Lethargy; Leprosie; Liver-grown, Spleen and Rickets; Lunatick; Meagrom; Measles; Mother; Murdered; Overlaid and starved at Nurse; Palsie; Plague in the Guts; Pleurisie; Poisoned; Purples and Spotted Fever; Quinsie and Sore-throat; Rickets; Mother, rising of the Lights; Rupture; Scal'd head; Scurvy; Smothered and stifled; Sores, Ulcers, broken and bruised Limbs; Shot; Spleen; Shingles; Starved; Stitch; Stone and Strangury; Sciatica; Stopping of the Stomach; Surfet; Swine-Pox; Teeth and Worms; Tissick; Thrush; Vomiting; Worms; Wen; Suddenly.

(from William Petty, Natural and political observations, mentioned in a following index, and made upon the bills of mortality by John Graunt, citizen of London; with reference to the government, religion, trade, growth, ayr, diseases, and the several changes of the said city., London: Printed by Tho. Roycroft, for John Martin, James Allestry, and Tho. Dicas ..., 1662).

The Primordial Darkness

A remarkable illustration, featured in this month's Cabinet, of the darkness of the cosmos before the Creation. From Robert Fludd's 1617 work Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica, atque technica historia. The phrase on each side of the black square means "and like this to infinity."

Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's 2004 film, Birth, asks us to imagine what it would be like if a lost loved one were reincarnated as a little child. The heroine's husband dies of a heart attack during the opening scene, with a voice-over of him giving a speech to some physicians' conference in which he expresses his materialist conviction that the self corrupts along with the body at death. Ten years later, a ten-year-old boy approaches the widow with the insistent message: "I'm Sean." The predictable conflict ensues.

Among the many details that make Birth a masterpiece, in my view, is the depiction of the boy's habitual need, in spite of the fact that he is the reincarnation of a middle-aged scientist, to do those things with his body that are typical of a ten-year-old child. Thus on a trip to the park with his wife, he cannot help but take a recess on the monkey-bars. He knows who he is, metaphysically, but he can't resist what he is, ontogenetically. I often think about this film when I'm walking to or from work, and a sudden impulse overtakes me to go across a slippery pool of ice, even if the sidewalk, cleared of snow, would offer me much smoother passage, or to try to balance on a curb, as if I were practicing to be a tightrope walker. I start to do these things, and then it is as if I hear a voice that says: you don't have to do this. I mean, neurologically, there is no need for this anymore. There's no need for anything now but to sit and think, and if bodily motion is recommended, this is not because it will help me to discover the limits of my world-boundness or to come to know the properties of things, but only because it will help me to stave off death, which, if the first incarnation of Sean had it right, will include the death of the thing-that-thinks.

Birth wears its metaphysics lightly, like a good deal of great cinema. That is, it asks us to imagine something that couldn't possibly happen in this world, in order to show us something true and commonplace about the world. It uses reincarnation (which doesn't happen) to show something about grieving (which does). In the end, the film remains ambiguous as to whether the boy really was the reincarnation of the husband or not: he writes the widow a letter of apology, saying that he is better now, and that with the help of adult experts he has come to realize he was mistaken. Or was he just coerced? This is the same ambiguity that leaves one wondering, throughout so many of Robert Bresson's films, whether a transcendent order is meant to play a role in the worldly events depicted, or whether Bresson only means to show the way that order often feels like it plays a role to us worldly characters who lack any real connection to the au delà. This is what I take to be Bresson's aesthetics of 'Christian atheism'. Glazer's film by comparison might be characterized as 'pagan atheism' (though for most of the history of Christianity this phrase would have been redundant).

Legion, for We Are Many

I have recently rediscovered a recording of a radio broadcast I did some years ago at WAIF 88.3 FM, in Cincinnati, Ohio, under the pseudonym 'Legion, for We Are Many'. The genre is mash-up (this term did not exist at the time), though with deeper roots in the experimental radio of Negativland et al., which goes back at least to the late 1960s, or whenever it was that youth with no talent but with much to say were first, presumably by some slip-up at the FCC, given access to broadcast media. It consists in found and processed sound, and the aesthetic pay-off, such as it is, derives from the juxtaposition of elements that do not ordinarily belong together.

To the extent that it works through incongruity, it is formally closer to humor than to art (see Kant, Critique of Judgment 5:333). But is incongruity humor, elevated to the status of irony, not the default mode of expression of so much of the art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? Isn't it in consequence of this that in order to follow so much recent American fiction, you must come to it with an advanced literacy not in literature, but in the sitcoms of thirty years prior? Is it my fault I was born in an era when the distinction between art and humor was no longer so clear?

Anyway, I'm making up for my wasted youth now (which is not easy when your youth lasted more than thirty years), and I'm not here to promote this recording or to condemn it, but only to upload it as a fragment of my soul (or of my soul at one stage of development) that has better odds of living on diffused throughout the internet than it does on the primitive writable CD-R on which I found it, let alone in the fading traces of it scattered here and there across my own highly corruptible carbon-based memory.

Download Legion-1

Download Legion-2

Download Legion-3

Wednesday Animals, #13

Baraminology in Action!

Holobaramin of the Chimp-Gorilla Relationship

Some Archaebaramins

*

For more, equally delirious illustrations, purporting to show the relations between divinely created animal kinds, please see Wayne Frair, "Baraminology-- Classification of Created Kinds," in Creation Research Science Quarterly Journal 37, 2 (2000): 82-91. 

Etymology from Memory, #6

Autoantonymy

Antonyms, of course, are pairs of words that have meanings opposite to each other. Autoantonyms, in turn, are single words that themselves can mean either one thing or its opposite. This can happen either by convergence --e.g., the English verb 'to cleave' comes from two separate but similar Anglo-Saxon verbs, and today can mean either 'to separate' or 'to latch on'-- or it can happen through a cleavage, so to speak, within a single lexical item-- thus 'to dust' means either to remove the dust from something or to cover something, perhaps that very thing, with dust or a dust-like substance. You might think that autoantonyms of the latter sort are rare birds in the dictionary, but in fact they are all over the place, particularly when the opposition between motion and rest is in question. Thus the adjective 'fast' means both 'swift with respect to motion' and 'bolted down', i.e., 'motionless'. A little reflection will also convince you that most prepositions are capable of autoantonymy. This in fact may have happened to you already: when confronted by a well-intentioned fund-raiser in the street, who tells you that she is raising money 'for breast cancer', does a little part of you not wish to reply: 'Sorry, no, I'm against breast cancer'?

Autoantonymy seems, in fact, to be the inherent tendency of words. Spinoza said that every determination is a negation, and to this extent the very use of a determinate word with a determinate meaning requires that one also implicitly say: this is not that. But to say what something is not is already to mention that other thing, and so to associate the thing you are mentioning with its opposite. This, I think, is the genealogy of autoantonyms.

Boris Gasparov, from whom I learned Old Church Slavonic, once observed that autoantonyms were also significant in comparative linguistics. Thus he noted that the German word for 'sky' or 'heaven', Himmel, is etymologically connected to the Russian word for 'earth', zemlya. What could be more separate than heaven and earth? Not the words for them in German and Russian, respectively, evidently. When a Russian says 'earth', a German hears, or perhaps thinks he hears, distantly, vaguely: 'not-sky'.

There is one autoantonym that might arguably be said to ground the social existence of Indo-Europeans and of all those who speak Indo-European languages, namely, the paired terms 'guest' and 'host'. Both of these, if I recall correctly, can be traced back to a hypothetical Proto-Indo-European term, ghosti, which described either the guest or the host in any given guest-host relationship (this is also, of course the source of 'ghost', which leads one to wonder what sort of relationship one ought to have to the supernatural spirits one purportedly finds in, let us say, a newly purchased Victorian: are they guests to be accommodated, or are they the hosts who lay down the house rules?). What is really remarkable about guest/host is that it is doubly autoantonymous: the guest and the host occupy two opposite, complementary positions in the core social relationship of Indo-European speakers, and at the same time both the guest and the host are hostile to the hostes, that is, to the enemies.

So the guest and the host are each other's opposites, but the two of them together are both the opposite of the guys they are trying to keep away: the hostile enemies. Yet they all are denoted by one version or other of the same word. Every determination is at the same time a negation, but by the same token every concept contains its opposite, if only implicitly. Autoantonymy occurs when this containment becomes something more than implicit. Yet one might conjecture that it is the general condition of words that they have their meaning only to the extent that they threaten to mean their opposite.

A Fetish Object of the World Itself

In sixth grade I was made along with my classmates to undertake a project that, we were told, would teach us something about science. Our task was to obtain a large metal coffee can (Folgers or Yuban, most likely), and to obtain an egg (chicken, white), and to find something (anything) of our choice to serve as padding for the egg in the can. Next, at a specified date and time, Mr. King, the principal of Pasadena Elementary School (which was in Sacramento, not Pasadena), took all the cans up to the top of the school gym and threw them off one by one as the sixth-graders watched from below. Those kids whose eggs remained integral 'won', and those whose eggs broke 'lost'. The lesson had something to do with materials science, or gravity, or some other feature of the physical world whose importance escaped me.

What went into my can? Some flour, some maple syrup, some yogurt, a sock, a dog's chew-toy, some Jell-O, a clump of hair from the bathroom sink, some peanut butter, some celery, some chewed BubbleYum, a bit of bubble wrap, some apple wedges. I would not be surprised to be reminded that I had peed in the can before sealing it up, though I have no recollection of having done so.

I think I wanted the inside of the can to be a sort of microcosm, to duplicate the outer world of qualitative variety and complexity in which eggs thrive. I seem to have believed that if one of the ingredients could not come to the egg's rescue, another surely would, and that that saving ingredient, whether the peanut butter or the sock, needed only to be represented in a token amount. To say that this was a primitive sort of thinking would not be the half of it. It bore obvious affinities to voudun and like practices, but rather than creating a double of some particular person or thing, I wanted nothing less than to bring into being a fetish object of the world itself.

In a sense, this has been my approach to every project I have taken on since, whether creative or scholarly. In the hope of protecting against failure, I throw in everything available. If this footnote doesn't save me, that one will. In the end I want everything, no matter how remotely connected to the topic at hand, to get its mention. I don't think this makes my work bad, in any case I hope it doesn't, though it does obligate me to constantly keep a natural inclination in check. 

What stuns me now when I think about this incident is how utterly inflexible personality is, and how consistently a deep, generally invisible pattern is able to determine the way a person performs in seemingly unconnected spheres of life. The recipe I threw together for that can was a rough draft of everything I have ever written. But how can it be that a lump of yogurt placed in a can in 1984 can come from the same place in a person's psyche as does a footnote 26 years later? The answer to this question probably lies somewhere in Spinoza, as the devotion to an everything-in-everything vision of the world leads directly back to Leibniz. With Spinoza, I strive to simply ride out this determined state of affairs, rather than to bemoan it as some sort of malediction, and with Horace I accept that, while you can drive out your own nature with a pitchfork, it always comes roaring back again.

It might be worth mentioning that my egg broke. It didn't just crack. Its yolk had so thoroughly intermingled with the disgusting mass of slop in which I had encased it, one would have thought I had included among my fetish object's many fluids a spoonful of hollandaise. Other boys, who had used nothing but space-age synthetic materials and whose eggs came out whole, were praised as rocket scientists and as future astronauts. They applauded one another heartily, shutting me and my freaky voodoo can out of the post-launch cheer altogether. The girls had wrapped their eggs in silks and cottonballs, and were weeping over their near universal failure to bring them down to earth in one piece. It was as if the poor lasses had confused this science experiment with another one that would come a few years later, in sex ed, when the egg transforms not into an astronaut reentering the earth's atmosphere, but a delicate infant. 

Here is what I wish I had done: rather than surrounding the egg with the microcosmic principles of everything, I should have allowed only the principle of the egg itself into the can. I should have filled the can with nothing but eggs (a large Yuban can would probably hold 12-15 of them). Surely not every egg would break in any given toss. I could select one that did not break and call it 'my' egg. This would be a properly philosophical approach, one that the public-school teachers of modest intellect would no doubt try to disqualify. I would have loved to see them contorting themselves to explain why, though I had pulled a whole egg out of my launched can, I had nonetheless not respected the spirit of the assignment. But it took me a full quarter century to come up with this idea, and at this point no one wants to see me throwing anything at all off the roof, no matter how philosophical.

But maybe it's not too late to write a book that would be the intellectual equivalent of an egg-only can? What would that look like, I wonder? How could I even get started?